“Moses took the bull calf which they had made, melted it,
ground it into fine powder, and mixed it with water.
Then he made the people of Israel drink it.”
Exodus 32:20

Readings

“India’s Top Tourist Sites Refuse Dollar for Admission: After years of urging tourists to pay in dollars when possible, the Taj Mahal and other Indian heritage sites will now insist on a proper hard currency—the rupee”…The Financial Times, 11/17.

“Time to break Free: The Middle East’s oil exporters should end their currencies’ peg to the dollar. In the past week Iran’s president has damned it as “a worthless piece of paper’ and China’s premier has moaned that it is causing his country “big pressure.” Nowhere are the dilemmas more acute than in the Gulf, where virtually all the oil rich states peg their currencies to the greenback…The worry is that the end of the Gulf states’ peg to the dollar would send jittery investors into a panic. That risk is real. But with oil prices rising and the dollar falling, the dangers of inaction are greater. The Gulf states need to get rid of their dollar peg now”…The Economist, 11/24. [Note: The irony is that the European press speculated the real reason we deposed of Saddam Hussein was that he was organizing a boycott of the dollar.]

“Dollar Ben: Watching the U.S. currency continue to decline in value, our irreverent friends at the New York Sun have stopped referring to the dollar. They now call it “The Bernanke,” in mock honor of the Federal Reserve Chairman who is presiding over the greenback’s plunge. With another rate cut yesterday, Ben Bernanke and the Fed are continuing to act as if they like the Sun’s moniker…Commodities have soared, including oil, which passed $94 a barrel yesterday, predictions of $100 oil are commonplace. Some politicians are blaming tensions with Iran for the oil spike, but those tensions have ebbed and flowed for several years. What has mostly flowed is the supply of dollars, and so some part of oil’s increase should be called the Alan
Greenspan-Ben Bernanke inflation premium. To the extent higher oil prices slow economic growth, they also defeat the stated purpose of the Fed’s rate cuts”…The Wall Street Journal, 11/1.

“Bernanke: The Anti-Robin Hood: The Federal Bank of Guardian Angels roared down Wall Street last Tuesday. Its mission—to bail out the stock market—was a success (for now). But the rate cut was no gift to Main Street, which lies outside the loop of crony capitalism. Long ago, the Fed abdicated its responsibility under then-Chairman Greenspan. But now chief Ben Bernanke has taken irresponsibility to a new level, where they have clearly demonstrated they work for Wall Street, and when the Street says “jump,” the Fed says “how high?”…MSN, Money, 9/24.

“A Perfect Storm: By itself, the plunge in the dollar would be enough to send the U.S. financial markets reeling. Against the euro, the dollar is down 9% this year, through Nov. 9, and down a startling 19% against the euro since the beginning of 2006. The story against the currencies of other U.S. trading partners is just as bad or worse. For example, the U.S. dollar is down 19% against the Canadian dollar just this year. That kind of plunge has made overseas investors and central banks think twice about holding U.S. dollars and hesitant to invest in U.S. stocks and bonds. With nobody buying and selling, whole sections of the debt markets have seized up…The Federal Reserve has to ride to the rescue by injecting new money into the financial system and by lowering interest rates. Though the Fed can’t really fix the problem by making money cheaper and more available, it can buy time for buyers and sellers to regain confidence…But in trying to buy time to solve the problem, the Fed has accelerated the plunge in the dollar”…Jim Jubak, MSN Money, 11/13.

“To understand the dollar’s current woes, you have to look to monetary policy and economic management. The supply of dollars in the world is ultimately controlled by a single source, the Federal Reserve. With its aggressive easing in September, and again in late October, the Fed has signaled to the world that it cares more about creating dollars in the hope of limiting U.S. credit problems than it does about the dollar’s value. Investors can see this, and so they are dumping dollars and looking for other assets to hold…Our current fiscal woes are in large part the result of previous monetary excess, which fueled a debt and asset boom that has become a banking bust”…WSJ, 11/9.

