Bids, Boards and Bubbles

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[Music]

Hello, I'm Alan Kohler, Editor-at-Large of Intelligent Investor and co-host of Kohler & Kohler, the podcast with my son.

And I'm Stephen Mayne, contributor at Intelligent Investor, founder of Crikey, shareholder advocate and publisher of The Mayne Report - if you're getting to do Kohler & Kohler, I'm going to do The Mayne Report, Alan.

Fair enough - and we are The Money Café.

We are The Money Café.

I had to say something because I'm no longer mentioning the ABC.

That's right, it's seven days of liberation, seven days since you were last on television, how does it feel?

This is the third day in a row that I haven't had to wear makeup, which is amazing. I've been wearing makeup for 24 years.

Gosh, so you're not getting made up for your videos with Chris?

Well, I'm dabbing a bit of powder on...

Oh, self-help, there you go! DIY makeup at home...

That's right.

[Laughs]

Stephen, tell us about your encounter with the father of Marnus Labuschagne, or 'Labus-shag-ne', as they call him in South Africa, come on!

Well, it's hard to keep up with everything but I've nominated for his board, Aeris Resources...

What's his company?

Aeris Resources, they're a Queensland-based miner, market cap of half a billion or thereabouts and at the time, I thought it was my 100^th nomination, but since then another two have come in so it's actually going to be the 102^nd, but I was reading a notice of meeting last night and they've actually been very cheeky. Marnus's dad has written, "At the time of the notice, Mr Mayne held 1,076 shares, which represents approximately 0.0000001 per cent of the company." So he's put six ducks in there to stress what a tiny shareholder I am, I thought that was a bit cheeky.

I thought he would come to the grand bargain that now 30 other companies have come to, which is to negotiate a withdrawal of the nomination in exchange for offering online questions at the AGM. But he, along with a very small number of other companies such as BHP, Minerals 260, Greatland Gold, DigiCo, Genesis Minerals and Tasmea have all said, "Nope, we don't want online questions. You can run for the board on your stupid platform, mate." So that's what I'm doing.

Right, so are you running for Andre Labuschagne's board?

Yes.

And what did he say about you?

He just said that I've got six zeros of a shareholding, so it's just tiny.

I thought he said something else, anyway...

Oh look, yeah, "Serial pest...", "Runs all the time..." all this sort of stuff. It is amusing how the different ways they treat you. Tasmea, which is a $3 billion Adelaide company, they've just totally censored the platform, like BRG. I'm still getting companies saying, "You're not valid because you didn't hand-deliver it at the office..." Chalice Mining, GR Engineering and a few others... Geoff Wilson - you'll like this one. I remember last time I was on the pod with you I talked about running for five of Geoff Wilson's nine AGMs on the same day in Sydney on November 18 and the platform was picking on the five of them that don't have a majority of independent directors, so I'm saying, "Elect Stephen Mayne, I'll be the third independent director and then we'll have a majority of independent directors."

Well, he's responded, he's appointed four new directors to five of these companies, including my old mate, Sally Loane, the former ABC mornings presenter in Sydney. All these people are getting jobs, Alan, as directors, so that Geoff can say, "We've now got a majority of independent directors, vote against the serial pest because I've fixed the issue!"

Right - and you've organised a job for Sally Loane, that's great, good old Sally...

Yeah, and Anderson at WAM Income Maximiser, Kim Evans at WAM Strategic Value, Rodney Ebsworth at WAM Active... I should be getting a commission from these people, getting these new board seats because of me.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And what did you say, you've got 30 companies that have buckled under your pressure?

They've done a bargain, yep, and that's actually going to be read out. Tomorrow at BHP is the first of what will probably finish up being 25 to 30 nominations before Christmas, but BHP is the first tomorrow, in Sydney, slow day for me, no webcast so I won't be going, so they've said, "Do you want to play some audio?" So I've sent them two minutes of audio...

What are you saying?

They're going to play this at the meeting, it talks about the fact that all these companies have come to this bargain but BHP wouldn't deal and they're the only top 10 company that doesn't have online access to their AGM, what is the problem with BHP?

What do you think that is? Why wouldn't they do that?

