You're listening to leaders in lending from Upstart, a podcast dedicated to helping consumer lenders grow their programs and improve their product offerings.
Each week, hear decision makers in the finance industry offer insights into the future of the lending industry. Best practices around digital transformation. And more, let's get into the show.
每周,听金融业决策者对贷款业的未来提供见解。最佳数字化转型实践。还有更多内容,让我们进入节目吧。
Welcome to leaders in lending. This week's episode features my conversation with Nick Timmeros, the chief economics correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
欢迎来到借贷领域的领袖。这周的节目将与华尔街日报的首席经济通讯员尼克·蒂默洛斯进行对话。
Nick and I had originally planned to talk mostly about the Fed, but given that we recorded this podcast on Thursday, March 16, less than a week after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, we decided to delve a little bit into what happened with those institutions, what the response from the federal government has been and how effective it's been. And how that might impact stimulus, monetary policy, other government policy moving for, what we think the after effects of those collapses might be.
It was a very timely conversation. We are glad that we could have Nick on to talk about this very important topic with us. So it was a really interesting conversation. I know I learned a lot about something that doesn't happen all that often and kind of what the causes and possible after effects are. And I hope you will as well.
So please enjoy this conversation with Nick Timmeros.
所以,请享受与Nick Timmeros的这次交谈。
Nick, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for making the time to join us today. Thanks for having me.
尼克,欢迎来到播客节目。感谢您今天抽出时间加入我们。谢谢邀请我。
You know, we're recording this here on what is it Thursday, the 16th of March. And we talked last week about things we might talk about. And I feel like over the weekend, the world changed. There's maybe timely topics that we don't want to ignore that have occurred.
So I thought I might just start off with, you know, roughly the takeaways you have from what happened. Obviously, I'm talking about Silicon Valley Bank and the kind of failure of that bank is stepping in of the federal government, the FDIC and kind of where we're at. Like what's your takeaway as we as we talk about this a couple days after the, you know, the ultimate takeover by the FDIC of what happened and how we responded.
Well, I think there are a couple things. One question has been, of course, what was going to break in this Fed interest rate cycle, right? The Fed is saying is the Fed always raises rates until something breaks or someone always goes through the windshield. And so now we're beginning to see. I mean, we knew last year, obviously, crypto and some of the other digital assets that had, you know, gotten parabolic in 2021 came back down.
But this is, you know, now you're getting into things that obviously policymakers are more concerned about because if you damage credit creation, you know, credits the lifeblood of the economy. Now we're beginning to see some of the casualties of the Fed's rate increases. And I think it's raising questions about how the Fed will respond because the Fed wants the economy to slow down. They want demand. They want to restrict demand to bring inflation down, get supply demand and a balance. But they don't want to do it by causing a banking crisis.
And so the analogy I use, Jeff, is sometimes, you know, the Fed doesn't know how its moves are going to affect the economy. They call those the lags of monetary policy. And it's like hitting that glass ketchup bottle. You keep hitting it. Nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. And then you smack it in another time and everything comes out. They want more of a squeezable bottle where they can kind of control it carefully. But that is not how the economy and industry policy works.
Is there anything you think gets them close? I love the squeeze bottle analogy. And I've got the ones out that you store upside down. So they're not really squeezable. But the ketchup right there. Yeah. And now it's right there for you. Is there anything that is equating to that? I mean, obviously not to the upside down squeeze bottle. But to the more real-time understanding of the impact of changes to the economy that they can respond to.
Because that's an interesting analogy. And I'm curious if you see anything that moves them closer to a squeeze bottle from banging on the 57 on the glass one.
因为那是一个有趣的比喻,我很好奇你是否看到了任何东西将它们从敲打在玻璃瓶上的57挤压到挤压瓶中的。
Well, you know, so I think the challenge here for the Fed is they have a mandate to bring inflation down, but it is harder to do that if you have an unstable financial system.
