When it rains it pours: tallying the East Coast Floods

Adam: [00:00:26] 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 is Adam, and we're joined, as always, by my little older brother and real life economist Thomas. Hi, Thomas. 

Thomas: [00:00:40] G'day, Adam. How are you going? 

Adam: [00:00:41] I'm doing well. Thank you. It's nice to be in the same house as you, albeit not the same room, because we can't work out how technology works. Big Show today. Don't forget, of course, registrations have us sorry are still open for the share market trading game. The game has begun. Thomas, you bought any shares yet? 

Thomas: [00:01:02] Not yet. Not yet. Someone to do list today 

Adam: [00:01:04] biding your time. Yeah, I've bought some and I'm down. So. So you're ahead by your apathy and inaction. You are leading between the two of us, but I expect big things from me. That's for sure. All right. Massive show to get through today. Thomas, we're into day five of the Holiday House together on the Florida Florida Peninsula here in Wonderful South Australia. One grandparent, three couples and six kids under seven. Fair to say there's plenty of gross domestic product going on around here, so it seems only right that we look at GDP data today. And here's a word you're going to hear a lot of in the near future tosser. That's because there's an election looming. Another word you're going to hear a lot of is stagflation, and we're going to take a look at stagflation today. And we've got a listener question about the business cycle. And no, it's not a setting on your washing machine that you use to wash your suits. It's an economics thing. But first, Thomas, when it rains, it pours. And much of the country is dealing with floods, including your home hometown Thomas of Mullumbimby. Hmm. So, yeah, as I mentioned, we are both holidaying together in South Australia at the moment. So thankfully you're not there, but obviously your house is caught up in it. The whole town of Mullumbimby, where you are, thousands of people are affected right across Queensland and New South Wales. So I guess firstly, Thomas, I wanted to ask you, how are things looking for you at the moment? 

Thomas: [00:02:37] Yeah, we were pretty lucky. So we got out the day the big rains came, flew out and saying it took us 20 minutes to get through the cloud layer. Flying out like it was just a phenomenal amount of cloud and dumping a phenomenal amount of rain. Our house was lucky, so we were at the high end of the street and it got up to our doorstep. Wow. Yeah, so another another two or three inches in the floorboards would have been under, which would have created a whole bunch of drama. But so we were very lucky. But all all down our street, it's just carnage. Some houses were up to the roof line covered in water, right? Yeah, I mean, we still still struggling like this. Like power outages. There's a water supply was off for a couple of days. There was no phone or internet, no ATMs, no EFTPOS, Malami, me sort of like a hub of a whole bunch of settlements that go up the valleys. And there all though the roads are washed away, the bridges are out there talking to folks back home. It's pretty pretty full on 

Adam: [00:03:37] some of the photos that I've seen through you and your wife, Anna. Just people sending them through to you going, Hey, check out the roads because you guys aren't there. So you're getting those kind of firsthand accounts of people like, Hey, look at look at where the road used to be. It's just incredible the amount of damage that's that's been caused by the floods. 

Thomas: [00:03:54] Yeah, it's really full on. And I mean, the thing is, it's like we were about 45 minutes from Lismore. So Lismore, Lismore went well under so like there. You know, you go through Lismore previously and there was like flood markers for the 1974 flood. So like on sides of buildings, going like this is where the flood got to and you look at it and go, Wow, OK, that's a lot of water. And that was all time record, and Lismore was kind of prepared for that. But then, well, you know, sort of prepared for that. But then this flood smashed that record by two metres, so the pews were like 12 or something. We got to 14 something in Lismore, so just smashed the record. And so it's just a huge amount. Yeah, no one was really prepared. Lismore was prepared for floods, but just wasn't prepared for floods like that. And then you're all through that region. And so, yeah, carnage. 

Adam: [00:04:41] So the flood waters are subsiding now have subsided in a lot of areas. And I guess now comes the time where where we start to count the cost and obviously there's a tragic human cost to it. You know, lives have been lost. I'm curious in terms of the economic cost. What does this do to these kinds of to the economies and to the towns themselves? 

Thomas: [00:05:01] Yeah, it's it's interesting. You hear the talk about the economic cost. They're talking about the damage bill going to top $2 billion Brisbane floods in 2011 cost $2.1 billion. Back in 74, it was 3.2 billion in today's dollars. So you're not we're not quite looking at that kind of carnage. But I don't know. I don't know how they calculate those numbers, and I think it's just off insurance claims. So, right, yeah, the insurance council saying that they've had more already, more than 48000 claims across sort of the East Coast region. 

