policies going on in the markets and what should be done about it. Yesterday we listened to Olivier Blanchard on fiscal policy and so today financial markets. I will invite everyone to shoot questions via the chat button. You can just share them with everybody and I will then group them by topic and give them to Daryl so you don't have to multitask too much Daryl. It's difficult enough with this technology. So we're aiming for about a 45 minute presentation and then some Q&A at the end. So with that we go over to you Daryl and thank you so much for doing this. Luke, thank you so much. It's a great opportunity to engage with you and to find out what kinds of issues you're thinking about as well. So I hope this will be lively. I'm not going to present a paper but rather just a selection of issues that have come up in my policy conversations since the crisis began that might be relevant to what you're thinking. I'm not really sure. My focus is on US central bank policy. So what I'm going to do is share the screen in a moment, go through a list of the issues and then dive a little bit more deeply into each but not in extremely fine detail and invite a conversation about some of these issues. I'm actually making a related conversation this afternoon with the Fed. And so this will be a good chance for me to find out how central bankers are thinking about some of these issues. So at this point let me try to share my screen. Ana Maria was very helpful in teaching me how to do this. Can somebody verify that you're actually seeing my screen? Yes, of course. Okay, good. So there's one issue in here that I think you'll agree should be treated as confidential. So I mark these slides preliminary and confidential. So here's the issues that I think are worth discussing maybe in rank order of interest or importance. So the first one is a concern that's arisen in the United States with the exceptional growth in central bank deposits over the last month. Now over a trillion of additional reserves in the US Federal Reserve System. And what happens as the Fed continues to expand its balance sheet with the impact of the leverage ratio rule, those reserves will begin to crowd out credit provision and market making inventories unless something is done. And the Fed has already taken some actions to relieve this crowding out effect by relaxing the leverage ratio rule. But that's not necessarily going to work and I'm also wondering what other central banks may be doing in this area as they expand their own balance sheets. And central bank deposits start to impinge on commercial bank balance sheet space under the leverage ratio rule. So we'll come back to that. The second issue, and this is the one that I think should be treated as confidential, is the idea that as banks start to experience losses, they will tend by in order to maximize shareholder value they will tend to react to their leverage and risk based capital requirements by reducing their balance sheets rather than by expanding the amount of capital. In other words, if you think of a capital ratio requirement as having both a numerator capital and a denominator assets, banks can maintain their capital ratios by reducing assets rather than increasing capital as they start to lose money. And I want to discuss the possibility, and this is quite hypothetical, of adding a temporary floor on the quantity of capital in euros as opposed to a ratio based requirement. And I'm doing some modeling of this right now that I'll describe although the results are not quite ready yet. This started last weekend because of the interest in this topic. The third topic area is how to think about big bank credit spreads during a stress period like this as a gauge of bank quality. And I've been watching bank equity levels, at least to market value of equity levels are extremely low, but credit spreads are surprisingly muted. And in order to try to disentangle the implications for the solvency or risk of banks, we have to remove the effects of credit or assumptions about state support to try to take those out of the credit spreads and see what the credit spreads might be telling us. And I've been doing some work on this for the United States, but my work on this for your with on the European scene is in progress. I don't have any empirical results yet, but I want to tell you what I'm doing. And then time permitting, which may not happen. A couple of other issues that I've been thinking about policy issues. One is pro cyclical margin requirements. As yet, I've noticed in Europe, for example, sovereign credit spreads are also muted. But that leaves an opportunity for in the event that some sovereign credit spreads start to rise for some pro cyclicality in the assignment of haircuts and margins that could place that could magnify stresses. And then finally, I have some concerns on behalf of, you know, thinking about central bank policy makers as they face in the United States. The request from the government to fund corporations with subsidized loans in order to preserve jobs, which is a beneficial objective, but may cause some issues for the Federal Reserve in terms of its mission and its political independence. So I can come back to those last two issues, time permitting and interest permitting. And I'm going to go back to the very first issue now, which is the effect of crowding out of reserves by reserves of other market making inventories. And I would suggest as we walk into this, that rather than waiting to the very end, that maybe wish, if it's okay with you, Luke, to take comments after each of these topics because they're somewhat separable and people may lose track of what they wanted to ask or the topicality may decline as we go through this. Absolutely. I'm just collecting all the comments via the chat and then we'll pass them on to you. Okay. So on this first topic, the Federal Reserve has added about a trillion dollars of central bank deposits and it's using those newly created reserves to purchase assets, basically taking mostly treasuries, about 1.3 trillion in treasuries and some other assets. And now it's beginning to expand its emergency lending and will continue to use reserves mostly to purchase more assets or to make more loans. And as those reserves are being added, of course, the commercial banking system is a closed system. They have to be held by commercial banks. And those commercial banks are under capital requirements and one worries that there will be space left for banks to provide intermediation and credit provision. At the same time, the customers of banks are drawing on their credit lines and increasing their deposits, which further expands bank balance sheets and puts further pressure on their capital requirements. Now there's some overlap there because some of those deposits are being invested in reserves but not all of them. So as the crisis proceeds and central bank balance sheets get bigger and bigger, the headroom available under the leverage ratio rule is declining. Now one could say the same thing about tier one risk-based capital requirements, but there is something that can be done with respect to the leverage ratio rule, I think. For two reasons. Number one, that's the one that's the leverage ratio rule applies to reserves in the same way that it applies to any risky assets, but reserves are not risky. So there's some space to make adjustments there. Just to give you an example, I went to this week's first quarter report for JPMorgan Chase and their balance sheet is grown by 450 billion in assets in the first quarter, almost all of it due to crisis effects. And at the same time, the headroom that they have available under the supplementary leverage ratio has been reduced by 30 basis points, which is quite a bit. Those SLR numbers are not very volatile normally. They had, for JPMorgan Chase, there had been no change in the previous year and suddenly a 30 basis point reduction in capital according to the supplementary leverage ratio rule. At the same time, loan loss provisions jumped, for JPMorgan jumped up this quarter by 77 percent and they had been dead flat for the previous year. So to have no change four quarters in a row and then a 77 percent increase in one quarter suggests the degree of severity of this crisis on bank earnings. So it happens that JPMorgan Chase is one of those kinds of banks that can continue to earn money even in a crisis and so it doesn't have negative earnings, but maybe for other banks, these losses will further reduce headroom available under capital ratios and something may need to be done about that, which I'll get to later. The Fed was not unaware of this problem and on April 1st it temporarily exempted treasuries and reserves from the supplementary leverage ratio rule for bank holding companies and it hinted that it may exempt treasury repos and we can talk about that hinting. If you're interested, it's quite a nice little back story there and the Fed was very explicit in its temporary revision of regulation Q by saying that they are indeed concerned that as banks accumulate treasuries and reserves due to the crisis, that their incentives and ability to continue providing intermediation to the economy may be cramped. Unfortunately, two other regulators have to sign off for the bank subsidiaries, which are the holders of the reserves. So the FDIC and the OCC, which are the two other large bank regulators in the US, have not allowed exemptions under the leverage ratio rules for the banks themselves. So even though the Fed has mitigated the problem at the holding company level, which includes the dealers, the banks themselves, which also hold the dealers' reserves, continue to accumulate reserves with no relief under the supplementary leverage ratio rule. In my Bafi lecture, I spoke about the fact that this imposing the SLR on things like reserves and treasury repos is counterproductive because these are extremely safe assets and imposing those leverage-based rules on extremely safe assets will have the effect of crowding out intermediation of other sorts. And now the general reasoning that I provided has become kind of exigent. The Fed has only done this temporarily. That's one year. And market commenters are asking, well, how will the Fed exit this temporary relief? I would suggest that it doesn't exit it. And I know this, for some people in the policy community, this is heresy because there are good reasons to have leverage ratio rules. I just think that they are dominated by the bad reasons to have them, the damage that they're causing to intermediation. And I'd be happy to discuss that further. Now, I'm assuming that banks won't issue new equity. I'm going to discuss in a moment the possibility of mitigating that problem, but assuming that banks will not issue new equity, unexempted reserves will eventually crowd out the incentives for banks to offer robust credit provision and market making. I'm not sure that's true in Europe, but I'm pretty sure it's true in the United States where the SLR is bigger for GSIBs, quite a bit bigger. If a central bank or a bank regulator were to say, well, we don't want to exempt reserves because then bank capital levels will go down, I describe in my Bafi lecture how that can be sterilized by increasing other capital requirements and still maintaining the objective of the leverage ratio rule on a system-wide basis. The idea being one calculates how much capital in the system should be based on the leverage ratio rule, but one does not apply the leverage ratio rule to each bank. One simply adds other capital requirements until the objectives of the leverage ratio rule are met on a system-wide basis. This effect can be sterilized. When the Bank of England exempted reserves a few years ago, they did sterilize it by increasing other capital requirements, which I thought was a prudent move, although I noticed that some in the central banking community didn't like the idea that one central bank would depart from the norm set in Basel, and I think there are good reasons for Basel to revisit the whole issue of leverage ratio rules, but that's a longer story. Okay, I'm going to move to the issue of enhancing capital requirements in a moment, but Luke, if anybody wants to comment on this or if there's chat about this issue, we could do that now. Well, there is sort of a more general question, Bero, from Simone Manganelli. How do you, how should we deal with cliff effects related to rating downgrades? So this you may talk about later on prosyclicality issues, but it's a pertinent issue for discussion in Europe, sort of these cliff effects from rating downgrades. That's a very apt question under this issue of prosyclicality, and just for sake of clarity, until two years ago, I had been on the board of Moody's Corporation, the board of directors for ten years, and this issue of prosyclicality comes up all the time, and credit rating agencies are under quite a lot of pressure, because on the one hand, as they were recently advised by Stephen Mayor, the head of ESMA, their ratings downgrades recently have been adding prosyclicality. But on the other hand, the rating agencies are not policy, they don't have policy objectives, they have the objective of providing guidance