Speaker 1delighted now to welcome Michael Howell on the show. Joining us today is Michael Howell, founder of Cross Border Capital and author of Capital Wars. Cross Border Capital is best known for its research on global liquidity, tracking how money and credit flow through the financial system and drive asset prices. Today we'll explore what global liquidity is, rising yields and refinancing pressures and what that can do for stocks and Bitcoin. Michael, welcome to the show today. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2Well, great, Chris. Good to be here. Always a pleasure.
Speaker 1Amazing. Great to have you. I actually saw a bunch of your content not long ago on YouTube and found it very, very insightful. So thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure. I wanted to get into maybe just starting with Cross Border Capital for people who are not familiar. You've been running it for, is it 30 years now?
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. 30 years.
Speaker 1So how did you start Cross Border Capital and how has it evolved over time? Obviously, now you've got this big focus on global liquidity. Was it always that way or has it evolved over time?
Speaker 2No, it's always been that way. The history goes way back to when I worked at Salomon Brothers. You won't remember Salomon Brothers. Salomon was the biggest fixed income house worldwide. It was the fixed income markets pretty much. It's now part of Citigroup. But basically, the whole ethos of Salomon Brothers was trading and research. And to understand both aspects, you've got to look at money flows. Money moves markets. And it was pretty obvious looking at the trading floor at Salomon Brothers. You could see money winging its way around the world, almost physically from desk to desk. So that's how the concept started. And the reason for doing Cross Border Capital, and actually, to be accurate, Cross Border Capital has morphed into another company called GL Indexes. Cross Border Capital used to be a money manager as well, but we're now just purely research at GL Indexes. And the reason for doing that, I think, was just simply the volatility in the investment banking world. I moved from Salomon Brothers after the Treasury scandal in the early, early 90s to Bearings. And then Bearings later. And I thought that, you know, the adage of banking is don't bother climbing the ladder, wait for the ceiling to come down and meet you. And that was a world I thought was, you know, just wouldn't go on. So in my view, let's just step aside and do something ourselves. So we did. And that's Cross Border Capital.
Speaker 1Very interesting. And over all of the years, then, in your experience, what is something that you have learned and kind of observed or are able to observe in markets that you think maybe newer participants in markets are missing? So just to give you some context, a lot like, as in my professional investing career, I've been doing this no longer than five or six years. And a lot of our audience are people who maybe entered, maybe crypto specifically in 2021, or maybe a first experience. What's something that you guys have seen over the years and decades that you think maybe now, newer participants are not as clued on to?
Speaker 2Yeah, good, good point. I mean, what I would say is probably three things. One is you've got to understand mechanics of bond markets. In other words, what drives bonds? What are the components of a bond yield? Why do bonds move in the way they do? And I think there's a lot you can learn out of the market right now as we were watching them. There was so much misguided press comment on what's happening in the bond markets. It's unbelievable. But anyway, put that to one side. I think in regards to stock markets, value investing may work at the stock level. It does not work at the market level. You know, in all the years I've been in the business, people have always said, well, let's look at European markets. They're sitting on a PE multiple below the US. Let's pour money into Europe and forget the US. That would have been every year for much of the last 30 years, a terrible trade. So it doesn't work at the macro level. You've got to look at other factors. And money flow is really the critical element in that. So that's the second lesson. And I think the third factor is that what we've learned in the last maybe 10 years is that Bitcoin and crypto are the most liquidity sensitive assets on the planet. They're very liquidity sensitive. And I think that's that gives us both insight in to liquidity as a feedback and confirmation factor, but also a way of understanding how Bitcoin and crypto move.
Speaker 1On that final point, before we maybe talk about the bigger points on global liquidity, when you say that crypto is the most sensitive, do you see that as therefore some an asset class that moves maybe before other things? And do you use it as a guide ever in your thinking because of its specific sensitivity?
