Maxed Out | James Scurlock | Talks at Google

Filmmakers at Google event.

Great day.

Today we actually have James Scurlock, the director and author of the book you're holding, to answer your questions after the event. So please stick around and think of some questions for James. I'm sure he'll be happy to answer them. You can also enjoy the popcorn at the back of the room and let us know if you have any questions about future filmmakers events after. After we show Maxed Out. So everyone please give a warm welcome for Maxed Out. We're going to start playing it here in about 30 seconds. And welcome James Scurlock. Thanks, everyone.

Or if you have a question, or just.

I'll start since I'm at the mic. First question, did you go into debt making the movie? And second question, what was the onus that spurred you to create this movie? It was really good.

Yeah, no, I didn't go into debt to make the movie. I think Variety reported that I'd maxed out my credit cards to make this, but that's not true, thankfully. The onus, actually, I was standing in line to see Super Size Me a few years ago at Sundance, and this guy named Morgan Spurlock had made Super Size Me. So I realized that someone sort of had done fast food. But every year, the New Year's resolutions are get out of debt and lose weight. And every year we get fatter and we get more in debt. So it was sort of the other addiction that we have that I was really curious about. So I thought it was going to be a comedy at first. I thought it was going to be this sort of romp through gated communities and consumer culture and so on and so forth. But it was probably a month or so researching it and getting into it that I realized it was going to be something quite different. How did you find your subjects? Finding subjects, that was really difficult because most people don't like to talk about being broken. In fact, we met this guy from Debtors Anonymous. We had to change his voice. We didn't use him, but we had to change his voice and use shadows and all this crazy stuff. And he said, this is the last taboo. Because I can talk about my sex life. I can talk about my alcoholism, I can talk about being a drug addict. I mean, this guy was everything. It was amazing. He was in like eight 12 step programs. And he said, this is the one thing. And he was in finance for the government. He was in the federal government, D.C. as some sort of financial analyst or something. He said, this is the one thing I can't talk about at a Cocktail party, because the minute you say you're having financial problems, people freak out. So it was hard to get people to talk about it. But we sort of, you know, Yahoo. I don't know if I can talk about Yahoo, but Yahoo has the sort of freaky news story. Sometimes Google is a little more respectful, I guess, but they have that really oddball story. We found a lot of those at first because it was going to be a comedy. Like this Marine sergeant who used her Marine credit card to get her breasts sculpted and she bought an Escalade and all this crazy stuff. A guy who killed his family student at the University of Tennessee who murdered his whole family over a $5,000 credit card bill, so on and so forth. But the New York Times covers this. We networked with a bunch of journalists from the New York Times and, you know, bankruptcy attorneys, journalists, academics. It just became a network of people. And that's how we found pretty much everyone. That being said, having made it now, everyone comes up to me and goes, you should have told my story. You should have made it about me. And I think, where. Where were you three years ago? Anyway.

I'm going to see if I can get this to work because I talk really quiet. Thank you so much for being here today. It was a fascinating documentary. I really enjoyed it. What was the biggest thing that you learned, the most surprising thing that you learned while you were making this movie?

Movie?

The most surprising thing that I learned. You know, I'd always assumed that your credit score was based on your income somehow, which is a really stupid assumption because, you know, there's never any sort of real income verification. In fact, when you. When you sign a pretty much any application for credit, you know, sometimes you'll have to put down your income or some other information, but that's just used in case you go into collections. That's just scanned and filed away somewhere. All they look at is the credit scores, your FICO score, and it's, you know, it's an algorithm. There are actually a lot of different FICOs that mortgage lenders will use, which is why part of the reason we have this big subprime mortgage crisis now, and we'll probably have a much bigger regular mortgage crisis in a couple of years. But, you know, it's an algorithm or algorithm's crunching all this information that's in your credit report. A lot of that information is inaccurate to begin with, but it's also kind of alchemy of like, how many times have you changed your address? What is the credit limit versus the credit used on a credit card, all this number crunching to try and figure out if you're going to be able to pay something in the future, rather than just sitting down with someone and saying, well, how much money do you make and are you going to be able to make this payment? So I found that very shocking because it's so counterintuitive, but it leads to something even more counterintuitive, which is if you lend to people who are really desperate, you'll make a lot more money because they're going to pay a lot more for that. You know, if you've got a lot of money sitting in the bank and you don't need credit, you're not going to pay a lot for it, you just don't need it. But, you know, if you're surviving on credit paycheck to paycheck, you'll pay almost anything, you know, to keep. To keep going. So the credit scoring system has really allowed people who would have been denied credit before but denied credit at a good, you know, decent interest rate to get credit now. But it's. It's usually pretty ruinous.

