Navigating Uncertainties: Strategic Bank Playbook

SPEAKER_01: Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that the cost of simply uh insuring a commercial cargo ship has just multiplied by five overnight. SPEAKER_00: Right. Just overnight. SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

I mean you haven't paid for the fuel yet, you haven't paid the crew, you haven't even bought the cargo. Just the insurance policy to literally leave the port has skyrocketed 500%. SPEAKER_00: That's staggering. SPEAKER_01: It really is.

And you know, that is not a hypothetical scenario or some stressed economic model. That is the exact reality of the global financial system in March 2026. So welcome to Deep Dive. We are stepping directly into a very specific, uh, a very intense moment in time.

SPEAKER_00: We really are. SPEAKER_01: A major conflict has just escalated across West Asia, and the shockwaves are basically rewriting the rules of global finance practically overnight. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and the source material we are unpacking today is the March 2026 Cedar View Strategic Bank playbook. SPEAKER_01: Right.

SPEAKER_00: It is uh it's a highly detailed intelligence dossier mapping exactly where the fractures are happening in real time. Aaron Powell Which is fascinating to read. Oh, absolutely. Our mission here is to take this intelligence and look at the underlying mechanics of a systemic shock.

Because crises of this magnitude, they don't merely destroy value, they redistribute it. SPEAKER_01: Redistribute it. I love that framing. SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

The financial institutions that survive and ultimately thrive are the ones capable of identifying the hidden vulnerabilities in their balance sheets before the rest of the market even realizes the math has changed. SPEAKER_01: Right. And we are taking your source material today and breaking down exactly what this means for you. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: Whether you're, you know, an investor looking at emerging market exposure or a business owner managing a complex supply chain, or just someone trying to understand why everything at the grocery store is suddenly going to cost more. This directly impacts your world. SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell It does. But to grasp how the banks are reacting, we first have to establish the physical reality on the ground in the initial 72 hours of this crisis.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's set the scene. SPEAKER_00: So the speed of the escalation is really the defining factor here. Within 72 hours, major energy corridors were severely disrupted. Brent crude spiked to eighty-eight dollars and fifty-two cents a barrel as of March 10th, 2026.

Wow. But the absolute focal point of this crisis is the physical bottleneck at the Strait of Hormuz. SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And the numbers surrounding that strait are just uh staggering.

SPEAKER_00: They really are. SPEAKER_01: I mean, it carries roughly twenty percent of global oil and liquefied natural gas daily. SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm. SPEAKER_01: And you can't just drive around it, right?

SPEAKER_00: No, not at all. SPEAKER_01: You can't lay a quick pipeline to bypass it. Tanker transits drop by about 80% almost instantly. SPEAKER_00: It's just fell off a cliff.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. They went from an average of twenty-four transits a day down to a trickle, leaving over 150 vessels, massive bulk carriers, oil tankers, commercial shipping, just totally stranded in the water. SPEAKER_00: And what's fascinating here is how looking at historical parallels helps frame the severity of that bottleneck. SPEAKER_01: Okay, what kind of parallels?

SPEAKER_00: Well, the 1990 Gulf conflict saw oil surge 89%, which subsequently triggered a massive liquidity squeeze where private deposits and regional banks fell between 15 and 21 percent. SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, up to 21 percent. SPEAKER_00: Yes. That is the baseline for how a geographic conflict translates directly into a bank run.

SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Okay, let's unpack this a bit because I think it's easy for people to compare this to another famous maritime traffic jam, right? Like uh the 2021 ever-given situation. SPEAKER_00: Oh, right, in the Suez Canal. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, where that massive ship got wedged in the canal.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. SPEAKER_01: So the ever given blockage lasted just six days. It delayed 430 vessels and disrupted nearly 93 billion dollars in cargo. SPEAKER_00: Massive numbers.

