Falling Dow, The Canberra hothouse & more

Hello, I’m Alan Kohler, welcome to Talking Finance.  Well, there’s been a lot of action on the economy and the markets this week, so let’s get stuck straight into it.  Shane Oliver, Head of Investment Strategy and Chief Economist at AMP Capital, tells me why the DOW fell 800 points on Tuesday and what that means.  Alan Oster, Group Chief Economist at NAB, runs us through the national accounts and what it means for interest rates.  Cameron Kusher, Head of Research at CoreLogic explains that the decline in house prices is accelerating.  And it’s not very quiet in politics either of course.  This week’s bulletin from the Canberra hot house is from Paul Bongiorno, Columnist for the Saturday Paper and veteran political journalist.

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And now to tell us about the markets, here’s Shane Oliver, Head of Investment Strategy and Chief Economist at AMP Capital.  Shane, Wall Street was closed last night for the funeral of George H. W. Bush.  Do you think that was a bit of a relief for everybody?  I mean, the previous session was an 800 pointer on the DOW.

SO:  I think it certainly was a relief.  It was a relief for me not to have to see it, but I think the fact that it closed down enables a little bit of the dust to settle around two key issues that have been affecting markets this week or at least affecting Wall Street.  The first one was the trade issue where sentiment around it seems to have gone all over the place.  Lots of optimism on earlier in the week and then of course questioning starting to creep in as to what exactly was agreed, and then of course yesterday we saw the Chinese come out and confirm various aspects of it and even refer to the 90-day period, which did at least inject a bit of certainty or competence around the deal. 

And of course, also there’s been this ongoing debate about what the yield curve is telling us.  For most of my career I’ve only ever focused on one yield curve and that’s the gap between the 10-year bond yield and the short-term interest rate as set by the central bank which is the Fed funds rate in the US.  And that’s still positive, but of course these days people seem to focus on all sorts of different parts of the yield curve and the gap between the five-year bond yield and the three-year bond yield has gone negative and some have said well that means recession is around the corner. 

The problem with both of those things is they’re all a bit airy-fairy.  The trade negotiations obviously will continue for a while yet.  I think the only piece of really good news out of that was that we won’t see the January 1 tariff hike that the US had threatened to put through.  I think that is a step forward, that is a good sign.  Beyond that, we’ve still got to wait until March next year to see what they come up with, and on the yield curve I think the concerns there are grossly exaggerated.  Historically, even when the yield curve goes negative it can be up two years or so before the US economy goes into recession.  That takes us into late-2020 or maybe even 2021 and the share market normally only looks forward. 

Historically, the share markets only peaked on average about four or five months before recession, so that’s just too far away to get overly concerned about, and in any case the standard yield curves in the US still haven’t gone negative, so I think it probably was good to have a bit of a shutdown and let the dust settle and hopefully it’ll be a bit calmer for the rest of the week.

I read a blog this morning by a fund manager in the US who was trying to figure out why the market fell on Tuesday.  He was looking at the precise time that the DOW turned lower, which happened to be 12:04 p.m. and he was looking at what happened then.  The answer he came up with was that something happened in the UK about Brexit which said that there had to be the publishing of the Brexit legal advice from the government, and so he reckons that’s what caused it.  What do you think of that?

SO:  It’s possible.  I think investors are looking around and of course investor sentiment now is very negative, so people looking around for negative news, and that was certainly negative news.  That said, the Brexit issue has a long, long way to go and I’m not totally convinced that it’s going to have a huge impact on what happens in the US.  My inclination is to think, yes it may have been a trigger in there but I don’t know that it’s a rational trigger because this Brexit issue just has so many twists and turns ahead of it.  Even if they do go out without a deal, it’s a huge negative for the UK economy, but I can’t necessarily see a big impact on the rest of Europe or certainly a big impact on the US.  I kind of think that Brexit is important for the UK but for the rest of the world it’s not that big a deal.

That’s what I would have thought, but anyway…  Just turning to the Dollar for a moment, obviously it clunked down yesterday morning when the national accounts came out, but interestingly it’s kept falling overnight, now down to 72.7 at the moment, seems to be pretty weak.  What’s your view about the Dollar? 

