Odd Lots - How Nearly Two Decades Of Fed Policy Contributed To Bubbles, Busts, And A Boom In Debt

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

Many people like to claim that the Federal Reserve is responsible for the high degree of leverage and speculation in the economy. But the mechanism via which this happens is often misunderstood. On this week's episode of Odd Lots, we speak with Srinivas Thiruvadanthai of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center about how the Fed's goal of inflation targeting contributed to a massive buildup in private debt. As he explains, the approach to minimizing the volatility of inflation at a low level created a perfect environment for lenders, creating all kinds of other risks elsewhere in the economy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Oddlots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa, play the podcast, Odd Lots on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal and unfortunately Tracy Alloway is out this week. But the good news is we have one of our favorite recurring guests on the podcast today. We're going to be speaking with Srinivaz-Vadantai. He's the director of research at the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center. Great voice and great insights on markets and economics. And today we're going to be talking a little bit about the Fed, monetary policy, bubbles, economic volatility, and things like that.

There's a lot of belief out there that the Fed contributes to instability bubbles. But a lot of the thinking is kind of muddled, sort of overly simplistic ideas about a low rate just lead to surge in speculation. Srinivaz has some more insightful, complex ideas about the nature of central banking over the last. several decades and how it's contributed to less than ideal outcomes in the economy. And we're going to talk to him now. So, Shri, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you, Joe, and good to be back. You know, it's interesting. Before we get into, you wrote this paper recently on inflation targeting. But before we get into that, it's funny. I was looking at a chart recently of just

inflation. You can measure it obviously several different ways and strip out of things. over the last 15 years and probably further, if you strip out oil prices, it's almost impossible to find any meaningful up or down trend at all, even the economic collapse, the boom, the whatever. It's like, it's, it kind of just stays the same. It's dead flat. Yeah. That is right. And people overreed, like, this always strikes me. They get really excited like, oh, the three-month annualized rate of change in core CPI excluding healthcare services is at its fastest level in three years and they get really excited. But then you zoom out, it's like inflation hasn't changed

dynamics in years. Yeah. And we have got used to that, you know, that stability, right? I mean, that even a small tick up in the three months gets people excited, you know. How much of that can be attributed to Fed policy in your view, the fact that inflation trends are so stable? I mean, what happens when inflation trends are stable? How much can it be attributed to Fed? I think certainly Fed has contributed to it. I mean, if you look, you live, you know, if you live, look at the Fed policy in the last 20, 30 years, what it has done is implicitly, they are not trying to, I mean, a lot of people attribute a lot of motives to Fed. I just want to be careful. They're not trying to do anything. They are trying to do within their mandate.

Now, it may be that the framework is wrong, which is what I believe. But what they have tried to do is they take two things very seriously, low and stable. The stable part of it is is a lot more problematic than just the low part in my opinion. If you have low with a little bit of volatility around it, that would be okay, probably okay. Maybe you need to cheat it up a little bit. But the stability that you're pointing out is partly the Fed's doing. So let's start. You wrote this paper and you took aim at a particular approach to monetary policy or framework,

I guess maybe one we call it inflation targeting. What is inflation targeting? when did it start? When did the Fed adopt this current framework in your view? The Fed actually officially started inflation targeting only in 2012. But implicitly, if you look back, they probably have been doing it since the early 90s, or maybe mid-90s at least. They have been doing that.

And even before that, you know, if you look at the 70s when people really got, of course, upset about inflation. So the original Humphrey-Ockins Act actually called for low and stable inflation and inflation to be like 0% or, you know, eventually they said that to zero is not possible, 2% over a long period of time. So it's been there. Implicitly we have been doing inflation targeting in one form or the other at least since the mid-90s. What, well, what is it? So it's just this idea that it's not enough to just have low inflation, but that they should really worry about any sort of volatility in that.

