Tether - risky, but probably not for the reasons they keep telling you

I keep being forwarded this article that came out in Medium recently. It poses as a big expose of tether, the stablecoin that powers lots of cryptocurrency transactions. We learn that it's a scam and a fraud, and about to crash the price of bitcoin.

The very short tl;dr on tether is that it's a cryptocurrency whose value is kept at a stable $1 USD. Why would you want this? Well, lots of people want to transact electronically in something that's basically dollars, but without the insanely anachronistic mess that is the actual US banking system. But USG has aggressively gone after money laundering by controlling the interface of the banking system and crypto exchanges. In other words, control the fiat/crypto interface tightly, and the rest of legal compliance will follow (apparently). If you as a company anywhere in the world take money from the banking system, you get aggressive demands from USG officials that you comply with US "Know-Your-Customer" (KYC) anti-money-laundering legislation. 

So some exchanges like coinbase specialize in being places that comply openly with the law, where you can hold your crypto and feel like there's a lower chance that it will be stolen, because coinbase is possibly about to become publicly listed, a good hallmark of establishment reliability. And others specialize in the opposite of this - transact there while being less legible to US regulators, take on massive leverage on your trades, pay lower fees due to regulatory arbitrage of not complying with US financial laws. So far, they've been able to do this, barely, because they follow the golden rule of "never touching actual US dollars". Just exchange one digital asset (e.g. bitcoin) for another (e.g. tether), and you never directly interact with the standard financial system. So tether ends up being the numeraire good, the medium of exchange on lots of these platforms. Hence why there's so much demand for it.

It's important to note that the way tether is priced at a dollar is that tether, the company, will (so far!) redeem them for exactly a dollar. As long as this promise is viewed as credible, they'll trade at $1, and they roughly do. Tether rather speaks out of both sides of its mouth on this - in marketing materials they tend to emphasize that tethers can be redeemed for the same number of dollars, and in practice they pay out your redemptions, but in the fine print they say that this isn't necessarily, technically, something promised.

So far, so good.

Well, what's the claimed problem? Here's the article's summary:

Tether Ltd. also says one Tether is worth exactly one US dollar. Can they do that? Well they say they can, because they hold $1 worth of assets for each Tether. But are those assets actual dollars? No, they are not. So what if the assets go down in value? Don’t worry; they will not. Okay, but can we at least see the assets? No, you may not.

Who in their right mind would use something like Tether? Well, the short answer is that many people use Tethers to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The long answer, though, is astounding — but more on that later.

Because Tether sounds exactly like a currency fraud, it may not surprise you to learn that Tether Ltd. is currently under investigation by the Office of the Attorney General for the Southern District of New York. That investigation was announced to the public on April 25th, 2019.

As an aside, the Office of the Attorney General for the Southern District of New York are a pack of assholes who feel justified in arresting anybody on the planet who so much as looks at a financial transaction in a way they don't like, on the highly compelling theory that a) Manhattan has a lot of banks, and b) Manhattan is the center of the universe. If you are not utterly cynical about their press releases by now, I don't know what to tell you. 

And from there follows a very breathless and interesting read of all the ways that tether has been printing tether coins, and this is pumping up the price of bitcoin, and it's all likely to collapse because it's a giant scam. 

 "Nonetheless, based on this evidence, I concluded my risk was now too great. I was long Bitcoin up to my eyeballs; Bitcoin was clearly correlated with Tether; Tether was clearly being issued at a frantic rate; and that issuance had a high probability of being backed by nothing at all."

Have a read. There are a lot of interesting facts in there. In fact, if you feel yourself well versed in finance, go away and read the article and try and find the big glaring conceptual error in it, then come back.  

I am in two minds about this article. 

On the one hand, the author is likely right that tether has a non-trivial chance of being shut down by USG, that it fuels a large amount of leveraged trades in crypto, and that the loss of tether would likely cause a big deleveraging that would probably be disastrous for bitcoin prices

On the other hand, the reasons he thinks this will happen are moronic, ludicrous and risible. They are a great example of a certain kind of stupidity that is annoying prevalent in crypto communities. 

What is the first order problem with the whole discussion?

