Latest / Trend Watch / Episode 26: Presidential Immunity, Student Protests, and Myanmar's Civil War

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Episode 26: Presidential Immunity, Student Protests, and Myanmar's Civil War · Trend Watch

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Ready to take a deeper look at where history, politics, and economics all intersect?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then you've come to the right place.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Each week,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: here's where we pull back the headlines and focus on the big trends,
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: the stuff that actually shapes our future.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Through the noise, we focus on the signal.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Neil Howe, and this is TrendWatch.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Today is May 1st, 2024, and this is Trend Watch.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: International Workers Day.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think, Christian?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: 138 years ago, this was the Haymarket Riot.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: So 1886.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Was it in Chicago?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was in Chicago.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, I call it the Haymarket Riot.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, if you're a
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a good socialist, you call it the Haymarket episode because it wasn't a riot.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, after all, this is a legitimate undertaking.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back, everybody.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: As per usual, I have on my fellow analyst, Christian Ford.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, Christian, I'm going to ask you, how was your week?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: My week's been pretty good, Neil.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've been enjoying the warmer weather.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was able to actually plant my vegetable garden, which I always enjoy.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Planting your vegetables.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I could have so many good comebacks on that.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing I would ask is, is that because in Maine, no vegetables would grow?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we always tried growing up, but our plants never did great.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think my parents finally gave up on their raspberry patch this year.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: I could have asked something like, is that because you can't afford to have kids?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, I won't.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Homesteading.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, homesteading.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's get into this.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: First, on to our farewells.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's been two weeks, so we have, you know...
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Two weeks of names of people, you know, coming out of the news.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: There are a couple of interesting ones that I think would interest our audience.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: One, a person who passed away.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think to anyone who manages assets,
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: and we do have among our audience some people who do that for a living.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: is Michael C. Jensen, the founding theorist of financial economics as an academic field.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: And in the 1980s and 90s,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: a leading advocate of deregulating corporations and enabling them to financialize
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: themselves through,
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: stock options,
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: LBOs.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Jensen passed away at age 84 last week.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a very interesting career.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Jensen was born and raised in Minnesota and knew once he graduated from Macalester
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: College in Minneapolis in 1962 that he was interested in the stock market,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think in part to escape his financial,
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: struggles in his family.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: He then spent the mid-1960s studying at the University of Chicago,
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: the Booth School,
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: with Merton Miller,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Eugene Fama,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: and of course Milton Friedman,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: working himself through school.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: He had to do odd jobs to get through school,
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: but in the process absorbing much of their free market perspective.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: He spent most of his subsequent career teaching finance and business administration
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: at the University of Rochester University.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: In the late 1980s,
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Jensen taught full time at the Harvard Business School before formally retiring in 2000.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Jensen single handedly defined.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, he practically created the field of financial economics.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: He founded and for many years edited the Journal of Financial Economics,
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: which Christian is today the top academic finance journal.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: He invents he invented Jensen's Alpha.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And anyone out there familiar with the Sharpe ratio or the Treynor ratio?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Jensen's alpha is a means of measuring the alpha,
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: the overperformance of a portfolio manager,
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Looking at your whole portfolio and seeing how you outperform.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: He founded the Social Science Research Network,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: which I was surprised to learn this,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: SSRN,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: which most of us who follow social science regularly use.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: almost on a daily basis.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And for his theoretical contributions, he became one of the most cited economists in the post-war era.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: To understand Jensen's contribution,
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: we need to recall that the founding GI generation of Chicago economists,
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: and again,
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: we're thinking of Aaron and Friedman and that crew,
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Coase and the rest of them focus mainly on the real economy and on the regulation
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: and taxation of goods and services.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: They really didn't write a lot about finance because they simply assume that the
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: firm's financing directed by the firm's executives would naturally follow the