SO:  I think it’s ultimately going quite a bit lower.  If you go back a month or so ago, during the big falls in October in share markets, it got as low as 70.2 US cents.  At that point in time it was very oversold, speculators were all short, hedge funds were all short the Aussie Dollar.  When that happens you often get a bit of a bounce as some of the short positions are unwound and the negative sentiment reverses a little bit and that’s what we’ve seen over the last month or so with indications that the Fed might slow down the pace of interest rate hikes.  And I guess there’s a little bit of better economic data in Australia coming through.  But I think that’s what it was, it was a bounce. 

I think the underlying reality in Australia is that growth is not as strong as the Reserve Bank was hoping, it’s not the 3.5% or so that they were saying.  On most recent numbers it’s 2.8%, it’s actually quite a bit weaker, and the first half of the year exaggerated the underlying strength in the economy is now partly being revised away.  And the problem in Australia is that we’ve, after many years of strong house price growth in Sydney and Melbourne which boosted consumer spending in those two states, that’s now going in reverse.  When the value of your home goes down over a lengthy period and I think we’re going to see house price declines continuing into next year, that makes people feel less wealthy, they’re less inclined to run down their savings rate to maintain consumer spending in the face of weak wages growth.

I think what’s happening is that the uncertainty around the consumer is actually starting to show up in weak consumer spending, even though it had been surprisingly robust, or holding up reasonably well until recently.  Therefore, I think very unlikely that the next move in interest rates by the Reserve Bank will be up.  The more likely scenario is that the next move by the Reserve Bank will actually be a rate cut and yesterday in my mind was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  We had seen some weaker data particularly around housing.  Job ads seem to be slowing down, ongoing weakness in wages and inflation.  But yesterday with those GDP numbers coming in well and truly on the low side driven by weak consumption, in my mind that caused me to sort of change my own view which was rates on hold for the next year or two, ahead of a hike at the end of 2020 to now looking for a rate cut some time in the second half of next year.

In fact, you mentioned 2.8%, but actually if we published and talked about annualised quarterly GDP growth, we’d be talking about 1.2% or 1.3% wouldn’t we?

SO:  That’s right, it’d be 1.2%, 1.3%.  If we were in America that’s what the number would be.

That’s what we’d be talking about.  I mean, and that is a third of what the RBA said growth would be just the day before. 

SO:  That’s right, very weak numbers there.  I know you can argue, well Australia’s 2.8% number is still pretty good on many global comparisons.  But don’t forget our population growth is 1.6% so per capita growth in Australia is actually quite soft.  Actually, per capita GDP in the last quarter actually went backwards.  That’s sometimes a measure of the standard of living, it actually went backwards.  These are pretty weak numbers.  I’m not in the recession camp for Australia, I don’t think we’ll see that because we’ve got infrastructure spending which is still very strong.  There’s signs that business investment might be picking up.  The big drag from mining investment falling.  That seems to be coming to an end and hopefully the global economy holds up our export growth should remain okay. 

But I do think that growth is going to be quite a bit weaker than the Reserve Bank’s talking about.  That points to lower interest rates eventually because it will take the Reserve Bank a while to change their mind on this and it ultimately points to a lower Aussie Dollar, probably heading into the 60s against the US at this stage I say, into the high-60s.  But I do think some time next year it will go below 70 cents.

Great to talk, Shane.  Thanks a lot. 

SO:  My pleasure, Alan.

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And now for this week’s view of the economy, here’s Alan Oster, Chief Economist at NAB.  Alan, in the RBA decision on Tuesday, which was no surprise of course leaving the interest rate on hold at 1.5%, but their statement said that they confirmed their view on growth was that it would average 3.5% over this year and next year.  Then, the following day we had national accounts showing 0.3% for the quarter on quarter.  That led to an annual rate of growth of 2.8%, but if we in Australia reported GDP in the same way as they do in the US, which is annualised quarterly number, it would have been 1.2%, not 2.8%. 

AO:  That’s right, although you do need to be a little bit careful.  I’m not trying to defend the RBA, but what’s happened essentially is the statistician after the last set of accounts, revised history up a lot, and then in this set of accounts history has been revised back down again.  Yes, it’s true that if you annualised the last quarter you’ll get your 1%, but if you annualise the quarters before that you get 4% in each of the quarters.  I think to some extent it’s statistical volatility that is causing the problems, but the reality is, given where we’re at, they’re not going to get 3.5% unless they get some really strong data going forward.  There are reasons to be optimistic in the sense that the public sector is still growing really strongly, particularly on infrastructure. 

