Odd Lots - Three Sovereign Debt Experts Explain How The World Can Instantly Bring Aid To Emerging Markets

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

The economic crisis will result in an extraordinary amount of pain for emerging markets. In addition to the health disruption, the global economic collapse means that in many cases, exports have come to a standstill. So how can poorer countries be helped right now? On this episode, we speak with three experts in the field of sovereign debt. Lee Buchheit is formerly at Cleary Gottlieb and is considered to be the world’s foremost expert on sovereign debt law and restructurings. Mitu Gulati is a professor at Duke University School of Law and Ugo Panizza is a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. The three have been working throughout the crisis to help put together a comprehensive aid plan for EMs. They talk to us about what it would look like, and why moving it forward has proven to be so difficult.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. So, Joe, I think it's fair to say that the world is in a pretty bad place right now. I would not disagree. We just had jobless claims. Those are still pretty bad. Obviously, we have a huge question mark over the U.S. economy. Europe has been doing very poorly as well. But I think it's also fair to say that some parts of the world are doing worse than others. Yeah, it's really interesting because, of course, you have to disentangle the sort of health crisis specifically from the economic crisis.

There are parts of the world that may actually be doing better in a surprising sense in terms of the outbreak of the public health crisis, the virus. but obviously not getting spared at all from the fact that so much commerce is at a virtual standstill. So even places that, yeah, where the numbers don't seem as bad as the UK or the U.S., from an economic situation, they may be even worse potentially. Yeah, but you also have some parts of the world where both the health crisis and the financial crisis is pretty bad. And I'm thinking specifically of emerging markets. So these are countries, that don't necessarily have a really developed health system. And they certainly don't have a lot of money necessarily to suddenly direct to containing a pandemic. And now, of course, they're dealing with an

economic crisis that is making the money that they have, even, well, reducing the amount of money available to them to fight the crisis. So it's really like a double whammy at this point. Right. That's exactly right. Relatively rich countries or rich countries like the U.S. for as bad as we may be doing on the public health side, there's no real financial constraint to spending a lot of money, both in terms of helping people pay their bills and also building out a public health system. It's more of a political capacity constraint. But some countries, obviously, they simply don't have the fiscal capacity to do what's necessary to really fight the health front, even if there were the desire or the political capacity to do so.

Right. So as bad as it gets in the U.S., don't forget that the U.S. government can always issue treasuries and widen its deficit for extra fiscal spending. Sorry, that sounded flippant, but I don't intend it to be that actually is an advantage. Okay, well, so today we're going to be digging into emerging markets. We're going to talk about some of those fiscal dynamics, but we're especially going to zoom in on this debt question and how emerging markets can actually handle the spending that they need, or raise the money that they need in order to fight the coronavirus. Exactly right. So, I mean, we've talked about this before. We had a discussion on it. We talked to Brad Setser several weeks ago. That was before some of the, I think, IMF meetings. But it's still, I think many people still sense that there is much more that needs to be done. And again, because of the nature of viruses and also economic collapses, I think time really is of the essence to move. extreme lasting damage takes place. Okay, well, on that note, let's get straight to it then.

I'm really happy to say that we have not one, not two, but three guests on today's episode. Two of them have been with odd lots before. One is brand new. I'm going to introduce them all. Mitu Galati is a professor of law at Duke University and, of course, one of the world's foremost experts on sovereign debt restructurings. Lee Bukhite is the legendary sovereign debt lawyer, now retired from Cleary Gottlie, but an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh. And Hugo Panitsa is professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.

All three of them are experts in their fields, and they've come up with a proposal for how emerging markets might be able to weather this crisis. So thank you all for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Why don't we set out the scene, I guess. How much trouble are emerging markets actually in at the moment? They're in big trouble, if that's the question. If you want, I can give you a couple of numbers. So we run some estimates, and according to our estimates, emerging markets need to service that in the next 12 months.

for nearly $900 million. So this is the public sector, and this is the external debt of the public sector of this emerging market countries. So this is a large amount of money. And there was an op-ed by the Prime Minister of Ethiopia in the New York Times last week, which basically said that in Ethiopia and some other discounts,

they need to face the choice whether to service this debt. or, you know, spend for health care of their own citizens. So that's a difficult choice. So already there are countries that have been forced just in these short, you know, it's really just been a couple months. Already we're seeing companies forced or, sorry, countries forced to make one priority over the other either stay good on their external public debts or do the necessary spending to keep the virus in check?