Yeah. Thank you. It was a really good film. It was really informative. And I'm sure you've looked at hundreds, if not thousands of cases of, you know, credit gone bad. I'm wondering, where do you think the fault really lies? Because it seems like a lot of these cases are predatory lenders lying.

Right.

But it also seems like a lot of these cases are just people who are living outside their means. These college students that have zero income but think that they can spend 500 bucks a month or something.

Yeah, it's a great question, and I really don't know the answer. There's definitely a balance between responsible borrowing and responsible lending. What that balance is, I don't know. What I can tell you is if you go back a generation and you look at what's really changed, it's responsible lending has evaporated. You know, we've totally changed our lending system to the point where we are loaning tens of thousands of dollars to college students and widows and people who just declared bankruptcy and so on and so forth. We used to have a system where the banks were a big part of the solution. You know, verifying incomes, for example, that was pretty academic. Like you sat down and verified that someone actually had that income, that someone would have an income in the future. Well, banks don't necessarily do that anymore. You know, credit scoring doesn't do it at all. The FDIC and the Fed Like a month ago, three weeks ago, came out with new guidelines which were, hey, verify your customer's income. You know, like, isn't that what the bank is supposed to do? It's, you know, it's. It's a totally new. So if you want to assign blame, you know, you can assign it both ways. And everyone in the film would tell you they were stupid, you know, or they were irresponsible, you know, or they got taken or whatever. But at the same time, they made the assumption that a major bank wouldn't screw them. And that was a valid assumption a generation ago. It's not a valid assumption today. Hi.

Thanks for the film.

Thank you.

And you also seem to be making a political point that there were a lot more Democrats who were on the side of the, you know, the people at large. And there was a very telling point about George Bush and his fund, you.

Know.

Being financed by mbna. So is it really that lopsided?

No, it's not that lopsided at all. You know, the bankruptcy bill was passed with bipartisan support. The Democrats have been beating up on the credit card executives and the regulators recently, but there's really no talk of serious legislation to deal with the issue or to rein this in. You know, the industry contributes huge amounts of money to Democrats and Republicans. And even more than that, there's such a fear in this country now that if credit dries up, if easy credit, instant credit dries up, that the economy will immediately go into recession or worse. And politicians are very, very aware and very fearful of that, Democrats and Republicans. So basically, I don't want to say they're the same. I think Democrats are a little more. Tend to be more clued in to the causes of this problem because they're just more sort of, you know, plugged into people who aren't as economically fortunate or doing as well. And you see, a lot of the Congress people were black or were minorities. And it's a much bigger problem in the minority communities than in the white communities, although it's a big problem in both communities. You've documented the abject hopelessness, the situation for so many of these people and also for our country, I suppose. Do you have any insight into the remedy now? Yeah, it's pretty depressing, so I apologize. But, you know, and when I wrote the book, I didn't have a prescriptive thing like, don't go to Starbucks every day and, you know, you'll be fine, or, you know, pack your lunch every day and you'll be a millionaire by the time you're 40, you know, the best advice people can give you to stay out of bankruptcy, to stay out of trouble, is to not have children. You know, to not get divorced, to not have a medical problem. You know, there are things that are very difficult not to do. So, you know, barring that, I think people just have to be very aware of how much this industry has changed. And if they get an offer, it doesn't mean they can afford to pay it back. If they get credit, it doesn't mean they can afford to pay it back. If they get an exotic mortgage that has to be refinanced a year from now, there's no guarantee that that will happen. Even if their broker says it will or their banker says it will. You know, people are really on their own now if Alan Greenspan tells them to get an adjustable rate mortgage, you know, maybe, maybe not. You know, people are just getting all kinds of advice and unfortunately so much of it is not good advice.

Can you explain more about the collectors that were calling people's neighbors and stuff? I don't really know much about that industry or how it works. Can you explain more about what exactly? What is that business that they're in?

Well, the business is beating up people to pay you money because you get to keep half of it.

Oh, so they buy the debt or something or they just get.