Speaker 2We use it as a confirmation signal. That's for sure. So if we've got a sense as to what's happening to global liquidity, we will see what the crypto markets, particularly Bitcoin, is doing. I think one's got a really focused statement on Bitcoin rather than the other elements, because clearly there are other things going on in other crypto units. So let's focus on Bitcoin. So I think Bitcoin is the key barometer in that regard. So we look at it two ways. We first of all try and predict what Bitcoin is going to do by looking at the liquidity backdrop. And then we try and if we might reinforce our views about liquidity by how Bitcoin is behaving. And I think there's a very interesting, you know, let's say inflection going on now, which is making us think again about maybe what the liquidity outlook is. So we can we can turn to that at some stage. So I would say that's those are really the critical elements. And if you look at it statistically, and we've done a lot of, you know, hopefully rigorous work on looking at what drives Bitcoin using weekly data, over as long a time horizon as we can get. And actually, the data shows remarkable robustness for, you know, given that people think that Bitcoin is sort of a flighty, and maybe almost random walk through through time, actually, isn't it? It's very, it's very systematically driven by liquidity. A lot of those relationships, you know, last were intact five years ago, and they remain intact today. So not much has changed.
Speaker 1Interesting. Okay, so let's, let's get into I maybe want to circle back to the bonds part of it, because that's clearly dominating that people's attention at the moment. And you said that it was very misguided, some of the countries, I definitely want to ask you about that. But you spoke about global liquidity, there and how Bitcoin is very much kind of moving in line with your analysis of global liquidity. How do you like when you speak about global liquidity as a term? What exactly are you measuring? And I believe recently, you kind of shared that you think global liquidity has fallen. And so where are we at the moment when it comes?
Speaker 2Let's be clear about that. First of all, to pick up on the last point, global liquidity hasn't fallen in absolute terms, no, but its growth rate has slowed. And in markets, it's growth that tends to be one of the most important drivers of markets. So at the margin, what we're seeing is a slowing of global liquidity growth, which we think is having an impact on markets. I mean, that's, that's really the backdrop. Now, what is global liquidity? I think you can define it in different ways. the way that we think about it is flows of money through world financial markets and I stress the word financial markets because we're not looking at money flow through the real economy that is a that is something which is which detracts from money in financial markets I often say that all money that's anywhere must be somewhere so if it's in the real economy it's not in financial markets and similarly vice versa and one of the main reasons that liquidity has been inflecting lower on our measures this year is because the real economy is so strong and it's just effectively crowding out the financial markets increasingly now that may not be so evident if you're in some of the big tech stocks but it's certainly evident if you're in the Russell 2000 it's certainly evident if you know a lot of overseas markets it's certainly evident if you look at the slope of the yield curve and maybe what bond markets are doing all the these factors seem to be telling us that liquidity is beginning the early stages of a slowdown and that's clearly an important factor to to
Speaker 1think about and do you in terms of the trajectory that you are seeing there is that something that you expect to continue and what are the driving factors for that expectation well
Speaker 2the the first point is that why liquidity is going down is because of economic strength the 64 000 question is does that continue now our expectation would be that you will see some slowing of economic growth not recession but you'll see a slowing of growth into 27 for a number of reasons one is the fiscal impulse in the us uh dies away a little bit i mean i'm saying a little bit uh it's not as strong as it was this year so there's some attenuation of growth for that reason uh secondly um you've got high oil prices remember you've had yields in markets backing up and the dollar has actually become quite strong and all those factors tend to detract from economic growth they don't necessarily force recession per se but they're certainly slowing growth and i think that would be a backdrop and consequently you will likely see maybe some lessening of those tensions. On the other hand, the other point is, what would happen if the central banks decided that inflation was really the serious bogey that it is, and they're going to start to tighten? Now, we've seen a little bit of that, for sure. But I think that, you know, I'm beginning to sort of look a lot more closely at what the Federal Reserve is doing or even saying, and maybe starting to rethink maybe the direction of the Fed. Because I think that if you look very closely at the Federal Reserve, there's kind of a sea change in how it's behaving. And let me just