Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Hello and welcome to
Speaker 1: another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: Tracy, the theme of the last two weeks has been,
Speaker 1: I don't know, emergency episodes of the podcast. Look in
Speaker 1: some respects, it's not surprising, new administration, new unexpected things.
Speaker 1: There's always going to be a flurry of activity when
Speaker 1: a new administration comes unexpected stuff. But uh, there's a lot.
Speaker 2: Yes, we're basically a daily show now, at least for
Speaker 2: the past two weeks.
Speaker 1: Well, it's like how we were a daily show. I
Speaker 1: mean we used to just do one episode a week
Speaker 1: prior to COVID. That was like really the mark of
Speaker 1: the world changing.
Speaker 2: It was like that, right, when you get more aud
Speaker 2: blots episodes, that's bad sign.
Speaker 1: It's a sign, right, So some people would say it's
Speaker 1: a good sign that there's a lot of stuff going
Speaker 1: on that people want, but it's certainly a sign. And
Speaker 1: of course there's been stuff going on on trade. I
Speaker 1: guess one of our emergency episodes was about the Deep
Speaker 1: Seek sell off. There's just a lot going on right now.
Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, and we're going to talk about one of
Speaker 2: the other things that's been going.
Speaker 1: On, right, and so obviously we've known for a while
Speaker 1: since part of the administration that Elon Musk and his
Speaker 1: Department of Government Efficiency would be coming in. To my mind,
Speaker 1: there's like multiple questions here. I mean, there's just so
Speaker 1: many questions about what that is. You know, some people
Speaker 1: are like, oh, is it going to be about just
Speaker 1: making the government run more efficiently? So the capital e
Speaker 1: which probably a lot of people wouldn't object to in theory.
Speaker 1: And then there's of course the question about how much
Speaker 1: can an organization or an entity like this do unilaterally
Speaker 1: because a lot of the big spending decisions they come
Speaker 1: out of Congress. One of the things that's happened, though,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of reporting on this from multiple outlets,
Speaker 1: is that Elon Musk and his team have apparently gotten
Speaker 1: access to a key payment system within the Department of Treasure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this has been all over the news in
Speaker 2: recent days, and I guess I guess the downside is
Speaker 2: we have a group of unelected people who I think
Speaker 2: technically aren't government employees, controlling the system through which the
Speaker 2: US sends basically all its payments, like everything social security
Speaker 2: to treasuries, all of that. But the upside is we
Speaker 2: get to talk about payments technology. Right, there's a small
Speaker 2: silver lining.
Speaker 1: Right, and you know, look, this is actually you know,
Speaker 1: we talk a lot about macro stuff on the podcast,
Speaker 1: showed the amount of government spending that goes to this
Speaker 1: or that or deficits are dead or whatever. But it's
Speaker 1: actually we both like it when we get to talk
Speaker 1: about like how does money go from point A to
Speaker 1: point b? And this is is an infinitely fascinating topic.
Speaker 1: But maybe sometimes.
Speaker 2: People don't care, but this is now they care.
Speaker 1: But now this is a time for people care, Like
Speaker 1: how does a payment actually get made to anything, whether
Speaker 1: it's a Social Security or recipient, whether it's to an
Speaker 1: independent contractor whether it's to an employee, or whether it's
Speaker 1: to the holder of a government bond awaiting their coupon. Yeah. Absolutely, Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be speaking to someone who really knows payments
Speaker 1: and the intricacies he seems to get. Really, I don't
Speaker 1: know many people who like are interested is going deep
Speaker 1: into how all these sort of like payments and accounting
Speaker 1: systems actually work, going deeper than just the macro The
Speaker 1: perfect guest, we haven't had him on in a long time,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna originally talk about something else. We'll get
Speaker 1: to that one day. We're gonna be speaking with Nathan Tanks.
Speaker 1: He is the author, editor creator of the Notes on
Speaker 1: the Crises Substack. So, Nathan, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: coming back on Oddlas.
Speaker 3: Well, I we'll say not substack anymore, but yes, thank
Speaker 3: you very much.
Speaker 1: You just let it write. What is the Bureau of
Speaker 1: Fiscal Service.
Speaker 3: The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy, obscure
Speaker 3: part of the United States Treasury that make sure that
Speaker 3: all of the sort of operational things that the Treasury
Speaker 3: Department is doing operates, so you know, you can have
Speaker 3: big conversations about foreign currency, about issuing treasury securities, about
Speaker 3: social security and Medicare, and government spending, and tax collection.
