The South Sea Bubble

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Back in, I wanted to do an episode on the south Sea Bubble because that was its three anniversary, and for various reasons, that just did not happen. But I saw a random joke on Twitter recently that referenced both the south Sea Bubble and tulip Mania, and I thought, hey, let's go take another look at that. One of the one of the reasons I did not do with south Sea Bubble episode back in is that at that time, a lot of the resources that I found were written by economists and economic historians. They were really, really in the weeds on their financial jargon, and some of them read like there weren't people involved in this, It was just market forces. It was all money and concepts. Yeah, it's like, that's not the approach that we take on our show. So a big upside of my procrastination is that a ton of new stuff came out in late and then all through that was geared more toward a general audience and not toward other economists. And then was written from a historical perspective. That's more like our approach of our show. So back to the top of the list it went. The south Sea Bubble happened alongside a similar bubble in France that was known as the Mississippi Bubble, and in some ways these two financial bubbles were interconnected. I thought about making this episode cover both of them, but it turns out that they're similar enough in big chunks of it that there were parts that were almost repeated but not exactly, but then also difference enough that there was a key passage that involved an unwieldy explanation two different times. So I pitched that idea. We will talk a little about the Mississippi Bubble, but the south Sea Bubble is the primary focus here. In the early eighteenth century, Britain needed money. The Nine Years War, also known as the War of the Grand Alliance, had stretched from sixteen eighty nine to sixteen ninety seven, and then the War of the Spanish Succession started in seventeen o one. As a result, Britain was deeply in debt, with much of that debt involving navy contractors. It had reached a point where some of them were refusing to provide service beyond its actual involvement in the war. The Royal Navy was also protecting British ships from pirates, enemy warships, and enemy trading ships, so Britain really could not afford to jeopardize it. This was happening alongside some changes in the world of British finance. British periodicals had started printing lists of stock prices around sixteen seventy nine. Then in sixteen a man named John Casting started posting price lists for stocks and commodities and other investments at Jonathan's Coffee House is founded by Jonathan Miles Coffee houses in London's Financial District, where where stockbrokers worked a lot of the time, and Jonathan's Coffee House was one of the busiest. For this purpose, Casting's price list became a newspaper that was called Course of the Exchange. This was really the first time that all of these prices were brought together in one place and published in a way that was easily and publicly accessible. So sometimes it's described as the beginning of the London Stock Exchange, although that was not formally founded until much later. This may be apocryphal, but stockbrokers were allegedly working out of coffee houses because their behavior was so disruptive that they were banned from the Oil Exchange. But coffee houses had also become a hub for socializing and information sharing. Most of them subscribed to multiple newspapers and periodicals, and the coffee houses where people would go to read them. So just as coffee houses made these publications more accessible to more people, the stockbrokers working from them did the same for investing. As that was happening, the Bank of England was also established in sixteen nine four. It acted as the government's banker, including loaning the government money to fund its wartime efforts. This led to the whole idea of national debt in Britain, but at this point the British nation as a whole had no overall budget. Loans and expenditures were approved as they came up. Nobody had a clear sense of even how much money the British government owed and who they owed it to. Eventually, Robert Harley, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked with sorting through all of this. As Harley was working on that Britain still needed to find enough money to cover the military payroll. Harley worked with John Blunt, secretary of the sword Blade Company, to raise funds through the National Lottery. The sword Blade Company, sometimes called the Hollow sword Blade Company, was exactly what it sounds like. They made French style swords that had become popular in Britain. But the company had also gotten into banking and it had raised funds to buy lands by exchanging shares in the company for what we're basically unsecured government bonds. The company had also bought up more of these same bonds ahead of time, expecting them to increase in value when people heard about the share swap, which they did. Harley was impressed with all of this, and that was what led him to look to Blunt for help with the National Lottery. Blunt was in charge of marketing and promotion. All of this really boosted the lottery's performance. It existed before or this, but not in a way that was making a lot of money. This time, it raised one point five million pounds, and then other lotteries followed. This was really a stop gap though it let the government cover some of its most immediate debts, but the money that was raised with this lottery was just a fraction of what the government