Transcript:

Phil Blancato (00:03.406)
Hello everyone, my name is Phil Blancato and I'm CEO and President of Latin American Thalmann Asset Management, Chief Market Strategist for OSAIC. Welcome to another Weekly Market Impact. I'm home today, you can tell me about my background. I get a lot of questions on this. That soccer jersey back there, that is a guy named Roberto Baggio. And for those of you who may not be soccer fans, why that's a big deal is he was, I guess, arguably the best or one of the top three players to ever play for Italy.

He's a friend of mine, actually. It's kind of a fun, long story. I was a translator for the World Cup. When the World Cup was here many years ago in 1994, I was a translator for the Italian national team. I speak fluent Italian. So we became buddies along the way and have had a good, fun relationship for a long, long time. And it's really been a wonderful experience getting to know him. And so he signed a jersey with me and I put it up on my wall. All good.

Friday was an interesting day. By the way, happy St. Patrick's Day for those of you who are Irish, you know, out there. I'm obviously not Irish. But I jokingly say, you know, if you look at what's happened in the world and you think about how the worlds have come together, I always thought I jokingly use St. Patrick as a good example. He may be one of the first people that was ever in globalism. Here's why. St. Patrick was an Italian guy. said from the Pope, by the Pope,

to Ireland to get rid of the snakes, so they say. And I jokingly say this to my Irish friends all the time, the guy that you're celebrating is actually Italian and you guys are celebrating an Italian saint. Now I'm not sure how true that is. least that's what the history tells us. Who knows what really happened. But for all my Irish friends out there, know that you're celebrating an Italian patron saint today. And just so we're all clear. I can't help but do that to my Italian buddies. All kidding aside, I hope you had a wonderful Saint Patrick's Day.

a number of friends who are, a guy named Brian Blum, example, one of my good buddies, Brian Blum, he's just a neat character. He's actually in our business to a degree, works for the government, but he works for the pipes and, what do call, pipes and drums, pipes and drums with an Irish band. And he's just, you gotta see this guy, he's your classic Irishman. He's got the hair and the kilt and the whole thing out there blowing bagpipes and there's nothing like it. Those guys.

Phil Blancato (02:28.814)
are great when the bagpipes get going, it's a blast. So hopefully you got to enjoy some of that. I didn't have any corned beef and cabbages going around. Maybe I need to do that, but I haven't had any of that either. By the way, it's finally starting to become spring in New Jersey. We actually gonna be in 60 degrees this weekend. That's exciting stuff. We gotta get outside and do something fun. I haven't skied all winter, it's killing me. But I am gonna ski in a couple of weeks here. I got the event coming up in Steamboat. So I'll get out west. I'm one of the...

Folks, I'm going with jokingly said, we bring our mountain bikes to go biking in the mud or we think there'll still be snow? There'll be snow. They're actually getting snow right now. So I'm excited about that. Anyway, hope you did something fun. There's a lot of consternation out there right now. Many of you are so worried about markets and you know, I often say this, please don't panic when it comes to markets. You know, first of all, there's ways to mitigate risks. Today, very good friend of mine, Brent Jenkins from Clarion is going to join me in a minute. There are things you can always invest in that don't always act like the S &P 500.

And we've gotten lured into the Magnificent 7, which are still magnificent, by the way. I've heard the Mellissifent 7 the other day. I think that's a stretch. Show me the last time a Mellissifent company, excuse me, had 40 % margins like Nvidia does. So let's be careful what we call them. Are they not expensive? Yes. If you haven't taken profits, you should be. But are they still phenomenal companies that are changing the way we live and will continue to change the way we live for years to come? Yes. So let's not get too crazy.

