Bank Earnings, AI Debt Boom & Trump’s Crackdown

Hello and welcome back to the Market Maker podcast and pleased to have back in the fold Piers Curran for the first time in 2026. And we're going to talk about, well, actually just before we started, there's just so much to talk about. We were like, how do we actually make this useful? And so we're going to talk about really 5 or 6 key points of macro and try to just touch on a little bit of detail on each one rather than a specific one singular deep dive. So we're going to talk about bank earnings. All the big boys have been out. So JP, GS, MS, you've also had likes of BlackRock and so forth. So what are the main takeaways from some of those corporate earnings? Obviously Trump has been a busy boy as he normally is. So whether it's a Powell probe or targeting credit card companies or the situation geopolitically in Iran, he's had his fingers in many pies this week and we'll try and cover that as well. As having a look at the latest US CPI print, which is always one that investors will follow very closely given its implications for future Federal Reserve policy. So Piers, how are you first?

Good.

Very good.

Oh yeah. 26. 26. The rocket boosters are on already. And yeah. Seems to, yeah, flying this year. It's good. Feels good.

Ready to go.

All right. Sentiment is positive.

Well, are these, are the banks on Wall Street feeling as positive as you are? It didn't sound like Jamie Dimon was quite being as positive as you are. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, mixed on Wall Street. I mean, look, we've got quarter 4 earnings season up and running this week, so that's all the companies beginning to air their laundry, show us what they've been doing in the Q4. That's October, November, December, of course, 2025. And so as always, the banks kind of kick it off in terms of, yeah, it tends to be the big financials that are the first ones to begin reporting. So yeah, we've had those this week. Bit mixed really. Some good, some bad. JP, not so, not so good. You know, investment banking fees fell 5%, for example, which is like, you know, I thought we were on an M&A boom, but clearly not according to that JPMorgan stat. So they brought in $2.35 billion on that. So missed their own guidance. And actually, we'll come onto it with Morgan Stanley, but what was really surprising in amongst their numbers was a dip in debt underwriting. Because we're going to talk about Morgan Stanley in a sec. They've been just off the scale positive with regards to their debt capital markets division. But yeah, also JPMorgan's net income dropped. That's maybe just more of a function of interest rates coming down, of course. But Jamie Dimon was saying, while labor markets have softened, conditions do not appear to be worsening. So at least he You know, that's obviously not a, that's not a negative comment. That's a positive one with regards to maybe, you know, the economic vibes out there. But yeah, I mean, some calling him the grumpy realist. So yeah, JP Morgan were a bit flat, I would say. But when you kind of walk across the street and go knock on the door of like Morgan Stanley or Goldman's, for example, well then, You know, it's a different picture. And I think we were just going to kind of highlight, rather than going through all of these banks and diving into their numbers, we were just going to kind of pick one item out, which was actually Morgan Stanley's fixed income underwriting. So in contrast to JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, they reported a revenue of $785 million in that division, which was a 93% increase on the same quarter the previous year. Which is extraordinary.

Yeah. And that number is extraordinary. And so one of the things that triggered in my mind was why? I think there's a good baseline attribute that I'd love all of the listeners to have, whether you're in your early careers or not, just running a business in general. It's like, if there's ever an outlier, it's like, well, why? I mean, what's Morgan Stanley done in Q4? That's changed the game, so to speak. And yeah, this is when, you know, you mentioned DCM there, debt capital markets. So I guess the way to just position this firstly, so everyone's on the same page, you know, start with an investment bank and within an investment bank there's a global markets division, there's an investment banking division, there might be others, private banking, asset management, wealth management. But in investment banking, you peel a layer off You go down and then you have these different areas. Now they could be sector coverage in a sense of we are covering technology stocks or autos or something like that. Or you might have these other teams which are squarely focused on other capital markets exercises like equity capital markets. So listing companies on exchange, going through an IPO, or in this case, debt capital markets, DCM. Peel another layer off and then you get down to, okay, so what are the separate things within DCM? There's high yield bonds, so junk bonds from riskier companies. They carry higher fees for the bank because they're harder to sell. You've then got sovereign type of debt issued by governments like the US Treasury and so forth. Then you've got asset-backed securities, which is bundling loans. And then hybrid securities. But the key one here, and one about Morgan Stanley, is investment grade. So otherwise shorthand, IG sort of bonds, debt from highly stable companies. There's no better bankable company these days than your mega tech firms. And so yeah, what is it then that these mega tech firms are doing that's requiring the services of that DCM function of MS?

