The real money in investing is made by those who perceive what the markets are likely to do tomorrow, and then position themselves today to profit from that future action.
Today’s guest, Lakshman Achuthan, co-founded the Economic Cycle Research Institute specifically to identify these key turning points for investors.
Which key turning points are in play right now? And how can we best take advantage of them?
Let’s find out.
Transcript
Lakshman Achuthan 0:00
I mean, I’ve done as I said, I’ve done a few of these cycles now. I’ve lived through a few of them. There kind of has to be this whole moment of like, oh my gosh, we’re in a recession. Oh, that means the sky is falling. Oh my gosh, woe is me like all of that. We haven’t done that real Lee. I don’t think that I don’t think that’s really happened quite yet. So that there may be some version of that narrative that still has to unwind.
Adam Taggart 0:32
Welcome to Wealthion. I’m Wealthion founder Adam Taggart. The real money and investing is made by those who perceive what the markets are likely to do tomorrow and then position themselves today to profit from that future action. Today’s guest, Lakshman Achuthan, co founded the economic cycle Research Institute specifically to identify these key turning points for investors. Which key turning points are in play right now? And how can we best take advantage of them? Well, let’s find out. Lachman. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Lakshman Achuthan 1:06
Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure. Thanks.
Adam Taggart 1:08
Well, look, I’ve been excited to get you on the program for a while Lakshman. So glad you were able to join us today. Lots of questions for you, I really want to dig into the cycles understanding part about the work that you guys do at ECRI. Very quickly, though, before we get into the details, I can just start with a question. I like to ask all my guests at the beginning of these discussions just to level set. What’s your current assessment of the global economy and financial markets?
Lakshman Achuthan 1:33
Okay. It’s a big question. So I’m gonna say, we’ve been in a cyclical downturn. So we’re all about looking at the direction of growth, we believe it cycles up and down. And we’ve been in a cyclical downturn globally, for well over a year, quite a long time, actually. And that in and of itself, maybe notable, our guests are educated guess I’d say let me correct. That is that it’s going to resolve in a what we would call a hard landing or recession for the United States. And for some other major economies around the world. It doesn’t all happen in lockstep. It’s pretty messy. There’s lots of cross currents. But that’s our outlook, our cyclical outlook continues to be to the downside, and probably resolves with what in retrospect, we will deem a recession. And so for the markets. Particularly interesting, as you know, that’s like the Chinese curse. May you live in the interesting times, and we do. There’s there can be a lot of so called bear market rallies, bear markets are typically associated with hard landings, but there can be a lot of bear market rallies. And we’ve seen some of that volatility. And there’s also this this very, you know, we’re in this Backdraft of QE and low inflation, and is it going to go back to the way it was? Or is it going to be something different going forward? And so the markets are really having fun kind of going into different slots of the equity markets to try and find the right horse to bet on.
Adam Taggart 3:24
All right, and definitely AI seems to be like the favored horse right now. Well, I want to dig into this in a bit as we get later into the discussion. Laxman, which is, from your perch, you see the global downturn that we’ve been in the the momentum continuing to go down till we hit a recession, likely a hard landing market definitely does not seem to have gotten that memo yet love to hear your thoughts for why but we’ll get to that. And as you said, that’s sort of the role of a bear market, right, it’s to, to cause as many people as possible to lose as much money as possible. So some of the biggest rallies in history have happened within bear markets to try to get everybody back into the pool before they’re the claws come back out. But let’s, let’s actually, if we can start this discussion with the work that you do at the economic cycle Research Institute, I think it’s really fascinating. What you guys do is study cycles, as you’ve said, but as I understand it, what you’re really trying to look for are key turning points, right? And to say that, okay, look, you know, here’s, here’s where we think the road veers in a different direction than it’s currently traveling in. And if we can see that in advance, you know, we can position now so that when it does make that turn, we’re positioned to benefit from that. So if I did describe that, right, and correct me if I didn’t, what key cycles are in play right now. You know, you talked about the the general, cyclical downturn cycle in the economy, but I’m guessing there are other cycles that happen within that right with inflation and growth and all sorts of other things.
Lakshman Achuthan 4:54
Absolutely. So, thank you. That’s a that’s a really good overview. You have kind of how we’re approaching this. And just for a little bit of background, I was a protege. I am a protege of Geoffrey Moore, who was my mentor. And he was he’s known as the father of leading indicators. And so at akhri, all the researchers, there are many of them, including my, my co founder, honorbound Banerjee, we all studied with Jeffrey Moore, and the leading indicator approach. And you hear the words leading indicator all the time. Now, everybody has their own leading indicator, there’s different leading indexes, countries have whatever, and so on and so forth. Now, the origin of this is probably, you know, the origin is probably 100 years old. Okay. It used to be just gargantuan jumbo varieties swings and the economy, depression and expansion. It was crazy. I mean, as crazy as today sounds, it was, it was it was more volatile. And, and with things like unemployment would be swinging huge. Now, there was a an obvious question, what’s going on? And what the researchers were finding, and this is my mentors, mentors, Leslie Mitchell, who helped found the National Bureau of Economic Research, they, what they saw was that in a free market economy, there’s a very natural inherent feature, that there is an acceleration and deceleration. Okay. So in free market oriented economies, if we are capitalists, and we’re not in a managed economy, we’ve got this free market dominated economy, we have ebbs and flows. Now, what becomes interesting is the turning points, the peaks and the troughs, and ebb and the flow. And that’s where leading indicators come in. They’re designed to kind of help us track where we are in the cycle, and what’s the risk of it turning. And so that technology, the original leading indicators are made over half a century ago. They some of them, they still work today, which is amazing. But we’ve done a lot of work. And we’ve been researching and researching and trying to figure this out, because everybody’s asking us the question, what’s going to happen all the time, right. So now, I’ve been doing this real time since 1990. And Dr. Moore beforehand, had worked on the idea that there’s cycles and growth. But it’s more complicated than that. There’s also separate cycles and inflation. They’re related to growth, right? They have a relationship, but it’s not perfect, it’s pretty messy. There’s long leads and lags for when inflation peaks and when growth peaks and vice versa. And then there’s a third cycle, which is very important, which is cycles in jobs and the job market. Again, it’s closely related to growth. But it can have different turning points, it could peak or trough a little off of the overall business cycle. All of those elements, those characteristics that I just described that inflation is a little out of sync with growth, where the jobs are a little out of sync with growth. They are all evident in full force today, right? And so in our monitoring of those three cycles, we’re tracking them all very closely. And we don’t require that they all match up. Sometimes they don’t. And that’s really confusing, but still just having a bead on where are we in the employment cycle? Where are we on the inflation cycle? Where are we in growth, gives us some anchoring, in the midst of all this stuff that is going on. And so we’re tracking all of those. And in every one of those big cycles, you can kind of drill in a little bit and look at manufacturing or services on growth. You could you could look at commodities or home price, inflation and things like that. So please let me know where you’d like to go. And I’ll delve to the next layer of that onion.
