The Dinosaur Edition

Summary

Slate Money: The Dinosaur Edition

Date: June 3, 2017
Host: Felix Salmon, with Anna Szymanski & Jordan Weissman

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Overview

This episode of Slate Money, dubbed "The Dinosaur Edition," dives into a turbulent week in business and finance news marked by the U.S. pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The hosts dissect both the immediate and longer-term implications for climate and international relations, discuss the rise in Americans’ credit scores and shifting debt trends, and unravel the controversial deal between Goldman Sachs and Venezuela's government involving distressed bonds. The tone is analytical, occasionally sardonic, and often irreverent, with the hosts challenging each other's takes and delving into the ethical, economic, and political nuances of the week's biggest stories.

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1. The U.S. Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement

Segment start: [00:33]

Key Discussion Points

• Announcement Context: The hosts express dismay at the Trump administration’s formal exit from the Paris deal, framing it as another pivotal, discouraging moment—akin to Brexit ([00:33]–[01:44]).
• Administration’s Justification: Felix cites an op-ed by H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, who described international affairs as a ruthless arena of competition, not global community:

  “The world is not a global community, but an arena where nations, NGOs, and businesses engage and compete for advantage... we embrace it.” ([02:20])

• Corporate Pushback: Anna highlights that most of corporate America, including surprising sectors like coal and Exxon, actually advocated for staying in Paris ([03:44]).
• Counterintuitive Take: Anna and Jordan discuss arguments embraced by some climate activists — that open withdrawal might do less harm than hollow participation ([03:49]):
  • If Trump had stayed in and brazenly ignored the targets or sought to weaken them, it would have eroded the agreement’s integrity globally, signaling to others that noncompliance was permissible.
  • Exiting, ironically, has perhaps galvanized other nations and actors to redouble their commitments ([11:00]).
• The Role of States and Cities:
  Felix:

  “...if California does things like have, you know, emission standards for automobiles, anyone who wants to sell their car in the US effectively needs to adopt those California standards.” ([08:07]) Anna, Jordan, and Felix reinforce the rising influence of subnational actors—mayors, governors, and CEOs—in maintaining climate action despite federal abdication.

• Impact on Clean Energy Investment:
  Felix:

  “The one piece of economic damage which is going to happen here is that...the investment in clean energy and renewable energy... has now basically been jettisoned.” ([11:56]) Although private sector and foreign investment might fill some gaps, federal withdrawal is a blow.

• China & Europe’s New Leadership:
  Anna:

  “...another silver lining here is that [China now] see[s] this as an opportunity to really assert themselves as global leaders.” ([12:49]) The hosts note President Xi’s speech at Davos as a symbolic rise of China’s international leadership.

• Reversibility:
  Felix:

  “...it was a weak withdrawal rather than a strong one... any future administration can very, very easily just snap back in again.” ([14:26])

• Corporate America’s Independence:
  Jordan:

  “...what we've seen is they're saying no, they're pushing back. And I think moving forward, that could potentially also be a good thing.” ([14:45])

Notable Quotes & Moments

• Felix, on Trump’s worldview:

  “There is no such thing as society as [Thatcher] would have, at least international society. It’s one country against the next...” ([02:54])

• Anna’s “silver lining” take:

  “By actually exiting, in a way, has galvanized a lot of other countries...he's made everyone else bind together a little bit stronger.” ([11:00])

• Jordan, reflecting on economics:

  “...it is no longer efficient to pump coal. And that's not going to change. If anything, that is just going to become more and more so.” ([11:31])

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2. Rising Credit Scores and Shifting U.S. Debt

Segment start: [15:04]

Key Discussion Points

• Improved Creditworthiness:
  Nationwide, credit scores have reached a new record high (average of 700) — a statistical rebound from the recession ([16:07]).
  • Anna points out the "mechanical" nature of this improvement, as bankruptcies and defaults from the crisis have rolled off credit reports ([16:39]).
• Auto Loans as an Exception:
  Defaults and delinquency rates remain stubbornly high in auto loans, correlating with faltering car sales ([17:26]).
• U.S. Household Debt Hits New High:
  The New York Fed reports nominal household debt has finally surpassed pre-crisis levels, driven less by housing and more by student loans (which now form 10% of household debt, up from 5%) ([18:21]).
• Socially Useful vs. Useless Debt:
  Felix discusses Adair Turner’s view that mortgage debt is “socially useless,” while student debt is more socially constructive ([19:15]).
• Concerns over Student Loans:
  Though a third of new student loans go to graduate education (often a good investment), stubbornly high delinquency rates (11%) point to deeper problems, especially among for-profit college enrollees ([20:40]).
• Impact on Homeownership:
  Anna and Felix debate whether student loan debt impedes homeownership—concluding that defaulted loans, rather than the debt itself, are the main barrier ([23:23]).
• Declining Homeownership as a Positive?
  Felix:

  “I'm not saying that [declining homeownership is] bad…you have a much more flexible labor force and...probably too high and should probably come down.” ([24:07])

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On recovering credit:
  Anna:

  “You have these wounds and then you convalesce and then you come out in some ways looking better than ever. You have this fresh, clean credit report.” ([17:04])

• Felix’s take on the evolution of U.S. growth models:

  “Maybe finally we're beginning to see what a world could look like where growth isn't driven by debt and by lending and by credit...” ([25:13])

• On socially useless student debt:
  Anna:

  “There is socially useless student debt. Yes. ...for-profit schools in the first place, especially if they never graduated with a degree...” ([20:55])

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3. Goldman Sachs, Venezuela, and the “Dinosaur” Brokerage

Segment start: [26:58]

Key Discussion Points

• The Scandal:
  Goldman Sachs purchased approximately $2.8 billion in face value Venezuelan bonds (for about $865m), indirectly infusing cash into the embattled Maduro regime and sparking uproar, especially since the transaction was mediated by an obscure broker, “Dinosaur” ([27:34]).
• Primary vs. Secondary Market Ethics:
  Felix draws the distinction between buying directly from a government (which receives the proceeds) and acquiring distressed bonds on the open market. Jordan and Anna debate whether there’s a significant moral difference, referencing Harvard’s Ricardo Hausman:

  “At the end of the day you're not engaging in good activity either way...it would be very hard to justify this.” ([29:28])

• Can Financial Markets “Boycott” Dictatorships?
  The hosts discuss the practicality of market-wide boycotts — noting that so long as high yields exist, some buyers will enter, and the bonds themselves don’t “disappear” ([31:39]).
• The Role of Dinosaur:
  The hosts find it odd that a tiny, obscure British brokerage acted as counterparty ('…a guy showed up in an alley with a trench coat, opened his jacket and there were some Venezuelan bonds in it.' — Anna, [34:05]).
• Risk & Recovery:
  On whether Goldman will be repaid, Jordan points out that buying at 31 cents on the dollar means the potential for profit even if only partial payments are made, given high coupon payments and possible future recovery ([37:49]).

