Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 11 of 89

Most Zero Sum Games Are Negative Sum & So Are Most Positive-Sum Games

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On August 24, 2022

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In economics there’s the idea of how much a “game” nets, where a game is any economic activity. The ideal is to have positive sum games, where more good comes from the game than bad, and ideally all players of the game win. A classic zero-sum game is if you and I bet $10 on a coin flip: any win is precisely mirrored by loss. And a negative sum game is where people come out worse: a lot of wars are like this, no matter how much plunder, both sides are worse off at the end.

Just because a game is negative sum doesn’t mean it can’t be positive sum for a few people. War, again, is often like this. Masses of people may be killed, huge amounts of wealth destroyed and certain war profiteers may come out much richer and some politicians or generals much more powerful. Some soldiers may loot enough that war was better for them than peace.

The fundamental environmental critique of capitalism and industrialization is that it only looks like a positive sum game: that the damage we are doing to the environment (which includes climate change, but not just that) and to our health, makes it a negative sum game if one uses the proper time horizon (aka. if you won’t die before the bill becomes due) or if you include everyone (aka. being conquered by Britain was not good for Indians; being conquered mostly Europeans was not good for native North Americans, almost all of whom died) and capitalism has not been a marvel for most of the third world. Which is why, by the way, there are all those “best time to be alive ever” books which try to use dubious extreme poverty statistics to claim this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to utopia: they want to argue that capitalism and industrialization are positive sum games, at least for now.

These folks have no real argument against climate change and environmental collapse and tend to hand wave it with “technology will fix it” as if technology can un-extinct half the world’s species.

So in the big picture we’ve been playing a negative sum game for a long time. The destruction of the native civilizations of North America was a negative sum game. The impoverishment of India under the British East India company was a negative sum game (India started out with more industry than England, by a fairly wide margin.) Africa’s exploitation, from the slave trade to colonization was a negative sum game, which is not to deny they didn’t get some railroads and whatnot out of it. (The Belgians were the worst, but the French who are still making African nations pay them for having been conquered are mighty bad. England’s evils are well known.)

But we’re in a lot of local negative sum games. Wall Street types like to brag they “eat what they kill” and it’s accurate in all sorts of way. The entire run-up to 2008 was negative-sum: that’s why it took trillions to bail them out. All their profits came from creating much larger losses than their profits, then having other people pay them off and suffer a long light depression. And Central banks didn’t then go on to print trillions more because value was being produced after 2008, they had to print to keep covering the fact that real economic value was being destroyed.

Your average Wall Street executive is a sort of super-optimized human locust, getting fat by destroying real value. Private Equity as a whole is so clearly massively negative sum that if you try to deny it you live so far in a fantasy world there’s no point in talking. The entire neoliberal movement, with its poster-child policy of austerity was and is about damaging the real economy to make a small number of people richer.

A lot like those war profiteers we discussed earlier: they cause widespread misery, illness and death but they get very rich doing so.

(The military industrial complex is obviously negative sum, which, again, doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit some people.)

The job of governments is to create positive sum games and to stop negative sum games. In some ways that’s almost their only legitimate function. (Any crime system with high recidivism, or large numbers incarcerated is negative sum, by the way, but boy, a lot of people get rich locking other people up.)

A society with a lot of negative sum games running can be compared to an animal with a lot of ticks attached, a tapeworm, and some nasty diseases. It’s supporting a lot of parasites, but one day it falls over dead after a great deal of suffering, and then the parasite have to try to find a new host. If they can’t, because they’ve infected the entire herd (or destroyed the grazing land), well, then they too die.

Welcome to the fin de siecle of capitalist society.

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When the Profit Motive Is Unnecessary or Harmful

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On August 3, 2022

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Markets are good for some activities, but for others they are actively harmful. There are a lot of jobs that people want to do, and all you have to do is give them a decent salary and whatever tools are necessary, and they’ll work hard. A good example is curing cancer, or, indeed, most medical research. People love the idea of helping people and saving lives. As long as they know that, if they do cure whatever it is, they can move on to curing something else (i.e., their economic welfare is not dependent on not solving the problem), they’ll bust their asses.