SPEAKER_01: Huge numbers. It was a mess, and it took three months for global trade to normalize after just a six-day pause. SPEAKER_00: Right. SPEAKER_01: But comparing the Suez Canal blockage to the Strait of Hormuz shutting down is kind of a false equivalence, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00: It absolutely is. SPEAKER_01: Like the ever given was like a broken down car on a multi-lane highway. It's a massive headache. The traffic backs up for miles, but eventually, you know, the tow truck comes, the lane's clear, and you get back up to speed.

SPEAKER_00: Right. It's temporary. SPEAKER_01: Exactly. But the Strait of Hormuz is like the only bridge off an island.

If that bridge closes indefinitely due to active conflict, we aren't just delayed. We are fundamentally stuck. SPEAKER_00: And that distinction between an operational delay and a structural credit event is vital. How so?

Well, a broken down ship is an operational delay. An active conflict zone closing the primary energy artery of the planet shifts the entire baseline of global economic resilience. SPEAKER_01: The baseline just moves. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

Prolonged disruption means sovereign rating pressures build, funding costs rise, and the banking system goes from managing a temporary supply chain hiccup to facing a systemic existential risk. SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell And that physical blockage at the bridge, it immediately translates into skyrocketing costs. Let's look at how this hits the ground, specifically the shipping and trade industries. SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's look at the insurance premiums.

SPEAKER_01: Right. The conflict risk insurance premium surging five times over, going from 0.2% to 1% of a ship's haul value. Yeah.

I mean, that changes the basic calculus of global trade entirely. SPEAKER_00: It does. And to put the mechanics of that into perspective, if a shipping company operates a$100 million supertanker, a 1% premium means they are placing a$1 million insurance bet just for a single voyage into the region. SPEAKER_01: Just to sail in.

SPEAKER_00: Just to sail in. That is pure friction cost added to the ledger overnight. At the exact same time, super tanker freight rates hit$423,736 per day. SPEAKER_01: Wait, per day?

SPEAKER_00: Per day. That is a 94% spike in a single training session. SPEAKER_01: That is unbelievable. And it doesn't stop at oil and shipping, right?

SPEAKER_00: No, it bleeds into everything. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we are talking about supply chains for pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, basic food commodities, and it hits aviation and hospitality instantly. SPEAKER_00: Oh, massively. SPEAKER_01: Over 4,000 daily flights were canceled as Gulf Airspace closed, hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded, and forward hotel bookings just plummeted.

SPEAKER_00: Because tourism and aviation in the Gulf region are not just supplementary industries, they contribute double-digit percentages to the regional GDP. SPEAKER_01: Right. It's core to their economy. SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Exactly. So a sudden drop in hotel bookings is an immediate revenue crisis for the entire service sector. Wow. Additionally, most Gulf states import the vast majority of their food.

When supply chains freeze, fresh produce prices spike, draining consumer spending power almost immediately. SPEAKER_01: Okay, wait. I want to push back on the banking risk here for a second. Yeah, sure.

The intelligence specifically notes that banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council or the GCC, so countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, they entered this 2026 crisis from a position of structural strength, right? SPEAKER_00: It did, yes. SPEAKER_01: They had solid capital ratios, meaning they had plenty of cash reserves set aside, they had high liquidity coverage, and non-performing loans were actually trending downward. SPEAKER_00: That's right.

The data showed a strong foundation. SPEAKER_01: Okay, so their foundation was objectively strong. If a bank has billions in reserves, why does a drop in hotel bookings or, you know, expensive ship insurance threaten their survival? SPEAKER_00: That's a great question.

It is a common misconception that a strong capital ratio makes a bank immune to a crisis. Capital buffers are purely defensive mechanisms. They are shock absorbers. SPEAKER_01: Like on a car.

SPEAKER_00: Exactly. They can absorb the financial pressure of a few defaulting loans, but they do absolutely nothing to prevent the underlying economic pressure from forming in the broader market. SPEAKER_01: Ah, I see. SPEAKER_00: It does not matter how thick the steel is on your bank vault if the local economy suddenly stops generating the cash flow required to put money inside it.

SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Right. The money has to come from somewhere. Trevor Burrus, Jr. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

A revenue crisis in hospitality or a massive cost reset in the shipping sector inevitably bleeds into the bank because the businesses they lent money to suddenly have their operating margins wiped out. They simply cannot make their loan payments. SPEAKER_01: So the Strength Foundation really only buys you a little bit of time. SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell That's all it does.

SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, which brings us to exactly how that hit tears into the banks. The Cedar View Playbook breaks this down into two distinct sides of the balance sheet assets and liabilities. And they are moving at entirely different speeds, which is wild. Let's look at the asset side first.

Uh the loans the bank has given out. This is described as a lagged impact. SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Yeah, the pressure on the asset side is delayed because of how corporate cash cycles work. It hits trade finance first.

Okay, so consider the small and medium enterprises, the SMEs, that depend entirely on port access to move their goods. Because of the conflict in West Asia, major shipping lines are rerouting vessels all the way around the continent of Africa past the Cape of Good Hope. SPEAKER_01: Right, avoiding the bottleneck. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

But that geographic detour stretches a normal 30-day working capital cash cycle out to 60 or even 90 plus days. SPEAKER_01: Meaning a manufacturer who usually ships a container of goods and gets paid 30 days later is now sitting around for three months waiting for that cash to arrive. SPEAKER_00: Precisely. SPEAKER_01: The factory still has to pay its workers, it still has to pay its rent, but the cash flow has completely evaporated.

SPEAKER_00: And the insidious part for the banks holding the loans for those factories is the visibility. SPEAKER_01: What do you mean? SPEAKER_00: It takes weeks, sometimes months, for a broken past cycle to actually show up as a formal default on the bank's internal dashboards. Oh wow.

Yeah, the clock is ticking invisibly. The underlying business is suffocating today, but because they haven't officially missed their 90-day quarterly payment yet, the bank's risk models still say everything is perfectly fine. SPEAKER_01: That is a terrifying blind spot. SPEAKER_00: It really is.

SPEAKER_01: So the asset side is a slow-motion car crash that hasn't even registered on the sensors yet. SPEAKER_00: Exactly. SPEAKER_01: The liability side, the deposits, the money people keep in the bank, that impact is immediate, isn't it? SPEAKER_00: Very immediate.

The GCC has a structurally mobile deposit base. We are talking about expatriate heavy workforces and highly mobile, high net worth individuals. SPEAKER_01: It's a lot of international wealth. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

Over the last decade,$83 billion in foreign direct investment flowed into Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and that capital is highly sensitive to what is called hub risk. SPEAKER_01: Hub risk. Okay, what does that mean in practice? SPEAKER_00: Well, institutional capital and high net worth money is inherently pragmatic.

It moves at the first sign of regional instability. In a region heavily populated by international wealth, capital flight happens at light speed. SPEAKER_01: They don't stick around to see how it plays out. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

High net worth individuals do not wait to see how the conflict plays out. They tactically de-risk immediately. They pull their capital out of regional equities and local currencies, shifting heavily into US dollar cash reserves and gold ETFs housed in different geographic jurisdictions. SPEAKER_01: And it isn't just the billionaires moving their portfolios, right?

SPEAKER_00: No, not at all. SPEAKER_01: The retail banking sector experiences this bizarre phenomenon that the playbook characterizes as a spurt and slump. SPEAKER_00: Right, the spurt and slump. SPEAKER_01: Initially, everyday consumer credit card spending actually spikes.

Residents are panic buying, hoarding essentials, filling up their vehicles with fuel. SPEAKER_00: Prepping for the worst. SPEAKER_01: Yeah. But that early surge on the bank's transaction ledger is a total mirage.

SPEAKER_00: Underneath that temporary spending spike, long-term consumer confidence is collapsing. Everyday residents defer big ticket commitments. Mortgage and auto loan applications drop by 20 to 40 percent in a matter of days. SPEAKER_01: Wow, just like that.

SPEAKER_00: Just like that. But the absolute most dangerous mechanic for a retail bank is the expatriate flight risk. SPEAKER_01: So what does this all mean? If I'm trying to visualize this, uh a bank's balance sheet right now is facing a bizarre dual disaster.

