In putting this together, we have done a great job.

I'm pleased to introduce you to Jim Allworth. Jim has been an excellent source of information throughout my career, and even some great guidance. I'm so glad to have him with us tonight, and to discuss his views on the current market environment as there's a lot of information and a lot of things that are going on out there that I'm sure you'd like to have some answers to.

So that being said, I'm going to mute my line and turn it over to Jim to get his thoughts on the current environment we find ourselves in.

Thanks, Paula. And welcome to everyone. It's my pleasure to be invited to speak to you this evening. And I think my job is to give you a sense of where we think things are, where the economy is headed-- our economy and the global economy. And what that means for financial markets.

And maybe, a good place to start is the investment framework that we kind of overlay on things to help us accomplish this. And the first one is pretty straightforward. And I can state it pretty explicitly. If there's no US recession on the horizon, then the odds, hugely, favor giving equities the benefit of the doubt.

And there's a couple of points to make about that. First, I'd underline US recession. That's what matters. The US remains the largest economy in the world. It's going to go on being the largest economy in the world for, probably, another generation, at least, if not longer. It sets the rhythm for the global economy.

And therefore, it's the prime source of direction for you and I, as investors. And the reason that's true is that when you look back over more than 100 years of history, you would find that every bear market in stocks, every one of those periods that's usually last longer than you'd like and involves stocks going down further than you're comfortable with, one of those periods that really shakes the confidence of investors, every one of those has been associated with the US recession.

So our view is that if we can work hard to see a recession coming ahead of time, we can know when to be defensive about investing. And just as important, we know that if there is no US recession coming, it pays to be more on the side of commitment to equities than anything else.

And to cut to the chase, there is no US recession on the horizon. And the things that we follow closely that have done a good job of telling you ahead of time when a recession is coming or saying the opposite. They're saying this economy has a long way to run before a recession is likely.

And there's a whole variety of things that one can look at. But the most important one is the condition and state of the credit market and credit conditions. With the exception of the COVID-induced recession, where government shut economies down, every other recession has arrived by way of the arrival of tight credit conditions, where interest rates get, prohibitively, high, and make borrowing unwise and undesirable.

And also make borrowing hard to do because at the same, time banks are becoming much more choosy who they're willing to lend to. So that scarcity of credit and the cost of credit are the two factors you need in place to get enough of a breaking power from credit to actually turn the economy south and make its start to contract.

And we have the opposite, as you know. We have interest rates that are remarkably low. It's not interest rates that's stopping anybody from borrowing. And we have banks that are eager to lend. They're out there looking for creditworthy people and businesses and projects to lend money to. All that will change before a recession starts. And it's nowhere close to changing in a way significant enough to produce a recession.

Let me just touch on that idea. How high do rates have to go to become prohibitive? How high do rates have to go to kill the economy? And again, history is a pretty good guide. Because you can certainly look back to as long as there's been a federal funds rate-- and the Federal funds rate was invented in the late 1940s, you could probably go back further than that if you chose to, by looking at things like in New York City discount rate or something like that.

Taking the Federal funds rate as our guide and the Federal funds rate is to the US what the bank rate is to Canada it's the rate the central bank sets and tends to demand adherence to. So that short term rates tend to be very close to whatever the Federal funds rate is.

In the past, you've always needed a federal funds rate higher than the growth rate of the economy before the economy succumbs and heads into recession. And the thing you need to know there is what's the Federal funds rate. Well, that's easy to get because it's published every day and we know what it is. It's basically 0 or pretty close to 0, maybe a tenth of the percent, something like that.

And then you need to know what the growth rate of the economy is. Well, people talk about the economy all the time. And you know that whenever you get to the end of a quarter, we hear about what GDP growth was in that quarter and how fast the economy was growing.

So we've got some handle on how fast the economy's growing. But what I need to tell you is that for the purposes of what we're doing here, the growth rate we hear about all the time is not the growth rate we need to look at.

That growth rate is adjusted for inflation. In other words, when you hear say, that the US economy grew at, I don't know, 3% in the last quarter or 4% in the last quarter, that's after taking the effects of inflation out. People don't want account price increases as part of economic growth.

They want to just count the growth of business and transactions and commerce and people spending and saving and so on in the economy without adjusting for inflation. But for our purposes, we want to leave that inflation factor in.

