Paul Krugman Hated Larry Summers for the Fed Chair. What Does He Think Now?

Larry Summers

Krugman still probably doesn't like Larry Summers for the Fed chair, likely for dispositional reasons.
Krugman might fear that Summers would end up pissing a lot of people off, and whether or not Summers got monetary policy right, he'd muck things up politically. Janey Yellen, on the other hand, has a defter touch, as Bernanke had, while being more dovish on the deficit than Ben was.

Whatever. From my distant vantage point, I might not have a clear view, but my gut says I'm right. It hardly matters on that score. Yellen is in -- and sure to be confirmed -- and Summers is out.

Yet this past week was a time in which Larry Summers not only said the right things in an important speech but, using slightly different language to get there, ended up largely supporting Paul Krugman's position on the liquidity trap. This delighted Krugman, though a little professional jealousy flared -- "Curse you, Larry Summers!" -- because Summers stated the case so well, so succinctly.

I watched the 16-minute speech with great interest. Summers seemed to be working without a written speech, likely with notes he rarely looked at. He had this stuff down cold.

The key phrase was "secular stagnation," which is hard for a non-economist to grok, but it might be better understood as "longer-term stagnation."

Paul Krugman

What worries Krugman and Summers is that we're in for a long period of stagnation with few options to get out of it without a bubble of some kind. That's the takeaway from Summers' speech, as well as an older blog post of Krugman's that clearly presages Summers' new points:

Our current episode of deleveraging will eventually end, which will shift the IS curve back to the right. But if we have effective financial regulation, as we should, it won’t shift all the way back to where it was before the crisis. Or to put it in plainer English, during the good old days demand was supported by an ever-growing burden of private debt, which we neither can nor should expect to resume; as a result, demand is going to be lower even once the crisis fades.

And here’s the worrisome thing: what if it turns out that we need ever-growing debt to stay out of a liquidity trap? What if the economy looks like Figure 4 even after deleveraging is over? Then what?

This is not a new fear: worries about secular stagnation, about a persistent shortfall of demand even at low interest rates, were very widespread just after World War II. At the time, those fears proved unfounded. But they weren’t irrational, and second time could be the charm.

Bear in mind that interest rates were actually pretty low even during the era of rising leverage, and got worryingly close to zero after the 2001 recession and even, you might say, after the 90-91 recession (there was talk of a liquidity trap even then). It’s not hard to believe that liquidity traps could become common, if not the norm, in an economy in which prudential action, public and private, has brought the era of rising leverage to an end.

And in that case, then what?

We might try to figure out why we seem to need leverage and bubbles to have full employment, and try to fix it. More thoughts on that on another day. But what if that isn’t an option?

One answer could be a higher inflation target, so that the real interest rate can go more negative. I’m for it! But you do have to wonder how effective that low real interest rate can be if we’re simultaneously limiting leverage.

Another answer could be sustained, deficit-financed fiscal stimulus. But, you say, this would lead to exploding public debt! Actually, no – not if the real interest rate is persistently below the economy’s growth rate, which it will certainly be if it’s persistently negative. In that case the government can run a primary deficit even while keeping the debt-GDP ratio constant – and the higher the level of debt, the higher the allowable deficit.

 Back to the more recent Krugman post on Summers' radical-but-right ideas:

Currently, even policymakers who are willing to concede that the liquidity trap makes nonsense of conventional notions of policy prudence are busy preparing for the time when normality returns. This means that they are preoccupied with the idea that they must act now to head off future crises. Yet this crisis isn’t over – and as Larry says, “Most of what would be done under the aegis of preventing a future crisis would be counterproductive.”

He goes on to say that the officially respectable policy agenda involves “doing less with monetary policy than was done before and doing less with fiscal policy than was done before,” even though the economy remains deeply depressed. And he says, a bit fuzzily but bravely all the same, that even improved financial regulation is not necessarily a good thing – that it may discourage irresponsible lending and borrowing at a time when more spending of any kind is good for the economy.

