Odd Lots - Meet The Mayor Who Printed His Own Currency To Fight The Virus

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

With the virus crushing economic activity, local governments have had to cut spending and rely on Federal support in order to maintain basic services. But one town in Washington is also trying something else. Tenino, Washington has printed its own wooden currency to stimulate activity, and help out its residents and businesses that have been hit by the crisis. On this episode, we speak with Mayor Wayne Fournier about how he got the idea, how it’s going, and what he plans to do next.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Rafini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off.

And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays, we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television. Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend.

Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. So Joe, we like to talk about money on this podcast, don't we? We love to talk about money. Of course, talking about market, talking about economics is always inherently or to some extent a discussion about money. But we also like to discuss money itself as in the stuff, what it is, where it comes from, what gives it its value, how it evolves

over time. Those are, of course, some of my favorite episodes that we do. Yeah, I know they are. And that's why I think you're going to enjoy this one, because we are going to dive into a sort of, I want to say brand new currency, but it actually kind of has its roots in something very, very old, which is during the Great Depression, we saw a bunch of different towns and areas in the United States issue their own local currencies. We also saw sort of unions, work unions issue their own script. This is something harking back to that era. Yeah, absolutely right. Like, you know, we have this crisis in this country and it affects every layer of government and every kind of business. But we have this sort of weird issue where a lot of the

entities that are on the front lines of fighting the crisis, so to speak, are the cities, towns, and states that deliver services to the people. But they can't create their own money for the most part, unlike the federal government. And this is all coming at a time when because of the collapse in the economy and the collapse in service activity like restaurants and stores, tax revenue is really dried up. So a lot of public entities at the state and local level, while they sort of wait, hopefully, perhaps, for more relief from the federal government, are in a severe crunch. Right. You have this tension between the federal level and the local level. But like I said,

you know, there have been instances in time where the local level, the local entities, towns, villages, you name it, take matters into their own hands and decide that they're not going to wait necessarily for federal money. So this is going to be one of those instances. And I'm happy to say that today we're going to speak with Wayne Fornier. He's the mayor of Tenino, Washington, population just shy of 2,000 people. And over there in Tenino, they've invented their own currency as part of their response to the COVID-19 crisis. Can't wait. I love this. All right. Well, without further ado, let's bring on our guest. Mayor Fornier, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for having me, Tracy.

Maybe just to begin with, you could sort of lay the scene for us. I mentioned to 9-0 is a relatively small town. What's it like and what's been the impact of the coronavirus crisis? Like you said, we're a smaller city of just under 2,000 people. We lie just about smack dab in between Portland and Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, and we're relatively isolated. So when the lockdown occurs and the shutdown happens, most of our businesses, our service industry, and there's not, you know, there's no like manufacturing or anything like that.

So when the lockdown happens, all the restaurants, the stores, the retail, they just roll up their, you know, they roll up the carpets and they lock the doors. For about three months, there was no traffic. There was no cars parked downtown on, you know, the traditional main street as you would kind of picture it in kind of the kind of an old way of thinking of a city and no people walking around. there was little to know economic activity outside of our supermarket where you couldn't buy toilet paper or anything like that. And so, you know, seeing this lack of activity and knowing that there would be some, you know, financial fallout from it, we decided to dust off an old idea that popped up into Nino in 1931, where we were the first city, I believe, in the U.S., to develop our own wooden dollar, our own currency. And so we fired up the same printing press

that we built in the 1870s. Yeah, yeah, this, you know, we've celebrated our history and the fact that we were, you know, on the cutting edge in the 30s during the Great Depression. And we've kept this printing press in our museum since then. And so when it came time to fire it up again

and use it to print money, it worked. We've got a guy that knows how to operate. operate it without losing an arm because when you fire this thing up, all these gears start turning and steam's popping up out of places and it looks like something out of, you know, the Wizard of Oz or Willie Wonk or something. And, you know, this person was in there for two days straight printing off these two-sided bills and he'd have to print every single one individually flip it. And it was quite a process, but we fired it up again and we're going for it.

