Michael Roberts

The last 20% now is starting to seep into end buyer, the customer.

I think most are saying we can't continue to absorb that much additional cost as the importer or the distributor.

Therefore, it will start shifting more and more to the end buyer, the client.

or the customer.

So there's been, I think, a strong effort, however, to try to absorb as much as possible.

So I talked to a retailer, a high-fashion retailer, saying me and the distributor or the producer out of Asia and me as the distributor are absorbing as much as we possibly can.

We understand we could do that, but it will come to an end soon.

Not yet.

However, there is a lot of cost pressures.

I think there's a delay in a lot of investments.

I mean, that's the flip side of that because I do think people want predictability.

The companies need to understand where they're going to put down a lot of capital, that that capital is going to produce good returns because more predictability.

I've seen slowing of hiring but not real firing today.

And so that's kind of, again, the flip side of that coin.

But really, it's the capital and the investments that you're starting to see slow down quite a lot.

Yeah, look, I do think this is not the first instance of what is inventory financing fraud, which is essentially selling or using the same bit of inventory to finance multiple times.

We've seen that in Europe a couple times as well in the last, say, nine months.

So I am more concerned.

And it's something that we're very focused on.

So, in fact, we're using technology we developed in our trade business and using it throughout all of our lending platforms now to try to go through and be very specific that everything we finance is good collateral.