Ed

So there's more to life.

A couple of stars aligned here in a really nice way.

The first and most obvious one is that banks do as well as the economy that they're sitting in.

And the American economy was pretty good, and that's where you have to start anytime you want to talk about banks.

When the economy is strong, people borrow money, people pay back the money they borrowed from you before, all of that stuff.

they deposit, they make deposits in your institution, et cetera.

So that's good.

Then you already hit the second important point, which is with the election of Donald Trump, the regulatory overhang lightened significantly.

And, you know, the most important for the big banks aspect of this is there were all these rules that hadn't arrived yet that they were kind of

coming down the pike that we're going to increase the capital requirements of the big banks even more than they already have been increased.

They were, of course, massively increased and hardened after the financial crisis.

This is to say how many dollars of actual equity capital you have to have for every dollar of loans or assets or whatever you have out there.

So we were worried that what they call Basel III endgame was going to mean

You know, JP Morgan has to hold two more dollars in addition to the 11 or $13 they already hold for every hundred dollars of assets.

Looks less like that's going to happen.

Uh, acquisition, you know, mergers are getting easier.

They're getting executed faster.

All this good stuff.

So regulatory, right?

Good.