Welcome everyone to depression to expression. My name is Scott and today we're talking about self Acceptance, how can we be more content with mistakes that we made in the past? How can we not let them affect our present? How can we have a flourishing and fulfilling future while not being our own worst critic? Well today, I'm sharing five steps five waves five waves five ways five different perspectives You can take and things you can integrate into your daily life that may help you with this this notion of self Acceptance so these five steps are about you know getting to a state of self-acceptance and showing Ourself some compassion as I said We're always our own worst critic and when we put ourselves down all the time when when we do something wrong when we When we mess up something when we make a mistake when we embarrass ourselves when we we're not in a Place where we think we should be in life. We blame ourselves and You know, there's nothing beneficial about that. So the first step to Self-acceptance is to think of something that you did in the past revisit your past a little bit and I know it may be painful and Tell yourself that you did the best you could at the time You Did the best you could at that time now the reason I say best is this can mean two things Maybe you did at that time give a hundred percent effort and something still just didn't work out The mistake was still made you are still hard on yourself even though you did the best Well, what if you reframe it as you did what you thought was right at the time I think of the mistakes I've made in the past if you go back to you Know when you're a teenager and growing up and our minds are a little smaller and the world is a little more compact And we're not as smart and open-minded as we are now and it's easy to think that that in that moment That you you thought you were doing the right thing You're you thought you knew it all it's easy to have a large ego at that age You thought you knew it all you thought you were doing the right thing and you thought you were doing the best thing Well have that perspective now How many years ago ten years ago five years ago at that moment in time you did the best you could you thought what you were Doing was the right thing Sure, you know it was wrong now, but not at that moment and you can't change that so that's accepting the mistakes that we make in the past as Noticing that I was somebody else back then I Don't have control over that person. I'm not that person anymore But he or she did the best they could at the time They thought what they were doing was right and it's now done and it's time to move on So that's step number one towards self-acceptance is looking at the past and realizing that it's over and you thought you did The right thing and the best you could at that time number two the second step towards self Acceptance is to know that perfection isn't the goal Your goal in life is not to be perfect the goal in life is not to avoid all Mistakes the point of life is not to avoid failure You know we all have different meanings that we put towards different things and we all have a different definition of what our lives should entail And what our lives mean, but in my experience It's the imperfection. That's the beautiful stuff. That's the gold the failures are What are what you know sprout new growth? The failures and the mistakes are what make us better human beings The failure is the soil in which in which we grow So if you're if you're trying to be perfect all of the time and you make one mistake well How can you be accepting of yourself in your situation when every time you veer off the path just a little bit? You're that much harder on yourself Acknowledge that perfection isn't the goal acknowledge that life is imperfect in itself Know that there's going to be mistakes and there's going to be plenty of hard times ahead There's going to be failures No matter how much you prepare There's going to be mistakes made and Know that that's okay. Know that that's all in the plan. Know that that's how life is supposed to be Because if you have the expectation that you're going to make no mistakes Well, you're setting yourself up to be disappointed you're setting yourself up to not accepting What life actually has to offer and that's a lot of shit? Life has a lot of curveballs to throw at you. So step number two is know that life Isn't supposed to be perfect and that perfection is not the goal number three We can think of self-acceptance as self-satisfaction. Are you satisfied with yourself? Do you like where you are in life? Are you happy with who you are right and if we're not satisfied with something? If we are dissatisfied, well, we can look at what things we can do to change that to be more satisfied with our life situation And who we are so I challenge you with number three think about things that you can change right away That can make you feel more accepting and more satisfied with yourself, right? How can you feel more accepting towards yourself? When you can look in the mirror and say I love who I see right now Is it something as simple as as changing what you're wearing? Is it as simple as shaving and looking a little more clean cut, right? Is it something to do with well, you know what? I haven't called my family in a really long time and I feel a little guilty about that Because I'd like to be the son or daughter that contributes to the family and has open lines of communication, right? Where are your values there? So are the things that you're dissatisfied with and If there are what actions can you take to solve that? Because when we have unsolved problems in our lives, which there always will be This there's of course going to be dissatisfaction But the very first step is to have an action plan note that there are problems But more importantly note that there are things we can do about them that we have the power, right? We have the power to solve them So part of that self-acceptance is to know that I have the power to solve all of these problems and everything I'm dissatisfied with in my life And I know that once I fix these and when I'm on the path to fix these I'm gonna be more of an accepting person of myself So if there are quick things you can fix do it, you know shaving and all of that was just a quick example But if there are quick things do them right now for long term write them down and have a plan of action Number four, okay I know that it's really really easy to look at the negative all the time. Of course. It's way easier We can train our brains so much, but you flip on the TV and I guarantee it's all negative news That's what sells that's the story We've been told that life is such a tragedy and and it's such a negative place And we just see what's happening around the world and we're kind of skewed towards this negativity And that's what happens in our minds a lot of the time When we think of our past the things that really stick The things that we constantly think of Well, those are the mistakes. Those are the times we messed up We think of the times where we had no control and we are taken advantage of We think of the hard times and the suffering in our past But believe it or not You have a lot of good in your past that you can reflect on a Lot of times where you faced a problem head-on a lot of times where where you thought you couldn't do something And you did it when you faced a fear head-on when you were really proud of yourself When you were truly happy when you made a difference in the world and in your community There are tons of these examples and step four is To be more self-accepting is to realize that you have made it really far And you have done things in your life that make you worthy of love and Worthy of others accepting you and worthy of you accepting you It's about self-love Reflect on your past know that you did a great job think of specific Scenarios when you did a great job at work when your mom and dad Told you that they were proud of you Right when you had a family gathering when you had a laugh with your friends Think of the good times That's self-acceptance to know that I did a great job. I'm continuing to do a great job I know deep within my being that I am worthy to be here That I'm worthy to be loved by me So reflect on your past and and write these down Daydream a little there's nothing wrong with daydreaming daydream think of those good times number five last And definitely not least we have uniqueness This channel is all about self Expression, how do we express ourselves in ways that make us feel unique make us feel like a real individual How do we express ourselves that makes us love ourselves? How do we express ourselves so that we're aligning our lives with what we believe in and what we value? That's what depression to expression is all about. I believe with all of my heart that This channel offers something unique that I offer something unique to the world by sharing stories of depression Anxiety offering strategies crying on camera being a little bit vulnerable online. I think I think I'm doing a great thing I think I'm unique in that I like what I'm offering So what I'm offering to you and what I'm asking you to do is think of what makes you unique What makes you unique? What's something you can do what's something you think about what's something? That nobody else has but you what's some strange talent you have What do you really like about yourself? This can be so simple.  Well, I play the guitar, but my friend is a better guitarist So that's not really unique about me. No, you play the guitar differently than your friend does We don't have to compare and get on the same level as everyone else That's not what self-acceptance and self-love is all about. It's knowing that you specifically have something to offer You like nobody else So what's something that's unique about you? Write them down. What's something that you really like about yourself? This can be anything. Do you like the way your hair looks in the morning? Do you like the way that you swing a tennis racket? Do you like your own smile? Do you like your own like really? I'm not sure what it is. Do you do you like the way? You I'm running out of ideas. I don't even know I gave my I gave my ideas and Alex up for you I was going to say do you like the way you? You manually shift a car if you drive standard. That's a terrible example, but what's unique about you? I Know you can have fun with it, and I know there are things that you can list you can list a hundred things man I know you can it's hard It's a hard process Because as I said, we're our own worst critics No matter how many people love us if someone says great job to you if someone says I love you if someone says you're Compassionate you're empathetic, you know, you're an incredible human being That doesn't mean anything to us if we don't believe it ourselves If we don't have that self-compassion and self-love if we don't like where we are in life Or we we can't congratulate ourselves and give ourselves a pat on the back what other people tell us doesn't mean anything It starts with you It starts with self-love. It starts with accepting our past failures It starts with knowing that life isn't perfect It starts with knowing that life is extremely difficult and no one has an easy time That's something we're not unique with everyone goes through hard times Everyone struggles with this exact thing this exact idea of self-love. We all struggle with from time to time That's why we have to work at it. That's why mental health and training our minds and being Being present and working on self-improvement and self-growth is a lifetime skill. It's a lifetime practice You don't go to the gym once Do 20 curls and say I'm fit. I'm done. That's it. Your muscles are huge. That's it. No That's not it You go to the gym three times a week for the rest of your life to maintain health Maintain the muscle and physique that you want same with the mind. You can't meditate once and Think that you're going to be happy for the rest of your life and super Zen You can't do these self-acceptance practices once and think you're okay We need to constantly think of these things not too much But just enough so so we know that our we're developing and that we're not stuck in the past and that we're not constantly Comparing ourselves to others and that we're content and satisfied with our life. That's what this is all about that's what this channel depression to expression is about and the testimonials and and the comments on this channel just continue to blow my mind at At the level of intelligence and and the self-awareness people have within, you know The self and and how they know where they're steering off the path and and they know that that life isn't easy But they're accepting towards that. So I challenge you to try these five things Towards self-acceptance five steps and please let me know what you think in the comments, please Spreading some love in the comments. Just say hi to everybody. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do plenty of videos About mental health on this channel. So Lastly, I just like to say to everyone stay strong Keep being you and don't forget To express yourself. This has been Scott from depression to express. Huh? Huh? depression to expression Take care


