Odd Lots - Richard Koo Explains Why The Recovery Will Be So Difficult

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

Countries around the world are undergoing an unprecedented, simultaneous real economic shock. So how should policymakers respond? Richard Koo is the Chief Economist at the Nomura Research institute, and is well known for having popularized the concept of the “Balance Sheet Recession” drawing on his work from Japan’s post-bubble era. In today’s episode, he talks about how his work applies to this crisis, what can be done to revive growth, and why the aftermath will be so difficult.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alleyway. Tracy, I know it's sort of gosh to brag or say anything too positive these days. Isn't it goosh to use the word gosh? It's probably gosh to use the word gosh too. But I kind of want to brag about something just real quickly. Sort of pat ourselves on the shoulder for a second. Okay. Go on. What is it? Well, I'm happy about the fact that prior to this crisis, we had a lot of guests on the podcast

whose expertise seems very relevant to the situation at hand now. Yeah, I'd say that's right. I mean, I'm trying to think of some specific names, but the list is pretty long at this point. No, the list is pretty long. We don't have to go through specific names, but I feel like on some level, the fact that we have gone back in the last several weeks. We've done so many episodes with repeat guests. I think it says a sort of good thing about our episode selection leading up to this when we didn't know that there would be an imminent global economic and financial crisis. Oh, absolutely. We have the

right people on speed dial. I'd put it that way. All right. So that we can end the bragging now, but obviously once again, we will be speaking with someone who we talked to previously. Ah, so I know who it is this time. It's Richard Koo from Nomura of Balance Sheet Recession Fame. And the last time he came on, it was a really, really interesting discussion. And I think it's going to be absolutely fascinating to see how much of that balance sheet recession idea, if anything at all, actually applies to our current situation. Right. So a lot of people, myself included, really discovered Richard Koo's work during the last crisis. He wrote a fantastic book, The Holy Grail of Macro-Economics, lessons from Japan's Great Recession. He's talked a lot about the need for fiscal policy as a tool to restore balance sheet health. And of course, in this crisis, there's been this widespread consensus that monetary policy. alone is clearly insufficient to address the scale and scope of the downturn to replace all of the

lost income from households and businesses. And although we have seen a lot of fiscal action around the world, there continues to be a lot of debate about whether the tools are right and whether they're sufficient and what kind of recovery we have. So I'm looking forward to talking to Richard. Now, Richard Koo, thank you very much for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me here. here again. So let's start big picture, or let's actually start in the U.S. We saw a fairly substantial fiscal action performed sort of passed at the end of March. Today is April 23rd, and we are expected to see another trench of more grants being made available to businesses to keep workers on payroll, plus a few other things, expected to pass this week.

In your view, how sufficient or insufficient have the policy measures that you've seen put in place in the U.S. so far been to address the size and scope of this downturn? Well, if we take a snapshot of GDP in all these countries, United States included, they are probably down quite substantially from what we consider normal levels. But this is brought about by this external shock, which is this coronavirus. And so ordinary measures like fiscal and monetary policies won't be of much help just because we had a loose monetary policy doesn't mean our supply chain problems or lockdown problems will go away. And so this time, I think policies will have to be very specific to help those people who are affected by this coronavirus, which is airlines and travel industries, restaurants, service sectors, and so forth.

And I think U.S. has done a very good job in coming up with these big policies very quickly. I understand that large number of people already receiving payments from the government. And once you see your bank accounts filled with some money from the government, I think people will feel that, oh, the government is really worrying about myself and the economy. And I think that has been very helpful in keeping people from becoming even more desperate or falling into despair. because if you compare that with what's happening in Japan, where I'm usually am, they talked about a lot, but very little payments have been made yet. And when you listen to the people there, they say, well, the politicians are talking all these policies, but we haven't seen anything yet.

