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Having spent the last 20 years accumulating ever-greater piles of debt, governments now face tough choices/ difficult decisions.

What if there was one weird debt management trick that would allow governments to slash debt-to-GDP without spending cuts, tax raises, financial repression, inflation or default?

There is. But it’s terrible.

As a broad metric of fiscal health, debt-to-GDP has simplicity on its side. It means we can quickly summon charts like this one, showing quite how indebted governments are today compared to yesteryear:

And simplicity can be great for catalysing public policy.

While the US debt-to-GDP numbers don’t seem to be high enough to prevent the US Congress from pushing through monster tax cuts for the super-rich, they do appear high enough to force US Congress to slash spending on the poor.

But simplicity can also be . . . simplistic? So simple that it can be easily gamed.

All governments need to do is exchange their old bonds (trading sometimes far below par) for shiny new current-coupon bonds. Doing so would, in some cases, slash debt-to-GDP.

🥳 🥳 🥳 

To get a (very) rough estimate as to the potential impact that such a hypothetical Big Beautiful Bond Exchange™ might have on debt ratios, we cross-referenced average bond prices in the Bloomberg Global Treasury Index with the IMF’s estimates for debt-to-GDP.

The big winners of any massive debt swap look to be the United States (for sheer dollar debt reduction), Japan, and the UK (in cutting debt ratios).

True, looking more closely at the US, our working assumption that all US government debt is tradeable US Treasuries in the bond index turns out to be a bit of a stretch. According to the US Treasury, these make up less than half of total debt:

So sure, swapping old USTs trading at a discount for current coupons would cut US federal debt by $1.6tn — or around 50x itemised Doge savings — it’s still only five and half per cent of GDP, which is less than a single year of Trump’s planned deficit.

It hardly seems worth the bother.

How about a closer look at the UK, where gains could be greater relative to GDP?

The British government spent years selling shedloads of low-coupon gilts when yields were on the floor. In today’s higher-yielding environment, this means oodles of bonds trading at deep discounts.

Keen readers will recall that low-coupon gilts are pretty useful to UK taxpayers and hedge funds alike. And this has led to the gilt curve looking pretty kinky. 

We’ve drawn the curve below, colouring each bond according to its coupon:

We calculate that swapping all gilts into current coupon bonds in a bondholder-friendly exchange could wipe £355bn off the face value of government debt and cut the debt-to-GDP ratio by around 13 percentage points — from 101 per cent to a mere 89 per cent. And that’s before we even look at inflation-linked gilts.

But the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that bonds with the lowest yields on the curve are all low-coupon gilts (in red). And bonds with the highest yields on the curve tend to be more recently issued gilts (in blue).

If swapped (on a non-coercive basis), our massive gilt exchange would see the richest bonds on the curve swapped into the cheapest ones — increasing the cost of debt. And so this is not an exchange that any government with an eye to actual economics of debt management — rather than mere optics — would think sensible.

So what?

Our mad exchange plan tells us something about debt-to-GDP. Bean-counters consider only principal payments to be debt; they just ignore coupons. The Big Beautiful Bond exchange reduces debt-to-GDP because the market would be nuts not to consider both.

Debt service as a percentage of GDP is — in general — a far more thoughtful way of considering debt-imposed constraints on current government finances. Whilst debt-to-GDP breaching the 100 per cent threshold may grab headlines, political appetite for fiscal consolidation reliably starts to pick up only when debt service rises. And eyeballing the chart below, when it breaches five per cent of GDP it has generally been met by a punchy response.

What does our one weird trick do to debt service? Nothing good.

Putting it altogether

The chart below shows where we are today on both debt-to-GDP and debt service across the G7. If you scroll down you can see where these ratios might head if we played OneWeirdTrickenomics without letting pesky facts as to the true composition of government debt get in the way.

Debt service ratios today are not particularly alarming across the G7. A massive bond exchange into current coupon bonds to cut the debt load would push interest bills immediately higher.

Of course, as debt matures and is refinanced at higher interest rates, debt service costs will tick up anyway.

But fiscal policymakers have time on their side. The average maturity of JGBs is almost ten years. The average maturity of gilts is over 12 years. If the UK and Japanese economies grow faster than their debts over these periods, the degree to which debt service rises will be limited.

