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PRIME MINISTER GORDON BROWN: We are within a few hours, I think, of agreeing a global plan for economic recovery and reform.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE BUILT THIS CITY")
STARSHIP: (Singing) Someone always playing corporation games. Who cares? They're always changing corporation names. We just want to dance here. Someone stole the stage. They call us irresponsible, write us off the page. Marconi plays the mamba.
CHANA JOFFE-WALT, HOST:
Hello, and welcome to NPR's PLANET MONEY. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt.
DAVID KESTENBAUM, HOST:
And I'm David Kestenbaum. That was British Prime Minister Gordon Brown you heard at the top of the podcast. Today is Wednesday, and it is April Fool's Day.
JOFFE-WALT: Today we're going to take a detailed look at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. We've been getting a lot of questions from you about the FDIC, like, how come the agency that ensures our bank deposits is asking for the ability to draw on a $500 billion line of credit? Should we be worried?
KESTENBAUM: But first, we have our PLANET MONEY indicator.
JOFFE-WALT: Yes, David, today it is five G's.
KESTENBAUM: Not 5,000, not five times the force of gravity - five confusing names. The G-20 meeting of the world's 20 major economies starts tomorrow. But we were just thinking, man, have there been a lot of G's.
JOFFE-WALT: Right. By PLANET MONEY's count, we've got the G-7 with finance ministers, the G-8 with heads of state. And there used to be the G-22 and G-33. Those included emerging countries. But now they've just settled on G-20.
KESTENBAUM: There's also the G-2, which is a name people sometimes use to refer to the U.S. and China, but I think that leaves out a lot of very nice countries, so we're not going to count it.
JOFFE-WALT: Right. Anyway, point is, a lot of global, which sort of makes sense right now since we're working our way through a global crisis that's affecting everybody everywhere. The World Bank this week just said that the global economy is likely to shrink by 1.7% this year.
KESTENBAUM: The thing is, though, that, you know, these leaders of all these countries - they sometimes have different ideas about how to fix things.
JOFFE-WALT: So tomorrow, Thursday, leaders of the planet's 20 biggest economies - they're going to sit down in the same room and hash it all out, try to fix the economy.
KESTENBAUM: It's called the G-20 Summit. It is happening in London. And PLANET MONEY's Laura Conaway caught up with an economist who is actually going, Adam Posen. He's the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Posen helped the U.K. government think through its agenda for the G-20. He told Laura that when the actual meeting starts, it's sort of like he's a baseball fan who just happens to have good seats, which I take to mean that he's not actually on the field, but he's close enough that he can shout and throw beer cans.
LAURA CONAWAY, BYLINE: What are meetings like this like?
ADAM POSEN: They're a very strange blend of extremely formal, highly scripted, for the most part, with a lot of protocol. So you have 20 heads of government, each of whom has a couple designated assistants, and very big jockeying about who sits next to whom, who gets to speak for how long and when. And the schedule is very formal, and they make sure everybody's in every picture and so forth. And yet, like many other conventions or meetings we would all go to, the big news is what's done bilaterally on the side. So Obama schedules a one-on-one, or close to one-on-one, with the Chinese premier and goes off and does that. And so it's this weird division between the very important off-the-record meetings and then the still important on-the-record, which is very scripted and mass-leaning.
CONAWAY: There is an awful lot on this agenda. Tell me, if you would, what things you worked with the U.K. to put on the agenda here.
POSEN: Well, I and some of the other economists who worked with the U.K. have a letter coming out in the Financial Times on Wednesday listing what we thought were the priorities. And some of them have made it through, and some haven't. The big ones that did make it through were some commitment to greater stimulus, although obviously the Western Europeans, particularly the Germans, are opposed to that. And so we're...
CONAWAY: This idea that other governments around the world would do their own economic stimulus plans...
POSEN: Right.
CONAWAY: ...Somewhat on the scale the U.S. has.
POSEN: Right, exactly - similar to what the U.S. did, and China did. And most of the others have not done anything nearly as big in terms of public spending or tax cuts. What the compromise that seems to have been worked out is people have agreed they will revisit the issue if the current level of stimulus is insufficient. We'll see what that means. A second thing that's a very big deal - and this is part of the scripted part because this is already baked in the cake; it's not really going to be discussed - is the huge increase in resources to the International Monetary Fund. Basically, the Japanese are putting up a hundred billion. The U.S. is putting up a hundred billion. The European Union's putting up a hundred billion. There is some back-and-forth with China as to how much they'll put up on what terms. But that gives more resources for troubled countries like Turkey or Ukraine or Hungary to go to the fund and borrow when they need it.
