Greece's money supply is

evaporating at a very high rate. The usually excellent Sober Look blog dissects the paradox of the BOG's growing balance sheet on the one hand, and the country's imploding monetary aggregates on the other:

The ECB has completely lost control over the monetary policy for GreeceThe Bank of Greece balance sheet has expanded sharply this year. This of course is part of the ECB's balance sheet expansion on a consolidated basis. But the Greek central bank's balance sheet by itself is now almost €200 billion. That's an unprecedented amount for Greece and represents over 65% of the nation's annual GDP. It is also close to a 50% increase year-over-year.

Bank of Greece balance sheet ( €mm, source: BoG)

One would expect at least some impact on the monetary aggregates from such a dramatic expansion. Yet the money supply measures, both narrow and broad have collapsed. We've seen this before with other periphery nations such as Italy. But nothing on this magnitude.

Greece contribution to Eurozone's money stock year-over-year growth (source: BOG)

This trend shows a massive drain of liquidity out of the system that will result in a total seizure of credit. How can the ECB claim any control over the monetary policy when a 50% increase in the Greek central bank's balance sheet results in a 16% decline in M1 and nearly a 20% decline in M3 money stock?  Greece is now in a  permanent state of extraordinarily tight monetary conditions no matter what the central bank does. In such an environment there is absolutely no hope for any growth, let alone fiscal consolidation. It seems the only possible solution for Greece may be to take control of its own monetary policy, which would require abandoning the euro. An ugly outcome, but given the ECB's inability to stabilize Greece's rapidly shrinking money supply, there may be little choice.

Suicide in Athens - Remember what touched off the revolution in Tunisia?

That's right, a very public suicide. Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself in December 2010; less than a month later, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had fled the country. The Arab Spring got going in earnest. Now comes the news that a pensioner shot himself in Athens, followed quickly by a wave of rioting (via BBC):

Protesters have clashed with riot police in the Greek capital, Athens, hours after a pensioner shot himself dead outside parliament.

The 77-year-old man killed himself in the city's busy Syntagma Square on Wednesday morning.
Greek media reported he had left a suicide note accusing the government of cutting his pension to nothing.
Flowers have been laid at the spot where he died and tributes have been paid online.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the square outside parliament on Wednesday evening, the scene of many large protests in recent months.
Violence erupted, with petrol bombs hurled at police, who fired tear gas in response.
Depression and suicides are reported to have increased in Greece as the country introduces tough austerity measures to deal with huge debts.

 'Dignified end'

The man has not been officially identified but was named in Greek media as Dimitris Christoulas. He was said to be a retired chemist, with a wife and a daughter, who had sold his pharmacy in 1994.
He shot himself in the central square just before 09:00 (06:00 GMT), Athens News reports.
In the alleged suicide note, found by police and reported by Athens News, he said: "The government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state.
"And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting... I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don't find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance."
Dozens of people left handwritten messages and flowers at the spot where Mr Christoulas killed himself.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the same course of events will come to pass in Greece... but when people only see their choices as suicide or living out of garbage cans, after paying into the pension system for 35 years, something is VERY wrong. Apparently, the Greek pharmacists' pension fund held a lot of Greek debt, which now got "voluntarily restructured" to be worth 20 cents on the €. 

Greece burning

I was on German radio yesterday morning, commenting on unrest in Greece. You can read (if your German is up to it) most of what I had to say in an interview with Der Standard from Austria. The punchline? We need to do what Wolfgang Schäuble already hinted at last week - reduce the extreme level of austerity in the policy mix, quickly, before most of Europe starts to look like Greece. 

When you don't want to be this right...

(image via libcom.org)

Last year, Jacopo Ponticelli and I wrote a paper looking at the link between austerity measures and unrest. We found a close one. The dramatic images from yesterday - with wide-spread rioting in Athens, building burning, etc. could not bear out our thesis with more force. And there is no question that this was about austerity, either ... normally a tough nut to crack in this context is the question if the link is really causal. Of course, academics always enjoy being able to say "I told you so", but this time, I would have preferred it if the Greeks had proven us wrong.