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: interests of the firm's stockholders.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: But Jensen,
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: like so many free market theorists of the next generation who began to make their
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: mark in the 1980s and 1990s,
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: challenged that assumption.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Looking within the firm, they focused on the misalignment of agency incentives.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that executives often don't do what's in the interest of stockholders.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Jensen later recalls his contribution as,
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: and I quote from one of his papers,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: breaking open the black box of the firm,
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: unquote.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: His most famous paper,
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: co-authored with Bill Meckling in 1976,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: was called Theory of the Firm,
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Managerial Behavior,
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: Agency Costs,
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: and Ownership Structure.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: By the 1980s, Jensen's ideas began to popularize the notion that government should liberate workers.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: what he called the market for corporate control.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: He thought we should help shareholders incentivize executives to work on their
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: behalf through liberal stock options and golden parachutes,
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: for example.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we should make it easier for one firm to buy another if the market believes it
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: would be better under new management.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we all recall the greed is good scene from the 1987 movie Wall Street.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: that is definitely an example of Jensen's ideas percolating through to public consciousness,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you recall that movie,
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Christian,
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: but it had all of these,
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: drone like executives just sitting there,
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: making lots of money and absolutely with no initiative whatsoever.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you have this
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: This guy coming up, we just got to incentivize greed.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: We'd actually have some efficiency here.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway,
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: during the 1990s,
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Congress passed laws making stock options,
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: performance rewards,
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: and LBOs easier,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: largely in conformance with the ideas of Jensen and his allies.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: And these ideas made a huge influence on the boomers who followed them, and especially on the Gen Xers.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: who are coming of age under their dominance, right?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: This new sort of freewheeling capitalist era, Reagan and post-Reagan, I guess you'd say.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: For anyone really interested in this era and the shift,
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: by the way,
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: I highly recommend a book by Justin Fox called The Myth of the Rational Market.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: It came out in 2011.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Just an excellent book on the academics who sort of made this shift toward neoliberalism
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And throughout,
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: not just in economics,
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: by the way,
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: but in business schools,
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: in law and economics,
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: even,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Justice Bork in any trust,
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: all of that.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: For a book more directly focused on Jensen's role,
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: including a very large and interesting interview with Jensen,
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: there's a great book by Nicholas Lehman called Transaction Man,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: So as you can see, Nicholas Lehman, a little bit of criticism may be buried in there.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Did Jensen ever express any regrets about the policy changes made at his encouragement?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, he did.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: In 2005,
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: he published an essay called Agency Costs of Overvalued Equity,
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: which points out that super incentivized managers will obviously succumb to the
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: temptation to lie about their firm in order to push up its market value.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's an agency problem he didn't think about, right?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Just think about Enron or Global Crossing.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Jensen said he was sometimes sickened by how his reform ideas played out in practice.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And in his retirement, he entered a very unexpected collaboration with Werner Erhard.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: The new age consciousness guru to offer what he called ontological phenomenological
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: training sessions of business executives.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: I can only imagine.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm sure they're pricey.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure he made money on them, right?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: The most wonderful things happen if you have integrity.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Jensen often told audiences late in his life, I was incomplete as a human being.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Was I successful?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, I was successful, but I was incomplete.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Michael Jensen, gone last week at age 84.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: The other person I want to talk about is Daniel Clement Dennett III,
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: just Daniel Dennett,
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: the widely published cognitive scientist and philosopher and one of America's most
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: eminent atheists who passed away at age 82.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Dennett was born in Boston in 1942,
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: but spent his early childhood during World War II in Lebanon,
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: interestingly enough,
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: where his father,
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: a Harvard scholar in Islamic studies,
