Odd Lots - Senator Pat Toomey on the Bad State of Crypto Regulation

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Cryptocurrencies often don't fit neatly into traditional asset buckets. They're not exactly currencies. They're not exactly commodities. And while many share commonalities with stocks, there are differences there as well. As such, US regulators haven't come up with clear rules on their trading and issuance, leaving entrepreneurs and investors in limbo. On this episode, we're joined by Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, who has been harshly critical of the SEC's approach, particularly under current Chairman Gary Gensler. The Senator also talks about his own legislative proposals to start providing more clarity. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to OddLots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast, OddLotts on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, you know, one of the big, well, there is a lot of ambiguity and confusion right now, I would say, about the state of crypto regulation. Just a little bit. Just a tiny bit. Like, I mean, and it's understandable why, because it's, I guess, a new type of asset class. They're not all the same. It doesn't seem to quite fit into commodity buckets.

Most of them don't fit quite into, say, equity buckets. They call them cryptocurrencies in many cases, but they're not really currencies. So you can sort of see why the existing regulatory structure isn't quite up to the task. Right. And often the technology or the things being made are changing all the time. So, for instance, we used to have, you know, ICOs. now we have tokens and things like that. But I think what you're getting at is there has been this long-running criticism of the way

crypto regulation is being done, which is it's often just better to launch something and kind of ask for permission later, right? Like just launch it, see what happens. But if you're a big crypto organization, you know, a crypto company with a team of lawyers and you actually go and ask the securities regulators about. what you're doing, often they just say no outright. That's the trope. That's right. So I've talked to lawyers. And this is what they say. Look, if we try to be on the right side of the law, if we say, go to the SEC and this is what we want to do, then they spend years trying to lawyers. Meanwhile,

someone just launches a token without doing any of that. And they're a billionaire the next day. That's got to be kind of frustrating. Right. It's not a great incentive structure if that's what's happening. Right. So, you know, there's this problem. The regulatory agencies don't seem to quite have their hands around it. And because of how politics seems to be in D.C., I don't think anyone is really holding their breath for some really clear law to get passed, like, say, the Telecom Act in the 90s in which the internet was coming and they passed a law about certain things. Like, maybe that will happen, but I don't think it's, like, obvious that, like, Congress is going to come to the rescue with a clear solution here. But also now that crypto is so big, it seems kind, well,

it seems inevitable that more people are going to be looking at this and discussing whether or not it needs to change should you have this sort of ad hoc regulatory regime or something else. All right. Well, we have a great guest today to talk about that and someone in D.C. who has taken a real interest in crypto. We are going to be speaking with Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and one of the more active elected officials with an interest in crypto regulation. So, Senator, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thanks very much for having me. Senator, who's to blame for this sort of this confusion? I'm not sure. Maybe you disagree with our characterization, but who's to blame for this confusion about crypto regulation, the lack of clarity, and all of the sort of perverse incentives that that creates? Well, I think I agree with your discussion with Tracy about the inherent difficulty of trying to shoehorn these crypto tokens from these various projects into existing law. Well, much of our securities law is based on 1933 and 1934 legislation, literally, and court cases that follow that often in the 40s and 50s.

Can you imagine being more far removed from crypto? Right. I mean, so it doesn't fit well. There are attributes of these protocols and the corresponding tokens that are completely unlike any actual. security, something that we all universally would agree as a security, there are ways in which most crypto projects are fundamentally different. So we have this new technology that came along. And, you know, I guess you could blame Congress for not moving quickly to establish the legislative guidelines that would then make it clear exactly what buckets these assets these assets.