On the other hand, if the profit motive is involved, some problems don’t get solved. If you’re a pharmaceutical company, you don’t want to cure diseases: You want to sell a pill, shot, or treatment that people have to take over and over again. You want to develop palliatives, not cures. Using for-profit companies to try and cure something, including Covid, is deranged. It would cost them hundreds of billions of future profits if they actually cured the plague or cancer, or anything else.

This is also why, when they do come up with actual cures, they price them massively high. After all, you only get to sell a cure once to each patient.

People like doing useful work. What you have to pay people for is to do bullshit work, and the more bullshit it is, or the more harm it does, the more you have to pay them. Meanwhile, work that is good and useful is underpaid, or not paid for at all, because our economy tries to free ride on the fact that people will do that work for less or nothing.

Doesn’t quite work — because no matter how idealistic you are, you need to eat, pay rent, and sock away some savings, and so work that is genuinely important goes undone, and Wall Street pays multi-billion dollar bonuses.

Capitalism thus often optimizes for activities that are actively harmful, or unnecessary, and actively makes it hard to work on what is important and good.

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China Jumps Two Chip Generations Ahead: Why Chip Sanctions Backfired

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On July 26, 2022

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Faster than most expected:

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) has likely advanced its production technology by two generations, defying US sanctions intended to halt the rise of China’s largest chipmaker.

The Shanghai-based manufacturer is shipping bitcoin-mining semiconductors built using 7 nanometer technology, industry watcher TechInsights wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

That would be well ahead of SMIC’s established 14 nanometer technology, a measure of fabrication complexity in which narrower transistor widths help produce faster and more efficient chips.

Since late 2020, the US has barred the unlicensed sale to the Chinese firm of equipment that can be used to fabricate semiconductors of 10 nanometers and beyond, infuriating Beijing.

Now, there’s a question if they can scale, but this is still a huge step. This means that they are ahead of Europe and the US, and behind only Taiwan and Korea. This is also sooner than almost all experts predicted: China did what Western technologists thought could not be done so quickly.

This speed, as I have noted in previous articles, is not that surprising; the technological lead always moves to the country which holds the world’s manufacturing floor. When Britain fell behind the US, it took about 30 years for them to lose their tech lead, but lose it they did. The same will happen with the US and Britain, but likely faster for obvious reasons like jets, the internet, and so on.

To put it simply, when you are right there with the factory floor, your innovation cycles are far faster, or in modern-speak, you iterate more quickly. You also have more practical experience with what actually works.

The “ban semi-equipment and semi-sales” to China card was a card, like the freezing of Russian foreign reserves, that you only get to play once at a great power. China is more than happy to subsidize chip manufacturers to learn how to make this tech domestically, and they are also crashing other key techs they’re behind in (like aviation), because it’s clear if the West would put a ban on semis, they’ll do it to anything or everything else.

China’s Job , and Xi has stated this publicly, is to make it so that they can’t be choked out by the US (the “West” is mealy-mouthed; the US makes the decisions, and the EU, Japan, and so on just do what they’re told, with occasional exceptions). Making Russia a locked-in junior ally with the sanctions regime made it so that China couldn’t be choked out on natural resources, and making it clear that crippling sanctions are on the board caused China to scramble to close the deficiency.

Unlike with choking out Japan over oil before WWII (which is why the Japanese felt they had to attack the US), however, the partial sanctions on China were not crippling, because unlike pre-WWII, the US is not the world’s primary industrial power, and it has its own dependencies on Chinese trade.

In realpolitik terms, because this is the case, sanctions should have been all at once, followed by war (I’m not for this, I’m massively against it, not least because of the issue of nukes). Half-assing it just gave China time to decouple its key dependencies and, as noted above, the anti-Russia sanctions were a gift from heaven to China.

The game continues, and if it were not for climate change, all the smart money would be on China as the pre-eminent world power within 20 years, probably sooner. As it is, a lot will depend on variables that humans have chosen not to control and soon will lack the ability to significantly control.

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Russia Turns Up the Pressure (and Turns Off the Gas) on Germany and the EU

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On July 18, 2022

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Well, well…

Russia’s Gazprom has told customers in Europe it cannot guarantee gas supplies because of “extraordinary” circumstances, according to a letter seen by Reuters, upping the ante in an economic tit-for-tat with the west over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Dated 14 July, the letter from the Russian state gas monopoly said it was declaring force majeure on supplies, starting from 14 June.

