 Good morning everybody. Thank you. Thank you all for being here as as I think you were. I mean these are as we know these are difficult times and I'm happy to say questions about anything. I think you know I'm originally from Israel. I've left Israel a long time ago with all my family still there and I regularly comment and I've done many talks in Fon Palsi and comment on the situation. If that is something that interests you feel free to talk about it. We're here to talk about finance today and I'm curious how many of you were here last year or wasn't even last year? Was it really this year? Okay so most of you are new. Different people. Okay, I didn't realize that. So you're all in banking. I take it. All finance? Banking? Finance? So I was in my PhDs in finance. I was a finance professor for many years and taught finance. And one of the things when you observe the world of finance you observe it regularly is that people don't like us. They don't like bankers. They don't like finance fields. And this has a long history. A long long time ago they started not liking finances. They don't like bankers. You know one of the most famous, I don't know how much you know Shakespeare in Georgia, but you know Shakespeare has a whole play about a banker. It's called The Merchant of Venice. And the bank of course is a Jew. They have to meet the banker Jew. And he's a really really ugly, horrible person. His name is Shylock and he is the bad guy in the play. And it has all the kind of the standard stuff about greedy bankers wanting to suck the life out of you. Exploit. Take advantage of people. And the whole of Western literature in the West is filled with anti-banking ideas. I don't know if you've ever seen a movie with a banker or the finance person is a good guy. I used to actually ask my students to go find a movie where there's a positive representation of a banker or a financier. And the answer is there is not. Usually, you know, we're cheating, stealing, you know. I know one. Maybe. About Will Smith. But he's broker. He becomes a broker. He starts out homeless and then he walks his way up and he exams. He becomes successful. Yes, I mean you can find a few here and there but it's pretty rare. There's a really good movie. I mean it's got a mixed presentation. It's from the 90s. If you're interested in investment banking, a presentation, a positive perspective, it's called Other People's Money. Other People's Money with Danny DeVito and Gregory Peck. And just, I don't know if you know Danny DeVito? Sure. He's the banker. Gregory Peck, you know, Gregory Peck, tall, handsome. You know, he's like the socially responsible businessman. And that's the contrast. So really throughout history, banking, finance have been viewed negatively. They've been viewed as something exploitative and, you know, greedy and evil and the bad guys. In Dante, in Dante's Inferno, where he tells you where everybody's going to be in hell, where do you think the banker is? The nine ranks of hell, the banker, first of all, is in hell. And he's in a seventh one, really close to the fire. And he's got a bag of money around his neck, a gold, and the gold is weighing him down towards the fire. So he really captures it, right? That's Dante. There's no escaping. You guys have chosen a profession. You are afraid in God's hands. I'm scaring you. But it's true. And indeed, in most countries, I understand George is a little bit better about this. But in most countries the consequence of having this view of bankers as cheating exploiting bad guys is the banking in the United States, at least, is the most regulated business in the country. Every aspect of what we do as bankers is what we do as financiers is what we do as investment professionals. It's regulated and controlled. And why is that? Why does the government feel like it has to regulate? Because there were so many, I would say, bankruptcies, frauds, and debacles taking place throughout the history of U.S. in the financial sector. Yeah, so I would say a little differently. I would say there's a lot of crises and problems that have happened in the economy of the United States. And guess who's always blamed for them? They are the players of this, you know, story. You know, if you set up a game, if you set up a game that is going and you set up the rules and the rules are always going to lead to bankruptcies and failure, then who's used to blame the people who play the game or the people who set the rules? Actually, what happened in, for example, last crisis in 2008, the decision-makers who made the wrong decisions, made the very risky decisions, and that happened, what happened? I've got online, we don't have time for this now, but I've got online, I've got an eight-hour course on the financial crisis, the 2008 financial crisis I did it in 2010 or 11, and I disagree with you. You know, the financial crisis in 2008 was caused by basically two things. It was caused by the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates very, very fast, very fast during the early 2000s, which created a huge amount of liquidity in the market, and then the U.S. government purposefully pushing mortgages, pushing home ownership, pushing people to buy mortgages, and then the rating agencies, which are controlled by the SEC, giving them triple-A ratings so that everybody rushed into products, motivated and incentivized, not by markets because there is no free market, but by government policies. Government policies orient the entire structure, so if you're going to blame anybody for the financial crisis, everybody blamed Wall Street, everybody blamed Bankers, because that's what we do, that's what we do in terms of every single crisis, but in terms of the actual factual evidence of what happened, the blame should be the Federal Reserve, the regulators, and I would say the Clinton and Bush administration that pushed people into home ownership and pushed people into getting mortgages that they probably shouldn't. I remember Alan Greenspan in 2002 said, you know, people shouldn't