You know, we haven't we haven't been too thrilled with the with the investment in Europe a lot of our partners are investing in Europe firms we Compete against when I see the GDP numbers come out of just the UK on Friday It tells me that sure there is still stress in Europe the reason why they're rallying is a little bit about weakening US dollar and much more about You know the kind of a potential for Europe to start investing in a ton of debt right away To help spur their economy by the way, not unlike what we did

But and I just think this has been about a rally because international stocks have been cheap. So let's not get too ahead of ourselves. But in fairness, when you think about a week last week, last week was a tough week, know, pretty depending on which market you look at down roughly around 2%, 2.25 % on the week for the year. The S &P 500 still down a couple of percent. So it's not been an easy go here. And even the bond market, which you would think would be much

Phil Blancato (04:55.458)
better at a time when when you look at the stock market, generally the bonds can act as a safe haven investment still have a couple of percent on you're not terrible two and a half percent basically, but you You're not talking double digit returns from bonds at a time when the stock market's under pressure. Heck, the NASDAQ itself down over eight percent on the year. My point is everybody these are normal and I just think sometimes we get so caught up in normal not that we we watch these headlines headlines.

The tariffs stuff, I guess, can't shout us enough. I just don't see why we are making such a gigantic deal about tariffs. First, we don't know what the end result is. Second of all, it is a bit about reciprocity, about what other countries have done to us for years. And third of all, who's going to get hurt most by tariffs? Yes, the United States will feel a bit. Sure, the market earnings, consumer, the one-time price bump and things. Sure, that'll hurt us a bit. But who's going to suffer a lot more? It'll be places like Canada.

Mexico Europe who are predicated on selling us stuff who gets the full impact here It's much more all these other countries. So I I want for a minute for you to just take a step back Even I thought some of the comments made by Delta Airlines and Kohl's and places like that I thought they were very early in their comment about what they're what they expect in a weaker consumer Because of tariff headlines, I'll make this up Let's just say we get a little bit less of the tariff rhetoric for the next. I don't know a couple of days

And let's assume for a minute that April 2nd doesn't become this seminal event. It's kind of more of the same. Don't be surprised if we get a rally in the market shortly thereafter. Why? Because April's a spending season. May is a spending season. And if you start to see a somewhat more normal US consumer, then the market will turn around in a blink of an eye. And that's where folks like us try to have conversations with you all to help you understand if you don't panic and you take advantage of moments like this, you can do quite well. And I guess that's my theme for today.

By the way, there's other places to invest in. For example, when I think about other areas of the marketplace, REITs, being invested in real estate, is a great asset class, because generally, REITs act very different than the rest of the market. For example, REITs are flat on the year. As a public trader, REITs are doing quite well. Why? Because as interest rates go lower, generally, real estate goes higher. So with that, I'm gonna bring in a buddy mine, Brent, are you out there? are you about, pal?

Phil Blancato (07:20.214)
I'm here. Hi Phil. are you doing? You know, maybe I should have put a jacket on. looks very sharp today. Now, Brent and I live near, we actually, where I grew up in West Virginia was right around the corner in Chatham, which is an awesome town. Chatham Borough in downtown Chatham, downtown. Beautiful. What's Italian restaurant? my gosh, I really, I think it's Carclo's, the Garlic Rose. Is the Garlic Rose closed? The Garlic Rose in Madison, you're thinking. That's Madison. I don't think it's still there, but.

That's taking it back 25 years there. Yeah, I used to go there little bit. Then the Scalini Fidelity or the other one that was still there. That's still a good place to live. He lives in a really nice area, tucked away, nestled into just a short hop outside New York City. you know, Jersey, it's a bad rap, but it's really a nice place to live. It's expensive. Don't get me wrong. And it's crowded. We have a lot of things we can do here. So Brett, tell us a little bit about what you do at Clarion, who Clarion is and what you do for them.

Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the podcast today. So just a little bit about me. I've worked my entire career, has been in real estate, real estate investment. I've worked on closed end funds that focus on opportunistic and development oriented properties. I've worked on open ended perpetual mandates like the one I'm working on today. And through my career, I have worked both as a lender as well as an equity investor.

And so, but today I'm with, so I'm with Clarion Partners. I'm a managing director, partner of the firm. I am a portfolio manager of the Clarion Partners Real Estate Income Fund. For short, we go by one of our ticker, one of the four ticker symbols, which is CP-REX. So we call ourselves CP-REX. But before I tell you a little bit about the fund, kind of as a setup for this conversation,

Let me tell you about Clarion, who is pretty well known in the institutional investment world, is well known within real estate, but in private wealth is a bit of an up and comer in terms of notoriety. The firm has been in business for over 40 years. We are a pure play real estate investment firm.