assets should be in, including the possibility that it's an altogether new bucket and what the various regulators authorities ought to be. And in the absence of Congress speaking, then you will have what we are witnessing, which is regulators kind of trying to grab authority here, whether or not they ought to. Right. And that's no way to create an environment for a really important new technology to thrive. So that's why I'm so determined to get something done in the legislative. legislative realm so that we can provide some certainty and hopefully a rational that have guardrails that will allow this innovation to continue. So just on that point, if I could ask a sort of big picture question, you have taken an interest in crypto and you've been advocating better

crypto regulation. And I'm just curious, like, what is the benefit of crypto in your mind? Because often when I think about crypto's relationship with the government, it's almost set up, or at least initially it was set up to be adversarial, right? This was about censorship-resistant money and technology, things that let you send funds or do transactions without much oversight. So it seems to me like governments maybe should approach it with some caution, but clearly you see some value from the technology itself. Can you just explain like what your position is? Well, first of all, I do think that we have a privacy right to move value in the form of a currency or some other asset without the government watching everything we do. There's a reason why I think Congress would overwhelmingly insist that we not abolish cash, right? I mean, in China, I think they have or they're they're close to as a practical matter abolishing cash.

it's very very convenient for the government to be able to monitor everyone's every transaction to force everything into a digital space that in China the government has eyes on. So that's one. I do think there's a legitimate interest in privacy. There's more practical matters because I think a lot of people, you know, they just look at the volume of transactions that go on credit card. And obviously that information is not uniquely held by the country. consumer it's held by financial institutions right but i think the ease of transactions the ability to

move money on a peer-to-peer basis and leave out intermediaries that inevitably charge a fee for the execution in particular that fee is extremely expensive when you move money internationally i then i also think that there's going to be very exciting innovations that we probably can't imagine yet. You know, when the internet was first being developed, I don't think too many people envisioned Amazon and Uber and Netflix and, you know, the things that have totally transformed consumption and not just consumption of information, but even consumption of goods and services. Well, I think that could happen here as well. I think programmable money, for instance, is a very exciting technology, the ability to have embedded in a unit of value, a form of money, a transaction,

a movement of that value based on some exogenous but verifiable event. That's really interesting, and I could imagine lots of applications, validating ownership in an immutable way. That's something that blockchain allows. So I think there's all kinds of applications that are likely to emerge. And we should not presume that that can't happen or and we certainly shouldn't do anything to preclude it. 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 Grasso. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcast. So you've been very critical of

SEC Chief Gensler, you know, and there's a lot of reasons. I think people are critical. There's been, there were a number of like, you know, central seed, C-Fi things that went bust. People weren't protected them, like people think about stuff like Celsius. And then as you pointed out, this idea of sort of like regulation by enforcement where no one knows the rules and then suddenly there's a lawsuit against them. What do you think that right now with the existing laws of the land that SEC Chairman Gensler has the ability to regulate crypto in a more meaningful manner or does he really need you and by you, I mean Congress to grant the SEC better and clear authority? That's a great question. And I think the answer is there are probably some crypto projects,

some protocols and associated tokens that really are securities and therefore should could and should be regulated by the SEC. But I think many, many are not. And that's my fundamental difference with Chairman Gensler. He maintains that virtually all cryptocurrencies are securities. He will acknowledge that Bitcoin is not. I don't think you could get him. Well, I'd suggest you try. I have not been able to to get him to identify a single other token that is not a security. And I think his argument is tenuous. And part of the problem is,

I think there has not been sufficient clarity as to what does constitute a crypto security and what does not. By the way, you could use crypto tokens in a transaction that definitely falls under the jurisdiction of the SEC, right? So Celsius and Voyager, when they're taking crypto deposits, paying an interest rate on it, using those deposits to then lend to, I suppose, hedge funds and other institutions, that definitely, I think, falls under the SEC's brief.

And frankly, I think there's questions about why, after an enforcement action against BlockFi early in the year, nothing happened to Celsius and Voyager until they blew up. But that's a little bit different from the question of why is it that every crypto project other than Bitcoin is a security? I think legislative guidance that would make it clear what is and what is not would be very, very helpful. And I would say two things, if I could, that ought to cast serious doubt on Chairman Gensler's argument. One is there are many projects where there is no centralized authority, right? That Bitcoin is an obvious case, but it's not the only one. And if you have a truly decentralized platform, you have code, you have software.

That's what it is. And the fact that people are using it doesn't mean that there's a central authority. And the idea of a central authority, really traditionally an issuer, is at the heart of what makes something a security. The other thing I would point out is that every security that I can think of involves a claim on an issuer. If it's equity, it's a claim of ownership. If it's a bond, it's a claim on the assets, right? There's a specific claim and there's usually also a specified return. Either it's an interest rate or it's a dividend or it's a promise of some share of income.