Adam: [00:05:34] That seems a pretty bad metric to use, though, like as I thought, you know, talking to you and some of your friends, like a lot of the houses, aren't covered for flood insurance. Are they like, say, yeah, if you're not covered, is you still lodging a claim? I mean, so that would seem to miss a lot of data and a lot of cost that wouldn't wouldn't be captured.

Thomas: [00:05:53] Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yes, I'm not sure how they how they estimate that or not. Maybe and maybe this a missed day's work or yeah, it's production. I don't know. I mean, the weird thing about it is that in some ways, this is kind of often pointed as the perverse way we talk about economics in calculating GDP. But a disaster creates a whole lot of economic activity, so people rebuild and roads get built and bridges get rebuilt. You're not gain anything, you're just getting back to where you were. But because it's economic activity, it's a net positive in the in the way that we count when we look at the economy. And so, yes, it's one of the perverse things about like an oil spill can be a net positive for the economy because it creates economic activity because as a cleanup, even though there's no sense in which it's a good thing. 

Adam: [00:06:45] Right. But don't rush out and tip oil in the ocean. No thinking you're helping helping the economy doing your bit. I'm just doing my bit to pull this petrol in the sea. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:07:01] But the disincentive, the insurance that I read, the thing is already 900 million flood damage claims, that's that's already just off a week's worth. And in the insurance council was saying, that's half of what Australian insurers paid out for the entirety of 2020 21. 

Adam: [00:07:18] Wow. I mean, it doesn't. You also don't capture the just a huge volunteering effort that's that's going on right now with I'm sort of seeing it through a un mullumbimby, but you've been on the phone a lot, talking a lot to people within the community. You've opened up your house to people, you know, because you're not there at the moment. So you're you're letting people come and stay, you know, so there's just a huge kind of community pulling together kind of volunteering effort that's going on there wouldn't be captured at all in any of the economic data. And we have talked about on the show before about volunteer work, and that's kind of not really captured. So this would be, you know, this is really kind of volunteer work on steroids, isn't it? 

Thomas: [00:07:58] Oh, it sounds amazing. It's actually really hard to be here missing that and hearing about the things that people are doing and the way the community is coming together of often Ren community will bind together through a crisis. And it goes, though. So I find 

Adam: [00:08:12] I find it really hard for you to be here to, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, there is a that's a good story that I saw. I saw there was a lady in Tweed Heads. She owns a pharmacy and she was trying to respond to people's needs for to get medication. And so she put a post out on social media saying, Look, I've got all this medicine that I need to try and distribute to people who are who are affected by the floods, who are stranded by the floodwater would love it if someone could could come and help me out of it. The next thing she sees is Mick Fanning riding in on a jet ski. Just like, Yo, what's up? And there's a world champion surfer for those that don't know, Mick Fanning goes, and I get to the pharmacist and helps distribute medicines to sick people, which I don't know, like the SARS do an amazing job and and and their efforts should be well recognised, but it's pretty hard to top. That would be one of the most exciting rescue missions going around is Mick Fanning on a jet ski. And the best thing is that if there were any sharks or anything else that got into the flood waters, then you know, Mick Stanford, just like smashing him in the face bare hands, I realised there was a crocodile that escaped into the flood waters of a Taliban, right? Yeah. So I don't know what happened to that croc, though. Well, Mick Fanning probably took it out. Yeah. All right, Thomas, GDP data was out this week, what have we learnt? 

Thomas: [00:09:49] We learnt that no one cares about GDP anymore, apparently.

Adam: [00:09:52] Finally, finally, 

Thomas: [00:09:56] yeah, it used to be, you know, the big economic, you know, event of the quarter. But so it happens 

Adam: [00:10:03] once a quarter GDP data. 

Thomas: [00:10:04] Yeah, yeah. Once once a quarter. Yeah, I mean, partly it's this, though. Is this all over the shop at the moment because it's all affected by the lockdown. So we've got 3.4 percent in the quarter, December quarter we're talking about. That's a big number historically. But then it follows a one point nine contraction in the previous quarter, which is a big number again. So it's this sort of like chopping and changing. And so everyone's a bit like whatever can make sense of it. If you can 

Adam: [00:10:31] see if I can make sense as I just start writing, it is like that tuning out, but 

Thomas: [00:10:38] you try and look through look through all that like GDP is running at 4.2 percent over the year. You can kind of think about GDP of three, three and a half percent being trend or average. So 4.2 percent a strong no economy seems to be seems to be bumping along pretty strongly. We're now three point four percent above the 2019 peak below trend, though like so it's definitely a good story, but we're below where we would have been if Covid had never happened. And, you know, previous trends had continued. So we still there's still a bit of a knock back, so there's room for growth. 