Adam Taggart 9:03
You just opened the right door there, which is you said, we’ve got these three main sort of cycles that you guys look at that are interrelated. But But, but in a messy way, right. And, you know, I don’t think I can’t but ask the question. Just say, can you walk through each cycle and tell us where you are in each one right now?
Lakshman Achuthan 9:26
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a fascinating and so, you know, we’re, you know, I’m a dad, so I am full of bad dad jokes. And so it was were all of the other researchers that I’ve worked with. So we are monetarists with an eye. I mean, it’s not that we don’t we watch money as an indicator. But we’re monetarists with an eye. We’re really just tracking where are we in these cycles? And so on growth, we’re cycling down you look at employment, growth is going down. You look at output is going down. You look at say OLS is going down, and even income is coming down. And those are the four indicators that define cycles and overall growth. And they’re all cycling down. I think there’s a there’s there’s this this kind of rule of thumb that people are used to, we have to see two quarters of negative GDP in order to say there’s a recession. And that’s pretty much the case. But it’s a rule of thumb. And, you know, a statistic is not a recession, it’s really a process, where output, employment income and sales all feed on each other to the downside, that’s your recession or slowdown. And then the recovery on the other side is when that’s flips, it kind of just flips almost in a binary way. And it becomes virtuous. Surprise, demand begets more jobs and income and sales, then it goes to the upside. So on growth, we’re cycling down. I think people are familiar, probably that that that you’ve been speaking with, and listening to you that demand on the growth side of our economy in the United States has been weaker, the services have been holding up for the most part. And so the story there is that post COVID, people kind of leave their home and they go out, and they want more experiences, and so on, and so forth. So there’s pent up demand on the services side, and therefore that’s adding up to an economy that’s growing,
Adam Taggart 11:31
right? Revenge travel was the way that one of my guests just described it.
Lakshman Achuthan 11:36
Yes, absolutely. And we’re still in it, I think in this summer, we’re still going to get some more of that. Or, or maybe you won’t travel quite as far, maybe you’ll you’ll keep it a little closer to home as as the discretionary spending starts to get constrained. But the the issue here is that. Most recessions, not all of them, but almost all of the lion’s share of them, are created by swings in the good sector of the economy. So that’s just a concept when you think about cycles and growth. I’m oversimplifying here, but let’s say that the US is services, manufactured goods and construction. Okay, so the construction and the manufactured goods, those those parts, that’s the good sector of the economy, the size of the cycle in that part of the economy, is about six times larger than the amplitude or the size of the cycle in services. Kind of makes sense, right? You don’t have a choice on school, you got to go to school or to the doctor.
Adam Taggart 12:59
Yeah, and sorry to interrupt you here real quick. But as you as you continue to elaborate here. So you said the size of the cycle is so much bigger in the goods part. Now, goods and manufacturing is now a minority of the percentage of the US economy, right. I mean, services as a share of the economy is substantially larger than than manufacturing now, but what you’re saying is you’re not referring to the size of the economy, you’re referring to the size of the cycle, is that correct?
Lakshman Achuthan 13:28
This, the amplitude of the moves in that part of the economy is six times larger than the amplitudes of the moves in the services side of the economy. Now, having said that, the output of the good sector is still pretty darn large. It’s not small. The employment there has gone down. And I think that’s the thing that we all kind of, viscerally feel, right? Not that many of us are working in manufacturing or construction. And the people we know, by and large, are probably more in these people oriented people facing services, jobs of some sort. But at the same time, because the size of the swings in the goods sector are so much bigger, the job losses during recessions and we’re gonna get them. They’re coming, right? They they’re focused in that good sector. They’re focused in the manufacturing and construction side. On the services side, you might have growth come down and kind of flatten out inside of a recession. But it doesn’t necessarily go negative. So that’s how you can see the restaurants full The interesting the concert is full or something, but the growth is negative. How does that happen? Right? It doesn’t something’s wrong with the numbers, they’re not counting it right, there’s some other story. It’s really just the nature of the size of the swings in the different sectors. And this goes through further to consumer spending. Right, since since a lot of our spending is on services, what you will see is that very often we enter recession, with consumer spending growth around where it is now. And if anybody wants to get into the weeds on the data, the kind of mother of all indicators, there would be the personal consumption expenditures gross right here is the that’s the big statistic on all the things that we’re buying as consumers, the more narrow measure would be retail sales growth, right? That’s a little more goods oriented. And there, I think we’re going on a half a year of negative real retail sales growth. And, you know, never say never, but we in the past, have not seen that reading away from a recession. So there are lots of these, like warning signs flipping off in different parts of the economy that are consistent with us going into recession, or maybe we’re already in being
Adam Taggart 16:38
in one. Yeah, yeah. We talked about a lot of those on this channel. And it just kind of going back to my point of the markets not having gotten the memo. There’s a there’s a I mean, the Conference Board leading economic indicators chart, and I know you have your own leading economic indicators we’ll talk about in a bit, but like, that’s a readings that we’ve never seen outside of a recession. Right. On the on your point there about consumer strength. And saying that, you know, we tend we go into recessions, with the consumer still spending pretty well hitting them. I, I wonder if so what I’ve sort of been intuiting from the recent data is you’re right consumer spending, the growth is slowing. In fact, we’ve had the negative real retail sales, as you mentioned. And obviously 2020 2021, consumer spending was really bolstered by the stimulus that was being pumped into the system and other forgiveness programs that wouldn’t have just made people feel, you know, more flush than normal. We a lot of debate going on how much of that stimulus pig is still left in the Python. But we know it’s on its way out. What we have seen happen is, when folks were getting stimulus, they were paying down to a certain extent, debt, which was great. They were spending it on cars and boats to maybe not so great, but they some were taking responsible steps. Well, that’s ancient history now. And we’ve seen consumer debt rocket back to all time highs, that debt as well is now trading, or is now you know, charging, in many cases, record interest on credit cards, auto loans, etc. So I guess where I’m going with this is, is usually what we see is consumers, keep their, you know, the momentum of their spending going for as long as they can by shifting its financing from savings to debt. And it’s only when they start hitting debt limits, right, where the creditors won’t let them have any more or they just have so much they can actually take on anymore, is when things really start to fall off a cliff.