get fixed mortgages. He said, historically, it's always shown that variable rate mortgages do better over the long run than fixed mortgages. So guess what happened in the early 2000s? Everybody shifted from fixed mortgages for the effects to variable rate mortgages, and what happened to variable rate mortgages when interest rates went up, people defaulted, people couldn't afford it, it's what's happening right now, you know, as interest rates are going up, people can't afford it. Now, I think they learned the lesson and understand a lot of people like the fixed mortgages, but in the mid 2000s, you got a huge number of people who had variable rate mortgages going back on. Now, you could say people are stupid, that's one reason. You could say Alan Greenspan shouldn't have given that advice, but to blame bankers for selling something that there's demand for. So, I think we have a tendency to blame Wall Street and to blame bankers for things. We can go back to the Great Depression, and whether the Great Depression was caused by green on Wall Street, it wasn't. It was caused by government policies. Government policies during the Hoover administration, government policies during the FDR administration, but everything we learn about economic history is almost always driven by this idea that government can never be wrong. That government gets it right, and we, all of us, the participants in the marketplace are the problem. We are the people who cause the crisis. From your point, it was government's mistake or it was determined action? Oh, was it purposeful or mistake? I don't know if I can say this, but politicians are not smart enough to do it on purpose. These are what you would call unintended consequences. They think they're doing good. They think they can control what will happen. They think they have it all right, but they don't. And then things happen that they don't foresee. Now, some of us as economists can say to them, look, this is what's going to happen. And they ignore us, because politically, they want to show that they're doing something. Politics is about perception. It's about politicians convincing the people, the voters, that they're doing something. Whether that's something is good or bad, most voters don't understand, and politicians exploit them. So I don't think it's purposeful. I don't think it's on purpose. They don't want people into recession because they usually lose their political standing when they get into recession. But they should know better. We have enough history to know. So what happens in finance, what's happening in the United States is you get a crisis and it's blamed on banking and finance. So you get regulations. And those regulations create distortions. Moral hazard, like if I give you deposit insurance, do you have deposit insurance in Georgia? Yes. The higher the deposit insurance, the more moral hazard we have. The more incentive it is for bankers to take risk. Because they're not suffering the consequences of going down because deposit insurance is covered. As depositors, you're depositors, don't care about how risky you are. Because they're protected because the government is there. So bankers take on more risk. So there's another crisis. And when the crisis happens, they blame the regulations. They blame deposit insurance, never. Once you have another crisis, we get more regulation. And those regulations are going to create the next crisis. And that crisis is going to be blamed on the markets, on bankers. And then you get more regulations. And what you get is a whole pyramid of regulations. You know, I don't know if you follow what happened in the United States in banking in March and May of this year. Where there was a big run on banks and some of the banks in the U.S. were bankrupt. Silicon Valley Bank was a famous example. A few banks were bankrupt. And bank stocks fell off a cliff. We really went down. Most of that is a consequence of Dodd-Frank. Dodd-Frank is the regulations that were passed after the 2007-2008. But nobody identified that. Instead, what they want to do now is pass a whole new set of regulations to control the latest crisis. And this... So should we call it like systemic co-ops, or is it just a few of the banks? Which is, I mean, the rule thing taking place in... It was not systemic. But partially it was not systemic. Because the government stepped in and helped bail a lot of banks out by giving them... The bank, the government was through the Fed, was lending the money at very good terms. This is an important point. You say that without the bailout, these banks or other banks also would collapse, right? I don't think they would have collapsed, but they would have been in trouble, much more trouble, yes. But again, that's because of the system that is in place based on all the previous regulations that have led to a very, very unstable banking system in the United States. Very unstable. But it is interesting, without the Dodd-Frank Act, what would happen? Without the Dodd-Frank Act, the crisis wouldn't have happened. It would have never happened. This crisis is a consequence of the way capital has been structured under Dodd-Frank. You could argue, again, you know, we could get into all the complexities, but you could argue the financial crisis wouldn't have happened without Basel II. Because one of the things that Basel II did is it told banks in Europe and in the United States, if you have mortgage-backed securities, that's free capital. That's risk less capital. So the regulators tell you, this category is risk less. So what are you going to do? You're going to say, no, no, no, we don't agree with you. We're going to hold some capital, but no, competitive pressure could drive you to say, if the government says this is risk less, I'm going to treat it as risk less. So a lot of German banks, a lot of European banks bought American mortgage-backed securities under the notion that Basel II said it was risk less. A market would have never allowed for that, but you don't have a market yet. Regulators are dictating