Ed

So there's this natural lift under banks' income, just as the old...

old world stuff rolls off and you replace it with higher yielding new stuff.

And final point, and now listeners who tuned out can tune back in, for the very big banks, when you have very active capital markets as we had last year, that's very good for your investment banking and your trading desk.

Than ever before.

I think that's probably true.

I mean,

There will be more of this replacement of bad assets with good assets.

That will still happen.

I think that, as you say, there's every reason to think, barring a crash or something awful, that the trading and investment banking business will be good.

And I think, as the economy is positioned right now, the economy seems pretty solid to me.

So all the conditions are in place for good performance.

But you have to remember, at the beginning of 2025,

Bank stocks were cheap.

They're not cheap anymore, right?

And so the reason people were excited about owning banks is that the stocks look like bargains.

They don't anymore.

I've been hearing a lot of chatter in the space where people are like, is JP Morgan a good buy at this price?

I mean, you can understand why Citibank went up 60% because it's a troubled bank historically, and it went from being...

mediocre to being slightly less mediocre and those kind of transitions is where you really make money in the stock market not from good to great the big money is from like trouble to slightly less trouble you know but you don't do but you don't do that twice right you know uh and so it's going to be hard in terms of stock market performance it's going to be hard i think for the banks

to repeat what they did last year.