Announcer - McCuiston, talking about things that matter with people who care.  Production of McCuiston is made possible in part by individual viewers,  supporters of the Foundation for Responsible Television, the Hatton W.  Sumner's Foundation for the Study of Teaching and Self-Government, the  Meadows Foundation serving the people of Dallas, Collin County Business  Press, locally relevant, personally profitable, and Sundown Ranch, one sundown at a time.  

Dennis McCuiston - Well, I'm Dennis McCuiston, and we're here in Las Vegas  at Freedom Fest, July 2009. It's a conference getting together a lot of incredible  people, including the two people that I have on the program today. We're going  

to talk about the cause of the financial crisis. Is capitalism that cause, or is  capitalism the solution to these problems? And joining me here, as he did last  year, is Steve Forbes. Steve, welcome back to the program.  

Steve Forbes - Good to be with you, Dennis. Thank you.  

Dennis McCuiston - As most of you know, Steve Forbes is the editor in chief of  Forbes magazine. He's also the CEO of Forbes, and he's got a new book out,  which I haven't read yet, called "Power, Ambition, Glory: The Stunning Parallels  Between Great Leaders of the Ancient World and Today and the Lessons You  Can Learn. So, Steve, I'm looking forward to reading this book about leadership. Thank you. And then, also joining me is Tom Woods, and Tom Woods is the  author of this book, which I have read, Tom. And I must say, it's called Meltdown: A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked,  and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Nothing controversial about  this at all, Tom, and I'm sure you've been let's just say in great demand to talk  about this subject.  

Tom Woods - Well, simply because people, I think, are tired of the conventional  wisdom, and I've got a little bit of an alternative.  

Dennis McCuiston - It's certainly unconventional, and you make a great case for what you do in Europe, the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Yes, and so we  appreciate your joining us here as well. My pleasure. Now, Steve, let me let me  start with this. Now, we it's hard to turn on a television without somebody saying  we have a whole breakdown here in free market capitalism, and that's what  caused the problem. Is that true?  

Steve Forbes - Well, it's like a guy shooting somebody and then blaming the  victim for getting shot. Most of the great economic crises, including this one, are  caused by huge government errors. In this case, the Federal Reserve printing 

too much money, keeping money artificially cheap. If the Fed hadn't turned out  so much liquidity, there's no way he could have had a bubble of this size. Add to  that to the mix: Freddie and Fannie, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, underwriting  hundreds of billions of dollars of junk mortgages. Then, when the crisis hit,  things like market-to-market accounting, regulatory mistakes turned a flood into  a tsunami. And then, of course, they blame the victim. In this case, it's amazing,  as you know, Dennis, in the private sector. If you make a mistake, you fail. You  pay a price for it. With government, when they make a mistake, they get bigger  and more powerful. Absolutely perverse. Opposite of capitalism.  

Dennis McCuiston - I see. Well, now look, Steve. I hear that, and I have some  sympathy for it. But you're you're in New York all the time, and I've read in  addition to this meltdown book, a little book called Chain of Blame, which is an  interesting book, and it talks about all the mortgage companies, the subprime  mortgage companies in Orange County, California, and they couldn't have done  all the stuff without having Wall Street, Lehman, Bayer, Merrill, Morgan, who  have I left out here, Goldman, underwriting all this stuff and then securitizing it  worldwide. And what does that have to do with government?  

Steve Forbes - Well, again, if the government didn't print the money, they  couldn't have done what they did. If the bartender doesn't give you the booze,  you can't get drunk. And in this case, they have a monopoly on the booze, and  they just kept churning it out. So whether it went to Wall Street or somewhere  else, when you print too much money, as we saw in the 1970s, bad things will  happen. You may not know where it's going to happen, but you know strange  things are going to happen, and they have nothing to do with the free market.  They distort the free market. They distort prices. For example, what is the real  price of energy? We don't know, so we can't make real decisions whether this is  a real increase, real demand, or artificial. And so it just makes goes makes  everything goes haywire.  

Dennis McCuiston - Well, I would say that I don't remember you're quoting  Steve a lot in this book, Tom, but you could have. He's making the case for you.  You you wrote this book, as I recall, the foreword by Ron Paul, who who all of us know here. You wrote this book, I think you said in a pretty much of a hurry, not  like you would write your normal book or you do a lot of research over time, but  you rushed it to print for what reason?  

