Welcome to NoMore Risk Better, a Credit Sites podcast. Across the global strategy team, we aim to make sense of the macro and the micro, highlighting opportunities and the risks facing the fixed income markets. As the macro makes headlines, we leverage our network of experts across fictions to better understand economic trends, rates, gyrations, geopolitical events, and how these factors impact corporates. At Credit Sites, we understand that credit investing comes down to picking winners to generate alpha and avoiding losers.
Our team over 100 analysts across the US, Europe, and Asia provide unmatched sector expertise and fundamental knowledge. In our weekly podcast, the strategy team offers a look at the conversations we have with our colleagues, including analysts, illustrators, economists, and leverage finance market experts. If you want to know more so that you can risk better, you'll want to give this podcast a listen. Hello, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of NoMore Risk Better, a credit sites podcast on your host, Zach Griffiths, head of US investment grade and macro strategy.
Today, we'll be discussing major shifts in US political and geopolitical risks and what it means for markets going forward. I'm delighted to say I'll be having this conversation with Mark Rosenberg, founder of GeoQuant, one of our sister companies within the Fitch Solutions umbrella. Mark, thank you so much for coming back on our podcast. Thank you for having me.
Good to be here. I know we had you on to discuss a variety of key elections last year, including your home country of South Africa. But before we dive in, can you give us a little bit on your background and how GeoQuant came to be? Sure.
So I'm a PhD political scientist by training, and that is the background of almost all of our analysts. Actually, we're all political scientists effectively trained like economists, so trained in quantitative methods. And what we specialize in is using those methods and tools combined with the domain expertise and political science, combined with advances in computer science, which allow us to take in a lot more data and structure a lot more, a lot of the larger variation of data in our models and quantify really systematically political and geopolitical risk for financial services clients, particularly asset managers, risk managers, country risk teams, et cetera. Generally political and geopolitical risk has been non-quantified or unquantified and within a more qualitative or idiosyncratic fashion.
Speaking to experts, reading reports, making subjective qualitative judgments. What we do is really bring advances in political science, which has just mentioned to come a lot more quantitative discipline in recent years, combined with computer science, which helps us grab a lot more data to model and quantify geopolitical risk, explicitly for inclusion and risk management or asset allocation models. So I'd say it has to be safe to say that you are the perfect guest to have and Gio quant is an invaluable service given the times we live in. Would you tend to agree with that?
I would, yes. It is one of those industries where you have what we call perverse incentives, where the kind of normatively worse the world gets, at least in terms of things like war and conflict and uncertainty and the more our services are in demand. And so, yes, I think that's a fair assumption. Yeah, so we're a busy bunch.
I'm sure I can only imagine. And even in time preparing for this discussion, there's been about three more key topics I want to cover. But let's start with the so-called eamification of the United States. I think that's something that you and the team have been talking about for almost a year now if my research serves me correctly.
So correct me if I'm wrong. But when you think about the eamification of the United States of America, how do you quantify it? What does it mean to you? So we've actually been writing, and then we as a team have been writing about eamification since at least 2020 actually, so for quite a while now.
Back when a lot of folks would look at us sideways. So you've had a better call than I even realized that. The United States, well, as always in markets, it was too early and then it became accurate. That kind of thing.
But the basic thesis was, and it really emerged from our data set, as well as from mine and some of my colleagues back in comparative politics, where we're looking at political economies across different systems and just seeing trends and themes in the United States that increasingly resembled emerging markets, including countries that I was very familiar with, both personally and academically, like South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, but more broadly, kind of less developed political economies where you have high levels of social polarization, you have high levels, leading to really high levels of institutional conflict, which in political science, it just means things like contested elections, things like the legislatures not functioning, particularly coherently, things like real battles between courts and executive or courts and the legislative branches where which creates policy uncertainty. So these kinds of dynamics that are really typical of quote emerging markets and that have been atypical of developed markets. In fact, one of the primary differences, along with the financial and economic differences, have just more developed deeper, more liquid financial markets, which is obviously critical, are the political differences where just politics and developed markets have historically just been a lot more stable, a lot more predictable, even in highly contested elections. If party A or party B won, the scope for policy change was relatively limited.