Yes, there have been a hundred countries that have asked the IMF for emergency financial assistance. That's more than half the membership of the IMF. But that money will not be enough. And for some countries, not nearly enough to defray the extra expenses that are coming with this health crisis. Therefore, they're faced with this choice of having to diet. divert funds that had been earmarked for other governmental purposes, including debt service, to divert those funds toward the expenses of dealing with this pandemic.

If I can just add one number, so the IMF forecast growth for all of 190 member countries, and at the peak of the global financial crisis, it forecasted positive growth for 77 countries. this year is forecasting positive growth for nine countries. This is really, and even for these nine countries, they are forecasting very low positive growth. Basically, nobody above 2%. I'm actually surprised that nine countries are forecast for positive growth. Okay. Lee, you mentioned the number of countries that have approached the IMF for help.

We've also had an agreement from the G20 for a temporary debt standard. I want to bring in Mitu, maybe you could talk about that and what's involved in that standstill. You know, there have been some efforts to think about the global implications of the current crisis. And one of the efforts that seemed very positive started with an IMF World Bank call for action and was then followed by the G20, you know, announcing that there would be a debt moratorium for the rest of the year 2020 on debts, on payments that are owed to the bilaterals. And importantly in that, there was a request that the private creditor sector also provide similar relief. And there had been indications that they were willing. The Institute of International

Finance, sort of a lobbying group for the private creditors, had agreed that, yes, we should provide relief to the poorest countries in the world, all together, all on comparable terms. And this seemed like a very positive sign that at least we were beginning to think about this providing relief very quickly. Unfortunately, as of today, this seems like it is, in my skeptical viewpoint, all completely falling apart. All of those enthusiastic statements about providing relief for the rest of the year seem to be going nowhere. I think the official sector will provide the relief. I think the private sector is basically trying to delay and not provide any relief whatsoever. I'm sure, I hope that they call in and yell at us and say that,

no, they actually want to provide relief, but I don't see it going anywhere. Well, Lee, I'm thinking about, you know, Tracy and I talked with you several months ago at one of our live events. And these sort of these debt renegotiations, even in the simplest terms of it's just one country trying to renegotiate some of its debt. They seem to, you know, these renegotiations can go on for years with different classes of creditors who own different types of bonds, you know, all trying to get their share. I can only imagine that it's orders of magnitude more complex

when it's trying to basically do a solution for every country in the world at the same time. Well, the way we've been thinking about it is that we have, an immediate emergency, and that is the need to get funding into the hands of these countries to deal with the pandemic. Entering 2020, there were a handful of countries who had already acknowledged that they needed a full-scale debt restructuring, Argentina, Lebanon, Ecuador, Venezuela, obviously. We will leave 2020 with a much longer list of countries that need a full-scale debt restructuring. But that's not the focus. right now, the immediate focus and the paper that my colleagues and I produced was intended

to find a way quickly and uniformly to free up, liberate cash that these countries could use for COVID-19 amelioration. This program that Me Too has described involving the the official sector and we hoped the private sector was all intended to focus on that. Everyone knows that within a relatively short space of time, we will have to confront the broader issue that you've just mentioned. How does one deal with full-scale debt restructurings? Because many countries will exit the COVID period with unsustainable debt stocks. will be a challenge, frankly, that we have not faced since the 1980s and the Latin American

debt crisis and the world was very different back then. I want to get to that point, but before we do, perhaps one of you could just walk us through what your proposal actually entails. As you mentioned, maybe it's not that difficult to have a debt standstill for bilateral sovereign creditors. Not that difficult. Maybe that's sort of over-egging but there is a sticking point in the form of the private creditors. So what's your solution here? Why don't I walk you through it? It's really quite straightforward.

We propose that the debtor countries that need this relief, and not all of them will. Some of them will not be afflicted by the epidemic as badly as others. And some may continue to have, or at least have hopes of having marketing. access, but for the rest, we propose that they open what we call a central credit facility, a CCF, with a multilateral development bank. That could be the World Bank, but it could be one of the regional development banks, African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and so forth.

