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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Today's discussion is the bond market struggles. So here's the deal with the bond market. I find this fascinating and it takes an understanding of how bond prices work to understand this. So this past month or few months, there's been hope that interest rates would go down and thus the interest rates paid out to bondholders would also go down over time. What's happened instead is as follows. The total value of the government corporate securitized debt market fell by 2.6 trillion or so in February from 77 trillion to 74 trillion. That means the world has outstanding about 74 trillion plus in debt, at least based on the Bloomberg index and how they view it. And the headline for Bloomberg is that bonds was 2.5 trillion in Iwar Iran war wipeout. That mirrors 2022. So here's the deal with the bond market. People were hoping that interest rates would go down. Instead they've gone up or stabilized to up what that means if you hold an existing bond, let's say you hold an existing bond that yields 3.5% and now the bond market is paying 3.75% in interest rates versus 3.5%. They that means the value of the bond that you hold at 3.5%, the value of that bond goes down. It goes down because to get an equivalent yield of the 3.75%, someone has to buy it for a lower price so it still yields the higher price that bonds are yielding today. I hope that people follow that. But what basically happens is as interest rates go up, the value of existing bond holdings go down. And now we're at a spot where between inflation staying relatively strong and we'll have another podcast, we discuss debt and inflation. But you end up in a spot where, and we'll discuss this later, but it almost becomes impossible to really tame inflation if you keep on government spending in big deficits. But a different discussion for a different podcast that we'll have for you tomorrow. But the point being here, the total value of the bond market got crushed since the end of February, basically based on potentially higher interest rates and driving the current value of bonds down, the value lost 2.6 trillion in value 77 to 74.44 trillion. There's a whole set of discussions and strategies about holding bonds and owning bonds that we could have a further discussion on. But suffice to say, as interest rates go up, the value of existing bonds goes down. And that's what's happened since the start of February. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. Thank you very, very much.