So what we saw, you know, this past Sunday was they came out, they made two big moves. The first one was they said they would, they said also, by the way, signature bank has been closed in New York. And we're going to, we're going to stand behind the uninsured depositors of Silicon Valley bank and signature bank.
And they did that by invoking what's called the systemic risk exception. The FDIC has to resolve failed banks in the least cost manner for their deposit insurance fund unless they deem they and the Fed and the Treasury deem there to be a systemic risk which allows them to not focus on the least cost to the deposit insurance fund.
So that was the first step. The second step was because there was some concern. There was a lot of concern that you would have a bank run on Monday morning if uninsured depositors of a bank that was seen as, you know, fairly stable.
I read that signature bank had by rating from more than half of the Wall Street analysts that cover it. So if, you know, people wake up on Monday and they say, well, the equity analysts who cover this bank couldn't do the credit risk analysis. What prospect do uninsured depositors have? You would have had runs on other banks that we're seeing is not large enough to have the government in there.
So they created this facility at the Fed called the bank term funding facility. I'm missing one of the acronyms there, but essentially it said, if people want to get their money out of the bank, we will provide a way for banks to borrow from us in order to meet demands for withdrawals. And the hope was that that would sort of cauterize this problem.
And you know, you don't actually have to use it, right? Like Hank Paulson said about backing the GSCs in 2008. If you have a bazooka, people know you have it. Maybe you won't have to use it. So this was really an insurance policy to say, all right, if there is, if there are deposit outflows on Monday, banks are going to be able to meet them. So maybe there won't need to be deposit outflows on Monday.
Do you sense that there is movement of foot to evaluate? I mean, this kind of feels like an admission that on some level, for any reason, one statistician, we're going to step in and ensure all deposits not feels like.
I think a lot of people, I mean, I think many consumers and even businesses don't understand the idea that they're in the deposits are not actually at the bank, that they're at some risk. They're kind of lending the bank the money to make loans and that there's risk in doing that.
I mean, most of us just as when you put your money in the bank, and if you leave it in the bank account, that should be the safest place it could be that can't go anywhere. And I don't know if there's going to be a movement to actually make that more formal and official and more holistic way where it's kind of implicit for the systemically important financial institutions where it's kind of an implicit guarantee from the government beyond the standard insurance limits. And now a questionable one for at least two institutions that make you assume that in the future, some similar measures might be taken.
I'm curious if you think there's some movement to make that a more official stance to make like an unlimited deposit guarantee. We've got to remove the limits on the deposit. It really raises questions about what's the future for deposit insurance, right? Because regulators said after 2008 that they had tried to address too big to fail.
And Silicon Valley Bank wasn't considered by anybody to be too big to fail. The 16th largest bank in the country. But I think a couple things to note here. One is the speed of the run on that bank was just shocking, right? A quarter of the deposits out the door in one day, $42 billion out of deposits being withdrawn.
And when you look at the customers of the bank, I mean, this was a very concentrated customer base, not insured deposits. These were not stable deposits, right? There was a risk that if people thought the bank wasn't safe, they would run. So I think now you probably are hoping bank supervisors are going through them looking at other banks that are in the same situation where they might not have such stable deposits. So that's one point.
I think, you know, this is not new, though, this problem for regulators. And I wrote a book last year about the Fed's response to the COVID crisis called trillion-dollar triage. I think this was a lot on the Fed, Jerry Powell, he worked at the Treasury Department in 1991 in January of 1991. So this is in the thick of resolving the bank failures that came out of interest rate increases in the 1980s.
And then there was a Sunday in the, I think the first weekend of the year, 91, the Bank of New England was failing. And they were talking about what to do with the uninsured depositors. This was the 33rd largest bank in the country at the time. It was going to be the third largest bank failure in the country at the time. And then, I want to say $19 billion in deposits, only 10% uninsured. So really the inverse, it was more than 90% of those deposits, the Silicon Valley bank were not insured.
