Episode 153: Inflation, interest rates and recession: what it means for you and what you can do about it – with Rob Dix of The Property Hub

Episode 153: Inflation, interest rates and recession: what it means for you and what you can do about it - with Rob Dix of The Property Hub

Jeremy Cline 0:00
Making money and getting paid is hard enough. But did you know that you are almost certainly losing money at the same time? In fact, you're probably losing a little bit even as you listen to this. To find out why, how it's only going to get worse and what you can do about it, listen to this episode. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life.

Jeremy Cline 0:36
Hello, and welcome to the Change Work Life podcast, where we're all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. If you want to know how you can enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life, you're in the right place. Whether you're saving for retirement or looking to achieve financial independence, like we discussed in the last episode, where's the best place to put your spare cash? How do you make sure that the money you've probably worked pretty hard for is working to help you achieve your financial goals? Yes, there's a lot more to work than just money. But having a basic understanding of the, frankly, weird economic situation the world finds itself in at the moment will help you to make better financial decisions. That's why I'm delighted this week to welcome back to the podcast Rob Dix. Rob is co-host of the Property Podcast, one of the leading business podcasts in the UK. Through Property Hub, he helps investors build up property portfolios, and he's the author of numerous books and articles about, among other things, property, investing, business and economics. Rob's latest book is The Price of Money: How to Prosper in a Financial World That's Rigged Against You, which if you're listening to this episode when it comes out is being published this week on 30th of March 2023. Rob, welcome back to the podcast.

Rob Dix 1:52
Always good to talk to you, Jeremy. Thanks for having me back.

Jeremy Cline 1:56
So, if you want to find out more about Rob and his backstory, then go back and listen to episode 26. But Rob, that interview was published in March 2020. Why don't you start by giving us a quick update on what's new with you and your business?

Rob Dix 2:11
Interesting time, March 2020, wasn't it? Quite a bit has happened since then, but in terms of in our business, we've kept on growing, so we've been a bit of an economic uncertainty, great for the numbers, people always want to tune in and hear what's happening. So, the podcast's grown, we've started doing a lot on YouTube now, and we're just doing more and more to kind of put our message out there, the business has grown off the back of that. I think this was before we launched our fund and its associated app portfolio last time we spoke, I can't talk about that much because it's a regulated product, but you can go to portfolio.co.uk if you want to find out what all that's about. But that's been transformational for the business in terms of the kind of what the business looks like has gone from being, what started out with a couple of podcasters and then went through a phase of being like a sort of a buy to let centric company, and it's become a fund management company. So, it's been a really interesting few years, and I personally have learned tonnes which is great, because that's what keeps me doing all this.

Jeremy Cline 3:15
Given your property background, what motivated you to write a book about basically economics?

Rob Dix 3:20
I asked myself that many times while writing the book. Why am I doing this? Property, for me, was an entry point into getting interested in economics. And I become increasingly obsessed with it over time. And then, going back to March 2020, it was when COVID kicked off that I sort of really wanted to get to grips with what was going on, because everything that was happening at that point was so super weird, in terms of, we just had about a decade of the government talking about how there was no magic money tree, and then suddenly, they produce about 445 billion pounds out of nowhere. What's all that about? How, how do you do that? Why do you that? What are the effects of that? So, I started diving deeper and trying to really understand all this stuff, primarily for myself, to try to put it all together, and I find that when I write things down, that helps me clarify my own thoughts. But then, as I went along, this is just so fascinating and so important. And almost everyone I know feels a bit stupid secretly, that they don't understand when people are talking about inflation and interest rates and all that sort of thing. They just sort of like nod or repeat the last thing that they heard someone say to them, without really understanding it. And I think it's such an important topic that people should feel confident about understanding it. We all live in this world of finances and money and central banks and everything else, there's nothing we can do about it, so we might as well understand it. And so, I've got quite excited about writing the book about trying to take this and turn it into something that anyone can just pick up and, in the space of a few hours, go from feeling a bit embarrassed and mystified to feeling confident and like getting it.

