Dr. Liechty is a Professor at the Smeal College of Business, with a courtesy appointment as a Professor of Statistics at the Eberly College of Science. He is interested in the creation of public goods and the role that universities can play in these efforts. Past initiatives include leading an effort that resulted in a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 that creates a new Office in the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Financial Research, which has the mandate to provide better data and analytic tools to the regulatory community in order to safeguard the U.S. financial system.
Episode Description
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in early March left many wondering whether the global financial system was on the precipice of a 2008 style meltdown. Just as the waters seemed to calm after that, UBS stepped in to buy Credit Suisse as that bank collapsed and as we record this regional First Republic Bank seemed to be teetering. The risks inherent to and the regulation of banking is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Dr. John Liechty.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
Just a reminder that Stats and Stories is running its data visualization contest to celebrate its 300th episode. You can grab data about the show to analyze and submit your entry at Statsand Stories.net/contest. Your entry has to be there by June 30th.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in early March left many wondering whether the global financial system was on the precipice of a 2008 style meltdown, just as the water seemed to calm after that UBS stepped into by Credit Suisse, as that bank collapsed. And as we record, this very episode, regional first republic bank seems to be teetering. The risks inherent to and the regulation of banking is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories. And the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist, John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is John Liechty, professor in the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University, with a courtesy appointment as a professor of statistics at the Eberly College of Science, who is interested in the creation of public goods and the role of universities can play in those efforts. Past initiatives include leading an effort that resulted in a provision in the Dodd Frank Act of 2010, that created the Office of Financial Research in the US Treasury, looked he's an expert in marketing research, computational statistics, and high performance computing, and derivative pricing and asset allocation, as well as financial stability. He's also a fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical society. John, thank you so much for joining us today.
John Liechty
Oh, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Rosemary Pennington
How concerned should we all be about the health of banking systems right now?
John Liechty
I think in general, we should not let that concern go away. I think the current system? I'll answer it in two ways. I think, in general, I do not think that the governments will allow the system to collapse in any way. So I wouldn't think that we're going to be concerned with that. But I do think there's a real, very real concern that we may have what we would call a financial crisis. And the way I tend to look at financial crises is when the taxpayers money is put to work in the financial system to stabilize it. So the taxpayers are asked to take a loss on some asset class or some group of assets in order to maintain the financial system to keep it going. Because if you didn't, the loss incurred by the broader economy would be much greater. And so in some ways, it's a prudent action by the government, because the government is ultimately an insurer of last resort against the type of things. But having said that, because they have that responsibility, they should be careful about their responsibility for monitoring these systems. And, and so that's why I started by saying, I think we should always be careful about these and cautious.
John Bailer
So that almost suggests that, that perhaps there was a little bit of complacency that, you know, in Rosemary's introduction, she she brought up the 2008 event, you know, and that that was a, that was a pretty scary kind of, you know, it was front page news for an extended period of time. And then there's this low end, you know, this nice, low where everything seems like there's never there's no concerns at all, and then it surfaces again, so, you know, you had suggested before we even started, before we started this recording that this is not the first time this has happened that this kind of, I don't know, tweak to the system, this kind of blip in a system is pretty regular. Can you just talk a little bit about what this looks like relative to 2008? And maybe some previous times, things like this have happened?