Speaker 3: Of course, you know, the tax collection is an IRS prerogative.
Speaker 3: But the other side of that, the sort of flip
Speaker 3: side of the IRS with tax collection is the payment side,
Speaker 3: and of course those tax collections in turn run through
Speaker 3: the payment system. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is
Speaker 3: what sends out tax refunds. So tax refunds are not
Speaker 3: actually technically an IRS prerogative in terms of making those
Speaker 3: payments going out, and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service
Speaker 3: is what does that. Eighty eight percent of government payments
Speaker 3: flow through this system every year, and it is what
Speaker 3: I've described as the beating, pulsating heart of the federal
Speaker 3: government's payments. Before you get to the banking system, before
Speaker 3: you get to the Federal Reserve. This is the heart.
Speaker 3: This is the artery that is making it all function.
Speaker 3: It is the most important aspect of the federal government,
Speaker 3: even though no one's ever heard of it.
Speaker 2: How complex is it to actually send out these payments?
Speaker 2: Because on the one hand, I can kind of imagine
Speaker 2: a scenario where people are just you know, pressing a
Speaker 2: button that says, like pay this person, pay that person,
Speaker 2: pay whoever. But on the other hand, I also imagine
Speaker 2: we're talking about, you know, millions of individual payments. People
Speaker 2: might have to be like onboarded into the system. I
Speaker 2: imagine getting into the technology that we're talking about, seriously
Speaker 2: old mainframe type computers like dinosaur systems. How hard is
Speaker 2: it to do this job?
Speaker 3: It's an incredibly complex task. I mean, we're talking about
Speaker 3: a mind boggling scale of payment processes that you have
Speaker 3: to do, and there's a physical architecture to the system.
Speaker 3: There's what you know encoding is called the business logic,
Speaker 3: So not just the logic of like the abstractly the
Speaker 3: language of the program, but the business logic that is involved.
Speaker 3: The Treasury has you know, belatedly gone into various payment
Speaker 3: modernization projects over the last twenty years, if you know,
Speaker 3: as we'll get to there's a sinking feeling in my
Speaker 3: stomach of that maybe it shouldn't have. But it is
Speaker 3: quite a complex system that requires a quite a specialized
Speaker 3: group of essentially aging programmers to manage this system and
Speaker 3: make sure that it is functioning properly and that you know,
Speaker 3: all payments go out from the Treasury on time, and
Speaker 3: that they never miss a payment and it's never delayed.
Speaker 1: We like talking about aging systems that are taken care
Speaker 1: of by a handful of gray beary.
Speaker 2: We need we need a Cobyl clasic cobylic.
Speaker 1: By the way, I went on IBM's website and I
Speaker 1: found some files where they had some Cobyl examples. I
Speaker 1: dropped them into Chad GPT. I said, rewrite these Python.
Speaker 1: It looked like it came out. Can't they just do that?
Speaker 1: Copy and paste the whole thing, drop it into a
Speaker 1: I'd say, rewrite this on Python or something.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean that is kind of what I was
Speaker 3: getting at with.
Speaker 1: You're a deep seat guy. Can't they just go, yeah, I've.
Speaker 3: Been Actually it's funny. I started playing with deep seek
Speaker 3: before this, CRISTI is really good. I was having fun.
