 Front left, second row, yes. Frank Mannheim, from the School of Public Policy, or the new name. I have a suggestion of a very major extension of your concept in the path-breaking environmental laws of the early 1970s. The NEPA Act and the Clean Air Act were dramatic extensions of any regulation that we had had before. And they made rapid progress against pollution. But I've written in a book that they also, their provisions, created a rift in society that because the laws could not be easily modified or reformed to meet new requirements. So we went from number one environmental country in 1972, and now we're rated 32nd by the Yale Columbia EPI Index, Environmental Performance Index. I'll take three questions that Greg can respond. Second row, one row up, yes. Regarding the great moderation, part of what that was about was price stability. And I want to ask if that plays into the story, because you talk about derivatives, you talk about lender of last resort. Is price stability just something that happened along with those things? Or was that stability a source of the demand for more financial innovation? John Graham. And then I'll do the side of the room after Greg responds. I'm just wondering, I was very excited by the Forest Service metaphor. And Mr. Pinchan's words that you quoted expressed a vanity of human power over the environment, which the Forest Service now repudiates, right? And they don't say we control fires 100%. We suppress them. Similar examples would be we wanted to exterminate the wolf in the mountain lion. We wanted to let the grizzly bears eat from the garbage pits in Yellowstone. And now that vanity in natural resource management no longer exists. They're much more or less a fair, I would say, except when it comes to climate. And I just wonder if you could extend that metaphor for us with respect to general regulation and financial regulation. Thank you. Greg, responses to any and all? Sure, I'll respond to the last question first. I have a whole chapter that deals with the fact that people, even when they know that their actions might actually be buying stability for the present, but storing up trouble for the future, they don't really know what to do. So the Forest Service still suppresses more fires than they allow fires to burn, because often those fires take place near human habitation, and it's not really a choice. So in some sense, by allowing people to build their homes in towns right next to the wildland interface, we've put the Forest Service in an untenable position. Something similar I think happens in the financial sector where you allow the complexity of the institutions to grow that you don't really feel like you have much of a choice. And I talk about, like, Jay Powell, actually, who's the governor of the Fed these days, gave me a very, I thought, really interesting anecdote about how he was in that position of deciding whether to let Bank of New England's uninsured depositors fail in 1991. And he was in Treasury, and they wanted to teach a lesson. They wanted to say, this is moral hazard. We can't let it happen. And the Fed said to them, if you let those uninsured depositors fail, you'll have runs on every bank in the United States and Europe on Monday morning. So they bailed them out. So I'm a journalist first, so I talk to people about what it's like, and I don't want to presume that sitting in an ivory tower and saying, this is what you should do makes it any easier when you actually come to it. Your question on price stability is an excellent one. I talked about that in the book. For those of the 70s and the 80s, inflation, the high and variable rate of inflation was enemy number one. And those who lived through that period just think it was like it caused, it didn't just cause bigger and worse business cycles and recessions, but it also actually contributed to the financial problems. So for example, savings and loans had made all these low interest rate loans, but as inflation went up, so did money market rates, and these institutions lost all their deposits, which led to serious liquidity and insolvency problems. So the belief at the Fed, and among many economists, was once that you defeated inflation, you defeated the single biggest source of economic instability. What we discovered though is that once you did that, it brought down interest rates, and it encouraged people to take bigger risks, and what we call in financial terms, it brought down risk premia that cost asset prices to expand. It's one reason why price earnings ratios on the stock market became so much higher in low inflation periods. The problem was is that if your presumption that the world was more stable place became actually disproven, then the equity price premium would explode and the price would collapse. So the very belief that by defeating inflation you had brought on stability was the source of its own undoing. Are there questions? Yes, also brought us closer to the zero, right there. Bert Ely, a banking consultant. Greg, to what extent in your book do you get into the issue of the distortions caused by tax policy? And I wanna cite two specific examples as they relate to the financial system. Number one, the equity capital is much more expensive than debt capital because of the tax treatment of interest on debt versus the payment of dividends. The other is with regard to home ownership. You have substantial tax deductions particularly available to higher income people both with regard to the interest deduction and the real estate tax deduction which has an inflating effect on house prices. To what extent, again coming back to the question, to what extent does your book address not just in those two areas but elsewhere in the economy the distorting effects of tax policy on very rational decision making by very sophisticated people. Class question. Yes, in the back. Hi, Ash Navabi, I'm a master's student in economics here at Mason. Mr. Ip, do you talk about in your book the effects of regulation on defamation issues and idea issues, for example, blackmail, slander, libel and how these issues might promote more of these things instead of less. For example, how if you have laws against slander, people if something is published anywhere people are more likely to believe it because we have slander laws and it wouldn't be published otherwise. Great response. I've never heard that problem before. So it's not in the book. But I mean, if I sense what you're saying is that I think it's a classic example of the moral hazard problem. Did those signs that the Fed put in the windows of banks in the 1920s encourage people to commit their funds to banks that then went and wasted them. And that probably does take place but it's one reason why in the presence of deposit insurance federal regulation of banks also became much tighter in order to prevent, because they understood that because the natural tendency of the depositor to let his guard down needed to be supplanted with federal regulation. I don't talk about tax policy but I was wondering if you, Jared, and the attitude- I'd love to answer that question because it's probably even worse than you said in the sense that the effective tax rate on debt financed investment is negative. Negative five, six percent. Whereas on equity it's double digit, 25, 30 percent. I'm sure, let me put it this way. If you arrived from Mars yesterday and I told you what I just said about the relative tax rates of debt financing and equity financing for investment and I asked you, do you think this situation would generate leverage problems? You would probably say, of course it would and in fact the course it has. So you're absolutely right. And I think the same thing is true about the mortgage interest deduction. Just to sum up, Greg's book, Foolproof, is indeed literally foolproof. I picked it up one evening. Greg gave me an advance copy and I didn't read anything else till I was done reading this and then I went to bed. So highly recommended. And did you sleep soundly or did you work? I was a little worried. I'd like to thank our panelists and also Greg for coming along. Thank all of you for coming in the questions and I know I didn't get to all of you but Greg and the panelists will still be here just a little bit. Thank you all. Thanks a lot.