“Hurricane Ahead: While markets focus on the subprime mortgage crisis, an even bigger one is looming: the ever weakening dollar. Twenty years ago we experienced the worst one-day stock market decline in history, a crash caused by the dollar and fears of trade protectionism. When both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, under its new chairman Alan Greenspan, seemed to signal that we wanted a feeble dollar, everyone suddenly wanted out of dollar-denominated assets. Today gold in particular and commodities in general are blaring that there are too many dollars in the market. The Fed shouldn’t increase interest rates, it should float them. Ben Bernanke and Co should soak up the excess liquidity—over a 12 to 18-month period—until gold drops below $500 an ounce”…Steve Forbes, Forbes, 11/12/07.

“The Fed’s Unkindest Cut for Savers: The surprisingly deep rate cut will send savings yields down quickly. For savers, the Federal Reserve’s half-point slashing of the federal funds rate spells bad news. As fed rates go, so go yields on savings accounts, certificates of deposit and money market funds. Money funds that paid 4% to 5% before the rate cut will drop to between 3.5% and 4.5% within 30 days of the Fed’s announcement”…November issue of Money [Note: And this at a time when politicians say they want to encourage saving and discourage so much borrowing. Is this yet another example of punishing the prudent and rewarding the imprudent?]

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“Now He Tells Us! If only they’d listened to Greenspan! And they might have, if only he’d spoken clearly…There is the story about a puffed up political figure, or maybe it was a movie star, who came out with a memoir and began the requisite tour. A reporter cornered him at a cocktail party: ‘Did you write this book yourself?’ ‘Write it?’ the man said. ‘I didn’t even read it.’ This crossed my mind while reading Alan Greenspan’s memoir…He disdains the Great Pork spree of the 00’s. The unifying idea that governed Bush White House economic thinking—‘deficits don’t matter’-was, simply, wrong. Mr. Greenspan found it a ‘struggle’ to accept that this is what the Republican Party had come to. Scrambling for political dominance became the party’s great goal. ‘The reality was even uglier’: They would spend and spend ‘to add a few more seats to the Republican majority.’ This is all strongly, and clearly, stated. But when the tax cuts, and the impact of spending, were being debated, Mr. Greenspan allowed his congressional testimony to be interpreted as supportive of the Bush plan. And he did this even though he had been warned in advance by those who’d seen his testimony that it would be seen as an endorsement of the tax plan. Indeed his testimony—airy vaporizing about long-term trends—was quickly seized on by the White House and its congressional supporters as support for their approach. Mr. Greenspan describes himself—literally in an aside he seems to find witty—as ‘shocked, shocked’ that politics is going on in Washington, and his words are being twisted. But he never quite cleared it up, not at the time. He does it now, with the book, and after the advance. As a writer, I am in passionate support of large advances, but $8.5 million to tell the American people what he should have told them when his views might have had an impact?”…Peggy Noonan, President Reagan’s favorite speechwriter and current member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, The Home Times Newspaper, 10/07

“Just Trust Us: Today’s credit problems have one thing in common—an appalling lack of transparency. Innovators are forever finding ways, most of them legal, to minimize the strictures of the securities laws, the tax laws, or both. Which brings us back to today’s problems…The core problem here is mainly not one for business but for government. The relative starving of the SEC, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the Internal Revenue Service by successive Congresses and Presidents means that government has abdicated its role. Without enforcement, no transparency. Without transparency, credibility has nowhere to go. And an economy that depends on innovation also depends on credibility. So my proposal here is not to predict apocalypse but to praise transparency. Investors, now a hundred million strong, must be convinced that government will resume its proper job of enforcing transparency”… Thomas McCraw, Forbes, 11/12.

“The Fed Cuts Interest Rates Again: This week’s decision carries risks. One is tactical. The Fed has validated the impression in financial markets that investors’ expectations drive the central bankers’ decision. It has done nothing to dispel the idea that if Wall Street clamors loudly enough for a rate cut, the Fed will oblige. The Greenspan put has in effect been replaced by the Bernanke pushover”…The Economist, 11/3.

“The point we’d like to stress today concerns the Fed and its credibility—or to put it more tartly, its character. It is easy for a central bank to cut rates and ease money. At least in the short term everybody loves a good time, as yesterday’s equity euphoria showed. The harder task is being willing to tighten money amid the business and political criticism that inevitably follows. That’s the true test of a central banker’s mettle. We’ve argued the Fed hasn’t shown that character in many years, which is a major reason it found itself this week having to choose between the risk of higher inflation [or falling dollar] and a potential recession…As Chairman Ben Bernanke looks beyond today’s crisis to what he wants his own legacy to be, we hope he’ll make a restoration of the Fed’s character his main priority”…WSJ, 10/19.