John Liechty
Sure. So if you go back historically, you can go back a long way historically throughout the US financial system and then into Europe, all the way back into Roman days, if you want to for banking, stress. I mean, one of the main things is that the bank system is what allows our economy to operate. So if we don't have a functioning bank system, people are not able to store the money safely and allowed to able to process payments to make payrolls to, to get loans for a variety of different activities. So it's a really an important system and it's, it's based off of the basic idea of putting in deposits and then the bank can take those deposits and use them to make loans. Right. So the very old, you know, 1930, kind of, I think what most people envision the banking system working looking like is the fractional reserve system. So you would put in a reserve, I put a deposit down $100, and the bank could take some percentage of that a large percentage, maybe 90%, it could lend that out, it'd become a mortgage or to become a personal loan, and the person would take that deposit in another bank, they can lend 90% of that out. And so you get this kind of multiplier effect that happens at the creation of money. And so that's one of the really interesting things is these banks are able to actually create money. And then you always have this worry, it's kind of twofold, because typically, the deposits are demand deposits, meaning there that you can go and show up and you can ask for the money at any time. And the bank does not have the opportunity to invest in things that can be made liquid immediately. There's just not that many opportunities to invest. And so you invest in things that are bank, that are going to sometimes be very long term, and sometimes are shorter term. But the goal is to invest in a way that you get enough money coming back in that you can meet the demands that people have for the deposit. So the big challenge that happens in a banking crisis, is that people no longer trust that the bank is going to be able to make good on those assets. So the use of acid is considered to be a credit risk, meaning they don't think the person you went to is going to give it back. Or we have a new idea. I mean, it's not that I knew, but did you have what we call it duration risk. So duration risk is where the bank lent money out at a very low interest rate. Because everything was very stable and calm. This happened recently, right? We've had very low interest rates, the Federal Reserve's and buying lots of money, lots of bonds and putting on their balance sheet. Literally, I mean, it's actually, during the pandemic, it more than doubled the amount of assets on the Federal Reserve. And we're not talking a small amount, we're talking something in the order from $4 trillion to $8 trillion worth of assets were pulled out of the system, and put into the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve. And so if you get this very low interest rate, and suddenly, there's something like inflation, that so when the Federal Reserve sees inflation, central banks, their response is to raise the interest rate, because that's been slows down the creation of money, you raise the interest rate, all of these assets that banks hold broadly, throughout, literally, trillions of dollars worth of assets, suddenly had to be devalued, because the interest rate they're paying is much lower than the interest rate the Federal Reserve is paying. And so suddenly, you have the shock to the whole system where you've got to have assets above liabilities. And suddenly you get the sharpest like this, and people are not sure it was this much, or did actually go below the liabilities or not. And so the challenge we're facing right now is not, I mean, Silicon Valley's got kind of a unique portfolio of loans, they make them make loans, largely well, most banks do them regionally around the geographic area. And so they are lending out to entrepreneurs into kind of maybe some higher risk activities. But they also own a lot of long dated mortgages, they have a lot of long, dated treasuries. And so when you see that interest rate go up, it just shifts down and, and then you get people saying, I'm not sure I want to be here. And they say, I'd like my money back. And then the Federal Reserve, and the regulators will say you can, you can pretend like your loans are at the value of the par value you paid for them. But when I go and say, I'd like my money, you have to sell them. And then you suddenly you're at 80%, or 90%, of what the regulator said you have. And then what the Federal Reserve did, or Silicon Valley Bank did is they went and said, We need more capital. So they went and tried to sell stocks. And whenever a bank tries to sell stocks, that's a huge signal. Everybody goes, Why are you selling stocks? Why do you need this capital? And then, and then people start doing this calculation. They're saying, Okay, do I want my money there? Right, because I gotta make payroll, I'm gonna lose, you know, just this, I'm not lending you money. People don't think of it as money. And, and for most of us as consumers, we don't, because we have the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FDIC. And they're all insured deposits up to $250,000, which is a lot of money for most people. That's, you know, most people don't keep that kind of money in their checking account. But companies keep millions of dollars in their checking account. And they have no guarantee. And so the companies that were at Silicon Valley Bank, were saying, you know, what, I'd rather have my deposits, that one of the big four, those four banks would consider to be systemically important institution designated by the federal government, they have more than a trillion dollars in assets on their balance sheets. And it's like a JP Morgan or Bank of America, these types of institutions and people said, I'll just take my money out of Silicon Valley and put it over and Bank of America put it over in JP Morgan, because I got a very high level. Have confidence that the US government will not let those banks go down, they could let Silicon Valley go down. And that may or may not have an impact. And so, so that's a dynamic that that is, is not uncommon. There's different ways it shocks. And this is very similar, very similar to the story with the savings and loan crisis that happened in the 1980s and 1990s. Where, you know, the new deal with Roosevelt, he was trying to get more financial resources into broader parts of the population. So they had started the thrift and Savings and Loan institutions, and they would loan mortgages, home, you know, kind of personal loans, automobile loans, but it was not mainly business loans. But it became primarily a mortgage operation. How many of these organizations do you think there's no risk, really, if one of them goes down, but they're all doing the same thing. They're all holding mortgages. And then for no fault of theirs, interest rates had to go up from Paul Volcker, because inflation was going out of control. So inflation goes out of control. And they're sitting there saying, Oh, no, I've got mortgages that are 30 years on that I'm getting 5% on, suddenly, interest rates are at 14%. And I need to get depositors. I've got to offer them more than the 3% I was offering before and, and so we had the Resolution Trust Corporation come in and was set up by the government and spent $130 billion worth of taxpayer money. And that's, that's the definition of a financial crisis. So these things happen, I think we have the same kind of thing. There's a lot of stress throughout the entire system, because the Fed has been raising the interest rates, and it's not coming to the point yet where we have a formal entity created by Congress with assets to go and back, then maybe they will use try to use the Fed's balance sheet for a while longer. But I do worry about having $8 trillion on the Fed's balance sheet with no plan to pay it back or no way to unwind it per se at this point.
