Well, ladies and gentlemen, Happy New Year. This is Grant's interest rate observer in the air.

I am Jim Grant, and we are coming to you from 233 Broadway. Now, that's in the Woolworth

building. We have moved back, Rans, moved back to the place where we started, which I guess, is it representative progress?

Well, we'll find out.

With me today, as usual, Eric White had the dials, the great Evan Lorenz, the deputy editor of grants and Phil Grant, who writes and propels into the ether, into the digital ether, the almost daily grant, the indispensable,

almost daily summary and of things financial.

So gentlemen, welcome back to the new year.

And ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to grants.

We've been on vacation and then we came back and we did some typing and we just published a new issue.

I don't know, things are, how do you think things are going?

And speaking as an employee of mine, pretty good. Perfect. Yeah, I would concur with that. Yeah, we have a few things

on the agenda today. I think that Evan has a few words on the state of the restaurant world.

And I, for my part, have a couple things to get off my chest. And among those things

are grateful words to our sponsors,

which include Petney Bowes and ZipRecruiter and more about them in a moment. But first,

did you ever see the, this is just new on the Wall Street Journal. I think it's only up on the

website, but there is a story about lack of women in the economics profession,

the in-hospitality of that profession towards women. And questions raised by Ben Espernagi, Ph.D.,

and Janet Yellen, Ph.T., what are we going to do about it? And all this got me thinking

about economics, economists, their conceits in the nature of diversity in central banking.

And this might take 45 minutes for an hour. This is a very important set of topics.

And I'm going to begin with an economic observation, Evan, you called my attention to this morning,

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