A third thing that we all push for that seems small but I think will get through is the expansion of trade credit, which is literally so the cocoa farmer in Ghana or the tin miner in Bolivia can get his stuff or her stuff shipped to market. That's very important to these small economies and to - especially to agricultural and commodity exporters to have the credit so they don't have to wait for the ships to actually dock at the other side of the world to get their money.
CONAWAY: Well, one thing's - one of the things you're making me think about is the question of whether some nations in the G-20 will push to erect barriers to trade and put in new tariffs and sort of go with the isolationist tendency a little bit.
POSEN: You're absolutely right to raise that, Laura. And I've been sort of ducking talking about that because unfortunately, I think the G-20 is going to do very little to prevent that. The instinct always is - it's a natural political instinct that when times get tough, you want jobs for your workers at home. So think of the U.S. We passed the stimulus package, and there was a clause in it called Buy American. People saying, well, if you're going to spend money, spend it in our communities. But, you know, if everybody does that, then we end up saying much more for everything. And people who are vulnerable and dependent on trade get totally cut off. And then you normally get an escalating circle of countries - cycle, excuse me - of countries trying to make things worse for each other. That's what we're trying to prevent.
The problem is the goal was to get the communique to say, oh, we're going to really monitor this. We're going to agree to reduce trade barriers between us - the ones - the new ones that come up. And that's not going to happen.
CONAWAY: What's the communique? Is that the thing that gets written up and signed at the end?
POSEN: That's the closest thing you have to a substantive agreement. So if you had an international negotiation, you'd have what's called a treaty which has the effect of international law. For this kind of organization, the G-20, it has no standing in international law. They can't compel anybody to do anything. So the communique is like the committee report. It's everybody signs on and says, this is what we discussed. These are the principles we agreed to. These are the policies we're all going to undertake or these are the things we're going to do next.
CONAWAY: Well, one of the big themes that I've been watching with some fascination is this back and forth between the United States and particularly the European Union countries - U.K. excepted - where the United States is pushing for an economic stimulus plan, a global one, to try to get more countries into the game of jumpstarting their economies.
POSEN: Right.
CONAWAY: And the other European nations, which are saying, hey, we do plenty already to stimulate the economy. We have this great Social Services...
POSEN: Right.
CONAWAY: ...Network here. So our people are still getting money. They're still spending money. What we want is better financial regulation and we...
POSEN: Right.
CONAWAY: ...Want it right away.
POSEN: Yeah. And the Europeans and the Americans each have a point and each miss the point. The easier ones is financial regulation. The Europeans are right. We shouldn't politically, let alone economically, be letting things progress too much without recognizing that lack of financial regulation in some ways caused the crisis. And if you don't push it through when the banks and other financial firms are most politically weak, you're not going to get the changes you need. The Americans are always reluctant, including under the Obama administration, to sign up for anything global. And they're always more skeptical of regulation, even now, which is somewhat surprising. The Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, came out with a plan that definitely is some progress versus the past and isn't that far from the European position. But, you know, the Americans have been a problem. The Europeans should have been pushing harder.
The stimulus stuff is on the other side, though. The Europeans - led in particular by the Germans, but surprisingly, they got a lot of Eastern European and even French support - keep insisting, oh, we've done enough and we shouldn't do more. And this is based on two fallacies. I mean - and they really are fallacies. They just don't get it. First is, yes, they have a bigger welfare state. And so, yes, their people suffer less during the recession than, say, Americans do. But the scale of what they're spending on their welfare state is still extremely small, either compared to what the stimulus package needs to be or the size of the problem. So it's kind of like saying, don't bother me. I gave at the office. Well, it matters how much you gave at the office.
The second fallacy is just they're so wrapped up in this budget conservatism. I mean, there are leading economists in Europe sort of tearing their hair out saying, don't you people understand this is the one circumstance under which deficit spending is a good idea? I mean, we shouldn't be too cynical. I mean, some of the things I've mentioned - like money for the IMF or for trade credit, some openness to fiscal stimulus, probably some recognition that the Chinese and other Asians need more voice in these things - all of those, if they do make it into the G-20 communique, they do become reality to some degree. And that affects millions of people.
