First Trust ROI Podcast

ROI Podcast | | Episode 23 | Is Government Spending Boosting or Slowing the Economy? | Brian Wesbury | June 17, 2024

• First Trust Portfolios • Season 1 • Episode 23

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On this episode of the podcast, Ryan asks Brian Wesbury about the impact of government spending on economic growth, the upcoming presidential election, and whether or not tariffs are an effective policy tool.

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Ryan:

Hi, welcome to this episode of the First Trust ROI podcast. I'm Ryan Issakainen, ETF strategist at First Trust. Once again on this episode of the podcast, I'm joined by Brian Westbury, chief economist at First Trust. Brian and I are going to dig into why government size growing a little bit too big can hinder economic growth and a variety of other related questions. Always a great episode when I can get Brian Westbury on with me. Thanks for joining us. Hope you enjoy. So, B brian, thanks again for coming on the podcast. You were with us not too long ago and I'm glad you agreed to come on again because I have more questions for you and where I wanted to start. You travel around a lot and speak with our clients and financial professionals and they always have questions for you. Someone will raise their hand after you've given a speech and I suspect that oftentimes you get the same question in that sort of Q&A session. So, as you think about the last four weeks five weeks what's the number one question you've been getting?

Brian:

Yeah, well, I mean, obviously we get you know, we talk about the Fed, we talk about the election, but I think the number one fear that investors have, which they've voiced to their advisors and actually some advisors have advisors and actually some advisors have is the US debt. We're now over $34 trillion in total. That's not debt held by the public, but that includes all the trust funds, and they're like how can we ever deal with this? We have a trillion dollars a year in net interest expense right now and it's you know. How can you know the US is gonna go broke and while most of our viewers your viewers, won't Know these names, but Reinhardt and Rogoff wrote a book about debt at the country level and they kind of came up with this theory that if you go over 100% of GDP with your debt, that that's it. Then you collapse. And the minute this book came out, the minute I read it, I'm like this is just not true. If we look at Japan, they are up to 220%, something like that Don't quote me on the number, but it's close of 220 percent of GDP in government debt and yet they're still I mean, they're not, you know, blowing the doors off. They're not a poster child for economic growth. But they're not collapsing, and that's the key. And so I would argue we're not going to collapse either.

Brian:

And one of the reasons for that is that if you look at all the assets of the United States and I know we can go into all kinds of different ways to look at assets versus debt, but I just look at the assets of the United States I was flying over Indianapolis one day, one evening, and the lights are down there and you know it's always pretty to fly it on in a clear night and I just started wondering how much would it cost to rebuild Indianapolis? I mean, what's the assets down there? And I kind of, in my mind's eye, came up with a trillion dollars. You know, if you think of all the roads, all the warehouses, all the houses, all the cars, you know all the retail stores a trillion dollars. If you think of all the roads, all the warehouses, all the houses, all the cars, all the retail stores a trillion dollars. What about Manhattan? It's $30 trillion. And we do know, and we have a pretty good number that comes from the Fed, there are $300 trillion worth of assets in the United States.

Brian:

And then I ask whoever asked me the question I say if your Uncle Sam passed away and left you a company worth $300 million, but he also had a $34 million loan from a bank, would you be mad at your Uncle Sam million loan from a bank? Would you be mad at your Uncle Sam? And the answer is no. You'd be filthy rich. And so, even though we have this $34 trillion in debt, we're still filthy rich. We're the most productive country in the world.

Brian:

Now, I'm not saying that it's okay to have $34 trillion in debt and run $2 trillion a year deficits and eventually, if we keep going this way, we will get in trouble. But as of right now, no, we are not, and this has been going on since the beginning of my career. I remember when the debt was $2 trillion and Reagan was running $400 billion a year deficits and everybody was saying the world was going to come to an end. And here we are, you know, trillions and dozens of trillions of dollars later, and we're still growing or have grown. And so it's not that it's. I'm not worried that our government's out of control, but it's not the debt. And so if I was looking at something to be worried about, it would be the size of government spending, and right now it's bigger than it's ever been in the history of the United States.

Ryan:

So the $34 trillion in debt. I think one of the concerns that some people have is not just the size of the assets, but the fact that as you refinance that debt at higher interest rates, you're committing more of the assets, but the fact that as you refinance that debt at higher interest rates, you're committing more of the national wealth to interest payments.