The country would then divert the payments that would normally have gone toward interest payments on external debt, it would divert those payments into the central credit facility. As the amounts arrive at the CCF, the administrator, the multilateral development bank, would credit the relevant creditor with a participation interest in the CCF, just like a syndicated loan. The country could then borrow from the CCF to deal with COVID-19 related expenses. This is a critical feature because the multilateral development bank would be responsible for monitoring the use of that money. No individual commercial creditor or even group of commercial creditors is going to be in a position to undertake that monitoring task. And the last thing anyone wants is money,

that has been effectively contributed by creditors to deal with this pandemic being siphoned away for other purposes, put it that way. So the multilateral development bank would be responsible for that. We don't specify what the financial terms of the CCF should be, but common sense says that they should be, the repayment terms for the CCF should not put further burden on the post-COVID financial position of these countries. In a nutshell, that's the nut. Do any of you have an estimate for how much money that could actually free up? It kind of depends on whether the bilateral creditors are also going to participate in this. Ugo would have a better idea, I think, of the numbers. The number is the maximum number is what I gave you before.

If you only focus on payment due on long-term debt, the maximum number is what I gave you before, that of course I gave it to you wrong because I always get confused between million and billions. I gave you a number of about 900 million. It's actually 900 billion. That's the maximum amount which is owed by all emerging and the very emerging. developing countries. Clearly, as Lee said, not all countries would need this type of help. So this is sort of upper bound. And the amount varies from country to country, but that's sort of, let's say, the envelope, the maximum envelope. So we have, as Lee pointed out, we're just this first

stage, which we need, immediate cash for these countries to fight the health crisis. Obviously, the question of where they will be in terms of debt stock sustainability, that's probably a question for next year and that's going to be infinitely more complex. But in terms of implementing the plan put forth by the three of you to free up this cash through a sort of international development, a bank or multiple banks, who are the actors that need to make this happen just to coordinate this first step? And why is it proving to be so challenging? to coordinate them? Initially, it seemed like everybody was going to cooperate.

The key actors in coordinating such an effort, because we do not have anything like an international sovereign bankruptcy scheme, this all has to be done in a cooperative fashion. And as the historical matter, the key actors have always been the IMF and the multilaterals. Here, the IMF and the World Bank,

through their leadership, took early action. I think March 25th was when they put out their call to action. And the private creditor group initially seemed to support this, which then resulted in the G20 taking concrete action. So end of March, early April, it looked like we were going, to be able to provide on a global scale relief to basically half the world for the rest of 2020. Massive relief as Ugo put the numbers in. And then as the question of implementation, so our team was thinking, you know, everybody's cooperating.

This is just a matter of figuring out how do we enable the cooperation. And as we were working on the enabling the cooperation, the willingness to cooperate gradually diminished. Now, there are many motivations one can ascribe to this. Or maybe this is just the natural process. But, you know, as the G20 said, we will provide official sector relief to the poorest countries. then the free rider tendencies blossomed. And I suspect that at least some in the private creditor world said, oh, well, if the official sector will provide all this relief,

maybe we don't need to provide relief. Maybe we need to explain, you know, we didn't really mean we were going to provide relief. We want, you know, proper compensation. Oh, you know, many of these countries actually can borrow. at market rates or above market rates. And maybe we should just let them borrow. Maybe we have fiduciary obligations,

even though many of the people I've spoken to don't even understand what fiduciary obligations are. So it is looking like the official sector will have to provide the temporary relief. It won't be enough. Private, many countries who have access will continue to borrow even though, I think they should not borrow as this stage.

If you read their risk disclosures, you would think they should not borrow. And then the debt restructuring when it comes will come earlier than it should and will be brutal. I do want to talk about the issuance that we are seeing from emerging markets. But before we do, I understand the free rider point for private creditors, but do you think private creditors might also be worried that by agreeing to the standstill, they're basically opening up a Pandora's box of, I don't want to say excuses, but extenuating circumstances that countries could use to hit the pause button on their payments going forward. Is that a concern?

It is possibly a concern, but I don't think anyone living through the experience that were all living, through believes that this is anything other than a truly exceptional worldwide phenomenon. None of us alive today have ever seen anything like it. And so while there's always a slippery slope concern in these things, I think the official sector and the private sector could minimize that by ensuring. that every time they speak about the relief that they're now providing, they do so in terms that confines it to circumstances of this once-in-a-century variety. I mean, just to reinforce what Lee said, if you oppose some policy, you always use the slippery slope argument, right? from legalization of marijuana to whatever, right?