Well, how fast is the economy growing right now if you don't take the effect of price increases out? Well, it's growing at a rate of about 9%, year over year. Assuming the economy slows down from this very rapid pace somewhat next year, we think by the end of next year, the US economy will have grown at about 6%. Again, leaving the effective price increases in.

Well, the Federal funds rate is at 0. If history is a guide, you need to get the Federal funds rate up equal to the growth rate of the economy or above the growth rate of the economy before you're going to get a recession.

So if you thought a recession was going to start at the end of next year, you'd have to believe that between now and then, the Federal funds rate is going to go from where it is, which is 0, all the way up to 6% or higher.

Highly unlikely for a few pretty simple reasons-- one, the Fed usually only raises rates when it has a meeting. It only meets 10 times a year. Typically, when it meets and it raises rates, it raises rates by a quarter of a point at a time. Very occasionally at a half a percent at a time, but that's very unusual. It's usually a quarter of a percent when they're going to raise interest rates.

So even if between now and the end of next year, at every meeting that you had between now and the end of next year the Fed raised interest rates by a quarter of a point, you'd still only be up to about 3% on the Federal funds rate. Way short of what it would take to push the economy into recession.

And we think it's much more likely to be late in 2023 or even beyond before the Federal funds rate gets high enough to do that. So we think we've got a couple of years here, anyway, of the economy continuing to grow, of corporate earnings continuing to grow, and of share prices-- the value of businesses moving up, as they generally do, somewhat in line with the increase in earnings.

So we're very much of the opinion that you want to keep a commitment to equities, really, for the foreseeable future until those things change. So we could look at this as a slightly different way, and just look at the kinds of things that contribute to economic growth and ask whether they are or not.

And we know is that following COVID, there are great many things that have been put in place to stimulate economic growth. Here's a few of them. One of them, we've got a lot of fiscal stimulus. Governments, the US government, the Canadian government, the British government, all the European governments, the Japanese government, the Chinese government.

All went out and decided to spend money or hand money to people and businesses in the economy and let them spend it. And they didn't raise taxes to do that. They left taxes where they were, so they did deficit spending.

And that stimulus is out there in the economy and it's driving growth. And there's usually a lag effect. In other words, you put the stimulus into the economy, but it's a while before the economy actually feels it. And we're still feeling the effect of stimulus put in place way back at the beginning of last year in 2020.

Secondly, there's more coming. The US government is thinking about another big spending bill. And they're talking about a big infrastructure spending bill, where they target the money they're going to spend to building roads and bridges and green initiatives and new power facilities and electric grids and so on.

And they're talking about that being anywhere from $1.5 to $2 trillion. Probably spent over a number of years, but a big chunk of it spent probably in 2022 and 2023 with more to come afterwards. So we know there's going to be more government stimulus than there's already been.

Then on top of that, we know that an awful lot of people and businesses took the money that government gave them and put it in the bank. Savings accounts are unusually high that we're calling this excess savings. And there's trillions of dollars of excess savings sitting in bank accounts in the US and Canada, both corporate bank accounts and personal bank accounts.

And the good shape of people's bank accounts has let them feel pretty confident about their situation. In many cases they've brought some of their debt down. In any case, their debt is costing them next to nothing. Interest rates are very low. And so people aren't paying a lot in interest expense and neither are businesses and neither is government, for that matter. So the cost of doing all this has been quite low.

And as I said, it builds consumer confidence and business confidence to have that much money sitting around. It's likely over time, at least some of it, to get spent. So this, too, is adding to a positive attitude along with the fact that there's just money out there.

Well, we also have a situation, where there are developing labor shortages. And businesses are having a very hard time hiring the people they need to carry on their business. And so as a result, businesses have undertaken a lot of capital spending in the last year. It looks like they're going to take on more.

One, because their profits are high. They've got the money to spend. Two, because interest rates are low. They can borrow more if they want to at a very low cost. And three, if they can solve their labor shortage by putting more machines to work, that can be quite useful for their bottom line.

And finally, one thing that has happened on the corporate front that is not talked about very much, but that is that inventories have been run down. Inventories are way too low. Businesses don't have enough goods and services on hand to meet the demand that they've got out there right now.