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“Who’s to blame for the mortgage mess? We name some of the villains in a credit crunch built on irresponsible subprime lending…No 1: Alan Greenspan. Greenspan took the federal funds rate down to 1% in 2003 and left it there for a year. Even as the Fed began raising rates, Greenspan’s exceptionally low interest rates “planted the seeds for the housing bubble,” says Robert Rodriguez, a money manager at First Pacific Advisors who saw the emerging subprime mess early on and managed to dodge most of it so far. Greenspan’s role in the current mess doesn’t stop there. He encouraged the use of adjustable-rate mortgages in a 2004 speech, which was ‘an insane, idiotic recommendation,’ says Rodriguez. The follow year he endorsed subprime loans to help marginal borrowers get into houses. And true to his somewhat naïve brand of Ayn Rand libertarianism, Greenspan dismissed calls for more oversight of the mortgage business. This gave free rein to our next culprits: greedy mortgage brokers who had no problem pushing inappropriate loans on borrowers so that they could reap lucrative fees”…MSN Money, 11/15

“Atlas Shrugged at Fifty: For fifty years, Christian and other leaders have been reading the Bible looking for one line in it that might justify the popular philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose novel Atlas Shrugged is still selling 150,000 copies a year, fifty years after its publication. Despite her philosophy’s frontal attack on selflessness, generosity, community-mindedness and similar merits, Rand has made her mark in a civilization considered to have been deeply influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that values such virtues. The Bible comes to over 2,000 columns. Every line in them is challenged, countered, and dismissed by the 1,168 pages of Atlas Shrugged. In October 10th’s Wall Street Journal, Randian or Randite David Kelley celebrates and expounds the book: ‘It’s had a special appeal for people in business. The reasons, at least on the surface, are obvious enough.’ In Atlas Shrugged and the rest of the Rand corpus, business people ‘are not the exploiters but the exploited, victims of parasites and predators…No wonder it has such enthusiastic fans in the upper echelons of business.’ Why? Rand’s ‘how to abolish God and soul book’ is ‘a moral defense of business and capitalism,’ writes Kelley… Kelley describes Rand as ‘notorious as the advocate of ‘the virtue of selfishness,’ as she titled a later work.’ Her ‘defense of the pursuit of self-interest and her critique of self-sacrifice as a moral standard is at the heart of her novel.’ She parts with Adam Smith and theorists of capitalism who are troubled, and are thus in range of being humane, by ‘cutting the Gordian knot…by denying that the pursuit of self-interest is a vice.’ For her, capitalism is a ‘system that regards every individual as an end in himself. That includes the right to live for himself, a right that does not depend on benefits to others.’ Not even through trade. Kelley approves when the hero of Atlas Shrugged says, ‘I work for nothing but my own profit.’ Here ends the lesson.”… Professor Martin E. Marty, Sightings, November.
“I have enjoyed very few books as much”…Barry Goldwater on Atlas Shrugged, WSJ, 10/13.

“So who is Alan Greenspan--The picture that emerges below is one of an intelligent man centered on the self. More than anything else, Alan Greenspan seems to take care of Alan Greenspan. His life and accomplishments turn out to be a fitting monument to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of rational self-interest”…Greenspan’s Fraud, Ravi Batra, Ph.D., SMU

“Only Human: A Special Report On Central Banks And The World Economy. ‘This is manna. I am blown away. These guys get it.’ All decibels and splutters, Jim Cramer, CNBC’s markets pundit, was cheering the Fed’s decision on 9/18 to cut short-term interest rates. That bold stroke would bring the credit markets back to life after the nastiest shock in at least a decade. It would, he shrieked, get people to start selling, shopping and hiring. If only life were so simple. The credit crisis poses questions about whether the almost mystical status central banks have acquired over the past two decades can endure—and whether it would be a good thing if it did”…The Economist, 10/20.

