So as Professor Fatik said, I recently taught this course. And this is really going to be a bit of a personal account of what I did. So as has been said, there were 700 students, 60 teaching assistants, and for some strange reason, it seemed that we didn't really have a good textbook. But anyway, I'm not going to talk about much of that. I'm going to talk about sort of the usual aspects of teaching, what should be the content and how should it be delivered. And I should clarify that this is my personal experience. And if you want to get anything out of it, you will have to customize it to your own personality. So some background to this or how I thought about all of this. So I feel that in the last 15, 20 years, students have changed quite a bit. And we need to really take that into account. So I'll talk about that. Then I'll talk about what are my own personal but not really original premises about learning. I feel that learning should be a lot of fun. And motivation plays a very important role in it. And there were some very specific themes that came up in the course that I developed. So they included some level of graphics, some idea on how to deliver every single lecture. So some idea about how the format of each lecture should be, specifically starting of each lecture with a problem to be solved. We'll come to that. There is sort of a feeling, and this is fostered in textbooks in schools, that it's OK to introduce subjects. So in chapter in say seven standard, we introduce fractions. We don't really do anything interesting with them. In eight standard, we do something interesting with them. I don't think that works. I think if you want students to learn something, some level of depth is really important. Otherwise, people just forget. Otherwise, it is just information. You have to do something with the ideas in order for that idea to really sink in. And I think that in any course, there should be excitement, something which students can be really surprised about. And students should find fun. And then I'll conclude. So here is what I think the new student looks like. 20 years ago, students were far more reverent. Students respected their teachers and parents a lot more. It's not that they don't respect today, but somehow they don't really trust. So if I tell my son that, hey, look, you should study this, he's going to ask me why. And we have to answer those questions. I think these days, all of us probably oppress our children a lot more than parents used to oppress their children 20 years ago. Very unfortunate, but that's true. So by the time students come to college, I think they are tired. They think that, look, at least now I should do something that I like. So students really want to know why they should be learning. And students also have a large number of distractions around. So there is TV, there are video games. So you have to be competing for their attention. So here are my basic ideas about learning. I think the first and the most important thing perhaps, which I think is missed quite often, is that the motivation for studying anything must be very, very clear. And by that, I mean not that you just articulate it and you state it very clearly, but somehow you have to persuade the student that he or she should really feel as connected to the topic as you perhaps might feel. So the student must really want to do that learning. For this, perhaps we should have topics that must be fun. Or if there are topics which are stressing more on utility, then we should say, look, this is really supposed to be beautiful. This is really supposed to be fun. But really, we should be teaching things which are both beautiful and which have utility. So I'm going to be dwelling on this aspect of fun, because I really think it is important. I think we really, at every level, we really must try very hard to make learning fun. So perhaps a short set of bullets on what is fun. Eating ice cream is fun, of course. Climbing a mountain is fun. Swimming or playing a sport is fun. Seeing a movie or seeing sort of a grand panorama from the top of a mountain is fun. Seeing a magic show is a lot of fun. And I feel that learning should have something like this over the course, over the duration of the entire course. Of course, I don't mean that you should actually have a magic show in your classroom, but there should be some element of magic coming up. As far as programming is concerned, there are a few additional things. Say for example, students should feel some kind of a sense of accomplishment. And of course, you could say that now, after I have taught this course, this student is able to solve force-order differential equations. That might be very exciting to you, but perhaps for the student, the student is just doing it just to pass that exam. I have done that. I have done that in this very institute. And I have passed the exam with flying colors. And today, if you ask me what was that course about, I have no recollection or I have very little recollection. So what we should really be aiming for is that students should accomplish something, which is really significant for their own liking. They should really want to accomplish. And that's where we should be helping them. There should be a bigger picture, say for example, computer science should be related to other sciences, other engineering, maybe humanities. And as I said, there should be an element of magic. Once in a while, the student should say, wow, that was really interesting. I don't know how you thought of that, something like that. Of course, it doesn't mean that the teacher has to think of everything, but the teacher has to pull out such interesting nuggets and show them to the student. So with this set of assumptions, I tried to develop this course. And perhaps the most important theme in this course was this theme of using graphics. So on day one, students had available a graphics library. If people here have seen this, there is some really exciting material on teaching programming to children. So Seymour Papert, currently at MIT I think, and a large following of his, have developed this notion of turtle geometry. Has anybody seen this? Anybody seen turtle geometry? If you have not, I would really strongly recommend looking at it. So one of the major ideas in this turtle geometry, it sits by the way, it's available in open source in all kinds of ways. Just go to the net and search for turtle geometry and you will get it. If you have a child five or in standard fifth or something, your child will love it. But of course, if you have older students, they will also love it. Students in my class also very much like this idea. So it's kind of a universal appeal. So what is this turtle geometry about? Well, you get a graphic screen. And on the graphic screen, there is a small triangle which represents a turtle. And then you are going to write programs which will drive that turtle around on the screen. So you can say forward 10. So the turtle moves forward by 10. But the turtle also has a pen attached to it. So as it moves forward, so say forward is going up. It's pointing upwards. As it moves forward, then it draws a line. Then you can say turn it by so much. Then the turtle turns. Then you say forward again, then it draws a line. So in this way, you can maybe draw triangles, polygons, circles. How do you draw a circle? Well, you have to draw very small segments, turn very little. The circle is a limiting case of a polygon. And all the interesting geometry that you read, long ago, and believe me, some engineering students have forgotten that geometry. And it actually gives them a kick to remember it. Because all that comes back. And in fact, in the very first lecture that I do, I use this package, which one of my TAs developed an year ago, the semester before I actually taught this course. And from day one, I can give them assignments which look exciting. The idea that you are commanding the turtle to do things is sort of a very vivid description of what a program is. You tell the turtle, do this, then do this, then do this, then do this. So the sequence, the notion of a sequence of instructions is very, very obvious. You don't have to really dwell on it. You don't even have to talk about it. You show the program on the screen, and it's clear that it's a program to do something. Can you illustrate iteration using this? Well, if I want to draw, say, lots of circles, or circles one following another, all I really need is a repeat instruction. So I do a repeat, and then I can, my repeat instruction naturally has a use, and I can use it to draw this pretty picture. Recursion, also, there are some rather interesting pictures that you can draw using recursion. That also works out very nicely. You can do things like, I can say, write a procedure called draw a house, and then that draws a house. The notion of why should I have a procedure? The question of why should I be having a procedure? What goes into it? All that, all those very trivial-looking syntax-related questions go through like breeze, there is no problem. Because what is happening is very clear. Most of the time, what happens when you teach a programming language is that what you are doing doing in that program itself is somewhat boring, or itself is not too clear, and therefore, the student has to understand what is supposed to happen with the program as well as understand the programming language, and that problem actually goes away. I use this for several things. Oh, okay, so actually, if you make a mistake in drawing a program, in writing a program which is drawing pretty pictures, what happens? Well, some other pretty picture which you didn't think of get strong. So it's a mistake, but your mistake comes out as a beautiful picture. So now you can play around with it, and you can debug it, but the debugging also becomes somewhat more interesting. Finally, once you have this package, you can use it for visualization. I taught trees, so binary search trees, but then I asked the students to draw them on the screen as well. So many things got cleared up as we did that. Here is one more rather important notion that the programming language which I was using has. So the programming language C++ has a notion of