on credit quality. So I would not suggest, and actually the chair of ESMA did not actually suggest calling on rating agencies to do that, but rather to have them thinking about it. But I would not suggest that rating agencies be prevented from providing downgrades whenever they are reasonable. However, policymakers will have to make a judgment about how to mitigate that prosyclicality. I had a discussion earlier this week with a senior executive at a large central counterparty about the issue of counter-syclicality, and this issue of credit rating downgrades came up in that discussion as well. And if we get to prosyclicality, maybe we could raise it again there. But it is true, as the question suggests, that ratings downgrades are prosyclical, in some cases they automatically trigger haircut increases or higher margin requirements or preclude certain types of collateral from being used as margin, and that is an accelerator that needs to be dealt with. And there's also a question, Darryl, from Isabel Schnabel, more on the topic of the leverage ratio. What do you think about designing leverage ratios in a macro-potential way similar to the counter-syclical capital buffer? I think that's a very good idea. I'm a fan of counter-syclical buffers. I would suggest again applying it on a system-wide basis. So just to repeat the formula, every bank reports its assets just as under the leverage ratio rule. The regulator and reports what its capital would be required under that rule, but that's not the binding constraint on that particular bank. Rather, the regulator adds up all of those capital requirements, determines how much capital would be needed in the system or large bank system based on that rule, and then increases other capital requirements to meet that level, if that's the binding constraint. In that way, you get the effect of the leverage ratio rule, but no individual bank is causing distortions because it doesn't internalize very much the purchase of its own asset balance sheet with respect to this leverage ratio rule. And that could be done on a counter-syclical way, and I think it's a great idea to do that. And then there is the last question from Klaus Massot on this. You get the example of J.P. Morgan in the US, which is reasonably well-capitalized. Unfortunately, in Europe, many capital ratios of banks are somewhat lower, and especially market to book ratios are low. So you making the assumption of no issuance of new bank equity, but in the case of Europe, should we be thinking of recapitalizing banks more up from? My answer to that is yes, and it's the next topic. So whenever you like, we can move on to that. Okay, so let me move ahead to that topic, and that doesn't rule out coming back to the topic of the leverage ratio rule. So this, just to, maybe I'll go back to where this came up at a conversation with Tim Geithner in the Federal Reserve in 2007. Jeremy Stein and I got into a discussion about this issue of banks will simply meet their capital requirements by reducing the sizes of their balance sheets so that they don't need to raise equity. And Jeremy made the astute point, well, during a period of concern, perhaps the banks could be required to maintain the numerator dollars of capital. And so it won't do them any good to reduce the denominator, they simply have to maintain the numerator or dollars of capital. And so I decided, I actually have been suggesting this in my recent policy discussions over the last few weeks, because I'm concerned by this same issue. So this is, so last weekend, my student Tim, or Sobolev, who's because of the social distancing measures is at home in Moscow, I invited him to work with me on modeling this effect. So let me outline the policy and then how the model works if we have time. But unfortunately, Timor is still coding up the results, so I don't have output yet to show you. I will in a few days. So here's how the rule goes. Well, first, just to remind when a bank's loan default rates or NPLs are expected to be high for some period of time, like during a crisis that we're experiencing, the capital regulation, which says that capital over assets has to be at least a given ratio, could incite reduced lending and reduce market making. And the reason is that the banks will not issue equity unless forced to, because it's bad for their legacy shareholders. It will reduce return on equity. It's better for the bank to avoid making its balance sheets safer and transferring value to creditors. The bank would rather just simply reduce assets, selectively provide less intermediation. There is, however, an idea, which is during this crisis period, however long it lasts, telling banks, whatever your assets are, it doesn't matter. You must have at least a certain number of euros of capital in excess of some floor, which would be around where capital is right now or possibly a bit higher or possibly a bit lower, depending on the impact that you're willing to create with this, because this would be extremely unpopular, to say the least. First, bank executives would scream about it, because it would really reduce the market value of their equity, given the inability of banks to meet their capital requirements by reducing assets. This is quite expensive for bank shareholders. So why do it? Well, there's two reasons to do it. One is, I think it was in the premise of the question, to keep banks a source of strength to the economy, not to let their solvency come into question, and so maintain capital from a financial stability viewpoint. The other one, which is the one that I think is more fun to model, at least, and more interesting for credit and loan provision, is that when this floor is binding and assets are strictly below regulatory requirements, the bank will have a positive incentive to increase its assets and retain the earnings. And that's an outcome of the model, but it's kind of intuitively obvious that if you have headroom under your capital requirements based on the size of your balance sheet, you might as well use that headroom while this floor on capital is binding. Then the floor could be removed at the end of the crisis. The bad news, as I mentioned, is that announcing a floor will reduce the market price of a bank's equity, and certainly if it's done too late or too early, it'll be worse. Too early meaning you, well, that is too aggressively, if you put a floor that's much, much higher than current bank capital, then that's going to reduce the current share price of bank equity a lot. It will make the system safer. It will provide incentives for intermediation that are stronger, but legacy share prices of bank equity will drop, and it's possible the market will get confused about what that means. This is a debt overhang effect. It's pure debt overhang. So one needs to be careful about how it's announced. And if I were you, I wouldn't talk about it externally unless and until you know what you're going to do about it, and then be very cautious about communicating it. And I would advise any policymaker to do the same. Another concern is that if it's done too late, under stress, rights offering would be required at a deep discount. Winnie Credit had one of those about five years ago that during now it's seven years ago, I think during the sovereign crisis, and it almost didn't get the rights offering off because even though it was at a deep discount, the market was spooked by the steep discount and the weak demand. So these, if it's done during a stress period where there's actually concern about the bank's solvency, the underwriting of these of the share of issuances that might be necessary, I should have a government backstop. And so that requires that's not a central bank issue. That's a finance ministry issue. But that's to ensure that there's confidence that the banks will be able to recapitalize rather than having a failed rights offering. So that's that's the idea. I think I'm going to in the interest of time, I'm going to skip over the modeling of it which is on the next slide. And which is a simple model that demonstrates the the effect of applying this floor on improving the incentives of banks to make markets and to provide credit to the economy. And maybe if there's any discussion, we could do that now, Luke. Without further questions at this moment. Yeah, okay, very good. Oh, this is just to make the point in reverse. About the incentives associated with capital requirements for growing assets. So this is the perverse effect of the same phenomenon, which is showing the total assets on this slide of large US banks leading up to the financial crisis and then afterwards and it is quite dramatically clear from the slides. Then when capital requirements were not tight, banks were very happy to expand their balance sheets and provide aggressive market making and credit provision, which is what policymakers would like to see except that they didn't they didn't realize at the time in the US at least, that the low capital requirements were also causing extreme financial instability. Post crisis, capital requirements are much tighter. And correspondingly, the rate of growth of assets of banks is muted, despite reasonable economic growth in the United States. So again, the lesson of this is if banks have loose capital requirements, they're going to expand their balance sheets, but you don't need to make loose capital requirements and have financial instability. You can impose a floor on capital. And then when assets fall below the ratio based capital requirements, there will be an incentive to grow assets back up again, just as existed in the US before the financial crisis. So this is a good anti cyclical capital requirement to apply during a period over which bank earnings are expected to be low and bank capital might might might be insufficient. Definitely, I would not advise just lowering capital requirements, except in so far as removing counter cyclical buffers, which is what they're there for. That's the model I'm going to skip. There's two figures that are being plotted based on that model. And I'm going to go to the last topic. The last topic that I want to mention, which is how to interpret bank credit spreads for the effect of too big to fail. And I actually spoke about this, Luke, I don't know if you remember, and a very preliminary version at the ECB over a year ago. But I'm just going to review what I did with my collaborators on Tia Berent and Ichao Zhu. So what we did is we tried to estimate how much too big to fail presumption of creditors has disappeared since the financial crisis, the idea being that after the financial crisis, with both the failure of Lehman and failure new bail in based failure resolution requirements, creditors began to believe that the state support would decline, would not be there as it was before the financial crisis. And the credit spreads of large US banks actually went up despite those banks being much better capitalized. In our empirical analysis, we estimated that effect for US GSIBs, and for US domestically systemically important banks that are shown on this slide. And I'm just going to give you the bottom line in terms of how to interpret the credit spreads. Before I do that, let me just give you an idea of what heightened credit spreads and improved capital, how those can be resolved. Again, it sounds strange, banks are much better capitalized, and yet they have much higher credit spreads. The only way to resolve it is to lower the probability that creditors assigned that they'll get bailed out. And this slide shows the implication of that. What is plotted here is the credit spread at five years in the form of a CDS rate, fitted to from the data for all US operating companies and large banks, fitted to a large bank that's always got a two standard deviation capital buffer. And let me interpret the slide. This is the blue line. Before the failure of Lehman, a bank with a two standard deviation capital buffer had a credit spread of between 50 and 100 basis points. After the failure of Lehman, and actually the same thing is through 2018 now, the bank of the same quality, still two standard deviation capital buffer, has a credit spread that's on the order of 200 to 250 basis points. So around 150 basis points more. And why is that? Well, one reason is that default risk premium had generally risen. So some of the effect is accounted for by that. But most of the effect is a presumption by creditors that they won't get bailed out after the crisis. And the data are remarkably speak remarkably strongly on this point. So no matter how we shake the model and look at the data, it always comes out that the implied the market implied probability of a bailout goes way down. So for example, if the probability of a bailout were 0.65 in the US before the financial crisis, then it's dropped to about 0.2 on a market implied basis. The red dotted line shows what those credit spreads would be. If the battle days were still present and creditors still believe that they're going to get bailed out with probability 0.65. So those credit spreads would be much smaller, or between 100 and 150 basis points, which is typical of some large banks today. Now, why am I telling you, why am I explaining this in the