Subprime Chaos: The Auto Bubble’s Bursting And The Data Is Worse Than 2008

Authored by Adem Tumerkan via Palisade Research,

Last week, used car prices had their biggest drop since 2009 – directly after the financial market meltdown of 2008.

Right now, the auto market is showing signs of incredible worry.

Delinquent subprime auto-loans are higher than they were in the last recession.

Look for yourself…

What’s interesting – and worrisome – is that consumers are defaulting on subprime auto loans when the economy is reportedly doing ‘very well’.

Like I wrote last week – there are cracks under the economy’s foundation. And it’s like a bucket of cold water in the face of the mainstream financial media that’s pushing the ‘growth’ story.

We must ask ourselves – “if things are going so well, why are subprime loan delinquencies at a 22-year high?”

I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic. This was the same situation that led up to the 2008 housing crisis. . .

First, there was massive growth in mortgage-backed securities and mortgage debt. Then, the Federal Reserve – led by Alan Greenspan – began aggressively raising rates after years of low rates. Soon after, subprime loans started blowing up – which trickled into the prime loans. And eventually, everything was in chaos.

Using the often-ignored Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) – coined by the little-known but brilliant economist Ludwig Von Mises – I am blaming the Fed for all this.

Thanks to the Fed, a near decade of zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP) and three rounds of Quantitative Easing (which totaled over $3.8 trillion in printed money) – the consumers became hooked on cheap auto loans. . .

Their policies made the entire system fragile by getting consumers addicted to cheap debt through their easy money.

They then began tightening credit – crippling the borrowers.

Think of it this way – imagine you’re addicted to alcohol. And your bartender keeps giving you cheap drinks each night for months. Eventually, from drinking way more than you should’ve been able to afford, you now have a very high tolerance.

But suddenly – the bartender becomes strict and starts giving you less booze. He tells you, “sorry but no more free alcohol for you.” Problem is, you wouldn’t have drank so much if you had to pay full price for it.

Now you’re left with awful withdrawals – scrounging together all the extra money you can just to pay for a drink. But the only way you can really afford to feel better is if he starts giving out free drinks again or you painfully detox.

Just look at the collapse in auto-loan growth since 2015 – when the Fed began tightening with their end of QE and talk of rate hikes…

Clearly the higher rates had an impact on new auto loans.

But a bigger – and more pressing – problem is that the Fed’s short-term interest rate hikes are making these current subprime auto loans unserviceable. The borrowers are having a harder time paying more interest for an asset that depreciates 15% the moment they take it off the lot.

Clearly, affordability is becoming a problem. . .

As I learned from Ludwig Von Mises and the other brilliant Austrian economists – the Fed created a bubble in auto-loans by keeping rates low and printing trillions. And now they’re going to blow the whole thing up with their rate hikes.

Just like taking the free drinks away. . .

I expect delinquent subprime loans to keep hitting new highs. And I expect the ‘growth’ story the pundits keep pushing down our throats will fade.

Because even if the auto-loan industry and general economy hasn’t rolled over yet, each new Fed rate hike pushes us one step closer to the edge.

0.25% at a time. . .

So, with our Macro-Fragility Index (MFI) alarmingly high in the auto sector – I’m going to spend time looking for opportunities here.

History shows us that when things start their descent into collapse – the subprime market is the first to get hit.

Food for thought. . .

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WTI/RBOB Bounce After Crude Draw Despite New Record Production

WTI/RBOB prices traded lower since last night’s API-reported surprise crude draw but a 1.404mm draw (and bid gasoline draw) reported by DOE prompted a buying knee-jerk in prices. Production continued to rise to a new record high.

Ahead of the data, Bloomberg explained that the number to watch today will be gasoline exports, which can typically drift lower this time of year as more product goes to domestic customers in advance of the summer driving season. If growing U.S. production and high refinery runs churning out gasoline are met with clues that domestic demand isn’t matching up to expectations, the crude price that has a lot of geopolitics baked in may falter still.

