Podcast: How Changes in Unemployment Numbers May Affect Financial Advisors

According to John Merante, Chief Economist at SkyView Partners, there are several ripple effects stemming from the high level of unemployment that are likely to impact financial advisors and RIAs in the months to come.

To listen to the episode simply click play on the audio stream below or listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. You can find The Advisor Financing Forum on Apple PodcastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

Transcript

Mike:

Welcome to The Advisor Financing Forum, a weekly podcast presented by SkyView Partners. My name is Mike Langford and this week I'm joined once again by John Merante, the Chief Economist at SkyView, for an exploration of how the analysis included in his latest report is likely to impact financial advisory firms and their clients. The subject for this month's economic whitepaper is the current status of the labor market, specifically, the historic levels of unemployment.

As you'll hear John discuss, and as the report's title suggests, we haven't seen unemployment numbers this high since the Great Depression, but while that context helps us understand the magnitude of the problem, it doesn't tell the whole story of what is happening and the ripple effects we can expect to see in the future. That's where John and I are going to dive in and explore with you today. The goal is to help you better prepare your business and your clients by making these complex economic events easier to digest.

Before we get started, I encourage you to swing by SkyView.com to learn more about how you can access traditional commercial loans to finance your goals for M and A, partial sales, restructuring your existing debt or even taking a little cash out of the business to provide some liquidity for other business or personal pursuits. If you have questions about this episode or for John Merante or if you have a suggestion for this show, please feel free to reach out to Podcasts@SkyView.com or hit us up on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Lastly, please make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend about the show. We've got a lot of cool stuff in the hopper that you and your colleagues are sure to enjoy. Okay, now let's get to it with John Merante.

Well, hi John. Great to have you on the show again. I'm really thrilled to dive into your latest paper titled Workers Returned at a Record Pace, but Unemployment Remains at Depression Era Levels. Welcome back to the show.

John:

Thank you, Mike, I really look forward to speaking with you again.

Mike:

Yeah. Me, too. Me, too. It's really fund when you realize we're going to have this recurring guest/host relationship here. We get to kind of... I imagine over time people get quite used to hearing from us and I'm looking forward to seeing how the banter between us evolves over time. It's interesting. If you've ever listened to a show and you see some recurring host and guest type of scenario there, some of the recurring jokes start to come in and the comfort level goes up and up and up the more time they spend with each other, so look, I'm looking forward, man. We're going to be with each other for years to come. I can see it.

John:

Okay, Mike and Mad Dog, huh?

Mike:

Exactly. Right? Exactly. Well, look, we are here to educate, engage and entertain our audience, so entertaining is really important, I think, in order to keep people listening. I want to make sure that they're having a good time with us. Let's start with the core topic of the report. You mentioned in the title as it suggests that workers returned, but unemployment levels are still very, very high, abnormally high. Let's level set that concept for people. What was the unemployment level during the Great Depression because that's kind of like you're saying they're depression era levels, so what was the unemployment level then?

John:

Well, to begin with, in 1929, just before the Depression started, the unemployment level was 3.2, so very close where we were pre-COVID. That jumped to almost 25% by 1933 and from there, it began to come down, go into the teens, but it didn't get below 10% until we entered World War II. 10% is kind of an interesting break point because since the war, or World War II, as it were, I'm showing my age just calling it the war, the highest level of unemployment the country saw was 10.8% in 1982. If you go back to the Great Recession, to give it a bit more context, the height of unemployment was in 2009 when it reached 9.9% before it began its slow grind downward. We're at levels that just have not been seen since the 30s.

Mike:

Wow, that's pretty [inaudible 00:04:47]. We're at what currently?

John:

Currently, yeah, currently we are at... what did I say? 13.7.

Mike:

13.7, okay.

John:

Yeah.

Mike:

That is really... and there's... We are, just for everybody who's listening, we are recording this on June 12, 2020, so obviously, numbers might change between when you're listening to this and when we're talking about this, but they're not going to drastically change one way or the other I would imagine if you're listening to us right around the same time.

John:

Yeah, and I just doubled checked myself. As of the end of May, it was 13.3, April was 14.7.

Mike:

Now, I know probably most folks who are listening are in the financial space and they have at least a high-level understanding of how the unemployment numbers are calculated, but just kind of... I don't know if you can give somebody an overview. I mean, obviously, there's some people who are not included in the unemployment numbers and others that are counted. I don't know if you can give the high schooler version, the average citizen version of what is unemployment, how is it counted and calculated-

John:

Sure.