Brian:

Oh, yeah, and it's going to squeeze all kinds of budgets. And what's fascinating about this? To kind of look at it from a little bit of a different angle, five years ago we should have been issuing 30-year, 50-year, 100-year debt in the United States. In fact, we're paying $400 or $500 billion a year more in interest today than we would today if we had issued 100-year debt five years ago or six years ago I mean, you have to pick the year and so the government has not been responsible. But the reason they did that is because, hey, if I can borrow at 0.1 or 0.2, that leaves more of my budget to spend on other things. If I issued 100-year debt at 2% on other things, if I issued a hundred year debt at 2% because that's what it would have been, 2.2, something like that Well then I can't spend that.

Brian:

So Congress is so short-sighted that they would, and the treasury too and remember they worked for the president so that they didn't issue this debt because they wanted more of the budget to spend on other stuff. Well, eventually what happens is you get inflation, interest rates go up and now you have less money to spend on other stuff and we now have a permanent deficit in the United States it's at least a trillion. It may be as high as two trillion, as far as the eye can see, and this is a disaster because government spending keeps going up. But when I say disaster, it's not a collapse of the economy, but what we end up doing is making different decisions about where we spend money. We constantly are pushing for more tax hikes, which would hurt the economy, and eventually that's what happens If a country has a lot of debt and then raises taxes to fix it. That's when we hurt economic growth and that's what kills the economy. It's not the debt itself, it's the reaction to it.

Ryan:

So the size of government I've heard you talk on this several times you think is too large, and part of the reason why is because it chokes off other parts of the economy. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Brian:

Sure, there are a lot of people that look at debt and they say it crowds out other debt. So if the government's going to borrow an extra trillion, that's a trillion that other people can't borrow. Well, think about that for a second. So let's say the government raised taxes by a trillion and then we got rid of that deficit. We didn't have to borrow the trillion of that deficit. We didn't have to borrow the trillion. But people still don't have the trillion, and so it's spending that crowds out the private sector.

Brian:

And so when I look at our economy today, federal government is 23% of GDP, state and local governments are 20% of GDP. And then the cost of regulation. So just think about complying with taxes. If you're a landscaper, the paperwork you have to put together just to carry a chemical in your truck is outrageous. Anyway, you add up all the cost of regulation. Private sector pays 7% of all its output just to comply with government rules. And so 23 federal, 20 state and local, 7% from regulation. That's 50% of everything we produce, and it has to be paid for by the private sector because the federal government doesn't make money. So every dollar that the private sector earns, 50% of that is either borrowed from it or taxed from it and taken toward government projects.

Brian:

Now here's the deal. It's pretty simple. If government is less efficient all the time when it tries to do projects because it has no incentive, there's no competition. It's a monopoly. You can just look at the school system in the United States. Public schools have continued to fail and we keep adding more and more money. So what's happening is we're getting worse results the more money we put in. And so there are certain things government does that help us Court system, fire, police defense. We could probably list a whole bunch. But after a certain point, when you use all this money for redistribution, you're now punishing productive sectors of the economy, subsidizing less productive sectors of the economy, and that leads to slower growth. We can see it in Europe. Europe has been growing one, one and a half percent a year for the last 40 years, and that's about where the US is today. Our underlying growth rate is under 2%. I think it's pretty close to one and a half percent. That's the worst it's been maybe in history in the United States.

Ryan:

So the reason that government is a less efficient or less productive spender isn't necessarily because those people are worse employees. But it's all about incentives, is what I'm trying to say. There's no competition on the one hand, and on the other hand, there's really not market signals. The private sector has market signals, right, exactly. The government doesn't have competition. Therefore, they don't really have those same signals that they can use to guide their spending.

Brian:

Exactly, and that's why you know there's two ways to allocate resources political power or through the market. If you develop a product that people want and then they buy and you make profits, that is a signal that you ought to be doing more of what you're doing In the private sector. Ludwig von Mises, one of my favorite economists of all time, he always said profits are the signal that you're using resources correctly. Losses are the signal that you're using resources incorrectly, and so money will flow to those people who use it well. And then what government does is they turn around and they call those people greedy, when in fact they're the opposite of greedy. They're the heroes. They are providing a service or a good to consumers at a price that is less than the consumer believes. The value on the other side is Because you don't buy something. If you think you're paying too much, I mean, I know I get it, people do, but in general a transaction is I think I'm getting more for my money than holding on to the money, and that's why people do it.

