发言人: There is a cyclical element to fraud, right? Because in good times people will look the other way.

发言人: And I don't I don't think it's cyclical. I think it's always there. I just think, you know, the who's that said it, you know, when the when the water goes out you can figure out is swimming nude. I think it was buffet. Buffet. Yeah. Yeah. Well Galbraith's however talked about the bezzle. Right. The, the the propensity of flimflam and scams to exist during the good times and people just like, and that accumulates and accumulates. But that could be. We've had like 20 years, as you said, like we haven't had a credit. I mean, we're it's almost 20 years since the financial crisis now.

发言人: Yeah. The finance always finds its way, finds a way to blow itself up. I mean, it's it's yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's it's not an opinion. And just look at history. I think what happens is you get you get, you know, we find good things and then you ride them and you. Yeah. In every instance where something's gone wrong, you just keep pushing on something till you take it over the edge. Right. Finances. An industry where historically you could make a lot of money at it. Right? You're playing with other people's money, you know, pennies and nickels coming off of other people's money. I'm just going to keep pushing. I'm going to keep pushing and keep pushing. When it finally falls, it falls hard.

Joe Weisenthal: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway: And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal: So Tracy, one of the motifs, I guess, of some of our recent. Motif is a. Good word. It's a good word, isn't it? Thank you. One of the motifs of some of our recent conversations, and also, I guess one of the megatrends of our time is this idea of just like scale is a competitive advantage. Size returns to size, returns to scale. The ability of someone to, like pick up a phone and say, I need a lot of money right now. And the advantage that accrues to financial players is we see it across a lot of sectors. But it really it stands out a lot in our finance conversations.

Tracy Alloway: It feels good to be big in business, right? Like once you get big, you have all this competitive advantage that allows you to get bigger.

Joe Weisenthal: The place where this is most noticeable, I would argue, and it's been this way for a while, is the banking industry right? Like the long run trend among U.S. banks is the big get bigger. And we've all seen those charts of like all the little banks that compose Bank of America or JP Morgan.

Tracy Alloway: I love those charts.

Joe Weisenthal: I do too. And that's the direction the industry seems to be heading, right?

Tracy Alloway: Right.

Joe Weisenthal: It's so interesting to me to like to think about, like, these are an analog to tech because it's the same in tech, right? If you look at big tech and we talk about the mag seven, etc., they've really outperformed middle tech or small tech. It is truly incredible. And we have intuitive reasons for understanding of that network effects lock and and so forth. And it's so fascinating that some of our story that we tell must be a little bit insufficient, because we see the same story replicated as, as we're talking about, with banks and with banks, it seems to be a couple of fold as like one is balance sheet capacity, right? And the ability to do big deals and so forth. And then of course, there's the other thing, which is just like the sort of the menu of services that you can offer, right? If you're a big bank.

Tracy Alloway: Right. And also just the fact that you have, well, balance sheet, you have a lot of money. So for juicy deal comes up, you can deploy it quite quickly and you get like first dibs on issuance, which has been good in the recent credit market. So we haven't done like a ton of pure banking episodes or the we've done some. But, you know, we did the most probably right in the wake of, Silicon Valley Bank, obviously. And we talked about like, the challenges of some of the community banks or the sort of smaller regional banks, etc., and then we know, like the huge scale of, like the JP morgan's of the world, but also like, what about the banks? And just sort of like some JP Morgan scale, not. Super regionals, I believe they're called. Super regionals. Interesting perspectives of their own.

Joe Weisenthal: And so and I've always said I love talking to bankers, people who understand how banking works just like they're I think they're usually at some of our, our most interesting guests. Have you looked at the, KBW Bank index, by the way?

Tracy Alloway: Not today, actually, not in a few days. Or maybe not a few days. Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: What has it been doing?

Tracy Alloway: It's up quite a lot. In fact, I think over the past 12 months it's outperformed the S&P 500. So that kind of tells you how people feel about banks and bank regulation.

Joe Weisenthal: Absolutely. Right. One of the things when Trump won was the sort of like the deregulation trade. And that was one element. And arguably I would say in finance, by and large, though, 10% credit card cash does not scream deregulation. I would say that's one of the areas in which the expectations of Wall Street have actually been met, by and large, by this administration.

Joe Weisenthal: Anyway, I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest to talk about the banking world in 2026. We're going to be speaking with Bill Demchak, CEO of PNC financial, which is the sixth biggest bank in the country, I guess a super regional. So, Bill, thank you so much for coming on of late.

Bill Demchak: It's it's great to be here, but I'm going to correct. Oh, we're a national bank.

Joe Weisenthal: National bank. Yeah. Why did I say super regional didn't. Were you once that.

Bill Demchak: You know, because we have the mega banks and people don't know what to call somebody like us, but yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: I always thought super regional was just like that category below the mega. But I mean, a regional bank is a bank that operates in a region.

Bill Demchak: Okay, we're. Across the country in the largest MSAs. We're in every state. We. So we're just, you know, one sixth the size of a JPMorgan.

Joe Weisenthal: Got it.

Bill Demchak: But we're still a national bank.

Joe Weisenthal: Excellent. Well, since we're just in the center of the correcting the record phase of the conversation, I'm certainly familiar with the PNC brand. You see it on things elsewhere, probably like a stadium somewhere or some other stadium somewhere.

Bill Demchak: We have PNC Park for the Pirates, PNC Park.

Joe Weisenthal: So there you go. But why don't you just give us the big overview? Like, what is PNC financial?

Bill Demchak: We are a traditional bank. We used to call it Main Street Bank. Maybe that fits. Maybe it doesn't. But, you know, we help people save. We lend money, we do investments, we move money through payments. We're a bank that aspires to be, you know, coast to coast with, with a retail presence, as retail share consolidates in the US. You know, our sweet spot is larger middle market, smaller, large corporate. But of course, we do commercial and and business banking. We're active in the capital markets across basically every product. But new new equity issuance. But more of a traditional bank. So when you talk about you were talking about scale and your initial thing at JP Morgan, they've got to be in 50 countries. You know, they're in multiple lines of business beyond traditional banking. We have scale and what we want to do. So there's scale and the things you choose to attack, versus scale, just measuring balance sheet size.

