The regulatory debacle behind SVB’s meltdown

Make Me Smart March 21, 2023 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

All right, let’s go ahead. Hey there, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome to make me smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m Kai Ryssdal. Thanks for being here on a Tuesday when we do a single topic, the topic du jour, de semaine and I think the week, maybe the month, and maybe the year. I don’t know. Banking regulation in the United States of America. I know it sounds exciting, but it’s super, super important. Trust us.

Kimberly Adams 

I know. And here, we thought we were gonna be like worried about the election all this year. Anyway. But instead, we are so focused on banking and banking regulations, and banking crises and banking failures and all of the little words you want to attach to banking at the moment. But one of the things we’ve been trying to figure out is the role that regulation played in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and what the rules that we have now and the rules we might have in the future might mean for the future of banking moving forward. So here to make us smart about this is Mehrsa Baradaran, she’s a banking law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the books, “The Color of Money” and “How the Other Half Banks.” Welcome to the show.

Mehrsa Baradaran 

Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Kimberly Adams 

So I guess the obvious question was the collapse of SVB of regulatory failure? What happened?

Mehrsa Baradaran 

I mean, it’s a complicated question with a complicated answer. But yes, and yes. And also, that, you know, banks are, as you said, you don’t want to think about banks, because you want them to work. And when we are thinking about banks, something bad is happening, right? People are running or, you know, there’s some sort of failure. And, you know, it’s not like other industries, where, you know, you’re talking about how much regulation, too much or too little, or the right kind or not. Banks are essentially, they, they are tied in with a lot, a whole massive government infrastructure without which they couldn’t do what they do. So, you know, going even back to deposit insurance or, or to money itself, you know, banks are the transmitters of the money that is produced by us, by the federal government. And so, yes, it is a regulatory failure, the banking crisis, but, you know, then the question is, like, when did that failure begin? How far back do we want to go? I think, with Silicon Valley Bank, it’s very clear that there were risks in this bank, that they were engaging in that regulators had the authority to sort of check and, you know, either increase capital or otherwise limit the risks. And there’s some things that maybe they had sort of legal loopholes, so it is both, you know. There’s some risks that just were missed, due to due to regulatory sort of, you know, they just didn’t didn’t pick it up and they should have, and some where they lobbied or got loopholes from laws meant to protect other banks, and we’re doing things different than other banks were doing.

Kai Ryssdal 

How far back do we want to go? Do we want to go to 2008-2009? Do we want to go back before that? What’s the what’s the, you know, timescale here?

Mehrsa Baradaran 

Yeah, you know, I would go back before that. I would go, big picture, I would go back to around the 80s where you had that deregulatory merger wave. You know, you can go back to 2008-2009 to the Dodd Frank Act and say, “Look, even that was, it wasn’t sufficient.” But even even with the Dodd Frank Act in place, none of this would have happened, you know. You had to have an exception to the Dodd Frank Act in the 2018 Crapo bill to get the SVB bank, you know, to exempt them from the stress testing and those regimes. So, you know, technically yes, Dodd Frank would have prevented this. But going back further, you know, you you started in the 1980s, this merger wave that, you know, the CEO of Bank of America famously said, you know, “you’re either growing or you’re dying.” And you know, you have these massive firms get conglomerated. And then you have these tiny small community banks that have been decimated for the past, you know, 30-40 years. And this only intensifies that. And, you know, the the effect of that is that you have these companies, these startups that need this financing, they need his capital, and there aren’t that size level banks, or there won’t be too many anymore.

Kimberly Adams 

That point you just made, I think is really important is that when you have a startup, and I know we’re thinking in this context, like tech startups, but also if you have a small business, traditionally, you might have gone to a small bank, in your own community that knew your community, or in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, knew your industry very well, to get financing. How is that dynamic changing? And I’m wondering how what’s happening with Silicon Valley Bank puts that kind of model of banking specialization at risk?