owed. In seventeen eleven, the south Sea Company, or the Governoring Company of the Merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South season other parts of America and for the encouragement of the fishery, was established to try to manage this debt. It was to be a counterpart to the British East India Company. There was also a political element to this. The British East India Company was controlled by Whigs, but the plan was for the south Sea Company to be under Tory control, so this newly established company would, at least in theory, adjust the financial balance of power between the two parties. John Blunt was tapped as the company's first chief exact Cative, with Robert Harley as governor. The south Sea Company was a public private partnership and it had multiple overlapping purposes. It was a business. It would have a monopoly on trade with Spain's colonies in the Caribbean and South America. Britain also hoped this trading enterprise would allow it to influence the Spanish colonies. In addition to all of this, the South Sea Company would also provide a way for the government to restructure and consolidate some of its debt. The heart of this debt consolidation was a debt for equity swap. The south Sea Company would buy a significant portion of the nation's debt. Investors would then be encouraged to swap any government debts they had for shares in the south Sea Company. The government would pay six percent interest on the debt of the south Sea Company held, and the south Sea Company would distribute that interest to investors as a dividend, So this would provide a solid, predictable return on people's investments. This wasn't just about that six percent return, though. As the price of shares in the company went up, the number of shares that were required to cover the government's debt would go down, but the total number of shares stayed the same, so once the government's debts were all accounted for, any surplus shares could be sold off at market value. As the price went up, people who sold their shares had the potential to make a profit that would be well above that six percent, and if Britain's trade with the Spanish colonies was successful, the company would become more profitable. In a portion of those profits would be passed along to investors as well. Of course, there was a giant hitch to that part of it when the company was first established, which was a Britain and Spain were a war, they were not trading with one another. Don't seem like kind of a weird thing to make your plan whoops. In addition to the potential for turning a profit, swapping debt for equity in the south Sea Company had some other potential benefits for investors. Holding government debt directly had become notoriously difficult. In many cases, debt holders were seriously limited and how or whether they could transfer the debt they were holding to somebody else or otherwise get rid of it. There was a lot of red tape involved. Sometimes it was essentially impossible, and because of the government's ongoing problems with finances, it's payments were often late or even non existent. So you could basically be in a situation where you had loaned money to the British Government, but the government wasn't paying you on time or at all, and you just had no way to untangle yourself from this situation. The south Sea Company plan got around all of that by encouraging people who were holding all kinds of debts with all kinds of terms attached to swap them for shares in the company. From there it would be up to the company to deal with the government and its repayments or black thereof, and the company would pay a reliable, predictable annuity out to those investors who had swapped their debt for shares. At first this seems to work. About nine point five million pounds of government debt was consolidated through the south Sea Company shares in about six months, But eventually things took a turn, which we will get to after a sponsor break. As we mentioned before the break. When the south Sea Company was first established, Britain and Spain were at war, which made it kind of weird for Britain to be penning a huge chunk of debt restructuring on a company that was supposed to trade with Spanish colonies. But in seventeen thirteen, so just a couple of years later, Britain's part in the War of the Spanish Succession ended with the Treaty of Utrecht, which was signed by Queen Anne of England and King Philip the Fifth of Spain. Part of the Treaty of Utrecht was the Aciento, or contract, which granted Britain a monopoly on the transport of enslaved Africans to Spanish territory in the America's. Under the Aciento, Britain would provide four thousand, eight hundred enslaved people to Spain's colonies per year. Britain assigned this right to the South Sea Company. The treaty also specified that Britain could send one trading ship of general cargo per year to the Portobello Trade Fair in Panama. Although these trading rights weren't nearly as broad as people hoped, Europe's colonies in the America's relied so heavily on enslaved labor that investors sought the Aciento made this a sure thing. So yeah, the South Sea Company was going to work with the Royal African Company. The Royal African Company was who would purchase the enslaved people in Africa, and then the South Sea Company would be who transported those people across the Atlantic Ocean and then sold them in Spanish colonies. We should note that in the early eighteenth century, Britain had a small but established population of free black people, particularly in London. They're also enslaved people in Britain at this