Is that the, what is the main approach to achieving that goal? So the main approach to achieving this goal, and this is the tricky part, because the mechanism is never really clarified. You know, when you ask monitors or when you ask economists, they would tell you, oh, it's all through expectations. But these expectations channels, I mean, if you really look at inflation expectations, they have really not changed much or they don't seem to have any relation to reality sometimes. So, you know, I don't know how that expectation channel works, except in textbooks. But the basic idea between the expectations channel is through some magic, I know it's not, they would never say magic, that we all expect inflation to be low and maybe around 2%. And if everyone sort of accepts that. And if we all accept that the Fed will do whatever it takes to keep it there, then that has the effect of actually keeping it there. And the main way sort of mechanically that the Fed keeps it there is by being very vigilant. raising rates at any sort of hint that inflation might be picking up to reinforce this notion among consumers, among businesses, that they will do what it takes.

That is right. And that is clear. They're signaling aspect of it, apart from raising rates, all the talk that goes along with it, is one aspect of it. To be sure, you know, I mean, of course, people, to some extent, you know, if there is a set expectations that, you know, prices go up by two percent, so people get wage hikes about two percent, people are happy. and, you know, that's what gets set in the pricing mechanism. But it doesn't work through the expectations way that a lot of people think it works. But that is how they sort of explain it or that is in theory. Now, you say inflation targeting officially only has existed since 2012, de facto it's existed

since the mid-90s. Okay, so then what was the earlier approach? How does that substantively differ from what the Fed did? the 60s or the 70s or 80s. Right. In the 60s and 70s, they were not particularly, I mean, 70s was a little bit different, but in the 50s and 60s, when they would see the economy heating up and inflation starting to pick up, they would just slam the brakes, but they didn't particularly have a specific target in mind. They were not trying to target inflation.

But it was also much more, from the industrial side, much more, you know, like a German-type economy. There were large unions and there would be large union-type bargaining. So the price mechanism was a little bit different wage and price mechanism. We don't have that kind of a thing. So, you know, I mean, prices were a lot more closely aligned with wages and productivity. Okay. So they still fought inflation. They still wanted low inflation.

And then did you say the Humphrey Hawkins mandate required them to have that? But it wasn't like, we have this number. It's about 2% and we're going to do what it takes. We just don't want inflation to go up. And if it looks like it's going up, we're starting to go up. we're going to fight it. That is correct. I think the difference in the post-1980 era is especially post-19, 1990, let's say.

Let's put that as a cut off, is the mandate on stable inflation and what they think contributes to the inflationary pressures. You know, see, in the past, they used to have some kind of, even if you try to recast it into a model and try to backfit the data. They did some tailor-tled rule kind of a thing all through up to 1980. They have been doing that ever since as well, but they also have an extra emphasis on not just the output gap, but on how fast you're reaching the output gap. I mean, so let's say you have a huge output gap. Let's say for simplicity sake, Nairu is 5% or unemployment is 10%.

The gap is huge, right? And that Nairu may itself overstayed and unemployment. I mean, the natural rate. But that's a huge gap. But let's say you are accelerating. Should the Fed be worried? Right. Should the economy is accelerating?

Should the Fed be worried because the gap is so big. But they seem to, data, I mean, empirical work shows that they seem to be really concerned if you're accelerating very fast, even if the gap is huge. Yeah. So even if there's, it's clear that, all right, everyone thinks that 10% is a very long way from full employment, like what we saw, obviously in the immediate during the financial crisis, there's almost no level, if we suddenly got hot growth. Right.

It doesn't matter how big that gap is. That makes Fed officials nervous at this. That is right. And you saw that early in the expansion, right? They were not, people keep saying now in hindsight, oh, the Fed should have been more accommodative. They should have said this, said that. But, you know, like for in 2013, that's six years ago when they did the paper tantrum thing.

I mean, you know, when things heat up a little bit, they react to the heating up. And I think. And that's kind of new. That is new. So you did not see that in the 60s and 70s. Absolutely not. If there was a big output gap, if there was clear that there was a lot of people who were left to come back in the workforce, they would welcome fast growth because that would get them to the goals faster. Yes, absolutely.

