Latest / Bloomberg Intelligence / Microsoft Plans Data Center Push to Triple Its Computing Power
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- 0:02Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts.
- 0:05Speaker 2: Radio.
- 0:06Speaker 3: News.
- 0:09Speaker 4: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live
- 0:13Speaker 4: weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android
- 0:16Speaker 4: Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever
- 0:19Speaker 4: you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
- 0:23Speaker 5: Let's get to some of those tech earnings, Oracle and Adobe.
- 0:28Speaker 5: We got an analyst who follows those companies, so that
- 0:29Speaker 5: makes it very easy.
- 0:30Speaker 1: Anurag Rana.
- 0:31Speaker 5: He is a senior technology analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. He's
- 0:34Speaker 5: out there in Chicago. Anurag, let's start with Oracle here because, man,
- 0:38Speaker 5: I saw their cloud business had a great number, and
- 0:41Speaker 5: that's what I thought people were focusing on. The stock
- 0:43Speaker 5: traded up 9% at the open, but it's kind of
- 0:45Speaker 5: giving it back. What's going on there?
- 0:46Speaker 6: Yeah, to be honest, it's a bit confusing because we
- 0:49Speaker 6: really like the numbers.
- 0:50Speaker 7: I mean, I think the.
- 0:51Speaker 6: Cloud business was improving even more than what– the street
- 0:55Speaker 6: was expecting and that's what had happened. I think the
- 0:57Speaker 6: guidance for next quarter is also conservative. They should be
- 1:01Speaker 6: able to beat that cloud numbers as well. I think
- 1:04Speaker 6: what's happening over here is there is a little bit
- 1:06Speaker 6: of uncertainty about data center expansion. you know, it's probably
- 1:12Speaker 6: that's more macro, not related just to Oracle. And I
- 1:15Speaker 6: think that could be one factor. The one thing that
- 1:18Speaker 6: I liked about the earnings was that they actually said
- 1:21Speaker 6: they're not going to have to raise CapEx because that
- 1:24Speaker 6: has been my biggest worry when it relates to Oracle
- 1:27Speaker 6: is that do.
- 1:27Speaker 7: They have to keep on increasing CapEx?
- 1:29Speaker 6: One of the things they're doing is they are asking
- 1:31Speaker 6: customers to think about it, bring your own chips or
- 1:34Speaker 6: bring your own hardware.
- 1:35Speaker 7: This way, they don't have to foot the bill ahead
- 1:37Speaker 7: of time.
- 1:38Speaker 6: So It's really doing these arrangements are helping them out,
- 1:41Speaker 6: but I think it's more the macro related about data
- 1:45Speaker 6: center expansion in general.
- 1:46Speaker 2: So our Bloomberg News story written by Brody Ford points
- 1:49Speaker 2: out as well that gross margin shrank to 61%. And sequentially,
- 1:55Speaker 2: that's a big drop because it was 66.3% in the
- 1:57Speaker 2: previous quarter. Does that worry you, Anurag?
- 2:01Speaker 7: Well, we have been modeling that for a while.
- 2:03Speaker 6: I mean, it is normally a natural, whenever you have
- 2:05Speaker 6: a brand new business starting in the infancy, it will
- 2:09Speaker 6: have very low gross margins. But imagine this, they missed
- 2:12Speaker 6: out massively on gross margins. I mean, compared to last year,
- 2:15Speaker 6: I shouldn't say miss, but the gross margins dropped, but
- 2:18Speaker 6: their operating margins improved. They have been cutting costs so
- 2:21Speaker 6: well that they are actually showing, you know, very decent
- 2:25Speaker 6: operating margin. So I personally would not worry about it
- 2:28Speaker 6: because you're adding a lot of gross profit dollars to
- 2:31Speaker 6: the company, which we would not get otherwise.
- 2:34Speaker 5: All right, Anurag, we got to get the story of
- 2:36Speaker 5: the day here. Microsoft here, Bloomberg's got a green B,
- 2:39Speaker 5: which means they got exclusive reporting. Brody Ford, Matthew Day,
- 2:43Speaker 5: Microsoft plans to more than triple It's data center capacity
- 2:47Speaker 5: going from 38 gigawatts.
- 2:48Speaker 1: I have no idea what a gigawatt is, but it
- 2:50Speaker 1: sounds big.
- 2:51Speaker 5: Up to, you know, I mean, it's going to be
- 2:54Speaker 5: up from like 12 gigawatts now.
- 2:56Speaker 1: What is going on there? Who's paying for that?
