The text below is a transcript of audio from Episode 22 of Onward, a Fundrise podcast, "The case for optimism, with Cardiff Garcia."
Disclaimer: This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate. While we have worked to ensure the accuracy of the transcript, it is possible that errors or omissions may occur. This transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original audio content. Any discrepancies or errors in the transcript should be brought to our attention so that we can make corrections as necessary.
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Cardiff Garcia:
Hello and welcome to Onward, the Fundrise podcast, where you can find out more about what's happening at Fundrise, and where you'll hear some in-depth conversations about the big trends affecting US and global economies. This is the Ben turns the tables, the case for optimism, episode. Going to be a lot of fun. We are recording this on Thursday, April 27th, 2023.
Please, folks, before we start, keep rating and reviewing the show in those podcast apps. We always love hearing from our listeners. And also, this is an evergreen reminder that this podcast is not investment advice. It really is not. It is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. With that, let's get on the show.
In the studio together for the first time, I'm Cardiff Garcia of Bazaar Audio. Joined as always, co-host Ben Miller, CEO of Fundrise. Ben, here we are, man. How are you?
Ben Miller:
Yeah, I'm looking at you face to face.
Cardiff Garcia:
I know. This is a first for us. Usually you're in DC. I'm in New York, in a studio there. But there's a lot that's different about this episode. It's not just that you and I are doing this together in person. Also, the format's a little different, and the subject matter is a little different as well.
Ben Miller:
Yeah, the case for optimism. So that's what we're trying to do here. And I thought, who better to make the case for optimism than Cardiff Garcia?
Cardiff Garcia:
I think people are going to be confused, right? This podcast generally has been presenting the case for why we're in a credit crunch, why we've had the great deleveraging, and soon to be the great cascade. These are themes from earlier episodes. You and I both now are worried about a possible recession later this year. But on this episode, we're doing something a little different. Beyond this year, the case for optimism.
Ben Miller:
So here's how I wanted to frame it, Cardiff, and then we can get into it. Because the big idea is I'm going to interview Cardiff, and he's definitely one of the number one optimists I know. So this is exciting. So basically the argument is after every winter is a spring. So we're in the winter. We are not saying to be optimistic at this moment. Right? We're saying that there's a case for optimism coming, because I still believe that 2023 has some bumps left in the road-
Cardiff Garcia:
Some rough times ahead. Yeah, I agree with that. There's medium term optimism.
Ben Miller:
Medium term, 2024 let's say ish.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah. I'm thinking 2024 and beyond, actually. I actually am as optimistic about the US economy right now for the medium term, as I have been in my adult life. Granted the last couple of decades haven't been like awesome in terms of the economy, but now I think we're about to enter a really interesting, fun period. But what do you think? Are you optimistic about the long term? Or are you just so looking for the downside to protect the downside, and you'll let the upside take care of itself?
Ben Miller:
I guess the contrarian in me was very negative, 2021. Our first podcast together at the beginning of 2022, I was a pessimist. And from an investment point of view, bonds, stocks, most things went down from that point.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yes.
Ben Miller:
And so it felt like an optimistic period in 2021. Everything was going well, stocks were up. But actually, that was a good time to get out, not to get in. And so now, we're not to the bottom yet, I don't think. But it feels like a time where you can start looking at opportunistically how to start getting in. And then as we hit the bottom, to start leaning in, piling in. I mean, I agree with you. I think there is a very compelling case on the upside coming out of this downswing.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah. Okay. All right. So how should we frame this conversation? Where do we start making the case for optimism?
Ben Miller:
Okay, so I tried to imagine a few ways to ask you this question, to break it up. So let's start with the biggest problem to date. And I want you to tell me a story of how we win the war on inflation. From now into this optimistic midterms, what happens looking back that says, "It's in the rear view mirror"?
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, that's a great question. There's the short term way to win the war on inflation, which you and I have already covered, which is that there's going to be a growth slowdown. There already is a growth slowdown. There may well be a recession. And that tends to lower inflation already.
In the longer term, the battle is won with faster productivity growth with making the American economy more innovative and more efficient. And I think there are some genuinely hopeful signs on that front, but that's the short version of the story.
The TLDR is we make the economy more efficient, more growth oriented, more innovative. And that tends to lower inflation, while still maintaining fairly high real wage growth. Those two things mean the same thing. Nominal wage growth, but low inflation means real wage growth. And you only get that with fast productivity growth much faster than we've had in the last half century or so, which has been a period of terrible productivity growth.
Ben Miller:
I think of the most consequential change since the pandemic to sum it up as the end of The Great Stagnation, which I think you've said also in the past. So how do you think about that? Maybe describe what it is. And then ultimately, that is a different way of saying productivity.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, The Great Stagnation was a label that came from economist Tyler Cowen, whose writings you and I both follow [inaudible 00:06:06]. He blogs it Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok.
And what it describes is this period from roughly 1973 to the present, wherein productivity has climbed at a much slower rate than it did in the preceding post-war decades. And there's all kinds of possible reasons for it.
And the truth is that productivity is itself kind of a mystery, to economists and to everybody else. But there's increasingly hope, including from Tyler himself, that the kinds of innovations that are beginning to surface are the kinds that eventually will have widespread commercial applications. And that therefore, productivity growth will start to climb up in that 2 to 3% rate where it was in the post-war decades, and not in the 1 or 2% rate where it's been for the last 50 years.
I want to just point out that there was one brief exceptional period in the last half decade, the late '90s and early 2000s. Those were years of pretty fast productivity growth.
Unfortunately, the promise of that era didn't really become realized, or at least hasn't been realized yet, because it turns out that the incredible advances in information technology didn't actually have the kind of effects on the rest of the economy that we had hoped. It did have some big changes.
But the point here is not that things haven't gotten better. It's that they haven't gotten better at the same pace that they were getting better in the time before roughly the mid-1970s.
That's The Great Stagnation. And that is, I think, the central problem of the American economy in the last half century. But it also applies to just the last 15 years, the time since the Great Recession of 2008, whose effects, frankly we were feeling all the way into the COVID pandemic.