So was that Greenspan who sort of beat was the first? I mean, in a way, I mean, sometimes it's interesting because Greenspan's legacy, I think, over the years is, I think people deteriorated a little bit. You could make the, you know, sometimes I think like you made some interesting choices and would certainly seem to tolerate. the boom a little bit in a way that maybe modern central bankers would be more uncomfortable with. Yeah, the longer you stay, the greater the chance that your image gets tarnished, because something will go wrong, you know. Yeah, I mean, he did in the 1990s to some extent. For sure, he let the boom run. And that is right. I mean, see, there are two aspects to it. letting the boom run is not necessarily bad, but the problem with letting the boom run

in the backdrop of an inflation targeting. framework where the Fed says it's going to keep inflation control leads to build up a leverage and the financial excesses. That's the issue. Right. And so this gets to kind of one of your key points, but also sort of what seems like the unspoken or increasingly vocalized problem with all of this, which is that so far we've just been talking about this sort of push-pull relationship between unemployment and inflation. But then there's this added dimension of financial leverage in speculation. So we had a very good economy throughout much of their 90s. But when things are good for a long time, people get reckless with speculation than we have a bubble. Right. That's right.

In the beginning, as I mentioned, as like, you know, it's kind of amazing. Like, inflation doesn't do anything. So on one level, the economy has been incredibly stable, and that's at prices. But this pursuit of stability on the inflation front, in your view, creates instability elsewhere. Right. Because when you have such stable inflation, the Fed is making two kinds of promises effectively, right? When you're saying that inflation is going to be stable. Look, if you are a investor in credit, it's telling you that you don't need to worry about inflation eroding your real returns.

The value of repayment stream. And you also don't need to worry about deflation, which would be really bad because the defaults would pick up if you're a credit investor. They're making you a very narrow corridor promise. Yeah. And if you're... That what does it encourage you? it encourages you so that Fed is going to do whatever it takes to do that, right, to hit that

mandate. Yeah. So you should go ahead and make loans. And that's why you see, if you look at this era, that's when you've had these junk bonds. There was no such thing called junk bond before. There used to be investment-grade bonds that would become junk, but there was no market called junk bonds. The whole junk bond market has been explosive in this era.

I think this is just an incredibly important point. And I think one that we should just slow down for a second for people to understand. And this idea that if I make a loan to you, there's two ways I can lose, right? So if inflation shoots up and, you know, you have to pay me back $100 every month and inflation surges, the value of that $100 a month is less. So that was an unfortunate choice by me. On the other hand, if there's a recession, you might lose your job and not be able to pay me back at all. Right. And so what you're describing with this inflation targeting and by keeping it very stable.

Right. And you say they're essentially making two bets is the Fed is taking both sort of normal risks for lenders off the table. Right. And that's just fantastic for lenders. That is fantastic for lenders. But what it does in a secular sense is builds up leverage in the system, which is to be very different from, which I want to distinguish this. You know, there is a lot of moral play in economic debates, policy debates that, that, oh, we need to purge the excesses from building up, you know, like, you know, Andrew Mellon saying that's yeah. And that's, doing that kind of thing is incredibly. incredibly painful for the most disadvantaged people in society. So I just want to be careful. It's not that the Fed should be hiking rates, you know, purposely when things are really bad. That's not what they should be doing. I think it is the mandate per se that creates so the issue is when inflation is low and so let's say the three-month moving average just went above two percent. But we are like five percent away from anywhere near closing the slack. It's early in the cycle where the Fed does this. Yeah. It's slamming down.

That really is the problem. which also has been shown in a recent paper. One thing I mentioned in the beginning is that everyone criticizes the Fed. There's all different kinds of criticisms and there is this view that the Fed prints a bunch of money that people go out and make speculative investments. And you're describing a very different mechanism than what I think is sort of the typical, I don't know, the sort of gold bug kind of Austrian crankish. I know, view.

No, I think there's a, I think we need to separate. A lot of people have this, like that is the mechanism. They would agree, they're like, yeah, the Fed is cause our bubble. Is it because they print all this money and they keep interest rates really low? And then people rush to buy speculative assets. And what you're saying kind of is that there is a connection between Fed policy and speculation and too much leverage. It's just different than a common mechanism that's previously.

Right. And I don't criticize the Fed for doing what their mandate says, which is trying to pursue full employment. You know that if slamming the brakes, I mean, so slam the break in 2008, and we did that. What happened? Right. I mean, the human cost of doing these kind of things is incredible, which somehow people seem to, I mean, paper over when they talk about. I think the issue, my issue is if we want to address these issues of cleaning up everything and have a stable economy and stable growth, we need to think, rethink policy. But not, there's no point in criticizing the Fed because they've been given the mandate of trying to manage the global macro economy.