Adam: [00:11:11] Still, it's still we've got a way to go. 

Thomas: [00:11:15] Yeah, I think so. I think December quarter captures most of the Omicron lockdown or the early stages of it. So yeah, it's still still in the numbers. There's still room for a bit of catch up could definitely happen. 

Adam: [00:11:26] Dare I ask, were there any highlights? Were there any sort of any interesting points? Was there anything interesting about GDP at all of trying to extract you?

Thomas: [00:11:36] I think the thing that's still really interesting for me is the massive increase in savings that we've seen since Covid started, so that's still in effect. December was another massive number, so four point so forty $4.6 billion in savings in quarter four. 

Adam: [00:11:52] So we're talking about household savings like like just people saving money, he 

Thomas: [00:11:56] people just stashing money. 

Adam: [00:11:56] It seems like a bad idea because everyone else like we're we're also talking about inflation. And that, to me, the opposite thing that you want to be doing during high levels of inflation is saving money. Does it include if you're paying off your home loan with the money? 

Thomas: [00:12:14] I think it does. I think or includes, I think it includes offset accounts. So if you put money into an offset account that's classified as savings, that's something. 

Adam: [00:12:23] But otherwise, if you're just saving money at the moment, if you're putting it into a savings account, you're getting, are you getting no interest? But B inflation is ramping up, it would seem. Yeah. And so I even went to order dinner at the surf club the other night, and it came to more than it usually does because we're pretty predictable with our meal ordering. And I'm like, that's $10 more than it normally costs. And the girl in the kitchen was like, yeah, inflation. Like what you're calling inflation the surf club, I guess.

Thomas: [00:12:58] I think it's not that people are going like, I think now's a good time to save money, though that probably is part of it. I think it's more that they just can't spend the way they normally do. When you when you're locked down and stuck at home, there's a bunch of discretionary spending that doesn't happen, but also what you consider not non-discretionary like, say, petrol prices, petrol expenditure like if you normally commuting to week to work every day and now you're locked at home, you just not buy petrol the way you used to. And that's not a that's not a choice to save more just naturally happens. Yes, that seems to be the story with this boom in savings. Yeah, but like so over the seven quarters since the pandemic began, Aussies have banked three hundred and seventy two billion. Is a massive number. Wow. So compared to the seven quarters previously, that was 132 billion. So we're sort of saving three times as much as as we were. So the question is what happens to that? Say what you know with that massive chest of money that households are now sitting on, what do they do with it? Some of it's really going to go into consumption. And so consumption was the big driver of of growth this quarter in the December quarter was up 6.3 per cent in the quarter. So definitely a consumption rebound in consumption accounts for 55 per cent. So over half of GDP is household consumption. You have to think that's going to drive GDP, drive the economy going forward. But it also thinks that maybe there may be something that goes into investments and maybe that goes into a deposit for a house or goes into the share market or something like that. So it's sort of it's sort of bullish for everything that that sort of war chest of savings, but still don't know exactly where it's going to go from here. 

Adam: [00:14:36] Cryptos well down at the moment. 

Thomas: [00:14:38] So, yeah, by the sea.

Adam: [00:14:43] All right. What? We take a break here, we're going to be back talking about the business cycle and then stagflation right after this short message from our sponsors. Welcome back here on comedian versus economist. Don't forget, you can send us an email CV at Equity Mates dot com or via the website Equity Mates dot com forward slash CV. Of course, you can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at CV podcast, and that's what Scotty did. He sent us a message on Instagram and Scotty asks, Hey guys, love you stuff. Could you do a podcast on the business cycle in double quotes? So, Thomas, I'm excited. What's the business cycle? 