Mehrsa Baradaran 

Yeah, so this is I mean, this, my first book is dedicated to this, “How the Other Half Banks” and several of my articles also talked about this. Look, that was not, I mean there wasn’t some, like… the reason we had community banks is because the law made it so. The law made it such that you could only have one bank branch. You couldn’t branch, even within a state. You couldn’t have, you know, one branch here and one branch. There’s very, very strict laws, when the FDIC was passed in the 1930s. And even before that, states had very, very strict banking regulations, because it’s, it’s a subsidize, it’s a charter, that gives many privileges to banks, right? You can print money, basically, that with the government, you can make loans out of nothing. You can create, you know, insofar as you’re doing it right, according to what the what the, you know, the government programs are, you can really, you know, have this, you know, charter to do a lot of things. And so, that system broke down about in the 1980s. But when it existed, it existed because of, you know, legislative and regulatory mandate. And, and it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t everyone, right? You couldn’t, you weren’t having banks in black communities, right. There weren’t no banks in communities that were outside of the structure. But insofar as it worked, it works very well. So this is the George Bailey, you know, the golden era of banking between 1930 and, you know, 1970 or so where you’ve gotten to kind of pumping out mortgages and GI bills, and corporate loans and business loans and your small business and medium business and big business and all sorts of different banks. And you know, that market changed as the banks change. And they’re very much related. The types of banks that we have also determined the types of businesses that get funding. So that’s, that’s also important to note. It’s not, banks don’t just show up. We have the banks that we create through the laws that we make.

Kai Ryssdal 

Let me run an old trope by you and see what you say: banking ought to be boring again.

Mehrsa Baradaran 

Yes, well, boring, you know? Yes. Right. Boring as in you, there… It is not the place where you want to be doing gambling. It’s not the place where you want to be making bets. There are types of banks, you know, you we saw this before 2008, those investment banks weren’t bank banks, they were investment banks, and they were for gambling. And I think the part of the problem is you end up creating these shadow banks. You you end up giving these exemptions to certain types of, you know, borrow short, lend long. That kind of banking. And if it looks like a bank, and it walks like a bank, then it’s a bank, and we call it a bank. And then now, that means we have to put the FDIC insurance in all of that. And that’s what you saw with Silicon Valley Bank, they were doing deposit taking, and they were doing lending, they they made mistakes. Sure, but this was a bank. And a lot of their banking activities, a lot of their deposits were not covered by FDIC insurance. That’s a problem. The whole point of FDIC insurance, it’s not about the insurance, it’s about like the panic, right? It’s about the run. It’s all psychological. When it comes to runs, you can run out of capital, within a you know, overnight. And we saw with Lehman, Bear Stearns, and now with Silicon Valley Bank where capital runs out real quick when people are running to the bank.

Kimberly Adams 

But I mean, this is something we’ve been talking about pretty much for the last week or so, how realistic is it to have FTI see insurance for the entirety of a business’s payroll, you know, like the payroll for your average business can be easily millions of dollars, and that’s definitely going to exceed the insurance. So what are businesses supposed to do? Like divvy up their money 250 grand at a time into 60-70 different banks?

Mehrsa Baradaran 

Yes. In fact, they do. I mean, we do we have business… So first of all, payroll shouldn’t be done as a deposit like that. They should, we should have had… There are tons of banks do this for tons of businesses. So GE, GM, everyone banks. And all of those deposits go into different accounts, and they can they’re all insured. Every single deposit in the country should be insured. That’s, that’s the role of deposit insurance. Because if some aren’t, so imagine, you know, they say, “Okay, you have 250,000, that was the cap.” We increased it during the financial crisis. I don’t know if you remember, but in before 2008, it was 100,000. And so during that run, immediately, the Treasury came out and said, “No, it’s 250” to stop the run. That’s the point. And so when you have, if you have 200, let’s say you have, you know, $280,000 in the bank, and it’s 250, are you going to be like, “Oh, 30,000, no big deal.” You’re still gonna go get your money out, and you’re gonna get all of it out. And then you have a run. So so this is this is what’s happening with the small banks in the country now is, not necessarily like it hasn’t happened, but it because they had to kind of other banks have to coordinate to put money into them. But some of the community banks, those funds were being drained out to the large banks, because that’s where safety is. And that’s just a perpetual problem with bank runs. Bank runs are systemic. They don’t stop at one bank, they ripple outwards. And that’s the real danger. It’s not just because it’s not like a stock, right? I think there was some mistaking equity here with deposits. Banking is very hard to understand in that way and sometimes you hear people like, “oh, well, they were insolvent, their shares were down.” Shares are a whole different thing. You can be, you know, your shares can be in the toilet, but those deposits, that’s customer money. So those have all got to be insured. Because that’s not that’s like, you know, as Brandeis would have said, “That’s other people’s money.” Your shares are your equity money, that’s your capital money. That’s your shareholder money. Who cares, right? Those can get wiped out, you screwed up, you should. But deposit money, that’s my money. That’s, you know, some other, you know, startup’s money. And those, we just put our money in a bank, we trust it. Right, you and I don’t know, you know, don’t know what kind of thing our bank does. But we know that the FDIC has us covered or we should know because it’s true. Now, if that knowledge leaves, then you have system wide panic. That’s the Great Depression. That’s the 1907 panic. That’s every one. I’ts 2008. Right? You you have this migration of banking into other realms that aren’t FDIC insured, and then you get the inevitable run. And this is what banking regulators need to be aware of and have not been. They’ve they’ve been a little bit lackadaisical.