4

“The 1929 breakdown was at its roots a moral breakdown. We were not living right. We had become extravagant. We had become intoxicated by the alluring notion that the royal road to riches did not lie through sweat but speculation. We discarded and scorned old-fashioned virtues.”
B.C. Forbes
Founder, Forbes Magazine, 1932

“Humanism—which is a polite word for the more crude and plebian atheism—is the ideological underpinning of the French Revolution, Marxism, and Objectivism [the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan’s mentor], and there is reason to fear that the practical results of the last will be similar to the first, should an Objectivist government ever come to power…Christianity and Objectivism have no presuppositions or propositions in common. They have no common ground.”
Without A Prayer:
Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System
By John W. Robbins, 1997

Reflections

I recently attended my company’s annual conference. Ben Stein, who recently offered an eloquent defense of God that is floating around the Internet, spoke of the connections between morality and money. Another keynote speaker was an investment psychologist from Wheaton. He agreed that our biggest challenge in today’s world is the lack of trust that some in business and finance may be passing on to our culture.

He cited 1972 as the year that a trusting America began to lose that trust. That was the year he wanted to go to camp. His father thought it would be good for him to earn the $50 he needed. So he found an ad in the back of a comic book, one that I remember quite well, that was for a company that helped teenagers earn money by selling metallic social security cards. All he had to do was go door to door asking strangers for their social security number and four dollars in cash and promise to get the personalized cards back in four weeks. He quickly got enough orders to go to camp. He then asked how many of us would now give kids we don’t know either our social security number or the cash. Heck, most of us would be afraid to let our kids go door to door talking to strangers!

Unfortunately, I encounter much the same cynicism when I talk to people about investments. Many investors, who are desperate for income on which to live, now have serious concerns about government-guaranteed mortgage-backed bonds, as well as municipal bonds that are (or were) rated AAA! So while his analogy was a bit folksy, it was right on. There has indeed been a fundamental shift in America’s values during the past thirty years. And preferring dollars to virtue is undermining economic prosperity. He didn’t know it but he had affirmed a chart that I have shared in my seminars the past decade. It is a chart about why our future leaders go to college. When I went to college in 1968, 80% of us boomers said we considered developing a meaningful philosophy of life as essential or important while 40% said making a lot of money was. By the early nineties, the numbers were the exact opposite. Those seeking money began to rise sharply in 1972, equaling those seeking meaning in the early years of the Reagan administration.

As one of the dimensions of religion is the ordering of priorities, one might logically look to see if there was a new religion that had inverted Christ’s command to “seek first the kingdom and all this [material wealth] will be added unto you.” And as many students in the sixties can attest, we had a new one. It was created by Ayn Rand, mentor to Alan Greenspan. And it indeed teaches that the moral purpose of our lives is to make a buck. While I happen to believe money is a useful tool, I have also learned, the hard way of course, that it makes an even worse god than gold. You don’t have to be a gold bug to know that at least God made gold in relatively limited quantities while the dollar is easily created in unlimited quantities by humans. And that can be economically dangerous when those who create dollars are as religiously devout in spreading them as Billy Graham was in spreading the Gospel. The more dollars they spread around, the cheaper they become.

I therefore believe our current moral and subsequent economic condition is quite different than anything experienced in the history of the world. The current lack of trust in the economy is not due to the usual “forgetting” of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, as described in The Bible and by the founder of Forbes magazine. This time many are consciously worshipping at the altar of an alternative religion that was developed primarily for businesspeople; one that has special appeal to Wall Street speculators who do not understand even “blue chips” represent real companies producing real products and services for real people. Small wonder ethically-challenged sub-prime mortgage brokers and lenders did not remember that all that paper shuffling was about real people in real homes, rather than a few bucks for the brokers and lenders.

In a very real sense, our new religion is very much like the intentional creation of that golden bull at the base of Mount Sinai by the people as they waited for Moses to come down from the Mount. It was actually sanctioned by Aaron, the priest who told the very angry prophet Moses that he had allowed the bull’s creation as the people wanted it. That might have been the first documentation of marketing a religion people want rather than giving them what they need but it certainly wasn’t the last. When disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker went to prison and actually read The Bible, he wrote a book that said he had been “an unwitting false prophet” who had “prepared the way for the anti-Christ” by preaching his prosperity theology. If he was correct, and I believe he was, there are still a lot of preachers growing fabulously rich by preparing that way, which goes the opposite direction of The Way. No wonder the Street loses its way so often.

