We are now moving to the next session, Marco Basetto from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis will present. His research focuses on game theory, macroeconomics and the design and consistency of macroeconomic policies. And he has made an attempt, as you will see, to look at the complexity of a monetary union with 40 budget constraints like the European Monetary Union. And so I'm really curious and fascinated about this presentation. So Marco, the floor is yours. Thank you. So I was trying to get rid of the side panel on Pedia. Here we go. Very good. It's a great pleasure to have a chance to present my work here. And I want to mention that I'd be happy to entertain questions as they go longer. So, Klaus, if you see a question that fits well with the floor, feel free to interrupt me and then we can have a longer discussion afterwards. But of course, I'm not going to monitor the chat myself while I talk. Okay, this is joint work with Gerardo Carraccio, who's a PhD student at UCL. He's currently on the market. He's a fantastic guy. If you are on the market for a junior market, you should definitely take a look at his file. Let me see if I can move this because it's not moving for me at the moment. Very good. Is it moving for you? Can you see my second slide, Klaus? Yes, very good. Excellent. Thank you. So, what's the motivation for this project? There's a lot of research that has been devoted to the issue that monetary and fiscal policy are connected by a common budget constraint. I tend to think about one of the main contributions as being Sergeant Wallace's present monetary arithmetic that was recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee.  Certainly, you know, even with the creation of back of England originally centuries ago and even before I was well understood that central banks played an important fiscal role. More recently, the fiscal theory of the price level has devoted a lot of attention to the question of how fiscal policy can, in some dimensions, help in determining the price level. So, making sure that we're not subject to the whims of expectations and that there is an anchor that will make sure that prices remain stable in some way, but at the same time, potentially creating problems for monetary policy. And let me remind you, by the way, that everything that I'm saying today reflects my own views and not those of the Minneapolis Fed or the Federal Service System. So the fiscal theory and unpleasant monetary arithmetic emphasize the single budget constraint. There's been more recent work trying to split the budget constraint of monetary and fiscal authorities and looking at potential implications from thinking about how this common budget constraint arises in an environment in which the two partially have a little bit of independence, maybe in their own budget constraint. And this was notably started by Sims. I have some earlier work myself with Todd Messer, and here Paolo Benigno has work and here this heading that I picked, New Style Central Banking, is something that Ricardo Riz came up with. He has a good taste for a catchy name, so I'm going to take it from him. Now the question for me, so the next step is, so the New Style Central Banking was about, say, the Fed and the U.S. Treasury. There are two agencies, to some extent, you can argue legally the Fed is not a government agency, although the board is, but that's certainly heavily regulated by the government. So there are kind of two government sanctioned entities and they're interacting. Now things become a lot more exciting in some dimension when you start thinking about the Eurozone, and that's why Gerardo and I started thinking about this project. In the Eurozone, it's not just one central bank and one government interacting with each other, but there are actually 40 players. There are the 19 national tragedies, plus the European Union, the European Union is a relatively small fiscal player becoming bigger by the day, with some of the issues that Evi talked about. Then that's the European Central Bank, but also something that may be a little bit underappreciated is that there are also 19 national central banks and we'll talk about today a little bit about what they do or they don't do. So what's chosen centrally and what's chosen at the level of the national central bank, but what's going to be very important is that each of them will have its own, does have its own budget constraint. So, you know, there isn't a single central bank with a single budget constraint in the European Union, the way there is, say, for instance, in the case of the Fed. Now, technically, the regional feds have also their own budget, but everything is shared at the end of the day, so that's fairly irrelevant. There are some minor complications, but, you know, everybody understands that if the New York Fed made losses, say, on made in lane, that was one of the things that was on their books, they would be covered by the system as a whole. It's less obvious in the case of the ECB. And so the key question for me is going to be twofold. One is kind of more technical. How does senior age, so the profits from running a central bank flow from the monetary authority to the budget of each country, because ultimately these funds end up at the Treasury. The profits are admitted to the Treasury and the question is how does that happen. But the second, maybe more important question is who's paying if a member country defaults on its debt. So, through various programs, the Euro system, so the ECB along with the national central banks have been buying a big amount of government debt. That government debt may be subject to default, hopefully not, but you know, Greece did default. And the question is who's going to bear the cost of that, which taxpayer will have to prop up money to account for the fact that there's going to be less profits coming from the central bank or maybe even losses. So, in my talk, I'm going to focus on two programs, the public sector purchase program and the pandemic emergency purchase program. Why these two, because these are the programs where the risk is not supposed to be shared for many of the other programs. The risk is shared explicitly at the level of the Eurozone. So it's kind of closer to the common budget. That's one central bank. If you want with a common budget constraint, there are still 19 treasures in the background, but you know, they're getting just their share of profits or potential losses. For PSPP and PPP, the rules are quite different. The rules work as follows. 20% of the size of these programs is undertaken directly by the European Central Bank at the European level and for 10% they're buying supranational bonds for 10% they're buying national bonds. These are common. So the risk on this is common shared according to the capital key. That's not what I'm going to be focusing on. I'm going to focus on the remaining 80%. For the remaining 80%, each national central bank is buying their own tragedies bonds. So Bank of Italy is buying Italian bonds. The Bundesbank is buying German bonds. Bank of Portugal is buying Portuguese bonds and so on and so forth. The national bank is buying Finnish bonds. The risk of this 80% is not supposed to be shared. It's supposed to remain with the national central bank that bought the bonds.  I'm going to try to use Italy and Germany as my main example, partly because I'm originally from Italy. So if Italy defaults, it's Bank of Italy that should remain on the hook for those losses that are going to rise on its books due to the fact that now those assets are worthless. So the question here is going to be to what extent that holds in a world in which really at the end of the day there's just one consolidated budget constraint. So let me go through a little bit in practice because this is going to be somewhat important on how this works in practice. So there are two possibilities. So I'm going to use Bank of Italy as my workhorse example. And so there are two options. They can buy these bonds from they're going to buy them from the private sector. This is going to come typically from a bank or you know, it could come from somebody else who has a relationship with a bank. And the question is where do these, you know, when Bank of Italy buys, where are these the counter payment for those bonds going on and up. If they're buying them from an Italian bank, then what happens is Bank of Italy is getting acquired in the bond and it's issuing reserves. Of course, Euro reserves are in euros. So that has to be a mechanism that makes sure that Euro is a Euro, no matter whether it's Italy or Bank of Italy or Bundesbank. But technically from the budgetary perspective, these reserves are the liabilities of Bank of Italy. And so that's where they sit on the balance sheet. Things are a little bit different. If Bank of Italy buys the same bond from a German bank, then Bank of Italy acquires the bond. That's not different. But because it's a German bank, it's a Bundesbank that is issuing the reserves that are going to show up on the payment for this asset. And then of course, there has to be some mechanism for equilibrating the fact that now Bank of Italy has an asset and the Bundesbank has a liability. That comes in the form of the target two balance. So what happens is Bank of Italy is going to acquire a target two liability that matches the asset that they just bought, the bond. And the Bundesbank will get a target two asset that matches the liability that they acquired, which is the reserves that they issued to the banks. All these target two flaws are netted out at the ECB system. So technically those are liabilities and assets against the ECB. As you will see in my model, I will short circuit that. It's somewhat important for netting purposes, but it's not important for the economics of what I'm going to talk about. And so one of the questions here is how is this going to interact with the target two system. So the target two system pays interest, although not currently, but in principle it pays interest at the margin of refinancing operation rate, which is the top of the corridor set by the ECB. And then Bank of Italy is going to have to pay this interest. But if the interest on government that is above that rate, which currently is then that profit is profit for Bank of Italy. If it makes a loss either because the interest rate is below or because it suffers from a haircut that would show up on its balance sheet that way. Positions I'm talking about are big. So that's going to be important. We are currently thinking about how to design experiments to match this magnitude. I'm going to show you an experiment at the end and you see that the effect there is much smaller. So that's a question of how we account for properly for this magnitude. So currently the Euro system is holding almost 40% of GDP of Italian debt. And the target two liability of Bank of