Odd Lots - Mitu Gulati and Ugo Panizza on Haiti’s Odious Post-Colonial Debt

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

Nearly 200 years ago, the colonialist French power granted independence to Haiti. But it did so under the brutal condition that it pay 150 million francs in exchange for its freedom. This was a staggering sum that imposed a staggering imposition on the Haitian economy. And there's good reason to believe that that initial debt contributed to the ongoing poverty in the country. On this episode, we speak with law professor Mitu Gulati and economist Ugo Panizza about this odious debt, the significance of this burden, and the ongoing efforts for Haiti to obtain reparations.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm June Grasso, inviting you to join me for the Bloomberg Law podcast. Every weekday, we help you make sense of the legal stories that shape the nation and the world. Listen for complete analysis of the biggest court cases, the latest actions from Congress and regulators, and the legal moves driving the markets, from corporate law to constitutional law, and from state courts to the Supreme Court. At Bloomberg Law, we go beyond the day's headlines. We speak with top attorneys, judges, scholars and policy experts to break down what the rulings really mean. We do this every weekday,

then bring you the best conversations in our daily podcast. Search for Bloomberg Law on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen as you start your day, and on the West Coast, catch up in the evening. That's the Bloomberg Law podcast with me, June Grosso. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcast. And welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. Joe, it feels like there's a lot of terrible things happening in the world at the moment. Yeah, it does. The news has been pretty grim between the virus, Afghanistan, natural disasters.

I would agree with your assessment. Yeah, and I think the sort of pace of the bad news means, that a lot of stuff is kind of getting buried in the news cycle very quickly after it happens. So we're recording this on August 17th. Just a few days ago, there was a massive earthquake in Haiti. I think more than a thousand people are believed to be dead, but that death toll is probably going to go up some more. But that event has already sort of been superseded by events in Afghanistan, and people have

just sort of moved on to the next big global drama. But I wanted to dedicate this episode to Haiti because if you think about what the country has recently experienced, you know, the earthquake that I just mentioned came off the back of its president getting assassinated just last month. And then, of course, before that, Haiti has had a long history of natural disasters, Hurricane Matthew in 2016, a really, really catastrophic earthquake back in 2010. And the country itself is one of the poorest in the world. So in many ways, it just feels like Haiti can't take a break or catch a break. Right. I would say pretty much all of my life, I think Haiti has been known for violence, extreme poverty, international attempts at

reviving the economy or domestic institutions that seem largely to have failed. And then, of course, they sort of unforeseen disasters. But I think, you know, within particularly the Western Hemisphere, Haiti is known to have had an extraordinary, extraordinarily bad fortune. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned international efforts to revive the economy, because today we are going to be talking about one possible effort and possibly the most obscure of those efforts, which involves bonds that were issued more than, let's see, almost 200 years ago as part of Haiti's independence movement. And there is a discussion now about whether or not you could possibly sort of unwind that debt in order to pay reparations to Haiti.

So it's sort of an obscure thing, but it fits right into odd lots and, you know, our obsession with old debt. So we're going to get into it. I'm looking forward to this. This is odious debt. One of the topics that I think you have really done a great job sort of bringing to the forefront of media and odd lots and looking forward to this and talking about this in the Haiti context. Oh, thank you. Well, I have to credit one of our guests, Mitu Galati. he's a professor at the University of Virginia.

He's the one that introduced me to this concept. And we also have his fellow researcher, Ugo Panitsa, a professor at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. So welcome, Mitu and Uco. Thank you. Shall we start with the very basics for people who haven't heard the concept of odious debt before? What exactly do we mean when we say odious debt? So there are at least two meanings of odious debt as it's discussed, both in the popular press and in the academic slash legal literature. One meaning is just, you know, any debt that you don't like.

It just has a bad odor and you don't want to pay it back. The more technical legal meaning of odious debt is, you know, is. is that it is debt incurred by a despotic leader without the approval of the population and the knowledge of the creditors that these debts are being used for purposes that are contrary to any benefit that would result for the populace. So the classic example, and during the Bush administration, odious deaths became very popular when the U.S. went into Iraq. The example was Saddam Hussein borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to buy arms, and those arms were then used to oppress the Iraqi people. So that is the popularized version of this odious debt concept.