Ben Miller:
My only counterpoint to what you said is productivity really didn't get unlocked, or wasn't explosive productivity growth after the '90s. Possibly there was, but it was exported abroad through globalization, by opening up US market to China. I mean a billion people in China came out of poverty. So there was tremendous productivity growth globally, but we didn't see the same share of that as we normally would before basically the rise of the east.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, certainly in the goods producing sectors, productivity growth has stayed pretty strong. Unfortunately, the share of the economy that goods producing sectors make up has been shrinking over time, as it should. That's what happens with fast productivity sectors.
I think that actually did continue, including because of automation and globalization. And you see this across all the rich countries really, including the countries of Western Europe, Japan, and so forth.
But what you really need is productivity growth to climb all throughout the economy. You need the kinds of technologies, general purpose technologies that change not just the kinds of products that we make, but the ways that we make them. And that includes services and not just goods. But in terms of productivity growth, they've been quite bad until the last few years to be honest.
Ben Miller:
Right. So you have a period of stagnation, which they call a Great Stagnation. And in my mind, I just sum it up as there was much less change in society. Change slowed. So what happened with the pandemic is it shook everything up.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah.
Ben Miller:
And then as a result of that, a lot of things that were stuck became unstuck, like telehealth and remote work, which was technology [inaudible 00:09:54] prior but really didn't get adopted because of different status quo impediments.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yes.
Ben Miller:
As the debt crisis limit hits and probably the, I think likely the recession second half of this year, you want to be optimistic at the bottom and more conservative at the top. So we're consistent here. And so now we're talking about, well, how do you get optimistic? What do you do? Because all the headlines are going to be negative soon.
Cardiff Garcia:
But the thing you pointed out that there's been a kind of era of experimentation brought about by COVID, is itself a big source of future optimism. And I share your caveat, not this year. Which I think has more to do with business cycle fluctuations, the problem of sustained inflation and having to get it down, the Fed's response, and so forth.
But the things that you just mentioned. There was experimentation in telehealth to just take one example. The big example is of course, work from home, which is likely to have big effects all across society. Some great, some frankly not so great. I think there's going to be a lot of struggle with this in the medium term, in the near term certainly.
But overall, the result of it I think is going to be that people are going to be able to better match themselves to the jobs where they can have the best productivity growth. The jobs that are the best fit for their skill sets. And in the long term, even though it can be painful for a little while, that tends to be really good for the American economy.
But I see all kinds of experimentation happening right now in the aftermath of COVID and especially the policies meant to combat the COVID recession. And maybe the single best example of this is the return of creative destruction in this country.
For decades, we had falling startup rates, falling firm death rates, and things of that nature. Now there's been a total reversal, and it's still happening now. Each month, the number of startups that are launched is much higher than it was before the pandemic.
So just to be clear, the pandemic introduced tremendous tragedy, heartbreak, more than a million deaths in the US. Many, many millions more throughout the rest of the world. So nobody's celebrating the arrival of COVID or anything like that. But the policy response to COVID was enormous. And it has led to a lot of people all throughout the economy and society trying new things. And that level of dynamism is something that we just hadn't expected, because every measure of dynamism had been falling for decades. And that's related to productivity growth too. Now it's changing. So that to me is a big source of optimism. I think you just put your finger on it.
Ben Miller:
Well, let's put some specifics on it. So you shared this data with me at one point, but the number of startups went from 250,000 new startups a year to 350,000 new startups a year. So that's 100,000 new startups. You can see it on a graph, it breaks the trend.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yes. There's a clear trend break. That's absolutely correct.
Ben Miller:
The number of companies going away also had that same trend break. Another source of data, which I think you've thought a lot about is the decline of inequality.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, absolutely. Also totally unexpected, especially in terms of wage and income inequality, which had been rising for a really long time. And which by the way, you don't have to be a hippity dippity lefty to care about this. No, I really mean this. I think there's been a lot of evidence now, including from mainstream institutions like the IMF that in the past had said that there's a trade-off between growth and inequality. Now all the evidence is coming in showing that actually, if inequality gets too bad, it hurts growth itself, that growth and reducing inequality can be consistent with each other.
And I think people need to look at that evidence and really try to dispassionately assess it, because a lot of people might have their minds changed on it. And in the US in the last few years, again, because of that huge policy response to COVID, what we've seen is a reduction of income inequality, where wages are now climbing the fastest for people in the lower wage brackets. We're also seeing a reduction of racial and ethnic income inequality.
These are trends that we just hadn't expected because inequality had been rising, and had been so trenched for so long. And I think what we're seeing now is the benefits of a really tight labor market. Which can lead to things like inflation, if it tightens too much, or if the policy response goes too far. And I think you can make a good case if that happen. But one of the virtues of a tight labor market is that folks who for so long had been falling behind are now catching up.
And I think that's just good societally. There's a lot of evidence that that's good societally. I'm thinking mainly of the work of Ben Friedman who wrote about the moral consequences of economic growth, when that growth is widely shared and people really see that they too can benefit from a strong economy. That tends to lead to more cohesion, and it undoes some of the corrosion all across the society and the economy that we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years.
Ben Miller:
Right. Just putting on my Cardiff hat for a minute.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yes. I'm scared for you.
Ben Miller:
So the way I'm imagining it as you're talking essentially, is that the high inflation that we have been experiencing, the straw is spun into gold through productivity. So it looks like inflation actually turns into productivity growth. And that's what a tight labor market can do if labor is, you said matched. Implicitly, it's an economic journal made a little more explicit.
Cardiff Garcia:
Matching.
Ben Miller:
Matching. Yeah. And I saw this anecdotally. Somebody works in the restaurant industry. Maybe they're not that happy. It's not that productive for them. All restaurants get shut down. They move to Sun Belt, they get a different job. Maybe they went to school, and they end up matching to a better job. But if there hadn't been in the pandemic, they really wouldn't have likely made all that change. But the midterm consequence of that is productivity. It's growth. It's growth begets more growth. That's the thing. Somebody ends up in the right job, they invest more in themselves.
Cardiff Garcia:
They hire people, they expand. This can be really, really great. So I want to make one distinction here though, which is that the pandemic by itself doesn't cause that. The pandemic plus the kind of policy response that replenishes people's lost incomes, and more by the way, is what can lead to that.
Because remember in the aftermath of the pandemic, we had a few different trends. We had extremely low interest rates obviously. And we had the fed backstopping all kinds of debt markets to stabilize financial markets.