Well, they do both. Those guys do both. I was actually speaking to the debt collectors convention last week, oddly enough. It's such a bizarre, absurd. And they were really nervous to have me. Then I thought, well, why did you have me here, you know, if you're going to freak out about it? But it ended up going, it ended up going pretty well. They bought a lot of books again, oddly enough. And I'm signing them like, you know, for bank of America, for collection agency, whatever. But there's the debt collections business, which is pretty, pretty. Well, no. I mean, you get a client like Citigroup or a car company or loan company and they give you the accounts for like 30 days or 60 days. And however much you can recoup, you get a percentage. 25 to 50% you keep and the rest goes to them. Debt buying is a really, is kind of a new twist on that, which is you can just go out into the marketplace and there are online debt auctions, which aren't a joke like the two guys in the film. I mean, they're very successful debt debt auction places where you can go buy debt for pennies on the dollar. And then it's just a Matter of either collecting that debt or just refreshing it, just making it seem current. Because the more current debt is, the more valuable it is. So that's why if you can get someone who has $10,000 and you can get them to pay $5, suddenly that's a performing debt and you can sell it for a lot more money. So it's a pretty simple business, but it's a business with a lot of room for manipulation and smoke and mirrors and so forth. And it can be very, very, very, very profitable as well. When you're buying debt for like 5 cents on the dollar and you can turn around and, you know, get people to pay you 10 cents on the dollar and you've doubled your money.

Sorry to follow up, but are any of those companies legitimate then, that say, like, consolidate all your debts?

Debt consolidators? Well, that's different. I mean, debt consolidators are offering to negotiate with your creditors and then you. You like, send them one check and they distribute it and. Or they're refund. You're refinancing your home or something and you're taking out a home equity loan to pay off all your credit card bills. Yeah, I mean, they're major banks and so forth. Doing this, the debt relief companies, is a huge scandal. The IRS just decertified half of them for being essentially fraudulent. So it's just, again, it's a really tough time for consumers because it's very difficult to know who to turn to. There's so much money being made, but there's so much, just so much. Predatory behavior out there. It's just really tough.

So do you own a house and.

Is it around here? I don't own a house and that doesn't mean I don't get refi offers all the time, by the way, which I do. But no, I live in la, actually. So the United States is pretty good at exporting our culture. Has debt been exported and which countries are. Have we exported debt? Absolutely. The book actually came out in the UK first. They're having huge problems. Australia is having huge problems. South Korea has a huge debt problem. The Dutch actually have the worst problem. But it's all mortgages, it's all housing. You know, pretty much anywhere you can go now. You know, major cities, people are having a hard time making ends meet and buying a home because the cities have gotten so expensive around the world, whether it's Sydney or San Francisco or Paris or whatever. But we've definitely exported this idea of just pay everything with a credit card, stay in debt Forever never pay it back. The Chinese are very scared of. They call it like, don't be a debt slave. Being a debt slave is this very terrifying idea in China right now because so many people are getting credit cards, but it's very much an American invention. Yeah. I mean, there's more of a tradition of regulation, I think, in other countries, whereas we have. And particularly with this administration, it's like everyone should be out on their own and everyone should manage risk. It's not up to the bank to manage risk. It's up to individuals to figure it all out and sink or swim. But in the uk, for example, there is a law that says if you charge a late fee or some sort of penalty, that has to be proportionate to what it costs you as the lender. So, you know, if someone pays their bill a day late, you can't just charge them 40 bucks like bank of America would. You know, it has to have some relation to what it actually costs you, which is usually nothing. So we just sort of exported all of this. Bank of America bought banks and Citigroups bought things in the uk. Well, we've been. These banks have been just behaving as though they were in America. Consumers in the UK finally got wise to this and started suing them in small claims court for all these fees. The banks just dropped over and paid everything they could. It's now become this huge issue because millions of people are now going to small claims court, you know, asking for all this money back, which they're absolutely entitled to in the UK under the law. So the banks freaked out and said, oh, no, they're not penalties, they're service charges. You know, where have you heard that before? You know, it's all just this Americanization. But I think other countries do have, you know, European countries, particularly Japan also just passed a new usury law which limits the interest rates finance companies can charge. They just have a much different outlook and I think a much more sober outlook. Because if you think about it, one thing in economics you learn, one thing experience teaches you is that individuals don't do a very good job managing risk. That's why you have insurance, that's why you have banks, that's why you have these large organizations that, you know, that manage that risk, so that if one person, you know, has a problem or a catastrophe, it's covered by everyone else. But in this country now, we have this idea that, no, you know, everyone should manage this on an individual basis and it's killing a lot of people.