Lakshman Achuthan 18:44
Well, that’s, that’s when you Okay, so we’re talking about two things here. And this is, I mean, we could it’s so easy to do where they’re related, but they can get conflated, right, we don’t want to inflate them. Gotcha. So so we have like the economy, and then we’ll have the markets and I’d love to talk about the markets in a moment. Yeah, we’re getting two separate things. They’re related, but they’re separate. So here about the consumer, and how are they purchasing? What are they doing? And what is their behavior, right? So what happens is sure they’re flush, let’s say with the steamy checks or with other sources of income or whatever, and they’re flushing, they’re saving, and they’re paying down debt, and they’re doing all these things. And then they’re trying to maintain some say some consumption, and they start to eat away at that and develop some bad habits. And then they still try to maintain some consumption, and they go to the credit to finance things. And then they still are trying to find a way to do it. And until someone says no, right. So the early part of that is your growth slowdown. That’s your cyclical slowdown in growth. Yeah. So they’re buying
Adam Taggart 20:03
as much but they’re not buying more obviously there are there
Lakshman Achuthan 20:06
are. So you have your acceleration and growth. This is a. So now let’s let’s just pretend business cycles don’t matter. Recessions recovery, forget about them, just put them on the side for a second, you have your acceleration and growth and your deceleration and growth. That moment that’s switch a very big deal. That’s a very big deal. Because that will, that makes its way to the margins to profits growth. Yeah. And so the deceleration and growth is a difficulty. That’s a headwind. Now, for firms that are producing discretionary products. That’s when they start to feel a shift in their customer. And they have to start to figure out how to navigate that. And all the managers have different ways of doing that. Now, one thing they might do is say, I love you in financing, because you don’t want to do it, you don’t have the cash to do it, I’m gonna finance you. And then like, I can’t give you 0%, but I’ll give you a low rate, and then the rate goes up and up and up. And then they say, Oh, your credits no good anymore. You know, I can’t I don’t, I’m not sure I should loan you the money. And we’re somewhere on that journey. Okay. Okay. And you see, so So in every time there’s a growth rate cycle downturn, about half of them turn into hard landings. Okay, half of them don’t. And so we’re just we know, we’re gonna go through a cycle downturn, it’s just is it a hard landing or not? It’s kind of like, how far are we going in that process. And we are seeing, and this is a long way of getting back to your point that the credit conditions are tightening up. People are bumping up on the top of their credit limits, loan officers, for small businesses, medium businesses are thinking twice, all those things are happening. And that’s contributing to lower capital investment, lower hiring plans, all of those things. So we’re in the vicious part of that cycle, where things are starting to feed on each other to the downside.
Adam Taggart 22:15
All right, great. Couple of questions here. First off this, this turning point in growth, right, you talked about how it accelerates, we hit the top of the parabola, and then we start heading down the other side. That’s like just the classic one of the turning points that you and the team at equity are looking at.
Lakshman Achuthan 22:33
Correct? The primary one. So so we’re all about risk management. And this is the segue in a way to markets because the same kind of concept you just said works for inflation. It’s just a different cycle. It’s a different target, but the same cyclical concept. And to to at a certain level, it’s just are we in an upswing or a downswing? And what’s the risk of the direction changing? As far as we can see, which is a couple quarters at best. And so Job Number one is, where are we? Are we on the upswing or the downswing? And the immediate follow up? Question is, is there a risk of this, whichever side we’re on flipping and going the other way, and the flip moment at that, at that inflection point moment? That’s a moment where the equity view will have its largest divergence from the consensus expectation. The consensus expectation is derived very much from you know, very sophisticated models, including now AI and regenerative models and all these things, which are extrapolating trends. So if you’re in an upswing, and you’re really good at extrapolating the trend, and these tools are they’re good. They’re useful tools away from turning points. So what they’re going to do is they’re going to be forecasting past that inflection point, right? So you need to know the time when the error is going to be big. And that’s really what we do. Got, because that’s
Adam Taggart 24:14
where the markets pricing something in where you think no, something else is going to happen. So let me let me position there before the market realizes its mistake.
Lakshman Achuthan 24:22
Right. So let’s say the market is looking at a half a dozen things on the cyclical component. I think we have a good read. They might be sitting there going, oh, gosh, you know, Yellen is going to do this or Powell is going to do that or whatever. And there’s some other thing that’s in their mind. But But on this on this actual is growth going to turn and go the other way, including the trough. You know, those are moments where it gets very interesting to see the forward risk of a term.
Adam Taggart 24:57
Got it and in terms of when it really matters to your model, right, in terms of taking positions and whatnot, is it that is it the turning point that matter? Or what’s the relative importance of the turning point from from growing to? From increasing growth to decrease in growth, and just to make an terms people can understand from inflation to disinflation, versus declining growth to negative growth will say like disinflation to deflation, right. What’s the matter more?
Lakshman Achuthan 25:33
I think, well, well, first, and maybe it’s just the solution looking for the problem. But I think I think it’s true. That is the inflection. Right. So if you’re looking one way, and I’m looking the other way, and one of us is going to be right or wrong, right? I think getting that direction is more important. And that’s the
Adam Taggart 26:00
declining growth, whether it’s a positive number or a negative number, as long as the growth is declining. That’s the trend that matters more.
Lakshman Achuthan 26:07
Yeah, like, Look, if we go from 6% growth to half a percent growth, and the expectation was going to go from 6% to seven or eight. I think that’s a really big deal. Yeah. Now if it goes to half a percent, or minus half a percent. Okay, now we’re saying the R word or not. But the the real big deal was looking the right way.
Adam Taggart 26:32
Got it? Got it. Yep. All right. That’s great. I’m glad we clarified that, because again, I think it’s really what makes your work so valuable to folks. Thank you. So I do want to get to markets. But there were two other cycles, you mentioned, if we can talk about them briefly. Because, you know, we just spent all this time talking about the consumer and, you know, their ability to try to hang in there as much as they can. Well, two things that are really going to impact our ability to do that is what’s going to be happening with cost of living, and cost of capital, which, which are kind of related to what’s happening in inflation. Because those impact cost of living in what the Fed decides to do with REITs. And then obviously, jobs, right, I mean, you can have all the best of intentions in the world as a consumer, but if you lose your job that changes your prospects, right?