Well, crypto doesn't typically have that. There may be some tokens that do, and okay, I'll call them a security. But when there is no claim on an issuer, when there is no built-in return, then I'm not sure it should even pass the Howie test. And at a minimum, I think you have to acknowledge that it's very different from all the securities that we have acknowledged over the years. And so that's why I think really Congress should act on this and specify how these projects ought to be regulated. So speaking of things being very different, one charitable interpretation of the SEC's sort of ad hoc enforcement approach is that it has to do with the pace of innovation in crypto, just being different to anything we've really seen before. So maybe it makes sense for the SEC to try to maintain flexibility and kind of learn. and develop alongside the industry.

I've also heard people talk about, well, if they codified everything, made it really, really clear what the rules actually were, then inevitably there would be crypto players who start poking around for loopholes and trying to exploit those and that sort of thing. What do you say to that interpretation of the SEC and Gensler's approach? Yeah, I don't think that's a strong argument because it really seems to be arguing for ambiguity and hiding the ball and ensuring that both consumers and developers just don't have clarity on this. Look at it from the point of view of a creative developer who has an idea for an application of a smart contract maybe,

but it's got to run on a layer two protocol. And his concern is he really doesn't know, is there a way to design this so that it wouldn't be considered. to security or do I have to go to bed every night wondering whether the SEC is going to come knocking on my door in the morning and accuse me of dealing with, you know, an unregistered, therefore, illegal security. That's where you end up. That's where we are now. And that's where you end up when you don't provide the clarity that both consumers and

developers deserve. Okay. Well, you're working on legislation. What is it going to say or what would you like it to say to resolve these ambiguities? Well, the first thing I'm working on is actually, I think of it at least conceptually as preceding some of the things we've been discussing. And that would be legislation that will provide guardrails for regulating stable coins. Okay. As you know, stable coins are the currency that's used to go in and out of crypto generally.

It's also, in some ways, I think the easiest and simplest challenge for Congress and for regulators to solve. So I've introduced legislation or a draft of a bill that deals with the category of stable coins that I think could plausibly be widely used as a method of payment. And that would be asset-backed stable coins. I think algorithmic stable coins are in a different category. But what we define, what I define as payment stable coins and are backed by assets, I think a regulatory regime makes sense. it would require, for instance, rules about disclosure. What is the nature of the assets? It would require that you'd have to be licensed to issue it.

And then we go through how you could go about obtaining such a license. And if you have them, then you'd have to have high quality assets, liquid assets backing it, cash and cash equivalence. We talk about the capitalization that would be necessary for the issuing entity. Anyway, the point is we lay out the criteria, by which this could be regulated. And I think it would make a lot of sense to start there. I could imagine you could start in other places,

but that's my first ambition in this space. What's the best approach, in your opinion, to protecting consumers when it comes to crypto and tokens? So, you know, my approach here is the same as it is in most areas, which is to have a lot of respect for consumers, right? I think sometimes some of my colleagues and some of the regulators adopt a really paternalistic approach, and they want to protect consumers from themselves, and they want to put all kinds of regulations about who can do what and under what circumstances.

I don't view the world that way. The way I think we ought to do is make sure that consumers have enough information to make a well-informed decision about what they want to do. So it's about, for me, it's mostly about disclosure. With the stable coins, for instance, the heart of the regime that I'm advocating is full disclosure, audited disclosure, attestation of continuity of the assets backing the stable coin. That's the heart of it for me. And I would take a similar approach to non-stable coins, other crypto projects. I just want to press further on this because I feel like where people have lost a lot of money, yes, people also gain money.

think I take seriously your point about respecting the consumer or the investor, but where people have a lot of risks are not stable coins. They're projects that have big, you know, eye-popping returns and big APYs and defy protocols where you can earn 10,000 percent, et cetera. And there is no right now, as far as I know, there is nothing remotely like the equivalent of, say, like filing a 10-Q for those projects. So it's very hard to have like, should, you know, know, should a defy project that someone launches some sort of lending protocol have some sort of minimum disclosure that some kind of resembles what a stock disclosure looks like? I would say if the nature of the arrangement that you're describing is one in which there is

a return that is offered or promised. And yes, then it starts to look a lot like a security, or at least the activity is the activity of a security. You know, If you said, give me a bushel of apples, and I will give you an apple a day, and at the end of a month, I'll give you the bushel back. I would say that actually looks a lot like a security arrangement because of the return that you're offering, and it probably actually meets the Howie test.