Jeremy Cline 3:38
Well, I better start with the usual disclaimer, whenever we talk about anything finance related in the podcast, which is that this is not financial advice, this podcast is for entertainment and education only, and the opinions of the host or the guest are not to be relied upon for making any financial decisions. That out of the way, when I read the book, there were kind of three main takeaways for me. One, inflation is likely to stay high, two, interest rates are likely to stay higher, but probably still below inflation, and three, that's probably going to mean the investment performance from now on, for whatever period of time, is not going to be as stellar as it has been in the past. First of all, is that a reasonable, very, very, very high-level summary of the book?

Rob Dix 5:55
You've given the way the punch line. But that's, yeah, that's my opinion, by reading the whole book, you come to your own opinion, having given the facts about whether you agree with that or not, I'm quite clear that this is just one view, and no one really knows what's going to happen with any of this stuff. But that's where I landed.

Jeremy Cline 6:14
Okay. So, let's look at those three aspects in turn. And the first two are more theoretical, but as you say, I think it's helpful just to understand this, frankly, very, very strange financial system that we have. So, inflation, people tend to say, 'Oh, inflation is caused by supply chain issues, or wars in Ukraine, or associated energy prices going up.' But I took from the book that that's actually entirely wrong, and it's much more systemic than that. Can you briefly introduce why that is?

Rob Dix 6:55
I'm not saying that it's not caused by those factors. It is. But there's something else as well. And because those factors are all temporary, but there's always inflation. So, if you go back to 1837, the pound has lost 99% of its buying power since 1837. That's nothing to do with COVID or Ukraine or anything else. What is it? And the thing that, this never gets mentioned, but a core reason for inflation over the long term is the money supply, increasing the amount of money. This never gets mentioned by politicians, because it doesn't sound very good. Jeremy Hunt did a really cringey kind of video piece on Twitter recently, where he was sort of laying out what's caused inflation and what they were doing about it. This did not get a mention, plenty of other things did, but not the increase in the money supply. It's really not that complicated when you start to think about it, because if you just go, okay, well, imagine that we all woke up tomorrow, and everyone had an extra million pounds in their bank account. So, however much you started with, you've got a million extra. Well, that sounds great. But nothing has actually changed in the world, there's no more stuff than there was before. So, there's suddenly a lot more money out there competing to buy the same amount of stuff. So, if that did happen, what you'd find is, very, very quickly, prices would rise to accommodate all the new money that everyone suddenly had. And that's an extreme example, but that exact same thing has been happening consistently for hundreds of years, and it's happened increasingly in the last few years. So, the money supply from 2020 onwards, because of COVID, has absolutely ballooned, because governments suddenly needed a whole load of extra money that they didn't have. As a result of that, money supply has grown, that is a prime reason why we've got a lot of the inflation that we've got now. Yes, it is to do with those other factors that you mentioned. But the increase in the money supply is a really important one that no one ever talks about.

Jeremy Cline 8:54
So, in other words, there's more of something, and so it becomes worth less, essentially.

Rob Dix 8:59
Absolutely.

Jeremy Cline 9:00
This illustration in the book absolutely blew my mind, the correlation between gold and house prices. Can you just talk about that? Because that one was the one that really stuck with in my head.

