Odd Lots - Lots More with Brad Setser

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Argentina has always been interesting from an economic and financial markets perspective, to put it mildly. And it's gotten even more interesting following the recent election of Javier Milei as the country's next president. Milei, whose policies could be described as radically libertarian, has floated a bunch of new ideas including getting rid of the central bank and dollarizing Argentina's economy in order to finally put an end to rampant inflation. But how realistic is this path for a nation which has spent decades burning through loans from external creditors? This week on Lots More, we chat with Brad Setser, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, about why Argentina's issues persist and what options it has going forward.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa, play the podcast, Odd Lots on Amazon Music. Hey, Brad. I didn't realize you were going to be in person. I didn't realize you were going to be in person. I thought you were like. And normally we're just disembodied voices. Singing country tunes from some undisclosed Texas location.

I wish. Oh, my God. I did a deadlift. One, two, three. Hedgmy. Okay, go. What's the other? GEMany.

Barges. This is an after-school special, except... I've decided I'm going to base my entire personality going forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the U.S. Where's the best squid ink pasta? These are the important questions. Is it robots taking over the world? No, I think that, like, in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the oddlots podcast. And people are saying, I don't really need to listen to Joe and Tracy.

anymore. We do have the perfect guest. Until then, this is lots more. A weekly chat about whatever is on our mind. And we really do have the perfect guest. Do you recall the first time we talked about Argentina?

Yes. Worst decision in my life? No, not at all. The worst, without a question, the worst interview I've done as being interviewed. The biggest bomb I've Have you tell me the story? Yes.

So it was 2006, probably, maybe 2007, 2006. I think it was 2005. Maybe it's 2005. I was living in New York. I was more or less unemployed. I think I was doing like, you know, temp work or something like that. And I saw an ad online, I forget where, that the Rubini Global Economics was hiring for someone doing to do economic analysis.

And I was like, I need a job. And I'm kind of interested in economics. just stopped a job that I had working for a small portfolio management company. And so I sent an email and I'm like, I just think I've studied a little economics and maybe I could do this. And I went to an office on the lower west side. I think it was Tribeca. Was that where it was Brad? Somewhere around there. It was a north of Tribeca. It's like there's a warehouse. It's off to the west of Soho. I met with Brad. I was applying for the job. I met with Brad. I knew actually in advance, of this interview that Brad was interested in Argentina specifically in all the problems that it had.

And I tried to cram the day before to learn something about Argentina. And I think the first question, Brad asked me something about how, you know, some policy prescription I'd have for that. And you know that experience, like if you're trying to speak a foreign language that you used to know 15 years ago and you think maybe you know it in your mouth opens, but nothing comes out. That was me. I also know the experience of like having a bad language.

interview in real time and you realize that it's going terribly. It's just like the mouth opens and it's like no words came out and I'm like, well, I guess I'm going to do something else. Anyway, it worked out. We should have hired you on the strength of your blog alone. Anyway, bad business model. Anyway. We should have recognized.

We should have moved to meet the talent where the talent was. It's incredible. 18 years later, here we are, 17 years later, here we are. And people are still talking about Argentina. Yeah. Well, we are here with Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's been on the show multiple times. He's got to be, he might be the number one now.

I don't know. I'm sure I've been eclipsed. I was out of commission for two years. Yeah, that's true. When Brad was at Treasury, there were a couple years where we didn't get to speak, we didn't get a chance to speak to him. But it's been a lot now. But to your point, Joe, it does all. It always feels like deja vu with Argentina.

Like it's always, it's either they've just defaulted on bonds because someone decided to give them money again for reasons I don't understand or something kind of crazy is happening. Like with Argentina, it just feels like the craziest outcome is like the one that tends to happen. And the thing is to Tracy is that all these years later, I actually still have no conceptual understanding of what's actually the problem. With the Argentine economy, I don't understand why. Why, you know, several years ago, I think they elected some pretty like normy, reasonably centrist, neoliberal president. And I was like, oh, he's going to shake hands with Wall Street and here. And it didn't work. And, you know, and so I don't really understand.