While there is a lot of understandable frustration with Greece's unwillingness or inability to implement reforms, the riots illustrate that austerity is reaching its limit. How many more budget bills can the government and the troika push through parliament? And what is the implication for the rest of Europe? For the moment, bond markets are a bit calmer, and equity markets are in party mood. The pictures from Greece tell us that the cheer of markets thanks to more austerity is bought in an unsustainable fashion. It's not the most likely scenario, but we may very well see a rapid deterioration in the growth outlook in Spain and Portugal, thanks to all the cuts and tax hikes being implemented now. If this produces yet more deficits and another round of austerity, the Greek scenario is beginning to look much more likely; somewhere along the way, the bond market will panic, and the mother of all bailouts could be on the agenda by mid-summer. Let's hope I am wrong. Even Wolfgang Schaeuble, whose pleasure in forcing austerity on deadbeat ClubMed countries has a been a constant at EU summits, seemed to hint last week that he is starting to change his mind. 

Portugal

In all the bruhaha about Greece's approaching credit event, people have taken their eyes of Portugal. The country is going down the Greek path with high speed - austerity, a shrinking economy, more austerity, and political and social instability around the corner. Matt Lynn over at WSJ Marketplace has a lot of clever things to say why Portugal actually has LESS of a chance to pull out of the death spiral than Greece... higher private debts, for example. The one difference I see is that Portugal is not a complete banana republic -- the government actually tries to implement reforms, and get some things done. Meanwhile, the Greek clown show continues; yesterday, the Greek parliament even failed to liberalize the opening hours of pharmacies... 

Europe's spectacular own-goal

The latest Euro summit was meant to build a firewall around Greece, and to isolate it from the other weaker members of the Eurozone. One week later, it is clear that this has failed spectacularly. Yields on Italian bonds are rising; the IMF has now been called in to monitor the budget. What is going on? Why does even the extended bailout fund not do more to stabilize investor confidence? The truth is actually very simple. The 50% "haircut" imposed on the private sector lenders to Greece is a gross violation of everything that European politicians promised until a few months ago. That's a bad way of reassuring investors.

Remember all the claims that no member of the Euro zone would ever default? That speculators betting on this would go bankrupt? That there would be no touching the creditors before 2013? All of this has gone out of the window, as a result of an ugly display of political strong-arming. Just as Germany's first post-war Chancellor Adenauer once said - "what do I care about the rubbish I talked yesterday". True, the politicians had the banks over a barrel; Ackermann could not say no to Mrs Merkel when she insisted on this voluntary write-down. But the obvious implication is that all other promises and declarations are equally empty - that bondholders of Spain and Italy might find themselves in exactly the same spot as the ones who hold Greek paper. Guess what? If you know you can lose up to 50% (up from 21% just 3 months ago -- latest update in November - Greece would now like to default/"voluntarily restructure" 75% of its debt in NPV terms), you don't feel that confident. About anything. How this was meant to solve the deeper crisis is anyone's guess.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's pretty clear that Europe should have just written an XXL-sized cheque for Greece a year ago. The Financial Times Germany is citing a few economists - Aghion, Alesina, me - saying precisely that. Austerity isn't working, and won't work. A single bad day on the exchanges destroys more value than all of Greece's external debt. Yes, Greece don't "deserve" another penny, but that's not the point. Europe has to do what is right for itself, without worrying about moral hazard (let's be honest - how many countries would want to follow the Greek route even if they get a big cheque?) It's time to switch from moralizing and punishing to actual crisis prevention.

CNN reflections

CNN has an op-ed by yours sincerely on the Greek crisis, and analogies with the case of Argentina in 2001. As they say - history doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. 

Germans and the bailouts... Michael Lewis/Antonin Scalia edition

In his How to Write A Sentence, Stanley Fish rightly spends a few pages lauding and analyzing Antonin Scalia's beautiful sentence:

Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.

I was reminded of it because a friend sent me the link to Michael Lewis's "It's the Economy, Dummkopf", published by Vanity Fair. The abstract reads:

With Greece and Ireland in economic shreds, while Portugal, Spain, and perhaps even Italy head south, only one nation can save Europe from financial Armageddon: a highly reluctant Germany. The ironies—like the fact that bankers from Düsseldorf were the ultimate patsies in Wall Street’s con game—pile up quickly as Michael Lewis investigates German attitudes toward money, excrement, and the country’s Nazi past, all of which help explain its peculiar new status.