- 2:57Speaker 7: I mean, they are paying for that.
- 2:59Speaker 6: I mean, they're spending over close to $ 200 billion a
- 3:01Speaker 6: year trying to do that. And in fact, you know,
- 3:04Speaker 6: the gentleman they mentioned in the report, we had him
- 3:07Speaker 6: on our podcast six months ago. And these guys really
- 3:10Speaker 6: are changing the infrastructure of all of Microsoft data centers
- 3:14Speaker 6: because the way you do GPU kind of computing or
- 3:18Speaker 6: AI computing is very different than what you would do
- 3:20Speaker 6: on a CPU-based or the older cloud-based. I mean, they
- 3:24Speaker 6: have some really impressive data centers that are going on live.
- 3:28Speaker 7: There is one in Texas.
- 3:29Speaker 6: There is one in um wisconsin so they've done a
- 3:33Speaker 6: very good job of managing it and right now whatever
- 3:37Speaker 6: they actually can't do it in-house they are outsourcing it
- 3:40Speaker 6: to neo clouds at this point so uh you know
- 3:42Speaker 6: frankly speaking microsoft is in the middle of this is
- 3:45Speaker 6: one of the biggest beneficiaries of ai um so you
- 3:48Speaker 6: you know and and on top of that you know
- 3:49Speaker 6: they will still be free cash flow positive.
- 3:51Speaker 7: This year Okay.
- 3:53Speaker 2: I mean, those are ambitious plans, but will they actually
- 3:55Speaker 2: be able to do that given there's a lot of
- 3:58Speaker 2: public opposition to data centers in local communities? I mean,
- 4:03Speaker 2: it's one thing to say that this is what they
- 4:04Speaker 2: want to do. Can it get done in the timeframe
- 4:07Speaker 2: they want?
- 4:08Speaker 6: I think that is the single biggest, you could say,
- 4:10Speaker 6: obstacle right now, or the overhang, and not just Microsoft,
- 4:13Speaker 6: but you can extend that to everybody, whether it's AWS, Google, Oracle,
- 4:17Speaker 6: or the Neoclouds, is do they get the permits to
- 4:20Speaker 6: be able to do it? Will they have the power?
- 4:22Speaker 6: And so far, we have not seen any major, I
- 4:26Speaker 6: would say, there have been delays, but not any massive delays.
- 4:29Speaker 6: But frankly speaking, the opposition we are seeing right now,
- 4:32Speaker 6: I would say across the board, not just with the Democrats,
- 4:35Speaker 6: but Republicans as well, I think this is going to
- 4:38Speaker 6: be a bigger.
- 4:38Speaker 7: Issue that plays out over the next six to 12 months.
- 4:41Speaker 6: And that is one thing I could, I think that
- 4:43Speaker 6: is one thing that could, you know, soften the growth
- 4:46Speaker 6: rate of some of these AI labs, as well as,
- 4:49Speaker 6: you know, I would say just the entire AI trade
- 4:52Speaker 6: in general.
- 4:52Speaker 1: So is this in the numbers?
- 4:54Speaker 5: I'm looking at the, I see CapEx ramping up on
- 4:56Speaker 5: the Bloomberg terminal for Microsoft, but is.
- 4:58Speaker 1: This kind of gigawatt expenditures? Is that in the numbers?
- 5:03Speaker 6: I mean, right now, I think you have because you're
- 5:05Speaker 6: looking at this year and next year. Almost everybody is
- 5:09Speaker 6: increasing CapEx next year. In our own BI's projected data
- 5:14Speaker 6: center model, we have CapEx going over the next few years.
- 5:17Speaker 6: We are not tapering it down at this point because
- 5:21Speaker 6: you have more backlog revenue on the balance sheets than
- 5:25Speaker 6: they have the capacity.
- 5:26Speaker 7: To fulfill it.
- 5:27Speaker 6: And the math is, you know, one gigawatt costs somewhere around,
- 5:30Speaker 6: depending on what kind of data center you're building, $ 40
- 5:32Speaker 6: to $ 60 billion right now of an NVIDIA data center.
- 5:37Speaker 7: Are you kidding?
- 5:38Speaker 1: I don't know what these guys are doing. Big numbers
- 5:40Speaker 1: either way.
- 5:41Speaker 7: Big numbers. By the way, half of that goes to NVIDIA.
- 5:44Speaker 7: Just think about it this way.
- 5:45Speaker 6: Stay with us.
- 5:46Speaker 2: More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.