So compared to that, I think United States, Germany are doing a much better job. But whether that's sufficient or not, I think we need to know how long this thing is going to go on, when the vaccines will be developed, or some other ways we are able to contain this coronavirus. And that's a medical question, unfortunately, not an economic question. And so I think we have to be ready to put in more as it becomes necessary. Just to step back for a second, one of the things that I personally like about your balance sheet recession framework is that there's a big focus on the psychological impact of debt crises. And there's this notion that people are so sort of emotionally scarred by the experience that they're afraid to take on debt for years to come. How much of the balance sheet recession framework applies to the current economic crisis? because I can see maybe not debt being an issue here,

but I could see, for instance, people increasing their savings for years to come after this shock. Right, right. You know, there are a lot of people out there who are worried that with so much money pumped into the system by the Federal Reserve and the government also borrowing money massively, inflation will be a huge problem once we come out of this recession. But when you think about it,

those people who have savings that is, companies and individuals, they probably did quite well, I mean, sustained less damage than those people who didn't have much savings or didn't have much retained earnings in the companies. If you didn't have much retained earnings, you bought back your shares and so forth, and then suddenly your revenue dries up, but you're in a huge mess, and I'm sure they have to scramble to get the cash in place so that they can make the payments. That kind of shock can affect people for a very long time. And if you remember 1991, 1992, US had a banking crisis also, and it was a credit crunch.

And those businesses who suffered during that period almost never borrowed money for the following 10 years or so. If you remember that banking crisis, that was George Bush, the father. And I think same thing will happen this time again with so many people. talking about second wave, third wave of this coronavirus, even if we come out of this one, the first wave, I'm sure people will say to themselves, we really have to have some savings for the rainy days. And if they go back to this savings mode, corporates and individuals, then all the money that was pumped into the system will be used to save money instead of going into consumption

or investments, and that will keep inflation rates from picking up. And that's exactly what happened during the Balanchi Recession. For Balanching Recession, people are actually paying back debt, because prior to the 2008 Lehman Crisis, people were leveraging themselves up to invest in all sorts of assets. Then the crisis happened, asset prices collapsed, liabilities remain, the balance is under water, so people had to pay down debt. And that's what caused the balance recession because in the national economy, if someone is saving money, including paying down debt, someone has to be borrowing money to keep the economy

going. Luckily, US did that. Japan did that. The Eurozone didn't do that. And that's how we saw all these differences in macro performances. This time around, once we come out of this recession, people will be saving money. They won't be paying down debt, perhaps, but they'll be saving money. macroeconomically, saving money and paying down debts have almost exactly the same effect on the macroeconomy.

And so I would think that inflation is not a big problem going forward, even after we come out of this first wave, or it's a last way. And if that's not the big worry, then the central bank and the federal government should feel much more at ease in putting additional no policy measures as they become necessary. So this is really interesting because at least so far you view the U.S. fiscal response as having been fairly decent, at least compared to Japan and perhaps some other places in terms of how fast money is getting into bank accounts and so forth. But sort of what it sounds like is, you know, everyone, and it's kind of a cliche, is trying to figure out the so-called shape of the recovery and U-shape and W-shaped and

V-shaped. I don't think that's necessarily the most useful thing to talk about, but just this idea that this is going to leave a searing scar on corporate behavior. And so whether it's buybacks or actual cap-backs or hiring, the experience that we're facing right now will alter corporate behavior and potentially household behavior for years to come. Yes, I believe so. Just like this banking crisis, the credit crunch back in 1991. 1932, that period affected corporate behavior for the following 10 years, I think we're going to see something similar that people say, oh gosh, we really have to have some savings. We cannot really run too lean, and that will affect macroeconomic performances if so many people

are increasing savings all at the same time. So what does that imply for the policy response? Because I guess when you have a balance sheet recession and the emphasis is on debt, then the ideal policy response is that governments sort of become the borrowers of last resort and do stimulus in various ways along those lines. But if you have a crisis of sort of savings, I guess, or cash flow, what can government, or central banks actually do here? What's the best thing for them to do? Well, during balance recession, we have a very special situation in which financial market and financial market alone or financial sector alone is flooded with cash.

Everyone else have no money. Households are paying down debt. Companies are paying down debt. But financial market, if you put yourself in a position of a fund manager, all these savings, newly generated savings from the household sector is coming to you. Those corporate debt payments are coming back to you. The central bank is trying to meet the inflation targets are also pumping money, which you have to manage at some point. So you're flooded with cash, and flooded in a sense that because everybody's paying down debt, no one's borrowing money.

