The FED’s Job Is To Provide a Stable Currency. Are They Doing a Good Job?

Paul Winkler: All right, welcome. This is “The Investor Coaching Show.” I am Paul Winkler. We talk about money investing, financial planning, and educating, because I believe the more educated investor is a more successful investor, but I also think that the education ought to be fun, don’t you think, Evan?

EB: Absolutely.

PW: I mean, I think we ought to have a good time with that.

The Level of Savings People Have

EB: Well, I think you absorb more when it’s a little bit lighter.

PW: Even if it’s a heavy topic. And also a little bit of audio never hurts —

EB: There you go.

PW: — from the financial channels. Yeah, I like picking on the industry, picking on the financial world, because you can learn that way too.

You hear them say things, you go, “Oh, that sounds plausible,” until you get it explained to you, and you go, “That doesn’t sound plausible. That makes no sense whatsoever. What on earth are they thinking?”

Well, that’s a good question. So, yeah, there’s always a lot to talk about. There is something that I wanted to get into — a couple of things. I think they’ll be really fun.

Plus, I’m sure, Evan, you’ll have tax stuff. You’re already holding an article.

EB: I’m just rereading.

PW: You’re just rereading it? Okay. All right.

EB: I’m not jumping in.

PW: I was like, “He’s already chomping at the bit on me.” All right. All right. So, yeah, I threw you under the bus.

EB: You’re the brains of the outfit. I’m just the eye candy.

PW: I don’t think so. So, yeah, I was listening to one of the financial channels, and we talk about inflation, we talk about investing.

There was an article, and this was totally unrelated, but this was an article in MarketWatch, I believe it was. It was talking about how a million dollars just doesn’t go as far as it used to. “Million dollars ain’t what it used to be.”

EB: Yeah.

PW: And what was fascinating, and I may come back to that, because it’s fascinating, was the level of savings that people have in America. It actually goes through the numbers a little differently than I’ve seen before. So I think we’ll jump into that and just different people’s opinions on why the amount of money that you’ll need for retirement will be greater.

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I think that so often the reason people don’t have as much is simply the approach that is taken in the investing industry. 

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And this is what we’ve been trying to fix for 25 years. We’re just going to keep going, and train people up in the way that we believe that they should go based on the academic research, and hopefully that they’ll get old and they won’t depart from it. Right?

EB: Yeah.

PW: So the thing that was talked about in the financial world, this was actually about a week and a half ago it was, but I wasn’t here last week. Evan took the reins. And I hope you didn’t create any heresies for me last week. I get people to tell me, “Oh, Evan said this,” and I’m like, “I know.”

EB: I did get some … what would you call it? Congratulatory emails from some clients. It was pretty fun.

PW: Nice. Cool. Okay. Confession: I listened to the first five minutes, and you said, “I hope Paul’s not listening.”

EB: Oh, did I?

PW: Yeah. Yeah, you did. You said that, and I shut it off.

EB: I also told people to call the office and tell you I did a good job.

PW: That’s hilarious. That’s hilarious.

I did, I shut it off. I was a good boy. Because I’ve been working on another book, and I did take the time off as I should.

Interest Rate Decreases

PW: But anyway, so let me just play this little segment. I think as we go through, I’m going to cut it up into little bits and pieces because I think there are a lot of interesting things talked about right here regarding inflation and what it actually should be versus Fed targets. So here it goes.

Joe Kernen: Fed policymakers remain divided over the need for more rate cuts this year. Joining us now, independent institute senior fellow Judy Shelton. She’s a former Trump Fed board nominee and on set with us on this Veteran’s Day. It’s good to see you.

PW: Now, number one, if you have interest rate decreases, which he’s talking about right there, that can be inflationary, is the concern that people have. So I just want to make sure that you understand what he started out with is this idea that there’s pressure to decrease interest rates.

Because when you decrease interest rates, you can increase the demand for cars, durable goods, those types of things, because people tend to borrow money for houses. People tend to borrow money for those things.

And if more people are wanting to buy cars or durable goods, you have to have more people to manufacture these things. And when you need more people, you might have to pay people more money because there’s only a limited number of people out there that are actually in the workforce, or you have to actually get some automation going where you have machinery do the work of what people used to do, and that’s expensive as well.

So it can all be inflationary. So I just want to start with that point right there.