Brian:

Well, you think about government. What have they done? I'll go back to the school system. We have a public school system. Many public schools are great. There are a lot, especially in inner cities, that aren't, and we keep funding them more and more. Their outcome, the test scores, et cetera, keep getting worse and worse. And then, instead of letting charter schools or private schools, which can do a better job, often flourish, they do everything they can to stop it, and so the monopoly of government, they set up rules to lock people into an inefficient system.

Brian:

This happens everywhere. You know look who's against clean air. And you know solar and wind seem clean, but they can't. We know. Now just look at Europe Germany, where they've run out of electricity, where there are brownouts in California. We know this isn't the complete answer. It's too early. We're trying to force our system to go in a direction that that maybe it will go in the future, but we're not counting on the market to get us there. We're using the government power to do it and, as a result, we're shifting resources into a sector of the economy that doesn't have the returns that the fossil fuel industry does, and so we lose jobs as a result. The government will always claim they create jobs and clean energy jobs, but for every job they create there, we lose more than one somewhere else in the economy because we're using those resources, that money, in a less efficient way than the private sector would.

Ryan:

Greg Linsalata MD. Yeah, the energy industry, I think is sector is just fascinating to me and all the you know, infrastructure, the power grid that goes along with that, especially because, as you mentioned, there's areas that are facing deficiencies and shortages of energy and, at the same time, you've got things like cryptocurrency mining, which, you know, last year, I think, used about the same amount of energy just to mine Bitcoin as the country of the Netherlands and based on last year's rate growth, you project that forward, it'll be as big as the UK by 2026. I mean, not to mention electric vehicles, not to mention all these data centers for AI, there's going to be a tremendous amount of energy demand coming down the road, and there already has been. And so, to your point, how are you going to actually meet those needs?

Brian:

right, it's going to be a combination of things, yeah, and if the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining, you can't do it that way, and I was gonna. I'm glad you added ai in there. These, these supercomputers that they're building, are massive draws of electricity and and so if you believe that's the future, the system we're building is not reliable enough to power that. I mean. The government just promised billions and billions of dollars to build charging stations and they and they and they're just inefficient at getting it done because there's no competition and you know, people, they, we fight back against all of this stuff all the time, not not we, but but the people in the country do so.

Brian:

For example, vouchers in public schools let parents choose where the kids, their kids, go school, and there are a lot of teachers that believe, well, that will kill public schools. Well, first of all, that's a sign If they think that that means they're less efficient, but second of all, it's not true. If you look at the US university system, it's world class. Nobody has a better system of higher education than the United States, and only 25% of the schools are private. That's it. So that was a system where there's lots of competition and yet only 25% are private, and I think that's where we would probably settle down with primary education, if we put vouchers in. But if you're a public school you have to have faith that you can compete, and by competing you have to get better. And so all of these things come back to. This Government is the opposite of competition, and without competition people don't get better.

Ryan:

You know, in my mind that clearly brings up the elections coming up and I'm not going to ask you to endorse a politician or who the next president is going to be, but I am going to ask you if you have a sense. You know, obviously it's early June, this will probably post late June. At this point in time, do you have a sense on who might win the presidency and maybe, more importantly, does it really matter?

Brian:

Yeah, you know, and I know this is jumping in the quagmire if you will, but if you look at betting markets, you can bet on the outcome. The UK really started this and now it's spread to some online platforms all over the world and the United States too. If you go from before the Trump trial in New York about his hiding payments, and you know, if you go from before that to now, the odds of him winning, according to the betting markets, have gone up dramatically, and so I like markets, and so if you're putting your money down to bet that Trump's going to win and more people are doing that than that Biden would win that's a pretty good sign, and they're not often wrong, these markets, and so right now, he's the favored and I think he's likely to win, and one of the reasons I think this is that inflation has become a worldwide problem. Immigration has become a worldwide problem. People are really focused on it. Economic growth around the world has slowed. Covid was there are. I mean, it's a mess in so many different ways. Whether we talk about the policies that we put in place, the lockdowns, the mandates you know all of the things we did to people. People are not happy and the pendulum seems to be swinging.