What seems obvious is that Krugman is drawing from Summers' remarks a new manifesto for looser fiscal policy: We're just not doing as much as we did in the beginning of the Great Depression. We're obsessed with the deficit trimming in 1937 that reignited the slump, just as the deficit obsession -- with our clumsy sequestration, government shutdowns, and debt-ceiling repeat debacles -- has stifled all opportunities to grow our economy without requiring new bubbles. What's next, another stock-market bubble caused by QE? That's already happening, but it's doing nothing for middle-class consumption. So it's not very bubblicious and won't do much for longer-term real economic growth. Also, it's not clear how and when we responsibly back out of it, or "taper."

What's left? I know my favorite responses to today's apparent secular stagnation: large fiscal stimulus programs in building infrastructure, greater education spending, radically raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, higher taxes on the rich to pay for expanding Social Security and Medicare (for all!), and a guaranteed income paid by, for example, a carbon-footprint tax: the more carbon you use, the higher your taxes, the less you use, the potential for a substantial tax credit, which is certainly one way to provide a minimum income while likely spurring energy innovation, which in turn would stimulate the economy. It could help fight global warming, as well.

Yes, solve income inequality through income redistribution. If that's radical, let's get radical. After all, Paul Krugman has been calling for it, and now Larry Summers is getting on the bandwagon. I read his remarks as calling for a return to Keynesian principles. With a bubble economy -- without a bubble in sight -- we may have no choice.

More than four years after the end of the recession, still not enough jobs? Not good.

The 401(k) Failed as the New Pension Scheme. What Could Take Its Place?

Elizabeth Warren: I get an idea she means business.

An expanded Social Security, that's what! Could we also have private accounts? Sure! They're called IRAs.

Imagine an America in which the notion of securing the future of our senior citizens was a vital goal, and we wanted to pursue that goal not at the expense of later generations, you know, without "stealing from our kids and grandkids." And one would think pursuing such a goal would be a very conservative goal, appealing to all political classes, even the tea partiers.

Just today, Elizabeth Warren joined a growing rank of economists, journalists, and Congresspeople who are supporting just such a notion. I applaud her, just as I applaud Senator Tom Harkin, Bernie Sanders, and others who are already fighting an uphill battle to pass a bill that raises current and future Social Security levels by removing the cap on contributions above the current $130,000 limit.

I'd also suggest increasing benefits even more by raising the employee FICA contribution by another two percent. I'd also raise the employer contribution by two percent, with the stipulation that half that would go as matching-fund contributions to employee IRAs. The employee's matching contribution would be automatically deducted from their paychecks.

Employees would not be able to withdraw from these IRAs until they applied to receive Social Security, effectively tying the two funds together at retirement, though they would be able to control how the money in the IRA is invested. Employees, of course, could have other IRA accounts over which they'd have total control.

As long as I'm living the liberal la vida loca, I might add another wacky idea to my wish list. Just found this in Slate today (cross-posted from Business Insider):

A simple idea for eliminating poverty is garnering greater attention in recent weeks: automatically have the government give every adult a basic income.

The Atlantic's Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker brought up the idea a few weeks ago when they contemplated cutting poverty in half, and Annie Lowrey revisited it in today's issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Real wages have been stagnant in America for decades now and income inequality has grown immensely. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, it’s only gotten worse. The Census Bureau reported in September that the 15 percent of Americans (46.5 million) live below the poverty line. Government benefits like food stamps and TANF help lift some of them above the line, but millions still live below it.

The author, David Vinik, goes on to explain how it would work -- it would, among other things eliminate the need for all federal and state aid, as all aid programs would be subsumed by the basic income payment -- and how it would be paid for -- the savings from all those other programs, plus other sources such as a carbon tax or an end to farm and energy subsidies. BTW, the amount of the payment would be tied to the official poverty level. Other benefits?

The clear one is that no American would live below the poverty line. The U.S. has been waging the War on Poverty for a generation now and still nearly 50 million Americans are below the line. This would end that war with a decisive victory.

