Trump vs. the Bond Market

26:42And that, I think, is something that policymakers, I'm Janet Yellen, has talked about this before. I'm sure Scott Bessington is aware of this issue. I think this is one of the reasons why they backtrack quite quickly when the bond market started quivering a bit after Liberation Day in April 2025. But it is definitely one of the biggest fault lines running through the financial system right now. And the concern here is that hedge funds, when they're leveraged, compared to the way pension funds act or the way other central banks act, things can happen that require them to move much faster to keep themselves from going under.

27:19So you could have correlated sell-offs of treasuries happening very, very quickly in a way that would not be typical of the way central banks act under pressure. Yeah. Normally, when there's an economic crisis, treasury yields fall because people buy treasury bonds because they're safe and solid and you want to get the hell out of stocks. But because of this dynamic, you can see different phenomena happen. We saw this in March 2020. We saw this in April 2025, when treasury yields actually started shooting higher as treasury bonds were sold off because hedge funds were essentially being shaken out of those trades.

27:56They were very heavy leverage. That means that they're not strong hands. You know how, you know, mean stock traders talk about diamond hands that were never going to sell GameStop? Well, hedge funds are not solid hands all the time. And so we've gone in this period, in this post-financial crisis period to now, from From a place where the borrowing cost for the U.S. government was just incredibly low. Yeah. I remember back when I was at WonkBlog at the Washington Post and we would constantly, because we were arguing that we should actually borrow more at that time and invest in infrastructure. We constantly put up these 10-year tables showing that at a real rate, the borrowing cost was negative.

28:37That when you took inflation into account, people were almost paying the U.S. government to borrow because they were so desperate for U.S. government debt because it was safe, because it was liquid, because you could actually work with it at a time of great uncertainty. So one dimension of the U.S. economy in that period was we had incredibly low borrowing costs. And just slowly and then kind of post-COVID more rapidly and then post-Trump more unpredictably, that's been changing. You're not going to get that 2 % or 3 % mortgage anymore. And so you're having this sort of like stepping up of the ladder of how much our money costs.

29:18And this year has felt to me like the year when people are starting to think, oh, this is going to change the way you should think about the U.S. economy going forward if something doesn't happen. Because people felt the inflation a couple years ago was transitory. The Fed would bring up rates and it would bring it back down. But the way the Trump administration is spending, the lack of predictability in U.S. policy, it seems to me that there is a shift in bond markets in the conversation about how to think about the U.S. So what is the shift? It has multiple dimensions. I agree with everything.

29:54And it was remarkable, right, how low bond yields were for a long time. And obviously it was a sign of malaise. It was not a healthy thing. And it showed that we should have been spending more money than arguably. 2022 was kind of the year of the reckoning. That was like the annus herubilis for the bond market. It was one of the worst years for the global bond market in centuries. I mean, in three centuries by some reckoning. And I think people think that after you have a reckoning, well, then there's catharsis. You move on and things kind of settle down to a new level and inflation will come down.

30:28The Fed finally jacked up interest rates. The European Central Bank jacked up interest rates. governments would start talking to the balance after covid so there was also in the bond market and we can see this on the prices the bond market kind of agreed with the fed that inflation would be transitory and we would return to you know it's a massively overused phrase but a new normal and that new normal would be inflation back to where it should be and bond yields that maybe treasury yields it's three percent maybe three four percent and then i think look pre and post trump also So, Mark, I think a sense of things you thought were unimaginable before are now certainly not unthinkable anymore.

31:08The U.S., you know, still depends on a lot of money coming in from foreign investors to buy treasuries. And, you know, that money doesn't feel quite as welcome as it used to. We can see China and other countries tiptoeing a little bit away from the treasury market. So suddenly things that even I maybe foolishly believed firmly a few years ago, I think you wouldn't feel quite as confident out today. And I think that ripples certainly through the financial system as well. One thing that has been a little unusual here. So in my political lifetime, typically presidents and administrations are they tiptoe quite gingerly around the bond market.

31:51James Carville, when he was a top advisor to President Clinton, had this joke that when he when he was reincarnated, he wanted to come back as the bond market because then everybody would have to listen to him. It's a great question.