And so businesses have to replenish their inventories in order more goods to have on hand. And that's putting a real tailwind behind the manufacturing sector. There's plenty of other things too, but these are enough to make sure that not only is the good growth we've had this year likely to be sustained through the end of the year and give us quite a nice year coming off a terrible COVID based year, but it's likely to continue on through 2022 as

So the economy has lots of forward momentum. And we can identify the things that are giving at that forward momentum. And the thing that will ultimately bring this to a halt and make things much tougher for the economy and much tougher buy for investors will be tight credit conditions. And we can already see, looking at the arithmetic involved, it's going to be a long time before we have credit conditions tight enough to accomplish this fact, this idea.

So to us, this is a pretty good environment. You can find things wrong with it. People are concerned about all kinds of things. They're concerned about inflation, which has jumped up here. And looks like it might be more of a problem than people had reckoned with.

And they're wondering whether that might be a longer term problem, and it might be. While I'm on the topic, I would just say, if it turns out inflation is more persistent and higher than people have been expecting, it means you got an economy that's running pretty hot. And an economy that's running pretty hot, probably, means in the economy, where profits are running at a faster rate than you were expecting to.

And profits moving up faster than you're expecting, usually push share prices up faster than you're expecting. So at least, for a while, more inflation, more pricing power tends to be good for profits and good for stock prices. And probably, is one of the things why we'd think this cycle might extend further than people have thought.

It's just going to take a lot longer and more rate hikes than we're even imagining now to get to a point where you have overcome this fast growing inflating economy.

Well, people, as I said, are worried about inflation. They're worried about things they're hearing about. Shipping problems out there, which are contributing to inflation. There's not enough ships to move goods around. There's not enough containers to move goods around. There's a lot of delay in this. Supply chains have been disrupted, so production has been disrupted.

These are all disrupting things that are giving this industry or that industry a problem. But they're also presenting opportunities for industries that solve that problem. And by itself, high prices, by itself, a difficulty to get shipping and shipping containers and supply chain disruptions, they're not enough to produce recession. They're enough to give one industry trouble or another. They're enough to slow the economy down to some extent. They are not enough to put it into reverse, at least, if history as a guide.

So we watched them. People are worried about them. Every once in a while, those worries can find their way into the stock market. We have some credit problems in China-- the property industry, the building and selling of new homes and condominiums and office buildings, and things like it seems to be having difficulty because the Chinese government did tighten credit over the last year.

But those problems are largely contained in China, and will be dealt with in China. And largely dealt with by government in China, who, probably, has the capacity to deal with this. So they may cause consternation from time to time. They may cause volatility in financial markets from time to time. We don't think they're the kind of thing that will rule out of China in a way that creates tight money elsewhere and would create an economic downturn for other parts of the world.

Well, that may be it's time to make a distinction about things. We think bear markets are predictable because they're so tied to the business cycle and the economic cycle. And if you can analyze the economic cycle correctly, you can see bear markets coming.

Corrections are another thing, altogether. Corrections happen usually without warning. Very often, when a correction comes along and the market starts going down and people get upset about it, people, through a rearview mirror, decide that you should have seen this coming. Any fool could have seen that that was going to happen is a common phrase.

I can assure you that is the luxury of rearview mirror thinking. It is not the case that you can be sure that you something is going to create a correction in the stock market. And if you want evidence of that, you only have to look back at the last cycle.

We had a financial crisis back in 2008 and into the first part of 2009. And the financial crisis tore the stock market to ribbons, and tore the economy to ribbons. Finally, through the application of a lot of availability of credit and cheap credit, the economy turned around and the stock market turned around in the middle of 2009.

And the economy, the US economy in particular, but our economy too, embarked on what was the longest uninterrupted economic expansion in US history. That lasted from the middle of 2009 until the beginning of 2020. And the stock market embarked on the longest uninterrupted bull market in history from about roughly the same dates-- from early 2009 until the beginning of 2020.

And I can assure you that if you went up back and dug out all the financial newspapers and business sections over the intervening time, you would find that never a week went by without somebody coming out and pronouncing their opinion, which was that the market was way ahead of itself, that there were lurking dangers in the economy, and the financial crisis might reassert itself any moment. That the market was behaving as if there were no such dangers present, that that, in itself, was dangerous, and that people should be skeptical about any more price advances that the market might deliver.

And that opinion was, essentially, wrong, wrong, wrong for a decade. There were occasional corrections. They didn't last that long. They were hard to navigate through. You couldn't get out of the market in time. You couldn't get back in time. And they never were a signal that a recession was coming.