Rob Dix 9:12
It's so nuts, that you have to kind of, when I was putting this together, I had to go back and look at it loads of times, and people really, even when you put it in front of people, they struggle to get it, because it is so at odds with what you generally take to be the case. So, obviously, houses are transacted in pounds, and so you're used to looking at the house prices over time and go, 'Oh well, in the 70s and 80s, house prices were really cheap, and now, they're really expensive.' So, the price of houses has gone up, must be because there's a shortage, not enough have been built, the population's expanded, all this kind of thing. But if you go and look at the amount of gold that it would have taken to buy a house in the 1970s, then it would cost you, obviously, vastly more pounds to buy the house today, but it would cost you the same amount of gold to buy the house today. So, in other words, if you took the amount of gold that would take you to buy a house, but instead of buying a house, you just put that gold in a vault 50 years ago, and then, you open that vault today, converted your gold back into pounds, at today's prices, you could then still go and buy the same house. And obviously, if you'd taken the cash and put it in a vault 50 years ago, you wouldn't be able to furnish the house. And so, that tells you something. Again, there is no kind of fixed point, it's not saying that gold is the thing that everything should be measured in, but it's quite a neat example of the fact that what's happened isn't just, oh, everything's getting more expensive, is that the pound is becoming worth less. And so, another example that is in the book is food. You think that food would get a bit cheaper over time, because you get more efficient at producing it. But we all know, from our own food shop, that it gets more expensive every year. Why does that happen? It doesn't make any sense. If the opposite is happening of what you would intuitively expect, it's not the food at all, it's the pound.

Jeremy Cline 11:06
So, this, you mentioned how pound sterling has basically lost 99% of its value since the 1890s. What is it that means that we're likely to have higher inflation now, than we're perhaps used to?

Rob Dix 11:24
So, there's a couple of reasons. So, inflation has been for the last 15 odd years extremely low. And a reason for that is that there's been sort of forces in place that have been deflationary. So, a big one has been the rise of China and globalisation. So, it's become cheaper to produce vast swathes of things, because you can get them done in a part of the world where labour is cheaper. And that's all that uptrend that's played out over about 15 odd years. That trend has probably peaked and will start to reverse, in part because of COVID and governments realising, actually, we kind of need to have a bit more control over things. And these supply chains are very efficient, but quite fragile. So, we're seeing a deflation returned come to an end. So, that's a big factor. There are others as well, in the more kind of general inflation-deflation sense. But the other key point is governments kind of need it to be, and it takes us into interest rates and sort of slightly more complex areas, but when you're in debt, the short version, when you're in debt, it's quite helpful to have inflation, because it means that the value of the pounds that you owe is decreasing all the time. Someone who's in a lot of debt is the government. So, it's quite helpful for them to have moderate amounts of inflation. And we've started to see this recently, there's been a few little suggestions around the edges that there's this kind of 2% inflation target that people may have heard of, it's deliberate Bank of England policy and the same in the US and lots of other countries as well to have inflation running at 2%. There's now sort of, 'Well, if it's two, why not three? Why not four? That would be fine as well.' So, there's these hints the 2% target may shift. And even if the target didn't formally shift, and inflation did continue, it's sort of like three, four or 5% for a while, maybe that's okay. So, I'm not saying that we're going to end up with 10% inflation, like we have done recently, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if, rather than two, we saw more like four or five.

Jeremy Cline 13:44
And you think that that could be government policy and action as a result of that policy to maintain that kind of state of affairs?

Rob Dix 13:53
I think it's, like I said, it's partially kind of going to happen anyway, but it's also not unhelpful. So, they may just allow it to happen and not take some, if it took like extreme action to get that back down to the two, well, maybe they don't need to do that.

Jeremy Cline 14:15
What's the kind of rate which would do the government's job for it in terms of reducing its debt, but would still be politically, and I suppose economically, acceptable, kind of like that frog boiling thing, what's the temperature beyond which that people start to realise that they are being boiled?

Rob Dix 14:34
Yeah, there's a study on this recently, and this is only, it's not like the most robust thing in the world, it's kind of going off the frequency of mentions on Twitter and like Google Trends or something like that, so when do people start talking about inflation, so at what point the people notice that inflation is happening, and I think it was around 3.5-4% was the number, the point at which people actually start becoming aware of inflation. So, that's obviously not particularly precise, but you could say that if it stays around 4%, then it's enough to make a meaningful dent in debt, but not enough that anyone's going to get particularly upset about it. So, maybe that's the point at which it's just simmering along.

