Steen Jakobsen: reality has become outrageous

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Merryn Somerset Webb: Hello and welcome to the MoneyWeek magazine podcast. I am Merryn Somerset Webb, Editor in chief of the magazine. And with me today I have Steen Jakobsen who is the Chief Economist and Chief Investment Officer of Saxo Bank and has been there since 2009, which, by the way, means that you have all read quite a lot of his work over the years because Saxo publish every year something called Outrageous Predictions 2022.

Now, I have not been following the accuracy of these predictions, but we might just ask Steen about that before we start. And then we’re going to find out what appalling things, because very often these things are appalling, Saxo are forecasting for us next year. Steen, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

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Steen Jakobsen: Thank you very much for having the opportunity.

Merryn: You have been doing this for years. I've been reading them for years, I've been writing about them in the magazine for years. Do you have any sense of how many of them turn out to be correct, or halfway correct? I think quite a lot, honestly.

Steen: So, I've done them, I started them 20 years ago. So, there's been quite a few things happening in the last 20 years, as we both know. But, I think, someone did the courtesy of checking out the validity of these calls. And if you extend the timeline, because, obviously, not all that we’re going to talk about today would have been in one year's time. But if you're allowed to extend that to 36 months, I think two out of ten tends to be right, despite the fact, and this critical for me to say. If we wanted to be right about these predictions, we would put something out there 100% of where you're... 20% of where you... That is not the way we think.

This is entirely to provoke you and your readers, listeners to just think outside the box. Because I think we spend too much time trying to figure out how tomorrow looks like in a linear fashion. Where I think the real exercise, especially for strategy, for investors is to say, right now in here I understand what are the rules? Or what are the changes to the outlook and the rules five, ten years from now and how could that impact what I do today?

So, the old testament to the way of trade, the old omen of, if you want to make money, short term you shouldn’t make money. You should think long term.

Merryn: So, just to be absolutely clear, these are not forecasts. They're challenging ideas.

Steen: Exactly. It’s just getting you to the seat of your chair and, hopefully, sometimes, very often, we provoke people to push back. And that is exactly the exercise.

Merryn: Great. Well, let's start with one that I think we can all hope does not come true in the next 12 months or the next 36 months, which is something that we talk about a lot in the magazine and worry about a lot in the magazine written by one of your colleagues that US inflation reaches above 15% on wage-price spiral. Yikes. How is that going to happen?

Steen: So, first of all, how did 7% inflation rate happen? Apparently I was told, and you probably the same, that by the central bank's authorities, that inflation was transitory. And now, here we are. This week we will get a print somewhere between 6.7% and 7% as the headline number. But what is going on, of course, is to a large extent, a combination of factors. One being that the physical world today is too small for the political aspiration of green transformation.

So, what we’re saying there is that if you look at the capex into the transport and mining sectors, it is the lowest in capex terms that has been in three decades. At the same time, you are putting huge taxes on the energy and transport sector through these new electric vehicles being one angle, but basically what you're saying is if you decarbonise the world, we are metalising the world.

On top of that we now have an energy crisis which is entirely driven by the fact, particularly in Europe and in the UK, by the short-sightedness of governments basically because they want to sell political ideas, not live in the real world where you have to have a base load electricity and base load electricity is based on turbines that run at a constant speed. And tell you what, if you have an inputs which is wind and solar, that is not a constant flow into these.

So, basically, we have a misfit between the government's long-term objectives, which is very fine and dandy, and the fact that we need to have a real plan for how we do this. This plan is not in sight. If anything, they will double down and triple down, as we see with the UK government on green, instead of actually going to the root of the problem, which is the infrastructure and the build out and also using fossil energy.

But the key component to us is wage growth. Because what is going on right now is that lorry drivers also in John Lewis get, what, £1,000, £1,500 to sign up. You have that the service industry, the classic retail industry is now having to pay, not only minimum wage, but more than minimum wage to attract young people, to get any people to work in that industry.

So, I think what the COVID-19 had done on the labour market is essentially to give full employment relatively to what people want to do. Because I think quite a few people have figured out what they don’t want to do during the COVID-19. And a lot of people took a life choice to change that, one being that there's not as many people as there used to be travelling to the metropolitan areas in that sense. So, we think all these things combined leaves the 15%.