API

  • Crude +4.845mm (-1.75mm exp)

  • Cushing +62k (+550k exp)

  • Gasoline -3.369mm

  • Distillates -768k

DOE

  • Crude -1.404mm (-2.00mm exp.. BBG users +1.13mm exp)

  • Cushing +53k (+550k exp)

  • Gasoline -3.79mm

  • Distillates -92k

DOE reports a draw – smaller than expected, but dramatically different from API’s surprise build. Gasoline stocks continued to slide but distillates draw seems to have stalled…

U.S. Fuel demand fell 1.12% in past four weeks, but gasoline exports jumped last week…

Crude production continues to surge – up 20k b/d to a new record high last week – but there have been signs out of the Permian basin that pipelines are full and rail shipments aren’t making up the difference in getting barrels out of West Texas to markets.

Overnight gains from the kneejerk lower after API faded this morning ahead of DOE but bounced on the surprise crude draw…

 

However, as Bloomberg notes, despite oil’s surge to near $80 a barrel, some corners of the market that reflect the trading of actual barrels are weakening fast.

The nearest Brent time-spread weakened its backwardation to as little as 6 cents on Wednesday, compared with about 60 cents a month ago. That’s in part because for the coming months cheaper U.S. crude is set to flood across the Atlantic, while demand for Brent grades from traditional buyers in Asia has been muted, according to Citigroup Inc. analyst Chris Main.

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Meet Tesla’s New Bondholder: Billionaire George Soros

Amid Elon Musk’s darkest hour in late March – as his stocks and bonds tumbled in price – it seems there was at least one other billionaire willing to buy the ‘blood on the street’.

According to the latest 13Fs, George Soros’ investment firm took a $35 million stake in Tesla’s convertible bonds during the first three months of the year

One glimpse at the volume in TSLA converts suggests Soros Fund Management piled in as the price plunged at the end of March…

As a reminder, convertibles are hybrid securities, either bonds or preferred stock, that can be exchanged for a predetermined number of common shares. That effectively lets an investor participate in stock-price changes, but with the yield and greater security of a fixed-income instrument.

The March 2019 Converts bounced handsomely off those lows – tracking the stock’s divergent bounce – but in recent days has fallen back towards the lows, catching down to the straight bonds record low price.

As Reuters reports, this is not Soros’ first dealing with Musk…

In 2016, SolarCity Corp, a debt-laden solar panel firm backed by Musk and now owned by Tesla raised $305 million by selling future cash flows for a portfolio of solar projects to a fund advised by Soros Fund Management LLC.

Soros also previously held some Tesla stock, but he sold off his stake last year.

Of course, as with all 13Fs – this disclosure is now 45 days old and may not reflect current

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Rand Paul’s Plan to Balance the Budget by 2023 Will Get a Senate Vote This Week

The Senate will vote this week—likely Thursday—on Rand Paul’s budget plan, which would balance the federal budget by 2023 by cutting $400 billion next year and capping future spending increases.

Passing the Kentucky Republican’s so-called “Penny Plan” would be a dramatic reversal for Congress, which earlier this year approved enormous spending hikes that busted Obama-era spending caps and threaten to put the country on pace for a $1 trillion annual deficits. The bill is not expected to pass, but Paul tells Politico that it will be a “litmus test for Republicans who claim to be conservative, but are only too happy to grow the federal government and increase our debt.”

Relative to current baseline projections, Paul’s proposal calls for a $404 billion spending cut in fiscal year 2019, which begins on October 1. After that, Congress would be required to cap spending increases at 1 percent annually. Over the next 10 years, Paul’s plan would spend about $13.3 trillion less than the current Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections—though federal spending would still increase by more than 14 percent over the decade.

Paul’s plan would balance the budget by 2023, as long as revenue meets current CBO projections. By 2028, the country could be running a $700 billion surplus instead of facing the $1.5 trillion deficit currently projected by the CBO:

Paul’s budget would require “some hard decisions now, and then a squeeze to force prioritization in future years,” Joseph Bishop-Henchman, vice president of the Tax Foundation, tells Reason.

