Salim Ramji

Well, first of all, it's great to be here, and so thank you all for having me.

Yeah, it was a very unoriginal act from Vanguard because it's the, by our count, it was the 2,200th time in which we've announced fee cuts since our founding.

And because of our client ownership structure, Katie, as you know, we don't have any outside stockholders or any internal owners.

And so whenever we generate a surplus, like we did last year, we're able to do a couple of things.

First, we're able to invest back into important technologies and important things for the long-term health of the company.

And I could talk a little bit more about how we did that.

As well as, we're able to give clients back a better deal through reduced fees.

And that's exactly what we announced this morning.

But last year's extraordinary growth in the markets allowed us to do both.

Well, there are a couple of things in there, Eric.

First of all, you know, Bogle's cost matter hypothesis really put into the central kind of focus for us that it's costs that matter.

We run active funds, we run index funds, and Bogle launched more active funds during his tenure than all of his successors combined.

But what we really see opportunity in

is to be able to help investors keep more of what they earn.

So we certainly see opportunities of that in index, and you saw that in a large portion of the cost reductions we announced today, but also last year.

But if I can just underscore, costs matter in active management as well.

And so if you just take an example of our fixed income or our active fixed income, we charge 11 basis points for our active fixed income.

88% of our active fixed income outperforms its peers over a 10-year period.

And that's not a coincidence.

What it means is that because we have a lower fee hurdle to overcome, it allows our investors to be much more disciplined about the investments that they're making, the risks that they're taking, whether it's around credit, whether it's around rates.