Aloha and welcome to Stan the Energy Man here on Think Tech, Kauai, I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies and can you believe it, this is the last Friday in 2018, gonna start a new year next week, I don't know where 2018 went but it sure went by quick and I think 2019 is gonna go by even faster so hold on to your hats. Anyway, we've got a great show today, like last week we talked a little bit about battery storage on the grid and our guest today, I've actually heard him speak several times but most recently I heard him about six weeks ago at an event here in Honolulu sponsored by the German Chamber of Commerce and the local council general from Germany and they put on a program that was focused around hydrogen and energy storage specifically but focused a little bit on hydrogen and we had a great chance to listen to some great briefings and our guest today put on one of the best, it's Dr. Matthew Dewberry from University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and I almost, I'm afraid I'm overexposing him because he's been on a couple of times with Mitch Ewing from H&EI, they worked together so Mitch had him first, he got first dibs on Dr. Matt but he's a really great resource to have here in the state especially as we talk about the more sophisticated or the more current batteries that are popular which is lithium, that's a specialty. So we'll try and demystify some of the lithium aspects and just talk about pluses and minuses of batteries in general, how they work, things that you want to do so glad to have a year and I know you've already told probably Mitch's audience how you got to Hawaii and how you got to work at UH doing battery stuff but tell my audience how you got here. Sure, so as you can tell from my accent, I'm French, I did all my studies in France. By formation I'm a ceramist engineer so I have two master degree, one in ceramic engineering and one in material science, I then did my PhD in France and that's when I started working on lithium metal batteries and after that I really wanted to start working on commercial system and start working on larger scale. So I came here 2005, working for H&E, I was a postdoc and then I slowly rose and now I'm faculty over there, we're doing mostly the diagnosis and prognosis of commercial cells and that's because we really want to help equal, obvious people in the state that wants to put large battery packs to understand how to use their battery better and what to do, what not to do with those kind of batteries. My guest last Friday was Ryan Wubbins from Burns & McDonald's, they're a large engineering firm out of St. Louis and he's one of their electrical engineers and we're talking about scaling up batteries and could you just talk a little bit about some of the challenges or some of the benefits to scaling lithium technology up to multi-megawatt, even gigawatt scale? Well the biggest issue is that all the, when you build lithium-ion batteries, they're all going to be slightly different and that's just the manufacturing and of course the really high quality battery are much closer together than the cheap batteries but even the really expensive one, they're all a little bit different. So it's not a big deal in a cell phone, just have one, but when you start to pack thousands of them, if not more, then you need to find a way to take into account all those small variations because they're going to influence a lot the performance of your assembly but even more importantly they're going to influence or you're going to monitor it because lithium-ion batteries, as you know, there is a risk in term of safety if you don't operate them properly and usually that risk increases when you have more and more cells because you have more and more parameters and getting harder and harder to make sure they all stay in sync and they all do exactly what you want them to do. So the main difficulty is to control them and monitor those cell to cell variations. We use some lithium cobalt technology in our vehicles so we have some 14 kilowatt hour battery packs that we put in there and to my surprise, probably not to yours, the cells are actually pretty small there, like two C cells are typical alkaline batteries, two C cells taught on top of each other and all set up. They also have cooling so that's another thing that's put in there. Is that part of the controls that you're talking about? Because battery behavior is going to be really dependent on the temperature and what you really don't want is having batteries at different temperatures and that's because if they are different temperatures, some are going to give more capacity than others and so they're going to get out of sync much, much, much faster. The reason why they tend to use those really small batteries is because they are mass produced. I mean we're making billions of them every year so their quality is really good and they're really close to each other. Some manufacturers, like I think the Nissan Leaf, is much larger batteries and then you run into issues because you make far less of them and so you take the risk of they're going to be a little bit more different than if you take two Bavos batteries, they're called 18650s, they're 1.8 centimeter by 650. Tesla made the choice to use only, yeah, but that's a standard for a computer and all these kinds of batteries. Tesla made the choice to use those, I mean the Tesla Model S varies 10,000 of them or something like that. So that's the choice of having something that's mass produced so you know the quality is going to be there and the chance of getting a less performing battery is pretty small. How about cost and just the logic of using batteries for huge, either long duration or for high, high voltages or high power requirements? I think for power it makes sense and the new generation of batteries are extremely powerful. For load shifting and all this kind of aspect, that's a bit more debatable depending on how much energy you want to shift and batteries, in the reality I think batteries don't store much energy. You compare that to hydrogen, I'm not going to talk to you about that, but batteries don't store much energy at all so it's really really good for power, it's really really efficient, but for long duration that might not be the best energy storage and large capacity. It all depends on the scale you want, for us if we want to store for the whole grid one gigawatt hour of energy, battery is probably not a good solution for that. So let's take off on that. So one gigawatt doesn't make much sense. When you think about Hawaii, Hiko, I looked on their website, they generate roughly a gigawatt of power plus or minus 250 megawatts or whatever, and different times of day they generate more or less depending on what the usage of the requirement is. But let's just say just for round numbers, they have one gigawatt requirement all day long. That's 24 gigawatt hours of storage potentially when we don't have coal or other base power. If you had to use only solar, wind or renewables, especially intermittent renewables and you have to store power, you're going to need way more than one gigawatt of storage. You're going to need probably 5, 10, maybe even up to 20 depending on having reserves for several days rather than just overnight. Yeah, I mean you can do an easy calculation, the BSS we have on the grid right now, they have one truck trader, but it's fairly small but still it's pretty big. I think the best one are probably around 500 megawatt hour. So to get to one gigawatt hour you need 2,000 of them. That's start to be a lot of batteries and that's just for, as you say, for one hour for the grid. So if you want two or three days reserve for days like today where we're not going to see the sun much, then it's too much. I don't think, to me that's not the solution I think. It's really good to have them for power and for instant access to electricity, but for long-term storage, especially if we want 3, 4, 5, a week of reserve, I don't think batteries are the right solution for the task. Well, let's talk a little bit about, you know, batteries are amazing things to me. And I had the one slide I showed when you briefed in that couple of weeks ago. My only slide just showed basic capacitors up to pumped hydrogens and stuff and the different batteries in between. So you had at the bottom end you had supercapacitors that are really powerful for really short duration. Then you move into the metal batteries that are, you know, a little bit longer duration and can still do a good power, power push or smooth power. And then you get into flow batteries and then above that you get into long duration batteries. But wonder, what is your outlook for the future? You know, I mean, I hear people say that lithium batteries are going to get cheaper when we go into higher scales of production, when we have economy of scale in production. But does that take into account where we get the materials and all the different materials that go into a lithium battery, at least by the current designs? So, you know, some folks have told me that cobalt is actually the limiting component in current lithium technology because there's less cobalt around than there is even lithium. And then we get those materials from countries mostly outside the United States. So we get back into that we don't control our own energy, major components of our energy system. Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. So on your first point, the power ability, the main difference between lithium batteries and the other kind of batteries is the electrolytes. And the voltage of a lithium ion battery is three point something volts. Any other battery that's based on the water electrolyte cannot go over two volts. Because then water split and we're just making hydrogen and oxygen. That's why lithium ion batteries are so powerful compared to the rest is that they don't use water as an electrolyte. The big drawback is that the organic electrolyte we use is really flammable and leads to almost thermal runaway winds. So that's if we want safer batteries, we need a water based electrolyte but then we cannot go over two volts to some degree. There are some solutions to override that. But to answer on the cost, I think the cost might still go down a little bit. But you're right, the more battery we produce, the more we're going to be limited by essentially the cobalt. A lithium is fairly abundant. It's just really, really small. So to get to the lithium, we need to remove everything else first. But yeah, cobalt is coming from Congo mainly, which is not a country that's known to be really nice to these people. So yeah, cobalt is going to be a concern. But there are several battery chemistries for lithium that doesn't use any cobalt. OK. Well, we talked a little bit before the show about the lithium ferrous phosphate technology. Can you explain how that's different from lithium cobalt? Sure. So what people don't realize is that in a lithium ion battery name, it can be a large difference in terms of the materials they use on both the positive and the negative electrode. So most batteries, 99. something percent, have a graphite as the negative electrode. And on the positive, there are five or six families of compounds that people use. One big family is called the layered oxide, and that's the one that contains cobalt. Those are great because they give you a lot of power, and the voltage is really high, around 4.2 or around that range. You have the manganese oxide. It's also really good, they have power. So if the cobalt is high energy, the manganese oxide powers around 4 volts. And you have another family that's the LIFEPO4 lithium-iron phosphate. So the drawback of that one is that the voltage is much lower. Voltage is only around 3.6 volts. Also, it has less capacity. If you look at the cobalt oxide, it's around 160 milliamp hour per gram, lithium-iron phosphate is at 120. So it's less capacity when you put them together and less voltage. So that's the drawback. The pros of lithium-iron phosphate are pretty significant. It's extremely high power. Most things you can put as much current as you want and it's going to work. The other huge benefit is that it's not as sensible to thermal runaway than the cobalt batteries. The thermal runaway, it's a really simple process. It's just that the electrolytes start to kind of boil in a way. The electrolytes start to decompose around 80-something degrees. And then the temperature slowly rises because that reaction produces heat. So when it starts, it's not going to stop because it produces heat. And usually in a cobalt-based battery, when the temperature reaches 300, it's going to strip the oxygen from the cobalt oxide. And that's when the temperature rises really, really rapidly and the pressure and all of that. In the lithium-iron phosphate, the oxygen is with the phosphate. So it's a much stronger chemical bind. So you don't really strip the oxygen from it. And so usually those cells don't go into thermal runaway at all. And I've seen videos of full battery packs of LFP cells for lithium-iron phosphate. You can put them on fire and nothing's going to happen. I mean, they're going to burn, but they're not going to burst into flame like the cobalt-based batteries. And when you have one of those fires, what happens when you put water on it? People still debate that. I think now for the firefighters, they still recommend to put a lot of water on that. Just because what you need really is to cool the battery as much as possible. And I think for your viewers, a really good tip. The great thing, if I can say about thermal runaway, is that at the beginning, that's a really, really, really slow process. OK. So... If you can interrupt it then... Yeah, and for what I do in my lab is when we have a battery that gets hot, the first thing we do is we, of course, unplug it and we wait an hour. If an hour later the battery cools down, you're fine. It's not going to explode. If an hour later the battery is still hot, then it's started the thermal runaway process and that's when you need to act about it. OK. So a good tip to know if your battery runs really, really hot, if you remove it, let it rest, it gets cold, you're fine. It's not going to explode. If it stays hot, then you need to act on it. And I would recommend to put it in sand or something like that. OK, I'll cool it down. Well, sand is great because it's going to act like a sponge if the battery leaks. It's not going to cool it down, but it's going to act like a sponge and sand melts at 2,000 degrees. So you're sure nothing is going to get out of there. OK.  OK, well, that's a great advice. We're going to go to break now and come back and talk to Dr. Burberry about some more technologies that he's working with in lithium batteries. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Jay Fidel of Think Tech. Come around every Tuesday at 2 PM with John, David, Ann, and me. We're talking about history, history lens, right, John? Exactly. Seeing current events through the lens of the past. Absolutely. See you next time. OK, Jay, thanks. Hey, welcome back to Standard Energy Man here on my lunch hour, as usual. And we've got a great guest today talking mostly above my head, but I'm trying to hang with him. I've got Dr. Matthew. I want to say Michel, because most French guys I know are called Michel, but Matthew Dubury from the university's H&EI. He's a specialist in lithium batteries, and we're talking to him a little bit about just some of the different think characteristics of lithium batteries and the different kinds of lithium batteries and what makes them different. So I think it's pretty interesting, but this kind of circles back around to what we're talking about earlier, where you can hook batteries up in parallel or in series, and with one, you actually build your voltage. And the other one, you keep the same voltage, but you build more capacity. Would that be a fair word? Maybe you have a right word for it. I'm sure I don't. Explain that relationship on how you hook up batteries to either increase the voltage or keep the voltage in. So by nature, a battery has a given voltage. And you may be surprised, the lead-acid battery is 2 volts. Most people think the lead-acid battery is 12 volts. But no, that's 2 volts. And in your car battery, you have at least six that are connected in series to make those 12 volts. So if you want 900-volt battery, you're going to have to stack them in series to increase the voltage. But then, you cannot apply much current to it because you have one string of really small batteries. So then you put a lot of strings in parallel, so you can increase the current you put and increase the overall power of the system. So that's where it gets really difficult with lithium-ion batteries because they really don't like to be overcharged or over discharged. When you're strings in parallel, you always take the risk that if one string is different than the other, it might get a lot more current, or it might get much higher voltage than the other just to compensate for the overall assembly. So most of the time, the control is at the single-cell level just to make sure that no cell goes into overcharge or over discharged. So it sounds like fixing a lithium battery at home isn't do not try this at home. I would absolutely not recommend putting battery together without a really good battery management system and a lot of sensors everywhere. I mean, battery packs are really expensive, and this is not just the cost of batteries. It's also the cost of all the voltage, current, temperature sensors, and what's called the battery management system that's going to take all that information and make sure everything stays safe. Yeah, I would not connect lithium batteries with just wires and call it a day. My electrical engineer friends hate when I say plug and play. And now I have a better understanding of that. Yeah, and the battery management system is still not great. The main difficulties to monitor was called state of charge. And that's pretty much knowing how much capacity you have left in your battery. That's extremely, extremely, extremely complicated. Because you cannot measure it directly. You have to use some indirect method to measure it. And those methods, they are really complex and they are pretty inaccurate. And I'm sure you notice that on your cell phone, where when it's old, you think you have 30% battery and the systems say you have 30%. And a few minutes later, you have 2% battery. The battery is fine. I mean, it's age, but it's fine. The problem is the monitoring of the state of charge. And on my cell phone, it's not a big deal. But if you look at cars, and there have been cases where some EVs got stranded because the car thought it still had 10 miles, whereas the battery was done. So understanding state of charge and monitoring it and recalibrating it to the age of a battery is extremely complicated. And that's because the battery degradation is going to change depending on how you use them. So if you take two battery packs, you put them in the field. They're going to degrade differently. So you cannot really pre-record what's going to happen for that battery. So a lot of our work in Chania is to try to find ways to diagnose the cells in the field and recalculate the state of charge. And we've been pretty successful in developing new methodologies to do that, as well as, in fact, we patented one last year or two years ago. Does some of the analysis include temperature? Or is it, I mean? Temperature is not really an issue for that. And that's because when the battery is at rest, usually it has to cool down. And the thermodynamic potential of a battery is dependent on temperature, but not by much around equilibrium. So that's usually not the biggest source of error. The battery getting out of sync, the way they degrade, is a much bigger contributor to the error. Are lithium batteries prone to degradation in super cold climates, like lead acid batteries are in cars? Or are they more resistant to that? I'm going to make a two-fold answer. Lithium ion batteries don't really like the cold. They're not going to degrade, but you're not going to get much capacity out of them.  The temperature room, definitely. In terms of degradation, actually, no. They don't degrade at all. And as a matter of fact, and I know that's surprising for many people, battery degrades the most when you don't use them. So leaving a battery fully charged is going to lose a few percent of its capacity every year. And that's irreversible loss. That's not self-discharge. So parking a car that's parked 90% of the time, if you park it in the sun fully charged, that's really bad for your battery. And that's because of the chemical reaction inside. And actually, if you freeze your battery, that reaction is stopped. If you go in my lab, all my batteries that I'm not using, they're in a freezer. And that way, we slow that reaction as much as possible so that when we need to use it, the battery is still fresh. If we were leaving it on the shelf after a few years, we would have lost 10, 15% of the battery capacity. So actually keeping them cold is good for them, except that if they're really cold, they don't get the power out. But in terms of lifespan, it actually protects them. Exactly. Back in the day when you could remove the battery of your laptops, I was always doing that. I remove the battery, freeze it, vacuum seal it, and put it in the freezer. That's the best way to increase the life of your battery. What are some of the technologies coming on to get us to the next level of batteries? I mean, it seems like we're all looking forward to that perfect solution where batteries are lighter. They're more powerful. They last longer. They're more earth-friendly in terms of end of life. They're not hazmat and things like that. What are some of the things we can look forward to in the battery world? So again, it's going to be a multiple-fold answer. In terms of performance, batteries are getting 5% better roughly every year. And that's mostly through little tweaks here and there. We start putting a lot of silicone to replace some of the graphite. And that makes it a little bit better. But it's not going to be amazingly better. For that, we need to completely change the battery. And there are two candidates that people are most focused on. One is a lithium-air battery. And it's pretty much using air as an electrode, a little bit like in a fuel cell. So one side of the battery will be a fuel cell. The other side will be a lithium electrode. That could give a 10-fold increase, one of the magnitude increase in the capacity of the battery. But there's a lot of problems with that. The other candidate is a lithium-sulfur battery. So using sulfur can take a lot of lithium. So that could make, again, a battery with a one order of magnitude increase in terms of capacity. But we're still really far from being available commercially. We're still a lot of fundamental issues to solve to get there. And does that have a lot to do with the control issues you talked about? No, it's more fundamental material issue. The problem with the sulfur is that some compounds along the way when you put lithium on inside, some lithium compounds become soluble in the electrolyte. And so they leave the current collector. And it's impossible to have them come back. So you're using a lot of capacity that way. So it's not reversible. For the lithium-air, the problem is