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Hello, and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money.

I'm Matt Levine.

I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.

And I'm Katie Greifeld.

I'm a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

Katie, what do we got today?

We have a meaty show.

We're going to talk about

24-7 stock trading potentially, what that world might look like.

Then we're going to talk about the FTC and non-competes, the FTC continuing to be aggressive on a multitude of topics.

Then we're going to talk about gold bars, which I'm quite excited about, and the arbitrage opportunities that don't exist.

My readers love an arbitrage.

24-7 stock trading.

Well there's 24-7 and then there's the possibility that there's around the clock trading just on weekdays, which is a little more humane.

Yes, exactly.

I was actually exactly going to say humane, but maybe we should set the scene that this comes from a Financial Times article that NYSE took a survey.

They're like, hey, if we had 24-7 trading, would you trade 24-7 24-7 or 24-5?

I think the survey had a bunch of options.

Yeah.

It was like 24 hours a day, seven days a week, both, neither.

And I don't believe that we have the results of that survey, which feel key.

I mean, it's not a public survey.

It's for their own information.

But the reason they're doing it is because there is pressure on it, right?

Someone started a thing called the 24 exchange that's meant to be a 24 hour, I think it's actually 23 hours a day.

And all the retail brokerages are moving to offer extended hour overnight trading because a lot of Robinhood customers would really like to be able to trade stocks at 3 a.m.

Yeah.

And so Nice

sees where the market is going and is asking its customers about it.

Yeah.

And I guess that kind of answers the question of who would this be for?

And it would be for pajama traders, retail folks.

I think it would be for a lot of pajama trading retail folks.

The crypto market has been 24-7.

Part of what is causing this is like crypto is 24-7 and people are like, oh yeah, 24-7 trading can work.

And you look at crypto, right?

There are like peaks when Asian markets wake up and when European markets wake up.

So I think some of this might be for like news happens in Asia in like the U.S.

overnight and people can go and trade American stocks.

But a lot of it is for pajama traders.

I was going to say, and who am I, but I feel like the crypto market, is that where we should be taking our cues from in terms of 24-7 trading?

I mean,

I'm not sure that crypto has necessarily provided great lessons for like real financial markets.

Real financial markets have patterns that come from technology of 200 years ago.

And sometimes it takes a sort of brand new market to cast aside that technology and say, wait a minute, we have the computers to trade 24-7, so let's just do it.

Thinking about the effects that this could have, again, in this hypothetical scenario where there's 24-5 or 24-7 trading, what the effects on liquidity might be are really interesting because in normal market hours in the U.S., it's the open and the close is when you get the most volume.

But if there's not an open and there's not a close, where are the liquidity clusters?

I suspect the answer is the open and the close.

I suspect, by the way, like Nicey and other exchanges offer extended hour trading, and it's part structural, but it's in part just like tradition.

Like people know that 9.30 and 4 are the times when everyone trades.

And so there are auctions then, and that's when liquidity clusters.

And you can trade 10 minutes before the opening auction or 10 minutes after, but the opening auction does collect liquidity.

I suspect that it won't be a crypto exchange where we just turn it on and it goes forever.

It'll be like NYCE, where there's a 9.30 auction and a 4 o'clock auction and trading during the day and then after hours there's some other thing that's like the overnight session but it's like a little deprecated so people understand where the main sources of liquidity are.

I root for chaos in general.

I'm interested to see what 3 a.m.

would look like on a 24-5 exchange.

What shenanigans would happen around that time presumably it's mostly pajama trading, retail traders interacting with one or two very nervous electronic market makers.

And then like every so often a catastrophe happens overnight and like big traders rush to sell and the stock crashes because there's no deep liquidity provision.

Yeah.

You'll see a lot more flash crashes because like fewer people are going to be putting quotes at 3 a.m.

So the charts will get super fun.

Even like one big retail trader could crash the stock.