So you're kind of stuck with this. cash. And if you are stuck with cash and there's only one borrower left, which is the government, you end up buying government bonds. And that's the reason why, during the balance rate recession, government bond yields, in spite of a huge deficit, keeps on coming down. And we saw that in Japan first. And then people thought that was a bond market bubble, but it wasn't because government was the only borrower left. So all the money had to go to the government. And then it happened after 2008 also. That part, the fact that financial market is flooded with cash is one of the key characteristics

of balancing recession. Now, in this recession or coronavirus recession, we have a different problem, and that is that everybody, at least for the moment, until the economy recovers, they will be withdrawing money from the financial market, right? because people have to rely on their savings to make the ends meet. So households will be withdrawing savings. Corporates will be withdrawing savings. And corporates, some of them who don't have enough savings,

will be desperately borrowing money, the distressed borrowing, to make the ends meet. So instead of this problem of not having enough borrowers, which is the characteristics of balancing recession, at the moment, we have a situation where, Savers are disappearing because people are forced to dis-save, whereas government will be coming to borrow, and corporates who needs cash also are coming to borrow. And so financial market gets much tighter, very sharply tighter in this type of recession. And we already see that in credit spares in a corporate bond market, where corporates used to be able to borrow very low rates until around beginning of March.

And then suddenly all these corporates with slightly less than the pristine credit ratings, suddenly faced much higher borrowing rates. And that's the characteristics of this type of recession. I mean, this Federal Reserve brought rates down to zero, pumped tons of money into the system, but corporate borrowing rates are significantly higher now than just two months ago. And a so-called financial condition index, the one that Chicago Fed puts out, which shows how tight the financial market is, we see that it's much tighter now in spite of all the work by the Fed.

So in this situation, financial market flooded with cash, that characteristics of balance recession doesn't apply. And if you have a very tight financial market, as we do now, central bank will have to continuously pump money into the system to make sure that we really don't get into the kind of crisis we saw back in 2000. And so this time around, I would say that central bank has a huge role to play in addition to fiscal policy by the government to make sure that financial market continues to operate in halfway decent manner. When you look at the actions of the Federal Reserve or other central banks, do you feel good that they recognize this? I believe that they are doing a good job.

And only central bank that I worry about is the ECB, because ECB cannot openly try to help individual governments, right? That's against their mandate. But everyone else, Bank of Japan, Bank of England, Federal Reserve, they are, I don't know what I can say openly, but they are very willingly, willingly, adding money to the system to make sure that financial market doesn't become too tight. Just in terms of the differences between how different countries are responding to the coronavirus outbreak and the economic damage that it's causing, you spoke a little bit about the U.S. I know you focus a lot of your time on Japan as well, but how are you viewing the crisis response in Europe in particular, because it seems like there we might have a problem of cohesion within the Eurozone block?

Japan was very slow incoming at the beginning, but now they have reasonably good policies moving forward. Very little payment has been made to the households or the companies yet, but at least I think the debate is moving in the right direction. In Europe, however, we discovered in 2008 that national governments really don't have much room for fiscal policy. In Europe, when they decide to join Europe, individual countries or the voters of individual countries were told that they are giving up their sovereignty on monetary policy, but they still have sovereignty on fiscal policy. And that's how everybody agreed to join Europe. But once the euro started, and when in 2008 fiscal policy became necessary because of the balance of recession, they discovered that they don't have sovereignty on fiscal policy for two reasons.

One is that the mastery treaty, which created the euro, says individual governments can borrow only 3% of GDP, and if you go beyond that, you get punished. but if private sector only saves 3% of GDP, that'd be okay. But if the private sector, like in Spain, was saving 7% of GDP after the bursting of the bubble, but the government could only borrow three, then the remaining 4% becomes the deflationary gap, and Spain probably experienced unemployment rate

or 25% or something. At that point, if the Spanish government said, oh, we have plenty of savings, 7% GDP savings from the private sector, we just use that 7% to fill the depletionary gap. Well, that didn't work because in the Eurozone, all these people, all these country, the investors are faced with choice of 18 government bond markets, all denominated in the same currency. And so if Spain seems to be ramping up fiscal stimulus, all these investors, including those in Spain, will quick move money to Germany or somewhere else where deficit is not so large. And then even though Spain had 7% private sector savings, government could not use that 7. They could barely use maybe 1 or 2 because the money ran out.