But we also had unemployment insurance that was magnitudes bigger than what existed before. It was temporary, but it was huge. It was 600 bucks a week. You had savings go through the roof, because so many consumption options had been shut down.
And so people ended up with more savings, a low interest rate environment, stability because of the unemployment insurance and the stimulus checks. And businesses that were also to some extent backstop by these policies.
And all that extra savings in a growth environment with low interest rates leads people to start new things, to try things. Not all of them are going to work, but the experimentation is the key point here. And a lot of that has continued even to now, well past the expiration of a lot of those pandemic era policies.
Ben Miller:
So I hope the lesson learned is one where the policy response focused on bottom up subsidies. Rather than 2008, which was a top down, bail out the banks, pretty much neglect the rest of the population. What you're really saying I think, is shock the system plus the right policy response can actually create this long-term growth cycle that we've both arguing or starting again.
And it doesn't seem like there's consensus on that, because there are a lot of people talk about the PPP loans and the waste. I look at that and say, "Well it's not necessarily waste, because it went to the middle class." And when it goes to the middle class, it's likely to be used maybe not the way the government necessarily intended, but in productive forms. And it's much more optimistic about money going there than going to the largest corporations who probably aren't going to change their behavior.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah. I mean the aftermath of the great financial crisis. You're absolutely right. The response was not big enough, and it was poorly structured. The response to COVID was not perfectly structured. But in terms of what it was targeting, the replenishment of incomes that were absolutely going to be lost in the pandemic disproportionately by people in lower income brackets was a big part of this.
And I think we all remember in the mid 2010s, how there were still even after the recession was over, people losing their homes, people unable to rewrite their mortgages, and all kinds of other things.
This time, we never got to that stage because the response was big, and the response was fast. And it got to the people who really were going to suffer the most. And by the way, in doing so, it also helped stabilize the parts of the economy that do have a lot of high income folks. Because all those other people that were helped were able to continue buying products. And so it wasn't this ignored whole swaths of the economy by focusing on bottom up policies. It ended up helping everybody.
Ben Miller:
We're arguing that there were two benefits of this massive policy response. The first was stabilization, which everybody recognizes. But the second is not yet visible, which is that it jump started a new era.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yep, it really did. And in addition to all that, we're also seeing some technologies that I think you and I have discussed in the past on this show, that also have a lot of promise. Will they end up being widely applied and have great commercial uses? I don't know yet.
But when we're looking at things like artificial intelligence, when we're looking at things like the new mRNA technologies, the new vaccines that are coming out, it seems like a huge vaccine comes out once every six months. We're looking at malaria vaccines now, dengue vaccines.
It's astonishing. These things can have big effects on the economy, especially if they end up having wider uses than we can even see right now. And I think that's quite possible. The energy landscape.
In fact, the one part of the economy that has the stubbornest productivity growth is the construction sector. And I'll let you talk about that if you want, but the construction sector has had flat productivity for half a century. It's really kind of amazing. And I don't know exactly what's going on. Some of that might be regulations. Some of that might be that it's just hard to come up with new ways of building houses and apartments. I don't know, but I'm curious to know what your theses are on that.
Ben Miller:
It's funny, I was just corresponding with somebody about this. So the productivity growth of construction in Japan has actually been really high, and there's been a lot of dynamism there. And I actually had spent a little bit of time earlier in my career trying to work on building technologies. And essentially, the regulatory landscape of the building code and local permitting make any kind of really significant technological change impossible.
So I think that like what we saw during the pandemic, most of the impediment to change is behavioral. It's not technological. We have AI, or large language models more specifically, in the process of transforming what we thought was possible. But I think that the behavioral changes of adoption will be the largest challenge.
Cardiff Garcia:
The big impediment.
Ben Miller:
Oh yeah. Even in our organization, because we're working on trying to understand how to apply it, changing how people do their work day-to-day, extremely difficult. And I look back with e-commerce, right? My parents never stopped shopping at department stores. It was only till the next generation was raised on that technology did the consequence of it get fully adopted. So that's the bear case for AI. It's not that it's not going to have an impact. It definitely will. It's just that our generation, which is now-
Cardiff Garcia:
Our generation.
Ben Miller:
Getting long in the tooth. Gen X, Gen X, the Gen X generation, the apathetic generation's actually reluctant to adopt new things. I don't think that's the case. I think that technology's much more innate than it was 40 years ago. But I'm always struck by the human side of the equation that really stands in the way rather than the atoms and the bits.
Cardiff Garcia:
That's fascinating. It seems like one of those things that could be slowly than all at once. Like if you have a lot of people who are slow to adapt to AI but you also have new companies emerging where it's an integral part of their systems already, then those companies where people are slow to adapt are just going to fall behind. They're not going to be able to compete anymore.
And I think that's a process where I agree it's hard to get people to adapt. But it can happen slowly, and then all of a sudden everything changes. I really think that's a possibility.
Can I ask you a question though about the construction productivity thing? What's your favorite example for a regulation that really impedes faster productivity growth in construction, something that really slows down what could otherwise be a faster, more efficient process for making houses, apartments, or commercial properties?
Ben Miller:
Well, like everyone who's interested in technology and in real estate, you fall for the trap that is modular construction. Because it seems so logical. And so we've funded and we've tried to build, and I've even looked at investing in modular construction companies.
And when you get down to what it takes locally to get the permits, it is so much more extraordinarily over-regulated. And we had projects where you could literally build an entire house and ship it to a location. And you can't do that, because the local permitting office has to inspect it before you close the walls up. Or they have extra permits around modular construction that doesn't exist for normal construction in California. And the extra permits basically add a year or two to the construction. And a year or two can often mean delivering into a hot economy or delivering into a cold economy. So it's because all permitting is done at the super local level. WE built last year, I want to say 3,000 homes, 3,000. Every home has to be inspected.
So we actually had to develop software just to get, the inspector property manager, and us to show up at the same time. Just to show up was a challenge, right? Because basically, they never show up on time, what day they're going to show up. And what they're inspecting, electrical can't be closed up until they... So you can't do the next thing in the part. So showing up, that's 80% in theory.
Cardiff Garcia:
This is madness.
Ben Miller:
But it's not really that much productivity there.
Cardiff Garcia:
Right. And the technology from what you're saying is there. But this kind of piecemeal bureaucratic requirement, house, by house, by house, really just snarls everything up.