Known as an “act of God” clause, a force majeure clause is standard in business contracts and spells out extreme circumstances that excuse a party from their legal obligations.

So, Europe and Germany get gas in exchange for rubles. But Russia can’t spend those rubles for most of what it needs from the West.

The question is, does Europe, especially Germany, need gas more than Russia needs rubles and an increased exchange rate (not always a good thing)?

Everyone has been concentrating on the winter and assuming Germany didn’t need much gas until then, but a great deal of Germany’s electrical grid is supplied by natural gas plants, and as you may have heard, there’s a heat wave in Europe and most of the rest of the world.

So much for air-conditioning. And if much of Germany’s industry will have to shut down as well.

Germany can lose a huge chunk of its industrial base if this continues. The whole “keep buying gas from Russia until we can transition off of it” idea was always dubious, because other gas is much more expensive, but it also rested on the idea that Russia was desperate to keep selling; that there was a symmetry of needs.

But Russia will suffer a lot less without sales than Europe will without gas, and in any case, a shutoff will likely increase the price of gas they are selling elsewhere, making up some of the losses.

The fact is that Germany, an industrial state without a lot of resources, and Russia, a resource state, are natural economic allies, but Germany needs Russia more than Russia needs Germany.

The companies who have been given notice that of force majeure are saying they don’t accept it, but what are they going to do?

The grace period for payments on two of Gazprom’s international bonds expires on 19 July, and if foreign creditors are not paid by then the company will technically be in default.

This is a non-threat threat, because Russia has already defaulted on loans, as it is largely shut out from the Western banking system and thus can’t even transfer the money. (As happened to Argentina.) More defaults theoretically mean that Russia will be unable to access Western loans and so on, but they already can’t, and they have access to the Chinese banking system, which is larger than any Western country’s and perfectly capable of keeping Russia and Russian companies afloat.

Understand clearly that most Germans and Europeans support the anti-Russia sanctions. This is a popularly backed policy: Europeans are paralyzed by fear of Russia and were long before Ukraine. I had a friend in Austria tell me how he scared he was of Putin back in 2016.

We will, however, see what the result of this is. I would guess that in the short-term, it will stiffen opposition to Russia, but I’m less sure about the medium- and long-term. German elites, especially, will feel a need to end the Ukraine war and get back to a steady Russian supply.

No matter what, however, it highlights the price Europe is paying for its anti-Russia stance.

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The Debt Trap That Helped Take Down Sri Lanka Was Not Chinese

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On July 14, 2022

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Let’s put an end to this nonsense:

The Asian Development Banks is essentially a US proxy and the World Bank is mostly controlled by the US. Market borrowings are almost entirely from Western sources.

The article goes into more detail:

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who spent a significant part of his life working in the United States, entered office in 2019 and immediately imposed a series of neoliberal economic policies, which included cutting taxes on corporations.

These neoliberal policies decreased government revenue. And the precarious economic situation was only exacerbated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Facing an out-of-control 39.1% inflation rate in May, the Sri Lankan government did a 180 and suddenly raised taxes again, further contributing to popular discontent, which broke out in a social explosion in July.

Seems that cutting revenues makes you more likely to default on your debts and does not magically improve the economy. And when you do it just before a pandemic, well maybe it doesn’t work out well.

From Reuters, about that tax increase too late.

An increase in Value Added Tax (VAT) to 12% from 8% with immediate effect is among the key tax increases announced on Tuesday, which is expected to boost government revenues by 65 billion Sri Lankan rupees ($180.56 million).

Other measures, including increasing corporate income tax to 30% from 24% from October, will earn an additional 52 billion rupees for the exchequer.

Withholding tax on employment income has been made mandatory and exemptions for individual taxpayers have been reduced, the statement said.

So, the biggest chunk of it was a regressive VAT tax increase.

I’m not an expert on Sri Lanka, but the third world debt trap, which started primarily in the 1970s was based on the idea that you could borrow money and use that money to buy development. The play was to spend the money to turn to exports the West wanted (cash crops, minerals, etc…), which you had a “comparative advantage” in. Problem is that everyone was getting the same advice, so the supply of cash crops and minerals increased in multiple countries and the price crashed. Worse, to grow cash crops you had to get your subsistence farmers off the land. They went into slums, and you now had to feed them, which meant you had to import food.