Rosemary Pennington
John, when we found out we were talking to you I crowdsourced amongst my colleagues for questions, because this is something that we've been all talking about for a while. And one of my one of my colleagues, this is I'm going to read his question pretty much verbatim. But he wrote to me, Derek Thompson, of the Atlantic in plain English podcast, has been talking about what he's calling the low interest rate phenomenon to explain how things have looked stable and growing over the last decade, but how they're really the result of a cheap money investing environment. And he sort of wanted to see kind of what your perspective might be on that. And whether that sort of helped fuel the situation we're in now.
John Liechty
Cheap money does fuel all kinds of challenges. So I do think we have been, I think we're exiting a cheap money environment. You know, the Federal Reserve kind of under Alan Greenspan took the position that you handle financial turmoil, business cycles, booms, and particularly the bust, by recently making money very inexpensive. So after the financial crisis, it turned out the financial crisis after the internet bubble burst, right, so that that burst did not have a real impact on kind of the operational business climate, it really kind of impacted people's pensions more than it did the bank balance sheets. And so the ability for the financial system to continue to function, but the Federal Reserve just lowered interest rates and flooded the market with money, so that people can kind of read more easily, even when the cost of money comes down, then your willingness or ability to take risks, certain risks, just increases, it goes down a certain level you can, it's now the expected return is sufficient. And I'll go ahead and try a different business opportunity, I wouldn't have tried to hire a returning client climate, for example. And so this has been a policy perspective, after the 2008 financial crisis, we were in an extended period of not only low interest rates, but we had the quantitative easing strategy, which was where the central banks would go and buy longer dated. So you know, the interest rate is about, like overnight, so it's very short term lending, and the Federal Reserve controls that and that then propagates out through the system, but, but they actually went out and bought bonds that were 10, 15, 20 years in maturity. And because they're so big, they buy these big, they go out and buy these things, no one's gonna go against it because they have an unlimited balance sheet, they can spy as much as they want. So it forces the interest rates down all across the yield curve all across the maturity of the assets that you can buy. So I do think we are in that. And I think we're probably actually going to be honest.
Rosemary Pennington
You’re listening to Stats and Stories. And today we're talking about risk and regulation of banking with John Liechty.
John Bailer
You know, I was looking at our local news headline on the front page of the paper on Sunday, and the headline read “experts banks look for ideas to halt next failure,” and then the subtitle, the subheading was: cry. CES occurred despite no shortage of warning signs. And, you know, as you were saying, I mean, it's, this is not something new that has not been experienced before, that there's sort of this, there's this, you pointed to 2008, as a relatively recent time when this was observed. So, you know, what's the kind of intervention that can be done to kind of lessen the chance of this into the future?
