Hello and thank you for rejoining for our second session of this afternoon. We know that when debt levels are too high, it stifles investment and may sow the seeds for future crises. Yet corporations, many short on cash during lockdowns, had little choice but to load up on debt during the pandemic. Economies are now reopening and some of the crisis support put in place by governments is slowly being removed. As we return to something approaching normal, how worried should we be about the macroeconomic implications of a debt overhang? Professor Moritz Schulerich of the University of Bonn has assessed this question and is now going to tell us what he found out. I'll hand over now to the session chair, ECB Executive Board Member Fabio Panetta. Mr Panetta, over to you. Thank you Claire and good afternoon to everybody. It is a pleasure to chair this session and introduce the paper by Professor Moritz Schulerich from the University of Bonn. The paper brings together two topics that are widely debated in the current environment corporate indebtedness and macroeconomic stabilization. I'm sure that Moritz will explain very clearly the findings of the paper which answers the question of whether corporate indebtedness creates key risks for a quick economic rebound. But let me spoiler this for you. The answer of the paper is no. Corporate indebtedness is unlikely to weigh heavily on the recovery. This doesn't mean, however, that corporate indebtedness does not matter for policy making during the recovery. I will take a couple of minutes to give you an example of why it does matter. In the initial phase of the pandemic, the choices facing policymakers were relatively narrow. Both monetary and fiscal policy had to support the economy on a massive scale. This support has sheltered firms from the liquidity crisis, but at the same time it has significantly increased leverage. In 2020, the corporate debt to GDP ratio rose by eight percentage points. Such headline increase in turn has exacerbated a key feature of the euro area economy, one that policymakers will have to take into account in the recovery phase. I'm referring to heterogeneity. Firms financial conditions have become more heterogeneous across countries, as the paper shows very clearly. Heterogeneity has risen also within countries, across firms and sectors of activity. Leverage has increased especially for those firms that had weak financial conditions already before the crisis. Another source of heterogeneity is the financial instrument used by corporates. During the crisis, most firms turned to their banks to cover their liquidity needs, but an increasing number of companies started issuing bonds on public markets. Taking into account these heterogeneities is crucial for center banks. We know that firms with different leverage and financial structures respond differently to monetary policy impulses. Heterogeneity also matters for other policymakers. I'm thinking, for instance, about the need to reform insolvency regimes in a post-COVID world in order to identify and resolve non-viable debt while facilitating the restructuring of viable debt. This distinction between viable and non-viable debt is crucial when financial conditions are highly heterogeneous. So, although the conclusions of the paper are relatively benign, the subject of the paper is extremely relevant for policy reasons. But let me stop here and hand over to Moritz, who will have 20 minutes for his presentation. Thank you very much, Fabio, despite the spoiler. It's a great honor and pleasure to speak here to you today. Thank you for the organizers, for the opportunity to present my work. I want to talk about corporate debt, its role in driving macroeconomic fluctuations and the implications for policy, as you said. I will take a macro perspective and a long-run perspective. I want to turn back, if you will, in order to look ahead. And that's very much the idea of this paper, namely to aggregate our knowledge about corporate debt dynamics over the business cycle. Let me start with what you also mentioned at the beginning at the introduction, Fabio, is the pandemic hit economies after a decade-long corporate debt boom and debt to GDP has risen very sharply in the recession as well. The questions I want to address today, what does this mean for the economic outlook? Especially, will corporate debt overhang restrain investment? Will roaming zombie firms, we heard about them from Victoria, will they slow down the recovery? And as you mentioned, there is a sense of history repeating in the air. Household debt overhang slowed down spending post-2008 and the experience of Japan in the 1990s where corporate debt overhang and zombification contributed to a very slow and drawn out recovery from the crisis. We're well aware of that as well. So what I'm going to do in this paper is I want to study corporate debt and output dynamics across the near-universe of modern business cycles. So it is a big picture view based on novel long-run data for corporate debt in 18 advanced economies since 1870. The data cover loans, bonds and lending for non-bank intermediaries to the entire corporate sector. And for further details, I recommend you have a look at the paper with Oscar Martin and Alan that this work is also based on and will have this data available at the JST database macrohistory.net. So with this introduction, let's take a look at the bigger picture. Let's look at take a bird's eye view of corporate debt over GDP ratios in the long term. And they are marked by financial deepening in the early industrialization, a collapse in the Great Depression and World War II and a slow and steady increase ascent after World War II. And you also see on the right-hand side quite an acceleration in the recent period and a jump about 10% points, 15% points in the last couple of years alone. We can also see is there is quite some cyclical variation in corporate debt, although this is a median across these countries, and it is that cyclical variation in the data that I want the corporate credit booms the surges, if you will, that I want to study explicitly in this paper. Another way to look at the data is to divide corporate debt to GDP changes in five-year periods and plot their distribution. And this is what I do here in this chart, which shows the distribution of all five-year changes in corporate debt over GDP in these 18 economies. And you also see vertical lines that mark the position or the distributional position of a number of important economies, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US, and where the last five-year corporate credit boom fits into this distribution. As Fabius said, I think there are two main messages here from this chart. One is that for some countries, especially for the US and France, indeed the last five years, have been quite a large credit boom, I've seen that is on the right of the distribution. On the other hand, and that's the advantage of these long-run data that we can use, it's clearly not out of proportion. We have quite a few other observations if you look at the density of the distribution here. Other countries, if you look at Germany, if you look at Italy, if you look at Spain, for those countries the past five years, even included the COVID-related increase in corporate debt, have not witnessed particularly large increases in corporate debt over GDP. The idea of large heterogeneity is also confirmed. We zoom in on the past decade, on the decade since the global financial crisis, for seven economies here. You see there's three economies that we will talk in greater detail, I guess, in the following and also after this conference, which are the US, France, and China, where the corporate debt increase in the past decade has been particularly pronounced. There's a group of European economies plus Japan and including the UK here that basically have corporate debt to GDP levels at the very same level as they were at the end of the global financial crisis. In the next step, I want to look at corporate debt dynamics over the business cycle. I called it a big data approach because we have data for almost all business cycles in these 18 advanced economies. We can say something about how corporate debt shapes business cycle dynamics. The first two charts give you the main idea of the paper, namely on the left-hand side, we show how corporate debt build-ups in over five-year periods are related or correlated with real GDP outcomes in the following three-year period. Another way of putting this is we ask the question whether corporate debt changes, blacked corporate debt surges and booms predict future GDP outcomes. On the left-hand side, you can see this for, as I mentioned, the near-universe of business cycles and advanced economies. There is basically no correlation in the data. Corporate debt does not predict GDP outcomes. If you look at the right-hand side chart, however, where we repeat the same exercise with household debt, you see a clear negative correlation, which meshes nicely with recent work by Artif Mian and Amir Sufi and Emil Verna, who also point to the predictive power of household debt booms for negative GDP outcomes ahead. In the following, I will look at this core results and become a little bit more formal. We're going to estimate local projections that show us how, that gives an idea how dynamically corporate debt build-ups shape the recession severity and the recovery speed across this large picture, large set of business cycles in the modern era. We're starting with a very simple chart that shows you how a normal business cycle looks from a long-term historical perspective. We start in year zero at the peak of the cycle. In year one of the recession, we lose one or two percent of real GDP. By year two and three, we're back to the previous peak level of output, and then we continue to grow along. In the following chart, I will show you the estimates of how a large household debt boom in the preceding expansion period shapes or alters effects this average path of economies going through a business cycle. It looks like this, the red line here with a relatively tightly estimated 95 percent confidence intervals shows you how two standard deviation household credit to GDP increase in the previous business cycle, in the previous expansion phase, slows down, first of all, increases the severity of the recession, and then slows down the recovery so that between the post-household credit boom GDP path and the normal GDP path, quite a large gap opens up after four and five years. We're talking easily here about four or five percent of GDP. An experience that I think many of you in the room have also noticed after the global financial crisis where sort of persistently our forecasts for the recovery speed were too optimistic. So now in the next step, I'm going to look at the same chart, but not look at household credit booms in the preceding expansion, but at the effect that business or corporate credit surges have on the recession path. And the picture looks like this. The blue line is the two standard deviation increase in the corporate debt to GDP ratio in the preceding five-year period. And essentially the path is the average path of the economy going through, of economies going through the business cycle is hardly affected. The blue line is virtually on top of the black dash line. So there's a large difference here between household and business credit. This key result is going to be conditional is that business, corporate credit booms do not shape business cycle dynamics and that corporate debt booms do not typically leave large traces on output dynamics is going to be conditional, however, on three main caveats. And I'm going to go through these three caveats now one at a time. The first caveat is that the sectoral composition of the corporate debt boom matters. We owe this insight to recent research by Karsten Müller and Emil Verner, who showed that tradeable sector corporate debt booms do leave traces, do predict bad really economic outcomes. This is reproducing the charts from their work here for a large sample of 116 emerging and advanced economies. So it's a slightly different sample and this is really taken from their work. But you see the difference between the