There are knock on effects as well. Americans would have greater leverage to demand higher wages and better working conditions from their employer thanks to the increased income security. Families could allow one parent to take time off to raise their kids. Eliminating the numerous different government welfare programs would also lead to efficiency gains as adults would simply receive their check in the mail and not have to waste time filling out paperwork at numerous different offices.

I like it. We could eliminate whole bureaucracies on the state and federal level and let the IRS manage this one automatic payment. The War on Poverty has been a colossal failure, just as the War on Drugs has (OK, add an end to that war to this la-vida-loca wish list, too).

Switzerland is currently toying with the idea, albeit on a bigger scale -- they're voting on a $2800 a month guaranteed income.

Imagine: spreading the wealth around so no one was poor. It would be fun watching Rush Limbaugh's head explode when he hears about this. Somebody call him!

How dare you even suggest ending poverty?!

Krugman on Summers: The Middle Class Is Screwed, Unless...

...somebody does something. Duh.

Of course, Krugman's latest column speaks to our dilemma:

More broadly, if our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression, we’re going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics — in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off — for a long time.

I know that many people just hate this kind of talk. It offends their sense of rightness, indeed their sense of morality. Economics is supposed to be about making hard choices (at other people’s expense, naturally). It’s not supposed to be about persuading people to spend more.

But as Mr. Summers said, the crisis “is not over until it is over” — and economic reality is what it is. And what that reality appears to be right now is one in which depression rules will apply for a very long time.

And Summers' speech, in which he says:

It is not over until it is over…. We may well need, in the years ahead, to think about how we manage an economy in which the zero nominal interest rate is a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activity, holding our economies back, below their potential…

Watch the whole thing if you like:

Some commenters on Krugman's column were surprised he didn't mention stagnant wages or income inequality as causes of this ongoing and potentially permanent slump. Those of us who read him regularly know that those issues are always on his mind. He also doesn't mention the lack of any current fiscal stimulus programs, either, but he does that for the same reason: Those familiar with him know how much he continues to promote such efforts. What he does stress is trade deficits -- which all can translate to manufacturing jobs moving overseas -- and a favorite of his, the paradox of thrift, that is, the practice of saving money when times are tough, thus reducing demand, which then makes the times even tougher.\

 Individuals, the private sector, and the public sector are all currently guilty of this.

I'm used to some pretty nasty commenters on Krugman's blog or below his columns, but generally the predominant theme is that our permanent slump is due to accumulation of wealth at the top, with corporations able to undo any good that may come from fiscal stimulus or monetary policy simply by maximizing profits at the expense of workers they're doing everything they can to avoid rehiring. The wealthy just hang on to the money that continues to flow to the top. And, by and large, I agree with the commenters, especially with those calling for more progressive tax rates and so on. I favor, as blogger Atrios does, widespread helicopter drops of money on one and all. That'll increase demand, by god!

Fat chance of any of that. At least it's good to see these ideas bandied about more than usual.

Let's assume Krugman, as a dyed-in-the-wool New Keynesian, favors all of the above. It well may be the only way out of our current "permanent" slump. It doesn't have to be this way, but the current conservative/libertarian crowd that have hijacked our government wouldn't have it any other way. So, too, with the austerity mavens of Europe.

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

Walmart Collecting Food Donations -- for Its Employees

Now they definitely won't be needing that pay raise...

Yes, we knew Ron Paul was right. Let private charity take care of the poor:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The storage containers are attractively displayed at the Walmart on Atlantic Boulevard in Canton. The bins are lined up in alternating colors of purple and orange. Some sit on tables covered with golden yellow tablecloths. Others peer out from under the tables.

This isn't a merchandise display. It's a food drive - not for the community, but for needy workers.

"Please Donate Food Items Here, so Associates in Need Can Enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner," read signs affixed to the tablecloths.