classes and class hierarchies. If you have seen C++ texts, then there are some class hierarchies which are invented. So what is the class hierarchy? So there is a car or whatever, there is a vehicle and then an automobile is a kind of a car. All of that is fine, there is nothing wrong with it. But once you have this geometry or graphics which you are actually using, there are some very natural hierarchies which come into play. For example, there is a notion of a shape class which is very, very, very natural. Or a, and then there can be different kinds of shapes. For example, there could be a line could be a shape or a polygon could be a shape, a circle could be a shape. And then it turns out that the turtle that we were talking about is actually an instance as is a kind of polygon. It's not just a simple polygon because it has some additional things that it can do. But that's exactly the whole point of object-oriented programming. So you have a class, then you make a modification to it. You get a new class, you make further modifications as and when needed. So you retain the features from the previous classes, but you can add your own features as well. So what can happen with this model is that you have a very, very concrete example which the students have sort of played throughout the course which they can relate to. And again the subject matter is already familiar by the time you are teaching them the concept. All right, so the introductory lecture, I want to say a little bit about that introductory lecture because most programming language textbooks have this notion that the first lecture should say hello world, should print out hello world. So this is fine, but it is sort of boring. At least I think of it as, I think of it as boring. There is, it should be a little bit more, okay. So what we did instead is that we had, we can introduce this graphics package immediately. And with that graphics package, we can drop pretty pictures on day one. And on day one, we can ask students to have homeworks which involve pretty pictures and they can start doing those homeworks on day one. So something non-trivial happens on day one. And I feel doing something non-trivial, something mildly exciting or shocking to the students is rather important on day one because that really sets the tone of how the course is going to be. So maybe I'll come back and I can show some of the lectures but maybe I'll just go through my talk first. The other idea which I tried to implement during the course was that every lecture should begin with a problem. As opposed to saying at the, what? As opposed to this. Instead of coming to the classroom or instead of beginning the chapter by saying, today we are going to learn about arrays, yawn, okay. So rather than that, begin with some problem perhaps, well one would hope a problem that students would care about, okay. So say the problem could be, we want to plot the movement of gas particles or charged particles and see how they collide, how they move because of their mutual attraction and repulsion, okay. So that's the problem. We have 50 particles. We want to see how they attract. We want to plot the next step, okay. They are currently there somewhere in space. They move forward. How do they move forward? Well, here is a chance to connect the learning of programming with physics or whatever they have learned before, okay. So they interact because of Coulombic forces and you can calculate the next step and this really is a very, very important idea because simulation is rather important in programming, rather important in science in general and in fact, this kind of simulation is routinely done if your students are engineering students or science students, they should really get this view of the world and the view of programming, okay. So this is the problem that we want to solve. So far we have not seen anything like arrays. So we really would be hard pressed to solve this problem and therefore here is a new statement which enables us to solve this problem, okay. So I tried to make every lecture of this kind. So it means sort of trying to come up with problems which students will identify with it but I think it is worth it, okay. At the end of the day, the students, if the problems are interesting to the students then the concepts are appreciated much better, okay. So the next important theme, some of these themes have sort of thought of in hindsight in the response to Professor Fatak's suggestion that I give this lecture but I'll stand by everyone, I mean. I think I really believe in everything that I'm saying. But I can't really say that I designed the course with all of these things very, very consciously in mind, okay. So for every concept, you must have good motivating with the examples, okay. And you must also discuss implementation. So I think there is a feeling that students don't like implementation but I think that's not quite true. If you discuss it properly, students do understand the implementation it actually clarifies the concept quite well. Say for example, recursion. So you should discuss, go over quite calmly what happens as each recursive call takes place. Draw out all the pictures painstakingly. It's really worth it, okay. Same thing about pointers. So where is this heap memory? How is it allocated? I think students like it because students really, I mean, students get a kick if they know that they are really understanding something which is at the root of all these systems. So I don't think they are reluctant or they are uninterested. And I don't think the problem always is the difficulty. I think students don't mind difficulty if there is some payoff, if they get a sense of accomplishment, difficulty is okay, okay. Like climbing mountains. If you're going to see a great view, it's quite fine to climb mountains. Generalization is also important. If you explain a concept in one context, if it applies in another context, that reinforces that concept, okay. So for example, you explain pointers in connection with, and you used it to build lists. But once you use it to build lists, building trees is really not that difficult. But then why should you be doing it? Well, for several reasons, there are some very nice things about trees. But at the same time, it reinforces the idea that pointers are very, very general. They are not implemented, they are not meant only for lists, okay. So the whole point is that most of the concepts that we are teaching have very general application, okay. So students should not think of pointers as associated only with lists. And of course, if they see that they can use pointers anywhere, if they see that there is this freedom to use pointers, I think then that helps. And here is an interesting exercise that I found, say use recursion to draw trees on the screen. So use build binary search trees and then use recursion to draw those trees on the screen. So students quite like this. So it exercised recursion, it exercised pointers, it exercised drawing. So that turned out to be quite nice. Connecting to other disciplines is quite important. For example, the course that I taught had example of Newton's method for finding roots. So that was quite, that students, I guess these students actually see that in 12 standard or something like that. But a number of students came back and said when we actually did the computations, we realized that we perhaps didn't understand it as well when we had learned them in the 12 standard. Only after we did the calculations, we actually understood what exactly was going on. So that was quite nice. So I have talked about simulating the moment of charge particles. Here is another theme that I perhaps should have pulled out separately. But so from time to time there are ideas which have some Indian element in them. So the numbers that we know as Fibonacci numbers actually were invented by a mathematician called Himachandra some 50 to 100 years ago. And there is in fact some evidence that these numbers, so that this invention traveled over Arabia and the Middle East to Italy. And that's how Fibonacci actually saw them. You can't be sure about these things, but there is some evidence. Wikipedia actually talks about all these things. So it's interesting the context in which Himachandra invented these numbers. So he was asking questions about poetic meters. So he was actually a poet mathematician and he was saying things like, suppose I have say some four beats. I think many people here are, so anyway, so there is a notion of matra. So I can have two matras go into or two words go into one matra and or just one long word go into another matra, into a matra and things like that. So am I going to put the effect, the audio effect of whether I put in two words into a matra or two syllables into a matra or one syllable into a matra is very different. So whether I put in a long syllable or two short syllables feels very different to the year. So Himachandra was concerned with this question. Suppose I have four matras, then I can break them up as two short syllables followed by all four short syllables. So a sequence of eight short syllables or I could break them up as say two long syllables followed by two short syllables followed by one long syllable. So there are several such possibilities. So he and a group of other mathematicians asked all interesting natural questions about this notion. For example, in these so many matras, if I want to fit in so many syllables, how many different ways are there of doing it? And the Fibonacci numbers or the Himachandra numbers as perhaps you should call them arise from doing this counting. Turns out that the nth Himachandra number is really the solution to the problem of how many ways are there of generating poetic meters of a certain kind. So I feel that it's important to tell this story that this actually is an Indian scientist of ancient times and also connected to something unexpected like poetry. So usually our examples tend to be connecting things to engineering, but if you can connect things to poetry, great. I think we should do it. So we should have nice algorithms. Newton's algorithm turns out to be quite nice. I think students like it. If you are searching trees, especially if you