I think over the years, big miners, you've been smashed by all the activists of different varieties and so you develop a bit of a siege mentality and you don't want to give your critics a platform and so if you can get away with having physical-only meetings around the country with the toughest security of any AGMs, then you can have a relatively quick AGM and you don't get videos on your website of anti-uranium or climate or unions or me or whatever it is. They shouldn't be able to get away with it, that's why I'm running, because they've just been getting away with it for the last four years and no one's been having a crack at them about this and they spray money around to a whole bunch of people, they sponsor Joe Aston's website, they've given $10,000 to the ASA, they sponsor AFR conferences. They're sort of untouchable and they're getting away with terrible AGM practice. So I've just said, "Come on, BHP! If you're getting away with it, it means everyone else can get away with it so we need to fix this..." and they wouldn't deal, so hopefully they get shamed into it after tomorrow.

You know what? I don't think they will get shamed into it, I don't think they're capable of being shamed...

I think they will because they look stupid. All these other companies - and I can't name too many of them, I can name Origin Energy, but so many big companies have come to the bargain because it's such a small thing to ask for, Alan. It's 2026 and you're telling me I've got to fly to Perth to go to the AGM. It's ridiculous. But the point I've got is I'm doing so many meetings now, I did seven yesterday, I've got eight today, the problem with all these companies buckling is I then have to turn up and ask questions. It's going to finish at about 350 meetings for the year, I think, the way it's going.

And you're asking questions at all of them, are you?

Yeah, like yesterday was Genesis Energy in New Zealand, Globe, Bendigo, L1 Group, Codan, Region Group and Cuscal; and today is SkyCity, Fletcher Building, Bega, Vulcan Steel, Transurban, EBOS, Sigma and Equity Trustees. And now that you're no longer doing five hours in the ABC studio every day, I'm going to start appointing you as my proxy at Melbourne AGMs and if you happen to be walking past, you can pop in and ask your first ever question at an AGM, boss.

[Laughs]

You're working from home, you need to get out more. You need to get out when you're working from home. Get out to an AGM, get a few nice sandwiches, it'd be perfect for you.

Stephen, I take the dog for a walk sometimes.

Oh, that's nice.

But in order to ask all these questions, you've got to know something about all these companies, don't you?

Well, some of it's a bit once over lightly, but I've got my standard questions, like SkyCity this morning - and AI helps - "PwC's been the auditor for 30 years, how many tenders have you run over 30 years? When was the last tender? When's the next tender?" It's just the standard questions.

Line and length, Stephen...

Because I'm only asking three or four and because you can go back and look at last year - "You censored me last year when I asked you this, please answer it this year." So you can sort of do it to scale after a while.

Right. [Laughs] Industrial scale annual meeting attendance, unbelievable.

Yes, but you can't do it at scale if you - I turned up at ARB Group, you know the four-wheel drive accessories company?

Yeah.

And ARB stands for Andrew and Roger Brown and they're the two founders. I'd never been to their AGM so I turned up and I said, "How many times have Andrew and Roger been on opposite sides of a board vote?" And Andrew Brown said, "None." And I said, "Has there ever been a non-unanimous vote in the board?" And Roger Brown said, "No." And then Roger Brown said, "Could you sit down, Stephen? Please, that's enough, okay? You've had your turn, I've watched you at other meetings, just sit there!" So I got sat down, my first ever ARB meeting and then I did say, "Gee whiz, you can see what happens when you take on the Browns at this company..."

[Laughs]

And next time I got the microphone, I said, "I'm going to stay seated as I ask these questions, just in case the Browns tell me to sit down again." Anyway, it was good fun.

That's pretty good.

Great company, just a slightly grumpy 76-year-old founder who doesn't like questions.

76, is he? Crikey. Are they still running the company?

There's two of them on the board, so I did say, "You've got 6 per cent of the stock and 25 per cent of the board seats, so you're a little over-represented there."

[Laughs] That's good.

I did raise the private equity question, I said, "Are you guys ready? Because there's such a deluge of takeovers at the moment." It's becoming a standard question, "Your stock's fallen from $50 to $17, you're looking ripe for the picking, the founders have only got 6 per cent, are you next?" Because they're dropping like flies at the moment, all these things...