The food drive tables are tucked away in an employees-only area. They are another element in the backdrop of the public debate about salaries for cashiers, stock clerks and other low-wage positions at Walmart, as workers in Cincinnati and Dayton are scheduled to go on strike Monday.

Happy Thanksgiving, Walmart shoppers! Walmart workers, not so much.

Holy Crap! I Want Some of That Money!

Or give it to the poor. But let this keep going on?

LETTERKENNY ARMY DEPOT, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania - Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,” Woodford says. “We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”

The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.

Read it and weep.

Here We Go Again: Tesla Model S Under Fire

Not long ago, the Tesla Model S got about the best reviews possible. Here's the Huffington Post report:

Here's Consumer Reports' review of the Tesla Model S:
Here's Consumer Reports' review of the Tesla Model S:

Here's a report of Tesla cars on fire:

Here's Elon Musk's response:

Now George Clooney gets into the act:

Elon Musk fires back:

In other news, George Clooney reports that his iPhone 1 had a bug back in '07
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2013

This has been another edition of people with too much time on their hands. (Not meaning to disparage Elon Musk. I think he and his company are getting a bad rap. Note: George Clooney had a Tesla Roadster, a discontinued model.)

Footnote. Remember the hundreds of thousands of Toyota and Lexus cars recalled by Toyota and the estimated $2 billion in losses suffered over problems with brakes on various models? Here's the outcome of the NHTSA and NASA studies:

In February 2011 the findings of a 10-month-long study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), aimed to identify the main cause of sudden acceleration in Toyota and Lexus models. The study was requested by the US Congress and "enlisted NASA engineers with expertise in areas such as computer controlled electronic systems, electromagnetic interference and software integrity". The most common problem was drivers hitting the gas when they thought they were hitting the brake, which the NHTSA called "pedal misapplication.” Of the 58 cases reported, 18 were dismissed out of hand. Of the remaining 40, 39 of them were found to have no cause; the remainder being an instance of “pedal entrapment.” One investigator says most of the cases involved “pedal misapplication” – that is, “the driver stepped on the gas rather than the brake or in addition to the brake.”

 Remember the problems with the Audi 5000 back in the 80s? Another one involving a NHTSA investigation:

A 60 Minutes report aired 23 November 1986, featuring interviews with six people who had sued Audi after reporting unintended acceleration, showing an Audi 5000 ostensibly suffering a problem when the brake pedal was pushed. Subsequent investigation revealed that 60 Minutes had engineered the failure – fitting a canister of compressed air on the passenger-side floor, linked via a hose to a hole drilled into the transmission.

Audi contended, prior to findings by outside investigators^, that the problems were caused by driver error, specifically pedal misapplication. Subsequently, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) concluded that the majority of unintended acceleration cases, including all the ones that prompted the 60 Minutes report, were caused by driver error such as confusion of pedals. CBS did not acknowledge the test results of involved government agencies, but did acknowledge the similar results of another study.

Good luck, Tesla.

Our Punishment-Oriented Society: Can We Change?

I spent five weeks in Europe this fall and another week in New York City, and during that time I was able to see a number of cultures and find the groove, if you will, of their societies. You'd think you couldn't learn much about a society by whirling through, say Vienna, for three days, visiting museums, palaces, marketplaces, and sitting in cafes, but if you take the time to chat with the Muslim woman that works the bakery, or the entrepreneur with a new cafe in the Jewish Quarter, or the architect who rented you the room during your stay, and so on, you can get a pretty good idea of the way the Viennese Austrians do it and why. And so it was with the dozen or so countries I visited.

To say that, by and large, European countries manage their populations far better than we do here in the U.S. is an understatement to say the least. But what would you expect from me, an avowed progressive for whom socialism is not a dirty word?