And that, I think, is one of the key problems of the Eurozone, that all these government bonds are denominated in the same currency. Whereas in the U.S., it's U.S. treasury is in dollars. Japan is in yen. So all these investors who cannot take large foreign exchange risk are forced to hold government bonds when private sector is not borrowing money. But in the Eurozone, there is this possibility of capital flight between government. bond markets, and that effectively removed the fiscal room for all these 18, well, I should say 17 countries. The 18th one, the one that is doing the best, of course, gets the opposite effect.

All these money will be coming into your country, and that's where Germany is at the moment. So fiscal policy is not really available to very many countries in the Eurozone. And monetary policy, of course, they lost the sovereignty over it. So if you put yourself in the position of an Italian or Sennia, you have a devastated economy, so many people dying every day, and you cannot even use your monetary and fiscal policies to fight the economic depression. And I find this very, very disturbing. And I hope they can come up with some sort of a compromise where even though Mastery Treaty

says you cannot borrow more than 3% of GDP. they will somehow come up with a ways to help Italy and Spain and other countries that are very badly affected by this coronavirus and need fiscal stimulus very badly, especially the kind of fiscal spending that goes directly to the affected industries, households, and companies. Yeah, I remember reading this thesis you set out about these sort of savings leakages from the periphery to German Boone back during the last crisis. And I thought it was fascinating. I want to get back to sort of ideal government policies in the post-crisis phase.

So once the health aspect of the crisis begins to fade and people start in theory reopening up stores and coming back to work, we talked before about the searing effect that this will have in terms of people's inclination to save. perhaps corporates will remain much less levered or they're going to be very slow to hire and expand KPEX after seeing revenues disappear in an instant. Obviously, as you say, okay, central banks need to do their part to maintain liquidity. Governments need to do their part to remain spending. But how do you off the cycle? And I guess this goes back to your work looking in Japan. What did Japan fail to do in the post-crisis period of its own crisis, that it was never, or that it had an extremely

difficult time reviving the inclination to borrow and spend. So beyond just having the government run large deficits, what do they need to do policy-wise to get the private sector back into a sort of aggressive stand? There's a lot of feeling outside Japan that Japan did. a very poor job of post-190, post-bubble period. But, you know, Japan actually managed to keep its GDP above the bubble peak for the entire 30 years. Japanese GDP never fell below the peak of the bubble. And with that, GDP was kept. GDP kept means private sector had the income to pay down debt, and they kept on paying down debt.

They were already finished with that payments. the balance sheets are probably the cleanest in the world. But because this experience lasted for so long, people became very adverse to borrowing. And if you remember the Americans after the Great Depression, they went through exactly the same experience. And many of these Americans never borrow money until they die, right, because experience was so bad. And we faced the same problem after 1990 when the Japanese bubble burst. and Japanese bubble was absolutely massive. You know, when the Imperial Palace Gardens in the middle of Tokyo,

period of about five kilometers, is worth the entire state of California. Right. You know how bad the bubble was. Is that true? I've heard that fact many times. That really is true? Well, if you kind of extrapolate from the surrounding areas

and they keep on extrapolating, then you get that result. I mean, I know they never really. put the palace on market. That's right. So this is all academic as well. So when the bubble burst, the amount of wealth Japanese lost just on stock market and real estate was like $1,500 trillion,

which is three times Japan's GDP. The amount of wealth, the American lost during the Great Depression, was equivalent to one year's worth of 1989 GDP. Japan lost equivalent to three years of 1989 GDP. And because it took so long, people became very adverse to borrowing. We could have used more policies to encourage people to borrow, like accelerated depreciation

allowances and so forth. And some of those were actually put in place. But those policies have to be super attractive to get these people off the trauma, trauma of borrowing money. And the one that we did put in in Japan wasn't all that. attractive. It was too much paperwork, too many conditions, and so unfortunately, they didn't create positive response as much as we expected. In the U.S. case, after the 2008 bursting of the bubble, U.S. actually did a fairly good job of keeping the economy from losing its bottom.