The problem is, it's sort of this cattle call - and everybody's got their own agenda. For the Chinese, the big thing is making sure the dollar doesn't go down. For the French, the big thing is making sure that they've got jobs in France. The Australian prime minister's actually being very visionary and talking about doing a lot of stuff for poor people. The U.S. is busy just trying to make sure nothing distracts them from their own domestic problems, unfortunately.
JOFFE-WALT: That trade credit provision Adam Posen's so interested in - it sounds kind of obscure, but it's actually really important to workers in developing nations. So we're going to have more on that on our blog, npr.org/money.
KESTENBAUM: And as we've been talking about here on PLANET MONEY, a lot of financial institutions are changing - and regulatory agencies. And today we're going to talk about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And, you know, the FDIC is doing things it's just never done before. And the FDIC is something I think most people, you know, have heard of, right? We know it insures our savings accounts, and we probably know that they can come and take over banks when they fail. But it is now doing a whole host of other things. Like, it's going to be guaranteeing loans for buying toxic assets. It's helping out with interbank lending. It may actually be expanding its role in the future from not just taking over failed banks but to taking over other kinds of financial institutions. So we sat down with the chief operating officer of the FDIC. That's coming up in a little bit.
But first, we want to go over the anatomy of a bank failure. And Chana, this is a story you did for All Things Considered and This American Life.
JOFFE-WALT: Yeah. So basically, I wanted to know what happens when the FDIC takes over a bank. I'm in Seattle. So last September, Washington Mutual fell - this huge savings and loan, biggest ever collapse. And I went out and I stood outside the bank headquarters downtown here like an idiot with all my equipment, thinking I was going to see what a bank collapse actually looks like.
KESTENBAUM: So what did you see?
JOFFE-WALT: Nothing. Nothing. This huge institution just suddenly doesn't exist anymore. And it looks like any other day. It's really weird. I mean, the FDIC is inside, but they're so controlled and they're secretive about what they do and they don't want people to know that they're coming into town.
KESTENBAUM: And they don't want people to know because they don't want to cause a run on the bank, right? So they sort of sneak in to town.
JOFFE-WALT: Yeah. It's really weird and it's an intriguing process and it kept coming up. I mean, after Washington Mutual failed, I started paying more attention. And every week, pretty much another bank would fall. I mean, lots of times there's more than one. And that's still happening pretty much every weekend. Thursday, Friday, there will be a bank that fails.
KESTENBAUM: So, Chana, you got obsessed, I think that's a fair word. And we figured we should let you find out for all of us what actually happens when the FDIC takes over a bank. So we sent you out to tell us the story of one bank failure in Vancouver, Wash.
JOFFE-WALT: Right. It's right across the river from Portland.
KESTENBAUM: And it's called the Bank of Clark County. It's a long story. So we are just going to play the first few minutes here, and we will link to the full version online.
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JOFFE-WALT: Thursday night, January 15, 2009, the operation begins. Around 80 FDIC agents pull into Vancouver, Wash. Their rental cars are generic, their arrival times staggered. One by one, the agents check into the hotel, each quietly offering a pseudonym to the guy at the desk. Nine p.m., the FDIC calls the CEO of another bank nearby, Umpqua Bank. They tell him, your bank has been selected to take over at the Bank of Clark County. Do not tell anyone. Come to a meeting tomorrow at noon. We'll tell you everything you need to know. Friday, January 16, Ric Carey, a vice president with Umpqua Bank, heads into that meeting.
RIC CAREY: The FDIC had taken a location approximately two miles from the main office of the bank in a hotel under a different name. And they've been through quite a few of these. I think one of the gentlemen that was leading the discussion said, you know, I've done 200 of these over my 25 years, and let me tell you how it's going to work.
JOFFE-WALT: Does it feel like a spy movie?
CAREY: It almost does. They've done this before, quite a production.
TODD ZALK: My name is Todd Zalk, Bank of Clark County. The best community business bank because we've changed the game in business banking, and we were winning.