outcomes of the aftermath of tradeable, non-tradeable corporate debt booms and tradeable corporate debt booms. The idea being that the non-tradeable debt booms resemble very much the household debt booms. They're typically related to real estate boom and bust cycles, whereas tradeable sector booms enhance productive capacity and have positive growth outcomes down the road. With this recent research in mind, we can look at the composition of the corporate debt boom, the sectoral composition of the corporate debt boom in the past decade. And my reading of these two charts on the left hand side, again the non-tradeable sectors, this is indexed to 2015 is 100. So you can see the economies coming in and going out of the 2015 level of non-tradeable and tradeable corporate debt to GDP. My reading of these two charts is that the boom in the past decade was not particularly tilted towards non-tradeable sectors. We have not seen a classical real estate credit fuel boom bust cycle, also not in the two economies that continuously stand out here as having had particularly pronounced corporate debt dynamics, namely the US and France. Even in these two economies, the dominant part of the debt increase happened in tradeable sectors and can be expected to have more benign economic outcomes. They also happen, this is a dimension I talk about in the paper, the non-tradeable debt booms also happen to be less concentrated in asset-based lending and more concentrated in asset-based lending. So the feedback mechanism between declining and asset prices and declines in net wealth are much more pronounced whereas tradeable sector lending tends to be cash flow-based and hence not prone to these dynamics. The second caveat is that, and we heard this from Victoria earlier, is that debt reorganization frictions matter. What this graph here suggests is that business credit booms become painful or have leave traces on the business cycle and have this negative aftermath if and when they occur in economies where debt reorganization insolvency and bankruptcy frictions are high. So when it's costly and inefficient and takes a long time to resolve corporate over indebtedness and insolvencies, the real economic effects of corporate debt booms show up. You see this here in this lower line, the purple line, where we trace the effects of the aftermath of business credit to GDP to incentivization increases in high-friction insolvency regimes. Again, in the low-friction corporate debt booms basically blow over in these high-friction regimes, output costs reappear. So now what we can do is we can use these coefficient estimates coming from the long-run sample and apply them to the current context. We can say we can trace how relative to the baseline trajectory going forward from 2021 to 2024, the combination of corporate credit boom and bankruptcy frictions, which by the way are taken from this junk of hard McLeish and Schleifer paper and then updated in recent years, how these frictions combined with a corporate credit boom can be expected to affect the economic outlook going forward. And the result for looking at Germany, U.S. and Italy is there's very little we have to be worried about. In the case of Italy, the coefficient is even positive, which has to do with the fact that corporate debt in Italy was actually reduced in the U.S. and Germany. There's very little deviation. The one country to watch possibly is France. These indicators are imperfect and they measure institutional quality only with a very large noisy background. But according to these indicators, France would be a country where the GDP outlook could be a little bit negatively affected. We come to my last caveat for this overall benign view of the aftermath of corporate debt booms and corporate debt surges. It is banking supervision and the zombie problem. I'm showing here data from a recent paper by Ryan Banerjee and Boris Hoffmann from the BIS who defined zombie companies, these are publicly listed companies, zombie firms as companies who have insufficient earnings to cover the interest rate expenses and have a low stock market valuation. The point here is to show that the evidence is actually quite mixed. There are some countries, if you look at the UK and the U.S., where zombie shares seem to have increased quite substantially in recent years. If you look closer, the increase happens to be in the mining and energy sectors, but then there are a few countries as well where zombie shares in Germany, for example, trend downwards or don't do much. So the third caveat will be what is, and the zombie phenomenon obviously is very closely linked to evergreening of loans by banks and incentives for banks, as well as weak insolvency regimes, as we heard in the first paper, to avoid loss realization and reorganize the balance sheets. So what we can do is we can also ask, is there evidence in the long run data that in regimes where banking supervision is weak, the aftermath of corporate credit booms becomes more costly. And once more, if you look at the left-hand side, the purple line, there is some evidence. It's not statistically highly significant. Some evidence that after a business corporate credit boom, in a poor supervision environment, the GDP outcomes are far worse than average. And there's also some evidence that this goes hand in hand with an increase in the zombie share as measured by Bernadier and Hoffman in their paper, potentially suggesting that there is a link from the emergence of zombies, the inefficient allocation of capital and productivity, lacking productivity growth to the real macro outcomes that are plotted on the left-hand side. So let me sum up and use my last two and a half minutes to talk a little bit about the implications of what I've just shown you as I see them. First of all, the long run view summary is indeed that the aftermath of sharp increases in corporate credit is typically benign. Since this is a borderline Panglossian view, let me also come back to the three caveats, but overall concluded, none of these three caveats currently raises big red flags. First, in advanced economies, the sectoral composition of the post-global financial crisis corporate credit was not tilted towards non-tradable credit. We have not seen the boom, bust, real estate dynamics that we've seen, for example, in Japan. Again, we've also talked about the caveat that debt reorganization frictions might lead to larger output costs than the average path that I showed you. And it's true, and we've heard this earlier, that weaknesses in debt reorganization regimes persist, and Europe has some way to do that, to go there, to reach a truly federal regime. But an important point is that the countries that don't score well on this indicator that are often named as countries that have somewhat sluggish, inefficient, and slow debt reorganization and solvency liquidation regimes are not the ones that boomed in the past decade. So Italy, Spain come to mind where corporate debt was actually decreasing. The main worry that I continue to have is bank supervision. It's definitely much improved, and we're not in the 1990s Japan scenario. But zombie lending is undead in Europe, as recent papers have shown, and I think that's a part to keep in mind. And of these three caveats, the one that, in my view, would be the one to worry most about loss realization and balance sheet strength are very important. We've learned this from the sluggish cleanup after the GFC. What are the implications of this? Well, the fears of a post-pandemic headwind to growth caused by corporate data wing are likely unfounded. Efficient reorganization liquidations framework are crucial. I can just underline what we heard earlier. In terms of corporate zombies, the evidence is mixed, but supervision and loss realization is crucial. And the last point is that is important to me that this debate about monetary policy in zombies is not only about zombies. A very nice recent research has shown that aggregate demand conditions are paramount for the success of new firms, of startups and firm formation. So to the degree that monetary policy creates the conditions for stable and strong aggregate demand, it effectively helps to create the environment in which new businesses can thrive. And that's very much the opposite of the zombie fears that are often raised. Thank you very much. I close here. Thank you, Moritz, for this very clear presentation. I'm sure that your findings will spur an interesting debate. To kickstart this debate, we will have a 10-minute discussion by Egon Zakraszek from the Bank for International Sediments. While Egon prepares his presentation, let me remind participants that wish to ask questions at the end of Egon's presentation, they should get ready to raise their virtual hand. And please do not be shy. With this, Egon, the floor is yours. Sorry about that. So thank you, Fabio, for invitation and to the organizers for inviting me to discuss this very, very interesting paper. As was pointed out, in the years leading to the COVID pandemic, corporate debt levels in advanced economies have risen substantially. And not surprisingly, the nature of the COVID-19 shock has led to a further significant increase in corporate debt. Just to put some context around there, the panel to the left, the red box and whiskers plot shows the distribution of the 2019-20 change in credit to non-financial corporates normalized by the 2019 GDP. You can see for the median advanced economy in this sample, that increase was 10 percentage points, as a lot of heterogeneity with some countries registering very significant increases. By way of comparison, the corresponding median increase in the credit to household sector was a lot more muted, around six percentage point, and it's also coming from lower levels reflecting kind of post-GFC household sector deleveraging. The panel to the right looks at this as slightly different and asks, you know, which countries borrowed most during the pandemic. So it just shows on the X-axis the 2019 credit to GDP ratios for both sectors, against the corresponding change between 2019 and 2020. Okay, and as you can see, there's clearly a positive relationship, so saying that countries that came into the pandemic with high levels of debt on average borrowed significantly more. In particularly, there's countries up in the upper right corner, Belgium, France, and Sweden, that registered very, very sizable increases, pandemic-related increases in corporate debt, and those were coming on the top of already very high levels leading into the pandemic. So what this session is about, and what Morris's paper is really about, is how concerned should you as policymakers be about these recent developments? As we heard, according to Morris, not too much, and why is that? So the real, the answer that comes from 150 years of macro-financial history for 18 advanced economies, and what the, you know, striking finding that emerges from this research is that that unlike household debt booms, corporate debt booms do not influence both peak GDP dynamics. In other words, corporate debt booms are not systematically followed by deeper recessions or weaker and more sluggish recoveries. That's a very striking and a new finding. There are, however, important caveats, and Morris discussed that, so I'm just briefly summarized that. The first one is that composition of corporate debt matters, right? So if you have, if the corporate debt buildup is very concentrated in a non-tradable good sector, that should be worrisome. Those things, those kind of corporate booms look a lot more like household credit booms. The other thing that matters, and we heard it also in Victoria's presentation and in earlier discussion, is that insolvency regimes must be efficient, which makes sense because it's the restructuring of the firm's balance sheets that's going to get you out and allow investment and output to recover after a shock. The other point that's also discussed in the paper is that bank-centric, as opposed to market-based financial systems, also tend to be more vulnerable to corporate credit booms. And this point has been made before by Alan Greenspan, the so-called spare tire argument, and there was some interesting research by my colleagues at the BIS