Joe Weisenthal: Got it. You have been growing, though. You made an acquisition recently. First Bank is the ambition to be, you know, as big as some of the, the G sibs, like the nationally, the national giants, let's say.

Bill Demchak: The ambition isn't about size. The ambition is about being relevant. So one of the things going on backdrop to the US market in particular, is there has been consolidation in retail, share in banking, you know, ever since they got rid of interstate banking laws. That continues apace with the mega banks largely winning, at the expense of the very small banks. And so at some point in the not too distant future, I suspect that there's going to be 5 or 6 players who control retail in the US.

Joe Weisenthal: The Canada model. Yeah.

Bill Demchak: And our aspiration, and we're on pace to do it. And we think we can do it just to be one of those 5 or 6 banks. What size that leads to? I don't care, you just need to be relevant to consumers everywhere in the, in the country. And you shouldn't be disadvantaged because you don't have presence in a particular market, would it?

Joe Weisenthal: How would you articulate why the really big banks continue to win a share of the retail market? I could come up with some answer. But what's the real how would you describe it?

Bill Demchak: It's ubiquitous market presence. You know, once you get over 7% branch density in a particular market, you tend to outperform, under the assumption you have an okay reputation and decent products. You know, the you don't have to have the best, but you have to have the menu of all the digital applications, digital signature branches in the right place, you know, electronic transfer, all the things you come to expect from the bank. You guys probably bank at, you get there, and you grow. And if you think about that definition, there's only 3 or 4 banks today. Actually only two that fit that definition. JP Morgan A. And B of A, the Wells, you know, has the potential, you know, now that they've gotten rid of the asset cap and so forth to continue to grow. And then you have some aspirants who'd like to get in. There were clearly one of those and one of the one of the people who's been after this game probably longer than most.

Joe Weisenthal: Just so what was the metric that you cited? 7% branch density. What is the.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. So so, by the way, we use 7% other banks. We'll talk about eight, but it's somewhere around there. You get to a place where if you have presence in a market, 7 or 8% of the share of just physical presence with decent products, you control a disproportionate share of the actual deposits in economics coming out of that market.

Tracy Alloway: So I'm actually surprised to hear that because the story, you know, that's dominated since the financial crisis has basically been that physical branches don't matter that much.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. So you've seen across the U.S., you know, net closures of branches is off the charts relative to new builds. But what you see behind the scenes is somebody like PNC, where we are, if you think about our very dense markets where we've been for 165 years, we're thinning those branches because you don't need as much. But we're building aggressively in Houston and Dallas and Miami. We were building in Denver until we bought first Bank. So going to all these growing markets where the population's moving.

Joe Weisenthal: Man, it just occurred to me, I already after we do this episode, I want to follow up and like do an interview with, like, whoever your main person doing site selection is because we've done episodes on like, oh, we have a drive through site selection, grocery store site selection.

Bill Demchak: We have a great team we're building. But by the way, you know, we've announced we're building 300 branches in these new markets. And as an aside, once we knock 100 off, we'll add another 100. So it's going to keep going. We're probably 1000 short of where we ultimately want to be, but we don't have to be there tomorrow. But just building a hundred branches a year is a mass of exercise on site selection.

Joe Weisenthal: You're a construction company.

Bill Demchak: Yes. I mean exactly right. So you need to pick the right location. You need to choose whether you're going to do a drive through, or you're going to be at the end of some shopping, something where you're kind of an end add on to a to a new development. The physical, you know, we have preset designs so we know what we're building, but you still need a contractor, you need somebody running at the physical plant that you move into the branch. We have pods now. New branch opens. Truck with a pod shows up and everything that that branch needs to run from computers to paper to pens is in a pod. Just deliver it right into the branch, which is what we're going to do. And we do the first bank conversion. As an aside. That's really interesting.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. Let's talk about bank regulation because I think this is fun.

Tracy Alloway: Yeah. Very fun.

Joe Weisenthal: This is part of the consolidation story, I think, is that even though post financial crisis, there was more focus on the significant banks, the G sibs, at the same time, those G sib seem to have benefited from, some of the regulation.

Tracy Alloway: Yeah. Is that how you would characterize it?

Bill Demchak: I don't know that they, I don't know. They benefited from regulation. They had to carry extra capital. They clearly, you know, in times of crisis, have done better than the broad swath of smaller banks, as we saw with Silicon Valley and some others. But they were sort of walled off from competitors. So, you know, I've talked for years about just the need to be able to compete. Some of that competition comes from M&A. Some of it just needs to, you know, the ability to do certain activities. In, in theory now or in an environment where it's easier to do that. And I think practically that's probably true. Although I would tell you, I think we could have done large deals had we chosen to back during the Biden administration. I, I think people tend like one of those sound bites that comes out of regulators is good deals are okay, bad deals aren't. But they won't tell you what a bad deal is. But a good deal is typically when you have one bank, someone one good bank, somebody in charge. Yeah, you have technology that can actually absorb the other bank. And you can protect consumers and so on and so forth. Those could have gotten done in the last administration.

Joe Weisenthal: That's interesting. Well, let's talk about more about your philosophy of M&A because so your stock has done very well. But it has for a while, especially in the last year up until recently had been underperforming. Yeah.

Bill Demchak: Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: Some of the other banks. And you're like quote is like everyone thinks we're going to do something like, I don't know, an exact quote, but it's like something. Why does it for the.

Bill Demchak: Whole world's betting I'm stupid. Yeah, right.

Joe Weisenthal: But so like but then how do you grow? So. Okay, all the market that I want to pay off the stock because they think that you're going to do.

Bill Demchak: This is that this isn't this isn't complex. We'll just start with the basics. All right. Last year we outperformed I think everybody including JP Morgan and top line revenue growth and EPS. People in our growth. People, you know. Sorry. You think I know pre pre-provision, net revenue. Okay. Yeah. Fantastic year. We set records and new client acquisition, revenue growth, expense control, great new tech roll and and stuff that we underperform. Part of the backdrop of that was the mega banks outperformed as people correctly thought regulation was going to drop and they could return more capital than they historically had. So take that bucket. They're doing great because they have all this capital and they're free to do whatever they want to. Smaller banks went up in value because, you know, people like Bill Demchak with a big mouth said there's going to be consolidation. So everybody's going to buy them. So they go up in value. And because we are a likely acquirer, given our historical performance and being good at integration, we get. Crushed.