Having said that, what caught my attention this morning was an article my wife, a preschool director and teacher, discovered in the New York Times, entitled "Schools That Separate the Child From the Trauma." What was contained in it was so profound -- and from my own experience as an educator, it rang so true -- that I immediately leapt beyond it to the implications for our greater society. First, consider this:

Recently, I reported on the damaging effects that prolonged stress can have on young children who lack adequate protection from adults. Over the past 15 years, researchers have learned that highly stressful — and potentially traumatic — childhood experiences are more prevalent than previously understood. Now scientists are shedding light on the mechanisms by which they change the brain and body. These insights have far-reaching implications for schools, where it’s still standard practice to punish children for misbehavior that they often do not know how to control. This is comparable to punishing a child for having a seizure; it adds to the suffering and makes matters worse.

Thankfully, some places are getting smarter. “The hot spots in education are Massachusetts and Washington State,” explains Jane Stevens, a health and science journalist who edits ACES Too High, an excellent website containing a wealth of information about “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs) and the effects of stress and trauma on children. “Educators understand that the behavior of children who act out is not willful or defiant, but is in fact a normal response to toxic stress. And the way to help children is to create an environment in which they feel safe and can build resilience.”

This is not a small issue in education. A great many students come to school with emotional and behavioral difficulties that pose serious barriers to their learning. In a study (pdf) of 2,100 elementary students in 10 schools in Spokane, Wash., for example, researchers from Washington State University found that more than 20 percent had two or more ACEs (experiences that include having been homeless, witnessing domestic violence or having a parent who uses drugs or is incarcerated). Compared with children with no known stresses, these kids are two to four times more likely to have problems with attendance, behavior, academics and health. As the number of ACEs increase, the students fare considerably worse on all counts.

“When kids have undergone a lot of adversity, it changes how they respond to people and challenges in their environment, including very simple things that we might not think about — like how many transitions you ask them to do before lunch,” explains Chris Blodgett, a clinical psychologist who directs the CLEAR Trauma Center at Washington State University(pdf). “For traumatized people, changes are encoded largely as danger.”

When a child violates rules or expectations, the standard response is to try to reason with the child or use punishment, he added. “What the science tells us about how stressed brains react to change, loss or threat is that children will often violate rules because they feel profoundly out of control. It’s a survival reaction and it may actually be intended to control the situation.”

The lessons learned here are clear and recommend strongly that we reform the way we deal with the behavioral issues of our most at-risk children. The implications for our greater society are profound indeed, which led me to think about key failures in our culture and compare and contrast them with what I've seen in both Europe and Japan recently and much earlier when I lived in the Netherlands and Japan.

Those societies are much less violent, incarcerate fewer citizens, have superior health outcomes for much less expenditures while having extremely vibrant economies. Americans should wonder why.

It's illuminating to view how we choose to "try to reason with the child or use punishment" when dealing with behavioral issues. And further on in the article I was struck by this passage:

One big thing is to help children become aware of their bodies, said Emily Cooley, a special-education teacher who works with Powers at his new position as principal of the Mary E. Baker Elementary School in Brockton. “One of my students has three pictures on his desk: a mail box, a snack and a bean bag chair. If this boy is not feeling in his body that he can be in class, he knows he can pick up one of the pictures and go get my mail in the office, get a crunchy snack, or take a break in the bean bag chair.” (Bean bag chairs and bubbles seem to be particularly helpful to young kids.)

“It’s not to avoid tasks,” she added. “It’s so he can calm himself and be here physically and mentally — so we can work on the academics. Little things like this can really have a big impact on children.” [emphasis mine]

 The point I draw from this is the parallel between "spare the rod, spoil the child" and the conservative/libertarian notion of what welfare does to people, as Paul Ryan so tellingly explained when he said, "...we don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives."

From Ryan's point of view, there is virtue in our punishment society. For conservatives, especially religious ones, it's a question of character. To let the child who misbehaves off the hook is to "spoil the child." To let people who lead stress-filled lives mired in poverty off the hook with food stamps, WIC, housing and home-heating credits, and unemployment insurance is to "lull able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency."