Italy against the ECB is 30% of GDP. So it's pretty big. So this target two liability has two key characteristics from our perspective. So this is variable rate. I told you it varies with the corridor set by the ECB. But it's that of infinite maturity. Unless a breakup of the Eurozone happened and people have studied this. That's a big literature on target two balances thinking exactly about what happens with a breakup. But that's not going to be on the table for me. I'm not going to be entertaining a breakup of the Eurozone. I'm going to be studying what happens if the Euro remains as it's currently supposed to. So in that case, this debt never becomes due. We remain on the books of that in the case of Bank of Italy, credit in the case of the Bundesbank. We remain on the books there. It may grow and grow. And that's the other aspect that is interesting. There's not a limit that that can go to 600% in principle to 600% of GDP. And there's no automatic mechanism for why that should ever be repaid in one way or another. Of course, it's still accruing interest. Now, before quantitative easing, this is something that the literature has addressed. That's a camp that says this makes total sense. It's just a counterpart for the reserves that are issued. So yes, if the reserves in Germany blow up, then that's this matching asset that helps the Bundesbank pay the interest that they would have to pay on all these reserves. And that's the target two system is at the heart of making sure that a Euro is a Euro, no matter who's issuing it. Because the moment you put a cap, then there's a question, how does what happens if Bank of Italy hits a cap and cannot issue more euros to its banks? Or vice versa, accept payment. That's the more relevant one and transfer those funds to a German bank. Things become more complicated now because this risk that is coming from buying all these assets is not supposed to be shared. When it was shared, the asset side was kind of boring, and then it was just a matter of giving up properly the payments on the reserves. Now it's different. So now it's time for me to get to the model. So I'm going to have two countries by two because, you know, this is, we want to keep it simple. We don't need 40 countries to make a theoretical point. So the countries are going to be called A and B. Think of A as the country that never defaults and be the country that might or might not default. They each have their own country and sorry, of course, their own treasury and their own national central bank, but the national central banks of country A and B are joined in a currency union. What does that mean? I'll show you in a second. It means that a number of decisions will be undertaken at the level of the currency union. So in particular, the obvious one is it's not each individual central bank that decides how many bonds of their own country they're going to buy. So Bank of Italy cannot go and buy 300% of GDP of Italian debt, not that there is that much, but whatever, you know, 100% of GDP of Italian debt unilaterally. No, that's chosen centrally how much that program is buying. I'm going to abstract from the European Union. I told you it's kind of a small player. I'm also abstracting from the CB because I want to focus specifically on this issue of distribution between national central banks. And the only role there for a central system is making some decisions. I'm going to be explicit about that. So now I'm going to, what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at budget constraints for all these players. I'm going to focus on who's making decisions and looking at various scenarios about how those are going to play out. So here's to begin with the flow budget constraint for a super simplified, of course, to keep things understandable for a national tragedy. So a national tragedy comes into the period with some debt, BIT minus one, which is due. If they repay it in full, that's great. They might default. So it is an indicator function that says that it's equal to one. If they default, then there's some haircut delta that they're going to impose on the creditors. How do they repay this debt? Well, they can raise taxes. I think this really is the primary surplus. I'm not having explicitly government spending in there. So this is the amount by which taxes exceed the spending. Of course it can be negative. It can be a primary deficit. SIT are remittances that are going to come from the national central bank. So these are the profits that are being distributed from the national central bank to the tragedy of country I. And of course they can borrow more. Here government debt is all one period debt. That's because I'm focusing on default risk. My earlier paper with that method was about maturity risk, mismatching maturities between the assets and the liabilities of the central bank. And so there, of course, long term debt is important, but not for the considerations I'm going to make today. So for simplicity, I'm going to have one period debt. As I mentioned, country A never defaults. So it will always be zero country B may default. And of course the interest rate you can see is indexed by I by country I so that can be A or B. And that's, you know, we reflect the risk of default. That was the fiscal authorities. Let me show you first the budget constraint of the Euro system as a whole on the monetary side. And then I'm going to break it up between the two countries. What does the Euro system as a whole do? The main liabilities are going to be currency circulation, MT, so they can finance themselves by issuing more currency, or they can finance themselves by issuing more bank reserves, and those are going to be the XT. Bank reserves may pay interest. It could be positive. It could also be negative as it currently is. With these funds, they're buying bonds of country A, they're buying bonds of country B, and they're potentially buying private assets. You know, think about before all these programs were realized, one of the main assets on the books of the Euro system were loans to banks. And those are still to some extent, although with a magnitude of reserves, that's a little less prevalent now, but that was one of the main factors before. So we're going to have it. I'm going to abstract from default risk on those so you can see those pay interest at the same rate as the risk-free bonds. That also means I'm abstracting from the liquidity reasons for this version at least of the paper that may drive a wedge between, do drive a wedge between the interest rate on German bonds and on private assets. And then of course, the Euro system pays dividends to the two countries, country A and country B. So this is period by period. You can sum up all these periods and compute a present value budget constraint from now to the infinite future for the Euro system. And this is what it looks like. It says the Euro system is currently sitting on some assets, bonds issued by country A, bonds issued by country B, the private assets. It has some liabilities on its books, currency and bank reserves. And to the extent that assets are more or less than liabilities, what's on the books? Well, they're going to pay dividends. Think of them as dividends. These are sign language transfers that they're paying to country A and B, not in this period, but in all future periods as well. So that's a present value. B0S is kind of stochastic discount factor. That just means it's a way of taking into proper account the discounting. And they're also making profits to the extent that government bonds pay positive interest rate and currency pays zero interest rate. That's one source of profits now and for the indefinite future. Of course, you want to discount all those profits. They're part of the assets of running a central bank. Same for bank reserves to the extent that bank reserves pay an interest that is below the interest on the assets that the Euro system has on its books. So that's another source of potentially another source of profits. Now there's a term highlighted in red. This term is what happens captures the following. So what happens if the Euro system rolls over? It's that for the indefinite future and never never asks the treasure is to pay it back. That's something that we usually don't think about. And that's a good reason. If I'm a private individual right then the European system. I don't want to roll over my assets indefinitely.  That's no point in holding assets and never ever ever touching them again. Normally, if we think about a central bank, it's a little less clear because kind of the central bank and the treasure are united in a single budget constraint. So does it really matter if they do? And the answer is if there's one treasure in one national central bank, the answer is no. And I'm going to show it to you right now. Because if you consolidate the fiscal authorities of the Eurozone, that's a matching term here. So it doesn't matter. Think of it this way. It doesn't matter if the ECB remits its profits period by period to the Treasury, or it just accumulates ever expanding bonds and never asks the Treasury to pay them back. It's the same thing. It's resources that the Treasury does not have to come up with with taxes. And so normally when we do one national central bank and one national treasury, we neglect this term because it's kind of without loss of generality to think that these profits are paid out. Things are different now because there are two countries in my model. So the question is which country's debt is blowing up over time matters? If the ECB holds only one type of those assets, that's the Treasury that gets to expand its balance sheet. And so that's part of what's going to happen. So now it's time to break up that Euro system into the national central banks. So the only difference here is thinking about who's choosing what and what does break up means. So we have currency issued by the Euro system as a whole. That's chosen. So MIT is chosen by the Euro system. How much currency there is out there? The only thing is it's a liability that is shared. So it's shared according to the capital key. For bank reserves, likewise, the amount of bank reserves is another thing that is chosen at the ECB level. Now exactly the split is not chosen at the ECB level. That's going to be driven by the demand for bank deposits that could be asymmetric between Germany, Italy, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, and so on and so forth. But the overall amount XIT is XT, the sum of the XITs is chosen centrally. Now that's this tau IT that precisely captures the fact that if there's more demand of bank deposits, that's going to mean the country party of that is going to be a target to asset. And so tau IT is the target to balance for the Bundesbank that will make sure that it will somehow restore symmetry to the extent that the differences in XITs are driven by differences