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Keynote Address: Kenneth Rogoff

Harvard University economics professor Kenneth Rogoff's Monday night keynote speech, recounting the economic and political conditions that led to current relatively high inflation rates, touched on the importance of the political economy. He concluded that the Fed could find inflation and market interest rates once again near zero if secular stagnation returns.

Transcript

Sheila Tschinkel: Good evening. After a great morning session on digital currencies and their potential systemic risk, I will not ask if the lender of last resort is here. [laughter] Instead, I will tell you it is great to see that a conference I began with Curt Hunter and Larry Wall about 30 years ago has survived and even grown. When I joined the Atlanta Fed as its research director, it seemed that the Fed could be doing more financial market research. Now, we don't have to worry about this at all. It's all over the place.

It's also great that this conference is an annual event, and one that has expanded its focus to include innovations and institutional change that keeps coming, and coming, and coming, and doesn't stop. After hearing an excellent discussion of digital currencies and their implications for the payments systems, I think we can agree with Chuck Kahn that the pipes used for payments flows are indeed more important than the nature of the underlying services or transactions. In a similar vein, Paul Kupiec raised issues of systemic risk in his discussion. He reminded us that congressional meddling can add to risk, especially at a time when the role of banks is becoming less clear.

Now, let me turn to someone who will surely have some answers and encourage more debate. Ken Rogoff, as you know, first in a JPE [Journal of Political Economy] article in 1985, argued how important it was to keep a central bank independent when it comes to issues of monetary policy and some of the issues that we discuss now. You have a short biography of him in your conference materials, and I'm sure you're familiar with the many other papers that he's written, so there will not be a shortage of questions for him.

Giving a talk on finance after a plentiful cocktail reception and before dinner is a tough assignment but let me assure you that with Ken Rogoff this time is different. [laughter] I turn to you, then... [laughter] That was your cue!

Kenneth Rogoff: My wife says I'm very slow on the uptake. No, no, she's right. Anyway, it's an incredible pleasure to be here. It's just a pleasure to be anywhere. I've hardly gone to any conferences. Coming down from Massachusetts, when I got off the plane, I realized the two masks that I had packed were two too many, so it's quite different.

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was ... I don't know how inebriated you are, but I wanted to talk about a serious topic, which is my feeling that in a lot of, not just the political debate and the policy debate, but actually in the academic literature, the importance of political economy, credibility, has just been lost. It just gets paid lip service. It's become very second order. You really don't see it in many papers. My colleague, the late Alberto Alesina, wrote many pioneering papers in this area. I'm going to argue that actually it's coming to the fore again. I'm going to talk about the United States mainly, but I actually think these issues apply everywhere, but because of institutional, political, historical, you have to give something some context.

With that introduction, let me launch into it. I have to apologize that I never use notes when I speak, but because I was told they would transcribe my remarks word for word ... I'm still not going to exactly read my notes, but if you've ever experienced this it's very painful, if you were just winging it, to then look at the transcription and see how it read. So, forgive me for this. [laughter]

The sharp, post-pandemic rise in the United States' inflation is an example of the overt but sometimes not so obvious political economy factors that can have a profound effect on policy. As you are well aware, there's a growing chorus of commentators that have taken the view that the spike we've had in inflation—we don't know where it's going—is a result of a profound failure in monetary policy.

The April 23 edition of The Economist magazine features "The Fed That Failed." I think some of you came from what was no doubt a very insightful Hoover conference with "How Did the Fed Get So Far Behind?" or some title like that. In this view, an inflation-targeting central bank should have realized far sooner than it did that by early 2021 the post-pandemic recovery was well underway, the economy was overstimulated by one too many, or maybe even two too many, stimulus packages, and the $1.7 trillion stimulus package in March 2021, coming on top of several other rounds, made inflation inevitable.

Instead, even as inflation appeared, the Fed kept insisting that it was driven by transitory supply shortages and would likely recede. Of course, the 2022 war in Ukraine, which drove up energy and food prices, only added fuel to the fire. Importantly, distracted by pressures to address long-term environmental concerns and social justice for which it lacks the political legitimacy of an elected body and, arguably, really doesn't have the appropriate tools, the Fed was asleep at the wheel. Now it faces a big challenge of bringing inflation down without having a major recession.