that has looked at those things. And those things are kind of a tight to banking supervision in the sense that a weak supervision allows banks to kind of extend and pretend policies that can lead to zombie lending, which then have deleterious effects on economic dynamics. I think this is a very interesting thought provoking in a timely paper, obviously. And I do want to call out that the construction of this credit series that Moritz and his co-authors have done is a really, really important contribution to the macro history database. It's a great public good. So, Moritz, thank you for doing that. I will have two comments. The first comment is best summarized by a quote by Mark Twain, who said, history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. The question is, how well does current situation rhyme with past history? And then my second comment will be a little broader. This is that I will argue that fluctuations in aggregate credit quantities, those are the kind of things that Moritz and his co-authors are looking at, provide an incomplete account of credit cycles. And I'll be more specific when I get to that slide. So, to give you just kind of my bottom line, what is my view is that I am somewhat less sanguine than Moritz. And I think that the current corporate debt buildup presents a downside, tail risks to the economic outlook. So, how informative can history be about the COVID-19 fallout? I would argue that maybe not too much. And one of the reasons is that the COVID-19 shock is very, very unprecedented, right? It has a very strong supply side dimension, reflecting all the economic and social restrictions imposed by the authorities to deal with this health crisis, public health crisis. On top of that, monetary and fiscal responses were coordinated. They were unprecedented. They're still ongoing. And importantly, the support programs, they were enacted different countries, different across countries. But in general, they were of very broad scope and limited conditionality. So, I think this just kind of really complicates how to think about this buildup and how we're going to get out of that for the near-term business cycle dynamics. And I think, and this point was echoed by Fabio in his introductory remarks, is that I think a much an approach, while history is certainly, I'm a big fan of this kind of approach, but I think for this, looking at with firm level heterogeneity, looking by industry size, financial conditions would be really, really important. Now, what's interesting is, is there has been some very interesting work done, and it's a very important, I think, French case study. And France is particularly interested, because if you remember from my first graph, right, it's a country that exhibited a big pandemic induced buildup in corporate debt, and it entered a crisis with a high level of corporate debt to GDP. So in March 2020, the French parliament established a committee which chaired by Benoit Corre, who's your former colleague, is now colleague of mine at the BIS, and they looked to evaluate and monitor, you know, the financial support available to French companies during the crisis. And what's, I think, really great about these studies is, is that his team combined firm level information on the take-up of credit support scheme, and in match that with their corresponding firm level balance, income and balance sheet data. So very large comprehensive database, 3.5 million French firms, and they're analyzing what happened, you know, to these things during the first two waves of a pandemic. There are a lot of interesting results. I sort of pulled out, I think, three points that I think are very germane to today's discussion. So the first one is, is that the intensity take-up rate, so the amount of support a firm received relative to its turnover was highest for financially weakest firms. So that's not great news, right? So that means is that the pandemic-induced build-up was very much concentrated in a part of the firm distribution that was already financially weak. The second point is, is that the share of the money that was paid out to small businesses was higher than the share of employment, okay? So it means that, you know, the credit schemes were, you know, the amount dispersed went very disproportionately to small businesses, which could very well make sense since they were in industries or sectors that were most hit by the pandemic. But it also brings up a point that was discussed earlier that you have a lot of small businesses. If there is an avalanche, a cascade, a highly correlated set of defaults, this could potentially overwhelm the court systems and, you know, impede an efficient resolution of these things, and that could slow down the recovery. Now, on the good news, is that pre-crisis zombies, so defined in a traditional way, did not make a disproportionate use of the credit support scheme. So that's on a good news. But, you know, I think as, you know, Victoria's research showed, and there's other stuff that has been looking into this stuff, defining zombies is not completely trivial. And, you know, the way you define it can give you very, very different results. But at least, you know, in this case, I would say this is a little bit of a silver lining. In my view, a lot more similar analysis using firm level data across different countries is needed to ascertain the likely impact of this corporate dead buildup on post-COVID macro economic dynamics. So history can teach us something, but I think I would be much more comfortable if we had many more French case studies done. My last comment pertains to what I would call an integrated view of credit cycles. The post-GFC research on credit cycle over which Schuler, it was Moritz and his co-authors were instrumental to kicking off, you know, convincingly demonstrates that at low frequencies, so three to five years, rapid sustained credit builds up, you know, predicts economic downturns. A point that is less appreciated, maybe not quite well, you know, no, is that investors' sentiment in credit markets also carries negative information about the future economic growth. Above and beyond that contain in credit aggregates. Okay. So what do we mean by credit market sentiment? So what this literature refers to, it refers to variation over time in expected returns to bearing credit risk. So when we say that expected returns to bearing credit risks are too low, it's equivalent to saying that credit is priced too aggressively. That's manifested to a narrow credit spread, lots of high yield bond issuance and easy laying standards. So it's not just the quantity, but it's also the pricing. Now what's particularly interesting, and there's a lot of interesting theoretical work and empirical work done on this is that exposed investors are predictably disappointed. In other words, this credit market sentiment is mean reverting. Okay. So credit is priced too aggressively, it will mean reverting. And that tends to lead to abrupt and large evaluation of credit related assets. It leads to supply in a pullback in the supply of credit and the downturn. Right. So by just focusing on credit quantities, this part of the credit cycle is missing. I do think that that's important. I don't have historical data, but I did a little very simple exercise just to finish up is I looked at the U.S. In the U.S., we have a reasonable measure of credit market sentiment over the last 50 years, something called the excess bond premium. And the way you want to think of this is it's a corporate bond credit spread net of default risk. So being net of default risk has a natural interpretation as a measure of credit market sentiment. So what I have done here, the panels to the right, just show what happens if you have a standard, if you have a sustained corporate credit boom that's in red, okay, that tends to be followed, okay, predictably by a reversal in credit market sentiment, okay, over the near term horizon. There's less so for the household credit booms, but this is only U.S. data where you don't have very many household credit booms over the last 40, 50 years. So another risk that I think policy makers should particularly be attuned to is that a sharp and sudden reversal in sentiment for these highly leveraged economies could be problematic. And there's very nice recent work by Arvin Krishnamurti and Tyler Muir who looks at this dynamic in this interactive way, employing long history data and finds important nonlinear interaction effects. Thank you. Thank you, Egon, for this thought-provoking discussion. Before opening the floor for the Q&A session, let me remind the House rules. First, participants wishing to comment or ask questions should raise their virtual hand. Second, participants should limit their intervention to 90 seconds maximum to allow for an active discussion, okay? We already have four persons from the audience who have asked the floor. The first one in my list is Governor Francois Villouard de Gallo from the Bank of France. Francois, you have the floor. Thank you very much, Fabio. I hope you can hear me. Very well. Okay. And thank you to Moret. So in 90 seconds, one remark, one strong interest, and one question. The remark is about methodology. On your first graphs, Moret, it's highly dependent on the definition of debt you use. If I take the case of France, which was often quoted, if you take consolidated data with economic groups and not only individual data, the picture is quite different. And if you take net debt and not only gross debt, the picture is completely different for the last two years. In our case, gross debt increased significantly indeed. But as cash holdings increase in the same proportion, net debt remains stable. Second, my strong interest is for your cavert number one. And I think you have something highly interesting there to say that that intradable sector does not matter that much. Trade in non-tradable, linked to households, probably matters to diminish the GDP potential. And the housing sector and mortgages is a very interesting test for your hypothesis. So we should dig upon that. And my question to conclude with, I would tend to agree with your idea that evolution with the caveats is not that important. But the absolute level of corporate debt to GDP matters and still more its opposite, so to say, or its complementary, which is the absolute level of equity to GDP. And here, clearly, a firm which is financed through equity will be more risk friendly and more read it in a way. And this is not only at micro level. We see it, unfortunately, for us Europeans at macro level, corporate equity to GDP is twice higher, at least twice higher in the US and in Europe. And the capacity to innovate is obviously stronger. So I would like you to elaborate on that. Thank you, Francois. Maurice, you want to address this question? Yes. Thank you very much, Governor. I'll point on the data as well taken and also think that maybe I can blend in what Egon in his discussion also mentioned. Thank you, by the way, Egon, for that great discussion, is that the absolute level of debt and the question of tail risk. So these are two things that we looked at, what I looked at for the paper. It turns out that the tail risk dimension, if you look at quantile regressions, is also not elevated after corporate debt booms. So corporate debt booms don't make the bad recessions even worse. And the level of debt, so controlling for corporate debt to GDP levels at the onset of the recession, just very little. It matters a tiny little bit, but it doesn't change the overall picture dramatically. But this being said, these two little clarifications, I think your point is very important and very well taken that the gross debt perspective that we take in this research is an ideal world. We could complement this by having the complete view of the balance sheet structure of these companies and even look at the distribution ideally of financial vulnerabilities and balance sheets across the firm distribution. I think that's very important research that has advanced in recent years. We know, for example, that some companies and the tax sectors are very cash rich and look very healthy, whereas others have increased leverage quite a lot. Last point, maybe also on Egon's point