Jeremy Cline 15:17
If people read your book, they'd think about it at rather lower level. Because what was it you said, it's something like 3% on average over 10 years means that, what, 50% reduction in the value of the pound or something like that?

Rob Dix 15:29
Yeah, compounding is an incredible thing. So, the pound has lost half of its value since the year 2000. So, that, to me, was quite shocking, because when you go back over hundreds of years, it sort of sounds a bit like, yeah, whatever, like it plays out over a really long time, it doesn't affect anything in your day-to-day. But when you're at our sort of age, you can remember the year 2000, it wasn't that long ago, and money losing half its value since then. And that's during a time when, as we've just said, inflation has been pretty low. And that still happened. So, imagine what could happen over the next 20 years.

Jeremy Cline 16:08
You touched on interest rates, so let's move onto that. So, what causes interest rates to go up?

Rob Dix 16:15
Interest rates are broadly a tool to control the, we call it the heat of the economy. So, when interest rates are low, it's cheaper to borrow money, therefore, people are more likely to borrow money, whether that's to invest, to expand their businesses, or just to spend, to consume more and push the cost of that forward. And when interest rates are higher, that's less likely to happen. So, if you've got an economy where you want to kind of get it going a bit, then you cut interest rates. So, that's what happened in 2008. Obviously, there was a huge crash, that was very deflationary, everyone was very scared, you wanted to get things going again. And so, the interest rate was slashed. Then, if you've got an economy that's running a bit too hot, then you increase interest rates. It's also used as a tool to manage inflation. So, if inflation is getting high, then a tool that central banks use to try to bring that back under control is to increase interest rates. Because the argument is that that reduces the demand for everything, which then sort of means that that pressure on prices isn't there, and inflation falls. You could argue about how effective that actually is, but that's the theory.

Jeremy Cline 17:35
As we speak, at the moment, people are getting a little bit nervous about the economy, there's talk of recession and that kind of thing, which to my lesser educated mind on this suggests that it would mean that interest rates might go back down again, in order to kick things along a bit. But it sounds like you think that they're probably going to remain certainly higher than we've been used to over the past 10 or 15 years.

Rob Dix 18:04
Yeah, they will. So, what you've said is right, and when you actually start thinking about some of this stuff, a lot of it doesn't really make any sense. And so, the recession is a bad thing, but the government recently has been trying to bring about a recession or close to it. It's almost like trying to talk into a recession, because that's what needs to happen for inflation to come down, people need to stop buying stuff for a while. So, they're using it as a tool in that respect.

Jeremy Cline 18:35
So, hang on, the government is trying to have a recession?

Rob Dix 18:39
They're trying to, it's the only way, without major changes to the money supply, to bring inflation down. So, if you've got the price of used cars or whatever, which is very high for a while, well, you need to stop people going out and trying to buy cars. So, a way to do that is to make them feel fearful about the future and their job and try and get them to sort of rein it in a little bit. So, it's a weird situation, it feels like they're trying to walk this line, but they obviously don't really want a major, major recession. But they also kind of need people to cool it a little bit while everything sorts itself out.

Jeremy Cline 19:18
How my interest rates play into that in terms of where they end up and perhaps where they go longer term?

Rob Dix 19:27
They're going to end up higher than we've been used to recently, because they've been so unbelievably low up until recently. So, again, when you're our age, you can remember the interest rates being higher than they were, but there are a lot of people who are used to interest rates being close to zero. And so, that's really, really unusual. So, interest rates have really spiked over the last year or so, and the speed at which that's happened has been unusual. But the level that they're at now is not unusual, it's still sort of at the low end, historical average is about 5%. So, they will end up higher just because that's normal, and what we've been going through is abnormal. And that's a healthy thing. Because when interest rates are zero, then the price of money is effectively free, and there's lots of negative effects in terms of malinvestment and all manner of things. And so, there needs to be a price on money, so interest rates need to be non zero. And you need to be able to use it as a tool, right? Like I said earlier, if you have a point where the economy runs into trouble, you want to be able to stimulate it by reducing interest rates. If interest rates are already zero, you can't do that. That's what happened when COVID happened. One of the policy responses you would normally have would be to cut interest rates, but they hadn't raised them since 2008. So, it's actually not a bad thing at all, it's just the fact that it happened so quickly, and within about six months, it was all reversed. That was what caused the issue.