Why is there a takeover deluge, do you think? Private equity looking for...?

Private equity has got a lot of dry powder and valuations are quite cheap on the market because of the index investing and don't buy outside the top 100, so it's just at the moment we've got - I'll go through it - Steadfast, Challenger Group copped a bid this week... By the end of the year, we'll have lost another 25 companies worth more than $100m to takeovers and we lost 30 last year. So it's a bit of a worry, the market's down, we've lost 250 stocks in three years in terms of the number of listings on the ASX.

And they're not IPO-ing. In fact, the one big IPO that was going to happen didn't happen, that's Firmus.

Yes. Did you see that one overnight with the Koreans, Elice Corp, they raised US$15 billion - they're one of those infrastructure/cloud/AI, a bit like Firmus, and the stock's opened down 32 per cent today, so that would have been the Firmus story, so the bubble has well and truly burst, hasn't it?

I think it's in the process of bursting, that seems to be the case. I spoke to Gerard Minack yesterday for Intelligent Investor and we were talking about the comparison between now and the late 1990s; and he pointed out that in the last 15 months of the dot-com bubble, the Nasdaq went up 134 per cent and there were seven corrections during that period while it went up 134 per cent of more than 10 per cent, including one of 26 per cent. Since ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, the Nasdaq's up 170 per cent or so and there have been seven corrections of more than 10 per cent. The thing is, there's no way of knowing which one of those is going to be the big one. Gerard says he still can't tell you why the correction in March 2000 turned out to be the one that ended it all, there were a whole bunch before that but the one in March 2000 was the big one and that was the finish of it and the Nasdaq dropped 78 per cent.

Basically, he was saying that it is a bubble, it's going to burst, he just has no idea when and he still doesn't, whether this is the bursting of the bubble, who knows? It was all pretty interesting and convincing, really.

Yes, but so many of us have been - who's been tipping that housing can't keep going for the last three years. There's more people who've wrongly said this is overpriced and bears who haven't been proven correct and it's been so long since that tech wreck, GFC, it's almost 20 years since the GFC, so we're just not used to it. When I was a younger journalist, there'd be crashes happening every five years, the '87 crash, there was a big one in '91, there was the Asian crisis in '98, the tech wreck, GFC... This has been a very long boom, hasn't it?

The thing is, in the old days, the central banks used to cause crashes because they thought that was the way to deal with inflation. But now the central banks don't want to do that, they're basically against crashes, they seem to have abolished them or they're trying to prevent them anyway. That was ever since the so-called 'Greenspan put' occurred and then it became the 'Bernanke put' and then the 'Yellen put' and then the 'Powell put'... The 'put' means that the central banks...

"We'll save you..."

...always save you. So we don't know yet whether Kevin Warsh will do the same thing, possibly not, who knows? But yes, at some point, you'd think that the AI bubble will burst no matter what central banks do and down it will come.

I guess it's interesting as to whether inflation stays out of the bottle, whether they'll actually have to get tough, that's the thing we really haven't seen. A lot of those induced recessions were when inflation really got crazy, wages spiral and this sort of stuff. It is interesting as to whether, because inflation is getting sticky and baked in around the world, it has spent too much money printing and stimulus and the political economy makes it very difficult to unwind that, but inflation is the result. Speaking of inflation, what about the pay rise negotiations for the Reserve Bank staff, are they locking in above-inflation wage increases for the 2,200 Reserve Bank staff with the union breathing down the Governor's neck at the moment?

I know, well they've been offered 9.5 per cent and they've knocked it back.

That's over three years, 9.5 per cent.

That's right, so it's arguably under the inflation forecasts of the Reserve Bank, so they're not trying to get real wage rises above inflation and worsen the job that they're trying to do, but still, it is interesting that they're at loggerheads with the boss, Michele Bullock, very interesting.

And two defeated votes... The last one was the 54/46, a margin of 93 votes. I was staggered to read that they've increased their staff by 60 per cent since 2021 to 2,200. Is this just big-spending Labor Government, or is this a policy to kick out all those KPMG, PwC consultants and rebuild the core policy strength of the staff and actual decisions who let's bulk up and let's rehire all those consultants and put them on as staff, then they keep voting against your pay deals, they all join the FSU and it's a good old industrial stand-off at the central bank, which is the last place you'd expect to see that.