that you want your organic electrolyte for the lithium side. But that organic electrolyte is not stable against air. So how do you design your system so that you can have air come in against an electrolyte that's not stable? There are a lot of issues there. One solution that people working on is to replace that electrolyte by a solid electrolyte, electrolyte made of ceramics. That's really promising. But right now, those materials, they don't conduct ions quite fast enough. So they work decently at 100 degrees, 80 to 100 degrees. And there were some examples in France. Some of the EVs we had, and we still have, work with all-solid batteries where the electrolyte is a solid. But they ran 80 to 100 degrees. So it would work for EVs, for cell phones. It's not that much. So that's potential leads. That's going to make battery better in the future. I know one of the things that I've learned just playing with making hydrogen in the office and stuff is that surface area has a lot to do with how much hydrogen you can make or how much production you can get out of a battery. So when we get down to nano technology and one atom thick surfaces, if you can make them compatible, is that going to really help batteries? Well, most batteries already have some nano materials. The big problem we have with really small materials like that is that the battery degradation is mostly because that electrolyte is not stable. And so it passivates at the surface of the negative electron. So more surface means more passivation and means more degradation. So it's a balance to find between something that's more surface, you're going to get a lot of power, but you're going to see a lot of passivation. For energy batteries, usually you limit the surface. You want larger grains so that you have limited surface and you rely a lot on the diffusion of lithium through the materials. OK. Yeah, I didn't catch when I read your background that you have the ceramics background, but ceramics have always fascinated me. Well, in high school I did pottery. So it was fascinating just to learn about glazes and things. But then my wife has a friend who worked for NASA and had space shuttle tiles and things like that. And I'm just boggled by it. They're featherweight. You put them on the bottom of a space shuttle and absorbs all that heat, insulates it so that on one side it's thousands of degrees. The other side is temperature is cool enough to touch. I come from Limos, France, which is the term that's most famous in the world for the China plates, and the best China plates in the world come from that area. So we have the best European school on ceramics. And we do tiles, plates, all of that. But we also do all the advent ceramics. I mean, you don't realize in your cell phone all the capacitors, all of that, they are ceramics. In your TV there's a lot of ceramics. And the battery electrodes, they're both ceramics. So yeah, ceramics dictates a lot of things. And there are some amazing materials out there. So do you think that having that background in ceramics really helps you working with the machine? Yes, and in all the method we developed for two diagnosed commercial cells, we put a lot of material science into it. And it's the understanding of what the lithium does when it goes inside the materials that give us a lot of information of the state of the system. And by tracking those clues, we can diagnose the cell perfectly without having to open them. So that's a really novel method we implemented. We started working on about a decade ago, and now it's well-accepted all over the world. And it's highly recommended for people that testing battery to use that diagnosis method, because it gives you so much information without having to open the battery or do anything destructive to it. Wow. Well, believe it or not, we've blown through 30 minutes here, Matthew, and I got to admit, I learned a boatloading of information, Boku info, as we say, and at HGAP. So thanks very much for being here. I really appreciate it. We'll probably have to have you back sometime when it doesn't overexpose you and bring you back on Think Tech on Standard Energy Man. But thanks for being here. Your moment, welcome. Good pleasure. And for everyone else, we'll see you next week Friday in a brand new year. Standard Energy Man is signing off till 2019. Aloha.


In business news, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, has concluded plans to increase the amount of foreign exchange allocated to banks to meet the request of customers. This relates to requests of travellers seeking foreign exchange for travel allowances, payment of tuition and medical fees among other invisibles. It follows a warning issued by the CBN governor, Gardiner Murphure at a meeting with the managing directors of the deposit money banks, and may feel a caution to them to desist from denying customers, particularly travellers the opportunity to purchase foreign exchange. This is foreign exchange for the purpose of personal travel allowance, PTA, basic travel allowance, BTA, tuition fees and medical payments, as well as small and medium enterprises transactions, all for the repatriation of foreign direct investment proceeds.


The first tool that we have in our hands is our own body, our own mind, our own energy. If these three things function at the highest level, whatever little things that are given to our hands will suddenly acquire a different significance. With small things, those who have control over their system do big things, simply because this is the first tool that we have, this body, this mind, this energy. Being some mastery over that will make a world of difference, particularly for a soldier because it's a demanding life, it's a lonely life. If one is not substantially organized within himself, then being alone is very difficult. A yogi is always alone by choice, not because he doesn't get along with people, simply because he's so well-organized, usually he doesn't find any company which is that well-organized. So you choose to be alone because you know when one of the disciples asked Gautama the Buddha, is it good to walk in company or to walk alone?  It is so for a soldier also. It's better to be alone than to have a fool next to you, isn't it? If the fool is on the other side of the border, it's a good thing. If he's next to you, it's not a good thing. So like a yogi, a soldier also has to learn how to integrate one's body, mind, energy in such a way that being alone is not a struggle because in that there is enormous strength, enormous. There's a human being becomes phenomenal simply because his ability to organize himself in such a way that being alone is not an issue. Those who seek company all the time compulsively, nothing wrong meeting and mingling and being in company with people. But if it's a compulsive need, you have to be with somebody or something. In that state, one becomes unnecessarily vulnerable, especially in the business that you are, vulnerability could mean life or death.


Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. Today, we are talking about some zero to 100K trading methods to get you off the ground and started and moving throughout FIFA 21 Ultimate Team to kinda get those coins moving. That first 100K is pretty hard to get. So I wanna kinda give you some help, especially if you're just getting onto the game during the early access or during the full game release in early October. I just wanna make this video for maybe some new guys that are getting on the game or if you're struggling to get off the ground started from zero coins in foot. I wanna talk to you about some ways that I use to get through my first 100,000 coins. As you can see here, I'm on 200,000 coins and I have gotten there with a few of these methods. So we're gonna talk about some sniping filters today, trading with SBC solutions and just sniping and bidding on silver cards because right now for some reason silver cards, although they're not really required for a lot, are still selling on the market for a really high amount and a lot of people are making big bucks on silvers. So I wanna talk about those things today. First thing is first. The first thing that I've used to make a lot of coins in the past, recent future on this game is trading with non-rare golds that are used inside of SBCs. There are two guys here that I've traded with a lot, Funes Morin on Andre Silva. There's many other cards out there that you can trade with. I just wanna talk to you guys about how to find those cards because they're out there and I can't just give you the name because then it won't work, right? But I wanna talk to you about SBC trading with the solutions, right? Because when people want to go and do an SBC, I do this myself, right? We go to Footbin to find out the cheapest solution and the cheapest solution on Footbin is usually changing because the prices on Footbin are not always exactly up to date right away. So right now, this is like the cheapest solution right now in Footbin and I trade with this Andre Silva card a lot, right? Let me take a look and show you this guy's graph and kind of allow you to understand why I'm trading with this card. So this is his graph from yesterday. Watch his PlayStation 4 graph, right? You see for that most of the day, he's around 1,000 coins, but there are certain parts of the day where he peaks to around 2,000 coins and even peaked up to 2.6K at one point. What happens is this card is a part of a lot of SBC solutions like this one right here, Portugal No Loyalties, the name of the squad this is the whole nine yards solution inside of the Hybrid Leagues, SBC set, Advanced SBCs. And you can see that these cards are, it says Andre Silva's 13 coins on the market, Jalta shares 500 and Tunes is 1,100, Cemento is 1,000, right? So Footbin reads these prices off and it updates and it says, hey, based off these prices that are, we have calculated on the market right now, this is the cheapest solution at the moment. Now if we go and look at Andre Silva, he's actually about like 1,500, 1,600 coins. So at the moment he hasn't risen too much yet, but you can see the supply at 1,500 is dwindling because we're right to the 59th minute and there's two new listings there. So he's actually rising right now as we speak because he is in the cheapest solution. This one popped up first and I clicked on one in the whole nine yards SBC. So that solution that shows up first is what everybody wants to click on, right? So they go and buy the players to do the SBC and what happens is those players actually end up rising in value. So until Footbin's prices update, people are just following this SBC and honestly they'll pay whatever it takes to get it done because it is a solution that is right there in front of them and it's easy, right? That's why these cards go up so much. I literally watched this Andre Silva card last night go from 1,000 coins all the way up to 3,600 coins on the market, it was crazy. How that fluctuation took place. So that's how I've made a lot of coins. All of these Andre Silvas that you see here that are sold for right around like 1,700, 1,800 coins, some of them for 2K, these Funes Moris were all bought for like 650 coins because his graph, just like Andre Silva's graph, I'll show you, Funes Mori, center back. I'll show you his graph as well. He bounces around a lot. Right now it says he's at 1,000 coins. His solution might not be the cheapest yet but look at this man. I sold him today when he was getting up to this mark. He was at 650 coins. I noticed that he bounced to 2K and he went to actually 3K today at one point and I sold a little bit early. But if that makes sense, that's kind of the key.  I usually click on the whole nine yards because this is an SBC people need help with because it's not easy. Sort by the price, look for ones with no loyalty and let's say we're going to look for the cheapest one right now with no loyalty is this one right here. Who's inside of it? We have some Spanish players, right? This Bustinza guy, Bustinza, what a name. This is a guy that I've traded with as well because I know that he fluctuates when the Spanish SBCs get into the cheapest pot, right? He's 1.2K. He goes up to like 2.6 to 3K. Right now it says he is 2,000 coins. Let me go check. Let me go check his price on the market and see if he's actually right around 2K. So he is, so Footbin must have just updated that solution because he's still right around 2K. What I would expect then is for this card to possibly rise up in the next, you know, probably 15 to 20 minutes. The cards actually rise up pretty fast and you have to stay on top of it but the fluctuations is what you want to look for.  