about sentiment, I'm absolutely, I think this is a complementary and a very important way. I'm a great fan of that line of research as well. And it is true that in recent years, many indicators of credit market sentiment before COVID have flashed red in terms of covenant light loans, in terms of spreads, in terms of the leveraged loan business. So I guess this big picture view that I present here, as you said, always has to be, this time could be different. But I think it's important to just say like, yeah, it would be the exception from the rule. The rule is more that corporate debt booms are certainly not as drawn out and not as harmful as household debt booms tend to be. Maybe I'll leave it here to leave time for more questions. Thank you, Moritz. The next quick question for a quick answer is from Professor Kalemli Oskar from the University of Maryland. Thank you very much. Excellent paper and excellent discussion. I'm going to make three remarks. First one is on COVID. And as the introduction pointed out, heterogeneity is very important. And if you want to do something that makes sure of that is the COVID shock. So purely, we're going to meet Sandra and Verneka-Pancheloka. We did several papers, one including in the Jackson Hall Symposium of this year, very similar to the French paper that Econ mentioned, but we did 27 countries, sectors, and firms balance sheets. And what we find is actually under COVID because of a tremendous policy action, neither corporate debts or rank nor zombification are issues. But this doesn't mean these weren't issues historically. So this brings me to my second comment and Moritz's main conclusion that this wasn't an issue historically. My paper on corporate debt or rank in Europe with look 11 find a very serious impact on sluggish recovery and low investment and output of corporate debt for the 2008-2010 crisis in Europe, which was, of course, a financial crisis. So I would like to get Moritz's views on that.  Many of the papers mentioned like Benerjian Hoffman only use listed firm data. These firms are not really financial constrained firms. And they have that, but they are other sorts of financing too. When we think about SMEs, which constitutes a large part of corporate debt in Europe and also in US in terms of bank loans, and also more than 30% of employment and more than 50% of active output. As policy makers, we should be very concerned about both loans and bonds of SMEs and need to think about ways how once we bring that into the picture, are we still going to get the view that these things don't matter for active outcomes? Thank you. Moritz, you have the floor. I would can be asked to have quicker questions and quick answers. Thank you. I'll be quick my answer. Hi, Shevnam. Thanks so much for the comments. They are very well taken. I know you work with Luke and others was very important. And I think it's it's fair to say there is a certain tension between the micro and the macro evidence. And I'm a great fan of these micro studies. And I think on the firm level, these effects are measurable. And there's a certain tension that apparently, at least from this very like bird's eye, high flying altitude perspective that I have in this paper, these micro effects do not translate into measurable macro effects that could have all kinds of reasons that could be general equilibrium effects. Yes, there are zombies, but then other companies come in and invest more and take up their business. Prices can adjust. I think I guess we're not going to solve this today. But I think it's important for policymakers to be aware that the micro evidence, yes, I would absolutely agree. There is from your work and other workers evidence that on the micro level debt overhang on the company level is a thing. And inhibits investment and firm growth. On the other hand, there is a gap between the micro and the sort of the macro. And we're not quite sure why these micro effects do not generate larger macro effects. On the second point, bank based systems, I agree small firms that regenerate, all these things matter a great deal. And I think all of those would probably argue that it's important for Europe and the European supervisors and policymakers to keep a close look at the small firm situation, at the situation at banks. As I mentioned in my talk as well, I think that's the main of these three caveats, likely the main risk right now for the outlook. Thank you. Thank you, Moritz. Next question is from Professor Emke from the London School of Economics. Professor Emke, you have the floor. Thank you. Thank you. I had trouble on reading myself. Sorry. My comment follows up, I think on what was just discussed also after Shannon's comment, you know, in the work that at the ESB ASC we did on bankruptcy, I think one of the worries that came out of our studies was that if a large proportion of this falls onto a small very small firm's stand and this, you know, links back to the previous paper we saw, then perhaps the, at least the formal, but perhaps also the informal bankruptcy and solving the solvency procedures that we have may not work as efficiently there. And so I wonder whether Caviar, I think it was Caviar too, in all of this paper, is something that deserves particular attention this time around that we interested in your views on that. Thank you very much. Thank you, Moritz. I'll endorse that. I think that's an important point. And it comes back to sort of, let's, we need to try to get the micro and the macro together, I think in the current context. And we have it from Victoria's excellent paper earlier. Insolvency and dead reorganization regimes are crucial. They are, I think, understudied in the literature. And but they matter a great deal, as is the question of asset-based versus cash flow-based lending in the corporate space where I think we don't have very good cross-country data. There's a recent, very nice paper for the US, but for other countries, we don't know that. And to the extent that we get these feedback cycles between declining asset prices, hopeful recovery, evergreening loans, you could, you know, you could have the suspicion that this is much more prominent in asset-based lending situations where, you know, you wait for recovery. So there's a lot to be done, but there's no margins. Coins are very, very well taken. Thank you. Next question is from Professor Sissova from the Catholic University of Luven. We don't hear you. You may be muted. Now, do you hear me now? Yes. Yeah, great. Just a small correction. I'm not a professor at Kyiv Luven, but I'm a PhD student, so I'm one of the participants of the Young Economist competition. I have a small question about the caveat theory of Professor Sholaryka presentation, and in particular, the zombie lending. So in that respect, it may be also related to the first presentation of Professor Ivashina. So my question is about whether we should see zombie lending as only a negative thing for the economy in the sense that I know there is recent evidence using European data that actually zombie lending can have a disinflationary effect in the sense that due to this extension of credit to additional firms, we actually create excess productivity capacity, and this pushes the prices down. So I just would like to hear your opinion on this potential effect and whether maybe policy makers in Europe could actually use zombie lending, which seems to be present in Europe, to decrease the inflation. Thank you. Moritz. I think that's maybe the last part of the more questionable policy makers for you, Fabio, but I think the idea with zombie lending is that it inhibits restructuring and the efficient allocation of capital and thereby slows down productivity because I think there is evidence for that, and that's why we're mainly worried about it. But at the same time, I think if I can make this point again that I made at the end of my presentation, these phenomena to the degree that they're often linked to accommodative monetary policy or low interest rate environments, I think they miss an important point, and that's come out of recent research by my former colleague and a student from Bonn that aggregate demand conditions are extremely important for business formation and the success of startups. So this opposition that's often created between low interest rates, inhibit business dynamism, firm creation, and creative destruction has it all wrong. It has the science wrong in the sense that you need a good aggregate demand environment to help startups thrive and thereby lead to the very creative destruction and productivity growth that we all want to see. Thank you. We now have the last question from Francesco Nymphole from the newspaper Milano Finanza. Francesco, you have the floor. Thank you. Good afternoon. My question is about caveat number three, because in your research, you have underlined the importance also of precautionary capitalization along with stringent supervision. Based on this conclusion, would you suggest an enhanced role for precautionary capitalization and maybe a more flexible framework than the one we have seen in Europe? Thank you. Moritz? Yeah, thank you very much for the question. It is important and I discuss it in my paper in greater length than I could in the presentation. I think the evidence is quite clear that weekly capitalized or weekly supervised banking systems see more evergreening of bad loans, see more zombie creation. Victoria added another important dimension, which is, again, there is also the role of bankruptcy and insolvency regimes that can also contribute and that then prevents the exit of impaired businesses and depresses productivity growth. I think we or ourselves as Europeans a very close second look at the situation this time around, because I think after the global financial crisis, the cleanup of bank balance sheets was not optimal, was not fast enough. And again, I think the worst policy, and that's true also from my research that I presented today in terms of the aftermath of corporate credit booms, the worst possible policy is a policy of kicking the can down the road. To the extent that precautionary recapitalizations are a way to deal with this, their political economy of those is very difficult, obviously, and credible stress tests are the important and best tools to deal with this. But I can just I agree with you that we have some homework to do I think on this front. Thank you Moritz. So we have no more questions. And as we come to the end of this panel, let me share with you my personal takeaways. In the coming months, it is paramount that we prevent with our policy actions the emergence of an adverse feedback loop between insolvencies, financial conditions, and the real economy. The problem, of course, is how to do this. I believe that the paper suggests two policy conclusions. The first one is for the European Central Bank. The best way for monetary policy to prevent adverse feedback loops in the recovery phase is to effectively support aggregate demand, avoiding premature actions that could drive up bankruptcies and start a vicious feedback loop. In other words, the benign results of the paper are conditional on policy. The second conclusion is for other policymakers. Enhancing corporate insolvency frameworks across the European Union is crucial. I thus hope that we could move fast on the initiatives on this front foreseen by the action plan for a capital market union presented by the European Commission in 2020. On this note, let me thank once again Moritz, Egon, and all participants who intervened for this very rich discussion. Over to you, Claire. Thank you, Mr. Panetta, for those very insightful closing remarks and the excellent chairing of the discussion today. Thank you to Moritz and Egon, too, who, despite the chair's spoiler, managed to, I think, provide much additional detail, which I think is going to be of interest to our participants. I'd also like to thank the participants, too, for asking so many insightful questions in both this and the previous session. We are going to now take another break. We're going to be back again at five Central European time to try and unpick one of the big topics of the day, which is the future of inflation. Join us again then. Thanks a lot. Bye.