But it doesn't make the Apple a security, right? The apple is still just an apple. But the activity is something that is appropriately regulated. So if you have a crypto project where someone decides, hey, I'm going to offer this return to an investor because I'm going to, you know, I've got this clever way to cover, you know, an eye-popping interest rate at, describe it. Then, yeah, that probably requires regulation and certainly disclosure. 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.

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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. What's your take on the Treasury sanctioning of a piece of software? And I'm, of course, talking about tornado cash. Is it legitimate for the Treasury to sanction a literal piece of software?

And if not, how should we think about, I mean, you mentioned the importance of privacy and the importance of cash, but there are issues. You can only, you know, it's hard to transfer a high volume of cash. And that's sort of the protection against money laundering, which is that you could theoretically do it, but it becomes cumbersome. Do you think there is legitimate for the Treasury as part of either anti-terrorism or anti-money laundering or going after North Korea to sanction a piece of software? And is that a worthwhile pursuit in some manner? So there's a lot to try to unpack there. And part of it, you know, in all candor, is this is new. And I am still really trying to make sure I understand the implication of this.

My first reaction is I get very concerned about sanctioning code. That does worry me. That concerns me. I think there are significant First Amendment issues. I think that is problematic. Having said that, I do acknowledge that. there is illicit activity that we want to be able to identify. And if we can't prevent it, at least go after the bad guys when they engage in it. What I would suggest is the wrong way to do

that is to take this archaic system that we now impose on banks and other financial institutions and apply it now to this whole new technology. I'm referring to like the reporting rules. every transaction over $10,000 has to be reported. So what we know for sure is that 99.7% of these reports are false positives, right? There's nothing wrong with these transactions, but we haven't even raised the dollar threshold since the 1970s, not even to reflect inflation. And so we just have this massive reporting requirement. It's quite onerous to comply with, and it swaps the Treasury with all kinds of this information.

What I think we ought to do, and I'm not an expert in this area, but I've spoken at some length with people who are, is use artificial intelligence on an open source blockchain and use that technology to discern suspicious transactions. Don't just assume that everything is suspicious because it's more than $10,000. Don't just import this completely, really, in many ways, obsolete technology and impose it on crypto. use the tools that we have now. And there are private companies that do this already, right? And we've had these great stories of recovering stolen crypto even because this is totally traceable. Now, with Tornado, I understand part of the purpose is to make it much more difficult to trace that. So it does raise some additional challenges.

But I'm not convinced that the right answer is to apply the current bank engineering Monopoly. So just when it comes to Congress and crypto, there's been a lot of discussion about the possibility of Congress actually, you know, maybe passing something to decide who actually regulates crypto. Is it the CFTC? Is it the SEC? Is it something totally different? What's the likelihood of Congress actually legislating on this or the legislation getting passed? And then secondly, does political appetite to interact and legislate crypto. Does it change depending on what's going on with the industry?

I mean, we're in a crypto winter right now. A lot of people have lost quite a bit of money. Does it feel like there's more political appetite right now to do something about the industry than before? I think the answer is yes, at least in some respect. So, for instance, I believe that when Terra and Luna collapsed, it seems to have elevated the issue of stable coin regulation with the White House and with the administration in general and with some of my colleagues.