in. In the demand for deposits. We're going to be interested in the counter party, which is what happens if there are differences in the assets of these national central banks. And so let's take a look at the assets. The assets are the bonds that are bought, so B bar IT, that's the bonds of country I bought by the national central bank of country I. And those are potentially subject to default. That's going to be the key question I'm going to be after. Now the amount B bar I is under control of the ECB system as a whole. The size of the PSPP and PPP is chosen centrally. What's not chosen centrally is the default. So that's one of the things that is under control of each individual country. The other aspect is how these profits are distributed out. The timing of those profit payments and potentially the amount of those profit payments is under control of the individual central banks. I'll come to that in a second. So those are the two elements, the default and the seniority remittances that are under control of the national central banks. That's where everything is going to play out. Now, where's the valve? So suppose the haircut delta is imposed. Where is what's going to happen? And that's the question I'm going to come after now. So what I did here is just I rolled over again that period by period budget constraint forward into a single present value budget constraint. Recognizing that if there's a default, say by the Italian tragedy today, that has an effect on the assets of Bank of Italy and that could mean that various things are going to happen either now or in the future. It doesn't have a loss, doesn't have to be covered immediately, but it has to be something that makes up for the shortfall. So let me first tell you what is supposed to happen according to the if the risk is not to be shared. So the risk of this loss has to remain with the Italian taxpayer. Well, the answer is simple. What should happen is that the present value of transfers from Bank of Italy to the Italian tragedy should go down. So the red highlights this adjustment. So there are fewer assets because there's been this haircut. So now Bank of Italy realize the loss and their holdings of Italian debt. If they're going to remit less profits to the Italian tragedy in a matching amount, that's the end of the story. So that means, you know, the Italian tragedy has imposed this loss on some private creditors and that presumably, well, that definitely will not have to be paid by taxes. But to the extent that he imposed losses on Bank of Italy, that will still come from taxes because it just means that Bank of Italy will remit fewer profits and therefore that will have to be covered with with taxes. This is going to work fine if the losses are not too big. Things become more complicated. If you get to the point at which you need these transfers to actually go negative, which means you need a recapitalization from the Italian tragedy to Bank of Italy, because the assets, the remaining assets including future profits are not enough to cover for this loss. If that happens, then you would need a recapitalization. The question is, would that recapitalization be forthcoming? So currently, the rules for how these profits are distributed from Bank of Italy are that 60% of its profits annually are emitted to the tragedy, minus a little bit of that goes to the banks that are the technical owners of Bank of Italy, but the residual goes to the tragedy. The 40% are kept as reserves. So Bank of Italy has some initial cushion that you can use, which is a non-trivial cushion, as I'm going to mention. But once that's done, it's not clear. There's no automatic provision for recapitalization. So then, if somehow these profits don't adjust, these remittances don't adjust enough, and you can think these rules could be changed. These are set at the national level. They're not set at the central level. So what if those rules change? For some reason, what are the other two escape valves? One is the target to liability. So suppose Bank of Italy just does not change its remittances, or it doesn't change them enough to account for the losses that they make. One of the things where this wood shop is in an ever-expanding target to balance. So those could explode over time. And then what happens if those explode? Well, these target to liabilities are zero sum game between Bank of Italy and the rest of the euro system. So somebody else is having exploding assets, and they will have to cut their own transfers to their own treasury. So to be concrete, let's say the Bundesbank would have to cut transfers to the German treasury. What if they don't cut either? Well, budget constraints are budget constraints. So something has to give. At that point at the central level, the central bank policy would have to change. What's the most obvious change? Increase money printing. But of course, if you start touching money printing, then there is an inflation implication. So one of the implications, if you're not willing to tolerate this ever-exploding imbalance, is having higher inflation. And inflation is also a shared risk. Now, that was the case in which bank reserves and assets pay the same interest rate. So there's no profit to be made. So you see this is the present value of profits from having issuing bank reserves and from having target to liabilities. These are the same. This term is not there. If that term is there, so if you actually the bank reserves or target to liabilities pay interest, there is below the risk-free rate of the economy. Then what happens is, if you have a target to liabilities, you're actually earning extra senior edge profits. You're appropriating a greater share of the senior edge profits that accrue to the system as a whole. And that's the alternative. So it may be that if the interest rate on bank reserves, so the policy rate of DCB sufficiently low, there's no reason why target to liabilities should explode over time. What's going to happen instead is that Bank of Italy is going to earn bigger senior edge profits on their liabilities. So they're going to essentially rebate less money to these Bundesbank and the Bundesbank correspondingly will earn a smaller share of these profits accrue to the system as a whole. And that's another backdoor way in which the common budget constraint comes in and leads to mutualized risk. So I think I should wrap up. I'm going to briefly mention the quantitative work is a work in progress. We do have an example. It's a very, very, very benign example. And I'll show you to make that point and show you what happens to the target to balance. It goes down. So this is a default by Italy that causes the target to balance to go down just by a factor of 3%. I showed you that we're sitting at minus 30%. This is minus three. Just with minus three, you get a spillover of 9% of the fiscal cost of the default being borne by the taxpayers of countries other than Italy. And so, you know, as you design more stressful scenarios, the risk sharing is going to be correspondingly bigger. So the point of the talk here is that assessing these risk sharing principles is complicated. It depends on a lot of details. And the key question here remains about thinking possibly about coordinating and limiting remittance policies at the central level. If you have a stronger risk sharing. And so let me leave it at that and open the floor to questions. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marco. Wonderful, wonderful discussion. And of course, it's a fascinating topic which goes to the heart of monetary union. I know that there is a question from Leo Fontaten, who always says that we need more papers who really disentangle and look at money, not just a single country, single treasury, single singles and the bank, but which look into the details of monetary union. And Leo asks the question, what is your view on the underlying normative question? How to design QE in the euro area? Was the euro system right to design QE in a way which attempts to avoid loss sharing in the first place? Okay, so normative, my job is an economist. I'm on the positive side. I mean, I do have normative papers from a more abstract perspective because here the key question is a political question. Do we want more risk sharing? Well, I mean, we can talk about in principle, if you have an abstract risk, people like insurance. So that sharing risk is great. But then of course, we all realize that the moment we do that, there are also moral hazard questions. And so it's whether the moral hazard is big enough or small enough is what this is about. We know that the European, we have rules at the European level. We talked about them in the panel at the beginning of this conference. We know that they are imperfectly, certainly imperfectly enforced, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for reason are more complicated. And so do we believe that those are enough to get rid of the question of moral hazard? Presumably, when DCB set up this arrangement of limiting risk sharing, they were concerned that these rules were not strong enough. It's not my call. It's somebody, it's the politicians call at that point to evaluate whether these rules are not sufficient and also how they believe they will be enforced. Thank you, Marco. That of your reply, of course, goes to the heart of the political policy issue. As you say with your title, 40 budget constraints for 18 National Center, 19 National Center Bank, 19 Treasury. That of course shows that whatever happens in this respect when it comes to, you mentioned, virtualization, or who is losing, who is gaining, we are in this gray zone between the monetary policy center bank balance sheet, which is of course governed by the decisions of the center bank governing council, and the kind of fiscal implications that can have and which can be heterogeneous across countries. So certainly that is the issue. In this respect, there are some academics who say, if there's no this sharing in case of default, your examples of one country default, then if the center bank has more assets, then if we start, say, there is 100 in a country, and there is a fundamental risk of default, say, if this happens, if the bad state occurs, there would be a 40% debt relief needed. So that would mean 100 goes down to 60, 40% haircut. Now, if you have the same fundamentals, but the center bank has bought, say, 20% of the bonds, if a 40 haircut is needed or debt relief is needed to restore that sustainability in the bad state of the world, then with 20 on the budget of the National Center Bank, the haircut would have to be 50 on the private sector. So to have the same net deduction in debt or the same net support for the future taxpayer. So that people arguing, as Daniel draws, if that is the case, then purchases by the center bank in such a monetary union concept, in such a monetary union situation, if fundamentals were