Because you know, 1,000 coins, you sell it at 2K, you're making 1,000 coins a card just like that. Even if you have 5,000 coins, you're gonna be doubling your coins very, very fast because there's solutions that are always going top to bottom at all times. So you can always be checking back here at the cheapest solution list and looking at which players, people are gonna be looking at to buy and be trading with those players. So that's number one thing that I would do to trade right now because especially at the start of the game where we're at, everybody is doing SBCs like this to try to get their clubs off the ground and get some coins. That's the number one thing that I would do. Number two thing is just with sniping filters. This is a tweet from Beewalds. I'm gonna put the link to this tweet in the description. These sniping filters right here are ones that you can go under gold or under silver players and just search these filters and snipe players because a lot of players pop up under these and basically you're gonna be trying to snipe for profit under these filters. So let's say gold Argentinian right backs is a sniping filter that we are looking at right here. So nationality, Argentina, quality, gold position, right back. Let's see how much these are going for. How much are these Argentinian right backs going for it? 3,000 coins? Wow, these are actually really expensive. 4,000 coins for Bufferini popped up right there. So it looks like a lot of these cards are going for around 4K and it looks like they are the economy bowl items for a lot of these cards, which is interesting. So boom, 4,000 coins for these but there's multiple different cards that fall under this gold Argentine right back, right? These Bufferini, Pellud, Montiel. So there's at least three different cards that are gonna pop up under this filter. These cards are packed a lot as well. The fact that they're selling for 4K is crazy. Let me sit here for a second and see how many of them I can get to pop up. Maybe they're very cheap. So like 4.2K it looks like is where they're selling. See if I can maybe get one or two to pop up here. But this is basically what a sniping filter is. You could sit here on this sniping filter, search over and over whether you're on the console, the web app or the companion. Wait for a snipe to come up and then try to get it really quick. From somebody that just packed this card, maybe thinks it's worth about 1,000 coins, actually lists it up and finds out, hey, that was a big undercut. So I haven't seen any pop up just yet. But this is basically what you would wanna do with any of these sniping filters that were listed on this tweet right here. Let's try one more. Let's go for the Colombian center back as well. Let me try this one. So Columbia, old center back. How much do these guys go for? Probably a little bit less. Maybe 2,000? Yeah, so right around 2,000 coins. Boom, look, there's a snipe for 1,200 and a snipe for 1,100. Wow, this is actually a really nice filter right here, man. So it actually looks like these guys are selling for 2K. And I somehow just got those nice undercut snipes right there. So that was a GG with those two snipes right there. So I'm gonna have to go list those up for 2K. That was awesome. And then basically just work your way through this list right here, find cards that are good to snipe and basically just snipe or bid on those and quick flip, right? That's a great thing to do when you're in a low amount and you keep building those coins up. So I'll put the link to this tweet in the description. And the last thing is, if I can find where I was searching these, Silvers. Silvers is the last thing I wanna talk about. Zero to 100K trading. This is a fantastic way to get chunks at a time. Going to Footbin. What I did here is I went to Footbin. I searched by version. I went to Silver. I went to All Silver. And then went over here on the PlayStation price. I clicked on Min price. I typed in 1000, Max price, 4000. Filter by price. And what I did here was I sorted by the price as well. And you find all of these Silvers that are going for 4,000 coins or below. Look at these, a 3.4K. So basically you can't always know that they're gonna sell, right? So look for popular leagues and popular nations. So I'm gonna sort this by, let's sort by France, right? Sort by some French Silvers. So we have some French Silvers here from a lot of right mids I'm seeing, right? So a couple of these guys, I'll probably just go out and look at on the market. And then you wanna watch the card to make sure that it actually sells at that price. Like I bought one from, there's this right back, he's probably extinct. This guy right here, this guy is always extinct but he sells at like 9 or 10,000 coins. It's crazy, right? There are Silvers that sell for 9 or 10K on the market for whatever reason. And for that reason, that's why finding filters and finding players like this is a great way to make some coins. So basically go through here, make sure that these players actually sell, that they're not just listed at 2 or 3K and they're not gonna actually sell. So what I would do is like for this knock art card, the Fulham right mid, I'm gonna actually search him up really quick, Anthony knock arts and see on the market what he's actually going for.  So a perfect way to get a gauge in his price is gonna be watch this card. The max price is 15K. So that tells me that he's not just a normal Silver but I'm gonna watch him right here on this open bid and see where that price goes. Possibly get myself an opportunity at flipping that card for profit if I can get him on a bid for like maybe 3K, sell him for 4K or whatever. So basically that's one way to find a bunch of players that you can look at. And the biggest grind with the zero to 100K and this is my biggest tip for you guys is just spend time doing it. Don't get frustrated even though you're making 100 or 200 coins of profit on each card sometimes, it's gonna add up in the end and it's going to be very, very profitable for you guys throughout the early parts of FIFA and getting your club from the ground to the top. It doesn't take that long, man. I think I did a zero to 100K in about a day or two but especially if you know these tips you might be kinda stuck at like 10K like, yo, it feels like I'm going so slow. I can't really do SBCs yet. Hopefully some of these tips in this video will help you get from that zero K mark up to 100,000 coins and get your FIFA ultimate team rolling. If you enjoyed this video today, smash the thumbs up on it, comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe and channel for new. It's been Nate the Foot Accountant. Catch you guys later. Peace out.


Hi, this is Helena Hart from commitmentconnection.com and in this video I'm going to be sharing six signs that a man is afraid to fall for you and this is Leo Leo loves to help me out when I'm making videos as most of you know already and he doesn't seem to want to go in The other room right now So he's gonna be hanging out with us for this one And this is something I get asked about all the time from women women come to us in our community And they are interested in a man who seems really interested in her But he also seems afraid to fall for her or afraid to commit to a relationship on some level So hopefully this will be really helpful for you. If this is something you're experiencing yourself I know it's really common. I've certainly experienced this in my past. Most women can relate to this So hopefully this will help you out But before I get started if this is your first time to our channel Be sure to click the button to subscribe to get all of our videos on how to attract the man and the relationship You've always wanted so sign number one that a man is afraid to fall for you Is that he's been hurt before and if the two of you have gotten to know each other You know over a certain period of time He may have revealed that to you that he has some kind of weird relationship baggage Maybe he's been cheated on in the past or maybe he's attracted women who were using him in some way or who Lied or something like that. So if a man's been hurt before and he doesn't seem over it yet He seems still kind of bitter or hung up on the fact that he hasn't had a great relationship history It's a sign that he might be scared to fall for you and you know jump into a new relationship So that's the first one if he's been hurt before he might be afraid to fall for you Sign number two is that he sends you mixed signals So he acts interested in you But if the two of you get too close or things seem to be moving in the direction of a relationship He might back off now some men run hot and cold quite often They come close and then they get scared and they get distant and for some men That's just a pattern that they repeat over and over and over has nothing to do with you It's just something that they do and it's certainly not your fault But for some men if they're really scared to fall for you, especially if he's displaying some of these other signs if You know he acts, you know He may act interested and then the next day he's a little cold and distant But he still keeps in contact with you and he still likes being around you and talking to you Which brings me to sign number three and that is he definitely enjoys spending time with you and talking with you and being Around you, but he doesn't make the first move So for example, he likes hanging out with you and maybe the two of you are friends But he doesn't actually ask you on a real date or he likes to be close to you physically when the two of you are together But he doesn't actually make the first move like going in for the kiss or something like that If those kinds of things are happening It's a sign that he might be scared to fall for you sign number four is that he's nervous around you or he's Awkwardly silent now, of course men can be silent for all different kinds of reasons, right? He might just be tired or stressed out, but you can feel it when a man is awkwardly silent because There's something he's feeling strongly, but he just doesn't feel comfortable sharing it yet So if a man's acting nervous around you or or silent in like an awkward way where you can tell he's holding back Feelings from you. It's a sign that he's might be afraid to fall for you right now sign number five is that he breaks eye contact with you or Looks away when you look at him So you might catch him staring at you or looking at you and when he sees that you've you know You've caught him doing that he'll look away or if you guys are you know talking and making eye contact He'll break that eye contact and it's one of those things that subconscious a man might do that and not even realize That he's doing it and just because he breaks eye contact every once in a while doesn't mean he's scared to fall for you But this in combination with all of these other signs is a clue that he has feelings for you But he's fighting them in some way and the last sign that a man is afraid to fall for you Is that he opens up to you and he feels comfortable being himself around you But he stops short of confessing his feelings So if a man's can fighting in you and opening up emotionally around you That's a pretty rare thing it shows that he feels comfortable being himself And he feels like you're gonna accept him and not judge him And that's a really really important thing men don't have a lot of people like that in their lives generally speaking So if he's doing that it's a sign that he has feelings for you or that he's he might be interested But if he stops short of talking about his feelings about you or a potential relationship It's a sign that he might be afraid to fall for you or he might be conflicted like fighting his own feelings So that's what I have for today on the six signs that a man might be afraid to fall for you I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with some of these and hopefully this helped to differentiate between Men who are into you or not looking for a relationship versus the men who are interested and do have feelings for you But they might just be afraid to take that next step right now for whatever reason So I hope this was helpful. Let me know what you think in the comment section or if you have any other Signs to add here. I'm sure that would be helpful for everyone. I love hearing from you and I will see you in the next video Thanks for watching and if you'd like to discover exactly what to say and do to get the man and relationship You've always wanted click the button on the right side of this video to visit our website and I will talk to you soon