You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data to keep you informed. Yes, there are other products like this from a variety of news organizations. But they usually rerun their radio newscasts throughout the day. That's not what we do. We create customized episodes that can only be heard on Bloomberg NewsNow.

And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast feed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments. Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. So, Ann, I love that.

I didn't even realize that. I love that you have the old printing press for the currency. I want to talk about that in a little bit. Very cool, huh? But before we do go further down there, I just want to back up for a second and just talk about the sort of Taino's municipal finance. What is your operating budget?

Where does the money typically come from? What do you spend it on? Like in normal times, like the year 2019, What do the finances of, uh, uh, tonight no look like? We have about a $5 million budget. Most of that is wrapped up, which is, I mean, that's, that's tiny. And most of that is wrapped up in, uh, a wastewater treatment plant operation. So our, our, uh, our water and sewer utilities, we've got, you know, we built a state

of the art wastewater treatment plant in like 2009. And so most of our budget is wrapped up in the debt service of that. Hmm. Uh, so then about half of. that is it goes towards operations. We have a police department, we have public works, we have city hall where we do all the administrative tasks. You know, there's not a lot of money to go around. We've been working really hard for the last couple years because things have been going well to save up some money. So we've got a little bit of money sitting in reserves, kind of an emergency

fund. And that's what we've been able to tap into for this. Not that, you know, we're, we only printed $10,000. So we printed $10,025 bills. But for a city of 2,000 people, you know, it's, if you were to multiply that by, you know, a large city, it gets, it gets, you know, it gets noteworthy, quick, I feel. And it's a scalable thing, you know, we as a city for a lot of things, we're just like a little laboratory. Right.

And we're, you know, we have the ability to try interesting, crazy things, see if they work. It would be wild for the city of New York to start. bringing its own money. But Tenino, let's give it a shot. So real quickly, you mentioned the $5 million budget, but on the revenue side, what is the standard source of that? Property taxes. Oh, okay. Yeah. So we don't have a lot of, you know, we don't have a lot of commercial or manufacturing bringing in, you know, tax revenue. Primarily, it's property taxes and we're a bedroom community. What have you seen in terms of a response from either the sort of state government or the

federal government. Did you get any emergency help for the coronavirus crisis from those two layers of government? There's a little bit of money that came in from the CARES Act, $60,000 here, a little bit there, and then we have to find ways to use it. We have, you know, literally, I think, about 12 to 13 employees. And so our city hall has three people in it. And they are tasked with, you know, doing the routine things. when something like some federal funds become available, typically, we don't have the staffing and the ability to apply, compete, go through the bureaucracy of getting the little bit of table scraps that are available to us. So most of the time, federal funds, we just, we don't even, we don't even apply for it

because all the rules make it not even worth us putting in the effort. That's interesting. See, I don't know anything about that, but like what is the, this sort of process. Like I guess if you were bigger and had more staff at the city hall, you could theoretically aim to get some of that money. But, okay, something like the CARES Act passes and they make some money available for towns and cities and states, how does that work?

Or you said you got $60,000. Like, how do you go about getting that? Or how do the bigger towns go about getting it? It depends on where it comes from. You know, like there are systems like community development block grants, right? And so we are an entitlement county. So our county has done the work for us to make us eligible for CDBG funds. If we were not, we would have to go and compete with everybody else.

And we'd have to have staff that were dedicated to administering those funds. We have staff that are dedicated already to absolutely everything. We don't have we don't have the ability to have. You don't have planning staff. We don't have grant writers. We don't have a finance department. Our finance department is like 60% of one person's job. And they're already tasked.

And I'm not much help. I'm just a normal citizen that decided for some reason to be mayor. You know, I'm a knuckle-dragging firefighter in my day job. And then I put on a mayor hat every once in a while and try to figure things out on my own. I had to start by Googling what money was before I started printing it. Oh, that's the best. Yeah. Oh, it's fun.