While I think there are absolutely some elements of the truth, this simplistic view ignores some fundamental political economy pressures on the US central bank. I think it also denies the massive uncertainty in the economics profession about the long-term trajectory of neutral interest rates, as well as the determinants of inflation. I have to tell you, we had a visiting graduate student from Sweden a few years ago. He was just brilliant, fantastic, wrote great papers. He comes into my office, and he says, "I have to throw my hands up when it comes to thinking about inflation at this point. If you told me it was caused by the Fed doing a rain dance, or angels dancing on a pin, I'm going to believe you as much as anything."

It's not that far off of where the profession was. There was a lot of uncertainty. We can come back to other things. I'd also say another issue, coming from the profession, was that the researchers, and there was a legitimate case, argued for a much larger role for countercyclical fiscal policy, particularly at the zero bound, without giving clear guidelines as to how it might be calibrated, not to mention in our very political environment.

Let me give an alternative perspective. In 2019, inflation seemed to have been conquered worldwide. I gave a paper at Jackson Hole in 2003, pointing out that in 1992 we had 44 countries that had inflation more than 40 percent. Once you got to 2015, it had just been eradicated except for Venezuela and Argentina. There were less than a handful of countries experiencing that. You can't just have a single country explanation. I think, very importantly, central banks were convinced they knew how to fight high inflation but were far less sure how to fight excessively low inflation, particularly given the collapse of equilibrium real interest rates.

As policy rates sat longer and longer at the zero bound, my interpretation of what markets thought was that the shadow Fed interest rate was really quite negative, and therefore it wasn't going to get raised above zero for a very long time. It's really quite remarkable how much long-term interest rates collapsed around the world. You're all familiar with this.

With conventional monetary policy stymied and the effectiveness of alternative monetary instruments fading sharply over time, central banks came under two types of pressure. The first, which we've already acknowledged, is if you're not doing your normal job you should spend more time addressing other issues, and I've mentioned the environment and social justice, where arguably they lack both the instruments and really the political legitimacy to take the lead in those areas.

The second pressure was less subtle. If the risk of high inflation is dead or deeply dormant, and short-term interest rates are zero, why not have the central bank cede a much larger share of stabilization policy to fiscal policy? Now, obviously, when there's a pandemic, or if there's an earthquake in California, nobody thinks monetary policy is the sole answer to that even though I've seen some papers saying, "It's just amazing; we've looked at this, and monetary policy is not the right answer to this." [laughter] Not much of an epiphany, but I think it was really talking about normal stabilization policy, that we should rebalance them, and that the Fed should play a supporting role. Of course, modern monetary policy is an extreme caricature of this viewpoint. Actually, I think if you look at the overwhelming amount of articles in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and many other places, they point in this direction.

Now, I'm going to come later to things I think the Fed got wrong in its 2019 policy review, but to its great credit, it did one thing right. The academics that it chose to present papers—aside from, I think, painting an overly rosy view of the Fed's alternative monetary instruments. One of the authors of a great paper, "50 Shades of Quantitative Easing," about how there's quite a bias towards featuring research which gives you the results you want—tried to confront this. You all know the framework, which is they tried to put in this very asymmetric framework we'll come back to.

Let's fast forward to the pandemic. Actually, let's not quite fast forward to the pandemic. If we're going to say the Fed always does everything wrong, let's go through the Trump years. I don't want to take any political view on this, but maintaining your independence during this period of assault on institutions was kind of impressive, so they did a good job. Of course, when the pandemic hit, the Fed did things that were very creative. Had they not worked out they would have been castigated for it. I actually know of people in this room who had papers pointing out that it might be very difficult to back out of this very easy "let's guarantee everything" policy, and we'd have a whole bunch of defaults, and they took a lot of risk. There's no question that with 2020 hindsight it's now clear that a Fed that was omniscient should have started gently hiking interest rates by mid-year.

I just want to make one other analogy that at least means something to me. When I was a young, rapidly improving chess player, I would see the games of the best players in the world, and an annotation of them. I'd see how on move 27 they made a mistake that I could see. I could beat them. "Goodness; I can beat them!" Then, when I got to play them, I realized you have to get to move 27. [laughter] If you're facing one problem after another, it's not easy.

