Lloyd Blankfein

They were allowed to make investment returns, they just weren't allowed to collect interest, but had the stability and predictability of an interest.

And what they were doing, and we can go into details or not, I don't want to be complicated here, cash and carriers, what people were doing, arbitrages,

between a spot market and a commodity and the forward market that effectively, if you buy, if you are, if you are selling somebody

You know, buying the cash product and selling somebody a forward, in effect, you're lending that person money because you're giving him the risk of the investment, but he doesn't have to put out that much cash.

You're the one who's hedging it by buying the commodity and giving him a forward in it.

Yep.

And that has an embedded interest rate to it, but it looks a lot like an investment return.

And so in chatting with them, but the markets weren't big enough to do the scale they wanted to do.

And that was a few years earlier was when they came out with the S&P 500 financial commodities in effect.

And those were big.

And so in talking to them, they said, well, holy, I'm at Goldman Sachs, biggest equity trader, blah, blah, blah.

What if we did this in the equity market in Manhattan?

We went out and they bought 500 commodities.

of the S&P 500 and, you know, put out the money in the market and hedged it by selling it in the forward market, would that give them, what was the embedded rate of return?

And it was very high because they were the other side of speculators who didn't have the capital.

I know this is a little bit complicated, but the short story was, I had the idea, I went to the then, like, number two guy in the firm, Bob Rubin, led by the Treasury Secretary, who I never spoke to.

He was a Goldman...

of the whole firm.

And I was in the tucked away in the, which was in a separate building at the time.

We never moved.