The new Performing Arts Academic Center will meet a critical need on our campus. It will provide a space that is equivalent to the wonderful talents that our students, our faculty have, and it has been a long time coming. The Performing Arts Academic Center would not only further elevate the program, but would also serve as a new campus icon that could literally transform this part of the university's campus into a new hub of activity. What's not to like about being the buzz of the Performing Arts Center world? What's not to like about introducing to that performance world that we are serious about the arts at the University of Alabama? We are where legends are made. We create them here, and now we will have a legendary facility to house those legends. Thank you.


The best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. Welcome to Unhinge, where door hardware nerds get together and knock and slam on different doorfills. We learn, we laugh, and sometimes we even cry depending on how bad the install is, but most importantly, we have a little fun why we learn a little bit more about door hardware. Today, we do have a very special nerd, Gary.  Why don't you hop on and say hello, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about what you do and a fun fact. Yeah, I don't know. Hi, I'm Gary or Gabby, and that's what I do. I read team social engineer, do any kind of logical hacking or human hacking, whatever you want to look at it as. Fun fact, man, I don't know. I was a helicopter pilot in the Marine Corps and I flew Hueys, and that's actually how I got my start into my current job is I built zipper bolts and my OIC officer in charge of the time asked me if I could break in and I said, well, of course I built it to spec. I can break in. I want to, I think it was a case of beer. I think it was a case of Sam Adams, October Fest, because he bet me a case of beer I couldn't break into the vault that I built. Well, you built it, of course. Well, yes, I know, but hey, I got the free beer. I'm not gonna argue with him. Yeah, no, can't argue with that. So red team, for those who don't understand that, can you give us a high level overview of what a red team does? It's funny you ask that question. In my previous employment, I would ask my teams what their definition of red team was but I never got the same answer twice. It's something in the industry that everybody thinks that they understand what it is but the basic idea of a red team is you're emulating an adversary and it's that simple. And typically during a red team you wanna give whomever is performing that red team the leeway to do whatever they think is the best avenue of attack just like a real adversary would and you don't wanna box them in per se and during that red team and again, this is a professional red team, right? Part of the red team is testing people, processes and procedures as well as any kind of facility or hardware in this case, whatever you're doing and you wanna test the whole thing not just breaking an injury. It's easy to break into a building very easy to break into building many times but what you get out of that from a red team perspective or an assessment perspective is you get to see how the people react what kind of policy that you have in place or maybe you don't have in place. If the people follow that policy what they do when they're confronted with contradictions to that policy do they err on the side of caution for the company or do they err on the side of humanity and just trust that the person in front of them is telling them the truth and I can tell you it's more often the latter than it is the former. Yeah, I'm really fascinated with your whole line of work I think maybe in another life I might have been a social engineer of some sorts. We'll see, maybe we'll see someday. It's not too late, Benji, it's not too late. It's never too late. Well, thank you Gary for hopping on the show and I'm looking forward to seeing your insights on some of these doorfells.  Well, yes, hello and Gary, I'm really pumped about this also. I love this kind of mystery and intrigue. So I think this will all be a good episode. I don't know if this is like a fun fact, but it's related. My husband is also a veteran Marine but he did not fly helicopters. He ran the gas chambers. So every year when you had to go through with your gas mask and test all your equipment that's what my husband did. So he was chemical, biological, nuclear defense specialist. I'm sure I forgot one more letter in there but yeah, so that's what he did when he was in. Well, then you're automatically good people. That's how that works. Awesome. Once a Marine, always a Marine, right? That's right. No better friend, no worse enemy. Mia and I jatted a little bit about this earlier today but my fun fact today is kind of random. I bought a house and the yard was really overrun and I could have paid someone to come in and re-landscape it, but I thought because I watched a couple hundred TikTok videos that I'd be like, I'm an expert now at landscaping but I'm getting really into like plants, which is weird because I've never really been into plants before. It's so weird that I'll be like driving down the road. I'm like, oh, there's a Russian siege over there. Oh, look at that rose garden over there and my wife will like yesterday actually were driving down this road and there was a garden center and she noticed that I was like looking over. She's like, I don't have to worry about you cheating on me. I'm worried that you're gonna like fall in love with plants or something. So I'm becoming a plant daddy. That's a thing, Greg, apparently. A plant daddy is a thing. I'll take your word for it. So there's my fun fact for the day but Gary, so glad to have you on the show. For those who don't know how Unhinge works I will share my screen with the different doorfills. We will knock and slam on the different doors give out any helpful tips or learning opportunities for these doorfills and then we'll give it a knocking score. One being not too knocking bad but 10 being pretty knocking bad I guess in this case, we wouldn't hire Gary's team to fix it but let's hire Gary's team to exploit all of the vulnerabilities of your facility. How does that sound? You guys ready to jump in? Ready? Very secure. I didn't even know what to say about this. There's a key in the lock. Sometimes people forget keys in the lock. I've seen it. Other times the lock gets messed up somehow and they end up putting a lock killer in there. Like I've seen people do that where the bidding on the lock, there's like a six and then there's a one and then you can't get the key out. Somebody could have been trying to break in and use the wrong bidding on the key and screwed up because they weren't very good at what they're doing. So it could just be stuck. There's that possibility but it looks like it was turned a little bit. What's interesting about this is you can get into that door just as easily without that key because it's a crash bar and you just put a little bit broad in there and pull and it opens the door wide up anyway. Am I missing something? I was gonna say a J hook would easily open this up pretty quickly, right? You don't even need that. We use our under the door tool to open stuff like that a lot.  We'll just take that and we'll go take a pair of channel locks and just borrow them while we're in the store and bend it the way we need it. And then we'll show up and put it in our pants.  We don't even touch locks, you don't even need to. There's so many ways to get into a door where you don't even need to mess with the lock. See what I would do in this instance, especially if it was during working hours, I would take a picture of the key or I would put it in my silly buddy and then I would go turn it in and be the good guy and then have a key of the building the whole time. Yeah, you like build the trust with them, right? Hey, oh no, I found this in the door. Oh yeah. I should be careful.  I don't know how well you're familiar with keyways, but do you recognize this keyway by any means? I am not super good with keyways, but judging by the end of the key, maybe a Schlagg. So it's a Schlagg C keyway, which is probably the most used keyway out there. It's definitely not patented, not secure or anything like that. You can definitely go down to your local hardware store and get it copied or even like the Kemi machines, the little kiosks. Yeah, oh yeah. Or even just get the bidding off of it and, you know, buy one and file it down to the bidding that you have. You could even make your own key for, I don't know, these are pennies on the dollar. Like probably the least secure keyway, but apparently you wouldn't even need it. It's a crash bar, just open it up that way. Well, I mess with a key when you can just bypass. You're right, we've got the punchers, you know, or you can stick the key in and you can just punch it and be done with a key in like 30 seconds at the most. But it's great if you're looking for like persistent entry and you can come and go as you please and you can put it on a key chain and look like you're a janitor and walk through there and nobody's gonna say anything because you're like, I've got a key to the door and no one is going to argue with that. They're not gonna be like, how did you get a key to the door? Unless of course it's another janitor that knows that you're not a janitor. That's about the only way that it's gonna work, but nobody ever looks at the maintenance people, you know, they typically don't know them by name and they don't know the entire staff and they don't know the turnover of the staff. So, and not saying that it doesn't exist, but there is yet to be a key that I have found in a facility that I haven't been able to come. They're there, but nobody takes their security that seriously. Yeah, it's scary when you really think about it. Like if someone wanted to really do harm to someone, it's scary to really think about that. But I guess that's why they hire your team. They listen. Yeah, if they listen and actually implement, you know, like knowledge is power, but only when you have action to go along with it. Funny because like, say you get this door, for example, right? And say this was, I mean, it looks like it's a store, but who knows? Say it's something that's vitally important. And you say, hey, you've got to work on your gap so you can have tool insertion here, right? They put the crossbar down the middle and they say, well, we can't do that because X, Y and Z reasons and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, okay, well then you need to make sure that that crash bar is locked at night so people can't manipulate it from the inside. Well, you know, then we got to replace the hardware on the door and blah, blah, blah.  