Although you say that the charts, like even now, if you look at like the Bloomberg charts, they are the 9.30 to 4 o'clock session.

There's trading after hours, but everyone kind of understands that it doesn't count.

You read for chaos.

I've been advocating for years that the stock market should move to half an hour a day.

The large bulk of professional trading occurs at the open and the close.

You don't have any like particular reason, right?

If you're just like, if you're a mutual fund with outflows or whatever, like you try to get the closing print, right?

You're looking to trade where there's the most liquidity if you don't have any special information.

And if you concentrate all the liquidity at one time, you get more efficient prices.

If you spread the liquidity over 24 hours, it like all gets worse.

One thing I was thinking about is if you do go to 24-hour trading, that probably moves some liquidity away from like 2 p.m.

Right.

And so then it has the effect of possibly concentrating even more trading at the open and close because people are like, oh, there's 24 hours of trading in the day.

There's two real events and everything else is like a ghost town.

So I might as well only trade at the open or at the close.

That would be a fun effect if it worked out that way.

It would be.

I get an email from a reader suggesting that there should just be one auction a day.

Everyone could put in their bids in the auction and like you'd clear the stock at whatever the clearing price of the auction was and then you'd try it again tomorrow.

Beautiful.

That is very appealing to me because it would give people a lot more free time, right?

Like you wouldn't have to trade all the time.

The other advantage of that is it cuts down on the cost of intermediation.

I'm not sure, but I think that if you go to 24-hour trading, then the high-frequency trading firms of the world are going to make more money because they're going to be trading with retail traders at 3 a.m.

and in the aggregate, that'll be noise trading, but liquidity will be very thin and they'll charge a lot for spreads, right?

I mean, like the point of a high frequency trader is that there are a lot of people who want to buy stock, there are a lot of people who want to sell stock.

They don't come to the market at exactly the same time.

And so some electronic market maker is buying from the people who want to sell, holding the stock for...

a second or a minute or an hour and then selling it to the people who want to buy.

If you spread out the trading, there's just more of that.

There's like more people coming in at different times and more money for high frequency traders to make because they are doing more of that intermediate trades in time.

Whereas if you put all of the trading in one auction, then all the the people who want to buy, all the people who want to sell, meet at that one second, and you don't have any need for like electronic intermediation.

They're your two extremes.

Those are your two extremes.

And like the modern like retail stock trading boom, the like meme stock boom, people are so mad at the Citadel securities of the world.

They're so mad at the high frequency traders.

But they also want to trade stock at 3 a.m.

The meme stock boom has been great for those high frequency traders, right?

Because they're getting all of this order flow to trade with while all these retail traders are so mad at Citadel securities.

This is the same thing where it's like this thing that caters to retail traders, I think will be very good for the electronic market makers.

So they need each other.

Yeah.

I think some of the meme stock traders have a somewhat faulty understanding of how Citadel Securities makes money.

I think that if you have 24-hour trading, it's going to be really good for those guys.

And if you don't like those guys, if you think that it's bad that

these intermediaries make so much money trading stocks, which I don't really think, but like a lot of people do, then collapsing it to one single point of trading would be good for making trades.

But then what would the financial television anchors talk about all day?

I was going to say maybe the same thing, but of course.

I just talk about the bond market more.

Oh, yeah, the bond market.

The bond market could do it to one auction a day.

Corporate earnings.

Yeah.

It raises the question.

I mean, you think about what happened with, what was it, Lyft, last earnings cycle with the typo in their release, and things went crazy, but it was after hours.

So the charts were still clean.

Yeah, I think that's like a really troubling possibility about 24-7 trading is like if you had real 24-7 trading where it wasn't like, oh, it's like fake and deprecated, but it's like the market is just open all the time, then like when would companies put out news?

Yeah, and the government too.

Right now, there is this norm of like six and a half hours of market hours.