JOFFE-WALT: Todd Zalk is what you call a team player, a total bank loyalist to the end - beyond the end. Four weeks after the failure, Todd's still wearing his Bank of Clark County nametag, still passing out his bank business cards, always with a warm handshake, inserting your name whenever possible. Todd had no idea the FDIC was in town and his bank was about to fail. Friday afternoon, failure day, he was bringing in new business.
ZALK: I actually was. I had people that wanted to open accounts. In fact, Chana, in the fourth quarter, I opened over 55 accounts.
JOFFE-WALT: Todd knew they were going through a rough time. Everyone knew that. The CEO had been using this analogy that the bank was like a ship. They'd taken on some water in a recent storm, and they might need a bigger ship, a larger bank to take them on. But basically, things were under control.
Friday, 5:01 p.m., a small team enters the bank of Clark County - casual. They head straight for the CEO's office. And this is when it happens. They deliver the news. They tell him his bank is undercapitalized. It has failed.
5:03 p.m., an agent positioned by the CEO's office door types this news into a BlackBerry. It's received by everyone on the FDIC takeover team, including manager Ron Hodges.
RON HODGES: At 5:04, we receive the notification to - that the bank had been declared failed.
JOFFE-WALT: So you get a message on your BlackBerry or something.
HODGES: Exactly.
JOFFE-WALT: And what will it say?
HODGES: The bank has been declared failed. It's that simple.
KESTENBAUM: I think we should point out here that there are - while there are a lot of banks failing, there - we have thousands of banks in the United States. So it's not like we are going to run out of banks.
A lot of you out there did have questions for us on the blog and in email about what exactly this means, though, if so many banks are failing. And the FDIC is also taking on these new responsibilities. It is guaranteeing loans for the Treasury Department's toxic asset plan. So you ask, how will the FDIC pay for all this?
JOFFE-WALT: So we called up John Bovenzi. He's the chief operating officer at the FDIC. And let's just get this out there right now. Bovenzi says there is no need to worry.
JOHN BOVENZI: It's important for people to understand that they don't have to worry about the FDIC, that they don't have to worry about the safety of their money if it's in an insured account in a bank. The FDIC's supported those insured accounts for 75 years and will continue to do so. Certainly, we are a lot busier than we would like to be and what the American public would like us to be with all of the financial problems going on today, but the important thing for people to remember is their money's safe.
JOFFE-WALT: So, David, I spent a lot of time with the FDIC over the past couple months. I went to this new office that they're opening in Irvine, Calif., because, basically, they're just bringing on all these new people, and they need to open a new office to handle all of these failures. So they're hiring about 30 new people a week.
And this is something that they say all the time, what Bovenzi's is saying here, that people don't need to worry. They actually say all the time people can sleep sound at night knowing that the FDIC has never lost a dime on insured deposits. They take that really seriously. But the thing is that I think a lot of people don't actually think about the FDIC all the time as they fall into sleep.
KESTENBAUM: What?
JOFFE-WALT: Yeah. Believe it, David. I know it's crazy, but I'm going to be bold here and guess that most people don't think about the FDIC at night. We see the FDIC plaque at our banks and maybe we know that means that our deposits are insured up to $250,000 - that's the limit right now. So if our bank fails and can't cover our deposits, the FDIC has to throw in millions of dollars to pay back depositors. But, you know, I don't know if people totally understand how that whole model works. So, David, one-question quiz - are you ready?
KESTENBAUM: Yep.
JOFFE-WALT: Where does the FDIC get its money from?
KESTENBAUM: I actually know the answer now, obviously. But I have to say, if you asked me that question before I started covering this stuff, honestly, I just would have never thought about it. I probably would have guessed the government.
JOFFE-WALT: Right. Well, it's called the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, right? But actually, the correct answer is banks. They're - this is - they're looking after their own here. When a bank like the Bank of Clark County fails, the FDIC has to pay out all the depositors. But it's not using government money to do that. It gets that money from other banks. Every bank that has that FDIC plaque that you see when you go in, every bank that has that plaque pays a premium to be insured by the FDIC.
KESTENBAUM: So it's sort of like if I want car insurance, I pay a bit of money, which all gets pooled together, and it gets used to cover me or whoever gets into an accident. So in this case, the banks are paying to have their - the savings accounts insured in case one of the banks gets into an accident. So they each pay a bit of money into the pool, and that is kept by the FDIC.
