Jeff Snyder

Just general prices.

Yeah, I mean, the wholesale price of gasoline at the CME is $1.70 a gallon.

That's where it is right now, which is the lowest it's been in five years.

Yeah, there's always individual items that go down in price.

And tradable commodities can go up and down in price, sure.

But we're talking about goods that usually the economists use the term sticky.

This is what sticky really applies to, which means that when prices go up, they tend to stay there.

Yeah, what they've been doing is buying U.S.

Treasuries because they're risk-averse.

So we need risk-taking in the economy, which can't happen because of all this other stuff.

Yeah, the reason why is because of international consolidation.

You have international competition.

So we internationalized the monetary system starting in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and by the 1980s it became hyper-international, which meant that you don't have a small regional bank in a local U.S.

location competing with other small regional banks in that same location.

Now you have large-scale banks in Switzerland and Japan and Asia competing with the large banks on Wall Street.

And those are the only banks that suck up all the money and oxygen.

And it is a big bank.

What do you do?

You buy all the smaller ones.

It's the cheapest way to continue to grow and scale.