You mentioned, okay, so we can understand easily enough this idea that if a despotic leader borrows money, doesn't use the money in service of the public. And then after they go, it's odious the idea that the public would then have to bear the cost of that debt. How much in the determination or the thinking of when debt is odious, how much or how difficult is it or how important is it to establish that the lender understood this, that when they were lending, that when someone bought the sovereign debt of a given country, that they were buying into debt that really was not going to help the public in any way? So usually the lender is not really analyzed in these discussions of odious debts. In almost every discussion of odious debts, for example, take the Saddam Hussein case, which is, you know, the most recent. A lot of the debts there were literally arms dealers selling arms to Saddam. but the primary focus was on the despotism of the leader of Saddam.

It's really only in a case like Haiti and sort of more broadly colonial or imperial debts that you begin to think about the lender. And that's not something that we have traditionally done. So I want to get into the exact situation with Haiti and the money involved. But before we do, you know, we're talking about a broad definition of odious debt that really focuses on the borrower. And as you mentioned, the classical example is a despot who borrows lots of money that doesn't necessarily benefit their country's population. How did that particular interpretation of odious debt come into being? because in some ways, like, it seems very, very defined and specific.

So this is an interesting question that you ask. And, you know, I've been working on this. And Hugo probably has a different perspective, but he's also been working on this for a long time. We work together on debts incurred by Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela. And sort of I always took it for granted that, you know, if you have a despotic leader borrowing, than the future governments, especially if they're, you know, democratic governments, they shouldn't be burdened by this debt.

And it sort of seemed natural and logical and sensible. And I didn't think about it. It seemed right until I started working with Hugo and our other two co-authors about the Haitian debt. And in that context, one of our other co-authors, Mark Whitemeyer, started asking the question of, you know, why have we framed this doctrine in this particular fashion? And my best guess from the literature and talking to social anthropologists who studied this in more detail is that it's a product of the interests who created this doctrine. This is a doctrine that was created by the U.S. State Department in the late 1800s after the Spanish-American War. They didn't want to pay the debts that had been incurred by Spain using Cuba as collateral.

And so they said, you know, you were despotic leaders putting down an independence movement. And then the U.S. again in 2003, 2004, does not want. to pay Saddam Hussein's debts. So the rejuvenation of the odious debt doctrine, again, is in the context of a despotic leader. But it never really touches colonial debts where the leaders are not quite as despotic and much more complicated, in part because the countries and the scholars who pushed this doctrine were pushing it in a particular context. I don't know, Hugo, if you have a different view. I mean, I am a former colonial subject and grew up in the Caribbean, so I have a particularly jaundiced view of all of this. I mean, there is also another aspect. So there is the

aspect from, let's say, the NGO movements, you know, kill the death and all this sort of stuff. And these people would like to cancel all sorts of deaths. So there is a more, I don't know, leftist, if you want to call it this way, perspective, right? And there is a debate. As me to said, it seems reasonable that when somebody borrows to oppress its own people, this that should not be enforceable. But then if you talk with market people, they tell you where do you draw the line, right? It's like where does the guy become a despot?

And some people say, if you start going there, then nobody will ever land to any country because no country is a perfect democracy. So there is this other dimension. So some people said that maybe you should have an exfante declaration of audiosness, right? So there is a famous paper by Michael, Michael Kramer and Sima Jaya Chandra, which says, you know, at some point the official sector may or the UN or whatever might declare this country is odious. And from this moment on, that contracted by this person by this country will not be enforceable. So there is a big also discussion on ex ante versus exposed, which is different from the Haiti case that we're talking about here. Well, what do you walk us through the basic contours of the Haiti situation?

The numbers, the claims, just sort of like give us the sort of like basic summary of the colonial debt that was incurred, why the debt was incurred, how much it was, and so forth. Okay, so I'll begin with the easy part, the. the story, which is wonderful. And then I'll give Hugo the boring part about the numbers that in the end are much more important. So I think it's a bit embarrassing. Hugo and I both consider ourselves scholars of international debt and have been doing this for at least two decades. And neither of us had really paid any attention to the Haitian independence debt. of 1825. It just seemed like this old obscure thing.