context of the COVID-19 crisis? Well, I'm going through this because when I look at large bank credit spreads around the world, I'm wondering, well, is this bank really okay? It only has a credit spread of 150 basis points. That's not bad. Or is it the case that in this jurisdiction, creditors still presume that there's state support? Now, I'm not saying anything about what state support actually exists, or whether a bail in could be successfully conducted. This is not about what governments intend to do or regulators intend to do with respect to triggering a resolution. This is about what creditors believe that the official sector will do. If creditors believe that they're still getting state support, then the cost of credit to banks will be bid down. The spreads that we're looking at may not be representative of the actual solvency of those banks. Now, I know you have independent sources of information on bank solvency, but market prices are usually quite helpful. The market equity prices of European banks, as was mentioned earlier, are extremely low to the point of being for two of the largest banks in the Eurozone on the order of 1% or less of total assets on the balance sheet, which is a very, very low credit spread. On the other hand, equity prices also have to be interpreted. It's not all in solvency risk. Some of it is expectations of declines in earnings or negative earnings. So, basically, the incentives of the bank manager are to keep the banks going, even if shareholders might be better off if the banks were liquidated or encouraged to create healthier banks in the Eurozone. So, that was kind of a, again, my reactions, and I'm still learning, to how to interpret market prices of debt and equity in light of bailouts and low earnings. The study that I just described here, the United States, I'm now collaborating with the same co-authors and one additional co-author to do for Europe. Europe is a bit more challenging because the largest banks in Europe are split across different jurisdictions. They have somewhat different conditions. It's not as a uniform a situation as in the U.S. But we hope to have data, we already have data of what we're working on the empirics. We hope to have empirical estimates of how much to beat the fail has declined in Europe since the financial crisis within a few months. And I hope you'll invite me back, Luke, to talk about that when the numbers are ready. So, with that, I would turn it back to you for any discussion. Yes, there was one question still on the previous topic of enhancing banking capital, where you were advocating a floor on the level of capital. Florian Haider is wondering whether it would not be more effective to instead forbid dividends or share repurchases. Would that go a long way and would that not be easier to implement? Yeah, so definitely that is moving in the same direction because that will at least prevent the capital available from going down with discretion. So it will mitigate the problem that I just described. Two were actually several caveats. Number one in the United States banks are not being prevented from paying dividends. In fact, I was a bit surprised that Chair Powell said last week that he sees no reasons for banks to be asked to reduce their dividend payments. I wouldn't probably have said that, it's not necessarily because it isn't true but rather that if things turn out badly, it would have been better not to open the gates on that. The other issue is, I know in Europe that banks have undertaken that they won't pay dividends and nor makes their repurchases, but that doesn't necessarily imply that they will meet a floor if they have negative earnings. Moreover, some banks, the effect of a floor on capital may be different across different banks. So for some banks, not paying out dividends may be excessively onerous if they're exceeding a natural floor and for other banks, not paying out dividends might not be enough of a floor. If the objective is that banks have a given level of capital, then it's more effective to impose a floor. Now it's a different issue politically because politically it's easy to explain that banks shouldn't needlessly pay out cash that they may need. It's harder to tell banks, well you've done such a great job on your risk-based capital requirements, now we're going to slap another one on you, cause your share price to go down and and and then suffer the communication challenge associated with that. So this is, this would be viewed as a heavy-handed requirement. Well from a policy viewpoint though, I think it makes that makes a lot of sense because it enhances financial stability and it enhances credit provision and intermediation in a way that would be hard to do without something like this, although again dividend pay, so restricting dividend and share repurchases is definitely going in the same direction Florian, thanks. And there is another question from Klaus Masouk the statement earlier that you made that legacy shareholders will not call for an increase in capital because their share prices will go down, but everyone sort of takes this from a welfare standpoint, would not this also simply reflect the decline in taxpayer costs to future bailouts of banks? Absolutely and in fact the analysis that I showed you on Too Big to Fail clearly shows that undercapitalization of banks with a prospect of bailouts is a generates a large subsidy so we get the fact that before the financial crisis 29% of total large bank equity was in the form of implicit subsidies associated with bailout and this also elevates the causes a distorted view of the health of banks from looking at their equity share prices because those are elevated when there's a prospect of bailout those are elevated by those subsidies to debt that are coming in the form of cheap credit spreads so I completely agree with that question the premise of that question. And then the last question is from Klaus Maslup in this section so his question is whether the public support that you are estimating here whether this could also reflect central bank support? Well there's two ways that that could happen number one central bank support provides liquidity and banks can fail for two reasons insolvency and lack of liquidity and so if central banks are providing less liquidity then credit spreads should rise. I don't think in the United States that the blue line in the chart shows that the Fed is supplying less liquidity and therefore credit spreads are higher rather I think it's a reflection of the disappearance of too big to fail. The other way that central bank liquidity can support banks is that in some cases it's not actually just liquidity in some cases central banks can do whatever it takes and sometimes that implies more than providing liquidity. Okay then there is a comment coming in from Jerome Henry he's referring to a study by Glassamann and co-authors they found that indeed consistent with just story that after the creation of the single supervisory mechanism in the EUR area the measurement of potential state support has declined and this is also consistent with not just single supervision but also the adoption of new bail-in rules but then later on again increased more recently due to some bailout decisions in some countries. So the question is would you also expect such indicators to fluctuate a little more in Europe than in the US? Oh that's a great question very perceptive yeah the paper by Glassamann has a very nice experiment because in 2014 there was a change in the coverage of credit default swaps one flavor covered bail ins and a legacy flavor which still traded did not cover bail ins and so the difference between the two revealed to the market the likelihood of a bail in on a market implied basis and indeed the likelihood of a bail in increased with the single stability mechanism and then it dropped back again with the bailout of Monte De Paschi di Siena so yeah this the the intentions for bail in versus not bail in can be detected to some extent for market prices and as I mentioned I'm interested in what the case is in Europe I do have I might even speculate about the situation in Europe versus the US but I don't have the results of our empirical analysis yet so I'm a bit hesitant to to tell you my bias which is that at least in some jurisdictions in Europe there is still a high presumption of bail in by the way when I gave my talk about this topic last week to 500 economists it's the wonderful thing about being in a crisis you get a lot you get a bigger audience because there's people watching all over the world I asked for a poll of all the economists watching on the probability of a bail in in Europe now going forward and the median the median probability assigned by 370 economists who took the poll was 80 percent that is the median probability assignment that an official sector in Europe would bail out a large a large European bank was 80 percent state support is still assumed to be very high in Europe I was also surprised to see that the assumption of state support is very high in the US so maybe maybe the decline in the US is coming from maybe a probability one of a pre-crisis a bail in down to more like 75 percent I don't know we'll see but in Europe in Europe yeah I think most commentators are saying that in some jurisdictions there's more likelihood of a government support than there is in the United States at this point so directly speaking to this there's a question from Isabelle Schnabel because of course things may now have rapidly changed in terms of these dynamics that you talk about since we are in the middle of a crisis so I mean how likely do you think it is to have a bail in in the midst of a crisis like the one we have today and if not would this not naturally raise the probability of a bailout well first of all I think from a policy viewpoint it's more justified to have a bailout in a systemic crisis the reason being is that it's a transfer it's a government transfer with moral hazard but not as much moral hazard as there would be outside of a crisis especially a crisis caused by a virus and that if there's ever a time to do a bailout it would be in a system-wide banking crisis where you're worried that bail in might not be extremely effective that said my sense is that in Europe there's no system-wide banking crisis and if banks start to reach the point of insolvency one at a time then I would you know my policy viewpoint would be to stick to your guns and stay the regime of bail in and I think that will have a create significant benefits the only reason I would hesitate is if you're not confident that the bail in process will actually work and you're more experts you have more experts than me on knowing whether your bail in process will work I've written a lot about this but it's getting the quality of the process is getting better and better especially with the treatment of central counterparties derivatives and repos there's still there are still issues as you know and just the fact that you're able to conduct a bail in without a failure doesn't mean that the financial institution that's left will be a significant provider of credit to the economy it could be that counterparties will shun that financial institution it will successfully get bailed in but shrink dramatically and if you do that to more than one or two banks during a stress period that's not good for the economy for sure thank you Daryl you have two more topics to cover right yeah if you're interested I can we're definitely interested in the margins maybe to close the topic on capital there was one question that I skipped that would like to come back to by Philip Hartman when you spoke about the capital lower proposal doesn't the the benefit of the effect of a capital floor depends on high on how high the riskiness of lending opportunities rises um okay so well there's a couple of issues yeah the couple of points in that question so if the if bank if the risks of bank lending going forward are high then that can be priced into bank loans and so from the viewpoint of the health of the bank the new loans that are made uh will be made on better market terms because of more aggressive bidding by banks and not cause losses for banks um because banks won't involuntarily head in for losses the their the flip side of that is that if the riskiness of bank loans goes up then the legacy loans already on the balance sheet or would be expected to experience higher um uh non-performance losses will accumulate the banks capital will decline maybe the accounting won't keep up with that but the banks will have an incentive without a floor on capital uh to simply because they're declining capital uh to provide fewer loans the alternative being to issue new equity which they're which they're loathe to do in normal circumstances you almost never see a bank doing a secondary equity offering uh when it's under stress except in the most extreme cases like uh uh well they have come up and during the financial crisis here in the united states the largest banks were forced to recapitalize uh with a tarp backstop and uh there was a beneficial effect there actually the increased confidence in the u.s economy and in the banking sector entirely