Tom Woods - Well, first of all, I'll point out that because even though I wrote it  very quickly, it doesn't mean that it's a piece of garbage. I mean, it still has its  merits, but but I did it quickly because I thought the country is about to get hit  with an avalanche of books by predictable people saying utterly predictable 

things that are all going to be disastrous. That are going to misdiagnose the  problem and come up with solutions, cures that'll be worse than the disease. So  I thought it's essential to get the free market perspective on this out there  because you're certainly not getting it on television, present company excepted.  So I thought it's essential to get out on this quickly because there'll be hundreds  of books on the subject by the end of the year, and then forget it; you'll be totally  lost. And I thought there is a persuasive free market account of what's  happened. And so far, I've had a lot of people say they've read this. It doesn't  sound like special pleading. It doesn't sound like I'm tripping over myself to find  some kind of way to blame the government for this. The governments and the  Federal Reserve System's fingerprints are all over the crisis, and you'd have to.  You got to be kidding me if you're not going to.  

Dennis McCuiston - All right, put the blame there in some way. Okay, now Tom,  let me let me put it this way. Now we we did. Let's see. I came to Freedom Fest  for the first time in 2007, July 2007, and I interviewed a guy that you guys know,  Fred Folvery, who's here at this conference. And Fred Folvery told me on  

camera in July 2007. He said this. He said we're going to have a depression in  real estate starting in 2008. He'd written a paper about it in 1997. Okay, so  based on that, we did a television program originating in Dallas in October of  2007. Now on that program, I had an economist from SMU. I had Bob McTeer,  who you guys know, Bob, former head of the Dallas Fed. I had the general  counsel, Texas Bankers Association, and I had a big-time money manager who's on the board of the Teachers Retirement Fund. And Bob McTeer, who's who's  really a good guy now, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, which  is a good group. I asked him, I said, "What culpability did the Fed have in this?  And he basically denied any culpability in October of '07. Tom, what do you think about that?  

Tom Woods - Well, that doesn't really surprise me. I mean, typically people  associated with the Fed are inclined to place the blame elsewhere, but I don't  find the special pleading persuasive. I mean, even Anna Schwartz, the Chicago  economist who is typically pro-Fed, says that Alan Greenspan's attempts to shift  the blame are utterly unpersuasive, and as Steve points out, had it not been for  the Fed, it would have been impossible for there to be this sort of housing  bubble. I mean, what would have happened if you had had a genuine free  market? Is that if we had all become irrationally committed to the purchase of  houses, what would have happened is the banks would have begun to draw  down the the money they could lend, and so therefore interest rates would have  shot up, and that would have put an end to speculation in real estate. But if you  have a magical money creation machine that can keep pumping money into the  system, that can keep pushing those interest rates back down and keep this, in 

effect, this artificial stimulus to speculation going, this couldn't this couldn't have  been done without Alan Greenspan.  

Dennis McCuiston - Well, now Steve, I I've read what Alan Greenspan said in  the Wall Street Journal. You know, John Taylor wrote a nice article with the  Taylor Rule, which we don't get too technical for that person watching. But, and  then Greenspan and Bernanke will say that it wasn't them turning on the money  machine. They didn't not. They pushed these interest rates down the the short  term rates down to 1% in 2003, 2004. That there was this. You talked about  tsunami. There was this tsunami of liquidity coming from China and other  places. How would you respond to that?  

Steve Forbes - So Alan Greenspan's epitaph is going to be the Chinese made  me do it. The fact of the matter is, there is no such thing as a savings glut. The  whole point of a financial system is to take one person's savings and put a  productive use. Be a middle person, put a productive use elsewhere. So, if the  Chinese had savings, a normal financial system would take in those savings and direct it so it can be invested productively. And so the key thing here, Dennis, is  when you look at commodity prices, it's a cash market. It's a global market. It's  nominated in dollars. If they're all going in one direction, as they did in 2004,  that's a sign something is going wrong. Usually they're all over the place. Some  are up, some are down, some are treading water. But when they all shoot up,  you know something is happening, and the thing is, it's unfashionable to say it,  but you look at G O L D gold is the one thing that stays constant in value, and if  that's starting to shoot up, you know something is wrong, or if it's plunging, you  know something is wrong in terms of dollars. So in 2004, all the signals were  there, and those of us looked at this stuff were saying, "We don't know how it's  going to unfold, but something bad is going to happen if they keep this up.  

