Welcome back to Kids Fun Science. My name is Ken. Today's experiment is the Kamihusen self-inflating paper balloon. It's a Japanese toy which means paper balloon. Hello. Welcome back to Kids Fun Science. My name is Grace and I'm Ken. And today we're showing you Kamihusen self-inflating Japanese paper balloon. All right. Self-inflating. But look right here. There's a hole, I get it all closed, in the self-inflating balloon. So nothing's holding the air in, right? But what we're going to do is Grace is going to bring it down, deflate it a little bit, just kind of squeeze it down. We're going to go down this way. Right there. Okay, so look. Show us sideways. It's, get the air out. And what we're going to do is self-inflate it by hitting it back and forth to each other and it will blow back up. It's pretty amazing. Yep. Here we go. We hit it up. Despite having a hole being open to the air, the paper balloon remains inflated. One might expect that the bouncing of the paper balloon would force the air out of its hole and cause the balloon to deflate. Instead of hitting it, it actually increases the paper balloon to inflate as seen here. Part of the genius of this paper is, which it is made. The paper is not only lightweight, but relatively impermanent to the air. It also is a degree of plasticity and also allows it to form easily and retain its resulting shape. Because of those properties, the balloon inflates to a volume with the air content and maintains the volume until additional air is added. As a result, the smashed balloon can accumulate air and eventually inflate to its full size from repeating bouncing. Even though the net pumping is just a single bounce, maybe very small. A balloon made of plastic, rubber, and other materials doesn't have the same key properties as paper for it to inflate like the Japanese balloon. Japanese balloon. Pretty impressive, huh? Yeah. Makes its own little balloon. So I'm gonna try to inflate it myself. The while Grace tries to inflate the balloon by herself, the pressure accompanies the oscillation. The balloon is contracted inside pressure is higher than the atmospheric pressure. When expanded, it is lower than the atmospheric pressure. The pressure difference between the balloon and the atmospheric works to restore the balloon to its equilibrium position. I hope you enjoyed this video. Remember to share and click thumbs up and thanks for watching. Nice.


I'm going to talk about trying to put a bunch of work that I've done together in sort of a policy framework, if you like. That's the short note I said, Moritz, for this conference. The main question that I want to discuss and think about is, I'm saying here how to think about our final, but you could equally ask the question of how to think about credit. So we have this notion of credit that we obviously feel is very important in the economy, but where does credit actually come from? And that's the question that I want to think about a little bit more carefully. And I think once you think about that question and you look at the data, you come to some conclusions that I'll talk about that are quite important in thinking about where we are heading going forward and what policy sort of implication it has. So that's the key thing I want to talk about. Just to set things up, there are two ways to think of credit. One is in the long run, sort of in steady state, if you like. That's the notion that I want to have in mind today when we think about credit. So while I will talk about the business cycle fluctuations in credit, but I'm only going to talk about that if it helps us learn something about the longer term trends, the steady state trends, if you like. So when I say where does credit come from, I'm really talking about where does it come from in the steady state notion of the word. So we're interested, I'm more interested today in talking about the long term trends and what has happened to credit in the long term. So we're going to start off with a picture that is very much motivated by the work of Jordan Shodoric and Taylor. And this is a total credit to GDP. I'm plotting you this figure for the US, but you could plot it for the advanced economies of the world. The basic picture does not change as, again, the GST team has shown us already. The one difference, perhaps, that I'm doing is that I'm talking about in the left panel, I'm showing you total credit. So that has three pieces to it. Household, non-financial firm, and government credit as well. And for reasons that hopefully will come clear, I want to combine all those three. That's like total credit in the economy. Obviously, the definition of credit is always gross. There's no such thing as net credit, which is always zero by definition. But this is what has been happening to gross credit over time. And the main fact is what GST called the hockey stick fact that since the 80s, total credit to GDP has basically skyrocketed. And the other fact that I want to highlight a little bit is that if you split the private credit portion of the left panel into household and non-financial corporate credit, essentially the big growth since the 80s is in household credit. And I'm adding government piece to it as well. Just to let you, the reason I'm doing, I'm adding household and government is for reasons I'll argue later on. This sort of debt is essentially financing the demand side of the economy. And so that's why I kind of think of these two institutes of one another in that sense. So that's what I'm adding those to. But again, the main fact is that credit has grown a lot as a share of GDP. And that's sort of a curious fact. The next thing I want to do is do exactly what Eugene asked us to do, which is not just look at quantities, but look at prices as well. So let's look at the price of credit. Credit to GDP has increased by 120 percentage points of GDP. It's a huge increase. I just want to keep the magnitudes in mind. The interesting fact is that despite that huge growth in the quantity of credit, when you look at the price of credit that has, which is the interest rate essentially, that has gone in the other direction. Now I'm showing you the 10-year real interest rate. That's sort of the most liquid market for long-term debt. And it's unquestionable and not really a contested point that globally, interest rates have gone down and gone down significantly to the extent that today, for a while, actually, we have been hovering around in real terms an interest rate close to zero. And moreover, it's been extremely difficult to get out of this. Even today, if you look at the news, that's the everyone has these expectations that these long-term interest rates are not going anywhere. So if I just told you these two facts, you already learn quite a lot from basic one-on-one kind of intuition. These are long-term trends. Again, you can think of them. These are steady-state trends. If you put the quantity and the price picture together, collectively, they are telling us that for some reason, and that's the next thing I want to get into, there has been an expansion in the supply of credit. Supply equals demand in equilibrium. We all know that. But there is this notion of what is the primitive here. So from that perspective, given the co-movement of quantity and prices, it's suggestive of an interpretation that is the supply of credit that's moving first, and it's trying to create its own demand, if you like. So what is the source of this, again, long-term interest in long-term trends? What is the source of this long-term growth, long-term increase in credit supply? One possible reason behind this might be the rising inequality around the world, not just the US, and here is one illustration of that. This is from the world inequality database by Piketty and others. This is the top 1% share across the countries that we have data on over time. And you can see that the picture that we are more familiar with in terms of the US picture is basically on average true for these advanced economies that the data set follows. In particular, the quality has measured by top 1% income share. This is pre-tax income share. It's important, given what I'm going to show you next. That came down after World War, but then again, the timing is exactly the same. From 1980s onwards, that has increased significantly and substantially. Interestingly, it's not just the pre-tax income share of the top 1%, the other thing that has happened is that the top marginal tax rate for exactly that bracket, that cohort of people, that has declined a lot around the same period. So again, now I'm showing you the top marginal income tax rate. The two lines, by the way, one is the simple average of these countries, the other one is a weighted average by population. The basic trends are the same. You can see that the top marginal income tax rate has declined on average quite a lot. This is a decline of 20 percentage points or so. That's a very significant change, and exactly it happens around 1980s. As has been documented in the inequality literature, when we talk about rising inequality, by and large, it's a top 1% phenomenon. So that's why I'm focusing on this particular cohort of people. The question is how is this related to the growth in credit, which again, if you look at quantities and prices, suggests that it's driven by an expansion in credit supply. Well, the basic fact about saving behavior that has been extremely well documented is that when you look at saving behavior, preferences look non-homothetic, which is to say that people at very high income levels, they save substantially more as a fraction of the income that they are getting. So if you just, even in a simple sort of spender-saver model, if you were to incorporate that key fact that top 1% are very high savings rates, what you're going to have in the economy is that the pool, the gross pool of surplus savings, if you like, that is available to the economy to be lent somewhere is going to grow, right? And that's my conceptualization of the financial sector since 1980, that more and more funds are available, which are channeled back into the financial sector to go somewhere, right? And the basic sense, this supply is coming from this, in this story at least, I haven't shown you that there is a connection necessarily between the two, but one possibility is the time series is consistent with each other, that is the source of funding if you like, that is then trying to find a way in the economy. Now, at the conceptual level, I want to highlight one point, which I think is important in terms of the typical macro model that we sort of use in thinking about steady-state models. When we talk about credit in a typical traditional macro model, the notion of credit is that it's driven by some notion of the permanent income hypothesis, which is to say that credit is