I don't know what peronism is exactly. I'm not sure anyone totally does. I don't know why there's this perpetual seeming basket case that has rapid inflation. After all these years, I would bomb another interview if I were being asked any Argentina question. And I've gotten good at BSing on other topics. But even I can't even begin to BS on Argentina. Brad, what's your summation of the Argentine economy? Like, if Joe was interviewing you for a job, what would you say?

Oh, well, I have a thesis. It may be a wrong thesis, but it is an economy with a very small banking system. So it has difficulty financing fiscal deficits domestically. It tends, therefore, to try to borrow a lot externally. and it has a relatively small export sector, very ag-based, with a lot of volatile export revenues, and it tends to over-borrow relative to its export capacity. And when you can't borrow externally, it tends to print money. So you get this combination of default inflation and periods of stability.

And all of that definitely makes sense of when you spell it out like that. But it also seems like, doesn't that apply to a bunch of country, like, you know, not a very depthful domestic financial system, commodity exporters, so obviously exposed to very volatile, like, aren't a lot of countries in this predicament? And why does it seem like Argentina specifically people think it theoretically can get out of it, but it just can't? Why is it, it seems to just keep tripping over itself? Well, I think actually compared to most other commodity exporters, like commodity exports as a share of GDP, aren't all that high. Okay. It's just there's very few manufactured exports.

Oh, I see. So it's a relatively low level of commodity exports relative to the size of the economy. And I think people tend to think that because it's a relatively big economy, it can support more debt than it can, given these constraints. So that's kind of my thesis. But, you know, there are countries around it that have commodity dependent economies. I mean, more mining, less ag. Or like Chile.

Like Chile copper, but a much bigger export base and less debt. And they've built up over time monetary policy credibility in a way that, you know, boringly in Argentina has not very clearly. Okay. So this feeds into my big question here. Why do people keep giving Argentina money? Because this is like a joke in the market. And I think I tweeted this once, but the distracted boyfriend meme, you know,

turning away from defaulted Argentina bonds and looking at it. at more Argentina bonds. And also, I didn't realize this, but Argentina is the IMF's biggest creditor now, which I think... Well, they owe more to the IMF. Oh, sorry. Let me restay that. If they were the IMS biggest creditor, we'd be in a very different situation. The biggest debtor. But you know what they say about debtors? If you're big enough, you kind of become a creditor. They're not big enough, I guess. They're plenty big enough. Okay. So why do they keep getting money? Well, actually, Argentina didn't get money for a long time after their 2001, 2002 default. They didn't eventually do a restructuring. It took a while. And then after they did the restructuring, there were a lot of holdouts,

and they really didn't regain market access for a long period. And then, you know, Joe's right. I mean, a centrist, relatively center right, really, maybe more right than center right. President was elected, President Makhli. He brought in a bunch of Wall Street. He brought in a bunch of Wall Street bankers to run his economic team, and they had a clear theory of the case that Argentina had underborrowed. They would settle with the holdouts. They would go out and raise a certain amount of bonds. That would cover fiscal deficits associated with tax cuts. Like a very conventional center-right-to-right agenda, finance with external foreign currency borrowing, and they went out and they did a lot of that. But apart from that one borrowing spree, which was big,

like 40, 50 billion or maybe more in two years, Argentina really hasn't had access to external bond markets. But then, you know, the IMF saw a group of non-perinist reformers struggling, and it gave them a... Structural reform. They were, you know, they were going to backing certain structural reforms. Macri was friends with Donald J. Trump. And they came from real estate development families.

You got a big IMF loan. But then the current government, the previous government had borrowed so much from the IMF, they've not had access to new money. They clearly don't have access to the bond market. Their bonds have been trading in, you know, between 20 and 40 cents on the dollar ever since the 2020 restructuring. So obviously, we want to talk about the theoretical economic agenda of the president-elect and his talk about dollarization. But just real quickly, before we sort of get to the present moment, what failed about the mockery plan? Like when he, you know, as you say, it sounded sort of normal on paper and standard, maybe, you know, conservative government staffed with Wall Street-friendly types. Why didn't that put the country on a new path?