It's just you legalize marijuana and the day after everybody's shooting heroin or whatever. I mean, you know, the Bank of England has just announced that this is the worst recession in 300 years. You know, they postpone the Olympic Games. I mean, there have been, we observe so many exceptional actions that the idea of saying, you know, if you do something now, then, you know, next year somebody is coming out with some excuse or this happened. You know, in 2020, we're going to do it again. It seems a bit a sign that you don't want to do something or coming up with some excuse. Can I ask a question and is kind of following on Me Too's point, and it's a little less academic or less theoretical,

but for those who have not of us who have never been in these rooms where the negotiations take place and these discussions about establishing new facilities and debt pauses take place, you mentioned the G20, but when you talk about the private sector, the private owners of government debt, how do you, I mean, there's thousands. I don't know how many there are, but how do they coordinate and who talks for them and how do they have a voice in the first place? What do those negotiations sound like? Well, in this case, a Washington, D.C. based organization, the Institute for International Finance, which has about 450 members. most of them are financial institutions.

They stepped forward on April 9 and wrote a letter to the official sector actors, in effect, offering the cooperation of commercial creditors in this standstill initiative. So in this case, they have raised their hand and purported to be the mouthpiece for the private sector community in this. Now, there are many institutions that do not belong to the IIF and might dispute whether they are a legitimate spokesperson. But in this case, that's how it was done. and the G20 in its subsequent communique, in which had announced that bilateral creditors were going to provide a suspension of payments for the balance of this year, actually identified the IIF as the coordinator for the commercial creditors. And so you said initially the private commercial creditors said they were willing to participate in some sort of program, then have gotten cold feet. How do they couch that?

Did they, I presume they don't just say, now, you know what, we'd like all our money and we want to be paid first. I presume they have some sort of higher-minded, theoretical-sounding argument. But what is there, as you say, it's falling apart, but how do they put their complaints with your program? Well, they sent a subsequent letter on May 1st, which said we've been consulting our members, and we feel we should bring to the attention of the official sector the many obstacles that private sector creditors will face. First, in their view, the initiative must be wholly voluntary. That is, any creditor who doesn't want to participate is perfectly free not to participate.

Parentheses, that is somewhat inconsistent with another principle that they espouse, which is inter-creditor equity, one for all and all for one. If everyone can opt out and everyone can negotiate different terms, you are not going to have inter-creditor equity. Second, they said, in order to do this, individual creditor institutions are going to have to calculate the net present value cost of this deferment and offset it, either by raising interest rates or getting official sector guarantees for the deferred amounts.

In addition, each institution or some institutions, certainly the asset managers will have fiduciary duties. They will have to explain to their investors why they are voluntarily agreeing to defer receipt of interest payments. And that will be a challenge for some of those institutions. So it was a long list. It was not a disavowal of their prior commitment. It was a preview of the many difficulties that would attend this. And they said that these arrangements must be negotiated creditor by credit, maybe instrument by instrument. And that process alone could easily eat up the balance of 2020.

I wanted to go back to the issuance point that Mitu made private creditors basically arguing, well, why don't emerging markets just sell debt normally into the market. Somewhat surprisingly, we have seen a bunch of EM bonds sold recently. I was just looking at Sri Lanka's debt and that's trading at distress levels. But there are some sell side analysts that are issuing by recommendations on Sri Lanka, of all things, in the middle of this global crisis. how are these countries still able to issue debt? And what are the buyers thinking at this point? I am completely befuddled. Maybe Lee or Hugo can explain this. But I have been watching this truly bizarre phenomenon of countries, you know,

take Guatemala, Paraguay, Mexico, countries that are in very deep distress that, if you read their prospectuses, explain to the market, look, we have no remittances coming in, our tourism sector is destroyed. Our primary commodity, say hypothetically, oil, say in Mexico, is down in the doldrums. We have shut our borders. we do not have adequate health care facilities, and then they're able to raise billions on the markets. I am befuddled, but I do not think that the argument that is being made by some that, oh, this is a sign that everything is well and we do not need to provide relief holds.