visualize them, visualize it with the turtle viewing of the screen, that looks, that works quite well. Students reported that they liked that kind of a demonstrative programming assignment. Another interesting algorithm which I talked about. And at this point, I realize I'm getting into the details of a course, treat my examples, treat the problems that I'm stating as examples rather than specifically what problems you should do. But I'll tell you why I took several of these problems. So for example, there are some very simple nice algorithms to find shortest paths in a graph. These are based on matrix multiplication. But the interesting thing is that they require you to represent infinities. So I want to say that the distance, that there is no path between this point and this point. So I represent that by saying the distance between this point and this point is infinity. If this distance is infinity and if there is some other path and if I want to do some arithmetic on infinities, turns out that C plus plus actually supports it. C plus plus allows you to do arithmetic on infinities. So there is this IEEE floating point standard, which you could talk about at some point. But rather than talk about that IEEE floating point standard, you could say that look, I'm not going to worry about how large an exponent is. You should know it roughly. Or who devised this floating point standard? When did it come about? All of that. But let us look at some interesting uses of that floating point standard. So say for example, I can have a floating point number, which is symbolically known as huge val. I think there is some math library which contains that. And then I can say things like huge val plus huge val is also equal to huge val. Or say minimum of 55 and huge val is 55. I can do it. I can write C plus plus ordinary programming statements and all that will happen automatically. And it turns out that this comes in very handy in this shortest path example. And my experience was that by and large students had learned matrix multiplication. But they had really not seen great examples at the first year level at which this course was taught. So by doing this example, I was able to connect some of the mathematics that they had already learned to the programming, to IEEE floating point standards. And making all these connections is actually quite interesting as far as students are concerned. Towards the end of the course, I provided to the students what is called an event loop in graphics programming. So basically just as you can wait on, say, the console in, you can wait for something to be typed. You can wait for an event to happen, like maybe a mouse is dragged or a key is pressed or whatever. And based on that, you could take actions. So essentially this resulted in students being able to develop video games. So many students, as you might believe, really enjoyed that. I mean, probably you would expect that being able to develop your own video game is probably a fantasy for many students. And as expected, they liked it. I could have talked about the more standard way of doing this, which is to have this notion of event-driven programming, listeners, and all of that. I didn't do that because it was very heavy on syntax. Whereas this event loop was using concepts that they already knew. And they could actually get to something interesting. So the idea again was that if you do things using which students can further their own agenda. But as a by-product learn whatever you are trying to teach them, that's great. So that's really the motivation in doing this. So there were several lab assignments. This is sort of a general remark. This may not apply everywhere. But I designed several lab assignments. TA has graded these lab assignments. I was worried that students might copy. And therefore I didn't keep very heavy weightage to these labs, give very heavy weightage to the lab assignments. But anecdotally, the students told me that they liked the assignments. And it helped them understand the material. This is really an interesting point which I should mention. So in the classroom that I was teaching, there was a tablet or whatever writing pad of this kind. And it so happened that one week because the internet was down, I was not able to download my slides. And so I used that writing tablet. And at the end of the lecture, several students came to me and said, look, don't bother with the slides. Use that tablet. And then from that point onwards, I switched to writing on that. And I guess it helps in developing the lecture gradually rather than slides with which material comes up in a flash. And there is a tendency to speed up a little bit. So if you are using the blackboard or if you have a tablet of this kind, I would recommend going with it. This is the feedback that I have had not only in this course and other courses as well. Use the blackboard because you can develop the material slowly. Here are a few things that I would like to do, but I didn't get time or somehow I didn't do it. C++ has this string class, which is quite useful, which can be a source of rather interesting set of programs. I didn't do it mostly because of time. One thing which I really regret not doing is talking more about assertions and generally reasoning about programs. I talked about it a little bit, but perhaps some more formal discussion, I think, is necessary. The standard template libraries of C++ and the algorithms class, which is provided in C++ also, I think, deserves more weightage than I gave. I could have talked a lot more about programming style. I talked a little bit. I could have also talked more about debuggers and IDs and things like that. I didn't do that much on this counter either. I suspect that in most places, the programming introductory course would have three hours per week rather than two hours as we did. So perhaps all this can be done quite comfortably. I think that's it. I'm at the end of my talk.


So I was glad to hear Jeremy talk about Piguvi and taxes. Remember discussion we had many years ago, right after the crisis where we were, Javier and I were talking about Piguvi and taxation as a way to control the sort of money creation, the excessive aggregate liquidity risk by the price.  So I think that's maybe the point of having quantities where you put limits to disposal and maybe at the aggregate level or so. But if we, now if, and this is a if, if we've done enough of a good work in giving them enough buffer, or if we feel that we can track better the creation, then we can go back to a less dramatic and in fact more efficient as you pointed out, system of managing excessive short-term creation, the private sector. The alternative is indeed to supply on the public side because it's clear that the demand is there. But to the extent you want to divide the task, then I think some instrument there, such as liquidity tax would be appropriate. That's not really a question, but Jeremy, do you want to comment there? Maybe I'll just use this as a quick opportunity to comment on something that Olivier said before, which is, I mean, of course, completely correctly, that it doesn't really make sense even if you bought all this stuff about like maybe the Fed should do it or the trade. It doesn't make sense to think about a target for the size of the Fed's balance sheet. If you were gonna get in this business at all, it would probably make sense to think of a price kind of thing, like let's do it in your preferred world where the treasury implements it. I would say the treasury should pay attention to the slope of the front end of the yield curve and they should organize their issuance accordingly. But that makes much more sense than saying, I have a target for how many T-bills I'm gonna have. If they just think of themselves, if the treasury would just think of themselves as basically trying to issue at low cost, but be a little bit more adaptable than they've been in the past, that might get you some of the way. But surely I don't think a quantity target so we'll make a whole lot of sense. Why do you think it's a good idea to go in the direction which the Fed is going now, which is to reduce the balance sheet because you seem to be agnostic. I mean they still have 20 basis points to be eliminated from increasing the balance sheet of the Fed. So we could decide that we're going to do it until that wedge is gone, in which case we should be increasing the balance sheet of the Fed now rather than starting to decrease it. Why do I think? No, again, my basic preference, all else equal, would be to have more, and whether it's the Fed or the treasury, would be to have more short-term claims in there. I mean that argument has been, the history, the sad intellectual history of this is we started actually with the treasury trying to urge this. But you seem to think that it's better if it is a central bank to do it rather than the treasury. Well, you know, I mean. If so, then I think you have to be agnostic as to whether Fed has the sign right. Whether they have the sign right right now. Whether they are decreasing their balance sheet where they should be increasing it because treasury is not going to do it. Okay, so, okay, let's stipulate that. I don't think necessarily the answer was ever to get it to zero because there's a trade-off. And so, you know, I think some of the slope right now, as you said, there's about 20 basis points of slope. I think some of that, you know, to appeal just to the expectations hypothesis might get you some of the way. There's probably one hike at least baked in over the next six months. So, you know, my guess is it is flatter now and that there is some effect. I wouldn't want to overstate the effect. And I wouldn't, given that the effect is not overly powerful, I wouldn't want to say that the job is to get it all the way to flat. But, you know, I would like to not see it reemerged with the sort of kind of steepness that you saw before. Yeah, and if it were me, if it were me, I would be in much less of a rush to shrink the balance sheet, you know, that's not my call. Let's say, that's a fascinating discussion. I would just like to encourage you not to lose totally sight of the fact that central banks are also in the