So what did they do? Powell's boss was a Harvard academic, his name was Bob Glover. And he kind of got up on his soapbox and he said, this is moral hazard. If we step in and bail out these uninsured depositors, then there won't be any risk, no plan risk taking by bank management or the wealthy people or customers that put their money in the bank. They should know what that bank is up to.
And the Fed, then there was a Fed governor, the name John Lawyer, and he said, okay, well, if you do that, here's what we think is going to happen. Every money sent, there will be a run on every bank in the country, as they're uninsured depositors try to get their money out on Monday morning. They will come to us, and then we will be dealing with that problem. So you're the government, you can do whatever you want, but that's what we think is going to happen.
And Powell later explained, you know, we chose the backstop of the depositors without dissent. So people, you know, are surprised this happened, but it's not surprising really if you look at the history of this, this is how policy makers have responded on this topic.
Yeah, and I think the comment, I think the president made the same comment. They've kind of like the equity holders, the bond holders, those guys are taking risk and they deserve to be wiped out. But I do think there's at least in the common man's perspective, a pretty big difference between the depositors who had their money in a checking account and the person who had equity or bond.
And I don't know what you're taking, but my sense is that like, small businesses were supposed to be looking at the financials of a bank to understand if they had their money at a safe bank that was making responsible lending or not, that that was supposed to be a backstop.
And at the other point, you know, the buy side analysts, the sales and all, and the equity markets were telling me these were good banks, you know, both of them having been through their audits relatively recently and coming out with clean bills of health from auditors, like it seems to me a bit unrealistic to think that the depositor is the one who's supposed to impose some sort of financial discipline by being unrelenting deposit with banks, making risky moves with money.
That's the idea that that's a backstop. That seems a bit misguided to me. It does though raise questions about, all right, well, if every time this happens, then the government's going to step in and, you know, ensure the uninsured depositors, what are we doing with deposit insurance going forward? Should that be priced differently?
I think the other thing that we saw, you know, this week again, it's March 16th or so. But what we saw at the beginning of the week was it didn't actually provide maybe the measure of confidence that you might have hoped that these actions, obviously we don't know the counterfactual.
A lot of people think it would have been a lot worse if the government hadn't done what they did. But I think a couple of people I've talked to have said what spooked folks about this is one, Silicon Valley bank, you know, the beginning of March, even though they had had some people knew generally what the problems were there. They had some interest rate risk that was causing problems for them.
They had bought a lot of lower yielding, long duration mortgages and treasury securities when they had all these deposits coming in in 2020 and 2021. You think of the kind of the pandemic tech boom or bubble that we had. And so this bank benefited from that. They put that money to work. They didn't manage the interest rate risk, perhaps as prudently as other banks have. And that caught up to them.
But the concern was that was seen as a fairly strong, healthy franchise. I talked to somebody who said, you know, two weeks ago, if you had said you want to own this franchise, they would have said, of course I do. Then people see how quickly the money can leave the bank.
Now it's March 16th. No one has bought the bank. I think the FDIC is doing a second auction for the assets on Friday the 17th. But then people begin to say, well, wait a minute. This thing that I thought had great value, the value's gone. The depositors fled. That leads to questions now around other similarly situated mid-size regional banks. And that's a concern because if the deposits are seen, deposits are usually seen as sticky. And if they're now seen as flighty, at least for these regional players, then you have a unstable equilibrium potentially, especially as deposit rates have stayed fairly low.
And the Fed has raised interest rates a lot. And so there's a gap you can close there by raising deposit rates. But that could create a negative funding spread for banks or certainly, you know, lower margins. And so I think those are the concerns that haven't been fully addressed or resolved yet.
Yeah. And the other thing is when I talk to banks that I definitely hear is the stickiness of deposits and the question of if that, the historical stickiness can be maintained in the future. Particularly, I mean, you know, the banks have this idea of beta, like how much they have to raise interest rates on deposits and keep deposits as interest rates in the markets rise.