Mike:

... and what does it mean?

John:

Okay, when you see the employment reports come out every month, it's important to remember that there are two surveys conducted. One is the enterprise survey, which is where you get the number of people working, the number of jobs, the total payroll. The second one is a household survey and that's where the unemployment rate comes from and unemployment is defined as people, the number of people working who are... the number of labor force and the number of people working, so to be in the labor force, if you are out of a job, you have to be actively searching for a job. Right there, it knocks out people who are marginally attached, they... right now, are you really going to be looking for a job? Well, I mean, things are opening up now, so perhaps you're starting, but throughout May, when everything was shutdown, how do you even look for a job?

Then, on top of that, there is a group of workers called workers who are working temporary hours for economic reasons. That is, they want to work full-time, but they're just not offered the hours they want. That's excluded from the headline unemployment number you see it every month. It's included in another count. Not getting too technical on it, especially since the unemployment report over the last couple of months have had a number of data collection [inaudible 00:07:32] logical problems. According to the Department of Labor, which estimates the unemployment numbers, they believe that a number of people who were listed as temporarily away from work for other reasons should have been included in the temporary layoff because of COVID. If you were to include those people, the unemployment number would have actually been above 16%.

Before anyone starts jumping to conspiracy theories and all that, all of this is spelt out in the press release the Department of Labor did. It's just really hard now for them to do particularly the household survey because there're no in-person interviews-

Mike:

Yeah.

John:

... and the response rates are really low, but anyway, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Mike:

That was going to be a clarification question and the reason why I asked for this clarification or exploration of how unemployment numbers are typically calculated, not only because it's reasonable to assume that just because somebody's a financial advisor or working at a wealth management firm, it doesn't necessarily mean they have a firm grasp on how these number are calculated and people like a refresher sometimes. The other reason, and the primary reason is, we are in a special environment, a unique time in which some of the norms that would apply to trying to calculate accurate unemployment numbers are being broken. You mentioned two of them. That normally some of these are in-person interviews, well, that's not happening because people are sheltering in place and we're not going out to other people's homes to get numbers. Then, the other is, as you mentioned earlier, that look, even if you wanted a job, there was no way to look for a job for six weeks or so, it was just what were you going to do? There's no place to apply to work. Places were literally shutdown.

I thought that was worth exploring because it really does paint the picture of why this is so challenging, but as you mentioned, this is very much directionally correct. There's no mistaking the significance of the level of unemployment we're currently seeing, as you mentioned, they're at depression era levels.

John:

Yeah, actually, I always address me, but the problem we wreak with misclassification occur in April, too, so the downward direction, even at 16% is still the correct direction. A matter of fact, it was a bigger drop if you were to adjust for the mischaracterization for both months.

Mike:

In the key point section of the report, you mentioned that some of these recent job gains, so we saw jobs coming back, were driven by workers returning from temporary layoffs, so kind of like a furlough. I imagine a scenario like people who worked at a restaurant that was closed down, and the restaurant's opening back up to serve people, those people are coming back. Why is that caveat, for lack of a better word, significant? Why is it worth mentioning that these are people returning to work and does that mean we can expect to see similar waves of people returning as things open up as well, like the unemployment levels shrinking more rapidly than other circumstances?

John:

Yeah. Well, I'll take the first part of that question first, which is that it was good news to see so many workers return to their job, but at the same time as you had the 2.5 million workers who were temporarily laid off going back to work, you saw over a million workers permanent lost their jobs, so I think it's really important to keep the numbers in context. It's also important to realize that although 2.5 million is a record and just smashes the previous records, at the pace of job creation in May, we would still need nine more months of similar numbers to get back to pre-COVID levels.

Mike:

Wow.

John:

There's still over 20 million people unemployed. I think, I mentioned it in the paper also, people need to keep in mind the difference between change in levels because we're going to see very, very big changes as the economy begins to bounce back up just as we saw when it headed down, but if you're down 50% in the stock market, for those who can remember back to the Great Recession, you need to go up 100% to get to the same level.