Speaker 3: You put it in, and you know, I I you know,
Speaker 3: I loved, you know, getting some R code and building
Speaker 3: an economic model, proving my mathemat skills and understanding the
Speaker 3: mathematical properties of monels. It was great for that it
Speaker 3: has a ton of data that it is based on
Speaker 3: that it can do that. And each system, I mean
Speaker 3: this is true about generally any sort of business system
Speaker 3: that has developed for over a long time, but it's
Speaker 3: especially true for COBAL system, especially true for older systems,
Speaker 3: and no system is older than the Treasury, even with
Speaker 3: the modernizations, you know, the modernizing these systems mean changing
Speaker 3: the physical architecture that they run on, and maybe updating
Speaker 3: the language so that it can also be used on
Speaker 3: say a computer and not just a mainframe. And there's
Speaker 3: some unification of business logic that at all, But it's
Speaker 3: not getting rid of COBAL and actually getting rid of
Speaker 3: COBAL would be about there's an updated version of gobal
Speaker 3: arm goball that they use. These servers are now or
Speaker 3: at least I think for the most part, running on
Speaker 3: Linux servers. That they've got modern operating systems, but they're
Speaker 3: still very, very complex, and it's still Cobal and it's
Speaker 3: still decades and decades of business logic making the system run,
Speaker 3: you know, and all of these systems are a highly
Speaker 3: confidential system in every bank in the world, in every
Speaker 3: you know, major insurance company, every government. So there just
Speaker 3: is not like a set an example of confidential data
Speaker 3: set of these things that can run on. And you know,
Speaker 3: I should say, and this is part of why I'm
Speaker 3: so you know adept for this moment. That my father
Speaker 3: was a COBYL programmer at Morgan Stanley and he for
Speaker 3: almost twenty years he was the person in charge of
Speaker 3: making sure every financial advisor got their compensation. I've been
Speaker 3: telling him for the last three days, please let me,
Speaker 3: you know, be in me in the odd lots interview,
Speaker 3: please please, and uh, it's gonna take me a couple
Speaker 3: of weeks to uh, you can do it. I believe
Speaker 3: I'm working at this. This is the hardest informant task
Speaker 3: that I that I've had in the last five days.
Speaker 2: Okay, so musk slash doge now have access to this
Speaker 2: incredibly complicated system, as you just laid out, Do we
Speaker 2: know exactly what kind of access they have, because there's
Speaker 2: been a lot of discussion over whether it's read only
Speaker 2: or maybe they have administrative rights. What do we know?
Speaker 3: So, you know, there was a lot of very terrifying reporting.
Speaker 3: You know, you want to make a point of saying
Speaker 3: that when I first read the Washington Post reporting, which
Speaker 3: is the source that broke this in three PM, I
Speaker 3: was absolutely terrified. I had an absolute panic attack. And
Speaker 3: you know, as this story got started developing in Saturday,
Speaker 3: anonymous sources started leading, say The New York Times other
Speaker 3: sources to update their articles saying, well, they only have
Speaker 3: read only access. But this was there was never any
Speaker 3: public confirmation the idea. These were anonymous sources that were
Speaker 3: trying to placate the utter panic that was coming out
Speaker 3: and Wired at one am today reported recording this February fourth,
Speaker 3: recording this February fourth, at twelve nineteen.
Speaker 2: But that's how fast the news cycle is. Now, we
Speaker 2: got to give the exact minutes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so at a at one am they exclusively
Speaker 3: reported for the first time that that is not true.
Speaker 3: They have read and write access, and I've reported as
Speaker 3: of seven thirty this morning confirmed their reporting from my
Speaker 3: sources independently. Unfortunately couldn't be to it first. I crashed
Speaker 3: out and fell asleep at seven PM, got up at
Speaker 3: three am and got going.
Speaker 1: So what can you do with read only access? With
Speaker 1: read like, if someone has quote read only access to.
Speaker 3: It, that means you can My understanding is that means
Speaker 3: you can look at people's social security numbers, you can
Speaker 3: look at other confidential medical information, you know, all sorts
Speaker 3: of confidential information. You can look at the source code
Speaker 3: and so come up with ways of restructuring the code
Speaker 3: and then propose those restructurings and then it, you know,
Speaker 3: goes through a testing process and then try to get
Speaker 3: one of these aging programmers to implement what you want.
Speaker 2: And do we have any sense of what Elon wants
Speaker 2: out of this access? I mean, this is the big question,
Speaker 2: right And if you look at his account on Twitter
Speaker 2: slash x, he's talking a lot about, oh, I'm rooting
Speaker 2: out fraudulent payments or improper payments and my impression of
Speaker 2: this bureau is that, you know, the validity of payments
Speaker 2: isn't really their jurisdiction, right, Like their jurisdiction or their
Speaker 2: task is to send out the payments that have been
Speaker 2: mandated by Congress or other sources. They're not there to
Speaker 2: necessarily say, well, this payment is legit and that payment
Speaker 2: is not legit.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, I mean, I think, you know, for an
Speaker 3: odd looted audience who talks about the banking system a
Speaker 3: lot more and talks about the Federal Reserve, I think
Speaker 3: that is where to start to talking about this. Talking
Speaker 3: about having individual verification of payments and trying to determine
Speaker 3: improper payments at the technical, operation operational level of processing
Speaker 3: payments is like saying that, like the operations departments at
Speaker 3: the Federal Reserve, banks should not just simply rely on
Speaker 3: know your customer laws, anti money laundering and all sorts
Speaker 3: of other sort of safeguards for an authorized you know,
Speaker 3: you know, authorized payer to make payments that you know,
Speaker 3: the fundamental premise of the payment system, of any payment
Speaker 3: system that you're supposed to rely on, is that whether
Speaker 3: or not a legitimate payment is going is determined by
Speaker 3: the process of letting people into the system, and that
Speaker 3: if a regularly show up with what is going on
Speaker 3: with one of these authorized users, then that gets investigated,
Speaker 3: maybe they get shut out of the system. But trying
Speaker 3: to examine the individual payments, I mean, you know, it's
Speaker 3: like saying that that the operations department of the Federal
Speaker 3: Reserve Banks have been improperly sending improper payments.