In Sri Lanka’s case tea, spices and coconuts are key exports. You can only eat one of those three. When Covid happened the market collapsed, incomes were already down, debt load was high and … BOOM. According to the figures Sri Lanka is a net “agri” exporter, but it exports mostly non food agri items and can’t feed its own population.

(Rule : if your country can’t feed its own population, you are always vulnerable to outside forces.)

So, anyway, Sri Lanka spent generations servicing debt by selling the developed world luxury agri-goods, but the prices of those weren’t that high, and they didn’t get a developed economy out of their loans, but still had to pay the loans while unable to feed their own population. Pretty normal story, sadly. (Egypt is the saddest, from the cornucopia of the world to a food importer. The Aswan dam should never have been built, losing the Nile’s annual flood was too high a price to pay for its electricity.)

Now, the media is constantly full of stories about the Chinese Debt Trap. They’re bullshit.

African countries owe three times more debt to Western banks, asset managers and oil traders than to China, and are charged double the interest, according to a study released on Monday by British campaign charity Debt Justice.

This is entirely consistent with what I have discovered every time I’ve looked into the issue. It is not that there have never been corrupt high interest Chinese loans, but generally speaking, Chinese terms are far better than Western ones.

The reasons are twofold:

  1. China wants resources. In exchange they are willing to build infrastructure for cheap in countries who will sell them those resources. If you want hospitals and schools or even an entire city as well, they’re happy to build that for you too.  This seem similar to Western policies from the 70s but is different in important respects: the West wanted the resources and they wanted to make lots of money off the loans and they wanted to gain control of economic policy in developing countries so they could institute neoliberal policies like getting rid of food subsidies.
  2. China has just spent decades developing its own country. While the job isn’t done, it has slowed down and China found itself with a lot of extra development ability: companies and workers specialized in building infrastructure: from ports and airports and railways, to everything a city needs, including sewage and power. They want to keep that industry running, and not have to get rid of millions of employees and have firms downsize and go bankrupt. So those firms, and often workers now develop countries all around the world. As long as they make some profit, that’s good enough for China. It doesn’t have to be high, especially, again, as they’re getting resources in exchange.

The “developing” world is a mess because of the West, not China. It is our policies which made it nearly impossible for most nations to develop. Those policies were designed to make our coporations and banks rich and to weaken the ability of poorer countries to resist us. They were exactly the opposite of what is required to develop a country, which is almost always done behind trade barriers and by moving UP the value added chain, not by selling raw materials and crops. This is how the US did it, Britain did it and almost every country in Europe did it. It is how Japan and Taiwan and Korea did it.

We sold countries like Sri Lanka advice that was bad for them and good for us, and which put them into a debt trap we refused to let them get out of by pretending that debt default was unthinkable and debts sacrosanct and by hurting any country which tried to default brutally.

This isn’t the historical norm. Previously third world countries defaulted all the time, and they soon floated new debt and yes, investors loaned to them anyway.

People who loan money should not be protected that much from default. Some protection is reasonable, but when a person or country is bankrupt, they should be able to default. Doing so keeps lenders honest: they either don’t lend, or they accept the risks, and they have incentives to keep debt reasonable, since if they don’t, they will be hurt.

When we made it so that default was virtually unthinkable, we changed the incentives (so beloved by economism believer) in ways that made it make sense for investors to lend money which was to be used in ways which crippled entire countries, indeed continents and made it impossible for countries to change course and pursue strategies which would actually allow them to develop.

That’s the story of most of the developing world.

And if you need to borrow money as a third world nation? Borrow it from China, not the West, if they’ll lend to you. As for the IMF, their job is to keep the payments going and keep countries in the debt trap so they can never develop and never have policies independent of the US and the West.

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ATMs and Debit Payments Go Down In Canada

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On July 8, 2022

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So, I’m not sure if it’s all ATMs, but I know Interac (our debit) is down. This is also apparently affecting 911 (emergency) calls.

Canada has three providers of phone and internet, everyone else is either niche (satellite) or actually uses their networks. They are Bell, Telus and Rogers.