- 5:52Speaker 4: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live
- 5:56Speaker 4: weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android
- 5:59Speaker 4: Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever
- 6:02Speaker 4: you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
- 6:06Speaker 5: I'll tell you, when I first worked down in lower
- 6:08Speaker 5: Manhattan in the mid-' 80s, it was a ghost town. Man,
- 6:10Speaker 5: at 5 o'clock, everybody just kind of bailed.
- 6:13Speaker 1: Maybe you had the South Street Seaport, but that was
- 6:15Speaker 1: about it if you.
- 6:16Speaker 7: Wanted some action.
- 6:16Speaker 1: That was on the fringes of downtown, yeah.
- 6:18Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
- 6:18Speaker 1: Now, that was good.
- 6:19Speaker 5: We did some good stuff down there at South Street
- 6:21Speaker 5: Seaport after work.
- 6:21Speaker 1: But now it's just ripping down there.
- 6:23Speaker 5: They did a phenomenal job renovating and rejuvenating the entire town.
- 6:28Speaker 5: southern tip of manhattan post 9-11 and we write about
- 6:32Speaker 5: it on bloomberg news had a great great story amanda
- 6:35Speaker 5: gordon joins us here she's a reporter for the wealth
- 6:36Speaker 5: team at the bloomberg news joining us here in our
- 6:38Speaker 5: studio amanda talk to us about what's going on in
- 6:41Speaker 5: lower manhattan because boy post 9-11 it's not just that
- 6:45Speaker 5: the world trade center site it's just kind of lower
- 6:47Speaker 5: manhattan in general has kind of been rejuvenated what's going
- 6:49Speaker 5: on down.
- 6:50Speaker 3: Exactly As this morning, as those names are being read,
- 6:54Speaker 3: we think of a void that was created. And it
- 6:57Speaker 3: really was one, to your point, that already existed. People
- 7:00Speaker 3: already felt that the uses of this downtown area were
- 7:06Speaker 3: not vital before 9-11. And so that void that was
- 7:11Speaker 3: created that day sort of spurred so many New Yorkers
- 7:15Speaker 3: to get on board to think about how to reinvent.
- 7:18Speaker 3: And I just think it's so important reporting the story
- 7:21Speaker 3: to note that those who played a part in conversions
- 7:26Speaker 3: of those office buildings where you worked into residential, of
- 7:31Speaker 3: opening restaurants when it was a leap of faith, of
- 7:34Speaker 3: reopening businesses after 9-11, when people were scared to be
- 7:39Speaker 3: down there, All of that, there's just a sense of
- 7:42Speaker 3: pride now in what it has become, but also very
- 7:46Speaker 3: much indicative of a New York spirit of resilience and reinvention.
- 7:51Speaker 3: This was the land that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton
- 7:55Speaker 3: also tread. And now the young people, the tech companies, Spotify, Uber, Amazon,
- 8:01Speaker 3: that are down there and making things happen in the
- 8:07Speaker 3: New York way is a sign that we always reinvent ourselves.
- 8:11Speaker 1: That was so elegantly put, Amanda.
- 8:14Speaker 2: And I heard you about Spotify and some of the
- 8:17Speaker 2: other companies that have really sprouted up and opened offices there.
- 8:19Speaker 2: That gets to the point that Paul said basically it
- 8:22Speaker 2: was the home of Wall Street and it was the
- 8:24Speaker 2: financial district, but it's so much more than that now.
- 8:26Speaker 1: I mean, finance is not even the.
- 8:28Speaker 2: It's still a big part of downtown Manhattan and lower Manhattan,
- 8:31Speaker 2: but it's not dominant the way it once was.
- 8:34Speaker 7: That's exactly true.
- 8:35Speaker 3: About a quarter of the office tenants in lower Manhattan
- 8:39Speaker 3: are finance-related. Tech, AI, design, a lot of creative industries
- 8:44Speaker 3: have come in. And it's a place that is not
- 8:47Speaker 3: just to go to the office. It's a place where
- 8:50Speaker 3: people live and work. I talked to one 28-year-old who
- 8:56Speaker 3: said that he chose the building that he did because
- 8:59Speaker 3: the gym was open 24-7. And that was the critical thing.
- 9:03Speaker 3: So what happened is that pre-9-11 and then afterward... when
- 9:10Speaker 3: the responsibility was to make sure that we could remember
- 9:13Speaker 3: and honor those lives that were lost, there was just
- 9:17Speaker 3: a lot of energy and diversification that took place.