And during market hours, you try not to put out market moving news because

one, if you get it wrong, the stakes are horrible, like are really high.

But like two, if you put out news at 10 a.m., someone's going to see it first.

Someone's going to trade on it ahead of someone else.

And like the person who sees it first is going to be someone who is paying for like the fastest data connections to the exchanges.

It's systematically going to be not the retail trader, right?

I have an idea.

Companies should release their earnings at 3 a.m.

And if you really care, you're going to be up.

And we can still have normal-ish hours.

Agree that it'll still be 9.30 and 4 p.m.

is when most of the trading happens.

But then you have goblin hours.

But if you're like a hedge fund, you're awake in goblin hours and like someone's winning and someone's losing.

That's great.

Not for them.

I know, but no, you have goblin hours and it'll be subverted where you have all the professionals, all the hedge funds, they're trading in the overnight session, and then the normal session will just be kind of boring in retail.

Look, I mean, news happens right now, and some people react to the news faster than others, but it is not the case that there is a race to react to every piece of corporate earnings news, right, or every economic data point, because most of those things come out outside of market hours, and you can't really have that race, right?

If

you have true market hours 24 hours a day, then like you do have that race every time news comes out, and it's a socially wasteful race, right?

If you ask hedge funds, like what socially valuable thing do you do?

They're like, oh, we make prices more efficient.

And it's like, yeah, understanding earnings news and buying stocks that are undervalued is like a good thing, but racing to do that at 3 a.m.

one second ahead of another hedge fund is like, you should just go to bed and wake up at 9.30 and do it.

I wish that I had the Financial Times article pulled up because wasn't one of the questions that was asked in the survey was, would the time you spend thinking about overnight trading be better spent thinking about trading during normal hours?

Yeah,

I think it was something like, should we stop asking you about this?

I think it was like, would the time that Nicy spends thinking about overnight trading be better spent on something else?

If trading was one second a day, hedge funds would still have incentives to understand companies and understand what might move their prices and incorporate all the information into their one trade a day.

But at 24-7 trading, it's like you're spending a lot of time optimizing like when you're waking up.

You're thinking about things other than the fundamentals.

Again, I root for chaos, but I feel like at least this conversation has talked me into maybe we should just stick to normal hours or maybe we should just be open for half an hour a day.

I feel like I haven't adequately emphasized the main benefit of half an hour a day, which is like everyone would get to relax more and spend more time with their families.

Or like watch financial TV.

Well, I mean, when I say everyone, I include financial news anchors in that.

You would also have less to do in a nice way.

Yeah, maybe.

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Non-competes.

So we talked, what, last week about how I did not take full advantage of my gardening leave.

And now maybe you never will ever again.

Now, maybe no one will ever get gardening leave again.

God.

Yeah, the FTC, interesting move here about

basically eradicating non-competes.

Yes.

Except for senior executives.

Only barely.

Yeah.

Basically, the FTC voted this week to ban all non-competes forever.

If you're a senior executive and you currently have a non-compete, it's enforceable, but otherwise, they voted to get rid of non-competes.

One important thing here is there's a good chance this doesn't ever happen, right?

The FTC voted to do it.

It goes into effect in about six months, but there are already like multiple lawsuits against it.

And even the FTC, there are five FTC commissioners.

Two of them voted against it, and they both said in their votes against it, this is not going to pass muster with the courts.

And we can talk about the FTC's authority for it.

I mean, I am interested in that because my first reaction was like, why?

And also, why the FTC?

And why is the FTC focusing on this?

Shouldn't they be like trying to stop tapestry from buying Capri and other things?

The FTC is in the business of stopping unfair methods of competition, right?

Like we mostly think of it as antitrust, right?

But it's also like false advertising and like other kinds of fraud.

And they think that non-competes are an unfair method of competition.

And you can see why, right?

I mean, like one thing that they talk about in the rule and in the public statements is non-competes can stop people from leaving a company to start a new business.