Things look more challenging in America. The average maturity of US Treasuries is around seven-and-a-half years. And in practice US debt service is much more responsive to interest rate moves because of all the T-bills they print. In their long-term forecasts, the CBO reckons that debt service will rise to 5 per cent of GDP — although not until 2050. This is based on their expectation that the fed funds rate falls quickly to 3.25 per cent and that 10-year Treasuries stay below 4 per cent. Furthermore, the CBO long-term forecasts don’t yet incorporate the Big Beautiful Bill. So today their forecasts look optimistic.

What does it all mean?

Today’s government debt loads are high but not unprecedented. Cutting them down to size through our massive debt swap plan would clearly be preposterous (although swapping long expensive debt for shorter cheaper debt would not). Sure, it would lower the debt-to-GDP ratio in a number of countries. But only because the ratio is silly. Interest bills would be jacked up in the short run. And this is before we factor in any vibes-based premium that might be applied by the market for mucking about.

Sorry guys, difficult decisions it is.

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Following a bit of a wobble around tariff shenanigans, corporate bond spreads are tight once more. The average single-B US corporate bond yields around 3.4 per cent more than US Treasuries — around 1.8 per cent below its long-term average.

This is despite downgrades to economic growth projections, and interest rates remaining stubbornly high. Maybe this makes sense? After all, default rates have not been particularly high.

If we’re looking for signs that the credit cycle is turning, we might be looking in the wrong place. At least, that’s the gist of a new note from Jason Thomas, Head of Global Research & Investment Strategy at The Carlyle Group.

It’s not that he’s down on credit in general. Thomas reckons tight single-B spreads reflect solid business performance. But, he argues: “[w]hat may appear as credit market complacency may instead reflect bifurcation”.

And the place to see this bifurcation in action isn’t in public bond markets. It’s in private or semi-private credit markets.

Traditional default rates in the syndicated loan market are still low. But they’ve been kept low due to rising levels of “liability management exercises”, or opportunistic debt restructurings. If you add these to the mix, Carlyle believes that syndicated loan default rates are now above long-run averages.

Furthermore, while it’s hard to get decent numbers about the opaque world of private credit, Thomas reckons there is a similar dynamic in play in direct lending:

where default rates remain low, in part, because creditors have converted struggling borrowers’ cash-pay coupons into payment-in-kind (PIK) where foregone interest accrues to the principal balance

We’ve discussed PIKs before. And as S&P Global Ratings explains:

When a borrower opts to preserve cash flow by making PIK payments, it may signal an inability to meet cash interest demands.

Since late 2023, PIK loans have been proliferating, with S&P Global Ratings’ estimates of the share of loans making PIK payments being just over 10 per cent in the third quarter of 2024. This was actually down on the previous quarter, though S&P expects it to rise over the rest of 2025. Their estimate is based on their analysis of 165 BDCs — business development companies, which serve as wrappers for diversified pools of private credit.

As you can see in the chart below, the proportion of income accounted for by PIKs across the 16 publicly rated BDCs varies enormously:

[Pop]

Lincoln International, a global banking advisory firm that — among other things — assembles indices to track the performance of private assets, found that by the end of Q125, around 11 per cent of debt investments tracked had some element of PIK interest, up from 7 per cent in 2021. Six per cent of deals had what they call “bad PIK” attributes — meaning that PIK interest had been added to loans that did not get done originally with PIK interest.

They think “bad PIKs” offer a decent proxy for a shadow default index, because . . . 

[w]hile not all “bad PIK” borrowers are distressed … [loan to value ratios] for these deals increased from 49% at close of the investment to 86% in Q1.

There are lots of possible endings to this story.

In a good scenario, earnings grow, and interest rates fall. Creditmetrics improve, all firms come good with all their debt payments, and Forest Green Rovers win the FA Cup.

Carlyle’s Jason Thomas is less optimistic:

Creditors’ willingness to work with troubled borrowers over the past few years seems to have been influenced by the threat of companies stripping assets from lenders’ collateral pool, alongside rate cut expectations.