Judy Shelton: Good to see you. Thanks.

JK: Make some interesting points. They’re always compelling, and that is that even the 2% Fed target is well above what the dual mandate actually set when it was Humphrey–Hawkins or whenever they decided we were going to do it, it was zero, which is something you think should actually be a goal.

PW: And it used to be that we had no inflation.

EB: Right.

PW: There was no such thing as inflation prior to the 1900s because we were on a “gold standard.” And I’m going to get more into gold in a second. And I’ve talked about many times why we went off the standard.

There are a lot of reasons that we did that. It was problematic for banking. It was not optimal.

You had bank runs all the time, every eight years, nine years or so, people would turn in gold for dollars when they felt euphoric, they turned in their dollars for gold when they felt scared. And you have all these wild swings in the economy.

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The idea of a fractional reserve system and velocity of money actually was something that was helping grow the economy at a faster pace. 

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And that was the idea behind it. You have $1 doing the job of multiple dollars, and there are a lot of reasons. And there’s all kinds of debate still regarding that. There’s all kinds of, “Should we have done that?”

EB: Even around this very table.

PW: Oh, I know. Some people think that it’s a really good idea, and you go, “I can see why they did it.”

Zero Inflation

PW: We look at the last 100 years when we haven’t been on it and say, “Okay, we haven’t had the bank runs that we had in the past.” We didn’t have that issue.

We’ve had inflationary times where maybe the Fed stepped out of line, they did something that they probably shouldn’t have done. When you had tax policy that went against what you probably should have done in the 1930s, you had interest rate policy that went against what we should have done in the 1930s as well.

There are a lot of things. There are a lot of things that created the Great Depression and created the inflation in the ’70s, but I don’t want to get into that so much here as the idea that you want to have a 0% inflation rate based on the way our monetary system works is a little problematic. And she’s saying that we want a 0% inflation rate.

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Well, it doesn’t give you a whole lot of leeway because if you have deflation and prices go down, people wait to buy stuff next year. 

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They wait to buy stuff two years from now because it’s going to be less expensive, and people don’t purchase things now; they purchase things down the road.

Well, you don’t need to manufacture those things. If you don’t need to manufacture those things, then companies don’t get profits now. If companies don’t get profits now, then you don’t get taxes now. And if you don’t get taxes now, the government can suffer.

So having a little bit of inflation, a small amount of inflation — you look at central banks all around the world, they operate this way. You have pretty much every established economy. I can’t think of one that doesn’t do this. They operate based on fiat currency, fractional reserve system, and to greater or lesser extent with success.

Now, what’s interesting right now is you have some countries that are trying to use as a reserve currency gold, and that has caused great consternation over in Europe, and we’ll talk more about that as time goes on. But the basic point is this: Her goal, zero inflation, can be very precarious because if you go into deflation, you can get into some serious problems.

Price Stability

JK: For pure price stability, the most important thing of the dollar.

JS: Well, that’s the definition of price stability. The Fed often quotes its mandate, “stable prices,” but that isn’t what they shoot for. They shoot for stable inflation, and they don’t have a very good record of achieving that. Why 2%?

PW: I would argue that it’s been a fairly decent record. Yeah, we can look at the early 1980s, late ’70s, and go, “Yeah, that was a misstep.”

We can look at the deflation and the Depression, but they were just getting their legs under them and trying to figure out how this stuff worked, so they made some big mistakes back then, but it’s been decent. If you look at the inflation history, it has been that. But anyway, so she’s saying they haven’t had a good history, but anyway, keep going.

JS: The idea is you have a money unit that’s dependable, that’s trustworthy. And that was what the founders had in mind when Congress was given the power to regulate the money; it was in the same sentence as defining official weights and measures.

PW: So, if we look around the world, we look at other countries, why has the stablecoin taken off? The stablecoins, the ones that have been talked about so much in the new regulations that are out there, are based on the dollar, the U.S. dollar.

Why has it taken off? Because a lot of countries around the world don’t have stable currencies.

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So what they’re doing is they’re trying to piggyback off of the dollar, which has been a more stable currency.

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JS: Because money was meant to be an honest measure. So is 2% a policy of deliberate debasement because you think you can chisel away the purchasing power of the money that people have earned?

Devaluation of the Dollar

JK: Or how much you have to pay back from how much you borrow, it’s easier to pay, it’s easier for debt service on our total debt, right?