Yeah. So I'M really interested in, well, that you wrote a book along with the film. And I'm curious, and you may have answered this earlier saying that you were inspired by Morgan Spurlock. But which came first, the research for the book or for the film?

No, actually the book. I wrote the book to pay for the music in the film because it was very expensive and I just got really lucky with a publisher and an auction and ended up paying for all the music and then some. So that's how the book came about. That being said, I think the book is actually better than, than the film because you can go a lot deeper into this sort of subject, something that's this academic, than you can in a 90 minute film that's supposed to be entertaining and not totally, you know, esoteric or depressing.

So in the movie you feature some people who obtain credit mortgages or credit cards who weren't really, you know, viable customers. Either they were mentally handicapped or physically handicapped or whatever. Is there an answer to that problem? I mean, would it be appropriate for a credit card company to say, no, I'm sorry, you know, you're, you're epileptic, I'm not going to give you a credit card?

Yeah, I think there's an answer to it. You know, I was shocked. There are arbitration clauses now in most finance agreements and credit card agreements. So like when this obviously severely retarded guy's 40 something years old in second grade, went into arbitration against Citi Financial which would refinance their house, the arbitrator said, oh no, it was perfectly legitimate. And I can't even begin to describe the logic behind his decision because it's so, it's just so circular and bizarre. I mean, clearly that guy did not understand what he was signing. But there are these clauses now in the agreements that if you have a dispute, you can't go to court, you have to go to the arbitrator and the arbitrators rule in favor of the industry, something I think 95% of the time as the most recent statistics. So you essentially don't have any recourse. I think the solution is allow people to go to court if they have a situation like this and allow a judge or a jury to say, you know what, this was totally inappropriate. There's no way this guy could have understood what he was signing. This is predatory behavior and, you know, make it null and void.

So how does it affect particular regions more than others? Or is it pretty much widespread, different regions?

I mean, I think it's just a different problem and you know, in regions like this, it's more a problem of people not being able to afford, you know, afford housing, for example. I mean, there's the woman in Half Moon Bay with a house she's trying to finance on credit cards in the Deep South. In areas like that, it's a matter of people being preyed upon, like elderly people, particularly people who have acquired a lot of equity in their homes. You go to Brooklyn or Queens, the Bronx, you'll see a lot of middle class, minority neighborhoods where the people have, you know, worked and worked and worked for decades and they suddenly own their home. And suddenly this broker comes by and within a year it's just all gone. So, you know, people in wealthier places are probably a little more sophisticated, a little more savvy. You know, it's just a different. It's just a different game.

Are there quick or are there good indicators to let you know? Is there an obvious way to see when people are. People aren't talking about this. What's the first clue?

Well, I mean, I think actually when I was selling the book, I met with like 10 or 11 publishers. And these are very, very smart people. They're editors, publishers at very large publishing houses. And they're very well educated and very savvy. And a few of them told me that they had been bait and switched on their mortgages. I was giving an interview to a journalist who had the same thing happen to her. Most of us don't know what is contained in these agreements. I mean, most of us can't make sense of our credit card agreement or mortgage nowadays. It's not cut and dry. The terms and conditions can be changed anytime. Anyway, the Harvard law professor in the film teaches contracts for a living. She can't make sense of her agreement. We all just sort of sign it and hope for the best. So if some guy knocks on your door and tells you he wants to refinance your house, that's probably a bad idea. But one of the problems is that in the old days it was like bank of America and Citigroup and Wells Fargo up here. And then like the pawn broker and the, you know, the guy who would break your knees or something down here. And there was a line that separated the two. Well, now bank of America and Wells Fargo and Citigroup all own these finance companies, you know, which may charge you much more than the loan shark ever would or the pawn broker can. So that line has become totally blurred. So it's really hard to know who's going to treat you fairly. And who's just going to take advantage of.

So you cover a little bit about the government's bias today and also some of the how worrying it is actually to have such a huge national debt. And basically we are, the country itself is doing what an individual user is doing, paying the minimum payments. So it's easy to say that on the individual level you should just have watch out for your own credit within your means. But as individuals, do you have any advice on how do you think we can affect the things on the larger scale, how we can help the government get out of this current situation?