never a primitive force in those models. People, for example, have lifecycle motives, so some of them who are going to earn more later on, they're going to demand credit today, and others are going to be providing their savings to them for borrowing, and that basically closes the model. So there is no notion of what I just said, which is that there might be surplus savings available in the economy. To generate that notion, you need to deviate from the traditional models by introducing something like non-homothetic preferences, where shifts in income distribution will become a primitive that changes the availability of credit in the economy. But when you look at micro data and you actually look at the savings areas of individuals and you combine that with the movements and inequality, the macro model that seems more realistic is more in line with what I'm just describing here. This notion that the growth in credit is connected with rising inequality is also consistent with who has been borrowing more than others. So here, I am plotting the, and this is using public tax record data. So this says Zuckman tax record data where they impute household debt using tax deductible interest payments. And if you plot the leverage ratio of households, again, I'm going to focus on probably 1% versus the rest. So that's where inequality is, or change in inequality is. What you see is that this, again, we are familiar with in the aggregate what is happening. The hockey stake, if you like, that starts around 1980. That big increase is essentially all of it is being driven by the bottom 99%. It's not there in the top 90, top 1%. One can open up this piece further and you generally see the same picture that the credit is coming from where more and more income is going and flowing in the rest of the population. So the cross-section of debt to income is consistent, again, with this motion that credit is supplies flowing from the top of the income distribution to the rest of the economy. Now, there is another variable that is also acts like an expansion in credit supply to the economy, and that is this motion of global savings blood. So everything that I've talked about so far would hold true in a closed economy. In a closed economy, rise in income inequality, all else equal has to show up as credit somewhere else. But in an open economy, there is another degree of freedom, which is you could export out your excess savings to someone else in the economy. Number one, number two, in terms of credit absorption, there is this substitutability which I highlighted earlier, which is that if there is more credit available, either households could borrow it. But if for some reasons, household cannot or do not borrow it, the government sector can step in and they can borrow on behalf of the households. It was for that reason that I was combining household and government credit together in the total credit graphs that I was showing you earlier. So on this graph, what I'm showing you is for each country, over this time period from 1980s to basically present, I am integrating the current account or net exports if you like, plus the deficits run by governments. So this is the net absorption of credit if you like in a country during this time period. And on the other axis, I'm plotting the change in stock of household credit. And what is interesting is that you see a very strong negative correlation between the two. So what you can see here is that countries, so one way to interpret this is that countries, it's like the global savings club. So if you focus on the net exports here, countries that have been running current account deficits, they have seen their household debt run, grow faster, all else equal. Another way of understanding the same is that countries that have been running large government deficits, they have the government absorbing the excess credit that is generated. And so household debt does not need to grow as fast as it otherwise may have. So all of these variables are linked together if you write down a basic macro model, which is how we are deriving these empirical relationships. So we can put all of these facts together at the macro level in an open economy macro sense. And now we can ask the question of, does movements in inequality times the top marginal interest rate, not interest rate, top marginal tax rate changes from 1980s to 2000s? Do they explain the rise in household credit or not? Controlling for these other two key factors, is this clear? So that's what I'm going to show you next. Controlling for these factors, do changes in inequality. So I'm going to essentially assume that changes in inequality are being driven exogenously for some reason. I don't have an instrument, and certainly I don't have the number of observations to do anything more sophisticated. I'm just going to show you a simple plot using this cross-country data. So that is what is shown here, where I'm basically partialing out the other variables of interest that come out of the macro model. And now I'm showing you the relevant partial correlation between rise in inequality and rise in household debt. And what you see is that basically there is a reasonably strong correlation between the two in this sample of around, this is at least 17 countries that we have consistent data on over this time period. The broader point I'm trying to make here is that there is this connection in the data, both in the cross country level, as well as at the micro level, if you look at the cross section of who's borrowing within a given country, there as well as the time series, which is what I showed you initially, this connection between rising inequality and rising levels of household credit. So all of this suggests that this is one of the fundamental structural shifts since 1980 that a lot of people have talked about, growth being unequal. That's a broader lesson to take away from all of the discussion that we just had. That since 1980s, the global growth process has been unequal, among other things, given rise to this top 1% share. And that has led to this greater aggregate availability of gross savings that shows up as credit to the financial sector. OK, now the next question is what are the macro ramifications of a pattern of this sort, a trend of this sort? Let's go back to the basic traditional macro models. In basic traditional macro models, all else equal if I told you there's more gross savings available, you'll say that's great. That means more investment. That means much higher growth. But that's not what has happened. And so I think that's the other dimension that we need to deviate from the traditional model. So it was actually in the macro framework that I was talking about earlier, you could have asked me this question of when I was showing where could this trend be absorbed, could it be absorbed by government deficit, you could have asked the question, well, it can also be absorbed by the capital formation sector. It could be absorbed as real investments. And so you could account for that empirically, and we do. But the basic empirical fact is investment to GDP has not increased at all from 1980s onwards. That's just so obvious that I don't even have to prove it. Given investment to GDP has not increased, in fact, some argue that it has gone down somewhat. Given investment to GDP that's real investment to GDP has not increased over time, credit to GDP has increased a lot. Again, the question comes back, where has it all gone? What is being financed by credit? And that's the central question. What I'm going to argue is that when you look at the data that suggests that credit increasingly since the 1980s, unlike our traditional textbook models, it's not the increase the marginal credit, if you like, it's not being used to finance investments, real investments, but it's being used to finance consumption, what you might call credit as demand. So this is what in a recent jet piece we call the credit-driven household demand channel. We are limited in terms of proving whether this kind of a channel exists by just looking at very long-term transfers because of the usual problems of identification and so on. However, I think the business cycle facts are interesting in convincing or useful in convincing us of this particular channel. What we have just talked about in a way is the super cycle that is in the background to a number of the business cycles that we have seen since 1980. So in other work with Emil Werner, we show that if you look at business cycles around the world since 1980s, they share many of the features that we saw in 2008, the crisis in 2008. And I'm summarizing some of that information here. And using that data, we can sort of come to this view that it seems more and more recently that credit is being driven, credit is being used to drive aggregate demand. And that's sort of an important feature of the macroeconomy. So let's look at or let's summarize that evidence that leads to this conclusion of credit-driven household demand channel. On the left panel, I'm summarizing what I think is one important fact from the Great Recession, which is each dot is a state in the US. When you sort states by growth in household credit GDP during the boom years, or two to seven, that predicts, in a statistical sense, the output gap, which is the rise in unemployment in the same state from 2007 to 2010. Interestingly, if you were to plot exactly the same graph but cross-country rather than within states, you see exactly the same pattern. Even in terms of empirical magnitude, the coefficient is comparable. What we argue in this paper, and I'm going to show you some evidence using a natural experiment from the 1980s, that this pattern is not only true conditioning on the recession. I'm cheating here, obviously, because I'm conditioning the scatterplots on the recession. But even unconditionally, this relationship holds true, which, again, means that stronger growth in household credit unconditionally predicts slowdown in GDP growth going forward. The question is, what is moving credit around? I've already talked about movements like inequality is providing an expansion in credit supply in the economy. Disruptions in that process and the business cycle frequency then move aggregate demand up or down. And that's what causes business cycle movements. What is the proof for that? Well, the proof for that is that when you isolate these business cycle movements in credit supply, that I'm going to talk about one natural experiment that does that, what you see is that that movement in credit supply moves aggregate demand up or down. And it is, when it's moving up, it moves aggregate demand up. And on the flip side, it is that expansion in aggregate demand that then predicts future decline in GDP because of the success supply of credit. So what's the proof that