Rogers is down, with no ETA to being back up. I found out when I tried to call Canada’s tax people (the Canada Revenue Agency) and got “no network”.

The short term point here is to always keep some cash. I’ve got $25 in my pocket, which is less than it should be but at least I can buy some food and so on.

Cashless societies are bad. Not just because it’s easy for the infrastructure to go down for technical reasons or due to some disaster or war or terrorism, but because they are inherently totalitarian. The government or corporations can freeze people out of the economy any time they want. PayPal, Visa and Mastercard have done this repeatedly (many years ago it was Wikileaks, since it’s been people with the wrong political views.)

I didn’t much like the Trucker protests in Ottawa, Canada, but they should have been dealt with by the police, not by freezing people’s bank accounts. That’s tyranny. It was done, I’m fairly sure, because the Ottawa police were sympathetic to the truckers and politicians didn’t think they’d obey orders.

Likewise, many folks who use things like bitcoin don’t understand blockchain technology: it’s inherently totalitarian and its traceable. It’s a LOT harder to trace cash. If you want anonymity, cash is still king. Any society which removes cash is doing so for two reasons:

  1. So they can track much more, micromanage what people spend and shut people and organizations they don’t approve out of the economy easily; and,
  2. So that middlemen (corps, governments if they want to) can take a cut off everything.

I believe we should pay our taxes, but it’s not an absolute value. Black and especially gray markets exist for a reason, and it’s not always a bad thing. In particular, in many countries, including the US and Canada,  you can’t always get a bank account. The cash economy allows those who can’t to survive; it allows those shut out to survive, and gray and black markets put a check on government power to say “absolutely not” to people things really want or need.

That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The more we love to e-cash only, the more our societies, intrinsically, are vulnerable to shocks, to authoritarianism and to rentierism.

Cash is worth keeping and I would go so far as to make it illegal for most businesses to not accept cash. Cash is, in a certain sense, freedom. In another deeper sense money based societies are anti-freedom, but that’s another argument and for another time. If we  use money, we need cash that can’t go down and which isn’t inherently authoritarian.

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Refreshing Honesty About Bank Loans & Environmental Destruction

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On May 23, 2022

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I actually appreciate this, from the HSBC AM Global Head of Responsible Investing, Stuart Kirk:

“At a big bank like ours, what do people think the average loan length is?” he asked. “It is six years. What happens to the planet in year seven is actually irrelevant to our loan book. For coal, what happens in year seven is actually irrelevant.”

That’s honesty. People in the financial industry are trained to follow the incentives. Their bonuses (most of their income for seniors) are based on financial results and internal power in the company. The more they make, the more they can give themselves.

To expect people whose entire careers are based on following financial incentives to not follow financial incentives is insane. While I’m generally down on incentives for control of behaviour, these are folks who are hyper-optimized for them. They don’t know any other way to operate, and if individuals were to try they would be replaced by people who do follow them.

This is why I’m a radical: I believe we need change from the roots. You can’t get a man or woman trained like Kirk to act any other way than he is acting.

Oh sure, you can try and change the incentives, and you should, but better is to create a system; a society, where financial return isn’t the most important thing. If it isn’t environmentally appropriate there should be a hard stop, an absolute ban. It should be unthinkable and anyone who does it should never be allowed to have any power ever again.

A capitalist system can’t do this. It simply cannot. It cannot “think” far enough ahead, because people are mortal, and they figure they can avoid the damage. In the run up to 2008 there was a saying on wall street, IBG, YBG—”I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.” In other words “we’ll both get the rewards and we won’t be here when the shit hits the fan.” (And if we are, well, we’ll still keep most of the money we made with this shitty fraudulent deal.)

Kirk’s a product of very close to a pure Skinner-box environment, trained to obey his conditioning till there’s little left but that conditioning. Oh, he has rationalizations, you can and should read them, but at the end of the day, he’s following the rewards.

People tend to do the right thing if they are mostly disinterested better than if you’re manipulating them with rewards and punishments. We don’t believe that, because we’re all warped. The warping started in school with grades, or perhaps with our parents and it continues till many of us know no other way of living.