There were lots of people who shouldn't have been talking. There were also some people who probably had the credentials to talk who said the same things, and they were just wrong. So imagining that you know what it is that's going to cause a correction, I think, is foolhardy.

Paula mentioned that this is my 52nd, I think, or 53rd year in the business. And I've known thousands of successful investors, many thousands of successful investors over that time. I've known hundreds of people who went from having nothing to being inordinately wealthy simply through investing.

And not one of those successful investors would ever tell me that one of the reasons they were successful was that they knew when corrections were coming and got out of the way of them and got back in a timely fashion.

A far greater percentage, a very high percentage would have said they wouldn't even pay attention to bear markets. They would just hold through those. They let the arithmetic of great businesses work for them. The fact that successful businesses, the kind that are good enough and big enough to make it into the TSX 300 or the S&P 500 have high internal rates of return that they can sustain over time.

And letting those high internal rates of return work to compound the wealth of the owners was the real secret that they found and discovered and lived by. And I believe that that is the correct assessment.

I know, personally, that I can't call corrections. I also know that human nature makes me want to try. But I also know what my batting average is. It's not good. It's just good enough to make sure that I'd bankrupt myself if what I tried to do was navigate by calling corrections. Sooner or later, I'd run out of money doing that.

I think the way to approach this is to get a very strong handle on the economy and follow it and live by it. And when the wind starts to blow in the wrong direction, to become more defensive. And the wind is not blowing in their own direction at the moment. It's a tailwind. So for all I know, we're in a correction.

I can assure you, if we are, I won't know, for a while, that we're in it. And I won't know when it's over. But a bear market, I think, you and I can legitimately aspire to see coming. And for the reasons I've said, I don't think we are going to see it.

Well, there's a lot of things I haven't covered here. And I'd be happy to be directed by you, Paula. I know you know what your clients are asking about. And I'm prepared to go anywhere. If you want to go onto interest rates, themselves, if you wanted to go to currencies, if you want to go to commodities like energy or anything else, fire away. I'm happy to try and respond to these things.

Well interestingly you answered a lot of the questions that I was given one was on inflation. The second was supply chain issues. Chinese real estate was another. And the bank accounts. The last one, though, that wasn't answered was, what do you think of gold as a hedge against inflation? We currently have a small amount in clients' portfolios for that reason.

But one of the questions was, given the uncertainty and, I think, the unsettling information that you hear through the media, clients have been buying physical gold and are wondering about holding it. Do you have an opinion on that?

Well, I don't mind having some in the portfolio. And gold stocks are still a noticeable part of the Toronto Stock Exchange. They're a tiny, tiny part of the American Stock Exchange, but they're a bigger factor in Canada.

If you are worried that inflation is really going to go crazy for a sustained period of time, maybe sooner or later, it gets reflected in gold prices. But you have to admit, so far, it hasn't been reflected in gold prices, has it? We're kind of sitting in the 1700s, where we've been for a while on an ounce of gold.

And yet, we have negative real interest rates. Interest rates are lower than the rate of inflation, which has usually been a propellant for gold. We have inflation that higher than as people have been expecting. So if people are starting to worry about inflation and worrying prompts them to buy gold, you'd think gold prices would be stronger. So apparently, so far, anyway, higher inflation is not prompting anyone to buy gold.

I have to tell you that over many years of watching this and hearing for people who always told me they knew what they were talking about, that gold was driven by this or that or the next thing, that I'm skeptical that people really understand what moves gold.

We've had lots of periods when inflation was moving up and gold was moving down. We've had periods when inflation was moving down and gold was moving up. We've had periods when there were wars or threats of wars and gold hasn't moved, and so on. For everything that you thought pointed to what gold was going to do, you can find an exception to the rule, that sometimes lasted for a long period of time.

I think it's more interesting, actually, as a gold investor, to do what I would do for any other commodity, which is ask the question, how much of it is there around, how much is being produced every year, and what's the demand for gold every year. And see if I couldn't get a handle on it that way.

I mean, you and I would do that for copper. We'd do that for oil. We'd want to know how much is being produced, how much is being consumed. Is there more out there than is needed, which would point to prices going down. Or is there not enough copper or coal or oil that is needed, which would point to prices going up. And I think you can do the same for gold, frankly.