Yeah. Well, yeah, so let's start on that side of it then. These big hyperscalers, they are, I mean, obviously as we've been talking about till we've been blue in the face, you know, we're obviously in an AI race and there's been a mega data center buildout, which is ridiculously expensive. You know, if you want to buy a few hundred thousand Nvidia chips, then, you know, you better get your fat checkbook out because it's going to cost a lot of money. Right. And so, But everyone's trying to maintain their position in the race and they don't want to fall behind, so they're spending and spending and spending. And look, some of these big tech giants, they're actually generating more free cash flow even than they're spending in this ridiculous, most expensive race in history. They can still afford it right out of their free cash flow. However, what they're choosing to do is to take the opportunity, you know, whilst interest rates have come down, They're taking an opportunity to say, well, actually, rather than just using our cash, you know, that's liquidity. Maybe we should, you know, whilst we can raise finance pretty cheaply here, maybe let's just borrow the money, or at least I should say borrow some of the— so they're kind of mixing it up. They're borrowing some money to spend on these data centers. They're using their free cash flows as well, lumping it all together to fund this race. And it kind of depends on if you go one level down, it depends on the company and their kind of free cash flows as to what the proportion is, how much they're paying through debt raising and how much they're paying through their cash flows. And actually, so Meta, for example, they issued $30 billion in corporate bonds in October 2025. $30 billion. I mean, this for Morgan Stanley, this is like way this is like never seen before kind of level of kind of corporate bond issuance, right? So $30 billion coming outta Meta, Amazon $15 billion, Alphabet $25 billion in November, that was Oracle $18 billion, for example. Actually, there's one notable absent member here, which is Microsoft, who are choosing a different strategy. They're actually continuing to just pay for it themselves, interestingly. And then within those I mentioned, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Oracle. Oracle's the one that's having to borrow more. So their mix of funding is more leaning on that kind of capital raised through bond issuance side because their free cash flows are much lower. So if you like, they're taking more leverage to stay in this race compared to Alphabet who's No, they've got plenty of cash coming out of all orifices. So that's kind of on the one side, right? So who, which bank is geared, you know, you mentioned like those different specializations. Well, it just so happens that Morgan Stanley is often kind of historically been seen as the tech bank. So they kind of specialize in the tech sector. And this, of course, right, this is squarely in that tech sector. They're also lead kind of DCM bank, you might say also. So it's kind of you getting that DCM and tech sort of specialty coming together here. And so Morgan Stanley have been right at the front of the queue to really take advantage of this kind of tidal wave of debt issuance that's been going on back in the last year.

And it's just an interesting point for people who are new to this to recognize when last year, obviously all the talk is about AI and the frontier labs. So OpenAI, Anthropic, and these amazing tools, then Gemini 3 drops and it's all about the tech. But then the next stage is people go, okay, so we need compute power and data centers. But then the next part of that is, well, who's funding all of this? And so that again, that sort of circular ecosystem slightly, but there's kind of, well, how does that then benefit to potential jobs and roles and organizations you might want to work for in the future.

Yeah. And it's like ripples on a pond, right? Or the orders of, so yeah, you find you've got these companies that are trying to stay in the race, right? They're spending, who's benefiting? Well, NVIDIA, but then who's benefiting next? You know, well, it's the banks and then next and then next. And then kind of each ripple is another derivative away from the epicenter, but you just got to think out, right? Who can benefit from this in whatever way, and then start to kind of figure out a strategy to invest in that.

Yeah. My Uncle Chang in China's air conditioning warehouse business is the sky's the limit at the moment. But the other one then is BlackRock. Just to wrap up on the earnings side, I did see the number $14 trillion, Mentioned this BlackRock, which is an insane figure.