But if we continue like this, we’ll burn the planet down. Oh, humanity will probably survive, but at the end, we’ll have genocided half the species on earth and reduced Earth’s carrying capacity massively. There’ll be less good agricultural land, few rivers with less water, most aquifers will be drained and poisoned, and large parts of the world where humans live now will be effectively uninhabitable for months every year.

That’s insanity, but it happens after six years and hey, if you’ve made enough money, you figure you and your kids will be able to live in one of the remaining good places.

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The Fed Wants To Crush Wages So Corporations Can Price Gouge

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On May 13, 2022

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There are multiple sources of inflation. As a friend once said, one man’s inflation, is another man’s pricing power.

Right now we have a situation where inflation is caused by (non exhaustively):

  1. Disruptions to the supply chain.
  2. Lots of dead and disabled workers (over a million dead in the US, who knows how many disabled) leading to a tight labor market in some countries.
  3. Sanctions on Russia (food, fuel, minerals, which feeds into other things, plus disruption of the dollar hegemony system.)
  4. Massive price increases by corporations above their costs, to increase their profits.

I’ve seen estimates of about 50% for corporations simply increasing prices because they can, even though their costs haven’t risen that high.

What does the Fed think should be done about inflation?

Chair Powell keeps mentioning the relationship between the high level of job openings and wage/price inflation,” Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek, wrote in a newsletter on Tuesday. “He’s not talking to investors. He’s talking to corporate America, and his goal is to have companies essentially institute a hiring freeze and end the cycle of paying up for new hires.”…

…“The Fed’s goal is to convince corporate America to enact a short-term hiring freeze, and it will keep raising rates and talking about aggressive monetary policy until that happens,” Colas wrote. “Lower stock prices are his way of convincing C-suites and boards to do that.”

“Chair Powell mentioned the ratio several times at last Wednesday’s press conference,” said Colas, who said job postings need to drop from 11.5 million to around 8 million to get to normalcy.

The only way to get there would be some sort of freeze from companies.

Since 1979 the only type of inflation pressure either the Federal Reserve or legislatures have been willing to recognize is wage-push inflation.  (See HERE for a long explanation of how the Federal reserve crushed wages with wage push inflation measures.)

This is why, for going on 43 years now, workers wages have not kept up with GDP, most people can’t afford to buy a house, rent is thru the roof, and people die due to medical care costs.

But the way to deal with companies increasing prices faster than their costs isn’t to stop employers from hiring, it’s to institute an excess-profits tax, where companies that are making a lot more than they did before the pandemic simply have it taxed away. Granted, that would take legislative action, but the Fed isn’t even calling for it, and the Fed has a powerful bully pulpit.

You could also aggressively act on anti-trust concerns and break companies up so that they have competition: they can raise prices in large part because they are unregulated oligopolies who raise prices in lockstep.

Those are legislative actions, but the Fed is the main regulator of banks and brokerages and could stop loans from being given to firms buying up the housing and rental supply and jacking up prices. It could encourage the government entities which guarantee housing loans to put conditions which disallow rent increases beyond a few percentage points, and not allow large numbers of homes to be owned by corporations.

There are certainly other steps which could be taken, but the point is that the Fed isn’t pushing anything but “don’t hire and don’t give raises”.

In tight labor markets wages should rise. That’s good. If every time there is a tight labor market you squeal about inflation then hammer the economy into the ground to kill wages, of course people’s wages will fall behind, and if that’s substantially the only thing  you ever do to deal with inflation for over 40 years, of course wages will be hammered.

If, at the same time you run policies which cause massive inflation in housing, rent, and medical care (and now food), well then, ordinary people will be screwed because those are things they must have, no matter the cost, so if they can pay they have to.

What the Fed is doing, in other words, is class warfare, the same as everything of significance it has done since 1979. People will die because of this and become homeless.

As for Congress, well, increasing taxes on corporations is unthinkable to them, so I guess people dying and becoming homeless and so on is their preferred outcome.

Might want to go demonstrate at the houses of key Congress members and Fed Reserve members too.

And remember, much of why the labor market is tight is because they let a million people die and probably millions be disabled by not handling Covid, It was noted near the beginning that the Black Death caused an increase in wages and that Covid might do the same.

It has. Now, on top of letting you die, they want you to not get wage increases, so that corporations can make huge profits and the rich can get even richer.

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