Lakshman Achuthan 27:17
And so for both 100%, right, and I’ll just restate what I said earlier, which is, cycles and growth are linked to cycles and inflation, and jobs, but their turning points can be quite different. And so therefore, we have a process for looking at the risk of a turning in each cycle. So all the three cycles are cycling down. Inflation, jobs, and growth, they’re all cycling down. So let’s get that out of the way. We know what general direction we’re looking okay, that’s right water under the bridge.
Adam Taggart 27:57
I’m gonna let you run your budget. But two things. One is inflation, clearly, right. We were at 9%. Last year, we’re now at 4.9. We can argue how sticky it’s going to be. But the it’s disinflation, for sure. Yeah, jobs. When you get to talk about that, I’d love for you to dig into that a little bit. Because that’s one where it’s a little less visible, where a lot of people are scratching their heads and saying, My God, this job’s market is so much stronger than we would think, given all these macro indicators and what’s going on. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with Michael Kantrowitz, his work, but the hope framework and you know, basically the employment ie being the last domino to fall, and that’s, you know, yeah,
Lakshman Achuthan 28:33
it’s very much I would, uh, I I’m not I’m not sure what he said in the most recent time, but I think that’s very much a play what you just intimated right now, I would agree with that wholeheartedly. When, when I say cycles in jobs, and the job market is cycling down, what I mean is from where it was, right, we were adding quite a lot of jobs, several 100,000 jobs. So over half a million jobs in some, in some cases per month. And now I think it’s I don’t have the exact data in front of me, we’re gonna get something this this on Friday, and I think it will continue to be the case that we’re probably two something year lows and the growth rate year over year. Great.
Adam Taggart 29:19
So your rate of change has peaked and is coming down. Alright. Yeah, it’s very important. Yeah. Yeah. It’s
Lakshman Achuthan 29:23
just like, boom, it says like, so. I don’t know. The the guesstimate today is 195 for Friday. Maybe it’s if that’s true. That’s a slowdown continuing. And if it’s weaker than that, then it’s more of a slowdown. Okay, so we’ve got a employment is roughly coincident with the business cycle. Now I’m speaking over a century ago, I’m jumping around here, so I’ll just make it over half a century a century. If you look at all these cycles, accelerations, decelerations, recessions, recoveries all these things. Employment is roughly coincident, sometimes it peaks a little soon, sometimes weeks a little later, we’ve had jobless recoveries, all these kinds of things have happened. Okay. And the so that’s, that’s very much the case today, in the mirror image way. Inflation, more often than not will follow growth. But enough times, it doesn’t, there’s probably a quarter of the time that it leads growth a little bit. So it’s interesting to have some some defense against that, in the current cycle, no, in in the current kind of narrative, hey, we’ve got a weakening economy, maybe even a recession, that’s going to kill inflation. I agree. Okay. But it doesn’t happen the way most people think. Most people think that, oh, it’s obvious that there’s a hard landing, so therefore, a recession is coming, inflation is coming down, so don’t worry about it. Actually, inflation won’t get near its weaker readings, until well, after the recession, which has yet to be acknowledged or defined, is over. So that’s not now. Right? That’s a long time from now. Okay, so now let’s flip over to inflation for a second. And then I’m going to start bouncing back and forth between installation and jobs. On inflation, it’s cyclical. It, it had been very, very low in the previous decade, following the great financial crisis and the Great Recession. Part of the reason a big part of the reason, a really big part of the reason that it was low, was really because we were importing disinflation around the whole goods sector of our economy, mostly from China.
Adam Taggart 32:10
Okay, but by offshoring, or manufacturing to cheap labor regions,
Lakshman Achuthan 32:14
and, and they had just a gargantuan amount of stimulus that they were kind of footing the bill on the production, a lot of stuff and selling it cheap here to keep their economy running, or for whatever it is, that happened. And that allowed all kinds of pretty experimental, dare I say, or aggressive or non traditional monetary policy to be put into the markets and the economy without inflation really getting out of control? last decade, post GFC, up until kind of COVID stuff. So then COVID is a massive shock. Right, it’s a quick recession, recovery, which we nailed. And then quite a lot of stimulus, right, that we all
Adam Taggart 33:16
well talked about. My name is Amanda stimulus. Irrelevant standpoint, but yes,
Lakshman Achuthan 33:21
it was like a huge amount of stimulus. And we have this and we and we have that whatever debate about inflation, the our future inflation is a leading indicator of inflation went to a 40 year high, like, like a rocket ship.
Adam Taggart 33:34
When When did it hit that?
Lakshman Achuthan 33:35
I’m curious, it was doing that in 2020. When they came in, it was like, Hey, is the recession over? And then and so then you run into that transitory stuff. And, you know, saw right through all of that. Now, when the Fed starts to hike rates, it’s doing it very gingerly, right? To begin with. It’s hard wasn’t in it. Until last summer. Almost a year ago, it starts to go 75 A meeting. And that’s really when people started to talk recession. Before that yield curve inverts all these things happen. And before that, you know, we were much more alone in our recession forecasts we forecasted about probably about a year ago, which is a long, that’s a long time ago, I will admit, you know, we’ll have and so lots of people are saying, Hey, you said there was gonna be a recession. It’s not here yet. Right. Sorry
Adam Taggart 34:36
to interrupt, but presumably that wasn’t just like, because you had an opinion. That’s because your cycles indicators were telling you, right? Yeah. All
Lakshman Achuthan 34:43
right. So I mean, we probably have 100 leading indicators for around the world. We do it for probably 14 or 15 for the United States, services, construction, overall economy, manufacturing, and then very importantly, for the world for 22 economies around the world. They all tanked. Right? So post COVID, post COVID, China went into a recession for the first time since 1989. Now a lot of people understand that, right. And, of course, Europe and other major economies into recession as well. And so we have a setup because of the mist, inflation cycle upturn where policy by and large around the world is tightening. Chinese were one exception, they didn’t tighten, because they, they’re concerned. But, but by and large around the world, everybody’s tightening while the leading indicators before the Fed started to go hard. We’re already recessionary. That’s unusual. So there’s a lot of unusual things happening, right. And that’s super unusual. Again, it’s it’s kind of a, you know, there’s the whole discussion about the Fed and how they go about policy, we got to put that on the side is too big. There’s the post COVID environment. And then there’s the this catch up, or whatever you want to call it, where the central banks in order to maintain their credibility have to fight inflation really hard into a recession. And the way inflation works is it often rises into an inflow into a recession, it can do that. It’s ancient history, but in 2008, you know, oil hit 140, something bucks, six months inside of a recession. So you know, and the bank was promising the Fed was was telling the markets and the markets believed them in May, June of Oh, eight, six months inside a recession, that they were raising rates by 100 basis points by December. I mean, so that’s how it looks like inside a recession when people don’t believe there’s a recession, right? Like the markets can get that out of whack. And so
Adam Taggart 37:17
we smells a little similar to the Wackness we have today. Yeah, yeah.
