Transcription
[applause] Well, thank you very much indeed, and it's fantastic to be here. And it's great to be here with somebody who is one of the most prominent media figures in America today.
Um, we were chatting earlier, and we reckon we've known each other for 23 years. Um, Andrew reckons we first met in probably either London or New York when we were both quite junior financial reporters, and we both went on to carry on writing about finance, myself for the Financial Times, Andrew for the New York Times.
Um, he was a New York Times reporter first, then he went out and created DealBook. Um, and then the great financial crisis happened in 2008. Um, and we both wrote books about the financial crisis. You wrote *Too Big to Fail*. I wrote, um, *Fool's Gold*. Um, mine was a little bestseller. Yours was a very, very big bestseller. No hard feelings.
And you then went on, if that wasn't enough, to become this anchor for CNBC, for Squawkbox, which has made you very famous in America. Um, if that wasn't enough, in your spare time, you decided to go out and write, um, a TV, a TV show script called *Billions*. You've dabbled in a whole bunch of other stuff on the side in between all this, and you've still been writing articles for the New York Times, and DealBook is still going strong. I mean, you must basically be cloned at least four times over because I don't know how you fit this into one 24 hours.
And between all this, I discovered talking backstage, he's also spent the last eight years, eight years, secretly writing a new book and not telling anyone about it because he says, in his spare time, if he had any spare time, he became obsessed with the story of 1929 and how it happened, why it happened, who were the key characters, and of course, what lessons we have for today.
So, we are in for a treat because we're not only going to hear about the story of 1929, and this is his new book, which he's just told me, in England, it sold a lot heavier than in America.
>> It's true.
>> Don't know why, but it can double up as a sort of, you know, doorstop as well. But it's a terrific, terrific read. I read it, um, on a plane just the other day, and I actually stayed awake for a very long time, much longer than I planned, because it's so readable. Um, but we're going to be talking about that, and we're going to be talking also about what the lessons are right now for all of us, given that we're living in an era which looks an awful lot like 1928 under some measures. When you look at the markets, when you look at the AI bubble, when you look at the hubris, and you, when you look above all else at the personalities, people like Elon Musk, people like Yenzen Hung, people like Jamie Dimon, they're not that different from some of the characters in this book.
So, no pressure. But before we start, I'm going to quickly make sure that you're all awake and ready to engage with what I hope is going to be an amazing conversation by asking you all to take part in the poll. And the question is this: How likely do you think it is that the world could experience an economic crisis like the Great Depression within the next 10 years? How likely is it that we're going to have a replay of what happened after 1929 in the 1930s with a big depression caused by a financial crash? Do you think that's going to happen in the next 10 years or not?
And I will give you a spoiler and say I'm going to ask you that now, and I'm going to ask you that also at the end of our conversation to see whether Andrew has managed to change your mind or not. So once again, no pressure. I don't know if I'm going to try to change people's minds on this one.
>> We'll see.
>> Andrew, tell me why you think that might be the wrong question.
>> So, what I, I hope, and, and I think the great lesson for me of this book is that the crash of 1929 was just one domino in a series of dominoes. In fact, the book is about the series of dominoes with the crash beginning a series of policy choices that ultimately were mistakes that ultimately led to the Great Depression. In fact, by the way, the phrase "the Great Depression" was chosen by President Hoover, oddly enough. Uh, he had been calling it a panic and decided that was a bad word. He thought it was less panicky if he told people that it was a depression.
>> Um, so that was...
>> And you made the point in the book that the problem about calling something a depression in a bid to calm people down on the basis that panic is too panicky...
>> ...is a panic at least tends to last a short time.
>> A depression can last a very long time.
>> Exactly. And it did. So, what I was going to, to my answer about this, I'm hoping that we have actually learned a whole bunch of lessons, policy lessons, since this period that would prevent another Great Depression. Do I think that there is a crash that's coming in the next 10 years? Without doubt. I mean, I, I would be shocked if there wasn't a crash. The question is, what happens on the other side of the crash? And I, I like to believe that when, and we'll talk about some of the policy choices that were made that were mistakes. The, one of the big policy choices that was made that we learned was the wrong choice was learned by Ben Bernanke.
>> Right?
>> And was played out in 2008, which is one of the things you have to do if you've missed preventing the crash.
>> What you have to do on the other side is you do have to pursue a series of bailouts which are politically unpopular, and you have to flood the system with money.
>> As politically unpopular as that is.
