Lyn Alden

I mean, if you're in finance, like people here, you can short the fiat currency and be long assets and you can actually benefit from debasement.

Whereas people who, you know, they work every day, their salaries are denominated in dollars.

That's a friction that they have to go through every time they're trying to get a raise, every time they're saving.

But I do think that, yeah, going forward, the reason deficits exist is because people want them, and they're all fighting over the pie to make sure that they're getting it.

Right now, it's going toward healthcare.

It's going toward the aging demographics, you know, the top-heavy Social Security system we have.

It's going toward defense.

to the extent that we do get job losses from AI, if we get a more pessimistic scenario where we do get kind of pretty weak labor market, yeah, I think that you'd see more people clamoring for answers from their politicians.

And if it hits a critical mass, then that's an avenue of money printing, and that's a whole nother part of the deficit that I think we'll see.

Yeah, one of the tricky things is that the GDP growth we're seeing is very concentrated.

And the deficits are, they feed into the GDP calculation as well.

So basically, anything that's kind of focused on AI or on the receiving side of deficits is generally booming.

Whereas the long tail of other things is the classic K-shaped recovery that it's called, or two-speed economy.

That's very real.

The short answer is long as energy is flowing and there's no bottlenecks, that does a lot to keep inflation down.

Almost any kind of major inflationary cycle in history usually has high oil prices associated with it.

So anything that either the administration or globally can be done to make sure that oil is not the bottleneck and natural gas is not the bottleneck and power is flowing in general and pro-nuclear type policies, whatever the case may be, depending on the country, that's the place you can get to where you have pretty high growth with inflation that's at least under control.

And so really when analyzing if inflation is going to come back or not at scale, I think you start with the oil market and go from there.

Lyndalden.com.

Thank you.