What did you find when you Googled what? money was what were some of the things that you found useful you know some of the original money was originally in ancient sumeria was traded play beads and you know it was backed by sheep in the communal pen and you know like stuff like that is fascinating and you know just what what is money it's it's just whatever the hell we want to put our trust in that is going to satisfy a debt between two people or two you know things and you know so some people are debating what you know internationally right this this whole story that we're talking about right now, it's, it's in Israeli media, it's in India, it's an, you know, I've seen it in the Persian Gulf Times, the Fiji Times. So all over the world,

people are talking about this thing that we're doing in this town of 2,000 people. I'm seeing in newspapers where they have like somebody from the Institute on Economics is debating what Mayor Wayne Fournier is calling money. Well, it's not money. It is money. And I'm getting a kick out of this whole thing. It's insane. I, I don't know what money really is. I don't know if, you know, Steve Mnuchin is going to call me someday and, you know, say I'm going to go to federal prison. I hope for something like that. I mean, that would just make the story more interesting.

I'm trying to think how to respond to that. Well, actually, you mentioned that you just decided to become mayor sort of one day. You have an interesting backstory, right? You were, well, you are a firefighter. And I think I read somewhere that you were doing like Banksy-esque type art. How did you get into local politics? So my grandpa was the police chief in the 70s here. My dad was an assistant fire chief.

So I kind of grew up in the city caring about things and being involved in things. And I went to school and got a degree in philosophy. So I'm, you know, I kind of, you know, I probably think differently than some people. And when I was about 31, there were things that I just found irritating. And also I want, you know, I have a drive to, you know, I have a drive to, you know, be in a leadership role. And I went and spoke with the mayor at the time about some things that I had concerns with. And he kind of like, I felt like I was kind of shrugged off.

And I didn't like that. So I came up with a scheme for like rousing interest in public property. And a friend and I, a friend and I, the guy that designed this artwork, he's an excellent artist. he and I came up with the concept of, you know, like guerrilla public service. It wasn't our concept. So it was at the time, Shepard Ferry was really popular and Banksy was really popular. And so we came up with our own guerrilla art and guerrilla public service campaign where we would, I bought like 30 used bicycles and spray painted of yellow.

And then I wrote share all over them. And I was promoting just sharing resources and, meeting your neighbor and started calling these public property on social media and the regime, you know, the political folks at the time, they didn't even know what social media was. So they would wake up and they would find these bright yellow bicycles under street lamps and what the heck are these? You know, we need to get them off the streets. They're garbage. And we'd get on social media. How dare they call our bicycles garbage? They belong to the people. And then kids started thinking they were cool and parents would take their kids out and get pictures of them

riding around. It was really like a moment that the community kind of bonded on something that wasn't from the establishment. And so it became an anti-establishment movement. And we were constantly kind of thumb on our nose. And we would do, and we're a city of 2,000 people. So everybody knows each other. And we would do, uh, we would do press press conferences. And my buddy Adam would wear like a bandana over his face and hide his voice. But everybody in town knew who he was. So it was kind of fun and tongue and cheek. And, you know, I was, I was kind of, like studying like what it was to do like, you know, guerrilla warfare and stuff like that and where you would, you know, you take the resources of the establishment and you turn it on its head.

And to make a bicycle, to weaponize a bicycle was kind of the concept because, you know, who hates a bicycle. But at the same time, the established order, like saw it as just a poke in the eye every time they saw one. But it was fun. We had the same thing. I went to college where I am now, but I went to college in the Austin, Texas. We had the same thing, the yellow bike project.

It was called. And I remember those, but I don't know if it's still around here, but that was a pretty cool thing. And then, and sadly, like all things, as I became the institution, the yellow bicycles, became less rebellious, and we'd get grants, and it became a nonprofit, and then it becomes

stale, and now they're just like, instead of like these wild horses roaming around town, they're, like, corralled on a bike corral, and you check them out, and you have to sign so you don't sue people. And I don't know. It's funny.

So let's talk about the money itself. What is it good for? How did you distribute it? And what can you actually do with it? How do people use it to pay their bills? Just talk about the mechanics. It gets into someone's hands. What can they do with it?