Let's look at the reality of the intellectual and political pressures they faced. The political side, I think, is clear, at least to me. In January '21, the progressives had swept into Washington believing that they had a mandate for change. Although the main idea of financing the programs was actually to radically increase taxes on upper-income Americans—and had that happened, I think things would have been very different—it was believed that if you couldn't overcome the entrenched interests, deficit finance was a strong and reasonable alternative. It had been very successful during the pandemic. There were ultra-low real interest rates, and frankly, very lax attitudes in both parties towards deficits.

Even aside from modern monetary theory, the academic literature, I would say increasingly if not quite unanimously, argued for greater use of debt finance given ultra-low real interest rates. Of course, Olivier Blanchard wrote a very influential American Economic Association address where he argued that growth rates were likely to exceed interest rates for a very long time, so debt could be much higher without ever having to raise taxes or ever having to inflate it down. I'm going to come back to it, but maybe needs to be said twice: If you just tell politicians, "You can spend a lot more" without saying, "Oh, I meant an extra 1 percent every year for 20 years as opposed to 20 percent this year, and another 20 percent next year," it's a very different thing.

When the March 2021 stimulus bill came along, what should the Federal Reserve have done? I must say, I admire my colleague Larry Summers tremendously, not simply for his prescience of what the risks were—you can read in many places why he thought it would happen—but also for the courage, because the progressives didn't want him listened to and wanted to shut out that viewpoint. There were a few that warned of inflation for sure, but if you look in the academic literature there was a lot of debate about it. The Phillips curve didn't seem to work anymore. I seemed to see a new paper on this every week that there's even less effect than you think. The uncertainty over the neutral interest rate is just vast; I mentioned that.

That made it very difficult to assess how much monetary stimulus was in the system. Given that, even though modern monetary theory seemed wacko to mainstream academics, given the very low inflation and the legitimate concerns about inequality and growth, didn't that point of view—that's extreme, but the general point of view, that you should really run the economy hot, run fiscal policy hot—didn't it deserve a chance to implement that policy without the Fed raising interest rates to get in the way? Isn't that an experiment we needed to see?

I think you can at least say the political system demanded it, but it wasn't just that. I think the academic profession is not being honest. If you did a vote, and I mean really broadly in the academic profession, not of three people in Chicago. [laughter]. If you did a vote of what was going to happen, it would have been pretty sanguine of what they thought. People would have pointed to the Japanese experience—where they've done helicopter money. They've done everything. They bought the entire debt. They bought a chunk of the stock market. They've done everything—that it might not happen.

It wasn't just a matter of the political pressure. Certainly, I will mention the fact that if there's too much demand you have to have inflation. That's not exactly true in an open economy. If there was too much demand, we could have had a big current account deficit, which if you don't think debt's a problem, I guess, it wouldn't have bothered anybody. It isn't quite obvious, but the point is that if there's too much demand you're going to get too much inflation.

I think if the Fed had tightened, even by a quarter percent, and something went wrong—which, any forecast was saying. Look at what the IMF [International Monetary Fund], or the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development], or neutral forecasters were saying. They were saying there are a lot of risks—the Fed would own it, the administration would make sure the Fed owned it, and the same people who are castigating the Fed, not all of them, but some of them, would say, "Well, you waited too long and you raised the interest rates, and you caused a recession." It's not an easy position to be in.

Now, there are also blunter factors that are at play. In the first year in office, President Biden would be able to appoint several members of the Federal Reserve, not least including the chair, whose term was set to expire. I was very proud to have been a Federal Reserve economist when Paul Volcker was chair, and he's the one who put this in place. Of course, this doesn't give the President the ability to dismantle the strong culture of independence of the Fed, but it has an effect. Had the Fed followed the Monday morning quarterbacking consensus advice that it should have been raising interest rates, even if nothing had happened, it's my view, and I think it's pretty reasonable, that the incumbent chair would not have been reappointed. Not only that, the market would have interpreted that as meaning policy is going to be even more dovish than we thought it was going to be. Interest rates wouldn't have responded. I think it's a difficult situation.

I'd also say that we're in a very different position, in terms of central bank independence, than when I wrote my 1985 paper, when no central banks except for the Bundesbank, the Fed, and the Central Bank of Thailand claimed to have been independent. No one was independent at that time. It was sort of a radical idea, and the Fed was an example. Governments have learned how to chip into that. Just the way the central bankers all go to the BIS and exchange ideas and listen to each other, including how they establish independence, I won't necessarily say the finance ministers at the G7 and the G20 talked to each other—"How did you nail your central bank [laughter] when they weren't doing what you wanted them to?"—but they look at each other's ideas, and it's certainly been chipped away at.

