Expert: Stephen Koukoulas – Do interest rates only work in Sydney and Melbourne?

Bryce: [00:00:15] Welcome to another episode of Equity Mates, a podcast that follows our journey of investing. Whether you're an absolute beginner or approaching Warren Buffett status, our aim is to help break down your barriers from beginning to dividend. My name is Bryce and as always, I'm joined by my equity buddy, Ren. How you going?

Alec: [00:00:30] I'm very good, Bryce. I'm very excited for this episode. We have got one of Australia's leading economists joining us to help us understand everything that's going on in a particularly confusing time, I think. I think it's fair to say. 

Bryce: [00:00:45] That's it. We're excited to welcome Stephen Koukoulas to the studio. Stephen, welcome.

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:00:49] Thank you very much. And I'll do my best to deal with all of the difficult ads, all the questions that are floating around right now. 

Bryce: [00:00:58] That's it. Plenty to get through in today's episode, but if you haven't come across Stephen before, he is one of Australia's leading economists previously working as chief adviser for financial markets at Australia's Treasury. Chief economist at Citibank and as a senior economic adviser to Prime Minister Julia Gillard. So plenty of experience and we're really excited to cover it so much. That's happening in markets at the moment. But Ren.

Alec: [00:01:24] Well, Stephen, before we get to what's happening in the economy, we love to ask this question to get to know all of our guests. We like to hear the story of their very first investment. We generally find there's a good lesson or a good story that comes out of it. So to kick us off today, can you tell us the story of your first investment? 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:01:42] Okay. Well, it's really sort of one and a half because my first investment was putting money in term deposits in the mid 1980s. So I'm showing my age here as I saved the deposit for my first house. So I was putting money in a few hundred dollars a time back in the day. That was quite a chunky amount of money getting 15, 16, 17% on my savings and then using that to buy my first house, which cost, I remember correctly, $66,000. Okay, game. That was my first investment. It was a terrific one. But in terms of dabbling in the share market, that came much, much later. 

Bryce: [00:02:20] Wow. Wow. 

Alec: [00:02:21] There goes my $66,000. 

Bryce: [00:02:23] That's 70% on your savings.

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:02:26] Savings? Yes. And every couple of hundred bucks I was getting that 16, 17% on the savings. Incredible. 

Alec: [00:02:34] That is amazing. Yeah. 

Bryce: [00:02:36] Well how times have changed. And that brings us to today. So Stephen, we wanted to start today's conversation just with maybe some general thoughts. There's plenty going on in stock markets. Housing is there's always stuff to talk about. Tip of the tongue on many of the Australians and cryptocurrency as well. We'd like to touch on all of them, but maybe if you could just start by sort of summarising how you think and perceive kind of markets, the broader economy at the moment.

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:03:07] Yeah, well the macro trend, we're seeing a range of things that even people of my vintage haven't really seen for 20, 30, 40 years. And by that I mean this inflation surge. It's happening globally. But also here the Australian economy is seeing inflation rates hit 30 and 40 year highs. So you think about that for a moment. Well, how do you cope when you're seeing an economic variable perform in a way that you haven't seen for 30 and 40 years? So that's one complicating factor before we kick off. The other thing which we're grappling with, I suppose, is the fact that the labour market, you know, the fact that we've got full employment around the world so that if you look at the US unemployment rate in the UK, New Zealand, Canada, here in Australia unemployment rates are 50 year lows. So from a business perspective, we know that this tightness in the labour market is, well, is a problem. Look, it's good. As an economist, I want everybody to have a job. That's good news. But as a business, if you're looking to expand, you're looking to get some talent, you're sort of looking still to contain your costs. You're actually confronting a situation where for the first time in 50 years, we've basically run out of workers, and that's actually putting pressure on businesses and their ability to spend, probably putting pressure on wages. We haven't seen that showing up strongly in the official data yet, but I think it's just a matter of time. So we're looking at these economic conditions of, you know, pretty good economic times in a way. And of course, our friends at the central banks, including the RBA, are hiking rates and we haven't really got used to that much in the last decade. And we've got a series of rate cuts having been delivered up until a couple of months ago.