Phil Blancato (09:37.298)
about 350 people strong. We're headquartered in New York City. We've got 10 offices throughout the US and Europe. In terms of size, we're a sizeable player. one of the largest pure play real estate investment shops and investors in the country with about 75 billion in assets under management. So across all of the different strategies we own as part of that.

75 billion, the various funds and strategies that we manage. It's about 1500 properties across multiple real estate sectors, whether it be industrial, multifamily, all of the major retail, all of the major sectors. We were pretty well known in the real estate space as being a first mover in investing in industrial warehouse, which has been a very lucrative place to be.

within the real estate investment world over the last 10 years, especially with what the upheaval in the retail channel and things going to electronic sales through various vendors online. Another thing about Clarion, we are owned, we are 80 % owned by Franklin Templeton. My friend through Franklin, yes. Yeah, and we're 20%, the other roughly 20 % is owned by

employees, thus the partners and Clarion partners. So just top down to give you a sense. So Franklin Templeton is about 1.6 trillion in assets under management. They have 250 billion.

in alternative investments and AUM in alternative investments. that- clarify Clarion as an alternative investment? Would you say that fits in that space or- does, squarely in that. And I think, you if you look at the definition of alternatives typically would include private equity, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, secondaries. So real estate is squarely in that bucket. And we're about a seven, so we're at $75 billion piece of the 250 billion.

Phil Blancato (11:46.958)
that Franklin has in AUM in that space. Now let's jump in then. So I'm going go off video, just save some bandwidth. You can do the same, Brett, if you don't mind. So everybody, when you think about real estate and a couple of ways to think about it, you're driving down a road, you see these houses. Believe it it's hard to invest in houses. There's ways to do it, you have to invest in a house builder. Maybe there are some smaller funds. But Brett's talking more about is those gigantic buildings to a degree or those big warehouses. So maybe Brett...

clarify a little bit about when somebody comes to Clarion and you guys obviously one of the best in space. First of all, what role does it play in a portfolio if it's really alternative? And what is a good example of an investment? Somebody that can, how tangible is it? Sure. yeah, real estate plays a very important role in terms of portfolio building for an investor. Clarion through its history over that 40 years has

primarily up until the last six years or so had been investing on behalf of large institutional investors. So these are folks like large pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, high net worth and family offices. And those investors use real estate in a particular way, which is that it is something that's ever present within their portfolio.

They use it and typically reserve an illiquidity sleeve, I'll call it, within their portfolio to invest in alternatives that includes real estate because of the diversifying effects of an asset class like that and how that diversifying effect really helps from a risk adjusted return standpoint with respect to improving risk adjusted returns.

for their overall portfolio. So that's helpful, everybody. You of get an idea that it's going to zig or zag when we're in that. when you're looking for investment, let me go backwards. You when we build a portfolio for you, when you're building a portfolio for yourself, can you have investments in the portfolio? They're going to act differently. Why? Because that lowers risk. If one's going up, one's going down, but on total over period of years, you'll get a greater sum with less risk. That's the goal of investing. Just put that simple.

Phil Blancato (14:11.17)
you know, something what you're doing in real estate specifically, Brent, it is a different type of asset class. But Brent, let me go back to you then. You know, is it meant for the ultra high net worth, first of all? Are there ways for just mom and pop to be involved? And then beyond that, you know, is it, you know, I guess I get stuck with private, you know, am I buying into a physical building or am I going to buy a stock in a REIT? Maybe explain the differences in how they work. Sure, sure. So this asset class is

definitely open now to individual investors. And that's been part of the evolution that we've seen in terms of product availability in the market over the last, that's been evolving over the last 10 plus years. So using CP-REX as an example, CP-REX effectively is given that it is a, it's a fund where individual investors have the opportunity to

purchase into, effectively expands this our Claring Partners real estate investment platform that's been built up over this time to individual investors, so that they can gain the benefits of what institutional investors enjoy from real estate. So typically, like going way back prior to these products like non-traded REITs, tender offer funds, CP-REX's structure is a tender offer fund.