Joe Weisenthal: Did you get penalized from the perception of a more liberal M&A?

Bill Demchak: Absolutely. But it was a part of it's my fault. And, you know, because I talk you know, I talk about the need for scale. I talk about the consolidation that's happening in retail. I talk about why this makes sense and people make this leap and therefore to end the sentence with at any cost. And that's a terrible assumption. Not at any cost. We can do this organically. It just takes longer. And, you know, today with everything flying in value and us underperforming, it's extremely unlikely we find something that makes economic sense for us. Plus, the fact just is inside the environment is so good right now. Nobody none of the reasonable size banks want to sell. This is like, this is like a sunny day in in August, man. You got you know, rates are going the right way. The curve is steepening. Credit's great. Regulation is coming down. Nobody sells their bank in that.

Joe Weisenthal: Do you wake up every morning and check the PNC share price? I always wonder about this. CEOs of public companies, you're graded instantaneously by the market.

Bill Demchak: Yes, but the market at times is an unfair grader, so I don't pay attention to it. You know, when we I look at metrics all the time, are we winning clients? Are we, automating things and getting more efficient? Are we? Is our marketing campaign reaching people? What's our traction level and digital? You know, all these things that ultimately will lead to a share price performance, but not in the day.

Joe Weisenthal: Well, let's talk then a little bit about okay, so a lot of banks are doing well. They don't they're not they don't want to sell. Yeah. You're not a stupid guy. So you don't want to make like a dumb deal. So there's there is. So there's not going to be there's. Not going to be deals okay. So you have this aspiration to one of the really big banks. And so okay that leaves organic growth. What is this.

Bill Demchak: But it also yeah I mean in perspective we're in this the the weird window in regulatory change isn't the Trump administration. It was the Biden administration any time before Biden. And now after Biden deals get done all the time, we're 165 years in business. You know, the little chart you talked about with all the banks? Yeah, we've got to have 150 banks under us through time, and that'll continue. But it doesn't have to happen now, right? The weird thing about now is just we ended the four years of strange period under Biden.

Joe Weisenthal: Got it.

Bill Demchak: Now we're just back to the old game will go for, you know, go on and on and on.

Joe Weisenthal: So what is the essence of the organic growth strategy to if it's yeah, to grow.

Bill Demchak: So, so far I've been talking about retail. Let me talk about the reason for retail. So ultimate reason for retail is retail deposits. Retail deposits are low cost or sticky. They allow you to support your corporate community and consumers with loans. We've been able to win and what we call our Cnib business a corporate institutional bank business, gain share every year for the last, I don't know, 15 years. And what is a very fragmented market? You know, we talk about the mega banks gathering retail share. But in corporate commercial nobody has any real share. It's it's it's shotgun everywhere. And we win in that space and we do it by, you know, going to market locally. We organize. And this will all sound kind of silly, but we don't have panels by product. We have panels by client. We go into the market. We have a regional president, we have product expertise, and we choose the most important and impressive clients to cover in that market, not anybody else. We don't do business with somebody necessarily who walks through the door, because that's all that we'll do business with. We'll call on the same rate. A client, you know, that, you know, you want to cover if you're in Miami or you're in Texas, we'll call on them for ten years until they call us back. Patience, persistence, consistency. Good product ideas are real low bank turning banker turnover and we win. And you just, you know, rinse and repeat going to new markets add people keep your eye on.

Tracy Alloway: Just on acquisitions. I'm really curious how difficult it is to integrate another bank with your company because you just said you're good at integration. What does that actually entail?

Bill Demchak: That's a great question. So integration there's a mechanical component. And then of course there's a cultural component, mechanical component. Should otherwise be easy, but as proven difficult for some people over time, the mechanical components to talk about first bank for us, we simply take all of their data records. So, you know, record field data items that are for one of their checking accounts. And we import that data, but we don't import that application. All that data comes into PNC. And then over a weekend we simply open up a million new accounts on our existing products and services. Sounds pretty simple. If you can move the data, you can just effectively open new accounts. My my team will scream, it's not that easy. But that's basically what you do.

Joe Weisenthal: It looks easy to you. Yeah.

Bill Demchak: Now all of a sudden, okay, now we have all these customers with new accounts. How do they how do they log in? How do they learn? Like our online is different than somebody else is online. So now you're getting into training modules, communications with clients, training their branches with first Bank trims and this front line set of people incredible bank in history. We're keeping all their client facing employees now. They all of a sudden have to know the difference between PNC products and their old products. So how do we do that? That's what integration ultimately means. There's a mechanical piece of it. Get the systems to work. So you turn it on, the lights go on. There's delivering pods to the branches. So they have all the PNC equipment and the signage and all that other stuff. But there's a lot of time with people. We send in branch buddies. So we'll take branch managers from all around the country and go have them spend, you know, a couple of weeks in each, you know, sitting with the branches at first Bank.

Joe Weisenthal: That just helps your perspective. Yeah.

Bill Demchak: And the learning and it's I mean banking, you know, in some ways is simple. In some ways it's wildly complex. An employee in a branch, the problems that you might walk in. Right. You say, oh, I don't really go into a branch or I don't think about it, but when you go into a branch, something's really busted. Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: So the employees.

Bill Demchak: So the employees. Right. They need to know how to fix it. And that's when we say we're good at integrations. It's because we focus on making sure that our new teammates know how to do their job and can help their clients because they have the same clients they've had forever. They don't want to look bad in their new role.

Tracy Alloway: Can you actually just talk more about the answers, like, okay, they need to know how to like, sell or be familiar with the PNC product now, like talk a little bit more about like what that difference is, what actually changes functionally, why it wouldn't be what it is about either culture or products such that it's not just replacing the the logo and the pens.

Bill Demchak: And the well, everything works at the margin, slightly different. I mean, checking accounts, a checking account. But imagine you're you're in a branch or you're in the care center. You have a problem. You made your car payment, you sent it through. It was time stamped the right time, but it went through snail mail, got lost. You got penalized a fee, and you go to the branch and you say, you know, it's really not fair. I sent this, and I you're hitting me with the fee and the branch person. What do they do? Right. It's there's there's some answer to that. What's our procedure? Well, you know, now with AI, you can just go into a large language model that is built off of all of our customer service protocols and say, what do I do? This just happened. They'll tell you, you know, credit the customer the fee and send a note to the, you know, whatever the answer is for that particular problem. But the person sitting there needs to know like which system do I query. What's my browser, what am I who do I talk to. You know, if I'm going to make an exception do I go to the branch manager or can we do that here. Or do I want to call somebody in some strange room in a back office and Philadelphia, all of that with us, because we automate so much of it is now center of query and self-learning in the branch. And then importantly, more and more with our customers self caring, you know, they get locked out. You know, just just be able to fix the problem yourself.