how and what you do. A regulator telling you whether something's risky or not, not leaving it up to your judgment, you're the experts. They are telling you how you should treat it. To think of a Georgian market, I remember times when banks, maybe 10 years ago or 15 years ago, first introduced credit cards that had huge interest rates and huge hidden fees. I was also in Korea. And then at some point, and there were lots of defaults, small-scale mass customers, and then there was regulation to stop this kind of lending which was not responsive. Such things also happened. How would you solve that problem without regulation? What would be the mechanism by which, in a marketplace, that kind of problem would be solved? How many banks do you have in Georgia? Fifteen. So is there a way in which you could solve this problem of some banks issuing credit cards that have very high fees and very high interest rates? What would happen? Without regulation. Without regulation? How would this go away? Without regulation? They would generate huge profit and a lot of... What happens in an industry? What happens in an industry when huge profits are generated? Huge profit. Yeah. What does that attract? New interest? Yeah, new interest. But the nation bank of Georgia, they banned. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, we have to agree that there's no marketplace here, right? You can't have new interest unless the government approves, the bank of Georgia approves new interest. So you have a constraint on how many people can enter the field because what happens when these high profits, new interest come in? How do they capture market share by offering a little bit of a better product? What would it mean better product here? Maybe lower interest rates, less hidden fees. So what drives bad behavior like that out of a market is, starts with a C, competition. Competition drives that out. But if you limit the competition and you create an essence, maybe it's not a monopoly, but a few big players who dominate and then are protected by the government, by the bank of Georgia, they're protected. That's when you get abuse. But that abuse doesn't happen in a marketplace, right? It's true. It's probably the case when the first phones came out, when the first phones came out, some of the cellular companies were abusing. They're charging a lot of money, huge profit margins in the first cell phone companies. And then what happened? Competition entered the market. And as competition entered the market, what happened to the prices? They came down. Today, I'm using the internet here in Georgia on an American plan, I think it cost me $10 a day for high speed internet, unlimited downloads. I remember when I used to have to watch how many megabyte I was downloading, because the prices were like that. But how did they come down because of regulation, because the government stepped in and said, I don't know, cell phone companies, for cell phones? No, because competitors came in and said, wait a minute, this competition will develop the technology to make it easy and easy and cheaper and cheaper. The same would have happened in Georgia banking if the government had not stepped in. And maybe because the government has stepped in and you've got regulation, not all credit cards are the same because they all have to abide by the regulation. And maybe you've got less competition in this industry than you would have had otherwise. And maybe the products that you offer are not as good as if we just allow the competition. And look, competition is messy. Sometimes you start with high profits and some people are using and over time, but you have to have the patience to let the market work, to let competition work, to drive the product to become better. And we look and we see industries in which this happens. And technology, my laptop is more powerful today than a supercomputer, which filled a whole room was 30, 40 years ago. And it's much, much cheaper. That used to cost millions of millions of dollars. I can buy a thousand bucks on my computer today. Did that happen because of government regulations taking out the... No, it happened because of competition. Why is banking different? There's nothing about what you do in banking that is different than any other industry where competition works to drive our bad behavior and to drive products to be better and better and better. Then why do regulators regulate banking necessarily? Why do they... Why do they regulate? Let me ask you, what is it that you do? What is your product? What is the product that banks engage in? What's the fundamental... Technology is computers, it's bits, it's chips. What is the product that banks are involved in? What are you dealing with? What are you selling? What is the fundamental product of banking? Money. Money. Money. Money believes that there's money. And it is money. What is the role of money? What is money? What is money? Possibility to find ourselves. Yeah, it's a linear exchange. It provides us with the ability to exchange things, right? We get paid because we're exchanging our labor for money. And then we take that money and we can exchange it for other goods. It's a way for us to trade. It's the way in which our entire economy functions. It functions using money. Today we use credit cards, we use phones, but it's all money in the end. And that money is the thing that makes an economy function. Is that important to politicians or not? Yeah, very important. They want it. They want to be able to control it. Because if politics is primarily about control, if politics is primarily about power, then that control and that power is meaningless if you don't have control over money. You know, the first money in history came about through markets. It came about through, you know, I'm exchanging my cow for your chickens and we're doing barter, right, before money. And then somebody comes up with the idea, maybe we take this rare shiny thing and we use that as a medium of exchange so that it's to make our trade much more efficient. And