I normally like Michael Lewis's writings, from Liar's Poker to The Big Short. This one, however, is a very long amalgamation of stereotypes, with almost no insight mixed in -- starting with the entirely non-novel idea that German potty-training (too early) is somehow related to the countries sinister ways (always lurking behind the corner) to the allegedly ordered and disciplined approach to anything. It's basically pop psychology (Germans are hung up about shit, and hence do the most awful things, from the Holocaust to buying subprime debt) combined with what every newpaper-reading halfwit already knows about the European debt crisis (only the Germans thought EMU was serious, and that rules meant something; the Greeks and everyone else who borrowed more than they now want to pay only did what was natural). Page after page, from the description of German finance ministry officials to the Autobahn, Goering's Air Ministry, and the Reeperbahn, Germans are portrayed as goosestepping automatons animated by the busy executive's version of From Dr Caligari to Hitler. 

You can debate if you want to devote 17 pages to predictable nonsene, writing or reading. I don't think Lewis is wrong about the notion that there is something like national character. He just gets it wrong, or at least 90% of it, after his multi-day fact-finding mission to Germany. What gets me the most is how smoothly Lewis skips over the disorderly, get-it-done, anarchic side of my countrymen - with all its good and bad sides. Try to have your flight cancelled in Frankfurt, and make it to the counter... in the UK, they would queue. In Germany, you will have one big melee, people getting their elbows out, fighting to get onto the next plane. It's a kind of can-do-anarchy, disorderly, results-oriented, each man for himself, and not very rule-bound.  It isn't always pretty, but it's ... very different from Michael Lewis's image, which seems to come straight out of a 1950s Hollywood war movie. Tax officials in local offices (whose name and a number appears on your tax notification) can make decisions on fining you, or taking that fine off. Every year in my classes, when I ask questions that require people to think outside the box, the German students do much better than many other nationalities -- the school system emphasizes the exact opposite of rote learning, from an early age. In days of old, the German army, despite being an instrument of a deeply anti-democratic state, used "empowerment" before the term was invented, pushing independent, important decision-making down to the level of sergeants and privates (which made for very high efficiency, as analysed in Martin van Creveld's wonderful Fighting Power). And several German classmates of mine are I-bankers... and doing pretty well as far as I can tell.

What does all of this mean for the EU debt crisis? To be honest, I think national character has very little to do with it. Germans behaved much like the Greeks in the interwar period, borrowing right, left, and center, building public swimming pools with the proceeds of bond issues, and then defaulted on ... those (stupid) Americans. Much of this is eloquently described in what is still the best book about the Weimar economy  -- Harold James's The German Slump: Politics and Economics 1924-1936. No need for potty-training fairy tales here. Back then, in the late 20s, American financier J.P. Morgan Jnr. lost faith in German borrowers, in the way that Germans are now updating their beliefs about Greeks. His comment? "...Germans are a second-rate people".

some basic arithmetic for gauging austerity's impact...

Brad DeLong has a beautifully simple back-of-an-envelope calculation on what the deficit implications of austerity are. His figures are for the US, and they are ugly... austerity means higher deficits in the future. Exercise for today: plug a number (any number, really) for Greece, and put them through the same formula. You get the opposite result, big-time. I dare anyone to suggest a multiplier so high that you can undo the effect of interest rates in this case. So, do the German deficit-hawks have a point? Discuss, in no more than 1,500 words!

You read it here first...

The Economist has come round to my conclusion of last spring, namely that the Greek sovereign debt case is a no-hoper... I hate to say "I told you so", but the simple debt dynamics of Greece are just too grim [see "Greece and 1+1 of debt dynamics"].

Meanwhile, the forex market is celebrating the "success" of the Portuguese and Spanish debt auctions. The Euro shot up against the dollar since Tuesday. It is true - the auctions didn't go as bad as feared. Yields still up by a 100 bp, and close to 7% for Portugal's 10 year bond. You can apply the same logic that I used for Portugal. Current debt stock is not as bad as Greece's, at 85% of GDP, but the Economist calculates that they need a swing in the primary balance of 8%. That's a very big number. Foreign bondholders will get scared long before any Portuguese politician can deliver on this. With fully 2/3 or debt held abroad, I agree with Paul Krugman, who observed in the NYTimes that with a few more successes like the last one, Portugal will be bust for sure.