And these are the tools that they have. What are they supposed to do with it? So what are what should they do? I mean, so is the issue that the Fed in any mandate doesn't have the tools to do this and that we need more more aggressive fiscal policy in some way and that essentially no matter what happens, if we lean entirely on monetary policy for macroeconomic stabilization, that will inevitably lead to these kind of. risky debt buildups? Yes. You need fiscal policy. Because fiscal policy, apart from being stabilizing, you know, in a macro sense, the flow, financial flows, you know, profits and everything. It also, in a balance sheet sense, what you're doing with fiscal policy,

you're adding more safe assets to balance sheets. Therefore, you're making them more resilient. Right. Right. I mean, you're adding more treasury bonds to portfolios. You're making it more safe. You know what's weird to me is, going back to the mechanism via which inflation targeting leads to buildups is I think that, you know, the Fed, as you put it, has created nirvana for lenders. So if you're a banker, if you're a lender, if you have capital, this is the absolute sweet spot. Shouldn't this be like what all the conspiracy theorists adopt? Because this actually kind of seems like, you know, the real tinfoil hat types, who think the Fed is like secretly in cahoots with the elites and all that. Shouldn't they adopt the view that what the Fed is

doing is setting up an economic Goldilocks that's just absolutely beautiful if you're the entities that have money and the ability to lend. That is actually true. In some sense, I mean, they're not doing it. I mean, there is no grand conspiracy. It's not an intentional. We're going to do this to enrich creditors. Right.

But de facto, they've created a great scenario if you're a lender. That is correct. That's absolutely true. And that's why it has been associated with the rise of finance, right? I mean, the rise of the financial sector in the last 30 years, you know, overall in gross value added, in profits and in everything, you know, it's clearly been associated with this era. I don't want to pin it all on the Fed policy. There are lots of which complicated issues going on. But certainly there is contribution from Fed policy.

Why did, so, yeah, there's actually a real diversion, but you mentioned inflation. They would like slam the brakes in 2008. I think in Europe they got really unnerved by oil in 2011. And why did, like, in the modern era, did central bankers still get so freaked out by oil prices? Because 1970s, and if you look at most of them, of the people who are in central banks, these are people whose formative years were in the 70s.

Right, right. All of them, right? So that's why inflation, when people get, I mean, David Graber just wrote something and all economists got really upset about it, right? But they don't do some soul searching. Why has inflation gotten so much preponderance in the economic literature? Inflation, inflation, inflation,

targeting inflation, that cost of inflation. And actually, if you look at the data, this is very much from the mainstream. The very major paper written by Nakamura, who used to be at Columbia, but she's now at Berkeley, I think. Fantastic paper. She just did amazing work with this. She and her co-authors.

Elusive costs of inflation. So she went back and looked at the 1970s data. She did all this microfish work to get that data. And she found that the cost of inflation that people talk about in the textbook or in the models, New Keynesian models, but simply not there in the 70s, whatever the costs that people talk about.

This is in terms of real costs to the economy. In terms of, well, what is the theoretical idea behind the idea that inflation is bad? So the inflation, what they're saying is, it distorts relative prices. If there's high inflation and therefore high variability in inflation, high volatility inflation,

it creates the distortion in the relative prices. And thereby it creates wrong signals for allocation of capital allocation, of output allocation of resources. So the essential belief that inflation should be both low and stable is this idea that if we just like get prices fairly predictable and stable, then all the other decisions that are actually important for the economy, companies making investments and so forth, they do a better job at that. That is good. And the economy and then theoretically, all these other things are like downstream from inflation. They do a better job of that. And so we've been talking about the speculative excess that

emerged due to inflation targeting. But go on, what are the costs in terms of other aspects of the real economy? Because again, if you look over the last 15 years, they've obviously achieved inflation is very low and stable. But, I mean, for most of that time, employment has been far away from anything that anyone would call full employment. So they're also failing on that front. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the standard New Keynesian model, this is how absurd it is. And people, this is one, the economists are going to give me a lot of blowback on it,

how absurd it is. The cost of having a little bit volatile inflation that distorts relative prices, apparently, which the data doesn't show that at all, is more than cost of recessions, much more than the cost of recessions. In their view. In their view, recessions are preferable to, having inflation be a little more volatile. That is how it is.