It's a great question, you know, I really don't know. Someone asked me the other day why, why did you put this stuff about the national debt in this movie? And I said, well we owe it, you know, it's, it has to be paid back. And most of it now isn't owed to us. It's owed to China, India, Japan, you know, Saudi Arabia, other countries, you know, the Iraq war has been fought off budget. It supposedly doesn't really cost anything, it's just these emergency appropriations. But it's hundreds of billions of dollars. The situation has just gotten so out of hand fiscally. I don't know how, you know, how we reign it in as individuals. We could write angry letters to our congressmen, we could, you know, try and stop the war in Iraq. We could try and stop a lot of things that, you know, that are just costing more money than we have. But I just don't know the answer to that question. Like what's going to happen? That's a really good question. I mean, I guess we just look more and more like a third world country, you know, because very wealthy people can move their money anywhere in the world in about a second, you know, and the money does come due, someone has to stick around and pay for it. I think the first thing that's going to happen is Social Security and Medicare benefits are going to get slashed, which Ben Bernanke, the new chairman of the Fed is already talking about. And you know, it's just going to go from there. You know, as Greenspan says, the more, you know, the more you owe and then the higher interest, it just creates a self perpetuating cycle where you're paying more and more and you're paying at higher interest rates. You know, at some point you just, you have to slash what you spend because it's all going to pay the people who own your bonds. I had a question about the hours. Is there any figures on as far.

As their Debt load.

The average working adult. I don't know about working adult. I mean, the average, average household is about $10,000 in credit card debt. If you just look at people who can't pay it back, who are revolvers, who are keeping a balance, it goes up to about 12, 12, $12,500. And then you've got car loans and things like that, and then you've got mortgage debt. So the total is like 10 trillion, I think so divided among 100 million households or so. That's. Yeah, that's what, about a hundred thousand. Is there a limit on the amount of interest you can charge? I mean, that you can. Is there an amount of interest? Is it. There is now for military families, Bush actually got this rider through on an appropriations bill, I think like six months ago that limits what military families can be charged at 36%. That was put through because there are so many servicemen. I know 36% doesn't sound all that hot, but you know, there's so many servicemen couldn't be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan because they had such horrible credit. They were considered a security risk. So Bush stepped in. No, this is true. Bush stepped in and said, well, we'll limit it at 36%. Got the rider through. Good for him. And now all the banks are lobbying to be exempted from it because they make so much money off of servicemen paying for payday loans and these really super high interest rate things. Furniture rental, electronics rental, all this stuff that can go into the hundreds of percents in Apr. So that is the only effective national usury law or interest rate cap there is in this country. They used to have them state by state and they, like Arkansas, I think was 8%. I mean, it could be very low. And a lot of these states still have usury laws. California still has a usury law, but in 1978, the Supreme Court decided that if you were in California, for example, and your bank was in New York, the interest rate that applied was the, was the bank's, the home state of the bank, not you. Which allowed credit card companies and banks to export interest rates from one state to another. South Dakota abolished its usury law immediately. Citigroup moved to South Dakota. Delaware said, you know, we want some of this action as well. And that's why all of your credit card statements come from either Delaware or South Dakota, because it's just, it's an end run around the interest rate caps that do exist in other states. Isn't it like loan sharking? Well, it is loan sharking. You know, I've talked to some people from the industry, one of whom wrote me a really nasty email. And I said, you know, just answer one question for me. Like, what is loan sharking now? Like, what does it mean? What's your definition? What's the industry's definition of loan sharking? You know, that was the end of our conversation. Like, they can't. It's just lost its meaning. You know, when a major bank can charge 20, 30, 40% plus fees, you know, Wells Fargo now has a payday loan product. It just completely lost its meaning. So I don't know what loan sharking is anymore. So are there any respectable banks that are worth dealing with? Well, actually, respectable banks. Elizabeth Warren is the Harvard Law School professor, is compiling kind of a database or a ranking of banks and products. I'm told that credit unions are generally a better, you know, better, better, more. A more responsible, fairer way to go. But even then, there's a lot of difference between credit unions. So again, you're really, you know, you're really on your own. But I think Elizabeth will have. Will have this ranking up by the end of the year. She's going to announce a new website. There's a website called affilafil.org which stands for Americans for Fairness and Lending, which may or may not have some information out, but they're going to post some as well. So I guess that's.