Alec: [00:04:53] That's somewhat the confusing thing at the moment. You know, you turn the inflation story off and you turn the stock market off and things are sort of, you know, throughout the 20 tens, we couldn't get inflation in the system and we couldn't get wage increases. And now we seem to be getting to. Much of both. But it's just funny that there's sort of like two there's different stories depending on what indicators you look at. How do you sort of reconcile that and make a complete picture when companies are desperate for workers, which seems to suggest that things are going okay? And then on the other hand, some of those companies share prices are down 80 or 90%.

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:05:32] Yeah, they're getting hammered, aren't they? Look, I think at the end of the day that there's still good companies and bad companies. I'm telling you more about the the individual companies than I do, but in very broad terms, you always get the stock market showing, you know, some stellar companies, some good old timers will continue to do pretty well come hell or high water, so to speak, in a few of these sort of new ones, some which will be the booming sort of new major companies, and some that start off well and then petered out because of some competitive pressure or they don't quite fulfil their promise legislative. And so that's in a sort of very in a very macro sense. But at the end of the day, I'm still a believer that while there's not a strong correlation between performance of the economy, the performance of the stock market in very broad terms, it's much better for corporate Australia. The economy's growing than we're in a recession. Interestingly, some of these inflation pressures might actually be enhancing the bottom line of many companies. One of the things that was evident previously, I suppose, was that if you didn't have that ability to hike your selling prices, a big competitor came in and squeezed you and took your market share. You were actually having trouble to maintain your profitability in your margins right now because everybody's in the same boat with high inflation, tight labour markets, availability of workers. Firms are able to put up their selling prices, which by definition is inflation by way. But they're putting up these selling prices and they are sort of maintaining their margins, which is good for the bottom line, good for the the valuation of these various companies. So there's a whole lot of things going on right now, which, again, we're still getting our minds around. And clearly, stock markets don't like rate hikes. And the bearish patients that we've seen in bond markets and yields spiking pretty dramatically in the last few months. But if the economy can sort of muddle through this hiking cycle, get into 2023 where growth is doing okay, still maybe not as strong as we've seen six months ago. You know, it's not a bad environment for equity markets if that is in fact the scenario that comes to play.

Bryce: [00:07:37] And so that's on the equity market side. What are your thoughts on we and we'll touch on it in a little bit more detail later on. But broadly speaking, housing at the moment, what what are the implications for for housing? Yeah. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:07:51] Lots of issues on housing. A couple of things that I've learnt looking at house prices going back, gosh, 40 years or something, whenever you get a 25% annual increase in house prices, you don't get another one 25% regardless of interest rates, unemployment, recessions, time, you just get two in a row. That doesn't happen. So we had 25% last year up until very early this year. And now we've got the housing market clearly, clearly cooling off. I am of the view that house prices will fall. They'll probably drop. I had this forecast all ago. So whatever haven't really changed somewhere between five and 10% on a nationwide basis. Some cities will do worse than others, some of the a little bit better than others. But basically the sharp falls in house prices. Any forecast that we've, you know, 20 or 30% up, some say in some people forecasting because the house prices, it ain't going to happen because the other drivers that housing there's more than just interest rates labour market conditions which we've already touched on. So if you've got a job, it's much, much easier to service even a large mortgage than having a small mortgage and being unemployed. So the fact that we've got a tight labour market, the unemployment rates looks like it's going to be hovering in the mid 3% region is a good thing for the housing market and something of an antidote to the rate hikes. Similarly with wages. If we're right, we do see wages growth pick up a bit over the next 18 months and you're going to have a bit of a positive impact on household incomes offsetting the interest rate hikes and the one which is more of a structural issue to the supply and demand type things. You know, we didn't have the housing falling when we had the borders shut and immigration is in fact negative. But we do have the borders opening now. We had a bit of a construction surge previously, but again, that's tapering off. So you think the supply and demand dynamics over the next 18 months to two years will be neutral rather than negative for house prices? So into that, I guess housing is going to weaken. We're going to have a year or 18 months when house prices do drop, as I say, between five and 10%. Any worse than that seems really unlikely because everybody who wants a job has a job and they can make their mortgage repayments. 