uh actually improved bank capitalization or improved share prices of banks uh coming on the uh coming on the market-wide effect of that confidence but normally it should uh it would not be good news for a legacy shareholder to to be forced to raise capital okay so in the remaining five minutes maybe you could speak to uh to margining which is a topic of great interest to the colleagues here yeah so there uh several things have come up in the last few weeks um the volatility is in the equities market has been around four times normal at points much higher even than during the financial crisis uh volatility in treasury u.s treasury markets has been exceptional all asset classes have been extremely um the the the effective margin requirements has been extremely pro cyclical because central counterparties and uh prime brokers and everybody else almost that's handling margin setting has been aggressively uh taking margins both through reduced valuation of collateral and through higher initial margin or haircuts and this has been really hard especially in the market for mortgage related securities and you you probably saw that um Ronin capital which had been speculating on equity volatility was uh was uh liquidated at uh two at two large clearinghouses in the u.s the FICC and the CME um the as far as I understand it the LCH has not increased its margin requirements because it already had reasonably significant margin requirements and haircuts but going forward um if I were in in the eurozone I would be thinking about asset classes that are systemically important um that could if the stress continues uh continue to uh could deteriorate and their pro cyclical effect could be set in there have been cases in the past as everyone uh listening today or watching today knows in which um BTPs the Italian sovereign bonds have been caught in an adverse margin spiral causing a lot of concern currently uh BTPs are out of spread to buttons of the last time I looked a few days ago it was 200 basis points which uh what I actually think is not alarming but uh uh if if uh conditions were to worsen fiscal conditions were to worsen in Italy where the european situation were to worsen and uh uh there's a uh risk off period uh it's quite possible that a pro cyclical effect could set in on that type of an asset that I'm not singling out that particular asset but that's an example that's come up before that's on my mind uh so what can be done well um try to have margins that are already sufficient uh for extreme events or at least moderately extreme events uh some central counterparty set their margin requirements based on something like a thousand-day look-back period which hasn't included enormous amounts of stress and so I would tend to ensure that margins are set um aggressively going right through back through to the last financial crisis or to scenarios that that uh would incorporate um extreme moves and then be ready um with lending of last resort uh to those that are suffering from a short-term extreme margin calls but remain solvent and uh I'm not sure exactly how you reach the non-bank uh players in that market but um I guess that's a subject for another discussion thank you very much Daryl for your interesting presentation um my last question for you is um you spoke now about margins uh bank capital um predator support what do you what do you see is the biggest financial risk also when you compare the current crisis to the global financial crisis what where should we have our eyes on is it what you just ended with the normal banks and where where do you see the concentration of risk I um I see the concentration of risk in the corporate balance sheets um there they tend to be um not part of the financial system I'm not as worried about the shadow banking system as a amplifier of uh systemic risk at least in US markets the ETFs the mutual funds the hedge funds the private equity firms are they're often viewed as significant sources of um of uh financial risk so far at least in the US the banks are also holding up well and that's why I think I think this is a good time to impose um capital requirements or restrict dividends and show repurchases uh to to ensure that they remain a source of strength I view this crisis as remarkably different than the the great financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 because that was a moderate macro shock that was dramatically amplified by fragilities in the financial sector this one is just the opposite it's a massive macro shock that has so far not been amplified significantly in my view by weaknesses uh in uh in financial intermediaries uh and I would just uh I would just want to keep it that way by keeping the financial sector a source of strength I am much less familiar with the situation in Europe I already mentioned my concerns about um a small number of very large banks in Europe and if I were in the European official sector and concerned about risk managing the financial sector I would probably start start there and also consider the potential for um a a pro cyclical the change in credit spreads of a very large sovereign issuer as a as another potential amplifier coming out of finance terrific thanks so much Darrow um I um wish you uh uh that you stay healthy and uh please share those results with us when they're ready so thanks to everyone for joining um tomorrow is uh another webinar a big shift of gears uh there will be Mark Lipschitz from Harvard University will be talking some uh on epidemiology uh probably more important than the economists um and uh that's it for today


Item number SCP-656 Object Class Safe Special Containment Procedures Any instances of SCP-656 must be kept in a low-humidity area for preservation. Any requests for testing must be run by Dr. W... Description SCP-656 appears to be a board game box labeled W... Home Edition, where W... is presumably the name of a game show. No such game show is known to have existed, although the host is an established personality and host of a number of other game shows. SCP-656 was purchased from the W... thrift store by Agent R while off duty. Contained inside SCP-656 is a recordable VHS tape, with W... Home Edition written on the label in black marker, SCP-656-1. The box contains nothing else. When SCP-656-1 is inserted into a VCR attached to a television, it plays a taped episode of W... which appears to be from the mid-1980s. The recording begins during the theme music, cutting off an unknown amount of time. The show follows a quiz show format, where three contestants answer trivia questions to win money. All of the contestants are confirmed to be living, although none have records suggesting that they competed on a game show. If all viewers remain silent, the recording will proceed as expected. The third player... will win with a sum of W... dollars. However, if at any point any viewer vocally answers a question before a contestant, the contestant will give the same answer as the viewer. SCP-656-1 appears to be able to distinguish between attempts to answer and discussion between viewers. Playing a recording of an answer will not cause the contestant to give the answer specified in the recording. The contestants will give anything as an answer of properly prompted, regardless of whether they could know the answer given or content of the answer. The contestants, host, and audience will have no visible reaction to profanity, vulgarity, or racial slurs given as an answer. The questions appear to be randomly selected and are different every time. Questions can be about any topic and from any time period, even information from after the apparent recording of the show. The only apparent limitation on the questions is that the answer must be known by at least one person viewing the tape. Questions will occasionally be of a deeply personal nature. Questions have in the past revealed extramarital affairs, illegitimate children, drug addiction, and data expunged. Anything known to any viewer can become a question. Copies of SCP-656 do not share its unique properties. Any copy of SCP-656 will play the recording as it appears when no viewers speak during play. Once a playthrough of SCP-656 has begun, it cannot be paused, rewound, or fast-forwarded. Three commercial breaks occur during the show, all advertising known products with the correct advertisements. After a commercial break, the camera view sweeps over the audience. Upon closer analysis, the audience consists entirely of people who have viewed the tape, as well as those currently viewing it. In addition to the foundation personnel known to have viewed the tape, six unknown people appear in the audience. At the end of the taping, after the host announces the winner of the three contestants, the audience winner is announced. And a member of the audience comes forward and is given a copy of SCP-656. The audience winner always corresponds with the current viewer who answered the most questions correctly. The tape cuts off soon after this point, during a disclaimer regarding the awarding of prizes. The disclaimer contains nothing of note. The recording runs for a total of 20 minutes, 3 seconds. There is an additional 5 hours and 40 minutes of blank tape after the disclaimer cuts off. No anomalies have been detected within the blank portion of the tape. Addendum. All winners are to be monitored. It is now known that any person who wins the game will receive, after a number of days equal to the number of questions answered, a copy of SCP-656 in the mail. All copies received by foundation personnel have displayed the address of site. The only foundation facility we're testing on SCP-656 has occurred, as the return address. All copies received by winners are fully functional. The foundation is currently in possession of additional instances of SCP-656. Lesson complete. If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-655, Biological Disinformation Campaign, right now. Or for the complete course, watch this playlist.


everybody welcome to the latest edition of Nets post game plus Bob Lorenz and Frank I solar with you so the Nets losing to the Wizards 1 49 to 146 and Frank it all came down to a two and a half second span late in the game when Nets thought they had it wrapped up but it wasn't the case let's be clear that's not a three overtime game that's a 48 minute regulation game and the Nets gave up 48 points in the fourth quarter but like you mentioned Bob they were up five with under 10 seconds to go back to back threes Bradley Beale Russell Westbrook who was outstanding on this night that Joe Harris turnover that led to the Russell Westbrook three and then of course at the end TLC had a chance to win at the buzzer good look by Kyrie Irving on the inbounds pass he has to finish their unacceptable loss for the Nets when you give up 48 points in the fourth quarter can't you can't be a championship team and be and do things like that great point there were huge numbers for all the big names in this one washington's starting back court of Westbrook and Beale combined for 78 points with Beale putting up 22 in the fourth quarter alone Kevin Orant let Brooklyn with 37 before his players spoke to the media Steve Nash was asked what he saw for the Nets on the defensive end that gave the Wizards a chance to steal the victory. That was basically the message after the game gave up 149 points 72 points in the paint 48 points in the fourth quarter 17 turnovers didn't help but you know the defense just wasn't good enough and I think everyone realizes you know we obviously have many opportunities to win it down the stretch at the end of the game there but probably didn't deserve it the way we guard it all night so frustrating night and our level dropped and we got to pick it up. So when you have a game with great scores on both sides you expect a high scoring affair that's said though you know when you look at the defense what would you attribute you know some of those issues to that you'd like to correct. Oh I mean it seems like every game we play we're battling just some some things that the game flow can sometimes bring you you know whether it be some calls going away whether it be some high scoring quarters they score 48 in the fourth quarter I don't know if we're gonna get many wins if we allow 48 points in any quarter so you know it's a tough night when you're giving up that many points and it's a tough night when you you know you're not particularly you know doing the little things that could create some separation you know down the stretch we we had that game it should have been our so you know we just look ourselves in the mirror and just see where we can correct as individuals and as a group you know just especially on the effort you know I couldn't guard a stick today you know those guys were just going right around me and you know I was getting frustrated a little bit but they kept attacking and that's what good teams doing good scores do so. A Brooklyn will return to action Tuesday night with a home game against the Clippers that will air on TNT yes's next broadcast comes your way Friday when that's face Toronto and coverage is going to start at 7 o'clock. I'm Bob Lorenz from Frank Isola thanks for watching Post Game Plus.