time, and there were absolutely people in Britain who objected to slavery on moral grounds, but all of this was happening decades before an abolitionist movement coalesced in Britain. So slavery and industries that relied on slavery were deeply entrenched in the British economy. And the fact that so many people were so eager to invest in what was at its heart a slave trading venture that's really reflective of societal attitudes about the institution at the time. In seventeen fourteen, Queen Anne died and King George the First came to the throne. As we said earlier, the South Sea Company had originally been envisioned as an enterprise controlled by Tories, but at this point many Tories were Jacobites. They supported James Francis Edward Stewart, son of James the second and seventh, as heir to the throne, rather than George the First. We have talked about all of this in prior episodes, including the one on the Jacobite Rising of seventeen forty five. So King George's administration was made up mostly of wigs. Robert Harley was arrested accused of being a Jacobite and imprisoned for two years. John Blunt also replaced the south Sea Company's Tory officers with wigs, and George's son, the future King, George the Second, was temporarily installed as the company's governor. George the First took over the south Sea Company himself in seventeen eighteen. Although the debt for equity swap with the south Sea Company had allowed Britain to restructure a portion of its debt didn't really have a part of the plan that was about keeping the nation from incurring more debt. By the end of seventeen nineteen, the British national debt was about fifty million pounds. About three point four million pounds of that was owed to the Bank of England, roughly the same amount to the British East India Company. Britain owed twelve million pounds to the south Sea Company and the rest was owed to the public. This was obviously a lot of debt, and at about the same time France was reckoning with its own debt. As Scottish economist John Law tried to totally transform the French economy. He founded a bank in France in seventeen sixteen, which became a lender to the French government and eventually merged with other banks to form the Bunk General. The Bank Generral held a huge chunk of government debt and was later nationalized and renamed the Bank Royal. In seventeen seventeen, Law established the Campaignie dud or the Mississippi Company, to control French trading rights in the Mississippi River Valley. He sold shares in the company as subscriptions. In seventeen nineteen, he also took control roll of both the French East India Company and the China Company, and he consolid all of this into the Company des Indeed or the Company. This put him in control of a company that had a monopoly on virtually all French trade outside of Europe. From there he amassed even more financial power. The company took over tax administration in France. The Law was later named Controller General and Superintendent General of Finance. Then, in seventeen nineteen and early seventeen twenty, the company's share prices skyrocketed from about five d livre per share to nine thousand. After the price hit nine thousand livres, the Bank Royale pegged it there to keep it from increasing any further. Investors started trying to exchange their shares for gold, and there was not enough gold in all of France to cover the demand. Inflation was rampant as the banc Royal started trying to get people to take their payouts in paper notes, including issuing a nine thousand livre note. John Law laid out a plan to systematically reduce the share price from nine thousand liver to five thousand livers to try to deflate the currency somewhat without losing too much share value in the company, but as the share price started to drop, his efforts were not enough to keep it from just plummeting. By the end of seventeen twenty, it had fallen all the way back to about five hundred livres, which is where it had been in the spring of seventeen nineteen. All of this came to be known as the Mississippi Bubble. The Bunk Royale collapsed in its wake, and John Law had to flee France after the bubble burst. As all of this was happening, the South Sea Company share swaps were also kicking in the high gear, with some of the demand coming from investors who had gotten out of the French market. First, the south Sea Company posed another round of debt for equity swaps and also loaned the British Government roughly half a million pounds. Then Parliament passed an Act for making fourth new Exchequer Bills. Under this Act of the south Sea Company loaned the government roughly five point seven million pounds. It also acquired roughly thirty one point five million pounds in government debt, which it was going to convert into shares. The promised returns on this were huge. The government was going to be paying five interest on the debt that was converted into shares, but the company was promising to pay investors a thirty percent dividend by the end of seventeen twenty, and then that was supposed to jump to fifty percent for the ten years after that. That probably sounds like too good to be true. Spoiler dun Dune Dune. The company had promoted its earlier swaps through adver tisements and pamphlets and propaganda, including some written by people like Daniel Dafoe and Jonathan Swift. In seventeen nineteen and seventeen twenty, it ramped up these efforts as well. It also published lists of prominent investors, including the King and various members of Parliament. This was all to reinforce the idea that this was a totally reliable investment that had the