Notable Quotes & Moments

• Anna:

  “Is it possible that [Dinosaur is] entirely set up solely for the purpose of laundering Venezuelan bonds?” ([34:05])

• Felix:

  “That alone makes the deal weird and unusual.” ([35:04])

• Felix on the special scrutiny Goldman receives:

  “There is this peculiar specialness to Goldman which works sometimes in its favor and sometimes against it.” ([36:12])

• Jordan on the trade’s viability:

  “This trade makes a lot of sense...you're paying 31 cents with the expectation that Venezuela is going to make it through 2017 and 2018...” ([37:49])

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4. Numbers Round

Segment start: [39:04]

Highlights

• Felix: 849,751% — The return on a satirical “cat factor” trading algorithm purely based on buying stocks containing the letters “C,” “A,” “T” ([39:04])
• Jordan: 1,000 — Amazon’s stock price breached $1,000, highlighting not only tech industry power but changes in stock-splitting and retail vs. institutional trading ([41:04])
• Anna: 8.7% — Germany’s current account surplus as % of GDP, far surpassing China’s, raising concerns about Germany’s role in global trade imbalances ([42:32])

Notable Exchange

• Anna:

  “Germany may be the most problematic actor [in] global trade...they may have done a better job gaming the global trade system than any other nation at this point.” ([43:22])

• Felix:

  “Maybe what they're doing is they're showing the way to prosperity without massive consumer spending...spending less on ourselves is a good thing.” ([45:00])

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Conclusion

This “Dinosaur Edition” presents a characteristically robust Slate Money exploration: from the global stage (Paris Agreement fallout, Chinese/European leadership), to American household finance, through the shadowy world of distressed emerging market debt. The show’s balance of skepticism, data, and sharp banter (with a few very memorable pull quotes) adds to the lively dissection of the week in economic news.

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Timestamps at a Glance

• Paris Agreement: [00:33]–[15:04]
• Credit Scores and Debt: [15:04]–[26:58]
• Goldman Sachs & Venezuela: [26:58]–[39:04]
• Numbers Round: [39:04]–[46:49]

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Notable Quotes

• “The world is not a global community, but an arena where nations, NGOs, and businesses engage and compete for advantage...” – Felix, quoting Cohn/McMaster ([02:20])
• “By actually exiting, in a way, [Trump] has galvanized a lot of other countries...” – Anna ([11:00])
• “You have this fresh clean credit report.” – Anna ([17:04])
• “Germany may be the most problematic actor [in] global trade.” – Anna ([43:22])
• “That alone makes the deal weird and unusual.” – Felix ([35:04])

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Skip ad sections, intro, outro as instructed—focus is all on content, arguments, and tone as delivered by the hosts.

Transcript

[Anna Szymanski]

The following podcast contains explicit language.

[Felix Salmon]

Hello, welcome to the Dinosaur edition of Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of a very depressing week. I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion. I. I'm joined by Anna Szymanski and Jordan Weissman. Hello, guys.

[Jordan Weissman]

Hello.

[Anna Szymanski]

Hello.

[Felix Salmon]

And this week was the week that the United States officially pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, which makes it one of those weeks a bit like the one after Brexit or the one after the election in the US Where I'm just feeling horribly depressed with. We are going to talk about that. Obviously. We are also going to talk about credit in America. Did you know that your credit score is going up? It is. Well, I mean, statistically speaking, it is maybe, possibly. It turns out that Americans have never been so credit worthy as they are now, or at least not in a very long time. And so we'll talk a little bit about that. And we are going to talk because Anna is here and also just because it's an amazing story about the tangled tale of Goldman Sachs bailing out the Venezuelan government by buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of distressed paper. This is an awesome story. You're going to want to hang around for that, but I think we can't but start with Paris.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yes.

[Felix Salmon]

Which is. Which is, you know, all right. Thinking. People know that this is a really dreadful thing that the President just did.

[Anna Szymanski]

I'm not so right thinking so.

[Felix Salmon]

Jordan isn't so right thinking so. The decision was made in the wake of President Trump's first trip abroad. He jets around the world. He comes back saying, I've jetted around the world and I'm going to make a decision on Paris. These things are somehow connected, I guess in his mind, overuse of carbon. And then once he comes back, before the official decision is made, there's a Wall Street Journal op ed by the national security advisor, H.R. mcMaster and by Gary Cohn, who used to be the COO of Goldman Sachs and is now the, you know, chief economic adviser to the President. And they write this thing where they say, quote, the world is not a global community, but an arena where nations, NGOs and businesses engage and compete for advantage. Rather than deny the elemental nature, this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it. And this is more or less the most sort of red blooded explication of Trumpism that I've certainly ever seen from the likes of Gary Cohn, where they're like, this is what America first is. There is no such thing as society as the stature would have, at least international society. It's one country against the next. And so we've decided that the Paris agreement is bad for America. And even if it's good for everyone else, if it's bad for America, we're going to pull out.

[Anna Szymanski]

Well, what's kind of funny about that is I'm pretty sure. I don't know where McMaster stood, but I'm pretty sure Gary Cohn was actually arguing to stay in Paris, and as was lots of corporate America, almost all.

[Felix Salmon]

Of corporate America, including coal companies, I mean, almost including Exxon, which is actually.