Joe Weisenthal: One thing I've wondered for a few years, does local expertise matter anymore when it comes to actual underwriting, either in retail or commercial? Because I think most of America used to have this very romanticized notion of the banks, the sort of It's a Wonderful Life model, where you're your branch manager, knows you and knows your entire life and business and all of that. My sense is that doesn't exist so much anymore. But tell me if I'm wrong.

Bill Demchak: You're wrong.

Joe Weisenthal: Okay.

Bill Demchak: It's harder to accomplish when you become a larger bank. But, you know, how is credit evolved through time? Consumers. Consumers. Now, if they're an existing client of you are scored based on their cash flows that you see. So not a fight go score. You can actually see when did somebody pay the rent or their spending patterns predictable. You can build models to see you know what. This person is a really diligent good credit even though it might should not show up in a like a local market business. You're going to lend to this small developer, you're going to lend to this store on the corner. Branches really matter and local bankers matter for small businesses because I see where the foot traffic is. They know the reputation of the person who's running that business. The people you know, are they a, community influencer in a good way, where they're, you know, people want to support them. All that stuff still matters and all that stuff. The more you can give somebody voice locally in the decision, I always kind of call it putting a thumb on the scale a little bit on a yes or no that's otherwise mechanical. The better your credit underwriting as well.

Joe Weisenthal: It's just we're talking about consumer credit. What happens to what happens to the world, what happens to America or the industry if there's a 10% cap on credit card rates? As president Trump has proposed?

Bill Demchak: So the only thing I know for sure, if that happens, is that all the credit card businesses in the country lose money, if run exactly the way they are today. So we have, you know, credit card business. I get swipe fees, I get most of those away with rewards. I earn credit when somebody is revolving a balance. I lend credit when somebody pays it at the end of the month. Right. I'm fronting that money for you. If you clear your account every month. But hopefully I'm getting some swipe fees to make that good. After all that, you charge interest rates, you have losses and you get a margin, maybe make 4% and assume interest. I make it up numbers here, but assume maybe the average rate is 18%. I make four at the bottom. Nothing going to take my 18. I'm going to drop it to ten. Oh. I just made minus four. It's all that math is going to come out. Which is why I don't think this goes like there's almost no way this can happen. You'll just simply shut down consumer credit in the US. They can't force they can say the cap is 10% and I'll say, fine, I'm out. I'm like, why would I do it if I'm going to lose 4% a year on that, something's going to change. Fees are going to go up, lines are going to get cut, rewards will go away. You know, and something will emerge out of the dust, but it's not going to look at all like it does today.

Tracy Alloway: What do you think the genesis of the proposal or the rationale behind it actually is? If you know, everyone in the industry says this basically ends credit cards.

Bill Demchak: Yeah, I think because first of all, the emotional appeal of it, it's I mean, it sounds absurd that you're charging somebody 18% for revolving credit. I think that sounds high. That happens to be the rate that you need to charge to make money. But it sounds, which is why I never revolve a balance. I pay it off every month. So there's this emotion appeal. Geez, you ought to be able to lend. Like I'll lend money to you at 10%. I'll lend money to you at 10%. Thanks. Right. But I can't necessarily figure out who you are in a sea of people, right? There's a bunch of people. I'll lend money at 4% because I'll never to pull it. You know, that's the issue. And you try to get to the broader population and extend credit to the consumer. That drives our economy. Science isn't so exact to say you get nine and you're 22. I don't know about you.

Joe Weisenthal: Well, actually, I want to push because intuitively, I would think you'd be able to do that. You just mentioned the fact that you have granular access to propensity to pay back, that it's not even captured by. Yes, you have incredible amounts of data and predictive capacity. And the difference between whether mere trace you're going to revolve. So when someone says 18% seems high, yeah. Are we supposed to just like, believe?

Bill Demchak: Oh, just trust me, it's high. This is what I need to charge in order to make money in this business.

Joe Weisenthal: I mean, I could trust you, but I'm like, how would you?

Bill Demchak: But the math is the math. Okay, the end result. Right? You say when you run your models and you look at, you know, propensity to pay you back, you basically, you know, whether you're looking at Flaco or anything, a Fico is only as good as whether that person has a job next week. Right. They, they you know you can look at predictability and yes this person has been paying their rent. They have a steady expenditure thing on food and on gas and on entertainment. And their savings account balances always stay pretty steady. That ought to be a good credit. Well it isn't a good credit. If they get fired or lose their job because the economy's in a downturn. And all of a sudden, well, I thought that was a really good credit. I should charge 5%. Turns out I just wrote the whole thing off because there's no recovery value in that credit. That's that's where the science fails. There's there's exogenous variables you can't model in the wider you cast the net, right. The bigger the dispersion on outcomes. However, if we've settled there, that interest rate kind of sets a reasonable profit margin. The largest card issuer in the country, you could figure out who this is, right? Best at best computer models, best funding credit, best expand. You know, extending credit to to to non-prime borrowers. They trade at one times book value. That this was a genius business like this way too much. I'd drop the rate by 1% you know and gross share. The problem is, it's not so great, actually.