Is Congress capable of such fiscal restraint? Probably not. But some states have similar spending caps and mostly stick to them. New York, for example, has a 2 percent spending cap. Social Security would be off-limits for budget cuts, but Paul’s plan is otherwise agnostic about what federal programs would face the ax to meet the new spending limits—and there is no shortage of targets.

Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House’s Office of Budget and Management, reportedly met with some congressional Republicans late last month to discuss the possibility of clawing back some domestic spending in the $1.3 trillion omnibus budget bill that cleared Congress in March. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has dismissed that idea.

Combined with last year’s tax reforms, the spending bill will produce annual deficits of at least $1 trillion for the rest of the Trump presidency, the CBO says. If Congress does not allow individual tax rate reductions to expire as planned in the middle of next decade, the deficit will balloon by another $722 billion. By 2028, the CBO projects the national debt will equal the nation’s overall economic output, with our debt-to-GDP ratio reaching levels “far greater than the debt in any year since just after World War II.”

Absent some surprising congressional move to re-litigate the omnibus bill, an overall plan to scale down spending, like the one Paul is offering this week, is probably the best—though faint—hope for anyone who wants to avoid trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future.

“It would be a sea change in how Washington works,” says Bishop-Henchman. “Cutting $400 billion is inconceivably large to most D.C. folks and improbable for a Congress that just did the opposite and voted a big spending increase.”

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Conservatives In An Uproar After Twitter Deploys Draconian Shadowban Filter

Conservative Twitter users are in an uproar over draconian new “behavioral filters” which will start hiding tweets that “detract from the conversation,” and which CEO Jack Dorsey says are designed to “significantly reduce the ability to game and skew our systems” (less than six months before midterms, we might add).

Twitter will now use thousands of behavioral signals when filtering search, replies, and algorithmic recommendations. If it believes you are trying to game its system, or simply acting like a jerk, it will push your tweets lower down. It’s the biggest update so far in the company’s push to create healthier conversations, an initiative announced by its CEO Jack Dorsey in March.

Among the signals Twitter will use: whether you tweet at large numbers of accounts you don’t follow, how often you’re blocked by people you interact with, whether you created many accounts from a single IP address, and whether your account is closely related to others that have violated its terms of service. –BuzzFeed

“A lot of our past action has been content-based, and we have been shifting more and more toward conduct and behaviors on the system,” Dorsey said in a Monday briefing at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. 

The push is meant to get out ahead of problems that might normally result in an abuse report under the existing system. In testing, Twitter said the changes led to an 8% drop in abuse reports on conversations (the discussions that happen in the replies to a tweet) and a 4% drop in abuse reports in search. These drops, the company believes, indicate that something is working. 

“Directionally, it does point to probably our biggest impact change,” Dorsey said. “This is a step, but we can see this going quite far.”

Dorsey says he will do a periscope soon about the changes. 

Sounds great Jack!

Facebook, meanwhile, is beefing up its reporting tools within the Messenger app. 

An app update for Messenger includes enhanced reporting tools – allowing mobile users to report harassment or someone who isn’t who they say they are (or jerk ex boyfriends). Users can find the new option in the Contact menu for each messenger conversation by tapping on the name of the person inside the chat, scrolling down to the “Something’s Wrong” option, and choosing from a list of offenses to report. 

“Providing more granular reporting options in Messenger makes it faster and easier to report things for our Community Operations team to review,” write Hadi Michel, Messenger product manager. “They review reports in over 50 languages. This means our community will see issues addressed faster so they can continue to have positive experiences on Messenger.”

One can imagine how much fun High Schoolers and your average Tinder users are going to have with this reporting feature every time they get dumped, doubled-crossed or otherwise made upset.

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Senate Releases Transcripts From Don Jr.’s Trump Tower Meetings

In what appears to be yet another ill-advised attempt to revive the Russia hysteria of early 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee has released more than 1,800 pages of interview transcripts with Donald Trump Jr. and others who attended a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that has become a key focus of the Mueller probe. However, instead of damning the Trumps, the transcripts offer more proof that Don Jr.’s account of the meeting – that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya used the opportunity to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, prompting Trump, who had been promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, to end the meeting after 20 minutes – is, in fact, what happened.