>> Right?
>> And he learned that because back then, and we can talk about why it was, they ultimately sat on their hands for a whole host of reasons. So, I like to think that if we got into that kind of situation, we wouldn't be doing some of those things. Having said that, we also, by the way, had a budget surplus in the United States in 1929. And so, what I don't know is if you actually did flood the system with money at a time when you actually don't have it, so you're borrowing more, is there a moment at which the investor class, bondholders and the like, raise their hand and say, "Excuse me, you know, we like you guys. We're happy to continue lending, but boy, are we going to have to charge you a lot more." And what happens then?
>> Yes. Well, we'll come back to that in a minute because I think to my mind, that is the key question. And it also helps explain why gold and Bitcoin and things like that are rising in price so dramatically. That question about whether there is enough money in the system today to do what they did in 1929. But before we start that, I will give you the answer as to how you voted. Um, then the proportion of you who think that it's likely that we're going to have a global economic crisis in the next 10 years is 45%.
>> Wow.
>> The proportion who think it's unlikely is 42%. So, on balance, you're gloomy. And there's 13% of you who are undecided. So they're the ones we can play for tonight. Okay?
>> Because I actually agree with you. I think that a financial crash is almost certainly going to happen. I think when you look at what's happening with AI and a lot of the other markets right now, it's very hard to believe that that's going to carry on going up indefinitely. Um, particularly in private credit. Um, but I think a depression is more questionable. So, we'll see at the end whether they agree with us or not. But anyway, perhaps we can roll back for a moment. Tell me why and how did you decide to write this book? Because as I say, you wrote your book about *Too Big to Fail*, about the 2008 crisis. You then went off and took on four different jobs all at once. And yet somehow in the middle of this, you decided it would be a great moment to start spending every single holiday, even with your kids, researching this book. Why?
>> So, the truth was, people used to ask me after I wrote *Too Big to Fail*, they would come up to me and they would ask me to compare 2008 to 1929. And I had no good answer. And so I went researching on a vacation. I, I downloaded all these books to my Kindle, like a real nerd, I mean, to really waste the vacation. And, um, and I, I guess I bought some other book, physical books with me. And I, I started reading these books and I became obsessed with the story, but more importantly, became obsessed with the idea that none of the books that I had read felt to me like the true sort of character-driven, inside-the-room, fly-on-the-wall, *Barbarians at the Gate*, *Den of Thieves* style book that I always loved. And I thought to myself, is that possible? Uh, most of the books that have been written about this period, and there's some great ones, Kenneth Galbraith, uh, John Brooks wrote *Once in Galcanda*, uh, there's a great book that was called *The Bubble Burst*, actually written by two Brits in the '70s, uh, that was very well done, but they all sort of had a little bit of a remove to them in terms of the way they were...
>> ...they were a little bit academic.
>> ...a little academic. *The Bubble Burst* was, and actually John Brooks's book had had some interesting characters, but it wasn't told with, to me, with the full arc and then in the room. And I happened to be at Harvard University, uh, giving a lecture, and I got there early, and I'm never anywhere early, and, um, I happened to walk into the library there, and they had, and I guess I knew this, they had the archives of Thomas Lamont, who's a big character in this book. Thomas Lamont was running JP Morgan in 1929. He worked under a guy named Jack Morgan, who was the son of JP Morgan. And...
>> [snorts]
>> ...I asked if I could look through some of these boxes. And I literally, on the first box, opened it up, uh, looked through a folder, and his secretary was keeping transcripts of his phone calls and conversations and meetings with Hoover and Roosevelt. And I thought to myself, bingo.
>> However, I went back to the archivist and I said,
>> "My name is Andrew Sorcin. I wrote this book, *Too Big to Fail*. I want to write *Too Big to Fail* for 1929." Do you have more material like this?
>> And she said, "You can't write that book."
>> [laughter]
>> And...
>> Well...
>> [snorts]
>> ...the archivist told you that.
>> The archivist said, "You're never going to be able to write this book." And that actually was probably actually why I wrote it. It was a personal...
>> ...to kind of a personal challenge.
>> It was. Have you gone back to to see her and give her a copy?