I mean that with all due respect to my buddy, Todd. You guys know we're good buddies. I love you. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All right, here we go. We're live on The Metal Voice. Live, live. And you know what? I did the math. Okay, before we got on, I go, who is the guest that has appeared the most times on The Metal Voice? Well, after 11 years. Guess, Michael. Well, I wouldn't guess me. The top three, the top three. Okay, top three. Actually, top two. I thought it was you, actually. I thought it was you. You're number two. But Todd Littori was number one. See, what it is with me, man. Lately in my old age, and I think Todd will eventually get there. I like to stretch things out a little bit more, you know? And not do quite as much. Quality over quantity. Well, I'm not saying that.  That's all, I don't know. It's all good.  Maybe if you do a couple more shows in the next few months, we can get you up there. It's all good. Let's do another one tomorrow and I'll be number one again. It'd be like a Saturday Night Live guest host where they keep track, so. All right, here we go. The new studio album. The final battle is here, is due in October on Frontiers Music SRL. Striper also will be streaming live from the trees in Dallas, Texas on Thursday, September 29th at 9 p.m. And you know what? We just went to see the Scorpions before we get into the album and all that and Skid Row, not Skid Row. White Snake. White Snake, you know, they had to cancel. And the first thing I thought of is, me and Alan were actually talking about this and go, why don't they call it Striper? Like, why don't they get Striper? Like, here's a viable band that could sort of bring in, you know, a different crowd perhaps.  Well, you know, when you ask a question like that, man, there's so many answers to that question. And I don't have to be the one to give you those answers. I think anyone who has the smarts can figure it out.  I don't know why I don't understand it, but people fear what we sing about. And the way they react to that is through mockery or, you know, poking the bear, poking fun at us, or whatever you want to call it. And it's this constant disrespect because of what we sing about and who we sing about.  You know what I mean? But you want to talk about ridiculous. That's about as ridiculous as it gets. But I don't go around telling people that.  I still listen to the bands and I love the music. Why can't people do that with Striper? I have no clue and no clue why. But then when people say that we suck, it's like that's really laughable.    No problem.  So that's besides the point. But I mean, it's just the fact that they didn't offer up another band. And then, you know, we interviewed Skid Row. They seem to be available. You guys, there's so many bands you can name. How can nobody ever reach out and just even try to fill their rooms? Well, does the phone ring? Michael, does the phone ring? Like, you know, Judas Priest. Oh, it's white snake. Oh, it's Scorpion. Does it ring? No, not for us. Now, the thing is too, in all fairness, you've got a lot of great bands out there. Skid Row's an amazing band, you know? I'm certainly not implying that we're any better than Skid Row, Queens Reich, you know? They're going out and doing the Scorpions thing. I'm not implying we're any better than Queens Reich. But we certainly hold our own.  And I think most people will leave satisfied. And it's really disheartening that we don't ever get those calls. And, you know, I just scratch my head and I just kind of say, if I, why? I have no clue. I mean, I mean, I do know why, but I don't know why, if that makes any sense. It's just, it's a mystery to me because we deserve the opportunity to go out and play with these bands just like any other band. And not only deserve the opportunity, but you know, I think surprisingly, it would shock a lot of fans. I think most people that would go to a show like that, say to see, you know, Judas Priest or Scorpions, and if Stripper came out and opened the show, I think most people, if you were standing there with the microphones, and so what'd you think, you know, Stripper opening? I think most people would say, wow, it was awesome. I was surprised, you know? I think they'd be pleasantly surprised. I agree with you. Alan, why don't we just say, all right, Stripper's on the bill. And you'd probably win over a lot more fans than you never had before in the past, you know? Because we sing about Jesus, period.  Dude, I tell you what, the guys in Kicks are awesome. We've done many shows with them over the years. They're great guys, they're a great band. They're stand up, I respect those guys so much for who they are and what they've done. And God bless them, man. And I know there's a lot of bands out there that we tour with Stripper and have tour with Stripper.  And so I'm not complaining at all. No, no, no, no, we're just, so is this a promoter thing or is this a band thing? Like the promoter just doesn't see it happening. He's worried, the ticket sales might not go the way it is. You know what? I mean, it can't just be about Jesus, right? Well, I think most of it is about Jesus. Not all of it, but most of it is, unfortunately. It's interesting because we just got booked on the Hell in Heaven tour, you know? And we're playing a four night run and you've got Slipknot and Judas Priest and all these bands and not really any other bands from our genre on the bill, but Stripper's on the bill. Merciful fate, merciful fate is going on after us two or three acts after us. I like that. You know what I mean?  And it's like Stripper deserves that. And when we go play into these crowds, they're there raising their fist in the air, like getting into the music.  It's just they love the music in there. We put on a show and they love it.  All right, me and Allen will get on it. We'll get on this right after here. We'll get on it, we'll throw out some faxes, get on the horn, we'll make it happen for you. Well, hey man, you guys have always been on it. As I said in a post recently yesterday, I believe you guys have always supported us, you know? And you don't care about the naysayers and taking heat and I'm sure you get heat.  And it's like, it's that mentality. It's like, really, you really think we suck? Really? Wow, okay. I'm supporting, look, I got my shirt. No. I brought my album. And you know what, Michael, just for you, I brought my Bible. Just in case you quiz me, just in case you quiz me, Michael. You guys, I love it. But that's why I love you guys because you're not afraid to take a stand and you just enjoy the music and you support the band and we're very, very grateful for that. It's amazing. Thank you. Another fellow we interviewed recently because of a great album and a great group called Iconic. Mr. Nathan James himself says, it's unfair how much talent you have that you can sing like that and play guitar the way you do. It's impossible to comprehend that somebody can have that much talent is what he said when we interviewed him. Dude, that makes me, I don't even know what to say to that because I honestly, I'm not kidding you.  I'm so hard on myself and I feel like I'm mediocre at both, you know, but I can do both and I'm really grateful for that. I started out playing guitar and I started singing after I played guitar for three or four years. I'm a guitarist first. And you know, I just got used to singing and playing guitar. And now when I don't play guitar, when I have to put the guitar down for a song, I feel awkward. I don't know what to do with my guitar. It's like I'm naked or something. I want to just hide. It's really weird. And so for Nathan, Nathan obviously for him to say something like that, that's high praise right there because he's one of my favorite current modern day vocalists and what an amazing talent he is. And what an honor it is for me to be in a band with him, you know? All right, so let's talk about this new album. All right, the Final Battle. Striper, yeah. Striper, yes, yes. There's Iconics over there. There's Iconics too. I mean, we plugged that one already. But now we're getting into the Final Battle. I mean, is this the apocalypse here? Is this the end of times? Is this a reflection of the end of the world as we know it today? Is the revelations being fulfilled? Is that what you're saying here? I'm saying a lot of things. There was even a little implication in my mind about this could be the last Striper album and people got worked up over that but it was in the back of my mind.  And the reason why is because we've had our health concerns and things going on and you just never know. I don't take any day for granted. This certainly could be our last album. I hope it's not. I don't want it to be. But that aside, that was a small little thing I was thinking about the large part of what was in play in my mind with the title and the artwork, Lisa and I were discussing. You know what, let me show it as you talk about it. Yeah, yeah. It is obviously the biblical stories about the Battle of Armageddon, which is in my opinion, the final battle in terms of where if you believe in the Bible, Christ will come back and basically Satan will be cast into the pit and that'll be the final battle. And that's on the artwork, that's supposed to be the Lord returning and the four of us returning with the Lord. And we kind of purposely went back, a throwback to the original to help the devil album. And it's got a similar vibe to that but just a 2022 look. I liked it a lot. We did that on purpose. And some people were like, most people love it but some people were like, oh my gosh. Michael, so the first guy on the horse is you would say the Jesus coming back, right? He's sort of right. Yeah, the one in the middle, yes. The one in the middle of the crowns because he's wearing the crowns, right? Yes. Now which guy are you? Okay, there's, I see four guys in the background. Okay, the blonde, there's Perry and your brother who's blonde, right? So I would assume them two. That's right. If you look to the far left, that's my brother. You look right next to him, that's me. Hey. Then you look right next to Christ and that's Oz, I believe. Is it blonde or brunette? He's brunette, he's brunette. So there's two brunettes and two blondes on the side. Okay, that's Oz. And then the one next to Oz is Perry. Perry with the 12 pack abs. Yeah, we got- And lightsabers, I like the lightsaber bit. Dude, we went for the lightsaber bit. Some people were like, why wouldn't we? That's it, it's cool. That's a great picture, man. I love that picture. Little Star Wars, Little End of the Earth. I knew there'd be a quiz. I knew there'd be a quiz, Michael. And I'm ready, I'm ready, don't you worry. Okay, I love it, I love that artwork. We don't take off our shirts on stage for one reason only. Because we don't wanna show off our stomachs. We're built just like those guys. Just like those guys. Yeah, Jim and I too. Yeah. Oh man, we gotta laugh, it's funny stuff. Of course, you gotta laugh at great artwork and who's the artist, by the way? That is, of course, the one and only Stan Decker. He did our last four prior to this one as well. Yeah, great artwork. And we wanted to kind of stay in that series and eventually we're gonna break off from that and do something different. But we've enjoyed that ride of sticking with that, those colors and that kind of epic look. Yeah, we love it. They've been really great covers. I mean, a lot of positive feedback on those covers over the last four albums, so. I think what those covers do is they make you wanna buy the album without hearing anything. Yes, yes. They kinda, and that's how old albums are. It's kind of like a big change from this, right? Well, I mean, yeah. And in a way it's the same, right? In a way it's the same and it's a way it's different, right? Well, the A-team, to be fair to Striper, the A-team was very popular when that album came out. Oh yeah, no, no. It was, it's true. And that can, I've gotta tell you guys, if I haven't told you already, but did I tell you the story about how this is true? We used to go to the market and get groceries in that van. That's true, I saw like a cucumber, but. There was a 50 caliber machine gun on top of it. Geez, look at that. And nobody pulled you over. Nobody, because it didn't really shoot, but it was still on top and we didn't get pulled over and we would buy, you know, bananas and apples and go home in that van with the 50 cowl. But to go back what you were saying, Michael, you know my friend Cork, that's how he did. He chose bands just on their album covers. So it does work. It's true. Now, we found that to be the case, especially with The Health of the Devil. Everyone wanted that album based just on the artwork alone. And that's what made us realize like how important artwork is. It really is important. It sets the tone, right? It sets the tone of some way. It just sets the tone for the rest of the album to be heard. Absolutely.  