And I think if you looked at gold over the last 30 or 40 years, you'd find out that quite a number of things changed, certainly, on the supply side. You don't just have to drive to Northern Quebec or Northern Ontario and drive down and already built road, and walk off into the woods and find an ore body that's near a road and near people and near power and has a high grade ore that is going to be very economic.

Increasingly, over the last 30 years, the gold that's found is not in Quebec or Nevada. It's in the Congo or it's in other questionable part of Africa or South America, 10,000 feet up in the Andes, no people, no water, no power.

And the grades are not high anymore. They're low. And so there's a heavy engineering cost to actually turn that low grade ore into economic ore. And the average grade on the average ore body that was found fell in half between the early 1990s and the early 2000s. And it hasn't improved since.

So for a while there, that was interesting because gold companies couldn't really bring much new gold to the market. It took too long to bring these mines into production, and then they were expensive. And it was very difficult. And any increase in demand for gold drove prices higher. And we saw prices go from mid $100 up to $1,900 an ounce.

And then a lot of those big mines that hadn't worked that were difficult started to be re-engineered. And a lot of that ore started to come to the market. And that drove prices down from $1,900 down to, I don't know, $1,100, $1,200 an ounce. They've recovered a bit, but not much. And there is gold out there that's coming to market at these prices.

And there are companies talking about bringing new mines on stream. So it's all up to demand. And demand is comprised of industrial demand for gold, jewelry, and then whatever investors want to buy. And I used to like the outlook for jewelry because there was a lot of growing wealth in places like China and India, and the cultural inclination to, perhaps, go and buy gold.

But I'm wondering about that. And I'm wondering about the big change in the Chinese environment and the fact that government is now seems to be discouraging conspicuous consumption. It's bringing in CEOs of large, hugely successful companies, they disappear for a while.

And when they come back out, they announced that their company is going to donate tens of billions of dollars to the government effort to bring more equality to the economic state of most Chinese. That sounds to me like a place that would think twice before you started driving a Rolls-Royce down the street or, perhaps, having enough lot of gold around. I just think that environment may be changing.

So I think you really need people starting to worry about an inflation in a way that's far more dramatic than what we've had so far to really light a fire under gold. But you weren't buying gold I don't think the way you described it, Paula.

Because you were wondering a big win, you were buying it for kind of some protection in the portfolio against a set of circumstances that you really weren't predicting, that you were just worried might arrive like some very large amount of inflation larger than people are contemplating now. And on that basis, I have no trouble owning a bit of gold. I think, though, that it might take a lot more inflation than we know to really light a fire under gold.

Great. Thank you. I'm going to turn it over to Brandon. He had a couple of questions. So Brandon, do you want to step in, please?

Hey, Jim. I was just wondering if you could opine on energy markets, specifically, in Canada, especially, giving the competing forces of underinvestment in the space for our [INAUDIBLE] five years now. But at the same time, a substantial increase in EV adoption. Can you just give us maybe a 5 or 10 year outlook on your opinion there?

Sure. Well, the population continues to grow, although, much more slowly than people would have imagined, certainly, in the developed world. The population is still growing quickly in the undeveloped or developing world.

As people come out of comparative poverty and start to have more reliable incomes and those incomes are growing, we know that they do things like buy washing machines and motor scooters and then cars and so on. That's a well-trodden path. And there's still a significant portion of the global population that's going to be doing that over the next 10 or 20 years.

So to some extent, anyway, the demand is probably there. The demand may lose some steam through electrification but that's going to take time. Even under the most optimistic scenarios of car companies who say they're going to be all electric by the 2030s, the population of gas consuming cars is going to be around for quite some time.

And as we've seen, with the power outages in China and with problems in Europe, just going to renewable, doesn't do it. You are going to need a base of fossil fuel based energy for some time to come still, even imagining that you're heading towards a greater and greater degree of electrification and renewable sourcing.

So I think, the demand is reasonable over that time. The supply question is always a question. But we've had one very large part of supply. Arguably, the largest reserves in the world-- maybe worse, the second largest reserves in Venezuela has gone almost completely offline. And it isn't a question of price. It's a question of the collapse of the society.

And the departure of all the majors and the major drilling companies and so on in a way that makes bringing back that production really problematic. We've had underinvestment, as you said. We know we've had underinvestment in our country, uncertainty in the oil sands for a while.