- 9:21Speaker 5: My 30-year-old daughter, she tells me, I'm going to go
- 9:24Speaker 5: meet some friends in Phi Di.
- 9:25Speaker 1: I'm like, what? Phi Di? What is the financial district?
- 9:29Speaker 5: You mean Wall Street? Is that what you're trying to
- 9:30Speaker 5: tell me? Apparently, it's a place young folks are going
- 9:33Speaker 5: to kind of meet for drinks and dinner. And I'm like, Dude,
- 9:36Speaker 5: you don't know what you're talking about, but all right.
- 9:37Speaker 7: That's the future.
- 9:39Speaker 1: That's what's going on down there.
- 9:40Speaker 3: Let's not forget the bones were there. Charm, gargoyles on
- 9:43Speaker 3: the buildings, old buildings that were not all torn down,
- 9:46Speaker 3: not a grid. So people who live down there, you know,
- 9:51Speaker 3: cite these elements of character and authenticity that they feel
- 9:56Speaker 3: that they don't see anymore in the rest of New York.
- 9:58Speaker 3: And then the transit.
- 10:00Speaker 7: Being able to get to Brooklyn. I'll tell you, the Oculus.
- 10:02Speaker 3: Anywhere.
- 10:02Speaker 5: That thing, that Oculus Center down there. I mean, if
- 10:05Speaker 5: you haven't been to that, that alone is a reason
- 10:07Speaker 5: to go to Lower Manhattan. The Oculus, it is a
- 10:10Speaker 5: transportation hub.
- 10:11Speaker 1: I mean, you can get anywhere. I think like anywhere
- 10:12Speaker 1: in the world from there. I think that's a really
- 10:14Speaker 1: good point.
- 10:14Speaker 2: The fact that you can get anywhere and the transportation options,
- 10:17Speaker 2: the public transportation options there are just phenomenal.
- 10:20Speaker 1: And that was always the case, wasn't it?
- 10:23Speaker 3: It was, but the Oculus, as you mentioned, the remaking
- 10:26Speaker 3: of the Fulton Street Station, everything was remade and made
- 10:31Speaker 3: much easier to use, much brighter. And that's an amenity
- 10:36Speaker 3: that cannot be beat for New Yorkers. Some get to
- 10:41Speaker 3: walk to work and some zip up to Midtown to
- 10:44Speaker 3: their office.
- 10:45Speaker 2: You spoke with Bill Rudin, who's co-executive chairman of a
- 10:48Speaker 2: real estate.
- 10:49Speaker 7: Company, Rudin?
- 10:50Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 10:52Speaker 2: And he was one of the key players who helped
- 10:55Speaker 2: diversify the area before 9-11.
- 10:57Speaker 1: What did he tell you?
- 10:58Speaker 3: Well, you know, the family has played such a role
- 11:02Speaker 3: at these critical times in my lifetime. In the 70s,
- 11:06Speaker 3: his father helped New York through fiscal crisis. And then
- 11:09Speaker 3: in this moment, in 1990, it was a Valentine's Day massacre,
- 11:13Speaker 3: he told me, when Drexel Burnham went bankrupt. And they
- 11:17Speaker 3: occupied most of the building that he had built initially
- 11:21Speaker 3: for Goldman Sachs. And he talked about mothballing it until
- 11:26Speaker 3: the market turned around. And I think that shows you
- 11:29Speaker 3: how bleak the outlook was. But what happened is that,
- 11:33Speaker 3: as in the 70s, business leaders got together and really
- 11:36Speaker 3: decided to put their brains to this idea of diversification.
- 11:41Speaker 3: And in that building, 55 Broad Street, they wired it.
- 11:45Speaker 1: They put in broadband, fiber optics.
- 11:47Speaker 3: The New York New Media Association opened their first office there,
- 11:52Speaker 3: and it became sort of the initial hub and promotion
- 11:56Speaker 3: of New York as a Silicon Alley, sort of the
- 12:00Speaker 3: downtown anchor of that new corridor, which we've seen flourish
- 12:05Speaker 3: so much. And so... He laid down those roots, and
- 12:08Speaker 3: I think it's very moving in the story that he said,
- 12:11Speaker 3: you know, it's taken these 25 years to get recognized
- 12:15Speaker 3: for that early work.
- 12:16Speaker 5: Very good stuff. 25 Broad Street was one of my
- 12:18Speaker 5: first offices at Payne Webber. And that was just when
- 12:21Speaker 5: computers were coming in. We didn't have enough outlets to
- 12:24Speaker 5: plug in the computers because the building was built in
- 12:26Speaker 5: like the 1800s.