Thomas: [00:15:24] So this is an idea that, you know, the economy sort of grows along around trends. So something like three per cent we talked about before, but then it is not a straight line. It's sort of like its cycles. It sort of like a wave form moves around that trend line. So sometimes it grows at 4.2 per cent, which we just saw. But then sometimes it grows at one and a half percent or something like that. Sometimes it goes negative. And so you mentioned like a straight trend line just going going up at a 45 degree angle or something. And then actually the actual data sort of wave forming around that sometimes how higher, sometimes lower, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. And that sort of like that cycle around the trend is what we call the business cycle. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. And so you've got sort of moves from like growth to a boom and then it slows back to trend and then it goes into a slowdown and then into a recession and then into a recovery and then back and forth and around and around it goes. And that's what we call the business cycle. And that's what you learn in first year economics. And it it carries a lot of currency like you hear it a lot. It's a sort of this idea. 

Adam: [00:16:32] Can you buy into it like any because I just did a quick Google here. So we've got the fort there for parts of the business cycle expansion pack, contraction and trough. Can we just buy at the trough all the time? So it the take. 

Thomas: [00:16:45] Yeah, if if it were that simple, if only it were that simple. 

Adam: [00:16:50] Yeah. Or is this like the Santa rally that everyone says happens every year and we go everyone profits. But no one knows when it's coming, even though it's at Christmastime every year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Thomas: [00:17:03] I mean, you kind of go to separate out. It's sort of two dynamic. So this ain't like the business cycle is sort of like the natural tendency of the market or the economy to sort of cycle around. And you see and you have these sort of natural feedback effects that sort of confidence goes up and things get to get good. But then things turn and then business contracts and credit contracts. And so you have these sort of natural in in the in the story, and it's more of a metaphor. And it's sort of it sort of comes out of the fact that 

Adam: [00:17:35] it's a concept because it's a vibe vibe. Well, it's 

Thomas: [00:17:44] like economics used to be in the social sciences. It used to be a social science and then and then the profession, the discipline, so that when you know what, we kind of think of ourselves more like a science than a social science. 

Adam: [00:17:57] I think this makes so much more sense now. Like, yeah, of course, economics used to be a social science like, yeah, it's so fluffy. Yeah, but in classic economist fashion, they went, I reckon we could probably make some money out of this. Why don't we make it like more of a science and then we can all get paid more? And all the economists went, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I g x. 

Thomas: [00:18:21] It lends itself to that because there's so much data like so much of the economy is quantifiable. And so you can create all this data and then you can create all these models that sort of track the interaction of those data points. And so it is. And that's not to say it's all valuable. It is. It's very valuable. But in the early days, economists took their cue from engineering and sort of the physical sciences. And so the conception of the economy is sort of like a it's like a machine that just sort of moves along and then it has this natural equilibrium and then it has shocks that that take it away from that equilibrium. But then it will return to that equilibrium because it's got these stabilisers and there's just a sort of a a natural tendency, like in a physical system where the system wants to be and it'll gravitate around that system and find its way back there eventually. 

Adam: [00:19:12] There's no one thing controlling the economy, like if you talk about physical sciences over engineering, then there's there are parts, it's it's but it's all designed to work together. Someone sort of built someone built a thing. But the economy is just like it as sort of an amalgamation of lots of different things and lots of different people controlling different levers and trying to make the economy do things. But no one person or no one entity can kind of go up. We're going to do this now with the economy. So, so it's 

Thomas: [00:19:43] yeah, it's not clear that there is an equilibrium or that if we ever get there or where that comes from here in, like you hear about the law of supply and demand, that's that's the way we talk about it. Because we're taking a cue from like the laws of physics or the laws of gravity. We're treating it like there's a little. To me, it seems like they're trying to 

Adam: [00:20:01] legitimise economics as a as a profession. Yeah. Thank you for what you're doing. Yeah, exactly 

Thomas: [00:20:06] fine. Exactly, exactly. So you can kind of separate in your model of the economy the way the way it's sort of taught is you have this this business cycle dynamic, which is this these laws of physics that sort of govern the way the sort of the equilibrium of the economy. And you have the business cycle, but then you have structural factors. So like a, you know, a change to some property law or something like the rules of the game, something something changes there or you have the big natural disaster, you have a structural change and that shifts that changes your equilibrium and it shocks the economy out of its regular patterns. And it'll take some time for it to get back. And so you kind of talk about in sort of economics, you talk about these two factors that the cycle, the business cycle being the sort of the natural tendency of the economy and then the structural factors that shock it here and there. But the thing is, we have an interventionist government running interventionist economic policy. Technology is constantly changing and constantly rewriting the rules of of economic interaction. And so it seems to me that it's just constant, constant structural change. That's what drives the economy. It's constantly structurally changing this way or the other. And maybe there is a business cycle dynamic in play, but the structural factors are much more, much more important in my mind. And that's why I think you can't play the business cycle. It doesn't. It doesn't play out in such a way that you can go. Yep, yep. Like you look at the charts of the business cycle in any textbook, it's incredibly smooth and predictable and you'd always like. Yet we're definitely at the trough year, and yet we're definitely at the peak here. But there's always debate in the markets at any point in time about where we're at, right, even right at the peak. You know, half the economists are saying we're not at the peak, we're going higher. You know, and right across half the economists saying, we're not at the trough, we're going lower. And so it's very difficult to play and it's difficult to play because I think it gets swamped by these structural factors. All right. 