>> She knows about the book. Yes. Um, [laughter] I, I've had to, I've, I've been back and forth with her for years now. Um, you know, she was right. She said to me, "The kind of granular detail you want, there's not one or two or three archives that have all this material that you can just excavate." And so it turned into this almost obsessive sort of puzzle that I was trying to put together by trying to find material in archives, probably 30, 40 different places around the country, in the world. I was, I, at certain points, I was paying students in different locations to go find things for me. I was flying to, to different places. It became this sort of crazy thing. And the reason I didn't tell anybody about it all this time is because I thought most people would think I was out of my mind.
>> I think they might have done. But, um, that explains why no one's written sort of a real fly-in-the-wall, breathless story of 1929 before if it's all scattered.
>> I think that part of the reason why this kind of story wasn't told was just the challenge of actually finding the material. And there was so much of it, it was a needle in a haystack. You know, the main character in this book is a guy named Charlie Mitchell. They called him Sunshine Charlie. He really sort of invented modern credit in America and ran a bank called National City, which becomes City. Um, he's, he never kept notes. There's no letters, memos in any kind of archive at all. Citigroup, which has its own archive, doesn't have material from Charlie Mitchell. And so, what I ended up having to do, uh, was very early on, was able to get the New York Fed. I shouldn't say early on, but midway in the project, uh, I got the New York Federal Reserve to give me the board minutes, uh, from that period of time. They had, they given it to anyone else before?
>> Never disclosed. In fact, the first time they gave them to me, they took six months because they, they had their lawyers redacting information from the board minutes from 100 years ago. I mean, it was crazy.
>> [laughter]
>> And did you find out what they redacted?
>> I ultimately did. Um, and there was an interesting reason for why they did it. It was not as revolutionary as you might imagine, but nonetheless, that provided sort of a treasure map for me for where Charlie would be at any one moment. And because of that, I was then able to say, "Okay, well, Charlie probably then talked to these five people." And then I would go try to find archives related to them. And then sometimes they wouldn't have material, but they would be corresponding with other people. And then I would go try to find their archives. So it was sort of, and sometimes you'd land on something that would be just magical, and you, I would be the happiest person for a whole week, and sometimes you'd be so depressed because you couldn't find anything.
>> Well, it sounds like an extraordinary kind of who-done-it detective story just to get this stuff together. It also sounds like the recipe for another TV series or TV script. Are you writing this yet?
>> I am not writing it yet.
>> Are we going to see it on Netflix?
>> Let's, let's cross our fingers.
>> Well, I, I don't quite believe that, but I'm sure we will see it on Netflix at some point, or or a movie. But, um, one of the things that's fascinating about the account, because it's told through the stories of a few key characters like Thomas Lamont, like Char, um, Charlie, Sunshine Charlie, um, is that in the run-up to 1929, the big crash of the market, there's a sense of extreme excitement and hubris in New York. And every time anyone starts saying, "It looks dangerous, it looks like it's out of control," there's this perception that you're old-fashioned, that you're not patriotic, that you're not a true believer. You just have to believe and get swept up on this, and everyone gets swept up in FOMO. Do you see parallels between what's been happening in the last year or so?
>> I mean, flashing light parallels. But the truth was, I didn't think when I started this book, I was not even looking for the parallels. I didn't, I was not imagining...
>> ...because you started in 2015 or something?
>> 2016.
>> I would say end of '16. I wasn't thinking about any of these things. I remember the only thing that I remember thinking, "Oh, this is a parallel," is that there, E.F. Hutton owned Mar-a-Lago in 1929 and was throwing big parties, and I thought, "Huh, I'll have to include that little detail." Um, but, you know, there, tariffs were not on the table. Tariffs were on the table. Um, I mean, so many of the things. But I would say the, the, the piece that you're referring to, I think the biggest piece is the 1920s really was this remarkable period of shocking euphoria and technological change. Everybody really was excited about the technology, and the truth was, they had reason to be. So, automobiles were emerging as a, as, you know, a meaningful piece of our economy. You had tech, you had, uh, telecommunications, you had radio. RCA, the ticker symbol is R-D-I-O, was the Nvidia of its time. I mean, it was like a meme stock. Everybody wanted a piece of all of this, and that's where the excitement came. You also had this, you, remarkable amount of euphoria coming from the banks. So, all of this was powered for the first time by debt. That's the other major piece of this.