Jeremy Cline 21:09
Okay, so governments quite like a bit of inflation because it reduces their debts, but they don't want it too high, because then people are going to start complaining about it. And one of the tools at their disposal is raising interest rates. Recently, we've had pretty high inflation, double digit inflation. I am just about old enough to remember double digit interest rates, so in the early 90s. Might rates go back up to that level again?

Rob Dix 21:42
I don't think so. And there are various reasons for that. But the most important of those reasons is that they can't, without basically destroying every asset market that you can think of and bankrupting just about everyone. So, so that's quite a compelling reason not to do it. And that's because of the amount of debt. So, the amount of debt that the government has, the companies have, the individuals have, is really, really high, and it's been able to get higher, because the cost of debt has fallen. So, we've spoken about how low interest rates have been, and the trend for the last 50 years or so, with some exceptions, has been like a downward trend in interest rates, that makes it cheaper to borrow, and that means that more borrowing takes place. So, if you look at the amount of debt as a proportion of the UK economy, consumers, incomes, company balance sheets, all that kind of thing, they're way higher now than they were in the 70s or even the 90s. And so, that means that, if you end up with super high interest rates, that people can't service that debt anymore. And rising interest rates are also problematic for asset prices. So, basically, by doing that, you crash the stock market, the housing market, the bond market, personal bankruptcies, company bankruptcies, it's just not going to work. So, that option isn't on the table anymore, because of the level that debt is now at.

Jeremy Cline 23:14
This is probably a really hard question, but do you have a feel for the level at which it could be the tipping point, what might be the highest they could go up to before that kind of catastrophe starts to occur?

Rob Dix 23:29
I don't think it's possible to work that out. I think the speed at which it happens is a big factor, and the duration as well. So, if rates plateau, people talk about like what was the peak of rates in the 70s, like sort of 15-16%, something like that, but it didn't stay there for very long. So, if it happened for a few months, it wouldn't be a big deal. But obviously, for a protracted amount of time at that level, it would. So, I think there's too much, too many variables to really give an answer to that one.

Jeremy Cline 23:58
If inflation is good for governments, because it reduces the value of their debt, presumably, it could also be good for individuals. Now, obviously, it can be a bit dangerous getting into too much debt, but is there an argument that, if interest rates are, say, below inflation, that debt could actually be used quite usefully from an investment perspective?

Rob Dix 24:32
Definitely. And it's well worth caveating, as you did, with the fact that it introduces risk, it's always safer not to have any debt, but you can use it as a tool. So, the situation where the rate of inflation is higher than the rate of interest, we've been living that way, again, that has been the case since 2008. That's not normal. It's not normally that way round. And it means that, if you do borrow money, effectively, the value of your borrowing in pounds is being eroded faster than you're paying interest on it. And so, that's good for you as an individual, if you take out some kind of long-term fixed rate debt against property, for example, and you get a period of inflation, well, that's great, because it's effectively inflating away the value of your debt, because you have to pay back a fixed amount of pounds, you pay back the pounds you borrowed, and those pounds are going to be worth less. And it's the same for the government. So, the government's got a huge debt problem, which has been less of a problem because interest rates have been falling, but with interest rates going back the other way, it's going to become a real issue. Actually, paying down the debt may be an option for individuals, it's not an option for the government. So, all they can really do is try and inflate away some of the debt to bring it under control. So, having the rate of inflation higher than the rate of interest is helpful for the government, as well. So, I think it is going to be, the government's going to use it as a tool, individuals can use it as a tool, as well, but of course, it is more risky, so you need to be aware of that.