expansion in credit supply and the business cycle frequency is moving aggregate demand? Well, for that, let me just use the 1980s as a natural experiment. It's something that all of us who have read Phil's strands work are very well familiar with deregulation of bank branching network at the state level or staggered. So we can use the timing of deregulation as a natural experiment at the state level. That's I'm just using the strand experiment to run that natural experiment. This is the first stage, early deregulating states saw a larger credit boom than late deregulating states. So the gap between the blue and the red is the first stage. The pre-trends are similar. That's basically the exclusion restriction. Again, that's not our work, has been well documented before. But what I'm going to focus on is that first of all, that credit boom has something very similar predictability that I showed you for 2008 as well, which is that it leads to a boom during the credit boom years but then a bust afterwards. So during the credit boom years, states that see a larger boom in credit, they also see a larger boom in real outcomes. So a larger decline in unemployment rate if you like. More interestingly, for our purposes, we want to understand what's driving this boom. And the claim I want to make is, this is the key question given the longer time series that I showed you, what is incremental credit at the macroeconomic level? What is the incremental credit being used for? And I'm going to argue here that that incremental credit is being used to move aggregate demand up and down. So how can we separate whether it's moving aggregate demand or aggregate supply? Karan, I changed the paper completely, so. So how can we test that it's moving aggregate demand and not aggregate supply? The key notion again comes from one-on-one, which is let's look at quantities and prices. And in particular, look at sectors that move differentially in terms of demand side versus supply side. So we're going to focus on the non-tradable versus tradable sectors. The basic intuition being that if a given variable here, it happens to be credit, is primarily moving the aggregate demand side, then it will disproportionately impact the non-tradable sector in that local economy. Because it's the non-tradable sector that, by definition, depends on local demand disproportionately. So relative to the tradable sector that caters to international or national demand. So if this credit variable is really moving local demand more than local supply, then it should primarily load up on the non-tradable sector, both in terms of quantity as well as in terms of prices. We should see an increase in relative quantity as well as relative prices of the non-tradable sector. So that's what I'm going to show you next. The x-axis, I'm sorting the same states by the extent of the shock, which is the timing of deregulation if you like. So that's the instrument. And on the y-axis, I am first showing you the aggregate, sorry, this is the predictability graph. So this is the same graph that I showed you in the very beginning. For 2008, states that levered up more suffered a deeper recession. You see the same pattern in the 1990s recession. So first, I just want to highlight the similarity. What we saw in 2008 in the US as well as across country to see a very similar picture in the 1990 recession. It's just that we didn't talk about it as much because it wasn't as salient as a subprime crisis. But let's focus on the boom, which is what I'm trying to use to discriminate whether it's moving aggregate demand versus aggregate supply. I already gave you the hypothesis. Let's look at non-tradable versus tradable sector. Again, the x-axis is the same, sorted by the instrument. What you see is that it's the non-tradable sector that expands disproportionately more in states that are experiencing a larger credit boom. The tradable sector, you don't see that at all. And also importantly, we can focus on non-tradable prices as well. And it's the non-tradable prices that are appreciating more. So you're seeing great exchange rate appreciation, if you like. Because these are states in a monetary union. Tradable good sector prices are not differentially moving. So putting this non-tradable sector evidence together, it suggests that credit was moving aggregate demand around. All right, let me close now to think of what does all of this mean. So let's now move forward. And let's say we believe in this macro model where this global savings blood rising inequality is moving credit supply higher and higher. And prices, which is the interest rate, is now adjusting to accommodate more and more credit in the economy. Where does all of this end? Everything I've said so far is not a problem for a macroeconomist, because macroeconomists don't care about distributions. So as a macroeconomist, everything I've said is just fine. Prices are adjusting, which is like the interest rate is adjusting. And demand is now being funded differently. But who cares? The aggregate economy is still the same, except that there is a problem. And that's what I want to focus on in the end. There is a problem if you start running against certain aggregate constraints. And there are two types of constraints that I want to talk about. I'm going to just talk about those two constraints through the lens of a simple graph. So let's write down the usual supply and demand curve, but in the growth interest rate space. So in the growth interest rate space, the demand curve would be our traditional Euler equation. And the supply curve could be whatever we want to make it to be. So in the traditional solar model, it's exogenously given that it would be a horizontal line. A more endogenous model would say that decline in interest rate makes firms invest more, so that raises interest rates. That would be a downward sloping line like that. The key issue is that if given everything that I've talked about, if you think that it's rising inequality that's driving movements in interest rates, the first set of graph that I talked about, then it's the Euler equation that's shifting to the left. And the question is, what does that do to the aggregate economy? Again, in steady state, let's forget about transition dynamics. If we are in a solar model, and it's just a horizontal line throughout, as I said, there's nothing to worry about. Interest rate are just, and we are where we would have been anyways in terms of the growth rate of the H1. The question is, what if that is not the case? And there are two reasons to worry about that. That might not be the sort of the solar model intuition might not hold at some point, at some margin. The first one has been talked about a lot, which is this problem of zero lower bound if you like. Another way to talk about that is that if it takes ever lower interest rates to convince people to borrow more and more, what if you hit zero, and now there is no more price adjustment to be had, then you hit what is called a liquidity trap. You cannot convince more people to borrow, and that results in a liquidity trap. In the liquidity trap world, the only way to absorb the surplus savings is for the economy, the real economy, to contract to shrink. That's exactly the definition of liquidity trap. So you could think of the economy now being close to that liquidity trap point, and growth must suffer to accommodate these increasing surplus as the cause of liquidity trap. That's one possibility. The other possibility is that even before we hit liquidity trap literally at zero, that at very low interest rates, there are other problems that arise from very low interest rates. And one possibility that we talked about in the paper with Ernest Liu is that at very low interest rates, markets become less competitive or more monopolistic. And as a result of that, growth actually reduces. So you have this backward bending supply relationship, and as a result of that, as interest rate continues to get close to zero, growth actually slows down. The broader point is that if that is the world that we are increasingly living in, then we need a more equitable growth to get rid of these surplus savings. B, this is coming from an earlier work that you need to worry about risk-sharing across these spenders-savers in the economy. And finally, the most radical conclusion that comes out of this sort of analysis is that wealth tax might be useful, because again, you're trying to absorb surplus savings away from the economy, and then at that. Tief was right. He did change the paper that he was discussing. You have the paper in your packet, and a lot of the themes that he was just talking about are just really related to what's in this paper. So I actually do have a summary of the paper, at least the way I read it at the beginning, so this will help orient you. In the paper, Tief talks about this enormous increase we've seen in credit relative to GDP in recent decades, and he has a chart showing that the increase is mainly explained by a rise in household and government credit. He talks about how a central cause of this increase in credit has been a build-up in what he calls financial surpluses, but basically credit supply, which has come hand-in-hand with a decline in the equilibrium interest rate. He notes that higher income and quality has contributed to this build-up, with the logic there being, of course, that rich people have higher propensities to save, so if you shift income towards them, you get more aggregate saving. He talks about how these developments have various bad implications, they'll come back on that in point, and he talks about ideas that can help, including more state-contingent debt contracts, which would be the risk-sharing products that he talked about at the end of his talk. Just as my meta summary, I wanna say, this paper's a great paper. You should definitely read it. It's very thought-provoking, so that's my meta comment. I'm gonna give some specific comments in several areas. I'm gonna talk about the importance of the topic. I'm gonna talk about this idea of productive and unproductive credit. I'm gonna talk about how well the story in this paper fits the current situation, and then I'll get into some policy issues about better protecting household borrowers and other policies that can help. Okay, so I'm gonna start with the importance of the topic. I think this topic is hugely important, so I'm just grateful that he wrote this paper. I think it's among the most pressing issues that we're facing in macroeconomics today. It's strongly linked to the secular stagnation literature. I should say I was kind of a lapsed macroeconomist for a while, actually for a number of years, because I just wasn't really compelled to be thinking about it during the period of the Great Moderation. It just didn't seem that