Yeah. So $14 trillion asset under management. So continuing to break their own record of being the biggest asset manager on the planet ever in the history of mankind. That's the value of the assets they manage. Of course, a function of that is that markets have been going up. Well, I mean, markets have been going up. It is true. I mean, I was looking at this just in preparing. Markets have been going up. When you think about international markets, it's actually the US where it's fine. You know, you could say the S&P has gone up, but if you look at the NASDAQ, the NASDAQ actually is trading levels that we were trading back at the end of October. So if you're thinking about Q4, so October, November, December, which is what these, this BlackRock figure comes from, right? They're up to $14 trillion. Then yeah, sure, at the start of October we had some kind of maybe a bit of upside for US stocks, but really broadly speaking, since then it hasn't been mega up. But all, most of the other areas of the world have seen a kind of strong increase. So, and actually at the start of 2026, German stock market spiked to a new high. Italy's up through the roof, new highs. The UK's new highs, Italy new highs. Even France stock market made a new high, if you can believe that, last week. So yeah, I would say the US is still being a little bit, maybe a touch of a kind of laggard here, and it's because of the big tech. It's the NASDAQ that isn't making new highs. And of course the big tech firms are the big part of the S&P. And so, but still, look, generally speaking, asset prices up means good news for BlackRock with then the kind of, private markets is a very attractive kind of, and ever more kind of interesting place for investors to put their money, right? So rather than public markets, which is the S&P and the FTSE 100 and your NVIDIAS and your Googles and whatever, it's public markets. Private markets is kind of the new kind of kid on the block for investors from a kind of diversification point of view. And so there's real money moving into private infrastructure, for example, and in that is data and so on. So yeah, BlackRock particularly performing well on their private market side of their kind of assets under management makeup.

Alright, well look, let's move on then and talk. I guess Trump is going to touch on each one of these threes going from Some news that saw really huge moves in some of these big credit card names at the beginning of the week. Then there's the probe into Jerome Powell and him being backed up by central bank bros, that's to fight against the great Donald Trump. And then there's also the geopolitical situation going on in Iran and how that's influenced oil prices. So perhaps with the credit card companies first, this cap that he's proposed of a 10% cap on credit card interest. Current average is around circa 24%. So this is large.

Yeah.

What does this actually mean though?

Well, so, well, firstly I would say this is a great soundbite. You know, Trump loves a headline and the little soundbites that he's going to get the headlines. And it's the soundbites where he wants to specifically speak to, I would say, the lower half of the income scale in the US of America, in the United States, right? They're the portion of the electorate I would say that Trump is trying to speak to. And when he says, right, I'm going to cap credit card interest at 10%, obviously he's talking to them and they're like, well, hey, this is amazing. I'd have to pay 24% on my credit card debt. Now it's going to be 10%, right? So it's a great soundbite and you know, we're in kind of midterms season this year. I know the midterms aren't until November, but believe it or not, the gamesmanship begins this far out. So there's that to say. But look, let's just say it happened. And I don't know what the— I haven't looked into it. Is he able to do this? I don't know if he's legally able to tell a public company like Visa, right? You have to now, we are setting the interest rate you are going to be charging your customers. I don't know how that all works, but look, let's just say there's a world where this happens. Well, fine. Yeah, you might think, great, great for the consumer. Great. They're going to spend more money. It's going to trigger a wave of, you know, consumption, and then this is going to feed into growth and it's going to be amazing, right? So that's one way of looking at it. But like with all of these ideas, there's also kind of the unintended consequences, because that all sounds fine on paper. Great. Lower the cost of borrowing, people borrow more, more growth, right? But the banks have to lend it. You know, it's not, that's a two-way deal. You know, if a consumer wants to borrow money, they can't just borrow money. They need a lender. Now, if you look at it from the bank's side and looking at the people, again, those people in the bottom half of the income bracket, well, their credit scores are much lower. 'cause they're not as wealthy, they don't have as much income, X, Y, Z, right? And so if you've got a credit score that's low and a bank can only earn 10% interest on them lending to you, well maybe that's not enough interest for the bank for it to be worth them taking the risk. So they might just go, you know what, bottom half of the income bracket, Trump might say 10%, but we're not lending to you at all. So deal with that. And then they're going to have debt that they've got to pay off immediately and they won't be able to, and then there'll be bankruptcies. And so basically it could be mega messy and actually could trigger the opposite to more consumption and growth. It could actually trigger a bit of a wave of a credit crunch, actually. So there's always two sides to these sort of fun soundbites that Trump mouths.

I think it's genius again. It's a political stroke of genius again, where absolutely, like you said, this won't materialize. And then what will happen is he can go back and as we are going to now sort of use the segue into Powell, not only can he go on to blame Powell for the weak economic performance at his door, not Trump's, he can also say, I tried to make all these efforts. But the establishment, i.e., the big banks, are not allowing you to have a better, more equitable way of your best interests in terms of the interest rates. So yeah, I don't expect any of this to happen as we're going to go into the plane, but that's not the point. And I think, you know, it's not about Trump winning and it being implemented because the actual win, we don't know until November. How this plays out.