Moreover:

Such generosity is likely to fade as market participants come to terms with life in a new interest rate regime. As [liability management exercises] fall back into distress and equity evaporates in PIK conversions, expect default rates to move higher.

Of course, we guess everyone could just pretend that everything is fine, and kick the PIK can even further down the road.

Further reading:
— Is it PIK-up time for cash-strapped companies? (FTAV)

A big FT Alphaville welcome to Trivial Pursuit fiend, dataviz wizard, reformed asset manager and all-round good egg Toby Nangle!

His first day on the job was yesterday, and despite being subject to FTAV’s brutal hazing traditions and the FT’s IT induction, he still had time to write a great post on Mike Mauboussin’s latest paper. Feel free to say hi in the comments.

Elsewhere on Wednesday . . . 

— Hideo Kojima’s Boss Fight With Time (GQ)

— Andrew Tate went 25X long on Hyperliquid, got liquidated, and quickly deleted self-congratulatory post (Protos)

— The UK’s millionaire exodus didn’t actually happen (Tax Justice Network)

— LLMs struggle with legal exams that require reasoning or are multiple-choice (SSRN)

— We should immediately nationalise SpaceX and Starlink (Jacobin)

— What a glut of new Oasis books is leaving unwritten (The Quietus)

Back in the halcyon days of August 2024, FT Alphaville argued that the launch of a leveraged single-stock ETF tracking MicroStrategy’s stock was the ETF industry’s shark-jumping moment.

Oh how sweetly/stupidly naive we were at the time.

Under new SEC chair Paul Atkins, the main US financial watchdog will “embrace and champion” innovation, an unsubtle signal to the crypto world that it can run wild once more.

The inevitable result is financial abominations like this:

A company called “Canary Capital” — yeah, us neither — has become the first asset manager to file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to launch an ETF that would contain non-fungible tokens.

According to the prospectus, the mooted fund would “invest” 80-95 per cent of its assets in Pengu, which, apparently, is the “official token of the Pudgy Penguin project”. A further 5-15 per cent will be held in Pudgy Penguin NFTs, alongside a sprinkling of solana and ether.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that those latter cryptocurrencies — only one of which (ether) has been approved by the SEC as a holding for ETFs — are seen as almost grown-up assets in comparison to its proposed spheniscidae-themed holdings.

Its filing admits that:

PENGU is a new SPL token that exists on the Solana Network. Relative to other digital assets such as bitcoin, ETH and SOL, PENGU has very few identified use cases apart from a collector’s item . . .     

There is no assurance that usage of the PENGU will continue to grow. A contraction in the use or adoption of PENGU may result in increased volatility or a reduction in the price of PENGU, which could adversely impact the value of the Shares. Sales of PENGU that have been newly released from escrow may cause the price of PENGU to decline, which could negatively affect an investment in the Shares. PENGU markets have a limited history, PENGU trading prices have exhibited high levels of volatility, and in some cases such volatility has been sudden and extreme. Because of such volatility, Shareholders could lose all or substantially all of their investment in the Trust.

Spot markets on which PENGU trades are relatively new and largely unregulated or may not be complying with existing regulations and, therefore, may be more exposed to fraud and security breaches than established, regulated exchanges for other financial assets or instruments, which could have a negative impact on the performance of the Trust. Disruptions at PENGU spot markets, futures markets and in the over-the-counter (“OTC”) markets could adversely affect the availability of PENGU and therefore their ability to create and redeem Shares of the Trust. The loss or destruction of certain “private keys,” including by the Custodian, could prevent the Trust from accessing its PENGU.

Pudgy Penguins is associated with the risk of an investment in NFTs. Investing in NFTs involves significant risk due to the highly volatile and speculative nature of the NFT market. The value of NFTs can fluctuate dramatically over short periods, influenced by factors such as market demand, trends, celebrity endorsements, and broader economic conditions. Unlike traditional assets, NFTs lack historical performance data, making it challenging to predict future value. Additionally, the NFT market is relatively new and unregulated, which can lead to increased susceptibility to market manipulation, fraud, and other illicit activities. Investors should be aware that the value of their NFT investments could decrease substantially or become illiquid, resulting in potential financial loss.

The tokens are at least going cheep, and are currently trading at $0.0103, according to Coingecko, a dive of 63 per cent from the level they hatched at in December 2024.