the kings, and you can see our theological evidence of this, the kings look at us and they say, ooh, there's this new thing and everybody's using it. Huh, maybe, you know, I want some of this. I want in on the game, if you will. And what happens? Suddenly the state starts making all the money and the coins, instead of just being used in a kind of a market, they all start having the picture of the king on them, right? Because the state, the government, starts becoming the monopoly on money. And in modern times, like in the 19th century in America, there was no Federal Reserve, there was no central bank. Where did money come from without Federal Reserve, without central bank? Where did the money come from? How did people use money if there's no central bank and no central bank, zero? No government. The government didn't issue money. There's no issuance of money in the US by the government. How did, how did, how was their money? There were dollars, there were dollar bills, but they weren't issued by the government. Who issued the dollar bills? The banks. The banks. So what happened is people would go mine for gold, they would find the gold, they would have, you know, little bags of gold, right? They would come to the bank and they would give you the gold and you would put it in the vault for them and in exchange you would give them dollars. The banks actually issued the money and gold was the money and the paper represented a claim against the gold that was in the vault. And we all traded, no central bank, zero. And when there was a financial crisis in 1970 in the United States there was a famous financial crisis. There was no central bank to bail anybody out. No, the government didn't have any money. It couldn't print money. So it was bankers, J.P. Morgan, a famous banker who bailed people out who helped settle disputes and, you know, there was a crash and there was a good conflict. And then the politicians stepped back and they said, huh, why does J.P. Morgan have so much power? And we don't. And in 1913 they got together and established the central bank. And the first thing the central bank did is it took over time the gold from all the private banks' vaults and centralized it and started issuing its own currency and slowly regulated and controlled and reduced the amount of freedom banks had and increased the amount of control and power and centralization that the central bank had. And now we can't even imagine a world in which private organizations actually create money. We think it has to come from government. Well, it's pretty cool for the government because now we're completely dependent on them. But it doesn't have to be that way. Many countries didn't have central banks. Canada didn't have a central bank until the 1940s. It was the 40s. And they did fine. No financial crises. In all of Canada's history it's never had a financial crisis even in periods where there was no central bank. So the reason they regulate it, the reason they control it is because banking is so crucial to the economy. It has a central piece of the economy that to leave it free means politicians have less control of the economy and they don't like that. They want that control. And it's interesting to me because, you know, you guys may be too young to have lived during the... Well, no, you're not. Some of you are not. To have lived through the Soviet Union, right? But we know that in communism, central planning, like planning the production of food in Georgia, the production of wine, didn't go so well. Central planning generally doesn't result in good outcomes, right? If you centrally plant food, what happens? Quantity is big, but quality... So quantity might be big, so quality is very low, and then there's no incentive to produce the food, so then you get quantity very low and you get long lines. And it doesn't matter how much I'm willing to pay, there's just not enough bread. So you get either surplus or shortage, but you never get supply and demand matching because there's no mechanism. Prices, free markets are the way in which we match supply and demand. So we've learned, because of our experience with communism, that central planning of food is not good. It doesn't work. We know that, you know, even today, like in the West, we don't centrally plan building automobiles for the most part, cars. Maybe now we're starting with electric cars where the government is trying to centrally plan, but we don't, because we know that the markets are very good matching supply and demand. But what's the one product that we centrally plan? The one thing that every Western country, every so-called capitalist country in the world, still centrally plans? What is that? Money? Interest rates. Who sets interest rates? Marketplace? Supply and demand? Indonesia. No, the central bank sets interest rates. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Georgian Central Bank, they set interest rates. And yeah, what's interesting about interest rates is it's the most important price in the entire economy. It's more important than bread. It's more important than automobiles because every other price in the economy is dependent on interest rates, right? If you think about the value of an asset, it's the present value of future cash flows. But how do we make a present value by using interest? So every value of every asset in the economy is dependent on this price that is set by a central planner. I need your help for argument. When people say that banks have high interest rates and it's our fault, just help me out to better understand yes, the regulator sets the interest rate, but how this mechanism, like some more arguments, is it really that the regulator sets the interest rate because of the country, because of the... Yeah, I mean, there's no question that the base interest rate is set by the central bank. So for a long time, during the last 15 years, for much of that time, the central banks have set interest rates very, very low. I would argue, you know, zero in Europe, some cases negative, which is, if