say that from sort of two dimensions. One is that if you look at what Kevin Walsh has said, he's clearly jumped forward guidance. But what does he replace that with? And it seems to me he's replaced it with a view that the Fed is long-term. Largely following the bond markets. So the bond market is telling us what they think interest rates should be. And it so happens that the Federal Reserve seems to be mapping in that direction. So you're seeing the potential for maybe one, two rate hikes coming through. And maybe that's it. And I think the bond market is beginning to sniff out already this whole idea that the economy may well be beginning to slow down a little bit. So, yeah, hold that thought. The other thing that seems to be very clear, and I think this, is more evident certainly since the error that the Federal Reserve made at the end of last year, when you may recall they were talking very loudly about shrinking their balance sheet significantly. And that was a lot of the talk around the power Fed at the time. And they actually started to do that. And what they did is they pared back bank reserves significantly around the fourth quarter. You saw in the repo, and remember the repo markets today are really the centerpiece of credit creation, not just in the U.S. economy, but globally. And that's been a big change since the GFC in 2008. So the repo collateral markets are key. You saw those sort of fall out of bed, with a hollow bump in November, December of last year. And as a result of that, the Federal Reserve changed policy. They invented a new acronym, yet another acronym, which was called RMP, Reserve Management Purchases, which basically meant they were back on the QE track again. They're rejecting money into the system, expanding the balance sheet, and giving banks more liquidity. And what we've seen pretty much since that time, since late 2025, is a flatlining of money market liquidity. So in other words, the Federal Reserve seems to be deliberately targeting these levels. Now I can go on and say, well, okay, there's also similar support coming from the Treasury, because the Treasury seems to be acting with the Fed to try and maintain low volatility in the Treasury market. And buybacks you would have heard about, buybacks are an instrument, contrary to what the media says, not trying to push yields down necessarily, but certainly trying to cap volatility. And at the end of the day, Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary, is doing a great job for the U.S. taxpayer, because he's retiring off the run Treasury, Treasury notes on the Treasury. So he's doing a great job for the U.S. taxpayer, because he's retiring off the run Treasury, Treasury notes and bonds at often 60 cents in the dollar. So he's doing a pretty good job in that regard. So what I would say is that you've got to look deeper into what the Fed is doing. It doesn't strike me that this is a central bank that is keen on aggressively tightening. We're not going back to a Volcker world. It seems to me that politicians and policymakers want to kick the can down the road as far as they can. It means they're going to tolerate a little bit more inflation. They're not going to say that explicitly, but I think their actions are different. They're going to tolerate a little bit more inflation. But I think their actions are telling us that. And it's not going to be hyperinflation. We're talking about high numbers, but we're talking about decidedly more than the 2% target. So it may be we're in a 3% or 4% world. But I think that's livable with. I mean, we've been there before after all. And that means that there won't be a huge amount of tightening. And after all, if you've got so much debt in the economy and you're fighting a capital war with China, the ability to tighten the policy is actually very limited.
Speaker 1Yeah, your point on the 2% is very meaningful because one thing I've been advocating for a long time, one thing I've started doing since Walsh took over is watching all of his speeches in full and then watching the Q&A. And one thing I've always noted is his commitment. He's been staunch in his commitment to the 2%, commitment to the 2% over and over again. But as you say, even in the Q&A, actually, after it's kind of enlightening, to see that come through, where people are asking, okay, so if you're committed to the 2%, what about this or that? And it seems like then it becomes a little bit non-committal and not necessarily wanting to go through with all the things that we need to do in order to really get inflation down to that level. You mentioned a couple of other things, which I think a lot of capital allocators have been grappling with, a few different factors. So a big focus on the Fed at the moment, and maybe a bit of a change in regime there. You also mentioned BESA. Yeah, BESA has been a big part of that. I think BESA is a big part of that. Also, he's been doing buybacks. There was also the Yen intervention, which I thought gave Bitcoin a bit of a kick earlier in the year. In all of this, there's also the Iran conflict with the AI build-out happening at the same time. I'm curious, these are the four things that I've kind of been grappling with significantly. Curious for your view on how they kind of interact, what you're placing more weight on at the moment.