interesting, but I'm back to kind of thinking and researching in the area, because I do think these issues are so important right now. But anyway, kind of like the key thrust of the paper is as they would say in Econ 101, there's been this great growth in the supply of loanable funds relative to the demand for loanable funds, and that's caused this big increase in the decline, or a big, sorry, a big decline in the equilibrium price for loanable funds, which we would call the neutral real interest rate. And just to give you a sense of the magnitudes, this is a screenshot from a paper by Larry Summers and Lucas Rochelle that was at Brookings last spring, but it's a screenshot showing you the decline in real interest rates in the US and globally since 1980, and you can see it's on the order of three to four percentage points, and that is what, indeed, the kind of literature is estimating as for the decline in the neutral rate. Anyway, these developments have led to a set of serious concerns. A key theme of this paper, and it's what Artif was talking about at the end of this last presentation, is that we perhaps live in this world where we are unable to get to full employment without all this debt, which is exposing the borrowers, and it's exposing our economy to risks that make it unsustainable. Yeah, there are other bad things about it as well. Many people think that low interest rates can make bubbles and broader financial instability, more likely, low interest rates, particularly if they're unexpected, create problems for insurance and pension providers who are on the hook for payments down the road, and then as Artif was saying at the kind of, end of his presentation, this is a really big one, low interest rates limit counter-cyclical monetary policy, so this is a zero lower bound problem, and it is, as a macro economist, I find this probably the most scariest implication of this all, the Fed came out yesterday and had cut their neutral policy rate again to 2.5%, you consider the fact that in the last three recessions the Fed has cut rates by five percentage points to stabilize the economy, we're in big trouble next time around. Anyway, let me move on to my next comment, which is on productive and unproductive credit, and I have to say, one of the things I like in this paper, and I think it's in the paper you just presented, is this idea that there's credit that finances things that expand the supply side of the economy, and then there's credit that expands the demand side of the economy. I do think in this particular, at least in this paper, they talk about how kind of credit on the business side is the productive credit, because it increases the supply side of the economy, I want to kind of push that back on that a little bit as an oversimplification. I do think there are other types of credit that can be productive for the economy, so even though I do a lot of speaking about how there are problems with the US federal government student loan program, and there are problems that need to be addressed, they are used to make important investment in human capital, and that will increase the supply side of the economy, and there are papers, for example, worked by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney showing that actually for most students investing in a higher education, even with student loans, is going to give them a bigger return than other types of investments. Mortgage credit, we know there are definitely risks associated, but I will kind of point out that traditional mortgages, they're basically this commitment device that can help households overcome behavioral barriers to saving. So that can expand the supply side of the economy by giving households the saving that they need to store businesses or to finance higher education. And then, of course, government spending, that can be viewed as an investment, or some of it can be viewed as an investment as well. I'm not just talking about infrastructure and research, which we know should explain the supply side, but there's this great new literature which is showing that kind of spending on social programs, programs that are aimed at making the lives of children better have a long-term payoff in terms of making these children more productive as adults. So that's another way in which government spending can increase the supply side of the economy. As long as we're on the issue of kind of different types of credit, actually one thing that's not discussed in this paper, but I'd love to get thoughts on is this big increase we've seen in financial credit. The graphs that Ateef showed were actually just domestic non-financial credit. That's kind of one of the headline numbers in the flow of funds accounts, but as I was poking around in the data myself, I was looking at the ratio of financial credit to GDP, and I was noticing how Ateef's up 60 basis points over this period, so that's about two thirds as large as the rise of household and government credit combined, and I don't have a view on whether it's productive or unproductive, but I would love someone who's an expert in finance to kind of weigh in on that issue. Okay, so third comment I want to make is how well kind of this general narrative fits the current situation. Okay, so for your consideration, we're at full employment now, okay? Households are not, right now, they don't look like they're overextended. Okay, so we can see this in the aggregate debt to income ratio and in the debt service to income ratio, debt to incomes down to its 2001 level, debt service to income is kind of at the low end of its range for the last 30 years. You can look at other measures for households and none of it suggests there's a lot of trouble for households right now, okay? If anything, there are worries right now about some types of business credit. So for example, the Fed's recent financial stability report, they talk about the rapid growth in leveraged loans as a kind of area of risk. I mean, they note as Ateef does in his paper that overall businesses have not been borrowing a lot, but there are areas that we're worried about, okay? So what is going on? You have to look at the kind of key charts to figure it out, okay? I've just redrawn Ateef's charts. He probably showed them at the beginning of his presentation, you did, okay? So I love these charts, okay? So this is the chart, this is just, I just redrew what he did. It's just credit relative to GDP and then you can see over in this chart, you can see the household and government category lumped together. You can see that this is what explains the big rise in credit to GDP, kind of non-financial business credit has kind of grown moderately over the decades, okay? So what I wanna do is I wanna break out household and government credit. I've done it on this graph. I've kept the scales the same as the last graph so you can't see what's going on. So what I'm doing in this graph is I'm kind of zooming into just the recent period, okay? So this is basically the point I wanna make which is you can see the household credit as I just told you, it's come down since the financial crisis. Households don't look like they're overextended right now. What's high now is government credit relative to GDP. That's the driver of high credit relative to GDP, okay? So this is then begging the question is how do we feel about kind of this high level of government credit relative to GDP? So traditional view, a bunch of my friends back in Washington probably still hold this view is that of course it's a problem to have high government credit relative to GDP but I wanna point out there's new thinking and research on this issue that is kind of challenging that view. So this paper I already mentioned by Larry Summers and Lucas Rochelle, they kind of basically are looking at the rise in or the expansion of governments and the associated increase in government debt around the world over the last several decades. And they calculate that the real neutral interest rates would have declined by an additional four percentage points if not for the increase in these programs, okay? So if you think kind of there's been this and we know there's been this development regarding loanable funds and kind of if you're worried about how far it's driven down the neutral rate, the common would be worse if we hadn't seen this rise in government credit, okay? Other literature as well, Olivier Blanchard's presidential address, for example, talked about how with R so low, all else equal we shouldn't be so worried about this level of government debt because we've got R less than G and we'll outgrow it. So I'm not saying things are to all else equal because we've got these kind of big rises and spending on the horizon related to support for older households that we need to fix. But I am saying that the kind of current level of debt relative to GDP is maybe not so bad. Okay, so now let me get onto a couple of thoughts about policy. So first of all, better protecting household borrowers. I do think, well, not that pessimistic about the current situation. I do think there are real risks around household use of credit and around household financial fragility more broadly. So in a team's paper, he talks a bunch about state contingent mortgage contracts. I think they sound like a good idea, kind of more risk sharing between the lenders and the borrowers. Having these things would mitigate business cycle fluctuations. It would reduce the need for these ad hoc policies to rescue homeowners in the face of another mortgage crisis I gave several years of my life to that effort. Great, we don't have to go through that again. I think there are some complications around these alternative products. So paper does allude to this. Lenders do need to be compensated if they're taking on more risk. So I'd love to see more thinking about how much do they need to be compensated. And how would we feel like, because that's gonna show up as a rise in interest rates. How would we feel about that rise in interest rates? And if we don't like it, do we want a government subsidy? It was a kind of real problem when I was in government as we were trying to do GSE reform that we had kind of a deal that we thought would be a good deal. But the opponents came forward with this research that was showing that there'd be this enormous rise in interest rates for borrowers, which I don't think the research was right, but it was enough politically to kind of send the reform deal, kind of just basically kill it. So I do think it's like important when we talk about these alternative products to kind of try to put a number around how expensive they're gonna be and how are we gonna deal with that expense. Few complimentary ideas for protecting household borrowers. So this is again, along the theme of like, basically we wanna prevent them from going