Tracy Alloway: I want to talk about private credit a little bit. Because obviously this is an area where we always hear about banks face new competition from middle market lenders and all of that. But at the same time, we also see banks teaming up with private credit now. And it seems to me also. Yeah. Okay. Talk us through that relationship.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. So traditionally, standalone high yield credit, if all you did was walk around and just lend money, with no particular expertise but across, you know, leveraged clients at a single big credit. That's a really lousy return on capital, right? The, you know, all the science going back to and Moody's started tracking this stuff in the 80s. You get kind of a 35% recovery. You have a 10% default rate. You go through cycles sometimes a lot worse, sometimes a lot better. It's not a particularly good business. Becomes a a better business and sometimes a fantastic business. If you couple that with the wallet that goes with that company beyond just the credit. So IPOs, M&A fees bond feel, you know, whatever the stuff is that goes along with all of a sudden it becomes a pretty good business what's happened in the last couple of years we've seen this drift into more and more credit, leaving banks going into private equity and other alternative forms that PNC, it manifested itself where we'd have a client that we might have banked for a hundred years on by third generation family that just got sold to private equity, and our client's gone, because I don't want to make that loan at that leverage ratio. And whoever does make the loan is going to demand the Treasury management relationship and all the other stuff that goes with that client. So are we come out at it is I don't know that I necessarily want to make the loan. I will sometimes, but I want to keep the relationship. So our partnership with TCW is an example is when that happens. Now we, you know, we put capital in the TCW fund, as did a bunch of other people, but happens now. We'll keep the client, you know, we'll diversify the credit risk but keep the fees. So the return on equity on that thing, you know, goes way up the whole notion, remember, like private credit in the last three years. Oh my God. So new thing. We're great at it. We're going to make you a fortune. Why is it private equity kind of hit the skids. Nothing was getting sold. They need to raise new money. We haven't had defaults in ten years. So a manager shows up and says, look at my track record. I can earn, you know, with two times leverage, I'll give you 10% return after fees. This is fantastic. Private equity sucks. Come with me. Of course, we haven't had a credit cycle in ten years, so those stats are all garbage.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. You know, I actually go through a credit cycle and you have two times leverage on that thing, and you start having defaults, which we've had a few of us on. It's not really exciting.

Joe Weisenthal: Can I ask one macro question in this conversation, which is where where do you think we are in the credit cycle at the moment?

Bill Demchak: I've given up trying to predict that credit today is pretty good. Better than pretty good. A lot of the leverage that's in this system that everybody complains about are actually with things that are very good enterprise value. So I don't worry so much about the disappearance of a company. I think about it in terms of reallocation of the ownership structure right over there, over leveraged. They go down either private equity firm bails them out or they say, no, here are the keys. And now the debt holder owns and then the debt holder restructures the debt and sells them again. Somebody lost money. But companies still a good company was just over levered to to go. But most of the noise you're hearing right now on credit beyond the fraud, you know the cockroaches that Jamie said come up when things get stretched. Most of it are decent enterprises just over levered. And then of course, you have the fraud. You haven't had anything that's really going down today because the economy just crashed on the spot. Other than some isolated issues with tariffs.

发言人: There is a cyclical element to fraud, right. Because in good times people look the other way.

发言人: And I don't I don't think it's cyclical. I think it's always there. I just think you know the who's a said, you know when the water goes out you can figure out who's swimming nude. I think it was buffet. Buffet. Yeah. Yeah. Well Galbraith however, talked about the bezzle. Right. The, the the propensity of flimflam and scams to exist during the good times and people just like, and that accumulates and accumulates and. That could be. We've had like 20 years, as you said, like we were the credits. I mean, we're it's almost 20 years since the financial crisis now.

发言人: Yeah. The finance always finds its way, finds a way to blow itself up. I mean, it's it's yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's not an opinion. And just look at history. I think what happens is you get you get, you know, we find good things and then you write them and you. Yeah. In every instance where something's gone wrong, you just keep pushing on something till you take it over the edge. Right. Finance is an industry where historically you can make a lot of money at it, right? You're playing with other people's money, you know, pennies and nickels coming off of other people's money. I'm just going to keep pushing. I'm going to keep pushing and keep pushing. When it finally falls, it falls hard. We haven't had that, you know, what's the new, new thing now? It's fintech and it's crypto and it's, you know, banking has been kind of throttled by regulation for ten years.

Tracy Alloway: Well, speaking of finance, always finding a way to blow itself up. Can we talk about, Silicon Valley Bank and 2023 because, you know, they managed to blow themselves up, for a variety of reasons. But one of them was they just had too many bonds, which is kind of, you know, an unusual one. What was that experience like for you?

Bill Demchak: First of all, Let's well, let's go back to Silicon Valley. I actually think they had a great institution. They had. Been saying that.

Joe Weisenthal: Who's been saying that they need terms of this plug on the silicon Valley bank or prospectors. Okay. Keep going.

Bill Demchak: No, it's just it it's it was a unique business model with a very loyal client base that they.

Tracy Alloway: Not that loyal in. The, I mean, look at, you know, if you're Diane, loyalty goes out the window. But,

Bill Demchak: they blew themselves up in something that was not at all of their basic business. Right? Interest rates are super low. They got as long by some calculations as, like, long term capital was back in the night. I mean, they were really, really levered and underestimated the negative convexity deposits. Right. You think you know on average through the cycle they're going to be there seven years ups. They're gone tomorrow. And so they just they blew themselves up on rates that had nothing to do with their core competence or what they were as a franchise. And it's unfortunate, but I mean, it was just it was rookie mistake. There was nothing. There's just a crazy position to be in.

Joe Weisenthal: How like how scary, you know, those those days afterwards. And then people started hunting for like any, any bank that had the word California in the name, like people were shorting it or people were they. Or, you know, you had headlines where, you know, the regional bank index, the regional bank.

Bill Demchak: And it's why I'm a national bank. We are not a regional bank, because the next time they put regional bank headlines in there, I don't want to be associated together. Now, we actually benefited during that. You know, we're we're a safe haven. And we actually gathered deposits and opened thousands of new accounts during that period of time. And then every day somebody would flash the regional bank index and we'd get blasted on our valuation, which is fine. It always yeah. You know, valuations are short term. It all came ripping back after that.

Tracy Alloway: So one of the issues that came up during the 2023 banking drama, I guess, is the discount window and the banks reluctance collectively to use it. And this is something that the fed has been trying to change. Right. And actually, do you remember in late 2022, there was a big spike in, tapping?

Bill Demchak: Yeah.

Tracy Alloway: Usage of the discount window. And it turned out that wasn't any of the banks that, like, ended up getting into trouble. It was Bill Bank down in Texas. It's a weird bank.

Bill Demchak: Yeah, it's a very weird bank.

Tracy Alloway: But anyway, regulators trying to get banks to use the discount window more, feel more comfortable with it. How do you feel about it?

