So we have James Altiger today. James and I go way back. We had a great debate on Yahoo Finance in like 2010 and I think that was the that was the first time James I had ever been in any kind of video presentation because dare I say like you I have a face for radio.

Yes, this is our perfect format. This is this is it for us and we had a great lively debate and I of course at the time was very concerned about Europe's banks and whether or not the ECB would ever decide to paper it over or whether or not there would be a real crisis in a bank run and you know the whole deflationary scenario.

You were very bullish on stocks in general and on Apple and I think at the end of the day we'd have to say that you were right.

Yeah, although although to be fair like Europe is a mess and they keep putting tape and glue on it to fix it up. I just think that's disconnected from the health of the US economy. There's not there's not as much contagion like it's not an infectious disease like people think.

Well, we have the perfect cure for contagion. It's called a printing press.

Yes, it's true. You're absolutely right, Porter and Europe is not allowed constitutionally to have a printing press. They have to back it with bonds out the back door, whereas again, whether you're philosophically for a printing press or not, it does inflate artificially make people feel well here and then they buy stocks with that artificial wealth.

Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. And just so you know, I switched my position and the fall of 2011. I think actually our interview was in August of 2011.

It was August 17, 2011.

It was 2011. Anyways, I went I went bullish on stocks in mid-December 2011 and I've added, I don't know, probably 40 securities to our recommended list since then.

Because what happened was, as you mentioned, the ECB began to basically they have created their own type of printing press where they're doing essentially the same thing the Fed's doing, but they have a little bit different language and a little bit different legal rules around it.

But they've greatly increased their money supply and they've been buying all the bonds of these weaker countries, the Spain's and the Ireland's and the Greeks.

I don't know if everyone knows this or not and James, I want to get past this European thing, but the one thing I do want to point out about what's going on in Cyprus is that the reason why the technical reason why the Cyprus banks collapsed is because the ECB enforced a haircut on the Greek bondholders and the Cypriot banks owned a lot of those bonds.

This issue is, if you start to hold people accountable in capitalism, there is a huge domino effect because no one's had to be responsible in capitalism since the end of World War II.

We've just had these currency regimes that were all based on the US dollar and where inflation was a constant process.

So Mexico goes broke in 1982. Oh, no problem. We'll just print up some Brady bonds and paper it all over and this has happened again and again and again where inflation was always the answer.

You call on the IMF, you get some loans from the from the from Uncle Sam and you inflate while laying your paper over all your problems.

And now I believe we're kind of at the end of the road of that process where we have created so much paper and so much debt that the whole system is just becoming unstable and starting to fly apart.

So if I can add to that, I think it's excellent that you that you mentioned it started with World War II because I think it's a psychological thing as well as an economic thing where women started to work so suddenly, which is great, but suddenly we have these two income families that forever after needed to keep up with the Joneses.

So we had, you know, the post war boom, then we had the great society, then we had the inflation after, you know, during Nixon, then we had, you know, milk economics with Michael milk and junk bonds everywhere.

Then we had the internet boom, then we had the housing boom. And then finally we had the Federal Reserve boom. You're right. We've run out of booms. What can boom next? There's nothing left.

And yet we still have this psychological need to keep up with the Joneses, which is falling apart.

Well, lately we've been trying to base all the expansion of credit in our economy on college students. How's that sound for a credit risk?

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