I wonder what all those 2,200 people do. They also run payments to some extent, but it's not as if they're doing something every day. They have a meeting every eight weeks or something and half the time they don't do anything at the meeting, so what are they all doing?

[Laughs] Yes, I agree. I was going to ask you, when did you last go on strike and are you a member of a union? Australia's famous for striking, I've been on strike quite a few times, I'm still a member of the journos' union. Have you ever been on strike?

Yes, I'm just trying to remember, it was a six-week strike and I had to drive taxis to pay the mortgage.

That was the big one against Murdoch, wasn't it, at The Australian?

Well, it was against everybody. I think it was 1980 or something when they were trying to bring in new technology and we wanted a piece of the action, we wanted some of the money that they were going to make by sacking all the compositors and doing digital typesetting on computers. I think we ended up with a 6 per cent share of it or a 6 per cent pay rise.

And you literally drove taxis because Rupert turned off your salary because you were on strike?

Yeah, I did.

Wow, geez...

Previously when I was young, I'd driven taxis for a while. When I came back from Darwin, I got a taxi licence and drove taxis in Melbourne and quite enjoyed that, so it wasn't too hard to start again during the strike.

Were you a happy smiley taxi driver or did you really get stuck into the drunks and tell them to shut up and get out...? What was your mood like as a taxi driver? Friendly?

Very friendly, of course. Love a chat...

"I've got a good graph I could show you, mate, have a look at my graph, it's pretty good, hey?"

I especially liked driving taxis at night, I don't know why that was... I thought it was good at night, it was quite peaceful, you do get the occasional drunk, but most of the time you're driving women home from companies, shift-working women who finish late and the companies provided them with a taxi home. I thought that was quite nice.

Very good. Well, we should probably do some questions, I'm guessing, we've got a few. Actually, I've got one little correction I've got to do. Robert Barnes has emailed me and twice I have mentioned this figure of 80 per cent of people over 65 are on some form of pension and Robert is correct, that is actually a very outdated figure. It's 80 per cent of people who are over 85 are currently on the pension. The actual number for the over-67s, which is when it kicks in, is down to 56 per cent from 70 per cent in 2012. So, the super system is working, there is a falling proportion of the population that's relying on the age pension and it's down to 56 per cent at the moment. It's 62 per cent if you add other Government payments, but strictly on any form of pension, only 56 per cent of the over-67s. So there you go, I was wrong, Alan, and thanks, Robert for pointing that out and Australia's super system is the best in the world and working, I would say.

You would hope so, wouldn't you? We're up to $4.7 trillion of superannuation pool, you'd think that at some point it would start to reduce the cost of the pension.

Yes and it is.

And it is.

I still think it's still too generous in terms of you can have a big house and plenty of dollars and get some sort of part pension, but there is a growing cohort who are not on the Government teat at all, courtesy of a large pile of super, that's as designed. It's a good policy outcome for Australia.

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And just the usual general advice warning, this is general advice only, if you need some personal advice, don't listen to us, go and see an adviser, please.

Okay, Archie from Collingwood says, "Do you agree we're still in a cost-of-living crisis? How will we know when we're not? There's a lot of data out there that's suggesting plenty of discretionary spending and inflation is steaming ahead. I have no idea whether this means we're in or out of the crisis anymore, but the politicians seem quick to tell me we're still in it." Yes, well that's a very interesting question because politicians always kind of talk about how everyone's doing it tough and of course, a lot of people are not doing it tough because they don't have a mortgage and they've got savings and the interest rates are going up and they're fine.

It's the people with a mortgage that are not fine and in my view, the foundation of the cost-of-living problem - I don't know about crisis, but the foundation of it is the high cost of housing, which is kind of leading to people having mortgages that are too high and those people are struggling. So when people talk about a crisis and politicians talk about everyone doing it tough and we have cost-of-living problems, that's what they're talking about, those particular people.

I think what's happening is this kind of widening inequality that's going on and a lot of people blame Baby Boomers or at least say, "The Baby Boomers are fine and all the Millennials and Gen Zs are not fine at all." And there is some truth to that I think.