Our preachers should know that Baal, the golden fertility bull of biblical fame, was a promise of future plenty for that nomadic tribe of herdsmen. As such, Baal was quite similar to our modern golden bull of “the Greenspan put,” which has recently been rechristened “the Bernanke pushover.” Without getting technical about the arcane world of financial derivatives, that is simply Wall Street speculators’ and mortgage lenders’ way of saying that no matter how imprudently they behave, the Federal Reserve will bail them out by creating more and more money, thereby boosting the prices of even marginal assets. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the word “Baal” is so similar to “bail”!

Yet few ministers usually have any idea what I’m talking about when I say that Wall Street literally calls the notion we can grow rich without sacrifice, thrift, prudence, patience and so on “moral risk.” But of course, The Bible says judgment begins in the house of the Lord. And when our moral leaders no longer understand the root of all evil hasn’t really changed over the millennia, our nation is bound to spend a little time wandering in the desert. Fortunately, The Economist better understands false priests are usually influenced by false prophets. It once ran a special section on the world’s most influential economic gurus. Ayn Rand, the mentor of Alan Greenspan who was in the front row of the White House when he was sworn in, was the only woman it listed. Not Nancy Pelosi. Not even Hillary Clinton, a Methodist who some conservative ministers consider to be the anti-Christ. But Ayn Rand.

The Economist said Rand shaped the economic policies of the Reagan administration, primarily through Alan Greenspan. (I believe she worked her magic through every administration since, including Bill Clinton’s, so I’m not being political here.) Yet Fortune recently described her as “a cranky, old loon.” She taught that capitalism, by which she meant markets unfettered by any government regulation and/or traditional moral restraints, is a new religion, calling it “the unknown ideal.” And while Moses and Christ advocated financial democracy, Rand thought salvation lies in giving our wealth to a few super-humans, which may explain the increasing concentration of wealth in our culture. Yet Christianity Today recently reported a conservative Christian college has fired a beloved professor for wondering if capitalism totally squares with Christianity.

It should have known better. Long before the sub-prime hangover set in, George Melloan, a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, referred to Rand’s influence before calling Greenspan “The Money Man Everyone Loves” and noting his answer to every economic problem was “generous liquidity” and “easy credit” (May 24, 2004). Worth magazine once ran a major article about Greenspan entitled “Playing God at the Fed.” It detailed his disdain of governmental regulation, which that old lawgiver Moses pioneered. And we now know that Greenspan rebuffed efforts to rein in the most aggressive sub-prime mortgage lenders. It’s also been reported that Chris Cox, the current head of the SEC, is a student of Rand. Let’s just say some socially responsible investors do not share his views about America’s need for corporate social responsibility.

Over the decades, I have written at length about why Mrs. Rand would proudly claim the title of “anti-Christ.” Basically, she hated Judeo-Christianity and its Golden Rule of social as well as personal responsibility (neighbor as self), particularly toward the needy through charity. If you’ve read Sir John Templeton’s Agape Love you know the Golden Rule has been expressed by every major religion in the world in some form or other, so her religion truly is a most unique creation for modernity. She hated St. Paul telling us to “honor and respect” government (Romans 13). As much as I appreciate many things he did, that probably prompted President Reagan, who was also a product of libertarian Southern California, to tell us “government is the problem,” rather than to “render unto Caesar” as loving money is the root of our problems, as The Bible does. So on behalf of secular humanists everywhere, Rand literally turned the root of all evil into the moral purpose of their lives with such books as The Virtue of Selfishness. Her gospel Atlas Shrugged--which the Library of Congress ranked the second most influential book after The Bible--ended with its humanistic savior making a sign over the world to replace the Cross and Star of David. It was the dollar sign, which was reportedly near her casket. No wonder a financial publication recently called Atlas our “most influential business book.”