>> Prior to... [clears throat] ...1919, uh, in America, and I would even argue here, probably even more importantly, uh, taking a loan of any real sort was considered a moral sin. It was just not something you would do. It was not something that proper people did. And it wasn't until John Raskob, uh, who was running General Motors at the time, decided, "How am I going to sell more cars?" "I'm going to sell more cars by loaning people money so they could buy my cars." That it became a socially acceptable practice. And after that, a company called Sears, Roebuck started doing the same to sell appliances. And then Sunshine Charlie clocked what's happening and says, "Okay, well, we can sell stock, and we'll loan you money, and you could walk into a brokerage house." I mean, they were, they were popping up on the corners of streets like, you know, Pret-a-Manger or or Starbucks or something. And you... [snorts] ...could walk into a hotel. They were everywhere. And you would walk in, and you could put a dollar down, and they would literally loan you $10. And that's how this all sort of emerged in this wild and crazy way. And so that feels very similar to me.
>> Right. And there were a couple of people in 1929 who were issuing warnings. A few people did sell up early.
>> But here's the problem. Here's the conundrum with being the Cassandra. So here we are as the Cassandras. Charles Merrill, who founded Merrill Lynch, the beginning of 1928, tells all of his clients and the public to get out of the market. He says there's going to be a great crash. Now, he was right, but he was wrong because from the beginning of 1928 to September of 1929, the stock market went up by 90%.
>> So...
>> And we're seeing that again. I mean, there have been Cassandras out there for the last few years. But the problem is, if you're managing money and you keep coming up short against the index, you don't survive.
>> So, this is the hard part. I was just with Paul Tudor Jones two weeks ago, and he said he thought that we were in the equivalent of, uh, October of 1999. And I said, "Ooh, that sounds very scary. October of 1920, 1999." And then he said, "Yeah, but the stock market went up 40% from there before it fell." And so the question is whether people either know or don't know when to get on and off the train, or whether they should be on the train at all. And the truth is, over the last hundred years, it's been a lot more profitable to be on the train and a professional optimist than ultimately to be the professional Cassandra.
>> Because the other thing that's fascinating about this story is that there were all kinds of lights flashing red during the course of 1929. The government itself, Washington itself, the White House was deeply concerned about what was going on. There were people shorting the market and potentially being very cynical about it as well.
>> And yet, when the market started to finally crack, it didn't crack in one go at all, did it?
>> No. It. I mean, you, when people think that 1929 was one big explosive collapse and you went from here to there overnight and everything got wiped out. I mean, that's totally wrong, isn't it?
>> Which is always people sometimes say that there's, you know, they all think it's one day. They talk about about a Black Thursday. Some people talk about a Black Monday. They talk about a Black Tuesday. By the way, there were all of those black days. I mean, it really, it really was like that. And the truth was that the market, [clears throat] fell effectively from mid-October over the course of a month, ultimately till November 13th, it was down from the high of about 50%. But here's the even more shocking part. By the end of 1929, the stock market was only down for the year 17%. Most people don't know that. But the interesting component of this is the reason why it was such a generationally scarring moment is that most Americans, all of these ordinary investors who had participated in the market for the very first time in their life, had taken on that debt, that 10:1 deal at the brokerage house. So that when the market fell 50%, it wasn't just that their equities were down by 50%. It was that they owed 10 times that. And so all of a sudden they were losing their homes, their mortgaging their houses. I mean, that's really why it was as painful as it was, and, and as I said, sort of became the first domino of then a series of things that go badly wrong.
>> And the other thing that's striking is that the market then rallied quite noticeably, and then it went down again, and then went up again, and then it just sunk, sunk, sunk, sunk, sunk for a very long time. So it wasn't a big explosion...
>> ...at the end. It was more just a sort of, you know, continual sagging.
>> But I would say it was a continual sagging because of the, the choices. So President Hoover gets into office in March, March 4th, 1929. So a lot of people say, "Well, could, if he stopped this, it would have been very hard to actually jump in front of the train." I think I'm somewhat sympathetic on that front because it was only a couple of months in the job to begin with. But then, once this crash happens, he then makes all sorts of choices that were at a minimum quite mistaken. At one point, very early on, he decides that he should raise taxes in the middle of all of this. Uh, at another point, he's pushing corporations to raise wages. He thinks that's how he's going to save things, and of course, the companies can't pay, uh, the wages. Um, he decides in 1930 to implement Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Uh, this is something actually in 1928, when he was running for president, he was so desperate to get farmers to vote for him that he had pledged to them that he would implement a tariff program so that they'd vote for him. So he felt in 1930 that he needed to make good on his pledge. Well, every economist in America was screaming from the rooftops, the way they were screaming at Trump just four months ago, uh, writing, you know, full-page letters in the newspaper saying, "Please don't do this." Thomas Lamont was going down there to, to beg him, and he did it, and global trade, I think, fell by 60% 12 months later. So I think it's all of those things, and then it's the Fed, which sat on its hands most of this period for two reasons. A lot of, there's a big conversation about the independence of central banks, uh, in this, in this age today. But back then, they were worried about the politics. You know, I went back and read so many of the diaries of the, the Federal Reserve members, and one of the reasons that they didn't want to do too much on the front end, meaning to try to stop the crash, they were all worried about the speculation. They thought this was terrible, but they thought if they raised interest rates too high and tipped over the economy, they'd be blamed. Excuse me, and the Fed was so new, born in 1913, they called it the experiment still, that it would end, meaning that they would, the Federal Reserve would just be, would disappear. They would end the entire project. And so they didn't do anything. And then on the other side, the idea of flooding the system with money was very difficult because they were on the gold standard. And then there was a whole debate about that.