Kai Ryssdal 

So what kinds of regulation do you think, given the current state of Congress, right, where people, leaders in specifically in the Republican Party have already said, “No, I don’t think we need more regulation.” What what fixes do you see? What remedies do you see coming out of SVB and this entire episode? Which granted, we’re not through it yet.

Mehrsa Baradaran 

Well listen, I’m gonna speak personally, here. I was, you know, for time, the nominee for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, you know, for the Biden administration. And we had, I was on the transition team for both, you know, the Treasury teams and the Fed and all the banking teams. And so we had a lot of regulations in place. So this is… the regulators have the authority, you do not need Congress for this, right. So we do not have an OCC appointed controller from the Biden administration. There’s an Acting Administrator, who doesn’t have as much power as someone who would be appointed does. And at FDIC, also, we had the Trump appointee who left and now they had to kind of move move people around, but we did not get a presidentially appointed. We, you know, we have someone there. The the agencies are great, the examiners, they’re all doing their jobs, but we haven’t had a forward looking regulatory agenda. Same with, you know, within Treasury. There, the banking regulators haven’t really, we haven’t really been, like, forward moving. And SVB a lot of the other exemptions, the loopholes, I would say, that came during the Trump administration, and, you know, didn’t get handled, could be dealt with through regulatory authority and the regulator regulators have lots of authority to deal with this. And I think a lot of this actually didn’t even need new rules. It just needed the rules that had to be enforced. The examiners are supposed to go in there and see the risks that they have. That’s their job. And, and they did. They are doing their job but but again, some of this could have been picked up by examiner’s. And and I don’t think it’s any one regulators fault, but it is a mood that has been sort of viss… and you see it, you see it cyclically, you know? We’re like, we get we get, you know, “it’s fine, let the market do its thing.” And then we get these loopholes. And then people forget, the banks aren’t like the market, they’re not the market, right? If a company fails, fine, let them fail. If a bank fails, we can’t let them fail. And then you’re seeing it now. We have to do the bailouts because it’s other people’s money, because a run is a psychological event, because the panic spreads and takes down everything. All of those things are always true. And we forget that they’re true.

Kai Ryssdal 

Do you think we’re through this whole episode by the way?

Mehrsa Baradaran 

You know, like, on Saturday, Sunday, I would have said there’s probably gonna be like a run on the banks on you know, this week. You know, and you’re, you’re seeing you’re seeing some little dips. I if I were to say, you know, a advice to people: just keep your money, calm down, it’s going to be fine. But calm is the thing we need. But to get calm, we need trust. And I think a lot of people don’t trust. And that’s really, really important and should not be underestimated. Because now we’re talking about, do we trust the federal government? Do we trust regulators? Do we trust that the examiners are doing their job? That the banks are following the rules? And that, you know, it’s a very intangible thing, but it’s the thing that banks need to survive. It’s the thing that our entire economy needs, because banks are the engines at the center of it. And I think we, we are at a critical place in terms of trust. I mean, look at how that mask thing went out. Right? You know, masking is the same thing with runs. If we say “Everyone just calm down” they have to trust you. And if they don’t, then you have a panic.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, that’s a note to end on. Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor of banking law at the University of California, Irvine just down the road from us here in Los Angeles. Professor, thanks for your time. We appreciate you. Thank you.