PW: 

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So the point that he’s making right there is that everybody benefits from the devaluation of the dollar. 

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To give you an example of that, I had a guy that ran a very large company. I was going to name the industry, but I won’t. A very large company.

His son was poised to take over the company. And his son, being very scared about taking this position of running his dad’s company and possibly running it into the ground, goes, “Dad, why don’t you just pay off your mortgage? I don’t know why you don’t just pay off your mortgage.”

And he goes, “Keith, let me tell you something.” He said, “Keith, when I took out this mortgage, $50,000 was a huge sum of money.”

EB: Yeah. Probably.

PW: And he says, “Now it’s a drop in the bucket.” He says, “I’m repaying with depreciated dollars. The dollars aren’t worth as much,” was the point that he was making.

Because he could make a lot more money running his company, and the amount of money that he could make using his own money to run that company — his return on capital was much, much greater than what the mortgage was costing was his point. So that’s the point that Joe Kernen is making right here: “Hey, everybody benefits.”

“The government is repaying with depreciated dollars when they borrow money too.” That’s the point she’s making, is the government is taking money out of the citizen’s pocketbook, and he’s making the point, “Well, everybody’s benefiting on this, really.”

And it was funny, it was when he said that, she had the deer-in-the-headlights look. It was like, “Yeah, you got me on that one.” It was funny to watch the look on her face.

EB: It benefits people that are financing their future.

PW: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly right.

EB: If you take cash for everything, it doesn’t quite have that same advantage.

PW: Yeah. That is quite right. And then the point he was talking about is the idea of debt.

JK: So there are reasons to want to do it.

JS: Yes, but that’s in the government’s interest.

PW: It’s not just in the government’s interest.

JS: Not in the interest of individuals in the private sector. It would define really their plans in life and for their family in terms of being able to count on a reliable store of value.

JK: But if they can’t even come close to two with any accuracy and you’re trying to get to zero, what if you overshoot? You have deflation, which is even worse than 2% inflation, isn’t it?

JS: Well, a little bit of deflation is actually the natural way of economic development.

PW: Now, not necessarily. She has a point in a way, and the point that she’s making, I think, is the idea that as technology improves, our standard of living improves because maybe we can do things, we can get things a little bit less expensively. Think of what you used to pay for a flat-screen TV when they first came out.

EB: Right. Right.

PW: You got deflation. Go ahead, Evan.

EB: Well, whatever, a 40-inch TV was probably $5,000 or something like that. And I got a flyer last week or something. I think BJ’s has a 75-inch TV for $300 or something.

PW: I was going to say $250. Oh, yeah. Isn’t that insane?

EB: It’s like, “Holy cow.”

PW: Is that not insane? So, yeah, that’s the point there.

How the Interest Rate Is Calculated

PW: Here’s the thing about the inflation rate, the CPI, Consumer Price Index: When you look at how it’s calculated, it tries, they try the best that they can to work this into the calculation.

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They look at technological improvements, and they try to work it into the data.

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So it’s a little bit misleading to say that deflation is the natural order of things, but there is that aspect of it. But the data, they try to do it the best that they can, and it’s not a perfect science by any stretch of the imagination; they try to play that in.

JS: Because you gain through technological improvement, through productivity improvement. So actually, a little bit of deflation would be the natural state of being. We should expect that. So I’m not uncomfortable with that.

PW: And I think he should have challenged her.

JK: They said zero. They meant zero.

But let me ask you this, then. So we’re well above that. We’re probably … what’s your best guess where we are? Are we at 3% right now?

PW: Yeah, who knows?

JS: I don’t really have much …

PW: Yeah, who knows? I don’t really yet. Who knows. But where she goes is this, and I want to hit this before we go to break, just because she has this proposal that, while interesting, could be problematic.

And I’ll talk about a lot more as to why that could be, especially in light of some new information out there and new technology that has come to the forefront. So here’s what she’s proposing anyway.

JS: We should demand honest government.

PW: No argument.

JS: I mean, perpetual deficit spending is immoral. It’s corrupt. You’re creating purchasing power based on future goods and services that have yet to be produced. And I think that we should guarantee honest money.