underwater in their first place. Okay, so I think there are mortgage products that people have suggested that amortize faster. Ed Pinto and Steve Olinner at AEI have this wealth-building home loan, which I think is really interesting and could be explored further. I think if we're interested in avoiding households kind of going underwater, we need to fight notwithstanding these zero lower bound problems, we need to fight recessions vigorously so we don't have housing markets collapse and prices collapse or over-correct and send people underwater. I think we need to preserve, of course, strong consumer financial protection. Okay, last thing is I wanna just run this out, talk about other policies that can help. The paper and a tip at the end of his talk talked about reducing income inequality to reduce credit supply to fix the situation. I agree with this point, particularly given the other downsides of income inequality. But what you wanna keep in mind is that the higher income inequality probably, according to the academic literature, only explains like 20 to 30% of the decline in the neutral real interest rate, okay? So it's less clear what, if anything, we can do about these other factors that we think are contributing. So this is kind of the demographic forces, the kind of precautionary saving, the buildup of reserves by emerging market economies, certain types of technological change that are thought to be contributing to the problem. So just kind of what else can we do? A few other priorities. So one, strong macro-predential policy. The chief talks about kind of these better mortgage contracts as a type of macro-predential policy. They agree, but there are other really important things that we should be doing. Top of my list would be that regulators need to be willing to deploy counter-cyclical capital buffers, credit booms, to stem bubbles, keep hassles out of the mortgages that they can't match. So I think that that's important with neutral low interest rates, kind of mostly here to say, notwithstanding what we do about income inequality, I think we do need more thinking to address the zero lower bound constraint on traditional monetary policy. So we need to be more willing to kind of deploy QE, we need to explore these other ideas like higher inflation targets, think about negatives. Okay, so that was basically my comments on this paper. I really enjoyed reading it. This is just my summary, you should read it too. It really is very thought-provoking. My personal view about the current situation is not as dark as the view in this paper, but I do think that there is plenty to worry about around these topics. Yeah, there's plenty on the list of kind of policies that we should be thinking about to address them. Mark? Yeah, Mark Carlson. So my impression is that sort of along with this expansion of household credit, part of this has gone to people who previously did not have access to credit. And so I was just curious, you know, how that fits in with your story and would you be concerned about sort of people being, those people losing access to credit markets if there was a dramatic cutback in the level of savings? Yes, I was thinking in terms of the cross-country evidence, just looking at household debt, so a huge determinant of the cross-country variation in household debt is how much households borrow for mortgages. And, you know, and you can see that variations in home ownership do not translate in differences across countries in households, Tennessee to accumulate wealth. But, you know, institutional factors in the mortgage market matter a lot for accumulation of household debt. So with respect to that, I think we can actually, you know, learn a lot from those institutional differences, both in terms of how to better structure mortgage products to ensure more resharing between borrowers and lenders, but also when we're comparing cross-country data, you know, those differences are going to matter for how we think about, sort of, you know, household debt to GDP ratio in one country versus another. And so probably you addressed this in the paper, but I would like to get your thoughts on this. Thank you very much, and thank you, Karen, for doing a great job, and sorry for all the trouble I caused you. Let me, I want to make two sort of points. I think partly to clarify one issue. My motivation for raising this conversation is very macro in nature, and what that means is that some of the issues that we might care about at the micro level or at the business cycle frequency are actually not that relevant. So let me push back on something that I myself said, which is this risk-sharing and state contingent contracts. It just happens that in this framework, that stuff is important for dealing with business cycle stuff. But in general, state contingent contracts or any kind of macro prudential is not going to solve the bigger problem. And I think that's very important to understand. The piece where I deviated and Karen didn't hear that piece in the beginning was that I said, okay, let's just talk about steady state. So if you're just thinking about comparing steady states from the 80s versus the more recent world, and we are worried about stuff like liquidity traps and so on, macro prudential does nothing to solve the problem. Think of it this way. If we force credit to contract through regulatory measures, economy will just slow down and it will contract. That's literally the way a liquidity trap economy would respond if we just forced less credit. Because actually liquidity trap economy actually wants more credit, not less. That's the irony, if you like, that while it causes all of these credit issues, credit itself is a symptom, not a cause of the problems. The fundamental cause, and that's partly what I was trying to get at, the fundamental cause in these kind of problems is this unequal growth that is driving the excess supply of credit in the long run in this long run steady state sense. I think that's something very important to keep in mind. And sometimes we are just, we might be sort of running after curing the symptoms, so to speak, without the underlying disease. So that's point number one. Related to that, and this is now in response to Mark's question, what I just said is also related to your particular question. It's less, again, from a macro perspective, of course it's a very important micro question, so I don't want to dilute the importance of those issues, including the one you raised, but from a macro perspective, it matters less in terms of who exactly is borrowing and so on. Let me give you one example of that. It could be that somebody is coming in and borrowing for the first time to buy a house for the first time, but in that process, and this is actually how it works, and again, if you actually put this down in a macro model, in that process, the price of housing has increased, and so they pay a higher price because lower interest rates have increased the price of housing and they pay for the higher price with credit, otherwise they would have just paid all cash, but who are they making that payment to? They are making that payment to an older generation that has now gotten a lot more cash than they otherwise would have by selling their house to this younger generation, these first time homeowners. That extra cash that gets generated will now be thrown back in the economy as additional demand. That's the key thing that matters from a macro perspective, and so when I say credit as demand, it is in that macro sense that credit generates aggregate demand. It doesn't have to be literally the same person who is buying the house, because they are buying, they are living that, and they may not literally spend that money in terms of consumption, but they are releasing liquidity for someone else who is then spending that money in the economy. So what I'm trying to say is that we need to focus on those aggregate linkages and think of what this is doing to the aggregate macro economy to fully understand the process of how credit links to the aggregate economy. Just as a side note, once you think through that, one factor that actually becomes very important is intergenerational mobility. You can have a high level of inequality of the time that we have been having, and that would be fine if you had somehow, which is not the case, very high intergenerational mobility, because a very high intergenerational mobility essentially acts like a very high top marginal tax rate, because your children are going to be very poor, and if you're very rich, and they're going to spend most of what you say, and that really helps the aggregate economy. So I just want to highlight that it's those kind of linkages that become really important from a macro perspective when you think about these courses.


Welcome folks, we have the Dow Industries down 90 points, Nasdaq up four S&Ps down three and a half gold. Gold contract up $3.80, trading at 15.72 an ounce.  You get the 10-year up three ticks, trading $129.05, the 30 up 16 at 157.11 and $Kingdala, $Kingdala up 233 ticks, trading at 97 flat euro at 111. The yen is out here at 108.54 and the pound is at 131 to 1 US dollar. Let's go over first and take a look at the NQs. So the NQs folks are the strongest indices that is trading out here. Bottom line, they want to go after their highs of Friday and they're right next to them. Right now you have 25 points and the high is 89.07. We've hit 88.94. So the bottom line is that you missed it by 15 points. What I expect that is going to get tested. That being said, guess what? We take a look at the S&P, little different setup inside the S&P here. The S&P right now, we're down four points. Bottom line inside the S&P, got up to a high today of 32.54. Couldn't handle that high right now. You're under the high of yesterday and the S&P doesn't necessarily have to test that high. The differential was when the NBX went topside folks on Friday. It had price, it had volume, all of the above. We take a look at the Qs. You're going to see the Qs had generated a high of 216.16. We did it with 31 million shares. We got today to 216.14. So this is pretty cool. I would have loved to see it go two more pennies because then you would have definite tests factually. Down two pennies, guess what? It can still get up those two pennies. But you can see the correlation. The correlation is that what you do have is that you have a huge contraction of volume as you're going up into that level.  You get the 10-year out here that basically flat out here today. You've done 1.1 million contracts. That 1.1 million contracts doesn't come into 1.8 million. So notes, bonds, they still want higher price, lower yield. Stay right there, folks. Next 60 minutes of trading coming back. Dow. Dow industrial is down 94. Nasdaq up 5. S&Ps down 4. We'll come right back.