- 12:26Speaker 1: They weren't really thinking about computers anymore.
- 12:29Speaker 3: I worked as a journalist a few blocks north. Our
- 12:31Speaker 3: offices opened in 2002. And there were days when the
- 12:35Speaker 3: phones didn't work because things were being rebuilt and it
- 12:38Speaker 3: was chaos.
- 12:39Speaker 8: And you just had to go with it.
- 12:40Speaker 7: Stay with us.
- 12:41Speaker 4: More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this. You're listening
- 12:48Speaker 4: to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at
- 12:52Speaker 4: 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with
- 12:55Speaker 4: the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get
- 12:58Speaker 4: your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
- 13:02Speaker 5: Jonathan Schanzer, he's an executive director at the Foundation for
- 13:05Speaker 5: Defense of Democracies based down there in Washington, D.C.
- 13:09Speaker 7: D.C.
- 13:09Speaker 5: Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us here. As we remember, 9-11,
- 13:14Speaker 5: 25 years on. What are some of the key lessons
- 13:18Speaker 5: from just a geopolitical sense, an anti-terrorism sense? What are
- 13:23Speaker 5: some of the lessons that you think this country has taken?
- 13:26Speaker 1: Maybe what we still need to do.
- 13:28Speaker 8: Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me. And
- 13:31Speaker 8: it's obviously meaningful for me today to be on this program.
- 13:35Speaker 8: This is an event that obviously shaped American history over
- 13:39Speaker 8: the last 25 years and I think continues to. I
- 13:44Speaker 8: think the first takeaway here is that we needed to
- 13:47Speaker 8: take these threats seriously when they first began to materialize.
- 13:51Speaker 8: We saw the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. We saw
- 13:54Speaker 8: the 1998 Twin Embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the
- 13:59Speaker 8: USS Cullen. We did not put the pieces together that
- 14:03Speaker 8: an enemy had waged or has declared war on us.
- 14:07Speaker 8: And we just kept waiting for the attacks to get
- 14:09Speaker 8: worse over time. I think that when you start to
- 14:12Speaker 8: see an enemy declare war and to follow up on it,
- 14:16Speaker 8: that you need to take action. And I would argue
- 14:18Speaker 8: that there were two presidents in a row that didn't
- 14:21Speaker 8: take the threat seriously enough. The first was Bill Clinton.
- 14:23Speaker 1: Then, of course, George W.
- 14:25Speaker 8: Bush didn't move quickly enough and then had to move
- 14:28Speaker 8: more quickly than he ever thought he would need to.
- 14:30Speaker 8: So taking those threats seriously as they emerge, I'd argue
- 14:34Speaker 8: we didn't even learn that when ISIS emerged. We were
- 14:37Speaker 8: still thinking that it was a minor threat This is
- 14:39Speaker 8: a consistent theme in American history. But I think the
- 14:45Speaker 8: other thing that we still struggle with to this day
- 14:47Speaker 8: is just getting our heads wrapped around the ideology of
- 14:51Speaker 8: jihadism or militant Islam. It's a minority interpretation of the faith.
- 14:56Speaker 8: There's no question. But it is still, after all these years,
- 15:00Speaker 8: something that we are having a hard time getting our
- 15:02Speaker 8: heads wrapped around. It is playing a role right now
- 15:05Speaker 8: in the Middle East conflicts that we're grappling with, all
- 15:07Speaker 8: the different Iranian proxy groups, not to mention Iran itself.
- 15:11Speaker 8: I'm looking at the Houthis right now as they look
- 15:13Speaker 8: to expand their war in the Middle East. We still
- 15:16Speaker 8: don't seem to understand how to defeat these groups. Admittedly,
- 15:21Speaker 8: they don't want to surrender, but that's part of the problem.
- 15:24Speaker 8: This is a martyrdom complex, a sense that they need
- 15:26Speaker 8: to continue to fight to the finish. And we have
- 15:29Speaker 8: not adjusted our way of war to figuring out how
- 15:32Speaker 8: to defeat this problem long term. And my sense is
- 15:35Speaker 8: we're going to have to continue to grapple with this,
- 15:38Speaker 8: even as we pivot into great power competition with China
- 15:41Speaker 8: and Russia. I don't think that these smaller conflicts are
- 15:44Speaker 8: going to go away. They're going to become potentially even
- 15:47Speaker 8: more of an irritant.