given, should increase the default premium which the market imposes on those bonds which are still outstanding, because they have to fear that in case of a bad state of the world happening and the default infrastructure happening, the private debt has to be hit harder in order to achieve the same debt relief for the taxpayer of the county council. What is your reply to this? I think that's correct to the extent that the risk is not shared. So think about one individual country to the extent that the bonds that end up in the hands of the individual central bank can be defaulted on. Well, the one thing, let me qualify that. I was a little bit too rash. There's always an escape valve and actually thinking about the individual country is a great example. So typically what happens in those cases is inflation is the escape valve. So if we do observe all the countries that ran large inflations, they ran large inflations because the central bank was buying lots of government bonds, in particular hyperinflations. That's a mechanism. Sometimes they bought private bonds too. So for instance, in the famous German hyperinflation, the rice bank was buying government paper if I remember correctly, discounting it at 15% while inflation was so medium percent. I don't remember the exact number. So as you can imagine, everybody went and discounted that. So although government bonds other than some collector items were in the hands of the rice bank, there was a limited amount of discounting of private stuff at 30%. Of course, that also was discounted as much as possible. So one way out is it doesn't have to be an actual haircut on the private bond holders. It could be inflation. How does that play out in the euro system? That's different because in the euro system, inflation requires a choice that is made centrally. And so at that point, you sort of have three mechanisms. One is either these remittances from Bank of Italy to the Italian Treasury really go down. And then yes, there is potentially an increase in the risk of what remains on the books of the private sector. Or somehow the European institutions agree on larger risk sharing. That's another possibility. Or the third is the larger risk sharing happens because that's a little bit of extra inflation. And that is a third possibility. Which one is going to play out? I don't have a crystal ball on just telling you the three options. No, no, no. Thank you very much. This is of course very, very good reply. And nobody has a crystal ball, but therefore everybody in the euro system, especially, is working to avoid the bad scenario where this default could ever be a realistic risk, a realistic risk. There are other very good questions. One from Gennad Mule, who says it's a great paper and he asked for the clarification. Is there also a transfer across countries in the monetary union implicit in the EU in the absence of the foreign banks? Just because the banks differ in how they transfer profits to their treasury? So you can argue whether it is or it isn't. But it's true. So here's one thing that is true. To the extent that Italy does no default and Germany does not default. And now Bank of Italy is buying Italian bonds that pay a higher interest rate than German bonds. Bank of Italy is earning extra profits and those profits are not shared. So on the upside, I think it's pretty likely that I don't see why it's not Bank of Italy is going to remit those extra profits to the Italian Treasury. And so, yes, in that sense, you can think that has distribution implications. Bank of Italy is making more profits than the German Bundesbank. But of course, you can also at the same time say, look, we are in the state in which the Italian debt is being repaid. Those interest payments are being made by the Italian Treasury to the Bank of Italy. They come back to Bank of Italy to the Italian Treasury. Is that a transfer from the German taxpayer to the Italian taxpayer? You can argue, no. Certainly, if the risk is isolated. So if in the law scenario, it's the Italian taxpayer that is on the hook, that's exactly the way it should be working. But yes, that is saying that the upside is not being shared. If the downside is being shared, that's kind of an extra worry that you may have. Jermij, you're muted, Klaus. No idea. Thank you for the answer. And I would just add that going back to the question from Leo Fontanen, that the ECB having decided that most of the risk is not shared, of course, has in that sense, it has been helpful to the Italian Treasury because what you mentioned, the higher interest rates on Italian bonds are not shared within the system, but they accrue only to the bulk of it to the Italian Treasury. And I would say from a principle point of view, conceptual, to the extent that you would argue that this risk premier are to some extent not reflecting fundamentals, but some kind of distortions or some kind of self-fulfilling too high risk premier. It is also fully justified that they go back to, justified from a normative point of view that they go back to the Italian Treasury. The next question which I have here is from, I read them out both, we still have five, six minutes, one is from Chacopo, can you rationalize the role of official assistants, for example, ESM knowns in your analytical framework, were thinking, for example, about the Greek debt crisis. And if Pappar has a question, the paper is very good, she says, as it is, I have learned a lot, but I was wondering how your model would fit the Greek crisis as well. So here, if you take your model and look back at the Greek crisis, what would you say? It's a very interesting thing, and I mentioned one thing, but I guess you know it certainly, that in the case of before, in order to inform the audience, I have been there, so before the Greek debt structuring, there was the S&P program of the ECB. The S&P program was not risk-shared. Once the Greek program was finalized in May 2010, one week later or so, the market was very volatile, and so the ECB decided to buy Greek bonds, although Greek was in the program, and Portuguese and Irish bonds. And two years later, there was this PSI, the debt structuring of Greece, but at that point in time, the ECB, the EU system, and of course the finance ministers agreed that there would be no default on the Greek bonds which the ECB had bought in order to stabilize the market. So that is of course, in the history, a different situation than the one which we currently have and which you were discussing. So much to the background, so now how do you see it? So I think, personally, this is strictly my view, but I like the idea of relying more on institutions like DSM and explicitly making more transparent where risks are or are not shared. I find the current arrangement a bit opaque. Now, sometimes opacity is deliberate. I'm not going to take a stance on whether that's the case here or not, but if the risk is to be shared, certainly I would like that to happen in an institution that is designed with explicitly that purpose and where people can debate about the merits and costs and benefits, we talked about those. In the case of Greece, as you mentioned, we don't really know the scenario that I am analyzing didn't play out because the ECB was made whole. And so we would not know how this would have played out if the ECB had incurred losses. The other thing, so that part, I didn't go back and do that in time, but you were mentioning that that risk was also not supposed to be shared at that time? You're muted again, Klaus. It was no, no. When the S&P was designed, there was no mentioning, as far as I know, but colleagues can correct me, I think there was no mentioning that the S&P risk would not be shared. But the point was, it was not that the S&P purchases were on the sender bank balance sheet, so also the Bank of Greece and under the contract, I think some of them. That was not the case. They were on the ECB balance sheet. And that became, as a certain surprise, not only to the market, but also to the IMF, that the ECB said, or that in the end, the ECB was made whole, which means, of course, everybody was made whole, the whole system. Nobody, not the Greeks and the Bank had to suffer any losses and also not the ECB itself. But there was, it's interesting from a political economy perspective, Marco, there was later a development where the profits which the ECB made on the profits, on the bonds, because they were purchased, not at zero interest rates. That's a significant interest rate. And the Greeks honored this debt. The Greeks had to pay this debt because there was no haircut. And there was an agreement that the profits which the little system ECB made because Greece was honoring this debt, these profits were given back and not by the ECB because that would have been money for financing. But the pressure is of all member states agreed that they collectively would give back the profits to Greece. So in a sense, that was, I think, a nice institutional decision just to honor the fact that Greece would pay back its debt to the ECB and then the pressure is said, we don't want the profit from the senior from this, we give you back the senior exchange. That was, say, kind of, and this giving back was done in a way that it was linked to progress in the program or to the funds and so on. And that was assessed by the Unicode and the ECB and so on. So it's quite an interesting twist. So asking the question, Greece gives you even more. Can you provide a second paper to apply your model? Any further, say, I'm looking here for the question. No, there are no further questions. So a final reaction by you, Marco, to what we just discussed or more generally? No, I want to thank you for organizing this great session and it's been a pleasure. I think we kind of learned the details again, looking at Greece, the details of how these things play out matter a lot and so it's worth thinking about. Okay, thanks a lot. I would want to thank you, Marco, and you, Efi, and Röhn for the wonderful discussion we had this afternoon. I would like to thank the organizers. I see here on the screen just Jacopo but also the other colleagues who were working with Maria and Yonano and Demos, I mean. And Leo, I think I have not forgotten anybody. Thanks a lot everybody for organizing this and thank you for Marco, Efi, and Röhn for the wonderful discussion. I wish everybody a good evening and afternoon. Jacopo, do you want to make any further remarks? I just want to thank also on the side of the organizer, all the participants. I think it was a great afternoon and thanks in particular to the speakers and the discussant. And just to mention that I hope we hope to see you all tomorrow at 2 p.m. We resumed with the keynote lecture by Ricardo Reis and have a good evening. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks, Klaus, for an excellent chairman. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye.