John Liechty
Well, part of this is a political problem. Right? So it's, when you put a politician in charge of fiscal policy, they can write checks. That literally is what happened in the last. So and, and there's a timing, right. So you've got to be really careful about the timing of putting stimulus money into an economy. So I think was very timely during the pandemic, when people were being unemployed businesses were contracting, lots of people suddenly didn't have income, then that was actually very helpful, because it helped keep people with resources that help them stimulate limited demand, which kept companies going and kept people and families, Poland together. But then when you get towards the end of the pandemic, it's always hard to know, you know, when the economy's gonna start coming back, but it looked pretty strong. When Biden came in, it looked like it was growing. And so you know, you had employment expanding, you had people getting jobs, you had them creating wealth. And as always, inflation is the number of dollars chasing the number of goods, so that you added a whole bunch more money. And it was not the same environment as earlier, when the market was contracting. And that money helped basically kind of level things out, he just exploded on top of it. And so that then gave the inflation shot. Right. So how do we solve the problem? Well, inflation is never good. And I think it was a political decision that I personally didn't support, told my wife. I said, I don't think it's going to end well. I'm concerned about the inflation Reduction Act, misnamed as it is. It'll just add to this concern that we have. So what can we have done from the regulatory side? So the regulatory side, really, Donald Trump said, we're in Congress agree, there's a lot of past things a lot, maybe this is an executive order, I think with a lot to go back and double check that, that only the really big banks, the four biggest ones have to be stress tested have to be looked at very carefully have to have their balance sheets, put through a variety of different scenarios of what the economy might look like in different, very difficult challenging potential situations, and then see which of the banks would potentially fail and then get advice back from the regulators how to adjust their portfolios to try to be more resilient. So we basically excluded all the rest of the banking system from being more rigorous because it's expensive to do, it's hard to do and expensive to do. So we then but even even in that situation, it seems like the regulators that were left, because they weren't the banks were not left unregulated. They just weren't regulated by the Federal Reserve for this particular designation as being systemically important. But people seem to just miss this basic play that if you buy long dated bonds, at a low interest rate environment, and inflation comes in the Fed response to it, you're going to have a real big hit to your acid portfolio. So that's, that's one thing that I think we could have regulators pay more attention to, you know, there's some other things that I don't have definitive knowledge on, but I always worry about and, and it's the alternates to our fiat money system, and through forms of the cryptocurrency products that are out there, and I personally, don't invest in those night, anybody asked me, I tell them, I don't think it's a very good investment. My basic reason, I think there's this huge political risk. I don't conceive of a central bank or a government giving up their ability to control money to cede that to some other entity. I think at some point, if they get, you know, Bitcoin or whatever it gets to a certain level of size, there'll be ways that governments will cartel it. And so then that crash came down as well, for that hit some of the balance sheets. Some of the balance sheets were, you know, in the higher risk venture capital type world, the Silicon Valley's that had a hit on it, too. So all of those are kind of hard to foresee. But the basic play here of long dated low interest rate assets on the balance sheet, and not having some provision for what happens when the Federal Reserve for political reasons or technologies, other reasons, decides they have to intervene. That's something we think society really hasn't solved, to be honest with you. The other regulatory thing I think that's missing really is we don't have a good framework for deposit insurance for large companies for companies that have got freedom Small companies above this $250,000 threshold. So I think it would be prudent for the US Legislature and the regulatory community to come together and find some kind of specifications, you can be, you know, banks have to have a certain designation, there could be a separate insurance fund, that doesn't touch the residential Insurance Fund, the FDIC runs, it'll still be run by the FDIC. But this needs to be funded differently. So there's not a cross subsidization to have different asset classes they can invest in, but give the banks and the companies to give me the company's a product and a tool for operation that is safer, more secure, I think that would be that would help mitigate some of these challenges.
Rosemary Pennington
I know that you helped push for the creation of the Office of Financial Research. And I wonder if this might be a good time to sort of ask what kind of data is that office gathering? That perhaps it wasn't pre 2008? And is there data available that might have helped people get a sense of this thing? That was oncoming?