JOFFE-WALT: And we asked John Bovenzi, the chief operating officer of the FDIC, to lay out the numbers for us.
BOVENZI: What the bank has to do is pay the FDIC an insurance premium. So we charge the bank 12 cents for every $100 you put in the bank as insured money. That allows us to build up our insurance fund to pay costs when we have problems like bank closings, where we have to then pay people their money back.
KESTENBAUM: So, Chana, that seems like pretty cheap insurance, yeah?
JOFFE-WALT: Right. And so then what ends up happening at a place like the Bank of Clark County, when the FDIC shows up and the bank doesn't have enough to pay out the guaranteed depositors - they don't actually have enough money to do that - the FDIC insurance fund takes a hit. And every time a bank fails, the FDIC insurance fund loses a little more.
KESTENBAUM: And this is where a lot of you are wondering, well, you know, can that insurance fund sustain this kind of a beating? It's got $20 billion in it right now, and Bovenzi says, yeah, it's shrinking.
BOVENZI: We have the ability to change the premiums we charge banks to replenish that fund as necessary.
JOFFE-WALT: The banks are struggling at the moment. Doesn't raising the premiums on them, isn't that a hardship for them?
BOVENZI: Well, that's a good question, I mean, because that's the balance we have to strike - that the banking industry is responsible for the insurance fund, not taxpayers. But there's only so much that we can charge them at any given time without making their problems much worse. So we try to balance how much money to bring in from the industry over time to build the fund up with the fact that there's only so much they can pay.
JOFFE-WALT: So if banks continue to fail at the rate that they're failing now - so we have, you know, one or two or three every weekend that are, you know, sometimes costing the insurance fund, like the Bank of Clark County, $150 million each. If that continued to happen every single weekend, would the insurance fund, where it's at right now, run out by the end of the year?
BOVENZI: Now, the insurance fund, our projections are that it would not run out by the end of the year with the kinds of failures we're having now. And we're trying to take the steps to raise insurance premiums to the banks to make sure that that doesn't happen.
JOFFE-WALT: How different is it than what they were paying a couple of months ago?
BOVENZI: It's a fairly substantial increase. I think, you know, the banks probably paid, you know, maybe around 3 billion into the fund last year, and they will pay just on the regular assessments 12, 13 billion. And we're talking about a potential special assessment in addition to that that could bring the total up to 20 billion or so for the year. So it is a dramatic increase. And...
KESTENBAUM: You're talking about what could be a tenfold increase in dues, right? That's like if my auto insurer called me and said, sorry, instead of 1,000 this year, it's going to be $10,000 to insure your car.
BOVENZI: Yes. But at the same time, remember; through most of the 1990s - after the 1990s, early in this decade, the banks weren't paying anything in deposit insurance premiums and...
KESTENBAUM: Free car insurance.
JOFFE-WALT: And just to be clear - so that means that, you know, a bank like the Bank of Clark County makes mistakes and fails, it costs the insurance fund, you know, $150 million. And so they're not paying those premiums anymore. They're not replenishing that fund. You're asking all of the remaining surviving banks to pay into that fund.
BOVENZI: Yes. Well, I remember back to the S&L crisis, and there was a great deal of tension as some of the banks said, you know, we managed ourselves very well, and we're forced to pay the costs for those who didn't. And the same is occurring today. We're seeing some of the tension between the smaller banks, the community banks, looking at the larger banks and saying, you're the ones - and the investment banks, saying, you're the ones who got us into this problem, and now we're suffering.
JOFFE-WALT: So David Bovenzi's basically saying here, it's OK, you know, we're doing OK, and if we need to, we can always raise premiums on the surviving banks if our fund runs dry. You know, the banks have it covered. But the thing that kind of didn't make sense to me about this is that at the same time the FDIC is saying our projections are OK, we're going to be fine, we have enough, they're also asking for this huge increase to their line of credit with the Treasury, right?
KESTENBAUM: Right. So right now they have a $30 billion standing line of credit and they want that increased to a hundred billion. And in an emergency, they want to be able to borrow 500 billion. That's borrow money from the government, from the taxpayers - alone. And Bovenzi said, he says, don't worry, the FDIC will definitely pay that money back. We promise.