The gigantic blind spot is that he, like lots of crypto people, seems to not notice the obvious fact that tether is simply a bank. The tether coin itself is a demand deposit, just transformed into cryptocurrency form. It's hard to think of a cleaner example of the hypothesis that money itself started as debt that began to circulate. The company keeps a certain amount in reserves to fund these possible redemptions, and then invests the rest. This is how basically every bank in the world works.

The reason that so few people spot this is that the world is roughly partitioned into 

-people who like cryptocurrencies and who think that all "fractional reserve banks" are scams, and

-people who like mainstream banking, and think that cryptocurrencies are scams.

So as a result, the number of people who are both knowledgeable and agnostic on both fractional reserve banking and crypto is surprisingly few. 

And when you see it this way, a huge amount of the apparent mysteries immediately get resolved. This comparison ought to be obvious, but it’s not, because guys like this tend to have completely moronic ideas about what a bank actually is, and simply think that all banks of any form are “scams”, regardless of how well capitalized they are. He has some huge hard-on of this idea of himself as the narrator in the Big Short, but somehow never learned how a bank actually works. 

Go back to the quote above. Banks are partitioned into two types. Those where every dollar of deposits is backed by 100% literal cash US dollars in a vault, and those where it is “backed by nothing at all.”

Like…did you consider any other possible bank balance sheets? Are these the only two possible cases? 

His idealized type of bank (assuming he even realizes that this is what he's describing, which I doubt) is called a narrow bank. In practice you should be able to set up a bank that just takes investors deposits, in turn deposits them at the Fed, and earns the interest the Fed pays on reserves. Why can't you do that? Well, the Fed has denied licenses to such banks, with largely spurious reasons given as to why, in ways that smell like corruption, even to very mainstream economists like John Cochrane.

So since we don't have that option, every bank is a fractional reserve bank. To a banking agnostic, the crucial question is not "is it a scam engaged in maturity transformation?". Rather, the question is "given how well capitalized the bank is, how likely is it that there will be a bank run that causes depositors to not get paid back in full?".

Suppose tethers are only backed 74 cents in the dollar by actual USD, a claim that’s floated around here. Here’s the question. They took in 100 cents in the dollar in cash. They now hold 74 cents. What does this guy think they did with the remaining 26 cents? Blew it all on coke?

No, what they very likely did is buy the exact cryptocurrencies that the guy laboriously shows that tethers are being used to purchase.

So at the time they bought it, their portfolio was most likely something like 74c cash, 26c BTC or whatever.

Now, a sensible risk weighting would assign a big haircut to these BTC assets, given how risky they are. Sure. But what this guy does, along with places who should know better like Bloomberg, is downweight every single asset that's not cash to a risk-weighted collateral value of zero. This is, to not put too fine a point on it, imbecilic. 

And the reason this is even more egregious is the following. Ex post, what happened to the price of that BTC? It went up like crazy. 

Assuming this much is roughly true, this would make tether among the best capitalized banks in the world. As a betting man, I’d wager pretty strongly that the value of their crypto is way higher than the missing 26c in the dollar or whatever of liabilities they owe, probably by a factor of 2-10.

Buddy, if you think tether is a scam, let me tell you about Citibank. 

So what do you do if you’re now a bank who's crazily over-capitalized, and holding a lot of crypto assets? Well, one option is to say “sod it, let’s print some more tether liabilities, and use those to buy more crypto”.

Absent government regulations, this is an entirely sensible thing to do. The timeline above explains every single “suspicious” fact that this guy points to.

The risk that tether, left to its own business operations, is about to go bust, seems quite low, as long as they’ve likely been using part of their cash to purchase crypto that’s since risen greatly in price. It's true, there hasn't been a proper audit, so we don't know for sure what they've been buying or holding. Maybe they really have just spent it all on hookers. But the strongest bet to me, for a variety of reasons (including those floated by tether skeptics) is that tether has been buying crypto assets. If they've bought some kind of diversified crypto portfolio before March 2020, happy days. Strongly well-capitalized banks do not tend to collapse in bank runs. I would wager quite heavily that, at current prices, they have way more crypto assets than they need to pay off every possible tether holder (even if, as is true, liquidating said assets all at once would cause a big price drop).