We hadn't really heard of it, didn't seem relevant to most of what we did. Until this last semester, last year, really, when COVID hits. And we decide in our classes, you know, maybe this is time to focus on some of the poorer regions around the world and see what's going to happen if they're really hit back. by COVID and they need to think about what kind of financial recoveries can we get. Some of my students in my sovereign debt class find this Haitian independence debt of 1825. And I want to dismiss it because it is not what I had planned that we would work on in the class. And then I started looking at it and started talking to Ugo and our other co-authors about it.

And it's astounding. So in 1825, Haiti has a debt imposed on it by France. France sends a bunch of gunboats. I think there were 14 gunboats with 500 guns pointed at the Haitian capital. And France says to the Haitian people, look, we are willing to recognize you as independent. Haiti had fought a bloody revolution against France and won its independence in 1804, so two decades prior. The French under Napoleon had tried to take back Haiti. They had failed. And then finally in 1825, and this is after the Louisiana purchase, France sort of decides, you know, no more colonies, at least in that part of the world. It's just too expensive when you keep losing. And so they try to negotiate with Haiti. We will give you your independence.

We will recognize you as independent if you pay us 150 million francs. Now, to get some sense of how much this is, and Ugo will hopefully talk about what fraction of Haiti's revenues it was at that time, but the Louisiana purchase was about 15 million francs. This is 150 million francs they impose on Haiti with the gunboats pointed at them. And the calculation of this amount, the historical record is not completely clear, but basically the French king, Charles, needed this money to pacify the former plantation owners and their estates in France. And calculations were made based on the amount of law.

that they suffered specifically in terms of the number of slaves who went free as a result of the revolution. So that's the basic. That's the debt that was imposed on Haiti. Haiti doesn't pay it back for almost a century, actually more than a century. And much of Haitian borrowing in the next century is just to pay back this extremely large debt that they owe to France. Now, in terms of specific numbers, I'll leave that to Hugo. So maybe we don't have good estimates for GDP at that period and or revenues, but whatever estimates we have suggested this amount was about 10 years' worth of revenue, so it's a very large number, and or about three times high its GDP based on the numbers.

that we have now. So there were very, very large numbers, and as me to say, it's more than the Louisiana purchase. Hi, I'm PJ Vote. My podcast Search Engine has a new two-part series for you. Of all the new technologies coming out of AI, the most transformative one might be driverless cars.

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So, you know, you mentioned there were gunboats pointed at Port-au-Prince, which seems quite threatening. But on the other hand, Haiti did get something out of it. And I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here, but they did get their independence recognized by France, even though they were essentially, you know, buying their freedom from slavery, which is terrible. But they got the recognition from France. That led to further recognition from places like Britain. That opened up trade relationships and things like that. Is there an argument to be made that this can't be considered odious because the population,

you know, got something out of the agreement. So you're asking the really tough question. Haiti, arguably, itself proposed that it would pay something to France. Now, they didn't propose this incredibly large amount. They were thinking more along the lines of the Louisiana purchase. And that would have still been at least half their GDP for the year. But perhaps manageable Haiti at that point in time was, One of the richest parts of the world, which is why France was so desperate to hold on to it,

they were a huge source of French revenues at that point in time. But the legal question of whether or not Haiti could be charged by France for, A, recognition, or B, independence, or C, for the slaves, fighting a revolution and becoming independent is quite complicated. It's not at all clear, at least in our research, whether or not at that point in time it was acceptable under international law for countries, new countries, to be charged for somebody else recognizing them. The law is quite murky. Now, we know it happened, but whether it was legally kosher is not clear. Can you charge a new country for it becoming free and fighting a revolution?

Again, not at all clear. And then it's not clear either that we would apply the laws and norms of that time or whether we would apply modern conceptions of human rights, where, you know, making Haiti pay for the freedom of the slaves clearly wouldn't be acceptable. Yeah, maybe just as Maladatat, thought, that for the first 15 years after independence, Haiti was actually split in two countries with a president in the south and a king in the north. So the president was, which was called Pechion, was the first one to sort of propose paying Sanemnity. But again, as me to said, he had in mind a much smaller amount, while the king in the north was always opposed to it.