And that’s why I have this proposal that Treasury should put out a gold-backed long-term bond. So at least for some specialized issuance, and you can tie it in, make it available starting July 4th, 2026, but let people who want to purchase this bond, kind of like a TIPS bond, be compensated for losses in purchasing power. Because at maturity, they have a feature where they could convert —

Gold-Backed Currency

PW: There’s only one problem.

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Gold doesn’t go straight up. As a matter of fact, it has a level of volatility historically that is greater than the stock market.

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So if you have this thing backed by gold and gold drops significantly in value for whatever reason, you could have a problem on your hands here. So how would this actually work?

JS: And take the principle back in terms of a pre-specified amount of gold.

PW: And how much would that cost the federal government, and what problems financially could that cause if they have to go back and purchase stuff for a fraction of the value because whatever she’s concerned about actually takes place? That’s … I don’t know. I’m not expecting an answer on that one. That’s a tough one.

EB: I mean, if the bond is denominated in ounces rather than dollars, then the government would be incentivized to do something to drive down the price of gold so that they could return.

PW: Yeah, I don’t think that’s what she’s talking about, though.

EB: Oh, probably not. But, I mean, to me, the other thing that just cropped up when she started was, “Okay. Well, first, we have to have the gold to back the bonds sitting somewhere.”

PW: And the story that’s coming, we might. So hang on, hold onto your hats on that one.

JK: This product might compete with Bitcoin. Or you could use Bitcoin.

PW: Or you could do … yeah, great. You could use Bitcoin.

EB: Yeah. When the pot doesn’t work, use crack.

PW: Yeah, what do you call it when Bitcoin goes down 30%? A good start?

EB: It’s a wake-up call, that’s for sure.

PW: A wake-up call? Isn’t that the truth?

EB: Thirty-five percent? Yeah.

PW: Yeah, isn’t that something? I mean, you just watch it, right?

Investing Based on Personal Beliefs

JK:  If you’re a believer.

JS: Well, I’m just saying, for some people, gold.

PW: I always love that when people say, “For some people, if you believe that this is going to happen, then you ought to do this.” What does it matter what I believe? “If you believe that inflation is going to increase, if you believe that interest rates are going to go up, you ought to do this. If you believe that interest rates are going to go down, you ought to do this.”

And I’m like, “What does it matter what I believe?” If I invest based on what I believe, most of my beliefs, quite frankly, are based on maybe what I expect to happen based on history, maybe it’s based on what my feelings are, maybe it’s based on my upbringing, maybe it’s based on whatever, but a lot of my beliefs are not based on really what’s going to happen in the future.

EB: Well, and I think, to me, her question and your response there is she’s summarizing how Wall Street works, period.

PW: Yes.

EB: She’s speaking to the half of the people listening to that show that think, Hey, I think this is going to happen.

PW: That’s right.

EB: That’s her customer.

PW: Confirmation bias, baby.

EB: That’s right.

PW: 

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We look for things that confirm what we already believe.

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Yeah, amen to that. No, exactly.

JS: And it is the second-favored global reserve asset now. I was in Europe a couple of weeks ago, and they’re very concerned about that.

PW: No, catch that again. I want you to catch that again. I want you to hear this again.

JK: Or you could use Bitcoin theoretically if you’re a believer.

JS: Well, I’m just saying, for some people, gold — and it is the second-favored global reserve asset now. I was in Europe a couple of weeks ago, and they’re very concerned about that. The euro’s been squeezed out. And here you have the U.S. with the dominant reserve currency, the most gold official reserves of any country in the world.

JK: Supposedly.

EB: Right. Right, right, right.

PW: And Evan’s like, “Yeah, U.S.” Yeah, we don’t really know. But I think that what’s interesting about what she said right there is that it’s now the second-in-line global reserve currency.

And what do people invest in gold as, as an investment, and what is she basically saying it is? A currency. A reserve currency. So you think about it that way, it is actually being looked at that way, and it’s pretty easy to miss that point right there.

But anyway, so we got to take a break. But this is going to get fun. Stay tuned.

I’m going to talk about some stuff going on that is technology and gold. It’s very, very interesting stuff. So we’ll be back right after this.

New Gold Mine Discovered

PW: We got to talking here, and we’re like, “Are we back? We’re back.” Oh, my goodness. Paul Winkler, “The Investor Coaching Show,” Evan Barnard.

Oh, yeah. I have been on a tear with writing lately. So I’ve been doing a ton of research, and it has been very, very interesting.