>> And so out of this came, as you say, the depression.
>> Mhm.
>> And a series of policy mistakes. Um, which really only started to almost half turn around when you got Roosevelt coming in.
>> Mhm. Now, and one of the things I again find fascinating is it took a whole four years from the market starting to crash for any sense of reckoning or regulation to actually emerge with the famous Glass-Steagall Act.
>> And the Glass-Steagall Act wasn't actually driven by particularly pure motives at all, was it?
>> That was one of the great revelations for me. So, one of the great characters in this book, I think, is a guy named Carter Glass. Carter Glass was a senator in Virginia, and he was, uh, for those of you who know who Elizabeth Warren is in America, he was the Elizabeth Warren of his time. He was probably a racist Elizabeth Warren. Um, he, he was actually trying to, uh, bring segregation or really to bring segregation back, frankly, at that time. Um, he had helped create the Federal Reserve the first time around, and he, for much of the, he was one of the Cassandras in the '20s. He would rail about this thing called Mitchellism, Charlie Mitchell, and how he thought that Charlie Mitchell was going to upend America because of this speculative fever that he was creating. By the way, once I realized that those two characters were sort of at each other, that's when I thought I had a, actually had a story.
>> Had a narrative.
>> Had a narrative spine. But the truth is that the Glass-Steagall bill, which ultimately broke up banks in America, broke up the investment banking side, effectively the casino side, from the sort of retail commercial side of banking, was not pure. I think, you know, a lot of times today it's cited in, in the US, especially by folks on the left, as some, you know, one of the great bastions of...
>> ...progressive rulemaking.
>> ...progressive rulemaking. The truth is, when you get underneath this story, it is almost shocking to me how corrupt that bill really is. Part of the bill was ultimately written by a banker against the wishes of Carter Glass, who's writing letters bitterly complaining to a friend of his about what's really happening here. Um, and how Roosevelt was effectively being sort of spun by one of the Rockefellers who wanted to, you know, shiv JP Morgan by putting this bill together. So, yes, that part was a...
>> ...it was all basically dirty dealing and fights for...
>> ...a lot of dirty dealing and, and that stuff was not, by the way, in any real literature.
>> Not at all. So why did the crash turn into a depression? I think the, I mean, first of all, let's just define the crash turned into the, the depression in my mind was at its, at its worst, 1932, 25% unemployment. That really was the, the sort of the bottom, I think, in the US.
>> 25% unemployment. I mean, can you imagine that today?
>> I mean, tented camps everywhere. Um, in New York City, literally there were, there were tented camps in Central Park, across the street from where Charlie Mitchell used to live at the time. Um, and then by 1933, I think we had 9,000 banks in America fail. So, you said, "What, how did the, how did the crash turn into that?" So, first of all, I think it was the confidence that was sort of sucked out of the system.
>> Everyone basically, animal spirits, quote John Maynard Keynes.
>> ...imploded. There was no real investment of any sort. Uh, you had the banks faltering in part, um, because, by, by the way, interestingly, back then we had so many banks in the country, and you weren't allowed to merge the banks. That was illegal at the time, because everyone was trying to be very, uh, protective of the local, local bank. But that was a, that was a terrible mistake, um, because you were on the gold standard, you couldn't print money, you couldn't really print money. That, so that was a problem. You had the tax piece. I just think it was the layer upon, on layer upon layer.
>> And, and that's what really sunk.
>> So I want to come back to some of the characters in a moment, but before we do, why do you think it's different now?