So what’s the actual problem with tether?

First, while they are a bank, they don’t say they’re a bank. They tend to imply, falsely, that they’re more like a money market fund, just holding cash and cash equivalents.

Second, if they are a bank, they run the risk of being regulated like a bank, and they sure as hell haven’t been complying with banking regulations, notwithstanding that they’re probably very well capitalized.

Third, their whole business model smells like know-your-customer violations.

All of this means that there’s a decent chance of them getting boned by some up-and-coming NY DA, running the same playbook as for Tradesports, and World Star Poker, and a bunch of others. Freeze assets. Destroy your business because you can't access any of your assets. You dip into some of the reserve cash to stay afloat. They declare you a ponzi scheme, improperly stealing customer funds, and say you collapsed for this reason. Whether you were or weren’t (and in the case of tether, there’s good reasons to think they have more assets than they need, not less), the proximate cause of the collapse is government.

Where this guy is right, is that tether fuels a lot of the levered bets people make on dodgy exchanges. Take away the tether that fuels these exchanges, and you probably get a massive deleveraging. I’d bet on this being a Mt Gox level event for BTC if it happens. If the only demand is now coming from unlevered, KYC compliant bets on Coinbase, that’s a big reduction in likely demand.

At the end, the big irony is that

a) he's right that you should be worried about tether, about the prospect of it being closed down, and the likely impact of this on BTC prices, but

b) the one thing tether gets the most flack for is the one bit that seems least likely to be true - being massively undercapitalized, and unable to pay back depositors. 

Suffering is Interesting, Ending Suffering is Uninteresting

One of the most important statements of Buddhist philosophy is the Four Noble Truths. These were taught by the Buddha in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the first discourse he made to the five ascetics, who he had worked with during his first years after becoming a monk.

The Four Noble Truths are stated thus:

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. 

Existence is suffering.

The cause of suffering is craving.

The cessation of suffering comes from the giving up of craving.

The way to give up craving and reach the cessation of suffering is to follow the Eightfold Noble Path.

These may be true. They may be false. That is up to you to decide, as the Buddha himself said.

But what is intriguing to me is the relative levels of interest in each of the Four Noble Truths. If you check Google's search results, you get the following number of hits:

"First Noble Truth" - 54,000 results

"Second Noble Truth" - 30,100 results

"Third Noble Truth" - 31,700 results

"Fourth Noble Truth" - 28,100 results

So to judge accordingly, people are far more interested to find out that the Buddha thought the world is miserable than to find out how the Buddha proposed to deal with this predicament.

Less than 60% of the people who found the First Noble Truth insightful enough to quote it displayed any interest in finding out how to actually get rid of suffering. Of course, the Buddha may just be wrong about all this. But then why quote the First Truth in the first place?

Not only that, but having gotten to the end, we're told that the way forward is the Eightfold Noble Path.

"Eightfold Noble Path" - 17,800 results

This, of course, is even less interesting to people than the Noble Truths themselves, hence another third of people drop away. Oh, you mean he was actually serious about ending suffering, and gave a detailed description of how to get there? Bah, who's got time for that!

As a result, Buddhism more or less gets reduced in the popular conception to Brad Pitt's pithy phrase in 'Se7en'

"You're right. It's all f***ed up. It's a f***ing mess. We should all go live in a f***ing log cabin."

So why is the First Noble Truth much more interesting to people than the rest?

Perhaps they don't believe the rest. This is possible, but given the frequency of repetition, I hear the Brad Pitt version quoted as if it's the actual main point of Buddhism. I think most of the 24,000 odd people who don't get past Truth #1 honestly don't know what the others even say.

If they haven't heard the other three truths, it's because they didn't resonate in a way that made people want to repeat them. So why is that?