Yeah. It's about Trump being seen to be fighting your corner.

Yes.

Right. Indeed.

And then, so yeah, talk about Powell then. I mean, this is an escalation, right? In terms of it's gone from calling Jerome out multiple times, you should cut rates. I mean, what are some of the nicknames he was calling him out? Like the stubborn ox and all these other things that he's called him. And then obviously that was that incident that we had a few months back with the renovations that have I think it's gone over like 700 million, is it? It's gone over the actual amount because it's an old building. There's been lots of problems.

Yeah. And so, which in itself, by the way, I mean, we shouldn't overlook the fact that that is shocking from a management of a project point of view.

Yeah. Whoever the project managers for that need to be sacked.

Yeah, for sure. But yeah.

But what's happened is the DOJ is investigating now if Powell misled Congress. Over those cost overruns. So that's triggered though an interesting response on a global level, right? So what's happened there?

Well, I mean, first of all, look, this is now a criminal charge, right? Which is what escalates this to a whole new level. But yeah, I mean, look, the central bank fraternity, shall we say, you know, rallied round and Powell's got obviously supporters in the big central banks, Lagarde at the ECB, Bailey at the Bank of England coming to his corner and very much vocally providing their support to Powell. But I don't know, look, Powell, his term ends in May. I mean, I don't know why Trump's messing about still with trying to, I don't know what he's trying to do here. Is he trying to de-seat or unseat Powell. Well, he's only got 5 months left, so why bother going through the turmoil? So look, a lot of people are bringing into question yet again, is this undermining the independence of the central bank? And I don't know, when you read the FT and stuff, you know, they're up in arms about this and oh my God, you know, if the Fed loses credibility, it's the end of the world. Kind of language. But then you go and look at the markets and all right, on that day there was a little bit of downside, but now they're back up. I mean, my point is markets don't care at this point in time. Markets could not care less. Now again, it's another threat, isn't it? It's just a Trump threat. Is it actually going to happen? Is Powell actually going to be criminally investigated? If he is, by the time it all comes to court, he'll be long gone in terms of his seat as the Fed chair. So it just really, in my view, it comes down to who replaces Powell. And I'm not sure that's necessarily linked to this criminal investigation or not. And so I just think it's a bit of a sideshow.

Yeah, I think the strategy is more no one's too senior or too important not to face the law.

Yeah.

That's the messaging here. Yeah. Which is like he should be punished. And that's what the optics are, I think. Not, not more.

Yeah.

Nothing more than that.

So, and again, it's kind of back to the other point about it's midterms and it's political. So, you know, ultimately it's the waste, fraud, waste, and abuse as they are talking about in terms of the spending that goes on within the government. And there's so much waste. We're not saying it's fraud here, but well, I don't know, criminal investigation, they maybe, they think it is fraud, but You know, it's waste for sure. At least it's waste in that this is a ridiculous overspend compared to what it should be. And I think they just want to send a general message to the average person on the street that, look, we are, yeah, it's not good enough anymore and we will call people out when they're wasting taxpayers' dollars. So again, it's all part of the political gamesmanship midterm year.

And then the third part of this, the Trump narrative is the geopolitical ongoing developments in both Venezuela and Iran and oil prices. And oil prices have had quite a bumpy week actually. A bit of up and down action. Probably the biggest move was the sell-off that happened midweek. But you and I actually haven't spoken since the Venezuelan outbreak, if you like, or intervention, let's call it. But yeah, quite interesting to get your take on Why have the markets reacted more to Iran than they have to Venezuela?

Yes. Well, this is a very good question and it's really just about, it has to come down to, in the end, it has to come down to the supply and demand, right? And with oil supply, the supply side of the equation is particularly volatile and, and has an outsized influence on price compared to most other commodities, right? And so with oil, let's just talk supply. So yes, the whole story and the theory behind the Venezuela situation is, ah, well, it's going to unlock— Venezuela have the biggest oil reserves on the planet, more than Saudi Arabia. And at the moment they're kind of maybe utilizing about 1, 2% of those reserves and that they could massively increase their output. So the supply of oil's going to go up. So right, the price of oil should go down. The problem is the infrastructure currently in place in Venezuela is so old and decrepit or doesn't even exist that the amount of money, first of all, and therefore will companies be prepared to invest that money is a question mark. But even if they are, the amount of time it's going to take to put in infrastructure to then maybe, right, see that Venezuelan supply start to really meaningfully tick up, it's going to take years. So from a price perspective in the near term here, it hasn't had too much impact. And look, the price of oil is on levels we haven't seen for 4 years. So we're at a 4-year low anyway, right? And so Venezuela, more supply leads to oil prices going down, but it's so far in the future, it doesn't really make too much odds now. So Iran, well, that is more near term. That really could have an impact on near-term supply. Which is why you've seen volatility on the oil price be more extreme off the Iranian situation than off the Venezuelan situation.