Why do stores accept it? Walk us through that. So the people that live in the city, if you're a resident, you're eligible to apply. You come in and you apply and you have to show the city that you have been harmed financially through the pandemic. And then based on your income level, you're eligible for up to $300.

And we would distribute once a month, you're eligible for your allotment. And then you just get it. You get these wooden dollars. You can take them to any participating business, which is nearly all of them. And you can use them just like the US dollar. And then the business that accepts them that are participating,

They should have come into the city, Paul, and read the program requirements that you cannot give more than 99 cents in U.S. dollars change. You cannot use it to pay for alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, lottery tickets. And that's basically about it. And then if you are a business that has certified that you understand that, you can then take these dollars in and trade them, exchange them one to one with the city of Tenino. However, most of the businesses are, and we haven't done that. I think we had our first ones exchanged just recently because the Tenino dollar is worth more than the U.S. dollar. So there's a lot of outside interest and there's a lot of, you know, kind of, you know,

where does value come from? It comes from demand. So there's a high demand for these things. And there are people offering five, six hundred dollars apiece per note. So the to nine o dollar has a higher exchange rate than the US dollar. So we're not getting them back. They're being circulated or they're being sold on the gray market. So then businesses are responding.

And now they're offering twice as much in goods for that. So you can get $50 in goods for the $25, US, the $25 to $9,0 in some businesses here. That opens up so many questions. So first of all, what is the current exchange rate of a to nine o dollar versus a U.S. dollar? And how do you know that's the correct exchange rate? And then secondly, does that affect how much of your budget you're using to fund this program? Or you mentioned, you know, 10,000 U.S. dollars set aside for this. So as the exchange rate sort of changes, does that impact the budget?

How am I saying that there is an exchange rate? Because we get phone calls every day. Our businesses are getting phone calls from all over the world, Portugal, China, and people are offering seven times the value, the face value. So I say, well, seven to one. You know, it's that simple. I'm kind of keeping my finger on the pulse. I get several, several emails every day. And if people are offering seven times the face value, then I guess that means it's a seven to one. an exchange rate. How does that affect the city budget? It doesn't because the city's not going to respond to that. The city's only going to back it one to one. I see. Okay. Got it. We have a potential $10,000 liability, but we know that won't be realized. So now we could, you know, we could have

printed off 20,000, having 10,000 in the budget, we could have potentially printed off 20,000 in bills and put them out to be used, which is that, that's like getting into the like the more theoretical side of it, I'm really getting excited about, you know, then we're generating wealth, right? Instead of just one to one, we're creating something from nothing. You know, the Fed has all these swap lines with foreign central banks and their currencies so they can swap their own, you know, they need dollars like everyone else, like say the Bank of Japan or, you know, the, I don't know, other banks. And then they swap their currencies with the Federal Reserve to get dollars. I take it, Has the Federal Reserve ever reached out to you and offered to swap U.S. dollars for $10.00?

Not yet. But this is crazy to me. And I'm going to pull it up real quick. Fox Business News ran an article earlier today. And the headline is in Fox Business News today, Tenino Wooden Money valued higher than the U.S. Greenback. That's a great Fox Business headline. I know.

This is Tom Keen inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. It's about making you smarter every business day. I'm Paul Sweeney. We bring you complete coverage of the U.S. market open. We cover stocks, bonds, commodities, even crypto, all the information you need to excel. And I'm Alexis Christophores. Bloomberg Surveillance also brings you the analysis behind the headlines. We do that through conversations with the smartest names in economics, finance, investment,

and international relations. We do all this live each and every weekday that bring you the best analysis in our daily podcast. Search for Bloomberg Surveillance on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen at lunch.