32:32contraction. Donald Trump is not really doing either of these things. He was very aggressive in pushing Powell out. He talked a lot about how he wanted to see the Federal Reserve bring down rates. He brought in Kevin Warsh, who is a relatively well-respected guy, but he's coming in under this cloud of what did he have to tell Donald Trump and what has he promised in order to get that job. Then on the other side, Trump has done huge amounts of spending, huge amounts of tax cuts. Nobody thinks they're about to do a big pivot to a grand budget bargain. So you have a very different orientation right now, it seems to me, from the U.S.

33:10president towards the bond market and towards what you should do if yields are going up and you don't like it. Like, as he said, Besson has a touch with the bond market, a touch with interest rates, a former currency trader. But you don't usually use the head of the Treasury Department as a traitor. He's supposed to implement fiscal policy. So how would you characterize where they're going on this and what that might mean? You know, I'm a journalist as well, and I always try to sort of project, almost steel man the other side's argument. But I do feel some of the policy making around this has been charitably incoherent.

33:48And some of it is due to some almost very natural misunderstandings that people think of interest rates, but there are obviously lots of different interest rates. The Fed decides interest rates on the short end, essentially like what overnight interest rates are, and that filters through the banking system. But the Treasury markets interest rates, the bond yields, they are set by markets, they're set by price and demand, and they're obviously affected by interest rates, but all sorts of things. And, you know, Donald Trump wants bond yields and the bond market to behave because he wants that affordable mortgage for Americans.

34:20That's clearly he's talked a lot about that. But he also wants the Fed to lower interest rates, and they don't really play well together, if at all. You know, if you want bond yields lower, I mean, the quickest way is for the Fed to jack up rates or just engineer some sort of massive recession. Neither are really that much fun, right? But like you say, you want a credible Fed chair. And I think that's why he chose somebody like Walsh, who in a fairly horrific long list of candidates was by far probably the most credible one, certainly on the short list. Because he realized if you put somebody...

34:56completely unqualified in the Fed chairmanship, then suddenly you'll see quite a violent bond market reaction. Yeah, Fed chair Peter Navarro would not have been good for yields. Bill Pulte was the one that really... I mean, as a financial journalist, I love, you know, messy stuff. But Fed chair Pulte would have been pretty bad, I think. But, you know, him and Besant don't play well together either. I want to bring up a clip of Besant from the other day on CNBC. Yeah, I was going to ask how big this could get. If the signal here is that you're not happy with the direction of yields, you know, they've gone back the other way.

35:34We've erased most of the Treasury rally that you got yesterday with that big surprise. So how much more are you willing to do? Well, again, we have a big toolkit. So we'll see. And part of it is signaling here and to show that we believe that the yields don't reflect the underlying fundamentals. This Iran conflict, we will get on the other side of this. We don't know when. And we can talk about the economic measures we're going to be taking against Iran in a minute. And we are in the administration. We are announcing probably at the end of this week, beginning of next week, an increased focus on fiscal consolidation.

36:17And it's coming from President Trump. So Russ Boat and myself will be examining both on the revenue side and the cost side what we can do. All right. So I want to go through a couple of pieces of that, because one thing you hear there is something I was mentioning a few minutes ago, which is at least beginning to signal they would like to do fiscal consolidation. But given how little they've done with Congress, I don't think anybody's taken that seriously at all. But what does he mean when he says we don't believe the yields reflect the underlying fundamentals? Reminds me a little bit of the John McCain quote that was very famous after when the markets were collapsing.

36:54The fundamentals of our economy are strong. That quote did not age well at that moment. What do you hear when Besson says that? Truthfully, I hear a little bit of desperation. I don't think bond yields are going to go massively higher. This is not a massive crisis, but the rolling out of an enlarged buyback program, a technical program, supposed to be very nerdy. It's not supposed to be something that has a major effect. So when the US government sells a 10-year bond, for example, which is the standard type of bond, kind of the benchmark bond, that's super tradable. It's super easy. You can sell a billion dollars of it without moving the price.

37:33But as that kind of becomes a nine-year bond, an eight-year bond, a seven-year bond, because it's stale, it's kind of locked away in vaults and pension plans at banks. So it doesn't trade that much. So the price usually kind of reflects that. And then you can typically buy them at a slight discount. So what the Treasury has been doing for a while is spending a few billion dollars on buying some of those stale, slightly cheap bonds and paying for it by issuing those super liquid 10-year bonds, 20-year bonds. Besant enlarged that program. He says, because the liquidity was getting worse in some parts of the treasury bond market.