So it's like a very direct way for a company to prevent new businesses coming up to compete with them.

Right.

The rule really mentions doctors a lot.

Like doctors are an important case.

Doctors will often have non-competes.

And if you're a doctor and you leave your practice, you have to like sometimes move to a different state to continue practicing medicine.

And like

to the extent the FTC is in the business of protecting consumer choice and lowering consumer prices, that seems like it would be bad for consumers that they can't get a doctor because the doctor had to move away.

So it makes sense that it's the FTC.

Yeah.

The FTC, this is not something they've done before, and their authority for it is a little unclear, and their ability to make rules about it is unclear.

Yeah.

And, you know, we live in a judicial climate where when agencies are like, we're going to make new rules to regulate things we've never regulated before, it's hard to imagine the current Supreme Court saying, okay, great, sounds good, right?

It just feels like that's the sort of thing that modern courts don't like.

So some pretty big question marks over authority here, and maybe this won't even happen.

But I mean, this was a good reminder that at least I almost exclusively think about non-competes in the context of the financial industry.

But if you take a look at some of the examples that the FDC used, you wrote about the power washer who said, all I know is power washing.

These business owners all want me to sign a non-compete clause.

They also cited someone who works in the asphalt industry, a bartender, and as you were saying, a physician in rural, underserved Appalachia.

So, I don't know, that was a nice reminder.

There have been like media reports about non-competes in the fast food industry.

It's really, it is pretty widespread.

Yeah.

The FTC had some numbers there, too, that nearly 20% of workers are subject to non-competes today.

And their estimates is that it would increase U.S.

earnings by at least $400 billion over the next 10 years to abolish non-competes.

A lot of readers emailed in about PE non-competes.

PE purchase non-competes?

I got like a couple of emails from readers being like, I work in private equity and we buy companies.

And

a lot of the companies that private equity buys are like, it's like asset like some guy operating a business, right?

And so when when you buy that business, you're sort of buying the person.

And if you pay that person $20 million to take over his business and then he leaves and sets up another business, he'll probably take all the customers with him because it's like it's just him.

Yeah.

And you're at $20 million for nothing.

And so

seeing the headline of like FTC bans non-competes, people got really worried that that'd make it impossible to buy and sell sort of one person small businesses.

But there is an exception for that.

Like if you're signing a non-compete in connection with the sale of a business, then that's enforceable.

So rest easy.

And you don't even have to be the owner of the business.

You know, if you have like a 20-person company, like all the people in the company can sign a non-compete and it's still enforceable because what you're selling is the people in the business.

So there you go.

Rest easy.

Oof.

I want to say one other thing.

Yeah, and you should.

So the way it works is like they banned future non-competes, but they also say all current non-competes don't work.

They're not enforceable.

And so one thing in the rule is that if you're a company that has non-competes, you have to send a notice to all of your workers saying your non-competes are no longer enforceable.

And like they actually have like language in the rule of like, this is what you have to put in the email.

My impression is that there are a lot of non-competes that are already illegal.

In most states, non-competes are allowed, but they have to be reasonable.

And a lot of people sign unreasonable non-competes.

And

my impression is that companies write these illegal non-competes because they figure everyone sees this contract and they're scared and they're not going to go work for a competitor because they don't want to get sued and they don't know enough about the law.

They don't know if the non-compete is illegal.

And so you can get a lot of mileage out of a non-compete as a company by just writing it down and never trying to enforce it, even if it's not enforceable.

You can just say you can't compete and then most people won't.

So the FTC wants to solve that problem by saying, you have to send all of your employees a letter saying your non-compete is unenforceable.

Go ahead and compete.

But Garden Leave, I know that you had a bad experience.

That also sounds really nice.

A lot of people

in normal jobs think non-competes are bad because they just restrict their ability to get a new job.

But in finance, you're like, oh no, I have to spend six months not working and getting paid for me.