Mike:

That's a really good analogy because I can remember talking about that back during the Great Recession that you lose half of your portfolio, you're going to need to increase it by a hundred percent to get back up to normal. That's why having... we talked to diversification matters. Well, here we are. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

John:

Yeah. I mean, I think it's important that people keep those facts in mind. I think in some ways that might be a better explanation of what happened in the marketplace yesterday than Jay Powell somehow surprising the market because I listened to the press conference and there really weren't any surprises in it, so there has to be a recognition that right now there's a great deal of uncertainty out there in terms of both the depth and duration of the current recession. It's likely, as I said, that we hit bottom in May, but if we continue to see spikes and if there's a second wave of the pandemic in the fall, then we might not have. We have to prepared for a great deal of uncertainty going forward.

Mike:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Makes sense. Now, you mentioned in our previous conversation about the... we talked a lot about the PPP and you also brought it up again in this paper. You credit it, and I want to use your terminology, which I think is really, really apt, as emergency funding. You mentioned that the PPP, Payroll Protection Program for people who are unaware, it drove a lot of these rehires or at least attributed to much of the rapid rehiring of people who were temporarily laid off. Is this lift likely then to last if there's no other emergency funding or is it something where we can expect these people to be re-laid off if there's no extra insertion of cash into the marketplace.

John:

Yeah, you have to look past just the PPP because that, the eligibility doesn't expire December 31st, so there's more time there, although, the amounts of funds have dwindled rapidly. You may want to top it off, but there are other relief programs, there are emergency financing programs, that are largely spent, such as the tax rebate checks, which had already been sent out mostly and then there are others that expire soon, such as the additional on the insurance payments of $600. That comes to an end on July 31st. Why that's important is if you look at the personal income and expenditures data, most recent we have is from April, in April personal income rose by 10.5%. That was all due to government transfer payments. Without those transfer payments, personal income would have fallen by over 6%.

Mike:

Wow. That's quite a swing.

John:

Yeah, and you would not have had the type of job creation if you had that type of drop, which also, interesting to note, and we might get into this later, the personal savings rate also hit an all-time high and that was a record of 33%. On average, people saved 33 cents out of every dollar that they received and most of that was going to be coming from government transfer payments.

Mike:

Do you think that's because people just didn't have spending opportunities or is it because they're afraid of spending because they just didn't know what was coming? Yeah, how much more [inaudible 00:16:17] is coming, I guess.

John:

Yeah. I think it's both and, I mean, I think, if you think about it, most people who are going through this right now, also went through the Great Recession, so we had what we were told were 100-year events happening twice in the space of 12 years. That can make people more cautious. There might be some permanent uptick. A matter of fact, after the Great Recession, savings increased considerably for quite some time. We were back at 1980 levels before it started dwindling again, so I think that what you're going to... Well, there are few things also. I mean, if you're getting an extra $600 in unemployment insurance and that boosts you above your salary, which it did for close to 50% of the people receiving it, well, you know that money isn't going to be there by the end of July 31st it most likely won't be there, so what do you do? You save it. By saving it, in many of these cases, is you pay down your credit card bills, you pay down your car loan, you reduce your debt, which is the same thing as savings.

Mike:

Let's take a quick break from this conversation and think about how this affects your business. One thing I find myself thinking about as I consider the current economic environment is how important it is to have access to capital. You may need it for things like business security, such as to buffer against cashflow shortfalls or a downturn in business due to a protracted negative market or maybe, if you're thinking about being aggressive, you could take advantage of the moment by growing your business through M and A while prices and rates are really low.

As Scott Wetzel encouraged you to do in the last episode of The Advisor Financing Forum, reach out to the SkyView team today to start a dialogue and explore your options. It's never too early to begin your preparation. Simply swing by SkyView.com and click the Get Pre-Approved button or call 866-567-6282 or shoot an email to Info@SkyView.com and someone will get with you right away. Okay, let's get back to our conversation with John Merante.

Really smart. What do you think... so we're moving into this consumer behavior and worker behavior in terms of their financial behavior impact of this. What do you think the ripple effect will be on the behavior of the financial consumers? If I'm a financial advisor, that's one of the things I'm concerned of is like how are my clients going to change their behavior because I think about it myself and I go, seems logical that we can expect, for example, some change in new asset inflows. That, yes, people are saving a little bit more, but in terms of putting that money to work with a financial advisor versus stuffing it under the proverbial mattress, I would imagine we're going to see some changes there. What are your thoughts on what we might expect to see?

John:

Yeah. I think over the short-term, you're probably going to see a high preference for liquidity until people feel more comfortable with the path of the recovery. You don't want... you're probably not going to be making all that many major purchases in an environment where you don't know what your future earnings are. Having said that, there was a big bounce back in the auto sales in May. That's partly because there were a lot of deals going out there and basically, you had two months of demand in one month.