I suspect part of it comes from what The  Last Psychiatrist said about narcissism, here:

The unconscious doesn't care about happiness, or sadness, or gifts, or bullets.  It has one single goal, protect the ego, protect status quo.  Do not change and you will not die.  It will allow you to go to college across the country to escape your parents, but turn up the volume of their pre-recorded soundbites when you get there.  It will trick you into thinking you're making a huge life change, moving to this new city or marrying that great guy, even as everyone else around you can see what you can't, that Boulder is exactly like Oakland and he is just like the last guys.   And all the missed opportunities-- maybe I shouldn't, and isn't that high? and he probably already has a girlfriend, and I can't change careers at 44, and 3 months for the first 3/4 and going on ten years for the last fourth, and do I really deserve this?-- all of that is maintenance of the status quo, the ego. 

and here:

Grandiosity is only one possible manifestation of a psychic process that went awry.  The essence, the defining characteristic of narcissism is the isolated worldview, the one in which everyone else is not fully real, only part a person, and only the part the impacts you.

Narcissism is self-protective.  It simultaneously allows for the reduction of the other to prop status, while reassuring you that this perspective is not wrong or dangerous because it's not about superiority. 

The First Noble Truth, quoted alone and out of context, can sound ego-validating. Your suffering is a cosmic truth that is inescapable! The misfortune you're suffering is pre-ordained in the structure of the universe. It's not your fault - you're perfect the way you are!

Truths two through four, however, inform you that it is your fault. Whether you find this demoralising or inspiring says a lot about you. Your misery is due to your actions and thoughts, but it's something within your power to change. That should be great news, but of course it isn't necessarily. Faced with the choice between continuing to suffer and changing oneself, are you really surprised that lots of people prefer the former?

And the number that go on to find the details of how to actually do it is smaller still.

The Buddha, of course, was not a psychiatrist in the modern sense, and The Last Psychiatrist is no Buddhist either. But they find common ground in the following observation about the modern world - the main craving that people have is not really craving for material things or money, but attachment to their ideas of self.

So it's well worth pondering The Last Psychiatrist's description for how to deal with the problem of ego:

"Help me, please, I think I'm a narcissist.  What do I do?"

There are a hundred correct answers, yet all of them useless, all of them will fail precisely because you want to hear them.

There's only one that's universally effective, I've said it before and no one liked it. This is step 1: fake it.

You'll say: but this isn't a treatment, this doesn't make a real change in me, this isn't going to make me less of a narcissist if I'm faking!

All of those answers are the narcissism talking.  All of those answers miss the point: your treatment isn't for you, it's for everyone else.

If you do not understand this, repeat step 1.

The surprisingly inconvenient implications of hereditary politicians

So Canada elects another Trudeau, the son of the last one. Meanwhile America ponders electing either its third Bush in 30 years or its second Clinton in 16 years.

Honestly, what is the polite acceptable explanation for all this nonsense?

Because I can only think of possibilities that are all in one way or another deeply hostile to beliefs that polite progressives hold. Either:

a) These are in fact the most qualified candidates in their respective countries, because ability to lead a country is extremely highly heritable, presumably due to an overwhelmingly strong genetic component (though Hillary Clinton doesn't fit this, being a spouse, not a blood relative)

b) These are not the most qualified candidates, and these are not even the candidates that the electorate really most wants, but they win anyway due to some combination of :

b. i) the fact that we are ruled by an iron oligarchy of powerful families and interests who perpetuate themselves, and/or

b. ii) the electorate is comprised of complete morons.

c) These are not the most qualified candidates, but these are the candidates that the electorate really wants, because the electorate really has a deep-seated desire to return either to a hereditary monarchy, or a system of alternating rule by powerful ruling families, a la medieval and renaissance Florence. 

I don't think these are mutually exclusive possibilities, and all have something of a ring of truth about them.

But seriously, is there some other answer I've missed that would be more acceptable to the way the world is portrayed in a high school civics class?

Don't hold your breath waiting for the media to discuss the implications of any of these hypotheses.

Bun Arbitrage

It is left as an exercise to the reader to show that, under the law of one price and the absence of arbitrage, the market-clearing price of a hamburger bun in Heidelberg is zero.

A good heuristic for a certain type of BS

One phrase that in practice means almost the exact opposite of what it claims is the expression 'scientifically proven'.