Our next speaker is Hannah Winterberg from the University of Saint-Galene and Hannah will present a paper entitled Money Market Disconnect. Hannah, the floor is yours. Yeah, thank you so much for the nice introduction. So the paper that I'll be talking about is called Money Market Disconnect. And it is joint work with Benedikt Bayernsiefen and Antoine Ronaldo. They are also both at the University of Saint-Galene and Benedikt is also in the audience and he would be happy to answer any questions too, I think. Yeah, very topical problem, isn't it? Should we try to maybe stop the presentation and open it again? Sometimes this helps. Maybe I can go ahead with a short introduction, what the paper is about. So what we try to understand is whether there are frictions in the money market and how these frictions kind of affect different segments within this money market and whether that leads to market segmentation. If you think about the money market, I think there are two segments that come to mind, the secured and the unsecured part. And we have a look at kind of the interrelation of those two. And in looking at this interrelation, we kind of zoom in into the secured segment. And the secured segment is the repo market, so the market for repurchase agreements. And if you think about a repo, that is typically an over-collateralized, very short-term loan. So it's a one-day instrument between two banks and they basically secured this with a government bond. So as you see in that example, there are kind of two parts. There is this cash and there is the government bond. Therefore, a repo can basically serve a dual role as either a source of cash or as a source of collateral. And once this collateral becomes central to the repo, in that case we observe kind of a lower correlation of those two segments. When the collateral motive prevails, the repo is less funding connected. And we show that there are kind of two sources of this disconnecting mechanism that come to play once the collateral motive in repos prevails and these relate to the central bank framework. Those two aspects, the first one that I will be speaking about is about the access to the deposit facility. And the second one is the eligibility of those collateral assets. Thank you so much for quantitative easing programs. And what we kind of expect to find is that when there are repo rates that are lent by banks that have access to the deposit facility, they can become collateral driven just as repos that are secured by quantitative easing eligible assets. And when this happens, those become more disconnected from funding-based money market rates. And we think that our results are relevant for several monetary policies and have suggestive evidence implications for monetary policy path through considerations. Hey, it worked. So I think we contributed two strings of the literature. The literature on money markets is one of the first things that we contribute to. We show that the money market becomes more segmented when the repo market is predominantly collateral driven. And we identify two mechanisms that lead to this source of segmentation. And then we also have something to say about the literature on monetary policy. So what we show is that there is some form of money market segmentation and that this can be relevant for different monetary policies. And we kind of provide some suggestive evidence that this has to do with pass through. Maybe to shortly introduce the setting that we look at. So we are looking at the Euro area repo market and that repo market has several segments. Two that are well known, I think maybe just shortly to sum up. There's the general collateral or GC segment in which a repo, any government bond out of a list can be used. And there is the special segment in which already before a specific bond is predefined. And this graph that I'm showing on this slide kind of shows some different rates. And there are several things that I think are interesting. First of all, we see that the GC rates, which are here in red, they tend to fall below the deposit facility rate a couple of times. During the sovereign debt crisis and also in recent periods. And if you think about banks that can engage in trades in the GC repo segment or that can use the deposit facility, that gives us an interesting trade off or an interesting decision problem between those two options. And then there's also the special segment. And here we have those various different government bonds and some are eligible and others are not eligible for quantitative easing. And we observe that those rates, they tended to drift apart due to those QE purchases. And that is another aspect that caused collateral to have to have a focus in the repo market. If we jump right in into the first aspect that we consider, which is this access for banks to the deposit facility. This is relevant for market participants and access banks are typically ones that are located within the Euro area. And for this analysis, we focus on the general collateral or GC segment. And we had already seen in this graph that the rates dropped below the deposit facility rate for an extended period of time. And this is something that causes an interesting decision problem. So if you are a bank that is a lender, a lender in a repo trade, then you can basically have two motivations. You can either be interested to have a very short term safe investment with a market based return. That would be a funding motive. Or your motivation can be to source a high quality collateral. Then your main motivation to enter this trade is collateral based. And of course this outside option of using the deposit facility is something that only banks with access to the facility may use. And if you think more closely about this kind of decision problem that they have, the incentive to deposit liquidity at deposit facilities is more attractive when the GC rate is below the deposit facility rate. And in that times they may deposit liquidity at the deposit facility to the detriment of engaging in more funding based repo trades, which already hints to this form of segmentation and motivation between the trades that we want to have a look at. So what do we expect to find? We expect to find an endogenous selection of these excess banks into collateral driven parts of the repo market. So there are different baskets in this market and some are for collateral that are more sought after, whereas others are for collateral that are less sought after or more general have a wider set of funds. And we observe that they kind of self-select into those that are more collateral driven, because when they are funding driven they also have this outside option that can be quite attractive at times. And then we also think about those other banks that don't have access to the deposit facility and we find that they have a higher need for cash immediacy. To kind of jump right in into the regression analysis, so what we do is kind of a panel regression and this graph basically illustrates the approach and the graph has basically two panels. You see on the left hand side the time periods when the GC rate is above the deposit rate and on the right hand side you see a panel that pertains to time periods when the GC rate is below the deposit rate. And we see two observations here, one for excess and one for non-excess banks. And what the graph plots is basically the change in the repo rate as a reaction after a change in the unsecured benchmark rate, which in this case is the EONIA rate. And this graph illustrates what we have in mind with this segmentation and something becoming collateral driven. On the left hand side, when the GC rate is above the deposit rate, then those two groups basically have a very similar reaction. Once the GC rate is below the deposit rate, the reaction of those excess banks is more or less muted. And we think that is due to them self-selecting into these collateral motives and then being less connected to funding-based market parts. The empirical results are basically a formalization of what we just saw in this impulse response. That's why I would like to very quickly go over them. So the panel regression formalizes these reactions and has a look at this time period when the GC rate is below or above and those two groups. And what we observe is that in general, those GC repo rates react strongly to changes in the unsecured benchmark rate. But those excess banks, they react less strongly and in particular in times when the GC rate is below the DFR. And what we also see in thinking a little bit more about this mechanism is that the reaction becomes even less stronger the further those GC rates are below the DFR. So if you think about this decision problem of the bank, for them it makes a difference how much further the GC rate is below the DFR and the trade-off between using a GC repo and the deposit facility becomes more important when the difference is larger. And this is exactly what we observe. And in the paper, we provide a variety of robustness checks for those two results that I've just shown. And the results remain significant across those specifications. We have a look at another aspect to have an illustration of this mechanism. We have a look at this kind of tiering program as some form of natural experiment. And that is kind of an out-of-sample analysis. And we have a look at those banks during this time period just before and after the introduction. And the tiering program, maybe to give a short introduction, what it did is basically an exemption of some part of excess holdings from the negative interest rate. So they would be renumerated at zero. And that kind of makes this endogenous selection even more attractive. And we find that just looking at this time period around the introduction, we find a fact that is in line with this idea that we had that this happens due to the DFR being attractive. The second aspect that we look at is the eligibility of the bonds in these repo trades for quantitative easing. And in this analysis, we are looking more closely at the special repo segment. So if you think of quantitative easing and the rules there, there is one program that is I think the most prominent one, the public sector purchase program. And we have a look at the implementation rules of this program and use this to define eligible government bonds. And we also do this retrospectively to define hypothetically eligible bonds. And this creates some form of difference in difference setting. Why does something happen to those eligible bonds? I think that has also been discussed in the literature is that there is a specialness premium for QE eligible assets. And this means that they are scarcer and therefore those assets or in our case, the repos secured by those assets, they become more collateral driven. And this being collateral driven kind of disconnects them from funding based money market rates. And yeah, another thing that we will be interested in is to see if we have similar reactions of those eligible and non eligible assets before the introduction of the quantitative easing program. To jump into the empirical results, the idea here is very similar to the results that I discussed before. So we look at those different reactions for two groups for the eligible assets and the non eligible assets and to time periods during QE and before. And what we observe is that those eligible rates, they react less strongly than non eligible rates to changes in the unsecured