But it’s also growing very strongly in terms of consumption which is basically wages and I think a lot of that is national disabilities.  They’ve built a lot of LNG platforms and just some of the slowdown in the September quarter was actually because one of the platforms they were building in the Northern Territory has actually finished.  They’re not building it anymore, now they’re exporting it, so that’s caused a temporary negative, if you like.  And hopefully we’re seeing a little bit of business investment improve because it’s sort of flowing over from the infrastructure spend.  But – and we saw this yesterday as well – the consumer is really weak, and so what we’re seeing is not much growth in wages, very high levels of utility prices.  House prices are not doing much, in fact, going down in Sydney and Melbourne and they’ve got a lot of debt, so consumers are nervous. 

That is one of the big differences between us and the Reserve Bank for ages.  Our view has been for a long time that the consumer is not going to recover anytime soon because we don’t see wages going up.

Alan, are you saying that part of the growth in wages is due to the National Disability Insurance Scheme? 

AO:  No, this is counted in consumption of the public sector.  What’s happening, in very simple terms, the people that had previously been looking after their disabled family were not counted and now they’re counted essentially in the public sector consumption because it’s within the National Disability Scheme.

So that is expanding GDP?

AO:  That expands GDP, yeah.

Oh!

AO:  Yeah, I know. 

By how much?

AO:  Well, not a lot, but it sort of contributes.  If you look at public sector demand in that area, it’s growing at around 5%.  It’s a growth area, if I can put it that way, it contributes.

Do you have any idea what it would be growing without the NDIS?

AO:  We don’t know, but in the past that sector has typically grown 2.5% to 3%, so it’d be adding 0.2-0.3% over a 12-month period to extra growth.  But that’s the way these things work and they’re counted and so it’s not a big thing but it’s one of the things that adds to growth. 

Isn’t it fair to say then that the GDP growth in the September quarter, such as it was, was more than entirely due to net exports and public demand?

AO:  Yes, and if you look at what we call gross national expenditure, which is everything excluding essentially the external parts of the economy, gross national expenditure essentially was zero.  Then to the extent that you got growth it was 0.3% in net exports and so that’s how you got your 0.3%.  The domestic part of the economy which adds up, if you like, private sector consumption, private sector investment, dwellings, you basically went sideways.  But again, that’s been growing like that for a while.  I do think you need to also put a bit of context that these numbers bounce around a lot. 

To be brutally honest, I certainly didn’t believe that the economy in the first half of this year, was growing faster than annualised rate of 4%, which is what the statistician said.  Now he’s revised it a little bit, but not much.  I think this is part of a natural catch up, if you like, but I still worry, going forward, that the consumer is basically still extremely conservative and I don’t see that changing.  We can get through growth in public sector demand, net exports of 2.75% or so, but once you get through that, 55% of the economy is private consumption and we have a view that says the economy, by the time you get to 2020, be growing at a little bit above 2%, but not 3% and not 3.5% either. 

Alan, last time I looked, you guys were calling a rate hike some time next year, I think?

AO:  Yep.

You must be getting ready to change your view?

AO:  Well, we said yesterday that we’ll be changing our view, one, not so much because we’ve got the economy right, we think we’ve got the economy more right than the Reserve Bank, but the Reserve Bank is very reluctant to do anything on rates in case it fires up housing again.  I think their focus is more on having a look at the economy, looking at wages, looking at inflation and basically saying we wouldn’t mind getting the balance sheet of consumers into a better space in terms of their debt levels. 

I reckon the housing market is beyond being fired up, I’ve got to say.

AO:  Well, it’s Sydney and Melbourne… 

There’s no way that’s going to get fired up.

AO:  No, I think that’s right.  We’ve got a peak to trough fall in Sydney and Melbourne of about 10%, and it’s almost already there so we’ll probably, when we put our new forecasts out, put a little bit more into that.  But again, context, if I go back four years, Sydney prices are up 25% and Melbourne prices are up 35%.  If you quote the Reserve Bank, what they basically say is if you’re going to have an adjustment in house prices to make the consumer a little bit more stable going forward, it’s not a bad time to do it if you’ve got a time when the world economy’s strong, the Australian economy’s strong, interest rates are low and unemployment in Sydney and Melbourne is 4.5%. 