business of doing monetary policy. So, if there is anything you would like central banks to do for financial stability reasons, you've got to explain how it squares with the monetary policy mandate. And I guess the answer then in your model would have to be about the composition of the balance sheet, which is what you said. But let's not lose totally sight of the monetary policy discussion. Please. Any other question? Please. Let me ask the obvious question. Elu Funtaden, University of Mannheim. Let me ask the obvious question to Jeremy. So, if 4,500 billion is the right size of the balance sheet of the Fed, we clearly got it very wrong before 2008. And so, is there a reason to assume that the lack of regulation before 2008 resulted in the private creation of those short-term assets in a dangerous way? And could by expanding the balance sheet before 2008 to 4,500 billion, we have avoided that type of private supply of short-term assets, which was dangerous? So, is regulation complement to balance sheet size or is there some subsidizability in terms of now going back to smaller balance sheets as many people seem to want? So, again, I think that this is very much in the spirit of Benoit's question. I think the pre-crisis thing was characterized by a combination of no regulation or inadequate regulation and a strong economic incentive to fund at the short end. And the right answer, I think, in an ideal world, you do the best you can with regulation. That's in some sense the first best instrument. If you think that it works very well and that there's no sort of evasion around the margins, then that's it. And we don't really know yet right now because I would say right now we've done the regulation but the incentive part has not really re-emerged. And again, we'll learn, we'll basically learn as the yield curve steepens. I suspect, just sort of based on the fact that there's regulatory arbitrage is sort of everywhere, that the regulation by itself is not gonna do as well as some complementarity between regulation and trying to keep the incentive somewhat moderate. Maybe to your point, Jeremy, maybe one additional remark is that the regulation doesn't apply the same way to banks and non-banks, as we know. So the constraints on the maturity transformation has not as yet the same say in the money market universe on the investment fund universe, even though the FSB is working on it. So that would be the worry, that would be precisely the worry, the yield curve steepens and we start seeing various shadow forms of maturity transformation, that's exactly right. Another question. It's a question to Professor Einstein. Can you recall in your model where the demand for a short term bond from the private sector comes from? Is there a friction, a very high risk aversion for example? And if with the crisis and now that the crisis is gone, is this friction gone? You know, it's a very good question and there's sort of a deeper take on it. In other words, a superficial answer would be to say something sort of institutional, to say well, you know, there's a lot of money market funds and there's three trillion of money market funds and so they need to have short term assets and there you go. And then I think a pretty powerful criticism of everything I've been saying so far would be to say you're taking all that demand as sort of given and in some sense as legitimate. You're saying well, we should be sort of organizing society to sort of accommodate that demand either via the private sector, the public sector but maybe that demand is in itself somewhat excessive. So just to give you an example, where's all this money market fund stuff come from? Some of it probably comes from all the cash that corporations have accumulated. That in turn has something to do with taxes and repatriation and all of that and maybe we shouldn't be doing all these gymnastics just to accommodate that demand and the right answer is if we sort of did something with the tax code so that guys repatriated some of the cash, there'd be less cash and money funds and some of this demand would go down. So I think that's a very fair point and I think it's sort of related to Benoit. There are other instruments in some sense that one might want to bring to bear that would be closer to first best instruments than essentially implicating the government in just uncritically accommodating this money demand. So I think that's completely right. Well, at point, there's an argument which has been made against not Jeremy's specific argument but that line of argument which is the people have incised which have focused on the wall of collateral and have argued that when the Fed does this it basically removes good collateral by basically holding it on the balance sheet of a central bank rather than where it should be. And I'm not sure I can make sense of this because I mean the Fed is actually providing amazingly good collateral which is money, except that it goes to the banks and people who need the collateral are not the banks typically are not primarily the bank. So it's something interesting. I suspect that the answer is that there should be a way of using cash as collateral outside the banks and so I suspect that the way this liquidity is provided should probably be extended to more than banks which would be the solution. But I mean in a way if I listen to the collateral argument I would conclude that what you're suggesting is completely wrong but I think it's not correct. I mean it's all right. So let me just totally agree with one thing which is here's I think an easier, lower hanging bit of fruit which is whatever we agree the size of the Fed's balance sheet should be I would prefer that the liabilities not be reserves but be something like their repo. You mentioned central bank bills. If we think that the world has a demand for safe short-term assets, why are we creating all these things and saying oh only the banks can hold them? That just seems like it's a violation of every Friedman rule type of principle you would want to have. You should make the stuff freely available to whoever wants it. So I always liked the RRP program in that sense and I would have loved to have seen them essentially put the rate on that higher and so thereby you'd be using your liquidity a little bit more broadly and I think that would answer your point and would not make their footprint any bigger in the aggregate but there seems to be for reasons I don't fully understand a bit of traditionalism associated with doing it more in the way of reserves and less in the way of repo. Can I just comment on this one, Beno? I think these two comments I think raised the bigger issue of who should have access to the central bank balance sheet and Beno, you're very familiar with this debate. One debate that's been going around has been on the role of central bank digital currencies, how widely they should be, what form they should take, who should have access, what's the elasticity and so on. I think that raises a whole host of questions which have to do with the nature of intermediation, what are the financial stability risks during periods of flight to safety that are going way beyond the narrowly focused question about the demand for safe assets. So I think we should try and take a step back and take in the larger picture here and perhaps in a position within a larger context. I was going to say exactly the same as you, so it must be some kind of central banking DNA somewhere. That if that becomes a broader discussion on who's having access to the balance sheet of the central bank, then we should look it through. We should look at the consequences for the future of the banking system or the kind of financial structures that we want to see looking forward and sometimes have the impression that we are jumping a little bit too fast to the conclusion that, well, the banks are no longer performing the social role that we would like them to play, which is maturity transformation that essentially is a social role of banks. And so we've got to move on and write them off and move to something else. But again, that brings me back to my first question to Jeremy. That would be a little bit also writing off all the regulatory effort that we've been having since 2007. So that might be the conclusion eventually, but I would like to be sure, I would like to be sure. So let's give a chance to intermediate finance before we move on. Luke. Yeah, so there's another argument that you hear often actually around here that Olivier did not include in this, otherwise I think exhaustive list, which is that there may be such a thing as a reversal rate. So the idea of now at some point when rates are low for a prolonged period of time, it may actually turn out to be contractionary, monetary policy, because it's basically eats up the net interest margin of banks. So Marcus Brinamire, one of his students, has written down a model of that and it's a bit unfair to ask the question since he's not here. But just more generally, I think this is also very much in the public debate. So this is less the plumbing and the collateral, et cetera, et cetera of what happens once we exit, but it's more sort of some of the impetus created in certain parts of society calling for an earlier exit. So what do you, as a group, kind of make of this type of arguments? I'm open to the idea that the sign of the effect of V interest rate, whatever it is, on aggregate demand changes as you get to very, very low rates, in which case it's not a good idea to do it. So the notion of a reversal rate strikes me as logically consistent and maybe even empirically relevant. Does this lead me to want to execute QE faster or not or increase interest rates? I'm not sure. I would have to look at how, you know, where the adverse effects come from and whether they come from the QE part or from the policy rate part. And I have not thought about that part of the answer, so I should stop here. No, I mean, I forget who mentioned it earlier today, but one of the previous speakers mentioned the point. There's sort of, if it goes negative, and then if it's just very low for very long, that the effect of, you know, the income and substitution effects may play out differently for a very