And that’s before we get to the NFTs. The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted that the whole point of NFTs is that they are non-fungible. To date ETFs, whether they hold stocks, bonds, derivative contracts or even cryptocurrencies, have always held fungible assets — shares in Apple, tranches of a given bond and even bitcoin are fully interchangeable.

Bringing in NFTs changes this equation. Each of the 8,888 Pudgy Penguin NFTs has a combination of different traits, including colour, facial expression, accessories and backgrounds. Indeed, it is this very uniqueness that gives NFTs “value” — at least to those who do not believe this value is approximately zero.

Quite how this would work in a fund structure famed for daily liquidity, constantly updated net asset value, and generally minuscule premiums and discounts to NAV due to the arbitrage model facilitated by authorised participants, is somewhat unclear.

To be fair, holders of Pudgy Penguin NFTs have thus far had a profitable, if wild ride, at least if they had hopped on board at inception.

The NFTs were minted at 0.03 ether in 2021. The floor price — the lowest price at which any of the collection trades — hit 21.68 ether in February 2024, a not to be sniffed at rise of 72,167 per cent. That took the market cap to within a feather of $500mn. The floor price has since dived to around 9.4 ether, or $23,300.

A push to extend the reach of ETFs into the realm of NFTs was perhaps inevitable, even under a less supine SEC.

Issuers have filed dozens of applications for ETFs that would hold cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin and ether, such as solana, XRP and cardano. Basket products holding a range of currencies are also in the offing.

Upping the ante further, in January, three asset managers filed to launch ETFs that would hold memecoins — lacking even the use cases usually ascribed to more “traditional” cryptocurrencies — linked to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

However, even in this day and age it’s unclear whether the Pengu ETF will ever actually happen. Canary Capital may have managed to make a filing, but that’s a low hurdle to clear. Many advocates for the ETF brand will hope it has as much chance of getting off the ground as everyone’s favourite Antarctic avians.

Further reading:

— SEC commissioner Crenshaw rips the agency’s ‘regulatory Jenga’ (FTAV)

— Bonfire of the NFTs (FTAV)

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Rather than working on the thing we’re supposed to be working on, FT Alphaville found ourselves once again on the hellsite — where we saw a nice tweet by Archie Hall of the Economist:

Naturally, inflation is a curious choice of messaging area for a political party that presided, somewhat helplessly, over the most rapid price increases in about half a century.

Rather than working on the thing we’re supposed to be working on, FT Alphaville took the obvious bait and found ourselves trying to see how the actual CPI index would look appended to that punchy social-media graphic.

Voilà:

As for the thing we were supposed to be working on… well, there’s always tomorrow.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

An easy way to start articles these days is to ask Google something and take the piss out of whatever prolix nonsense appears in the AI Overview. For example: “What’s the difference between a chart and a graph?”

Got that? Graphs always have axes except when they don’t, and are for analysing trends and patterns over time except when they’re not. Line graphs and bar graphs are graphs, whereas line charts and bar charts are charts. This is the quality of explanation we get from forcing the sum of human knowledge through an uncomprehending algorithm that does to information what Kraft does to cheese.

Anyway. Below are three charts that are also graphs. Identify what they represent and you might win a T-shirt. The answers are loosely themed, though knowing that probably won’t help much.

Email your entry to [email protected] with QUIZ in the subject line. Players with all three correct will be entered into a prize draw for an exclusive FTAV charts-quiz-winner T-shirt.

We usually namecheck those who go into the draw so, if publicity’s not your thing, be sure to tell us. The deadline for entries is mid-morning on Monday, London time, and the judge’s decision is final.

Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up to the Capital markets myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

Traditional Chinese medicine is so hot right now:

Regencell is a Hong Kong-based/Cayman Islands-incorporated/Nasdaq-listed “early-stage” bioscience company that develops herb-based treatments for ADHD and autism spectrum disorder.

Net losses reached $4.36mn and $6.06mn in the fiscal years ended June 30 2024 and 2023. But a frankly stupid surge over the past 30-odd days means the company is now valued at about $9.7bn — somewhere between Jefferies and Walgreens — having hit $11.4bn on Friday.