I think that is utterly ludicrous and dangerous for us to use as a projection for what will come. But that argument is being made, especially by some who do not want to provide relief. They are much happier to sell bonds, to buy those bonds at very high interest rates, although I should caveat that the interest rates are not nearly as high

as I would think them to be. But, you know, maybe Lee or Hugo has a more sort of rational, the markets understand everything and price every risk perspective. But I am just completely befuddled. Well, the countervailing factor, I think, is the tsunami of quantitative easing that's occurred in the last two months. You just have a wall of money that's entered the market. It must go somewhere. the interest rates on the bonds of developed countries like the United States or the Europeans are near zero or below zero. So if you're an institutional investor, you must find a home for all of this money someplace, and that perhaps eclipses your normal risk aversion in assessing some of these investments.

I have to say it sounds me too. And actually both of the both sides of this debate feel very much like the debate around basically every asset class in the world right now, including U.S. equities in which you look at the fundamentalist. This makes no sense. Unemployment expected to shoot to 25%. And then the other side of that coin is, yes, but there is all this extraordinary intervention happening. One way it's going to have to resolve presumably. But the debate about how the EM Bond world continues to trade and raise money feels just like a microcosm of literally every other asset class debate we have these days. I was going to flag one of my favorite countries in good times, which is the Maldives, which are very close to my home in Kerala, just a 45-minute flight away. And normally their economics are quite good because they have such a booming tourism sector. But they are completely dependent on tourism.

I think it's close to 70% of their GDP comes from tourism or tourism-related activities. They have a small portion of their economy that comes from sales of fish. And they do not have anything resembling a meaningful health sector. Part of the reason I know a lot about the Maldives is people from the Maldives, workers come to India for even the most basic healthcare needs. Now, in the current situation, they are down to zero.

no tourists, fish prices gone down to the bottom. They're having multiple COVID-19 outbreaks, and they can't send their citizens to India because the flights are all closed. Now, this is not temporary. This country is going to find it incredibly hard to recover even in the medium term. So, you know, the estimates from both the official sector and the private markets are much more optimistic in this case than I think reality requires. But I wonder whether it is a window into what's happening in the rest of the world that we are just refusing to face the reality of how bad this is. But I am a pessimist. So hopefully I am wrong. Just on that time horizon point, I mean, this theme tends to come up over and over again

whenever people are talking about debt relief or debt standstills, if you give people a grace period now, for instance, in the U.S., like for certain things, they are granting grace periods, does that save up the problem for a later date? And how do you manage the exit process? How do you make sure that a borrower doesn't end up owing all of the money for the past six months that they should owe and they have to pay it in one big lump payment. How do you actually manage that? And how do you ensure that you're not saving up a problem for a later date? Tracy, it's a fair concern. The G20, when they announced the bilateral debt suspension, proposed that the deferred interest and in their case principal payments would be due

over a four-year period with one year of grace. So one year in which no principal is repaid and then another three years, that was their proposal for how to smooth out this problem. The thinking on this is that at the moment, it is simply not possible for anyone to prepare a debt sustainability analysis for any of these countries that is in which one can repose confidence, put it that way. There are simply too many variables. When does this crisis end?

What will commodity prices look like when it ends? What will export markets look like? What will the tourism industry look like? What will the financial markets look like? Those are shrieking unknowns at this point in time. Hopefully, by the end of this year, some of those issues will begin to be able to be analyzed, and that would allow the IMF to begin to assess longer-term debt sustainability. As I said, a moment ago, we should not expect to leave 2020 with only four or five countries facing the need for

full-scale debt restructuring. I think there'll be many more. But who's on the list and how severe is that debt restructuring at the moment? No one, I think, can predict. So just on that note, if we're looking forward and we think that the world and emerging markets especially are going to come out of the current crisis, owing more money, if we think that we're going to get a bunch of restructurings, It's just a question of how many and who's first and who sort of needs it the most. Is that maybe, is that an opportunity perhaps to rethink the way emerging markets are funded or just sort of hit reset on the way this whole system actually works? I'm trying to end on a sort of optimistic note, but do you see an opportunity?

You stole my question. This is literally the question I was going to ask. No, no, no, no, it's perfect. It's great. last go. You and I were in the exact, had the exact same thought at the same time. Mind melt. Mind melt.