I think you just need to be a little bit more careful in terms of saying, “Woe is us because Sydney and Melbourne house prices have fallen 10%.”  If they fell 20-30% the Reserve Bank would be in action and they wouldn’t be going up, but that’s not what we really fundamentally think is going to happen. 

Except, we don’t know what’s going to happen, do we?

AO:  Well, it’s very difficult because what you’ve got is you’ve got a combination of banks are being more tricky or they’re less inclined to loan for investor homes.  They’re still growing at 7% for owner/occupier, but traditionally what you typically get is things like population, interest rates, unemployment are the things that drive the demand.  This side is the supply side, so banks are being more careful, they’re basically saying to you, “Hey guys, we need to see your receipts, what you’re actually spending, and that’s taking a little bit longer.” 

Therefore, we’re not sure how much further these house price falls will be.  If you said to me peak to trough Sydney -15%, which would across Australia contribute or basically mean that house prices fell 5% this year and maybe 5% next year, I’d say that’s probably reasonable.  What might that do in terms of taking off growth?  It might take a quarter point off growth and make the Reserve Bank sit a little bit longer.  That’s what I think is basically most likely to happen.

Thanks, Alan.  Great to talk, as always.

AO:  Thank you.

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To talk about property prices, here’s Cameron Kusher, the Head of Research at CoreLogic.  Cameron, is it fair to say that the decline in Melbourne and Sydney house prices is beginning to accelerate?

CK:  It certainly is fair to say that.  In the month of November, we saw a 1.4% fall in Sydney and a 1% fall in Melbourne.  In Sydney that was the fastest rate of decline since back in 2007 and in Melbourne it was the fastest rate of decline since 2011.  Certainly, we’ve been seeing reasonably large falls on a month on month basis but November really did see a pretty significant acceleration in those falls.

In your experience, and you’ve been watching property for 15 years or so, this late in the cycle or this steep into a downcycle, if the falls are accelerating they’re getting larger, but what does that mean?

CK:  I think it means there’s fewer buyers out there in the market.  We’re seeing that in sales volumes and we’re seeing that in properties taking longer to sell.  I think just the tight credit conditions are really driving this weakness.  I think it was a little surprising seeing the Reserve Bank’s commentary after their board meeting that there was really no change in their tone around what was happening in the housing market.  Personally, it’s a little bit alarming to me that we are seeing this acceleration now. 

Yeah, what I’m wondering is, if you’re seeing this kind of acceleration – because prices have been falling for 12 months pretty much, haven’t they – 12 months into a decline and you see an acceleration, has that happened in the past in your experience?

CK:  Not really, not like this, and certainly if we look at the declines that we’re seeing in Sydney and Melbourne at the moment, whilst they might not quite be as deep as some of the previous downturns, in terms of the pace of the downturn, it’s faster than most of the previous declines that we’ve seen.  I think it is a bit of a cause for alarm that, as you say, this late into the cycle, with 16 months into the downturn in Sydney, 13 months in Melbourne, the fact that we are seeing acceleration says that it probably is not as orderly as we’re led to believe.

And certainly nowhere near over?

CK:  That’s right.  It looks like at the very earliest you could probably see things change maybe March/April next year and that would be once the Royal Commission into the banking sector has been handed, the report has been handed out.  Maybe we then would see APRA and the Reserve Bank and ASIC make some changes around lending policy, maybe ease back a little bit.  But that would be the absolute earliest and there’s no guarantee that that would happen. 

What’s your feel for what sort of broader impacts this might have?

CK:  Well, the broader impact is that the wealth effect really helped retail, trade, car sales on the way up, particularly in New South Wales and Victoria.  Now you’ve got the declines in the housing market, people are feeling less wealthy.  A lot of people have bought over the last 12 or 18 months and are seeing the value of their home less than what they paid for it.  I think it is likely to lead for people tightening their purse and it will suck some of the demand out of other areas of the economy.  Add to that, obviously you’ve got building approvals and construction activity starting to roll over as well. 

It does have the potential to start to derail the economy a little bit and that’s why I think, although the Reserve Bank isn’t targeting property prices, they’ll be very closely watching how this unfolds over the next couple of months.  Of course, we don’t have another board meeting now until February.  It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a bit of a change in commentary and tact by the Reserve Bank next meeting.

As you point out, the statement this week was dripping in complacency. 

