Morgan Housel

It has gone up, but not to the extent that it has, because the increase in government debt has been muted a little bit by the decline in household debt as a share of income.

I wonder if they're still- Well, the number's gone up, but as a share of income, that's a different story.

And I think what you're referring to is in the 1990s when we had balanced budgets and the forecast was balanced budget and surplus as far as the eye can see.

And Greenspan, if that forecast came true, it obviously did not.

It was almost the opposite because forecasting is difficult in the economy.

If that came true, his fear was that central banking wouldn't work because there wouldn't have been enough debt to

engage in open market operations to buy and sell debt.

And so the idea was maybe the central bank, maybe the Fed can start buying corporate debt because there wouldn't be enough treasuries.

Obviously, we solved that problem by trillions of dollars of deficit.

So we don't have that issue now.

I mean, all those all those acronyms, PIP and all these vehicles that they created in 2008 to buy it.

I would say

I think if we did not, this might be very contentious.

I have a feeling you're gonna disagree with this, so maybe this is a good conversation.

I think if we did not have Ben Bernanke at the helm in 2008, we would have had the next Great Depression.

I think we got unbelievably lucky that the guy who ran the Federal Reserve was the world's foremost authority on central banking during the Great Depression and had gigantic balls.

During that time.

And I would rather balance between those two.

The one counter to that is I think a lot of wars are initially caused.

The spark is...