Lakshman Achuthan 37:22
So out of whack is kind of normal. And the reason is, look, I’ve done my first recession, real time was 1990. Working with Geoffrey Moore. And I can tell you that inside of a recession or when one’s starting, nobody knows. Nobody is like, yeah, oh, yeah, it started.
Adam Taggart 37:42
Right, which is why the official government agencies don’t tell you about the recession until like, a year after it started, right.
Lakshman Achuthan 37:49
Yeah, you have to wait for the revisions to the data, and so on, and so on and so forth. And the I think it was I was looking at this the other day in July of Oh, eight. Now, your three quarters inside a recession. There was no negative GDP print. Right now there is there was, then there wasn’t right. And so the markets were like, what there’s no negative GDP. What are you talking about? Yeah,
Adam Taggart 38:17
they were still partying at that time. Yeah.
Lakshman Achuthan 38:18
So. So now there’s two things on jobs that are really important. And you may have talked about this, but I want to relate it to cycles. One is the so called money illusion. And this is when you’re in an inflationary environment. Right? How do people act? And the best example we have to think through about the psychology of consumers, of policymakers of business managers, is the 70s. And so you walk into the 70s, and inflation’s kicking, starting to kick up. There are several recessions in there. There are several inflation cycles in that decade through the early 80s. And initially, it’s burns, Arthur burns, and he’s like, oh, there’s inflation and he starts to fight inflation, and he gets his head handed to him. I am telling you it was on a pike practically. Yeah, what you see today is nothing at all. He was persona non grata. I mean, nothing, nothing, nothing like what we see now. And so. That’s the reality. People didn’t care so much about the higher prices because they were getting paid a little more, and the job market was hanging in there. And so it wasn’t terribly annoying. It started to get annoying. After 7375 and going into the 79 recession, it’s hard to get super annoying. Okay. And Burns was out and Volkers coming in And it’s a different world now. Well, yeah, inflation is a problem, I want you to fight that, perhaps at the expense of jobs. And there was a much more of an opening for Volker to do it. And he still had pressure not to do it. And he still kind of goofed up in 1980, and let his foot off the gas, and then had to really stomp hard and 8182 and make a big recession. So that this, this dynamic that happens in an inflationary site, we just talked about the policymakers, business managers are like, whoa, if everybody else is raising rates, I can raise rates. And we all everybody listening here, I feel it, you feel it, everybody feels it, you know that the package got smaller, you know, that the price got higher. And you know, whatever you’re getting, you’re getting a little less of it, you feel it in your bones, right? And you’ve and that that is all of the managers are saying, well, wait a minute, if you’re paying up for everybody else’s stuff. I gotta push it a little here and see what I can get. And so even though internally, you’re paying more for your worker, you’re paying more for your inputs to your product. There is for a period of time, not forever, but it could go for a few quarters, you can pass some of that along. Yeah, the illusion that things are going to work out. If I can get through this, yeah, then the economy will firm in the second half, and I’ll be okay. And I won’t have to fire these people. Okay, so now let’s switch over to jobs post COVID, you lose millions of people, right? Anybody? You know, within 10 years of retirement, you know, might have taken a look at retirement, and said, Why am I doing this? It’s a lot of grief. Let me retire a little early, because we lost a lot of people there we lost some people to health situations and, and complications. We lost some legal immigration, which is critical for our workforce growth. So, so we we lost some of our senior workers, who are highly more productive, actually quite productive.
Adam Taggart 42:23
Yep. And highly skilled. You just can’t replace them on a dime. Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s,
Lakshman Achuthan 42:29
that’s actually showing up there’s evidence of that showing up in construction, where, you know, if you if you’ve got a an experienced construction worker who’s took early retirement, and you might have to replace them with two people who are younger, and even then it’s not that good, right? You know, and it because it takes a while to figure this stuff out, and which again, hurts profitability. So you’ve got but you’ve got this constraint labor supply. You have the massive kind of spurt in post COVID Revenge spending. And you have, as a result, what what’s called labor hoarding. And this actually happened in a couple of the recessions in the 70s, and then go back to the inflationary eras, that inflationary mindset, the money illusions floating around, the recession starts. And we don’t get negative jobs growth until the ninth month, inside of the 7375 recession. For eight months, jobs growth is positive inside of an official recession. And that happened again in 1980 for two months. So you have this thing, this thing, and you can understand it, right? If you’re managing some firms, some enterprise, you’ve had a really tough time hiring, hiring backup post COVID. You’re able to push your price pretty darn hard because of the inflationary environment. I don’t want to fire anybody right away.
Adam Taggart 44:07
Yeah. You don’t want to fire if you have to. Right. Yeah. So it’s gotten to the head time,
Lakshman Achuthan 44:11
until it’s going to hit time. And I think I think we’re starting to get there.
Adam Taggart 44:14
Okay. So first off, it sounds like what you’re what you’re telling me. And if this is true, it echoes from what David Rosenberg was saying, when I interviewed him yesterday, that you’re not super surprised by this disconnect right now, between the markets. And, you know, the decaying indicators that you’re looking at simply because you’ve just given us many of examples. We see a lot of this relative strength, maybe false strength in a lot of these, you know, top line metrics going into recession. So you said we had job growth, you know, nine months into a recession. Right. So you’re not shocked
Lakshman Achuthan 44:53
here? No, because of that combination of inflation. Oh, I, and by the way, in the combat inflation, we’re in a cycle downturn on inflation, but it’s sticky. It’s our forward looking indicators there have gone sideways for a couple of quarters. So that’s the sticky core services, wages, stuff that really freaks out central bankers. And if you look, there’s various ways of looking at that the heart of inflation, not food and energy, which are bouncing. But that heart of it. And, and, and not even shelter. But that wage growth stuff that starts to get a little sticky. That’s what happened in the 70s. Powell does not want to go there. And I’m pretty sure when I when I am listening to him, that he’s saying, gun to my head, I take a recession over sticky inflation.