I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Final tap, spell the glove. What's that? Spinal tap. Clearly black. It's so black, it can't get any more blacker. That was fun. So you released two singles, Rise of the Call and Hear No Evil, I always get this, Hear No Evil, Hear No Evil, right? All right, so what's the rest of the I'm gonna sound like? Are we going down this? And this is like, these are pretty strong tracks in a way a throwback, but in the same sense, you know, it's a little new, the territory in the sense of a groove, maybe? A little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I tell you, when I was writing the album it was really important for me and the guys too, of course, we were all on the same page with this but really important as I'm sitting here in this room putting the songs together to stick to our roots and not wander off that path too much, but at the same time try to incorporate little differences here and there. Just to give it its own special signature. That was important for me to do. And we wanted to come out strong out of the box but not with our strongest out of the box. And that's what Transgressor will prove that when you hear Transgressor, I'll never forget, I sent it to our agent, the whole album and he called me right after listening to Transgressor and he said, I mean this in a great way but I feel like I've just been violated. He said, I feel like I've just been like the crap has been beat out of me. Yeah, yeah, I got you. And he said, but I mean that in a good way. I hope so. So why wouldn't you lead off with their strongest song then if you're... Because once you lead off with the strongest song which we've done in the past, like I feel like the strongest heavy song on the last album was Blood From Above and that's what we led with. You kind of have nowhere to go from there. And we led off with what we felt were really strong songs but now just waits to see what's coming. That's the calm before the storm. The storm's gonna come and it's gonna shake things up. And when you hear Transgressor I think you're gonna go, whoa, you know? Cause it's gonna say that we're serious and it's gonna say that we haven't gone anywhere and that this is our most powerful album. I really believe that. Well, the first two songs are certainly powerful. You know, we've got a lot of those, you know those Queen-ish harmonies, I guess you could call them. But not overtaking the song just enough to sort of highlight or just to, you know keep it, what do you wanna say, melodic perhaps? I don't know. That's a good way to put it. What happened with Striper is very odd in the sense that when we were growing up as individuals, all four of us were raised on a very eclectic music, broad music base. So we listened to everything from the Beatles to Black Sabbath and everything in between. So Queen, Journey, Van Halen, Dio, Maiden, Priest, the Bee Gees, I mean, we listened to so much stuff. Including country music. We listened to country music. My parents are country singers and songwriters. Oz listened to Buck Owens. We listened to Buck Owens. We watched He-Haw. I mean, and I think that played a really important role in how our songs and our sound has come together. Yeah, you can hear it. I mean, the rest of the album, compared to these first two songs, and of course you just mentioned Transgressor, what can people expect? Well, I mean, it's a really broad album. When you listen to the whole album from start to finish, you're gonna see that there's some really aggressive metal tracks on there. There's some straight-up mid-tempo songs. There's a few songs that are a little more modern. One of those is the second music video following Transgressor. That's called Same Old Story. Really powerful song. One of my favorites on the album. And then we've got a power rock ball. It kind of reminds me a little bit in some ways of the Loverboy tune, one of my favorite bands of all time. Canadian. It's over. Oh, yes, great song. Just how the guitars kick in. I love that song. And that's a power ballad. And I love those kind of ballads. And we've got a couple of songs that are a little bit more pop metal. So there's quite a broad spectrum in terms of how this album is laid out and sequenced. Okay, all right. Alan? Well, again, and I wanna ask you about your triple threat because did you produce this album as well like you've done in the past? I did, man, but these days, I don't even talk about that anymore because nobody cares. Nobody cares. If you get some big name producer, they care. If you don't, they don't care. But yeah, I've been producing all the Striper albums. I produced this one as well. And I always say this humbly, never with an ego or an attitude. But I think producers for a band like Striper are a complete waste of time and money. 100%. They're not gonna... You do it yourself, yeah. They're not gonna bring anything to the table that we can't already bring. And we're gonna lay out a lot of money and points to get there with them. And we've been there and done that and we know what we want better than anybody. So, you know, that's why we don't hire a producer. In our albums, you put our albums against anyone else's albums and they have their own unique sound, but they hold their own in terms of production. They have a great engineer, Danny Bernini. He is very musical and just such an incredible asset. So, we couldn't do it without him for sure. What about... Max Norman, we interviewed him a few times. So, what's the secret of your success? He's like, well, you got a great band and great musicians. I'm just the engineer of that point kind of thing. He's guiding them, yeah. I'm telling you, it's true. I'll never forget when we worked with Michael Wagner on that album you held up earlier. Soldiers on the Command. We went into the studio and we were very prepared. We had every note worked out. Every single guitar lick, note, part, everything. All he did was push record and we performed it. And after every take, he would be smiling ear to ear and say, that's great, that's great, you know? And it's just, we had everything worked out. And Michael obviously made it sound great and brought his clout and his name and all that he has, which is amazing to the table. But we knew what we wanted and how to achieve that. And it was very easy for him to produce and record Striper, very easy. But was Michael, I always got the impression he was more of an engineer than a producer as well, if you know? No, Michael's very, very much a producer and a very musical guy. He used to be a guitar player. He brings a lot to the table in the guitar area, because he's very into guitar tones and achieving the best guitar tones you can achieve. But no, he's absolutely a producer as well. But yes, it is true that he's a brilliant engineer. So he's both and that's hard to find. You don't usually find that. Yeah. All right, I'm gonna ask you my next question. But before I do, I'm gonna ask everybody out there, your number one all-time favorite Striper song. I'll just read them after I ask you this question. Number one all-time. You're all-time. You're all-time. You have to pick one Striper song. Like you were not allowed to listen to anything else, but you have to pick one Striper song. Which one would that be? We know the top three. We could do top 10. We could do top 20. Man, that's so hard, buddy. Number one, pick one. I always pick a classic in a modern, but if I have to pick only one, I'm gonna upset a lot of people. I'm sorry, but I'm gonna go with Yahweh. I would say so too. Good choice, yeah. Yeah, I would agree. That's an epic. So now I'm gonna read what people are saying now, okay? People are in the chat here.  Mike is saying reason for the season. Robert's saying, wanna makes me sing. I can't pronounce his name, he's saying soldiers. Kathy's saying blood from above. Rich at the metal asylum is saying to hell with the devil, but writing on the wall, Yasmin's saying, always be there for you. The Valley, soldiers under command. Yahweh, Yahweh, another Yahweh. Soldiers under command, that's Kiss Army, Revenge. Jay's saying calling on you. Frank's saying soldiers. Justin's saying, take it to the cross. King Diamond slash Striper saying take it to the cross. Well, there you go. There you go, there you go, wow. Yeah, he's saying, okay. All right, so here's the question. What happened with this tour?  We just, we're not, we're releasing an album but we can't go on tour to support it or we have to postpone it because maybe you wanna fill us in. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's the deal. And it comes down to the number one reason being we could not secure a bus. And some people will kind of say what? How is that possible? It literally came down to that where we were talking to different bus companies and then we were talking to one in particular we thought we had a bus set up in line and then we were told we don't have a bus. And basically what happened over the past few months is buses started being leased out for double the price. Oh yeah. And bands were paying it. Yeah. We found ourselves in a position where we can't afford to pay that because you know, Striper's a 10K a night on a good night band, okay? And sometimes we get 15, sometimes we get 20, sometimes we get 25, but we play a big festival or something. But when we go on a bus run and we do touring usually it's on average around maybe 10K a night.  Because at the end of the year, we've got so much red and so much debt that we can't afford to tour any longer. So you add to that a bus being double the price. And it's like, okay, we can't do this run. So what we did is we postponed the run instead of cancelling. And a lot of people were confused. They thought we canceled, we didn't cancel, we just postponed and it was only part of the run. Yeah. Okay. And then of course, blabbermouth, you know, I guess posted about it and some people tried to turn it into we're over and done with and we can't afford to tour and we're washed up and all this kind of nonsense. And it wasn't about that at all. It's just that we couldn't secure a bus. You know what I was thinking? Why don't we use this bus? Drive around in this bus as a tour. Where is that van today? Where is that van? That's what I was just thinking. Oh my God. As you were talking about this. Man, if we had to use that bus, we would be dying because if we were 18, we could do it. But when you're 60 years old, you can't do that. No way. Parents also saying not to mention the fuel that you put in the bus, but I think that's the reason why the bus prices have doubled because of the fuel. Supply and demand. Well, that too. The cost of fuel and all the wear and tear and then you got the cost of the drivers now and you got the overtime.  