Electricity prices to triple? That escalated quickly.

Adam: [00:00:25] Hello and welcome to comedian versus economist. We demystify the world of money and help you get a handle on the bigger picture. My name's Adam and we're joined, as always, by my little older brother and real life economist. Thomas, hi.

Thomas: [00:00:39] G'day Adam, how you going? 

Adam: [00:00:41] I'm going very well. Thank you. Thomas Before we start the show, I've just got a small favour to ask. We're coming to the end of the financial year and just taking a bit of stock of where we're at through our stats. We know we've got one of the highest listen through rates in the industry, but now we're on a drive to grow our listener numbers. If everyone who listens to this show tells one person, just one person, that's all you got to do. That would be incredible and would help us out so much. So if you know one person who's intelligent, curious about the world with a good sense of humour, then please tell them about us. We'll tag them in one of our socials posts. That would help us out incredibly. But Thomas, as always, big show coming up. Let's get into it. And Thomas, this is a call to action as one we need to rise up and fight the power. Fight the power prices. That is because they're out of control. We're going to find out why a little bit later on. Rates. Interest rates just keep going up and up and up and down. Apparently ANZ has cut its interest rate. We're going to find out why they've done that. And in case you didn't understand Nfts already. Well, strap yourself in because we've got some hardcore NAFTA nonsense coming up a little bit later in the show. But first, Thomas, it's time to check in on the ASX share market game. I think the final checking for the game and Thomas is volatility. Just a nice way of saying we're all really losing money. What's happening with the ASX game for you? 

Thomas: [00:02:11] Yeah, no it hasn't. I'm not bathed in glory. 

Thomas: [00:02:16] My numbers. I'm in the top 7000. No, just top 7000.

Adam: [00:02:23] Here this is sit with you. Yeah.

Thomas: [00:02:25] A bit disappointed.

Adam: [00:02:27] I'm. I'm a bit disappointed in you, to be honest. 

Thomas: [00:02:32] Yeah, we know. You know, the funny thing is that I was like, okay, I'm so far out of the game, I'm going to sell up all the dogs that haven't done anything. 

Adam: [00:02:41] And barked. 

Thomas: [00:02:42] And barked. 

Thomas: [00:02:44] And I'm going to sink it into a bear ETF. So it's I'm shorting the entire market effectively. So like, I'm praying for a crash because the market's been on a downturn and everyone's talking about how the market's struggling and the market went up. 

Adam: [00:02:59] So I think that just like the markets, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm sitting at 4000 and my overall rank is 4748. So if you told me that with a couple of weeks to go, I'd be sitting at 4748. Oh. Would've taken it. 

Speaker 4: [00:03:23] We were in check is that we said we got Genghis Khan is. 

Thomas: [00:03:27] Sitting on 64,000. There's nothing like that. 

Adam: [00:03:30] I'm presuming that's a pretty good start at 50 K to be sitting at $64,000. That's, that's well playing in a bear market. Yeah. So it's on a bear market. Yeah. Is it. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:03:41] I mean I think that's what's interesting about the numbers is like we got, we got into the leaderboard, got into the 60,000 pretty early on. Hmm. I reckon about three months ago. And then really hasn't gone all that much further since then. All the leaders that we've checked in on high exposure to commodities and to mining players, they had really good run and then that has started to come off. So you're not getting big pops out of your miners like you were in the first half of the game. Right. Market's been tracking. Yeah, on the slide. So basically the lead, the leaderboard, the peloton, the top group, they've been just able to hold onto those gains. And that's that's how you've that's how you stayed ahead through this second half of the game. It's interesting how it works. I think that really jumps out for me is that 24% of participants are in profit, so over three quarters of the gains participants have and are running a loss, which I think goes to show how short term stock picking is just hard. It's a tricky business. 

Adam: [00:04:41] Yeah, probably fits about with my portfolio as well. I reckon 25% of them are in profit, 75% of the companies. 

Adam: [00:04:52] Running at a loss. It's a tough I mean, it's tough times. It's you know, we ran this game 12 months ago. You know, everyone would be, you know, feeling like a genius, myself included. It'd be a very, very different result.

Thomas: [00:05:04] I was happy one of my one of my trades to be quoted. I got I bought AGL and bought the right today. So I don't know if you saw. 