I think that a lot of people are going to be more prepared to put money aside as a liquidity buffer or to reduce debt going forward at least over the short-term. Longer term, old habits die hard, so you should expect to see those come back, but I do think... Well, a lot of the challenges that you're going to be facing, particularly with the retired clients is we're back at zero rates and they need to have income. If you believe the statement and the press conference, Federal Open Market Committee Statement and the press conference from Wednesday of Jay Powell, then you should expect to see zero rates through to 2022.

Mike:

Wow.

John:

That's going to continue to put pressure on income. It's going to be the same as during the Great Financial Crisis, Great Recession, that you're going to have to reach for yield and that means going out in duration and it means going lower in credit quality.

Mike:

That's really interesting. Yeah, I didn't think... that wasn't the first thing that came to mind when I thought about how this is going to affect financial consumers in ways, and by extension, the advisors, but you're right. I mean, if there's less opportunity to earn a living for people, produce their consumption income via income products, right-

John:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike:

... that are more safe and have more stable, you're going to have to look for other opportunities or maybe it ends up people having to dip into their principle to have redemptions from the actual balance of their account. This is one of those things we heard about for years and years that at some point in time, we can expect retirement accounts as a whole to go into net redemption because of the large population of baby boomers, when they're in retirement age and they're going to start just taking more money out than goes in. There's more of them than the generations before them that are funding, so this will be an interesting thing to watch over the course of the next several years.

What is the lag time for these types of... just if you know, for these types of impacts to start happening because we're in, what, month three, maybe month four-ish now of this pandemic and the financial impact, what's the lag time before we start seeing significant impacts on financial consumer behavior?

John:

I think you're seeing it already. You definitely saw it in the personal savings rate. Although, in other ways, old habits are continuing like by the dip and we saw that all through May and part of April. Based on what I saw most recently, today, after the sell-off yesterday, you got at least a decent bounce back earlier in the day. I mean, I think those types of behaviors really haven't changed that much yet, but if you see the recession extending, if you see another shutdown, another series of stay-at-home orders, I know some places are already considering it, I just read that Houston is considering putting in stay-at-home orders again. If that begins to happen, then I think you're going to see more profound changes.

Mike:

Yeah. At that makes sense. I think that would really be a shock and that's what everybody's worried about, obviously, that as the so-called second wave for that, you uncork and let everybody go back to semi-normal life and, as we see, some people are doing that a little more enthusiastically let's say, than others. As a result, I was talking about it with my wife, I'm like, "Well, we're going to see, we're going to see soon whether," because that many people are suddenly out and about, you know-

John:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike:

... no masks and just going about life as if nothing ever happened, we'll see soon." You'll just know within a few weeks whether-

John:

We'll see if schools open, if major universities open and you have... and by major, I'm talking large, and you have people from all over the country going back to campus. That is one way it could spread again and don't forget that right now, what we're seeing are spikes. The second wave, if it comes, will be in the fall alongside the seasonal flu, which will make diagnosis and treatment more difficult because you're now going to have competition for hospital beds.

Mike:

Wow.

John:

I'm just Mr. Sunshine today.

Mike:

Oh, no, no, no. It's funny you say... I agree. It is one of those things. It makes you antsy, but there's no other way around it and I think it's really important to have these conversations because our primary audience is advisors and what I hope we are providing... and I think it's interpreted the right way. We're not providing doom and gloom. What we're trying to do is provide good information that they can use to better serve their clients. By having these types of conversations, they can take and repackage the here, here, and share it if they want or they can use it to investigate certain things a little more in depth or analyze a certain concept, like when you and I were just talking about how it might change advisor behavior, oh, excuse me, consumer behavior, I think it's a really good thing. You have to discuss the bad stuff and the good stuff when it comes.

John:

Yeah. I mean, I think the best way to look at what I'm pointing out here is really just the known potential risks or better word, uncertainty. I mean, in economics, they often make a distinction between uncertainty and risk. Risk is something that you can attach probabilities to. Uncertainty, you don't have any probabilities for. While the epidemiologists or the infectious disease experts may have some range of probabilities on a second wave, I certainly don't feel comfortable putting any number on that.