So that real world event, and even though it was an algorithmic stable coin and I think the most likely regulation on stable coin will actually be for payment stable coins, the fact that there was a sort of sensational bad, event did move this up the list of priorities, put it on people's radar who didn't have it on their radar. So I do think what happens in the crypto world does bear on Congress's inclination. I still think there's a chance to get stable coin legislation done this year. I think the administration would like to get something done. There are Republicans pretty overwhelmingly would like to get something done. Some Democrats would as well. On the broader, outside

of stable coins the question of ordinary if i can say you know ordinary crypto project right what does that mean but but non-stable coin let's say that's that's tougher i think it's more difficult you do have a bipartisan bill you have actually two bipartisan bills right they're they're they're different the um lumas jillibrand bill and the stabina boughsman bill so you're starting to see some engagement by members and members on relevant committees of jurisdiction. So I'm still going to hold out hope that we get a stable coin bill done this year. And next year, Congress might do considerably more. You know, I understand that, you know, stable coins are the low hanging fruit because they're pretty straightforward, particularly the asset back ones where really the requirement is if you're

going to have a dollar stable coin, have a dollar equivalent in a bank account and let an auditor verified that it's that one-to-one. But obviously, you know, you mentioned the Terraluna collapse, and there's an algorithmic stable coin, it would not be covered under that. When you get into this more defy areas, and I get, I want to push on this a little bit further. You think of some sort of like defy exchange like Uniswap, which is a piece of software, but to most people looking at it, it looks like a stock market and it looks like an unregulated stock market at that. It looks like There's a bunch of different stock like things that you can buy and you can go there and you'd buy them in any amount like you would at like, you know, if you're using Robin Hood or Schwab except their crypto. Does that, is that acceptable?

Is that do we need some sort of rules on defy? Like can this go on this sort of active trading in various protocols in a way in which nobody really has any sort of disclosure requirements at all? Is it tenable? Not politically, right? I think there will be political. pressure to do something. And I could probably support some kind of disclosure requirement. But, you know, again, I'd go back to the fact that I think we ought to respect the judgment of consumers. And, you know, I think with some minimum disclosure, a consumer can decide, do you

want to trade on an unregulated, automated, decentralized crypto exchange? Or do you want to go to Coinbase. You don't have to, you know, it's not like you've only got one choice. You've got multiple choices. I think that's an acceptable place to lend. Now, I probably personally would favor a lighter regulatory touch than most of my colleagues. Who knows where that ends up. But I think consumers can generally make good decisions for themselves. So just on this point, there's another aspect of Gensler's SEC that you're critical of. And that is the proposal for more climate disclosures. How does that square with your broader message on crypto,

which is give consumers more information, get better disclosures, and then let them make their own decision? Why isn't that the same case for companies and ESG mandates and things like that? Well, it's a very, very different. First of all, we're starting from a point with crypto where there is zero regulation, right?

There is no requirement. There is no regime. There is no disclosure. There is nothing. And so we're having a conversation about, well, is there anything at all that we ought to provide? And I'm suggesting, yeah, there probably is some. You can't even begin to make that suggestion about ordinary securities, right? I mean, my God, we go way overboard in terms of all the disclosures that are required, useless information that nobody reads, that does not helpfully inform investors. And what Gary Gensler is doing now with this proposed climate rule is to add this massive new category, many multiples of more expensive than all the rest that's ever been applied before in terms of the cost of compliance. And it's not even financially material to the issuer, right? So they're proposing that somebody, by virtue the fact that you issue stock or bonds on an exchange, that you have to disclose not just the amount of CO2 that your business operation releases, but you've got to figure out how much CO2 is released by the source of the energy that you purchase.

And then in what I think is the height of absurdity, you're supposed to figure out all the CO2 released by all of your suppliers and all of your customers. This is ridiculous. It's not even possible to comply with, I don't think. And it's not meaningful. And there's no authority, by the way, for the SEC to do this. You know, the authority for the SEC is to require the disclosure of. material information and I think that's always been understood to be financially material. And here we have this really speculative guesses about CO2 emissions by your customers.

This is way, way beyond anything that Congress has authorized in my view. Senator Pad Toomey, thank you so much for coming on Audlaught. Really appreciate you taking some of your time to chat with us. Hey, thanks very much for having me. Senator Pad Toomey is really plugged in to crypto. Yeah, I'm kind of wondering, like, is he, like, hanging out? Like, is he, like, yield farming or something? No, is he, like, in the, no, he's like, like, for an elected official, he clearly obviously, look, you know, it sort of, he has this sort of regulatory light touch stance, which I think is not particularly surprising given his political ideology.