Alec: [00:10:02] Well, Stephen, while we're talking about housing, we do enjoy following you on Twitter and you definitely are happy to share a contrarian. Contrarian view on Twitter and we screenshotted one tweet recently. Sort of funny that house prices are still rising in Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. The interest rates only work in Sydney and Melbourne. And it's a very fair point. It's a it's a great question. How how do you, I guess, think about the mechanism of interest rates and the fact that Sydney and Melbourne are slowing while some of these other capitals are rising? 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:10:38] Yeah, look, I think there is a relative shift in demand in absolute dollar terms. Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth are cheap compared to Sydney and Melbourne. We know Sydney. Melbourne 1,000,001.1, 1.2, 1.3 million, depending which source you use. And Adelaide's in Brisbane is still 708 hundred. That's part of the issue that there are people moving to those areas because housing is cheap and places to live. To be honest, it goes to show that there are things other than interest rates, as I was just relating to a moment ago, then these other interest rates that do drive house prices. And in fact, I've had a look just if you've got an extra minute to hear me out on this one, because this is this is something that sort of hit me between the eyes when I actually stopped and looked at numbers like, well, I know how radical is looking at that. We've had four interest rate hiking cycles on the Reserve Bank since the early 1999, so we had four episodes. What happened to house prices in each of those four episodes was that two years after both the first and the last rate hikes, most cycles, in one instance, house prices were flat. The other three, they were up to up to sort of ten 15% over two years. Five years after the rate hike and cycle, house prices were up by an average of 30%. So what was happening? Labour market was strong. So what we've got now, more or less supply and demand imbalances were there too. So look, interest rates are clearly a driver, a cyclical element of house prices. Clearly, no doubt the fact that interest rates are massively higher or maybe massively higher will constrain one's ability to borrow. But there are other things that drive it. And just as you've got another 30 seconds, the canary in the coal mine for housing. I love Perth. Okay. You know, a city of 2 million people, you know, it's a pretty big cosmopolitan, great place to live. So it's not a we're not looking at a little country town in the Pilbara or something. This is Perth. Curiously, in the 2000s, so roughly from 2002 to 2010 ish, that decade, interest rates were being hiked a lot. Perth house prices rose by 110% with rate hikes in 2010 to 2020, approximately Perth house prices -10% in nominal terms, not real terms, nominal terms. And that was with the longest rate cutting cycling history. Something else was driving Perth house prices. Mining the business cycle. Yeah. 

Alec: [00:13:18] Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. Well, I saw that Perth was up about 2% in the June quarter. So if that's the canary in the coal mine, houses probably aren't getting affordable any time. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:13:30] So yeah, not in Perth and well again the borders have reopened again. We've just put W.A. was locked down pretty aggressively during the COVID disaster, if we can call it that. And now we've got Perth Open. People are moving back, the mining sector is doing pretty well. So perhaps we've got an influx of people wanting to work in the mining area and mining related industries. So and Perth is cheap compared to most cities. So even with rate hikes nobody is going to be that be the strong, the strong person on the block with Sydney and Melbourne could taper off just out of affordability issues.

Bryce: [00:14:05] So let's let's move on. Speaking of tweets, we've we've got another one from you, Stephen, and it says, I'm very upbeat about one sector of the economy, the fiction area dominated by those forecasting recessions, house price crashes, extreme household financial stress. I suppose people do love scary fantasy. And that leads us to sort of mainstream financial media. We've we've seen plenty of instances where forecasting is wrong. I mean, we even look at some of the commentary from some of the RBA, you know, the RBA and central banks around the world. 

Alec: [00:14:44] Stephen Context Bryce has beef with the RBA for how wrong they got in the last couple of years. We've recorded a number of episodes recently and he's brought it up. Every talk.

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:14:55] I repeat, came out of a loss to join the pile on on the RBA. But I keep going. 