To blend means to smoothly put parts of a word together to say them as a whole word. Cat, tul, cattle. In this video, the teacher uses active participation strategies. Students use hand movements to represent syllables and respond corally. Students are provided repeated practice opportunities. Now we're going to take the parts of the words and put them together to make one whole word. Ready? Pencil. Pencil. Mother. Mother. Mother. Laughter. Laughter. I love that I can hear the front rows, let me hear the back rows. Flower. Flower. Let's whisper it to me. Snow wing. Okay, so hit it in your voice level two. Father. Father. Kindness. Kindness. Member. Member. Dinner.


Right, so hey guys and welcome to another flask tutorial today's tutorial We're gonna be learning how to pretty much serve up a static folder that exists in our directory and Also, we're gonna learn how to post content on our website Dynamically so in the last tutorial we learned about how to render out HTML templates But we only learned about how to render out kind of static templates So in this tutorial we're gonna be learning how to use Dynamic templates and pretty much grab information from the Python file and then serve it in our HTML file So first off what I'm gonna go ahead and do is open up visual studio code and then I'm going to open up the My website folder which pretty much stores all the files for my website and my web server So I'm gonna grab it and then drag it in here Cool, so now if you guys haven't already watched part one and part two of this tutorial It's gonna be linked in the description So I recommend you guys watch those short tutorials first because this is all linked and it will make more sense if you watch Those first if you already have a bit of knowledge about flask you can carry on watching this So first off what I'm gonna do is zoom in a bit so that it's easier for you guys to see Cool, so what we have going here is the app.py file which pretty much has the Blueprint to the different routes that we have on our web server and then we have a separate app.blueprint file or App underscore blueprint.py file, but which pretty much stores the different routes We have on our web server and then it stores the render function for rendering the different HTML files that we have So in the last tutorial that's what we did. We pretty much rendered static HTML files to the browser So what we're going to be doing today is first off we're going to be actually Creating a static folder Destination on our web server. So what do I mean by that? So technically what I mean is by default if I go ahead and run flask So I'm gonna go ahead and open up cmd. I'm going to go in my directory. So cd Desktop and my website and in here I'm gonna do set flask Underscore debug equals one now I'm setting this up because I don't want to keep refreshing the server every time I make a change to my app.py or any other related files If I enable debugging flask automatically detects those changes So what I'm gonna do next is type in flask run and Then it should pretty much start running the web server on the address right here So my local machine on port 5000 So I'm gonna open up Chrome and then I'm going to run my File or the link that I have and as you see We are greeted to our index.html page because that's the initial forward slash route So we have this So we're not gonna be obviously making the templates for the public because why would we want the users to view these files? In here because they are meant to be served according to the link that the user types into the URL bar So we're not going to be making this folder public This can stay private because that's private information only the server needs to know about So we're gonna go ahead and create another folder for okay.  So obviously products are gonna have images So we need an images folder where we store images of our products. So I'm gonna go ahead and Chrome and type in T shirt And then we'll just grab Let's just grab a t-shirt image from somewhere here So let's just go with Let's just go with this one for now.  Okay. I can't really right-click there for some reason I'm gonna go ahead and save this image as and then I'm gonna go to my website and then the Directory that I just created which is called images and it's in my website So I'm gonna go ahead and save it over there And this extension is J FIF so you need to remember the extension of the image J FIF so JPEG So save that up and now that you're done You need to go back to your app.py file where you are initializing your flask object and you need to pass in an argument So the argument you're actually gonna pass in is called It's called comma gonna put a comma in there to pass an argument and the argument is going to be static folder Equals to and then the name and the directory of your folder So I'm going to go in my current directory by typing in dot forward slash That just means we're in our current directory and then I'm going to make the images folder available So now that I've done that as soon as the flask server restarts We need to specify what content we're looking for so the image we have in that folder is actually called images dot J FIF So if I actually go ahead and type in that we're able to see it But by default we wouldn't be able to see it now that we've made this folder available We are able to access the different files that are inside But if I just type in the name of the directory itself, nothing will show up because it's not allowed to show the contents of that directory It's only allowed to show the content if the name is directly accessed. So if I type in images dot J FIF which is the direct link to this image in that images folder That's the only time it's gonna work. Cool. So now that we've learned how to make a static folder available to Our clients. We're gonna go ahead and do is learn how to render out dynamic pages So I'm going to go back to my default page, which is the store right here So let's assume we have a section on this index.html page Which shows the user the most popular products that are being sold on the website And then it will show the user the name of the product the size of the product and then the price Since it's merchandise so clothing. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead into my app app underscore blueprint Dot pi file which is where all the routing is now obviously the routing for my index page is right here So this is where we're going to be dealing with the information But before that we're going to go ahead and create a quick variable Which is pretty much going to act as a dummy database, which is going to store the information about our products Now the information is going to be read from this variable. It's going to be a list type Which is going to store a dictionary of different product information So what we're going to do first is type in variables just to just so we know what's going on and then in there We're going to type in popular Products so we're going to create an array called popular products and in that array We're going to have a set of different dictionaries. So my first dictionary the name of the product is going to be Let's say Dear hand you do now T-shirt, so I'm going to make it really basic then maybe we have another another Key value pair in there called size Size where my size is going to be set small for this product and then another key value pair Which is going to include the price so price and the price is going to be Let's just say five for now now Also, we need to include an image link in here so that we can grab the image later So I'm going to do a key value pair for an image So the key is going to be called image and then the value is going to be the link to the image So the link to the image would be images folder and then what was the name of it again? It was images dot J F I F Now I'm going to set the same image that I downloaded for all of my products if you guys want different images You guys have to change this image Link that is specified in here So that's this whole dictionary that we've just created in our array is only for one product So that's for the product called your hand Godino t-shirt, which is a size small now I'm going to create two more products in here So I'm going to copy the first line and then paste it twice now make sure that you have commas in here because that's the separator for each Dictionary that is created in our array so it needs to have a comma as a separator now I'm going to keep the titles the same But I'm going to change the size on this one to medium and then I'm going to change the size on the last product to large and Then we're going to change the pride prices site slightly as well So I'll make this 10 because it's a medium bit expensive, but it's fine and then 15 because it's a large so we've pretty much got an Array going here called popular products and we've got dictionaries in there So each dictionary holds information about a specific product cool So now that we have a little database going what we're going to do is actually learn how to Grab this information and then render it out on our index.html page without having to physically type it in So first of what you want to do is where you're rendering the template you want to pass in a new argument and call it popular products and Then equals that to the variable or the list we just created which was called Popular products right here. So now whenever we run this index.html file This popular product array is going to be available to us in the index.html file. So in the actual index file the The popular product array that we've just created up here is going to be available And the name of that variable is set to popular products obviously Now you can change this to products or anything you like But I'm going to go with the name popular products because it's just relevant cool So now that we're done with that what I'm going to do is go ahead and my templates folder and then open up my Index.html file because that's the file that we're working on and it's going to be serving the different products that we have So if I open it up in here now as of now it only has your hand store and best merge in the game pretty cringe But that's fine. So I'm going to refresh. We have an error obviously because Okay, let's see what the error is. I'm going to go back to app.blueprint and Let's see what I say Okay, I don't think it has refreshed since the last time we've saved it So I'm going to go ahead and run it again Refresh, okay, so it is working fine. Cool. So this is what we have We just have your hand store and best merge in the game, which is a pretty static website Now we're going to be adding on the products that we saved in our Popular products array. We're going to be reading all the products from there and then adding them to this file right here