Ed

kind of intellectual thread that runs back to, I don't know, the 18th century, maybe even the 17th century, that says, if people just stuck to business...

If we all just worried about our material well-being and our economic interests, everything would get better, right?

And people have been talking that way since Montesquieu.

And you saw it, for example, in the view that we had 20 years ago that no two countries that had a McDonald's would go to war.

Or that Russia, once the wall fell and communism ended and became a capitalist country, of course they're going to be our ally and they're going to join Europe and whatever.

And so that kind of general school of thought that says economics will save us

is really deeply ingrained in a lot of people.

It's too bad that it's not true.

It's just not, right?

And we have to be reminded of it every quarter of a century or so.

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.