Now, just for the record, 15% follows the historic reasoning on inflation because every single cycle since World War I where we've had inflation boosts has always had a higher print. And the high print in the 1980s was 14.2%. So, we just put it north of that. So, that’s the reason for 15% exactly.

Merryn: So, let’s come back to fossil fuels in a tick, but it’s partly about this idea that workers... What you way, in the piece is that workers have had a great awakening during COVID, and they realise that they're more empowered than they’ve ever been before. So, they don’t just want a job, they want an experience, and they want a better experience. They want better job conditions, they want to have wages, they want flexibility, they want a sense of purpose from work. But are these really long-term trends?

Steen: I think they are. Because you have a whole youth generation coming through who's living on different standards from you and me and those of us who have really benefited from lower inflation and higher stock markets. And that is not the case. Why is crypto taking off? It’s taking off because it’s the only asset out there where the youth feels they have an ability to attach themselves to potential future richness or income, if you want to put it at that.

So, I think there's a very frustrated youth that is not willing to take up this job as they used to. And, of course, in the specific case of UK, you have these new immigration laws after the Brexit which is not going to be solved short term. I saw Mr Johnson trying to apply to get lorry drivers. What did he offer? 2,000 passports to go. And he got, what, 13 to apply for it. In this world people want to stay closer to home. And as long as we have vaccine and COVID and all these things being at the forefront of the health sector, people want to stay home, closer to home. And I think there's a lot of lifestyle changes.

So, no, I don’t think it’s coming back. We have a tendency to want things to be as they used. And I think 22 is going to very much be a year where we are being forced to adapt to a new way of thinking about both markets and socioeconomic factors like our workplace.

Merryn: But this seems like a good thing to me, and one of the things that we've written about in the magazine a lot over the last 20 years, and particularly with reference to the US where it’s been more of a problem than the UK is the share of returns going to capital over labour has been out of whack for decades, right? So, this just seems in some ways to be a perfectly normal, if accelerated, return to the mean when it comes to return to the labour.

Steen: And there you have a critical, critical point. The reason we have a lot of these socioeconomic culture wars almost is exactly that point, the fact that the monetary policy that we conducted since the LTCM in 98 has been one where we have done excess return to the capital, and then we have underinvested both the research and development, but also into, of course, labour share of that pie. And that pie needs to rise.

Because we can disagree a lot about what Karl Marx says about capitalism, but ultimately, capital needs to have customers, and those customers need to be paid in order to be customers. So, it’s interesting that it’s Karl Marx who teaches us that to get the capitalistic system to work we actually need to get all boats to float. And as you rightly say, the boats that have been at the tail end and even the middle income end of income streams have seen a significant hollowing out, which, of course, is only getting worse by the fact that we have very high food and energy prices right now.

Merryn: Well, I think, I'm hoping that one isn't going to happen. 15% seems very high, but it’s hard at this point to imagine how it won't. So, let’s move on to fossil fuels, because we talked about this briefly just now. And this is another one of the predictions that appears outrageous, but actually, also seems inevitable. A plan to end fossil fuels gets a rain check.

And again, this is something that we have been writing about in the magazine, saying, it’s all very well wanting a green future. We all want a green future. We all want an energy transition, of course we do. Everyone would love not to use filthy fossil fuels. That would be great. But I think it’s really complicated, it’s really difficult, it’s really long term. And it comes with a lot of muck along the way. Because you can't have a green transition without fossil fuels to keep you going until you get to the other side. And green energy in itself involves a lot of really grubby mining and a lot of nasty politics.

So, this idea that it’s possible in 20, 30 years to move from a dirty energy world to a supposedly clean energy world is ridiculous. And if we were to follow through with it, we'd destroy our lifestyles and turn the lights out completely. And this is our worry.

Steen: And that is exactly what we are mirroring as well. But we are saying is just going one step further. And in terms of your investor base, what we’re saying is there needs to be a reclassification of a nuclear power and natural gas. There is no way in hell that we can get to that very, very good and aspirational CO2 emission target without reclassification. We need to use these energy sources better. You have many nuclear reactors today. That is not a risk to society. That is not a risk in the... As you and I grew up in the 1970s and 80s where we saw these protests to... It’s not the same on a [unclear] anymore.

And also, just to underline your point, I think people need to understand that we need to deal in real terms with the CO2 emission. Then we need to do something 180 degrees away from where we are today. The fact is that China today consumes 30% of all electricity in the world. That electricity right now is being created through using coal 70%. So, 30% of global electricity is driven by 70% coal. Which means that you and all your friends and everyone in Denmark can drive as many electric vehicles they want, it’s not going to change one iota to the overall footprint of CO2 emission in the world.

