ralph schlosstein is still with us.gative headline i had to read and yet a record year for m&a? to august.s the back ,f we had this show in august we would be talking about a steep decline in stocks, steeper than we would have right now. steeper than china. an upset ine had the currency markets comparable to what we have now. and what really matters is the length of that volatility and uncertainty. if it goes on for one month or two months as we saw last summer, it really does not have much effect on the real economy, nor on the confidence of executives to execute strategic transactions. if they volatility last summer had gone for six months for nine months or 12 months, we probably would be sitting in a different circumstance in m&a today than we are. obviously we had a record year last year. it was a record year in dollar buyout of announced transactions. dollar volume of announced transactions was up over 40%. the number of transactions last year was flat. so what has happened here is large transactions, transactions