permanent change than for a short. I don't know that we have any evidence on it, but I think it's worth at least entertaining the conjecture that, you know, the stimulative effect becomes weaker over time because people start worrying about saving more effectively. Well, that's clearly something we're looking into, but so far it seems that the reversal rate, and I agree with Olivier that it has to be a reversal rate somewhere. Question is, how low is it? And so far it seems that it has to be either very low or low for very long to materialize because there are cumulative effects, as Jeremy just said. And when we look at the eurozone today, where the deposit rate, which is the main policy rate in the current environment is minus 40, it seems that the, so far, but against so far, the negative impact in particular on bank lending of having a very negative rate has been more than offset by the general equilibrium impact on aggregate demand for loans, et cetera. So this might not be true eternally and this would not be true if we would push the deposit rate much lower, but so far it seems that we still have a comfortable margin. Could we just come in on this one? Benoit, I think we had a very interesting paper earlier in the day from Glenn Shepards on why the, at least for the retail deposit rate, it seemed the zero is pretty hard, low bound. And I think a very interesting case study of where this reversal rate might be is just to give it time and see what the impact of a very prolonged period of negative rates might be. Because I think it will actually have an effect on some of the structure of the intermediation as well. And let me just mention the experience that the Swiss have had recently, which is that what happened when the deposit rate went very negative was that the mortgage rates actually went up because the larger banks were able to mobilize their pricing power to actually raise the mortgage rates. But what we've seen, I think more recently, is that as the period of low deposit rates have persisted, the structure of intermediation itself has changed in the sense that the players that I talked about, the insurance companies have discovered these very long term mortgages have very fixed income like attributes and it's the insurance companies who have also entered the mortgage market. And then the initial pricing power that the banks thought they had may not be all that lasting after all. And so I think where the reversal rate may be depends not only on just a number, but also on how long this period persists. No, that's absolutely correct, but then it depends also a lot on the kind of degree of competition that you have on the retail market, which is different in different countries. It's certainly different in say in the Eurozone in Switzerland, in Denmark. What we see in the Eurozone is we still have too many banks, there's a lot of competition. So that's probably not the most likely negative effect. So of course there is no free lunch. That also implies that the low interest margin means implies low profits, which is less internal capital accumulation so that might be an issue for financial stability over time, but it's probably more of a long-term impact than a short-term impact. Thank you, Bert Sinetal from UBS. I was wondering since the title of the panel is exit from non-standard monetary policy and we've talked, or you've talked a lot about the Fed. And I was wondering, I mean, the Fed has started to exit and it has been going very well. I mean, the curve has been very well behaved. In fact, it has flattened. Long-term yields are low. I was wondering what do the panelists draw? What conclusions do you draw from this? I mean, does it mean that maybe the exit is actually not as scary as many other central banks, I guess, including the ECB, the RICS banks, it's National Bank, particularly in Europe, and in Japan as well, where central banks are still engaged in this non-standard monetary policies. I mean, would it be correct in your view to draw the lesson that maybe all this withdrawal of QE may not have such negative impact in the end? That's a very good question. Let me just say that we're not scared by exit. I mean, that's not part of the job description to be scared by anything. So we just want to do it carefully, prudently, and in the light of our price stability mandate, so in the light of the impact on medium-term inflation. But I would be interested to hear the answers of the other panelists. I mean, I think Hewitt has it exactly right. I mean, you can do the usual stuff and say, you know, all this has been telegraphed to the market, so there are no surprises coming to the market, so if the thing is sort of market expectations, we don't expect much. And if you ask me for a baseline about what's gonna happen, at least with the Fed's wind down, I would probably say my baseline is, you know, it's not gonna be a big deal, but we just don't understand markets all that well. We are in a situation where, you know, some asset markets, if you look at like US credit and other things like that, or at least, you know, valuations are at least moderately stretched, you know, to say what the trigger will, even if you believe that you can forecast returns a little bit based on valuations, we know very little about triggers. But at the same, I mean, I would just be, I would be uncomfortable being overly complacent. And then I think Hewitt made some great points about the interconnectedness of all of this. Even if sort of the narrow hydraulic effects of just the US, the Fed shrinking its balance sheet, even if you think that those are sort of modest, I suspect that a lot of the low-term premium and the narrow credit spreads that are in the US, for example, we've imported from Europe, right? And there are these nice, you guys have probably produced some of these charts where you can see the amount of, for example, US corporate bonds that have been bought by European asset managers, right? And so there's all these kind of floak type of things going on that I think we don't understand super well. So there's gotta be some tail out there. Again, it's different than making a baseline forecast, but. I don't think, there you go. Just one quick remark, which is I think the portfolios of the different central banks are different. And maybe the exit from QE from the Fed is simpler than it is for the ECB, the extent that you have the implications for fiscal positions in various countries of the Eurozone are more complex than the implications of for the fiscal position of the US government. So yes, so far so good and clearly a clear, at least initial path, not final path has made an enormous difference and things have been priced in nicely. But the challenge is still there, I think for the ECB and surely even more for the BLJ. You know, I think it's very tempting to reach for the textbook model where we have a single individual investor and you can sit down with the investor and say, look, let me tell you, it's gonna be very gentle, it's gonna last several years, so there's nothing to be afraid of. And I think that's the kind of picture that we have in mind. And I think that's certainly a possible scenario. And I think what we should bear in mind is that the market is a very complicated place with different players, with different motives. And I think it's worth thinking about how those interactions will actually play out. You know, one thing that we do know from the academic literature is that bond markets do overreact relative to the expectation through the yield curve. And there's a very interesting paper by Jeremy's colleague, Sam Hansen and David Luca and Jonathan Wright, which have looked at the recent evidence on bond market overreactions. And what they find is that the frequency and the extent of that overreaction has increased markedly since the year 2000. Now, I mean, you could say, well, we shouldn't really worry about this because it's just a short term, some short term effect on the market, which will die down. And that was certainly the experience we had in 2013 with the taper tantrum. I think the difference perhaps this time around with the taper tantrum was that in 2013, the backdrop was still very accommodative. I mean, there was the central bank asset program in the US just backing up. This time, if the broader backdrop is less accommodative, then I feel like the final destination may be somewhat more uncertain. And I just go back to my previous point during my introductory comments where in textbook comparative statics exercises, if you have a demand curve that slopes upwards, as well as a supply curve that slopes upwards, depending on how you draw those curves, you could certainly have multiple equilibria. And that may be one kind of scenario where everything makes sense, but it's very difficult to foresee where you land up. And I think this is another instance of the old adage that in finance, it's much easier to talk about consistency across assets at a moment in time than to think about the inter-temporal consistency. Because the inter-temporal consistency may be much harder to achieve because there is much less arbitrage going on across time than you have across any single date. And so I think this is something that is food for thought. And I know that, and we are sitting in front of people who have really contributed a lot to this literature. So maybe we could ask them at the end of this panel. Bonnick, I think we're looking at you. They don't seem so eager to answer. Do you want to answer? No. No, two things. I mean, first, I think the point that Hume just made and made earlier in our discussion on granularity is very important. If you want to understand the impact of whatever we're doing on market prices, you've got to be very granular. It's not always about different political structures, which Olivier mentioned, and that's important. It's also about different differential structures and different people holding the bonds, right? So just to illustrate, Hume, you gave the example of, or you flagged the risk of long rates going higher, insurance companies or pension funds marking down the liabilities and then dumping bonds and having some kind of convexity there, which is clearly something that