support of some of the nation's most powerful people. All of this fed into an investing frenzy. The south Sea Company started offering subscription plans so that investors could buy shares even if they didn't have all the money up front. There were multiple waves of these subscription plans, and they allowed investors to pay for their shares and installments. The company also loaned money to prospective investors so that they could buy stock with it, and they loaned current investors money based on the value of the stock they already had so they could buy more stock. Hello unsustainable. As interest in investment surged, share prices spiked in the Bank of England and the East India Company, but not nearly as much as in the south Sea Company. The number of companies to invest in surged as new joint stock companies were established all over the place, one for making Muslin, one for importing lace from Flanders, one for ensuring horses, one for making soap, on and on and on. Some of these new companies were obvious scams, and in seventeen twenty Parliament past the Bubble Act, which banned all joint stock companies that did not have a Royal charter. Those new companies were outlawed, and many of their former investors turned to south Sea Company stock. The price for shares of the south Sea Company rose from about a hundred pounds per share in seventeen nineteen to three hundred pounds in April and nineteen twenty five undred pounds in June, all the way to more than a thousand pounds per share in August. The company thought this price was just gonna keep going up, especially once it had covered all the required government debt and could just sell the remaining shares at market rate out of profit without having to offset government debt with it. So the company started paying out more money to investors who wanted to cash out then it was taking in. I was expecting those future games to make up the shortfall that it was creating, but instead the price plummeted precipitously, dropping from about a thousand pounds in August of seventeen twenty two a hundred pounds in September. Like the Mississippi bubble, this had just basically dropped back to its pre bubble price. A more limited bubble was also playing out in the Dutch Republic. As all of this was going on, The price for shares in the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company both rose, along with the Mississippi and South Sea shares. Roughly forty small joint stock companies were established in the Dutch Republic which went through the same pattern. This became known as the Dutch vent Handel of seventy and that, combined with the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles, is sometimes described as the first international stock market collapse. This sense of the word bubble existed before this point. Its first use in writing was in Edward Ward's Labor in Vain or what Signifies Little or Nothing in seventeen hundred, but writing about these three intersecting financial collapses popularized the words use. We will get into the aftermath of all of this after a quick sponsor break. When the price of shares in the South Sea Company dropped precipitously in September of seventeen twenty people who had bought shares when the price was low saw all of their games evaporate seemingly overnight. They were understandably outraged, but a whole lot more people lost actual money, not just unrealized games that reverted to the previous amount. Some of these were wealthy people who had previously held government debt and they had swapped that debt for shares, but others were just ordinary folks who had gone to a coffee shop and had bought shares of the company with their savings. People who had bought subscriptions when the price was still high also still had payments due on those subscriptions, but now these payments were for more than the stock was worth. People who had taken out loans to buy stock defaulted on them, and in some cases had to declare bankruptcy. Britain reportedly saw an increase in suicides in the way of this financial collapse. Meanwhile, people who had bought early and sold before the crash he mostly just kept quiet about it. Okay, you don't. You don't hear a lot of about the people, except for the officers of the company who were accused of wrongdoing. You really don't hear a lot of the people who sold at the right time after having bought at the right time. Uh there were also some people who sold their shares before the price crashed, but then wound up buying more shares. One of those was Sir Isaac Newton, and he is often used as an illustration for how financially devastating this was. After some initial skepticism about this whole setup, Newton had invested, he had made about a hundred percent return on his initial investment, and then he had gotten out of it, but then he purchased more shares near the peak of the bubble. According to his family lore, he lost about twenty thousand pounds when the price collapsed, but more modern analysis of his financial records suggest that it was closer to ten thousand pounds. This is still a lot of money, even if he did lose more than that, which would be a lot more money he seems to have recovered. He was rich when he died in seventy seven, with an a state that was valued at about thirty thousand pounds. One of the reasons that Newton became sort of the poster child for the Soucia bubble. It's just that He was Isaac Newton. He was a mathematician. He was the warden and later the master of the Royal Mint. If Isaac Newton, of all people could fall victim to this crash, then surely no one could have foreseen it. Newton is still