[Anna Szymanski]

And that's why I'm sort of. And this is not. This is not my original point, I should say, but there's this. I'm sort of glad this has happened. And in a weird way, the counterintuitive take has almost become the conventional wisdom among a lot of climate activists here, which is that Trump had two choices, right? He was either going to stay in this climate agreement and basically flout all of its rules, because no matter what, he was going to do with Obama's green power plan, and he was going to try to unleash the fossil fuels industries in any way he could in the United States. So he was going to flout the rules and try to negotiate sort of a less stringent commitment, you know, make the agreement less powerful, less effective, or he could just leave entirely and allow the rest of the countries that signed on to this thing to kind of continue along as they were.

[Felix Salmon]

And so wait, wait, I'm not quite following you here. If you're saying that if he had missed the US Targets or if he altered the US Targets, how would that prevent the rest of the countries from continuing on, continuing on as they were?

[Anna Szymanski]

So basically, there were two. Well, he could have done two things. One is he could have just. Just stayed in the agreement and then just completely flouted the U.S. yes, that was an option. And that just says, okay, we're in this and we're not taking it seriously. And that sends this signal to other countries that you can kind of behave the same way. The other possibility is that he could actually try to renegotiate it. And he sort of signaled maybe they will. But that was another. That was something that was on the table. People were discussing that idea that he would stay in, but say, hey, we want this to be changed. We want to weaken it. And that was actually pretty much what the fossil fuel industry seemed to want. That's why Exxon and all the coal companies, there were two.

[Jordan Weissman]

The reason they want is because at the end of the day if you're an executive and you're considering what you're going to be doing for the next 10 years in terms of multibillion dollar capex programs, you have to have a predictable framework of where regulations are going to be. And this creates tremendous uncertainty.

[Anna Szymanski]

Well, I don't think. No, I think they know what Trump's doing on regulations. I mean, as far as the US Goes, I mean, he is going to undo the green power plant. That was the biggest thing, that was the biggest climate initiative that the Obama administration has. And Trump is going to try to reverse that.

[Jordan Weissman]

So to work from that for right now. But I think the idea that I would imagine most people in corporate America have is at a certain point when he gets out and a reasonable person comes in, then things are going to change again. And there's just tremendous uncertainty about where America is going to be in terms of regulations moving forward.

[Felix Salmon]

And also, like, I want to push back a little bit on this idea of renegotiating because there are two different things going on here. One is the framework, which is basically every country in the world has agreed that it will set its own targets and then every five years it will report on whether it met those targets.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah.

[Felix Salmon]

Then there is the targets themselves, which are entirely set by the individual countries. So if you want to change that target, there's no negotiation involved. There's just changing the target. So when you're talking about renegotiation, who are you negotiating with and what are you trying to negotiate? What are you trying to change?

[Anna Szymanski]

I am not saying that the Trump administration. I mean this. I'm saying this is what was reported as an idea that was on the table. Okay, but so like this clear about.

[Felix Salmon]

What was being reported, what was the idea?

[Anna Szymanski]

The idea was that Trump was going to go in and say, we need to change these targets. Possibly he may have said we should. You know, if we're going to change ours down, other, other countries can also.

[Jordan Weissman]

And I guess there is an argument that if he had stayed in the agreement, but he had completely degraded what it meant for America to be in the agreement.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah.

[Jordan Weissman]

That potentially kind of worldwide, that could have had a more negative impact about what people thought about Paris. Whereas I guess the argument would be if we're entirely out and the rest of the world can actually meet their targets, then maybe overall the agreement will appear to have more legitimacy.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah.

[Jordan Weissman]

So that's.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah, I like 10% by that. It's this weird idea that if Donald Trump violates a voluntary target which was set by his predecessor, and which he has denounced, then that's like a very bad thing. And so he needs to leave the entire framework just to avoid that. I mean, okay, fine. I do think that civic society generally in the U.S. if you look at the mayors and the governors and the CEOs, have stepped up quite impressively to say, look, the President does what the President does, but we are sticking to as close as we can to this framework. And I think that California in particular is incredibly important here, because if California does things like have, you know, emission standards for automobiles, anyone who wants to sell their car in the US Effectively needs to adopt those California standards.

[Jordan Weissman]

And also, if the rest of the world starts to adopt these standards, then US Products that are going to be sold in those other markets are going to have to meet certain standards. So it's not as though the US Actually can completely divorce itself.

[Anna Szymanski]

Trump's climate policies are still a blow, and they would be a blow to our future, regardless of whether or not he left Paris. That's the thing to remember here in the end, like, this is sort of the last symbolic capstone to his overall policy of pumping as much carbon in the air as possible in order to bring back four or five coal jobs in West Virginia. But, you know, yes, there is a. To some extent, it will be slightly be mitigated, at least by what California will do. It's. I don't think we should overemphasize that. I mean, if you look at the projections like California is a sliver, is still only a sliver of what the overall decline in carbon use that was supposed to.

[Felix Salmon]

No, no, no one is saying that California is most carbon emissions. What we're saying is that California's regulations affect more than just California. And in general, the engine of the global economy is cities. That more than half of the world is urban now, and most of the economic activity in the world is in cities. Most of the carbon emissions in the world basically are generated in one way or another by or four cities. And one of the things that has gone along with that is that global mayors have done a much better job of getting together and becoming a global force over the past, I would say, 10 years or so than they ever were. And they can act collectively in a way that actually has as much impact as any individual country has, certainly also.

[Jordan Weissman]

Because a lot of the emissions are concentrated in cities. So if cities can work to reduce that, that has a larger amount.

[Felix Salmon]

And the global mayors are in favor of Paris, including the American. Yes, but the, but the big picture of this decision is a bad decision, and it's going to be harmful, I think is still true. And it's true. Not because necessarily it means that US Emissions are going to be higher because, as you said, like, the federal regulations were going to be lifted anyway, but it's true because the whole concept of a global community has basically been thrown out The Window by H.R. mcMaster, Gary Cohn, Donald Trump, and the rest of the administration.

[Anna Szymanski]

I think. I think that's true. I think that staying in the agreement and flouting it would have had a similar effect and in a way may have been more subtly corrosive. Whereas, like this, by actually exiting in a way, has galvanized a lot of other countries. You're now seeing, like you said, global mayors, you're seeing China, you're seeing Europe all come together and say, no, we are going to support this. So, in a way, I think by pulling out Trump, I mean, there might be a silver lining here. I'm saying instead of just kind of degrading it from within, he's made everyone else bind together a little bit stronger.