that's possible. What we've seen so far is exactly the opposite, that us buying bonds from investors who are increasingly buy and hold investors, increasingly regulatory constrained investors, putting a higher price on the bonds because of the regulatory constraint, meaning that that has contributed to the very low level of long-term rates, or we've been able to inject the higher amount of duration for a given quantum of purchases because of the nature of the investors we had against us and on the other side of the market. So you've got to understand all of that to understand the impact and it's very difficult, it's very difficult looking forward. May I ask you one last question because we're coming to the end of the discussion. The discussion has been very much about balance sheets, volumes, not that much about rates, which is of course an important part of what we're doing, forward guidance and all the like. And there is one striking difference or striking to me between the US and Europe, which is about the end points, the terminal rate. So Fed has communicated quite a lot on their expectations or FOMC members have to communicate on their expectations of long-term interest rates, or the long-term value of interest rates easily. So you have a fairly good notion of the distribution of the terminal rate in the US and that's not something we're doing. So is that important as a non-core or how much this contributed to the, to stabilizing the exit process? I think it's, can I, maybe I could start with this and hand over to the other panelists. The famous dot plots, the summary of the projections from the FOMC members, I think is something which is very widely, which is very closely followed. And yet it's also an instance of one comment that I made earlier, which is that there does seem to be something of a gap between what market prices are signaling as to what the future conditions will be and what we know is coming up in that the market implied path of interest rates seem to be somewhat different from the summary of economic projections. And I think it's, I think it will certainly have a value, but I think it's also, I think illustrating that if it's a forecast and it's filtered through the market process, so it's not simply a statement about one's intentions, but rather it's a forecast that's filtered through whatever economic model one has. The signaling value of that may be less than full. And I think it's quite telling that we do see this wedge between the market implied path and the dots. You've been disclosing your... I've been a dot. Your dots. You've been a dotter. Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, obviously I understood the theory of forward guidance, you know, that there's sort of strong form forward guidance at the zero lower bound, where it's more than just, you know, this is my best guess, where it was at least in our case, it was a quasi-commitment. So that, I think, you know, there was a textbook and I think it was the right thing. Away from the zero lower bound, I understand a little bit less well what the role is. And I have to say, I have a little bit of discomfort because I worry, I mean, I worry that you could get into a situation where it basically confines your ability to move when you need to. Now obviously the Fed has not had a problem not meeting its guidance when that, not meeting it has been going slower than the market expects. I wonder if there comes a time when they need to be more aggressive than the market expects, will they feel sort of somewhat constrained or reluctant because they kind of put a number out there. It's like a corporation that puts out earnings guidance and then feels it has to meet or exceed its guidance. So a little, you know, away from the zero lower bound, if you could kind of make the dots go away, I think it's a good, it's a debate worth having. And this is a long discussion what the terminal rate is likely to be. My own view is that my own distribution has a much larger up a tail than the market. I don't know where I would put the dot if I was allowed to put a dot. Dot might be in the same place as the others, but the distribution around it would be very large. Because I mean, the more I, that's something on which I've worked, which is where do the low rates come from? And if it comes from a decrease in the rates of return in general, and then if you think about the reasons we give from the global savings dot and all, it's not clear it will remain, or it comes from a safety discount. And there you can tell stories where it will also largely go away. So my sense is people in the market seems to be expecting very low rates. And I expect, well, at least, I think there's a risk of much higher ones. But I've said this for three years now and I've been wrong, so. But that, by the way, that's exactly where I was coming from. Not that my point estimate is all that different, but I think there is that tail. And you wanna be, if that tail manifests, you wanna be able to do what you need to do. And I just don't know enough about how the market will behave. But I worry a little bit that once you put this marker down, it's a little harder to react if that turns out to be the case. Thank you very much. I'm not going to attempt at summarizing the whole discussion. The conference reconvins tomorrow at 9 a.m. to discuss globalization, inequality, and welfare.


Γεια σας, και θα σημανωσουμε ότι εγώ έχω ένα εξωτερικό βιντεο και θα σας δει την νέα εξοτερική εξωτερική μεταγωνία Μπιξωτατική Μπιξότατας by C-Six. Αυτό είναι η στιγμή μεταγωνία πίξωτη με την εξωτερική μπιξότατα με την όλη την νέα νέα συμβουλία. Αν δεν έχεις ένα μπιξότατο και εσάς στο μέρος της μπιξας για να παίρνεις ένα, αυθυμούστε να πέτω αυτή την συμβουλία γιατί είναι μόνο και δυσκη. So I'm going to unbox it and we will see what's inside together. Now, just because I am a C6 Ambassador, I get to play with new stuff way before they are available in the market. But that means that I do unbox videos and you get to see what's coming up. Next, I am going to share throughout the video more details on where you can find the machine and when, but first let's set it up together.  Make sure to hold on to it, don't throw it away. There are actually instructions there on how to register online your machine and this is going to give you an extended 2-year warranty on top of the one year that you already have. So this is a standard Big Shot platform with a 6-inch opening in a beautiful mint color with silver design on top and a white bed which I absolutely adore. I think it gives a lovely fresh air on my studio. I am switching to this machine actually from now on on my future videos and you will get to see this in action. When you get your Big Shot, you will find out that the handle is not in place which means that you need to do a little bit of assembly to put everything together. On this video, I am going to do that in real time so you can see how that works and how easy it is to put it all together. Of course, there is a little booklet in many different languages that you can follow. First of all, instructions on how to put this machine together although I am going to do that for you today. Then there are all the sandwiches that you need to know on how to emboss with your embossing folders and how to die cut with all the different types of dies. So let's put this booklet on the side and take a look on what else came with the box. So you get the platform along with adapters and cutting pads. So the white one is actually your standard platform. The thin one that I am holding now is the thin die adapter and everything is marked on top with text and images so it is really full proof. And you also get two cutting plates with glitter inside which I absolutely adore. They really put a smile on my face. Now I am going to put those aside and I am going to bring a little bug that has some bits and bobs inside which you will going to need to put everything together. So let's do that together in real life and you will be able to see exactly what I am doing and how easy it is to put everything together.  And also there should be a little key there so that you can screw everything together. Now I am going to unwrap the handle and on your machine you will find that there is a protective cap. Just take it out and throw it away. You don't really need this part. It was only for packaging. Now take your handle and I am going to try and do that as slow as I can. Place it in place and then add the washer on top. Hopefully you can see what I am doing. So this is the little round thing and I have the screw on top of the little round thing. Now I am going to turn the screw with my fingers a little bit and then I am going to use the key to make sure that it is nice and tight. And once you feel that everything is firmly tight then you can put on top the protective cap. It's that little plastic thing in the same color, mint color as the rest of the machine. And your machine is ready to go. And you can see here the beautiful silver design. There are rubber feet as always at the bottom. Look at the beautiful shine of this machine. I am just in love with it. It's so pretty. Now if you do have a big shot you really don't need this machine but I know it's going to be so hard to resist. And here are the rubber feet underneath just because I am working on a glass mat these grab beautifully on top of it and it doesn't move super sturdy. Now this is a limited edition machine which means that it's going to be available only on specific retailers. For now it is available through the UK Hochanda website you will find links down below and it's going to be available worldwide until spring. As it becomes available on more websites I am going to always let you know. Now if you want a chance to win this big shot machine there are three big shot machines that the CISIX is giving away. Make sure to visit my blog to find all about it. And there are 18 more big shot machines to be won. So I am going to leave everything you need on my blog make sure to visit you will find a link down below in the description area. So good luck on the giveaways thank you all so much for watching today and I'll come back tomorrow with a fun blog hop. Have a great Friday.