And that is the critical point because it’s not only China which is the most populous nation right now, but it's also the fastest growing nation, India, who use even more coal than them, and then, of course, Russia. So, if we want to be part of the solution for the future... And this is something I really think will drive a huge investor concept and basket and idea going forward, is that we need to set up something equivalent of the Manhattan Project during World War II. That was to create the atomic bomb, of course. But now we need to create that technology, that new innovation where we can take the [unclear] of energy very close to zero, and at the same time reduce the CO2 footprint.

That’s the export we need to do to China, to Russia and to India. By driving up and down the numbers of electric vehicles and doing small propellers on green buildings in London is not going to change the overall stance. We need to get realistic about how we get to that end goal because we all agree that the standard needs to be better. We all agree that we need to get off fossil energy. But we don’t get off it by creating an energy crisis, which in terms of real forecast, is my major forecast for this winter, that we’ll have a massive energy crisis.

Merryn: I think I have to agree with you on that one. One of the things that we talk about in the UK far too much is how we can micro stuff like insulate old buildings and this kind of thing. And we don’t talk nearly enough about the big picture. Now, the end of that, and I think the readers will be interested in this, you say market impact. The iShares STOXX EU 600, oil and gas, ETF could touch 50% as the whole energy sector gets a new lease on life, and, as you said, there'll need to be a crisis this winter for that to take off.

So, I think actually we’re doing rather well here. Neither of the things that we've been through so far are actually particularly outrageous. Are you mis-selling this report?

Steen: I've been asked that a lot because people push back, this is not that outrageous. But if you take the total ideas we have this year, it’s quite revolutionary, to be honest. But the gap between reality and outrageous has closed over the last 20 years.

Merryn: Yes.

Steen: Even ten years ago it was much easier to me... These same things we put up today would have been outrageous ten years ago. But now, all of a sudden, we have this massive tectonic shift in attitude, in the fragmented political... We have the social media overload, we have all these things, meaning that the gap, i.e., the difference between what is perceived to be outrageous and reality. To be honest, reality is far more outrageous than our course and has been for the last five years.

Merryn: Yes, that’s fair. I’ll give you that. It’s hard to think of anything outrageous these days. Just looking through my Twitter account. Moving on. The next one that I think our readers will find very interesting is EU Superfund for climate, energy and defence announced to be funded by private pensions. Now, the key bit for me here is to be funded by private pensions. Because, again, one of the things we've written about a lot in the magazine is financial repression in general, but also how over the next few years people with private pensions should get used to the idea that the government is going to start using that money for their own stuff. And that will be probably climate-related infrastructure, etc.

And so, there's going to come a point when we have to look at what we consider to be our private funds and realise that, in fact, they're going to be co-opted into public funds, whether we like it or not. And we're going to be told that’s a very good idea because we'll get good long-term returns from them, etc. We all know that story. And that is beginning to happen in the UK, we’re hearing talk around it. And that you're predicting that it’s actually going to happen in the EU.

Steen: Yes. And there are two major drivers. The first one is a very interesting one, again, from a socioeconomic perspective. If you think about the biggest gap and the biggest inequality in the world today, it is actually not between the rich and the poor, but between the youth and elder part of the... The baby boomers. There is so much wealth concentrated among the baby boomers relative to the youth. So, the youth will do a claim politically through the system on the future. So, you screwed up our future. How are you going to pay for that? And in the process, you accumulated so much wealth.

How can we transfer money from the youth and invest into the future without actually having the youth contribute to that part of it? And then, of course, it comes up very easily, oh, hang on a minute, we've got all of these captured the money that’s sitting in pension funds, most of them, and particularly in the public sector, funded over many, many years. So, it’s a big reservoir of capital available.

On top of that, of course, if you look at Europe strategically, and even the UK, we are deficient on energy, we are deficient on military, and we are deficient on political ability to manoeuvre. So, if you are deficient in energy and military, just take two easy ones, and you need to ramp up the investment, both will be done, as you say, under the headline that this is good for productivity, this is good for the youth, this is good for the future.