Brian:

So in Argentina, javier Millet was elected. He quotes Milton Friedman. He reminds me I mean he's not anywhere near the same personality, but his policies kind of remind me of Ronald Reagan and that was the pendulum swing that got us out of the 70s Millet's 70s malaise. Right now, president Biden is less popular than Jimmy Carter was when Reagan beat him. In Canada, justin Trudeau, the current prime minister, is in trouble. The last poll I saw is he's down 17 points to and I never say his name, right, pierre Polivet. It's a French name, and he quotes Milton Friedman as well. Now, I haven't ever heard Trump quote Milton Friedman, but he is talking to people like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are quoting Milton Friedman, and Nikki Haley, who are all pretty free-market conservatives, and that's the kind of pendulum swing in the that Reagan brought.

Brian:

That really changed the course of the country and I think people are ready for it. I think people feel like the pendulum has gone too far and I think that will be a real positive. So I know we've talked about this before, but I tell advisors put your seatbelt on, because I still think we're going to have a recession. But if the pendulum swings politically and we don't raise tax rates. The know the Trump tax cuts end next year. If Trump's in power, they're not going to go away, especially if the Republicans win the House, the Senate and the presidency, which I think could be a real possibility. It's not like we're going to change the spending and deficits and everything all overnight, but policies will actually get better. So I think we're going to have a recession, but add the technology that we have today with a better set of free market policies, and I think the future looks really bright.

Ryan:

Let's say that President Trump is reelected and the Senate and the House all go to the Republicans and the tax cuts are extended, but spending isn't trimmed.

Brian:

Right.

Ryan:

I mean or maybe that is too much to assume I'll ask that question to you Is it likely that the Republicans will put in policies and spending priorities that are actually going to be smaller, or is it just smaller than what the Biden administration would have done?

Brian:

Yeah, if we look back over history, I mean I am a. When it really gets down to my core, it's intellectual beliefs, philosophical beliefs. I'm a libertarian. So I'm not a Republican, I'm not a Democrat, I'm a libertarian. I believe in smaller government and, for all the reasons that we talked about, when government gets too big, we slow down. It makes problems worse, not better, and we're to that point. So we need to cut the size. But, being a libertarian, I'm mad at Republicans and Democrats because all of them spend. Seems like you go to Washington and that's what you do.

Brian:

It's easy to spend other people's money, especially if you think it helps you politically, and Reagan was able to do it. You know Trump. He was a Democrat all his life. I don't think he came in wanting to spend. I don't think George Bush came in wanting to spend. But then they all find out that if we do give this away here, give that away there. The people like us for doing that and it worries me.

Brian:

So we need a change in philosophy. And there are a couple of people out there I mean, if you listen to Vivek Ramaswamy, who probably will end up with a prominent role if Trump does win, he's going to be a voice of smaller government. We have a lot of congressmen and congresswomen and senators who are saying the same thing, so I hold out hope. Sometimes I feel like Don Quixote in I'm going to change the world and bring the knights back and fight the windmills, and you know he was ineffective and maybe I will be too. But the reason basically is because when you go to Washington, I think thinking gets changed and when we look at this political environment, spending gets you votes. Therefore you spend and somehow we have to find a way to change that. And I don't know what it is, but I guess I'm still hoping.

Ryan:

Still hoping. And you've been in Washington, you've worked. You were the chief economist of the Senate budget committee.

Brian:

Chief economist of the Joint Economic Committee, yeah, of the US Congress. No, it's the longest title ever. It sounds really, really important. When we locked down, I was there when Newt Gingrich shut down the government and Bill Clinton, because they were in a fight and I was essential. I always laughed about that and I was essential for the US government to operate. That's such a joke. That worked. I mean, when we shut down the government.

Brian:

Today, republicans are terrified of shutting down the government, but Newt Gingrich did it. I mean, he got in a fight with Bill Clinton. Both of them let it happen, but the end result was we ended up with less spending and a balanced budget by the end of Clinton's term. We had a balanced budget. In fact, we were running surpluses. We had a balanced budget. In fact, we were running surpluses.

Brian:

By the way, one thing people don't remember is Alan Greenspan, who was the chairman of the Fed at the time, gave testimony in Congress that said I'm worried because we use Treasury bonds to manage monetary policy. We buy and sell them and we're running these surpluses and we might run out of Treasury bonds to do monetary policy. We buy and sell them and we're running these surpluses and we might run out of treasury bonds to do monetary policy and I'm like, please do Like, wouldn't that be great if there's no more debt? But he actually was testifying those kinds of things and I think that's. People make mistakes about all kinds of stuff. One of the biggest mistakes that leads to more government spending is this idea that there's a multiplier to government spending. So if we have a dollar that we add to welfare or we raise the minimum wage by a dollar, that it actually adds more than a dollar to GDP. This is one of the kind of the bedrock principles of Keynesian economics.