Adam Taggart 45:51
Yeah. And so he’s actually said that, I mean, he’s he said, Look, if people don’t listen to him, I know people don’t listen to him. But he said, like, Look, if we tighten too far, we know how to undo that, right? Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, you’re right. Yeah, no way. The markets aren’t listening too much right now. So Sorry, I interrupted you.
Lakshman Achuthan 46:09
Yeah. So. But I think if you’re so so we do a lot of asset managers, a lot of companies, big C suites, and multinationals and asset managers, and the really, really big thing is asset allocation. And so, now, you’ve got bonds that mean, you know, treasuries or other government debt that has returned. Yeah. On it. So that’s an alternative, different, that’s different. Okay, you’ve got higher for longer. So that’s got to be in your playbook. Even on shorter term rates? And then you’ve got probably the biggest question is, do we go back? Like we have a recession? And so let me try to hide in the market where I can. And right now AI, or the tech stuff is the place to go. For all the reasons that have been discussed, but many other parts of the economy. You know, they’re just not being valued as high B, I think, because of the recessionary backdrop. The and the commodity commodities, which is the one the other asset class, you still have this global industrial downturn, it’s quite long in the tooth. So we’re looking for it to kind of wind up, but it’s still cycling down. So even when China reopens, and everybody gets bullish on oil? Yeah, there’s not a lot of there there. Yeah. Right. Because they haven’t they’re not gearing yet. Because the Global Industrial cycle hasn’t bottomed quite yet. It’s still, you’re still looking for that to happen. And and all of this adds up to probably, uh, you know, uh, you know, generally it’s more of a defensive posture until you can get some real green shoots in the forward data. And it’ll happen is just, you know, is it today? It’s hard to say, I mean, you might have the AI story to play with, or some other speculative stuff to play with, because, quite frankly, a lot of big institutions have gotten defensive. All right, they’ve switched to a defensive posture. That’s kind of where they’re sitting now. And, and wondering, is the Fed gonna pause or not pause or pivot or this and that, I think it’s kind of higher for longer for the time being, and when, you know, they’re there. The way it? I mean, I’ve done as I said, I’ve done a few of these cycles. Now. I’ve lived through a few of them. There kind of has to be this whole moment of like, oh, my gosh, we’re in a recession. Oh, that means the sky is falling. Oh, my gosh, Woe is me. Like all of that. We haven’t done that real Lee. I don’t think that I don’t think that’s really happened quite yet. So that there may be some version of that narrative that still has to unwind. And I think other commentators have made this point and we certainly have backed this up with our cycle research. Is that when the Fed it all it all is here’s where magnitude comes into it if it’s a hard landing and the Feds cutting. Yeah, the market is quite risky. The equity market remains quite risky to be in. If it’s a soft landing, and the Fed pivots and start cutting, great, I would go fully risk on but it just doesn’t seem like that. Right. So soft landing fed cutting. I just want to give you an idea of when that was that would have been 95. Yeah. Okay, great time to go along. Yeah, it doesn’t like the indicators aren’t showing that, right? If it’s if it’s if it’s 2008, and the Fed starts cutting Yes, too early, there’s still more kind of like a little bit more of a crack up, that has to happen.
Adam Taggart 50:28
First. Okay, so. So, your indicators suggest that a hard landing is more likely? You’ve said the market hasn’t had this? Oh, my God. You know, we were we were too optimistic. And then maybe you get that kind of, you know, change in sentiment and all of a sudden, it’s the sky is falling for a period of time. How? Like, not trying to get you to pick a number but like, I mean, how? What magnitude of A repricing would you expect, given the difference in where the market is right now, given what your indicators are saying about the hard landing? Mild repricing moderate repricing major repricing?
Lakshman Achuthan 51:11
Yeah, so now we get into magnitude of the cycle. And, and again, it’s exactly the question massive asset allocators are asking for the same exact reasons, right. It’s, it’s like, Okay, I’ve gotten my basic defense on, but what am i where my where my guardrails? Right? Is it back to 3600? And that’s it. Okay, I can handle that. Yeah, right. I think that was whatever last fall, right. So or, and then we run up to 4236 42. We’re back and forth. Okay. And say that come down off the top was like a 20 25%. Come down at some point. Right. That was roughly what that was. That’s a pretty garden variety correction, are associated with recession. It’s not a big one. So it, could it be a is it a mild recession? Or is it a medium recession? Or is it a severe recession? Now? I don’t know that our indicators don’t provide that answer. So now I have to shift to institutional knowledge, and shifting to institutional knowledge. One thing that that gives me pause and makes me think it’s worse than mild. Is the global nature of the recession. And that was your tone an elite? And you were asking what’s going on with the global economy? What’s going on with global markets? And that global nature, what happens is there’s no locomotive around the world to pull us. Right. You know, I
Adam Taggart 52:53
like Sorry to interrupt, but China was quite unlevered going out coming into the 2008 crisis. So they were able to hugely lever up and pull one of the world out with them. They can’t do that this time around.
Lakshman Achuthan 53:05
No, they to the contrary, they can’t they have a massive debt problem. They can’t really do it, they have low inflation. So they, they’ll poke at it here and there and do some targeted stimulus. And that’s something and then there’s a geopolitical, kind of whatever, which is not, let’s hold hands, it’s more like, let’s go back to our corners and put up walls, right, so that that’s actually inflationary. That’s and that’s not growth supportive, unless it’s like defense spending or something that could maybe grow a bit here. Right. Right. Um, so that that’s one thing that makes me say, man, maybe don’t bank on it being mild. The other thing that makes me say, maybe it’s not guaranteed to be mild is the long and variable lags. You know, monetary policy works with long and variable lags. I know, some researchers have done some stuff to say maybe it’s not that long. And you know, I don’t know, but the weight of the evidence is long and variable lags. And and when you see again, that happening globally, that just doesn’t happen. Yeah, we haven’t this is new ground for you and me and everybody, where, hey, this is the most predicted recession all over the world. And we’re all going to be raising rates at the same time. That’s a unusual one and makes me think, ah, you know, this may not end quickly. Got it? There.