I think the combination also of petrol at the moment, crude prices above $110 overnight and I filled up this morning at $2.37, the relief's gone now with the excise being halved, a lot of the relief has gone now with energy prices, so I think people are really noticing it and the whole thing is if it gets baked in then you get the wages spiral and you get more and more people saying, "I need a pay rise because of cost of living..." and then it just feeds off itself and you get this feedback loop... Statistically, we'll be told when the cost-of-living crisis is over because we track house prices, we can all see the petrol prices and we can all see the cost of when we go to the supermarket is up and up and up, so we'll know when it's over, Archie, but I don't think it's over yet.

Evan from Melbourne says, "Enjoy the podcast..." and Evan's a bit sceptical about this recent wave of small business lobbying - "Are small business really fighting for survival or are they just defending bad management and structural loopholes?" And he specifically references the ballyhoo over the ATO credit card backlash and the discretionary trust fight. I guess I'd open up, Evan, by saying the 30 per cent capital gains tax as well, I think it has been not a coordinated hit but a whole bunch of things coming together which does make the business community feel unloved at the moment and copping it from all sides when they're already under pressure.

That was an interesting backlash on the credit cards and there's still a bit of debate on the discretionary trust, but I don't think it's a beat-up, Evan. What do you think, Alan?

I'm in favour of a 30 per cent minimum tax on trusts, I think that's fair enough but a lot of people are not happy with it because I presume they would use a trust to do income splitting. I think you're right, small businesses are feeling unloved, but they always do, don't they?

It's like farmers are always whinging, people say, but actually farmers are doing pretty well and commodity prices have been strong and you don't actually hear a lot of farmers saying, "We're doing it tough, we need bailouts..." et cetera. But I think generally small business, it is pretty rough. I'm going to segue to - over the page, James has asked us whether our opinions are ever affected by who our employer is. So when you work for Rupert, do you have a pro-business point of view and when you're working for the ABC, do you have a slightly more left point of view? Now you've left the ABC, Alan, are we going to see a Karl Stefanovic? Are we going to see a sudden pivot in your positions or will the very same Alan Kohler, no longer at the ABC, have all the same perspectives on climate and inequality and inheritance taxes and all that sort of stuff?

I've suddenly grown horns and vampire teeth, dripping with blood...

But you're now a small businessman, not associated with any big media company.

I can assure you, Stephen, my views will not change at all. I've worked for many people over the years, including the ABC, Rupert Murdoch, Fairfax, you name it. I was writing for The New Daily for a while and they were owned by the super funds.

When I worked for Rupert, I used to do hatchet jobs on his enemies quite happily, "Fairfax is a joke, the ABC is a disgrace, Kerry Stokes has stuffed up again..." Rewrite his press releases, that was just what you had to do. Then when I worked for Kennett, I resigned from the union in high dudgeon, "I'm working for Jeff Kennett, I can no longer be a member of your union." My history is I've been influenced by who's paying the bills a little bit, but we're old and cranky enough now that we probably don't have to do that anymore and you never did it, I dare say.

Well, look, I don't know, I think it's human nature I guess to be influenced a bit by who you're employed by, sure, of course that's true. Malcolm says, "Thanks for the podcast. This is my third email regarding Bitcoin, I first started buying Bitcoin in 2019..." I'm going to read this out because it's interesting, what he's saying, but I don't know that I have an answer for his question. "The average house price in Melbourne in 2019 was $778,000 and you could take 46 Bitcoin to buy the average house. Now the average house in Melbourne is $910,000 and it takes 7.5 Bitcoin to buy the average house. How many Bitcoins do you think will be needed to buy the average house in Melbourne in 2030?" I've got no idea, Malcolm, but I think that was interesting to see the change in the number of Bitcoins needed to buy the average house, I think that was kind of interesting.

Yes, well I think the point he's making is that Bitcoin has been on a bit of a tear and like all investments, it all depends when you get in, because the things can go from very cheap, they can then go to the stars. ARB Corp, $1 to $50, back to $17. It's all a matter of timing when you get in. Bitcoin has been a good investment, but who's to know?