So, what we will do is we will go in and say, we're not taking away money from you, but 10% to 20% of your pension now needs to be channelled into government, quasi, like the Swedish bank model, bonds or equivalent that is being used to actually fund those two things that we are deficient on, an energy transition into the green transformation and increase and build better to create a Europe that has the ability to navigate geopolitically through a military minimum standard in Europe and the UK.

Like you, I think this is very likely, but it will be the biggest infringement [?] on pensions ever, of course. But, if you consider what's been going on during COVID-19 in terms of central bank man days, monetisation of that, unified basic income. Again, these things are actually not only disgracious [?] in the way they’ve been implemented, but they are already outrageous in action. Again, I come up short being outrageous relative to what central banks and finance minister are willing to do so. This one, I, unfortunately, think is very likely to happen.

Merryn: I highly agree with you. And just looking at what the report actually says, France has a light-bulb moment as it seeks to overhaul its pension system. It decides all pensions for all workers above the age of 40 must allocate a progressively larger portion of their pension assets into Superfund bonds as they age. This allows new levels of fiscal stimulus in the EU even with sleight-of-hand trick of hiding the spending in inflation and negative real returns on low-yielding Superfund bonds that are actually EU bonds in disguise. And really sounds so likely.

It’s also very interesting. I wrote an FT column last week about the nature of ownership. Everyone thinks that owning things is very black and white. My pension, my house, my this, my that. But, of course, inside any kind of government system, ownership isn't black and white. And the pension that you think belongs to you, of course, it doesn’t belong to you because it’s inside a government wrapper, a government-mandated wrapper, so, it can be used however anybody else wants.

So, one of the things that the last couple of years has really thrown up is this argument about how do you own something, and particularly a financial asset of any kind?

Steen: Yes, and what is your duration of that asset? You may have it today, but do you have it in 20 years? And what can you do to mitigate that risk?

Merryn: So, that’s another one that is just too likely for comfort. I'm flicking through now trying to find one that I really, really disagree with. But so far, so bad. So, the next one I think is really interesting because, one, it’s something that I've been writing about a lot recently. Readers take note, my book on this, Share Power, is out in January. You can pre-order on Amazon. Please do. Unjustified as, I know, but there'll be more of those.

Women's Reddit army takes on the corporate patriarchy. Now, this is fascinating because one of things that over the last couple of years we've really seen is the retail investor beginning to understand, the power of share ownership. Honestly, you saw all of the funny stuff during the pandemic with GameStop, etc. We saw lots of young people and new people come into the equity market and begin to realise that not only was this somewhere where they could conceivably make a lot of money, although I suspect they were also going to lose a lot of money, but somewhere where they can use to put pressure on companies to do various things.

And this is a suggestion that, mimicking the Reddit army tactics of 2021, a group of women traders launched a coordinated assault on companies' weak records on gender equality leading to huge swings in equity prices for targeted companies. I can't decide whether that sounds absolutely appalling or really great.

Steen: That sounds really great. And we need to embrace this. I think the retail movement that we saw was a liberation call, to some extent. I mean, not for you and me as being old [?] market of service. But if you are 25, 27 years old, this, again, as I alluded to before, is one way that you can execute some power over the market. You can choose stocks that your grandparents and Dad and Mum hates. And then, you ramp them up or ramp them down, whatever way you want to do it. But I think, as you say, that is interesting.

What is super interesting is that women not yet have done a women's Reddit army, right? Because the patriarchy, I mean, we are long overdue for equal pay, for C-suites to have 50% women, and certainly on boards as well. And what I see at the grassroots, and, like you, I'm being invited quite often to do seminars for different groups of people. What I've seen over the course of the last 24 months is that a lot of young women entrepreneurs or whatever, is assembling, creating small working groups and are now acting as one unit.

I think the next step up is actually to make sure that their purse, their share of the market... Which for the record, is the biggest, and may be [unclear] information which you know, but I'm not sure everybody knows, when you look at service of who is better at trading, men or women, the clear winner is women, simply that they trade less, and they have a longer view. So, all academic studies show that women are better investors, which is kind of interesting in itself.

But what is even more interesting is the share of the purse, i.e., how much money control? It’s larger than men as well. Even in very patriarchal societies like in the Middle East, it is the women that run it. Despite this, we don’t have a women's-only bank, we don’t have a broker for women. If you look at the whole PR and commercial way that banks express themselves, it’s very masculine. I don’t get it. And I'm a man. I'm exactly the wrong type to say this. But I think it’s time for this to happen.