Adam Taggart 54:45
We’re not just raising rates at the same time we’ve been raising rates at the same time meaning to the extent there is a lag we’ve got numerous rate hikes traveling through time you know that
Lakshman Achuthan 54:59
those seven He fires from July are starting to bite now. Yeah. Does it propagates through to that credit limit? Or that that loan officer right around here? So, yeah, so so so, so this, this is going to take a little while longer. I I want to take the other side, go for it. Okay. And be like, gosh, you know, this the sun is shining, the clouds clear, we’re off to the races, what happens, right? I’m just trying to be like, what could it be? And and the I’m not gonna go to AI because I think that takes a while. Um, but you know, maybe there’s something about just losing millions and millions of people out of the workforce. That, that that that keeps jobs chugging along. A little longer. I mean, we didn’t necessarily have that case in the 70s, right? They chugged along for eight months, and then stopped inside of a recession. And here, you know, maybe the super tight labor market because you lose that many people. We’re not having huge immigration, legal immigration. You know, so the demand for workers. It has a bit, even in a recession, it’s got a bed, and we’re seeing that. I just don’t know if it’s going to be enough.
Adam Taggart 56:36
Yeah. And I’m curious. Do you have productivity indicators that you look at? And if so, what are they telling you?
Lakshman Achuthan 56:43
Oh, gosh, sorry. It’s like the doctor giving you bad. It’s horrible.
Adam Taggart 56:52
So I’m taking a stool out of your bullish?
Lakshman Achuthan 56:56
Yeah, no, no, look, I am everything we were looking at is hard landing. And it’s not that bullish in the near term. Having said that, look, we know, literally the cycles turn even when you think they can’t, right. So, so if and when that’s going to happen, and hopefully it happens sooner, rather than later, I’ll be the first one to raise my hand and say, Whoa, we’re turning and I’ll probably do that when everybody else is cutting, slitting, you know, really?
Adam Taggart 57:23
Yeah, please, please come back on. When you start doing that.
Lakshman Achuthan 57:27
I will, I will. But on productivity growth, it’s quite bad. It’s It’s It’s inflationary, right. before the financial crisis before Oh, seven, where productivity is really jumpy. And it’s really hard to know why we’re productive, by the way. Why it grows and why it doesn’t, we can guess. So that’s the lay of the land. But if you if you average out that productivity growth, pre GFC, it’s, it’s healthily it’s well above 2%. For the overall economy. Post GFC boom, it jerks down about 1%. So it’s sitting at around 1%. from two to one for the entire US economy. That’s very material. That’s a really, really big deal, especially if you’re thinking about policy and economic policy. That in and of itself, in a vacuum is inflationary, but for China, sending us disinflation for the decade that bailed us out of that one. Yep. Now China’s gone. Post COVID, our productivity growth has gone down even further. Like, noticeably, so the worst is in construction. Manufacturing is also quite negative. And even services productivity is negative a little bit, which is unusual, harder to measure, but it’s a little bit negative. So all that boils down to profit squeeze, unless you are a company that can automate. And so you know, it maybe makes sense to go to the AI and tech stuff. Because that’s where the margins are juicy. Oh, God, there’s
Adam Taggart 59:23
so many topics you keep bringing up that I’m like, I don’t want to dig into that with him to come multiple. Please do and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the automation part. Because my my quick little preview on this is it’s something I’ve been tracking long before AI got real big, but like we have just been making it more and more expensive to employ humans in this country. And for a long time. We had a tremendous perverse incentive for companies to really accelerate their their automation and they’re offshoring and whatnot, because it was so cheap to borrow to do so. Right. That’s a little bit different now. But now we have potentially the threat of AI right. So, super interesting on that. We also didn’t talk about housing And you’ve talked about the money illusion of a lot of companies with their hiring, just just trying to hold on. And hopefully it’ll get through to the side, we have that happening exactly in the housing market right now, too, would love your thoughts on that. But rather than shortchange you in the last couple of seconds here, we’ll bring you back on and you can add that to the discussion. Real quick. I’m about to get to my last question, which is where folks should go to follow you and your work, but but really quick, because it sounds like you’re saying that, you know, from an asset allocation standpoint, looking at safety right now, at least seems prudent. Yeah, Utah talked about kind of safe, you know, debt that’s yielding 5% or more. You talked about hiding in some of these bigger companies, you said AI, I don’t know if anyone wants to hide in video right now at its current prices. But but you can hide an Apple or Microsoft right now, that’s a stock that’s not going to likely get cut in half, you know, tomorrow. Where are some other places that that your clients or some of the companies that you talk to, you know, when they’re thinking about safety, where they look and actually love to hear about your clients, but of course, we just have regular people watching the show, who are just trying to say, look, I don’t want to become collateral damage here. What are some of the things I should be looking at?
Lakshman Achuthan 1:01:15
Yeah, so the same issues, are there for asset allocators? If it’s billions, or if it’s 100, grand, okay. Or 10? Grand? You, you know, what can I risk? And what do I need to have safe? And, and so, these, this kind of balanced portfolios are a reasonable idea. And then you could tilt them towards being a little more defensive or a little more aggressive.
Adam Taggart 1:01:48
So maybe now’s a good time to dial up your cash holdings, right? Just Yeah,
Lakshman Achuthan 1:01:52
well, I mean, if you if you have, you don’t need to be a hero here, it’ll be there’ll be another time to be a hero, it’d be better to have cash, so that you can buy in a little bit. Or, and maybe you’re not going to bottom ticket, but you’ll you know, hopefully get three quarters of the ride or something. And that would be great. Or two thirds of the ride, and that would be great. So we’ve definitely had a more, I mean, it’s kind of run its course, there’s an allocation to gold that people had earlier, that’s kind of run its course of bonds obviously. Make those really, really solid companies, like you mentioned. And it may, in the place I’m looking for the next opportunity may be actually in the commodity space.
Adam Taggart 1:02:52
Okay. You’re gonna wait until the global cycle bottoms out,
Lakshman Achuthan 1:02:56
right? Well, yeah, I think it’s, it’s, I think we’re closer to that than farther away. Um, but right now, it’s pretty, you know, it’s risky stuff. It’s falling knife stuff here right now. But there may be an opportunity there, if you’re somewhat speculative, in the coming months, where you’ve got your defensive posture on, and you’re willing to, you know, I’m antsy, I want to take a little bit of risk,
Adam Taggart 1:03:27
right? Dollar cost, average nibbling and maybe overdue for sure.