Yeah. Hugo is our optimist. Let's let him in. I don't know. I mean, I've been pushing for a long time towards this idea of using more contingent debt instruments, and so far they haven't worked. We can tell you of many cases in which

countries have paid dearly to try to use you know, issue GDP index bonds in the sense that they paid a price when things were going well without getting anything when things were going badly. So if we could go in that direction, that would be great. Even though I'm the optimistic guy, I'm not very optimistic, but I don't know what Lee would add on this. Well, the current effort by some in the official community is to try to figure out a way in which we can deal with multiple sovereign debt restructurings going on simultaneously. We did that in the 1980s, but of course the creditor universe was a much

more homogeneous group of commercial banks. Arguably, we did it starting in 1990 with the Brady initiative. And that's what some in the official sector are looking at. Is it possible to replicate a template for how a sovereign debt restructuring could be done so that if we are faced with the situation in which there are 10 or 20 or 30 countries going through the process at the same time, they would not have to each individually and in a bespoke manner attempt to figure out how to implement a debt restructuring. That's right now the subject of investigation by someone the official section. Okay.

Well, on that sort of optimistic note, but not necessarily, we're going to leave it there. Hugo Mitu and Lee, thank you so much for being on and for that fascinating conversation. Thanks very much. Good to be with you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that was great. Appreciate it.

Thank you. So, Joe, I found that conversation fascinating. as I mentioned. And I know you're fond of saying that people don't necessarily need to worry about debt. In fact, I can see you tweeting that just a few hours ago. But that really only applies, I think, to some developed markets. Right. In EM, you can and probably should worry about the debt. Yes. I think there is a very different conversation when you think about debt sustainability and the cost of borrowing in all these countries in the EM versus the development. market context. And what this conversation really drives home is that, you know, it's so complicated to

just get any short-term debt relief or sort of that when, as Lee pointed out, when it actually gets to the point about looking at sustainability of the overall debt stock, it really does just just going to be mind-bogglingly difficult challenge for the world in the years ahead, even if the virus itself fades is a problem. Yeah. I mean, the complexity, you're right, is what really stands out. You have all these different creditors, all these different claims. You have public, private, foreign, and domestic creditors. I don't even know how you would begin, but, you know, kudos to the three of those guys. They're trying to put this together. Yeah. No, in terms of the immediate need, like, I think there's an agreement. The immediate need everywhere is cash, right?

Like, the cash isn't going to solve a health crisis, but cash can keep people solvent, keep people paying their bills, keep paying doctors, and so forth. And so there does seem to be this recognition that we don't need to make the first part of this too complex. We just need to free up cash. And that's even true in the U.S. contact. Yeah. And I guess it would be interesting to see if the urgency of this particular crisis makes people realize that they do need to create some sort of template or sovereign restructuring. going forward because that's been, I mean, we've had so many episodes on sovereign debt restructurings because each one of them tends to be unique in its complexity and in its particular issues. Yeah, you know what I was thinking about too, like a little bit. You know, obviously this was a sovereign debt context, but I also think about some of our

conversations we've had with Chris White of private sector debt. And the consistent theme is that when you start talking about the asset class of debt, it's just infinitely more complex than any other asset class. because of how many different versions are. I mean, you think about like, there's one Microsoft stock, right? MSFT. Right. You want to look at like debt or I don't know if Microsoft has debt.

No, I'm sure they do. But it gets infinitely more complex right away in the number of, and the difficulty of trading that and coordinating that. And so then you think about this on an international level, all the different things that make public sector debt way more complex. And it just, yeah, it's mind-boggling. And that's why there have been certain stories, like say, Argentina, that have been in the news for like 20 years,

and that's just one country. Yeah, and it's the same story pretty much over and over and over. All right, should we leave it there? You know what I just want to say one other thing? I mean, I didn't love it, but Mitu's comment about, you know, he's pessimistic, but he'd like to be proven wrong. I feel like the amount of times I've said some version of that over the last few months.

I'd like to be shown that I'm wrong is really sore just because there's so many sort of bleak ways that this could all go extremely bad. Well, I think if you're a bear right now and you're going, and I hope I'm right, that would probably be a not very popular position to be taking. Taste. Yeah, untaste, I agree. Okay. Well, this has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you should follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson 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.