Obviously, Paul Ryan didn't grow up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, or east Oakland, California. He has no idea of the stress caused by poverty, just as many Americans can't imagine how these and other realities in the lives of children leave them at risk of being unreachable without special accommodations.

In my view, we turn our society into prisoner factories, allowing children who grow up in the stress of poverty and crime to end up under-educated, with little to no opportunity, and thus turning to a life of crime that feeds our prison system. Yet have we made an effort to offer preschool nationwide? No. Do we offer, as a right of citizenship, universal access to healthcare? No. Do we allow, according to the 2010 Census, 23 percent of American children to suffer from food insecurity? Yes. Have we allowed college tuition to rise to levels that place a college education out of reach for an increasing segment of our society? Yes. Do we instead declare this to be a character issue in which those who are born into or end up in poverty deserve their fate? Yes, as our society as a whole has done so far, with conservatives and libertarians in the lead.

How might our society do things differently? Look to the social democracies of Europe and East Asia for answers. These societies, with their universal preschool, maternity/paternity support, universal healthcare, and social safety nets, have low crime and general healthy, productive populations with stable economies. Is this an accident? No.

If there is a place to start, it would be with our children. Establish universal preschool and at all levels adopt teaching and behavior methods reflected in the NYT article quoted above. Eliminate malnutrition, especially among our our children. Good, stable, successful societies are no accident, nor are dysfunctional, failing ones. It's time to make better choices.

Remember this example of how tea partiers view what to do with the unfortunates among us?

Or what conventional conservatives think of those who end up in the "hammock" of welfare:

Finally, let's look at what the budget chief of the Republican Party thinks about his country:

I've no choice but to parse that statement because of how almost comically wrongheaded it is. First, uncomically, Ryan frames his whole statement with "The point is we are reaching a fiscal tipping point, the moral tipping point is even worse." Since he goes on to talk about takers versus makers, the only conclusion one can draw is that makers are moral and takers are immoral.

Then, he says that "We can become a society in which the net majority are takers not makers." What the hell is a "net majority?" That implies that the group of people, American society, is not a whole but a net amount. Of what? The only conclusion I can come to is that Ryan throws the "net" in there to sound wonkish. Jeez.

So, he establishes a fiscal and moral tipping point, which he considers one and the same: Certain fiscal choices must, then, be immoral. Which fiscal choices are we making or about to make that are immoral? Good question. How does he answer it?

What's this "net majority" of "takers?"  "Seventy percent of Americans get back in dollar value more than they pay in taxes." Ah ha! The takers! Are these the conservatives or the liberals? You'd think because he's a conservative he'd be talking about the liberals, since the moral divide by his rhetoric would dictate that the moral people would be conservatives who aspire to be makers and the liberals who either aspire to be takers or to be the enablers of the takers.

In the course of the next few sentences, unfortunately for Ryan, he gets it all jumbled up:

"The good news is that survey after survey, poll after poll, still show that we're a center-right country, seventy-thirty."

"Seventy percent of Americans want the American Dream."

"Only thirty percent want the welfare state."

For a policy wonk (those who've looked at his budget proposals, none of which has ever added up, know better), his math really, really doesn't work. And if his math doesn't work, then what is he really trying to say? Here's his math:

Seventy percent of Americans are takers. Thirty-seventy is the makers-versus-takers split.

Our center-right country is seventy-thirty, with seventy percent believing in the American Dream, by which he must mean the responsible, hardworking conservatives.

By Paul Ryan's math, however, forty percent of the conservatives are takers, which surpasses the thirty percent of takers that are liberal. Who knew?? Certainly not Paul Ryan.

Here's Paul Ryan's real math: When you combine his "hammock" statement with his "moral tipping point" statement it adds up to this: It's the poor's fault that the rest of us can't have more shiny new objects, and it's the liberals' fault that forty percent of conservatives are takers.

What is he really talking about? What are these shiny new objects? What are Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, any conservative or libertarian for that matter, talking about? Certainly not universal preschool, or universal healthcare, or unfettered access to higher education. That's for the makers, not the takers.