And on the West Coast, listen as soon as you wake up. That's the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast with Tom Keene, Paul Sweeney, and me, Alexis Christophorus. Subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts. Bloomberg Surveillance, Essential Listening, each and every business day. So we've been talking a lot about the international response,

and you've seen a lot of interest abroad in this. Talk to us about the local response. How have your constituents reacted to this? And I guess you have sort of two sides to this, right? You have the people who are getting the Ten I know wooden dollars, and you also have the shops who are exchanging those for them. There's a lot of excitement. There seems to be a lot of pride.

this is a city that really enjoys its history and we you know we treat it as a you know one of our greatest commodities being able to relive it and being able to participate in a historic moment people are they're really enjoying it when a business gets the wooden money in you'll see a post on you know Facebook or Instagram where they're celebrating it and everybody starts kind of talking about it outside of tonight no there's been a lot of a lot of cities in smaller cities that have contacted us asking us for our guidelines and our ordinances, and they're wanting to create their own local currency programs a lot like ours. And that is another really fascinating aspect to this.

We set aside $10,000. That's nothing. But if 5,000 cities set aside $10,000 and inject it right into their main street, that's a lot of money. And it's like it's kind of like a ground up approach. instead of waiting for the feds to, you know, rain money down on you from above, which never gets there. It always ends up, you know, in some blue chip company or, you know, somebody's friends ends up getting it all or what, you know, you read about that every day. And this is a chance

where cities take it upon themselves and hack the system and inject it right into their businesses. And it wouldn't take very many cities to have kind of a watershed moment where, you know, you kind of bolster things up. And that to me is kind of the America that we're supposed to be. So you mentioned those blue chip companies. And in some of the examples of local currency that we've seen before the coronavirus crisis, I mean, the whole point of it is to sort of keep money flowing locally, right? And to make sure that whatever aid people are getting isn't necessarily going to a place like Amazon or a big Walmart. Do you see a use for these sort of local currency? beyond the coronavirus in the sense that they could help, I guess, revive or stimulate local economies?

I hope so. The biggest city to contact me, some folks with the biggest city to contact so far is the city of Portland. And there's some folks in Portland that are toying around with the idea of creating their own currency that would be used in there. And they have a lot of farmers markets. They would be used solely in their farmers markets. So then you would be taking this local currency, helping out people that are, you know, strapped for cash, and then giving, not giving it, but using it for local agricultural producers, and then having it circulate around the farmer's market community, that's pretty exciting to me. And I could see that being something that happened, that occurred outside of COVID. That seems like a very Portland thing. Oh, super Portland. I swear, though,

before I forget, you really should get the Fed to set up a swap line with you, because they do it for other countries. I don't see why they shouldn't do it for cities. I'm going to have to Google what that means. Yeah. I'll send you a link that talks about it exactly because I think it's the next level. Anyway, here's another question. How many annoying crypto people have reached out to trying to sell you their crypto solution to local currency? Oh, yeah. Somebody even designed a wooden chip crypto thing and they were trying to like the the new age to nine oh wooden dollar a PhD student from MIT got a hold of me trying to create and I haven't really bit on any of it and I like I like to throw it back at them that our our wooden money is less hackable than theirs oh well

that was actually I was going to ask this question so what do you do like how do you prevent counterfeit have you you got to see our machine nobody do who has an 1870s printing press sitting in their garage, you know? God, I love that it still works. It's cool. It's very cool. If you watch the travel channels mysteries at the museum, they did a special on our museum and our printing press, and they show some of the operation.

Oh, I'll have to check it up. I guess I'm wondering how big do you see this going? So you have 10,000 set aside right now, but would you sort of grow the money supply and look to make it a bigger part of your respective economy? or do you see it extending beyond the current crisis? What's the end goal here? So we started with 10,000.

We've almost doubled that in donations. The people from all over the world have donated. We got like somebody from England that sent us $5,000 to help grow the fund. So it's gotten a little bigger. And I, you know, we want to make sure that we have enough, you know, in that fund to help people that are struggling through COVID. So that's our primary intent is to help people through this. Beyond that, there's a lot of talk and there's a lot of interest.