SPEAKER_00: That's a good way to put it. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the asset side is a slow motion unraveling of commercial loans that the bank can't officially see yet, while the liability side is a sudden chaotic evacuation where the wealthiest clients and everyday depositors are taking their money and running for the exits at the exact same time. SPEAKER_00: The reality of those two forces intersecting is incredibly destructive, particularly when you look at the mechanics of an expatriate mortgage.

SPEAKER_01: Okay, walk me through that. SPEAKER_00: If an expat worker loses their job due to the economic freeze and decides to leave the country, the local real estate market is likely already deflating because thousands of other expats are doing the exact same thing. Right. The borrower leaves the jurisdiction, leaving the keys on the counter.

SPEAKER_01: Literally just walking away. SPEAKER_00: Walking away. The bank now holds a depreciating physical asset. And because the borrower has crossed international borders, recovering that unsecured debt is structurally nearly impossible.

That's wild. The mortgage converts into a total structural exposure before a single missed payment is officially recorded by the collections department. SPEAKER_01: Here's where it gets really interesting. SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Because beyond the traditional financial metrics, the mortgages, the trade finance delays, the capital flight, the most alarming parts of this playbook are the risks that absolutely no business continuity plan anticipated. SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell The total blind spots. SPEAKER_01: Exactly. The total blind spots.

SPEAKER_00: But the cascading operational failures that risk models simply do not capture on a spreadsheet. SPEAKER_01: Right. So the first major blind spot is microfinance and community lending. SPEAKER_00: This is a huge one.

SPEAKER_01: We are talking about informal sector expats and small community traders. They operate entirely on cash flow and have literally zero financial buffer against supply chain disruption. SPEAKER_00: None at all. SPEAKER_01: When the regional ports freeze, their capacity to repay a microloan is destroyed in a matter of days, not months.

And again, cross-border enforcement for like$5,000 community loan is nonexistent. SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell And this segment flies completely under the radar of macroeconomic headlines. But because they lack the cash reserves of a large corporation, they surface in the non-performing asset data first. SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Ah, they're the canary in the coal mine.

SPEAKER_00: Exactly. They are the leading indicator for the retail banking sector, signaling the exact speed at which the local consumer economy is seizing up. SPEAKER_01: But the blind spot that really changes the paradigm of modern banking is the digital infrastructure failure. SPEAKER_00: Yes.

SPEAKER_01: During the initial 72 hours of the conflict, infrastructure disruptions to regional data centers degraded over 100 cloud services simultaneously. SPEAKER_00: Unprecedented. SPEAKER_01: Commercial banks literally had their mobile banking and payment platforms taken offline. I mean, banks spend millions preparing for market crashes.

They run stress tests for bank runs, but they clearly did not anticipate their mobile apps going dark simply because a regional physical conflict choked the local cloud infrastructure. SPEAKER_00: This raises an important question, doesn't it? How resilient is a modern digital bank if its underlying regional internet infrastructure is vulnerable to geopolitical physical disruptions? What's a scary thought.

It introduces a brand new category of operational risk. What's fascinating here is how it forces a complete reevaluation of what the cloud actually is. SPEAKER_01: Right, because we don't really think about it. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

We use that term to imply something ethereal and omnipresent. But the cloud is just a massive warehouse of physical servers sitting on the ground, reliant on local power grids and terrestrial fiber optic cables that run through shallow waters and across national borders. SPEAKER_01: They're physical things. SPEAKER_00: Very physical.

When a geopolitical conflict disrupts those physical cables, or when local power grids are rationed, the data center degrades. SPEAKER_01: So a bank can have the most sophisticated AI-driven digital platform in the world. But if the physical fiber cable running into the Gulf is severed, or the data center loses power, the bank effectively ceases to exist for its customers. SPEAKER_00: Completely offline.