You really have to match that. And the answer has typically been not that much. But we've also, for quite a period of time, haven't had interest rates go so far so quickly that people are going, wait a minute, I can go get three and a half points on a checking account at one of these new FinTechy banks. Like, that's a pretty big delta from the 0.5 or whatever I might be getting.
And so I do think there's more concern that those deposits are becoming less sticky, both because there's a big beta, a big delta in terms of yield available from a traditional, you know, most banks today and the most aggressive banks on the forefront. And to your point, just how rapidly and easy it is for people to move money. I mean, that $42 billion in a day was just, I think, terrifying people that it couldn't just, I mean, it's just a click on the bank. Click on the cell phone away from moving for A to B.
And I think that's a new reality that people are not quite sure what to deal with, what to do about and how to think about how much stickiness of deposits really has been more less permanently shed, particularly if there's a big, big gap in return rates.
Yeah, it's, I mean, people have called it the first, you know, bank run of the digital age or the 21st century, right? This kind of social media. And, you know, it's a cliche to say perfect storm, but you did kind of have a perfect storm here.
And I think that's a very, you know, these startups that need a stable source of funding, they're on tech, they're talking to each other, they're all being financed by some of the same, you know, they're portfolio companies of the same venture capital firms. So once word went out, get your money out of this bank, you know, there wasn't a whole lot to do at that point.
It really, and it took, I think it took the regulators just by surprise because we're not used to seeing deposits flee that quickly. I'm sure they thought they had more time to try to do what normally happens, which is, well, if this bank isn't going to make it, we're going to find a buyer, we'll go in, take it over on the weekend, announce it after, you know, close the business Friday, but here you had the state regulator in California going in at 8.50 in the morning. And I think that also spooked people that, gee, that this could just happen that fast.
Yeah. Yeah, I think there's probably, if you looked at the depositor to Twitter user ratio at Silicon Valley Bay, quite a bit higher than most institutions, and that kind of like the meme stocks that kind of went crazy on Reddit, I mean, it was, it was an environment where those customers were highly concentrated in a small number of information channels, which could cause, you know, at least within that depositor based on high degree of contagion really rapidly, which is probably a bit unique to some of these, you know, to Silicon Valley bank and others, but in the general concept of how much more quickly this thing can spread in the age of social media is probably a very real phenomenon for every institution.
Yeah, definitely. And, you know, I think it's something where people are only going to now have to figure out how to deal with it. I mean, I saw something from a communications, a PR shop this week, sort of tying their clients like, you got to get on top of this when it happens now, you got to have a plan and tell people what it is you're actually doing so that they, if they're feeling sick, you can make them feel well.
Yeah, yeah. I do think the other piece of that, if you think of this as being a Silicon Valley bank's experience, particularly being kind of a combination of some mismanaged interest rate and duration risk, along with the kind of very rapid bank run, the communications seems to have been one of the places where people wanted to not do the best job of kind of calming their customers and their crisis communications PR firms, I think, are using this as an example of, did not really effectively manage the communications and the risk through that as they could have is probably a good, a good note for others.
Yeah, it was, I mean, but what the catalyst for all this was on Wednesday night, they announced they were going to raise capital, I think, to $2.25 billion. They were going to have to sell. They were going to have to take losses on some of these hold from maturity securities. And so they were going to record a loss and that just made people ask questions. And so you want to try to answer those questions before people can say, well, wait a minute, what else might we not know? What's going on here? Right.
So I'd like to shift a little bit from the story to, you know, we were actually talking about the Fed and I think a lot of people are debating what will the Fed do now. Are they going to stop interest rate rises or like, you know, how are they going to respond?
And the thing you and I talked about that I think is fascinating is getting beyond this kind of simplistic view of the Fed as kind of things happen in the world. And then just the Fed responds as if it's a monolithic institution that just isn't input output kind of, you know, we just keep raising rates until inflation hits the nerve.