Without typing it in manually So to do so what we're going to do is we're going to create a center tag first, which is not good practice But hey, it's not an HTML tutorial we're doing here So products and then this section is going to mark the product section So if I go ahead and refresh the page, I'll show you what I just did It's just created a product section right here now under this title product is going to be all the popular products Actually, let's just call this popular products Popular products and now what I'm going to do under there is going to be starting a loop So in this HTML file, we can actually run code There's going to be run by our flask engine. So the flask engine can interpret this code and pretty much Do dynamic stuff instead of just doing static stuff with it. So we're going to start a for loop So whenever we want to write code, we want to use curly braces and percentage sign One in the start one in the end and then you can write your code in there. So I'm going to write for product in popular Popular products now if you remember We if we go back to app dot blueprint we passed in this popular products argument right here Which is storing the popular products array, which is why we can access it in here We can access the popular products array because we passed it in there Now we don't use the normal format, which would have been using a colon We need to specify where this loop ends actually. So we need to create An end for this loop, which is why we're going to add another code block By doing curly braces and percentage signs in the start and end And then we're going to say end for which means end the for loop Now all the instructions that are going to be one inside the loop are going to be between the start for loop and the end for loop So I'm going to go ahead and create an h3 element in there Which is going to hold the product name. So I'm going to type in product name and then in here What we're going to be extracting is going to be the product name that we gather From our product object. So for each product object in our popular products array We're going to grab the name and display it in here. So whenever you're displaying a variable You need double curly braces in the start and double curly braces in the end And then you can specify the variable name. So I'm going to go with product dot name Obviously because product is the object we're accessing and then dot name is the name of the product So if I show you right here, we did that before dot name Is the name of the product dot size would be the size and then dot price would be the price and the image would be the image directory Cool. So we have gathered the product dot name. Now, let's save this up and refresh to see how we're doing So as I said before popular products, it says and now it's rendering pretty much all the product names from our list So it says product name johan gudino t-shirt and then it says it three times because we pretty much have three products in our popular product array Now obviously the names are the same Because we haven't changed them up. So let's go ahead and display the sizes and prices too So i'm going to for the prices Before we actually do prices actually we can show the image So it will be nice if we would show the image of the product after the product name So let's do image and set the source which of the image So we set the source of the image to product Dot img because dot img Means we're accessing the value of our Img key which pretty much is the directory to the image Cool. So if I go back here as you see dot img is the key and then that's the Link to the image so directory to the image. Let's save this and refresh to see if that works And as you see right here that works flawlessly as well Now all the images are the same because we've added the same image for all three products Now when this when it comes to size and prices It's going to show you different sizes and prices because each product has a different size and a different price So let's go ahead and do that. We're going to go ahead and display the size and the And the price so for this to display the size i'm going to do in a h4 And then i'm going to do double curly braces in the start and end because it's a variable That i'm trying to display and then i'm going to do product dot size because i want to display the size And then i'm going to go ahead and copy this and replace the h4 with a h5 because i want it to be a slight bit smaller than the h4 And then i'm going to do product dot price Cool And then after that our loop will successfully end because it's pretty much showing all the product details for each product that we have And our popular products are rated. So if i refresh this right now as you see right here It's his product name. Johan gidino t-shirt a nice little image small and then five pounds And then it says medium and 10 pounds large and then 15 pounds Now we need to add size and then price here so that it makes more sense So what we're going to do is add some static information. So instead of just showing the product size value, we're going to say Size and then whatever value is grabbed from our array and then we're going to say price And then whatever value is grabbed from our array and obviously we need a pound sign as well for it to make sense So if i refresh this now as you see right here As you see right here, we have our static element that we added which is size and colon And we have another static element price and Price colon and the pound sign. So as you see we have a decent looking or I wouldn't say decent looking but the hyper markup language version of a product store running So technically when you're doing this in a realistic scenario, you would have the data for all of these products in an actual MySQL database. We could do a tutorial on that in the future But for this tutorial, this should be fine because we're just using a temporary data structure where we're using an array to store different dictionaries of products So that was it for today's tutorial guys. Hope you have learned something new and you can Use this to implement your own websites instead of using a data structure like an array you can try using MySQL If you guys liked the video, please make sure to drop a like comment subscribe and share because sharing is quite important Um, I would like to thank you guys for all the support you guys have been showing me recently If you guys would like to support the channel directly, you can do so by signing up as a patron using the patreon link in the description If you do so, you're going to be quite lucky because i'm soon going to be posting a lot of exclusive videos on patreon Such as backend programming and backdoor using python as well So if you're interested sign up using the link in the description Also guys make sure to check out the discord channel and my socials in the description And I will see you beautiful faces in the next vlog tutorial. Peace


Are you guys aware that there are multiple passageways into the Great Sphinx? There is even a huge drill bit stuck in the back of the Sphinx head from an attempt in the 1840s to reach one of these cavities. They've even tried blowing up certain parts of the head and the body causing massive damage during the 1800s. Crude measures were undertaken as the race to reach hidden chambers within the structure reached the point of madness. Did you know there was an ancient grotto at the side of the Sphinx? And during restoration of the ancient wonder, this was covered up by a thick heavy iron trap door and covered by limestone blocks as if it had never even existed. What's that all about? Our curiosity as to what lies beneath the Egyptian monument has not dwindled throughout the ages despite clear attempts to either steal or cover up the ancient history of the Giza Plateau in particular. One aspect of the Great Sphinx at Giza that has somehow been overlooked by authors is the presence of four odd masonry boxes that are situated against the body of the Sphinx at floor level. Two on the north side and two on the south. Just wait till you hear this. August Marietta uncovered the boxes while clearing the sand around the Sphinx in the 1850s. At that time there were five boxes but one on the north side has since disappeared. The arrangement of the boxes is asymmetrical and seems to make little sense. What was their purpose? Incredibly after further excavation of the surrounding area statues were uncovered. Badly worn through time the faces of the statues were worn away but it was obvious they were on top of the boxes around the Sphinx. They even had limestone crowns on them. The statues would have stood an incredible 26 feet tall each. Two at either side of the Sphinx and one at the breast. It was just another stunning example of lost history and it's incredible to think that these statues were simply destroyed during efforts to find secret chambers within the ancient structure. In 1923 department of antiquities engineer Emily Baraz began an 11 year excavation of the Sphinx area. In December 1925 a photograph was made by the team showing the area of the large masonry box on the south side of the Sphinx. Loose stones can be seen, stones cut for repairs, but in the side of the Sphinx body a large gaping entrance or perhaps a grotto is visible. It was covered up in the restoration. Further conservation included lighting the largest fissure on the Sphinx vac with limestone blocks and covering the resulting shop with an iron trap door. He also paved with cement a deep hole on the tops of the Sphinx head. The hole measures approximately 5 feet square and nearly 6 feet deep. An iron trap door was also fitted to the mouth of the hole. It has been theorized that the hole began as a means for it fixing a headdress to the Sphinx in the matter of the new kingdom and was later deepened in search of hidden chambers. So when you look at the Sphinx today you think you're looking at an ancient Egyptian monument and you are, but during the past 300 years or so it was destroyed by humans, drilled by humans, and eventually rebuilt and the passages covered up as well as significant pieces of the Sphinx destroyed before we could understand what they were. Will we ever really understand this ancient marvel? Perhaps the anchors are staring us right in the face and we cannot see what they are because we think far too deeply instead of clearly. Maybe there is a more simple way into the great Sphinx. We recently came across information that there is in fact a blocking stone that has been hidden in plain sight for millennia behind the ear of the Sphinx. Once released it opens up to possibly release information that holds secrets to the universe, the earth, and the ancient civilization that built this place. What do you guys think anyway? Comment below and thank you for watching.