Kimberly Adams 

Thank you.

Mehrsa Baradaran 

Thanks for having me.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s tough. It’s tought right? You got to trust, but all the signs are like, “Oh my God!!!”

Kimberly Adams 

It’s like, “don’t panic, trust us. Really. It’s fine.”

Kai Ryssdal 

Nothing is here. Move along. Oh, my Lord. So look, first of all, we have to say this, you know, for 99.99% of the population in this country, your deposits are safe, right? It just your money is safe. The Feds are there, the Treasury there, they have said they’re going to do. And in fact, Janet Yellen today said we’re going to make some moves to guarantee deposits across the board. So your money is safe.

Kimberly Adams 

Well especially at the smaller banks, if we were to believe some of the early drafts of the speech that I think she was going to be giving. Which is going to be interesting.

Kai Ryssdal 

What do you think about the meltdown at SVB, of Signature, talkl about Credit Suisse if you want to too, although that’s kind of a different thing. Do we need regulations and professor said no. Some people say yes. We’ll see. Let us know our number is 508-827-6278. 508-U-B-SMART. You can email us if you’d like. Makemesmart@marketplace.org. We’re coming right back. All right, news. Kimberly Adams.

Kimberly Adams 

First, I want to start with a story in the Washington Post because I was feeling a little grim yesterday after the IPCC report and the dire state of our planet. But the Washington Post has a regular column, it’s a climate advice column. And the goal is to be kind of not so doom and gloom. It’s got the same vibe as our How We Survive podcast, which is, yes, it’s a bad situation, but what can we do? Right? What can we do differently, to potentially mitigate some of the things contributing to climate change, or at least adapt to what’s coming. And so there’s a story in the Washington Post saying, you know, we should eat lentils every day. Now, granted, some people have dietary restrictions for a variety of reasons. I know it sounds trite. But. Small changes in everyone’s habits, make some difference. Of course, for meaningful difference that’s actually going to help us meet our climate climate change goals, governments have to be involved. It has to be coordinated worldwide. And, you know, that’s the only thing that’s really going to get us there. It’s not the responsibility of an individual person to fix the warming planet. However, that doesn’t… I’m trying to remember how he put it and I doubt this was his original phrasing, but my dad used to tell me: “just because you can’t be the solution doesn’t mean you have to be a part of the problem.” And so in that light, if we change some of our eating habits, especially eating things that, you know, are easier on the planet to grow, that don’t have as many emissions associated with it. Eating more things like lentils instead of meat all the time, you know, it can help. It can help. And just, it’s easy to just be and stay pessimistic about the climate. But in the meantime, while we, you know, fingers crossed, get our leaders to do something. well, not just fingers crossed. But people can take action to encourage their leaders to do something about it. We can also do things in our own home, which I think is worth keeping in mind. Okay, the other thing, I thought this was a very interesting article in Bloomberg called “what’s a Minsky moment? And why the worries about one?” I am not an economist. I didn’t get a degree in economics. I took a couple of economics classes in college, but I never tried to pretend that I’m an economist. So sometimes when we’re reporting, and we come across these sorts of economic concepts, you know, I have to kind of go back to school myself to learn about them. And there’s, you know, a bubbling conversation about you know, whether or not we’re headed into a Minsky moment. And this is a term that refers to a sudden crash of markets and economies that are hooked on debt. And I’m going to read here, from how Bloomberg describes it. “What makes a Minsky moment. The term refers to the end stage of a prolonged period of economic prosperity that has encouraged investors to take on excessive risk to the point where lending exceeds what borrowers can pay off. And that triggers an increase in speculative and Ponzi finance. Then when a destabilizing event as simple as an increase in interest rates occurs, investors can be forced to sell assets to raise money to repay loans, which in turn sends markets into a spiral emitted demand for cash.” Right. And so, this has happened a couple of times in history. In recent history, 1998, after the bursting of asset bubbles in Asia, the global financial crisis in 2007-2008. And sometimes as as we’ve learned recently, the economic models and the economic theories don’t always hold up in our current environment. We’ve certainly seen a lot of that in recent years. But at the same time, I think it’s worth taking some of these terms that are thrown around casually in the world of economics, and just making sure we have a sense of what they mean. So that, you know, maybe we don’t throw them around so casually. And we really consider what we’re saying when we’re talking about this stuff.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, totally fair. Totally fair. Sorry, I’m just looking at Willow. She wants to open the door, and it’s pouring rain and cold here by my shed and I just I want to close that door.