[Jordan Weissman]

If you embolden the EU and China and the rest of the global world to essentially push back on everything Trump's doing, you know, maybe that could. And I also think it's important to remember that part of the reason that US Emissions have come down is simply because of math, is simply because it is no longer efficient to pump coal. And that's not going to change. If anything, that is just going to become more and more so. I think it's important to remember that corporate America is going to stay in, even if the US Is.

[Felix Salmon]

Although. Although. The one thing which, you know, the one piece of economic damage which is going to happen here is that the investment in clean energy and renewable energy, which was a large part of the Obama plan to reduce emissions, has now basically been jettisoned. The United. The United States government is not going to put that much money and effort into those technologies anymore. And that's going to be bad for a huge swathe of industry.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yes. But I think that because these technologies are increasingly becoming more cost efficient, I think investment dollars are still going to go there. Because if investors are. I mean, yes, I do agree with you that I think this is going to be a blow in terms of federal dollars, but I think in terms of private money, if people see that this is where the future is and this is more efficient money still going to go there.

[Anna Szymanski]

And I can't believe I'm taking this role because usually I'm the one saying the US Is the whole world, and you guys are telling me to be less provincial. But again, when you have China and Europe trying to move in this direction, there are going to be very large markets for these technologies. And going, again, to the idea that China now has stepped up and said, no, we still support Paris in a way this may. I mean, you know, another silver lining here is that they now see this as an opportunity to really assert themselves as global leaders. And so they may take it even more seriously than they did before. Just to show up the US Just to say, hey, we're. We are at the front of the pack. We are, you know, we're going to lead this charge.

[Felix Salmon]

And this reminds me of President Xi's speech in Davos in January.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah.

[Felix Salmon]

Where he came out, you know, in, like, Chinese presidents rarely, you know, make those kind of international appearances. And he was basically going up to the international community and saying, I'm willing to take on a certain amount of this world leadership mantle along with, like, Angela Merkel. And in so far as the United States is very explicitly saying they have no interest in it.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah. So, I mean, again, silver linings just outline, again, instead of sticking around and undermining this agreement from within, Trump has pulled out. And as a reaction to that, you now have Europe and China and global mayors clinging to this agreement even more strongly than they would before. And maybe this will encourage them to be more aggressive in going after their targets to some degree. And, yeah, I mean, this is. I think that's the summary why.

[Felix Salmon]

And the other. And the other silver lining is that it was a weak withdrawal rather than a strong one, in that he's withdrawing only from the Paris agreement and not from the underlying UN Treaty. So the treaty remains, and any future administration can very, very easily just snap back in again.

[Jordan Weissman]

And the last silver lining, I will say, is that, you know, when Trump was first coming into office, it seems as though he could send a tweet, and then corporate America would really act and get very frightened. Whereas now, I think what we've seen is they're saying no, they're pushing back. And I think moving forward, that could potentially also be a good thing.

[Felix Salmon]

Jordan.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah.

[Felix Salmon]

Have you checked your credit score recently?

[Anna Szymanski]

Uh, not since I made the potentially disastrous decision of buying a home, but, no, I haven't, but I assume it's fine. And on average, if I am the average American, my credit score is certainly getting better.

[Felix Salmon]

You are not the average American.

[Anna Szymanski]

That's true. I'm not, but.

[Felix Salmon]

But, yeah, you managed to buy A home with a good interest rate because your credit score was perfectly fine when you bought the home.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah, it was.

[Felix Salmon]

And, and this is not uncommon. And this is despite the fact that you're burdened with student loans.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yes, despite the fact. Well, student loans. The interaction of student loans and credit scores is a complicated subject we could spend many an hour on. However, there's some good news for just about America's credit worthiness. Our credit scores have reached a record high. So we've fully recovered from the crisis and now they're better than ever. We are more credit worthy than ever, apparently.

[Jordan Weissman]

Those of us who have credit scores.

[Anna Szymanski]

Those of us who have credit scores. Exactly.

[Felix Salmon]

Which is also more people than ever, right?

[Jordan Weissman]

Probably, yes.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yes. And so a few. The Wall Street Journal had article about this. The share of consumers deemed to be the riskiest with a score below 600 hit a new low of roughly 40 million people or 20% of adults. Meanwhile, the average credit score nationwide hit 700 and 700 in April.

[Felix Salmon]

This is a nice round number.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yes, a very, very easy, nice round number. And so I'm going to go out.

[Felix Salmon]

On a limb here and say that your average Slate Money listener has a credit score even above 700.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yes, likely. We are all Lake Wobegon. We're all above average. But yeah. So you know, this is in a way, this is almost like a mechanical thing, right? You would expect credit scores to have healed a bunch since the recession because it takes seven years for bankruptcies and for mortgage defaults and such to clear off credit scores. And in that time while you have that on your, you're probably not taking out a lot of debt.

[Jordan Weissman]

Right? This is what happens in credit cycles.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yes. And so eventually you have these wounds and then you're you, you convalesce and then you come out in some ways looking better than ever. You have this fresh clean credit report.

[Felix Salmon]

So a week or two ago you were talking about cars and the problem with the auto industry and you were saying something about subprime loans and yes.

[Anna Szymanski]

Non default, that is an exception here. So actually, and now if you look at what's happening with car, a car loan originations are decreasing and they are the default rates or delinquency rates are kind of staying stubbornly high, rising. So that is consistent with the idea that car sales may be falling apart because of credit issues. And again, we do have that 20% of adults with low credit scores who are in that subprime category. So it's not as if all is well. But at least for people who are in the sort of overall, America is looking healthier, even if there are kind of warts in there.

[Felix Salmon]

So I guess the implication is that we are becoming a country where only poor people buy cars.

[Anna Szymanski]

Well, poor people do need to have.

[Felix Salmon]

Cars and rich people don't need to have cars. And I think that's an interesting grand macro thing. But again, let's try and keep our eyes on the Brazil.

[Anna Szymanski]

So there's a second story also that's happening, though, and this is the one I know that interests Santa. So, on one hand, our credit score scores are better than ever, which is really good for us macroeconomically, theoretically, because more people can get credit, they can buy things. Also this week, the New York Fed reported that total household debt hit a new high. It finally passed the level it was in 2008. So in nominal terms, not in real terms. So if you don't adjust for inflation, just the total amount of debt. But something kind of intriguing has happened there where before, you know, that was, you know, well, it still is mostly housing debt, right? But a higher percentage. It's less housing debt now and more student debt. There's been sort of a switch where before student debt made up about 5% of the total amount of, I guess, household debt out there. Now it's up to 10%. And so you're starting to see this swap of the kinds of debt that Americans are carrying.