widely quoted as saying I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people, when he described the rapid rise of the stock price and the bubble's ultimate burst. But that quote may very well be apocryphal, and the idea that nobody could possibly have foreseen this is just inaccurate. In early seventeen twenty, multiple publications warned that this escalating share price was just not sustainable. On March thirty one, seventeen twenty, Member of Parliament Archibald Hutcheson wrote quote, if the truth be as I verily believe it is that there is no real foundation for the present much less the further expected high price of south Sea stock, and that the frenzy which now reigns can be of no long continuance in so cool a climate. And amongst the people hitherto so justly famed for wisdom and prudence, I say If this be the case, is it not the duty of a British Senate to take all necessary precautions to prevent the ruin of many thousands of families? And that our weekly bills of mortality may not be filled with large numbers of unhappy people who have hanged, drowned, or shot themselves. And surely no honest, good natured man can enjoy with comfort an estate, how immense soever, raised on such a foundation as this. Hutchinson printed up and distributed a lot of material about this, trying to warn people at his own expense. Economists and economic historians have made all kinds of arguments about what exactly caused the South Sea bubble to inflate and burst, factoring in market forces, policies, and individual and collective decisions. But the two prevailing ideas in the eighteenth century where that it had been a deliberate fraud, or that more emotional factors were at work, like greed, or as Newton allegedly said, madness. In the face of public outrage about alleged fraud, Robert Walpole was named Chancellor of the Exchequer and was tasked with sorting all of this out. Walpole again restructured the national debt, including establishing a sinking fund that the nation paid into to help stabilize the economy. Multiple committees investigated and issued reports on the bubbles rise and collapse in seventeen one. One big source of criticism was that a lot of officials who had promoted this stock or worked on these debt swaps had taken bribes to do so, although bribery was really routine at this point. Directors of the board of the south Sea Company were arrested and faced corruption trials. The Postmaster General was implicated. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, John A. Souby, who had heavily promoted south Sea Company stock and had sold his own shares at the peak, was expelled from the House of Lords and imprisoned. In January of seventeen twenty one, Parliament banned the former directors of the company from leaving England and also prohibited them from serving as officers in the south Sea Company, the East India Company or the Bank of England. In August of seventeen twenty one, Parliament passed an Act for making several provisions to restore the public credit, which suffers by the frauds and mismanagements of the late directors of the south Sea Company and others. This was in part a relief act that canceled some of the debts of people who had borrowed money to buy south Sea stock, as well as canceling subscriptions for stock purchases that still had outstanding payments. It also seized the money that the company's directors had earned when the share price increase, and it redistributed that money among people who had suffered big losses. Some of the company officers estates were also seized and sold, with most of that money covering the south Sea Company's losses. At the same time, Walpole's response was widely perceived as scapegoating some of the people while shielding others from punishment. As a result, he was nicknamed Screenmaster General. In spite of that, he effectively became Britain's first prime minister before that term was even coined. A lot of people also wrote about how greed had been at the root of all of this. One of those was Daniel Dafoe, who published this in the Complete English Tradesmen Quote. Avarice is the ruin of many people besides tradesmen, and I might give the Late south Sea Calamity, for an example, in which the longest heads were most overreached, and not so much by the wit or cunning of those they had to deal with, as by the secret promptings of their own avarice, wherein they abundantly verified an old proverbial speech or saying all covet all lose. So it was there, indeed, and the cunningest, wisest, sharpest men lost the most money. Defel also wrote such works as The Villainy of stock Jobbers. Detected jobber was the name sometimes used for stockbrokers and sometimes for go betweens who connected stockbrokers to ordinary British investors. Other people placed the blame on naive or inexperienced investors. The government's encouragement of people to buy south Sea Company stock had combined with the use of coffee houses as a stock trading location to make investing possible for people who had just never done it before. This included people with more modest incomes, and it included women. About twenty percent of the general public investors in the south Sea Company were women. Consequently, there was a lot of sexist commentary about women's involvement in the market after the bubble burst. Propaganda, artwork, satirical writing, and even playing cards also targeted immigrants, Jews, and non conforming Protestants as people who should never have been involved in the market in the first place. Therefore they were to blame past podcast subject. William Hogarth published and engraving called the