Mike:

Yeah, yeah. I'm with you. Well, because it is and we've not seen this for a hundred years, right, since the Spanish flu pandemic. You really don't 100% know how this is going to play out. You know what's really interesting, kind of shifting gears, too, another unknown that is... I think is going to be interesting to people and you and I were talking about this before we started recording, in prep, was how is the commercial real estate market likely to be affected long-term by this because as you and I were chatting about, many companies prior to the pandemic had probably better than 90% of their workforce in office buildings around America. Whether they're high-rise buildings in a New York City or Boston or whatever, or they're office parks, just packing people in, in cube farms and other office type environments. Now, those workers have been working from home for months on end. I've got to imagine many of these large companies are starting to rethink the need for very large chunks of office space going forward. What do you think?

John:

Yeah. No, I fully agree. I mean, there've been a number of surveys conducted already that indicate that work from home experiment is probably going better than a lot of people expected, that productivity has not plunged. Some firms find that it did, but most firms find that their workers are either more productive or as productive, at least based on a series of surveys that have been out. If that's the case, I think that we should expect to see more of that going forward. The advantages to both the worker and the company are huge if you can have people working from home, well, they save money and time commuting, they may save money on childcare. Schools are open, so you get the kids in school during most of your workday, but on either end, you're going to be at home, so you don't necessarily need to spend as much on childcare.

The question is how it's implemented. I mean, there's something to be said about working in a collegial atmosphere and seeing people, some of whom you wouldn't normally talk to, in your day to day operations if you're working from home, but you run into them in the cafeteria or in the hallways and you're able to sit down, talk, have an exchange of ideas, so there's certain advantages, which is why I think we may be instead of having everyone work from home, we're more likely to see everyone working a few days from home. I mean, there'll be some functions that can't be done from home, obviously, but for the average office worker who can do it from any computer top, I think you're going to see a pickup of that because... I went through the advantages for the employees, but for the employer, if you could cut down on expensive office space in New York or Boston or San Francisco or Austin, Texas, why wouldn't you?

Mike:

Yeah, absolutely. Why wouldn't you? I mean, usually, especially for information workers, the second largest expense, after salaries or payroll, is real estate. It's rent. It's very expensive for office space, especially class A space in most downtown financial districts and if you're thinking about, again, our listeners, many of them in that space, their own individual business that they're in is likely to be potentially positively affected from a cost perspective. The thing you brought up, though, is the long-term question, and I don't know how you measure it, is number one, is productivity going to remain the same and then, obviously, there's also some questions about quality, so it's not just productivity, but does the quality remain the same if everybody's just working from their home?

The other thing I curious about and I know this isn't necessarily an economic question, but I guess it could translate into it long-term, is the impact on corporate culture is difficult to see in a short time. Right?

John:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike:

I would imagine that you need to have a longer sample size period of like a year or two years to see, well, how has culture changed since now, instead of having 90 plus percent of our people in offices, let's just say half of them are home or they only are in the office for a couple of days a week. That will be really interesting to see.

John:

Yeah. No, it would, and it will take time. Economists think everything is an economic question and we've even thought that epidemiology was an economic question, but once again, we were wrong. I mean, that, I guess, is more of a sociological question. We're going to have to examine it if and when it occurs. There's no way to model that, at least that I'm aware of, with any predictive strength and different corporations are going to respond differently depending on their preexisting culture, but I mean, I do think that there will be an increase from pre-COVID levels in working from home. I think it's not going to be everybody who's working from home, you can keep working from home. I think it's going to be much more gradual than that.

Mike:

I agree. To me, I love thinking about these types of concepts and just there are people wondering, again, why we're spending time on this and you make to think to yourself it's not necessarily an economic idea, but at least from my vantage point, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not an economist, but I did take econ in college and grad school. I always looked at it as a behavioral science. You're studying behaviors of people and people, whether they're in the form of those people are running companies, so institutional behavior or governmental behavior run by people, again, or individual consumer level behavior, worker behavior, I always look at it as that answer, so when we're thinking about this, what are companies going to do and how is it going to affect them, how are workers going to respond?

If I've been working from home for the last year or so and I get into this new normal of, hey, I like being able to see my kids during the day and all those types of... or maybe you don't. I'm sure there are some people, get me out of here, that type of thing, but there is, I think, what you're likely to see is there will be a change, too, on the supply side of labor where people may make decisions like if you're going to ask me to come to an office, the answer is no. Or, if you don't have an office for me, the answer is no, I want to get back into getting out of my house. It will be very interesting to see how that changes.