Like in finance, people are like, oh, I kind of like the non-compete status quo.

I was trying to figure out

what happens to that in finance.

Like what tools do you have as a financial firm to prevent people from competing?

So one is like you have a non-compete, which is maybe now illegal.

But I think the way that things normally work currently currently is that like you have gardening leave which is normally structured i think as you continue to be employed at the firm and they pay you your base salary and you stay there for some period not going into work not having access to like the email system sounds great getting paid your base salary and then eventually you leave There's a little unclear how you would actually enforce that because I think that the way finance works is that you have a non-compete.

And so when you quit, you say, I'm quitting.

And they're like, stay for your six-month notice period and we'll pay you.

And if you say, no, I don't want to do that, they say, we have a non-compete, so you can't actually leave for the other firm anyway.

So it's like both like the employment terms and the non-compete.

If the non-compete goes away, it's not totally clear to me that you could enforce the gardening leave.

Because you can be like, oh, you need to provide six-month notice to quit.

And then someone is like, I quit.

I have at-will employment in New York.

I'm quitting with no notice.

And it's not clear how much they can force you to stick to your six-month notice period.

If you don't want to get paid, if you want to go to your new firm, which

if that became the norm, your new firm would insist on it, then you wouldn't be able to get your gardening leave.

So I think you can do it.

I think you can write employment contracts that say you have to give six-month notice, but it's a little trickier than having the non-compete as well.

That's interesting to hear because, I mean, reading your column and the description of notice period, I was like, oh, well, then we'll just do that.

Yeah, I think that might be where it shakes out, but I'm not totally sure.

I think it might be harder to enforce that if people really want to leave without their gardening leave.

Now, you can imagine everyone having the sort of gentleman's agreement of we're all going to take our gardening leave.

The real hard chargers don't always want to take the gardening leave.

Well, it sort of reminds me this discussion very loosely about like paternity leave.

Maybe we can cut this, but like if you can get some alpha by not taking your paternity leave and like showing how hardcore and dedicated you are, maybe the gardening leave will kind of turn into that.

I'm so dedicated and I'm so eager to just get going.

I'm not going to take gardening leave.

It will become a thing.

Nobody says to their new employer, I'm taking gardening leave.

I'll see you in six months.

Everyone always

conveys the impression that they're so sorry about the gardening leave and they'd really like to get started right away.

And then they like go home and sit on the couch and are happy.

But I think if it became possible to not take the gardening leave, then I think that would become the requirement.

I guess this ties into the 24-7 trading, right?

You need a certain amount of rest from your financial jobs.

Gardening leave is a nice way to get that.

Like, life is just hurdling towards relentlessly just being on all the time.

I think that that is certainly the message of 24-7 trading.

And, like, my impression is that there are...

minority of people in finance who have gotten really good at optimizing for gardening leave.

You like, quit your job, spend six months on gardening leave, you start your new job, you're like, ah, you know, I got to go back to that other job.

Yeah.

Quit after a month, you get like nine months of gardening leave.

It can be like...

This is so good.

I mean, you linked to that tweet about that LinkedIn profile.

The guy did that, and his descriptions were so funny.

It was winter while he was gardening leaving, so he just sat on his couch and read books, which came from trees.

So it was still a form of gardening.

It's a nice benefit of the financial career.

You get the occasional sabbatical in the form of gardening leave, and it would be sad, I think, for a lot of people if it went away.

Now, the only way to get a lot of time off is to have a child.

Spoken like someone who does not have children.

I don't think most people think of parental leave as time off.

Yeah, maybe.

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Did you know,

according to Wells Fargo, Costco shoppers spend $200 million a month on gold.

That is crazy.

Some of that must be because they want to own gold.

Yeah, for sure.

Some of it, I guess.

Also, gold has gotten a lot more expensive.

Yeah, right.

Some of it is like gold hoarding for whatever reason.

Some of it is correct financial speculation.