It's almost faster with bypassing than it is a key many, many times. Yeah, because this is probably a night latch function.  So the lovely Kelsey Carnell, love her from access communication. She sent me this photo and it was actually at a wedding venue. So I'm sure there's not like a ton of proprietary information in there for you to get, but there's a lot of probably expensive equipment, probably a lot of, I don't know, a bunch of booze or something in this venue or I don't know, maybe people have their marriage certificates or I don't know what proprietary information you would be looking for, but you can do a lot with a little. You would be amazed at the things that organizations will do. You could make some large antennas for RFID readers, get people's credit cards and badges and everything and just set it up there while they're having their venue and you could come back to a plethora of information and items that you never had before. You could set up like they've got the wall of sheep at DEF CON where people leave their wifi and their Bluetooth open for their phones and you could collect the metadata on their phones and get way more stuff than they probably ever want you to have. Let's see, what else could you do? Oh, you QR codes everywhere, right? And like QR codes are just like somebody going to a website and we all know that if you get an email, you don't ever follow the link because it's malicious and so it's hilarious because you could just start putting QR codes everywhere and you could put someone like, hey, do this QR code and send us pictures that you take during the wedding and you're like, oh, and then you can set up a fake website where you collect all the pictures and everything and the whole time you're just owning everybody because they are happy to go to this website and upload the pictures and then eventually they would go to the Friday group and they'd be like, we went to your website and upload a little pictures that we don't have a website. Like people just don't realize how malicious people like us can be that are actually real bad guys. Everything is an opportunity to do something. Even if you got three or four different IDs out of there or cards or something, there's always a place to sell it on the dark web that people will pay good money for it. Wow, yeah, I was thinking like, oh wedding venue, there's not that much in there and then you just gave us five different examples of insane uses of what you could do in this situation. But yeah, it's true. Like every weekend it's a new batch of people showing up and you could just be copying and collecting a lot of new information. A key to this place is innocent as innocuous as it seems. You could put anything in there and again, it's a wedding venue. Like they're not gonna probably know what belongs there, what doesn't, could put stuff wherever you wanted to and collect all the information the day that you want. Wow, I'm really glad you're on here. This was the warmup, but this was the... And here we are, I think you're just gonna talk about a key. Yeah. It's not the key that's important, that's what's behind the door. That's why we do what we do, right? Okay, knocking score. I didn't think this was gonna be very knocking bad, but you make it seem like it could be really bad. Anytime someone has access to a place you don't want them to have access to, I mean that as far as I'm concerned, that's a 10. It's persistent access. You've given them the key to the facility and like we talked about, take a picture of the bidding, they can make their own key, they could use silly putty, they could just take it. If they just took the key and they didn't turn it in anybody, the chances of somebody changing those locks out is probably zero, and they're just going to assume they lost the key somewhere and then they're just going to go have another key made from somebody else's key ring.  It was a single key, it wasn't on a key chain, which begs the question, why is the key to their facility not on a key chain? Why is it just a single key? Which means they probably have it hanging somewhere, right? It's probably owned by some sort of facility management company or property management company and it probably sits in a lock box somewhere on a wall and somebody was opening it for somebody else and so they took the single key off of there and opened it up or whatever. I mean, who knows? There's a million different reasons, but yeah, this is bad. Persistent access is never a good thing. So from a security standpoint, you would say a 10. Absolutely, wouldn't you? What would you say from your standpoint? Yeah, I mean, I guess it defeats the whole reason why you have a door there. From code and compliance, like there's nothing life safety concerns here. So like, I couldn't give it that big of a knocking score from that side of things, but security-wise, yeah, this is a 10. It doesn't get worse than this unless you just had the door open. But even this is not the worst thing. It's much open, yeah. This is worse than just leaving the door open because then you can open up the door even when it's closed. That's right, I agree. It's worse than the door open. Maybe this needs to be an 11. We need to come up with a new scale. So we have vulnerability ratings, right? In cybersecurity and usually low, medium, high, and then some people will have a critical. And then we had an interview with a gentleman who came up with catastrophic after critical. And so that was his, his low, medium, high, critical catastrophic. So yeah, I think this might be in the catastrophic. Mia, any thoughts? Yeah, no, I agree, yeah. From a security standpoint, it would be a 10. This was like new construction. They used a Schlage C keyway. That's been out of patent for how long? I don't know, it's not secure at all. Climbing, when you think about it, what's that old saying? Locks are there to keep honest people honest without going to complete extremes and over kills with high security locks with six security pins or something insane to keep a normal person out. Like this is fine. It's gonna keep 99% of the people out.  If you wanna be featured on a future episode of Unhinged or if you have a picture to submit, you can email me at Mia at doorhardwarenerds.com. Thanks for watching.


Alrighty, construction updates are back. Again, I know a lot of you were asking in the comments section when's the next one in DMs. It was a long weekend. There was no construction work going on, but it's back. I do wanna say that our newsletter has dropped on Patreon. So again, if you wanna support the channel for $5 a month, you get your monthly newsletters and then construction updates a whole day ahead of everyone else. I will say that we have dropped some major T in our Patreon newsletter this month and this is T that will be backed up in the next couple of weeks. So again, some of the stuff we've claimed will be able to get proved within the next two weeks. So definitely super excited about that. And yeah, so let's get started. So overall, we flew four times yesterday and the reason is I wanted to show you guys a whole process of something that's going on. So on the screen, you don't see any construction workers right now in the tunnel. They're really far back. They're setting up some supporting and bracing.  Over at Leviathan, if you look closely, they're really adding in that netting. So the netting is definitely gonna take up most of the ride by the looks of it. So they're on site, a welding company welding those pieces in and then they'll add the wire netting as well. Obviously to protect guests down there from falling phones and all that. So for those of you that were hoping for no netting, unfortunately it's looking like netting. So this was midday. You can see the support structure is working their way out and the drill bit's on top. So earlier in the day, they were definitely emphasizing, removing the snow, putting in new markings to show where they're gonna drill. This is a very common practice when excavating or refurbishing a tunnel. So whatever route Wonderland has chosen to go down, I truthfully don't see it being refurbishing but maybe I'll eat my words. It's gonna be a lengthy process. So what they're doing is they're setting up almost like support structures. There was a proper word for it and it just slipped my mind. So I'm just gonna call them support structures. So they're setting up support structures to kind of brace the tunnel for the work they're about to do.  Do you guys remember Tundra Twister construction updates? And do you guys remember what I told you about this construction trailer? So that is Wonderland's construction site trailer, the one that I showed before, not that one.  It's for Wonderland's actual construction team. So for those that don't know, Wonderland's got a really talented team of construction and planning to division. This trailer goes where it is like a big sign. So if there's a ride, this trailer is gonna go there. So if this is the site of the coaster, which it is, I can promise you that, that trailer is gonna come over here and park over here for Wonderland's crew to have access to the site because they almost like supervise the construction project. Again, very talented people on Wonderland's team. So if that trailer moves over here, you know construction on the roller coaster is about to happen outside the mountain, or there's a chance it's gonna go move over to Moosehorn and then move over here. Cause either or both projects are about to start. You have the footings that are almost ready to start for Moosehorn and then vertical construction. And then you have them ready to start the footings outside the mountain on this project. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens. Now the next shot you guys are about to see is the end of day, a 5.30 PM shot.  So when they come in today or tomorrow when you're watching this video, the next video, they will start drilling the sides of the mountain. So that'll be really cool to watch. So just wanted to show you guys a whole day of work going on in the tunnel. Cause when I only fly once, it looks like they've hardly done anything, but when we get to show you, start to finish, it's a lot of work that they do. Again, it is really difficult to tell how much is done in one shot, but when you fly four times, we can show you the overall project. Anyways, hope you enjoyed today's construction update and yeah, have a good one. Bye guys.