And, of course, Reddit is just the label we’re using for this. But we really think that inside this increasing ability to navigate as small groups with targeted objectives, I think we will see a revolution. And I think, in particular, we will see women becoming more and more aggressive in pursuing companies that are doing well on this agenda, and being negative in companies that are doing well in this agenda. And, for God's sake, if ESG, which is a label without any content, can be driving 50% of the investment flow, why shouldn’t this be able to be happening to the market?

Merryn: Interesting. A label without any content. Love it.

Steen: But that’s true.

Merryn: It is completely true. It’s absolutely meaningless muck. You're absolutely right.

Steen: But it’s 50% of the market, and they expect it to be, what, 60% of all the AUM. And that is shocking. I probably should have done an outrageous call on that. But the fact is there’s going to be more ESG despite the fact this being an empty label. And again, you and I, I know for a fact, are not against better ESG. We just want something that is actually tangible...

Merryn: That means something.

Steen: And means something. Yes, exactly.

Merryn: Now, listen, Steen, I am going to give you a lot of this stuff on the women's Reddit army. But I have to pick you up on one thing, which is this idea that women are better investors. Because there are a lot of these academic studies, and I've looked at all of them. And I would to be able to say hand on heart that women are, on average, better investors than men. But I'm not convinced it’s true.

What it actually is about... Because all these studies, they all show the same thing, right? They all show that it’s about not trading so much. And everyone backs out of that, that women don’t trade so much because they're much more careful, because they do their research, because they're long-term investors, etc.

I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s that women... They're all American studies, right, all these studies. They're all trading accounts, and women tend to have money to start investing when they're in, say, their 40s, early 50s, etc., which is also the same age as they have to work, do all the housework, take care of the kids, take care of the parents, drop a sandwich. They don’t have time to sit around in the evening trading. This doesn’t happen.

So, they get their money, they stick it in stuff, they leave it there. And thanks to the fact over the last 30 years, which is when all these studies have been done, everything has just gone up. It makes it look like women are better investors. I don’t think that’s true. I just think we have less free time. That’s all it is. We have less free time. It’s a function of men not doing enough school runs. That’s all it is.

Steen: Easy now. But I could do one better, and maybe that is a good way to close this out. So, I think Fidelity famously did a survey of the best performing accounts they had. And then Fidelity, a US broker [?], has a huge amount of funds, right? The best asset group was the clients who were dead.

Merryn: Really? There you go.

Steen: So, I think you're probably right. And, of course, these surveys, to a large extent, are done to prove the point that they set out as a premise. But I think maybe on that exact issue on who do well and who does not do well over time, I think the investor needs to realise that trading less, of course, is an advantage from a cost perspective. But 90% of our return comes from asset allocation, right?

And that is also part of your mathematical bias here. So, if women, as you say, stick them in an account, or whatever they do, even if they just stay invested full out all the time, then, of course, they are benefited from the biggest bull [?] market ever. But I think, over time, 90% of what you do is what you do the first day when you decide how much you have in equity, how much in fixed income, commodity, volatility, crypto, whatever you do these days.

And I think that is a critical point. Because you and I have been doing this for 30 years, and we know no one can predict the market. It is always about having allocation to the illiquidity of equity where you get paid up to do that investment and then having fixed income for stability. And now, these days, we know [?] modern asset classes like you can actually be long volatility without having to buy [unclear]. And you can be long crypto and commodities as well, and real estate, of course.

So, I think it’s super interesting, and it’s a conversation that needs to be answered by the women here. Prove me wrong, women, and you right.

Merryn: Throwing down a challenge to women at the last minute there. OK, we can take that.

Steen: I'm sure. If you can handle all those things you just complained about, then I'm sure you can take this challenge as well.

Merryn: Then we probably can. Now, listen, Steen, we’re nearly at the end. I promised you I’d only keep you for 25 minutes, but I lied, by the way. I'm going to ask you for just one more minute because I want to ask you about the outrageous prediction that you wrote, medical breakthrough extends average life expectancy 25 years.

Now, again, at the magazine we've written about this a lot. We spend a lot of time talking about longevity, and we often have the wonderful Jim Mellon come to speak at our conferences and Wealth Summits because he's so good on all that stuff. But 25 years, a breakthrough that could happen in the next year, 36 months, that does seem a bit outrageous.