38:12But it looks like a fairly naked attempt at lowering those bond yields again. But completely ignoring the scale of what we're talking about. We're talking a few billion dollars. There's over a trillion dollars worth of treasuries that trade every day. And this is like putting out a wildfire with a water pistol. And that's why you saw the bond market first reacted to the signal he was sending that we want yields down. And, you know, when the Treasury Secretary says that and acts that way, the knee-jerk reaction is, oh, we're going to buy bonds. But then people realize, well, actually, no, this is clearly not going to have an effect.

38:50And it's one of the reasons why the bond market is so tricky for people, why Carvel made that amazing quote about how you can intimidate everybody. Because you can't push around trillions of dollars very easily. The only people that can really do it, they have the resources to do it. there's only one place in town that can print unlimited dollars, and that's the Federal Reserve. So the Federal Reserve has done this in the past. It's beaten down bond yields after the financial crisis and in COVID. But the Treasury just doesn't have the resources.

40:06We'll see you next time. There's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones, and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background play, so you can lock your phone, and it still plays, baby. Oh, and it is completely ad-free. Yes, I said it, ad-free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime.

40:48Some see borders. You see possibilities. At HSBC, so do we. If today is the day you put your plan into action, we are here. Whether you're navigating markets from Seattle to Singapore, For London to New York, HSBC brings strategic insights and a global perspective to give you an edge wherever you go. HSBC, we are here.

41:20One thing that I've heard a lot of traders talking about, and one reason maybe you saw this rapid movement where Besant announced a policy where they increased these buybacks, and that seemed to bring yields down for a minute. and then yields bounce back up. Yeah. Is it, you keep saying this is looking a little bit desperate. It's maybe worth expanding on what that actually means because what he is saying is that I am trying to bring things into alignment with the fundamentals. You know, we're even willing to put our money where our mouth is on this. It seems in many cases have the opposite effect of actually scaring people a little bit, that if they're willing to do this, what does that actually make you think about where this is all going?

41:59but how do you see that dimension of it like why why does it have this sort of effect on expectations it is in the opposite direction of the treasury's purchases well it just boils down to credibility i mean the u.s has for a very long time over across many many administrations of both from both sides of the aisle built up a ton of institutional credibility about how it acts how it behaves, its predictability. When you see, you know, the world's most influential economic policymaker acting, I wouldn't say erratically, but acting the way that, you know, most bond traders sussed out very quickly that this was not going to work.

42:46It makes you doubt other parts of what else are they thinking about. If they're unpredictable, What else could happen? And that makes people skittish. And I don't think people are panicking about the US or worrying at all. And I think, you know, frankly, it was weird that Besson would respond so forcefully to what looked like a unfortunate but entirely natural increase in treasury bond yields because of, you know, people think inflation might stay a bit higher for a bit longer to, you know, compensate you for that risk you're taking. But it wasn't out of whack. This was not like we saw in Liberation Day.

43:24This was not March 2020 when the Treasury market really crept out on the pressure from COVID. So I'm honestly a little bit baffled because as Trump said himself in that opening clip that, you know, Besant, I'm not sure he has a deft hand with the bond market, but he is a former bond and currency trader. He does understand these things. He's doing things he himself knows to be wrong and won't work. I don't doubt for a second he knows this doesn't work. Didn't Bussin criticize Yellen when she was doing a more modest version of these same buybacks? He did. And he also criticized the Biden administration for issuing more bills.

44:04So the idea was that this was activist treasury policy. And of course, they're doing the same thing. I chalk that more up to sort of standard political partisanship. You're always going to criticize incumbent government for anything. And yes, it looks massively hypocritical when you do exactly the same thing. But that feels standard. What doesn't feel standard is this kind of incoherence and doing things that people in the administration know won't work. Well, usually when there's incoherence in the Trump administration, it comes because either Donald Trump wanted something or people thought Donald Trump wanted something.

44:42Now, when I asked, Donald Trump said, of course, I had nothing to do with my treasury secretary engaging with the bond market and intervening in this way. I'm going to take that as something that I don't believe has truth value one way or another. Besant also came out this week with this FT op-ed about, you know, just a complete trend to do an economic annihilation of Iran to end that. So this feels to me like there is a debate happening inside the Trump administration somewhere where they're upset about what is happening in Iran, upset about the bond market. So how much is the answer to why is Besson doing things that at another time he seemed to know you shouldn't do simply that the president is telling people that he does not like the path of the bond market and he wants it to use the word behave earlier.