Two things might explain Regencell’s roughly 15,000 per cent gain this year: either it miraculously discovered a plant-based cure for hyperactivity (though it has not disclosed as much in filings), or its shares (13mn of which are outstanding, with about 800,000 in the float) are themselves being hyperactively massaged higher by persons unknown.

Trading in the company’s stock is a tad erratic, ranging from as little as 8,000 shares exchanged on March 12, 2025 to 23.3mn a few days later. On Monday, Regencell’s board of directors approved a 38-for-one forward split — subject, of course, to the final approval of Nasdaq Capital Market’s notoriously tough taskmasters.

Regencell’s first research study in 2018 left no hot stone unturned. Seven patients aged five to 12 who had been diagnosed with ADHD or ASD were taken off existing medication and treated with personalised Regencell ’erbs. And wouldn’t you know it: “All participants showed a drop in assessment scores” after a three-month course with its liquid-based TCM formulas.

The company employs 12 people and went public on Nasdaq in July 2021 with the help of US underwriter Maxim Group and New York legal firm Hunter Taubman Fischer & Li, raising about $21mn. A month later its shares had climbed from their offer price of $9.50 to an intraday high just below $60.

The unlikely jump was cheered by Regencell CEO, founder and director Yat-Gai Au (who controls the company through a BVI entity) in his letter to shareholders later that year . . . 

“Regencell is the #1 performing stock among the 1,035 US IPOs in 2021. I am extreme grateful for all your support!

. . . even as he lashed out at a supposed “short selling attack” on Regencell’s shares.

Au is a seemingly unassuming guy who filings state once worked in investment banking at Deutsche Bank and ING Barings. His stripped-back Twitter/X account betrays a fondness for basketball star Stephen Curry, Apple boss Tim Cook and the cast of Marvel’s Avengers franchise.

For years, Au has been paid an annual salary of just $1, with no bonus. That would only change, he said, once his company hit a market capitalisation of $1bn.

Happily for him, Regencell’s recent rally has left it worth more than eleven-times that paltry amount, with Au’s stonking 86.2 per cent stake meaning all those years of parsimony may finally be about to pay off. There is no suggestion that either the CEO or Regencell have anything to do with the stock’s unusual performance.

FT Alphaville reached out to Au but has yet to hear back. Nasdaq declined to comment. Regencell says none of the raw materials used in its treatments are sourced from endangered species of animals or plants.

Further reading:
— Fantastical goings-on in Nasdaq-listed Chinese micro-caps (FTAV)
— Yet more fantastical goings-on in Nasdaq-listed Chinese micro-caps (FTAV)

Last week, MainFT jumped on the potentially wild implications of an obscure but explosive provision buried deep in the Trump administration’s budget bill.

Section 899 of the bill passed by House of Representatives last week would let the US to impose additional taxes on companies and investors from countries that it deems to have “discriminatory” tax policies. As Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos put it, it represents the potential “weaponisation of US capital markets”, given the trillions that overseas investors have in the US.

Well, here’s another one hidden-away humdinger, which you can find roughly midway through the ca 160k word “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”:

SEC. 50005. FINANCIAL RESEARCH FUND.

Section 155 of the Financial Stability Act of 2010 (12 U.S.C. 5345) is amended by adding at the end the following:

(e) Limitation on Assessments and the Financial Research Fund.

(1) Limitation on assessments. —— Assessments may not be collected under subsection (d) if the assessments would result in

(A) the Financial Research Fund exceeding the average annual budget amount; or

(B) the total assessments collected during a single fiscal year exceeding the average annual budget amount.

(2) Transfer of excess funds. — Any amounts in the Financial Research Fund exceeding the average annual budget amount shall be deposited into the general fund of the Treasury.

(3) Average annual budget amount defined.–In this subsection the term ‘average annual budget amount’ means the annual average, over the 3 most recently completed fiscal years, of the expenses of the Council in carrying out the duties and responsibilities of the Council that were paid by the Office using amounts obtained through assessments under subsection (d).

This is . . . potentially quite problematic, if we’ve read this right.

US legal-political jargon is hard to parse, but Alphaville’s understanding is that this could in practice kill the US Treasury’s Office of Financial Research, a body set up as a kind of early-warning system for financial crises after 2008. Here’s how, and why that would be a big deal.