There was the kind of institution or political conflict was really bounded by institutions and institutional norms. And so there were certain things that investors could count on in terms of being the normal course of business in politics, in these policies that in emerging market, you just couldn't because the ideological differences were wider between parties or because the stakes were higher in the election because of high social polarization, where a new leader would come in and really change things or reward one group and punish another, or where you had things potentially like political violence or contested elections, which would create uncertainty for investors in terms of what the political regime or even would look like and what policies that the new government would pursue. So all that said, those kinds of trends in both social polarization and institutional conflict, in particular, started showing up in our data for the United States. And it was not so much that the level of these risks were equivalent to emerging markets, although it was moving that way, but that the change in these risks were accelerating and that more than any other developed market, the United States was really closing that gap in average political risk between emerging market and developed markets.
So developed markets still have almost by definition, like I said, lower political risk than emerging markets. But the United States was the DM that was really closing that gap quickest and really in a kind of bottom up kind of way. So not necessarily because at the time in 2019, 2020, because of massive policy uncertainty, although that was beginning to start, but more because of what we see in terms of social polarization in terms of institutional change or attempted institutional change, the 2020 election, of course, really kind of accelerated that. But our thesis was always that this would continue regardless of who won that election.
And I think that has really borne out in the 2024 cycle and then the second Trump administration, in particular where you have former Treasury secretaries like Larry Summers, et cetera, saying that the United States resembles an emerging market, right? Just because of some market characteristics, like the dollar declining while yields increase, right? Treasuries yields increase, but also just the political behavior of the government in terms of kind of very high degrees of policy uncertainty. And that was not something that investors come to expect from a particular United States.
So the two big pillars here, and there's a bunch of these is the social polarization and institutional conflict. How would you quantify, and you just mentioned it's not necessarily the level, but the change accelerating toward what other emerging markets look like. Can you give us a frame of reference in terms of the measure that you're looking at? Sure.
Yeah, absolutely. So all of our, we have for each country, we cover 147 countries, there's 22 kind of sub-indicators of political wrestling aggregate up into this top line, political risk measure, right? And those indicators are pretty evenly divided between governance risks, that's them from the nature of the government and power and the institutions that the government operates in, the policies that government pursues. Social risks, that's them from the kind of structure and stability of the society in the country, and then security risks, those are kind of more bread and butter geopolitical risks like potential for war, political violence, terror, and including things like crime, et cetera.
So generally, the United States, at that top line political risk level, in say 2016, ranked alongside kind of Canada, Australia, it was a higher end developed market in terms of overall political risk, and these are 0 to 100 scores. So the United States scored, say, a 39 on overall political risk out of 100 in 2016. And by 2020, then through now to 2025, the United States scored something like a 59, right? And don't quote me like I'm not looking at the app right now, but they've just seen a significant increase in score where the United States now ranks alongside the likes of Hungary, as opposed to Australia, Canada, and the overall political risk.
So that's an idea of kind of the scope and the change. There's only a few countries in our system that have seen the level of change in political risk over that time period in the United States. So keeping level constant, you're looking at countries like Turkey and Russia in terms of change in political risk, which again is not the kind of common company for the United States. Some of these underlying indicators, like you mentioned, social conflict, institutional, or social polarization and institutional risk, those that have seen even larger change over time.
And so what you've gotten is really this kind of bottom up increase in political risk. And now what we see as a result of those underlying drivers is really pretty rapid changes in policy risk. So policy risk, which is part of governance risk in our system, hasn't necessarily changed that much, particularly in aggregate in the United States up until 2025, because it's certain risks have gone up and gone down and there's been different administrations. The volatility of policy risk has definitely increased.
So the frequency of change, even though an aggregate level has stayed the same. But now we see in the second Trump administration that policy risk is really accelerating. And that's a typical EM pattern where the social and institutional volatility and uncertainty comes first, and then that leads to policy risk. And that's why generally EM debt has a higher political risk premium than the EM debt.
It's also, of course, because of the underlying financial and economic fundamentals in the country, but the political fundamentals matter as well. I think that's really helpful. Kind of it's a little tough not knowing the scale for listeners that might not be familiar, but it sounds like a move to 59 from 39 over the course of eight or nine years certainly is substantial and moving from company like Canada and Australia very well established about markets to somewhere like Hungary, which is certainly an emerging market. I think that help frames helps frame the discussion very well.