45:30I would just say be lower, right? He wants yields lower. He wants money cheaper. He wants things more affordable. He wants the economy growing faster. And even though that is maybe contrary to a bunch of other things he's done on the policy side, maybe some of the problems here actually of his causing. He wants all the things at once. Yeah, who doesn't want all the good things at the same time, right? I'm the same. I like my cake, and I like to eat it. But it does feel, I agree that I'm not an administration watcher, I just watch the bond market. But it does feel there has an element of that, I can't remember which Henry it was, one of the English kings who said, who will rid me of this troublesome priest?

46:08And then, you know, somebody went out and murdered Thomas Becket, that, you know, he will say that he wants certain things and people will feel the need to go out and somehow do it, even when they know that in practice, this is not going to help the king. It's going to probably harm him. It's a very sort of short-termist way of thinking. I mean, like I said, the simple solution here is that the Fed raises interest rates. Well, the very least signals a strong willingness to do so. That, I think would restore a lot of calm. It would do way more than these measly buybacks. Ending the war in Iran and restoring free passage through the Straits of Hormuz would certainly help a lot as well.

46:47But we're really talking, you know, there's a lot of things going on. We're talking in the week of the Jackson Hole Symposium, which is the annual big central bank conference. This will be the first where Kevin Warsh is there as Fed chair. What are you expecting him to say, do? You know, normally, Fed shares have not wanted to rock the boat too much at Jackson Hole. Walsh does not think that. And I have to admit, I have some sympathy with his view that maybe some volatility in the bond market, just a little bit, might actually be a healthy thing in the long run. So the central bank view, and I have some sympathy with that too, is that predictability means that bond market volatility interest rates volatility is low, and that's better for economic growth.

47:35That is completely true. I believe that wholeheartedly. But some unpredictability can maybe make the system as a whole safer. So if you think back in 2000s, when the Fed was actually jacking up interest rates because the housing bubble was inflating, they saw some of this. They were raising interest rates in a very predictable, steady way, in a way that maybe didn't really blow away the froth and a bit of uncertainty about what the Fed might do, might be on the whole be healthy for the system because it kind of reigns in a bit of risk taking. You feel less confident about doing dumb stuff if you don't really know how the Fed is going to react to certain things.

48:14I've never seen Walsh articulate it quite in that way. And maybe he does so at Jackson Hole, but it's going to be fascinating to see because I mean, this is a new era of central banking at the world's most powerful central bank. So it's going to be probably one of the most interesting Jackson holds for a very long time. I'm certainly getting my popcorn ready. I mean, this is a way in which Warsh is differing a little bit from those who came before. I mean, it sounds very, it's a weird thing to be arguing over. But yeah, Fed, recent Fed shares have been very into forward guidance. They tell you what they're going to do well before they do it.

48:52So you know what they're going to do and you can react and everybody can plan. And Warsh has been, I don't want to say opposed to all forward guidance, but he has announced his forward guidance has been there will be less forward guidance. Why? So I should say that I think both the proponents of forward guidance, and that's most central bankers around the world, and enemies of it, have almost to a comical degree overstated the case for and against. That the enemies of forward guidance have indicated that this is central banks binding themselves to the mast. That if they say they're going to do X, they have to do X, and it takes away the flexibility to be able to do anything and respond to incoming data.

49:38And that's just baloney. Central banks have issued forward guidance, and when the data changes, they change their mind. We've seen that happen in every central bank, including the Federal Reserve. of. I think central banks have frankly overstated the advantages of forward guidance as a way of sort of stimulating the economy. They said that, well, if we say we're going to keep interest rates low for super long or until X or Y, sometimes there's been concrete triggers, that will give people so much safety that we're not going to raise interest rates, that they'll go out and borrow money, stimulate the economy, get all that economic growth going.

50:13And I think also, again, And people don't really listen to that because they also do understand that if inflation suddenly erupts as it did in 21, 22, then central banks are going to very hurried backtrack on this forward guidance. It just doesn't matter that much. So when people used to worry about bonds and the US government debt, the thing you would hear them talk about was the coming of the dreaded bond vigilantes. So who are the bond vigilantes? And is there any reason to still worry about them? So these are the people that Trump is going to deploy the military against, right? Only it's our last option.