John Liechty
So I started that effort at a, I didn't know a lot about the banking system. And I went to a workshop that one of the main bank regulators and put on at the National Institute of Statistics was kind of a joint thing. The Office Comptroller of the Currency regulates the national banks in the US. And, and we're supposed to be talking about kind of research problems. So the statistical kind of technical research problems, and I listened to everybody talking, and they're all talking about what they called Basel one and Basel two regulatory frameworks, that's about individual institutions, nothing about the whole system. I said, this is when I raised my hands. This is kind of crazy, why aren't we talking about the whole system? Who's got data on the whole system? Who's in charge if I figured somebody figured the Fed or somebody had it? And the answer was, nobody sees the entire system, this group sees one part that group sees and other other parts of the system are not seen at all. And it was pretty clear from the tenor of the conversation that nobody was going to share their data. Not unless the president of the United states set them all down and said you must share. So we thought, I mean, I personally thought that was just crazy dangerous, like how can we have such an important part of our doesn't matter what if you're on the left or the right, if your financial systems are not working? Well, we will achieve none of the goals we would hope to achieve. So I helped organize a small group. We went for a legislative response. these are the things we think need to be in this entity, ended up being called the Office of Financial Research, and was about being able to mandate and collect data, system wide. And the industry was really in favor of this, because they have all kinds of troubles and expenses they put into actually just trying to keep track of all the transactions they do. So to have a standardized list of companies, every company, at that point, probably still to this, well, we have a legal entity identifier, so it's probably been solved. But at that point, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, they would have deals with subsidiaries, and they have like 1000s of subsidiaries and have deals and they have their own internal identifications for these different companies. And they would never match up and they spend like $2 billion a year in the back office clearing and cleaning up all these things. So there was strong support and motivation to pull this together. But what was that really targeted towards what it really was targeted towards, I would say is the part that we understand well, was more what we call the shadow banking system. Right. And so the shadow banking system is a system of their financial companies, typically set up by large established investment banks or commercial banks. And they play the same basic role that a traditional 1930s bank would have played, the basic role of a bank is to give short term funding lines of credit to allow you to operate, you know, kind of smooth out fluctuations in your payroll and accounts receivable and such. And to give you long term capital loans, to go build factories or to, you know, buy large amounts of inventory is also the two functions in the shadow banking system is, like I said, a series of markets and companies get formed that, that kind of extend that those two basic capacities, and that's the part of the system that was not well monitored, not really well understood by the regulators, maybe not even by the people that were creating it. And so the Office of Financial Research, I think that was one of its primary objectives was to try to help us keep track of major organized, we have a swap repository now, which is one of the banks do swap deals, swapping credit risks or other things, not an exchange and there's a centralized auditory that information gets documents. So there's there's a number of things that have been improved, but but I think the shadow banking system essentially got contracted after 2008. Do you look at like the commercial paper market or the tri party, repo markets, these have come down quite a bit. And so I think people move more back into traditional banking. So I'm not sure other than maybe scaring people or watching people in this element that want to be here. I won't say they scared them. But but but I think maybe you've just dealt there was better protection from the Federal Reserve and, and the regulators if they stayed more traditional banking system. But but that's a really interesting dynamic that shadow banking system, because it is what created the really big systemic problems in 2008.
John Bailer
You know, one of the things is, you've been talking about this. I found myself thinking about, you know, who should own the risk of investments, you know, and what, when the banks are putting out loans, I mean, you describe this idea of credit risk, you know, sort of whether something is going to fail, you don't get paid back for the money that you lend, but this idea of duration risk that you're buying, you have this financial instrument that, that maybe locks you in at something that's not that, where there's if there's volatility outside of that you're going to have trouble with this. But it seems that, you know, you would set that up that maybe 90%, perhaps is loaned out, you know, the banks do work with this money, should they have kind of should should it be more should be kept on board? Should you know, should they be more at risk of, of kind of the decisions, should they have more responsibility for the decisions that they make possibly lending in a way that has higher risk.