Speaker 1: Explain this further because obviously, just in the abstract, the
Speaker 1: idea of being vigilant about improper payments, it's a good idea.
Speaker 1: I don't know how often they are, et cetera. But
Speaker 1: just sort of explain this idea further, where you know,
Speaker 1: in the vast system of the Treasury is the place
Speaker 1: or the seat of these sort of judgments And why
Speaker 1: is the in your view of the Bureau of Fiscal
Speaker 1: Service not the sort of place to identify these.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, I mean, you know, the big pictures that
Speaker 3: think about this is that the Treasury, the Bureau of
Speaker 3: the Fiscal Service is essentially and thus the Treasure as
Speaker 3: a whole is essentially a fiscal agent for every administrative
Speaker 3: agency in the federal government and a various maybe some
Speaker 3: other entities as well, And so You know, traditionally, when
Speaker 3: we talk about this, we talk about treasury payments. People
Speaker 3: consolidate the entire federal government and just say the treasury. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And you know, it's a shorthand that's useful for ninety
Speaker 3: nine percent purposes, just like other forms of consolidation would be.
Speaker 3: But for payment operational level issues, and you ask that
Speaker 3: question or when you ask questions about it, you have
Speaker 3: to disaggregate the federal government and examine those payments up there.
Speaker 1: For example, the Department of Agriculture, they would have their
Speaker 1: own focus on who is getting a payment that's legitimate
Speaker 1: or not. The Department of Education would have a division
Speaker 1: that focuses on these things, et cetera. Yeah, but then
Speaker 1: ultimately they make some decision. The Department of Agriculture says, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's some subsidy to corn growers somewhere, but ultimately that
Speaker 1: just gets routed through the Treasury. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And the Bureau of the of the Fiscal Service wants
Speaker 3: those administrative agencies to have better internal controls. They have
Speaker 3: their own Payments Integrity Unit, which is not supposed to
Speaker 3: investigate the payments themselves, but to help improve the controls.
Speaker 3: There is one of these sprawling systems is a do
Speaker 3: not pay system where there is a list of do
Speaker 3: not pay that these files get pushed through before the
Speaker 3: payments actually get put out. And you know, the buer
Speaker 3: of the Fiscal Service also has legislative proposals. Their last
Speaker 3: you know, Fiscal year twenty twenty four report has seven
Speaker 3: legislative proposals. Five of them are about reducing improper payments,
Speaker 3: including giving them greater authority to require better internal controls
Speaker 3: from other administrative agencies. So these are known problems. The
Speaker 3: main barrier has been Congress has not budgeted enough and
Speaker 3: authorized enough to do this, and notably, a lot of
Speaker 3: this needs legislation to do, both on you know, internal
Speaker 3: legal things within the federal government and also in terms
Speaker 3: of privacy protections for people of doing responsible changes that
Speaker 3: and make sure they're still privacy respecting.
Speaker 2: So the other word that's been flying around lately is impoundment.
Speaker 2: And I guess my question is, you know, if DOGE
Speaker 2: starts cutting off certain payments for whatever reason, is there
Speaker 2: a backup contingency payment processor. Is there like another agency
Speaker 2: that could maybe step in and do some of this.
Speaker 3: No, there's no rule book or game plan if this
Speaker 3: system goes down, then the payments don't go out that day.