I just want to say a word about banks just because it's breaking stories constantly. I probably will talk about this one next week because this is a developing story that I'm going to be tracking and we don't have a lot of information so far. But it really does appear that the banking crisis is spreading, in this case, to Europe. We already have credit suites basically being bought by UBS, which is a massive, massive development. Switzerland, down to one major bank, is putting a question, the whole Swiss identity, I think. But now, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Bank, the largest bank in Europe, I believe, and it clearly is too big to fail from the perspective of Europe and really from the perspective of a global bank. The regulators and the central bankers of the world are not going to allow Deutsche Bank to fail. Deutsche Bank seems to be in trouble, the exact nature of that trouble I have not been able to get to the heart of. But credit default swaps, which is basically a way in which one can bet, if you will, on whether a bank is going to be solvent or not in the future. Through the roof this morning, so a lot of market participants are, in a sense, betting that Deutsche Bank is in trouble. Credit default swaps are a very good predictor of financial crisis. Deutsche Bank is the biggest player in Europe and is a real, you know, it's going to be really interesting and it's not clear, anybody in Europe can bail out Deutsche Bank. It's not clear that the general government or the European central bank has the capacity. It is going to be interesting to see to what extent Europe relies here in the United States. Is the Fed with the U.S. through the Fed bail out Deutsche Bank? Is that a possibility? Could that happen? Anyway, this crisis is rolling and it's not stopping and it's affecting, now it's affecting Europe, Credit Suisse now, Deutsche Bank, who knows what other banks are in trouble in Europe. France has millions of people out in the streets protesting, it's going to be an interesting rest of the month and it's going to be an interesting April, so buckle up guys. It's not good. It's not good. It's not good if you care about wealth creation, it's not good if you care about economic stability, it's not good if you care about your jobs and the economy and everything else. I think we are in for rough times, rough times. I don't think those rough times will be hyperinflation, but I do think a recession is coming faster than what people expect. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to www.uranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.


The Benefit of Movement Training Part 2. The second is the Supportive Strength. This means your body's ability to support and carry its own body weight in many different positions and many different angles. When it comes to movement training for example you always support it with your shoulders. The example is you can support yourself whether it's overhead position, whether it's the forward or 45 degrees. Whether your arm is abducted, whether it's extension, whether it's downward rotation or external rotation. It doesn't matter which position you get to. You always have this ability to produce amazing suspension in your body and you have this 10-child tolerance to withstand different types of variety of strains that come during movement.


Complex he was already in route Damn, hey y'all try to call him. No, we didn't try to call him. He was just once we figured out. He was gone Was the interview though like man, it was about 840 minutes or something like I was kicking he all kicking and we thought he was gone because we like he said he wanted to come Oh, maybe he just was like maybe in his mind. He was like He's up. I'll just leave him with that We on boss talk one-on-one one-on-one.   Uh-uh. Say what you said hard part about the entertainment industry How much I had to do It was this was like I started doing like when I'm in comedy in 2005 Scratch you That's the only thing that scared me with this little hand. Say what you say Okay, so this is right at the end of like the old school Go to the comedy club sign up for open mic type it this is before you could become an Internet personality like right before that. So how long did it take for you from the first moment? You started your comedy to really like get where everybody knew who you were from the first day to yesterday I ain't finished yet. I'm still Still know you right now.  You know I'm saying I'm gonna be honest It's hard for me to answer and the only reason I'm gonna tell you that is because they all meant so much for different reasons But then he's just kind of easy He floated out that's the craziest thing about because it was like like nothing happened Nobody says he just went to the bathroom like you say he was he got the check of his phone and hidden the blood And then it just kind of floated out to is I don't even know if it was just like I don't even know if he knew He was leaving cuz he's just like that man, you know Rick Ross a big dude Did he just tip-toed none of us see him or nothing Like we see y'all didn't say me and you talking like this some kind of way that just floated through the background just like He go how long did y'all wait before y'all knew like damn like he was gone gone before we knew He was like out of the complex. He was already in route Damn, hey y'all try to call him. No, we didn't try to call me. It's just once we figured out. He was gone With the interview though like man, it was about 3840 minutes Kicking he all kicking and we thought he was gonna because we like he said he wanted to come Maybe he just was like maybe in his mind. He was like That's my dog, though, we know it everybody that ran into him we didn't chop it up man Oh perfect how else could a Rick Ross interview in man, I don't know But I want him to come back and just wear the same I Then like come out the bathroom wife in his hands with a Smooth to when he be talking that is hilarious every time I hear that when he went off about the crypto currency Bro, that was good for me right there. He crypto crypto where it's at Well, I played that for all my money with the crypto Texting sin Rick Ross to everybody shout out to that boy watch man. My tea. Yeah Yeah, we on boss talk one on one. Yeah, we gonna talk


No, the Portland Ballet's next production is Gallery. Tell us about it. Gallery is a full evening of dance brought together by different choreographers. So Portland Ballet puts out a call for choreographers looking to present their work and we go through an audition process. Certain choreographers are chosen and then they come in from away and set on our dancers. And the culmination is an evening of different works from different voices. Do you give them any guidelines as to what they can do or do they come up with the ideas completely on their own? Right now, this is the second year of Gallery and there is talk about maybe kind of putting it under an umbrella or a theme. But it's really exciting in the beginning stages of Gallery to have the choreographers bring their own visions and their own work. The interesting thing is that when we do get the different submissions from people, sometimes unknowingly a theme develops on its own. Sometimes it can seem like we did put together a theme at the beginning but in actuality it's just these were the pieces that came through and they all fit together in a really interesting way. These are original works for the dancers. How is it different doing a brand new original work as opposed to doing a standard classic work? Well, the really great thing for the dancers is that in order to build your artistry I think it's really important to have different people seeing you and different people saying sometimes the same things to you but in a different way or sometimes saying something brand new to you. There's something out in you that maybe you didn't know was there before. That same thing can be discovered in classical work but I think there's just a different energy when it is contemporary or brand new coming from someone else's mind completely onto you. You don't have a reference point so you have to dig within yourself to find the whole picture of what it is that you're trying to say. Is it the same for a choreographer looking at something with a blank slate and just sort of saying okay where do I begin? Yeah, blank slates are pretty difficult but with these pieces these are works that have already been created either in entirety or in some pieces. So I don't know exactly the creation process for each choreographer at the inception of this piece but when they bring it here and they see it on these new bodies and these new perspectives and these new minds I think it begins to take on a new life. And for the parts of the show that are being created after or being added onto the existing pieces I think that feeling of kind of wiping things clean and having new bodies there in front of you gives it a really neat life and a really neat time in the studio together.  How did you come to Portland? It's a very fun situation. A friend of mine who's a dancer who was actually in the original version of From the Craigsth saw the post on Facebook for it because she is a friend of one of the dancers here and shared it with me and told me I think this would be great for you. It sounds like something you would love to do. So I emailed Nell Shipman, the artistic director, asking her if I could submit my work and she said yes please and then I heard back I think like a month later saying that they had accepted me and then after that it was just me sailing and now I'm here working with a dancer so it's really great. Tell me about the work. The work is settled from the Craigsth and it was created both with a personal perspective and a national perspective because there's a current debt going on in Puerto Rico that's very bad and in Spanish, Kievitas, which is in the title, it also can mean being in debt.  