Okay, welcome, Councilor McGee. We have Councilor Barlow here and me, we have a forum of the Board of Finance. So let's dive in. I'll call the Board of Finance to order at 5.33 p.m. Good to see everybody. We have a fair amount of get through. The first item on the agenda is the agenda. It's the agenda and I guess I didn't mean to ask the back and city attorney, Derek, do we, should we be warning, should we be amending the agenda to have a potential executive session on Main Street if we want to keep that possible? That's the attention, yes. All right, great. I would recommend that we make that motion with that. Agenda as amended. Second. Thank you, Councilor McGee. My thinking there being, has been, since we talked in executive session last week about the Main Street project, there's some updates. So let's share and there's still, I think we'll give some public update, but I think there's still, there's still a need for some executive session, discussion potentially, so. With that any further discussion of the agenda? Seeing none, we'll go to vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously and that brings us to item two, welcome Councilor Cenk. Item number two is the public forum. Is there any member of the public that wishes to speak to the Board of Finance? I'm not seeing anyone in the room and we do have Sharon Buescher on line with her hand up, so Sharon, go ahead. Hi, good evening. So this is a difficult day. Last night certainly for the city was a hard one and I'm not gonna dwell on it, but I think as a resident, I continue to worry about what we can do to stem the tide of violence that we're seeing and the people that are dying at the hands of individuals with guns. So I'm pretty devastated by last night, but I'm calling because I wanted to speak about two items on your agenda. The first one has to do with salt procurement and I have no problem with what's being proposed, but I'm not well versed in whether or not we use a salt brine, Mr. Mayor, when we apply it to the roads.  And so as the head of the city and interacting with department heads, I'm hoping that that information, if we do it, I'm hoping that information will get out to the citizens so we know we do it. And if we don't do it, I would like to ask that you ask DPW to consider if that's possible. I know smaller communities, I guess it would be more difficult for them, but I see us as, you know, we're not big, but we are big for Vermont. So I'm hoping that maybe that could be considered if we're not already doing something like that. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'm gonna put under the umbrella of downtown vibrancy. And this is for the board of finance. This is loosely, this really isn't on your agenda, but it's on the public works agenda for Wednesday. And I've already spoken to the commission about this. It has to do with the two hours of free parking for downtown. I feel like our downtown is so fragile that having two hours of parking on Friday and Saturday really doesn't cut it. Now, the reason I'm bringing this to the board of finance is because it's going to be a hit to DPW's budget, but I really think we should be broadening that and making parking free for as much as we possibly can. So to encourage people to come downtown and shop. I just feel like this is a pittance and that's not enough for our downtown. I've been worried about our downtown and businesses in general for quite a while. I know that we need housing, but I don't feel we have to go in one direction and ignore another direction. I feel our businesses are screaming. It's not just church street, it's businesses in general. And we're going to become a bedroom town and I don't think that's what any one of us wants. So please take this request under your consideration as a board of finance and see if there's a way that we can free up more money so more hours can be free and we can encourage people to come down and shop. Thank you. Great, thank you Sharon. And I don't believe there's one other person on Tending Online if you'd like to be recognized to speak to the board of finance. I was going to keep that by hitting the raise hand function. Does not appear that we have any other takers for public forum tonight. So we close the public forum at five 39. And now move to the next segment of the agenda, which is the Consent Agenda. I do know maybe really briefly that since the SALT procurement is on the Consent Agenda Chapin, are you able to give a 15 second explanation of how we use Brian or SALT? Yes, so on the agenda tonight is the SALT procurement, which is the rock salt that we use. We also do mix it with liquid Brian that does reduce the amount of overall salt that we need to use. And I'm happy to follow up with former councilor Buescher to give her more information. Great, thank you for that. With that, I think I would welcome a motion to adopt the Consent Agenda to take the actions that came in. So moved. Thank you, councilor Gay. Second. Seconded by councilor Jeng. Thank you. Any discussion on the Consent Agenda? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Consent Agenda is adopted unanimously. And that gets us to item four, the section of the agenda for approval and recommendation to the city council. We have three items here. The first is a brook and fire park and station alerting item. Welcome, chief. Good evening, everybody. My project lead, deputy chief, Steve, but he is with me. He will give you a presentation tonight. So we're looking for approval and authorization to spend up to $430,000 to replace our existing station alerting system. The funding for this comes out of the 2022 Go Bond. So it's part of the plan that was in place. With this particular system, what we're looking for is reliability and the ability to ensure that our members get notification in the stations as well as out of the stations, which this product is able to do for us. Our existing system was installed, part of it, in 1998. It is beyond its useful life and does not allow for many of the features that we are looking for of it when being reliability. And then the other aspect is being that with the station alerting that includes lights and audio and that element within the stations, including like our older stations is much older than 1998. So I don't know the exact date, but what this system would do would replace the alerting system to include the speakers. It would provide digital notification, audible notification and visual to our responders, included as a part of this, there are digital backwards, so signs of being the stations and there's also a mobile application. So there's some redundancy and it allows for us to provide notifications to on-duty responders as well as a means to recall off-duty personnel. What is interesting with this is that the vendor that we are posing we go with was actually the lowest bidder, but actually provided the most for us. And they were able to do that by using current top technology. The other station alerting vendors who had submitted, they required a lot more hardware. So this particular product, what they use is a wireless ZigBee network and uses commercially available products. So down the road, if we want to expand, we have the capacity and the ability to go down to the hardware store, to buy a Phillips product off the shelf and add it into the system. So we're not relying on a sole source or a vendor to be providing that. As a piece of this, what we also are purchasing is the warranty that provides coverage for the software. It keeps us current and up-to-date so long as we have that service agreement. And that particular warranty what it also does is it covers all of the hardware that we would be purchasing. So that would be, that's a part of our concern now is our current system. There is no warranty. Nothing is covered at any time, it's online. Great, thank you very much. The floor is open for questions, discussion or emotion. Go ahead, Castle Barlow. Thank you. I'm just, you got curious what's the expected light span of the system? So what we've been given for an answer is that they expect the lifetime of it to be as long as we maintain contract service agreement with them. So what is included is as long as there is an agreement and there are changes to their software or the hardware is required to be changed, that we move with them as the company grows. So do we, we stay current. That is not something that we found we would be getting with other products. And that was a big concern for us is we're making a big purchase. We want to be able to ensure that down the road it offers a solution and as long as lifetime possible. So the service level agreement would basically say as long as you were under warranty to be covered but like all software eventually it comes to end of life and is there any provision to tell you when that might be, I mean it's within the contract. I would have to go back. As long as they're in business we will be up to date. That's the assurance that was given to us by the vendor. Go ahead, thank you sir. The biggest question I had when we went visit them was the hardware. Something fails or something goes out of date. What then, am I buying new tablets every, these as long as you have this service we keep all of your hardware updated. Any further questions? Yes. Go ahead, get to Jamie. Yes, and I had the same question as Consular Barlow and now one thing that's not clear is what if the company go bankrupt? I mean, I think as long as it exists and do business we should work with them. But what if now something happened on their end? How will we ensure provision with this contract? Well, I don't know how we would do that with any of the vendors to be honest with you, Counselor. They all are web based, basically. So they all will be required to have some sort of connection and updates and, you know, we are not new to this company. This company has been around for a little while.  They're putting their products in... Boise, Idaho. Boise, Idaho. Detroit. So honestly, we have a feeling that this company is very solid and we're comfortable with the product that they're offering.  