John Liechty
So the fractional reserve system does not exist anymore. That's thinking back to the 1930s, maybe I don't, I'm not sure when they transitioned, maybe as late as late as the 70s, when they use now as they call risk weighted capital. And so essentially, it's a discussion and negotiation between the bank about the assets they're holding, and the regulator about whether they feel that's sufficient to cover the liability that they have in their deposits. And so that's why you can get things like duration risk, kind of sneaking under the radar, because they feel like it's just treasury bills, or just 10 year treasury bills, like, we don't think there's any credit risk that the US government is going to pay that back. The regulators, okay, it's 10 year treasury bills. And they said, Look, we're, you know, we're in a period of trying to come out of a recession out of the COVID. So the risk of interest rate hike is very low. And so they have this kind of conversation. Now, as far as who should hold what risks. So that's, again, cue build. That's what a lot of financial innovation, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were set up in a way that helped take mortgage risk long term mortgages. So if you're in the United Kingdom, for example, where I'm at right now, you can't get a 30 year mortgage, 15 is the furthest you can go. It might be even less than that. You have to carry this interest rate risk personally. Whereas essentially, the US government said, we'll help back an aggregator of mortgages that can then more efficiently manage this duration risk in a central entity called Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And that is going to be a way to provide a 30 year mortgage to the, to the general population, right. So whoever wants to put capital at risk can take these risks. That's, that's fine. The question really, I think more is when should the US taxpayer be backstopping particular risks that people are taking? And I think it should be pretty clear. Like we should be, we should be transparent about that. There's a lot of ways it can be done. But ultimately, as a taxpayer, I should know. And that's probably the challenge we have right now is that when President Biden says we're going to backstop all deposits in choose a class of assets, choose a class of banks. That is not something the legislators granted authority for. Right, the FDIC has got legal authority to go up to $250,000. It doesn't get legal authority to backstop all institutions. And so when we have these events where essentially the legislature miscalculated, right, they did not foresee situation scenarios. And when you're in the financial crisis of 2008, for example. And the Secretary of Treasury and the chairman, the Federal Reserve walk into a group of senior lawmakers to say, if we don't put $700 billion into the hands of the Federal Reserve to backstop our system, it will freeze and it will stop the function. And by the time all that damage works its way through so you might say just let the cost happen. Just let it work its way through. As you can potentially see, I don't, it's hard to guess maybe a third of our total capacity to produce goods and wealth disappear, maybe a quarter, it would be substantial, it would be so substantial. If we would have done that I would view China as being the dominant economic power in the world today, I think it would have switched in that direction. And so you sit there, say $700 billion, or, and just imagine you're going to stay in government after that, right. So it's not going to happen. So it's a process that keeps evolving. I don't wish I could say this is the perfect way because sometimes the problems happen outside of what anybody would imagine, sometimes their technology innovations, sometimes their financial product innovation. So the financial crisis of the savings and loan was sparked by inflation, Jungian accomplice at Yale has got this great paper that basically makes the case for and outlines how the introduction of credit cards is what spurred that bout of inflation. So use credit cards, suddenly, everybody, everybody, everybody's offering credit cards. This is the money equivalent, you can take the credit card, you can change it for things that you can buy with dollars, and suddenly you get this increase in the money supply. That is not being paid attention to maybe by the Federal Reserve, obviously control, it's coming out of banks that coming out of all kinds of different financial institutions. And that's what, that's what ultimately, the government has to come in and rescue the savings and loan institutions. So it's very hard to predict where the shocks will come. So you do need an active ability to have a dialogue. And occasionally, the other thing you mentioned, John, you know, it's an interesting question, like, we could solve this problem, I could just make banks have to keep 50% Of all the deposits in cash. So, what would happen, then? Well, the amount of capital available to invest in new innovations and new operations, you know, new opportunities within our economy would, would substantially decrease. I mean, think back to pre, you know, banking systems back in medieval England, that England, sorry, Italy, is where you get the money to use and the banking systems that we kind of look at today coming into existence. And just think how much wealth they're able to generate in numbers prosperity, it did concentrate, no doubt, but it had a tremendous effect on the whole economy and society. So how much do we want? I can't answer that question. So it's, I think it's more of a political question, to be honest with you. Because if you make the requirements really low, the banks will lend that money out. And if money's easy, they'll try people to try all kinds of very interesting and sometimes devious or questionable things. And then they'll come a crash, and so is your you better to grow really fast, have a contraction, grow really fast, have a contraction, or will slow but have very little chance of contraction, which is kind of it that's what the political debates about in this arena, in my view,
Rosemary Pennington Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.