Bryce: [00:14:59] Well let's start the pile on. Well, is there anything that you think mainstream financial media gets wrong or is getting wrong at the moment about the economy in general for. Casting. Yeah. Let's start the pile on. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:15:14] Because the economy is slowing, people are extrapolating. That leads to recession. Okay. You never say never. And I've been around long enough to see a lot of unexpected things happen. But one of the things the central banks around the world are trying to achieve is slower demand growth. They're hoping that the supply chains do start to repair themselves, which they appear to be at. There's evidence that, you know, the production of chips is increasing and fried chicken rates are coming down. So some of those things are starting to come through and hopefully they continue. But the slowdown leading to an inevitable recession, I've seen some people sort of saying, hang on, I look at recession indicators. I've lived through a few. And other than the pandemic recession for obvious reasons, you know, that's nobody's fault. I think nobody could have any responsibility. It was just a nasty, nasty event that occurred. But when you get other recessions occurring, it's because of policy errors from the central bank. And okay, there's a chance that the Fed and the RBA will over time. But see, they're way behind what should be doing given the inflation by method. So you can't say that they're ahead of the curve right now. We normally get some of the leading indicators on the labour market starting to turn and as we've just discussed, it's still going up with the job ads and job vacancies, things like that. Look at business confidence that consumers are a bit more fickle. They don't like paying ten bucks for lettuce and 2.24 a litre of petrol. But if you look at and that's sort of fair enough too, but as we saw in the recent retail sales numbers, we're feeling gloomy, but we're going out for some retail therapy. Retail sales are booming, you know, so I'm not quite sure. I believe the consumer sentiment numbers over there might be a bit of a break in the links there between sentiment and spending. But then I look at the net business confidence and there's another survey, the Westpac what's it called, survey of Industrial Trends. Nobody looks at it other than me and Bill Evans. I think we've got into the third. It's showing that Manufacturing Australia is doing really well and even though commodity prices have come off the boil a little bit in the last month or two, iron ore saw 130 bucks US a tonne. The Aussie dollar is still sub $0.70, a huge stimulatory factor for our economy. Our international trade surpluses are around about nine or 10 billion a month, so that contribution to national income is still very strong. And I like I can't see the recession indicators coming through. So we get a look inside and writing the story saying, I think the economy is going to perform moderately well. Growth around about trend, inflation's got to moderate a bit. You won't get as many clicks as if you say we're heading for a nasty recession. And I think that drives the media commentary on financial markets and economics. 

Alec: [00:18:06] Well, Stephen, to make sure we get plenty of clicks on this episode, we'll title it something like a recession. Stephen Koukoulas calls recession or something like that. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:18:15] Inevitable should tell you low. [00:18:16][1.9]

Alec: [00:18:18] Yeah, but look, Stephen, you mentioned inflation there and I think there's a lot of debate and a lot of media clicks by getting certain headlines, so we'd love to turn to that. But before we do so, Bryce and I can continue to afford $10 us. We're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. So, Stephen, before the break, we were talking about some of the things that financial media and the financial industry as a whole get wrong or, you know, perhaps over sensationalised. And I think one thing that Bryce and I and everyone in the Equity Mates community has felt a little bit lost around is inflation. In 2021, the word of the day was transitory and in 2022 it's now structural and the new normal. And you know, this data, whatever your point of view, you can find data that backs it up. And Bryce and I were talking earlier today about how a number of the commodities have sort of dropped over the last month. And what does that mean? And I guess we're just going to take all of our questions and just put them to you. What are your thoughts on inflation? Where do you think it's going? Transitory, new normal? Well, as you head out about at all. Yeah. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:19:28] Well, obviously, we've got a fair bit of momentum on the inflation upside. And a year ago, not that long ago, inflation was at one and a half percent. We're now heading to 7% by the end of this year. I think that's more or less correct. And it's pretty much as I've been sort of analysing elsewhere, that's pretty much baked into the economy. You can't change the momentum on prices that quickly. Now, as you rightly touched on, there's a few things that are happening that make me think that this time next year we'll see some clear evidence that inflation started to cool off. And in no particular order, the policy tightening is will see demand growth soften. So when you think about the mechanism of high inflation, if we are rushing out to the shops in the same order of magnitude because we are seeing a slowing economy because of the policy tightening, then the ability of firms to hike the selling prices is diminished and you get that sort of normal cyclical approach to inflation, if you like. I didn't look at commodity prices as you touched on. I'll look at and again, the link between commodity prices and consumer prices doesn't always hold 1 to 1, but it's not a bad indicator other than for oil, which is obviously an obviously headline grabbing indicator of prices. But all stock rise and it's probably come off a bit. So while we're still paying $2, 20 a litre, even if all comes back a bit stays where it is, instead of increasing by 30%, which it has in the last year, it'll increase by nothing. Could it not be slight negative? So all of a sudden just the mechanics of how inflation's calculated? You're seeing a deceleration. Throw in the fact that you've also got things like lumber prices significantly lower. They're feeding into the construction costs. Similarly, copper, nickel even, and prices. And I know they're being heavily, heavily influenced by the Ukraine war. And that's, you know, who knows what happens in that horrible situation. But yeah, but even they're starting to come off a bit. So I look at the broad indices of commodity prices and see them coming down and okay, it's early days, yet they're only off 10% approximately these broader indices of commodity prices. But it seems to be something happening. And if that actually then translates into an ability of supply chain issues to be corrected, you know, prices are down, auto production is booming again. So we're all really out to buy a car and some of that price gouging, I call it all on car sales will no longer be there. And in fact, I might have to just sort of normalise for us. So you look at the mechanics of what's happening to inflation. It's not impossible to see a scenario where after hitting 7% at the end of this year, we'd get back into the 4% by the middle of 2023, 3% shortly thereafter into the range of the RBA's target late 2023 or early 2024. And we'll be talking rate cuts, heaven forbid. 