I'm not one of those to know, that's for sure.

Speaking of Victorian housing actually, Alan, the Region Group AGM yesterday, $2.5 billion company, they own about 80 regional shopping centres or small neighbourhood shopping centres, Coles and Woolies. The CEO said that Victoria is uninvestable for international capital because we've got this foreign land tax surcharge, so the land tax is even higher if you're a foreigner. If you're a sovereign fund, if you're the Singapore Government or Canadian, he was literally saying you cannot invest in Victoria because they've got this ridiculous - and he was really angry about it, he said it is the highest in the country and it's ridiculous and no one else has got it... So yeah, taxes in Melbourne on property.

I think we should jump to Rob and his question about sewage.

Yes, "In the fantastic Money Café of October 14, there's a chat on the densification of essentially suburbia as the primary quick fix tool for Australia's housing problem. Particularly a note was made of the proposal at an old Bunnings site in Wollongong..." and then he goes on to talk about the infrastructure costs of the sewerage, it's substantial and you've got to take that into effect, so this is following on from you and James last week, what do you make of that, Alan?

I think it's absolutely true. We're talking about building all these high-rise apartments to take advantage of existing infrastructure, they're mostly talking about transport infrastructure, this is in Melbourne and Sydney especially, they're going to build apartments around train stations, particularly in Melbourne. But I'd like to know whether the sewerage pipes can handle all the extra stuff and I suspect surely, they're not.

Rob's saying that the pipes already in use in Wollongong anyway won't be able to cope with a 35-storey building and with each floor having six units, he says, so an immediate 210 extra toilets, all emanating from essentially the same area, flushing into a piping system that was never designed to take that much waste. I think that's an interesting and worthwhile point.

That should be publicly disclosed, the quality and capacity of Australia's inbuilt stormwater and sewerage systems and what can cope. If you go and look at the scandals of UK water privatisation and particularly the awful mess that Macquarie got themselves into buying Thames Water, where they were flushing open sewage... Their whole comment was, "We didn't expect that the population of London was going to grow so much and the infrastructure was so old that, yes, it required billions and it was an absolute disaster." Everyone in the UK is saying water privatisation was the biggest disaster Thatcher ever did and we have done no water privatisation in Australia. It's very interesting. Kennett didn't do it, no one has done it. Virtually the entire water sector is Government owned and so they'll be blamed if they have disasters, but at least the Government, which is also the planning authority, will know if they haven't got the sewerage capacity when they issue the permit for the 35-storey skyscraper in Wollongong or Woollahra. It is an interesting part of Australia about the lack of water privatisation and we haven't had too many scandals around poor water quality or poor sewerage infrastructure, so far so good, but an interesting point as we try to densify.

On a similar subject, Jimmy's wondering whether all these high-rise developments in Woollahra in Sydney are going to go ahead, "It looks like they want to put in a lot of high-density apartments, but there isn't any planning or any update on the critical infrastructure due to higher land values and the lack of mandated long-term affordable housing rules, there is no incentive for developers to build affordable homes, which doesn't really help with the housing price issue. Is this a viable project that will have legs?" I've seen a picture of what they're planning, it's unbelievable what they're going to do to Woollahra...

I'm actually okay, I used to live in Queen Street, Woollahra and it's an easy walk down to Edgecliff Station or it was a 15-minute walk into town and if you look at the density around Bondi Junction, Harry Triguboff and all the skyscrapers around the $4 billion Westfield there, Woollahra itself is not very dense at all, it's very heritage and it's a beautiful location and there'd be a lot of NIMBYs there saying, "Don't ruin our wonderful Woollahra..." just like you get the same thing in Camberwell, Glen Iris, the leafy parts of Melbourne.

And because it's a Labor Government and that's a Liberal seat, they don't care about upsetting the NIMBYs in Woollahra, that's why the Minns Government is going all out to densify Woollahra and there's a coordinated campaign against it, including questions coming to The Money Café saying this is crazy. But I actually support it, for me it's a no-brainer to densify Woollahra whilst respecting the heritage of the place.

Can you do both?