you've taken across the finance, which I assume everybody has, that's crazy. There's no such thing as negative interest rates in a marketplace. And yet the central bank can force that. So then that is the base rate. That is the rate at which banks are borrowing and lending from one another. That's the rate at which you're borrowing and lending from the central bank. So everything is... All other interest rates are going to be drawn down to that base rate. And in terms of real rates of return, what have real rates of return been over the last 15 years, excluding the last two, three years? What have they been? They've been negative. Which is, again, not a market phenomenon. You can't have that in a market. There's no such thing. I'm never going to give you money and pay you to take it. That just doesn't happen in an marketplace. It can only happen in a controlled, regulated environment where force is being used, where somehow there's coercion. Because nobody would have accepted. Why would I lend you money and pay you to take it? So now, how do banks determine interest rates above that base rate? The base rate that the central bank... Now, in the last two years interest rates have been going up because central banks have been raising interest rates. Why have they raised interest rates? What are they trying to fight by raising interest rates? Inflation. So the theory is, and whether this theory is true or not, is a real question. Is all that period of time of negative real rates and governments printing a lot of money, particularly during COVID, ultimately resulted in what? If you hand people money, what's going to happen to prices? If we haven't fixed the amount of goods, but more money, what happens to prices? Because more money chase the same number of goods the prices go up. And the idea is, if we raise interest rates, we force people to spend less, people have less money to spend, so if demand for goods goes down, and if demand for goods goes down what happens to prices, they will go down. That's the theory. Whether it works or not, we'll see. We don't yet have the evidence. So central banks are raising interest rates, and what are banks doing? Banks then say, okay, I'm coming to you for a loan, and you're looking at me and saying, okay, I'm not going to charge the rate that the central bank charges me because I need to make a profit. I need to charge a little bit above that. And then, you know, Iran looks a little shady. What's the probability that he's going to pay me back? I.e. what is the risk of the loan? And then I'm going to take a risk theme at the top of that. And that's my interest rate. And if you charge too much, if you charge a lot, if, you know, we talk and you say, oh, Iran's really, really risky. I'm going to charge you a huge rebate. And then I go to another bank and they say, okay, so I'm going to charge you my loan. Competition again. Competition is going to drive interest rates to some kind of equilibrium. So banks don't determine the interest rate. Competition does in the marketplace. And it's all based on a floor which is determined by the central bank. You don't get to make up interest rates whatever you feel like. You start with that floor, and then you build on top of that a profit margin and a risk free. So people accusing you of charging too high interest rates will go to another bank if that's true. But really, go talk to your central bank. And it's not always politicians because in some countries we have a separation of the central bank from politics. European Union, for example, is one central bank, but lots of states. But it's still true that it's not the banks, the private banks that determine interest rates. It's the government in one way, one form or another. One kind of agency of government or another. So... And again, the more competition you allow the more open lists to start new banks, the more ability to start new banks and to compete the lower generalized interest rates will be because you'll have more competition. All I can get around supply and demand. And if interest rates go too low what will happen if interest rates go too low from a bank's perspective? If competition drives interest rates too low? No profits? Some banks go out of business? The survivors? Again, interest rates will go up to reflect a profit. Every business has to have a profit otherwise can't pay salaries, can't raise capital, can't do anything. You have to make some money, but you're not going to make a huge amount of money. Actually, that's what takes place globally, everywhere. Even in Georgia, the number of the banks are decreasing. In the US, I think, as far as I remember statistics, the number of the banks are decreasing. Okay? But the assets, of course, of the banks are much bigger. Yeah, so the United States is unique. But look, the number of banks is decreasing. Why is the number of banks decreasing? Because powerful banks have a huge incentive to make sure that there are barriers of entry so they don't have competition. But who sets up the barriers to entry? The central bank and the regulators. You can't set barriers to entry other than competition. So yes, the number of new banks to be created is small. As you said previously, the competition drives. I mean, they have no more than profitable. Yeah. There's some optimal number of banks that should exist in any given economy based on the market. But my point is we don't have a market. We don't know what the optimal number of banks is. Because there are barriers to entry that regulators have set up that control on the banks. So let's say five banks go bankrupt. But let's say you have an idea, an idea for a new bank. And you're going to change the industry. You're going to revolutionize it. You've got a new technology or something. Very difficult to get started. Much more difficult than it is to get started in any other industry. Because with banks you have to convince the regulators. You have to convince the central bankers. You have to convince the politicians in order to enter the space. So in that