Dennis McCuiston - Now it's going to be a pretty picture. Yeah, and Dennis,  

Tom Woods - let me add to what I agree completely with everything Steve said.  But on top of that, we can point out that Asian saving remained pretty high  throughout the housing boom and bust. So the, its explanatory power is it seems to me rather limited. Whereas if you look at the interest rate picture, that tracks  what we actually observed in the real world much more closely. So the prima  facie evidence, I think, is pretty compelling. All  

Dennis McCuiston - right, Tom. Steve mentioned Fannie and Freddie, and most  people who watch our program have heard of Fannie and Freddie. For sure, but  give us some sense of not just Fannie and Freddie, but how the federal  government, in all its agencies, and from Congress to the president, to Fannie 

and Freddie, were actually pushing for more and more loans and affordable  housing to be made for the last roughly 15, 20 years.  

Tom Woods - Right. Well, this is we have to realize a bipartisan phenomenon. I  mean, George W. Bush talked about helping people to make down payments,  and these, and there was this sense that these old standards of  creditworthiness-the ability to make a down payment, to prove you have a job these were just viewed as kind of old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy obstacles to  people becoming homeowners. So we've had not only Fannie and Freddie, but  the federal housing, various federal housing agencies, HUD, almost anything  you think of. The Fed pushing so-called private lenders to make loans they  wouldn't otherwise make to to suppress lending standards, and this was to  create a so-called ownership society. But obviously, if you're in a house you  can't otherwise afford, in what sense do you really own it? And it would  obviously have been much better for many of these people to continue renting,  which is not a waste of your money, contrary to popular belief, or simply to get a  smaller house. I mean, it's like putting some kid, sending him to Harvard when  he's really only you know suited for the you know the University of Mississippi.  Well, you're not helping him by sending him to Harvard. You're just setting him  up for failure. So so that's in a sense. And then we should also remember the  Fed plays a role here too, because again, suppose the the Fed floods the credit  markets with money. Well, where are the banks going to lend this money?  Logically speaking, they've got to lend it out to borrowers they would otherwise  have rejected because how at any given time they're already lent up to the  ability they can let's stop there for a second they've got to lower the lending  standard basically because  

Dennis McCuiston - as that viewer knows I'm a recovering banker so let's say  that I was a banker and and as we all know bankers have kept their we call it a  loan to deposit ratio up very high in order to try to make money in the last few  years, which they have made a lot of money, and so you're saying that they  probably met all the loan demand that met their credit standards. Exactly. And  then more money comes in. Then what? Then  

Tom Woods - it's like if you have a basketball team, and suddenly you're told, by the way, you get to pick two extra players. Well, logically speaking, where am I  going to get those players from? From the pool of players I would otherwise  have rejected. So likewise, if I'm going to lend this additional money, I either  have to lower my lending standards or lower interest rates, or something's got to give here in order to bring more people in. So the whole combination of all these factors, where you've got all the credit being poured in by the Fed, and then all  these regulatory bodies, in effect, helping to channel that money into the 

mortgage market, and the result is this catastrophe we see here. And  meanwhile, we've got all the usual suspects scratching their head. Gee, where  did this housing bubble come from? I have no idea.  

Dennis McCuiston - Well, the way he talked about regulatory bodies. Now, look, Steve. Here's one of the complaints that these these greedy capitalist pigs in  New York made sure all the regulations went away. Did regulations go away  during all this crisis?  

Steve Forbes - The banking industry is probably the most regulated industry in  the United States. Hedge funds and equity funds are the least regulated. Where  do the biggest disasters take place? Where supposedly they are being overseen 

by the regulators. They were drinking their own Kool-Aid, they really believed  this was a new era that secure that securitization and other measures had taken away risk. Now, in any of these disasters, instruments that are normally good,  like securitization, spreading risk, lowers interest rates, good thing, misused  becomes a disaster, like an automobile. You misuse that, it can become a lethal  vehicle, and so in this case, these things were misused, and they and you got  things like a new mortgage. Why have an income? Why make a down payment? Why why why because housing's going up? It's written in the Constitution, and  therefore there's no risk because the asset's going up. So even if the borrower  defaults, what's the problem? Exactly.  