And obviously we see the policy unfolding in a chaotic manner in terms of trade, whether or not you agree or disagree with Terrace and what they might do for our manufacturing sector or the US economy, it's being rolled out in a chaotic and unpredictable way. I think that's pretty much not up for debate at this point. And so obviously for us, we want to bring this in and figure out what it means for the market. And in a recent write up, you highlighted that the rising US political risk has driven both treasury yields and gold prices higher.
We have our own fair value model that we recently updated and found the model only captures 10 basis points of a 35 basis point monthly move higher to a recent peak of 460 in the 10-year treasury yield. If characterized as historically large deviation between our fair value model and the realized value of 10-year yield as concerns about potential demand for US treasuries amid a backdrop of high and rising US fiscal deficits, higher political risk, all of these things that you just been discussing. So in the context of the models that you look at incorporating the macro and now this political risk factor, this really geo-quants, bread and butter, where do you think the 10-year yield is likely to go from here? Do you think we're on a more sustained path higher or does the peak end?
I mean, we tried water here, but eventually moved lower. So our model would just really speak to that gap that you highlighted in your model, that unexplained portion and explain part of it, at the very least. Meaning our projections would, if you say included that in your model, you would probably get something higher based on, in fact, you would definitely get something higher. So that's a really good frame for what our model says.
Just that treasury yields 10-year and particularly even longer term, up to the 30-year yield, are the explanation for their deviation from macro-based models is political risk. You can see that explicitly and quantitatively by using our data. In terms of where that data is going and the forecasts, US political risk remains elevated. It does in our models, if we're talking a longer term, 6-12 month time frame revert to trend, and so there is a more sanguine forecast there.
I would, given the validity of that 6-12 month forecasting, the United States historically, kind of see that with a grain of soul in that. It's hard, when you look at the model, it's easy to see where it reverts. When you look at reality, the underlying driver is right, there's not really that key issue, particularly with midterms coming up to say, we're going to get a reversion. That said, the model does tend to win when it fights with your intuition.
For now, we go with a similar take, at least if we're using our data, which is that we are up near the peak. I personally am skeptical of that forecast just because of the trends that we've seen so far as well as the underlying dynamics of the midterm elections and the fact that we've had escalating institutional conflict in terms of battles between the courts and the executive, and as well as the lack of kind of a check, effective check by the legislature. That said, what would support those models' projections is that the market has provided that check. The market has, particularly the credit markets, have pushed the government back on some of its more unpredictable and kind of inflationary policies.
There's been a lot of walking back of tariff threats, walking back of threats to fire, central bank, governor Powell, et cetera. I'm sorry, I was in that. See, that's how much I think of the rest of the emerging market. I started using terms like central bank governor.
So I think that's fair. Our basic take would be that treasury yields will say higher for longer because of politics. That would be the elevator pitch or the kind of quick summary. That's been our take for, as I said, for about 24 months, but in particular, the last 12 months in the election cycle and then thereafter.
It continues to be our... Whatever the macro fundamentals are saying in terms of where yields should be, add in a significant political premium pushing yields higher. That is what you get in an emerging market, almost by definition. That's particularly when the currency is declining.
Those are kind of empirics that really validate the thesis, but in terms of forecast, that's what we would say. We don't have a point projection or we don't. We just say, given our models, whatever your macro fundamentals say, add on a pretty significant political buffer. Yeah, I think that's helpful.
Really, the way we're simplistically thinking about that is basically we have large deficits. They might be getting larger, depending on what happens with this tax bill, or at least staying around this $2 trillion annual rate for the next several years and probably going higher from there. Thinking about what treasury has to do to finance that, they're going to have to increase coupon auctions. I think our model does a pretty good job capturing supply, but what's really coming under scrutiny or is more uncertain, is there going to be the marginal demand there?
I think historically, yes, maybe when you have a political risk factor of 39, maybe not so much when it's 59 if we're putting it in that context. I think you've done a lot of great work on this. I wanted to get your take on you highlighted the correlations between political risk factors and a variety of assets, including the S&P 500, which is positively correlated with your political risk measure. How do you interpret that to me?