Adam: [00:22:10] Well, there you go. Hopefully, that's answered Scotty's question and once again reminded us all that economists can't predict anything. They can just tell you simply what has happened before. Unlike a building engineer can say, I'm going to build a building over there and it's going to be 100 metres tall. Economists don't know how tall the buildings are going to be until after it's built. So, Thomas, the top of the show, I mentioned the word stagflation that seems to be popping up more and more, particularly as the war in Ukraine unfolds. I Googled stagflation last night and I found that article and I didn't really understand any of it, though I had been drinking. So hoping, hoping you can maybe explain stagflation and why it seems to be popping up more and more now in the news. 

Thomas: [00:23:03] Mhm. Yeah. As I was saying last night that you probably don't remember, obviously, 

Adam: [00:23:07] that stagflation is a portmanteau 

Thomas: [00:23:13] of stagnation and inflation, and it's the sort of weird economic situation you get where you have inflation and a recession at the same time in the typical way it's thought of and particularly in that business cycle, we're just talking about, you get inflation at the top of the cycle where the economy's running hot. There's too many dollars chasing too few goods, so prices start to lift. That's when you stabilises. Lifting prices starts to slow economic activity, but that's what you get like when the economy's running hot. There's too many dollars chasing too few goods, and that's when you get inflation, and that's typically in the inflation that we get. But you can get and also so-called demand pull inflation. 

Adam: [00:23:54] And that's what we're seeing as the result of the pandemic. So supply chain disruption, a bunch of other stuff that meant 

Thomas: [00:24:01] what it is. No, that's the opposite of it. All the stimulus checks that came through and all the money that people have. Yeah, that created demand pull. But the when this is when there's a supply shock, when there's disruptions in supply chains and that pushes prices up, that's cost push inflation. And that's that's a different thing. So that's not coming about so nuanced. 

Adam: [00:24:24] Mm hmm. I'm calling it nuance anyway. If you use portmanteau, I'm using nuance. 

Thomas: [00:24:34] Yeah, right? That's cost push inflation when when the supply chains could get disrupted and that creates creates inflation. What we're talking about with stagflation is that the economy is starting to slow in some places. So they're worrying about that, particularly in America. Not so much here. Like you talk. You know, we're growing at 4.2 percent. The Aussie economy's running pretty hot, but that's not all. That's not everywhere in the developed world right now. Some, some some economies are slowing and they're slowing just as prices are rising and price shocks are growing, particularly through oil prices through what's happening in Russia. And so that raises the prospect that they could be slowing, potentially moving into recession just as prices start to ramp up even more. And then you get stagflation, and that's a that's a pretty that's seen as worse than just ordinary vanilla inflation, even ordinary high inflation. Because in the demand pull story, it's because the economy's hot and people have jobs and it's like, okay, their purchasing power is going down, but I'm earning more and I've got I've got bargaining power. I can get higher wages and I can, you know, I can try and catch up so it doesn't put ordinary people at such a disadvantage. But in a stagflation rich settings, you've got a recession and people are losing jobs or their wages are going down. At the same time as the cost of living is going up and everything's becoming more expensive, and then you've got a really horrible situation for households that they're losing jobs. They got less money, but everything they need to buy is going up to their purchasing. Power is going down.

Adam: [00:26:09] So is that happening at all in Australia at the moment? Are we seeing it yet? I mean, people, I hear I hear a lot about the rental market. People just being people are kind of being priced out of the rental market like a things like that. Is that is that a kind of stagflation thing or are we not really seeing stagflation yet? 