Ben Miller:
Right. And another way to is the insurance side of it. If you wanted to build something new, like people have done or try to do modular vertical construction. I mean the insurers basically don't have actuarial data. So it becomes more challenging from that point of view. So I think the morally abstract way to think of it is where there's large capital costs, it's just much more resistant to taking risk.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah. It's really unfortunate too, because there are some policy ideas right now trying to spur the US economy to build more things, more actual things. In the same way that you and Fundrise build things that people literally need. Homes, apartments, and so forth. But these bureaucratic snafus are to me one of the biggest blockages to the case for optimism.
The other is workers and immigration policy, which the US has a kind of killer app in terms of integrating immigrants, in terms of our ability to attract some really wonderful talent from all across the world. And not just college or grad school educated talent. I mean people from all across the world that want to come here and work and do jobs. And again, the bureaucracy, or in this case deliberate government policy often slows it down.
And if we were to get those two things right in my opinion, things like permitting reform, eliminating the structural procedural bureaucratic blockages to building things, and getting immigration policy right, those are the two big things I worry about. And if we got them right, I think so many other things would sort of fall into line.
Ben Miller:
Yeah. I'm going to try not to fall for the trap.
Cardiff Garcia:
Okay.
Ben Miller:
Just to get a little bit constructively critical.
Cardiff Garcia:
Go for it.
Ben Miller:
On the ground, we're seeing the permitting process become much worse after the pandemic. So everywhere where we were building anything, it's maybe twice as slow as it was. Los Angeles is just, forget about it. Basically, government mostly adopted remote work broadly. And as a result, the permitting process is much slower.
Cardiff Garcia:
Once you slow down in Los Angeles, it makes things so much worse. If you want to get an addition to your house to work from home or something like that.
Ben Miller:
We bought up a neighborhood that was industrial, and we're rebuilding a neighborhood to this Bloomberg article called Can an App Redevelop a Neighborhood? And that app would be Fundrise.
And so we're renovating these properties. First you have to get the neighborhood to sign off on what you're doing, and you have this permit, and the permit looks like a roll of blueprints. And you go to the LA permit office. And the LA permit office is literally a giant cardboard box, with just blueprints sprawled all over the floor.
Cardiff Garcia:
Waiting for approval?
Ben Miller:
Waiting for someone to pick them up. And you'll call them two weeks later and then you say, "What's happened to my permit?" And no one picked them up. I can send you a picture of the permit officers, cardboard boxes and plans sprawled all over the place. And if you were to ask them, "What's going on here?" I think they would say two things.
One is that they're actually having a really hard time getting labor, so the number of people doing the work has declined. And I think remote work has huge quality of life benefits, but also some negatives on actual productivity. If you're not working in the office, you're not going to be able to get that blueprint. You're working two hours away in LA, because you don't want to commute. And then so you're much less likely to go get that blueprint sitting in that big carpet box. So it's like a small thing, but it's like a good microcosm.
We're also permitting outside Washington DC, or in Nashville, and it's the same story over and over again. So it's not singular example. It's just a good illustration of how if you're saying basically low cost housing and increased immigration of the right policy are the two biggest unlocks, doesn't seem like either one of those are on a good path.
Cardiff Garcia:
Those are two really intractable problems. One of the deep sadnesses for me, and I promise I'm not about to get too political here or anything, is that essentially, the two major political parties in this country are not instinctively internationalists in any particular way. We've seen it both on trade and immigration, and that is a big thing to lament. It's a big regret. Will they get even worse in the future than they are right now? Because remember, we're talking about rates of change here when we make the case for optimism. I don't know, but it's really regrettable both that immigration policy isn't better.
But also the thing that you just described, which I think is a problem beyond even just a construction sector. Because that's a great example, what you just gave of what happens in LA. I think that happens in manufacturing. I think that happens in other parts of the economy, and it's really too bad because we're shooting ourselves in the foot
Ben Miller:
And ahead of this episode to interview Cardiff Garcia, I looked up your background. So the immigrant story is near and dear to your heart.
Cardiff Garcia:
It is.
Ben Miller:
You want to share where you come from and why you might feel that way about immigration?
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, I'm the son of Cuban exiles. And my family really benefited from what was a Cold War era policy where Cubans who were fleeing the Castro regime in the aftermath of the revolution there were allowed to come to the country and very quickly get citizenship. So you can arrive, as my family did as refugees and asylum seekers, and very quickly become a US citizen.
I won't belabor the point, but essentially that class of exiles built Miami into this global center of commerce, certainly for Latin America that it is now. And so that's my family background. And it's also something that has informed a lot of my views on immigration certainly. I try not to make it a naive view on immigration.
But in general, I think that the US when it really does get the policy right, has a particular genius for absorbing talent from all across the world, and turning it into a real productive asset. So I hope that's something that continues.
But yeah, it's something that is, you're right, very near and dear to my heart. It's very personal to me. But when I analyze it, I also try to bring facts and rigor, and look for the places where there are complications.
Ben Miller:
So the case for optimism for me is generational change. The baby boomer has been the dominant generation since the '60s. We're now I think at a sort of turning point where we're seeing new generations come to power.
And so historically, generational change is a critical part of how previously intractable problems all of a sudden become soluble. So I'm optimistic about that. I've been looking forward to that kind of change. I don't know if it falls to us or we just get skipped as a generation. I'm okay with that, just as long as we make some progress here.
Because when you think of the policies you're talking about, they're not actually hard to imagine as a combination of left/right. And an example is new supply-side economics.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yes.
Ben Miller:
So maybe want to talk about what supply-side economics is and how it's been re-birthed?
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah. Well for a long time, people associated the phrase supply-side economics strictly with tax policy. That if you were a supply side, it meant that you were in favor of low taxes. Maybe you believed in the Laffer Curve, which is the idea that lower taxes can actually increase tax revenue because of the growth response. For the most part, that specific idea has been discredited, including by Republican and right wing economists and so forth.
That is not what the phrase supply side ever should have meant. The phrase supply side should be about increasing the economic capacity of the US economy. And that could be any number of things. It could be some combination of better designed regulations or fewer regulations in some cases. It could be public financing of innovation, investment, R&D. it could be getting in place the incentives right so that the private sector does a lot of this work and is incentivized to invest a lot in new ideas, in research development, in factories, and all kinds of other things that make things.