So I'm here at Brandon Road and I want to tell you a little bit about this property. It is a stone ranch. It has three bedrooms, first floor laundry, completely updated throughout. It has laminate flooring and a wonderful layout. It's a beautiful home. Take a look at the beautiful property that goes with it. This house is totally wide approved. Right Wyatt? Right? And check out this addition here on the back. You've got this nice outdoor living space. You have a fire pit, a patio. Could be a hot tub just for you. Sliding glass doors, which add a ton of light to the new addition.  As you come inside here at Brandon Road, you can see all the neutral paint tones. You've got the lovely grays. You've got the laminate floor and the custom kitchen in the back with a wooden island. Brand new stove as well. It's a double oven, high efficiency. And take a look around. On into the master, you've got great views outside. You've got wood flooring, walk-in shower, and a GPC tub. This place even comes with a baby bait for all of your critters. Large finished basement with a walkout that goes out to your backyard, 1.6 acres. There's also a lovely man cave over here. Voila! You have your own saloon man cave. So one of the great things about owning a ranch home is that you can park in your driveway in your garage. And you can usually come in because it's one floor living. Now this house, you can come in from the garage. And you have this lovely little area here that leads to washer and dryer.  And then it takes you into the main living area. So it's still not too late. If you buy this house now, you can still move in by Christmas. This could be your Christmas gift to your wife. Guys, don't do that. Don't buy a house without your wife. Bad idea.


With Project IR, we're building a decentralized community of researchers and coders alike to together build an AI tool to somehow semi-automated help in the peer-review process of scientific articles. In hand in hand with this would come a repository of validated knowledge of all humanity that is decentralized and open and accessible to everyone. We are an open science publisher in Berlin and we use blockchain and distributed file systems to securely store the data and the articles and authenticate the data on the articles. And our idea how to bring the opening science environment along is that we offer a space for everything that's important in science to be published. DABE could help open science ecosystem by providing new crypto economy for the science. It will allow to monetize directly scientific knowledge created during research. So you will not have to pay to anyone to publish your research. It will be published automatically on our decentralized research platform and accessible for everyone. And you will be able to even pay for doing this work. We want to implement all the publication process from the first papers submission to the paper publications with the technology that bring us material and IPFS. Making a totally decentralized and serverless system. We're building a ledger of record for research by making it easy for researchers to interact with blockchain technology and share their work. It becomes much easier for researchers to share their works if they can establish provenance and they can have proof of existence. In addition, allow that work to be cited at any stage of the research process for any type of artifact or output from the research process.


good morning youtube team keep it clean uh what's going on it's in graven here with another video um happy happy thursday morning but even better than that happy football day man football is finally back uh tonight and we get well football's been back uh for about a month now a month and some change but regular season football is back so we now we finally get a regular season game that counts that goes on your real win and loss record not pre-season and this is the start man this is finally the start um good morning to everybody i can't really see everybody that's coming through right now but just know that i do appreciate it um and something else that i know you guys appreciate is when i introduce myself so let me take care of that right now uh me i'm in graven vids and this is my youtube channel in graven vids and i'm a ravens fan but on here uh we just talk about football period so if you're a ravens fan make sure you subscribe if you're a patreons fan make sure you subscribe if you're a cheats fan make sure you subscribe if you're just a fan of the game of football period make sure you subscribe and turn your notifications on so you never ever ever have to miss a thing um and i just know that i really do appreciate everybody on here man i really do um and if like i said if you're new here welcome and if you're old here appreciate you staying around um but in tonight or tonight we got the the chiefs versus the patreons chiefs versus the patreons in this game i'm hoping i don't think it is though but i'm hoping it'll be a lot closer than expected um i said in the video that i did last night um that i think it will be uh either 24 to 13 or 35 to 14 or 13 um i don't see the chiefs really scoring many points um just because of alex smith i don't i just feel like with alex smith um and i said this a lot of times before and i'll say it again because i really do believe it and i stick by it uh but i feel like alex smith is he's already hit his peak he's already hit his peak he's already reached his max potential and i don't feel like he is going to get any better um and not that he's a bad quarterback because he's not so don't take it that way um but i don't feel like he's going to elevate that team any more than he's already elevated them um so can the chiefs get to the playoffs can it be a playoff team yes they certainly can and you know uh if they get to the playoffs then if any team gets to the playoffs then technically anything can happen but not with alex smith because alex smith is not like um he's not like some quarterbacks and i mean i just use him as an example because he's the best one that i know um he's not like a joe flacco where during a regular season you never know what you're going to get uh he could play terrible one game he could play great one game it's always up and down up and down up and down um it's like a roller coaster with flacco well that would be all around it but uh it's like it's like a seesaw with flacco because you he gets his play will be up and down it's so inconsistent um but then when it comes to playoffs you know you are going to get the best flacco that you've ever seen in your life um but that's that's not how it is with alex smith with alex smith his play is going to be consistent where he he doesn't really turn the ball over but the thing about that is he doesn't score many points so that's what you got to take with alex smith you you really got to think man can our defense make enough plays throughout the entire game uh to help us win this thing and if it's a low scoring game oh so be it alex smith that's your guy um because he is in a low scoring game where offense is really on moving much he'll be just fine because he is not going to put your he's he's more or less than likely to put your uh team being the chiefs in a bad situation by throwing like a bad interception or something like that because he just doesn't do that alex smith doesn't throw he doesn't throw a lot of picks it doesn't but he doesn't throw a lot of touchdowns either um and his his touchdown to pick ratio it always looks nice but is he doesn't score many points he doesn't score many points um because he doesn't he doesn't get the he doesn't get the ball downfield enough he doesn't throw the deep pass too often he's a check down king man he is a check down king um but he he throws a lot of safe passes and sometimes uh as a quarterback sometimes you just got to chuck it down the field man even if the the pass ain't so safe sometimes you got to take that risk you got to be willing to put yourself out there uh for the greater good of your team um because if if you forever doing check downs and us ravens fans we definitely know especially from last year uh if you're doing nothing but check downs especially when it comes to second and long third and long um even on the fourth and long and oh boy one of the worst decisions that flacco ever made on the fourth and long it ended up we ended up getting uh bailed out because it it shouldn't have been the first day it was fourth on the fourth and twenty eight or fourth and twenty nine where he threw the check down the ray rice this dude like if you look back at that it's like man this dude really threw a check down to ray rice on fourth and twenty eight or fourth and twenty nine oh man i'm over here i gotta i gotta remember this is school zone i gotta slow down this is school zone but there ain't no school okay that makes sense um but anyway yeah he he threw a he threw a check down on the fourth and twenty eight or fourth and twenty nine um and that it ended up being the first down even though in that field out it was a really bad spot it took him probably like 1015 minutes to get that spot right because i remember watching that game at home and we were just sitting there waiting forever uh to find out what the ruling was going to be but anyway back to alex smith he i can't if this is a shootout then it's only going to be one team firing uh it's only going to be one team firing that being the patriots um like i said in the video from last night y'all make sure y'all check that out the gauntlet video um i just felt like with the patriots i felt like it was a case of the rich getting richer uh because they i feel like they they only got better they only got better their uh their safeties are still intact patrick young and um one of the best in the league uh james i'm no devin recording excuse me james is his brother uh they still got their safeties in their secondary got upgraded because last year they had uh malcom malcom ryan i feel like that's i feel like i'm saying his name wrong was it malcom smith man i malcom smith malcom butler there we go malcom butler there we go i forgot it i knew i i knew that name didn't click they had malcom