You can densify to a degree. It's all got to be in proportion, but Woollahra is a wonderful location, it's halfway to Bondi Beach. If you want to live somewhere nice, live in Woollahra and more people should have that opportunity, I would say, rather than going out to Campbelltown and further west as has been the tradition in terms of affordable - I mean, it's never going to be affordable in Woollahra, but it's just a great place to live, so let more people live there because you've already got all the infrastructure there, trains, it's all there, why not? This is what the whole densification thing should be happening, it's like above the train stations in Melbourne, Alan, it makes sense.

There you go, good for you, Stephen.

Alan, Martin says, "Alan, you're a legend, so is your son. They should build a statue for you along with Warnie. Thank you for telling it how it is with no sugarcoating and slipping your wise opinions in all the time. Seriously, thank you. There was the reason you said what the price of gold is every week. About five weeks ago I got my hands on my first autonomous AI agent, Grok Bot, and I was watching you on 7:30 and I thought to myself, I really wish I could get a summary of all the useful things Alan had to say, keywords, graphs, pics... So I thought, perfect, use Grok Bot, so I created... Don't worry about the domain name, I just had to park the site somewhere." But he's got a domain name, he's created this whole thing for you, Alan, have you checked it out?

I have, it's unbelievable, it just goes on forever of all the graphs and stuff that I've done over the years, it's unbelievable.

Are you flattered? Are you saying, "That's all my IP..."? What's your copyright sort of perspective on the ability for someone to do that with all your work?

Well, the ABC owns it, not me, for the stuff that I've done on the ABC, so it's up to them to complain to Martin, if they're going to. I don't know. I think it's interesting that Grok Bot can do that, I haven't used Grok Bot, I've been using Claude.

You should maybe put a link in your Weekend Briefing, which is the only place now you can get Alan's graphs and his written word, every Saturday morning at 7 o'clock, the opus that you produce. But yeah, it's amazing, I had a quick look at it too, it's phenomenal, it's all there. And they love you, Alan, they all love you. I've read your Weekend Briefing piece, all the nice things that people said about you. "You've lost weight, I hope you're not sick, are you well?" "Yes, yes, I'm fine," says Alan, "I don't have cancer."

I don't have cancer, no.

"I've lost weight because I want to live to my youngest grandchild's 21^st birthday..." It was such a lovely little piece you wrote on Saturday, I thought.

My youngest grandchild is coming up for two in a couple of months and I want to be there for her 21^st, which means I will have been at all of my grandchildren's 21^sts and I'll be 94. That's good, that's what I want to be.

Well, I reckon you're going to do it.

Me too. My mum's 98.

Wow.

My mum's 87 and going strong, dad got to 96 almost. So we're living longer, aren't we?

We are.

Fit and healthy.

Your turn.

Oh is it my turn? No, it's your turn.

"Hello, Mr Kohler, congrats on your retirement. I wanted to ask you your thoughts on the trajectory of print media and if you're aware of any pathways there were for young people to get into economics?" That's like one of my AGM questions, two completely unrelated questions submitted as one. Print media, I'm still amazed, Alan, that we've got two printed newspapers seven days a week in Melbourne and Sydney and we don't have a capital city which is a news desert. Every single capital city has a daily newspaper. There's not many other countries that can say that anymore given the mass closures of print titles. I'm a relative bull, it hasn't been the disaster that people predicted on print. It's only going one way. What are your thoughts on print?

I thought there'd be no print 10 years ago and it's kept going. I think basically it's been kept going by Gerry Harvey.

He is a great man, Gerry, isn't he?

Well, you look at the newspapers, the actual print papers and the main ads are Harvey Norman ads. I presume Harvey Norman's advertising people have discovered or they know that those ads work, so that surprises me to be honest. I guess some people still get the paper delivered and read the paper in the café and all that, I think there's still a bit of that.

They've put the prices up too, it's like $5 and $6 now for the Fin Review. They're charging more and obviously the online subscriptions are holding up as well. They're not what they once were in terms of the quality and the scope and scale, but the fact that we still have them I think is wonderful. I'm surprised as well, I would have thought... The real problem is the local papers, when Rupert shut literally 101 titles across the country during COVID, I live in Manningham and the Manningham Leader got shut and there's no one holding the council to account anymore, whereas when I go down to Phillip Island where I've got a place, there's a magnificent weekly newspaper down there that has all the latest...