Bill Demchak: But that's a great question. So before the financial crisis and before regulation, and LCR and long term debt proposals and all that other stuff, there was a very active fed funds market. So in a given day, the excess reserve a bank would hold deposited in its fed account was tiny, and we would trade fed funds around with each other. If I needed 2 billion, you'd give me 2 billion. Next day I might give you 2 billion, like big size fed fund positions. And that's how you balance your books at the end of every night. And then they come out and they say, hang on, we don't want you doing that anymore. There's an LCR. You have to have this much liquidity stuck aside. Instead of going into the fed funds market that gave rise to all these excess reserves, fed fund markets, basically the fed sets that rate, nobody trades on that rate. It's as dead as LIBOR. It's gone. I don't even know why they talk about it anymore. Now you have they basically said to you, don't use the discount window and hold all this cash. You just froze the economy because you stopped the circulation and of, of of capital transformation. Home loan banks step in because I have to hold all of these treasuries and mortgage securities. I can pledge them the home loan and they'll lend me money at a pretty good rate. So that's going to be my outlet. I'm going to go to a home loan and I'm just going to borrow. They're at a pretty good rate or I'm going to repo my treasuries that I hold. Silicon Valley happens. And they had home loan loans. They didn't have any discount window lines. Now the discount window will lend against treasuries and agencies pretty simply because it's basically settled electronically through effectively the fed wire system. If you're pledging loans, it's really hard to pledge. So if all I have is securities to pledge, I should just repo them or I'll give them to the home loan bank discount window will do more than that. But if I want to draw against my loan balance, I need to give them physical wet signature loan docs in a vault guarded, audited 24 hours a day like there's going to be a garden. I wet signatures stacked up so they know that when I draw against that loan, I actually have that loan because it doesn't settle fed wire like a bond does. This is a loan, right? I lend you money, you sign the thing, I put it in the door somewhere. Then you say, all right, let's pre-position these loans we spent PNC spent millions and millions and millions of dollars. So the vast majority of our CNI loans are now at the discount window, We don't borrow on them, but they're there. If we wanted to borrow under them. I got a call. It's gotten a little better, but you can't finish it. That I got to finish it, so it's gone a little better. But basically, like during Covid, you know, or post Covid, when nobody is coming in the office, you'd call, like the way you borrow from these companies, you call it Cleveland. There are there are fed to all this. And then they say, okay, you're in good shape, will allow Washington to allow you to use the discount window. And then they'll call Washington and then maybe like a day or so later, you can have money when nobody is coming in the office, nobody would answer the phone. I got to draw in the discount window. It just rings. Nobody's there. There's no system. It's not like I can type in and draw. It's not like I can do a fed funds trade through a broker and draw the money. It's it's unusable.

Joe Weisenthal: But now you're pre-positioned. Yeah. To borrow against loans. If you need to.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. We have enough liquidity on hand basically to cover anything that can happen because we positioned all of our collateral and the optimal spots.

Joe Weisenthal: Plus we just got you talk about physical spot when you say you because you're talking about like wet signature documents.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. So the only place you can borrow against CNI loans in effect is the discount window.

Joe Weisenthal: So okay. So okay. So they're going to go over there. That's what signature.

Bill Demchak: I can borrow against securities in the repo market at the home loan or the fed. So this is kind of the confusion that happened with where was stuff pledged with Silicon Valley. I have, you know, 50 billion of cash sitting on the Fed's excess reserve book. So that's instant liquidity. And I own a whole bunch of treasuries that I can sell if I had to. So you just you figure out how do I optimally earn whatever I can on these assets? I'm pre-positioning, but get them in the right place. So if I need liquidity in an emergency, I can get it. Silicon Valley did not do that, and the fed did not make it easy for them to do that.

Joe Weisenthal: And I'm just going to be clear when you say get them in the right place, you mean like a physical place?

Bill Demchak: Some of it's physical, like the loans, the wet signature ones. I literally think we take them down to, like, a vault and spin a dial, you know, with the big, the big crank, and they get locked in there. But, no securities by Cusip, you would say. Like this, Birch accepts, is pre-positioned with the fed. So I just know where they are. I know the balances. I know I can send them right over fed wire and draw on that. So it's it's it's that thing. Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: One thing I always wondered with the discount window. So part of the reluctance historically to tap it on the part of banks has been they're worried it'll get out into the market. Right. And there'll be rumors that they're tapping the market. How does that actually happen? I don't understand the leaks.

Bill Demchak: So in theory, because let's imagine somebody drew on the fed. So the discount window is regional fed. Let's assume somebody took down 100 billion from the or even 20 billion from the discount window through the Cleveland Fed kind of levy PNC. So the people can figure out who it is. So why are you doing that? And then I got a story and I got to explain it where I think this should go. So go back to the original where I said fed funds is dead. Nobody trades it. We ought to just trade the discount window. Right. The discount rate ought to be. I'm just lending and borrowing all day long. I can leave money excess reserves. Right. If I have money to give and I can borrow money discount window when I need money. And there ought to be like a five basis point. Better offer on that. You'd put more liquidity into the system here to grow the economy if you did that. You know, in a great way. But it's like they wiped out LIBOR. They wiped out fed funds through all their LCR from the, you know, the idea of the discount rate, just bet offer on the discount rate and then all of a sudden discount window becomes right way transaction. It's happening.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. The stigma goes away.

Bill Demchak: Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: So you have to forgive me because there's a lot going on in the world today. So I can't pay attention to everything. I have no idea where you stand on a yield bearing stablecoins, which I understand to be a big thing, debate in the sector. And I'm again, I have I've been paying attention to other things, but I see headlines about this pop up.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. So, stablecoin legislation, genius that comes out. They left a little loophole in there. They said no interest, but it kind of got run around by offering rewards, promos, same thing. Clarity act is what's being debated right now. They're trying to close that loophole. They being kind of banks and people around banks. Keeping the loophole open as crypto. You know, why not. If you can pay interest it's going to drive volume. I want to pay interest banks. I don't want you to pay interest because you're going to potentially suck deposits out of this system, and you're messing around with the capital system that's worked for 250 years. You sure you want to mess with it? You know, at the end of the day, I think of I think the following stablecoin has been built, launched, marketed as a payment mechanism. It's somehow. And by the way, I'm not sure it will, but, you know, it's going to make payments easier, faster, cheaper, whatever. Not as an investment vehicle. Right? An investment vehicle is a different animal and needs different regulation. So all a sudden like a stablecoin this by T-bills that pays you interest. That looks an awful lot like a money fund to me. That's fine. If it's a money fund, then regulate it like a money fund. Can't break the bank. You got to have this much liquidity on hand. You know, all the disclosure rules that go around with it. Then do what you want with it. You know, go ahead and pay people and money funds. I just think they're mixing things. And I think, you know, my, my uninformed worry is we're not done blowing up in crypto yet. Right. It's in fits and starts as you learn these things. Why do we need to start everything at once. Let's figure some stuff out. If it works and there's a logic to doing it then go ahead and do it later. I just I don't know that you need to do it all at once.