John:

Yeah. No, I agree and there will be economic consequences, it's just what the impact will be, we won't know for a long time. We'll need to see the change in culture before we're going to be able to measure the economic impact of it, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Mike:

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's going to be fascinating. This is why we're going to be talking to each other all the time. You and me, like I said at the top of this podcast. Get used to hearing John Merante and Mike Langford banter about this type of stuff because I really think we're living... this is a incredibly... as stressful as it is and as challenging as it is, we are living through a historic time. I know you can say that about every period, but this is a historic event that we'll be telling grandchildren about someday, so it's really, from an intellectual standpoint, very interesting. Then from a business perspective, it's very meaningful if we could help inform people, so that they can help their clients as an extension. What are you working on next, John? What's in the hopper, what can we expect coming up?

John:

That's really a good question because right now there's so much to choose from. You could look at the recent demonstrations and riots and what that may mean for the economy. You can look at how the recovery is progressing, where you're seeing the recovery moving forward the most, and where you're going to see that, really, I can give you a spoiler on that one, it's in the low-contact businesses. It's the ones where you don't have to deal with the customers on a day in, day out, basis in person. Travel, tourism, retail, those are the ones that are going to continue to be the most affected, but it will affect all business. I mean, think of it this way.

If you have people working from home and not going downtown, even as restaurants reopen, they suddenly don't have customers because they're not going downtown any longer.

Mike:

Right.

John:

There are going to be a lot of ramifications from all those decisions. Trying to narrow it down, I think it may be time to talk about the fed.

Mike:

Yeah? How so? What would be something [crosstalk 00:36:18] about the fed?

John:

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of people seemed to have thought that Jay Powell was full of surprises on Wednesday, which I personally didn't see, but that's me. I mean, I follow it pretty closely, so I may not be the best judge, but I'm not sure if people have fully caught onto what the fed is trying to do. Basically, they have now put a floor under every fixed income instrument out there and they have clearly stated that they will take tail risk off the table. When you start seeing them buying high-yield bonds, that's an indication that they are in for the long haul and that they are really concerned about market functioning.

The problem shouldn't come from the financial sector with the fed acting the way it is. The risk I think is, leaving aside the pandemic and all that comes from that, the risk is going to be in terms of fiscal policy and whether it's cut. I mean, one thing I didn't mention earlier is the need for federal assistance to states and localities. Since March, governments have laid off and this includes states and localities, over 1.5 million workers. That is going to continue as sales taxes are going to remain down, as expenses for hospitalization and also the expenses associated with disturbances go up, and states have to run balanced budgets. They're not the federal government.

You're going to see more layoffs there unless they get additional aid from the federal government and that was a main contributor to why the recovery from the Great Recession was so slow because you had large layoffs at the state and local level starting after 2010 and 11, and that just kept unemployment more elevated than it otherwise would have been.

Mike:

It's so interesting to think about the interconnectivity of all this stuff. Right? Oftentimes, our brains like to oversimplify things sometimes. This happened and this is why it happened or whatever, but sometimes it really does, like you say, it takes a little bit longer to see how things ripple through the process. It takes a couple months before the states decide, okay, we have to make some changes on our end and then it takes a little while for people to realize, oh, the states laying people off is a problem that's going to affect us, so we need to find a way to counteract that. It's going to be really interesting to see how this works out. Well, this is why we have you. It's great. You're like our economic superman. You can come in and help us out, learn some stuff, what works.

John:

Well, I hope so.

Mike:

This is great. Well, John, this has been fantastic. As always, if you have a question for John going forward, please do reach out to Podcast@SkyView.com and make sure you swing by the SkyView.com website and click on media there to see John's latest report, as well as other awesome stuff being shared by the SkyView team. Thanks again, John. I really appreciate your time today.

John:

Okay, thank you.

Mike:

Thank you for joining John Merante and myself today for this episode of The Advisor Financing Forum. Huge thanks to John as well. I really enjoy how he makes complex economic issues so approachable and easy to understand. As always, if you have questions or suggestions for topics or guests you'd like to see on this show, please feel free to shoot us an email at Podcast@SkyView.com or you can ping SkyView on your favorite social media platform. The social team at SkyView is top notch and it will make sure they get you connected with whoever you need.

Of course, if you're interested in exploring financing options for your independent financial advisory business or RIA, please swing by SkyView.com or call 866-567-6282 or shoot an email to info@SkyView.com. The team is excited to help you out. Until next time, please stay safe and be kind to each other. Remember, we're all in this together. All right? Have a good one. See you next time. Bye.

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