Thomas: [00:26:25] I don't think you'd call that stagflation. I mean, the Aussie housing markets pretty dysfunctional, and that's kind of its own beast. And it's more of, yeah, I don't know, it's about household formation. There's just so many households chasing too few houses. So I guess you'd call that demand pull. Yeah. But I think in terms of we're not really seeing the Aussie inflation data is still pretty soft. We're not seeing that pick up yet that you should that should accelerate with oil prices because petrol prices are pretty and those water level nosebleed levels here. Mm-Hmm. So that should feed through into inflation. But the economy's hot, so we can kind of roll with it. If it starts to hurt the economy, then that's a that that might yeah, that might change. I mean, the thing is like when you start, when oil prices go up and the big states stagflation example that we look to in history as the oil shocks of the 70s, when OPEC decided it got together and just jacked oil prices, then when oil prices go up, that feeds through everything in your economy, and particularly because your whole economy is geared up around petrol prices within a particular range and everything sort of float, you know, the whole system. Works with with petrol prices at a in a certain range. Once they bust out of that range, then all of this sort of economy is just not able to deal with it. And you get a big, you know, you get massive disruptions and the economy can't really roll with that roll with that punch. 

Adam: [00:27:50] And is that why is that why I'm hearing the word more now as as the war escalates in Ukraine, because they're talking about a lot of disruption to oil supply as a result of the war? Yeah. So is that why the why I'm hearing it more now because of what's happening there? Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:28:07] Yeah, that's right. That's right. So we're looking back to histories. And when was the last time we had a major oil shock? Well, it was the stagflation or 70s. There have been sort of moved up, been sort of temporary shocks like 

Adam: [00:28:19] I've never I've never heard them called the stagflation or 70s. I've had the 70s described a lot of different ways and never as the stagflation reserve. It is. 

Thomas: [00:28:29] It's not. It's not. The economy is bigger and more complex. Oil prices matter, but I think as much as they mattered back in the 70s is 

Adam: [00:28:36] green energy kind of green and 

Thomas: [00:28:39] lessening the blow? Yeah, it would definitely have to be, yes. 

Adam: [00:28:42] So as as more and more, you know, green energy comes online, then then I guess the impacts of of oil supply shock would be less.

Thomas: [00:28:50] That's right. That's right. If you get a permanent shock to oil petrol prices and they remain high, that just encourages the uptake of electric vehicles like that just wasn't an option in the 70s, like EVs weren't around. But now, like if petrol prices stay high, more and more people would be like, You know what? I'm just going to go electric. I'm going in there anyway. This would just do it now. 

Adam: [00:29:13] Yeah, right? But still, I mean, it's a long way off, though, because oil prices obviously factor pretty heavily into shipping and transport and, you know, moving goods around. So, you know, that's that's going to affect supermarket prices, whether whether or not you've got an electric car or not to get you good time from the from from Woollies, you've still got to get down to Woollies in the first place. 

Thomas: [00:29:34] It could be a story, definitely. But I think I think I think it's still too early to talk about because the economy is still running pretty hot right now. Hmm. Households are flush, as we're saying, and that's a developed world phenomenon. It's not just Australia, and most households across the developed world are pretty flush. So I think it's maybe [00:29:50][16.6]

Adam: [00:29:50] the media has taught me anything. If the media has taught me anything, it's not too early to talk about it. And if there's a hint or a tentative whiff of stagflation, then it could very quickly become the new buzzword. So. Well, that's good, though, like at least if you're out there listening to this show and you are reading about stagflation here and there, then maybe you can just kind of relax and ease into some stagflation, you know? I, of course, would panic just yet. Hmm. All right. Oregon, that does it for today. It's all of us. We've got families that are due home any minute, and this house will not be conducive to podcast recording in about six minutes, I reckon. So we'll wrap it up for today. Don't forget lots of other great shows across Equity Mates Media Get Started Investing feed Equity Mates Investing Podcast. You're in good company. Talk money to me. Crypto curious. One thing I did want to point out as well was that if you if you do feel you'd like to contribute some money or make a donation, particularly Thomas's community is is struggling with the impacts of the floods. A lot of people within within Thomas's area affected by it, and you'll get your heading back soon. Thomas to help out. We'll put a link in the show notes to the Mt. Mullumbimby District Neighbourhood Centre. Have a donation page there, really central to providing services in the Mullumbimby area, so we'll put a link there if you do feel inclined. We thought about setting up a Go Fund Me page, but I think money is best directed to people who can coordinate the effort a bit better than certainly than I could, but Thomas would probably be right at it. But if you would like to donate and contribute in some small way, that would be much appreciated by Thomas and the broader community in the area. So that'll do us for now. Really do appreciate you tuning in once again, and we'll talk to you again soon. On comedian versus economist