One of the things that I want to run by you, there was an article I saw in, of all places, Popular Mechanics. And it was just talking about how workers had just discovered a gold mine worth $192 billion. “Workers Just Discovered a Gold Mine Worth $192 Billion.”

It says, “After over a year of work —” This gold mine, I can’t even pronounce it. It’s Dadonggou or whatever. I’m like, “Whatever. “— has yielded more gold than any other in China, with nearly a million gleaming pounds of precious metal being unearthed. Tectonic activity beneath the landmass, which involves intense heat and pressure, is behind the formation of such large veins of gold,” blah, blah, blah.

And I’m reading this going, What on earth? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why now? 

And it’s not just there. There are other countries around the world where this is happening. And I’m thinking, What is going on here? 

So I did a little research. You get some of these hyperlinks inside of articles, and one of the hyperlinks sent me off to an article in National Geographic.

And so I actually went to that article and started going through it. And this is tongue-in-cheek. Just take this, Evan, for what it’s worth. Okay?

This is Paul being a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Okay, so we got, I’m not going to start a heresy, but I’m going to come close.

EB: I’m there.

PW: Yeah, it’s intriguing, right? So fall of Babylon. The fall of Babylon is driven by financial issues, right? We don’t know exactly everything about that.

Not the previous previous fall of Babylon, but the one in Revelation. Okay?

EB: Got it.

PW: All right, so I want to make sure that I’m clear about this. Now, what is everyone buying based on that last clip that we talked about right now? They’re buying lots of …?

EB: Gold.

PW: Gold. Nailed it. Very good.

Foreign governments, second reserve currency, passed the test so far. What happens to the value of something when you increase the supply of that thing?

EB: It goes down.

PW: That’s right.

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So if you increase the supply, you can drive the value down.

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And what is going to happen in the “end times” is that we’re going to have a destruction of the economy, is the idea behind that. That’s the whole idea.

So if you have more and more countries buying and selling things using gold, and the value of that has been destroyed because of an increase in supply of it, that could be problematic. And so I’m just saying it’s interesting. It’s an interesting theory.

EB: Yeah.

How Do Gold Nuggets Form?

PW: So anyway, the article says, “How do gold nuggets form? Earthquakes may be the key.”

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So they said, “Gold has always been a hot commodity, but these days, finding a nugget isn’t too tricky.”

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“Much of the world’s gold is mined from natural veins of quartz, a glassy mineral that streaks through large chunks of Earth’s squashed up crust. But the geologic process that put gold nuggets in there in the first place was —” was, past tense “— a mystery,” is what they’re saying here. Okay?

So you look at that and go, “Okay, so it’s a hot commodity. What’s going on here?” And what do we know about the end times? Like I said, we’re going to go back.

EB: We haven’t gotten there yet.

PW: Yeah. But there’re going to be lots of earthquakes, right?

EB: Right. Yeah.

PW: And then that’s what they’re talking about here. Earthquakes, right?

“Now, a new study published today in Nature Geoscience has come up with a convincing, and surprising, answer: electricity, and earthquakes — lots of them. Those nuggets owe their existence to the strange electrical properties of common quartz. When squished or jiggled, the mineral generates electricity.

“That drags gold particles out of fluid in Earth’s crust. The particles crystallize out as grains of gold — and, over time, with enough electrical stimulation, those grains bloom into nuggets.”

And this guy says, “If you shake quartz, it makes electricity. If you make electricity, gold comes out.” Now, I laughed when I read this because, remember, Evan —

EB: So my quartz watch is now gold.

PW: Well, no, but you look at it, you shake it enough, it might be.

EB: Yeah.

PW: And wait until you get to the experiment. This is fascinating. When you get to the experiment on how they actually did this, this is mind-boggling.

EB: Cool.

The Precarious Worth of Gold

PW: So what happens is, I’m reading this, and I’m thinking back to when I did the TV show on Channel 5+, and I did a thing where I was playing a segment of Twilight Zone. Remember this?

EB: I think so.

PW: Okay, so those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, haven’t heard me say this, tell this story … matter of fact, I told my wife, and she goes, “I don’t remember that,” I go, “Okay, I better retell this story.” So these guys rob a train.

EB: Yes.