But in the last 30 years, since 79, not 30 years, 40 years now, unemployment rate has been above Nairu. I don't believe in Nairu, but let's take that as a... Nairu is the non-what's it for those... Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. I know you don't even believe that this number actually exists, but the premise of that is that of this idea that Nairu exists is that there is a level of unemployment below which

suddenly inflation really takes. But the vast majority of time we've been above that. We have been more than two-thirds of the time since in the last 40 years, 70% of the time we have been above Nairu. So 70% of the time we are running the economy on Slack. Just imagine. So that, why, and why doesn't this get more attention in the academic literature, the fact that, I don't know, I mean, why? I see that all the time. That is what I'm trying to say.

Because I tweeted the other day, the chart of like inflation being stable and someone's like, oh, so that you're like, you're saying is the Fed is doing its job. Right. And, well, no, because they have two mandates. So they're like, one of them is doing one mandate, the low and stable inflation mandate. Yeah, I guess you could say they're doing their job. Right. But it's clearly they're failing on the second one. It's an exorbitant cost of achieving a mandate for whose benefits are very nebulous. That's what it is. The Fed is a dual mandate of low and stable inflation as well as maximum employment. is to all central bankers more or less think those are not, that the second one, the employment part of the mandate is the lesser among equals? I do think they do. And in the other case, they don't even have that mandate. Like ECB doesn't have the mandate.

It's just prices. It's just prices. So they don't even have the mandate. So, well, they don't care about it. So let's go back to policies that could ameliorate this. And I think a key thing is, you know, you're not talking about liquidation. You're not saying, oh, yeah, we got to like raise race. and squeeze out the bad debts and cause a recession. But what you're saying is that from a much bigger secular standpoint, it's not about 2019 stocks are high and that makes you nervous. It's that for decades, we've run a regime in both ups and downs that contribute to a buildup of risky debt. And we had your colleague on the podcast, David Levy, a few weeks ago, and you talked about

that risky debt, but this is not a cyclical thing. It's just, it's a, it's a fixture of the economy. That's right. It's a fixture. It's a fixture of the economy. And so how do we, that, that contributes instability, like it leads to the kind of thing that we had in 2008 and then before that in 1990, the banking problems. So how do you deal with that? I think you certainly, fiscal policy has to play a much more active role, number one. Number two, you know, Minsky said this also, that regulation will always, the innovation will always be ahead of regulation, but you do need to keep on improving on regulation. So the Fed's approach generally has been, okay, we're going to do monetary policy with interest rates or something like that, but we're not really going

to do much regulatory suvation in one form or the other. Like in the 1990s, Greenspan resisted doing anything with margin debt people. People are talking about, I don't know whether that's a right approach, but one has to think about a variety of regulatory tools, like, you in the housing bubble when it was going, you could have kept interest rates low, but try to curb down on the risky lending, puts more guidances. They did come up with the guidance, but it was like in 2006. They came up with the guidance. Powell, the current Fedger, seems cognizant of this tension. He does not seem like he has any appetite to slow the economy via interest rates. He doesn't seem particularly concerned about inflation, maybe less concerned probably than

even some of his predecessors. He does seem concerned. I think it was I think it was Jackson Hole summer 2018 and he talked about how imbalances don't really show up in inflation, but they show up in financial excess. So do you have some hope that the Fed in its current direction is maybe thinking about at least identifying the problem a little bit more, if not necessarily coming up with the tools to curb speculation other than through the rates channel, at least identifying that the current setup is kind of insufficient for all the real concerns that are out there? I think so. I think if you see even the academic literature, a lot of work has been, is being done on the macroprudential stuff and on, and even, you know, the dot frank, whether the legislation

was perfect or not. I don't know. No legislation is ever perfect. But, you know, it's a work in progress. But you can see that it certainly has contributed to frictions and, you know, complete easy lending and easy policies. So we don't get the same crazy things happening. Do you think that economists who are doing their work now and then over the coming years and maybe entering academia or central banking will carry the scars of mass unemployment with them and put an emphasis more on the employment side 15 years from now, 20 years, from now in the same way that central bankers in the 90s had their formative years, the inflation of the 70s? Probably, but I don't see that much of it. I mean, I do read quite a bit of the literature. I don't see that much of it. What I do see a lot is much more of the macroprudential

stuff, you know, or the financial crisis and the financial friction modeling. I think their advisors are still probably people who are still very much focused on inflation. It's funny. Like, I mean, I know what you're saying, and I don't read much academic literature, but I am surprised at the number of, you know, smart people that I follow out there who are like still like pretty kind of deadenders on the sort of New Keynesian models that you describe despite, I mean, to me is just a sort of lay observer of this who's not steeped in the literature. It looks like they've mostly failed.