Ryan:

I've heard that many times.

Brian:

Yeah, it is so untrue If it, because if there's a multiplier for that, then there's a multiplier for everything, and private sector dollar spent has a multiplier. Why wouldn't it? Only government money, when it's spent, has a multiplier, and so somehow they've gotten away with things that make zero sense and nobody seems to think about them. But that's what they tell themselves in Washington. So whenever they pass a bill, they assume they're going to get more than what we spent and it's just going to lead to great wealth. And yet the bigger the government gets, the slower we grow.

Brian:

The other thing that they kind of believe in nowadays and we are closer to state-run capitalism than we've been in a long time but we passed a bill a couple hundred billion dollars for semiconductors. It's the CHIPS bill, the CHIPS Act, and the whole idea is we're going to, we need to compete against China, and what's fascinating to me is that what that really says is we're trying to be like China, to beat China, because China directs everything by the government. So now we're going to do it, but we'll never be as good as China at being China, because we're not communist and, by the way, if we were, we would fail just like they are. So I don't get this. This is the wrong way to go. We should be trusting the private sector. In fact, the number one chip company in the world is NVIDIA, and it didn't get there with government money. So, at least right now, I think they're overvalued, but nonetheless, they didn't get there with government money.

Ryan:

The semiconductor industry is really interesting when it comes to government spending. In my reckoning, just because there is so much demand right now, ai has created a tremendous amount of demand, and there's always been demand for semiconductors, and it's difficult to fabricate them as quickly as industry needs them, and so the market signals we were talking about before should tell semiconductor companies they need to build more. They need to build more factories, and they're doing that. So my question is would the government if, setting aside the CHIPS Act, if that never took place, would there still be this level of spending that we're seeing, because there's been a huge growth in factory construction for semiconductors?

Brian:

Yeah, part of it is coming from the CHIPS Act, but it would be happening anyway. What worries me is and I haven't done the complete deep dive and figured this out completely but I have seen too many times over history where companies sort of they cozy up to the government, and one of the ways that that's been happening in the last decade or so is through ESG and DEI, and my belief is that some of our greatest chip companies in the world have moved in that direction and and instead of focusing on creating a really good product and staying on the cutting edge of technology, they've been focusing on things that have nothing to do with their core business. They're going to become more diverse. They're going to put grass roofs on all their office buildings and become more green. None of that has to do with creating the next greatest chip. That's my theory.

Brian:

I'm working on studying whether that's true or not. I won't name companies because I think it's I can't prove it number one. But I won't name companies because I can't prove it number one, but I feel like I read enough. I follow enough news to know that there are a bunch of companies out there that redirected their focus and then the next thing. You know they have problems financially and corporately, and I think that's going on, and government, by subsidizing this, is kind of pushing people in that way or trying to make up for the mistakes, and so we end up having companies go the route of ESG, dei, and then they fall behind and then government gives them money to try and catch up and it's not going to work. I mean, we government Japan used big government, big business, big banks, and they got lucky.

Brian:

They picked consumer products in the 70s and 80s and they crushed it and they were exporting all over the world. And we're buying their motorcycles, their cars, their Walkman. That's when Sony exploded and became household name, and then it stopped working because other people figured it out, and so that just kind of proves it. It doesn't matter how much government subsidizes it. If you pick the wrong thing or if you're inefficient with your investments, you're going to lose anyway. And so that's why I say we can't beat China by being like China. The way you beat China is to be like America, which means free markets and capitalism is to be like America, which means free markets and capitalism.

Ryan:

So we've gone about 25-ish minutes without me mentioning the Fed.

Ryan:

And I'm actually happy about that Last time we spoke, the point that you made that I thought was great was we've talked too much about the Fed, because why do they play such a central role? But I'm going to bring up the Fed anyway, because the European Central Bank just cut rates for the first time in this cycle and I guess I'm curious what your thoughts are as to how that will influence the Fed. Will they kind of think, well, they're behind and maybe that will push them in the direction of cutting more quickly than they otherwise might?

Brian:

Yeah, it's really fascinating. We had 3% real GDP growth last year, which is pretty good. I actually think half of it came from government spending the CHIPS Act and all the other subsidies that they're providing, but leave that aside. We had 3% growth. We have 4% unemployment in the US today. Inflation is running hotter than 2%, which the Fed claims that's their target. The stock market is really close to all-time highs.