Because sometimes you have help from your family, your friends but sometimes you might find yourself in a situation where those people might not understand even if they wanted to help. So you have to restart yourself and push yourself to do more and at the time it also resonated with the dancers, it resonated with me a lot and when I got the opportunity to do this choreography originally I was in that moment personally and it was a good moment to explore that and then also explore the current crisis happening in Puerto Rico and how do you recreate and restart and renew yourself. And those are political themes, they're economic themes. What's your process in terms of translating that into movement on the dance floor? Well, I started with doing a lot of broken images with the body so there's a lot of bed legs, a lot of broken arms, not literally in the work and finding that with the dancers and how they would interpret it as well and then how you could come because I'm an optimist so how do you from the broken imagery find fullness in the collective because there's five dancers so how do they work together and how are they also individuals because we can be broken individually but be whole as a community or vice versa, we can be broken as a community and be whole individually so how do you find both and how do you deal with your struggles but also come in to find it personally and I try to do that through the bodies but I'm also very abstract in my work, I don't even if it has these political statement or this economic statement or inspiration I still try to leave room so people can take it, interpret it to what might be their crisis, their struggle so not like oh, this is about Puerto Rico or this is about the economic crisis but if someone sees that, great, if they don't, that's okay too. What do you hope the audiences in Portland will come away from your work when they leave the theater? I just hope that in some way they're a little bit on the edge of their seat it doesn't have to be excitement but I want them to just want to see it and want to be inside of the situation even if it seems negative I want it to be a breath of fresh air and I want them to just be able to see a different perspective and my perspective is not better or worse than someone else's but I think it's different enough, it's from a young Latino coming in and just sharing what he thinks so far in his life and other people can maybe be like oh, that's beautiful what he created or not so beautiful but what they may take, I hopefully just think that they are at least a little bit attracted to it and think wow, they can take something from it personally or just at least find beauty and be enlightened for a night What does a production like Gallery bring to the audiences in Portland? Well, I think the best part about Gallery is that Portland Ballet is bringing these choreographers here We have Fernando who's here right now in residence, he's coming to us from Puerto Rico I don't know how much other touring he does at the United States but the audiences of Portland don't have to go to Puerto Rico to see his work they can come to the studio theater and see this vision come to life and the same with our other choreographers, Savannah Lee and Annie Kloppenberg is here in Maine but I don't know how often her work has been seen with the audiences of Portland Ballet so I think it's great that our audiences can see voices that they haven't seen before but also that they can see if they are familiar with the work on different dancers and how that comes to life And when will the audiences be able to see that? Gallery opens March 3rd, it's March 3rd and March 4th and then the following weekend as well, March 10th and March 11th


So, if you've done a lot of escapism in your life, a lot of time-wasting, procrastination, avoiding facing the music, you've probably been told, don't do that. Stop escaping. Face reality, face your responsibilities, do what you have to do. Basically, good advice, but it's very easy to say, much easier said than done. Of course, you can look at anybody escaping, maybe using self-destructive behaviors, drugs, time-wasting, bad mental loops. We can easily just look at these things and say, well, that's a mistake. You really should be facing reality, making changes to your life to make a better life. And it's true, but I think one reason it's so difficult for it to really get through and really sink in is because it hurts. It hurts to stop escaping. Because the escaping, it's there to escape from pain, from feeling uncomfortable, anxious, from feeling that something's off, that something's wrong, that kind of uncomfortable feeling of just things feeling bad and wrong, things feeling difficult, no end in sight, all those kind of feelings that are relieved temporarily through escapist behaviors. So telling somebody to stop escaping is kind of like somebody who is running away from a bear and you say stop running away from the bear because that's not a good idea. But if you're actually being chased by a bear, then it's very difficult to not run away since you are concerned about being eaten by a bear. Now, maybe I need a better example because I have been told that you should never actually try to run away from a bear because they run faster than horses, so you have no chance of running away from a bear. But the idea is if someone says stop avoiding your problem. If the problem feels like let's say being chewed, having your arm chewed off by a bear, I don't know where this metaphor is going to go to exactly fit the metaphor of escapism. And if you have, please let me know if you have an idea for a metaphor that could work with this idea. But the idea is that it's easy to tell somebody to stop doing an unhealthy thing. But if they're doing that unhealthy thing in order to avoid what to them is very difficult pain, then it's also easy to understand why it would be so difficult to actually put that into practice. I think in any discussion about overcoming escapism, any discussion about self-improvement, changing ways of life, changing perspective, it has to be very clear, we have to be very open with the idea that this is painful and it's not something that anybody really wants to deal with. If it wasn't for the great rewards of going through the pain to improve our lives, there would be no reason to do it. And when you're in the middle of pain, it's not easy to be convinced that, oh it's for your own good, don't worry. When we look at why people are repeating their patterns of behavior and not changing, despite all the logical force pushing them to say, change, even if they can understand in their minds, I need to change.  It's still difficult to make yourself face that pain. So I think that this is something to always keep in mind and in order to get through this, in order to move through it, we have to go through a phase where we simply feel bad and I think we have to accept that it is okay. It's okay to feel bad, it's okay to feel pain, it's okay to not be okay. This can be a difficult thing because it seems like the standard way of interacting with people is, okay, how are you, great, how are you doing, okay, fine. When you say how are you, people are not ready for the response of I am in pain. If they do get a response, if you say how are you and somebody says I'm in pain, what would be the reaction? Immediately, reaction is this is an abnormal situation. Something is, something needs to be addressed right now. How can this be improved immediately? It's not just how are you, I'm in pain, oh, well, that's too bad, I'm doing okay. Anyway, carrying on, it's like if something is not okay, if something is bad, it's a natural reaction conversationally, at least to have to address this and fix it. So it can be difficult.  And you're like, I'm not okay, I'm in pain. People don't know how to react, they become uncomfortable. They maybe try to solve the situation immediately through some quick solution, whatever they can think of to then take you out of that abnormal state, return you to the normal state of cool, okay, fine, all good, so that the normal interaction can carry on. So people that are feeling pain, instead of going through that in every single conversation and making every single conversation difficult, the easy thing to do is to simply say, how are you? I'm fine, how are you? I'm okay, all right, no complaints. Maybe stay away from the great awesome levels, but just like, okay, fine, not bad, it's all right, and of course no complaints is one that I used to use when somehow I didn't want to complain about anything, even though I wasn't feeling good, but I didn't want to complain. So it becomes difficult to express this feeling and this feeling of pain and discomfort and unhappiness, and instead it becomes once again easier to simply cover it up, pretend that everything's okay, maybe carry on with escapist behaviors just to help things flow more smoothly and just not address the problem. But to address problems, I believe certainly we have to accept what they are. We have to be okay with not being okay. That's the beginning of change, the beginning of making change possible. Through accepting the situation that I'm in now is not okay. I don't have an immediate solution. I don't have an answer. There is nothing that anybody can say that will fix this situation immediately, but simply I am unhappy, I am in pain, and that is how I feel, and that is perfectly okay. Imagine being able to simply say that and for that to be totally okay, that we don't have to try to fix that abnormal situation immediately, we don't have to end it, we don't have to stop all activities in order to address this one particular person's problems, but simply we accept okay.  Now I can see why for normal conversation, for everyday interaction, that this may not work and it may not be something for everybody. But I think for people that are interested in self-development, in overcoming escapism, in improving their lives, that this can be a very powerful practice. If we simply let ourselves be okay with not being okay, and from that point, change is invited to begin.