Bryce: [00:22:29] Yeah. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:22:30] And not only that, but this inflation issue, it is a big issue. It's a cost of living issue and it is a dampening effect in itself on the economy. But that just is there's a few flashing lights saying that this could be starting to turn. 

Alec: [00:22:45] Yeah, we'll have to hear that. 

Bryce: [00:22:48] Could be if if we do hit that 7% mark which you just said by the end of the year, what are your expectations for interest rates by that point? What would what would the Reserve Bank response be. Tight end of 2022. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:23:01] Yeah, well they've got such a poor record. I make this forecast with a very low degree of confidence and I would argue if I was the RBA governor, heaven forbid, watch out everybody. What would you do? Be mad on on Twitter? Clearly you've got to have the cash rate near 2% as quickly as you can. Currently there's a recording this, it's 3.85. They need to go hard in the July meeting, hard in April and get towards 3% very quickly and then maybe start moving in 25 point increments. So by the end of the year we get that, we get the 7% figure in January 2023. That's when the date. Released. You want to have the cash, right? I'd say around 3% by then. So another 200 odd points. 175 to 200. And I guess the caveat would be if we do actually get some of these indicators on inflation coming off a bit, the RBA would have a degree of confidence being able to say that, look, that will be the peak and we're going to be seeing lower inflation. So we can perhaps pause a little bit once we get to that two and a half to 3% level. More rate hikes to come, there's no question. And they've been way behind the curve. You know that promise to keep rates steady until 2024? Yeah, I was saying I'm going to go dry July and I'll get to the glass of wine then. So I'm going to have to be careful what you promise. 

Alec: [00:24:25] So, Stephen, in this interview, we've already spoken about how important mining and China's demand for iron ore was in the global financial crisis and that period to get Australia through. I imagine number one with the bullet is Chinese demand for our minerals that that'll be a big determinant. But are there other things that you look to that when you're thinking about the future direction and the health of Australia's economy? 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:24:51] Yeah, look, there are a myriad of things. We are heavily export dependent and of course China takes a third of our exports. So what happens there is going to be important. And you know, the COVID lockdowns seem to be moderating a little bit too, which is good for the Chinese growth and our exports. Obviously, a couple of things that are going to be important to me anyway. Immigration. What does the new government do with immigration intake? That's a really important issue, one to address some of the skills shortages. But two, I think we had too much immigration pre-COVID, which created congestion, demand for housing and led to some other concerns and lack of infrastructure that there are too many people for the existing infrastructure. So we had these problems where we had state governments in particular borrowing tens of billion dollars to build infrastructure as quickly as they could. And that led to some of the concerns occurring in the economy. So there is not a level of immigration. They've been relatively quiet on that so far. But watch this space. I know that in the budget in October that Jim Chalmers, the Treasurer, is going to be talking about that a little bit more. The other thing that I think is important for us to well, speaking of the budget is to what extent will the new government try to repair the budget? Now, clearly, they've got to implement a lot of the policy promises they took to the election. Most of them were expensive child care, disability care. So in a sense, there's going to be money being pumped into the economy as they implement that policy approach. And fair enough to I think they're all legitimate policy issues. But then the question is, will what do they do to try to save money? At this stage, all they're doing is the inverted commas, getting rid of waste and rorts. That's a couple of billion bucks. It's not a big issue. And they're going to collect extra tax from multinationals. Again, it might be a billion or two. And when you're talking about budget deficits of 40, 50, 60 billion detaining, of course, don't get me wrong, you don't waste $1 if you're a treasurer or hopefully you don't, but they're not really the big ticket item. So I'm just wondering, will we see a bit more restricted fiscal policy coming into play? Once we get the new governments entrenched, they start implementing their policy agenda, whatever that may be. To be fair, I think there has to be some budget consolidation. I'm still one of the believers that the budget deficit sort of matters, and when the economy is doing pretty well, you repair it with its weight on a deficit. That's absolutely fine. But, you know, we've got debt on track to hit $1.2 trillion. We do have a rising yield environment. So your debt servicing costs are high. So I'll be looking at that to see whether there's any macro implications for what's happening on the budget. 