I can't, but I also can't guarantee that of any vendor that we've dealt with. All right, thank you. Thank you. That's for me. Thanks, Mayor, and thank you both for the presentation tonight. I heard a little bit about this a couple of weeks ago, and I'm glad that we're at a point where we're approving it. And I think it's kind of rare that we make these vast improvements to some of the systems that operate in the city. It's great to see that this is scalable and also has so many benefits for the membership as well. So with that, I'd be glad to make a motion if there are any other questions. Is that good? Great. Any further discussion? Yes, Mr. Mayor. You're going to answer, Jack. Yeah, this is for our city attorney and was just wondering what type of provision should we put in place for the security of the city if something goes wrong? Well, I am working with the fire department to evaluate the contract. But Councillor James, as you brought up, if they were to go into bankruptcy, like any type of breach of contract, we would have those provisions to make sure that the city is protected and in which case we would evaluate it. And if there is a civil remedy that we can take them to court and pursue to make sure that we recoup any lost expense, the city may have already put out if they cannot provide the scope of services that they're under contract with us for, then we would evaluate that and make sure that we take that remedy. That's helpful. Thank you. Okay. Any further discussion? Vote all those in favor of the motion. Please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Next up is 4.2, Raleigh Art Enterprise Project. Stand tech, design, contract, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, WM, The scope that was already kind of proved previously through the initial decision to select Santa and we would be looking to this amendment, just keeping it within the current budget, operate budget that we have for the project, but we would be looking to amend further amendments would require additional funding at this point as we progress in the project. But all within the anticipated, allowable amount that we have for the forecast for the project. So we just, this is keeping us within, but we'll be back later with another amendment as work progresses. Very good. Thank you. I would like to make the motion as indicated on civic work. Thank you for the update. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the records. Brian pine director of the community and economic development office. And before you tonight is a request to the existing contract to both allow for more time using the services of white and work as well as to increase the funding allocated to that work. Work continues to be pretty, pretty deep as well as somewhat broad because it includes both TIF districts and this very different issues facing our districts. We have we have expertise in in our consultant that is very unusual and is extremely difficult to to build within in house. So it is our recommendation that we continue to work with white Burke. In order to advance these important projects for the city. I think the investment is eligible for reimbursement under TIF related cost rules. And I would urge your approval, but answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Brian. For questions, emotion. I'm just happy to make the motion. Great. Thank you to a second. Second by Councillor Chang. Any further discussion? Seeing no vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. And that is. That was your passage. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. All right. This brings us to the last time on the agenda, which is update regarding. Great streets. Main Street. And. Norm. Here. So this is an item. Obviously the main street project is a major project that we've been working on for many years and is getting close to construction. Sorry, I think I'm going to say that. We've been working on it for many years here as well. And we had an exact session discussion with the full city council about this project last week. And we are moving towards potential council action next Monday. We wanted to have some, I give up that's much of a public update as we could tonight. And then I do think it would be advisable to continue the executive session discussion with the board. And just to clarify there. We are not recommending action on these other contracts to that there will be a number of related contracts to the main construction contract. And we're going to save recommendations for all of them until next week. That's correct. So with that one of you. I'll move on to the next question here. On the agenda. And I'm going to start with the general public. And I'm going to move on to the public and give it up to the owner. Great. I have permission to share. Well, I'm doing that just to note that we will be having a special board of finance to do that next week. So not currently on the calendar, but stay tuned. Laura's queuing up a presentation. I'll just say that as with any construction project, there's far more than the construction contract that needs to be approved. We have the design contract that needs amendment and we have resident engineer and outreach services that are all part of a successful package. And so senior engineer Willak will walk through those components here so that the board of finance has as much information in advance of the 20th as possible. Thank you. So as we talked about at the council, we're really right on our current schedule, which is what we presented to the public, the council and other interested parties back in the beginning of 2022. We're at the point we're about to head into construction for Main Street. With that comes a lot of work from a lot of different entities and in the interest of being able to present and provide the information in a more succinct way other than the current seven pages that were in front of you. We wanted to just highlight that here. So our design consultant for VHB, we are looking to amend their contract to add some more support services during construction to help with managing the contaminated soils that exist in the corridor as well as adding specialty inspection for water sewer. It's a very involved project and our group is already, group at DPW is already taxed and really having the specialty expertise is critical to having our water supply constructed in a really safe way. We also have some changes that occurred during our bid period and need to amend the contracts to allow them some time to be able to update the plans. Revised totals and contingency are all what are currently in the memo, but I have them here for clarity. The other contracts that we look to revise is with EIV technical services. They are inspection and outreach consultant. When we procured EIV in spring of this year to help us through the bid phase, the winter work was not known as part of the contractor's schedule. And so we were adding in time to be able to cover the winter work, which is anticipated with the contractor's work as well as a field office for them so that they have a location approximate to the construction site. The third service that we are looking to amend is with our artists. So we have four artists that were previously selected as part of the project to provide four pieces of art throughout the corridor. The city council heard this back in April of this year for their phase one contract. We felt it important to bring all of it through the Board of Finance and City Council knowing that we would be back to you asking for their design and fabrication contracts, which is what we're here for today highlighted as phase two. So this will be adding the ability for them to fabricate their pieces and install. Total public art budget is $500,000. Last we are looking, we'll look for the ability to sign an MOU with the Burlington Electric Department. They will be providing removal of the existing street lighting installation and energization of the new decorative street lighting for their lighting policy to highlight in the memo, which could be confusing if you're not intimately familiar with the lighting policy, is they provide us a decorative lighting price, which is what the project is expected to pay, but they do allow an offsetting standard light credit, which makes it a little bit more affordable to add decorative street lighting out to the corridor, a little less than $400,000 for that. Which then brings us to our construction project. Jaypen. Yeah, so as the mayor discussed, we are inactive negotiations with the apparent vote better as the Ireland. There are some items here in the negotiations that preacher disclosure of which would put the city at a disadvantage. So we'd be asking the board to make a finding and then after the finding, move into executive session where we can brief you fully on where we're at with those negotiations. Thank you, Jaypen. I hope that they would say here in our recession we are obviously facing a situation where there are some challenges with the bid and we are considering possible scope changes to manage our way through the situation. And before that's the nature of I think it's important that we be able to discuss such potential changes in a protected space. But of course, before action, any changes would be laid out and be very clear as to what the board and other councils may ask to improve. So that's the nature and that's what we're doing here. I'm happy to try to answer questions about the presentation before going into executive session or off on motion upon to make that finding. I just ask that that presentation be added to the back. I'll get posted on that on the scorecard. Absolutely. Okay. Councilor McGee. Do we have motion language for the session? Yeah. We do and as soon as the presentation's back up. You need to note the staff. I've got a dream for finance. Team TPW, we'd like to have Laura Wheelock and we're involved with Leah Durie's and Brian Pine here for the corridor. Are you planning to start? No, okay. Okay. So that was five folks. Great. Okay. So did I make that motion yet? I am. I'm happy to move to make a specific finding that premature general public knowledge of negotiations regarding the main streets, great streets, construction contracts would clearly place the city at a substantial disadvantage. Is that? One motion and then we do the second one or? Yes, you would take that first motion, vote on it and then move. Okay, thank you for that motion. Is there a second? Second. Further discussion? All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. I heard, just want to confirm that Councilor Jang and Councilor McGee and Councilor Barlow so that motion passes unanimously and then we'll take the second finding, second motion, Councilor McGee. Based upon that finding, I move that we enter into executive session pursuant to one VSA 313A1A. Seconded by Councilor Barlow, discussion. Seeing none, let's go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. That is unanimous and with that, we are now in executive session and the vote has been cleared.  I think it will come from, Catherine's going to send it but it may show up in your email as being from Jordan and click on that and back into it. Thank you. Thank you. It's coming from who? Jordan Orca.