Remember, we want, and then we decrease rates until we're even, but it's really, it's really ultimately run by individuals, and particularly Chairman Powell. And so, tell me a little bit about how you think his perspective, like where's he coming from when he thinks about, I mean, obviously, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say that it was an unusual world pre this particular incident in terms of the interest rate rises we'd seen in the economy we've been experiencing.
Where do you think he's coming from and the motivations that are driving him? And then I guess after that we'll talk about what you think we might see from the Fed moving forward.
So Powell just to give some background, he's spent his career mostly in the private sector as I said before. He worked in the Bush administration, the first Bush administration in the early 90s. And then private sector, private equity, you know, came back to, he's from Washington. So he was living in Washington, not really working in 2011 and worked on the debt limit problem.
He really helped the Geithner, Tim Greithner, the Treasury Secretary, convince Republicans, here was a Republican private equity guy saying, you guys got to raise a debt limit, even though you don't want to because you'll just really screw everything up if you don't. And so they sort of thanked him for it and they put him on the Fed board. They were also having trouble getting Republicans to agree to one of their nominees for the Fed.
So he's on the Fed for five years under Bernanke and Yellen and he sort of became a centrist. Republicans were quite unhappy with the policies that been Bernanke and Janet Yellen and Powell supported them. Donald Trump becomes president. And he sort of likes Janet Yellen's policies, even though he wants to have his own person in the job. So Powell becomes the Fed chair.
And Powell had taken sort of in that same tradition of Bernanke and Yellen of you that, you know, the economy needed more support after the COVID shock. The Fed went all in. And the concern before the COVID shock had been that actually growth is too weak across the world. And the inflation and interest rates are going to be low, that's going to leave central banks with less room to stimulate.
Then of course you get hit with this inflation in 2021. And now, you know, I think Powell is focused on making sure that he isn't remembered as the central banker who undoes 40 years of relatively successful inflation control or what was seen as inflation control by the central bank, by the Fed, you know, Volker, Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen.
And obviously there were other forces at play that helped inflation to stay low as it came down. But I think that's the concern now is you can't, you know, if you're the Fed and your job is to maintain price stability and maximum employment, but the Fed has already sort of said, you can't have great employment if you don't have price stability, if you don't have real wages going up, well, good as a job. So, that's, you know, that's, I think where he's coming from, where he's been coming from as he raises rates quite aggressively is there is no reason for this place to exist if we fail on inflation.
Now one thing he has that Paul Volker didn't have for better or worse is the Fed has said they've set this new American inflation target of 2%. Volker didn't have to worry about that. New inflation was too high, he knew he needed to get a lower in 1982 as inflation came down from, you know, double digits down to four or five percent. He said, okay, I think I've done enough and he backed off. But the Fed now, and we can talk about this if you want, he has made 2% sort of the, the what they need to have. They've set that as their target. And so there's a, you know, the credibility is at stake for the institution, but also for Powell, and I think that is important in thinking about how this institution is approaching what they're dealing with here.
So let's dive into a little bit. Where did the 2% come from? What's the nature of the target for 2% that the rationale for a specific, specific target on that?
So 2% wasn't something that, you know, economists did finely tuned empirical analysis to get to arrive at. It actually came from New Zealand. New Zealand had, like many countries, a bad inflation problem in the 1980s. And so in 1990, they said, all right, we're going to set a target of 0 to 2 percent. And actually we could fire you, central bank governor if you don't hit the target.
The idea though was, if you tell people what it is you're trying to do, you know, monetary policy, interest rate policy operates through the financial sector. And so before the 1990s, the Fed didn't tell anybody what they were doing with interest rates. So they were just trying to make a big mystery. And you just kind of figured it out from what was happening in the overnight borrowing market.
But there began to be this, you know, revolution, a glass nost in, in, in monetary policy where if you actually tell people what it is you're trying to do and how you will react to incoming data, the Fed's reaction function. If you tell people what your reaction function is, then as the economy unfolds, people in the markets, they're guessing, but they're really educated. They're really, well, better educated guesses about how you're going to respond.