Steen: Yes and no. But what is really changing, and you know this from Jim as well, is that we have gone away from the model where we have one pill that fixes us for another 25 years. What we've figured out, or the medical science has figured out, is that it’s actually our resilience that defines how long we live.

And there is a certain resilience right now around 122, 125 years before we disappear, if not already being hit by a car or cancer. But what we are now doing and able to do, of course, is all of this cell generation, organ generation. We can do therapeutic different ways of doing gene mapping. The whole CRISPR technology.

So, it’s interesting. And I think that’s how, very often, life works, that we are looking for one thing in particular, and it turns out it’s a cocktail of things that makes a big difference. So, I would not be surprised. But, again, I think you know me enough to know I really don’t care whether it works or not. I'm just looking for a great opportunity in investment, right?

Merryn: Yes.

Steen: And the underlying expected growth of this sector is 25%. I mean, the amount of money, right now, going into ESG and other stuff will also be going into this. Because there's utility function and there's investment function. Let's take the utility one because that’s important for the future of our society. Imagine we move to a state where we can do diagnosis on health before we get

So, right now, we use 98% of our cost of healthcare in the system of treatment. Imagine if we switched that around, and it was like 70% in early stage discovery. Then we could save on [unclear] people going to hospital, all this treatment that we talk about. So, the ability to do advanced work in diagnostics, I think is going to be the biggest saving to the utility system.

But on top of that, all of the sectors, including some of the stuff that Jim and his teams are doing is indicating that this will be a $10 trillion market in ten years from now. Because, of course, we all want to live longer. And, certainly, society wants the utility of reduced healthcare cost. Because, I think, it’s pretty clear that despite the valiant work that these nurses and doctors and treatment specialists do in that system, it is getting increasingly complex and getting more and more burdensome on the budget to run these healthcare systems, also because we grow older.

If we now have an ability to actually diagnose people before they go in and start to use the expensive hospital system, then it’s a net save for the whole society. And driving that revenue or that saving will be a massive win for investors. So, for me, if I look at... And you probably know me as someone who is slightly contrarian, is slightly defensive. But my offside is almost entirely with cyber security, which is negative, and then it’s with next gen medicine. Because I'm not going to surpass an opportunity to have a growth market of 25%.

The problem, of course, is show me the three stocks that will win. And I can't tell you. I need to buy, of course, a wide range of these names.

Merryn: We would have loved the three, but we'll let you get away with that one.

Steen: It’s probably better to talk to Jim than to me about that.

Merryn: Oh, we get great ideas from Jim on that.

Steen: But it will also be inside some of the conventional companies that we have today that all of a sudden breaks up to this point. Because the healthcare system is under pressure for a number of reasons. We can't afford it simply in the future. So, we need to change that. And I think, having done macro for 30 years, things change when they have to. That is exactly the time where they change. It’s not one minute before, not one minute after. They change the minute they need to change. And what is needed now is a lowering of the cost of healthcare.

Merryn: Brilliant. Right. So, where are we? We have bad news for you, listeners. Inflation is going to destroy your cash and many of your assets. There's going to be an energy crisis coming very soon. If you live in the EU, all of your private pension is going to be co-opted into public projects. But there is good news as well. You're going to live a really, really long time. And you have more power in the equity markets than you know. Is that a fair summary of where we've come so far in the last half an hour?

Steen: Slightly on the edge, but, again, it’s only outrageous calls. And I'm pretty sure we... I actually feel very, very strongly. We sit in front of the most interesting five to ten years in macro ever. So, don’t get frustrated by these calls, which are only there to provoke you. I really think we are getting to a point where everything has to change. And it will change for the better, as you say. The amount of capital that goes to labour, the amount and the way we conduct ourselves in the monetary space.

And certainly, again, as we just talked indirectly about the fiscal space. I really think we are at the end of the road with this mismanagement that we've seen over the last ten to 20 years. We need to get the youth onboard. We need to get the women investors onboard. And we all need to realise that the solution is by investing into people, that’s the way we create the future.

Merryn: Fantastic. Steen, thank you so much for joining us today. That was absolutely fascinating, if not quite outrageous enough. We enjoyed it enormously. And I hope that maybe you'll come on again next year and tell us about next year's...

Steen: Would love to, absolutely love to. Great session, and thank you for having me. And best wishes for the holidays for everyone listening.

Merryn: Brilliant. Thank you.