Even if the US is the cleanest dirty shirt in the closet, as you and the team have alluded to in your research, I would think that rising political risk in the US would push investors in the safer assets like Treasury's, which would push yields lower or investment-grade corporates relative to equity. How do you think about that positive correlation between large cap equity and political risk? It's a really good question and truth be told, before you started seeing stress in the currency and the credit markets that looked emerging market like one of the things that one of the graphs I would show was the S&P 500 versus our political risk indicator, just to laugh at myself and ourselves in terms of the almighty power of the US investor and global investors to put money into US equities, despite much higher political risk. I think you've seen that again with the recovery of the market from some of the tariff shocks.
It's been pretty wild. Just like one would be very hard-pressed and would ultimately almost certainly be wrong to say these kinds of dynamics would upend the global reserve currency or really in times of stress greatly reduced demand for US Treasury's relative to other assets. I think the same can be said for US equity markets is that there's still just no real better place for the money to go. The one thing and we think that probably holds.
I think there are two caveats to that. The first is that the one asset where you have a stronger positive correlation between political risk and political risk is gold than the S&P 500. If you looked at the S&P 500 in gold terms, for instance, you would see a much more different story. That I think is just the graph that put alongside the S&P 500 to highlight the structural risk to those equity markets from higher levels of US political risk.
Well equity markets continue to fly higher. We have seen episodes of sell-offs that are clearly politically driven in the United States. There is definitely potential for more of those, whether it's tariff policies that come back online, whether it's the almost certain replacement of Jerome Powell with someone who is more politically pliable with the central bank, whether it's something like a major credit shock from the fiscal legislation then moving over into equity markets. What we would say is that the structural level of political risk in the United States is very high for the value of the equity markets.
That might be irrelevant given the overwhelming power and depth of the US economy. That is fair enough. But that we have seen certainly increasing incidents where it is very relevant and where investors are responding pretty forcefully to higher political uncertainty. That is not over.
That is not going to be over in any structural sense for a while. It would be as I have lots of other managers and they say the same thing to me, which is I'm not going to tell my clients to get out of the S&P 500 at the very least, even if because look at the line. When I think just speaking conceptually when momentum becomes so important, then it's not really the mystery why if the line keeps going up, folks will keep putting their money in. We just would caution, and because the potential for shocks are bearing out more and more that just structurally we're in a different equilibrium than we have been before because of the high uncertainty of the US government, because of these signals of a loss of confidence in US government debt, because of the misalignment now between treasury yields of the US dollar, all the kinds of things that are clearly politically driven and that should give all investors pause.
Now, where the money goes is not a question that I have an answer to. But gold is, as I said, the one asset that is more highly correlated with the US political risk than the S&P 500. That makes a lot more intuitive sense. I think your point, if you look at the S&P in gold terms or the performance of large cap US equities relative to gold, it's a lot less robust in the past 12 months.
I think your point about there not being a true alternative and looking at historical trends over a much longer time frame, that's clearly been huge. One of the things that we keep coming back to, just thinking about how much risk sentiment has snapped back despite a lack of certainty on policy, increasing geopolitical uncertainty. It comes back to this idea of all the cash that was pumped into the system, both from a fiscal and monetary perspective during COVID, and maybe how that's taken a lot longer in its head more staying power in the system than some or many head anticipates, especially as many central banks have been doing quantitative tightening. I want to shift the discussion to what's going on, geopolitically, particularly in the Middle East.
Now we're seeing treasury yields moving higher on risk off days, perhaps as a response to inflation concerns from oil prices jumping higher as a result of the Israel and Iran conflict. Maybe take us through your views on that. I know you used to be a Middle East analyst strategist previously. How are you thinking about it?
To me, it seems like pre-COVID, if you had this going on, these types of events with Israel attacking Iran and vice versa would have been 10% risk off moves over the course of, I wouldn't say one day, maybe two or three days in the S&P, maybe a 5% day. We're just not seeing that reaction. How are you thinking about the severity of the situation over there and what it means for financial markets going forward? Yeah, to answer the question backwards, I agreed that the oil market response and commodity market more broadly response to this, you know, intuitively should be larger.
There's a couple of things, just at least from our data, that I would point to in addition to some of the other explanations out there. The first is that almost always oil market shocks from geopolitical risk are ephemeral. They almost always revert after, and at the time, if you look from say the 1973 war and that oil shock to, in terms of oil market responses to geopolitical instability in the Middle East, the window of impact is getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter for a variety of reasons, right? That they have to do with supply and demand in the broader ecosystem, as well as I think the nature of how oil is being traded, right?