[Felix Salmon]

And if you listen to people like Adair Turner talking about the difference between, like, socially useful and socially useless debt, he will say, you know, that mortgages are the classic socially useless debt. Like borrowing money to buy a house is. It does nothing for society, whereas borrowing money to get an education is much more socially useful. And so this is a objectively better mix.

[Anna Szymanski]

Right?

[Felix Salmon]

Because I was before.

[Jordan Weissman]

Some people will look at this number and they'll go, oh, is this concerning that we're seeing debt at these high levels? And I would argue, I don't really think it is, because taking on more debt to educate yourself is going to have, we think, longer positive dividends than taking out lots of money for housing loans. And also on top of that, because ultimately the mortgage market is still so much larger and so much more integrated into the global financial market. Problems in the mortgage market are going to have many more ramifications than problems in the student loan market.

[Felix Salmon]

Also, student loans have gone for decades with incredibly high delinquency rates. If you have a car loan and a mortgage and a credit card and a student loan and you can't repay all of them, most of the time the first one you default on is the student loan because there's really the lowest negative ramifications.

[Anna Szymanski]

You can't take your degree away. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I'd say that. So I buy the theory somewhat that student loan debt is socially useful debt, especially. One thing to keep in mind is about a third of all new student loans are actually graduate degrees. You can argue how useful graduate degrees.

[Jordan Weissman]

Depending on what it's.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah, yeah, you can argue. But I mean, like some, you know, these are people who are, people who are borrowing graduate degrees tend, for graduate education tend to be in a better position and they really are investing that. It is a, is a investment with a good return. However, there's also obviously problematic student debt. There is socially useless student debt. Yes. And that does make up, you know, you have to remember again that we have these stubborn 11% delinquency rates right now for student loans which are kind of a symbol of the fact that you have a lot of kind of low level borrowers who probably shouldn't have, you know, taken out that loan to go to a for profit school in.

[Felix Salmon]

The first place, especially if they never graduated with a degree. And, and I feel there that the problem is not really the debt. You know, if you wind up going to college and then leaving with no degree, that's bad on a number of different levels. The fact that you've wound up with debt which you're going to wind up defaulting on is certainly bad. But the real cost to you is the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost in terms of the foregone income and career development you could have had absent going to college is significantly larger than the amount of your student loan.

[Jordan Weissman]

Also, if you're going to a for profit college as opposed to a community college or a city or state university, because again, a lot of this debt is in for profit colleges where even if you get the degree, many of them are essentially useless.

[Anna Szymanski]

So I mean, I guess so, I guess there, there are two, two ways of looking at this because I want to kind of tie together these two stories about credit scores and overall household debt. One one is a really happy story here, right? Credit scores are better than ever. Americans are overall in a pretty good place in terms of, I guess their, you know, their FICO scores, whatever. And then at the same time, we're moving from socially useless debt, quote unquote, with mortgage debt, especially subprime mortgage debt, to socially useful debt, student loans. So like, yay, hurrah. The not so great story, I guess you could tell here is that Americans are having a harder time. There are a lot of Americans who are still borrowing for degrees that are not really worth anything or kind of bad investments and are also having a harder time, you know, putting down money for the traditional savings vehicle that was a home, that was a taking out a mortgage and investing in real estate, which was essentially their big savings account. And so I guess, you know, is. Do you think that I kind of worry about that second story here is that. Do either of you feel like that's.

[Jordan Weissman]

A. I'm still curious. I know there is often these claims, and I haven't honestly looked at it closely enough to. But whether the higher student loan debts that people are holding are actually holding people back from buying homes.

[Anna Szymanski]

I think I spent a lot of time looking at that a few years ago, and the conclusion I came to is it's not the amount of student debt that really stops people. It's the defaults again, it's people who have defaulted on their debt. And then there's the larger question of are those people just in a financially terrible place anyway and the default on that is sort of symptomatic of a bigger problem, or is it actually having a student loan debt that went bad that's keeping them from applying and getting a mortgage? I think it's probably a little bit of both.

[Felix Salmon]

I need to jump in here and do my, you know, obligatory. It's not bad if you don't buy a home thing.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah, right.

[Felix Salmon]

And if we're moving from a world where, like home. If we're moving into a world of declining homeownership, which we are. And part of the decline in mortgages is not. Is. Is simply a function of the fact that fewer people own homes now. And that's good. It means you have a much more flexible labor force and you have much, you know, I mean, yes, you lose that enforced savings vehicle. But I'm a bit. I do believe that homeownership in the US Is probably too high and should.

[Anna Szymanski]

Probably come down, and that money could.

[Jordan Weissman]

Probably be invested more efficiently.

[Anna Szymanski]

I guess what I'm saying here is I'm wondering if the rise of, you know, the rise of bad student loan debt, because that is part of the story and the fall of. Of homeownership mortgages. I mean, they're related to some extent. People are. Both of them are a sign of people having a harder time, you know, getting by or getting ahead in life without a great deal of education. And some of those people just aren't, you know, a position really to get A higher degree. And so it kind of all goes as they try to strive for the American dream or whatever you want to call for it, it all goes wrong for them. And I guess that's, that's the dark side of this story.

[Felix Salmon]

And the other side is that maybe finally, I don't know, what are we sort of 10 years after the crisis now? Maybe finally we're beginning to see what a world could look like where growth isn't driven by debt and by lending and by credit. In the run up to the crisis, I remember this vividly in sort of 2005, 2006, there was this feeling that the world was running to standstill and it needed to borrow more and more money every year just to get the same increment of growth. And maybe now we can get, you know, we're finding some kind of a growth model and it might not be as high growth as we would want, but which doesn't involve just borrowing enormous amounts of money and you know, lending enormous amounts of money to people who can't afford to pay it back.

[Jordan Weissman]

I mean, I would say that it's still a lot of consumer spending is fueled by debt and that essentially is still fueling the credit cards.