And the U.S. companies were never involved in the bubble to begin with. It was the household sector. And so U.S. company could still borrow, and I think U.S. was able to come out sooner than other countries, even though U.S. was the epicenter of that crisis. Now, this one, it's the household, it's the companies, both sectors are involved, and those affected sectors, I'm sure, will take a long time to recover, and especially the psychological part. My guess is that once we get to that stage, government will probably try to come out with incentives to get these guys off the trauma. You know, this is a psychological thing. So if you make the program super attractive, which is not what Japan did, unfortunately, but if you come up with a very attractive policy,

and if people said, oh, if it's that attractive, maybe I should try to borrow it once. And if they borrow it and then they have a good result, then the trauma will be over. And I hope that's how we will overcome this problem after this pandemic is behind us. What do you think this means for the relationship between central banks and governments? Because I'm thinking clearly governments are going to have to borrow a lot of money in order to finance whatever fiscal stimulus they undertake. And I suspect that means that central banks are going to have to step in and help them in, some way, either by doing QE-E-type asset purchases. But a lot of people are also talking about sort of direct monetary financing by central banks of government debt at this point. Do you see

that kind of relationship happening? Well, as you probably noticed, I was the strongest opponent of the use of QE or use of helicopter money, direct financing, MMT. during balancing recession, because my point was that the recession was caused by this excess savings in the private sector. Everybody's paying down debt. That means the money needed to finance the government deficit is all in the private sector. So let the private sector finance the government debt instead of the central bank. That was my argument all along.

That's where I crashed with people like Paul Krugman, who said central bank should also come to help. But I argue from the people as a member of a financial sector that financial sector is absolutely flooded with cash. If the private sector cannot even lend to the government, then the private sector will end up lending to some funny places that could cause another bubble. So I was very much against QE, helicopter money kind of arguments during that recession when financial market was flooded with cash. But this time, I'm actually all for it. And that's because for the reason I mentioned to you earlier, people are dis-saving now. Financial market is not flooded with cash.

It's actually seeing cash being withdrawn by all these people who are making ends meet. And so if the central bank doesn't come in to finance the deficit, at least in a short run, interest rates can go sky high. and that will start causing another set of problems. And so I very much like to see Central Bank come in and absorb some of these government bonds through QE until we are out of this mess, until some medical solutions are found to this crisis.

Now, once that medical solution is found and we are out of this pandemic, then Central Bank should be withdrawing that liquidity that it put in during the crisis. Because, as I mentioned to you earlier, by that time, private sector should be increasing savings again. Instead of this saving, they will be rebuilding the savings that they drew down during the pandemic. And when the private sector as a group is increasing savings, then inflation cannot happen.

If the private sector as a group is actually saving money, money multiplier turns negative at the margin. And that's the reason why in the last 10, 12 years, Central Bank could never get to their inflation target. Because if the money multiplies negative at the margin, you can put all the money into the system. You multiply with a negative number, you go absolutely nowhere. And so once we return to that world, hopefully sooner than later, at that point, Central bank should be withdrawing money slowly at the beginning so that at the end of the day,

we've got knows how many years that is from now, excess liquidity in the financial market is no longer a big issue. And so it has to do tons of liquidity injection during the pandemic when the government needs the money, when the private sector is withdrawing money from the financial sector. But once this pandemic is over, when the private sector is now, are trying to increase savings, then that means there will be no inflation because money multiplies negative at the margin. Then you use that time when the private sector is still rebuilding savings for the central bank to remove some of the liquidity that was put into the system.

I think it has to go in that sequence. So we've been talking a lot, obviously, about corporate behavior post-crisis. What about in terms of household behavior? You mentioned incentives for corporates, like maybe some sort of... tax incentives for capital investment, things like that. When will, of course, in the immediate wake of the crisis, as you mentioned, households likely to start to rebuild the savings that they've drawn down to provide sustenance during times of no employment or no income.

What does the, so what do the scars of the past tell us about how households will behave in the years to come? Well, I think it comes in different phases here. So during pandemic, of course, household, there are two kinds, right? If you're still getting paid during this crisis, but you won't be able to spend the money because you are in a lockdown mode, these people will be actually saving money. But for those people who are affected by the coronavirus,

and then their income has dried up, their savings have dried up. When the economy begins to do better, those people will be increasing savings. But for those people who still had income during this period, either by working from home and so forth, in the short round, they will be so happy to spend money, right? So when the lockdown is over, pandemic fear is behind us, there's no more fear of second wave or third wave, they will be spending a lot of money. So we're going to have a very sharp V-shaped recovery from those kind of consumption behavior. But at the same time, this is a global pandemic.