We're in a situation now where if you look at the academic consensus as of 2019, fiscal policy certainly should play a role. Thinking about central bank independence, what should the policy rule, Taylor rule, inflation targeting...what should it be in an environment where there are two agents, coequal, trying to manage the economy, theoretically with the same objectives? I think it's a difficult question.

I want to cut into the idea that fiscal policy is a great technocratic, independent tool. If you read the AER [American Economic Review], and the JEP [Journal of Economic Perspectives], I'm not sure if we had one in the QJ [Quarterly Journal of Economics], there were all these articles where, well, you draw an IS-LM [investment savings-liquidity preference-money supply], and you shift the IS with the fiscal policy, and you shift the LM with the monetary policy...kind of looks the same, but yes, there are some differences and lags. They're just completely oblivious to the political economy around fiscal policy. Of course, if you have a pandemic and you get complete consensus, it's one thing, but normally it's not. I mentioned Alberto Alesina. He and Guido Tabellini, and also Torsten Persson and Lars Svensson, had these nice papers 30 years ago, back when political economy was a topic, pointing out that in their view there was a deficit bias. I'm going to simplify it, but basically when the Democrats are in office, they want to spend a lot and they're willing to eat into the debt to do that. When the Republicans are in office, they want to cut taxes a lot, maybe raise military spending, and they're willing to eat into the debt to do that.

When you look at the March 2021 package, clearly this is not brain surgery but is something very hard to do, the Fed has managed to achieve something very, very different. On a technical point, if you can forgive me for that, if you read what I think is a really nice paper, the [Lawrence] Christiano, [Martin] Eichenbaum, [Sergio] Rebelo 2011 JPE paper, they sort of make the claim, "Well, the right thing to do is you run fiscal policy very strongly until you lift off from the zero bound, and then you can start thinking about monetary policy." They say that in a very nuanced way I won't go into. You can find many people, but Paul Krugman 1,000 times, saying, "You should run fiscal policy full steam until you get off the zero bound, and then we'll talk. Until then, just run fiscal policy." The trouble is, if you go into the Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Rebelo model, fiscal policy is this thing you're dripping out, and you can kind of turn off the tap if it's credible. But that's not how fiscal policy works. You're doing it in these big chunks and making these long-term commitments. You can't say, "We're off the zero bound. I'm sorry, your food stamps are cut off." It's clearly something very different, and I don't think it's going to be very easy to make fiscal policy technocratic. There are fiscal councils, if you're aware of this, and what other countries have tried, but it's been very difficult. We have the Congressional Budget Office, and the simple fact is there are very sharp divisions between the parties. Any kind of framework you tried to put into place, I can tell you after 2024 that it would be blown up. It's the same in most other countries, so I think it's very important for monetary policy to retain a very central role in stabilization policy.

There is a question of what you can do, because at the zero bound you can sell your alternative policy instruments all you like, but I think the fact is that certainly pure quantitative easing—where you're buying government debts, just maturity transformation, the Treasury can do it without the Fed—is really smoke and mirrors. You can buy housing, you can buy the stock market, and that's effective to a point. It's not as powerful as interest rate policy, and there are certainly lots of problems with it.

Let me conclude with what will provoke you; it's intended to. I don't know where we're going to land at the end of the pandemic. Ukraine, COVID in China, deglobalization, and it just might be that real interest rates, which dropped precipitously after the financial crisis, what we call "secular stagnation" is mostly what happened after 2008, where the real rates dropped 2 percent. Maybe it will reverse itself at some point for reasons I don't necessarily predict or understand, but if it doesn't we will settle back to this same situation where we're back near the zero bound, or just a small downturn away from the zero bound, and what to do. I've argued for a very long time—it was discussed somewhat dismissively this morning, which is fine—but I've advocated for a long time, you need to use the tools that were put in place, the institutional legal tax changes, to implement effective negative interest rates. I'm stunned at the profession that there's just nothing about this. You actually have some papers on negative interest rates, but they're looking at the existing experience where it's not open ended. If you can only go to -1 percent, obviously the effects of going from -0.75 to -1 are very different than if you're not at the zero bound.

