Okay, good morning everyone. I wanted to talk today about what I believe to be the only two

scarce resources left on Wall Street.

So a lot of things that looked like they were resources and looked like they were scarce.

It turns out aren't terribly important and not just in our business but around the world.

I was looking at returns for commodities over the last 10 years

as part of something that I'm writing and I was just completely blown away. I knew

they were bad but they are atrocious.

The returns for any version of the commodity asset class,

whether you're looking at one index that's dominated by oil

or another index that equal weights and

and has a bigger emphasis on metals and on and on and on there's just there

seems to be no bottom and funds based on commodities have been decimated and the asset class has completely

fallen out of favor.

And there are many reasons for that which I'm not going to go into and there are many reasons

why that possibly could reverse, although who knows. But just the point

that a lot of things that seem to have been scarce or hard to get or an

expensive proposition just continue to plunge.

Whether we're talking about building materials or we're talking about sources of energy or

we're talking about the types of precious metals that people store as some sort of a

hedge against either inflation or a broken financial system.

But one, food commodities, anything to do with livestock, anything to do with feed,

just one by one when you look down the list, all of these things are plunged in value.

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