Our Chamber of Commerce is kicking around the idea if maybe they would take over the, you know, kind of the operation of it. But like right now, it works because it's fairly simple. And, you know, the city's acting as the treasury and it's very, you know, basic how we're doing it. If we get it to, you know, go beyond this, I would love to see that. And I'd love to see this kind of thing happen in other small communities, you know, throughout the country, but exactly how to make it work. Still try to figure that out. Currency aside, obviously the federal government about to begin debate and theory about this next round of aid. What should people in D.C. know right now about the economic and fiscal situation that small towns in the U.S. are facing?

So small towns, and it's not just through COVID, but we have a hard time getting to the table and getting resources. You know, our roads and bridges are crumbling, and it's hard to unlock exactly how to get road money, to have the infrastructure we need to be to thrive and be competitive and be sustainable. It's really hard to figure that all out. You know, so much of our resources and really every year. thing in this country is just centralized, whether it's like mega culture, mega business. And I feel, and I think that this COVID thing is exposed, that there is a lot of danger in that. If all your meat is being produced at some massive warehouse outside Stockton, California, and, you know,

everybody gets sick there. All of a sudden, there's no, there's no beef with a lot of things. we need to decentralize for safety reasons and for, you know, just and also for like cultural reasons. When everything is mass produced and you don't have like local flavor being developed like it used to be, you just, you lose something in the human experience. I think that microculture, local culture, those kinds of things have been lost and little, you know, little efforts like this, if other communities can be inspired to take it upon themselves to take initiative and do crazy things like our country was designed, you know, to have little laboratories of democracy, then we're going to have a much more robust country.

You know, if you're just constantly waiting for the federal government to write you a check or, you know, some authority to tell you you can do something or what to do, that's just, that's boring. All right. Well, Mayor 48, it's been a fascinating. discussion, we're definitely going to ask you to come back on, like, in a year's time or so, to talk about how the monetary experiment went and whether or not the Fed did ever ask you to swap currencies.

I'll be live from federal prison. Hopefully not, but that would make it more interesting. Oh, it would be legendary if I would have that. Either you're going to be in prison or the Tenino dollar will be quoted on the Bloomberg current. So it'll be one of those two outcomes. Either way, it'll be legendary. I'm sure.

So Joe, I really enjoyed that conversation. I mean, it's fascinating to get an insight into how a small town is doing in a really unusual time period. But I also, I, Mayor Fornier sounds like a really interesting guy. Like, I love the guerrilla art program. I love that he was Googling what is money before he started this entire program. It sounds like, he makes it sound like a fun job. Yeah, I know. You got to, like, Mayor Wayne.

or mayor for you. I don't know what he goes by. The locals probably call him mayor way. Should have found out. Yeah, Googling, like launching your own currency by starting, by starting by Googling what is money is like a pretty, that's pretty awesome way to get going. Yeah. And I mean, we've had the designer of the Burke shares program on before, which is the local currency in Massachusetts. And there does seem to be an argument about creating sort of parallel local currencies in order to capture some money and sort of force it to stay local rather than let it leak out of the system to big corporations or other places

that don't really need it. Yeah, it definitely in theory solves the leaks problem. But beyond that, like I said, why should the Fed be providing liquidity to all these other money printing entities, but not U.S. ones? Like, it's more and more local. It's been done before, I think. think of the past. I think there's like, I think Atlantic City once during the Depression had some sort of agreement with the government. So they should go for it. They should get Jay Powell on the phone. I mean, it is interesting because you do see people arguing that the Fed is taking on more of a sort of fiscal role than traditionally. Like, it is actually deciding where money can and can't be spent. So I guess in one sense, that would be a sort of new evolution of that role. Absolutely. Helping a local

communities exchange their local currencies into federal dollars. It'd be a huge stimulus program. Could you imagine? They would blow up. Yeah. That would really blow up. Okay. All right. Well, let's get Jay Powell on as our next All Thoughts guest and we can ask him. And ask him why he hasn't done that, why he hasn't helped out tonight. Yeah. Okay. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. Okay. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alway. I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart.

And you should follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy at Francesca Today. And check out all of our podcasts under the handle at podcast. Thanks for listening. On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning,

A man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16.