I have known a good number of scientists, both social and physical, and I've never once heard them use this expression non-ironically to describe either their own, or anyone else's work. Mathematics proves things, by formal theorems. Science, on the other hand, provides evidence that supports some hypotheses and which rejects other hypotheses. But even when a null hypothesis is formally rejected, knowledge in the sciences is contingent. At any time, your theory is making falsifiable predictions that are so far consistent with the data, but which might be overturned at any time.

And even in places like economics, theory models, which do use formal mathematical proofs of particular ideas and thus may loosely be justified in terms of speaking of 'proof', almost never use the term when referencing the broad idea they're trying to advance. Economists will say 'I solve a model which shows how information asymmetry affects trading volume', not 'Information asymmetry is scientifically proven to decrease trading volume'. What has been solved is one particular model, but there are many other competing models that may be consistent with the data too. Nobody would dream of saying that science proved their theory result.

'Oh sure', you might say, 'we understand that there's a distinction among the finer points of philosophy of science. But in practice, saying science has proved something just means there's lots of evidence consistent with it. Why be such a purist?'

A good question, since you asked.

The reason my heuristic works, however, is that most people who perform actual science do understand the distinction, and are likely to use the right language. By contrast, people who like the phrase 'scientifically proven' are almost always sneaking in an appeal to authority in order to paper over either a) their lack of understanding of the complexity of the issue, or b) the annoyingly inconclusive evidence for the particular proposition that they think it would be politically desirable for more people to believe.

The claim in the above paragraph, of course, is a hypothesis. In the name of science, we should see whether the evidence supports the hypothesis or not.

To check, here's the top 5 results that come up when I type in the phrase 'reject the null hypothesis' into Google News:

1. Do Teams Undervalue European Skaters in the Draft?
2. Hypothesis Testing in Finance: Concept & Examples
3. Culture war in the deep blue sea: Science’s contentious quest to understand whales and dolphins
4. WaPo Climate Fail on Missouri
5. Using a fund manager? You'd get the same results at a casino

So that may not sound stellar, but they're all somewhat related to formal evaluation of evidence for and against ideas in the social or physical sciences. Now compare it with what comes up for 'scientifically proven':

1. Scientifically proven herbal aphrodisiacs
2. Writing Exercises Scientifically Proven To Redirect Your Life
3. 10 scientifically proven ways love can heal!
4. Emojis Are Now Scientifically Proven To Help You Get Lucky
5. Ryan Gosling’s Face Has Been Scientifically Proven To Make Men More Supportive Of Feminism

In other words, worthless clickbait. Colour me shocked.

The results, while not subjected to formal statistical testing, directionally support the hypothesis that 'scientifically proven' is a brain-dead appeal to authority by lazy English majors who wish to unjustifiably associate their claims with the patina of scientific credibility.

A non-rhetorical question for people who believe race has no genetic basis

A certain class of trendy lefty and soft social science academic is fond of asserting loudly that 'race doesn't exist', or 'race is only a social construct', or other such nonsense. Bonus points are awarded when it is also asserted that 'science' has determined that race doesn't actually exist.

If there are any such people reading this diary, I have a proposition for you. I will bet you $1 at 1000-1 odds in your favor that by the end of this article I can ask you a question that you will not be able to give any coherent answer to if race has no genetic basis at all. If I'm right, you can pay me a dollar. If I'm wrong, I'll pay you a grand. Sound fair? We economists believe that those who think they're right should put their money where their mouth is, so here's mine.

One example of the 'race is just a social construct' acolyte is noted nitwit Justice Mordecai Bromberg at the Australian Federal Court. From his judgment in the disgraceful Andrew Bolt case:

"It is now well-accepted among medical scientists, anthropologists and other students of humanity that ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are social, cultural and political constructs, rather than matters of scientific ‘fact’. 

Despite what is now known about the invalidity of biology as a basis for race or ethnicity, legal definitions of Aboriginality, at least until the 1980s, exclusively concentrated on biological descent."

Got that? Mordecai Bromberg's lazy appeal to authority has declared it from the temple mount that everyone knows that race has no biological basis.

