CUT DEFICIT

“When you say you want more Aussie babies, you're not saying I want people who wanna be able to have kids to have kids. A decent, but thankfully very small minority of people will talk to me about the great replacement theory and how people are coming from around the rest of the world to replace Australians. The dog whistle is well known, which is you say a thing knowing full well how people will take it so you don't have to say the thing out loud. That's that's the very nature of the dog whistle.”

“No. God, no. For god's sake, do not give these people more power. Like, no hard no strong, the most emphatic no that I can go. For god's sake, it's like giving a machine gun to a monkey. They they do enough damage as it is with the tools that they've got. And to give them another one, you know, nah. It just comes back to the the Hayekian face or conceit, you know, which is is just the the the height of hubris to think that a board of 12 very, very rich people can make decisions for the whole nations by meeting once every six weeks.”

“Auckland's seen house prices drop 26% in the last few years. Toronto's seen about a 23% drop. Now and this isn't the, oh, here we go again with the the property doomerism. It's just I sometimes feel as though we see it in Australia as sort of like, that's an impossibility. You know? And, you know, you you see the headlines when prices are down 2% quarter on quarter. Woah. People freak out.”

“The government should massively reduce the government deficit so they're not adding demand to the economy, making things worse. That that's easy. We are collecting more tax revenue than ever before. There there is no there is no deficit. And the treasurer could say, I'm gonna remove stimulus from the economy so that I'm not working cross purposes with the reserve bank so that they don't have to deal with higher inflation, put rates up.”

“Johns Hopkins. I wanted to be a research chemist. Really? And it's I loved science in in high school. I loved math and I loved science. My parents were always encouraging of learning broad things and trying to find what you wanted, and both my brother and I were both very much math and science people, and I go to Hopkins, and I, first semester I take organic chemistry, where you're in with all the Hopkins premeds, which was probably the worst experience of my life.”

“It's very, very hard. So there are things you can't do, and there are things you can do. You've got to be, first of all, very selective in looking at your balance sheet and saying, okay, it's not the worst thing in the world to say we need to become more efficient on our balance sheet, what's less efficient, where do we make less money, how do we reallocate that balance sheet usage. You then turn to certain things and say, we're just not going to be active about soliciting loans, we're not going to be active about soliciting deposits. We were very careful not to throttle consumer deposits, because you tell a consumer to please bring your deposit elsewhere, you've lost that relationship.”

“Right now, from everything that we see, the economy is still extremely strong. We just we all just reported our first quarter results in the banking space. Loan demand is decent. Delinquencies on the consumer side, are extremely well controlled. Consumer spend is growing on a year over year basis. They're spending more money on gas, but making adjustments in some of the other categories. Businesses have gone into this in strong financial shape. So those are all the good things, but then when you ask them how they feel, everyone's nervous.”

“Wanna know the the the the truth? Yes. I get to Wells, and first thing I wanna do is get a Wells Fargo credit card, and so I get the new card, and I was out to dinner with some good friends who run some big companies, and I pull out my card and it got denied.”

“It's a question of the degree of debt that you're carrying there. If if it was a pretty chunky amount of debt and losing your job would really put you in a difficult situation. I mean, it feels like playing a bit of a game of chicken. But if you've got a fairly sizable buffer that's there, you know, you're one of these property investors that actually makes a net positive return on your rental income.”

“The independence of the Fed is critically important, not just here in The US, but in other parts of the country. And when you think about just the way our our governing system works, you know, it's different than a place like China where there's long term management, long term goals, high coordination across all the different areas of government. You know, here we have, you know, a political infrastructure that turns over, which has points of views, and we have a more long term structure in place at the Fed.”

“No. I don't think private credit's about to crumble. I mean, when you look at private credit, when you just look at the size of private credit, it's not big enough to be a systemic risk broadly the way we think about systemic risks, that have existed in the past. But it's credit. And there's been a huge amount of money that's flown into these products, both institutional and retail, and we've all seen this in the past when there's just when there's a lot of money that needs to get invested because that's the only way that these firms get paid is to actually invest, it doesn't always work out well.”

“Stockpiles is my answer. And the reason is that stockpiles, you pay effectively just the carrying cost. If we had ninety days or a hundred and twenty days worth of fuel rather than twenty eight, we'd have a a storage cost, which would be the infrastructure cost to create, build tanks, and whatever else. If we are invaded by Indonesia or China, if we'd had hundred days of fuel, we might be able to last behind the barricades for another month or two. And then the tanks rolls straight over the top.”

“What Matt is arguing for, Tom, is a lower standard of living sort of because it's literally more Australian. Let's shut off. You're not allowed to buy any car that isn't made in Australia. Right? And let's play the record forward for ten years. The cars aren't that good. They're really expensive because it's a tiny market. No one else in the world is buying them. With the structural disadvantages in a thousand different ways, it's just not going to make that viable.”

“I think it's incredibly important, and I really dislike when people talk about lobbying like it's some awful, horrible thing. Showing up and trying to convince a senator or a congressperson at the last minute that what I think is right, when it's clear that it's just gonna benefit me, goes nowhere. What really matters is over a period of time, building a relationship with members and their staffs where you're where you're honest about about what works, what doesn't work, what the risks are, and so that when they need to actually have a position on something, they're more educated.”

“Yeah. I think right now there's pretty clear consensus that it would be the wrong thing to do. Until the, Iran conflict is clear what the end is in sight, there's there's real risk out there. I mean, I think as you hear voting committee members talk about it, there's a high degree of consistency, including, I think, from, treasury secretary in terms of, you know, waiting to see how this all plays out.”

“It's been a bull market for a long time. There's a huge amount of liquidity in the system. There's this underlying current that things are gonna be fine for a long period of time. There are a lot of people in the financial services space, in banks and outside of banks, that have never been through cycles, like a real cycle in terms of what that means, and there's a point in which that's gonna turn, and that's gonna have a whole bunch of impacts that I'm not sure we all really understand.”

“Try and try and do some scenario analysis and just ask yourself if if I did lose my job tomorrow, not saying you would, but just do do it. What if? What if? How do things look like and and they say it takes six twelve months, twenty four months, thirty six months to get another job. There's a lot of people who think that they're the world's, you know, greatest investor. They're God's gift to investing because they did some very, very reckless things, and it just happened to go well for them.”

“Galls Law. It comes from 1975. His law says a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make work. You must start over again to with a simple working system and build outwards. Complexity is your enemy. It is always your enemy. It's in it's your enemy in investing. It's your enemy in policy making.”