So the idea that a country would have to pay its former colonial master for recognition to pay this extraordinary sum to essentially escape, you know, depart from slavery. Obviously, it's, you know, it's grotesque. It's awful. why is it important, or at least intuitively it is, why is it important to fold it into the odious debt literature? Because obviously the contours of it while being, I guess, objectively and morally odious are different than the sort of conception of the conception that we talked about in the beginning of a despot. Why is it important today in sort of the establishment of the study of odious debt to weave that in as opposed to thinking of it? as its own distinct concept. What does that get? What does that accomplish?

So again, you're asking an extremely good question and a tough one. Here's my take on this. The odious debt movement is a powerful one. Just the rhetoric of that movement has had a lot of sway with NGOs, with academics in the popular press. So to get this debt that has really not gotten much attention, the Haitian independence debt of 1825, you ask anybody in Haiti, they know about it.

They think about how many billions they are owed. But ask people outside of Haiti, scholars who study this, ask people in France, anywhere else in the world, they have no idea about this. To bring it into the odious debt framework. And this is as odious of a debt that we've ever had in history, I think could give power, rhetorical power, to the movement to get some kind of compensation paid,

but also would open the door to other similar, similar colonial debts that have not been included in the odious debt discussions. So, I mean, this goes back to the question that Tracy started with, which is, you know, how is it that the odious debt discussions really have been very limited to these despotic leaders and whether or not sort of Western creditors will get paid back on their bonds? when there are all sorts of other stinky debts around the world, particularly colonial debts. I mean, think of King Leopold of Congo. He borrowed heavily on the international debt markets and then, you know, basically committed genocide in the Congo.

There's no discussion of, you know, those debts. But this one is a – this one is among the really just the – thinkiest of those, to my mind. Mitu, you mentioned the rhetoric of odious debt being a powerful influence. And I think here it's really important that we mentioned that even though there's been a lot of talk about odious debt, it hasn't actually been sort of acted upon in any real way. So the Iraqi debt that you mentioned earlier, and we actually recorded an episode a while

back with Simon Hinrickson, who did some really great work on this. The Iraqi debt situation was basically the closest the world ever got to actually acting on the principle of odious debt and negating some borrowings under Saddam Hussein. But it didn't actually happen. So I guess two questions. Why hasn't it happened yet if everyone's talking about it so much? And then secondly, what good is talking about odious debt if it never actually comes to fruition? So I'll use the Iraqi example. You guys had a great episode with Simon. And just drawing from Simon's work, discussing the Iraqi debt in terms of its odiousness

was part of the strategy of the legal team there. and they knew they didn't have a leg to stand on if they actually had to go to court and try to argue that this doctrine existed. Now, there are legal scholars who argue that as a matter of customary international law, such a doctrine has evolved. I am skeptical that you could actually persuade a court to do that. But the rhetoric of odious debt was powerful enough that the negotiators for Iraq were able to get in the Paris Club the biggest write-down of debt ever in history. I mean, it was something like a 90% write-down of debt. And it was because, at least in part, that they clothed it in the rhetoric of odious debt. I mean, now they did it brilliantly.

I mean, they got everyone, basically, to agree to take this massive write down because nobody wanted exposure of what had actually happened. And if we go back in time to the strategy that the lawyers for Haiti had planned in 2000, between 2002 and 2004, this was exactly what they had. in mind. I don't think they thought they really had much of a chance of sort of winning a legal case. But they wanted to get into court. And once they got into any kind of international jurisdiction and they got a hearing, then the atmospherics of how bad this was was going to be on their side. So that's a long-winded answer to why this could have really practical consequences.

Can I add something, Tracy? Of course. You know, I'm by nature optimistic. And I remember one episode. And so if you remember around in the 90s, there were people campaigning for multilateral debt relief. And basically the position of the, you know, U.S. administration and the G8 at that point was that this is never going to happen. And then at some point it just happened, right? And, you know, the White House was on board.

And the people who were on board were exactly the same people. people who two or three years before said this is never going to happen. You know, the World Bank is never going to cancel that by low-income countries. So in a sense, maybe, you know, preparing the ground, sort of building a case for something that you think is right. Maybe at some point things can change. So I also see this in this sense, but me to always think that I'm a dreamer.