But in the US, also, we know that conventional drilling really, really suffered. And we know that the guys in the shale business got in a lot of trouble because they financed an awful lot of their expansion with debt. And they've, apparently, since then, got religion. And they've all sworn that they won't spend too much on drilling until they've reined in their debt.

So that's keeping them kind of well-behaved right now. But not for long because share prices have gone up a long way. And if you look at something like the old Encana, Ovintiv, which is around $50 a share today, it wasn't that long ago. It was under $5 a share. And raising equity to pay down debt was unthinkable.

But as you get up to prices like this, it's entirely possible that companies like that with much higher share prices in the market might go out and just do an equity issue and pay some of their debt down faster and dedicate more of their cash flow into production again. So the shale is going to come back to some degree. And we know it can be quite substantial.

I think it has a limited future because of the decline rates of most fields. And I don't think that's been improved substantially. But we can bring more supply on. And I think the sector is getting a lot of play these days. And I think there's more of that to come.

I believe, however, that the energy business today looks a lot more like other commodities, which tends to be boom and bust, which tends to be want to be there when things are good because prices move up quickly, and that can go a lot further than you think.

You also don't want to overstay your welcome because when the tide turns the other way, you can find yourself in a position where a lot more oil arrives than you expected. And demand for whatever reason might be faltering and not growing as quickly as you'd like.

So I think it's one to be do not rule out as an investor and want to be there. But just like it's always been a mistake, at the top, to imagine that lumber prices were going to go up forever or copper prices were going to go up forever or coal prices were going to go up forever.

We shouldn't be kidding ourselves about how long and how sustained energy prices can be. Let's take the good times where we've got them. Let's not dig ourselves into a hole that we have a hard time getting out of on the other side.

Right. Well, I think that concludes all the questions that we have. Do you have any final comments before we end our conference for today?

Not really, Paula. Just to say that-- you mentioned, I think, in a phrase a moment ago about people being concerned about everything that you heard in the media. And I will just underscore this.

It's an industry out there-- the media. And the financial media is a gigantic industry that didn't exist 35 or 40 years ago. I remember, in the 1970s, living here in Vancouver and there was a newspaper strike. And both of the newspapers in town-- The Province and The Sun were printed by the same company. And the strike shut down the two papers in town for 11 months if I remember correctly.

And that was back in the time where you didn't just go and pick up The Globe and Mail or The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. They weren't sold here. You, maybe, could get the Sunday New York Times somewhere, but really, other papers were hard to get.

And all of our clients used to find out what their stocks were worth by looking at the evening paper and looking at the share prices. And all of a sudden, they didn't have those. And for about a month, our phones rang off the hook. People calling in to wonder how their shares were doing.

And gradually, the volume of phone calls quietened down. And I remember it as a period when our clients did quite well in their portfolios, did quite well because they weren't worrying about them day after day after day. And in those days, the business section in the Vancouver Sun consisted of two facing pages. One page about 2/3 of it was share quotes, and the other page was all the business news that the Vancouver Sun could find to print.

And now, that's morphed into the Report on Business and The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and any number of online sources. And if you're in the newspaper business, you have to say something.

And you're not going to sell newspapers for the space on the internet if you come out every day and say, everything's OK again today. The economy's growing. Several billion people went to work again today, and they're going to get paid on Friday.

And so there's a tendency to be extreme. You would never have used the word crash in the financial press, ever. Unless you were contemplating something as bad as 1929. Nowadays, people talk about a stock being down that day and they say, it crashed. Like people use emotional language that designed to get us overwrought.

And my solution to this, I get The Globe Mail every day. I get the Vancouver Sun every day. I don't read them every day. I read them on the weekend. It's amazing how fast you can read a week's worth of newspapers once you get a few days past the news event.

I just think having a reasonable understanding about the economy and how that translates into the environment for business and trusting in the long term that the world is going to be here tomorrow and the day after and the month after that and the year after that, and letting the arithmetic of owning great businesses work for you is the answer. And the thing that stops us from doing it is trying to live in the present too aggressively.

If I'm going to leave on a note, it's have confidence in the long term and find a way to turn the noise off if you can.

Well. I'd like to end on that note, Jim. And thank you so much for your time. And thank you to our clients for attending. And if you have further questions, Brandon and I are always available. Even though we're not in the office, our phones are forwarded to our home. And we're available to answer any other questions that you may have.

So on that note, I bid you good night. And thank you so much.