Yet when a major Christian foundation invited me to dialogue over lunch with Leonard Piekoff, the current head of the Ayn Rand Institute in Orange County, a few leaders of a major ministry joined us. And they were taken back when I began by asking Leonard, who was a likeable enough fellow, to share his worldview and he replied: “Worldview? I don’t give a s____ about the world; I only care about my family.” And even he winced when I reminded him that Rand apparently cared little about her family; famously having an affair for years with a disciple after telling their spouses. In other words, to be truly faithful to Rand’s new religion, Leonard would have to only care about himself. It is that most individualistic ethic of looking out for number one that Greenspan apparently followed politically and economically at the Fed. It is the one that is again causing the distasteful headlines on Wall Street, as it did back when Michael Milken, the junk bond king, and the heads of America’s S&L’s, were devotedly practicing Rand’s ethic, regardless of the consequences for America’s investors and taxpayers. In other words, I believe Rand’s was a false religion that worshipped the dollar; and it is now disappointing so very many people around the world.

Not so long ago, American monetary policy was influenced by Judeo-Christianity, which has long taught that easy money is no better for the soul of businesspeople, and therefore the economy when viewed with a more “eternal” perspective, than it is for teenagers. Paul Volker, Greenspan’s predecessor who is a devout Christian, once ran interest rates to the high teens to tighten money and stop Americans from speculating in gold coins, diamonds and so on so they would begin investing in truly productive assets. He tilled the soil for unprecedented prosperity…and Greenspan.

As impoverishing as I believe his faith and policies have been for morality and now our economy, the good news is that I can now imagine better times ahead for America if we again think of the dollar as a tool rather than a symbol for the meaning of life. Of course, that means we will have to get our priorities straight again. We might begin by remembering wise old C.S. Lewis’ paraphrase of Christ: “Shoot for heaven and you get earth thrown in. Shoot for earth and you get neither.” That is, rather than yell at the Federal Reserve for ever easier money, which will only further destroy that pretty decent tool called the U.S. dollar, Americans and investors worldwide might trade rampant materialism and speculation for a spiritual reawakening and prudence, one of the four cardinal virtues of the old faith.

Of course, in the short-run, economic redemption always causes a bit of pain. Economic history suggests the Fed can improve structural imbalances in the global economy--meaning America trying to consume everything made all by itself--by weakening the dollar. But as we’re seeing, that can only go so far before it becomes destructive. At that point, we just have to stop consuming more than we’re producing in order to bring things back into balance. And that suggests a recession may lie ahead. The big firms, such as Goldman Sachs, have been raising the odds of such recently. Goldman is now at 40% odds. I agree with its assessment. That means those investors who are now going to non-dollar denominated assets may be zigging when they should be zagging. Depending on the report, net new inflows into mutual funds have been very heavily weighted toward foreign by as much as 90% this year, largely as the weak dollar has been improving their performances. We know all too well that most investors still chase past performance rather than trying to look ahead to what might work in the future. That might mean it’s about time to get more money back to the United States and a more balanced portfolio of domestic and foreign investments, while diversifying as much as possible for safety and hedging all our holdings the best we can. In the long-run, we may need to consider emerging economies to achieve the returns America had last century. But even America had long periods of stagnation in its markets during that time. And history suggests most of those periods happened just when most investors thought they wouldn’t. And that expensive lesson never seems to end.

Readings & Reflections is an email publication of The Financial Seminary, a non-profit whose sole interest is to encourage the reintegration of spirit and ethics into political economy and personal finances. While R&R is written by an investment professional who gladly submits this newsletter to officials trained in the intricacies of securities regulations, nothing in it should be construed as counsel to consider any particular investment opportunity. R&R is also posted on www.financialseminary.org, along with other articles and speeches by Gary Moore, the Seminary’s founder, and other contributors .Gary Moore offers securities through NPC of America (NPCOA), Member FINRA/SIPC. Gary Moore & Company, The Financial Seminary and NPCOA are separate and unrelated companies. The political, religious and ethical opinions contained are not endorsed by NPCOA. Opinions are not intended to provide specific investment advice and should not be construed as recommendations for any individual. To determine which investments and investment strategies may be appropriate for you, consult your financial, tax or legal professional. Please remember that investment decisions should be based on an individual’s objectives, goals, time horizon, and tolerance for risk. Furthermore, any listing of a vendor or product does not constitute an endorsement or warranty of the vendor or product by NPCOA. NPCOA is not to be held responsible for, and not be held liable for, the adequacy of the information contained herein. International investing entails special risk considerations, including currency fluctuations, lower liquidity, economic and political risks, and differences in accounting methods. Past performance cannot guarantee future results.