They should just be buying ETFs, but

something about holding an actual gold bar instead of just a DTF.

You can't beat that.

Like, if you want gold, you want gold.

You don't want an ETF.

You're actually tapping into like a very real tension.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Sounds like it's a tension you're familiar with.

Oh, I've encountered people who want to buy gold.

Okay.

But some people who buy gold from Costco are doing it for credit card reward points.

Or trying.

Or trying.

They're doing it for credit card reward points.

But

I wrote about this because the Wall Street Journal had an article about Costco gold, and it started with this guy who bought

a lot of gold from Costco for credit card points.

And then he tried to resell it, and he got less than he paid for it.

And i hate when that he was like oh my margins you know he was very sad and i wrote in general the great consumer financial arbitrage is like if you can buy

a thing that you can resell for the same price you paid for it and if you can put it on your credit card then like you can get your credit card points and you know you have a sort of a perpetual motion machine where you can like manufacture credit card points without spending any money and I said something like this is the great consumer financial arbitrage but it's hard to do because credit card companies are aware of this right and they try to crack down on it and of course my readers oh is it something like I shudder to think of all the reddits that must all the subreddits that must exist about buying Costco gold yeah for credit card points I got so many emails people are like people like this is how I manufacture credit card points

like a lot of people pointed out that in like 2010 the US Mint really wanted people to start using dollar coins because the dollar coin is like more cost effective for the Mint than the dollar bill.

And so they were like, we're going to be like Europe and transition to the dollar coin.

And so they were like trying to encourage people to get and use dollar coins.

And one way they did that was they let you buy dollar coins, like sacks of dollar coins, for a dollar each with free shipping, which is they're heavy.

And you could do it on your credit card.

And so people were like, I'm going to buy a thousand dollar coins on my credit card.

I'm going to get ten dollars or twenty dollars of credit card rewards.

They're going to arrive at my house.

I'm going to put them directly in the car, drive them to the bank, deposit them in the bank, pay my credit card bill with that.

And so the U.S.

Mint did not get what it wanted, which was like circulating use of the dollar coins because everyone was just taking them to the bank to pay their credit card bills.

People got a lot of airline miles out of it.

Eventually they shut it down.

Yeah.

You know, and I think the Mint was like losing money on each transaction, right?

I would imagine that they were.

The way credit card rewards work is that the seller pays a fee of 1.5% to the credit card company.

And so here, the Mint is paying 1.5% to the credit card company, which is giving it back to you in the form of airline miles.

And the Mint is losing 1.5 cents on every dollar coined.

Yeah.

So eventually they shut that down.

I will say, like, reading the Wall Street Journal article and then your column, I was thinking, I don't know, maybe these people are just trying to flip it too fast.

I mean, gold prices.

Well, right.

With gold, you're not buying a dollar coin, right?

With gold, you're buying a thing that could go up.

Yeah.

Right now, it's been going up quite a bit over the past few months.

But then I read there was an anecdote in the Wall Street Journal article about Luke Gride.

I hope I'm pronouncing his name right.

He's of Southeast Michigan.

He waited almost a decade to to make a profit on his gold bar.

He sold his one-ounce Credit Suisse bar for $2,350 in April.

Not bad.

That's after he paid $1,500 for it back in 2015.

Was it worth it?

I feel like if you bought the SMP, you'd have done better.

Yeah.

You wouldn't have had to carry on the gold bar.

Yeah, it's a lot of thinking.

I would just buy an ETF.

With a credit card?

Yeah, I don't know.

I do want to mention another credit card award story, which I've seen.

As you should.

Somebody reminded of me of this.

I actually wrote about it in the past.

There's this guy who's an experimental physicist and he was like, how can I build a perpetual motion machine?

So he had an Amex.

Amex, a lot of these credit cards, the way it works is like they pay like 1% cash back, but they give you like extra bonuses on certain categories of spending to like encourage you to use their card more.

