Latest / Bloomberg Intelligence / Ad Budgets Shift from Social Media To Connected TV: Steelhouse
Transcript
- 0:05Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bloomberg p m L Podcast. I'm pim Fox.
- 0:08Speaker 1: Along with my co host Lisa A. Bramowitz. Each day
- 0:11Speaker 1: we bring you the most important, noteworthy, and useful interviews
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- 0:20Speaker 1: L Podcast on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Bloomberg dot com.
- 0:32Speaker 1: We've talked a lot about Mark Zuckerberg in his presentations
- 0:36Speaker 1: in front of Congress. One thing we've heard less about
- 0:40Speaker 1: is what's been going on in the minds of big
- 0:42Speaker 1: advertisers and how they're going to be using Facebook going forward.
- 0:46Speaker 1: Here to talk a little bit about it from that
- 0:47Speaker 1: angle is Mark Douglas, chief executive officer of Steelhouse, which
- 0:52Speaker 1: works with advertisers of all sizes and tries to give
- 0:56Speaker 1: them some context from a data perspective of how to
- 0:58Speaker 1: go about doing so, and his bay in Los Angeles. Mark,
- 1:01Speaker 1: thank you so much for being with us. UM, So
- 1:04Speaker 1: just let's start with how much advertisers have actually pulled
- 1:07Speaker 1: back in the wake of the Facebook reach, if at all. UM,
- 1:12Speaker 1: we haven't seen any advertisers pulled back, and we have
- 1:15Speaker 1: UM close to a thousand pretty sizable advertisers that use
- 1:20Speaker 1: our software. Um, what we've seen is actually a lot
- 1:23Speaker 1: more concern about GDPR, which is a whole another topic.
- 1:27Speaker 1: Basically there being yet global basically is a global UM
- 1:32Speaker 1: protect a privacy protection law that's coming out of the EU,
- 1:35Speaker 1: and so I think there's and that has that has
- 1:38Speaker 1: some stiff penalties. If you violate it, you can be
- 1:40Speaker 1: penalized four percent of your revenue. What's the concern on
- 1:44Speaker 1: behalf of advertisers. Well, because the virtually every company in
- 1:48Speaker 1: Europe has to conform with it, and it's brand new,
- 1:51Speaker 1: it goes in effect on MA and UM. Europe has
- 1:56Speaker 1: more consumers than actually the US does. So in other words,
- 1:59Speaker 1: the idea here is advertisers wouldn't be able to access
- 2:03Speaker 1: the information of European users. Therefore they couldn't target the
- 2:07Speaker 1: odds as well as the idea they have to dislose.
- 2:09Speaker 1: But what the information that they're collecting is being used for.
- 2:13Speaker 1: So Apple actually this past weekend released OS updates for
- 2:17Speaker 1: every every Apple OS, iOS, Apple TV, Mac os and
- 2:23Speaker 1: now when you open their operating systems or any of
- 2:25Speaker 1: the apps, they just slose to you that they value
- 2:28Speaker 1: your privacy. They dislose what data are collecting, how long
- 2:32Speaker 1: they're retaining it for. That's going to happen in Europe
- 2:35Speaker 1: for essentially every company in Europe and every app in Europe.
- 2:39Speaker 1: And Apple did it worldwide. I don't know if they
- 2:41Speaker 1: did in China, but they did it certainly in the
- 2:44Speaker 1: US and Europe. And that that happened for Apple this weekend.
- 2:47Speaker 1: It has to happen for all companies that operate in Europe.
- 2:51Speaker 1: So if someone, if you're a US company, soone gets
- 2:54Speaker 1: on an airplane, when they get off the airplane and
- 2:57Speaker 1: they read and they use your app, you now subject
- 3:00Speaker 1: to that law as a company. And that's coming on. Mark.
- 3:05Speaker 1: I want to give you about the thirty seconds or
- 3:07Speaker 1: maybe even forty five seconds, give us the short version
- 3:10Speaker 1: of of Mark Douglas. Because you're born in the Bronx
- 3:13Speaker 1: Aviation High School, you learned to code in Seattle Oracle
- 3:19Speaker 1: Center of you E Harmony. These are all part of
- 3:21Speaker 1: your biography. Yeah, so um, yeah, I'm a Bronx kid
- 3:25Speaker 1: and UM dropped out of college about one semester and
- 3:29Speaker 1: then UM taught myself to program, bought a book and
- 3:33Speaker 1: borrow a computer, taught myself to program and then UM
- 3:36Speaker 1: just kind of found kept connecting with the right technologies.
