Oklahoma. There are lots of people that have never been to Oklahoma and will never go to Oklahoma. For me to have made those trips and to have met people in that state, I find them to be tremendously welcoming, very friendly and interesting. I enjoy interacting with people there, and it's one of my favorite places to visit. Quite honestly, as you travel around the United States, there are places where it's not as much fun, safe, or intellectually interesting. I'm also someone who enjoys going to places where I feel that I'm in America, as opposed to a state or a city that rejects being American. Some of the appeal of traveling to Oklahoma is that I feel I'm in the American homelands, and that's appealing to me. Q: What’s one common misconception about the economy or economists that you’d love to set the record straight on? A: It’s easy to sound smart when you’re saying that the economy is going to crash, and equities are going to go down. There are many people who have created a competitive industry saying that doom is coming. But the reality is that in a democracy, we are looking to grow markets and economies, and we are seeking to improve everybody’s life — and you do that through economic growth. The trend is for things to be better. One of the misconceptions is that things are about to turn bad all the time. They’re just not. That’s not how things work. You need to have a more optimistic outlook, I think — especially when you’re investing — because it’s about being patient and understanding that democracies and economic growth will create wealth for you if you’re patient and have a systematic approach to investing. I’m acutely aware of the idea that working in finance doesn’t provide a social benefit. But it does, in a way, because it helps people grow their wealth. Helping
people grow their wealth has benefits. You could be cynical about it, but at the end of the day, if you can improve the lives of families and the generations that come after them, that has to be a social benefit. Q: What do you hope attendees take away from your understanding of where we are and where we're going. People ask me, “How can I buy equities here when they're at all-time highs?” or “How can I buy gold here when it's at all-time highs?” You don't want to worry about where things have come from. You want to worry about where things are going to so I want to get people to think about the world in terms of what the opportunities and risks are going forward, and how to be prudent about managing those risks. Hopefully, the advice and the data will help them to have a better understanding about how we think we're going to move forward over the next 12 months, if not longer. Q: What do you want the audience to know in anticipation for State of the Economy? A: I’m not an economist—I’m a strategist. keynote at this year’s State of the Economy? A: I want them to come away with a better While I didn’t study economics—I find sitting around very smart people who are economists very intellectually interesting. But they get it wrong a lot. The reason they get it wrong is because economics is really about trying to predict human behavior. Human behavior determines how economies perform. We can try to shape that behavior through direct and government policy, but sometimes humans can be very surprising. They can be more resilient or less resilient. They can fold very quickly, become scared and run for the hills. At the end of the day, how all those human beings act is what determines how economies do. Trying to predict that is incredibly difficult. That’s one of the misconceptions about this field — it’s not easy. You may listen to me, and I could be completely wrong. You have to remember that just because we have all the data and look at all the trends and momentum, that doesn’t necessarily mean the hopes, fears, greed, or caution of all those humans will translate into markets and economies moving in the ways we expect. People can be very surprising — and that’s another big misconception people have.
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