Lakshman Achuthan 1:03:31
And one of the things that we’ve learned over the last couple of decades is that semiconductors, actually, they’re right in there. They’re a commodity. And that’s, and so I’m only talking on the cyclical component of it. I know there are other stories around that. But I’m just talking about the cyclical component, which has been waiting on some of these may may begin to bottom out. Then you may look at as I mentioned, there’s a lot of different countries that we’re looking at. So I think as China has become tougher and tougher to invest in, people have turned to India, India’s, India is actually slowing right now. But it may not matter. It’s on a recession. And it may not matter. Because I think a lot of people are having to reallocate away from China. It’s just too difficult, because they’re
Adam Taggart 1:04:38
on a relative play basis. Yeah, yeah. And
Lakshman Achuthan 1:04:41
so that’s going on. The other one is with the onshoring. And kind of where we are in the cycle. You know, Mexico may be a pretty good beneficiary. It’s an interesting that all of these economies I’m mentioning have very clean cycles, they’re cycling up and down. We’re not all in lock lock sank. I mean, Mexico certainly suffers as the US stumbles. Right? It’s not immune to that. But maybe there’ll be some opportunities as a result of that. cyclically. Right? The cycle stuff will always let me give you timeframes, right? I’m looking at a few quarters. Not farther than that. Yeah. So this is the cycle stuff is very useful in your process, to just get on the right side of some of these tactical moves. And if you can kind of regularly be on the right side of some of the tactical moves, then you open up strong kind of strategic opportunities. And that’s the way people use us. Really. Great.
Adam Taggart 1:05:53
Awesome. I’m going to ask just one last question on countries because it came up yesterday, pretty strongly from Rosenberg. You said that India and Mexico, they’re the cycles are pretty clear. Are they the same for Japan to theirs, Japan is all of a sudden, you know, being talked about, as you know, one of the more attractive people at the dance right now, all of a sudden after being, you know, shunned for decades?
Lakshman Achuthan 1:06:16
Yeah, yeah. Well, structurally, I don’t think anything’s changed. So all the structural issues they had earlier, they continue to have the one cyclical opportunity I’ll share I wasn’t planning on sharing, but I will, is that there were so so the same way that we have growth indicators around the world. We have inflation indicators around the world inflation Cycle Indicators, including for Japan. Now, what’s interesting, there’s been a switch at the BOJ Kuroda is out. And then new gentleman, new gentleman’s in theirs. They’ve had inflation for the first time. Right? They haven’t had inflation a long time. Yeah. And they have it couple percent. On on on some of the measures, which is a big deal for them. And there’s been a little bit of a feeling of, oh, maybe they don’t have to do that crazy, crazy intervention that they’ve been doing for decades. Which makes it on the margin. A little more attractive, perhaps. Right. So that kind of fits with the with the vibe or the story, you’re saying their future inflation gauge Japan’s plunging. So that I don’t think the bank knows that.
Adam Taggart 1:07:41
Okay, so you think that’s a little bit of a false hope people are getting like, Oh, we’re back to inflation, you’re like, it’s not gonna last?
Lakshman Achuthan 1:07:47
Yeah. And so if you can think through how that manifests how that plays. There may be some opportunities there. You got to the Fed higher for longer here. And the BOJ kind of a false start. So, so you can think through those kinds of things. Maybe the, the market looks okay, but on an exchange traded basis, maybe not as okay. You have to you got to work through a little bit of that. Yeah, you
Adam Taggart 1:08:26
definitely keep the currency risk in mind. All right. Well, look, this has been wonderful. Lachman, just this was everything I hoped it would be in your brain, on this channel. really look forward to having you back on in the future, especially as you see key indicators, make a turn, please reach out to me and say, Adam, I got something to tell your audience. We’ll have you back on anytime you want to come. Last question. For folks that have really enjoyed getting to meet you through this interview would like to learn more about you follow you and your work? Where should they go?
Lakshman Achuthan 1:08:54
Well, I think first and foremost, business cycle.com. Our website, talks about our process. And there’s also we do something there called the column where we write our own editorial piece every few weeks and post it up there. And so some of the themes I touched on today would be in there, for example, and you can read those there. Then I would also go to Twitter, it’s at business cycle. So we pop out little, you know, tasty appetizers there from people. And there’s also something on Fridays, we put there a weekly leading index, a picture of that, which is the offspring of the LSI. It’s It was what Dr. Dr. Moore made the LSI back in the day, and then he made the weekly leading index afterwards. And so we continue to put that out on Fridays. And you can you could watch that on Twitter. And then on LinkedIn, I think we’re called economic cycle Research Institute. So you can just follow us there too.
Adam Taggart 1:10:00
Awesome. And Watchmen, when we edit this, I will put up the URLs to all those resources so folks know exactly where to go. All right, well, just in wrapping up here, Lakshman did a phenomenal job of laying out, you know, a lot of the non intuitive trends that are going on right now across these different cycles. All the crosscurrents that he talked about makes us a really hard time for the average investor to navigate. Specially because most people have a life and a family to kind of pay attention to that get a job. They just don’t have the time, experience, bandwidth or even desire to try to tease out untangle all the things that are going on. Which is why we highly recommend that most people should be working with a professional financial advisor in general, but but specifically one that understands all the macro points that that Lakshman has shared here today, if you have a good one, he’s doing that for you and creating a personalized investment plan for you and then executing that plan for you. Great, you should stick with them. If you don’t, or if you’d like a second opinion from when it does. Consider scheduling a free consultation with the financial advisors endorsed by Wealthion. To do that, just go to wealthion.com only takes you a couple seconds to fill out the form these consultations totally free they don’t cost you anything. There’s no commitment to work with these advisors. They just offer their counsel as a public service to help as many people as possible prudent position prudently for what may lie ahead and hopefully to you know watchman’s mission, position themselves to profit from some of these turning points. And again, if you enjoy the watchmen coming on this channel, folks would like to see him come on again, especially if there are some of these key turning points he observes that we all want to hear about. Please do me a favor, support this channel by hitting the like button and then clicking on the red subscribe button below. As well as that little bell icon right next to it. Lachman again, thank you so much. This was just wonderful, buddy. Look forward to having you back on the program again soon.
Lakshman Achuthan 1:11:52
Great. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