and interval funds existed if one- I'm gonna jump back out. That's a great point. Let's talk about that for a minute, because I love interval funds. What is an interval fund? Let's go throw a curveball at you. This is the way I'm gonna frame it. My point, I see it as a way for Main Street to do what, you know, corporate America or private world has done forever. Effectively, you know, I'll take CP-REX, for example, being a tender offer fund. Effectively, what it did is it lowers the minimum, it lowers the minimum investment threshold.

for investors down to a place such that buying in becomes relatively affordable. So for the individual investor. if someone wanted to invest in a fund that was geared towards institutional investors, the minimum investment for a fund like that could be 1 million to $10 million. And what's T-REX? CP-REX is 20 % of

Phil Blancato (16:37.838)
So you're at $2,500. So think about that, everybody. Here's a chance where the world has evolved, and that's why I wanted to bread on so badly, is you used to have to be a multimillion dollar person to be able to go and invest in a private fund that would buy a physical building and make it up in New York City. Well, now we've got a way for everybody to be able to access investments that traditionally were not really meant for Main Street. So I feel like Main Street private equity or private credit or Main Street and Main Street.

So sort of, what do you think? I'm curious. Yeah, so it's interesting. mean, so if you look at real estate, what does an investor get out of real estate or what is have institutional investors historically gotten out of it? One is income and it's tax advantaged income, in fact, depending on the structure of the fund and its capital appreciation over time. so CP-Rex has been set up to provide both of those.

through, as you said, investing directly in real estate assets. Now, what do I mean by real estate assets? Again, take two forms. Could be buying buildings outright, or it could be investing in debt as well. Lending, lending money for a building to be built. That's right, or lending money to an owner of an existing building with the building as being the collateral for the loan. How big is the private world?

Let's frame this for folks. Yeah. Stock market is 14 trillion. The bond market is 38. Yeah, our research is up in the like 50 trillion dollar like for the equity market. So real estate, let me just frame real estate because if you look at the top three asset classes that are out there, Bill, right? You've got the bond market, you've got the stock market, and the third is real estate. Real estate, Right.

We actually looked at this as a firm late last year, because we get this question a lot, which is, how big is the investable universe within real estate? And that investable universe, 27 trillion. My gosh. 27 trillion. Now, if you strip out, I'll call it non-institutional real estate, and I'll explain that in a second, it takes it down to about 12 trillion. So 12 trillion.

Phil Blancato (19:00.062)
of investable institutional real estate. And the way that I would define institutional is these are real estate assets or buildings, right, that typically are of larger size, right, in whatever sector it's in, whether it's retail, office, industrial, whatever, and real estate that is owned by large institutional funds.

The thing about it, it is a massive market that is often overlooked as a tool that can really help drive that risk adjusted return with that more traditional portfolio. Is your goal here to just make the rent payments that come back as money dividends to you or is your goal to grow the price of the money? How do you make money? That's right. It's super simple.

CP-REX, basically investors can come in and buy shares of CP-REX. It's a non-trade and it competes with a number, there's a number of other competitors that are out there like in the non-traded space, same thing. Investors can come in and buy shares of CP-REX. It's a non-traded stock. So that means that it does not trade on a major exchange like New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ.

So CP-REX, the fund, takes those dollars and literally goes out and invests in a well-diversified portfolio, geographic diversification, real estate asset class diversification, diversification in terms of asset type, investing in both debt and equity, invests in making loans and buying buildings. And if it's a loan, the interest payments come in. If it's a building that we've invested in, it's the rent payments that come in.