Speaker 3: And if they break this system in a way that
Speaker 3: takes months to fix that we have no rule book
Speaker 3: for this. Now. Ironically, the memos that I've gotten through
Speaker 3: FOYA about what the federal reserves game plan in case
Speaker 3: of treasury default the debt ceiling kind of makes this
Speaker 3: situation a little bit less stuff on the panic because
Speaker 3: you could, like, you know, who's caring about legalities at
Speaker 3: this point anyway? With this, you know, basically decided to
Speaker 3: do anything. So you maybe like create an SPV for
Speaker 3: each administrative agency, lend to it with you know, thirteen
Speaker 3: point three authority, and then try to work out payments.
Speaker 3: But you still have to figure out who to pay
Speaker 3: and where.
Speaker 1: But there's two separate questions here when we're talking about empundment.
Speaker 1: One is the theory of just something break. But then
Speaker 1: the other question is there is a legal theory, you know,
Speaker 1: the classic like sort of constitution one to one Congress
Speaker 1: controls the power of the purse, and the Congress decides
Speaker 1: so gets money, et cetera, and then it goes out there.
Speaker 1: And then there is the other theory that some in
Speaker 1: the trumpe administration support that actually the executive branch does
Speaker 1: have discretion about payments, so Congress could authorize something, but
Speaker 1: tell listeners about the legal debate about what impoundment is.
Speaker 3: Yes, so, and this is what I was called covering
Speaker 3: Friday morning with my first I mean, that's how Also,
Speaker 3: how you know things are really bad is when there
Speaker 3: had been three notes of the crisis pieces in three days,
Speaker 3: in three business days. But the core issue is, as
Speaker 3: you said, the foundational constitutional principle is that Congress has
Speaker 3: control of the power of the purse, and that is
Speaker 3: is not supposed to be abrogated. There is some you know,
Speaker 3: the historical precedent here is the Nix administra. The Impowerment
Speaker 3: Act of nineteen seventy four was meant to stop Nixon
Speaker 3: for impounding because he claimed that he could impound because
Speaker 3: you know, Congress is spending too much and they're you know,
Speaker 3: maybe just.
Speaker 1: To be is the executive branch unilaterally decision sorry uh uh, Yes.
Speaker 3: Impowerment is the concept of the president deciding not to
Speaker 3: spend money that Congress has appropriated, and Congress appropriating the
Speaker 3: money is a directive to spend, and especially when Congress
Speaker 3: directs uh for an exact amount of money to be
Speaker 3: spent or an exact formula of money to be spent.
Speaker 3: The president does not have the authority to just stop
Speaker 3: those payments.
Speaker 1: I mean, you mentioned the Impoundment Control Act of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four. So there's obviously been some dispute about the
Speaker 1: basic premise that only Congress has this prerogative. Does this
Speaker 1: end up in a court fight?
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean that is the traditional check and balance
Speaker 3: in our system is that the judiciary is supposed to
Speaker 3: step in and speak to a constitutional question and impose
Speaker 3: or say that a certain act that the president is
Speaker 3: engaging in is unconstitutional and should be stopped. In this situation,
Speaker 3: the obvious thing to say about that is that Trump
Speaker 3: appointed three of the nine Supreme Court justices that are
Speaker 3: on the Supreme Court. So it seems very unlikely, although
Speaker 3: not impossible, that the Supreme Court would actually step in
Speaker 3: and declare what Trump's is doing unconstitutional and even more importantly,
Speaker 3: impose some sort of consequences or block to what Trump
Speaker 3: is doing.
Speaker 2: But even if the Court were to rule it unconstitutional,
Speaker 2: you would still need someone to actually enforce that decision,
Speaker 2: which seems like it's pretty up in the air One
Speaker 2: more question from me. So, one of the interesting things
Speaker 2: about all of this is the doge people who have
Speaker 2: access to the payment system. I think it's like a
Speaker 2: group of young, twenty something year old programmers, according to
Speaker 2: various reporting. I find it kind of funny because I
Speaker 2: always thought Cobaal was like, you know, this thing that
Speaker 2: not a lot of people understood or there wasn't a
Speaker 2: lot of expertise in it. But apparently, you know, twenty
Speaker 2: year olds seemed to be able to understand it. What's
Speaker 2: the potential here that they actually mess something up pretty bad?