Hi guys welcome back to the independent investor channel for the weekly update guys. Never been so excited to be a Hylian investor right here with the stock finding some support here. Nobody's talking about it. I find it ironic. The analysts are doing whatever they can do to continue to downgrade the stock and buy the stock cheaper. Let's just call it for what it is. It is modern day stock manipulation so congratulations on that. What does it mean for the Hylian community in just two short years for you guys that are new to the Hylian story here two years in the making Count them one two in public markets. They've got two products on the marketplace aimed aggressively at integrating into the class eight space and the electrification of powertrains. What makes Hylian so different they're not looking to reinvent the wheel here guys. They're looking to take what it is that they do best and provide electric powertrain solutions to the trucking industry. And I think for a lot of years the trucking industry has been able to sit across the table and respectfully decline. They can't ignore this one. Hylian boasts a thousand plus mile range. Hylian knows that there are tailwinds that exist right now in the industry and that a lot of those tailwinds are created by the customers themselves which are demanding social responsibility at the fleets that are transporting our goods. A very necessary industry. There's no doubt about it. So stick with me. There's going to be a short offering. A lot of people may take some comfort in that. I haven't had time this weekend. I've been at the soccer field for both days with my son. But we're going to roll out the update as we have seen them transpire over the week. And you know for a stock that continues to base out at these levels here. I find the progress of the company absolutely stellar. Now before we get started you guys if you haven't noticed to kick over to Hylian dot com. I want to kick over to Hylian dot com. They have just updated their website yet again which they have from the beginning received an A plus as far as I'm concerned with regard to that being the single best conduit for information. It can jump you over to social media. If that's your thing no problem. You've even got some links on there after the Hylian interview with Thomas Healy introducing the Hylian holdings opportunity. You'll find videos of mine on there actually on Hylian dot com which I think is wonderful. I look at myself as a singular advocate for the company. I am a bullish shareholder in the company for full disclosure. Who cares. Okay. Don't hold a grudge. If this is your first time being introduced to this company you're going to need to listen up. Okay. Doesn't mean that you have to trip over yourself to go take an investment position in this. But people need to be more aware that there's companies on the cutting edge like Hylian that are looking to tackle global warming and global warming initiatives. And for a lot of the fleets out there and a lot of the company's customers that they serve they can't wait 10 years. Okay. And they can't wait five years. And so you look at a company like Hylian and the progress that has been made in the last two years has been absolutely remarkable. To bring their hybrid EX product to the market it is available now on the market today. That provides a twofold benefit from Hylian's perspective. Number one is the data and analytics that they've been able to draw off of putting the hybrid EX into the fleets hands different iterations have provided them a lot of feedback with regard to upgrading certain components making certain systems improvements they've gotten well over a million miles of data that has gone into the original iterations of the hybrid and now the hybrid EX with those iterations incorporated in them. It's ready to go and Hylian's vision at one truck at a time puts those systems on board to provide a twofold benefit for the CNG trucks. It provides that little bit of an extra oomph to the tune of about 120 horsepower. It's made certain applications where impossible before under the old CNG engine envelopes that much more potentially possible with the increased payload on the CNG slide with the either retrofit into an existing truck or looking to take an order and place those orders on a new truck being rolled off of the line. I think that's attractive for new fleets out there that are looking to be introduced for the first time to the to the Hylian opportunity and the second application on the hybrid EX side is the ability to supplement diesel and where again those routes call for a certain diesel the diesel power towing and torque to provide especially that extra power for the tandem trailers provides that opportunity to install that get the fuel savings up front and then pay that back over time to the bottom line. Now that depends on what type of fuel savings you get but it's inevitable to to run the system and then eventually have that system pay itself off with the fuel savings so the hybrid EX is in my in my opinion an absolutely fantastic product a lot of the major fleets are running them if you're new to the Hylian opportunity I highly suggest you go over click into the Hylian innovation council do some research on your own with regard to NFI Werner Schneider Anheuser-Busch is also on there some of the most the largest fleets agility rider and the like are also on the innovation council and they've been doing deals with both on the innovation council they've been seeking interest on their hybrid EX as well as starting to solidify orders on their order book in way of orders with deposits against their reservation order book which is already extremely impressive guys so these guys are making all the strides and you think okay well if we don't want to wait five to ten years what is the realistic time frame here that we're looking at for Hylian the answer is 21 months it's just that simple looking to deliver in the back half of 2023 we have some certifications and some validation and testing that needs to happen before that end 21 months in the evolution of a company is peanuts guys it's peanuts okay these these folks have got to have that this opportunity to see this vision through and I've never been so steadfast on the message of sharing with the YouTube audience my quick thoughts on progress that's being made toward that end that's why I want to project some excitement right now about an impasse being met between how the stock market views the stock itself and the goings on at Hylian holdings they are silently walking toward these goals and they're aggressively pursuing this end okay and this 21 months is eventually going to pass now we're less likely to understand how this is going to transpire now at the onset of this 21 month short cycle I call it I call 2022 and 2023 beginning of a bridge to this end and this is going to be very exciting to track this whatever order book they can continue to solidify from the newly established sales team is just going to be game on and to be honest with you and I'm going to sit back and watch the show as I expect you guys to few notes here when I talked about the diesel savings on the hybrid EX product 38 billion in diesel costs per year that that is just insane of upfront costs some can cost depending on the mode of transportation that that that it's entered into extremely interesting we're talking about penetration to a market of close to one trillion dollars 800 billion dollars of an industry here and you think well what does that mean what's a quantifiable metric well I got that for the first time this week during the yahoo interview Thomas Haley was on the new york stock exchange floor with with ice with the new media campaign that they're rolling out I thought it was fabulous but he mentioned and this will really hit home with you guys the 300 units that the industry demands per year that is 300,000 delivered units per year the very OEM that highly on is synced up with right now which is Peter built they can turn out a measly 40,000 per year okay so you can kind of see where this is going now highly on has been very very implicit about them wanting to solidify the first iteration of the hyper truck yaw rex with Peter built it's that simple and why not it is absolutely a demand of choice they've always had an understanding with highly on Peter built is the very name right at the front of the hood and I think it's a wonderful wonderful opportunity to get it right with Peter built get it right for these first demo units that are going to be rolled out for the testing and certification and further input and solicitation of said input from the fleets back to highly on for the final integration of the quality control application before the truck is basically reverse broken down reverse engineered and put to the line for for mass scale through the OEM hubs so highly on really in in in its totality is looking not to reinvent the trucking industry at all they are a powertrain solutions provider that means companies get to keep the trucks that they've grown accustomed to but enjoy all the benefits of electrification the quieter they attract younger talent they attract that talent that understands the initiative has to step into this direction they enjoy the thousand miles plus of range which has been doubled down on on the newly revamped website again kick over and check that out as well as the increased payload over time to increase the payload which all of those things that I just mentioned drives the TCO so when highly on gets to sit down with these big fleets and they get to go down the checklist and the checklist it will be industry will have really no other choice but to sit across from highly on and say you know what I'm interested and you're darn right they are because customers again are salivating in the mouth the pressure is on the industry as a whole to stop marching forward in a very necessary industry at the expense of the planet we are at that impasse of time if you don't believe that we are at that impasse of time I would suggest that you that you reconsider in your opinion the time is now now highly on differentiates itself from the competition in way of not going full electric okay what I would encourage you to do is look at the range anxiety on behalf of the industry to turn over to full electric right now because they are not meeting the range that is necessary to step into and compete on the bottom line with the class eight space and what is necessary via horsepower to to get maximum payload to go green yes and the ability to put an economical fuel and fuel the rig okay there has to be something that fuels the rig now all electric is provided by electricity from the grid the problem now is the availability of said electricity from the grid where that electricity comes from via coal plants and and and finally the downtime that is going to be incurred upon the industry guys time is money in trucking they cannot incur anything above what the downtime is for filling a truck with diesel right now the downtime is absolutely on par and equivalent with pulling over putting compressed natural gas and or renewable natural gas into the hyper truck 10 minutes you're good to go you're back down the road making money for the company bottom line and you're doing so with the solution that's