SPEAKER_01: You can't wire money, you can't check your balance, you can't pay for groceries. We build these impenetrable virtual fortresses, but they are entirely dependent on highly vulnerable physical infrastructure. SPEAKER_00: And if we connect this to the bigger picture, the vulnerability of that physical infrastructure is precisely why a localized conflict in West Asia instantly becomes a global contagion event. That spreads.

Exactly. The shockwaves do not stop at the borders of the GCC. The intelligence heavily emphasizes the profound and multi-layered impact on major global trade partners, specifically focusing on India. SPEAKER_01: And the connection there makes perfect sense when you look at the mechanics.

SPEAKER_00: How so? SPEAKER_01: Well, India is a massive importer of Middle Eastern oil. So the moment the Strait of Hormuz is threatened and energy prices spike, India faces an immediate widening of its trade deficit. SPEAKER_00: Right.

Their import costs go through the roof. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they have to spend significantly more capital just to keep the lights on and the factories running. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. SPEAKER_01: That dynamic places intense downward pressure on the Indian rupee.

SPEAKER_00: And that currency pressure feeds directly into domestic inflation, which is where the banking contagion really takes hold. SPEAKER_01: Okay, lay that out for me. SPEAKER_00: To combat inflation driven by expensive oil, central banks have to keep interest rates high. Government-owned Indian banks hold massive portfolios of older government bonds.

Okay. When inflation and interest rates rise, the resale value of those older, lower yielding bonds plummets. This forces the banks to recognize what are called mark-to-market losses. SPEAKER_01: Let me make sure I have the mechanism right here for the listener's sake.

Sure. A bank buys a safe government bond paying, say, 3%. But suddenly because oil prices spiked, inflation is raging, and new bonds have to pay 6% just to attract buyers. So nobody wants to buy the old 3% bond anymore.

So the bank has to officially mark down the value of the asset on their books today, wiping out a chunk of their balance sheet instantly, even though the bond itself hasn't technically defaulted. SPEAKER_00: That is the exact mechanism. The global cost of capital resets and the bank takes a massive balance sheet hit halfway across the world. SPEAKER_01: Wow.

SPEAKER_00: But beyond the bond markets and the movement of oil, there is a secondary liquidity pipeline that is equally critical. The movement of people. SPEAKER_01: The expats. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

Millions of expatriate workers from India live and work in the Gulf region. If the Gulf economy stalls and those workers are forced to return home, the remittance flows, the billions of dollars they send back to their families every month, dry up drastically. SPEAKER_01: And Indian banks rely heavily on the steady influx of those remittance deposits to fund their own domestic lending. SPEAKER_00: They absolutely do.

SPEAKER_01: It is a perfect illustration of how deeply entangled the global financial system is. A physical bottleneck in a strait in West Asia dictates currency valuations, triggers mark-to-market bond losses, and severs the remittance pipeline that a local bank in Mumbai relies on to issue small business loans. SPEAKER_00: It's all connected. SPEAKER_01: It really is.

Human movement and migrant labor are just as critical to global banking liquidity as the movement of crude oil. SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to the ultimate question for the institutions staring down this scenario. How do you actually navigate this without collapsing? SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what's the playbook?

SPEAKER_00: The final section of the playbook provides a highly specific methodology for surviving and crucially redistributing opportunity. SPEAKER_01: And the overarching theme of that methodology is a mandatory shift from passive review to active watch. Right. Like a bank can no longer wait for the 90-day quarterly report to tell them their commercial clients are defaulting.

By then it's too late. Way too late. They need to build a monitoring nerve center to track global trade corridors in real time. The playbook specifically dictates tracking 30 to 60 day delinquency trends on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_00: Daily. SPEAKER_01: Yeah. You have to monitor the early warning signals daily because those trends tell you what the formal credit classifications won't show you for another two months. SPEAKER_00: And once you have that visibility, you have to act with precision.

The natural instinct during a major geopolitical panic is a blanket retrenchment. SPEAKER_01: Everyone just pulls back. SPEAKER_00: Exactly. Banks want to stop lending to everyone, freeze all credit lines, and hoard cash.