I think he just borrowed too much in four currents. So it's just a conservative version of the same old problem. I mean, I think if you were going to fund a big tax cut. You know, his thesis was you would, you know, provide the sugar before you do the tough structural reform. The sugar was a round of tax cuts. and they were going to slowly phase in spending, protecting social spending. So the first effect was a bigger deficit, fully financed by external foreign currency borrowing, and the market, and I guess the Macri government, overestimated their capacity to sustain

a higher level of external debt. And sort of things went downhill. There was, you know, the standard cyclical fluctuations, which made it hard to bring the fiscal deficit back down. And they were reluctant to do brutal cuts because they thought they would lose the election. And if they lost the election, we'd be back in Parenthism. We would surely have a default. But it ended up adding clearly like $100 billion to Argentina's external debt in a four-year period. I shouldn't laugh, but it's something grim about it. I mean, it was a stunning spree of external borrowing. And, you know, they didn't want to let the currency weaken too much because

they were worried about inflation. Right. So the current account was not helping. them. And so, you know, I think they just borrowed too much, to be honest. You can fund tax cuts if you can fund them domestically, but funding them with external dollars when you're a dollar-constrained economy's risky. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Ruffini. We'll bring you the latest headlines in-depth analysis and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off.

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Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. We're recording this on November 29th, and I feel like I have to caveat the conversation with the exact date because things move fast in Argentina. And in fact, I'm looking on the Bloomberg terminal now, and it looks like the new president, Javier Millet, has just picked his economies are. And it's someone who I think wasn't the frontrunner like a week or two ago. Anyway, we wanted to talk to Brad about dollarization. And I don't know much about this process. I am very willing to admit. I think it's happened in like Panama and Ecuador.

But can you talk generally to begin with, like, what does dollarization actually mean? I think you can think of dollarization as two things. One, it's just a buyback of your own currency. People have currency and circulation bills. You buy them back and you give them dollars. Euroization in the euro area becomes the legal currency that settles all transactions. If the dollar is the legal currency settling all transactions, then debts that that were previously in your local currency

also have to be redenominated into dollars. So the second component is a redenomination of debt into dollars. And so you combine those two things. Dollars have replaced currency and circulation. Dollars are legal tender and your debts are in dollars. You've dollarized. What's the problem that you're actually trying to solve? Usually you're trying to solve a problem of inflation.

That you're trying, you basically need to tie your hands. It's like a dis-sic-a-discus goal. through the straits with the sirens, you know, lashing himself to the mast and will not be tempted to print money. You have no capacity to print money. So if you want to spend money, you got to raise money. You know, you have to raise hard dollars to fund domestic spending. It sounds like you need money to do this as well, though, like the idea of you're, you know, replacing your existing currency. So I guess in this case, the Argentine peso with the dollar, like you would need dollars in order to do that.

That is a very important insight, Tracy. Thank you. That is one of the problems that Argentina faces. They are trying to dollarize, and the central bank is out of dollars, which is an interesting theoretical problem. So this new incoming president, Javier Miele, he said he wants to dollarize. He's also talked about getting rid of the central bank. Of course, we don't know what he's going to do, and it's possible that he sort of ends up

governing the country as a sort of standard. Well, he's kind of going back and forth on that, right? Yeah, conservative, you know, center-right, Latin American president, as, you know, often countries go back and forth between left and right. Like, I get that impulse, actually, which is that, you know, if your country has a pattern of just printing too much money historically, then you solve the problem by essentially throwing away the printing press. There's literally no way Argentina can print dollars, dollar for pretty stable. Is there a path to doing that, given the lack of dollars? Not unless a generous benefactor were willing to lend Argentina a bunch of dollars. Is it the IMF again?

Sorry. Well, I don't think the IMF is actually willing to provide the dollars. I mean, I think the IMF believes it needs to finally get a little money back. But, you know, conceptually, it could be the IMF. It could be the United States. It could be private Argentines who have a lot of dollars offshore who ban together and provide a generous loan. But Argentina doesn't actually have the capacity to pay very much interest on the dollars

that borrows, given how much is paying on its existing dollar debt. So there are some real challenges coming up with the dollars, which is probably why Malay is at least the last I had read. He said that dollarization is a goal. He said it's something that he doesn't need to be accomplished on day one. They're not going to, in the first instance, shut down the central bank. And their first move supposedly last I saw was going to be, as Joe suggested, a sort of standard but harsh fiscal consolidation, budget tightening, which is also just a reflection of reality at this point. Argentina cannot finance its fiscal deficits right now.