The Financial Research Fund referenced in Section 50005 finances both the operations of the Financial Stability Oversight Council — an overarching body that includes all the main US financial regulators and is chaired by the US Treasury Secretary — and the OFR that supports it. The FRF gets its money from a small annual levy on big US banks.

The bill seems to place a cap on these charges, equal to the average annual budget of the “Council”, which presumably means FSOC in this context. But FSOC’s budget is tiny compared to the OFR, which consumes the lion’s share of the money raised by the Financial Research Fund’s bank charges.

By seemingly restricting those charges to a maximum of only FSOC’s average annual budget, the budget bill would de facto kill the OFR by defunding it, without the hassle of having to actually pass any legislation to do so formally (a favourite playbook of the Trump administration)

Again, it’s hard to be sure, given the bill’s messy language, but our interpretation of the wording seems to match that of the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service. As the latter noted, with Alphaville’s emphasis below:

. . . Section 50005 would limit both these annual assessments and the FRF balance to the average FSOC budget over the previous three years, which from FY2023 to FY2025 were $16 million (assuming FSOC’s transfer to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would qualify). Fund balances above the limit would be transferred to the Treasury General Fund. This compares to FSOC’s and OFR’s combined estimated obligations of $136 million, OFR assessments of $124 million in FY2025, and an FRF unobligated balance of $74 million as of April 2025. Thus, this section would lead to significant decrease in annual assessments and OFR (and potentially FSOC) spending. CBO estimates that this section would decrease the deficit by $292 million over 10 years.

The whole point of the original 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was to bring together America’s stupidly complex patchwork of regulators and prevent the kind of cataclysmic failures that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. But to do so it needed data, research and analysis, which was why the OFR was set up inside the US Treasury.

You could argue that FSOC can continue to play the same overarching, convening role of financial regulators without the OFR there to aid it. Some of its research is inevitably duplicative of work done elsewhere in the federal government, or by the likes of the IMF. Moreover, $16mn should be enough to finance some rump-FSOC/OFR staffing. Alternately, the Treasury could seek additional funding through the normal budgeting avenues to maintain the OFR.

However, if nothing changes it would definitely require jettisoning all the information collection, cleaning, dissemination and analysis that the OFR does. Its data, technology and research centres cost about $83mn a year, and produce good stuff like its Hedge Fund Monitor and Money Market Fund Monitor (Alphaville used the former for this story, and the latter for an upcoming one). The OFR also played a pivotal role in getting the Legal Entity Identifier database off the ground.

Most consequentially, the OFR plays an important role in collecting the much of the data that underpins the Secured Overnight Financing Rate — Libor’s successor as the world’s most important interest rate benchmark.

Unlike Libor, SOFR is an interest rate benchmark derived from actual financial transactions, rather than vibes and whatever was convenient for some traders’ P&L. Specifically, it is based on the overnight US repo markets, where US Treasuries serve as collateral for short-term loans between banks and other financial institutions.

The New York Federal Reserve is SOFR’s administrator, but the crucial raw data comes from the Bank of New York Mellon Corp, the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation — and the OFR. Whoops.

In other words, after years of hard work by regulators, central bankers and finance ministry officials around the world to wean the global financial system off its LIBOR’s dependency, the Trump administration could now be sabotaging its main successor just as it begins to gain traction.

In a statement to FT Alphaville regarding the budget bill’s impact on the OFR, and the potential knock-on impact on SOFR, a Treasury spokesperson would only say: “Treasury regards its role in ensuring the proper functioning of financial markets as one of its upmost priorities.”

It’s true that even if the OFR becomes a zombie agency, its SOFR data collection/warehousing role could in theory be simply picked up by somebody else, perhaps the New York Federal Reserve itself. But this repo data is very messy, and there are probably myriad legal ownership issues involved. Shifting SOFR data collection from one agency to another is therefore almost certainly not a straightforward process.

Is the defunding of the OFR and the potential damage to SOFR intended, or just a snafu? It’s hard to say. But the OFR’s motto is “a transparent, accountable, and resilient financial system”. It seems like none of those things are desirable in America in 2025.