And so interest rates begin to move as people begin to understand, well, actually, here's how the Fed's going to reaction this because we know the Fed is seeking, in this case, 2 percent inflation. So the Fed also up until that point in 1996, inflation hadn't, you know, inflation had been too high. And so they always knew the direction of travel was we want to bring inflation down.
But by, by the early 2000s and you, you begin to worry maybe about, you know, interest rates went to 1 percent in 2003. There were concerns that, that maybe the problem could be too low as opposed to too high on inflation. Japan was dealing with deflation and it was a very difficult problem for that central bank to get out of it. It has been up until very recently.
So Bernanke, Ben Bernanke goes and says, we should set an inflation target and they had sort of already informally been conducting policy with the eye of, you know, one, maybe it was one and a half, maybe it was 2 percent. But finally, the financial crisis hits in 2008 and they say, okay, this is, you know, this is it. We could have deflation here. Let's set a target. Let's announce what it's going to be.
And there's a great quote from Bernanke before he became chair, he was a governor of the Fed and in 2003 at an FOMC meeting. He said to his colleagues, you know, ambiguity has its uses in games like poker, but monetary policy is a cooperative endeavor. And so if we tell people what it is that we're trying to do, we actually improve our odds of achieving it.
And so that's really where this 2 percent inflation targeting came from and it's something that's become a global standard really. Most central banks around the world have inflation targets with maybe some, you know, differences, but generally 2 percent has sort of become the standard.
The goal thing, what do you think happens if impacts like, like what we saw this weekend, like, are in conflict with 2 percent because inflation is obviously not there yet. And yet there's some sense that maybe they will stop raising rates for a little while based on the reaction to the failures of the banks, the concerns about contagion.
How do you think they weigh different factors in the economy against that inflation target? Is that becomes, once you've got to explicit target and you're not there, you kind of ties your hands and yet at the same time there are other things that you might want to take into consideration that might change your point of view. I'm curious how you think the Fed is trying to palen up weighing their things.
So before the banking issues, the Fed had been able to say, well, this is pretty easy. Inflations, we have two mandates and kind of a silent third mandate. The two mandates are inflation, employment, maximum employment. The silent third mandate, I think, is financial stability. But financial stability was fine and employment was 3.6 percent unemployment in February. What's not to like about that?
So they were saying, well, we can just go all in on fighting inflation. Now, if unemployment rises or if you have financial instability, now you have to actually say, what are the trade-offs? How do we manage these trade-offs?
One way they can manage it and you hear some people talking about this is, well, we never said we have to get to 2 percent tomorrow, right? You can get to 2 percent over time. So right now, a lot of their forecasts and projections are consistent with getting there by 2025.
So they're giving themselves two or three years to get to 2 percent. You don't need to get 10 percent of the workforce unemployed tomorrow to try to get 2 percent by December. This is referred to sometimes as optimal control, where you're trying, you want to balance these two things or these three things.
The banking problems, though, I think are a wild card, certainly for the Fed right now, if they can deal with these with other tools, like the things that they came out with on Sunday, that would be their first choice. It's not to have to use monetary policy to deal with the right tool for the right job.
So if monetary policy is the tool you're using to deal with macroeconomic management and inflation, then you come up with other tools. Sometimes they're called macro-prudential regulatory tools. You can intervene in the markets, but continue to focus interest rates on bringing inflation down. But if the banking crisis gets really bad, then you're going to have a much tougher conversations I think and decisions around that.
And I would just point to 2008, the day after Lehman went down, there was a Fed meeting and the transcript is public. So anybody can go look up what they were talking about at the FOMC meeting on September 16, 2008. And it makes for fascinating reading because there was an inflation problem actually that summer, oil prices went to 140 a barrel. CPI, the consumer price index went above 5%. Now core, which is what the Fed is more focused on, wasn't so high.