Are there any bills in Congress or up for debate? In the bills, is there anything going on legislatively that's worth looking at or paying attention to right now?

No. Interestingly enough, the only thing that's really legislatively happening right now is on a state level. I don't know how much you've read about the whole subprime mortgage meltdown, but essentially between 2 to 3 million mortgages for subprime borrowers, people who have less than perfect credit are now threatened, you know, and headed towards foreclosure. So the only legislation that's being contemplated is state legislatures trying to create a fund, almost like the SNL fund back 20 years ago, to bail out these people who can no longer afford to make their mortgage payment, who can't refinance now because rates have gone up or because the underwriting standards have suddenly finally tightened. But that's the only legislation being contemplated.

I'm assuming that you talk to well over 100 people that are severely in debt. And I'm kind of curious when you talk to them, what percentage felt that it was like, took responsibility for getting themselves into the mess versus what percentage blamed it on the bank or said that somehow they'd been scammed.

Yeah, I went to a Debtors Anonymous meeting in London, and it was the most depressing, the most depressing hour of my life. Like, bar none, it was, you know, just people staring at these sayings and in the center of. I'd never been to a 12 step program before, but, you know, people introducing themselves and there's a whole, like, rapport that you're supposed to have. And just people staring into this, taking responsibility for what they'd done. You know, everybody that we talked to took responsibility. Except there was. Actually, that's not true. There was a drag queen named Visa Decline who did not take responsibility. But barring Visa Decline, everyone else that I talked to took. And Visa didn't make it into the film. She's very, very upset about it, but she didn't even make it on the DVD extras, actually. But everyone said, you know, I was stupid or I messed up. Like the woman in the film with a Franklin Mint plate or the realtor is building this McMansion that she knows she can't afford. Everyone accepts that, and everyone internalizes it. And it's part of the reason that nobody wants to talk about it. These publishers I talk to, they're really smart people that you talk to who've been taken in, who. Or just made a mistake or didn't look at everything, whatever. Those are the people who are actually least likely to talk about it because they just internal like, it's all my fault. The people who were angry enough to actually talk to us had made this leap from it's all my fault to, yeah, it was my fault, like, you know, $50,000 ago. But how did it go from me owing $12,000 to $50,000, you know, how did you know, how did I get preyed upon when I was down a little bit or I made a mistake? How were they allowed to, you know, multiply that mistake three to four times in a period of a few. Few years or less? So I'd say everybody, you know, everybody took responsibility. But at the same time, they knew if they talked to us, you know, they knew that they just hadn't been treated fairly, and they wondered why, and they wondered why no one in the government was protecting them. So.

So if the government did get involved, like I think Ohio is involved in refinancing.

Well, yeah, Ohio is contemplating bailing people out of their mortgages. Well, yeah. I mean, not only does it reward the behavior, but it just keeps these people going a Little bit longer. Like they can't afford, you know, they can't afford the house they're in. So their option is to sell it. And I think that's really what this is all about. It's all about. And the credit rating agencies haven't downgraded these loans yet, which is really bizarre. But when you think about it, once they do that, all the mutual funds and pensions have to dump them. And it creates this domino effect, theoretically. But it's been seen before, I think, in real estate. You just dump all these houses on the markets, the banks get rid of them, and suddenly it's a really horrible situation. So I think that's more what the legislation is about. I don't think it's really about bailing people out. I think it's about keeping the housing market doing sort of okay and not completely imploding. Because if you look back, like in the last three or four weeks, most economists will come out, including Ben Bernanke, the chief of the Fed, will say, look, you know, this is going to be okay. We won't have a recession as long as housing prices stay where they are or don't go down too much. I mean, that's the big thing, because as long as housing prices are fairly stable or go up a little bit, people can refinance, which means they can keep spending money, which means the economy will, you know, will keep doing okay. That's what everyone's really scared of, that housing prices are going to go down. No one can refinance. No one can take money out. No one's going to be able to spend, you know, except very wealthy people. And suddenly, you know, we're in a recession or worse. But, you know, on the other hand, how do you have an economy that's based on people losing the equity in their homes? That doesn't really make sense either. You know, it's just there are loans that these people never should have had. A lot of them went bad within a month. They hadn't made the first payment, and it was already shot. Thank you very much. Your time is probably more valuable than mine, so appreciate it.