- 3:40Speaker 1: I learned how to program on Windows, which is now
- 3:42Speaker 1: way back from the developers at Microsoft that wrote it,
- 3:46Speaker 1: and then eventually met Larry Ellison and then that you know,
- 3:49Speaker 1: was in Silicon Valley, and now um, I'm in Los
- 3:52Speaker 1: Angeles kind of enjoying the l A lifestyle, but I
- 3:55Speaker 1: think working harder than most people. And you know, I
- 3:58Speaker 1: bring some New York five to l A, so working
- 4:00Speaker 1: a little harder than most people in l A. The
- 4:03Speaker 1: reason I wanted to introduce your background here is because
- 4:06Speaker 1: I want to get to this idea of how you
- 4:09Speaker 1: reinvent yourself and specifically the reinvention of video and video
- 4:13Speaker 1: on demand. Tell us what's going on with things like
- 4:16Speaker 1: video advertising, Direct TV now, Hulu Live, Fox Now, and
- 4:22Speaker 1: the way that marketing and advertising is going to be
- 4:26Speaker 1: working with video in the future. So, you know, one
- 4:30Speaker 1: thing that's really interesting. If you ask UM, if anyone
- 4:34Speaker 1: in the industry, what's whether to where the biggest um
- 4:37Speaker 1: at tech companies, the first name they'll say is Google
- 4:41Speaker 1: and the second name they'll say is Facebook. Well, actually
- 4:44Speaker 1: that's not right. Fox is actually bigger than Facebook. And
- 4:48Speaker 1: if Fox and Disney combined, they might be bigger than Google.
- 4:52Speaker 1: So and that's all television ad revenue. All that ad
- 4:56Speaker 1: revenue is going online and so connected to TV. More
- 5:00Speaker 1: than six percent of Americans now watch a majority of
- 5:04Speaker 1: their television on demands, so use it. It's started with Netflix,
- 5:08Speaker 1: but now it's basically every channel. And so when you
- 5:12Speaker 1: watch television is broadcasts we might I say broadcast, I
- 5:15Speaker 1: mean just cable. Um, those ads are just broadcast based
- 5:19Speaker 1: on time slots. Like the people watch the show have
- 5:22Speaker 1: these qualities and we want to, you know, kind of
- 5:25Speaker 1: put our message in front of them. But you watch
- 5:27Speaker 1: the same exact show on connected TV, um, you can
- 5:31Speaker 1: you Basically the targeting on those ads is now much
- 5:35Speaker 1: more personalized in the way that Mark Zuckerberg talked about
- 5:38Speaker 1: basically gave a tutorial on Internet advertising this week and
- 5:43Speaker 1: for a lot of centators even just the Internet, and um,
- 5:46Speaker 1: so you get kind of the same kind of targeting
- 5:48Speaker 1: now for television. It's a huge transition. Okay, So given
- 5:52Speaker 1: that that is a huge transition, are you seeing that
- 5:56Speaker 1: Facebook and frankly Google are losing some of the lure
- 6:00Speaker 1: that they once had because these targeted ads are perhaps
- 6:04Speaker 1: even more effective given the fact that they are more
- 6:07Speaker 1: notable as the only advertisement and they're on a specific show,
- 6:10Speaker 1: and they're also not skippable. The ad completion rates broadcast
- 6:14Speaker 1: television or fourteen percent, so because most people DV are
- 6:19Speaker 1: the ads. The ad completion rates for connected television on
- 6:22Speaker 1: demand television are nine percent because they're completely unskippable. And
- 6:26Speaker 1: you're right the the earl. We can now measure this
- 6:30Speaker 1: at sealhouse. We can now measure this. And the TV
- 6:34Speaker 1: is a powerful medium and it's showing up on connected
- 6:36Speaker 1: TV also, so we're seeing already some budgets. That's where
- 6:40Speaker 1: we're seeing some budgets move where the early adopters have
- 6:44Speaker 1: connected to the advertisers who are early adopters are starting
- 6:47Speaker 1: to move some budget from UM social media, from other
- 6:52Speaker 1: digital channels like mobile advertising, display advertising to television and UM.