It looks like, A, they haven't delivered much stability. And B, that the models they have for, say, even anticipating when inflation is going to take off. everyone seems to have embarrassed themselves on this. And yet, by and large, there's a lot of people who don't strike me as having done a particular amount of soul searching. You know how long it takes to learn the apparatus, learn the mat behind it, learn the coding behind it, how much investment in human capital it takes to do that. And are you going to throw it away? Think about it. If you had put it that. Some costs. Yeah, absolutely. I know. You know, that's really what it is. I mean. Before we go, so, you know, the sort of

other end of the sort of New Keynesian idea is the sort of modern monetary theory school, which essentially says the Fed should just set interest rates at zero and they should all just go on vacation and that all of the sort of task of fighting inflation and maintaining macroeconomic stability should be left to fiscal policymakers or policymakers in general, including non-fiscal tools or regulatory tools, price controls, whatever it is to fight inflation, maybe other supply side things in terms of busting up rent seekers and cartels. Is that too far? Like, what is the proper role for, in your view, for monetary policy to help curb some of the excesses in the economy? And, you know, how far should we go in the other spectrum to where you've said we need more active fiscal policy,

but is there, you know, how far actually do we go? Well, you know, I don't go that far. I am more in the camp of Tom Pally, who has been a critique of MMT. I'm not a critic, bitter critic of M.T. I consider them my friends. But I am more than Tom Pally camp that monetary policy is too important a tool to be left in the garage, in the toolbox and not to be used. I think it has a role to play. So that's what we need to rethink.

And I certainly don't think we can just keep it at zero and leave it at that. No. So some role to play still, but it's just this over-reliance that's created the deadbilt. That's right. That is exactly the issue. I think the problem in thinking about any policy is we have to be humble. I mean, and Minstki said this, that you are never going to be. Capitalism is an innovative animal. It's a complex system which will adapt and change. As you make more rules, people will innovate and find their way out of the rules. So you cannot think that you're ever going to tame this beast so that in a way. But we have to find ways in which we minimize the pain for vast majority of the people. That's the key issue. And then we used to have recessions in the 50s and 60s. They were severe recessions, but they didn't have lasting scars. Unlike the last several recessions, each one of them, we take like six years to come out of it in terms of get back to full employment.

You know, that's the damage we do. Even though this is a, you know, we're having this conversation about sort of big secular themes. Right now in the U.S. economy, do you see signs of, are there aspects of the private credit market that concern you? Right now, no, I mean, the corporate credit, corporate debt has gone up. People talk about corporate credit all the time. Corporate leverage is near record levels. Yeah. And that's partly because, you know, interest rates are low and that enables people to, when earnings yield is high, but you don't have too much capacity for growth. Yeah.

You don't need to invest. So what you do is you do the buybacks, which people keep criticizing, but what else are they supposed to do with the money? I mean, you're giving them money and they're doing it. All right. Well, Srinivas, great to have you on. I always love talking to and I appreciate your appearing again on Adlau. Thank you so much, you. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed the episode today. Shri is always one of my favorite people to talk to. And I think this idea that the Fed has created a sort of nirvana for creditors is such an important. important concept because there's a lot of confusion about the relationship between monetary policy and asset bubbles and so forth that I find this framework to be, this explanation to be very compelling. And I hope you did too. So this has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And even though she wasn't here, you should follow Tracy on Twitter. She's at Tracy Allaway. And definitely follow Srinivaz on Twitter.

He's at T3, one of my favorite followers just great all around. Be sure to follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. And check out all of the Bloomberg Podcasts on Twitter. It's at the handle at Podcasts. Thanks for listening.