PW: And then they rob the train of gold, they take the gold into the desert, into a cave in the desert. One of the guys is a genius. He has these three coffin-looking things that are made of glass.

They lie down in it, and he introduces a gas into each one of them that is supposed to put them to sleep for exactly 100 years. And 100 years later, they’re supposed to wake up, and then they’re going to go through the desert, and they’re going to get out of the desert and they’re going to go into civilization.

Nobody would be around anymore that would have any memory of the train robbery. So they would be scot-free, wealthy people with lots of gold 100 years later.

So they do this. Well, in the midst of this 100-year period, a stalactite comes falling down, hits one of the coffins, it breaks, the gas leaks out. The guy is all bones is basically what happens, right?

And they’re going, “Hey, this must be 100 years later. Look, it’s all bones.”

So two of them wander out in the desert. One of them has a flask of water, the other one has no water. He forgets to bring his water with him.

They’re in the desert. The one that doesn’t have any water keeps asking the one that does have water for a drink, and he makes him give him a bar of gold for every drink that he takes. And he’s willing to give his bar of gold in exchange for the water because he’s going to die otherwise.

So they get all the way to the end of their journey, and there are jet planes that fly over, and they go, “Oh, my gosh.” They came from the Wild West, and jet planes were not a thing in the 1800s.

So anyway, so what happens is they get all the way to near civilization, and the guy’s down to his last bar of gold, and he wants another drink of water. And the guy says, “Well, give me that bar of gold and I’ll give you a drink of water,” and then he decides to hit him over the head with it and kills him. And then he takes all the gold.

And then what happens is these people come in in a hovercraft, a husband and wife come up in a hovercraft, and the husband comes up to the guy and goes, “Who are you? What’s going on here?”

And he goes, “Give me a drink of water. I’m dying. I’ve got this gold, I’ll give you the gold in exchange for a drink of water. What is it worth to me?”

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I make the point, yeah, gold is only worth something because we all agree that it’s worth something. And that’s precarious.

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Right?

How Wealth Grows

PW: So what happens is the wife is going, “Honey, what is he wanting?” “Well, he’s got this gold and he wants to give it to me for a drink of water. And he seems to think it’s worth something.”

And she goes, “Well, it was at one time, wasn’t it, honey?” And he goes, the end of the show, “Yeah, it was before we figured out how to manufacture it.” And that was the end of the show.

So the point being that this process, well, they say it’s “Modern-day alchemy,” the article in National Geographic goes on to say.

“To find out if earthquakes were the mysterious force at play, Voisey and his team placed slabs of pure natural quartz in sealed chambers containing gold-bearing liquid solutions. Some slabs were jostled about by a machine that replicated seismic waves from an earthquake. Others were left unshaken as control experiments. The hope was that gold would start appearing in a solid form atop the quivering slabs.

“After the fake quakes subsided, Voisey took the quartz and looked at it under a powerful microscope. There they were: myriad gold particles, glittering across the surface.”

So they’re saying, “Well, now the big conundrum is how do you make really, really large gold nuggets,” was his question. To address this, he “subjected another chunk of quartz to his artificial quake machine — but this time, the quartz already a little nugget of gold in it. And when that sparkly slab was shaken up, the gold nugget began to grow.”

I’m going, “What is possible? Is there anything to this that could possibly …”

But it’s just fascinating. I just think that the idea is fascinating because how is money actually grown? How is wealth grown?

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This is a common mistake that people make. They don’t understand how wealth grows.

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They think if a wealthy person got wealthy, how did they do it? They took money from somebody else that didn’t have wealth.

How did they really do it? They typically created something of value. Wealth is created, it sounds weird, but it’s created out of thin air.

And to look at this and go, “What if you have something that you have relied on being in limited supply …” Because that’s what supposedly makes Bitcoin worth something, right? And then now you’ve increased the supply of it, what can happen to the value? Just really, really interesting.

So this is the reason that when I invest, what we talk about investing, gold is not part of the deal. It just isn’t. It’s just something that we don’t have in our investment portfolios.

But this is part of the reason. Might help you understand a little bit of that.

Advisory services offered through Paul Winkler, Inc an SEC registered investment advisor. The opinions voiced and information provided in this material are for general informational purposes only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine what investments are appropriate for you, please consult with a financial advisor. PWI does not provide tax or legal advice. Please consult your tax or legal advisor regarding your particular situation.