Brad, you know you mentioned earlier that the Argentina economy is sort of characterized by a small banking system. Would dollarization help with expanding the first? financial system in the sense that, like, maybe you're encouraging more faith in the money, and that would translate into more willingness to actually put money into bank deposits, and then banks would be able to lend more. So there are two, I think, offsetting effects. One is, at least in theory, there are a lot of dollars in circulation in Argentina, a lot of dollars locked up in safe deposit box. The black market. Well, it's black market plus, you know, some wealthy Argentines, just rather than trusting the banking system, you know, have a certain

number of dollars in Miami and a certain number of dollars under the mattress. So there are dollars in circulation, the black market. There are dollars under the mattress, and then there are offshore dollars in the offshore banking system. Conceptually, some of those dollars could migrate into the domestic banking system, which would expand the deposit base, allow the banks to lend more. They have to lend more in dollars, and they could conceivably provide more dollar financing to the government. So that's kind of effect A. Effect B is that you really don't have a lender of last resort. So banks are in the business of maturity transformation, particularly if you don't have a printing press, if you don't have your own central bank. So if depositors ever want their

deposits back, you have to provide them with dollars cash. So either you get those dollars from your central bank. Again, the central bank doesn't have dollars, or you have to hold as assets a lot of offshore dollars. So it tends to have offsetting effects. If it worked, it could bring money into the banking system. If it doesn't work, you will have converted a bunch of peso deposits into dollars. people will show up and ask for their dollars back, and the banks will be unable to honor those dollar promises, and you'll end up with a frozen banking system. Are there other ways besides dollarization in which,

I mean, because you're trying to solve an institutional problem. And I love the analogy of tying yourself to the mast, and so you don't have the temptation to do anything. Are there other examples, either historically or around the world, where countries solve the institutional problem of essentially self-constrained other than sort of dollarization, which seems kind of off the table without the dollars. So you can do various forms of pegs,

which are just sort of softer. Yeah. But you know. But you could always break a peg. You can do various, you know. But again. You can always undollarize too. It's hard to,

it's harder to undollarize. But, you know, it is conceptually. I mean, remember Argentina got off a currency board, right. Which was supposed to be the next. Is it a board and a peg basically the same thing? A board is you fully back all currency and circulation with dollars. Okay.

Or whatever your peg to. So anyone who has a peso could get a dollar. Okay. And those dollars are available at the central bank. Now, it doesn't solve the problem of a lender of last resort to the government or to the banking system. But it means like every peso is backed by a dollar at the central bank. So it is more constraining in that respect. You know, a peg is a function of credibility.

Yeah. And if you were really, really, really committed to the peg, and if you have a really tight budget, you could conceivably make it work. But it's basically, ultimately, it hinges on fiscal discipline. I mean, this kind of goes back to being boring. Tracy, I'm just looking on the terminal. You know you mentioned the new finance minister. The title, our colleague Sebastian Boyd, who outwrote it, one of our great colleagues, Milley picks architect of Argentine borrowing boom to run economy.

And then is one of the, Caputo was the finance minister for Mauricio Mockri and ran the negotiations with bondholders that paved the way for a return to international markets in 2016. So this just proves my point that like the craziest outcome is always like what's going to happen with Argentina. What's the scorecard for dollarization in places where it's actually happened? So I mentioned Ecuador and Panama. And I see like different interpretations of the success of those programs. So some people look at Ecuador and say, well, Ecuador growth is still relatively sluggish, whereas Panama has boomed. But with Panama, it's hard to kind of disentangle the factor of the Panama Canal and having

like an offshore financial center and things like that. So how would you evaluate the success of previous dollarization programs? So, yeah, I've spent more time thinking about Ecuador than Panama. I would tend to think that Panama's success is a function, probably less. of the canal and more of being an offshore financial center and the Panama Papers and a set of less savory aspects of contemporary globalization, which are probably, they are facilitated by doing business in dollars. I mean, presumably some Argentines have their offshore dollars in banks in Panama.