Global means that even though the country that came out of the crisis will be seeing some sharp pickup in consumption, that sharp increase, I think, will peter down as we go along because there are other countries that are still being affected, which means, for example, tourist industries will never really get back to where they were before. as long as other countries are still being affected. Supply chains will still be affected. Foreign demand will still be affected.

And so what I envision is that once this pandemic is behind us, there will be a V-shaped recovery for perhaps a couple months. And then it begins to kind of slow down until other economies recover. And this is different from the 17 years ago when we had a SARS experience. SARS actually only affected certain parts of Asia only. And so when that pandemic was behind or epidemic was contained, since other countries are all doing quite well, including Japan, those countries that are affected by SARS could experience a real V-shaped recovery.

But at this time, the V-Shade recovery will be short-lived, and I think it would be a very slow recovery until the fear of this coronavirus is completely behind us. And that's going to take a long time because, you know, we have so many countries in the world, and some of them are just beginning to feel this pandemic. Richard Koo, it was great to have you join us. really appreciate you coming back to apply some of your wisdom and theory to this current moment. And I hope you're well. And looking forward to hopefully chatting with you again when we see more of what the ultimate recovery eventually looks like. Well, I'm looking forward to it. Thanks so much, Richard.

That was great. Tracy, you know what I was thinking about during that discussion? So his book about Richard's book about the, aftermath of Japan's Great Recession is called the Holy Grail of macroeconomics. But I feel like just since then, there's been like all these other potential holy grills that have just illuminated so much. Like you think Japan is like, okay, this tells us so much. But now we have so many other extraordinary examples of crises and tension since then that he could probably write like four or five sequels by that. Yeah. It's kind of like maybe I'm

carrying the analogy too far, but it's sort of like that scene from Indiana Jones where you have all the different cups, right? Yes. To choose exactly the right one to fit a situation that you've never really been in before. Wow. Okay, I think I'm stretching that way too far. I think that really works because that was actually one of the things that was striking to be listening to him is how all of these crises are similar, but just like a little bit different. Yeah. And it's really important to appreciate the subtle differences, whether it's the corporate. sector there was participating in the bubble, whether it's real estate, households, etc. to understand, like, sort of like, which policy responses are going to work best.

Yeah, it's also really interesting to hear from someone who was against QE in the previous crisis, really talk about the need for it here and even sort of hint at a layer of modern monetary theory or direct monetary financing or whatever you want to call it, sort of being necessary this time around. That's a big change. Right. The idea of more explicit cooperation and coordination between the central bank and the fiscal authorities. I also just think, like, and you brought it up at the beginning, the psychological component of recovery is going to be so huge because so many households and businesses have experienced a loss of income that was unfathomal. I mean, basically 100% losses in many cases in the span of a few weeks. Nobody really anticipates that kind of downturn. Plus the behavioral changes associated with the health emergency and the way all of our lives have just changed going on day-to-day living. It really feels like that's going to be such a big component, obviously, what any recovery looks like. Yeah, it sort of reminds me of those stories you hear about people who survived the Great Depression and then ended up, for instance, hoarding food for the rest of their lives.

Like, I'm sure there are going to be those sorts of lingering emotional effects and we're all going to be horrid. toilet paper or something like that forever, or at least keeping more in the house than we used to. But on a serious note, the other thing that I think is really important was his point about the pace of the recovery, because it's certainly something we've experienced here in Hong Kong. Even if Hong Kong starts to recover and the number of new coronavirus cases starts to go down, when it picks up elsewhere in the world and we see economies elsewhere start to shut down, that sort of has a ripple effect and comes back to hit Hong Kong. So even if one country recovers, if the rest of the world is in trouble, it's going to prolong the economic pain.

Yeah, I really liked his point about there will be some people around the world, people who manage to hold on to their incomes and jobs during the duration of the crisis, who will probably go on some sort of big spending spree, the moment they can going out shopping and restaurants, et cetera, and you might get the appearance of a V. But the sort of the widespreadness of the crisis and the unevenness of the pace at which different parts of the economy opens up almost guarantees that that can't last very long. It would be very uneven. So even if we get a little V, you probably want to turn it into a true V. Lowercase V versus a big V.

Oh, good. Another letter to add to the jar. Right. That's good. All right. Should we leave it there? Let's leave it there. Okay.

This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Holloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. Be sure to follow our producer, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca Today,

as well as all of the Bloomberg podcasts under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.