Joe Weisenthal: What's the rush? Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal: You know, we are coming up to, the Super Bowl. And when I think of Super Bowl, I always think of, the basil and game proposals and that ad that they ran in 2024. It, it was a real, wasn't it? It was a very effective marketing tool, at least for me. And we are expecting a proposal, of the end game. What's your sense of what might change between, you know, the original document or suggestions versus now?

Bill Demchak: I have no insight information on that. But, the original proposal that was written was in contempt of math. They basically they had a goal of raising capital, and then they used bad math to cause that outcome, which was a lot of what the outrage was over because if you start making up rules and capital allocation, you inadvertently cause risk to emerge in places that shouldn't. So I think the math is fixed. You know, the lawsuit on the stress test and the in the fact the models need to be public. So the math is going to be a lot better on what they measure. You've heard about indexing some scores to inflation and some of the boundaries. I don't know what they're going to do on operated risk capital. That's been a fight. I think they're going to give some credit on credit risk ratings that Europe gives that we don't. And my guess is there'll be something in there for everybody, and then everybody will collectively be disappointed about something. They're not going to give away the shot, but they're going to try to make it directionally correct and based on real math, instead of made up stuff.

Joe Weisenthal: I want to go back to something you said about the bank integration, and you actually gave a very rare, I would say, actual 2026 application of, generative AI implementation, where you mentioned that the person at the local bank branch can actually, like ask a question about the policies and learn so that that wasn't just a hypothetical. That's a real thing that's happening right now. Yeah. That's real. Can you talk? This is a theme that's been we've been talking about on the, podcast lately, which is, you know, not just AI per se or implementing AI. We're going to like implement AI, but like, you know, the changing relationship between a company and their software vendors and, you know, does AI change some of these relationships? Do you have leverage because there are certain, like niche functions that you could, like, build yourself? Can you talk a little bit about how you're seeing some of these things play out within your firm?

Bill Demchak: Yeah, this is fun because there's so much better information. Great about that. So start with the basics. In order to utilize a, you need clean data. Define data with a single source of truth. We've spent ten years doing that in a fortune. So, you know, as silly as that sounds, I think how many different places inside of a company you might have, you know, a checking account balance that's in morphed into the average checking account balance over seven days, or the median or the this or the that. And so when someone's trying to pull data to run a report or build a model, they don't even know what the real, they don't even know what they're pulling. So you got to get it clean at the base source and an index. Then you're going to know you have the capacity to build a model, whether it's large language or analytical, like large language models. There's open models out there you can just use, which is what we tend to do to build our document sorting. We're using it on our own data, our own documents. I don't need their data. And I don't need to retrain their model per se, other than running it on my own data, which is a much smaller compute factory, right? I don't have the whole internet down there and downloaded. I just got this thing right. And then once we train the model, running the model doesn't take a lot of compute training. The model takes a lot of compute. When we implement talk about AI, some of it's the the fancy object thing. I'm going to implement Copilot. And now people can write emails for me. Everybody knows when copilot wrote my email because it's way too polite and the punctuation is correct. Does that make us any money? Probably not, you know, but it's cool. And yeah, that's so when you hear most people say no reason, I they just plugged in copilot and paid somebody 20 million bucks a year for licenses where it starts to make a difference is when it can answer questions in a hurry for our employees or our clients, and where it can automate process the same way. We've been on this automation journey for 20 years now, right? Starting with internet and then kind of microservices and applications. AI is just the next stage of that. You know, we've got we over the last ten years probably get 30 points of productivity efficiency in our operating environments, really last seven years, actually, AI is going to give us another 30 and it's going to come through time. But it's think of it as a automation. All it is is even when people talk about AI, they'll say, oh, you know, send an email. It's not an AI model, it's just a decision tree. You know, it's automating a script in an answer, moving data in a way where somebody doesn't have to swivel, you know, pretty basic stuff.

Joe Weisenthal: What about on underwriting? Would you use AI to automate that particular process?

Bill Demchak: It's actually not legally allowed today. So the there's. I mean, it's truth in lending or something, you know, 1 or 1 of these laws where if I tell you, you know, you applied for your credit card, they just kept my rates at 10%. So I said, no, I've got to give you the three reasons you know, of why I said no. With an AI model, we look at a thousand variables, and the weight of each of those variables is dependent upon their interaction and your particular profile. So the weight of rent might be very heavy for one person and not for another. Based on the profile, I can't give you three reasons. The model told me no.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, the model told me yes.

Bill Demchak: So what ends up happening today in credit decisions? This is crazy. But it works is we'll set with our normal criteria this like this debt to income, you know, whatever else you look at, we'll say yes or no. And then if we tell, you know, we use AI to try to tell you. Yes. Because I can still use my original excuses. No, but if I turn, you say yes after the fact. You're not mad at me. So it's. It's crazy. But the point is that, legally speaking, if you say no, you have to be able to articulate a reason.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah.

Bill Demchak: So what ends up happening is everybody sets this bar way too high. This is the one of these silly rules that needs to be, looked at. I mean, we we do use. It's not so much AI. There's a lot of decision tree models on automation that help with underwriting. But it's not necessarily a machine learning application.

Tracy Alloway: Tracing. I mean, I find I get this idea of, like, AI as another form of workflow automation. Very intuitive.

Joe Weisenthal: Yes. Tracy and I used to, publish transcripts of the podcast, but it was a very labor intensive, labor intensive process to, like, clean it up, etc.. And so I thought, like I was going to be the panacea. It's like clean this text. It just when we were doing it, it wasn't there yet. It was like creating fake. It was creating sentences that weren't there. But I understand this intuition that I can then be like trained on a repeatable process right now. And again, the things that we call I would do days, large language models, those workflow automations like are they are there certain workflow automations that today workflow processes that you could say we've been able to automate them in a way we couldn't have five years ago?