Adam: [00:05:11] AGL did a dip today because I heard over the weekend that the AGL board have shelved plans for the demerger. So Mike Cannon-Brookes and CO, we talked about that on our show before. So that's not going ahead now.

Thomas: [00:05:24] No, that's that's that's off the cards. As we flagged it was a very high hurdle to clear. They needed 75% of shareholders to agree to the demerger. Mike Cannon-Brookes controlled 13%, so you only need to bring another 12% over to his side of the ledger to to kill that deal. And through over the last couple of weeks we've seen a big, some big holders come out and say they're not in favour of the demerger. So I think AGL saw the saw the numbers are on the board and just went like this isn't going to fly.

Adam: [00:05:53] We just had save a CEO, save ourselves the indignity of a vote. And I mean. Right, that's. 

Thomas: [00:06:00] It. The chairman and CEO, Peter Botten and Graham Hunt, they've both step down now. So they're saying, okay, well, we lost this battle, so we're out and the shareholders want to go in a different direction, so need someone else at the helm. So big changes for AGL.

Adam: [00:06:15] And so their share price dipped today did it. Is that why you bought it. 

Thomas: [00:06:19] Down or down 2%, but it dropped. It dropped 4% initially. It's more about when I got in with. All right, I reckon it's sort of I think once. People sort of get on board with Mike Cannon-Brookes vision of that I think it could could lift.

Adam: [00:06:31] I think top 7000 is well within reach for you know these kinds of these kinds of sleek trades that, you. 

Thomas: [00:06:40] Know, I'm on record, I should probably just cash out now while I'm ahead while. I'm up $15. 

Adam: [00:06:46] Definitely. All right. So AGL was one of the one of the stories in. Anything else going on, any sort of trends within the ASX within the market? 

Thomas: [00:06:55] I got into classic as that was my reopening play. I was looking for a reopening play and I just took a punt on City Chic without knowing all that much about the company. Hasn't done well, hasn't done well. But the reason for that is that the CBD reopening has a lot of the city chic offices are in the CBD. That reopening has taken a lot longer to play about. Then people are expecting. 

Adam: [00:07:18] Is it going to happen? The reopening that people talk about because it may just be the new normal, as I say. 

Thomas: [00:07:24] Yeah, I like the Property Council's got data saying that Melbourne's CBD occupancy is is 36%. Wow. So yeah, so it's just 36%, it's down to 19% on Monday, gets up to 40 and Friday.

Adam: [00:07:41] So yeah, I love Fridays in the office. I like going out at work on a Friday. A lot of people don't, but I quite enjoy it. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:07:46] For for fifth the people don't apparently.

Adam: [00:07:50] Like it because it's quiet. 

Thomas: [00:07:55] So CBDs haven't, haven't bounced back. They still like all the capitals, Melbourne's the worst but all the capitals, about 50% or lower.

Adam: [00:08:03] I think people have got reopening fatigue as well. Yeah, we've had a few cracks at reopening now there's at least, at least twice that. I remember where people have said, right, we're good, let's all let's start, let's start going back to the city. We're going to go one day a week, two days a week, and we kind of just started getting some momentum. And then COVID, a new COVID wave, it hit and and we were back to sort of everyone stay home for a bit. And so I reckon people are just like, uh, I don't know, you say reopening. I'm just kind of, kind of over it. I'm just. I might just stay home. 

Thomas: [00:08:35] Yeah. I don't think it's really up to them, though. 

Adam: [00:08:38] Well, they are beg to differ really. I think it is. 

Thomas: [00:08:42] You telling your boss that. Yeah. No, I'm not coming in. 

Speaker 4: [00:08:46] I think she said we're all back in the office about you know. 

Adam: [00:08:48] But it's usually phrased as. Cut to make it in today. 

Adam: [00:08:56] Okay, Thomas, I'm hearing the price of electricity is going to spike if it hasn't already. What's going on with electricity? 

Thomas: [00:09:03] The price is going up. That's the basic story. So the news, the data point is the Australian Energy Regulator came out and approved price increases of up to 18% in New South Wales and up to 12% in Queensland. So the energy regulator sits, sits on the energy market and tries to stop energy companies gouging consumers, and so does that by setting the ranges for the increases that they're offering. 