Is it in a much more computerized fashion, et cetera. And so I think all of those markets learning over time that the impact of these events are generally episodic. I mean, ephemeral and short-lived, even when they have some supply impact, which we don't quite see yet, as well as the fact that Saudi has played ball here, increasing output, and there's, I think, an expectation given the very transactional nature of geopolitics right now with the Trump administration, just explicitly transactional and meaning quid pro quo without necessarily taking into account historical alliances or common values, these kinds of things that generally determine policy outcomes. That's really kind of being, let's say, made secondary to what is seen as kind of financially beneficial for the United States, even for the administration itself, right, in some cases.
And so all that to say is there seems to be, I think, a market expectation that major oil producers are aligned around, are aligned around counteracting a supply shock here, in part because a lot of those oil producers, including the United States, our energy producers, the United States, and Saudi, et cetera, are not particularly upset about the Iranian regime being weakened, right? So I think all of those factors contribute. And while Israel has expanded its attacks to energy infrastructure, right, it hasn't really targeted it as explicitly as it has other regime targets or kind of military targets. And I think that's still also a car that is being held, and probably to the extent there is pressure on Israel from the United States, it is toward kind of keeping that in check because no one wants higher energy prices and inflation at this particular point, given all the things we just spoke about previously.
So I think a lot of this is being kind of absorbed by the market with the background of, hey, Israel and Iran have already exchanged pretty significant tit for tat attacks over the past few years with almost no impact on actual oil production. And really since, you know, since attacks, I attack on some Saudi infrastructure, you know, a few years ago, there really hasn't been anything significant. That probably the largest concern for folks is about shipping and shipping lanes. And there's been, you know, no kind of hard evidence that there's any kind of reduction in transport.
Or has there really been through, you know, all told through the entire conflict and with the Houti threat from Yemen? So I think all that is learning for the market to say, to have this kind of underwhelming reaction relative to what it might have been in the past. I think that's a good point. And just to clear up, my comment was even just about equities and the sensitivity to what I recall is much less significant headlines and the sensitivity, whether it be in treasury yields or equities, just to respond to North Korea firing a missile and the over Japan, that's, you know, it's like 10 basis points in the 10 year when the 10 year was 2%.
And now some of these seemingly larger, but to your point, the market has learned. And it's not like this came out of the blue, though. Israel's been fighting Iran. Iran's proxies for a while, not for you know, for several years.
But to me, to think of, you know, the S&P, just a couple of percentage points off the all-time high, threads back to pre-liberation day tides, it's just, it's crazy to me. I agree with you. I agree with you. So, and it's the apologies for going off on an oil price.
No, no. I mean, that's the most direct, of course, correlation. But, you know. So, agreed.
Again, I think, I'll just give you an anecdote, you know, that kind of rhymes with what you just said, which is, you know, we use natural language processing to process news into our more traditional political risk scores, right? And over the past 10 years, just the nature of headlines and reportage around kind of geopolitical risk terms and phrases, et cetera, has just become so saturated, right? That, you know, the term, you know, interstate war or, you know, potential nuclear conflicts, et cetera, have just become denuded, right? Relative to their significance, previously, because of the rhetoric, because of the political rhetoric, because of the nature of reportage, et cetera.
So, I am not saying there's a similar thing going on in the market because I don't have that data. But I wouldn't be surprised to your point, if it's just so much alarmism, so many scary headlines, so much headline risk over the past decade, such a significant increase, particularly now. And yet, you know, a very clear trend in markets, I think, you know, and I'm sure older and wiser of markets than I would say, you know, that's not a good place to be, but also, I'm sure none of those folks are going to bet on when that's going to come to bear in their 401ks, etc. So I agree with you.
It seems unstable, but it also, by, you know, it would be hard to guess when I would imagine some kind of real shock to supply or demand of oil and or some significant, you know, shock to the economy. Let's say, for instance, if the United States became explicitly involved in an attack on the Fordo nuclear conflicts in Iran, which requires a certain kind of weaponry to access, which then opened the United States up to retaliation across the region and also the prospects of kind of pseudo nuclear conflicts right in the Middle East. I would imagine that would have an impact on every markets. I think most investors are betting that's not going to happen.