With Ecuador, look, Ecuador has stuck by dollarization. So in that narrow sense, it is worked. The banking system has not imploded. There have not been runs. Ecuador has not grown especially rapidly compared to its Andean peers that have not dollarized. You know, Colombia, Peru, Chile have generally outperformed Ecuador. And Ecuador rather clearly, and this is, I think, an important principle, you know, dollarization doesn't end the risk of default. And when oil prices go down, Ecuador still regularly defaults.

So there have been multiple defaults after Ecuador dollarized. So I think the record is a little bit mixed. Certainly, if you can pull it off, having your own stable currency, which you can use to denominate bank accounts and most of your own borrowing, is a better, clearer path to disability, particularly if you have a limited export base. I'm Francine Lacquois, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacquois from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment,

but I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix wherever you get your podcasts. In theory, if there were some generous borrower, rich Argentines, who wanted to repatriate their money to facilitate the transition,

is there an estimate of how many dollars the country would need in order to dollarize at some reasonable dollar peso conversion? Oh yeah, wait, can I just tack on to that? How does it actually work? Because my understanding is there's like there's multiple like exchange rates currently in the economy. There's like the gray market currency conversion and then the official rate. It seems tricky. So yeah, there's a blue, the blue dollar, which is the, the,

black market rate, which is, you know, like I think it's about at a thousand. The official rate's $3.50. So like a little bit of a gap. And then there are special rates. So Argentina has this problem that exporters would like to convert their soybean exports into pesos at the black market rate. They are unwilling to convert at the official rate. So at various points in time, Argentina gets desperate for dollars. And it basically gives a special rate to various sectors of the economy to try to pull money in. But the two key rates are the black market rate, the blue peso, blue dollar and the official rate. I think at the official rate, getting rid of the monetary base, which is probably insufficient, right, that leaves you no dollars to back the banks,

no dollars to cover your dollar debts. The central bank actually has a lot of short-term peso bills, which are a really big problem, no matter what, but particularly if you dollarize at a too high of a rate, but you could take out the monetary base with about $20 billion. Now, you do have the problem that at the current exchange rate, the short-term financial liabilities of the central bank are like $60 billion. And so you would probably be unable to pay the central bank's liabilities, and so you would have to restructure there.

If you devalued, you can kind of lower that costs a bit. But again, you need extra dollars beyond what it takes to get rid of the monetary base because the government has to pay all of its domestic debts in dollars. The government has to manage fluctuations in monthly revenues in dollars. The banks have to handle demand for, if anyone wants to pull money out of the bank, they have to have dollars available. So it becomes, you need a buffer. And so I think realistically, you need more like 50. 50 billion. Something like that. Yeah. Wait, so I know we've been talking about... 50 billion and a debt restructuring. And a debt restructuring. Well, without the debt restructuring, it was really

realistic anyway. No. I know we've been talking about dollarization, but could you get a situation where, like, there's UNization? Did you do that? Well, Malay is so keen, so fond of the Chinese. I mean, he is kissing and making nice. But sure, I mean, Argentina has an $18 billion swap line with the PBOC. I think they've used at least five. Maybe, you know, I think maybe that's gone up in the past few weeks. We don't know. So if the PBOC were willing to extend that swap line, you know, swap line is, you know,

Argentina puts pesos on deposit in China. The PBOC puts you on in the bank account of the central bank of Argentina. you could provide enough yuan to allow ewanization, if you so desired. You would have to yuanize all of the debts, not dollarize them. And then, you know, Argentina would still owe a lot of dollar debts on its external bonds. It would owe SDRs back to the IMF. So not all of its liability structure would be ewanized. But it is possible.

It would be slightly strange because, you know, The yuan is not freely convertible in China, but if you have enough yuan in Argentina, you can solve that problem. So I just want to say thank you for coming in. And I do think now I could at least BS my way for about 10 minutes in an Argentina. You would have been hired. You would have been higher. Stroke my chin and take things like, well, you know, dollarization has been no panacea for Ecuador.