going to satisfy the customers and is a radical shift in the in the next generation of trucking whereas in the last hundred years of trucking we've evolved to this impasse in time where we're looking at the very few companies that are providing these solutions coming forward make no mistake about it highly on is an rng cng play with the opportunity to step into more of an agnostic agnostic product with the potential of running hydrogen fuel cell down the line problem with hydrogen fuel cell competitors with hyzon motors and nicola motors the problem with it is the availability and you cannot sit across from industry and make this pitch to industry and expect industry to just fall all over themselves with a solution that they cannot put into play highly on right now is the only solution right now stepping towards its finalization stages of the hyper truck erx 21 months seems like a lifetime away the guys in the scope and the big picture of things it is nothing the solution is here now today this product is actually in the hands of fleets as we speak being enjoyed on the hybrid exide reducing the diesel consumption the diesel saving side as well as burning cng and providing that extra horsepower to those fleets paying those units over time with every mile that's traveled with these units we're right around the corner from getting a certification for the hyper truck erx never been a better time to take a look at the highly on the opportunity guys so it's been a pleasure i wanted to quick throw out the interview this week with there's a lot of nuggets there check out the revamped website with highly on they get in a plus or higher and like crazy that information is also on the website the interview with thomas healy on the floor of the new york stock exchange was also very telling i highly encourage you if you've never heard of the highly on opportunity before i am a bullish shareholder in the company i do awareness and profiling on highly on holdings i do so free of charge i'm not compensated for my time to do this i do it willingly because i think their vision and path toward a full electric fleet into the future and thomas healy said they want to dominate the class eight space i have no reason to believe that they don't have the product the desire the willingness the technology and a a willing customer ready and able to accept these products and start to integrate these in the fleets for a better tomorrow guys thank you so much for tuning in to the message of your comments at the bottom of the video if you enjoy content like this make sure and subscribe to the independent investor channel we're we're we're here we're providing that awareness we'll continue to footstomp the message for the good of the planet for the good of the trucking industry and for the good of the awareness of the patrons of the message guys thank you so much for tuning in the message and good luck in your investment future


They're like spiders, I'll put it down. Get ready to go. Take a few pictures. Here we go. Ready? Thank you.


Dear students and friends, I am Professor Ankechada, former professor head psychology department of University of Delhi. In continuing to my earlier videos related to the examination anxiety, today I will be talking about examination anxiety and the questions which often I get from the students. In last 40 years as a psychologist, the questions which often imposed to me by students which are very genuine and thought-provoking questions, I will share one by one some of the important questions and then try to answer it to help you to overcome your exam anxiety. One question which often asked by students that does eating chocolate reduce anxiety? It is a good question and my answer simple to this, yes not only chocolate, yes black chocolate helped you reducing anxiety later to exams, but it is not only the chocolates even the chewing gum, the cookies, the other sweets can also reduce, but other sweet dynamite you take in large quantity, other sweets basically will help you in reducing anxiety, but chocolates definitely will much more helpful. Another question asked by students that sitting in the examination hall all my other friends what I see around me are writing very fast the answer to the question and I am a slow writer, how can I reduce my anxiety, listen my answer to this is you and they are they don't try to compare with them, try to understand your own potential, don't follow what they are doing it, you continue with your speed with accuracy, if you keep thinking that they are right faster than you then my dear students this will increase your exam anxiety, take out this thought from your mind. The other question which asked by the student often is that I could not prepare for my test properly, how can I reduce my anxiety in that case when I am not prepared, my answer have debrief, take a debrief and whatever time you have at your disposal instead of thinking on that you could not prepare you utilize that time in going through the slavers, it might be a little faster, but it will help you to overcome your anxiety. Another question is a very interesting question which asked by student that is, is it bad to study overnight? I study entire night, is it bad? My answer, yes definitely bad if you could not take your proper sleep which you require for the body, body require some amount of sleep and that you must have and don't study entire night, plan, organize your night sleep, have deep sleep may be 4 hours and then start preparing fresh, this will make your preparation much more better, is a good interesting question. Another interesting question which often I get from people is that should I avoid consuming caffeine because I feel so stressed out that I feel like going for it, there is a craving coming to me, my answer in short definitely you avoid caffeine, caffeine will increase or also level of anxiety and definitely let to your examination which are going to have it, so kindly reduce that. Another question which often asked by student that last time I missed by 40 marks or 30 marks and that is still on my mind how I can reduce in that case, I may this year again lose by 40 marks, so my answer if you keep on thinking on that then this will not allow your mind to get free to prepare, forget what happened, start your journey new, if you keep on thinking and spending your energy and time, energy spend somewhere which is not utilizing your life, utilize energy which is more fruitful and meaningful for you. Another question I have not studied properly for my exams, if that's true with me then how I can lessen my anxiety later to exam when I'm not prepared, do you think still you have a time, think over, if yes, if you still have a time then utilize in preparing rather than thinking that you could not prepare your exam, go through the syllabus quickly scan it and that paper is not the end of the world that is one paper, one exam the others also, so if you lose something over here then you can compensate by concentrating on other exams, so remember that you have to compete and that confidence, self-confidence which I've told you in my earlier slide of the video also please keep on in your mind that will help you, there is strength in you to overcome your examination anxiety. Another very interesting question I do not do well on my first examination which I given the other day, how can I concentrate on studying for my next examination when I'm anxious and afraid, who made you anxious and afraid, my answer is you yourself, you could not do in the last examination, you think you could not do well, fine can you do anything for that, you can't do whatever had happened had happened, now you have to think with future orientation, the next examination comes, I can't do anything what has to happen, but I can definitely think, I can definitely do far better in the next that might compensate what I couldn't do in the past, so there your focus should be future oriented rather into the past what had already happened, happened means happened. Another question very interesting asked by students often that what if I'm missing one third of the information I need to know, I got only one third of the information that 33% of the information I have and two-third of the information I don't have, the information which you don't have you can't do it, but strengthen yourself on the information that is 66% or two-third of the information you have in cash on that information rather than struggling but you don't have, if you can dig out that information or maybe with the likelihood that when you make yourself very good in the two-third of the information which you have then one-third will also might come in your rescue, the information you got from two-third can help in answering some of the or maybe related with some of the information which you don't have at this moment rather than just struggling what you don't have. Another question interesting even if I prepare well, anxiety pressure me a lot what can I do though I prepared very well if you have prepared very well then I don't see the reason why you think you can't do if you practice it planned it time management you have done it with your work obviously this will help you to overcome take deep breath relax take change your posture maybe you have a sip of water you know maybe you can have a small cup of soft drink maybe you can have a chocolate which I told you change your mindset and start working fresh this will help you overcome is some fear of an exam anxiety is very common here the answer in your question yes it's a very common phenomena everyone undergo exam anxiety it's not you are the different person you think it's you no every one of us including me I also experience in my career the definition that if it's a normal phenomena it's a common to everyone why we should fear of that why we bring that fear in mind let's take out the fear from the mind another question how do I deal with anxiety when I am running out of time try to stop at least for few second and think are you sure running out of the time or using this as a defense mechanism you're running out of the time you have to catch it not to bring any negative thought in your mind is you brought the thought that you're running out of time and you keep on struggling with that thought I'm sorry you were not of time catch the time time is in front of you avoid as much as possible self sabotage you're doing the self sabotage by saying you run out of the time why I feel so anxious to compare myself with others because you are not governed by your own internal consciousness make those internal consciousness stronger and when you make it stronger what I want to say think if you whatever you achieve what efforts you put on that whatever you couldn't achieve till now where you lack once you've identified that where you lack I'm sure you can overcome that we have a few questions which I thought to share with you which I have often get through from my clients whenever a child come whenever the parents come with the child or whenever I hold any kind of training session I find student the children's really us I hope I wish these questions and the answers will be helpful to you to overcome your examination anxiety good luck thank you subscribe to our channel and click on the bell icon to get latest updates on upcoming videos