The Mother of All Bailouts

I was just in Rome for a talk at Ente Einaudi (and some plain old tourism, enjoying Richard Meier's Ara Pacis Museum) when German TV asked me to comment on the mother of all bailouts and latest perturbations of the current sovereign debt crises. For German speakers, the link is here. I am trying to say nice things about speculators, and at the same time think we have to get serious about bank reform. They didn't ask me about the rescue package, which in scope and motivation seems singularly misguided. They do want to know about what to do, and I emphasize the need for financial sector regulation. How often do we want to live with this type of blackmail, where the financial sector asks for a bailout because otherwise, the rest of the economy might suffer.

Times of distress also create a demand for cranky ideas. The Germans from 3SAT found a "visionary" in Vienna that wants to replace the Euro with the Globo -- a single global currency. I think it's a spectacularly stupid idea, and if there is something stunning about it, it's that this kind of idea is given an airing at all. But hey, people discussed Federgeld at some point, money that would lose its value if not used in transactions -- a way to tax "dead capital". The party that pushed it? Just a bunch of freaks, on the very fringe, with no chance to enter office... until they did, in Berlin in January 1933.

Me? Worried? About Spanish banks?

My bank in Spain has recently been unusually friendly and generous. Normally, they are happy to pay me 0% interest for the balances I keep. Now, as I was asking for a routine transfer to my other account in Germany, I got a phone call - and a bit of a surprise. How about, said the friendly branch manager, 4% if you keep it here? No? How about 4.5%? No? Did the Germans offer more? What can we do to keep it? Shall we meet in person? Wow. I am so friendly with my local branch, I have actually never met my branch manager. So this was starting to sound a bit funny. I don't keep balances the withdrawal of which will threaten the survival of this bank (or any other) single-handedly, so this particular, keen advisor got me worried... but checking a bit, it seems to be a general thing. Spanish banks are effectively finding it very hard to borrow in wholesale markets; private banking clients are pulling their money out bigtime, and putting it into stable core countries; and every bank and caja is now offering 4% term deposits, which is a pretty amazing rate given that Euribor is just a touch over 1%. Now Moody's has published a small note on contagion risk from the Greek crisis for Spanish and Portuguese banks. Given that they are rapidly becoming real estate investment trusts with a banking business attached, trying to sell millions of repossessed homes, there were plenty of fundamental problems to worry about. Now, we have something similar to a bank run in the bond issuance building up. Actually, while I have no particularly insight into how the balance sheets of Spanish banks look, I think I'd rather be safe than sorry, and send a bit more dough back home...

Next stop, Portugal?

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone have some interesting things to say, thinking through the implications of the recent aid package to Greece (Baseline Scenario). They basically see the incentives firmly in favor of moral hazard throughout the Euro zone... nobody will want to tighten after the EU underwrote Greek profligacy (and after the spineless ECB decided to take Greek bonds as collateral no matter what their quality). Funny thing is, where is the rally in bond prices? After a brief pop, Greek bonds have been trading down again. Financial markets, as we all know, love a good bailout. Now that the EU has finally committed to rescuing the irresponsible, what is there to worry about?

Beware of the people who cite you...

for the wrong reasons. Over at the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had lunch with Carmen Reinhart, who (together with Ken Rogoff) wrote a well-timed, erudite and enormously important book on financial crises: This Time Is Different. Evans-Pritchard cites my work with Mauricio Drelichman on the debts and defaults of Philip II. He argues that Greece is a bit like Habsburg Spain -- and that default is inevitable. I actually agree with the conclusion, but I cannot agree with his characterization of why bankers lent to Castilian Crown. Mauricio and I basically say -- the defaults were anticipated; bankers made money, on average; and a default was simply a bad outcome that everyone anticipated could happen. Much like in the case of insurance, the insurer sometimes has to pay out. In good times, they collected a lot of money upfront. It all evens out.