A lot of the analysis and the objections people put out are just really silly. I don't know what to say. The papers on the European experience show that the pass-through for large depositors is pretty big, even with the current system. If you can prevent people from arbitraging into cash, then the whole issue about profitability of banks, and it was mentioned this morning, the wedge between what banks can charge and what they're paying their customers ceases to be such an obvious theoretical problem.

As far as financial inclusion, my 2016 book explains how you can basically exempt 99 percent of the public from this. You don't care about what someone with $20,000 is doing. You care about what someone like a hedge fund, a pension fund, an insurance fund, with billions of dollars is doing that slight bleeding wouldn't matter. I hope if there's another review of policy, which I heard there was going to be, but not a lot of talk about it, that we'll consider negative interest rates, which were taken off the table for political reasons. I was a speaker there, but really not supposed to talk about it that much. I regret that. I think I just should have said, "Well, I was supposed to talk about this paper, but I'm not going to," and I regret that. I hope it will be taken more seriously. I mean, obviously, the Fed's not necessarily where you want to start with an experiment like this, just like with digital currencies. But I feel if we get back to these very negative real interest rates that seem to be the equilibrium, if you want to have independence, you want to have a very clear-cut role for the central bank. You don't want to have the central bank be, frankly, primarily an agent of fiscal policy. You need to restore this instrument. Anyway, thank you, and I'll stop here.

Tschinkel: Thank you. I'm sure you all have questions, but they're not showing up here.

Rogoff: Sounds like my class. [laughter]

Tschinkel: Yes, right. So, how would you restore the possibilities of negative interest rates? [to someone off-camera] What am I supposed to do?

Rogoff: Let me answer that really quickly while you're working on the technology. There are really two ways, but you don't need to do anything with cash. You can have a dual exchange rate system, basically. This idea has been batted around for a long time, and I actually traced it back to Kublai Khan in my book. Obviously, as cash becomes marginalized, it becomes much easier to deal with.

Tschinkel: Okay, I see questions now. Sorry. Well, let me ask an easy one: "What do you think is the right degree of central bank independence? Is it possible for any central bank to be both accountable, but still be appropriately independent in the political environment?"

Rogoff: There are whole, Talmudic-sized books written about this, and I'm not sure I can glibly say what it is. I think a thing central banks have done very, very well is preserve technocratic expertise and convince people that that matters. I think inflation targeting, which is also in my 1985 paper, is an instrument for saying, "We have to do it because of this."

It's really even much broader than that. I hadn't really imagined back then how many different uses there would be of this technocratic expertise. On the other hand, just as the Federal Reserve shouldn't be setting the goals for the environment, it shouldn't be trying to decide what the inflation rate target should be over the very long run. The government should have some say in that. That was an incautious comment, but I still said it. Of course, on the regulatory side of the Fed, the Fed's a player in things, and again it's technocratic expertise.

Tschinkel: Four votes on the next one: "In 2016 October, it was allowed that government money market funds are staying at par and that means mathematically you cannot go negative. So why write papers about negative rates?"

Rogoff: I mean, you don't have to enforce that they sell at par.

Tschinkel: Right, I know you don't.

Rogoff: Change it.

Tschinkel: You can change, but you have to change that when you introduce it.

"When economics was political economy, it was common to refer to MV=PT [M=money supply, V=velocity of circulation, P=price level, and T=transactions]. As early as April 2020, it was clear M was going up a lot and T was going down, and higher P should have been the best case or V would collapse."

Rogoff: I'm actually going to try to take this question in maybe a different direction. Part of the thing is, there were a lot of people in 2010 and 2011 saying, "Inflation is going to go through the ceiling because you're printing so much money." Of course, the thing that's wrong with that is that at the zero bound reserves are pretty much a perfect substitute for Treasury bills. In fact, they often pay a little bit more than Treasury bills. So at the zero bound, it's just a form of maturity transformation, and that's why it didn't.

That was very relevant to why, if the Fed's looking out, is there going to be inflation after the pandemic? It hadn't happened in all that time. It would be fairly brave going out there and raising interest rates a quarter point. Look what happened to Jean-Claude Trichet, [former governor of the Bank of France]. If any of you remember that one at the end of 2010, the beginning of 2011. Concerned about things that didn't ultimately happen, they raised interest rates 25 basis points twice. He's considered the devil, you know, for doing this. I sincerely doubt the European debt crisis was made way worse by that. It was, I think, a marginal effect.