Alec: [00:27:25] On that point, it feels like Australian politics in the mid 20 tens was debt and deficit. That was the tagline. You know, the last couple of years we've really moved away from that, not just in Australia but globally. And you know, you look at you look at a country like Japan where people have spoken about debt and deficit over there for probably decades now. And as long as they can print their own currency, they can sort of get through it. So why do you why do you still think that deficits are, you know, a top concern? Yeah, well.

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:27:56] We do have the capital markets heavily dependent on what bond yields do. And in fact, one of the interesting issues that's been negative for equity markets in the last six months is the end of sort of the interest rate hikes from the central banks. It's the end of QE and the beginnings in some instances of queue take on quantitative tightening. So in a sense, it's sort of it's sort of medicine while I can reinstitute quantitative easing, those sorts of things, you know, you want to have a budget position where you're not allocating, you know, $25 billion a year just on interest payments on the level of government debt that the mechanism. So we're in a high inflation environment you don't want. Is the policy be pumping extra money into the economy. And for those believers in modern monetary theory, but they don't really have a solution for the high inflation dilemma that we're confronting right now. It's all very well when the economy's weak. Sure, print money and don't worry about it. We put our own money. But when the economy's got this inflationary problem, you do need to use interest rates. You do need to use fiscal policy to take that hate out of the economy. So, again, it's not an urgent problem. I don't think we need to fix the budget tomorrow. But if the economy can maintain a year or two or three of decent economic growth, you'd be erring on the side of getting towards a balanced budget rather than keeping budget deficits at 50, 60, 70 billion a year. Well, Stephen. 

Bryce: [00:29:23] Unfortunately, we have run out of time. So I would like to absolutely thank you for sharing yours with our community today. Make sure you go and follow Stephen on Twitter. Stephen could call us to the UK or UK is his handle. But we do have one final question that we've got to ask, and that is your thoughts around crypto currency. There's it's one asset class that has fallen quite dramatically over the past sort of six months or so. And a number of our community obviously quite invested in the space as well. And yeah, love to hear your closing thoughts on on what's going on in crypto at the moment. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:30:01] Yeah, I'm not a fan. In fact, if you've got $200, good on you. If you paid 60,000 for it, not so good. Now, I'm not a fan because I don't understand what it's trying to do. You know, is it going to be a means of exchange? Well, not really. Is it going to be an alternative asset class or not? Really. We do know that regulators are now coming off a bit more than they were before. But this is a global phenomenon that is one of the reasons that will undermine some demand for it, in my view. Look, if you like it, go for it. I'll keep my gambling to Rosehill on a seven year old. I'll look at a few horses, go around and, you know very quickly whether you've made a lot of money there by the wins or loses. But look, but for those who like crypto, good luck to you like any asset class. Good luck to you. I hope everyone makes money. That's a nice thing for the society. However, it's not a fair call. 

Alec: [00:30:59] Well, stay tuned. Soon we'll have the combination of two things that you're not a fan of cryptocurrency and central banks when we have a central bank digital currency. So we'll have to get you back on when when Australia gets around to that. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:31:13] But I'd love to be back. Look at what they actually do. Yeah. 

Bryce: [00:31:17] Well thank you so much Stephen. It was an enjoyable conversation and we look forward to getting back on at some point as well. So thank you very much. 

Stephen Koukoulas: [00:31:24] Thanks to been a pleasure. 

Alec: [00:31:25] Thanks.