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go back to the details of Haiti. I mean, you mentioned the stats are not particularly reliable from that time, but maybe the debt was a 10 years worth of total revenue for the country at the time. And as you mentioned, it's still talked about today. And we taught, and as Tracy and I discussed in the intro, Haiti is obviously one of the poorest countries is known and people think of it as one of the poorest countries in the region. How much did that debt contribute to the economic trajectory, the poor economic trajectory of Haiti, some nearly 200 years ago or about 200 years ago,

how much did that contribute to the economic and sort of disaster that Haiti is known to be all these years later? So we did a bunch of backer of the envelope exercises. Some exercises are trying, aimed at trying to estimate how much this money would be worth today. And another exercise is exactly focused on your question, Joe. How much of the horrible growth performance of Haiti over the past 200 years can be attributed to this debt. I'll tell you about the numbers. But before that, there is a document in a declassified document in the archives of the IMF.

And this is a report of a mission to Ahiti in 1949. So the IMF must have been one or two year old. And let me use this to just give a big thank you of whoever manages the archives of the IMF because they did an amazing service. They put everything online, all these declassified documents, and now I can kind of read this stuff from my bedroom, and it's fantastic.

So anyway, this 1949 IMF document starts by saying fiscal policy in Haiti in general has not been development promoting because it has been primarily been primarily motivated by revenue yields and basically to service the debt and this has taken priority on any other type of investment that promoted economic development. So without running any, let's say, statistical analysis, there is this report from the fund from 70 years ago that basically says there is some problem linked to the debt. Having said this, there are some econometric estimates on how debt affects GDP growth. And there is a famous paper by three IMF economists again, Katipatilo, Elen Poisson and Luca Ricci, which suggests

ballpark estimates that high level of debt reduce growth between one and two percentage point per year. Now, if we apply the lower this is just, we apply the 1% growth reducing effect, we find that GDP per capita and Haiti now should be about $8,000, which is much higher than than what is today. And in fact, it would put Haiti basically at the same level of income per capita of the Dominican Republic. Now, it's hard to say that, you know, without the debt, Haiti would be the Dominican Republic, but that's what you get from doing this calculation. And then if you compute the present value of this differential in income per capita, you get, you know, a ridiculously high number. You get something like, you know, one trillion dollars,

which is, you know, which is really a huge number. But even if you get that the growth effect of the debt, it's only one-fifth of the lower bound estimate of Patio and co-authors, you still get that the present value of the growth effect of this debt is about $51 billion of today's dollar, which is three times of a height of GDP, which interesting was the debt-to-GDP ratio when the debt was created. Quite a coincidence. So here we have this debt burden, which Mitu has described as like the stinkiest of all odious debt. We have something that, as Ugo just laid out, basically contributed to the long-term poverty arc of Haiti.

You can trace the impact of the debt on Haiti's current debt situation, you know, 200 years later, which is pretty amazing. What are the chances that odious debt actually comes into play and that we get some sort of legal process exploring this option? I guess that's another way of saying what would a legal claim on this issue actually look like? And is it more likely that we get a situation similar to the Iraqi debt where maybe odious debt is used as an argument for, some sort of additional financial aid rather than total reparations, you know, $50 billion or whatever, based on the economic impact of the original bonds. This, in a sense, brings us full circle to the question that you had asked Tracy about the existence of an odious debt doctrine. If we were really litigating this, so somehow we could

a jurisdiction like the International Court of Justice to hear this, that would be hard because France would have to agree to show up. Then I think it's a fairly straightforward legal claim under international law, even if you don't want to use the odious debt doctrine. Here, you would just make the argument that this was an unjust illegal debt that was imposed in 1825. and the money needs to be returned. So we would call it, just give us restitution. You were not entitled to take our money. Give it back to us.