Speaker 2Well, I think if we go back to the bond markets, in many cases, I sort of alluded to what it's all about. I mean, you've got to understand bonds really to understand markets in many cases. And as a sort of point to note, capital markets today are really not what the textbooks say they are. They're not new capital raising vehicles. They're basically debt refinancing mechanisms. And what they're doing, 80% of what capital markets are transacting are basically debt rollover transactions. What you're doing is people issue debt. And let's say it's a five-year bond. When that bond matures, you've got to refinance that. Debt's never paid back. It's just rollover. So with this increasing debt pile, the rollover is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, that's why you need balance sheet capacity. And that's why you need liquidity in the system. So you've got to start thinking about it in this dimension. It's a very different way of understanding how markets are. Now, if you come back to the bond markets and you start to look at yields and maybe what's going on, it's very important, particularly if you consider that liquidity, in a sense, grows from debt. In other words, that liquidity needs collateral, good quality collateral. And that's why you need balance sheet capacity. And that's why you need collateral. So to expand liquidity, you've got to have a very good collateral base, firm collateral base, which means you don't really want yields rising aggressively. And you certainly don't want a lot of bond volatility. And so it's very much in the Treasury's interest and the Fed's interest to maintain stability or integrity in these markets. Now, if you look at what's going on the bond market right now, there's been sort of two schools of thought which have sort of come through. One is that if you look at the rise in US yields, it's basically because of either because of Trump, because of Besant's errors, because of fiscal problems or whatever else. You look at on the other side, another factor, you look at the big differential between Chinese government bond yields, which are about 1.6 percent and US Treasuries, which are almost 400 basis points higher. Many people say, well, this is a term premium or a risk premium that is being factored into the markets because the US is finished. OK, I mean, this is complete rubbish. The reason that there's a big differential between US and Chinese yields is that the Chinese economy is flat on its back. Don't believe the economic statistics that come out of the PRC. They're rogue. I mean, they're just plain lies. The economy is not growing at four to five percent. It's growing at nearer one to two percent nominal. Not real, nominal. The economy is in a bad way. And that's what the bond markets are telling us. What are the bond markets in the US telling us by almost 5.5% is saying that's the level, the underlying level of nominal GDP growth in the US. What we're seeing is the fastest growth rate in the US economy in nominal terms. I'm stressing that not real, but in nominal terms since probably the mid to late 1980s. So, you know, we've got to go back a long time. What were bond yields then? They were about seven to eight percent. So it's not surprising you're getting upward pressure on yields. Now, I don't think they're going to get to those levels. I think we're near a sort of threshold or returning point now. But, you know, this is the first time in what, five years, at least maybe 10 years that you can actually start to buy bonds again because yields have moved back above their long term average. If you do a very simple calculation and you've got to dig back into the archives of the US Treasury and the Bank of England, but you can work out a hybrid bond yield, let's say UK-US bond yield that goes right back to seventeen hundred. And the average yield on government debt over that period was as a tad under five percent. So we're back there. We're back above those levels. So that puts in context, you know, the madness is over, perhaps. And what we're in now is a situation where you can actually comfortably think about buying bonds as a tactical hedge in a downswing. I'm not advocating bonds long term, bear in mind, but I'm saying as a tactical trade, this is not a bad time.
Speaker 1very interesting you mentioned one when you first mentioned bonds you said that there was some particular view that's been most misguided at the moment i wonder if you wanted to double down on that a little bit and say what do you think people people are getting most wrong about this situation are people panicking too much because they're not aware that we're just kind of going back to this historical norm kind of going back reverting back to a bond number which is completely reasonable and uh if you if you look at a historical trend
Speaker 2but yeah it's a very good point i mean if you look at um i mean a lot of the misguided talk is in the media i'm not going to call out different different newspapers but i mean you've got a pretty good idea about who the financial commentators are and the nonsense you read is this is ridiculous i mean what they're talking about is they're saying that the rising yields is all about an increasing risk premium on term premium uh that is basically being factored into the markets so in other words because uh the us has got a rising debt debt to gdp ratio or because the deficits are wider because best is having problems uh the markets are factoring a bigger risk premium on bonds there's no evidence of that at all this is just pure assertion if you do the calculations which you can do mathematically uh you find actually the term premier uh which is which is the risk premium for holding duration uh in the markets that that term premium risk premium is in or actually even falling so what it's telling us is actually the integrity of u.s government debt as a safe asset is still there and actually you're starting to see money moving into that safe asset right now i mean evidence the fact you want a sort of quick and dirty guide to that uh without doing all the maths of term premium look at the spread between 10-year and five-year bonds i mean that's mostly term premier in that spread and that is that is contracting