50:51Our last option is jailing all the bond vigilantes. Last option. Yes, exactly. Or jailing them. So, I mean, it's you and me. It's our pension plans, our mutual funds, our banking, the money that we have in the banking system. The bond vigilantes is kind of a very amorphous phrase. It's wonderful. I've used and abused it many times myself because it's so evocative. But in reality, it's just a vast ecosystem of money that is in a mutual fund, a pension plan, an insurance company, a bank, a sovereign wealth fund, a private bank in Switzerland. Even you and I, we can buy treasuries directly from the US government.

51:31And the idea is that the vigilantes would stop lending to countries. And it's really the only power. They can't go around beating people up. Which is to say they would stop buying these bonds. Yeah, or maybe just buy the less of them or want a slightly higher interest rate. So it's both a overdone phrase. And I think certainly in a place like the United States that can literally create dollars, the US bond market is a very different beast than it is in, let's say, Pakistan or Sri Lanka or even Argentina that tends to borrow a lot in foreign currencies. but it does actually you know it has a bit of truth in us to it because in a world in a global economy that runs on credit the ability to raise the cost of credit or deny it altogether is an incredible power and this is not set by you know bond investors in a secret whatsapp group but it is the individual decision of a million people sometimes acting in concert but you do sometimes see the bond market just get jittery about certain countries, certain companies at certain times.

52:44Most famously in the UK in 2022, where they managed to oust a prime minister in, I think, 45 days, but typically more in poorer countries that frankly don't have the resources that a large advanced developed economy does. So you have more conversations with bond traders than I do. uh it's not a super high bar to clear but you clear it some of my best friends are bond traders when you guys are a couple drinks in and they're describing the bad scenarios the stuff they worry about or they think about the stuff that maybe besan is worried about in you know the wee hours in the morning what does this look like over the coming couple of years if this goes wrong i mean And what do informed people think bad outcomes here might look like?

53:35Also, Ezra, one of my favorite topics in the whole world, and this does make me a very sad human being probably, but a sovereign debt crisis and sovereign debt restructuring. I just think there are just this fascinating collision of finance, economics, politics, geopolitics, everything comes together. But they usually affect smaller, poorer countries, of course. But because of my interest, I actually had thought probably an unhealthy amount of time about what a US debt crisis would look like. A US debt crisis would not look anything like anything else in the world. First of all, the US can't really go bankrupt unless it chooses to.

54:14I mean, the US only borrows in dollars and it can create dollars. It's very hard to go bankrupt if you can create the currency that you're borrowing. Now, that can have other crisis-like outcomes, like runaway inflation, a financial system that, you know, convulsed by all this dollar printing. But a classic default is unlikely, or vanishingly unlikely. And that's why when I've talked to bond investors, including in the early hours of the morning and a few drinks in, very few bond investors I know are genuinely worried about a debt crisis in the conventional sense. But you can see lots of unconventional types of severe debt issues in the United States.

55:00Like, for example, if they suddenly start, if they suddenly are out, manage to co-opt the entire Federal Reserve and start creating dollars, like Trump says, I want interest rates lower and we're just going to print as many dollars to do so as possible. That has ripple effects everywhere. What do you think the, because we're, what is the Treasury rate at right now? You probably looked at Bloomberg this morning and I didn't. Well, 10 years kind of, yeah, it's around four, four between. I mean, it's been between 4 % and 5 % for a while, which is why, you know, I don't get why they were freaking out so much.

55:34What's the chance, in your view, that come, you know, November of 2028, we'll use Election Day here as a kind of marker, that the rate is 6 % to 7 %? I mean, one thing that I love about the bond market is that it synthesizes just an insane amount of information. economic growth, inflation, productivity, health of institutions, things like that. And I'd say that, you know, people smarter than me embarrass themselves trying to predict the markets all day long, so I just don't know. But as long as the economy's booming, and we want that, the Treasury yields should go higher. That would be a healthy signal.

56:21And if bond yields go back to, let's say, 1%, if you and I are talking in November 2028, and Treasury yields are at 1 % again, well, that's a very terrible economic backdrop. Which way it would go right now, I don't know. I mean, AI is the big factor right now. I mean, it's kind of the investments are happening in data centers that may be on the margins, sucking a little bit of investment away from the Treasury market, but they're certainly juicing the economy. The US economy would look, I think, rather different if we weren't seeing these huge CapEx programs that, you know, the biggest is the railway splurge.