Dennis McCuiston - So we had this situation where prices of real estate were  going up, and I think you would doubt that because money here is in terms  

Steve Forbes - of greed, as somebody said, blaming this on greed is like saying gravity causes airplane crashes. No, it was contributing factor, but not the key  factor. And again, if you the government floods the economy with money, bad  things will happen, and people will do things they normally would not have done. Doesn't excuse what they did, but bad things are going to happen. All right,  

Dennis McCuiston - let me tell you some bad things that happened from right  here in Las Vegas, just to give you an example, Tom, and you're a visitor here to Las Vegas, as am I. But a lady signed up for a $300,000 mortgage through a  local mortgage company. Now there was a bank in Texas that bought this  mortgage. Now we have to ask ourselves why banks in Texas were buying this  mortgage, but that's another issue. This woman was approached by the  mortgage broker. I'm talking here about fraud, and said, "If you will let us use  your credit, we will pay you a $42,000 fee." And you'll sign these $300,000  mortgages on. We'll sell the the property to somebody else here pretty quickly  because things are going up all the time. She agreed to do that. Well, she 

defaulted a few months later. The bank actually had a bunch of defaults. They  came out here. The mortgage company went broke. They came out here to  Clark County, Nevada, and they were looking through the records and they  found that this woman, trying to find this woman among others, and this woman  had sued the mortgage company because they stiffed her for the $42,000 fee.  So they defrauded her. But it was a fraudulent fee that they, and she had sued  them, and that's how they found her. So we had this kind of fraud going on here  in Vegas and in all over the country as well. Is that a big problem or not?  

Tom Woods - Well, I mean, obviously, any fraud should be prosecuted. Nobody  disputes that. But the but to me the key point is that when you look at how  gigantic the problem is, I mean obviously there will be when you've got so many  people thinking they're going to make fortunes as mortgage brokers and  fortunes as real estate speculators, inevitably there'll be bizarre turns of events  such as you've described, but to me it seems that we have plenty to focus on  when we look at the legitimate deals that that go through. I mean that's the  thing: the the loans that were approved, the loans that by any conceivable  standard no no rational person would have gone gone along with. That that's the the key problem, or to to me is not not the not the corruption or the fraud, but the vast bulk of legitimate loans that were made, all of the vast bulk of certain  classes of which were utterly absurd.  

Dennis McCuiston - Well, and also they made these loans, Steve, as you know,  thinking that with very little down payment. A guy in Dallas at the University of  Texas at Dallas, Dan Liebowitz, written a paper called "Anatomy of a Trainwreck, which you probably read, and he talks about no down payment, which is one of  the things that again politically wanted loans to everybody. No down payment,  and then an option arm loan. Steve, what what is it? What kind of a product is  this? For heaven's sake, do you do you understand what what goes on when  you can just say whatever you want to pay, and then later on you'll try to catch  up? This  

Steve Forbes - is how you persuade yourself this thing can go on forever. They  have a low rate. The Federal Reserve's keeping rates down one or 2% which  means you can do a very low mortgage rate for a year or two, and then they tell  you, in effect, well, when the thing comes due and normally it goes shooting up,  we just rewrite the mortgage because, after all, the house is going to go up in  value. Blah blah blah, and that's what happens. So, so the mortgage, instead of  being a 10-year, 20-year, 30-year instrument, becomes a 12-month, 24-month  instrument that is always going to be constantly renewed at these low, artificially  low rates. And so, this gets whole undermines the whole ethos of a free market  system. That is, if you let the thing function, it'll meet all the needs of the 

marketplace and do so in a sound way. Look at telephones. Look at cell phones. 4 billion in the world. We didn't need a Fannie and Freddie to get everyone to  have a cell phone.  

Dennis McCuiston - All right. In the 10 minutes that we have left, if capitalism  wasn't the cause of the problem, even though you would admit that there were  some capitalists who were greedy, and some who did stupid things, and some  who reformed. Well, human nature does. My  

Steve Forbes - book points out: human nature does not change. That's been  with us for 1000s of years. 1000s of years. Okay.  