[Felix Salmon]

And credit card debt is, you know, is going up. But it's, I believe, Jordan, it's not reached its pre crisis levels.

[Anna Szymanski]

You're right. No, it has not reached its pre crisis levels. It's still a little bit below. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right to some extent, Felix. You know, we are, yeah, I hate to use this right. But we are sort of moving a little bit more to a human capital model and we're start. And we're at least getting, you know, where instead of residential fixed investment driving the US Economy completely, we've inched ever so ever a tiny bit away from that. And maybe that's, that's good having less of it. Less of our future prospects hinged to the housing market.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah, I would agree with that.

[Felix Salmon]

All right, Anna Shymansky. Every week the Slate Money team has this email which goes around saying, what are we going to talk about this week? And every week we're like, let's talk about Venezuela. And every week Felix is the killjoy saying, what's the news hook? And now we have just the juiciest news story of all time. Where the great global vampire squid, Goldman Sachs somehow managed to inject what, $800 million into the Venezuelan central bank.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah, I mean the face value of the bonds was like 2.8 billion and they bought them for about 31 cents.

[Felix Salmon]

And so. Okay, so let's rewind here. This comes out, it's a big scandal, but the headline is that Goldman Sachs bought a bunch of bonds.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah. The reason that this I think has gotten a lot more coverage, these bonds are, I mean not these specific bonds, but Venezuela and Perevesa bonds, Pervesa is the state owned oil company of Venezuela, are regularly traded. The reason that this particular purchase created a lot of controversy was because it appears that these bonds, bonds were held by the central bank.

[Anna Szymanski]

So as a result that was just an infusion of money straight to a dictatorship.

[Jordan Weissman]

Exactly.

[Felix Salmon]

So this is the huge difference between like primary markets and secondary markets. If I buy a painting from an artist, the money goes to the artist. If I buy a painting, you know, at auction, it goes to the person who owned the painting. And if you, if in this case, if I buy a $2.8 billion bond deal from Venezuela directly, that money, however much money I'm paying for it goes to Venezuela directly and goes to prop up this loathed Maduro regime.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah. And essentially to pay their near term bond maturities because what they're essentially, they do not have enough hard currency to both pay their importers and pay their debt or their debt interest payments.

[Felix Salmon]

So the question, the first question I have for you is like, are bonds fungible? Is there actually a sort of moral distinction between buying a bond on the open market from someone who owns it versus buying a bond whether it's brokered or not from the Venezuelan central bank?

[Jordan Weissman]

And I mean, I think I should probably say here that again, I used to work in em distressed debt. I have many friends who work in em distressed debt.

[Anna Szymanski]

There are good people there.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yes, I just want that to be very clear. But I do think you get into a lot of these ethical issues in the EM market and this, these particular bonds. This is a very, this is a very tough issue because I mean, I know the Ricardo Hausman argument, he is a professor at Harvard, has basically said that both are bad. That whether you're trading on the secondary market and essentially benefiting off of this situation, or whether you're essentially buying the bonds almost directly from the government and funding them, at the end of the day you're not engaging in good activity either way. And I don't think there's really any way to, I don't think there's really any argument against that. I think it would be very hard. I think unfortunately in this community it is very hard to justify this.

[Felix Salmon]

So just to stick to the Question. Goldman Sachs and many other asset managers own a lot of Venezuelan debt. And in large part they have to because Venezuela is part of the bond indexes. And if you don't own any Venezuelan debt, then you really risk underperforming. So given that if we accept that this Venezuelan debt is out there and just by law of conservation of mass, it has to be owned by someone. If I am a bond investor and I have some morals, is it worse for me to buy bonds from the Venezuelan central bank, thereby propping up the regime for however long they can use that money for, than it is for me to buy bonds from some relatively innocent bond investor?

[Jordan Weissman]

Honestly, I don't think there's a huge difference either way. And I think the other argument that while we should drop the bond, we should drop the bonds from the index so then people essentially don't have to hold them or people don't have to benchmark against that then also raises the question like, well, okay, but then you'd just be selling those bonds to other people.

[Felix Salmon]

So is that ultimately because they don't go away?

[Jordan Weissman]

Right.

[Anna Szymanski]

Well, so I guess my question is, is it feasible to have a market wide boycott of these kinds of bonds?

[Jordan Weissman]

What would that mean?

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah, I mean, well, so Felix says these have to be owned by someone. And it's true, like you're not going to make the bonds disappear at least until they'll hit mat. But theoretically every, a lot of people could just say I'm not going to buy these bonds. And so there's just no market for them. Their value drops. You know, there's no point in issuing new ones because no one's going to buy them. I'm not, I don't. Is that even remotely realistic is my question.

[Felix Salmon]

There have been many, many periods where many countries have had bonds outstanding but have had no access to the market. The window is closed.

[Anna Szymanski]

So that usually is because it's become a basket case. I'm like a moral boycott situation. You can imagine that unfolding in.

[Jordan Weissman]

And essentially the, you know, this is an issue where part of the reason that right now these bonds are yielding so much that someone's going to buy them. Yes.

[Anna Szymanski]

That in the end there'll be someone to break the boycott.

[Felix Salmon]

Well, I mean that's just a different way of saying the same thing that like whatever the price is, is the price that someone is willing to pay and then you can work out the yield from the price. The more interesting question I have here though, because we need to talk about this is dinosaur.

[Jordan Weissman]

So yeah, it's this, This. I mean, it's this tiny British brokerage that. Where they bought the bonds through, which is part of the reason everybody says, like, even though Goldman says we didn't buy them directly from the government.

[Felix Salmon]

So is that Goldman's argument? They're like, it's okay, we didn't buy the bonds directly from the government, we bought them from Dinosaur.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah, and it does. I mean, I think nobody takes that seriously.

[Felix Salmon]

So Goldman did know that it was being sold by the government, I would imagine, because this is, by the way, $2.8 billion of $1 billion bond deal. Like they bought the overwhelming majority of one deal. And you can't do that just by some secondary market deal. But like, tell me, because this is a company I've never heard of before. Presumably you have heard of before. Dinosaur.

[Jordan Weissman]

Oh, dinosaur.

[Felix Salmon]

So wait, so a question. Have you ever heard of these people?

