It interferes with the radio mics in the auditorium sending a stuttering blast of feedback across the hall.
Here's where things stand: Tonight's debate covering foreign and domestic topics will employ a contrived "town hall" format in which pre-selected, supposedly undecided voters ask scripted questions of the candidates, who will have cordless mics and can get up and walk around as they answer.
But most crucially for the bank's future, the MICs have started doing a better job at nursing their own balance sheets.
If it insists on an activist role, it will run up against MICs that take a different view of the trade-off between greenery and growth, and hence borrow elsewhere.What of the bank's own books, if it should lose its returns from its lending to the MICs?
The MICs are growing faster than either the poorest or the richest states.
It relishes dealing with its "best" customers: the middle-income countries (MICs), a group whose GDP per head typically ranges from about $1,000 to $6,000.
The MICs are now heading for the exit: over the past 12 years, they have repaid an annual average of $3.8 billion more than they have taken out in new loans.
Just 7% of MIC lending goes to countries with no credit rating and virtually no access to private capital at all.Naturally, the MICs now turn to private lenders, who do not tie money to advice.
Assad needs to sleep like the rest of us, and, if we had the patience and permission, we could bury mics deep in landfill to hear all the children's toys in Kent with battery life left in them make a noise.
When the girls arrive in Hanoi, the tempo kicks up a notch and simple threads and dreams are exchanged for glitter, mics and men.
Marling and her band occupy a tiny, intimate, circular stage where she rotates between four mics - so her back is to the audience one quarter of the time.