Jeremy Cline 26:20
So, we talked about inflation, we talked about interest rates, and I said that the combination of those factors was likely to affect the performance of investments going forward. Can you talk a little bit more about that link and why it's going to be, well, why we're not going to get the returns that we're used to over the past, say, 10 or 15 years?

Rob Dix 26:39
Yeah, interest rates are the real key. So, inflation is beneficial for certain asset classes and not others. Inflation is pretty good for real assets, like property, for example. It's all good for some companies, but not others, so it has a mix of effects on the stock market. But interest rates are the key, because these falling and low interest rates that we've been so used to have been a real tailwind to the performance of just about everything. And that is now reversing. So, that tailwind is not going to be there anymore. And we've seen this very recently with bonds, bonds had like a run of incredible performance for about 50 years, and that was basically all because of falling interest rates. And we've seen interest rates gone up, bonds had last year their worst year pretty much ever, because it was this trend suddenly reversing. And high interest rates are generally bad news for all investments, because like I said earlier, it's like money that was effectively free isn't anymore. So, this is not particularly actionable advice, but I think it's possibly worth being aware of that, if we've had like a pretty stellar decade or more in terms of returns, it's probably going to be lower in the decade to come. And so, that's not something you can control, but it's something to be aware of when making your plans. If you've been looking at your performance over the last decade and just kind of extrapolating that forward, it's probably not going to happen.

Jeremy Cline 28:26
The average person who's saving, maybe they've got a pension, maybe they're following Barney Whiter's model and trying to invest to create their escape portfolio, how do they start to think about things like allocation and how to protect their money and maybe hopefully get a bit of growth? I mean, what are the sort of things to think about? Obviously, you can't give investment advice, but yeah, give them some help here, Rob.

Rob Dix 28:56
I'll try. So, we go into this more in the book, but I think one thing, it's just my opinion, but I think that real assets tend to perform well in the conditions that we're moving into. So, real assets, meaning property, commodities, infrastructure, actual physical stuff, rather than financial assets. So, that's one area that you might want to be looking. But for most people, trying to get too deep into trying to pick winners, whether that's individual companies or sectors of the market, it's probably not a smart thing to do anyway. So, I think, my kind of two main things in the book was all about real assets and avoid bonds. And annoyingly, the avoid bonds part has come through before the book's even been published, so that's less relevant now than it was. But those are sort of like the top two or like bigger levers that you could be looking at, if you do want to be trying to pick winners. But I think, in terms of actually what you could do, the broader points would be, first of all, being aware of the stuff means that you're not going to be overly, you're not going to be misled by what's happening and not be overly optimistic. So, you're not going to go, 'Oh, brilliant, well, I'm going to make an eight or 10% return every year, because that's the historical average. That may be the historical average if you back tested the 70s, it probably won't be in the future. Also, it means that, because you're aware of the fact that, you can be aware of the fact that you're losing money in the bank, so for the last 15 years, it's been really obvious that you're losing money by keeping it in the bank, because the money that you've been paid in the bank is pretty much zero, and inflation has been above zero, therefore, it's really obvious that that's happening. But now, you might be getting sort of 3% in your savings account, 3%, that's pretty good. But if inflation is running at, say, 7%, then you're at negative four. So, you're still losing real value in the bank. But it's kind of more insidious, because it doesn't seem like you are, because the nominal number that you're seeing is positive. So, not being misled by that and actually going and investing in the style that Barney or anyone else talks about is important, and not just kind of sticking with purely cash. But then, putting all this together, just being realistic about how the markets might not be an amazing place, over the long term, you absolutely do want to be invested, rather than just in cash or saying sod it and spending it all. But being realistic about and thinking, well, let's be conservative in my planning, let's see about ways of trying to earn more money, rather than relying on the market or whatever it is, it's probably better than just being overly optimistic right now.