And things like that. And I sound very wise. And he's like, oh, you know, and of course, we must remember that there are two exchange rates in Argentina. and all these great things like that. So I will just finish this up, my last question, with the question that you asked me like 17 years ago. And so you get the call from Javier Milley and says, Brad, you've been studying our economy for 20 plus years. You've known more about dollarization and international capital flows than anyone else in the world. Please join my government as the new special advisor. What would you tell him in terms of a policy approach?

Well, I think I would tell him three or four big things. Okay. The first big thing is you really don't have an option to dollarize. Okay. So the first item is your agenda is impossible. Well, I think that's pretty much what Caputo told him as well. I mean, it really is impossible to dollarize when you don't have dollars at the central bank. I mean, technically there are a few dollars against the mandatory reserves of the banks, but those are not realistically usable.

dollars, and you have no prospect, no real prospect of borrowing the dollars. So dollarization is not a realistic goal. Second is, you know, you have to do what you want to do, which is tighten Argentine fiscal policy. You're going to have to cut the fiscal deficit. I think Caputo wants to go to a 2% of GDP primary surplus next year. Good. I think that is necessary. I don't think you can do that fiscal consolidation and OSCO cut the size of government and have. which has been his other proposal. I think you have to be realistic about how much consolidation, how much shock therapy the economy can take. But clearly directionally, you need to have a big upfront fiscal consolidation, get rid of some of the subsidies, rein in spending, whatever

tax breaks that the last government provided at the end of its term that you're willing to roll back, even though you want tax cuts over time, you want to strengthen the state. I mean, in the short run, don't do tax cuts, but execute on tight spending. And then you have to restructure third, the balance sheet of the central bank. My friend Chris Marsh, who writes blogs, tweets as the general theorist, has a great blog on this. The central bank has a horrible balance sheet, like really horrible. It has these long-term, non-traded, low-interest rate dollar bonds that are, they're called non-transferable treasury securities.

But basically, their dollar bonds, of consequence of loans to the government, that pay a very low interest rate. That's their main asset. Their net foreign asset position is now negative. They've borrowed more in foreign currency than they hold in foreign currency. Their main asset are these foreign currency

denominated low interest rate, government of Argentina, securities. And then they borrowed a ton, or issued a ton, of short-term peso bills that pay these incredibly high interest rates. So they are hemorrhaging cash is this backdoor fiscal deficit. So you have to do a restructuring.

No matter whether you want to dollarize or just have a normal functioning central bank, you have to swap out the zero or low interest rate, non-transible treasury securities, for something that pays a real interest rate. So there's income coming in, and you have to probably restructure these short-term bills. And so you have to kind of change a situation where the central bank has no income, but it's paying like 100% interest. And you probably can't just do that with credibility. And, you know, we're going to bring the interest rate down. You probably need to do a pretty hard-ass restructuring.

Fourth component, you know, the bonds are trading. They've rallied a little, maybe too much. Bonds have been trading under 40 ever since they were issued in the restructuring. They're really starting to amortize in 2025. these are bonds that are clearly that Argentina clearly can't pay. And I would say you need to organize over the next year a preemptive restructuring of your 65 to 70 billion in international sovereign bonds. You will not be able to pay them when they come due in 2025, nor should you want to.

So that would be my agenda. What number restructuring would that be? This is going to be the last restructuring, though. They're really going to do it this time. I think Argentina and the smart bond investors, realized that the 2020 restructuring was built around the wrong premise. It was built around the premise that U.S. Treasury rates were going to be 2% forever. And so therefore, a 5% interest rate for Argentina would have been a reasonable rate.

That is not the case right now. So the bondholders wanted to preserve the face value of the bonds and were willing to accept a low coupon back in 2020. And then they wanted relatively short amortization. So the bonds started to amortize after five years. and you just have this steady wall of amortizations for the next 10 years. What you need to do is you need to do cut face, raise coupon, give Argentina another five to 10 years before they have to amortize.

Hard deal, but it's doable. Lots more is produced by Carmen Rodriguez and Dashel Bennett with help from Moses Andom. Our sound engineer is Blake Maples. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Catch you next time for lots more. Thanks for listening. This is Tom Keene, inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. It's about making you smarter every business day.

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