BOVENZI: The taxpayer could be - you know, potentially could be on the hook temporarily in lending money. It would just be how long it would take for that money to be paid back, and that money would be paid back with interest at the end of the day.
KESTENBAUM: There's no way it wouldn't be paid back.
BOVENZI: Well, the FDIC has always been funded by the industry. Taxpayers never lost a penny from the FDIC. But at the same time, at the end of the day, the FDIC has the full faith and credit of the U.S. government so that people don't have to worry about the safety of their insured deposits.
JOFFE-WALT: What would have to happen for the taxpayer to be on the hook? I'm hearing you say your projections say the fund will cover us through the end of the year. So what would put us in that position?
BOVENZI: Well, what would put us in a position would be if bank failures were - there were many more than expected, more - they were larger, they cost more, and it overwhelmed the capacity of the industry to be able to pay that money back in a reasonable period of time. So then there could be a longer period of time before that happened.
KESTENBAUM: Could you handle the failure of a huge bank? I don't want to name names, but, you know, could you handle the failure of one of the big banks that we're now worried about?
BOVENZI: Well, let me just say, there are clear, defined mechanisms and laws associated with how to close a commercial bank. And as you saw from going to one of the smaller bank closings, the FDIC is very used to that. And it's handled with virtually no disruption to the general public. Last year...
KESTENBAUM: But these big banks have trillions of dollars of liabilities, right?
BOVENZI: Well, last year, a $300 billion bank, Washington Mutual, was closed and sold to another bank in a very nondisruptive way. That said, there are banks that are even larger than that and create more complexity and have led to the concern about some being too big to fail and what we should do about that going forward in the future.
JOFFE-WALT: So you all have - that line of credit that we're talking about - that's 30 billion now?
BOVENZI: That's correct.
JOFFE-WALT: And you're asking for 100 billion and the ability for - to borrow, in emergency, 500 billion, if necessary.
BOVENZI: Yes. And the 30 billion was the amount that was available in 1991. We looked at the fact that in today's dollars, that would be roughly 100 billion. So we think it's reasonable to raise that line of credit up to 100 billion. But if there were the kind of emergency circumstances that you're talking about with your questions, we feel that it would be appropriate to be able to borrow up to that 500 billion with the consent of Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
KESTENBAUM: I mean, are you asking for this line of credit in case you have to do something big on the scale of a Bank of America or Citi?
BOVENZI: The line of credit is, you know - the government has made it clear they're standing behind the larger banks in this country so that people don't have to worry about their safety of their money. But it is - there are expenses that are happening. There are new programs, such as asset purchase programs. There are things where we just think it's prudent to have that line of credit available if there were an emergency.
KESTENBAUM: But in order for the taxpayer not to get paid back, the banks would have to say - when you tried to raise rates on them, they'd say, sorry, forget it, we don't want FDIC insurance anywhere. That's literally what would have to happen before the taxpayer didn't get paid back.
BOVENZI: At the end of the day, the banks are responsible for paying the taxpayer back, yes. And it's just a matter of how can that be done in a reasonable period of time? I think...
KESTENBAUM: 'Cause you're saying there's no way they're going to walk away from the FDIC.
BOVENZI: The FDIC insurance proves its value during times like this where it would be very difficult for a commercial bank or others to do business without that deposit insurance. So it would be just a matter of how long it would take to pay money back, if it were borrowed from the taxpayer.
JOFFE-WALT: OK. Thanks to John Bovenzi of the FDIC. And thank you all for all your great questions.
KESTENBAUM: We do want to make one final point, which is that while the taxpayer may not directly foot the bill for this, some of the cost could come back to us because if the banks have to pay more money to the FDIC, they might then end up - they got to pay for that somehow, right? So they could raise ATM fees or charge us a little more for loans. So I would say while we are not on the big hook, it is possible we are instead on a lot of little hooks.
JOFFE-WALT: I hate that image - a bunch of little hooks up and down my arm or something.
OK. That's it for today. Be sure to check out our blog, npr.org/money. You can hear the full version of the FDIC takeover story about the Bank of Clark County. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt.
KESTENBAUM: And I'm David Kestenbaum. Thank you for listening.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE BUILT THIS CITY")
STARSHIP: We built this city. We built this city on rock and roll, built this city. We built this city on rock and roll. It's just another Sunday in a tired old street...
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