Speaker 3: The potential is absolutely enormous. The reporting that I've done
Speaker 3: that confirms the WIREDS reporting is that there is a
Speaker 3: twenty five year old SpaceX former SpaceX employee, Marco Ales,
Speaker 3: who has read and write access to the payment Automation
Speaker 3: manager and the secure payment system of the Bureau of
Speaker 3: Fiscal Service. It is an absolutely enormously terrifying situation. I
Speaker 3: had a source describe it as apocalyptic. There's no way
Speaker 3: to exaggerate how enormously dangerous this is. Every financial market
Speaker 3: in the world, in the country in the world should
Speaker 3: be pricing in the operational failure uncertainties of this system.
Speaker 3: Every single finance market should be pricing it, and none
Speaker 3: of them are. None of them are even close.
Speaker 1: And just to be clear, my last thing, so like
Speaker 1: bond payments run through this system.
Speaker 3: Bond payments run through the system. There's another Coball system
Speaker 3: at the New York Federal Reserve which I know less about.
Speaker 3: That was also part of that. But I think it
Speaker 3: still foundationally relies on the Coball systems that it communicates
Speaker 3: with at the Treasury.
Speaker 1: Nathan Tankers, thank you so much for coming on up.
Speaker 1: That was great. Yeah, Tracy. On the plus side, I
Speaker 1: like talking payments stuff.
Speaker 3: No, I really do.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there are two main takeaways from
Speaker 1: me so far. It's like, one is the idea that
Speaker 1: this team now just has such access to, like such
Speaker 1: sensitive data is extraordinary to me. And two, I have
Speaker 1: zero doubt that it would be very easy to screw
Speaker 1: up something that is truly at the lifeblood of just
Speaker 1: like especially how the entire economy operates.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I guess we still have to learn more about
Speaker 2: what the end game is here and what DOGE is
Speaker 2: trying to accomplish exactly. The other thing I was thinking
Speaker 2: about was, you know, Nathan's kind of warning towards the
Speaker 2: end about the market just overlooking a lot of this.
Speaker 2: And I kind of remember in the first Trump administration.
Speaker 2: Do you remember one of the rating agencies came out
Speaker 2: and they have a little peace warning about US credit
Speaker 2: worthiness and saying, like the rule of law gets eroded,
Speaker 2: and that's kind of bad. It's weird that we haven't
Speaker 2: seen a lot of that over I guess it's still early.
Speaker 2: It's happening so quickly, but like there hasn't been any
Speaker 2: of that in the past two weeks.
Speaker 1: Well. Look, the way I would think about it is
Speaker 1: sort of like the debt ceiling, which is that the
Speaker 1: market will freak out when something happens, right, but before then,
Speaker 1: like if something happens and there's a payment system something
Speaker 1: gets broken, then we're gonna see a market freak out.
Speaker 1: But everyone until that moment is just always operates. Like
Speaker 1: in the end, the payments will be fine. I don't
Speaker 1: think financial markets are good at situations like this where
Speaker 1: it's very binary, right, where it's like the default is
Speaker 1: you just sort of expect the payments to keep on
Speaker 1: running and everything is fine, et cetera. The defaults you
Speaker 1: expect them to always raise the debt sealing eventually when
Speaker 1: they have to, or the default is you expect the
Speaker 1: Fed to step in or whatever. The mental trillion dollar coin,
Speaker 1: but like how to actually think about like payments not
Speaker 1: actually happening and they're not being an easy way to
Speaker 1: fix the system. I for what, I am not surprised
Speaker 1: that this isn't that you know, it's hard to price
Speaker 1: that stuff in.
Speaker 2: Here's a question if the system got messed up or
Speaker 2: pays or impounded or something, would treasuries go up or down?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: I love this question. I'm actually I put myself in
Speaker 1: the category of if you own a bond and you
Speaker 1: miss a coupon, you freak out, you buy more bonds.
Speaker 1: I think that's where eventually, I think.
Speaker 2: That's what actually tends to happen during debt sealing crises.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, all.
Speaker 2: Right, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 1: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 2: And this has been another episode of the aud Thlots podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart.
Speaker 1: Follow Nathan Tankers He's at Nathan Tankers, and check out
Speaker 1: his newsletter at crisesnoes dot com. Follow our producers Carman
Speaker 1: Rodriguez at Carmen Ermann, Dash o'b bennett at Dashbock, Kilbrooks
Speaker 1: at Kilbrooks. More odd lags content go to Bloomberg dot
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