benchmark. And this is about half of the sensitivity. And another thing that we observe is that those two assets were not significantly different before the quantitative easing program. So we think this is an effect of the program. And we again provide a variety of robustness checks in the paper. Speaking of robustness checks, we also have a look at a couple of other robustness checks or extensions for these ideas. In particular, we have a look at these kind of rates that we have a look at for the unsecured market. So the results that I have shown you so far were for the Aeonia rate. And we use that as the benchmark unsecured money market rate. But there can also be other measures for funding based money market rates. For example, one thing that we consider is a combination of the Aeonia and the Esther rate, but also other derivative based rates. And the results are very similar. One idea that I'd like to talk a little bit more about is that we also have a look at the rate on the ECB's GC pooling basket as kind of the most funding driven secured market rate. And we do find something similar and that points to there also being a segmentation between the more funding based baskets and the less funding based baskets. And finally, I have been talking about kind of this access for the general collateral segment and the effect of QE on the special segment. But of course, these could also have inter relating effects on top of each other. And this is indeed something that we find in the paper. Like I shortly introduced in the beginning, we think that this has some implications or maybe suggestions for monetary policy. Because collateral has such a prominent role and collateral have been occurs in many situations. And one policy that seems to be interesting to have a look at in our example, which is why we included it is the tiering program. So just the tiering kind of makes depositing funds at the DFR more attractive and could kind of foster create an even stronger segmentation. Another aspect that could make depositing funds at the deposit facility more attractive is kind of some amendments to the capital requirements regulation. They could their reserves are excluded from the calculation of the leverage ratio and that could make them very attractive. And you could say, okay, why is that something that we should care about? Besides this segmentation that we talked about, another aspect that is of relevance is price determination. So if there is the amount of lending goes down and that's very strong, then there can be a negative side effect on price determination as has been discussed in the literature. Basically, when we did this analysis, we came about the idea after reading this quote, which is from former ECB executive Benoit Corrie. And he mentioned that there might be the case that under the central bank framework, some short term market rates would not respond fully to changes in key interest rates, which is very similar to what we have shown in this analysis. And going further that that could lead to a continued dispersion of short term rates and that could have a negative adverse impact on the transmission of monetary policy. And we kind of follow these steps to have a look at the dispersion and the transmission as like some suggestions that can be drawn from our results. So we observe that there is a dispersion in both market segments. So we compute a dispersion measure. We take a methodology that is similar to a paper from Duffy and Krishna Murthy that has done a dispersion measure for the US. And we compute such a measure and we observe that the dispersion increases when the GC rate is below the deposit facility rate. And also in time periods when the QE program was introduced and expanded or extended. And in the paper we also show some suggestive evidence for the pass through to lending rates. To conclude, I hope that I was able to convince you that there are kind of two aspects of the central bank framework that have led to a form of market segmentation in money markets and that this has to do with collateral being a central motivator for the trade. And those two aspects are the access of banks to the central banks deposit facility and the eligibility of collateral assets for quantitative easing programs. And these two aspects they do have this effect when the role of collateral becomes central and then those money market segments are less connected to funding based market rates. Thank you so much for your attention and I very much look forward to the questions and the discussion. Thank you very much, Hannah. The discussant is Sebastian Infante from the Federal Reserve Board. Sebastian, good afternoon. Good morning for you, I suppose. Can you hear us? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, perfect. And we see your slides. Great. Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, thank you for the introduction and thank you for the invitation to discuss this interesting paper. I would have loved to have been there. I think this is a fantastic conference. I've only been able to attend virtually so far, but hopefully in the future I can actually go there. Because I think I look forward to the discussions with folks there. As was mentioned, my affiliations with the Federal Reserve Board, so naturally the typical disclaimers apply. So what's the motivation for this paper? It's basically just to underscore that, you know, repo has two legs. One is a cash and the other is collateral. And therefore the contracting, there's different economic motives that you may want to participate in these markets. One is to invest your cash in safe manner with high quality collateral at prevailing market rates. And the other is to source collateral specific or of a specific kind, if you will. And obviously these different economic motives to trade result in different repo rates and different contracting terms in general. And so the perspective of this paper is that will central bank policy choices such as the remuneration on reserve balances or asset purchases can affect repo lenders to incentivate that repo lenders incentives to participate in these markets. And therefore, you know, the actual prevailing market rates that we observe could actually depend on the lender's identity. If they have access to the deposit facility or the collateral availability, which depends on the amount of asset purchases that have been taken place. And so recognizing these spreads between repo rates, these wedges, if you will, can have an effect on monetary policy transmission. That's where this paper is going and that's where this paper is contributing to the literature. So what do they actually do empirically? Well, they basically the authors basically study daily changes of lender and collateral specific repo rates and daily changes and unsecured rates and the only is the main rate that they work with. And effectively, what they find is that rates are below the rate on deposit when the rate of repos are below the deposit facility bank lender and quality QE eligible collateral rate repo rates are less responsive to changes in unsecured rates and sort of a picture is worth 1000 words, you know, kind of explain this very well and sort of, but I'm just going to reiterate it here. What we have is seeing scenarios when the GC rate is above the deposit rate. And there you see there's no difference between access banks and non access banks in the dark and gray dots and plots and whiskers. And then on the right, we have when it's actually that a GC raised below the deposit rate and low and behold here, you can if you can see my clicker, we can see that, you know, access banks really just do not change your interest rate. Right. And so the interpretation is a large fraction of repo trades are collateral driven. Thus, monetary policy transmission, which operates in part through changes in funding rates. There are many other channels obviously can be affected by this prevalence of collateral driven a repose and that that then that consequently can be affected by by central bank actions. So that's kind of like the main takeaway of the paper. So, for today's comments, I have, you know, three more substantial ones. And but I'll start with the first which is sort of more. Let's say superficial. Don't listen to me. This paper, I already got this advice once before this paper is second round R&R and RFS congratulations to the authors. So you really just have to listen to the referee and the editor and sort of whatever I say, you know, just think it's a cute sort of reference, maybe for a future paper but just sort of just keep that in mind. And then I'm going to talk about sort of, you know, what is this issue of collateral driven repose, you know, how prevalent is it. And, and then I want to push back a little bit on what to the authors mean by collateral driven repose because as I'm going to explain the policy prescriptions are going to be wildly different depending on what is actually the collateral driven incentive. And finally, I'm going to briefly touch on the role of regulation. So, this is just, you know, the first point just to clarify, lower rates for collateral driven repose is a very well documented phenomenon. So, you know, starting with Duffy in 1996, and others who have subsequently, you know, worked on this area, they document that Treasury repo rates can trade special as below prevailing market rates, right. And this has been wildly recognized. Even in the policy space, where sort of recently the Federal Reserve has been publishing and promoting the SOFR, the Secured Overnight Funding Rate, and its construction actually recognizes that, you know, you can have rates that are below prevailing market rates and therefore you shouldn't consider them in the calculation. And so here I have in a specific, from a paper from colleagues here at the Fed, we have a snapshot of the distribution of rates for a given day on the x-axis on the, and the x-axis we have rates, y-axis we have, you know, take up. And then, you know, this green spike is the overnight R&P that, you know, Tony really unpacked in the previous presentation. And what I want to draw your attention is that there's a lot of rates in the DVP market, which is the centrally cleared market for seasoned collateral and on the run, which is very well below these prevailing market rates, and therefore we just don't consider them, right. Now there's a very crude sort of fix to the problem, but just to make the point that this has been sort of well recognized and policy makers at least in the context of construction, this in construction, this indices have already taken into account. So the more normal part is about monetary policy transmission. And sort of if that is really where we want to go, I think it's incredibly important to know what is the collateral driven motive, which I'm going to detail in the next few slides. So as I said, the paper talks about collateral driven repos, but never takes a stance on why lenders want to source this collateral. And so this is going to be relevant for the public policy implications. There are a few answers. One, it could be source specific for short securities. That may not be that prevalent in the GC market, but in the SI and specific issue for cert for short. It could be that the profits that they're still profits if the borrowing rates of these firms is relatively low. Right, so in the matchbook repo, you know, they're still going to make a profit even the rate is low. And the other is the final one that I want to bring up is sort of the distribution source in distributing safe assets. And this last one is kind of really interesting because Angelou and Benedict actually have an incredibly interesting paper where they completely unpack the differences in repo rates and they call it they characterize the safe asset carry trade. And so I was very strict and I was very surprised that they didn't try to say whether it was the safe asset demand that was driving these wedges. And so in earlier work, I've also shown that, you know, when the demand for safe assets goes up repo volumes actually go down is a little bit, you know, answering Maria's question, you know, what happens with private provision of repos. Well, in fact, this is this paper answers that