Adam: [00:09:29] What did it set? A limit of 12%. 

Thomas: [00:09:31] Up to 12% in Queensland, up to 18% in New South Wales. 

Adam: [00:09:35] Now it's to stop gouging consumers just to say thanks regulator. 

Thomas: [00:09:47] To pass on the wholesale prices, so the regulator sits on top of the retail, but the wholesale prices are going up. So if retail isn't allowed to increase their prices, they go out of business because wholesale prices are going up. Right. And we've had three retailers go bankrupt in the past three weeks, something like that. So they're all well, they're already going to the wall. You're not dealing with a look at how the wholesale electricity prices, the numbers are kind of ridiculous. So back in September last year were trading at under $50 per megawatt hour. That's electricity prices per megawatt hour. So it is under $50 back in September. Last year, by January, it was just under $80. It by March we got up to $100. And then right now it's running about $300. Right. So we've gone from under 50 to about 300 in less than six months. So it's really through the roof. And some some of that's temporary. Like some of it's obviously a lot of it's around the war in Ukraine and the way that that's disrupted energy markets. I talked to my mate Tim, who's an energy market economist, and he said a bunch of coal fired power plants are just blowing up at the moment. And big fiery explosions, not literally what he was saying, but like. 

Speaker 1: [00:11:02] A mine alone. 

Adam: [00:11:02] That's what I was going to say. I would have thought that would have made the news. Another coal fired power station has exploded today. 

Speaker 4: [00:11:12] Yeah. Yeah. So the gig. 

Thomas: [00:11:14] To, I think three, three reactors at different, different plants are out of action at the moment because because these assets are getting really old. I mean, this is sort of the story of these these power stations are getting very old now, getting towards the end of their life, which means they're becoming more unreliable. So three reactors are out of action. So Australia's electricity capacity is down by about 20% at the moment. So you've got these sort of factors feeding into the current spike in prices. But even if you look at the what the Ford market saying, the Ford market saying we're getting back down in about a year or so to $100, $120, that's a lot better than $300, but it's still three to 3 to 4 times what it was six months ago. So we're we're locking in effectively a tripling of in electricity prices in the wholesale market, which then yeah, see through into into retail prices. 

Adam: [00:12:07] I mean it could be like we're trying to get people to go back to the city. This could be the masterstroke. Like if we jacked prices up through winter, people go in and use the office power instead of, you know, run the heater in the office. And I have both working at home and around the heater all day, and the bills are going to go through the roof. So, yeah, we'll give back to the city in someone else's power. So what kind of impact does this have on on the economy? Like because we've already got inflation, right? Like, how does this affect everything else? 

Thomas: [00:12:40] There's no good news in this story. So, yeah, so. 

Adam: [00:12:43] That's what we're about to hear on TV. Very much the bad news story. I'm going to have a word about your Instagram charts, too, by the way. So any chance of any chance of a good news chart? So one of these days. 

Thomas: [00:12:59] I don't come around that. 

Speaker 4: [00:13:00] Often, I'll be honest. 

Adam: [00:13:02] So the wider the wider impact. Yes. 

Thomas: [00:13:04] Well, the implications, first of all, is that retail is going to go to the wall. So a lot of retailers are struggling to like it's crushing their margins or they haven't bought well, they haven't hedged. So they're they're not able to survive. And so yet three have gone bankrupt in recent weeks. Electricity in a box. Send out a letter to all of their customers saying that they're going to have a 95% increase in their bills. 

Adam: [00:13:23] Wow. Well, that's because they're shipping it in a box. There's no way to ship electricity supply charges through the roof. 

Speaker 4: [00:13:30] Have you been to Australia Post lately. 

Adam: [00:13:33] Their behaviour? Not until the electricity arrives. 

Speaker 4: [00:13:38] Guess. Yeah. So that's going to, that's going to shake up the retail market and it. 

Thomas: [00:13:41] Also then it feeds through into manufacturing. So Australia's manufacturing sector is a big consumer of electricity. They're going to really struggle like I was reading about some textile manufacturers and Melbourne's the electricity prices have gone up four fold in the last couple of months so they. That's going to really hurt. There's not a lot of businesses like if energy is a big factor, big, you know, big part of your your cost mix there that's that's really going to hurt and some manufacturing in particular is ozone manufacturing has been on decline for a while. This could be you could knock it it knock it down another peg, which is not a great story. 