57:01And then, you know, it depends like, is this going to get the economy going or is it just going to end in another sort of the infrastructure bust? And that would probably decide what things look like in November, 2028. Right. To draw that out, you can imagine a world where AI proves to be a bubble. There's a big pop. This investment that is powering so much collapses. And then you probably would get to lower bond yields because one, there'd be less private demand for debt. And so more of those funders could buy treasuries. Second, the Fed would probably have to bring down rates because you'd be going into a recession or very likely going into a recession.

57:39So that'd be a world where, yeah, maybe bond yields are down to 3%, but it's not a good world. They're down there because the economy has gone into crisis. Now, we want bond yields to go down for the right reasons, and that is that inflation is low and stable and quiescence and not very volatile. But you want some interest on your treasury bonds. It should be fair to expect that. But whether they're up at the 6%, 7 % you talk about, that also is, I think, probably a very unhelpful world because that would imply that inflation is not under control. It probably implies the Fed is tacitly, probably unstatedly given up on controlling it to a large extent.

58:24And we are heading into what we have seen in the past as a proper stagflation where both growth and inflation are, you know, growth is too low, inflation is too high, and interest rates have kind of lost the power to move things around too much. Well, there's something weird in all this. So you wrote about a National Bureau of Economics research survey that I found genuinely shocking that said among bond investors surveyed, they believed there to be a 50 percent chance of a U.S. debt crisis in the next decade. But then almost all those investors said they had no change in their portfolio strategy based on this.

59:04So I had trouble making heads or tails. Like, on the one hand, if the bond market actually believes we're going to have a 50 % chance of a debt crisis, I wasn't clear what that actually meant. But then also, if they believe it's that high and nobody's doing anything, that's weird. What did you make of that? How would you explain what that survey was revealing and what did you make of it? I mean, Paul Santo, is it St. Augustine who said, Lord, make me chaste, but not yet? And it's how we humans respond to so many things, like climate change. You know, we know it's a big deal and it's coming. And we maybe might tweak it a little bit around the edges of our own lifestyle, but in reality, we don't.

59:43And we might say we want politicians to do X or Y, but in practice, until it actually starts affecting us on a daily basis, you can see people don't really like that. And I think it's both shocking, but also incredibly unsurprising because it just sums up human nature, right? Even when you can see something big and nasty potentially coming, you know, down the tunnel towards you, you still think that light might be something favorable. I think that is a good place to end. So then always our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience? I have to admit, I've been dreading this because you ask me tomorrow, they'll probably be different books.

1:00:22But I'm going to choose three books that show that finance, economics and business can actually be really fun and interesting and riveting even. um i think the obvious first place the first book is is barbarians at the gate i genuinely think it's kind of the gold standard of of narrative business journalism today but really it's kind of like a history of american business over the past century told through the prism of this private equity and all the crazy characters involved it is astonishing um my second book uh daniel jürgen's It's the prize. It's the history of the oil market. It's kind of the model for a lot of similar books that came first, but Jürgen's kind of the OG.

1:01:07Uh, it's, I love those histories that kind of tell the history of the world. This is almost a history of the 20th century, but through a completely different angle. So it tells it through the oil market is tremendous, has crazy characters, of course. And just, I learned so much just as a journalist, but also just as a person. My third one, I can almost feel some of the books behind me, screaming at me. Just hoping to be picked. Hoping to be picked. I mean, yeah, the glowering at me, I can feel it. I think I'm going to go with Liyakit Ahmed's Lords of Finance. It's just a fabulous book about this kind of tumultuous interwar period and the run-up to the Great Depression.

1:01:51And it tells what is an incredibly complex, multifaceted financial economic story through the heads of the major central banks at the time. And, you know, in my day job at the FT, I spend a lot of time trying to kind of pass these things and make them digestible to a general audience and make them sort of riveting and fun. And, you know, I don't think I've seen such a complex story told with such verve as well as in Liarket's book. So I think that'll have to be my third pick and I'll just have to accept the books, some of the books behind me staring down at me angrily. Robin Bugglesworth, thank you very much.

1:02:33Thanks for having me on.

1:03:15Thank you. BC, we are here.