Jeremy Cline 31:42
I think that's a great note to end on. It's about education, it's about awareness, and it's about spotting the stuff that's not right, that people will tell you. So, if your bank sends you a letter that's going, 'Your interest rate has increased 3%', then you can look at that and go, 'Yeah, but I'm still going to be losing money if I stick my money there, so no thank you.' Aside from your extremely good book, if someone else wants to dive into this in a bit more detail, what resources did you find particularly helpful as you were writing the book and looking into the subject?

Rob Dix 32:11
For me, I looked at a lot of individual pieces, rather than anything that guided me in one particular way. And interestingly, the more you start digging, the more you realise that loads of stuff just doesn't make any sense. And you're sort of trying to fact check something, but it's actually based on nothing at all. But if I had to pick a single source, there's a writer called Lyn Alden, I can send you a couple of links, and she writes for US audience, but it's still completely relevant, so she's got a couple of fantastic articles about some of this foundational stuff. So, if you don't want to buy the book, you can go and read that article for free instead. So, I can link you to a couple of those. But whether it's through her work or through the book, my hope is to kind of give people that foundation, so you understand enough to go away and then get interested in this stuff and do a bit of digging for yourself, and you have the confidence that you're going to understand what you see.

Jeremy Cline 33:11
If people want to find you, and more importantly, if they want to find the book, where would you like them to go?

Rob Dix 33:16
priceofmoney.co.uk is the place to go and grab a book, and there are some bonuses there as well. And you could also go to robdix.com to find more of my work.

Jeremy Cline 33:26
Brilliant, as always, links in the show notes. Rob, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

Rob Dix 33:32
Thank you. It's been fun.

Jeremy Cline 33:32
Okay, hope you enjoyed that interview with Rob Dix. A little bit of a different interview this time around, much more about economics than work and working life and careers, but important stuff. I mean, when I read Rob's book, it made me think, first of all, how did I not know this, and secondly, why don't other people know about this, this is really important stuff. I've got a couple of episodes coming up where we're going to talk a little bit more about what a recession might mean in terms of jobs and careers, but for this episode, I just wanted to set a little of the economic backdrop to what's going on. Maybe it'll have an effect on your career, maybe it won't, but it'll definitely have an effect on your finances in some way, shape or form. And as Rob said, even if there isn't very much you can do in practice about it, just having the knowledge of what's going on and what's likely to happen is going to stand you in pretty good stead. When your bank proudly emails you to announce a 1% rise in interest rates, you'll know that, well, on the grand scheme of things and with inflation as it is, that doesn't actually amount to much. So, let me know what you thought. A little bit of a departure from the core topic of this podcast, but it was something that I felt was too important not to share. I'd love to know whether you agree with me. Is this sort of diving into the wider macro topics of interest? If not, and you'd prefer that I stayed in the lane, well, let me know that as well. As always, you can reach me on changeworklife.com/contacts, that's changeworklife.com/contact, where there's a contact form where you can let me know what you thought. You'll also find the show notes page for this episode at changeworklife.com/153, that's changeworklife.com/153. And I happen to think this is a really important topic, this sort of economic discussion and this kind of realisation about what's going on in the world today. So, as well as buying Rob's book at priceofmoney.co.uk., I'd love it if you would share this episode. It's just one of those topics that I really do think everyone should know about. In two weeks' time, we'll be returning a bit more to a career focused discussion, and this one is going to be much more about, well, if there's a recession coming up, what can you do to protect your position in your job or career? Is now the time just to keep your head down and keep working? Should you be selling yourself and showing off your achievements to your boss? Should you even be considering a change of career or a change of job, or is now just a ridiculous time to be doing that? That's what we'll be talking about in two weeks' time, so if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. There should be a little plus button on Apple Podcasts or whatever app you use, there's going to be an option to subscribe. Make sure you do that, so you never miss an episode. And I can't wait to see you next time. Cheers. Bye.