And it's just insane.  Striper is in a little different position where we can postpone or we can do other things and to kind of make up for it and we can continue on. But we're not going to pay to play and we're not going to go in debt when we go out and tour. We just can't operate that way. We're trying to be smart and can't do it. Well, nobody can. Exactly. We spoke with Michael Wilton when he was here in town and he said the tour was going great until they hit the West Coast and that's when the cost of gas jumped up. And he said, there was no way we budgeted for that, that high of a spike. And we're talking months ago, but. Oh yeah. That's what I'm saying. And when you're out there, we were out there for a while when the fuel started rising and at the end of the tour we got hit quite an astronomical amount over and above what we had budgeted, right?  The tour is over. And this is the real life stuff that not just Striper has to think of, but pretty much most bands on the planet have to think of. Not all. Yeah, bands are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to who is important in society. They're just at the bottom and nobody cares. You can't sell albums, you can't produce vinyl and you can't go on tour. It's just, yeah. It's true. It's becoming more and more difficult for bands to survive. And yeah, you see all these bands touring but even that's a problem. So many bands, because they weren't touring during the pandemic and the downtime, so many bands are out touring now that there's oversaturation and it makes it difficult for some other bands to tour. And it's just a tough time right now but we're gonna get through it. Everybody's gonna be fine. Everyone's gonna be okay. I'm not concerned. Well, I look at the album cover, it doesn't look like things are gonna be fine there, Michael. I look at the album cover, it looks like the end is near. The final battle is here. I got in the heat over that because I made a comment in an interview about the end times the guy asked me, do you think we're in the end times? And I said, yeah, I do kind of think we are. Now, I didn't put a specific date. I'm not a whack job. I view myself as a relatively intelligent guy. I don't sit around, I don't have a shelter filled with food. Fill the guitars, it looks like. Looks like it's filled with guitars and recording equipment. I got a lot, I got a shelter filled with guitars and recording equipment. I'll be eating wood if something happens. But man, I'm not crazy in that sense, but people try to paint you out to be that way. I just think that, you know, again, I believe in the Bible. The Bible talks about everything that we're seeing right now. And, you know, I believe that we're kind of seeing it all unfold before our eyes. Will that be a year? Will it be 20 years? Will it be a hundred years? I don't know. I have no clue, but I do think that the times we're living in are definitely questionable, to say the least. I would agree. And unstable. Yeah, it's funny because at the turn of the millennia, is that how you pronounce it? Before, you know, a thousand, right? People were really, you know, questioning things. And every time there's some sort of, you know, major change in society, people, you know, look to it and they look for the signs and... Oh yeah. And again, again, nobody knows. Nobody knows, right? But you can only speculate, right? Nobody knows. You see, I was one of those guys when we were at Y2K, when we were going into the year 2000. Everyone was talking about the computer shutting down and we're gonna have problems. And I was one of the few guys that I'm like, we're gonna be fine. You know, I don't, I'm not a conspiracist and a weird guy that gets, yeah, I'm not a flat earther and one of these guys that thinks these crazy things, you know, but I try to be reasonable with my thoughts and weigh things out. And of course, research, but man, look, who can argue with the fact that you look around and you see what's going on in our world that, you know, things aren't always good. So it's definitely, like I said, there's issues going on that make me believe, like, you know, these aren't the greatest of times. There's still good things going on, good people, but man, there's a lot of darkness in this world right now. I, you know, just on another point, I remember when credit cards were sort of becoming popular and I was a kid, they thought that was sort of like buy and trade with numbers, you know, like they thought that was sort of the end of times. You just, you just, here's my philosophy on this. You'll never know. You'll never know because you won't expect it and you'll never know. I think as technology advances, we draw closer to the end of times. And what I mean by that is now anyone can hack your computer, hack your credit card, hack your bank account. These are the times we live in because of technology. And that's what I mean by a statement like that, you know, with the weaponry that's available now and people that can use it and abuse it, it could lead to the end of the world. You know, it takes one person, you know, hitting the button on a nuclear warhead and it's like, okay, I guess this is it. And that's my point is I think we're definitely living in end times, but who can put a date on it? I can't, I'm not trying to put a date on it. No, no, no, we're speculating here. We're speculating from what we see around us. That's all right. And that's okay. And it's okay to speculate, right? So, you know, we always like talking to music with you Michael, what's been the feedback that you've been receiving on iconic? Because I can't stop listening to it. Well, I'll tell you what brother, the feedback has been incredible. The label was a static over the response and the sales. They're talking already about getting in the studio and doing another album. Obviously talking about the band touring, that's going to be tricky because we're all in different projects. And you know, my first priority is Striper and always will be. So it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. But man, I mean, what a great album. What a great album and band to be a part of. I'm blessed that anybody wants to work with me on any level. And, you know, I've got so many things going on right now. Obviously it's weird to come out of the release like iconic and then jump right into release like Striper. It's kind of weird, you know? It almost feels like too much, but this is life. This is the way it works. And again, no complaints. I'm very excited about the Striper album. I'm excited about a new metal album I'm working on with CJ Grimark from Sweden. The music's done for that. No, no date on that, but it's killer. I can't wait for you guys here. I think you guys are going to love it. And I got this inspirational album that's already done. And I started on a new album with Alessandro from Frontiers. Oh my God. Geez. Three weeks. Three weeks. And then I just finished the album and I just turned that in like three weeks ago. So it's crazy, guys. It's really crazy. And I love it, you know? And I love the fact that people want to work with me and I'm a very, very blessed guy. I have nothing to complain about at all. What about this livestream? Tell us about, is this going to be with an audience? Is this going to be in a studio? What's that going to be about? That is going to be in the club that we're playing Trees in Dallas. So it's actually going to be a live show, full band, and we're going to stream that live show. So mistakes and all. Me going, you know, and you crack it, you're going to hear it. But it's going to be really cool, man. We did that in Nashville at the basement east and we're doing it again at Trees in Dallas. OK. Full show live. It's going to, all we're going to do, we're going to give the people what they want. We're going to come out and do calling on you 21 times. OK. I want to ask the people out there watching, give me a really good question to ask Michael Sweet. I want a good one. I want a good question. Well, look, I'll go to my favorite stripper song. And you know, the one that when I'm doing the dishes or I'm walking around the house, I find myself singing is, you know what to do. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's a surprise. I mean, I can name you 10 that I prefer that one. But for some reason, that's what I'm singing all the time. Wow, dude. That's amazing. I wasn't expecting that, but I'm pleasantly surprised. You know what? That's one, if I had, if someone said, pick your favorite off of the first album, that'd be the one I'd pick. You know, maybe it's because I'm living alone now. It's like, are you feeling lonely? Are you feeling blue? Maybe that's it. I don't know either. Because you can't say it. All the soldiers under command is a strong song. Y'all wait. But that's the one I find myself singing around the house. You know what that is? That's one of the first striper, official striper songs that I ever wrote. And it's got that melodic but edgy sense to it. And it's just a cool song. And it's very classic striper. First video we ever did as well. Wow. Yeah. The chorus is so catchy. Oh, good, man. Well, I'm glad you like that. And that plays on the vocal stack stuff. That shows you our influence from bands like Queen and even the Beach Boys and Journey. And we love vocals, love background vocals. All right, here we go. Here's the questions. You can make them quick and sweet just so we can. No pun, but would you ever do a church tour? I like that. Robert says, would you ever do a church tour? You know what? We would consider a church tour if it was done right. In other words, if we could go in there and do full production and rock it, and there were no limitations on decibels and sound and this sort of thing. And full blown striper show? Sure. Why not? Paulo, your thoughts on Merciful Fate. Oh, dude, I'm going to be honest with you. It's not like I listen to Merciful Fate all the time. I don't own any Merciful Fate albums. But I have, of course, heard them. And I'm very familiar with King Diamond. And I did nothing but respect. My gosh, amazing. Amazing singer, amazing band. Obviously, they represent a little bit of a difference in what we represent. The alternate view. An alternate view, flip side of the coin, whatever you want to call it. And I don't have a problem with that. Nothing but respect. And I've never met King Diamond and my brother has. I'd love to meet him someday and be able to tell him in person how much I respect his vocal ability and everything that he's done. Very cool. I met King. Oh, did you? Was he a nice guy? Yes, I did. You know what? He was, it's just like he's just wearing makeup at the end of the day. And he's just representing a sort of a scare thing, some sort of image, right? Look, I don't know what his personal beliefs are. So he's just a regular guy. Seems like a regular guy. Very new. Actually, he sat there and he spoke to me for like 15, 20 minutes. He was so nice and polite. Wow. Yeah, it wasn't a meet and greet either. I was just there backstage with Annela Rock. And he goes, here, I'll introduce you to King. Can you just start talking to him, talking to me? Oh, that's so awesome. Yeah, it was a really, really nice moment. And the other thing, Mike, I don't know if you heard, but Steve Grimann has passed away recently. And I want to know if you've ever met him and what you thought of his vocals. Dude, I'm going to tell you, man, I never met Steve. I've met Nick. I actually jammed with Nick. Well caught at Sweetwater. We did Crazy Train with Rudy Sarzo. And I love Steve's voice. Of course, very familiar with Grim Reaper. I remember seeing, I'll say who now? You know, I'm going, whoa, what? You know, way back with him. And it's nothing but respect for him. And it's so heartbreaking to see what he went through, right? With his leg and the situation with his health over the years. And it just threw me off guard, man. And it made me realize, like, you know, it could be any one of us.  