Speaker 1the whole time hmm yes very interesting um we mentioned i wondered you know there there are two other big things that i that i mentioned i just wondered how much they play a factor in your thinking i know you keep going back to bonds and i think it's helpful to have that impression of how important they are are you factoring in the various conflicts around the world whether it's iran or russia ukraine and how are you thinking about the ai trade which you know even today we were just talking about previously on the show that anthropic's valuation is going to go from two maybe down to 1.5 trillion and there's a bit concern about maybe these companies were being valued too high as they as they go from private to public are these big factors in your specific frameworks and how you think about analyzing the market they
Speaker 2are but i think they're sort of they're very long-term factors but they're part of this sort of maybe philosophy or more view vision that says what we're really talking about is capital wars i mean forget all this stuff about trade wars i mean trade wars are sort of the the sort of flag but the underlying conflict the main battle is basically a capital war it's a it's a battle for for uh you know for control over maybe economies worldwide or uh the dominance of currencies but it's all about capital and putting your capital uh above someone else's so this conflict is really between china and the u.s uh it's chinese capital versus u.s capital uh what i can see increasingly is a conflict between the two countries and it's a conflict between the two countries and it's a conflict between the two countries and it's a conflict between the two countries and it's a conflict between the two countries and it's a conflict between the two countries i read a book about this about and then about five years ago which sort of went into the details but what it was really saying is you were likely to see a cleaving of the world into two parts one is a china led uh grouping and the other is a u.s led grouping uh presumably europe goes into the u.s led grouping uh maybe with some asian countries uh presumably the the rogue states go in with china i mean who knows but china has got its influence and what you've got is uh two uh two financial systems that are revolving around that now if this is capital wars and i'm not suggesting by any stretch that this is a kinetic war i mean i think it's much more like a cold war where you get probably any minute military conflicts of proxy wars uh rather like vietnam wars or whatever it may be or uh the indo-chinese conflicts more generally uh during the cold war so maybe you can view the middle east or maybe you can view uh russia ukraine as being in that category uh but i think the the whole my my vision of this is that uh all these conflicts are about trying to stop china getting control of resources and maybe the key resource is uh is energy right now which is why the trump administration has actually gone to great lengths to secure uh some of these critical minerals and maybe you know the whole play towards greenland is exactly the same thing what they want is critical minerals why do they want russia on side i mean it's pretty clear to me anyway i mean maybe i'm being ultra naive here but there is a there are a lot of overtures being made towards putin because russia has a lot of resources and a lot of those resources are in the arctic and the us would like to use its expertise to try and help russia get those out now that would stop china and china would then be in a much weaker position and the worst thing you want to do is to get russia and china together i mean that would clearly be a disaster for the west so that's how i view geopolitics politics so it clearly has a role um but you know what we're getting is an evolution of two separate monetary systems and i would argue that monetary system those monetary systems are based around the u.s dollar which is backed by its collateral which is the u.s treasury market hence the importance of making uh sure the treasury market is stable and robust and china doesn't have the luxury of a treasury market that is international because no one understands chinese government bonds so you've got to have an asset as collateral against their system and that is likely gold so china is accumulating gold they are not going onto a gold standard but the nearest thing they're moving that we can uh you know think about as an analogy is they're going towards a bretton woods style system so you know they have all this backing it doesn't mean necessarily that uh that anyone can get access to that gold i mean think of the goal in fort knox during the bretton woods period america was very reluctant to let go of that and china will be the
Speaker 1same position yes very interesting um two two more questions as we as we kind of come to a conclusion here first i want to ask you know just what you're most excited about and uh what you're going to be working on how we can follow stuff after but you mentioned just a moment ago that you wouldn't necessarily be advocating for bonds long term necessarily yet so how how do you see the outlook then for you know we're coming towards the end of the year here but maybe looking into 2027 i've seen a lot of prominent uh capital allocators suggest that 2027 could be could be a difficult year maybe one reason being when we speak of flows that there's a lot of you know spacex has taken a lot of liquidity this year you've got another two big very prominent ipos potentially coming in 2027 um what's your kind of outlook for 2027 how would you um how would you be what would you maybe be advocating more for well