For sure, there are aspects of the way that we describe racial groups in casual conversation that vary over time and across countries. There were large changes over time in social acceptability of the Irish and Italians in America, for instance (although it's not clear they were thought of as being 'not white' as much as just 'not desirable'.) Barack Obama's race is viewed differently in America than it would be in Kenya or Brazil.

But this is a very different claim from the one they make, namely that race actually has no genetically identifiable basis at all.

I assert, dear reader, that this claim is laughably, demonstrably stupid, and that it is not hard to show that this is so.

To do this, there are two strands of argument you might consider.

First, you can patiently explain things like Lewontin's Fallacy, and the idea that race is best thought of as capturing the principle components of genetic variation in lots of alleles all at once. Want to bet on how much impact that's going to have?

But a much simpler technique is to pose the following conundrum:

If you go to 23andme, for a hundred bucks they'll send you a tube into which you can put a saliva sample. Send that tube back to them, and they'll analyse it in their lab and tell you the percentage of your ancestry made up by each different racial group.

Now, granted, if you're a diehard sceptic it's hard to prove that there answers are actually correct. But I would wager large amounts of money that if you have a reasonably good knowledge of what your family history is, they will give you answers that line up with that. I will also wager my entire life savings that they will not find that you have a majority of your DNA from an ethnic group that you neither look like nor have any known family history of. If you look white, and your parents look white, and they tell you that their parents came from England, it is vanishingly unlikely that 23andme will tell you that the majority of your ancestors 500 years ago were living in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So here's my $1000 question to Mordecai Bromberg:

How do you think they're able to do that?

No joke. No rhetorical flourish. Take as long as you want to think about the answer. I've got my stack of hundreds at the ready.

In your own mind, how is 23andme actually generating these answers?  How are they able to pretty accurately describe the very same 'social constructs' that your parents were talking about using only information contained in your saliva?

Bear in mind that this is a huge puzzle even if the answers they're giving are imperfect and error prone. How are they able to generate any answers whatsoever? Dumb luck? Guessing? IP or postal addresses? Traces of food you've been eating recently contained in your saliva? Private Investigators?

Be careful which of these you answer, because they're all easily refutable. If it's private investigators digging into your family history, that's easy to test - just secretly send in a saliva sample from someone of a different race and don't tell them, and see what comes back.

But this aside, I genuinely have absolutely no idea how the blank slate see-no-race-hear-no-race crowd explains this magic to themselves.

Jim Goad very aptly described this kind of race fantasy. He called it 'liberal creationism'. And he's exactly right. It is an article of faith, not science. Science made up its mind long ago. The hypothesis that race has no genetic basis is not just falsifiable, but falsified.

Oh Noz! OMG!

Apparently the USDA website is shut down due to the government funding crisis.

This prompts two responses from me:

1. Oh no! How will we ever possibly survive without whatever the hell it is the USDA website is meant to do. It will seriously impact the ability of the USDA to deliver key services in...er...um...

2. These people apparently have such a low opinion of your intelligence that they think you aren't aware that it doesn't actually cost any money to leave a web page in the same state it was in. Quite the contrary - it costs money to change the web page. If the web server were shut down due to lack of money, you wouldn't get any page at all.

I can scarcely think of a better advertisement for firing everybody who signed off on this absurd stunt. Or, you know, just fire the whole USDA. Be honest, do you even know what these clowns do? Have you noticed the lack of services from them in your life recently? If US farmers stopped making milk, I wager you'd notice that pretty quickly. If the USDA stopped interfering in this process, it's far less obvious that you'd miss it.

Thanks to Hector Lopez for the pointer.

That's why you're in admin, not in IT

In the annals of hilariously lame administrative @$$-covering messages, I always enjoy receiving these emails:

'Department [X] would like to recall the message titled '[Mistaken Subject Y]'.

You'd like to recall it, would you? I bet you would.

Unfortunately, that's not how email works - you don't get an 'undo' button after you send it, and you don't get to magically delete it from people's computers if you send the wrong thing.

So why don't you just send the obvious message:

'The message [Mistaken Subject Y] was sent in error - please disregard it. My apologies for the confusion.'

Ah, because that would imply that someone in particular was to blame, and admin fools can't ever commit that to writing. Let's just press the magic 'recall' button instead!

Tools.