Kimberly Adams 

But she’s golden retriever. They love that.

Kai Ryssdal 

She wants to be out in the rain so bad. And I’m like, sweetie, it’s like 42 degrees and raining and we’re not going for a walk right now. Anyway.

Kimberly Adams 

But she is built for that let her run in the yard  or something.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, I know. And she will wander around the backyard all day, and then come inside and be wet. And you’re like, I love you. But ew. We have, alright, here’s the update. We have compromised. The door’ss cracked open, her nose is stuck outside and the rest of her body is inside. So I’m just gonna deal. Okay. Here is my news item. And it goes a little bit to the banking crisis that we’ve been talking about. It goes a little bit to real estate, which we talked about every now and then. There’s a piece in The Wall Street Journal today that points out that a record amount of commercial mortgages is expiring in 2023. And why is commercial mortgage important? Well, here’s the deal. Commercial real estate is really challenged right now, because, specifically office space because so many people are not in offices. And thus those buildings and that real estate has lost value. So we have assets losing value. We have interest rates going up. We have leases expiring. We have mortgages on those leases held by, a lot of them, regional banks. And that becomes really challenging, and I don’t want to pile on and say “Oh, my God, it’s the banking apocalypse.” But I think we do need to be aware that maybe we’re not entirely through the banking situation that we’re having now, because of other events that are going to happen besides Silicon Valley Bank. It’s we’ll put it on the show page. It’s a good piece. It’s a good, good piece.

Kimberly Adams 

Right, because if they don’t finish paying them off, they’re gonna have to refinance into astronomically higher rates than what they had at the beginning. Wow.

Kai Ryssdal 

Right. And look offices, you know, companies just don’t need as much office space as they used to. And I mean, look no farther than Marketplace, right. And I’ve talked about this many times. We’ve got twenty something thousand square feet, and there’s like four and a half of us in there on on an average day. So, you know, it’s… I’d love to know what the negotiations and talks are like up in St. Paul, shall we say? Anywho. Anywho. Anywho.

Kimberly Adams 

All right. That is it for our news fixes. Let’s go ahead and move on to the mailbag.

Mailbag 

Hi Kai and Kimberly. This is Godfrey from San Francisco. Jessie from Charleston, South Carolina. And I have a follow up question. It has me thinking and feeling a lot of things.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay, last week, we did a deep dive on TikTok. And we asked you all to let us know what you think of the app. And we got this from Nick.

Nick 

Hi, I’m Nick from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I’m on TikTok because it is the only democratic and fair social media platform. Other platforms you already have to have a significant audience to be able to reach people and on TikTok you don’t. I recently had a video that reached over 20 million people and raise awareness for the East Palestine train disaster and I think without Tik Tok no one would have heard about it and it would have been like every other environmental disaster that doesn’t affect anyone outside the town and doesn’t get heard by anyone outside the town.

Kimberly Adams 

That’s really interesting. I, you know, I’ve recently gotten on Tik Tok, and much to the terror of my, you know, privacy settings. And I’ve been so fascinated to come across so many different videos from just regular people, you know. And on Twitter, you know, you have to actively make the decision to follow someone, or that person has to be pushed out by a large group of people. But with TikTok, you will get served a video based on the algorithm of what TikTok thinks you want to watch. And what you know, people you follow might be watching. I’m not really following all that many people. But I mean, it’s, it definitely exposes me to people, individual communities and groups that I wouldn’t have seen. It actually reminds me a little bit of early Twitter, because Twitter was kind of like that at the beginning. And then it kind of became more of a curated platform. I I’m still a bit skeptical about how honest the algorithm is. And you know, we’ve talked about this, you know, in terms of whether the parent company sort of weights, the scale. You know, I was telling you about all the ads for Tiktok here in DC. The other day they had, on the Washington Post, you know, they wrapped the paper in one of those ads, that’s like an extra layer. It was a giant TikTok ad.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh really? That’s so funny.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, it was wrapped around the newspaper. It was like full page, front and back on the back and then a little sliver, like half a page over the front. And I mean, it was like, “Really, we’re doing the best we can. It’s okay.” It’s like full court press for TikTok here in Washington.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m sure they’re paying their lobbyists and their ad agencies and all them a gazillion dollars, but it may well be worth it to get some traction, right. All right. Let’s see one more. I was talking last week about this piece in The Washington Post about corrosion… coastal erosion, sorry, not corrosion, coastal erosion in Rodanthe, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, North Carolina. And we got this