And basically that net income that is made by that is made off of those produced by those assets is then passed along to the investors in the form of income via a distribution or dividend. Distribution or dividend. just said a word that's music to my ears. Dividends fully taxable distribution because it could be a part of other stuff. Amateurization zone is not correct. And that is the, that's the, that's one of the beauties of this product, right? Because

Phil Blancato (21:20.846)
CP REX, for example, is taxed as a REIT. So there's tax benefits associated with that. CP REX also owns real estate. And if you think about it, if kind of to take it to like a more personalized example, to the extent that you personally own a building, what are you getting from that building? You're getting depreciation. And that depreciation acts as a tax shield.

it's the same thing, that same benefit actually exists. There's a return of capital and that return of capital, right, is driven by off of depreciating these assets, which acts as a tax shield. So when I say that it's a tax advantaged distribution or there's tax advantaged income, it's because you're getting the same benefits as if you were to own the property or own property yourself. And because it's structured as a REIT, you're also getting those benefits.

those benefits as well in owning a share of an investment vehicle like this. Think about that, everybody, if you're listening. You can go out and buy a bond from the federal government and everything's taxable. You can buy a muni bond and that would be non-taxable. But certainly, this asset class, the money you get back, a portion is not going to be taxed because of depreciation. But here's where it gets a little sticky for me. The pandemic hit.

and we saw a bunch of buildings go empty, Brett, where we were worried about defaults. What happens if a tenant can't pay its rent? How do you all as a company avoid that scenario? And then I'll add to it, interest rates skyrocketed for a while here. Did that hurt you or did that help you? Let's start with the post-pandemic world and what happened and did you guys get hurt by it are you smart enough to avoid some of that? Yeah, so I would say it's an interesting thing that happened.

this time around. It's like every single cycle. And Phil, mean, both of us have lived through multiple cycles. It's different every single time, right? You know, this time, what did we see? We had a pandemic and then quickly followed by really a capital markets dislocation. Now the pandemic, right, did have a dramatic effect on certain asset classes within real estate or certain sectors, the office sector in particular. So to the extent that you

Phil Blancato (23:34.89)
were not heavily invested in the office sector, you actually did quite well because it wasn't a recession. didn't lead to a recession because of all the money that was pumped right into the economy to prop it up. So for a fund like a CP-Rex, it's a vintage 2019 fund. We were in the fortunate position to really be able to see at a very early stage as to what was to be

come to be of the office market and therefore don't own much office. So did not take any sort of hit there, invested in other asset classes instead. So, but those who were heavily invested in office, that's certainly you took a hit there. Now, the one thing that we didn't see were businesses going under. In fact,

balance sheets, the personal level for individuals as well as companies have remained quite strong over the last few years. You've seen it through consumer spending. You can obviously look online and see company balance sheets in general pretty strong. So we didn't have a recession. But as you said, what happened was we did have a lot of inflation followed by high rates as a reaction to that.

real estate being a levered asset class, right? So uses leverage or borrows, right? To purchase properties, right? There's a potential impact there. Now, once again, for us, it really didn't hit us. It didn't hit CP-REX because CP-REX really borrows, has a very low leverage ratio. So it's not a fund that's sensitive because it's a conservative strategy that's investing in

well-occupied buildings not taking on a lot of leverage. So when interest rates spiked, it didn't see much of an impact from that. But flip over to an investment strategy, and let's look at rates relative to investment strategy. To the extent that you had an investment strategy that included buying buildings, but also lending in a higher interest rate environment,

Phil Blancato (25:57.806)
That lending becomes quite attractive from a number of different ways. One is just simply capital constrained environment. Let's look at what happened in 2022, 2023. In real estate, you had the regional banking crisis. Regional banks were big lenders in the real estate space. At the same time, you had rates going up. So you had higher interest rates in a capital constrained environment with respect to availability of

debt. So for a fund or a strategy like a CP racks that had the ability to pivot over into debt and make loans, you started making loans at that point in time. Right. Yeah. So that's interesting. You guys took advantage of the situation of anything. You were there. You were there as a lender. Yeah. And I'm guessing you probably picked up a property or two inexpensively that was distressed along the way. Yeah. You know, it's interesting.

The better risk adjusted return really, really square in 2023, for example, squarely sat with being a lender and really doing more, doing loans. And part of the reason was because in that, because real estate's levered asset class to the extent that rates go up, value comes down. So value adjusted, as people know from the headlines that they're reading about commercial real estate markets, you know, and taking office aside, even the well-performing, operationally well-performing asset classes took, you know, took a value hit.