[Jordan Weissman]

No, I'd actually not.

[Felix Salmon]

And you have been intimately involved in this world for many years and you have never heard of dinosaurs? So they really are tiny.

[Jordan Weissman]

They're tiny, yeah.

[Anna Szymanski]

Is it possible that they are entirely set up solely for the person purpose of laundering Venezuelan bons?

[Jordan Weissman]

No.

[Anna Szymanski]

Okay. That they something.

[Felix Salmon]

But when you were working on this desk, would you get calls from like random brokerages in places like London saying, you know, want to buy a big bond deal? Or like.

[Jordan Weissman]

No, that is not how it works.

[Felix Salmon]

I mean, but that's clearly how it works in this case, right?

[Jordan Weissman]

In this case, again, I. Not a Goldman. I don't know specifically how they functioned, but in most firms, you know, you have certain brokers that you work with and when you're talking about distressed EM Paper, there aren't that many brokers who are trading in it.

[Felix Salmon]

So this is a really weird deal just on the basis that Goldman bought a $2.8 billion deal from a brokerage that no one's ever heard of.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah, it's like a guy showed up in an alley with a trench coat, opened his jacket and there were some Venezuelan bonds in it.

[Felix Salmon]

That alone makes. Makes the deal weird and unusual.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah, it is. There are many things about this that are just questionable and just raise the. The decision to do this now I think is just raising a lot of questions because again there, I do still think there is ultimately a difference between buying on the secondary, actually buying on the secondary market, and directly funding.

[Anna Szymanski]

Okay, well, you do think there's a difference?

[Jordan Weissman]

I guess, yeah. I'm going back and forth because I.

[Anna Szymanski]

You're vacillating.

[Jordan Weissman]

I am vacillating, granted. My point is like, look, I'm not going to try to justify either one.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah.

[Jordan Weissman]

Because I think you can, you can bring up moral issues either way. But, but I do still think that part of the, I think that if Goldman had simply bought these bonds or if this had been some type of other different issuance and they just bought it from some other well known firm, I don't think it would be getting the same press that it's getting now. I think it's getting this press because it is specifically seen as Goldman funding the Venezuelan government.

[Felix Salmon]

And also it's getting the press because Goldman is Goldman.

[Jordan Weissman]

I mean that's.

[Felix Salmon]

If it was blackrock, I don't think people would have blinked so much.

[Jordan Weissman]

No, I mean, and if you actually look at the, you know, in terms of Petavisa holdings, you're looking at like Fidelity and Pimco who have some of the kind of highest holdings of these bonds.

[Felix Salmon]

Right. And I can easily imagine that Pimco could have done this deal quite quietly and no one would have noticed and no one would have said anything. But there is this peculiar specialness to Goldman which works sometimes in its favor and sometimes against it.

[Jordan Weissman]

People love to hate Goldman's acts. And, and Goldman isn't wrong when they say that again, it's not like they're the only people who are involved in these, these bonds. It's not as though that, you know, again, it is true that if you hold a number of ETF, EM ETFs or index funds, you likely have exposure. Yeah, they're not wrong about that. But that's not really a justification. I mean, I think this is the problem is that when you, when you try to justify this, you essentially just dig your hole deeper. Because if you're trying to say like, well, we're giving them, you know, yes, we are paying, but then maybe they'll use that money to actually pay their import. Know that that's not the case.

[Felix Salmon]

So final question on this one. Goldman ended up paying 31 cents on the dollar for these bonds which mature in what, five years? Yeah, 2022s and in five years, according to the bond contract, they have to get paid, Goldman has to get paid 100 cents on the dollar and in the meantime they're getting a bunch of coupon payments assuming there's no default.

[Jordan Weissman]

Right.

[Felix Salmon]

So, so the question I have for you is what is the chance that Goldman is going to get repaid in full on.

[Jordan Weissman]

Oh, well, I can tell though. So this, I can very much tell you that. So there is a strong, again, this is Going to sound very crass in light of what's actually happening in Venezuela. So very fair. But this is actually a, you know, this trade makes a lot of sense. I think it's not as risky as I think when people look at it, because the reality is you're paying 31 cents, so I don't think you're paying 31 cents with the expectation you're getting paid out at par. You're paying. You're paying 31 cents with the expectation that Venezuela is going to make it through 2017 and 2018 because they have a $8 billion hole to fill this year, $7 billion next year, and people think they can fill that.

[Anna Szymanski]

So Basically, you're paying 31 cents, hoping you get 50 cents back.

[Jordan Weissman]

Because this is the thing, if you look at recovery, what we expect recovery value to be in the event of a default, you're almost certainly going to be right now getting essentially more than that. And then on top of that, when you. If you factor in coupon payments, so you have tremendous downside protection. And then on the off chance that, you know, a new government gets in, they're able to actually start ramping up production at pd and then you actually do get paid out closer to par, then it's a tremendous return on the bonds. So that is why they're going to do the trade. I'm not saying that makes it good. I'm just saying that is why you would do that trade.

[Felix Salmon]

Let's have some numbers. I am going to start with a fun number, which is 849,751%, and that is the return on a hypothetical trading algorithm that a Bloomberg reporter called Danny Berger managed to come up with where she bought. She went back for five or six years and bought any stock with the letter C, a T in the. In the stock price.

[Anna Szymanski]

Any.

[Felix Salmon]

This is. This is the. The cat trade.

[Jordan Weissman]

It's a very specific factor model.

[Felix Salmon]

She's like, I like cats, so I'm going to buy stocks with the letters CAT in them. And she managed to fiddle around with Bloomberg and built this factor model, which returned 849,751% over six years. Now, this was in large part due to the, quote, basically, untradeable Catskill Litigation Trust, which gained 79,000% this year. And they're still trading at, like, one penny. So it's not obvious that this would work, but she did phone up Cliff Asness, who's the, you know, emperor of factor model trading, who's like, that's completely ridiculous. No, One should use cats as a factor. They have no basis. I only use parakeets.

[Anna Szymanski]

Good line.

[Felix Salmon]

So. Yeah. So if you want to go and make money in the future, like cats works in the future.

[Anna Szymanski]

But are you sure that's gonna be arbitrated away?

[Felix Salmon]

I would, I would highly recommend arbitrage. Sorry, I would. I would high. I would highly recommend going like pivoting to the parakeet model going forward.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yes.