Indeed, an excerpt published by the Washington Post notes that the attendees who answered the committee’s request to testify largely corroborated Trump’s story.

The excerpted testimony shows that attendees at the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting largely agreed with Trump Jr.’s long-standing contention that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, did not transmit dirt about Clinton. She has denied she was acting on behalf of the Russian government.

According to the Associated Press, Trump Jr. appeared to evade questions about discussions he’d had with the president – including whether the two men ever discussed the Russia probe. he also said he didn’t think it was wrong to seek “dirt” on his father’s rival, Hillary Clinton, even if the information came from Russian sources.

Trump

Donald Trump Jr.

The Senate testimony also reaffirmed that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had never met in person, despite what certain liberal conspiracy theorists would have you believe, before Trump became president.

Putin had apparently agreed to attend a rehearsal for Trump’s Miss Universe pageant when it was held in Moscow in 2013, but the Russian leader canceled at the last minute.

The testimony also includes new details about Trump’s long interest in building business ties to Russia and a relationship with President Vladi­mir Putin.

An Agalarov employee testified to the committee that the Russian mogul tried to get Trump a meeting with Putin when the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned, was held in Moscow in 2013.

The employee told the committee that Agalarov “secretly requested” the meeting through a Russian government official.

Putin agreed to attend a pageant rehearsal, but canceled at the last minute. Though Trump periodically claimed during the campaign that he knew Putin, there is no evidence the two men met until after Trump took office.

Trump Jr. told the Committee that he was disappointed when Veselnitskaya failed to come through with the dirt she had promised.

The president’s son acknowledged he too was disappointed that the Russian lawyer did not provide more information that could be used in the campaign: “All else being equal, I wouldn’t have wanted to waste 20 minutes hearing about something that I wasn’t supposed to be meeting about,” he told the committee.

Though panel Republicans conferred with their Democratic counterparts on point-by-point issues during the preparation of the transcripts, their release is expected to touch off a new wave of partisan bickering.

The committee interviewed several people who had attended the meeting eventually provided at least some testimony to the committee. UK Publicist Rob Goldstone, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and Russian businessman Ike Kaveladze all testified before the committee. While Don Jr. testified, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort rebuffed the committee’s requests.

Veselnitskaya only agreed to provide written answers from Russia to the panel’s questions. Neither Kushner, now a top White House aide, nor Manafort, who has been charged with a series of financial crimes related to his work before joining the campaign, sat for interviews. But the committee interviewed the five other men who took part in the session, including a Russian American lobbyist who once served in an Soviet counterintelligence unit.

Here are Paul Manafort’s notes from the meeting…

The testimony also purportedly showed emails sent by Goldstone, who initially organized the meeting at the behest of Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star and developer, saying the Trump Tower gathering was a “bad idea.”

Music publicist Rob Goldstone, who arranged the meeting at the request of pop singer Emin Agalarov, said he thought the meeting was a “bad idea.”

“I believed it was a bad idea and that we shouldn’t do it. And I gave the reason for that being that I’m a music publicist. Politics, I knew nothing about,” Goldstone said, adding that neither did Emin Agalarov nor his father, Aras.

Trump Jr. also said he wasn’t aware of his father’s role in drafting a White House statement that said the meeting was primarily focused on reversing Russia’s restrictions on Americans adopting Russian children.

But mostly, the transcripts are a giant nothing burger – which will only reinforce the public’s belief that there’s “no ‘there’ there”.

*  *  *
Full Transcript below…

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Trump Slams Accusations He “Folded” On ZTE As China Trade Talks Begin

Shortly after Chinese Vice Premier and President Xi Jinping’s special envoy, Liu He, arrived in Washington on Tuesday afternoon for ongoing economic and trade consultations, less than two weeks after a similar US delegation visited Beijing but achieved nothing in the ongoing trade talks, president Trump took a hard line stance ahead of today’s negotiations, and following allegations that he had “folded” by urging the commerce department to re-engage China’s telecom giant ZTW, Trump blasted a series of tweets, stating that “nothing has happened with ZTE outside of larger trade talks.”