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: worked as a counterintelligence agent for the OSS.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1947, his father died in a plane crash in Ethiopia.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: So Dennett went back to New England and there he earned his B.A.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: at Wesleyan, his Ph.D.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: in philosophy at Harvard.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: He spent most of his subsequent career teaching at Tufts University, also in the Boston area.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Dennett recalls that he was first attracted to philosophy while attending a summer camp at age 11.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: After listening to him, a camp counselor told him, You know what you are, Daniel?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: You're a philosopher.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: So Dennett wrote about philosophy in a way that appealed not only to academics,
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: but as he grew older,
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: it was in a lively style that was popular with the general public as well.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: His first book appearing in 1981 was Brainstorms.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: In the 90s, he wrote two bestsellers, Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: More recently, in 2006, he wrote Breaking the Spell, Religion is a Natural Phenomenon.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2017, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, The Evolution of Minds.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, that's a great title.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: From Bacteria to Bach and Back.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway,
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: through his writing,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: the public got to know Dennett as a principled believer in natural materialism and
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: as such in atheism and religion and secularism and politics.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: He was widely known as one of the four horsemen of atheism whose views have been
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: widely circulating in widely circulating in recent decades.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: The other three being Christopher Hitchens, who passed away in 2011.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Richard Dawkins,
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: also very famous,
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: author of The Selfish Gene,
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: The Blind Watchmaker,
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: who,
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: by the way,
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: is about the same age as Dennett and still very much alive.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And Sam Harris, the fourth member, who is much younger.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: What Dennett had in common with the other three was an active desire to proselytize
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: against religion and religious dogma,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: to elevate the public's understanding of the scientific method,
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: and to explain the origin and nature of humankind by appealing to Darwin and
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: natural selection.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's some interesting generational contrast here, Christian.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Dennett and Dawkins, both members of the silent generation who came of age in the 1950s,
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: and began publishing in the era of the moral majority,
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: seem especially opposed to the narrowness of Christian orthodoxy,
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: right,
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: and its influence on politics and public policy.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a big contrast with Sam Harris,
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: an Xer,
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: much younger,
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: who came of age really in the 1990s,
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: whose peers are a lot less likely to go to church,
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And who goes out of his way to talk about the virtues of spiritualism without religion, right?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: You see Harris,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: who's definitely,
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: very secular,
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: very much an atheist,
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: but talks a lot about spiritualism in a way which I think the older generation doesn't.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Politically,
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: it's fair to say that all four horsemen of atheism have generally appealed more to
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: the left.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: The left, like like all of these philosophers, likes to appeal to science and rationalism.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: They instinctively resist the evangelicals.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: And Dennett was no different.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: But in one critical respect,
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Dennett and even some of the other of these four that we're talking about have
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: resisted one big new intellectual tide on the left.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the move toward postmodernism and toward the critical study of race, class, gender, whatever.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: All these approaches based upon subjective perspectives.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: The so-called lived experience of the victim.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Denno was a positivist and a philosophical realist.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: He believed that nature really does give us right and wrong answers to life's
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: biggest questions and that these aren't merely questions of perspective.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: So he was definitely an anti-postmodernist.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Late in his life,
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: he was profoundly opposed to trans or racialist ideologies that depended merely on feelings.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Probably because he sensed it opened a back door for any nonsensical creed,
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: including organized religion.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Let me let me give a quote here from Dennett.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is probably a good summary.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: He says postmodernism,
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: the school of thought,
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: quote unquote thought that proclaims there are no truths,
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: only interpretations has largely played itself out in absurdity.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence,
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: settling for conversations in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed,
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: only asserted with whatever style you can muster.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: for much the same reason,
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Dennett was skeptical of the thinking potential of artificial intelligence.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think because he believed that...