Adam: [00:14:15] So is this on is this on top of inflation or is this part of inflation?

Thomas: [00:14:19] This is inflation that is coming because. Because. Because the regulator sets prices. We haven't seen this bit pass through yet. We knew something was coming. And so this has happened. But it is probably not the full sum of it. Like there's more in the pipeline like is a saying like it's. 

Adam: [00:14:33] Low and. 

Thomas: [00:14:35] It's up, it's up 18% in New South Wales, but that's, that's probably not going to cover the full in blow out in the wholesale market. So yeah, there's more, there's more coming and it could sort of keep coming for another couple of years. That's my and my team reckons it sort of could take 1 to 2 years to fully pass through. 

Adam: [00:14:55] Yeah.

Thomas: [00:14:55] Well yeah. And so yeah. 

Adam: [00:14:56] Well, what can we do about anything? Are we just beholden to. Is this. Is this a green energy kind of transition story here? Like, can we can we? Oh, it's. 

Thomas: [00:15:05] In the in the sort of medium term. It does sort of turbocharge the the impetus for for green energy alternatives. But in the in the short run, that that's you can't really bring that on line quick enough to really deal with this. So there's sort of two things you could do to the UK. Has the Tories over there under Boris Johnson, they've just introduced a windfall tax. So oil and gas companies are going to be charged 25% tax on the, quote, extraordinary profits for the extra profits that they're made just because prices have gone up because of the war. And that makes sense. They haven't done anything. They've just they're just profiting because the wars created a spike in their prices. So they're going to they're going to yeah, they're going to tax them. The US the there's a group of Democrats in Congress are pushing for this as well be able in the UK they're going to put this tax and then they're going to cycle that back to households. So every household in October is going to get £400 and then low income households are going to get another £650. And so that's sort of how they're trying to manage that transition. Are they going to tax the the the extraordinary profits of the energy companies are making and then cycled that back into households through grants? That's one way to do that. Anthony Albanese ruled that out on Friday, saying that that's not a thing that they were looking at none. If you remember that Labour got pretty burnt with their super profits tax and that sort of killed the Rudd Gillard Government. So they're not, they're not really interested in looking at that again. 

Adam: [00:16:26] What Labour's in government now. 

Thomas: [00:16:31] But the other thing they could do is they could have a reservation and domestic get a domestic energy reservation. So this is we have a mechanism already in place. The Coalition brought this in in 2017, it called for gas in anyway. It's called the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism for the reason why prices are. Why prices in Australia are so high is not because we don't have an a super abundance of energy resources, it's that we're paying global prices because we ship most of it off to the world and pay global prices. And so we're paying global we're paying as much in Australia as China is paying like for gas those prices equalise out. But if we reserved it and said like okay, we're not going to you're going to keep some for the domestic market and then that that can keep a lid on prices. And so like for gas, like currently it's it's $35 per gigajoule on the global market and that's what you're paying on the East Coast in Sydney. But in Western Australia, West Australia has its own state based gas reservation and over there they're paying $9 per gigajoule. So yeah, West Australia's laughing right now and you might see a lot of manufacturers move west because of this, because they might have cheap access to cheap right to cheap electricity or Chinese manufacturers.

Adam: [00:17:45] Look. Yeah, well, I think we're all moving west to bid those low, low prices. All right. Why don't we pause here? We'll grab a word from this week's sponsor. After the break. We're going to be talking about ANZ cutting interest rates as well as an NFT story that just makes it even more ridiculous than it already was. Back in a minute here on comedian versus economist. Welcome back here on Canadian versus economist. You can send us an email at Equity Mates dot com or hit us up on Facebook and Instagram at CV podcast. Thomas ANZ is cutting interest rates that I read that right. Mhm. 