question. I welcome you to take a look. And more recently, I have a paper with called here in the Fed where reuse of Treasury securities also increases with a man for safe assets and this is the idea that the distributing more securities when the demand for safe assets is high. And so, if it is the in fact the demand for safe assets driving this what should be done. But as I said, there are many other reasons that, you know, could not just be safe asset demand there could be other reasons, and sort of I would invite the authors to tease this out. And one specific way that they can do it as a particularity of the contracting terms in the in the in Europe, is that effectively they had there are many different contracts that have different settlement dates of delivery of collateral, basically overnight tomorrow in the spot next. And again, you know, Benedict and and Angela do a really really careful job in studying this and their other paper of when they actually receive collateral. And so, if we thought that it's, you know, actually the reception of the collateral that matters, we would see a differential sensitivity for these different contracting types, and that would really bolster the message, right. And the other issue is like, I see on the program there was another interesting paper on on sort of the effects of securities lending program, and sort of if it is that quantitative easing or asset purchases more generally is in fact draining securities, then why isn't the securities lending program alleviate the problem. And, and sort of, again, this points to what is it that agents really want to source collateral, what is the problem. And again, this is much more informative to what should be what should be done. You could also think that maybe the securities lending program isn't is an effective could be reasons why you may want to change that, or other sort of policy prescriptions. So, so turning to my legs, my, my, my next slide and I'm sorry I'm speaking a little fast I'm going to make sure I'm on time. I want to talk about the rule of capital regulation Hannah briefly mentioned this and sort of you could do something about capital regulation and ameliorate this problem. I think that there, there's there's much more to say about this so I'm cognizant that in in EU mainly capital regulations are major measured on quarter end. But you know there's a lot of nuance and how banks respond to capital regulations you know you can think about there's international firms you can think that their investors also investor case also cares about these things. And so therefore, you know you may have these effects that are prevalent throughout the year. You know as a risk management perspective that makes sense. And so if you read carefully Duffy Christian murky they actually suggest that regulation could be an important part for this limited path through pass through that on our co authors are trying to promote. And so, if it is regulation, the setup of the market in Europe is going to be a great place to kind of inspect this. Why? It's because the three platforms where the data comes from broker tech urex and TS are essentially cleared repos. Right. And so what's the idea. The idea is that you have if you have a bank with a large repo liability, right in one of these centrally clearing mechanisms that it may be incentivized to lend and take a haircut on the on the on the rate basically accept the lower rate in order to net down their gross positions. Right. In the in accounting rules, you can net down your gross positions and repo if they have the same maturity date and are cleared on the same platform. And so effectively, this creates an incentive to you to you to want to deploy funds into a trade that you know in order so that your balance sheet just looks smaller for regular regulatory purposes. And in fact, recent theoretical literature, you know, starting with Duffy, Hey, Nagel and song have really emphasized the role of the SLR supplementary leverage ratio and low yielding balance sheet intensive activities such as reverse repo and positions in in Treasury markets. And more recently I have a paper with co authors in the Fed, where we actually show this empirically that effectively the SLR is really affecting firms participation in the US Treasury market. And so, if it is the SL, if you believe that it's the SLR or any other capital regulation that doesn't risk weight and you think, and then one possible solution is expanded central clearing which is also something that's been discussed. And so this would effectively allow agents to reduce the balance sheet size associated with this activity. Right. And so this is very, very different than from what. So the policy prescription would be very different than changing the central bank implementation frame. This is talking about changing the regulation. And specifically, there's the way that the regulation is implemented and the way that is calculated. And so to be able to be able to discard or rather support the role of capital regulation, maybe the authors may want to consider the net lending positions of these firms that are accepting low rates. If they are very, very, if they have a huge imbalance, specifically that they have a lot of repo borrowing, then they may incentivize to add that extra dollar to the lending in order to reduce the net balance sheet. Right. And then you could also look at different CCPs, because this is going to be isolated any CCP. And so you could potentially discard this, which, you know, would be would be incredibly interesting. So, that's sort of all I have. I, again, I think this is an interesting paper. I think that documenting thoroughly widening of spreads across money markets is something that, you know, it's good to observe it's good to know. I think the real, real punchline is, you know, thinking about how this really affects monetary policy transmission implementation and transmission. And to the extent that that is really what we care about. I think it's incredibly important to actually spell out what is this collateral driven motive, because that's going to have wildly different implications on what you actually to do to try to address this. So, that's it. And thank you for the opportunity to present and look forward to the discussion. I suggest we collect some questions from the floor and then let Hannah respond both to the discussion and to the questions. There's a question over there. Yes, thank you. Your mark for me on APG management. To build on the story that the colleague just presented, I think that in your current research you look at banks with access and banks that do not have access to the deposit floor. I think if you broaden it to non bank institutions, then you come also across the ones that have different collateral motives, i.e. search for safe assets, asset managers, pension funds. They hold large liquidity buffers due to regulatory standards, clearing markets need for cash liquidity. And we reinvest that in markets through reverse repo and we are searching collateral every day in large size. And that goes below the deposit facility. So the motives for safe assets are growing and growing and the demand for collateral also. So if you would look beyond only banks, but also into the non bank sector, then you find the real motives of why the GC rate is dropping below the deposit facility. And then also crossing over to the previous paper, there one argument was made to allow money market funds to overnight reverse repo facilities, not only for financial stability. But if you consider the non banks also part of the transmission mechanism and operating below the GC rate, if you open up to an overnight repo facility, then you also take away part of the inefficiency that is currently there caused by this deposit floor. Then you create a level playing field between banks and non banks, and also have a better transmission mechanism. So maybe something to research. Hannah, over to you to respond to Sebastian and to the question. Perfect. Yeah, first of all, I'd like to thank you very much, Sebastian, for your sorrow discussion. And we were very glad to have the opportunity to receive your feedback on this paper. I think your comments kind of started with this more general question why this is interesting, especially since there is some literature on like the levels of repo rates. I think what we bring to the table on top of this is that we are looking at kind of the sensitivity of this repo rates in response to unsecured, unsecured developments of funding based developments. And I think that is something that in Europe is maybe also of interest because of this discussion about kind of the benchmark rates because I think in the US was so far now there is a secured rate. So the repo market starts to be very close to this remains very close to this. Well, in Europe, we have this kind of Esther rate, which is still unsecured. So that kind of brings this trade off a little bit more into the focus. And I think another aspect that we look at that hasn't been discussed in the literature also on the levels is this aspect of access to the deposit facility for the European market. And yeah, I think you were also talking about kind of the motivation for banks to want collateral, so why their trade can be collateral driven. And I think there is another difference to the US market here that I think I can shortly mention is that there are various GC baskets much more than in the US where it's like Treasury GC and that is it. So there is another differentiation. So some banks can, for example, use those collateral in margin accounts where some collateral is valued more. And if you place their government bonds as collateral, you don't have a negative interest rate like you would have on cash collateral. That's why this can be quite attractive just as like one example. I think you were also mentioning these regulation aspects and I think these are very interesting aspects and there are many regulations that I think could be mentioned. The collateral plays an important role in various of them and so that will be a very long chapter. But I fully agree that this is something that is very interesting to look at in more detail. Yeah, so I think these were very valid sorts and well taken points and I think we will try to incorporate them into the paper. And I think we also had the point about the non-bank institutions. I think that is something that is very interesting and was also looked at in the US market I think. I think in the past and I think that is something that would be highly interesting. I'm not sure if we can find any data on this, but I would be glad to talk to you a little bit more about that. It would be very interesting. And yeah, I think to conclude, I'd like to thank you so much for the comments and if you would have time to send me your slides, that would be very amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Hannah, Sebastian and everybody. This concludes the session. Please join me in thanking all the speakers and discussants.


Hey everybody, I'm James Cato-Cataya here at JSA and I'm proud to say I'm an ITW virtual attendee for 2021. I am very much looking forward to having this time, this platform, to meet with you guys virtually, some of my team in person, to really hear your stories and never has there been probably in the history of our industry a time where we've been this far apart for so long so I really want to hear your stories, what's newsworthy in your work of the world and how you survived the past year and a half, what have you learned, what are the lessons that we can all walk away with, make tomorrow hopefully a brighter, safer day. So looking forward to hearing from you guys and please go ahead and share your news on JSA TV as well on news platform, we want to interview you, leading into ITW to be released during ITW but we'll be asking questions like what is newsworthy right now for you, why, who does it impact, what have you learned in the last year and a half and what do you see as trends and relevant for the years ahead for us all as an industry. So again, we want to hear you, I'm sure your stories and we look forward to coming together as an industry growing and here's to receive for tomorrow, happy networking.