And the way you would calculate damages for them having unjustly taken your money and not even imposing punitive damages would be to ask, what are the opportunity costs of your having taken between 90 million, francs and 150 million thanks, depending on how you make the calculation, back in 1825 or over this lengthy period. So that's if you get into some kind of tribunal. Now, the lawyers in 2004 under President Aristide were just about to file a claim. There was this dream team of lawyers from around the world who were working pro bono for the Haitians. And they thought they had a good chance of getting into a tribunal. And then President Aristide is overthrown. And the new government decides

that, you know, it does not want to anger the French who are supporting it in bringing such a claim and the whole thing disappears. But this is not as implausible of a claim. as I would have thought legally the Iraqi argument was. This is much more potent, but you have to get to some tribunal. And, you know, Ugo and I have presented our work in front of a few audiences. And often we are faced with our friends who are French economists who have never heard of this. And they are completely outraged that France did this. I mean, their reaction is, I have not found their reaction to be defensive.

Instead, it's why didn't I know about this and what can we do to fix it? I do think that this is a matter of public discussion and that will result in something positive, particularly given the horrible state that Haiti is in now. Tracy, I think that's a good place to leave it for me unless you have anything further. That works for me. Yeah. I think you both laid it out the issue wonderfully. So thank you so much for coming on all thoughts and walking us through how 200-year-old debt could still be relevant to today. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was fantastic. I really appreciate it. So, Joe, this is, as you can probably tell, a topic that I find. endlessly fascinating, partly because I think it says something wider about financial debt. And

I don't think we think about this often enough, but debt is almost exclusively about morality and fairness in the sense that in order for debt to exist, you know, someone has to borrow and another person has to lend and someone ends up owing someone something. So yeah. And so there's, There are so many judgments and norms that go into how that story is told of who owes what to whom and why. And I don't think we step back and sort of consider those norms enough and the judgments that are shaping how debt actually functions and how we think about it. Yeah.

You know, the other thing, I completely agree, you know, the other thing that's interesting is, you know, finance in general is like a kind of, I sometimes think of finance as a time machine because you're essentially, you know, you can have cash right now that would otherwise say, like if you borrow money, you can have cash right now that would otherwise take several years worth of work. So, you know, you're sort of transferring, it's transferring of value, transferring of money across time. And what Hugo and Me Too discuss is, like I said, actually an extremely long version of that. And so, you know, it's one thing. It's like we can all wrap in our heads very concretely, how, say, debt that was taken out 10 years ago may affect us today. But there's no particular reason to think that a debt that's 200 years old that people have forgotten about, that people around the world don't even know about or had never thought about before might still be relevant today. It's kind of an extreme outlier. But fundamentally, As you say, it's all part of the same question, but I guess that's what makes this particular case extremely interesting.

And as me to point it out, sort of like worth folding into the odious debt literature. Totally. And the other thing that I was thinking, and we've been talking a lot about this on AllBOTS for the past year now, but whether or not the extraordinary circumstances of 2020 and 2021 spark a wider role. reckoning on some of these complicated issues. And I think, you know, we've spoken about attitudes towards debt shifting in the context of modern monetary theory and MMT. And I do wonder if given the terrible humanitarian situation unfolding in Haiti, you know, you have COVID, you have the president getting assassinated, now you have another catastrophic earthquake. I do wonder if you could see a big shift

in the narrative around something like colonial era debt. Well, that's interesting because Me Too made this point that even prior, so, you know, it's like, okay, why is this an important thing to classify as odious debt? And as he pointed out, yes, there is the legal dimension, but there's also the activist dimension. There's the NGO dimension. There's the kill the debt movement. And so much like MMT, which is sort of this high. hybrid between, I would describe it as like a hybrid between sort of like pure economics and

political activism. It kind of feels like situations like this end up being this hybrid between what's in the law, what's in the sort of legal text, and also the general public and the activism around these things. And so I think you make a really apt point here that, you know, we could be in a moment where there is just sort of like more public awareness and then that has this sort of like feed-through effect to what happens in various courts of law and marketplace. Totally. And I would say that gets back to the sort of morality of bonds more widely and this idea that, you know, ultimately a debt is about fairness and achieving fairness in the outcome. And so in many ways, it's sort of the perfect instrument through which to discuss the injustice

of the past. Like it fits very nicely into arguments because you can suddenly say, well, you owe us X amount for damages inflicted, you know, 200 years ago and we can put some sort of quantity on them and we can talk about what the economic impact is. All right. Well, Joe, I could keep talking about this forever,

but we should probably go. Should 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 Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. Follow our guests on Twitter, Hugo Panizza. He's at Up Panizza.

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