But he, he, you know, you hear from some people in D.C. and this is this big thing that's coming. and they don't seem to be particularly plugged in or know the arguments or anything, but that's clearly not the case with him. No. You know what I can't believe after listening to that conversation is that we've never done an episode on the Howey test. Have we really not? No, I think it's come up at various times, especially in very early crypto interviews, maybe with Matt Levine at one point or another, but we've never done an episode specifically on that.

Yeah, we probably should. To the Senator's point, it is kind of crazy that we're trying to relate. you know, tokens and defy to a Supreme Court precedent that was set in the 1930s. It's really tricky. And, you know, to his point, like, disclosure is a good, seems like a disclosure seems uncontroversial, right? Disclosure is good. Maybe there's a level of disclosure that's appropriate for a crypto.

I still don't even know, like, how it would work in practice. Because, look, you could just have someone in Estonia, like, you just, it's just to create a piece of code that interact with another piece of code and it lives maybe on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC 20 token, how do you enforce that? And how do you, are you going to enforce like defy exchanges that operate in the U.S. to block? I think like, I think this is going to be very tricky because even an uncontroversial idea, like some sort of disclosure. I don't even see how you go about enforcing that against like, you know, it's like, you know, pickle farm. Well, the...

No, you... No, sorry, I got to credit. Frank Chaparro over at the block always has like, he's like, how are you going to regulate pickle? So I think that got stuck in my head. Okay. All right, but the big issue that I see is that actually a lot of crypto projects already have excellent disclosures and are quite transparent.

And you can go and look at the source code and try to understand it. And yet, that doesn't stop anyone from doing stupid things. Like Tara Luna. Right. Right. Like you knew how that worked. It's an algorithmic stable coin. You could see what was supposed to happen. And people talked about the nightmare scenario of what would happen in a panic. And then exactly that occurred. The whole thing collapsed. It's not like we didn't have disclosures. So I guess my question is like how do you, yeah, does it actually change that much? No, and you're absolutely right. Like you can, you could, I've seen people make this argument that actually it's all extremely. It's all right there on the chain. It's a public blockchain. And you can look at like, the GitHub uploads and read the code. The problem is like there's this huge gap, right,

between the people who are like buying tokens for money versus the people that can actually look at code and understand the tokenomics of the code. I don't know. I think even uncontroversial ideas. Like the stable coin regulation, it does not strike me is that hard. But even there, it seems tricky because you could have, again, someone outside the U.S. launching something that's called a stable coin that's algorithmic and suddenly, like, where do you go? So I think there's this like little bit of low-hanging fruit with like, say, the U.S.DCs of the world where you can sort of very transparently audit. Do you have a dollar or do you have a dollar's worth of what the SEC considers cash equivalence? Okay, you're good. But I think beyond that, like regulation is just going to prove to be very tricky.

And I'll say one other thing, you know, is he pointed out that, look, a lot of these aren't like companies in the sort of traditional sense. Right. They're not howie or whatever. They don't pass. But like, they're not companies, but they do have teams and many of them are on Twitter and not anonymous. And they kind of look like companies. Okay. Despite all these questions, I think one thing is clear, which is it does feel like we are kind of coming to a crunch point on some of these issues.

Like there is enough momentum right now. in D.C. and elsewhere to actually start thinking about this. The industry is big enough to start thinking about how are we actually going to regulate it? Are we okay with the status quo? Or do we want to do something different? I have a feeling we're going to be talking about this a lot more. And it was great to hear from him. And yes, a lot more coming on this. Okay. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allo. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart.

Follow our guest on Twitter. Senator Pat Toomey. He's at Send Toomey. Follow our producer, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin. Follow our substitute producer for this episode. Our colleague, Dashel Bennett, who filled in. He's at Dashbot. I want to give a big thanks to our Bloomberg, colleague in D.C. Matt Shirley. He's on Twitter at Matt or Shirley. And check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.