Right? So being a lender on a property was a good place to be because if you're lending at 60 % loan to value of the property, right? In an environment where value- 60 % of everybody means a building's worth a buck and you're loaning 60 cents. 60 cents. That's right. So what does that say? It means that the value can come down by 40 cents, right? In that example, before the lender who's lent 60 cents takes any sort of hit

to the value of their loan effectively or getting paid back the full 60 cents that they've lent. it was a great place to be. Now, what happened then is the flip-flop kind of happened a little bit, right, from 23 to 24 because real estate levered asset classes values came down into the point that you just made. That then opened up some great opportunities. Now, I won't say it was super broad based.

Phil Blancato (28:20.258)
but the market value started stabilizing in the real estate space in early 2024. So you had some real kind of pinpoint rifle shot opportunities to actually buy real estate, right? At that point in time for, you know, increased yields effectively given that values came down. Got it. So everybody, when you sum up this asset class, it's important when you walk through New York city and you see those big buildings, they take money to build.

So you gotta lend the builder money, you gotta find people that are gonna occupy them, and you got people gonna own them. So I think Clarion represents the best of that. I guess Brent, this is probably a hard thing for most folks to understand. They're used to investing in equities, they invest in bonds. This is a different asset class, hence why it's part of Franklin Templeton and alternative, a great historic firm. But certainly, guess, if you had to conclude with folks today, why should they do this? Well, what's the principle reason for Main Street folks

who don't always do this investing in this thing. know that tariffs aren't an issue for this because it's homegrown stuff. You can take advantage of it, right? So what would you leave folks with? What should they remember? Yeah, I would say real estate can play an important role because it's a great inflation hedge, right? It's indexed by leases if you think about it because buildings are occupied by companies that have leases in place where they're paying rent that increases over time.

and that resets every time the lease expires. So it's a great inflation hedge. It can lower volatility, especially private real estate, because private real estate's not traded on an exchange. It's valued based on the underlying, the shares of CP-REX, for example, are based on the value of the underlying real estate. So you're not, unlike a public REIT, you're not subject to public sentiment around that particular stock. So lower volatility.

Three, would say, correlation, low correlation to the public debt and public equity markets, generally speaking. And all of that combined can really enhance the risk adjusted returns. And in fact, the way that I like to put it, gets a little bit wonky, so excuse me for a moment, but you can really shift your entire efficient frontier, investment frontier. I call it up and in.

Phil Blancato (30:45.772)
So you get to get that better risk adjusted returns. So higher return for a lower unit per unit of risk through investing in real estate. Because if you just look at what real estate yields on average or has yielded over the last 10 years, just on an absolute basis, it's a good chunk of income that it kicks off. And then lastly, I would say,

you know, for those who are looking at it from a tax advantage and tax planning standpoint, certainly it's investing in a fund that can, you know, benefit from, a vehicle that can benefit from re-taxation and depreciation, obviously there's those benefits, you know, that one can enjoy through investing in private real estate. So everybody, it's a really different topic today. We haven't done this topic before, and I was excited to have Brett on.

Putting it simply, don't want all your eggs in one basket. The beauty of what we do, we talk stocks together all time and mag seven and we talk about the bond market. This is a completely different thing. And to the best point, when he says up and in, it means you can buy other investments that will make the journey of your investments smoother, kind of avoid potholes. And by that, mean, when the bond market is getting clobbered, this asset class won't. In fact, it'll take the other side of it very often times.

When the stock market is getting clobbered, this won't, because it's going to do just, this will get, if rates rise sometimes, you'll see private values go down. But right now we've talked a lot about, this is an environment where rates are probably going down over time, not up. So it makes the asset class even more interesting. And the trick here is, it's not like your house, by the way, for those of who own a home out there, notice that your home has doubled in value in the last couple of years. The same scenario, same sort of another thing applies to many of these buildings, why some of the stuff they own is up so much. The trick is to have a

Quality firm help you do it and this is we hit on a little bit It used to be just for the elite used to be just for big institutions and folks with millions of dollars Well, guess what now that products have different today. It's evolved to where anybody can be in this thing and then that's pretty cool Yeah, and Phil what you hit on in terms of manager. This is one of those those spaces specialty area it's really where manager matters and experience really matters because if you look at dispersion right of return