[Felix Salmon]

Cliff, has this. Has your back.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yeah. This has been published.

[Jordan Weissman]

Screw momentum.

[Anna Szymanski]

The information is totally useless. It's now public anyway. The markets.

[Jordan Weissman]

Efficient market. It's already been priced in.

[Anna Szymanski]

Priced in. Cats are priced and done.

[Felix Salmon]

Okay, Anna, what's your number?

[Jordan Weissman]

So my number is a thousand. So Amazon's stock price breached a thousand this week.

[Felix Salmon]

That's dollars. Yes. $1,000 for one share of stock.

[Jordan Weissman]

And the reason I think this is interesting is that I think it represents a lot of what's actually happening in the market right now. Because it's not just that it shows that, you know, the power of the tech industry and Amazon, but normally it used to be that when stocks became very expensive, you do a stock split because you wanted to.

[Felix Salmon]

Oh, is this about average stock price?

[Jordan Weissman]

Well, yes, the average stock price has.

[Felix Salmon]

It's almost $100 now.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yes. And it's because, again, it used to be that you want. You didn't want your stock to appear expensive and you wanted to appeal to mom and pop investors and people picking individual stocks.

[Anna Szymanski]

Now no one gives a shit.

[Jordan Weissman]

Exactly. Because on the individual retail side, people are more indexing, and then on the institutional side, people are really concerned about fees. And when you have additional shares, you have to pay more fees. So I think this, this price kind of represents all of these changes that are happening right now in the market.

[Felix Salmon]

And I will also add, just as a PS here, we've always grown up with ExxonMobil being the most valuable company by market cap in America. Right now, the top five most valuable companies by market cap in America are Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft. Like five big tech companies are all worth more than ExxonMobil.

[Anna Szymanski]

My turn?

[Felix Salmon]

Your turn.

[Anna Szymanski]

Yep. Okay. My number is 8.7 or 8.7%, which is Germany's current account surplus as a percentage of its gdp. We're going to get into that. This past week, you may have seen that Donald Trump is having some tensions with Germany, not just over Paris, but also called them very, very bad. Very, very bad.

[Jordan Weissman]

That second. Very.

[Felix Salmon]

Yeah.

[Anna Szymanski]

Also, if you. Depending on the translation, it might be very, very evil. But assuming it's Trump. I'm going to go with that here. So large, large in large part, that's about trade. He takes, he's not happy about the fact that Germany has a trade surplus of the US And Donald Trump is wrong about many, many, most, almost all things. But one of the very few subjects I feel like he's actually sort of zeroed in on something correctly is when it comes to Germany and trade, do.

[Felix Salmon]

You think that Germany is very, very bad?

[Anna Szymanski]

I think Germany may be the most problematic actor, global trade. I know I wrote, I know I wrote an article saying that they may have done a better job gaming the global trade system than any other nation at this point. And here like to get a sense of this. So, so a current account surplus is basically it's the widest measure of your trade and financial flows. But think of it as just for simplicity's sake, right here, Your trade surplus, that is 8.7% of their economy, that is the largest in the world. China's by comparison is 1.8% of its economy. Germany's is not only larger as a percentage of its economy, it's actually larger in absolute terms as well. It's actually so overall, Germany just dwarfs the rest of the world when it comes to trade. And those kinds of imbalances, as we've talked about on the show before, are very problematic, especially if you're also in the European Union. You can argue that Germany is essentially sucking the life force out of the rest of Europe.

[Jordan Weissman]

Although I agree with you, I do think it's important to remember that Germany doesn't actually control their own currency.

[Anna Szymanski]

And, but that's part of how they're gaming this between that and their labor market.

[Jordan Weissman]

Right, but I agree with you, but the part of the reason that they're their labor, part of the reason that their products are, they are so competitive is because essentially the euro is not valued where it should be and they don't actually have control over that. And I think one thing to remember, they actually have been the critics of ECB policy of keeping rates very low, which is part of the reason you have a very weak euro. So I don't disagree with you and, but I, I think they're taking advantage of what's going on right now, although I don't think they're necessarily controlling it as much.

[Felix Salmon]

The question is what choice do they have? Should they just become less productive?

[Anna Szymanski]

No, they could, they could deficit spend. I mean, this is what, and they.

[Jordan Weissman]

Do have fiscal space. And I think this is an area where almost anyone would argue that they have fiscal space to stimulate consumer spending more because, you know, essentially the German population does not spend and then their banks do very, very bad things with their savings.

[Anna Szymanski]

Know, there is that spending, like if you have a surplus, if your consumers aren't spending and you have a surplus and that you've excess savings and your government surplus, that's going to lead to a trade surplus if you spend and you, if you, if your government deficit spends and your, you know, population saves less, you're going to import more. That's. So they do have some control here of this giant trade balance. And they are just, just being obstinate. They're being way too frugal for the. It's, it's the paradox of thrift as.

[Felix Salmon]

The Germans at the table. Yeah, I am going to say that, you know, number one, Germany is one of the global leaders in solar power. They're definitely fully behind the Paris Agreement. And maybe what they're doing is they're showing the way to prosperity without massive consumer spending. I'm German. My family in Germany doesn't spend huge amounts of money. And that's okay, everyone.

[Anna Szymanski]

They can't have a trade surplus.

[Felix Salmon]

But no, I'm not saying they can.

[Anna Szymanski]

Okay.

[Felix Salmon]

I don't know why you're thinking. I'm saying that what I'm saying.

[Jordan Weissman]

But the problem is then they're not importing goods from other.

[Felix Salmon]

What I'm saying is that Germans don't spend a lot of money on themselves. And that's what you're upset about. You're saying they should be spending more money on themselves. And I'm saying, well, maybe if we're thinking about the planet here, spending less money on ourselves is a good thing.

[Anna Szymanski]

This is the numbers round, so I won't.

[Jordan Weissman]

We'll leave it at that.

[Felix Salmon]

We'll leave it at that. Okay, that, I think, is it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Slate Money. Email us. Our email address is slatemoneyslate.com Many thanks to Dan Schrader, June Thomas, Steve Lichti, Andy Bowers and the whole Panoply crew. And we will talk to you next week. Next week on Sleep Money.