Somewhat oddly, Evans-Pritchard drags out the old chestnut how Philip II's defaults ruined his bankers, including the Fuggers. This is what Fernand Braudel famously claimed, but we find the exact opposite -- the same banking familes who lent to Charles V also lent to Philip, and the ones affected by the early bankrutpcies (in the 1550s) are still there in the 1590s, doing a healthy business, including the Fuggers. Even a default needn't be a calamity, if you play it right.

The implications for today? I think a Uruguayan solution (ie a healthy haircut for the bondholders) would make a lot of sense. It won't be fun for the investors, but we are creating a world of monstrous moral hazard if we bail out Greece and, in turn, the French and German banks who bet that the taxpayer will always help. Will this create another Lehman-style meltdown? I don't think so. Financing costs on sovereign debt are going to go up anyway, by a bit, in the next few years; many people are worried about the overall level of debt as it is. A Greek default won't change a thing. A lot of people received higher interest on their Greek bonds (unless they bought in the last 2 years); the higher return goes with higher risk, which should materialize in their portfolios roundabout now.

All Greek to me...

So there is a solution to what some people have called a "Greek Tragedy" after all. In true Euro-fashion, it's a bit of a fudge -- IMF involvement in the way the Germans wanted, but some Euro-bailout, too, with a role for the ECB and EU Commission. Loans are to be at market rates, or so one reads. I wonder what to make of all this. The origins of the Greek problem are clearly not a sudden speculative attack or disequlibrium in bond markets. If you lie, steal, and cheat long enough, you get caught. Try to lie about your FICA score (for Americans) or Schufa history (for Germans) for about 10 years, and NOT see a change in your interest rates after lenders catch up with what you have been doing. So a big package via the IMF that says "boooh" to some nasty speculators is not going to do the same trick that worked so well when Brazil was in trouble in the early 2000s.

Fiscal austerity will now be reinforced by the IMF. In an earlier post, I raised some questions if that is going to work -- it's a bit like root-canal work without anaesthesia. Everybody else is trying to spend more, in a bid to ward off depression. If budget cuts are too big, you get more recession. Today brought the news that Ireland's GDP fell even more in Q4 than in Q3, which puts it on a very different trajectory from everybody else. This tells you that very severe budget cuts can backfire, as Chancellor Brüning of the late Weimar Republic could also tell you. Given the size of the adjustment needed in Greece, I doubt that public finances can be cut back to health.

So, just before we all despair, four German economists writing in the FT come up with a real solution (indirectly). They remind us that the German constitutional court put a lot of emphasis on the no-bailout clause in the Stability Pact; its last ruling said that, if violated, Germany would have to leave the Euro. Should aid to Greece really go ahead, I expect someone to sue the German government. Sure, German lawyers and judges sometimes find ways of bending the law if it suits those in power (just try watching Roland Freisler in action, or reading "Der Führer schützt das Recht", a treatise by the brilliant Carl Schmitt on why Hitler's massacre of the Nazi Party's left wing was perfectly legal). Today's bunch will of course do nothing so outrageous (and I am not trying to say that declaring "too bad" and ignoring earlier EMU rulings would be comparable to Schmitts and Freisler's transgressions. I am just trying to point out that creative lawyers and judges can justify anything -- they did award Freisler's widow a bigger pension after she sued, because he would have had a brilliant career in West Germany had he not been killed by a bomb in 1945). So there is a non-zero chance, given its earlier rulings, that the Constitutional Court would actually oblige the government to either stop support to Greece, or get out of the Euro. If you take a deep breath for a minute, and dispassionately think about the consequences, this may be actually good solution for everyone (except, perhaps, the ECB bankers who would presumably have to move away from Frankfurt). The new Deutschmark would probably revalue by a lot. The soft-currency countries who now dominate EMU would get their beloved pesetas, francs, and escudos back, but with a common design on the pieces of paper. Policy could be as loose as Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, France, and Cyprus like; Germany could engage in its preferred policy of reducing unit labor costs, and running big current account surpluses. Every time they get too big, the Euro would devalue against the DM, the way the lira et al. used to. Everyone is happier. Probably, countries like Holland and Austria would shadow the new DM, as they did before EMU. Now, to be realistic ... if history teaches you something, it's that countries will stick to a silly monetary standard for way too long, especially if it's seen as the ultimately proof of adulthood in terms of currency. Just think of how long it took countries to abandon the gold standard in the 1930s... and as a beautiful paper by Sachs and Eichengreen showed many moons ago, you can explain most of the variation of when countries exited the Great Depression by when they abandoned gold.