- 15:48Speaker 2: Jonathan, you previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst at
- 15:51Speaker 2: the Department of Treasury, where you followed and froze the
- 15:54Speaker 2: funding of Hamas and al-Qaeda. We now have different forms
- 15:57Speaker 2: of funding that is less traceable. Crypto, for instance. You
- 16:02Speaker 2: have a gray market, a black market. How does that
- 16:05Speaker 2: complicate our efforts to follow the money, so to speak?
- 16:09Speaker 8: Oh, it is absolutely more complicated than it was when
- 16:13Speaker 8: I was doing this, you know, some 20 years ago.
- 16:17Speaker 8: Back then, it was much more simple, right? I mean,
- 16:19Speaker 8: you know, people were still dealing in cash, which is,
- 16:21Speaker 8: I think, still the preferred way of terrorists to move money.
- 16:25Speaker 8: But yes, now we have various means of crypto trading.
- 16:29Speaker 8: And it's a lot easier in many ways to create
- 16:31Speaker 8: cutouts and front companies than it was even back then,
- 16:34Speaker 8: even though we've got greater tools to be able to
- 16:38Speaker 8: track some of this stuff. But yes, I would argue
- 16:41Speaker 8: that terrorists are getting more creative here. It's also important
- 16:44Speaker 8: to understand that, you know, there are state sponsors that
- 16:48Speaker 8: continue to front these terror organizations and move money on
- 16:52Speaker 8: their behalf. You know, I look at China. That's one example.
- 16:57Speaker 8: Russia is another. North Korea has been a perennial problem. Iran, obviously,
- 17:02Speaker 8: although I think that Operation Economic Outcast is certainly constraining
- 17:08Speaker 8: their ability to move money in this way. But yes,
- 17:10Speaker 8: crypto is a growing problem. Crowdfunding platforms are a big problem.
- 17:16Speaker 8: One of the things that I look at right now is,
- 17:18Speaker 8: have we done a good enough job of purging the
- 17:21Speaker 8: bad apples from just the American nonprofit sector, the 501c3s
- 17:25Speaker 8: that have a license to operate here? My sense is
- 17:29Speaker 8: that we've not done enough to purge. We were so
- 17:32Speaker 8: good looking abroad, but I think we've kind of taken
- 17:35Speaker 8: our eye off the ball on the terror finance problem
- 17:39Speaker 8: here at home. That is going to be one of
- 17:41Speaker 8: the things we have to address in the months and
- 17:44Speaker 8: years to come.
- 17:45Speaker 1: Jonathan, do economic sanctions work.
- 17:49Speaker 8: They do, but they only work as much as you're
- 17:52Speaker 8: willing to ensure that they are adhered to by all.
- 17:57Speaker 8: One of the things that I've been marveling at is
- 18:00Speaker 8: the success, at least so far, of this new sanctions
- 18:04Speaker 8: regime that we've put in place against the Islamic Republic
- 18:08Speaker 8: of Iran. It's actually not new at all. There's nothing
- 18:11Speaker 8: new or innovative about what we're doing. We're just simply
- 18:14Speaker 8: making sure that these sanctions are adhered to in jurisdictions
- 18:18Speaker 8: that were ignoring our sanctions guidance. So I think right
- 18:24Speaker 8: now about the UAE, a friend of the United States
- 18:26Speaker 8: that continued to allow for Iranian assets to move through
- 18:31Speaker 8: their banks and through their businesses, the Turks, NATO allies,
- 18:35Speaker 8: that had banks that were openly operating on behalf of
- 18:39Speaker 8: the Islamic Republic. In fact, one bank moved $ 20 billion
- 18:43Speaker 8: in cash and gold during the height of our effort
- 18:46Speaker 8: to sanction the nuclear program of Iran back in 2012
- 18:50Speaker 8: to 2015. Iraq is another jurisdiction that we need to
- 18:54Speaker 8: be aware of. Malaysia, Indonesia. These are all areas and
- 18:59Speaker 8: countries where we have alliances. And we have an understanding
- 19:03Speaker 8: with these governments, but they have not been enforcing our sanctions.
- 19:07Speaker 8: So now we're really starting to button all of this down.
- 19:12Speaker 8: And we've made it serious that nobody gets a free pass.
- 19:15Speaker 8: That's great. But why did it take so long? Why
- 19:19Speaker 8: can't we make these sanctions work the first time, bankrupt
- 19:22Speaker 8: our enemies, force them to come to the table and
- 19:24Speaker 8: get the capitulation that we were looking for?
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