CK:  Yes, it certainly was, and I guess none of the statement really changed that much.  I think it’ll be a little bit more interesting to see what was discussed when we do get the minutes.  But I think it was quite complacent about the housing market.  Maybe they’re not getting too concerned about one month’s worth of data, but for the last six or seven months we’ve been seeing both Sydney and Melbourne record monthly declines of at least around half a per cent.  Maybe they’re just taking a slow and steady approach and not too concerned about 1 month of data.  By the time the February meeting comes around and we’ve had another couple of months of 1%-plus falls, then I think we will see a change in commentary from the Reserve Bank.

They would have had the November numbers from you wouldn’t they?

CK:  They did, yes.  They received the November numbers.  They got it a day before their meeting. 

They acted like they hadn’t read them.

CK:  Well, I guess that’s their prerogative.  I would assume they have read them and I guess they’re just waiting to see some more data to confirm exactly what’s happening.

It is true that it’s just Melbourne and Sydney, really, and Perth now.  I mean, it’s interesting that Perth is suffering an almost as serious a decline now as Melbourne and Sydney, even though it didn’t really participate in the recent boom.

CK:  No, that’s right.  It’s interesting, I was in Perth last month and pretty much everyone was saying to me, “12 months ago there were starting to be some green shoots,” but then, start of this year we saw that credit availability tighten again and they just said, “Any sign of a recovery in the market really faded very quickly.”  A 0.7% fall over the month, values are now down almost 15% from their peak.  The last thing Perth’s housing market needs is this credit squeeze that we’ve got going on at the moment which is largely because of what’s happening in Sydney and Melbourne. 

But the Hobart market appears to be impervious to their credit squeeze?

CK:  It is.  I mean, it’s still growing.  We’ve seen values up 9.3%.  The only thing I’d say about the Hobart market is that the rate of growth is actually starting to slow a little bit.  There were a couple of quarters there earlier this year where we’re seeing around 4% increases over the three-month period.  It’s down around 1.5% now, so it has slowed a little bit and I think the thing to watch with Hobart is it really has always had that affordability advantage over the other capital cities.  It’s now more expensive than Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, closing in pretty quickly on the cost of housing in Brisbane as well.  Whilst it’s a beautiful place, it doesn’t have the affordability advantages like it used to and I think that will lead to a bit of a slowdown in that market over the next 12 months or so. 

Great to talk to you, Cameron.  Thanks.

CK:  Thanks very much, Alan.

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[Parliament audio clip]

And now to tell us what’s going on in politics, here’s Paul Bongiorno, who used to be the Channel Ten Political Editor and now is a Columnist for the Saturday Paper and has been around a long time.  Paul, I’m just a poor finance journalist trying to keep up with what’s going on in politics, and I must confess I’m very confused.  Can you enlighten me?  Are you able to just sort of summarise where we’re at, what’s going on?

PB:  Yeah, I’m a political reporter and I’m just as confused as a finance reporter about what’s going on.  Well, clearly the broader picture or the broader context is we now have a minority government in both houses of parliament.  Traditionally in Australia or for a long time in Australia, the government of the day has had a majority in the lower house and a minority in the upper house.  Well, we’re now back at minority in both houses, which means that the government doesn’t really have control of its own agenda or of the parliament in such a way that it’s able to portray to the electorate generally, a) that it knows what it’s doing, it’s getting on with it and it’s in charge. 

And complicating the issue of course is that on August the 24^th, the date that’s seared into the brain of Malcolm Turnbull, we saw yet another Australian Prime Minister brought down by his party room.  Normally, these coups are done by the party that believes that decapitation will lead to a stronger and better position.  The Turnbull decapitation in fact has seen a deterioration in support for the federal government according to all the opinion polls, but most particularly, the influential news poll.  As a result, Scott Morrison, the new Prime Minister, is basically reeling from the instability caused last week when Julia Banks quit the Liberal Party to sit on the crossbench and this has emboldened several others to make similar threats. 

The latest example of course being Craig Kelly, and we saw Morrison further discombobulate – I love that word but it fits in with what’s happening here – the Liberal Party particularly in New South Wales when we saw basically open warfare between Turnbull and the Moderates and the Conservatives and the small centre right faction that’s Morrison, the Prime Minister’s.  It’s been a very messy last two weeks of the parliament, and even messier, if I can put it that way, government situation since August the 24^th.  What we’re really seeing now is the government limping to the next election, flying by the seat of its pants and trying to win over voters by, a) scaring them about the prospect of a Labor government and promising them all sorts of things if they vote Liberal at the next election, which at this stage if the government can hold its act together is likely to be on May 18.