Here is the full Trump tweet-trio-storm:

The Washington Post and CNN have typically written false stories about our trade negotiations with China. Nothing has happened with ZTE except as it pertains to the larger trade deal. Our country has been losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year with China… We have not seen China’s demands yet, which should be few in that previous U.S. Administrations have done so poorly in negotiating. China has seen our demands. There has been no folding as the media would love people to believe, the meetings haven’t even started yet! The U.S. has very little to give, because it has given so much over the years. China has much to give!

With Chinese talks stalled, and North Korea suddenly threatening to pull out of denuclearization talks, with Nafta discussions similarly making no progress, it may explain why Trump remains on edge ahead of the next two days of talks, especially if he sees the public narrative as shifting against him over the ZTE fiasco.

Meanwhile, the Chinese delegation visiting DC today – like that headed by Steven Mnuchin weeks ago – is substantial: Liu, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chief of the Chinese side of the China-U.S. comprehensive economic dialogue, leads a delegation whose members include Governor of the People’s Bank of China Yi Gang, Vice Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission Ning Jizhe, Deputy Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs Liao Min, Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Luo Wen, Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao, Vice Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Han Jun, as well as Vice Minister of Commerce and Deputy International Trade Representative Wang Shouwen.

Since there is little optimism for a deal breakthrough in the coming days, it is unclear how the negotiations will continue after the Chinese delegation departs.

Meanwhile, the one tweet that everyone is expecting – Trump’s response to North Korea’s threat to cancel the high level summit – is still missing.

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Democratic Socialists and #MAGA Candidates Both See Wins In Tuesday Elections: Reason Roundup

No simple narratives from Tuesday primaries. Voters in Pennsylvania, Idaho, Nebraska, and Oregon held primaries yesterday. “The realities of a complex array of races with their own local dynamics defy the construction of pat narratives,” writes Matthew Yglesias. But while no easy and overarching narratives emerged, there were a few notable results from Tuesday’s votes:

Socialist women win in Pennsylvania. Two candidates running as part of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won challenges against more traditional Democrats for seats on the state legislature. The “pair of first-time candidates…knocked off two incumbent state legislators from a well-established Pittsburgh political family,” notes Yglesias. “Both Dom and Paul Costa, the incumbent losers, were on the conservative side of modern Democratic Party politics but also seemingly well-entrenched.” Taking their place in the general election will be Sarah Innamorato and Summer Lee.

Berniecrat with biker vibe beats out incumbent. John Fetterman, mayor of the small Pennsylvania town of Braddock, won over incumbent lieutenant governor Mike Stack. Fetterman—whom NBC Philadelphia’s Brian X. McCrone describes as “a progressive Democrat who received Bernie Sanders’ endorsement but looks like he just walked out of a biker bar”—will now serve as incumbent Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s running mate in November’s general election, with Republicans Scott Wagner and Jeff Bartos as their opponents.

The office of lieutenant governor “itself is not particularly powerful or significant,” writes Yglesias, “but it does provide a statewide platform from which to run for higher office—either governor or senator—and consequently we are going to end up hearing more about John Fetterman in years to come.”

In any event, his wife seems cool:

Two Senate candidates backed by President Trump won yesterday. The #MAGA-endorsed winners were Pennsylvania’s Lou Barletta and Nebraska’s Deb Fischer. “Barletta, currently a congressman, was heavily favored over state Rep. Jim Christiana to become the Republican challenger for Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, who is seeking a third term in November,” reports the Associated Press. “Fischer, the incumbent, defeated four GOP challengers and will be the strong favorite to win re-election in deep-red Nebraska.”