The campaign they're running against McDonald's in the main street of Cowes, it's such a great newspaper, it's the heart of the community, whereas in Manningham there's no one covering the local sports. I did say to Kim Williams, the boss of the ABC, I said, "Mate, you've got to set up ABC websites, Eastern Melbourne, Western Melbourne, Northern Melbourne... You've got to get some local news going on the ABC because these local paper news deserts are a disaster for cohesion in the communities which are no longer serviced by anything."

Fat chance of that, I'd say. I mean, they haven't got enough money.

Well, he initially said, "Have you been reading my emails?" as if to suggest he was about to do it, but then that was a year ago and then nothing's happened, so I don't think that's going to happen now. Then as for young people getting into economics, Alan, which was the second half of Ian's question, they can no longer watch you on the news to get started, as they all seem to have done over the years, haven't they?

They have. They'll have to watch David Chau now, he'll be fine, he's okay. I was getting all these messages from year 11 and year 12 students saying, "Please thank our teacher, Mr So-and-so, who always shows us your finance spot as part of our economics class every day and we love it and please thank him for doing that." So I often do.

I'd say if you want to get into economics, just get a job at the Reserve Bank, there's 2,200 people who've got jobs there and there must be hundreds of them who are economists.

That's right, they're probably sending out scouts to find people.

All right, boss, the Fletcher Building annual meeting has already just started over the ditch there in New Zealand, I've got eight today so I reckon we probably almost better sign off.

Fiona says - I'm doing this because it's short, thank you, Fiona - "Thank you for a great podcast, I've been on a steep learning curve and have learnt so much from you all. I also now find the world of finance fascinating. I was interested in your opinions about the impact of the American elections on bonds and the equity markets." Well, we could be here all day talking about that, Fiona, but yes, the American election is coming up on November the 3^rd, when most of the House of Representatives comes up and not quite half of the Senate and it's expected that the Democrats will win the House and probably win the Senate as well, so it could be a big change in America and what will it do to bonds? The traditional thing would be that bonds and equity markets don't like Democrats...

Don't like lefties, that's right.

Don't like lefties, the view is that they spend too much...

They're anti-business, they put taxes up, they don't chase economic growth as much, they hit wealth hard rather than building wealth... The old left/right stuff.

Well, Trump is definitely pro-business. The main problem will be if there's a big sort of riots, because I think that there's a serious prospect of Trump interfering with the elections and basically either ignoring them or trying to prevent the Democrats taking over and then if the Democrats do win the House and the Senate, they'll impeach him and the way that impeachment works is that the House is the prosecutor and the Senate is the court, as it were. What we've had is two impeachments of Trump by the House, which have both been lost in the Senate.

So you can expect that to happen again, the House will impeach him and so then it goes to the Senate and needs a two-thirds majority of the Senate to convict him.

They'll never convict him, I just think they should wait him out, two years, see him out.

I reckon a lot of Republicans are now sick of him.

I think everyone's sick of him. In terms of an endless war against him, impeaching and I think people are a bit over that as well, we're just over the whole thing, just wait him out and pension him off.

I think there's a chance that enough Republicans will switch sides to actually convict him.

That would be a good thing, wouldn't it? But would the markets rally if you've suddenly got Democrats in there putting taxes up? Because his tax cuts have turbocharged the US equity market, there's no doubt about that.

No doubt about it, that's right.

Speaking of riots, the markets don't like riots. Did you see the French bonds are now 150 basis points, that's 1.5 percentage points, above German bonds, which is a record, it's never been that bad. Oh boy, it's a wild, wild world out there anyway. All right, boss, I think we're cooked.

We are cooked, we're done. Thanks everyone for listening to today's episode of The Money Café, I'll be back next week with James Thomson, send in your question to themoneycafe@intelligentinvestor.com.au and we'll try our best to get to it. Until then, I'm Alan Kohler, Editor-at-Large of Intelligent Investor and also co-host of Kohler & Kohler.

And I'm Stephen Mayne and we'll talk to you in a fortnight.

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Got a question for next week? Please send it to themoneycafe@intelligentinvestor.com.au.