Let's go back to the beginning, the founding of LTCM, the roadshow from Merrill Lynch. Roger, it'd be great to learn more about that part of the story because, of course, ultimately, this is a fed, initiated rescue plan that involves the banks self-insuring each other. That's because the banks were such large creditors to LTCM. That goes back to the beginning. The way in which LTCM raised capital, there were banks that were investors. Some of them central banks, which I think is quite fascinating.

Merrill Lynch, they were not just creditors, they were investors. Look, you'd ask why Maryweather wanted people like Martin Shulls. In the simple answer, there weren't no people like Martin Shulls. They were these brilliant, so-called black box theorists because no one quite understood the theory, they just went from Wall Street institution to Wall Street institution with these gilded names and gilded pedigrees to make these big returns, picking up these nickels with no bulldozers and running over them for a good number of years at Solomon. Solomon's team was going to be joined by these future nobelters. They would win the Nobel Prize during LTCM's existence, but Martin Shulls is fully famous already. Wall Street has this curious fascination for black boxes. You would think if you were putting up your large amounts of money, you'd want to know everything about how the sausage is made. But very often it happened that when people say it's too mysterious or in this case it's proprietary, we can't realize it. By the way, another great divergence from Buffett is if I can't understand it, I don't want to touch it. We see this in cryptocurrency. If you wind up a thousand people now, we speculate crypto. Who owns some sort of crypto and ask them to explain it. Do you think five of a thousand could explain it? I seriously doubt it. But obviously it has a fascination to appeal to great many. And we saw that with Madoff. Nobody would do what Madoff is doing because he was stealing. And I should make clear that nothing like that was going on with LTCM. These were honest, upright people. The money did not end up in Brazil. A quote from somebody in the book. The biggest losers in this were the partners themselves. They were whole-hearted believers in what they were doing. But this black box proprietary trading strategy of theirs had great appeal to people who wanted to say whether it was at a cocktail party or in a boardroom on Madoff TCCM. That has a lot of cash for people. They could have raised far more money than they wanted. They began, I believe, I have to check the book with something like $4 billion. They had almost a miraculously benign verse three years because no bulldozer came, kept clipping those 5% tokens. Those migrant shoals referred to picking up pickles in front of bulldozers. And then that asset value just kept going up and up and up. I would have pointed out something about spread trades, which is there is a certain finiteness and the possibilities for a spread trade. If you're, let's just say, buying a stock, at least in theory, there's no limit to how high it could go. I wouldn't suggest investing that way because in practice, there are limits. And the same thing with the commodity. Oil can go to $80, about $100 or $200, it could go to $400 in circumstances. Again, I wouldn't bet on that, but then on particular limits. But with the spread trade, there is a limit because if you're betting on the convergence, if you're betting that the difference between the yield on Russian debt and the yield on Treasury bonds is going to go to zero. And currently, it's two points that can only go down by two points. That's all there is. And then you're at zero and you're converged. After three years of successful investing, all the spreads they had bet on to converge had converge. And that meant that there was much less profit to be had and that the profit potential was the table would be the hardest to come by. Because after all, to say that Russia's debt, if it's trading at 5% points higher than US debt, to go to three, well, maybe that's one thing. But then to say that the only one point higher, a half point higher, you really got to get people awfully comfortable with the idea that Russia's just as good a credit risk as the US. You can see that there are just logical constraints on how far that's going to converge. The very fact that you've been making a profit now is your future opportunity. And LTCM realized, and they made I think then, is at the end of 1997, ended a third year, or be the third of four years of the fund, really a fatal mistake. The only thing you can do then when you've had all these conversion trades successfully is to accept what the market gives you and to say there's not much left. Maybe we should take some chips off the table because for the moment, there aren't the prospects that there had been for convergence because we've seen so much convergence.