Yeah. Yeah. That might be a five bagger on the day on the recipe, probably more. Mark before I let you go, I want to just get a sense of how surprised, if at all, you were that Israel went so directly at Iran's nuclear sites and, you know, in terms of the data you look at and how you're able to assess the situation from your standpoint, do you think this is going to be a lengthy conflict or is there a chance that this from what I've read, it doesn't seem like it's moving towards a resolution anytime soon, but I'd love to get your perspective on that.
Sure. So again, to answer backwards, I think this is going to be a lengthy conflict, meaning, you know, weeks and months, not days in some fashion. Again, you know, there's a high unpredictability in terms of the role of the United States, but that is the point in that there is no real decisive outcome here for Israel, even though, you know, on kind of security force capacity and military grounds are clearly, you know, winning the conflict in terms of relative damage inflicted. There's no decisive victory for Israel without US involvement because the US has required that US weaponry and US support is required for Israel to truly take out Iran's nuclear capability.
And to deal with the fallout of doing so. And so barring that, this will, you know, much more likely be some kind of extended series of tiff or tap exchanges where Israel hopes to just degrade Iran over time to the point where it's just a significantly less pressing threat. And Iran just hopes to survive in terms of it, particularly in terms of the regime, but also inflicting more and more damage on Israel such that the Israeli kind of effort to, you know, to kind of solve the issue is precluded. So I think that the scenario where the US does get involved more significantly, either in military support and or, you know, in some kind of, you know, broker of a deal could shorten the conflict.
But I think in some sense, those are, I don't see the sides agreeing to some kind of non-decisive ceasefire without some kind of path toward something more decisive than that would again involve the United States. So I think that's why I say more protracted. But again, less less of a kind of, oh, this ends up in something really regional or really global in scope like a World War III type scenario because that again would require the United States to get involved in a serious way and I still think that's unlikely. In terms of surprise, our models were surprised by not by the Israeli action per se, but by the timing of it in that we expected it either earlier when we had kind of forecast of Israeli or of higher probability of Israeli action during earlier in the US negotiation process and or later right when the negotiations then concluded.
Another factor that was kind of weighing down our forecast of higher war risk between Iran and Israel in our models was internal politics in Israel historically in our models that we could the Israeli government, particularly the Netanyahu government, the lower the risk of war with Iran in part because of some of the assumptions that are common to democracies around the incumbents willingness to take on another extended conflict when it's unpopular. In less democratic settings, that logic is often reversed where the incumbent starts to look for distractions from unpopularity and has enough institutional insulation from popular pressure to make some kind of foreign adventure more likely when they're unpopular. And that logic seems to have prevailed in the Israeli case here in that this has certainly extended the life of Netanyahu's government significantly. And so that was one kind of causal mechanism that our model had wrong in that we saw rising kind of government instability in Israel as a reducer of risk of war risk with Iran when in fact it was an excel.
I feel like that's just another great example of how historical norms are seemingly being broken daily, monthly, weekly, whatever your favorite time frame to look over is and that doesn't make it easier to forecast financial markets or anything for that matter. So I try geopolitics. Yeah, it might be the only thing tougher at this point. Well, Mark, this was a great discussion.
I really appreciate you coming back on the podcast. We've got a laundry list of issues that you and the team at Gio quant are on top of. So I'm sure we'll be having you or a member of your team back on soon, but we really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
And if you don't mind, I just wanted to clarify because I did get a chance to check that the top line US local risk was that hasn't increased quite as much as I alluded. It has increased from 34 to 42 over the course of since 2016, but the larger swings that I mentioned were around the political violence indicator. The political violence indicator has increased by some of the metrics that I mentioned earlier. And so just to make that explicit, the rankings though hold in terms of the US in top line political is ranking alongside Canada Australia previously and now alongside Hungary.
That does hold at the scale of the increase in that overall measure was not as severe as my memory served. So I apologize. Okay. Appreciate that clarification.
I'm not sure if you're interested. I guess they just need to get their own Gio quant. So yeah, so all of a sounder doesn't get it wrong. Yeah.
All right. Well, thanks again, Mark. We really appreciate it. This was a great discussion.
I learned a lot. Thanks for having me. All right. Thank you all for tuning in to know more risk better.
We'll catch you next time. Good luck out there.