FREE MINDS

Wikipedia will be out of this world. A nonprofit plans to print all of Wikipedia and shipping it to the moon. The group, Nova Spivak’s Arch Mission Foundation, intends to print all 25 million existing Wikipedia pages on small metal disks. “The project was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which tells the story of a group of academics and artists tasked with preserving humanity’s collective knowledge to mitigate an impending galactic dark age predicted to last for thousands of years,” reports Motherboard.

FREE MARKETS

Budget balancers stand alone. Rand Paul is back with another plan to balance the budget, but as usual it has little chance of gaining enough colleagues’ approval. The bill “would severely curtail federal spending, according to two people familiar with the matter,” and balance the budget within five years, reports Politico. “But its spending cuts in future years are so steep that the plan is highly unlikely to pass. The budget needs 50 votes to move forward, but Republicans control only 51 seats, and several center-right members are unlikely to support such strict spending cuts.”

QUICK HITS

  • Chicago cop William Whitley pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a 14-year-old girl.
  • “Our healthcare systems are designed for the workforce of 1950.”
  • “We Millennials have been accused in think pieces of ruining a litany of good things—including democracy, marriage, beer, and napkins—but I’d like to posit that American foreign policy is notably not among them,” writes Matt Purple at The American Conservative.
  • The ACLU is suing over Iowa’s ban on almost all abortion procedures.

NORTH KOREA WATCH

Bolton threatens North Korea talks. “We shed light on the quality of [National Security Advisor John] Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him,” wrote North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan in a Tuesday statement.

Prior to the scheduled summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump, “unbridled remarks provoking the other side of dialogue are recklessly made in the US and I am totally disappointed as these constitute extremely unjust behaviour,” wrote Kim Kye-gwan. “It is absolutely absurd to dare compare the DPRK, a nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development.”

“If the Trump administration fails to recall the lessons learned from the past when the DPRK-US talks had to undergo twists and setbacks owing to the likes of Bolton,” he continued, “and turns its ear to the advice of quasi-“patriots” who insist on a Libya mode and the like, the prospects of the forthcoming DPRK-US summit and overall DPRK-US relations will be crystal clear.”

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Industrial Production Growth Stabilizes At 7-Year Highs

Industrial Production moved higher in April (+0.7% MoM) to a new record high – marginally above the Nov 2014 peak – but while year-over-year growth remains near 7-year highs, it did stop accelerating in April.

  • Utilities rose 1.9% in April after rising 6.1% in March

  • Mining rose 1.1% in April after rising 0.8% in March

  • Vehicle Production dropped 1.3% in April after rising 2.8% in March

 

Manufacturing Production rose 0.5% in April (as expected) and Capacity Utilization rose to 78.0% – highest since March 2015.

Finally, the question is – will Industrial Production catch up, or Industrial Average catch down?

 

 

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European Council President: “With Friends Like Trump, Who Needs Enemies”

The last few days – since President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal – have been tempestuous at best for US-EU relations.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel slammed President Trump for his decision to pull out. The unofficial leader of Europe believes it “damages trust” in the global order. She is not alone.

The UK and France have also admitted that they regret Trump’s move. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire stated that European powers should not be Washington’s “vassals.”

All of which follows US trade tariff impositions that sparked similar responses, as Eurointelligence notes.

Over the last three days it gradually dawned on the Germans that Donald Trump’s sanctions against Iran are in reality sanctions against Europe, and Germany in particular. The combination of third-party sanctions and changes to US tax laws has led to a situation where a large number of German companies now have an overwhelming interest to shift their business to the US, according to Spiegel Online.

FAZ notes that the helplessness of the German government is becoming increasingly evident, both economically and politically. The paper notes that even Angela Merkel is casting doubt on whether it is possible to maintain the Iran nuclear agreement after Trump’s decision.

And Der Spiegel made its feelings clear…

But European Council President and former Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, has set the bar high for Trump rebuttals with his latest tweet, blasting that:

” Looking at latest decisions of @realDonaldTrump someone could even think: with friends like that who needs enemies….

But frankly, EU should be grateful. Thanks to him we got rid of all illusions. We realise that if you need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of your arm. “

As Merkel stated last week, maybe it’s time for “Europe to take its destiny into its own hands.”

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