Dennis McCuiston - All right. If capitalism isn't the cause of the problem, how is  capitalism going to help? Because it seems to me that every time we turn  around, we have this big stimulus package, almost 800 billion in stimulus. We've had the Fed running up its balance sheet. We've had the nationalization of  General Motors and Chrysler and that sort of thing. So, Tom, how do you expect  capitalism to help us out of this deal? Looks like to me, government's got to be  the answer.  

Tom Woods - Well, Steve and I were talking on the way over about a totally  neglected historical episode that I talk about in meltdown, which is the the  depression of 1920 to 21, which is a depression basically everyone's forgotten  about, and the reason they've forgotten about it is that it was so short, and the  federal government pretty much did the exact opposite, and I mean the exact  opposite of what they're doing today. They basically cut the government budget  in two years by about a half. The Federal Reserve System didn't actually begin  open market operations until 1922, when the recovery was already underway  anyway, and so you had a very swift, robust recovery by the late summer of  1921, and so you had the opposite of a fiscal stimulus. You had no so-called  monetary stimulus. You didn't have these big bailouts. You simply allowed the  market to reprice things that had been blown up into bubbles, to shift resources  out of areas where they had been misplaced and into areas where they could  add value. This can be done only through the price system and only through the  free interactions of individuals. There's no way some central planner can  substitute for these decisions, and the result was an immediate turnaround. So  you'd think when we always hear about the need to learn from history, we would  learn from this episode. Instead, what learning from history always means is,  let's look back to some previous catastrophe the government caused, and let's  learn the exact opposite lesson from 

Dennis McCuiston - it. Well, you do talk about the the blip in 2021, but Steve,  the one that gets talked. Most and you wrote about that in here too, is obviously  the Great Depression in which and and you know I I found it interesting that  Bernanke was the keynote speaker at Milton Friedman's 90th birthday party, and what he said to Milton Friedman, which you clearly  

Steve Forbes - Friedman believes in diversity tolerance exactly, but he said he  said to  

Dennis McCuiston - Friedman he said first of all he said I want to confess even  though he was not the chairman of the Fed at the time but he was with the Fed  he said I want to confess that we caused the problem in the Great Depression  that is we didn't pump the money supply up we let it shrink by 25 percent or  whatever and he said I promise you Professor Friedman we will never let that  happen again. It sounds like he believed what he said.  

Steve Forbes - Well, this this gets. Why did the money supply decline during the depression? Because the government was deepening the depression. So what  they call velocity, money, people clutch the cash like food in a famine. And so in  this case, it's not printing the money that gets us out of this thing, it's allowing  people to do positive things again. If you have a stable dollar, you can trust the  thing and make investments, lowering tax rates as we did in the 1920s. Great  key to prosperity. We've seen that in the 60s. We've seen that in the 80s. Even  in 2003, when we reduced tax rates, it has a positive effect. There are positive  things that you can do, but the thing you don't do is think that the government  turns on the printing press yet again. The government takes over more of the  economy. Dennis, if the if the government could cure make economies move,  the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War. It didn't. The last I looked,  

Dennis McCuiston - it certainly didn't. Now, in terms of capitalism, Tom, that  person watching this program, who has his or her own business, as an example, or works for a small business, etc. I mean, they're having problems borrowing  money now. They're having problems collecting their receivables, as an  example. They're having problems making more sales because the economy  has gone down. Surely, this stimulus must have some positive effect.  

Tom Woods - Well, all it's doing is, I think, intensifying the problem. It's it's it's  sucking more resources out of the productive private sector and and allocating  them to who knows what use. But ultimately, what's what's I think also what's  spooking investors right now is the is the atmosphere of uncertainty that's  hanging over the market, because who knows? It's just like in the 1930s. Who  knows what the regime is going to do next week? Who knows what crazy idea 

they're going to come up with? They they nationalize this. They're taking over  that. They're taxing this. It is unbelievable, and and it's interesting to note that  Bob Higgs of the Independent Institute did an interesting study, and he looked in the 1930s to see, you know, why was the recovery so long in coming? And one  of the factors he said was what he called regime uncertainty. That if you look at  polling data among business executives, they were holding back from engaging  in investment because they didn't know what this regime was going to do.  They're being attacked in the press every day as being the great robber barons.  They brought on the crisis. Well, you know what? That's not an environment  that's that's really going to encourage a lot of investment. So we've, if if the  regime would simply just give us a one and a half year breather, just shut up,  stop doing anything, stop pouring fuel onto the fire, let the market sort this out,  you would see credit being extended again. You would see the restoration of  prosperity. But right now, who wants to lend? Who in the world wants to lend in  this environment when you know there's very little chance you get paid back?  