butler they had logan ryan um and i forgot who their other corners back corner corners were but now and they won a superbowl with that which was fine but now this year they went out and got uh staphon gilmore man like and when they they were the ones that signed staphon gilmore i couldn't believe it i'm like wow what like where are they getting all this money from uh how are they able to sign one of the one of the best free agent corners in the league one of the best free agent corners in the league i didn't say one of the best corners in the league i know somebody gonna try to take that and twist it i said one of the best free agent corners in the league at that time i i just i was like wow they got them um then they went out traded they with first round draft picks you never know how they're gonna pan out uh they could be rated the best player ever in college and then they ended up they ended up being terrible look at your markets russell um look at alex smith he was the first overall pick i believe uh but he was here he hasn't been terrible though um but anyway you never know what you're gonna get from the first round draft pick so patriots say you know what we don't know what we're going to get from a first round draft pick so let's trade the first round draft pick and get Brandon Cook so they they got him from the same so i'm like man what are y'all doing then they go and trade uh trade for colts titan backup titan dwayne allen uh then they uh gron kowsky's coming back um they just traded for philip door set from the colts uh and man they i know they lost edamon but they got amondola steel um they and you know that they don't even they don't even need the best of the best ever receiver they don't need the tallest of the tall they don't need the fastest of the fast they don't need all that to to continue to run a good offense they're actually a great offense i hate it sucks being a ravens fan and watching teams have great offenses or even good offenses because you get jealous you get jealous because it's like oh man if only my team could have that but they don't so anyway um i think it's going to be like 35 14 tonight um the closest i think it'll be is 24 13 i'm hoping that i'm wrong um it's one of them cases where i just want i just want a great game man i just want a great game sometimes that's all we can ask for uh as football fans it's just a great game or just you know but we still appreciate the fact that it is a game that actually counts that's on tonight so anyway appreciate y'all man thank you um i'll see you on the next video y'all enjoy the game let me know what you think it's gonna take you man i'm out bye


Hello everyone. This is Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service on Primus Hutchinson. The issue today is Helen's Daughters, a non-profit agricultural organization that focuses on empowering rural women engaged in the agricultural sector. To provide the answers is Ms. Keflin Karoo, Founder and President of Helen's Daughters. Welcome to Issues and Answers, Ms. Karoo. Thank you for having me, Mr. Hutchinson. Great. Tell us a little bit more. I just gave a sneak preview of what Helen's Daughters is all about. Tell us a little bit more about Helen's Daughters. Well, Helen's Daughters is a non-profit organization that focuses primarily on empowering rural women in the agricultural sector. We started out in November 2016 when we got selected for a UN Women's Empowerment Project and from there we've continued our programs. So it's a sort of a UN initiative? What prompted it was that there was an open call for proposals for women's empowerment proposals and I decided to send out an idea, a pitch about advocating for, I guess, initiatives that support rural women in St. Lucia and we got selected for the Caribbean region. Why you decided that this is what you should be engaged in? That's a good question. At the time, that was my second year as a desk officer at the UN and I had joined because I, like most of the people they want to help their country and so on but what I found was that when I joined the organization, I was actually moving further and further from focus areas that affected the Caribbean region. So when I saw the call for proposals, I thought it would be a good way for me to have a job at the UN but still maintain a connection to St. Lucia and still help in whatever way that I could. So rural herons daughters is a solution based organization. How are we able to get it going here and get it in contact with the rural women and so on? I'm fortunate that everybody else on our board is based in St. Lucia so I'm the only one that's back and forth from New York and St. Lucia. Getting in touch with rural women, it's been a mix of social media and also I guess you could say offline canvassing, going to different markets and rural areas, using whatever would-of-mouth techniques that we could to try to market our programs to them. So you were at the UN at the time, you're still at the UN, but you're targeting rural women here on Ireland. How difficult was that? I mean you mentioned social media but in rural women how are you able to trigger the interest? I think that social media has helped even though I know a lot of people say well people don't have access to that but from my experience what it has done is that it triggers the second generation of children of rural women. Many of our members and partner farmers actually got to know about Helen's daughters because their son or daughter saw our posts online and so on and then registered them. Like I said we've also gone through the markets done the canvassing in rural communities and so on. So it's been a mix of would-of-mouth and also social media but through the children of farmers getting the without for us in essence. How easy it was to get them interested to have them to react and to at least follow your guidelines in that regard. I think it was actually easier than more people would think because in my experience rural women tend to be invisible in the agricultural sector when there are training programs and capacity development initiatives. When somebody thinks about agriculture they automatically think of a man and a farmer and what we started off was advocating for rural women. Highlighting the plight like market vendors and castries market and so on and I think they were happy to at least get some type of spotlight on the issues that were affecting them. What was the experience were you able to visit rural women on their field?  I have I'm actually tell us a little bit about that. I have because I'm actually from a rural community. I was about getting to that but anyway which is technically what I guess you could say pushed me towards advocating for rural women. I'm from Faso Babono so a lot of I'm surrounded by farmers and farmers families so it was easy for me to go from farmer plots that are near my family home but we have also extended to different areas for example Miku, Denry even as far as we thought actually going to their farms. Go ahead. You and I was planning to come up with this question a little later but now that you mentioned you're from a agricultural family as well. I mean your granddad one of the leading farmers at one time and grandmother as well from the Faso. How did that impact your interest and so on in the field and what was the experience like growing up with your your grandparents so as agriculture is concerned? As far as agriculture is concerned sadly my academic background is not lying agriculture at all. It lies in political science and international relations but like I said in a way my grandparents and parents sort of pushed me towards a different field like many other farmers because after the crash of bananas and so on I think a lot of farmers felt like why would I put my child or children into a profession that's that precarious so my mindset was never on farming but when I got to the UN and then I kept going back and forth and I started seeing the statistics of St Lucia's food import bill for example which is now at 360 million dollars. Seeing climate change and the hurricanes that are affecting us and just wondering how we would actually prepare for something like that like we're not due for a break I'm sorry about that we're not due for a break but we will continue just hold that thought just stay tuned issues and answers will be right back. I'm innovative. I am productive. I am creative. I constantly improve what I do and how I do it. I am output oriented. I never stop learning. I give off my best always. The National Competitiveness and Productivity Council embracing excellence. Welcome back. This is issues and answers. We are talking Helen's daughters and the president and founder Miss Keflin Karoo is with us. Before we took the break you tell us a little bit about how your family background impacted your agricultural interests. I had the pleasure and honor of working with your granddad in my previous profession as an agriculturalist and I'm sure that they impacted your interests greatly because I know them very well and they have a strong history in the field of background in agriculture and you're telling us about that as well. So were you by any chance able to do a little bit of our cultural work yourself? Not withstanding the experience in international relations and so on. Now that Helen's daughters came about in the last three years now I got certified for example in agroforestry and so on but now I'm actually planting trees for the first time and doing little herbs and tree crops and so on but before that no I had never had any experience at all not even implanting a tree. How about the clusters, the various rural women clusters and how are they, how is it going now? What's the experience like? Well the experience is that it does take a while to get to rural women. There are definitely some helpful partners that we have for example the solution network of rural women the president is Robin Daryl and she's been quite instrumental in highlighting some of our programs and pushing their members towards our programs and so on so in that regard there are few rural rural women's groups that are linked to Helen's daughters. How has been the