SPEAKER_01: Which makes sense on paper. SPEAKER_00: It does, but the playbook argues that is a fatal error. Banks must apply tighter credit standards selectively to the most exposed sectors rather than choking off the entire system. SPEAKER_01: They emphasize aggressively revisiting collateral requirements, demanding shorter tenors, which means, you know, forcing borrowers to repay loans over shorter time frames to reduce the bank's long-term exposure.

Trevor Burrus, Jr. SPEAKER_00: Right, getting the money back faster. Trevor Burrus, Jr. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's about tightening the leash exactly where it matters.

But the line in this intelligence that fundamentally shifts the perspective is the thesis that crises do not destroy opportunity. They redistribute it. SPEAKER_00: I love that line. SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell So how does a bank actually go on the offensive during a global shockwave like this?

SPEAKER_00: It requires combining defensive discipline with strategic boldness. SPEAKER_01: Okay, what does that look like? SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Well, while a bank is tightening its tenors and scrutinizing collateral on the defensive side, they must simultaneously lean into their strongest clients. While competitor banks are completely frozen in panic, pulling back from all their relationships across the board, the bold institution steps in.

They deepen their advisory and treasury partnerships. SPEAKER_01: They become essential. SPEAKER_00: Exactly. If a bank proactively helps a major corporate client navigate their foreign exchange risks or helps them onboard to a more resilient digital platform during the worst days of the crisis, that bank locks in a foundational relationship that will last for decades.

SPEAKER_01: Oh, I see. SPEAKER_00: They capture a massive amount of market share precisely because everyone else in the industry is too paralyzed by risk to move. SPEAKER_01: They transition from being a fair weather lender to a structural partner. SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: So to wrap up this deep dive, we have explored the terrifying velocity at which geopolitical conflict infects the localized banking system. SPEAKER_00: We really covered a lot of ground. SPEAKER_01: We did. We started with the physical reality of a closed geographic bottleneck, driving a 94% spike in freight rates and straining 150 vessels.

Right. We examined how that physical blockage creates a dual disaster for banks, the slow motion suffocation of commercial trade loans, and the sudden chaotic evacuation of expat deposits. SPEAKER_00: Spurt and slump. SPEAKER_01: Yep.

We uncovered the unmodeled blind spots of microfinance collapse and the physical vulnerabilities of digital. Digital banking infrastructure. And we followed the economic contagion all the way to India's bond markets and remittance pipelines. SPEAKER_00: And we also explored the narrow path to survival, shifting to an active watch posture, utilizing selective credit tightening, and having the strategic courage to seize the market share that a crisis redistributes.

SPEAKER_01: But there is one final provocative thought from this intelligence that I want you to mull over. SPEAKER_00: Okay. SPEAKER_01: We talked earlier about the cost of maritime insurance surging from 0.2% to 1% of a ship's hull value.

The playbook makes a chilling observation about that specific metric. SPEAKER_00: What is it? SPEAKER_01: It states that this increase is not a temporary conflict premium. It represents a permanent recalibration of regional risk.

SPEAKER_00: Wow. Permanent. SPEAKER_01: Permanent. So here's the prompt for you to explore on your own.

If the cost of merely ensuring the transport of goods through once reliable global corridors is permanently five times higher, what happens to the entire foundational concept of globalization? SPEAKER_00: That's a huge question. SPEAKER_01: If global banks and massive shipping conglomerates permanently price in this level of geopolitical risk, will we see a future where hyperlocalization completely replaces global supply chains? SPEAKER_00: Just out of necessity.

SPEAKER_01: Exactly. Not because of political tariffs or trade wars, but simply because the world can no longer afford the insurance premiums required to trade with itself. SPEAKER_00: It forces a profound re-examination of our economic history. We really have to ask if the era of seamless, cheap, hyper-efficient global trade was actually just a brief historical anomaly rather than the permanent state of human affairs.

SPEAKER_01: When the global economy breaks down, the diagnostic landscape is murky, the symptoms are entirely interconnected, and the treatment requires navigating totally unforeseen blind spots. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. Stay curious and keep questioning the systems around you.