Yeah. And that, that exacerbated by the short period of time going from these protests that are happening in Iran, an intervention that's happened with the military in Venezuela. Your first thought goes to, well, that's pretty unprecedented. Yeah, that might happen. But then midweek when we had that big sell-off, he's kind of talking about strategic patience and things like that, holding off military action, of which is very, I'd say, my opinion, unlikely to happen given the consequence of within that region.

Yeah.

And then the price came down, that oil premium kind of faded pretty quick. But one thing on Venezuela, and again, going into the more tactical strategic approach of the US administration. The US have talked about the potential of 30 to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude hitting the market.

Right.

An interesting point I wanted to share there was that, as you said, I think the somewhat naive approach would be, yeah, they just turn the taps on, unlock this huge deposit of oil. As you mentioned, takes time. You know, not only that, how long, you know, what is the political situation? So stability there. The licensing, the exploration, all of the stuff that goes into it. So what they're talking about, the US, when they're saying 30 to 50 million barrels, this is basically backed up crude that's just been sitting there.

Yeah.

Because for months, storage tanks, tankers have been sat there due to US embargoes. There is oil there. Yeah. Venezuela produces one of the lowest amounts of the OPEC group. But it's not inconsequential. It's still a few, several hundred thousand barrels that accumulates over months. And I did have a look. What Trump was saying was that he wants to basically take all that oil from Venezuela and give it to the US Gulf Coast facilities because they have the exact equipment to effectively convert that crude into something useful and meaningful. Yeah. And the proceeds of that are estimated to be $3 billion. So what a good headline again to go to the electorate and say, look, there we have, we've just made 3, it's the best deal ever. We've just been given $3 billion here to top it up. And at the same time, the other thing is if he can bring all of that to market, obviously you talk about that pendulum of supply and demand. We're already in a supply already oversupplied globally. This is then going to make that situation even worse. And if he drives those prices down, I mean, we've talked about this before, it's a bit of a double-sided coin here because on one hand, sure, he can put more pressure on the OPEC situation. Venezuela is an OPEC country, which he's now just basically taken out of that. And does that put pressure on some of those other countries as well? In that way. But at the same time, what happens to the shale industry if prices start to go below breakeven like you've mentioned as well? So, exactly. Yeah. Some interesting things definitely going on there. But away from the oil side, what about CPI and from a bigger, broader macro perspective?

Yeah, well, I want to talk about CPI and GDP, US GDP growth, and actually maybe a touch of labor market. But CPI was announced earlier this week. And we often look at core CPI. And remember, this is the key with regards to interest rates. Are the Fed going to cut in 2026? Are they going to continue to cut rates? And look, Powell getting threatened with legal action, is that going to impact, will Powell now not cut rates because Trump wants him to cut and now he's pissed off with Powell, sorry, with Trump. So I'm not going to cut. There's all that. I think you can kind of forget. That. I think Powell is going to do his job and then he will look at the economic situation and he'll make decisions. So this CPI report on Tuesday, I think it hit the newswires, was on the one hand really good, like good news as in inflation dropping, therefore actually maybe promotes the chances of more rate cuts. And when you look at core CPI, it hit 2. 6%, which was in line with November's 2.6%, but it basically maintained this 2.6% level, which is the lowest inflation has been since March of 2021. Okay, so we're near, we're now at a 5-year low on inflation. It's just, so that's the right direction. Okay. If we want positive economic vibes, rate cuts and so on. Okay. So that's the good news. The bad news, I can, when you kind of start to look inside the basket, 'cause inflation is measured by taking a basket of goods and seeing how the prices of, you know, the, all these goods in the system, how are the prices changing month on month? And then when you start to look at the different parts of the inflation basket, you've got a really, you've got a good part where prices are nicely coming down. That tends to be the kind of physical goods. Okay. So cars, clothes, electronics, you know, all that stuff. Really good signs where you are really seeing a continuation of the price, the price inflation rate coming down. There's the thing around the tariffs we should mention with inflation as well. So Trump's tariffs, remember back to April, his Liberation Day where he slapped 10% tariff on all goods. Okay? So that's prices basically going up by 10% in theory.