Thomas: [00:18:25] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They came out last week and announced that they're, they're dropping their lowest variable rate back down to 2.29%. Right. So yeah. So they passed on the full rate hike in the beginning of the month, up to 2.25% and now they're dropping it down 1.5%. Yeah, back to 2.39. So it's only for new customers but they're looking the idea is that rate city we're saying Sally to New Zealand analysts they're saying it's a quite a competitive mortgage market at the moment. There's there's not so many people applying for mortgages right now as there were were sort of six months ago or the end of last year. And so the mortgage market is getting competitive and banks are offering juicy rates to get people in. Westpac did the same as well. They they dropped their rate. They hiked by 20.25 and then dropped their introductory honeymoon rate down to just 2.09%.

Adam: [00:19:19] Is this a lot of people coming out of their fixed term as well? Do you think so? My fixed term ended up found myself on a bit of a higher rate, so I went shopping around and a lot of them I noticed are offering cashback as well. So that's another sort of mechanism for attracting new business. Is that is that part of it to the end of the fixed rates that people may have done two or three years ago? 

Thomas: [00:19:39] There is there is a big fixed rate reset in the pipeline. It's starting to happen now. Like Lucky I did. I did the same. And I'm just just come off mine now. Right. Yeah. So that's that's got to be part of it. 

Adam: [00:19:50] But is this an interest rate story then, or is this just a we're having a sale story? 

Thomas: [00:19:55] Oh, it's a little bit. I mean, I think I think for me, it's interesting to remember that the RBA is not the only thing that determines the rates that you can get in the market. I'm looking around at the moment because yeah, my, my fixed rates have come off and now I'm looking around what's the best deal that I can get? And there's quite a variety of them in the market, you know, like there's anything from a flat to all the way up to a four for a sort of like a pretty standard basic mortgage. That's a lot of a lot of variation in in the market. That competitive pressure does influence the rates that you can get. But the other story I think in this is that because like we had the wages data, like we talked about it last week, that came in a lot softer than people were expecting. And so even though the inflation rate came in, hotter than expected wages was particular, was particularly soft. And I think that that caused economists and the whole market to sort of ratchet back their expectations for rate hikes. And so I think part of the story is, is the banks going like, okay, we passed the full 25 basis points on. We thought, you know, it's off to the races with rate hikes are we're just going to keep keep pace with the guy. I think I think there might be to an extent going like, oh, maybe it's not going to be so, so aggressive from here going forward. It might be a little. 

Adam: [00:21:09] More chill, right? I mean, a honeymoon rate does imply that it finishes like soon. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:21:15] So the marriage rate. 

Adam: [00:21:17] You go to the marriage rate where they nag you over time for repayments. All right, Thomas, you know, I love Nfts. You've got an NFT story for us this week, which is I'm quite excited about. 

Thomas: [00:21:32] Like it's one of these stories that sort of either like really illustrative or just shows that we've reached peak stupid. 

Speaker 4: [00:21:42] Yeah. So, uh. 

Adam: [00:21:44] So maybe could we just, can we just reset and just for anyone that doesn't know what an NFT is, it's a non-fungible token. You've probably heard of them by now. It's a, it's also there's a gif also known as that. What now. Well, yes, but it's, it's an image or it's some sort of digital property that you can prove ownership with through the blockchain. You can buy and sell them. We're not going to go into any further than that. We did do an episode on NFT, I think probably a year ago now, so if you want to know more, go back and listen to that one. But Thomas, what is this one about? Mm. 

Thomas: [00:22:20] Yeah. So there's, there's a guy called Seth Green. He is a sort of an actor probably best known for voicing the character of Chris on Family Guy. So it's sort of a comedian. 

Adam: [00:22:30] He also did Robot Chicken, I think if anyone's familiar with Robot Chicken. But yeah, he made Robot Chicken. 

Thomas: [00:22:35] Is pitching a TV show called White Horse Tavern. I think it is. But the idea of the TV show is it blends real life characters with Nfts animated Nfts I think they're all NFT. I don't know, it's just animation and bit like, Yeah, Space Jam.

Adam: [00:22:52] Who framed Roger Rabbit? For anyone who remembers the masterpiece that it was, who framed Roger Rabbit. 

Thomas: [00:22:58] On the bus? It's a bit like a cross between space jam and cheers. Hmm. I think. Yeah. 

Speaker 4: [00:23:04] Pitching it. But the. 

Thomas: [00:23:07] The lead character was an. A board ape nft. So board apes are very famous. NFT is the board at yacht club collection? Yeah. And there's one at one of them called Daniel Simian. I don't know what was particularly special about that NFT. 