Steve Forbes - Some sort of sort of capital goes on strike, and so what you  want an environment is where people are willing to take risks again. But look  what happened to General Motors: secured creditors got shafted, to use a  French word, so what's that mean in the future? You lend somebody money, you think you've got collateral for it? Who's to say the government can't come in and  say we're going to change the rules of the game and give it to a union? And so,  in that kind of, we see that what that did to Argentina, Dennis.  

Dennis McCuiston - Well, we did. Now, in just in the short time we have left, let  me share a little story with you. I ran into the former President Bush 90 days ago in Dallas in an office building, and he was there talking to some good Catholic  friends. You're a big Catholic writer, among other things, Tom, and they were  telling him how much they liked his stem cell approach and how much they liked his abortion approach and that sort of thing. And he was signing some  autographs. He asked me. He said, "Dennis, what do you think about things?  And I said, "Well, Mr. President, with all due respect, I was not too happy about  your bailout plans. And he said, "Well, let me ask you this, Dennis. He said,  'What would you have done? So I'm going to ask you this, Steve. He said,  'Dennis, what would you have done? He said, 'My top three financial guys, Cox,  Paulson, Bernanke, come into my office in September last year and said, 'We  don't bail out AIG and these banks. We're going to have a major financial  meltdown. What would you have done? So I ask you, Steve, what would you  have done?  

Steve Forbes - First, fire them. Number for getting in the crisis. Number two, if  you have to do something short term, do it and get it over with. But then they 

should have gotten rid of things like market-to-market accounting, which has  deepened the crisis. And Bush should have announced then, from henceforth,  we're going to. Get rid of this weak dollar policy. His administration, they will  never admit it, had a weak dollar policy because they thought crazily that it  would improve our trade balance. So if he'd announced in September no more  market-to-market and the big thing, we're going to have a strong and stable  dollar. This crisis would have quickly been resolved.  

Dennis McCuiston - Let me tell you what I told him. I'm going to get you to tell  that viewer who Ludwig von Mises was, I said. Well, Mr. President, what I would  have done was what von Mises would have done when he was teaching at NYU in the early 1940s. I don't know that he knew who von Mises was, by the way. I  can't say that for sure. And and he said, well, what's that? I said, the student  asked him. He said, Professor, had had you been in the government in the early  30s, and you saw people's houses being foreclosed, and you saw banks  closing. You tell me you would have done nothing, and he said yes, but I would  have started doing nothing much sooner. So give us give us just a 30 seconds  of who von Mises was and why you have this institute in in Auburn.  

Tom Woods - Well, Mises was one of the great economists of the 20th century  and perhaps of all time. He was a Jew living in Nazi-controlled Europe who  eventually had to flee that continent. The Nazis hated him and his teaching  because he taught about international cooperation as being what the market  was all about, and that's not what National Socialism is about. He has to flee  Europe. They destroy his papers and library. He comes to the U.S. almost  empty-handed, speaking not a word of English, and yet he becomes-he has the  most productive period of his whole career. And long after people who were  honored when he was ignored in the United States have been forgotten, Mises  has the Ludwig von Mises Institute, M-I-S-E-S.org, named after him. He still  learned from and studied, and he has the best approach to help us understand  what just happened to him.  

Dennis McCuiston - Thank you, Steve. We have about 30 seconds left. I'm  going to give them to you to tell us why capitalism is going to save us.  

Steve Forbes - Capitalism will save us because it allows we, the free people, to  get us out of this mess. And if we lower the burden on people, we'll do it. We've  been doing it for 230 years. We should have learned the lesson by now. Our  founders understood it. We can relearn from them.  

Dennis McCuiston - Well, I appreciate both of you joining us here. I know that  Mark Skousen and the folks who put on Freedom Fest are glad to have you 

here. They worked you to death, but 1,500 people talking about free markets  and all that's been great. So thank you for being here, and thank you for joining  us too. Because as you can tell, this is an extremely serious issue that,  unfortunately, is not going away. We've been talking about things that matter  with people who care.  

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