Speaker 2there's always uncertainty certainly of course chris but you know the fact is that as long as i've been in this business everyone always says the next year is a difficult year potentially so it's always hard to judge that i think the thing is to try and understand there are two things that i think that are important to understand one is what is the underlying trend in markets um and secondly where are we in the cycle uh and if you look at the the trends first of all we're in a very different world as regards to trends because debt is growing exponentially and the situation is is that you know governments you know can't tax us anymore they're reluctant to cut spending and so what you've got is um basically runaway deficits in other words bigger and bigger debts and that ultimately have to essentially monetize those debts so debt is growing exponentially one of the things that we've established uh with data uh over the over many years is that stability in financial markets requires a stable debt to liquidity ratio so you need that balance sheet capacity to roll over debt because we live in a refinancing world so liquidity has got to keep pace with debt the problem is is that liquidity is very cyclical and if you get a strong economic rebound that will basically take liquidity away from uh those refinancing activities and cause potentially a crisis so central banks have got to be very alert to that and provide liquidity when necessary now they did a bad job in 2008 uh they had their eye of the ball in 2019 with the repo crisis in the us i think there are a lot more onto it now certainly the fed is and the latest actions of the federal reserve under walsh seem to be that they're actually got uh their focus very clearly on maintaining money market liquidity but hey let's see because you always you always get errors uh so we can't be too optimistic so i think in terms of of the long term what i would say is that debt is growing exponentially liquidity is going to keep pace in the long term for sure and therefore if debt is growing at something like eight percent per annum okay or thereabouts which means the debt stock is doubling uh every 10 years at least okay what you're going to say is what you've got to say is which investments in my portfolio are going to give me at least eight percent returns because if that doesn't happen you're not beating monetary inflation and your wealth is being eroded okay and i sort of regale against this uh this idea about financial repression because i think it's the wrong thing to think about uh financial repression hits your income but money Monetary inflation destroys your wealth. And it's that which people have got to start thinking about. Printing money is easy. Controlling interest rates through financial repression is pretty difficult. And, you know, my argument is, well, if it's if governments could do that, why don't they always do that? Why now? But monetary inflation, they can always do and they do do. And that's what's happening as we speak. The whole shift of the U.S. funding structure towards the bill market is monetary inflation is monetizing the deficit. It's just a disguise of doing it. Therefore, which assets will keep pace? Gold has always demonstrated that for that feature. Ever since Bretton Woods, the growth of global liquidity has been about 90 percent per annum. There are thereabouts. OK, regularly. The growth of U.S. debt is a tad under that over that same period, about eight and a half percent. Gold has basically increased over the same time frame by about eight and a half percent. So gold is a fantastic monetary inflation hedge. Crypto has done better, but there are other reasons for that. But I think you've got to have crypto in your portfolio. Equity markets over that period have done about nine percent. So equities keep up. But bonds have lagged. The average was over that period has been about six to six and a half percent. And if you go down the term structure towards five or lower maturities, you're talking at least 100 basis points less than that. So bonds won't keep pace in that environment. So you don't want bonds long term. Short term. If you believe the economy is slowing down, which I do, and you believe that bonds have been tactically out of favor and yields are probably spiked in the near term because of misguided talk by many people saying that, you know, all the stuff we just rehearsed, then bonds are probably not a bad tactical thing to buy. And you can buy U.S. tips three percent real. That ain't bad.
Speaker 1Very, very, very interesting. I think that'll strike a chord with a lot of the people tuning in. You have probably historically definitely got into their minds. The inflation protection, I think, is so strong for people in terms of the things that they're trying to prioritize at the moment. And as people who've been predominantly in crypto for years and now kind of expanding out, it's interesting to hear those numbers that equities, gold, crypto, maybe crypto has done well for now, but gold and equities seem to be pretty resilient over that kind of long term. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. I just wanted to ask before we let you go, is there anything that you're kind of working on as we get to the end of the year that you're excited about, anything that you're looking out for that you think it's important for people to pay attention to, and how can we kind of follow along and just keep on top of what you guys are doing?
Speaker 2Well, the easiest way is through Substance. Capital Wars. That's our subset named after the book I wrote. If you want more detailed data, we provide a lot of data for institutional investors. That comes through the website glindexes.com. And what I'm working on right now is really trying to understand where we are in the cycle. We tend to think that markets move through seasons. There's an investment cycle that moves from rebound to calm, as we call it, to speculation, to turbulence. We think we're moving into that turbulence phase kind of right now. That's what the bond market seems to be telling us as well. And that may be a lot tougher for equities over the next six months. So I'd be wary there. And what we're doing, to answer your question explicitly, looking into 27 is when that inflection in the liquidity cycle occurs. And it may occur. I mean, our original view was that it would occur in the second half of 2027. But I think there may be a case for saying bringing that forward and say it could be as early as Q1.
Speaker 1Interesting. Michael, it's been an absolute pleasure. I think if, if, if those that inflection movement does happen, we'd love to have you back to help us navigate it.
Speaker 2Great. Look forward to it. Thank you, Chris.
Speaker 1Thank you so much for joining us. Look, guys, that's our show for today. Hope you enjoyed it. Reminder, we do this every single day, Monday to Friday, 7am Eastern Time Live on XX Video, YouTube, and you can catch us on Apple and Spotify as well. Thank you so much to Michael again for joining us. We'll be back same time. same place on monday have a wonderful weekend bye
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