Speaker 4: [00:23:26] That picture of a monkey. 

Adam: [00:23:28] I'm actually fairly well across this story because I was interested in it, unlike most of your other stories. But I was loving listening to you. Explain. Explain what went down. 

Speaker 4: [00:23:40] Yeah, that's a career highlight for me too. This Daniel Simien. 

Thomas: [00:23:46] NFT was apparently worth $200,000 for the picture of Daniel Simien. Yeah, he is. Seth bought it and owned it and animated it and injected it in as the main character in this TV show. 

Adam: [00:23:59] Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:24:00] Put together a pitch. There's a there's a preview on Twitter. And then someone stole. 

Speaker 4: [00:24:06] His NFT and no longer has. 

Adam: [00:24:10] New York based Seth fell for a phishing campaign. Like, I don't know the details of it, but he fell for a fish. Like a phishing email. You got him at work or whatever all the time. So he fell for the fish and someone stole an NFT.

Speaker 1: [00:24:25] Yeah. 

Adam: [00:24:26] Someone stole his NFT. So I don't know if there's a precedent for this. Like like having your your late actor on your soon to be TV show getting stolen. I think that actually happened during the filming of the latest Top Gun movie. People thought Tom Cruise got stolen, but it turned out it just fallen down behind the couch. This guy, I think his name was Duck Wing 84 is his handle. 

Thomas: [00:24:54] No, no, no, no. In Dark Wing 84 bought it from whoever's sold it. So now they. 

Adam: [00:25:00] Could be the same person they like the. Well, I think so, because you don't know who anyone is in the in the crypto sphere. 

Thomas: [00:25:06] Okay. Yeah, right. But he bought it from someone with a different handle. 

Adam: [00:25:09] Right. Yeah. So one handles, stole it and then sold it to Dark Ring 84, which may have been the same person. Right. Right. I wouldn't know how to look at doctoring 80 four's collection of Nfts, one of which is a picture of Clive Palmer's face with the axe drawn all over the top of it while he's asleep. I have no idea why that even exists, but this darkling 84, he's now transferred it to a user called GB Vault, which sounds like he's put it in a vault. So it sounds to me like Seth's not getting his NFT back. I'm interested in your thoughts on these times, because is this kind of where we're heading with the metaverse and the future and and digital assets like in the future in the metaverse, this digital thing that might be your house that you've built in, the metaverse that you've you could lose it through a fish like this is kind of concerning, I think, for the future. 

Thomas: [00:26:06] No, it's not. No. 

Speaker 4: [00:26:07] I don't see that happening. 

Thomas: [00:26:11] When you think about Nike, it's like, what do you what what he's stolen is like? It was the original board. Ape is just a jpeg, right? Like it's just a picture of an ape. Seth Green is like it's effectively his concept art for the character, for the animation that was going to go in the TV show. Yeah, it's not you're not actually animating the NFT, so it's like, I don't know why Seth Green, I think is I think he's ahead with it. Like, yeah, come at me, Dog Wing 84. If you're like and you've got IP on this thing, come see me in court. 

Speaker 4: [00:26:42] Before you go with it. 

Adam: [00:26:44] Do you think do you think law enforcement's kept up well enough to, to to track down this kind of situation like I did because I know certain it didn't? Doesn't sound like he rang the police. He just like sent dark week 84 Twitter message and went, look, you really need to give it back or you're going to find yourself in court. And I really want to avoid that. So I'm curious why he wouldn't have gone to the police. I guessing he went, there's no way that they're up for solving this crime. 

Thomas: [00:27:12] And, you know, I mean, you do hear about them tracking down stolen bitcoins and things like that. Now onto it. 

Adam: [00:27:19] You file a missing persons report. 

Thomas: [00:27:23] Can you describe. 

Speaker 4: [00:27:24] This to me. 

Adam: [00:27:25] Sir? But you write, I could have used another hope. There's a whole collection of these things, and one of you could just grab any of the cheap ones and just say it's. It's this one just dressed up in the other one's clothes. And because that's what actors do, right? 

Thomas: [00:27:41] That's it's a picture of a monkey like and it's not that much unique about it. Like, I think I don't know what this character Daniel Simian had, like other than maybe a a signature t shirt that he wears. 