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: The AI that most impresses people,
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: like large language models,
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: is mostly parasitical upon original human thinking.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now,
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: personally,
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Christian,
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not an atheist or a secularist,
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: but I can agree with many of Dennett's arguments.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: For example, about what he says about postmodernism and AI, for example.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: So there you have it.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Daniel Dennett, one of the four horsemen of atheism, no longer with us at age 82.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: And before I leave,
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: maybe I could just add very quickly,
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: two other members of the silent generation who are no longer with us.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Carl Erskine,
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: nicknamed Oisk,
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: the pitching star for the Brooklyn Dodgers,
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: whose team won five National League pennants.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: In the 1955 World Series, very famous, passed away at age 97.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And Roman Gabriel,
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if anyone grew up on the West Coast like me,
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: but that was the big physical quarterback who played 11 seasons for the Los Angeles Rams,
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: five more for the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1960s and 70s.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: He passed away at age 83.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Gabriel never won much in the postseason,
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: at least I can't recall,
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: but he went to the Pro Bowl four times.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that was back when fans really cared about the Pro Bowl.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Unlike today, I don't think we care about it.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: They just no one wants to get injured.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think that's it.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: as always,
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: let me remind you,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: if you like this podcast,
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: please go ahead and share it with your friends and family.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Repost on social media.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: From now on, only some episodes will remain free.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Christian,
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think we should take a moment to clarify to listeners that this podcast isn't all
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: we do on Substack,
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: but that we also put out lots of written content under the name Demography Unplugged.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where we break down demographic, economic, and generational trends.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's right, Neil.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And just for our listeners to know,
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: we posted a great piece this week on a bunch of new demographic news that came out,
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: including what's happening with the U.S.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: fertility rate.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have some great charts looking at the generations by age and how big they actually are by population.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I really recommend if you're only really listening to us to go and check out
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: some of these written pieces.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think pieces like that remind people, you know, why we actually are called Demography Unplugged.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: We really do cover demography.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: We cover other things as well, but that's sort of our taproot, right?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: So let's get right into today's podcast.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: As always, we have a lot to talk about.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: We got market news.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: We'll start with that.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then as usual, we'll be covering stories from around the world.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just going to give just a quick upfront.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about the four part foreign aid package passed by the House,
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: then by the Senate,
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: signed by Biden.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to look at that.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: As expected, Marjorie Taylor Greene will call her motion to vacate Speaker Johnson to a vote next week.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Will Johnson survive?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: We'll look at that.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: The immunity case filed by Trump against federal prosecutors is being argued before the Supreme Court.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: How is this going?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: The universities are indeed moving against students protesting Israel's combat
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: operations in the combat strip.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: We will talk about that.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: The FTC voted three to two to ban non-compete disclosure agreements between employers and workers.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll say a few words about Lina Khan, how that's going at the FTC.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: Israel strikes back against Iran with missile and drone attacks on Iranian missile radar systems.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk a little bit about the the Myanmar's or Burma's attacks.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Civil War, how it's going against the ruling junta.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a mess.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think we can say it's a mess.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to I know Christian, you're going to talk about that.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: And finally,
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez vows to stay on as leader of Spain after being attacked,
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: or at least his wife was attacked.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: for corruption.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: So all that and more.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: So Christian, take it away.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go into markets.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Neil, the S&P 500 closed down 0.34% today.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And over the last five market days is down 1.05%.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: As for the global Dow, that closed down 0.28%.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And over the last five days is down 0.71%.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: The VIX closed today at 15.42, which actually is a little bit lower that we've seen over the last week.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And as for the 10-year Treasury, Neil, that's at 4.635%, down 1.1 basis points over the last five days.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it's up around 20 basis points over the last month or so.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Creeping up.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Creeping up.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Should I go right on the indicators?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: You go right ahead.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: For the U.S., we had annualized Q1 GDP, which came in at 1.6%.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: That was a lot worse than expectations, Neil.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: The forecast was 2.5%, and it's significantly below last quarter's reading of 3.4%.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: But is the bad news good news?
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of people are saying, well, that takes the heat off the Fed.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: After all, anything below 2% GDP growth, you can't say the economy is overheating anymore.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Look, I'm just saying that's what a lot of people will say.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we have some more bad news here.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Conference board consumer confidence fell from 103.1 in March to 97.0 in April.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: We also have flash PMIs from the S&P Global for April.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: manufacturing fell from 51.9 to 49.9 and services fell from 51.7 to 50.9 that's the
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: lowest reading we've seen in five months and if we go to the euro area neil we have
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: q1 gdp which expanded by 0.3 you know that's after two quarters of actually
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: negative gdp readings
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: the fastest growing economies we saw spain they had positive 0.7 percent italy
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: positive 0.3 and france and germany came in at 0.2 percent these are these are not
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: annualized is that correct right okay so that's 0.7 so you'd have to take uh you
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: know 1.007 to the fourth power do that in your head christian
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, it's obviously pretty good for Europe.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Anything from the East?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: Anything from China?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, not much news there yet, but I think we should have stuff next week.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, great.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: hopefully we're going to go over all this later this month and are all about the indicators,
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: but we will report more on that in time.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start with our first story, Neil.