No. And it's why it's so important for us to take care of ourselves and enjoy every moment, because we just don't know what tomorrow brings. And God bless him and his family, man. I never met him. I always heard he was a sweetheart of a person and always wanted to meet him, but I never did. Here's another question from Paul. He says, any plans to come back to England? It's been a while, right, since you've been to England. Oh, man, yeah. Last time we were in England, I want to say it was 2010, if I'm not mistaken. So that's way too long. We usually try to go to different parts of the world every two, three, four years. So you're talking about, what, 12 years, almost 13 years. That's crazy. We've got to get back to England. I love England. Absolutely always have. Holds a very special place in my heart. We shot our Honestly video there at the Hammersmith Odeon. And I just love it there. We had spent a few vacations there, drove from London to Wales and back. And I love the people.  I love the food. I just love it, the spirit there. But man, we got to get back there. Hopefully we will soon. It's just very costly. It's hard to go into Europe right now for a band like us. OK. Alan, you hear anything else?  I forgot it finally came out. We haven't, you know, we spoke to Nathan. Nathan, he told us he's ready to go. Sign me up for another two or three albums. And the goal would be put on a couple of shows for sure, as far as he's concerned. So I'm glad after years of talking about this legendary or mythic album that finally came out. And now we're looking forward to the Striper release.  We wanted to do an album just him and I, but it's great. It'll work. And we're just happy that we were able to do something together. And we talk about that. Joel's such a sweetheart. You know, I love Joel. Always have for the first time I met him. He's just a stand-up guy. He's salt of the earth kind of dude, one of my favorites in this business. And I love him. And any opportunity that I have to work with him, I'm there. Not even a question in my mind, ever. He's played on my solo albums. And we've done a few videos together.  So when we go tour, if we do, with Iconic, I'm going to have to rehearse extra hard, you know? Was it a few years in advance? You could tell Alan really likes the album. You could tell he really likes the album. We didn't have a chance to talk to Michael about it, you know? You're right. It's right. It's right. OK, here's the last question, because I know you have to go off. And you have another interview. And this is you, Michael. Your least favorite striper song. Oh, my least favorite song. Favorite striper song. I think it's pretty common knowledge. That everyone knows. And I think I mentioned this in my book. There's a song called Come to the Everlife. And it just so happens that Oz wrote that song. So it's nothing to do with Oz. At all. OK. We don't have to do with Oz. But some might think that it does, but it doesn't. But that song, I'll never forget when I had to sing that song inside what was going through my mind. I was just thinking, oh, my gosh, how do I sing this and mean it? And how do I sing it with passion? Because every song that I sing, I want to sing with passion and feel it, mean it. That's really important as a singer. And that one, I just couldn't feel it, you know? The groove, the melody, the lyrics. I that would, if I had to pick one, that would probably be the one I would choose out of all of them. That would be it. OK. You know, well, it's very honest of you. Alan, what about you? I don't go there. No, no, no, I want to hear from you guys. Come on. I don't know. I don't know. You know what? You know why I don't know? Because I haven't really thought about it. That's why I'm sure I'm sure there's I'm sure there's one song that I don't love, but I just haven't thought about it. That's all. But I know you did think about it. There's a lot of songs I don't love. I can I can name your list of 20s, right? For songs that I don't love that I skipped, you know. But I mean, the one that I probably love the least would be that one. OK. Yeah, yeah. Twist, you're a song that you really connect to vocally and you can really put the emotion in, regardless if it's a Striper solo song. Oh, man, that's a great question. Really good question. I know I'll stick with Striper since we're on Striper when I'm live and I'm singing and we're performing. The songs that always kind of go up to a little higher level because I can feel them a little bit more. Songs like All For One. I don't know what it is about that song, but maybe it's the message. Maybe it's the melody. I don't know. Other songs like obviously we don't perform it often, but first love, you know, when we perform first love, it's like I can feel it. Yeah, sometimes I get I get goosebumps when I perform it, not because of me, but because just the song, something about it. Yeah, that's a really good question. It's a great question. But I'll come back at you with a few more songs down the road because there's many songs that I get that feeling for. Yeah, I know. I know on the spot, it's tough to sort of really, you know, come up with something, right? It is, it is, it's, man. All right, on that note, Striper's new album, the final battle is due in October, Frontier's Music.  It's Dallas, Thursday, September 29th, the live stream starts at 9 p.m. Like you said, it's in front of an audience. Yep. And yeah, and check out everything else that's going on with the band on all the social media.  Well, brothers, we got a lot going on. We got the new album coming out in October, as you said. And then after that, we're gonna really focus on, finally, on our documentary. Oh, there it is, yes. Yeah, we've been putting together a team to do that and to do it right. That was most important. And now that we're at that point, we're gonna really focus on that at the end of the year and, of course, all of next year. And we're gonna tour for this album, the final battle next year as well. And we're just thrilled that we're able to go out and tour. We're still able to do it. I'm thankful for everything that I can do. And, man, I never take any second of any hour of any day for granted. And I'm a blessed man, and I'm happy to be alive. And, man, I hope you guys, we can get together for dinner. Yeah, yeah, we better hold you to it. Well, listen, when we get up to your neck of the woods or you get down to our neck of the woods and we're in the same vicinity, we're gonna go to dinner and have a great meal and break some bread and actually talk a little bit in person. That would be fun, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And before, let's go, how's the eye? Because a lot of people are wondering. Yes. The eye is doing good, man. I showed you earlier, I'll show you again. You can just see it's a little on the red side, you know? Can you see? Do you have any visual, is it blurry? Like I can see the phone and the light in front of me right now, but I just can't still quite make out detail. And my doctor says that that's gonna get better and better as time goes on. They basically had to put a new lens on my eyes. It's over my cornea, so it's on the outside of my eye. Wow. Yeah, because the reason why they did that was to keep my lens away from my retina inside. Because my retina is what, detached twice. They don't want that to detach again. And, you know, I got some peripheral blindness up here. It looks like someone drew a sharpie up there. It's blacked out. But I'm getting used to that. And once I get used to it, I should be fine. And, you know, I'm trying to keep this side from doing the same. I gotta be real careful. I can't jump out of any planes. No.  Put down the lightsabers. I was told not to kick anybody's butt, man.  That's what I do on a daily basis, you know? How about Oz, quickly, as we have a few minutes left. He's doing great, and Oz is doing great. It's a miracle, isn't it? Yeah, he's come down spack amazingly well. Incredible. Unbelievable, unbelievable. So we're still going, man. And now, hopefully, we won't have to worry about Robert and Perry.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what? Congratulations on the Metal Hall of Fame induction. That was now, it's gonna be almost a year. But, you know, congrats to the Striper for that. Thank you, guys. That's a wonderful award. We got my award right over there, and that was really incredible. And like I said earlier, you know, if anybody thinks of us, it always blows my mind. Because I guess we're so used to, you know, kind of not being thought of in many ways. But man, when someone awards us with something like that, and kind of respects what we do, and it's incredible. It blows our minds, we're all humbled by it. And it drives us to keep going. It really does. It moves us. Amazing. And I've witnessed it, Michael, in many concerts there's a whole new generation coming up in their late teens and twenties that are discovering the older bands, and they love it as much as we did back in the 80s. I love it, man. Thank God, thank God. Because I think some of the best music came out of that era, the 70s and the 80s, just incredible music. And it's really sad when people don't know about that. You ask them about, hey, have you ever heard it to you? And it's like, I've never heard it to you. I was like, what, what? You know? What do you mean? It blows my mind. But anyway, that's awesome. I love it. Michael, you know what?   And you know what? Congrats on the new album so far. We haven't heard it, but we've heard the first two songs and they sound great. Man, you know what? We gotta get you guys the full link so you can hear it. I'm surprised you don't have that yet. No, no, no, because we're too quick. We just, hey, let's do an interview. Let's go, let's go. Slap it on your to-do list. I'll talk to the label and make sure you guys get that because I want you to hear it. And I think you guys are gonna like it. I sure hope you do. Well, I'm sure we will. I'm sure we're consistent Striper fans throughout thick and thin. So I'm sure we'll like it. Well, I love you guys for that. It's so great to have you guys on our team and you're always there for us and not to be no pun intended. And we appreciate it, man. We're thankful for you guys. You really are. Thank you. Hopefully we'll see you on the road, my friend. Have yourself a great day. You guys are awesome. God bless.