Margaret 

Good morning Kai and Kimberly. This is Margaret from Reston, Virginia but originally from North Carolina. And I wanted to call during my morning walk to say that the story from The Washington Post about Rodanthe is a gentrification story too, in a way that y’all and the Washington Post didn’t really talk about. Did you notice in that article that of all the people they quoted, only the sheriff seemed to live there full time? It was all so and so from New York state, so and so from Golden Colorado whose vacation homes are falling into the sea. So there’s a little bit of that aspect to it, too. And that’s happening all along the Outer Banks and has been for years. And it’s important to remember that too when we’re having these conversations about these places who doesn’t get to be in the story for The Washington Post. Thanks for making us smart. Y’all have a good one

Kimberly Adams 

It’s so important to point. It’s a very good point. And this comes up a lot when when you’re talking about FEMA and flood insurance. You know that a lot of the people who build on the coasts and have these vacation homes tend to be very, very wealthy, and then they’re taking emergency funds to rebuild homes and often have better lawyers and better access to get those funds, than lower income people who actually live there and end up being permanently displaced. And, yeah, that’s a very good point. Thank you for sending that.

Kai Ryssdal 

Super quick on the pronunciation. First of all, it’s Rodanthe, so I appreciate that correction. Also Nancy Jensen on Twitter yesterday. Apologies. It’s King County, Washington talking about the Oxford comma, not kings, my bad. Apologies. Yeah, yeah, King County.

Kimberly Adams 

Happens to the best of us. All right. Before we go, we are going to leave you with this week’s answer to the make me smart question, which is: what is something you thought you knew, but later found out you were wrong about? And being that it’s Women’s History Month, this week’s answer comes from Kaye Wise Whitehead, president of the National Women’s Studies Association.

Kaye Wise Whitehead 

I grew up believing that I did not want to have children. The children had nothing to teach me that everything I needed to learn, I could learn on my own through my own experience. I’ve since found out after co-raising two brilliant and beautiful African American sons that motherhood is not easy. It’s not for the faint of heart. It is for the strong and for the strong will. It has taken everything from me and given me so much more in return. I have found myself through the eyes and the experiences of my sons. I have realized quite happily that motherhood is indeed my greatest joy. It is the moment when I’ve come face to face with who I want to be and who I am becoming. I am happy that the greatest thing I’ve ever done is I’ve been a mother but I found myself on the other side.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, that was lovely. That was great.

Kimberly Adams 

It is. I’ve often said that it is one of the most astonishing feats of bravery that I can ever imagine to be the mother of black sons in the United States of America.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, it’s gotta be terrifying every single day.

Kimberly Adams 

Every day and people do it and do it like she does.

Kai Ryssdal 

Keep doing it. So send us your answer to that question, which is of course: what is something you thought you knew but later found out you’re wrong about? Voice message, email, whatever. 508-827-6278. 508-U-B-SMART and we’ll get you on the pod.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Antonio Barreras. Today’s program was engineered by Drew Jostad with mixing by Gary O’Keefe.

Kai Ryssdal 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez did the music music. Marissa Cabrera is the acting senior producer of this podcast. Bridget Bodnar is her boss, she’s the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital and On Demand, she’s Bridget’s boss. And Francesca’s boss is Marketplace’s Vice President and General Manager, Neal Scarbrough. I just want to shake up the credits.

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, technically, everybody’s boss but you know.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well yeah that’s true.