south Sea Scheme in seventy one, so this would have been one of his earlier works. The inscription at the bottom alludes to this idea that this mixing of women and immigrants and nonconforming Christians was involved in the collapse. Quote here all religions flocked together, like tame and wild fowl of a feather, leaving their strife religious bustle, kneel down to play at pitch and hustle. Thus, when the shepherds are at play, their flocks must surely go astream the woeful cause it. In these times, honor and honesty are crimes that publicly are punished by self interest in villainy. So much for money's magic power guests at the rest you find out more. By the mid nineteenth century, people were looking at this in terms of math psychology. For example, in eighteen forty one, Scottish journalist Claude McKay published Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He described the south Sea Bubble this way quote. During the progress of this famous bubble, England presented a singular spectacle. The public mind was in a state of unwholesome fermentation. Men were no longer satisfied with the slow but sure profits of cautious industry. The hope of boundless wealth for the morrow made them heedless and extravagant. For today, a luxury till then unheard of was introduced, bringing in its train a corresponding laxity of morals. The overbearing insolence of ignorant men who had arisen to sudden wealth by successful gambling, made men of true gentility of mind and manners blush that gold should have the power to raise the unworthy in the scale of society. Although the immediate effects of the south Sea bubbles collapse were huge, it does not appear to have caused a long term recession or depression in Britain. The south Sea Company sold most of its rights to the Spanish government in seventeen fifty. For a while, the company moved into whaling, but eventually it mostly retained only its purpose for managing governmental debt. It existed as a company until eighteen fifty three. That was south Sea Bubble, something that, Uh, it's weird to consider still. I mean we talked about a little bit earlier in the episode. Weird is probably not the right word that all of this was essentially tied up in a slave trading company. Uh. There are a lot of articles that just seemed to not say that part. Uh. For a while, there was a perception that this whole thing was basically a giant scheme and that there was no actual work being done by the south Sea Company. But that is just not true. It was definitely actively involved in the trans atlantic slave trade and had a monopoly on Britain strade with the Spanish colonies, and like that's that was not something that existed only on paper. That is something that existed for real. Uh. And so of course the lives of the people who were captured and transported across the Atlantic and enslaved are underpinning all of this. On that pepper note, Um, do you have listener mail as well? I do? I do? I have a listener mail from Emily. Emily says Hi, Holly and Tracy. Longtime listener, first time writer. Though I'll admit I'm a bit behind on episodes, I knew how I had to write after listening to the October edition of Unearthed. In part one, you covered a story about Jeremy the pigeon who saved World War once lost Battalion. My great grandfather was one of the one ninety four men who survived the World War one lost battalion, so Cheremy and the battalion story hold a very important place in my family's history. In the episode, you wondered whether you'd previously covered this lost battalion on the show. I can confirm that you have not, as I've listened for it. In every episode of the archive you did would cover a World War two lost battalion, and I experienced emotional whiplash when that episode came out, thinking you'd finally done an episode on quote my lost battalion. I hold out hope that one day you'll do a full episode on this lost battalion. My family was incredibly fortunate to honor the legacy of the lost Battalion by visiting the site of the battle on the one dredth anniversary in ten. It was surreal to stand in the ruins of the bunker. Photos attached where my great grandfather, a second lieutenant, was with Major Whittlesey when he received the orders that launched the offensive. We've also visited Jeremy while he is on display at the Smithsonian, although he's looking a little worse for wear a hundred years later. Photo attached. Ironically, I did not miss the Lost Battalion in history class. My world history teacher showed us a two thousand one A and E film about the battle. Shout out to Mr de Bruin, and these days, my sister, a high school history teacher, is also ensuring students don't miss the Lost Battalion in history class. Thank you for all the hours of education and entertainment. Attaching favorite photos of our beloved mini assured Dots and Daisy in the hope it brings you a moment of joy, Best Emily, Thank you so much for all these pictures, Emily. I really appreciated seeing the ones of the battle site and Jeremy, and of course seeing as sleeping Dots Dots. Daisy is so cute. I want to, like, I don't know, I want to kiss Daisy's face real fa um. So, thank you so much for sending that email those pictures. If you would like to send us an email about this certainly other podcasts where at History podcast at i heart radio dot com, we all over social media. Missed in History. There's where I'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on iHeart radio app and wherever else you like to take your podcast. Stuff you missed in History class is the production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H