But all of that expands the capacity of the US economy. That's the supply side of the economy. Distinct from the demand side, which is what people want to buy and what companies want to invest in. That kind of thing.
What's happening recently that's new is that even on the left, there's increasingly a focus on the supply side. This wasn't there in the aftermath for example, of the Great Recession, where the problem was a shortfall, a chronic shortfall, in demand. Where you wanted more stimulative policy from the government or from the Fed, from policy makers generally. Because inflation was incredibly low, because there were still a lot of people out of work. We hadn't gotten anywhere close to the labor market tightness that had existed previously.
But now what's happening is that because we have a relatively tight labor market, and in particular... This is a silver lining of high inflation. Because inflation has remained high and has been intractable, the left is also saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Inflation really hurts a lot of people. And if we want to lower it, we actually need to expand the capacity of the US economy."
So you have terms the economics of abundance, which was coined by the writer Derek Thompson. You have left of center writers like Ezra Klein talking about supply-side progressivism.
And so you now have more of what I would consider to be a bipartisan or a cross ideological consensus in favor of doing things that expand the supply-side potential of the economy.
This is a really big deal, and I hope that intellectual shift continues. Because that also can lead to the kinds of policies and changes that produce faster productivity growth. So this is really exciting as an intellectual shift. Will it remain, or will it be swamped by other interest groups or other considerations?
I don't know, but we hadn't seen this before. You had a lot of free market rhetoric on the right for years and decades, and some of it was sincere and some of it was not. On the left though, you very rarely heard this. You heard a lot of talk of inequality. You heard a lot of talk of needing to get people jobs, and employed again, and policies like that. You heard a lot about the labor movement.
And those things aren't mutually exclusive to an emphasis on the supply side, but it's new. And to the extent that it sticks, I think it could be a big intellectual shift. Because frankly, even the Biden administration is listening quite a bit to this, and employees, economists who also pay a lot of attention to these writers and to these things. I think it's really exciting, to be honest.
Ben Miller:
And even this, I attribute, or the success of this I attribute to the consequences of the pandemic. Because what we saw happen was supply chains collapse, and then a recognition of a dependence on foreign suppliers. So a decision to invest in bringing manufacturing back to the United States, bringing important or strategic manufacturing like chips back to the United States, investing in infrastructure. There was a moment of agreement from both sides.
We are seeing it on the ground actually at Fundrise. So we have a lot of investments all across the Sunbelt. And there was an expectation that industrial would actually really suffer as Amazon pulled back, because Amazon was a huge driver of basically the logistics, infrastructure investment.
Cardiff Garcia:
Huge warehouses, infrastructure investment, trucking, and so forth.
Ben Miller:
Right. So a year ago, there was this bearish forecast for industrial real estate because Amazon was flashing and cutting back. And what we've seen on the ground is that that has been more than offset by the on-shoring of supply chains and chips.
So we have a bunch of warehouses we've bought and built in Phoenix. Intel's building there. TSMC is building there. I think Texas Instruments. There's so much new manufacturing being built, largely in the heartland and the Sun Belt. And that is a new phenomenon, or much at least the scale of it is. What I hope is that the conclusion by all sides is basically if it works-
Cardiff Garcia:
I have to be honest, I have a very mixed view on the latest industrial policy moves that we've seen in policy. I don't think they're all bad, but I think there's a lot of hidden dangers there. Including by the way, from the very permitting problems that we've just described. We're trying to build semiconductors here. They're going to be a lot more expensive than the ones that are built in Taiwan.
Similarly, we're trying to build a lot of energy infrastructure. And I think that if anything is a little more promising, then trying to build the kinds of things that we typically would import from abroad.
Because let me stick up a little bit for the system that we had during the pandemic. If you just look at the volume of imports that we had throughout the pandemic, they went way up. This was a spike in demand for different kinds of goods than we were demanding because the pandemic had changed things so radically for a time. We had these global supply chains that didn't react maybe as quickly as we wanted to. That led to inflation. Totally agree all that happened.
But is it the case that if we were building a lot of these things domestically, that would've been more resilient than the system that was set up abroad? I'm not so sure, would production have spiked as quickly as we were able to source it from abroad in the pandemic. I don't think that's actually a given. And I think there's a case to be made for alternative approaches.
All that being said, experimentation typically is good. So even if it turns out that we get this wrong, there could be a lot of spillover effects that are positive if we try to build supply chains internally. Maybe some of the technologies that we come up with, some of the new processes that we come up with aren't directly useful for the things we're trying to do, but they're applicable in other ways. And we at least gain some process knowledge. But I don't think this is going to shake out in these idealistic terms that a lot of people think, just based on what we're trying to do. The world is a messy, complicated place.
So we'll see. But I think we need to be careful with a lot of these made in America provisions, by American, all that stuff. I don't mean to sound unpatriotic, not at all. I want the best thing for the US economy. But a lot of those things tend to backfire.
Ben Miller:
I mean, a US made iPhone would probably be very expensive. I understand what you're saying. In some ways, I would say it's like a cost or an investment in political consensus. It's worth it. It's potentially worth it. So anyway, that's a little bit speculative. So let me go back to another positive Ukraine, China. How do you think about that? What's the case for optimism there?
Cardiff Garcia:
The case for optimism I think begins first with how the US and the countries of Europe responded in terms of the flexibility of their economies. In terms of what we learned, by the way, about the US' ability to produce energy, we essentially have what seems like an infinite amount of natural gas in this country. You know what I mean?
The Europeans responded much more forcefully than I had anticipated. We were helped along by the way, with the bit of luck, the mild winter. And that was great. So the energy shock from the war, and I'm speaking strictly about economics here. I'm not talking about the moral dimension of the war where full disclosure, I think the Ukrainians have every right to defend themselves. I think this was an act of Russian aggression.
But leaving that aside in terms of the case for optimism, for economic optimism, I think there's been quite a strong response. I think we've learned a lot about the flexibility of the US and European economies at least.
In terms of other geopolitical dimensions, obviously the big one is the US' relationship with China. That's the one where things are really nerve-wracking at the moment. What's going to happen with Taiwan?
What's going to happen if the US does pursue an aggressive policy of what's being labeled decoupling, where it tries to completely untether itself from China? I don't know how possible that is. I don't actually think that's desirable, despite the difficulty of that relationship.