We are in fact, virtually in an election campaign now, which means that everything that is done and announced in politics is in that context, is it not?

PB:  Yes it is, and Paul Keating – but he’s not the only one to have put it in these terms – Keating was always wary of what he called the ‘election discount’, and that is that voters see when you’re in this sort of situation, everything you put out there, everything you promise, everything you do as a government, they see it through the cynical prism of the election and vote-buying and especially if a Liberal or Labor government starts promising things that it hasn’t been promising or has been warning against for its previous time in power.  Already, the cynicism of Australian voters – you know the old saying that, ‘No matter who you vote for, a politician gets in.’  I think that’s ingrained in Australia.  It’s actually heightened in the rundown to an election. 

Do you think that my investor subscribers should get ready for the Labor Party policies on negative gearing, capital gains tax and dividend franking?

PB:  Yes, I do.  I think this is prudent given that, well first of all, nothing is certain in politics as we know, and I think it was Harold McMillan wasn’t it?  “My dear boy, events will shape things.”  But if you look at what’s happened basically since the last election when Turnbull just managed to escape minority government.  The Liberals under either Turnbull or now Morrison, have not won a public opinion poll.  That means at least I think the number’s up around a million Australians have decided that they’re not going to vote Liberal again, or at least not give the party their second preference. 

That means – and of course the betting markets show this if you take any notice of them, and they’re not a bad guide actually – that the favourites to win the next election is definitely the Labor Party.  From that point of view, it would be wise for business to take notice of what the Labor Party’s economic policies are and policies as they affect investors.  By the way, that also goes for energy investors as well.

Yes, indeed.  In the meantime, what do you think we’re going to be faced with in the next few months?

PB:  We’re going to be faced with summer and I suspect that the government is hoping that the conventional or traditional thing happens for it, that everyone goes into a summer haze if not a summer daze and they start feeling good about themselves and therefore about the government.  There’s been a fairly long history of governments improving their stocks over summer because they’re doing nothing and the opposition is doing even less, but I think we’re in a different situation this time.  One of the things that will be very difficult for the government over the summer will be extreme weather. 

You might cast your mind back to when John Howard lost the election in 2007, we were still in the grip of a decade-long drought which also of course fed into the inconvenient truth and a more alertness if you like about climate change.  But what happened is the psychology of voters around this issue changed dramatically in Australia as our capital cities began running out of water and as the drought dragged on.  What we’re seeing now with bushfires – I mean, it’s unbelievable really, bushfires in Northern Queensland in what’s supposed to be the wet season up there.  The message is that extreme weather is happening. 

Whether you want to have a big argument about, is this caused by global warming or climate change or not, the fact of the matter is, scientists are saying, or the overwhelming consensus of scientists is that global warming or climate change causes extreme weather.  You’re pretty brave to argue that every extreme weather event’s got nothing to do with climate change.  I’ve gone on about all of that to show that if we get more extreme weather as they say we’re going to, as the forecasters say we’re going to over the coming summer months, this will further erode the standing of the government because it’s perceived and we know this from Victoria, what was being said on the booth to Federal Liberal politicians, we know this from any number of opinion polls on the issue.  The electorate believes that the Liberals are at best, half-hearted about climate change and what to do about it, and of course you’ve got Malcolm Turnbull out there telling the whole world that they’re incapable of doing anything sensible about it.  In fact, on Monday he accused his own party of being ruled by idiocy and ignorance when it came to energy policy. 

I tell you what, if the North-Queenslanders start believing in climate change, the argument’s all over.

PB:  [Laughs] Well, exactly, but the message is that they’re all wondering what’s going on.  I mean, they realise that the bushfires and the extreme weather up there is caused by something.  [Laughs] I think Abbott said the other day, “Yes, it is, it’s caused by weather.”  [Laughs] Anyway…

Anyway…  Good on you, Paul.  Thank you.

PB:  Good on you, Alan.  All the best.

[Music]

Happy Birthday, Gregg Allman, who would have turned 71 on Saturday if he hadn’t died last year in May.  Here’s my particular favourite from the Allman Brothers, The Statesboro Blues.  That’s all for now, have a great week.