Okay?

But when we're talking about inflation, when I said 2.6%, That's a year-on-year measurement. So what are prices today compared to one year ago? And that 10% bump, okay, when that works its way out of that 12-month kind of timeframe. So let's say when it comes to April 2026 inflation, you will no longer have the tariff bump in the prices cuz you'll be comparing April 2026 to April 2025. Well, in April 2025, the tariffs have already come in. So we're heading towards the tariff bump coming out of the equation, which means that should lead to inflation dropping. Okay? So we're also quite excited about that. And we, again, that would promote more rate cuts and the rest of it, right? Fine. That's all the good news. The one bad spot here in this inflation situation was then on the services side. We often talk about this supercore services. And that's feeding into kind of wage growth, right? So wages are actually going up really strongly. Wage growth is at 4%, which is really high. Sounds good. People earning more money. Awesome. But from an inflation point of view, well, if they're earning more money, they're spending more money, more demand for goods, prices rise, inflation goes up. Powell can forget about his rate cuts, right? So we're still a little bit worried about the services side and the supercore and the wage growth rate being very high and that could just be the thing that comes in and spoils the party here because one of the key risks in 2026 is inflation goes back up and prevents the Fed from cutting more.

And then is that the term, what you've explained, is that the terminology that gets used of a wage price spiral.

Yeah.

One thing leading to another. Is that when people would use that phrase?

Yeah. So the wage price spiral, which can be the key driver for inflation getting outta control on the upside, is when wages are going up really strongly, people are spending more, driving up prices. So the cost of living is getting more expensive. So employees demand even more wages, right? And then their wages the wage growth rate goes up faster and then they're spending more and then hang on, I need more. And you get into this kind of vicious spiral that can be a kind of a driver of an inflation problem. So we're kind of half worried about that. And maybe just finally here, we're still in what people are terming the data fog. So we're still in that fallout from the government shutdown back in October slash November, right? And so all of this data We do have to take it with a pinch of salt still, and that absence of data for that kind of 2-month period is making it harder for economists to kind of be confident about trends and directions of these kind of data points. So there's some uncertainty in there. But that being said, I did want to flag thinking about GDP growth because look, Trump's big beautiful bill, there's a lot of tax cuts in there, right? No tax on tips, no tax on overtime. You know, all this stuff. There's other stuff in there where I won't go into the details, but corporations now, it's more beneficial from an accounting point of view to buy equipment like CapEx. There's a CapEx spending binge going on, which is obviously driving growth, right? The Atlanta Fed, who have something called GDPNow, is a GDP forecaster tracker. And it's actually one of the ones most people look at because in the past they've actually been a really good, one of the better forecasting models for GDP. You know what their GDP forecast is for Q4?

I haven't got any idea actually. I've not looked at it in a while.

5.4%.

Wow.

Yeah. And you are getting people getting really excited about 2026 with all this tax cut stuff, right? If you get interest rate cuts, if the AI— there's a lot of ifs here— if the AI boom cycle continues, then actually, and then if AI is actually starting to really show through in productivity, which it is, by the way, people are starting to talk about 5 or even 6% GDP growth for the United States of America in 2026, which would just be Insane timing, baby. Right.

So look, make America great again.

Yeah, there are people that are pretty punchy on the kind of positive outlook front, but just to add that little bit of concern back in, it's inflation. If that gets back on the upside, you can kind of write all this stuff off. You're not going to get Oracle borrowing money by issuing corporate debt if interest rates are going up. And yeah, so there's that one. And then Japan, as I think I mentioned in our show before Christmas, Japan's my kind of key risk for this year. So if those two things stay in their box, it could actually be an interesting year from a GDP growth point of view.

So although Trump is actually quite skillful at kind of spinning many plates of the political narrative, if he did push too hard on Powell, And Fed independence did come into question more seriously, that's really problematic for that story you've just described as well. So it's interesting how it's a high-stakes game, but you know, big risk, big reward, I guess, as far as he's concerned.

Indeed.

All right. Thanks very much, Piers, for all of your insight as ever. And if anyone has any questions at all or comments or differences of opinion, drop us a comment, do let us know. I do also know that there's a portion of viewers who are probably new to the channel or don't subscribe. So remember to subscribe and hit that notification on your, your podcast platform so you get these episodes every week. But yeah, thanks very much everyone for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.

Catch you later. Thanks a lot.