There are some things the US should untether itself from China on, certainly when human rights are at stake. Certainly if you look at what happened in the Xinjiang Province where it looked like there was a policy of ethnic cleansing by the Chinese government. Goods that are made there, I would have no problem saying, "Forget that. We're not going to do any commercial activity with on that." If you look at what's happened in terms of the movies that get made in Hollywood that are adapting Chinese censorship laws, essentially, this is really troubling. So there are some really tricky geopolitical complications here, and we absolutely should be fully engaged on those.
But the idea that if we completely untether ourselves from China, that that would make the world safer is a little strange. We've had a Cold War before, and that was an incredibly tense, dangerous period where we almost annihilated ourselves a couple of different times. That was horrible. And so I'm not sure that a policy of total disengagement is the right thing, but getting the right policy mix on China is to me the central foreign policy concern of our era. And I don't have the perfect solution to that.
I happen to be long-term, pretty, I don't know if bearish is the right word, but skeptical that China's ascendancy will continue because they face such demographic problems. Because the Chinese state continues to intrude in parts of the economy where things should be better left to the market, that tends to be bad for entrepreneurialism, and innovation, and whatnot. It certainly is going to slow down China's rush to get to the production frontier.
Right now, the average Chinese living standard is about 60th or 70th in the world. It's not very high. It's a powerful country because there are so many people there, and because its economy is quite large, and it plays such a big role in global manufacturing processes.
But I'm not convinced that unless China changes its institutions, in a direction that would make it inherently safer anyways for the rest of the world, that it's going to continue its ascendancy as a superpower. I think that makes it a more dangerous adversary in the short term, but I think it makes it a less dangerous adversary if we can get things right in the long term.
Ben Miller:
So the case for optimism is that there's a way to work with China as a peer. Is that how you would articulate it?
Cardiff Garcia:
No, I don't think China is part of the case for optimism. You asked about geopolitical dimensions, so I wanted to give you my central take there. The case for optimism there is that the capitalist democracies are quite flexible economies, and can find their way through some really difficult things like the Ukraine Russia war. But if there's some kind of a global conflict over Taiwan, for example, that's not good for the global economy. That's horrible.
So I'm not saying that what's happening with China is part of the case for optimism here. I'm saying that that's already pretty bad anyways. So relative to the status quo, I am still optimistic about future growth in the US, future productivity growth in the US. But a conflict with China could screw things up. Absolutely. I'm worried about that. I'm not enough of an expert to know if something is going to happen in terms of a global conflict with China.
But I really hope not. I think our interests are shared enough that there's at least room to hope that that will be warded off, but I'm not sure about that. And that is something that I absolutely worry about. What do you think, by the way? I sense a certain skepticism that anything in terms of the geopolitical realm could be optimistic.
Ben Miller:
The case for optimism would be that essentially, it doesn't get worse, and that there's some kind of reconciliation. That seems like the most probable outcome there. And with China, what's so great about China is that they really are a practical society. I mean, they're extremely entrepreneurial as a people.
Cardiff Garcia:
Tons of human capital there as well. In addition to just being a lot of people in absolute terms, there's a lot of entrepreneurial, extremely well-educated people there as well.
Ben Miller:
Yeah. I mean, the success of China from 1980 to now is without parallel history. And it's not an accident. It was done by extreme agency, by a political leadership that made a lot of good decisions. And you have to recognize that both as a constructive sense, and then as a competitive sense.
And so I think about China as an adaptive co-competitor. I'm optimistic that they have similar aims of wanting to see good outcomes. Not like Russia or Soviet Union that had really ideologically strange motives. So I don't know if the Cold War is a great parallel.
Cardiff Garcia:
Well, no, what I'm saying is if we get to that stage where we were untethered entirely from China, it would resemble the fact that we were completely untethered in economic terms from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I don't want to get there. That would be terrible.
I want to say this. I don't see what China has done as unprecedented. They followed the exact same business model of ketchup growth that South Korea followed, that Japan followed, that before them Germany followed, that before them the US followed in the 19th century. This is a well-trodden path of emphasizing exports and local investment. There's a lot of protectionism in the beginning stages of this. You protect your domestic industry so that you can catch up industrially. But you also force your companies, your national champions, to compete in global export markets to make sure that there's an incentive to keep getting better.
But that's very different from competing when you're already at the production frontier the way the US is. So in terms of China continuing its growth, that depends on knowing when to start liberalizing parts of its economy that we all thought it would've started liberalizing by now. It hasn't done that. And in fact, if anything, it's cut hard in the other direction. And that I think is a problem and will be a constraint going forward, unless they change their minds.
Ben Miller:
So you're teeing up what we have to do, which is to lay out the counterargument against optimism, which you started to do.
Cardiff Garcia:
It may be inadvertently when we start talking about China [inaudible 00:49:29]-
Ben Miller:
Supposed to be talking about the case for optimism.
Cardiff Garcia:
No, that's all right.
Ben Miller:
Because a lot of the positives are double-edged swords, right? Because the investment domestically is inflationary. The technological change are likely to drive more inequality. So how do you envision the risks that we are likely to have to manage around?
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, great question. I will say this. The nature of the technological changes that we're discussing now, and in particular, AI for example, seem to be coming for different kinds of jobs than the automation of the past, which came for routine oriented blue collar jobs in factories that previously were well paying middle class jobs. They were automated away. In some cases, they were globalized away. And so there was a huge collapse of a lot of these communities where those factories were such central parts. But, now a lot of the automation we're discussing looks like it's coming for more brain oriented tasks. Jobs like mine, frankly.
So in terms of inequality, it might end up being an inequality reducer. An income inequality reducer. The outcome in terms of capital versus labor, that's a little more complicated. Because a lot of the places that are invested in these technologies, the people and the companies that are invested in them might reap a huge reward.
But overall, I think if they lead to rapid economic growth, and if the kinds of jobs that are substituted away or complimented are the sort of white collar jobs, then I think it'll have a very different effect than the automation of the past, which came for manufacturing jobs. So I would just make that case there.
But second, my biggest hurdle in terms of going full on optimism is just that there are so many societal blockages, which we've already kind of discussed. And I worry sometimes that when periods of rapid change are on the horizon, that there's a lot of hunkering down. There's a lot of nostalgia for the past. There's a lot of fear of change, because change is hard. Dynamism is hard.