Brian:

Why would you cut rates? I mean, what's the evidence? But I think it's because it's an election year. People want a rate cut. It makes everybody feel better and maybe mortgage rates come down and the things that are bothering people about high rates today become less. And today I think that would be the only reason the Fed cuts rates, but they're likely to do it. I mean, it seems like if you just sort of look at the ether I always call it, look at the corner of your eye, listen out of the corner of your ear there's way more talk about rate cuts than holding them steady and the ECB cutting rates. It definitely, you know, if one of the things you're worried about is currencies, so if we cut rates and they didn't, then maybe the dollar would weaken. But if they've now cut rates and we cut rates. It doesn't affect the currency. So they kind of gave us some room. If you in in the global financial system, ecb cutting rates makes it easier for the Fed to.

Ryan:

You mentioned currency, and that made me think of another issue that I wanted to ask you about, and that is during the last Trump administration. One of the things that was a policy tool was tariffs. He put tariffs in place, and obviously that was done tactically, mainly with China, but also with Europe, and I'm just curious, just curious from a philosophical standpoint is that a good tool to be using? Is it a bad tool? They have an opinion there yeah, my.

Brian:

My knee-jerk response, being a free market economist, is tariffs are terrible, and if you go back and you look at the smooth Ollie tariff Act, there are a lot of economists and I'm one of them who believe that was one of the key causes of the Great Depression. But one thing we have to remember is that that smooth-ally tariff was across the board. I think it was 30 percent on every import into the United States, no matter what from what country, where it didn't matter. The targeted ones are a little different, especially when we're looking at China and I'm not an expert on everything China does, but I read enough experts. They clearly subsidize industry, play unfairly with their currency values, they have abused the most favored nation status that we kind of gave them under Reagan, and so I would look at these lower tariffs that have been on Chinese goods over the last couple of decades and the fact that they've they committed so hard to exporting their way to wealth that they, that they, they compete unfairly and and and. So I always think, hey, keeping tariffs low on them for for a couple of decades was good.

Brian:

We lifted eight or nine hundred million people in China out of poverty. They went from bicycles to cars. I mean it's obvious. If you look at pictures of Shanghai in the 70s, the roads were packed. I mean you step in the street, you get run over by bicycles. Today, step in the street, you get run over by cars. Bikes are gone. They're wealthier. So I always say, hey, grow up, get a haircut, get a job and pay tariffs like everybody else. So it didn't bother me as much even though I'm a knee jerk free trader. It didn't bother me as much that we went after China. I don't want to see a broad-based tariff or us to use those just to protect certain industries. So there's one thing about China and I just described it all. It's a total other thing to start using tariffs as an economic tool.

Ryan:

I think I'm kind of similar to you in the sort of knee-jerk response. I just think if someone's willing to sell me a product at a cheaper price, it's good for me to buy it.

Brian:

in general, Absolutely Totally agree, and we've benefited from that. But I would also put one other layer I didn't mention this and that is national defense. If we don't have rare earth minerals and if we don't have steel production capability or aluminum or the things that we need to make ships and tanks and planes and the rudimentary tools of the military, and we outsource that to the rest of the world, that makes us really vulnerable, and you don't want to lose the expertise in those industries. So I could also argue for tariffs from a national defense perspective, and I wouldn't work. However, if they're strategic enough, they can actually mess up other countries by subsidizing steel so much that we forget how to produce it, and China seems to be the worst of the group.

Brian:

They're the ones that have figured out how to make steel, and now they subsidize it, and they're doing it to undermine our industries, and so, yeah, maybe we ought to fight back.

Ryan:

Well, brian, it's been about 40 minutes. Time flies by once again. We were going to try to make this a little. Well, brian, it's been about 40 minutes. Time flies by once again. We were going to try to make this a little bit shorter this time, but there's about 10 other questions that I wanted to ask you that we won't have time for. So hopefully we can do this again sometime soon, maybe later on this summer, but thank you again for coming on the podcast.

Brian:

It's always great. I look at you and I see Joe Rogan, so you've got a great future. It's fun to talk to you.

Ryan:

Great to talk with you as well. Thanks to all of you for joining us once again on this episode of the First Trust ROI podcast. We'll see you next time.

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Ryan O. Issakainen, CFA | Senior Vice President | ETF Strategist

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