Greece and 1+1 of debt dynamics

When is Greece going to go bust? It may sound a little harsh, but without help from the outside, I see very little hope for the indebted Euro member by the Aegan to avoid such an outcome. As we teach our students in the ITFD class on financial crises, one of the easiest ways to think about debt sustainability is to ask – what would it take to stabilize the debt/GDP ratio? If you start with debt of value x relative to GDP, then debt tomorrow will grow by the interest you pay. If there is growth, more debt in nominal terms can be supported more easily, and if you generate a surplus and repay some debt, it’s all honkey-dory. Pick a growth rate you believe is plausible, and an interest rate at which the government can borrow. The number you get is what the primary surplus should be to stabilize the debt/GDP ratio. Primary surplus doesn’t mean a fiscal surplus – it just means that your revenue is greater than your expenditure excluding debt servicing costs. If you play with the basic numbers a bit, you get something like this for the case of Greece.

Here, g is the growth rate, and i is the interest rate. If growth from now on is 2%, and the Greek government can borrow at 3%, then the government only needs a primary surplus of 1.1%. This is not too hard to achieve. If, on the other hand, interest rates go to 9%, then you need a surplus of 7.8% p.a. If growth dwindles, it gets ever harder to stabilize debt/GDP ratios. At 0% growth and 9%, we are talking 10.2% of a primary surplus. So just how bad is the situation in Greece? Needless to say, the government is currently not running a primary surplus – it’s in deficit, to the tune of 7.7% (thanks to DB Research for the figure). In the table, I have highlighted in bold the combination of figures that I think are plausible in the intermediate future. I am being optimistic here – even 0% growth is a good outcome given how uncompetitive the county is, and how bad the drag from fiscal consolidation will be. We are talking here of a swing of around 15% of GDP.

Overall, I fear this is a no-hoper unless the EU rides to the rescue on a white stallion. Fiscal consolidation on the scale required of Greece is beyond even the most cohesive states. I cannot think of countries other than after a major war producing such a shift in their public finances. Germanyin the early 1930s under Brüning tried to engineer a swing in the public accounts that was of a similar magnitude (it reduced nominal spending by about 1/3 from 1928-32). The budget cuts were so severe that Brüning became known as the ‘Hunger Chancellor’. Many believe that the program of fiscal consolidation enacted by his government undid the Weimar Republic.

Let’s get back to the little table. I think that a range of 5-9% for the interest rate is pretty optimistic, too – as creditors start to worry that Greece may not repay, they will demand ever higher interest rates. This creates a self-fulfilling dynamic, of the type that some politicians have branded “speculative attack”. It is, of course, nothing of the sort – nobody is manipulating markets here, rising interest rates just mean that, as a borrower looks ever worse, creditors are not keen to refinance them. Kehoe and Cole have a very nice paper, inspired by the Mexican crisis, on self-fulfilling sovereign debt crises, and Wei Xiong of Princeton has some new work on rollover risk (as applied to private firms).

So what should be done? Many equate default with a cataclysmic meltdown. This is not entirely without reason. As Rogoff, Reinhart, and Sevastano show in their paper on serial defaults, these can seriously damage your “fiscal health” – the state institutions you need to build a modern tax state. On the other hand, there is pretty convincing literature arguing that, since governments rarely sell contingent debt, defaults are a way to achieve market completeness. Investors de facto anticipate that things can go wrong, and the higher interest they receive beforehand compensates them for the risk. Defaults are when countries collect on the ‘insurance’ they bought before. Theories in the ‘excusable default’ vein (Grossman-Van Huyck, say) require that defaults happen in verifiably bad states of the world, and are driven by exogenous events. Half of that at least applies to Greece – things really are bad. One can argue if accounting fraud and an unwillingness to create a functioning tax bureaucracy qualify as exogenous. Be that as it may, it remains unclear why the burden of adjustment should exclusively fall on the Greek taxpayers, instead of bond holders.