And so Amex was giving him 5% cash back at grocery stores.

So he would go to grocery stores.

He would buy gift cards, like Visa prepaid gift cards at the grocery stores, and he would get his 5% cash back on these Visa prepaid gift cards.

He would take the gift cards and buy money orders.

He would take the money orders and deposit them in his bank.

He would use the money in the bank to pay his credit card bills.

So it was just like a sort of like closed loop of exchanging money for money for money.

Beautiful.

And he got 5% on the credit card transactions.

He had to pay a little bit for the gift card.

He had to pay a little bit for the money orders.

But all in all, he made like 3%.

Millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of prepaid gift cards.

like every time he went to the grocery store he bought like all their gift cards he made i think

three hundred thousand dollars of profit three hundred ten thousand three hundred ten thousand dollars of profit and then we know about this because

the irs wanted him to pay taxes yeah his gains from this trade and he was like no long-standing irs rules are that credit card cash back are just a discount.

They're not income.

They're just like reducing your expenses.

And so you don't have to pay taxes on them.

And he actually won in tax court.

So he had this like $300,000 of arbitrage income that he didn't have to pay taxes on.

See, that sounds more worth it than less than $1,000 over 10 years.

Sure.

Gold is in some way an inefficient way to do it because it's heavy, right?

Gift cards are lighter, right?

And so a lot of people find ways to buy cash equivalents on credit cards and then max that out as much as possible before the credit card company shuts it down.

I have two points here specifically on gold, not on credit cards.

You make the point that gold is heavy and it is heavy.

And actually, actually, in one of the articles, according to JM Bullion, shipping fees can be as much as $40

for an ounce of gold.

So it is expensive to ship it around.

And then insurance on the shipping, that's another $40.

Gold is heavy, but an ounce of gold, I think, weighs an ounce.

Yeah.

That's not that heavy.

I know, but if you're shipping more than one ounce of gold, it's going to add up there.

Sure.

The other point is that we were talking about ETFs and gold ETFs.

The largest gold ETF is GLD, and it's no shipping fees.

No shipping fees for gold, ETFs.

But the gold is in a vault underground in London, which I'm fascinated by.

I would like to go to the vault, but you can't go to the vault as a journalist.

Okay.

Interesting.

Yeah.

But there are a lot.

I remember actually how we got there was because GLD skyrocketed in assets at one point during the pandemic.

Everyone wanted it.

And it just grew so much.

And there were a ton of conspiracy theories out there, probably on Reddit too, about whether they actually had the gold to back it up.

Sure.

But it's in London underground, but you can't go to the vault.

None of us can go to the vault.

You hear how suspicious this sounds.

I know.

I don't see why people are buying gold bars at Costco rather than GLD.

It makes sense.

Then you have it.

Do you trust State Street?

Apparently a lot of people didn't.

I asked you.

I do because my life is integrated into the modern financial system.

If I didn't trust the modern financial system and I wanted to own gold instead, I wouldn't want to own gold through State Street in a vault that like crack reporter Katie Greifel couldn't even get into.

I did ask a stupid question at the time because assets in the CTF were going crazy, so they were having to buy a lot of gold.

Well, I said, is there enough room in the vault?

They're like, yes, of course.

Like gold is pretty small in the gold bar.

So there's plenty of room in this vault.

It's like a room this size.

It's just like a little pile in the corner.

They're like, okay, plenty of room.

I just always thought of Gringotts, and that's what I had in my mind.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Levine.

And I'm Katie Greyfeld.

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.com.

And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day between 10 and 11 a.m.

Eastern.

We'd love to hear from you.

You can send an email to moneypod at bloomberg.net.

Ask us a question and we might answer it on air.

You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review.

It helps more people find the show.

The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andaum.

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

Brendan Francis Newnh is our executive producer.

And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast.

We'll be back next week with more stuff.

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