Phil Blancato (33:03.406)
results, you you can see a much larger dispersion in a space like this, that really point to making sure that when you're investing, you're investing with somebody, you know, who has a thematic approach to it and really understands the space through multiple cycles. For sure. That's, that's what's so interesting. So for those of you, first of all, Brett's a California boy come East. So what would you consider yourself a New Yorker? I, know, I think, you know, Phil, think you're a hybrid New Jersey now I've been there 25 years. So I think people

consider me a Jersey boy. You're a Jersey now through and through buddy. Listen, those who don't knock us come to the Jersey Shore. I promise you, you won't be disappointed. It's very nice. And we got this big city called New York. That's a pretty cool place to them. Well, Brett, thank you for being on today, pal. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Great to see you, Phil. Good to see you too. For everybody who's interested, know, Franklin Templeton is a great firm. You can contact them directly and for learn more about this, I would suggest you contact your financial advisor and they'll gladly introduce you to

What the folks at Clarion do. can contact us. You know how to get a of me. It's lamp at latinberg.com. A P at latinberg.com. But we always like your feedback on the podcast. If you have any, when I asked the question about the Porsche, remember the folks who live for my daughter and I got all kinds of responses. So you all were far too kind. All right. My shout out of the week, you're going to laugh at this one. It is the Irish economy. And the reason why I want to give the shout out of the week to the Irish economy, because in a world where sometimes it takes guts to make change,

post the last 10 years, but significantly post pandemic, Ireland to their credit really post global financial crisis really began on this path, went a different direction than all of Europe. They went out and they cut their income tax rates for corporations in some cases down to zero, 10 % or 15, depending on the type of the country and where a company where it was from. And what it did was create, know, effectively known as the Irish experiment.

or the Irish miracle, depending on where you sit on this. You know, for those of the United States, the reason why we have a St. Patty's Day parade in the United States is because so many Irish immigrated from Ireland to here. Why there was no, no, there was a famine. The whole potato famine, for example, and the need for Irish workers going back to Civil War days. Finding a place where they could survive, coming here, to over to California, New Jersey, New York was loaded with the Irish, because there was nothing for them in Ireland. Well, guess what? For the first time,

Phil Blancato (35:25.966)
Modern history the Ireland needs people back. They want you to repatriate why because they're doing so well They're doing so well because the Irish experiment is because become the Irish miracle. The economy is booming there They have just about every major corporation in the world now has an office there, you know in Ireland They're looking for people to come back to Ireland to join the workforce. They have a growing economy low tax rates They are the miracle of Europe

I don't know if the rest of Europe can ever figure this out. I don't think they will because it's a very different tax system. But to Ireland's credit, if you get time, read about it. Especially if you're Irish, you should be very proud of what it's become. It's a little bit like Argentina, an incredible turnaround story there. Ireland's much more developed and more sophisticated. I think it's a really cool thing that the Irish experiment is working. So kudos to Ireland and what they've been able to pull off.

By the way, everything else is pretty normal. girl, I don't have anything new to talk about the girls. The Bulldogs got it, looks like they were going to make it for the NCAA 20, but they lost to Oklahoma that night. So nothing too much to report there. I guess there's going to be a quarterback debate between who's going be the QB for the Bulldogs next year. I don't know, nothing too exciting on that. And it's soon going to be baseball season. I'm a Yankee fan. think Yankees going to be terrible. We just lost Garrett Cole. How can they find this out now? The guy pitched all through World Series.

And now you find out in each Tommy John surgery, you got to wonder who runs these teams, man. I think people like Brett and I should run it. Business people make sure that people are showing up and doing their job. Come on, what are they doing? How did you find this out now? It's ridiculous. In any event, for all my Irish friends out there, all kidding aside, have a wonderful and happy St. Patrick's Day. For the rest of us out there, maybe you should go get some corned beef and cabbage. It's good stuff. I do try and have it this summer here. Have a wonderful week, everybody. Thank you again to my friend Brett for joining me from Clarion and the Franklin Temple, the family of companies.

Really appreciate him being on today. Have a great week everybody. Talk to you all real soon. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.