Tschinkel: "What are the lessons that we can learn from the Japanese experience?"

Rogoff: One thing I would point out is it's not a recipe for growth. [laughter] The idea that, and there are people who debate this, if you just borrow and borrow and borrow, and spend and spend and spend, build bridges to nowhere you're going to grow, and it's not. I think it's also remarkable how durable their "zero" inflation rate has been. I think they're a really good case for using negative interest rates, but not coming to a theater near you. I suspect it will happen in some smaller countries. When we have a recession in Japan, they may think about it. Again, the pandemic's a completely different situation. It's a natural disaster.

Tschinkel: "Do you subscribe to the theory that one of the key reasons the Fed went big and stayed accommodative so long in response to the pandemic is that their response to the 2008 crisis was too tepid?"

Rogoff: Well, if you look at fiscal policy, we'd definitely say that. I actually do think the Fed's response in 2008 and 2009 was too tepid. They stuck by inflation targeting too long, but that's a technical point next to the fiscal policy, for sure, although the pandemic is a very different crisis than the financial crisis. In some sense, part of the problem is the Fed and the fiscal authorities were fighting the last war, and it wasn't exactly the same. It was also a supply shock.

Tschinkel: We have a lot of questions that I can't say have high votes, but there are a lot of different questions, so let me just ask a few this way. "Should the Fed modify its 2 percent inflation target, and if so, what should the target be?" And, "should it be a headline measure, or a core measure," or just sort of that general question of "what to use if you're going to target inflation?"

Rogoff: If you just absolutely take negative interest rates permanently off the table, and I mean permanently, then it's not crazy to think about raising the inflation target. It's not as good, because it doesn't buy you as much room. I think something we often don't say about raising the inflation target is, presumably, eventually, prices and wages would adjust more often. In that case, monetary policy is less effective because it ultimately operates that as a central channel.

If they're adjusting more often, you need to cut the interest rate more than you would otherwise. That's why you raise the inflation target, so you'd have more room to cut. It's not crazy. I think the big problem with it is if you told everybody that 2 percent is nirvana forever, and then suddenly you say, "Just kidding, it was 3 percent," and I think there was a thesis out of NYU recently saying 5 percent, it's very hard to anchor expectations again.

Tschinkel: Like it can all be measured exactly, too.

Rogoff: Yes.

Tschinkel: "What do you think is the right degree of central bank independence? Is it possible for a central bank to be both accountable, and still appropriately and strongly independent?"

Rogoff: Yes. You'd need a framework for defining that. We sort of covered that before, and I feel there's been a lot written on that. They're independent, but in what sense are they independent? I think that depends on the country. Also, there are different frameworks, but coming to the United States there's a question about whether the system we have for reappointing the Fed chair is actually an ideal one. Is there a better way of doing that?

Tschinkel: Yes. And, the curse of cash: "You pointed to the need to get rid of physical currencies to help reduce tax evasion and crime. Does a central bank digital currency solve that easily?"

Rogoff: First of all, my 2016 book was about a less-cash society, not a cashless society. [laughter] It was about regulating cash differently.

Tschinkel: You're right. I'm just reading the...

Rogoff: No, no, no.

Tschinkel: I understand that.

Rogoff: A central bank digital currency. We had a great session on that this morning, and there were some excellent presentations that made a lot of good points. I was going to talk about it, but I was going on too long. If you're Kazakhstan, having a central bank digital currency that gets you in the game, and you can use it for different things, and maybe it will get used in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, it's great. It's a great gig. If you're the United States, and you kind of rule, it's less obvious why you would jump into that game so quickly. That point was, I think, made very forcefully this morning. Although I think we'll eventually get to something; if we look at the history of any kind of currency, coins, paper currency, the private sector always innovates, and everywhere, every place, the government eventually regulates, and then appropriates. I promise that's coming here, but I can't give you a time frame.

Tschinkel: Well, I think that that's a perfect way to close this off. The change is coming. We don't know exactly when, we don't know exactly how, but it's coming. Thank you very much, and let's all enjoy dinner.