sense, you don't get real competition. You don't get real innovation. You'll be like under real innovation. Now the United States is unique. Small, they're going to be local. Even city bank, big bank, right? Global bank in the 1970s and 80s. Just in New York. The net branches in California. The net branches in Texas. It was just in New York. By control, by regulation. So, again, the whole industry, the whole industry is dominated by government control. You do not live in a free market. It's not like technology, not like other things. The justification for it is it's too important to leave to the market. Money is too important to leave to the market. My view is the other way around. Money is too important to leave to government. To leave to central planners. Are much worse than markets at coming up with optimal solutions, if you will. So it's the reverse. The more important the industry is, the more we should leave it to the marketplace. Because we talk a lot about systemic risk in banking. Where does systemic risk come from? From the economy with some more systemic problems. Yeah, and what systemic means that it affects everybody. What affects everybody? What kind of things affect everybody? Inflation, maybe who causes inflation? Monetary policy. Monetary policy, which is dictated by who? By central banks and governments. So interest rates can be systemic risk. It's going to make their life better. Otherwise, why would they take a loan? Why would they take a loan? You are making the world better for people, not worse for people. And yes, some people take out loans that they shouldn't. Some people are irrational. Some people buy iPhones when they can't afford them. Some people buy go gambling. Some people spend money on all kinds of stupid things. But that's not your fault. You're providing a service. You're providing value for value. And the fact that the value is measured in terms of dollars or in terms of money doesn't make it any different than somebody producing an actual product. Indeed, Apple couldn't build an iPhone. Without whom? Without banks. Without bankers. Without financiers. Who built this? Finance built this. I mean, who laid the fiber optics in the ground in the United States to connect the entire country so we would have internet? Have you heard of Michael Milken? Michael Milken? Michael Milken was a banker in the 1980s in the United States for a company called Drexel Burnham. And Milken invented the idea of junk bombs. High-yield bombs. And using high-yield bombs to raise capital. And what did they use that capital in the early 1980s for? They built fiber optics abstract. It's very difficult to understand how what you do makes this. But what you do does make this. And you should understand what you do makes this. Without bankers, there is no iPhone. Without bankers, none of the modern world exists. None of what we have today exists without bankers and without financiers. And most people don't understand that because they just have to pay their mortgage. They don't appreciate even that. And partially because you are constantly defensive. You don't go out there and say no. You should be happy you got a mortgage. Because getting a mortgage allows you to buy a home that you can't right now afford if you pay cash. You should be happy you get a credit card. All of this allows for what we call an economics consumption smoothing. Right? We can consume more today than we can afford to right now because we know our income is going to continue into the future. And you bankers allow us to take money from the future bring it to the present so we can buy a nice car we can buy a home and pay for it later. I mean that's a massive innovation. That's a real achievement. And it makes possible again you can give Steve Jobs a little bit of money with the idea that you'll make these. And by the way how many investments a venture capitalist makes how many iPhones do we get? Like how many apples of any 10 investments how many apples do you get? How many successful companies do you get? 10 investments that a venture capitalist makes how many great investments are there? One. How many okay investments do you get? Four. And how many bankruptcies do you get? Five. So I tell you 50% of everything you invest in is going to fail. It's going to go to zero. And yet you're incredibly successful. Why? Because the one is such a huge success. And the one changes the world. And if I only focus on the bankruptcies you look like a loser. He looks very bad. Our whole perception of finance our whole perception of this world is distorted. Because it's an abstraction. It's sort of because it's money and people get very emotional when it comes to money. But it's important that you understand what you do. You make the world turn. You make the world work. None of the market can function without well functioning finance well functioning banks well functioning finances in every single level. You're good. Alright. I've gone for two logs. So any questions you guys have on anything? Don't be shy. No problem. I just didn't know where you were. It was like I could hear a voice. Somebody there. I thought that I found a good place to not interrupt you but sorry. One question. Yes. From your point of view does the U.S. later reach the final level with rising base rate? They're finishing rates. Does the rush between U.S. and European central banks just in Washington increasing neutral rates? Yes. In Europe which is about 8% now average but in Norway it's 2% and in Bulgaria it's 20%. We were this the national governments in the European Union somehow to get rid of the ECB regulations and then make more independent policies. Yeah. So two questions really. One is is the European central bank and the Federal Reserve they finished raising rates given inflation and then given the differences in inflation across Europe will we see countries abandon the euro basically and try to adopt local policies local currencies and local central banks? So is it the end of the rate raising cycle? The reality is I don't know.