But they were worried about inflation. And you read what people were saying that day. And this isn't a gotcha exercise. There were a lot of people around the table who were worried about inflation as they were about financial sector instability. And in hindsight, you say, oh my gosh, how could you inflation? Wasn't going to be a problem anymore. And we had the financial crisis.
But at that point in time, so I've been wondering for months, wow, what happens if we get into a situation like that? And I'm not saying we're in a situation like that. But if we were in a place where you're worried about inflation, you feel like your hands are taught, there's a financial stability issue, but you feel like your hands are tied because you really got to focus on inflation. You know, it creates much more difficult decisions. Yeah.
And I do think the concept of financial instability at large scale feels more real in recent, I think, the idea that that is a thing that can happen, I think, after 2008 probably doesn't feel as abstract to policymakers as it does, is it might have at that time in some ways, you could maybe a little recency bias in having seen some of those.
All right, last topic, Eric, I know we're running up on the time I told you we'd take, but you mentioned the kind of data and responsiveness of the Fed. And I wanted to ask what you see in terms of obviously the kinds of data that Fed uses.
I know there's a lot of survey data that goes into this and at least in my world and a lot of consumer spaces, the validity and kind of usefulness of survey data is coming into question. Is that becomes less people are less responsive to various ways that we've taken surveys, we're trying to find new ways? Are there interesting trends you see in the kinds of types of data that are available to policymakers at the Fed and other places and shifts maybe in how they think about those data sources as they try and respond to pretty rapidly changing conditions, me and even right now like waiting for a survey or response feels out of date compared to how quickly you might have to make choices in some of these situations.
So I'm curious if you see any trends on the data side of how they look at what they look at. I think big data or these new data sources do offer opportunities. I think one of the drawbacks is maybe that there isn't a long time history with some of them.
So the great thing about the payroll report is it goes back to 1948. There have been changes over time but you do have a long time series on it where you've seen some of these newer data sources being really helpful. I think during the pandemic, the open table and some of the small business payment processors Wompley, there was a home base which was way to track kind of small business payroll.
Those real time sources when something really crazy was happening, we were shutting down the economy or people were staying home out of their own choice because they were afraid of getting sick. So you're trying to figure out what's happening out there. What's mobility like? What's foot traffic like? You could use some of these data sources to try to figure out if we were actually getting out of the worst of it.
The Fed did use those inside of some of those, just in their kind of analysis of the U.S. economy. And so it will be interesting to see if more of those data sources, the Fed gets some I think credit card data real time credit card data. If you have companies that have fairly good market share then and the market share is stable, you're not having to worry about mixed shifts polluting the data, there is more data that might be you can bring the bearer to try to figure out where those turning points are in the economy.
Yeah, well certainly I'll add that to my list of interesting things to watch. Nick, I appreciate you taking the time today. I know it's a very timely conversation. I guess we'll all be watching what actually happens over the next couple of weeks because I said this is a pretty fast moving environment and I'll be curious to see how things play out compared to some of the things we talked about today. So I appreciate you coming and sharing your perspective.
Upstart partners with banks and credit unions to help grow their consumer loan portfolios and deliver a modern all digital lending experience. As the average consumer becomes more digitally savvy, it only makes sense that their bank does too. Upstart's AI lending platform uses sophisticated machine learning models to more accurately identify risk and approve more applicants than traditional credit models with fraud rates near zero.
Upstart's all digital experience reduces manual processing for banks and offers a simple and convenient experience for consumers. Whether you're looking to grow and enhance your existing personal and auto lending programs or you're just getting started, upstart can help. Upstart offers an into end solution that can help you find more credit worthy borrowers within your risk profile with all digital underwriting, onboarding, loan closing and servicing.
It's all possible with upstart in your corner. Learn more about finding new borrowers, enhancing your credit decision process and growing your business by visiting upstart.com slash four dash banks. That's upstart.com slash four dash banks. Keep them listening to leaders in lending from Upstart.
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