Bill Demchak: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But let me let me just give you kind of some scope and some numbers and what's actually happening. And I we have a pretty clean tech stack. So maybe we're a little further ahead at this than, than some. But we have we focused on a billion, four of addressable spend inside of our care centers, in our operating environments. This is just solving problems for customers, moving all that stuff. A billion for we spend we've come up with a 171 different ways to use AI in reducing that spend and the addressable piece of the billion for, we think probably 40% of it. Of the 171 use cases, we prioritize, five that are live. And so what is you know, what is one of those look like, for example?

Bill Demchak: So imagine, inside of our wealth business, you know, we got a bunch of trust lawyers. So my grandfather, it's actually with PNC. My grandfather created this small little trust skip generations and it's written it's beautiful. It's for handwritten on, like three pages. Maybe it was my great grandfather. Some lawyer every month has to look at that thing and say, you know, this qualifies or doesn't or we're going to do this distribution. All of those things are manual. Now just read them into the document writer and all of the things that are mechanical outcomes from those millions of pages of trust documents are right in front of you. Right. Payment on this date here. The beneficiaries, it just it makes it real simple. So document reading expression of what's in documents and the basic stuff. You know no I don't have to just go and search and find and human error. That that stuff will make a difference. I worry with too much focus on the cool, fun toy. ChatGPT. I mean, this is, you know, it's a new Google search. It's called. Give me the answer that that isn't going to make the world better if that's all it's used for.

Tracy Alloway: How did you get a clean tech stack? Because this is something that also goes hand in hand with bank consolidation. You always hear that, you know, banks end up with this tangled mess of technological systems, maybe some that include, cobble or like old languages and things like that.

Joe Weisenthal: COBOL, I can never. Remember can't even. Yeah.

Bill Demchak: You weren't even born yet when we were programing and COBOL.

Joe Weisenthal: So how do you so how do. You manage so.

Bill Demchak: Honest answer right in the middle of the financial crisis. Right. We merged with National City under duress from both firms. Kind of a regulatory wedding. Neither of us had the capacity to run a larger firm. I mean, I distinctly remember, you know, talking to the combined organization, we have to rethink how we run something you can't manage by walking around anymore. And neither tech stack could survive on its own. And so we saved less money than we said we would in the announcement. Or actually, we saved what we said we would save. But quietly, we reinvested 2 billion bucks a year for ten years.

Joe Weisenthal: Wow.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. So literally all new. We went from single server stack Apple, you know, so this computer runs that application and each computer is different because whoever the application owner was went to dinner with Dell that day or HP the next day. Yeah, we had 11 data centers. None of it was in a virtual environment. So building our own, first cloud environment and then secondly, writing everything in cloud language in a microservice application. So it's cloud native. That's forever. But we spent a ton of dough and just have invested, invested, invested, and got to a place where our tech stack is as modern as any fintech you'll find out there.

Joe Weisenthal: All right, build them. This is fun. This is a lot of fun. Thank you so much for taking the time. We had a lot.

Bill Demchak: Thank you for being interested.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, that was great. That was great. Really appreciate you coming on.

Bill Demchak: Yeah. Good to be here.

Tracy Alloway: Thank you Tracy I really enjoyed that conversation. There was I learned a lot about banking.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. Conversation. We had a lot in that. But I, I just want to keep going. There are so many interesting angles. Bill actually answer the questions. Which is cannot be said for every seat. You know, I would say most of our guests are very good at answering questions. Not every CEO is great at always answering questions. But I was like, oh, I'm like learning something with each one of these things. Let's keep. Going.

Tracy Alloway: Also, genuinely, he seemed to have a good handle on like the granular practical aspects. I know running a bank. So I was really interested to hear how they redesigned their tech.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. After the financial crisis, I guess they got a head start on everyone else. And then also the pre-positioning of collateral at the discount window, I knew that the fed had been encouraging banks to do it. I did not realize that you had to send the actual mortgage docs. If you borrow against those.

Tracy Alloway: It is crazy how much is not just done automatically, electronically. Right?

Joe Weisenthal: And here was I didn't ask it, but I was going to ask does blockchain solve this question? But the idea that like, okay, all of these things really are electronic ish, although there's clearly this physical component, but the idea that here is something which is theoretically monetizable, which has liquid value is a liquid instrument. But because of the way that the system is structured cannot actually be liquidated or turned into liquid assets immediately if it had were not pre-positioned. It's sort of a that actually does still seem a little bit wild to me that that is the case.

Tracy Alloway: I always thought that mortgage assignations were like one use case for blockchain, right?

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, yeah. You could reasonably see blockchain, you know, helping out with that problem versus, I don't know, tracking the origins of lettuce. And it's like it always seemed kind of ridiculous.

Tracy Alloway: Well it seems like one of these things which is in banking and again is like integrated databases. So there's like a be a central bank database. There will be a home loan bank database and the regional bank and the bank database. Right. And the question is like, why can't they just all.

Joe Weisenthal: Talk to. Each other.

Tracy Alloway: See the relevant parts of the database. Right. And I suppose that's easier said than done.

Joe Weisenthal: I really like hearing him talk to you about practical applications of AI.

Tracy Alloway: Yeah. Which again, maybe feels a little different than some of our conversations last year, or it feels like now there's more articulated examples of being, of this as a sort of labor saving or time saving technology. So that's another thing I think we have to pay more attention to in 2026.

Joe Weisenthal: Okay. Shall we leave it there?

Tracy Alloway: Yeah, let's leave it there.

Joe Weisenthal: All right. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me @tracyalloway

Tracy Alloway: And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me @thestalwart

Joe Weisenthal: Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez, @carmenarmen, Dashiel Bennett @dashbot and Cale Brooks @calebrooks And if you want more Odd Lots content, then you should definitely check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at bloomberg.com/oddlots And you can chat about all of these topics 24 seven with fellow listeners in our discord: discord.gg/oddlots. And if you enjoyed this conversation then please like the video or leave a comment. Or better yet, subscribe! Thanks for watching.