A lot of us would rather be able to say, "Hey, I know exactly what my salary is going to be for the next 5, 10, 15 years. I can then plan to raise my family and send my kids to college and all that stuff." And in an era of dynamism, it is likely to prove true that you'll actually do better over 15 to 20 years, than if things were stable and never changed. But, it's hard to see that in anticipation.
So if for example, we start seeing a lot of rapid technological changes of the kind that I'm anticipating, we might respond in one of two ways. We might respond intelligently as a society, and maybe put in place a good safety net. Or embrace the dynamism, but make sure that people don't get left behind the way we did, frankly, to factory workers in the manufacturing sector
Or, we might go the other way and start putting in place more societal blockages, more bureaucratic hurdles. Slowing down technological adaptation because we're afraid of change.
And that is the thing that I worry the most about. We've had this remarkable era in the last few years of experimentation that we've discussed in the COVID era. How do we embrace that and make it work for everybody, as opposed to fearing its continuation and putting in place all these added hurdles that are unnecessary?
You started this chat with the example of telemedicine. There were regulations that were undone during the COVID era to make it easier for people to access telemedicine. That's a wonderful advance. Some of those COVID era policies have been undone, and those regulations are back in place. And I'm really worried that that's something that's going to be replicated throughout society. The new barriers to growth and innovation in dynamism will be erected because our response is not the right response.
Ben Miller:
Right, response of fear. I mean, it's easy to imagine that AI gets better at many of the functions of medicine, for example, like radiology. And then the American Medical Association basically puts regulations around that to prevent its application.
I can also see that this is something closer to my day-to-day, much of the work of an accounting professional could be done by software. And basically, the accounting profession will create barriers which will masquerade as basically saying there's risk, and we got to make the policies more complicated, more review, more audit. And that ends up really as a guild to prevent it from being made obsolete by technology.
So there's no question that's going to be a dialectic. That's going to be entrenched interest fighting against... This is essentially a threat to their profession. It's totally natural. And the question is, how are we going to mediate that differently than the past?
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, yeah. That is my central concern. And we can already see that that dichotomy has existed for a while. I just made the point that for decades, we exposed manufacturing workers, factory workers to globalization, to competition from abroad.
I happen to think that exposing workers to competition from abroad in the long term is a good thing. It has big dislocations in the near term. You got to take care of those workers. You have to have policies in place, domestic policies, that keep spurring the local economies so that there can be an adjustment. But in general, that's a good policy.
Here's the problem. We don't expose doctors and others in the healthcare sector to that same global competition. We limit the number of people who can become doctors. There are very strict regulations on that. There's very strict regulations on allowing people to access healthcare from abroad or remotely.
And imagine what's happening here. You can see it. We expose workers to wage competition from abroad if they're middle class. But then they have to pay the higher cost of getting healthcare, because the high end professions are protected from competition abroad. In that case, the problem is not free trade. The problem is a lack of free trade applying across the whole economy.
And my worry, as you just said, is that, for example, in the case of something like radiology, where eventually AI will likely be able to be really good at diagnosing things, I don't think the regulation response is going to be, "You're not allowed to use AI." But it might be only doctors are allowed to interpret the findings of AI, when maybe that's not necessary, or something like that. It'll be something that protects.
I'm using the case of doctors, and we're going to get emails from doctors who are going to really yell at me. But I'm not trying to single them out. I promise. I think this applies, by the way, to my job in journalism, in media. Absolutely. I should be exposed to that kind of automation, to that kind of competition. There's no excuse to not be exposed to it.
So this applies across society. And that is my big worry. And it's one of several things that I worry about getting wrong in the coming years, but also there might be workarounds to that as well. So again, a lot of these policies already exist. So relative to the status quo, I still think things will keep getting better.
Ben Miller:
Yeah. My biggest concern is the scale of our US indebtedness. That whether it's consumer, or government, or corporate debts, they have ballooned over the last few decades, and they're forecast to double, triple as a result of aging populations. And that debt also falls disproportionately on younger people, and people are less disadvantaged. And there doesn't seem to be any real policy innovation around that. And it seems that so much of dynamism requires risk taking. And when someone is burdened with a lot of debt, it limits their ability to match to the right job and get the right opportunity.
Cardiff Garcia:
You're talking about the national debt, you're talking about government debt, or you're talking about the debt held by households and corporations?
Ben Miller:
I was talking about specifically individuals, but my refrain has been that the financial sector is more fragile than inflation. So they won't be able to tame inflation, because the financial sector will break before you have inflation tame. That's been something I said to you I think the first time we ever had a conversation. I think that's a negative or not optimistic view. Because if they can't tame inflation because the channel which they use to send the message to inflation to tame breaks. And that's because of indebtedness, right? That's really a product of indebtedness.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah. And I want to make a couple of points there. One is that fast economic growth helps with indebtedness a lot. Fast productivity growth helps with indebtedness a lot. But that doesn't mean that it can't slow down the very growth that is necessary to help. I think that's a possibility.
Debt dynamics are tricky. In particular when it comes to the national debt, government debt. And I don't have a great view on what will eventually happen there. But that is worth worrying about. I'm not one of these people who thinks that the debt can go on, and on, and on, especially if it grows as a share of GDP well into the future, or if it's projected to do that. Then I do start getting worried.
The other thing, by the way, we haven't mentioned is that the cost of a lot of energy alternatives has fallen quite radically. Will they fall fast enough and be adopted fast enough to make a big difference in terms of climate change, and in terms of just developing the kinds of domestic industries that matter, and that'll employ a lot of people, and come up with other great innovations and so forth?
I don't know, but there I have the same concern, which is that the technology continues at pace. But societally, will we be able to put in place the kinds of infrastructure changes that are necessary to really adopt it and to use it quickly in time, within years instead of within decades? That's an interesting question to. But I wanted to bring up energy at some point because it's such a crucial part of everything else. And there, my optimism is just by disposition and not evidence based.
Ben Miller:
But that I think is the essence of the case for optimism, that the technology is there and is going to be there. And it's up to us to get it right. And then you have to hope and believe that that will happen.
And I think that there is a good case, especially again, with this generational change. I don't think younger generations are nostalgic, and so are more willing to embrace the other theme of this conversation. Which is that you have to have creative disruption in order to get high productivity, high growth. And what impeded it before was essentially broadly a political, cultural phenomenon. And we're seeing a generational shift since the pandemic of who gets to decide and what people are willing to change. And that should continue this period of actual productivity growth.