assistance from the authorities as far as helping them out the produce you know selling the produce markets and all of that how is that a bit challenging how is it working for them? It's challenging for us we started out with advocacy then that led to capacity development which our training programs like for example we just launched our six-month rural women's academy that's at alias forces and now what we're doing is we've created a social enterprise and in a sort of way a women's cooperative you could say that facilitates the sale of these women's produce to the hotel sector so we've been doing a lot of bootstrapping and and work ourselves on the ground to be honest. Okay gender equality is receiving lots of attention in recent times how does that impact women in the agricultural sector? I think that it's definitely gone a lot of spotlight or a lot of good media but I think that a lot of people at times use use that in gender equality just as a catchphrase because they know how important well they see how it how some people use it as important. I think in the agricultural sector in St Lucia to be honest I don't think it's really gotten to the point of opening the doors for as many women farmers as it should have. That takes me to the other question you and women do you believe they marginalize in the agricultural sector what are your views on this? I believe that they're marginalized but in different ways for example with women I think that the mindset is that a man is a farmer. Though they go people go to the market the castries market and so on they see most women but they think of them as river days as vendors but they don't realize that a lot of these women are actually doing both jobs farming and vending. For youth I think that generally in St Lucia you hear oh St Lucia and young people they don't want to do nothing they're lazy and so on but I actually think that with youth it's difficult because in the banana days the reason why most people went into bananas was because they saw a lucrative benefit to it. With youth they're not seeing that benefit at all so I wouldn't blame someone for wanting to go into a profession without actually seeing the money that they could make from it. So in that essence I think that they've sort of been marginalized but it's in a way not their fault because they don't see the actual investment or the benefit. But the trend of thought is is it changing maybe slowly? I think little by little you're seeing quite a few agricultural entrepreneurs that are popping up but it's still not something I think you could go into a room full of helens daughters has to be credited for that. I hope so I mean I wouldn't say that we're the primary reason for changing the mindset but I really do hope that we contribute a little to that. Has there been any data collected to determine women's input in agriculture? That's actually a great question and to be honest gender mapping in St Lucia there's not really much data that you can find in not just in the agricultural sector but overall. Have you been looking at that direction and seen how that can be rectified somehow? We are trying to do that ourselves. It's difficult because right now we're trying to do our capacity development on a small team that's mostly voluntary already. Are you all collaborating with the ministry of agriculture anyway? No we are not collaborating with the ministry of agriculture as yet. As yet? But are you planning to? We hope so. The expertise is there. Yes I mean we have we let them know what we're doing and our doors are very open for a collaboration so if they're watching then helens daughters is very open to collaborating with the ministry of agriculture. Okay so hopefully in the coming years one can look forward to you know greater cooperation with the ministry of industry and helens daughters working together. I definitely hope so. Okay do you believe women can do more? Are you satisfied that they're taking advantage of the opportunities available so as agriculture is concerned? And I said opportunities available I'm not sure if you believe that there are opportunities available. In agriculture? In agriculture. Oh absolutely I think agriculture is a very lucrative business. I mean 90 percent of every developed economy in the world one of them mean exports and internal markets is agriculture. Look at the Netherlands look at America and so on. I think in St Lucia we just with bananas it created a highly specialized economy and farmers were never given the chance or the information to diversify and to get access to different markets. So hopefully with a little bit of investment and some information sharing and so on we can actually change that. Okay so for a woman who may have heard of helens daughters but perhaps not have that much information and probably wants to be aligned or to work with you or to have contact with you or somehow what are they supposed to do to be part of that organization? It's quite easy they can reach out to us on our number it's 287 7700 they can also email us info at helensdaughters.org. We are also on Facebook and Instagram and we have our website as well www.helensdaughters.org. Do you have any specific produce I've got your produce that you have given priority to or just our cultural produce generally do you have specific ones that you believe are marketable as far as the organization is concerned? We do we are focusing primarily for our green gold initiative on fast cash crops so for example tomatoes cucumbers and so on. Okay and how how's that going successful? Well it's right now it's something that we're currently working on so in the next later down the line I'll be able to tell you. And most of the clusters you mentioned a few of the communities that are involved perhaps you may need to to just repeat that repeat the names of the communities and so on so that people. Well we invite women from all communities but primarily we're we have clusters in Babono, in Dennery, in Miku, in Viewfort and they all engage in fast cash crops. Yes they are. All right well we will speak a little bit about yourself we want to do that you tell us a little bit more about yourself but before we do that anything interesting as far as the getting the organization off the ground something that that may have you know how should I put this not probably disappointing as such but a few little challenges that you may have encountered. Yes. I think the biggest challenge for me and running a women's organization and for our partner farmers is that they see us first as women and as professionals. Okay just hold that thought we'll get back to that we do for another break this is issues and answers stay with us we'll be right back. Hey look at your breastfeeding I give him both just now but I don't think I can breastfeed. Why won't you breastfeed? The thing is my breasts are so small I don't think I will have milk for my baby. My dear you can breastfeed the size of your breasts does not matter the more the baby sucks on your breasts the more milk your breasts will make. People say your breasts will fall when you breastfeed I don't mind to fall. Eventually all breasts will fall once you wear a supportive bra it will help maintain the muscles of your breasts while you breastfeed. Breast milk is very important for your baby's health it is complete nutrition for your baby with the right nutrients. I did a lot of reading whilst I was pregnant and found out a lot of good things about breastfeeding. Really like what?  Breastfeeding does all that now you make me want to breastfeed I want my baby to be healthy and smart. There's more in addition I saved a lot of money from not having to buy formula do you know how expensive formula is? No formula how is that possible the baby will go hungry. No the breasts adequate for the baby's need from birth to six months the baby needs no other foods or liquids during that period. Is that so my sister had a baby last year and my granny insisted she give the baby two normal and she was only three months. Nothing before six months the nutritionist will guide you on how to introduce foods to the baby. Wow I learnt a lot I had no idea breastfeeding was that important. Yes it is breastfeeding is the best thing you can do for your baby do it and you will see you will also bond with your baby. I will my girl nice talking to you. I'm happy to hear that. Also encourage your friends and family too. Welcome back to issues and answers we discuss in Helens Daughters and we have with us the president and founder of Helens Daughters the organization a non-profit agricultural organization Ms. Keflin Karoo and before we break we tell us a little bit about the challenges that you have encountered as far as the organization is concerned you want to tell us a little bit more.  Now Ms. Karoo we can be discussing rural women in our culture and we can't say something in Kuiol. Okay.  Future plans and organization I think we're just getting started and I just hope in the agricultural sector in the next few years that we'll be making our mark as women farmers in St. Lucia I think. And influence the direction that agriculture is going I'm sure that you can perhaps play a strong role in that regard. We really do hope so. Okay um well almost in that same trend of thought um do you see how do you see the future for women in agriculture here I mean apart from of course what you just said and your plans for develop develop in the agricultural sector playing a role in the development of our cultural sector but women in particular in that regard what is your better future for them in especially and Helens Daughters playing a serious role in that regard. Especially in this time and this current climate I think that agriculture is probably one of the most important emerging markets that has to be redeveloped in St Lucia and I just hope that Helens Daughters can be a huge part of that redevelopment. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me Mr. Hutchinson. I've been speaking with Ms. Keflin Karu who's the president and founder of Helens Daughters. This has been Issues and Answers a production of the Government Information Service. I'm Primus Hutchinson. Thank you for viewing.