Adam: [00:27:55] Yeah, he wears a bones t shirt. Does distinguish him from the other apes that wore, like, different t shirts and had eyeballs hanging out of their faces. Yeah, I don't know. And if it's if it does end up in court, like, how does that even play out? Like. Imagine the prosecutor going into the courtroom despair. Well, you say, Judge, this is just a classic case of an NFT which was stolen during a phishing attack and then tried it on a crypto exchange that you filed pretty much open and shut. Imagine that. Be like, right. Well, it seems as good a time as any to retire and it's years later. All right, Thomas, super quick. Before we finish up for the day, just a bit of listener feedback to get through. Amy sent us a message via Facebook at CB podcast. We talked about terror the other day and the crash of the stablecoin that turned out not to be so stable. Amy sent us a link that I thought was worth mentioning. She's linked us to a project called USD T, spelled us DTA as in the drink. It's the first stablecoin backed by Arizona iced tea. It makes no sense to me. But then again, it is either the nfts and. And these are the dogecoin, I think worth pointing out when it was launched, that was launched as a joke.

Speaker 4: [00:29:18] So I think I think the thing I love about Usdc is they've now they've been oversubscribed, so they're no longer selling Usdc. TS Because really.

Thomas: [00:29:27] Yeah, because they kept it at a thousand because for every dollar that they, that they received, they had to go out and buy a dollar's worth of iced tea. So if they ever went viral, I think that the story I like to imagine is that started to go viral and they realised that they had to buy a warehouse to store all that iced tea. Where to back? Back that back to the stablecoin. 

Adam: [00:29:48] But doesn't iced tea have an expiry date on it? You can't. And how do you know it's going to be worth the same as when you if you bought a dollar's worth of iced tea? I think this is thinking I overthinking this. I need to put it more in the context of a friend of mine who made sausage coin just as a thing to do when we didn't get the same viral traction that update days got. All right. Clement has sent us a message via Instagram at CV podcast. Says she was listening to Bryce and Ren the other day on Get Started Investing feed or an Equity Mates investing podcast. Not sure which one. And she said they were talking about intentionally selling some positions at a loss for tax purposes. Thomas is wondering your thoughts on this and how does this work? Also, I asked actually, should I finally get rid of my zip shares? So noting that you are not a qualified tax accountant in any way. Barely an economist. So it's. 

Thomas: [00:30:49] No, I don't really have any like be nice to be that rich that you've got to create losses to. 

Speaker 4: [00:30:56] Minimise the attacks on the situation. 

Thomas: [00:30:58] That I'm in. But I can see how it could work that you, you know, you lose the money, you drop down the tax bracket. But on really depends on your personal circumstances, wouldn't you know? The thing I note about zip though is that NAB has just launched their own buy now pay later offering. So that's coming into the market as well. And we've talked about this a bit in the past, but like for me, buy now, pay later. The whole reason it existed is because it was exploiting a loophole in the credit system where it was just it was offering credit without doing thorough credit checks. Banks weren't allowed to do that, that there was a niche in the market that buy now pay later jumped into. But now they've paved the way. Banks are now following suit and joining that market. And I think all of the existing players are going to struggle to hold ground as the market gets saturated and as big banks come into it. I think there's a lot of pressure on on on the buy now pay later companies and that's kind of that's going to that's going to hold. 

Adam: [00:31:55] Right. Well, there you go. Definitely not a buy hold or sell recommendation in any way. And I would. Clairmont I'd talk to a tax agent about the selling positions at a loss, if that's if that's your game. Definitely do not take financial advice from any podcast, but this podcast in particular. Thank you once again for listening. We really enjoy bringing you the show every week. Don't forget to tell one person if you could just one that would really help us out immensely. Of course, lots of other great shows to get your ears around from Equity Mates Equity Mates Investing Podcast. Get started investing. You're in good company, talk money to me, which had a really good episode on debt recycling actually, if you're interested in that as a strategy. Crypto curious and the dive which is excellent as well of course invest also happening October 15 head to Equity Mates dot com forward slash fin fest for all the information but Thomas, that's it for us for another week. We look forward to joining you again next week. For now, it's bye from us.