>> Do you think the fact that the, the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve could eventually just print money if we had another...
>> I think the biggest issue is we could print money. That's, that's the first piece. We could print money and...
>> ...and in fact, we did print money after the, after, you know, after COVID. Yes. And interestingly, I was surprised. I don't know about you. I remember after 2008, there were so many recriminations about bailouts and so, and about sort of flooding the system with money. When COVID happened, there were no recriminations. Nobody was screaming from the rooftop saying, "This is crazy." They were saying, "Give me the money."
>> And they were very happy about it.
>> So, I thought it would be almost politically unpalatable to do that again.
>> Clearly, that's not the case. So I think that you would see the Federal Reserve do something like that again. The one thing that I don't know is how the sort of national debt piece overlays with this. And the other thing that I think we're, that I'm unclear about today, that I think everyone's unclear about, is where the leverage lies today. And what I mean by that is, if, if every financial crisis ultimately is a function of too much leverage in the system, too much debt, it, that's the match that lights the fire every single time. It's the accelerant to the whole situation. If in '29 it was the, it was, it was these margin loans. In 2008, it was subprime loans. Today, it's probably the leverage that's living in private credit around the ecosystem that's now building the AI bubble, which is to say, it's not just the tech companies getting involved. It's the energy companies that are, you know, powering these things. It's the construction companies. It's the real estate. It's, there's the whole sort of complex. And because we don't, because basically after 2008, most loans moved from the bank balance sheet to these private credit firms, we don't really know the full extent of it. And we also don't know how connected the private credit funds are. Not to get too in the weeds for some people here, how connected they are to the banks. In some cases, the banks are actually, uh, helping these guys lever up their funds. In other cases, there's liquidity provisions. And so, if everybody sort of runs through the exits at the same time, there could be a problem that I don't think we even can comprehend.
>> Yeah. [clears throat] Of course, the problem with private credit is that it is private, right?
>> And therefore, it's not public, and therefore you can't see it very clearly. And that creates a lot of problems. And one of the great truisms of the last 200 years of financial crisis is every time there's a crisis, the authorities change the regulations and rules to deal with the last crisis, and then they create the next crisis in response. Because the reason we have private credit today exploding...
>> ...because after 2008...
>> ...the Bank of England, the Fed clamped down on the banks, the public markets.
>> Well, this is what you've written so much about in *Fool's Gold* and everything else.
>> Yes. And so it all went into the private markets. I mean, I guess there's two questions there. One is, if the private credit markets were to burst or to fail, or if people start to lose trust in that,
>> um, would that be a pop, or would it be a long, slow hiss as the air came out the bubble? Because one of the things about private markets is they don't have to, the people running private markets don't have to reveal what they think the value of their assets actually are. So unlike a stock market where you can see the prices, you know, go up, go down, and they all start collapsing, everyone panics, and that feeds on itself. In private credit, it's not visible, and so it can be quite stealthy and slow instead of a pop.
>> So I agree with you. I think it could be stealthy and slow. And just so everyone, we're all on the same page together here, the thing that's so interesting about private credit, so in a bank, the bank lends out the money, but you, the depositor, whose money they're effectively lending out, can call on that money on any given day. So you can, and that's why we have runs on banks, because the bank has lent out too much money, and then everybody else is trying to get the money beforehand. Private credit, ostensibly, is supposed to be safer because what's technically supposed to have happened is I've gone to, I, I've gone to you and I've said, uh, "Give me a billion dollars, please," and I will give it, [clears throat] back to you in, I'll give you the money back in 10 years from now, and then I will go loan it, uh, for 10 years. And so there's supposed to be a sort of a match in terms of the duration. So no, so you can't call on it early. So the, the reason why it could be a long hiss is also because the money is not due back to the investor for a much longer period of time, and technically, in some cases, you can even extend out when you are supposed to make those payouts.
>> Yes. Well, the difference between, you know, if there's a sudden pop, you can get a panic, but then you actually get a clearing out of all the excess. If there's a long, slow hiss,
>> you can have it like zombies. You don't have such a dramatic, you have zombies and you have something like Japan, where, [clears throat] no one trusts the value of anything anymore because everyone knows there's a lot of rot in the system that's concealed, and it just keeps feeding on itself and creates deflation and a real loss of confidence in a very pernicious way. I think a pop is like a heart attack, and a hiss is more like cancer. But both can be pretty bad. So maybe I don't want either.
>> [laughter]