Cardiff Garcia:
It's interesting because one of the reasons I was really excited to do this episode, and stating clearly the case for growth instead of doing a kind of wishy-washy like, "Here are the forces in favor of optimism. Here are the forces in favor of pessimism." It's because of something I've learned during this podcast with you in the last year.
Something I've realized is that a lot of what people like me do, economics commentators, economics watchers, economists themselves, is not super useful to people like you. Or it's of limited use, I should say.
Because you actually have responsibility for allocating actual investor money into something which means you need a clearly stated case and a clearly stated defensible base case for what's going to happen, as opposed to the kind of caveat ridden things that someone like me might say. And it's been fun trying to jump into those shoes and say, "Here's what I think is the base case. I'm optimistic about all these things." And you can be flexible. You can start talking about the things that might slow it down, and you should, and you should be ready to change your mind. But it's been fun to just say, "This is why I'm optimistic damn it." And it's actually a lot of fun.
Ben Miller:
Yeah. I mean as an investor, we currently invest at this point, billions. Either you're buying or selling, because to hold is to buy. So the essence of the analysis is you have to position yourself so you can withstand a downside, and then you move to focus on the upside. And so we did that, and I think that in an ironic sense today, as negative as the dynamics are, the multiples you'd pay buying versus in 2021 the price per square foot. Any price you pay today is far better than you would've paid when economy seemed red-hot in 2021 and price is inseparable from risk.
So the optimism, as an investor, you have to think of it as a fundamental price decision, and then also as a forecast about how things are likely to play out. And in the short term as things bottom out, that's a great time to get aggressive. And so here we are getting optimistic.
The real question is when is it time to really start to deploy, really start to buy? On a tactical basis, we're seeing opportunities as a lender. Occasionally there's a really good buy on a property. But still broadly, there's a limbo period of will it or won't it? When's the next shoe to drop? And I'm firmly in the view that there will be another shoe to drop.
And that's actually, I think part of that magic of investing is conviction. And most people don't have conviction. So I have conviction on the short run about what I think is going to happen, which I've been expressedly clear about. And then now, we're trying to formulate a conviction around both what an optimistic case looks like, and then how you would invest into it.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah. And our default dynamic on this show has been that in the past year and change, you've been seeing some worrying signs. And I'm sort of like the counterpart who says, "Well, okay, fine. But I'm by nature optimistic. So here are some things to at least keep in mind."
But it strikes me that you wouldn't be doing what you do if you weren't a medium and long-term optimist by nature either. It's not like your entire investment philosophy is to short different parts of the US economy. You're buying things that you expect to go up over time. Both in housing, and in the property sectors, and now in tech. So there is a necessary, I'm guessing, strain of optimism in you as well.
Ben Miller:
Right. And if you look at our portfolio, what we just covered, we invest in housing in the Sun Belt. That's basically focused on a middle class or more affordable priced entry point. Industrial for what turns out to be mostly onshoring manufacturing and chips, and technology.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, it is.
Ben Miller:
Our investments express their opinion, so the benefit of the show is to make our opinion more manifest for the investment.
Cardiff Garcia:
And clear so people can ask questions as well, and send in questions to you, and to your investment team also. And you can field those. And they've been doing a lot of that, which is excellent.
Ben Miller:
They do have a lot of investors. Well, how would you want to sum up the case here going forward, Cardiff?
Cardiff Garcia:
The period after the Great Recession was grindingly awful. The direct effects of COVID have also been awful. But underneath all that, the forces of reform have been activated. You just have to know where to look.
And the things that have happened in the last few years in the economy have shocked me. Genuinely shocked me as somebody who as a journalist covered the aftermath of the financial crisis.
What's just now happened in the aftermath of COVID has shown that actually, society can learn. It can do things better. That all of us are not just the product of the moment, but the product of the things that we've gone through in the past. And that sometimes, those lessons are learned by policymakers, but also to people in the private sector, to normal folks just trying to get by, who now suddenly found the courage, the conviction to try new things, to experiment.
These things can be really tough, but they yield tremendous benefits in the medium and long term. And we're seeing a lot of those trends that I think can yield those benefits now.
So lots of problems. We've covered them, but I am excited. I genuinely am, and I've never felt this way since I graduated college in the teeth of the aftermath of the dot-com bubble when the market sucked. It was a terrible recovery. Then a few years later when things looked like they were getting better, we had a horrible financial crisis. All kinds of geopolitical events in the last couple of decades that have been rough.
And now, we're starting to see the fruits of that learning, of all that learning of the last couple of decades. And I'm hopeful that they'll continue. And I am quite excited about the economic future. How about you? Have I convinced you at all? Are you persuaded that the future is so bright, that you're going to have to start wearing sunglasses?
Ben Miller:
That's my view as well. Starting 2024 or starting when the winter starts to thaw, and right now it's still mid-winter, so it's premature. But you do a lot of preparation for the spring.
But yeah, I'm optimistic. I'm seeing incredible energy from people I work with and from other organizations. Really, it reminds me of the '90s. It really does, in terms of the type of excitement, and new things. I feel like what you've really said was onward.
Cardiff Garcia:
Yeah, that is kind of what I said. Unintentionally, but that is absolutely what I said. I suspect that a lot of our listeners are going to have some pointed questions about what we just said. Because we covered some big themes, including some controversial ones. So I'm actually kind of psyched to see the kind of feedback that we end up getting. Keep it nice, keep it respectful, but feel free to disagree with us as firmly and as aggressively as you want. Ben, this was awesome man. This was a really fun chat.
Ben Miller:
You're an inspiring person Cardiff.
Cardiff Garcia:
Same. And next month, I'll be back grilling Ben again. We'll be back in our typical positions, I think. So you have been listening to Onward, the Fundrise podcast featuring Ben Miller, CEO of Fundrise. I'm Cardiff Garcia of Xinjiang, and we invite you again to please send your comments and questions to onward@fundrise.com. And if you liked everything you heard or if you just liked some of what you heard, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.
Finally, for more information on Fundrise sponsored investment products, including all relevant legal disclaimers, please check out our show notes. This podcast was produced by The Podcast Consultant. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next episode.