- 6:58Speaker 1: We're seeing response rates for the consumer that are just,
- 7:02Speaker 1: you know, kind of really really strong. Approaching paid search
- 7:05Speaker 1: in terms of effectiveness. If you're in the marketing or
- 7:08Speaker 1: advertising world and you're listening to Mark Douglas, what are
- 7:13Speaker 1: some of them I'm going to use the term buzz words,
- 7:15Speaker 1: but what are those key things that you want to
- 7:18Speaker 1: be spending your weekend learning about so that when you
- 7:21Speaker 1: go into the office on Monday, you can have a
- 7:24Speaker 1: constructive conversation about how your business is going to operate
- 7:27Speaker 1: in the future. The that's an interesting question. I think, um,
- 7:35Speaker 1: you know, the topics we touched on are really the
- 7:37Speaker 1: ones I'm putting most of my energy into, and it's there.
- 7:41Speaker 1: There's basically another way to think about it is that
- 7:44Speaker 1: traditional media is making a comeback. It's kind of been predicted,
- 7:49Speaker 1: you know, like Google dominates and Facebook dominates, and Display dominates,
- 7:54Speaker 1: and essentially traditional media because it's not just connected television,
- 7:57Speaker 1: digital radio is like with and or with Spotify, who
- 8:01Speaker 1: I think just went public or is about to go
- 8:03Speaker 1: put don't know they went public, got it, and so
- 8:06Speaker 1: that is making a big comeback, and I think that's
- 8:09Speaker 1: where we're putting a lot of attention. I think any
- 8:12Speaker 1: advertiser should, especially traditional media advertiser, should be thinking, how
- 8:17Speaker 1: can you know? How do I how do I now
- 8:19Speaker 1: target traditional media? Thanks very much for being here, Mark Douglas,
- 8:23Speaker 1: Chief executive Steelhouse. You're listening to Bloomberg. It's been one
- 8:41Speaker 1: of the biggest secrets in the global oil business for
- 8:45Speaker 1: more than forty years. These are the financials of Saudi Aramco.
- 8:49Speaker 1: Well secret no longer here to tell us more. Will Kennedy,
- 8:53Speaker 1: Managing editor for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Energy and
- 8:57Speaker 1: Commodities for Bloomberkey, joins us for London. Well Kennedy, thank
- 9:01Speaker 1: you very much for being with us. Just to give
- 9:03Speaker 1: people a little bit of a sort of description as
- 9:06Speaker 1: to why this is so relevant and interesting, not only
- 9:09Speaker 1: if you're an investor, but just if you want to
- 9:11Speaker 1: understand how the oil business works. There were two things
- 9:16Speaker 1: to say I think him One, Saudi Arabia has suggested
- 9:20Speaker 1: that it might like to I p O this company,
- 9:22Speaker 1: and it would, given its scale, be the probably the
- 9:24Speaker 1: largest sequity deal ever. So that's made it hugely interesting
- 9:28Speaker 1: to investors and everyone around the world. And secondly, this
- 9:33Speaker 1: soil at Aramco pumps underpins the whole Saudi economy. This
- 9:36Speaker 1: is the income stream that pays for social spending in
- 9:39Speaker 1: the kingdom. It's increasingly assertive military and uh the royal family.
- 9:45Speaker 1: So I want to just get your sense. Do you
- 9:48Speaker 1: think the potential investors looking at the numbers reviewed by
- 9:51Speaker 1: Bloomberg would feel more positively towards the company considering the
- 9:55Speaker 1: fact that it's the world's most profitable one, or take
- 9:59Speaker 1: a take a little bit more of a placious stance.
- 10:02Speaker 1: There were there's a mixture of things here in Lisa.
- 10:05Speaker 1: I mean there were some extremely good positives. Clearly, even
- 10:09Speaker 1: last year when our prices were below where they are now,
- 10:12Speaker 1: this was a company that was making considerably more than
- 10:14Speaker 1: any other company in the world. Um, and it will
- 10:17Speaker 1: be making even more money this year as all that
- 10:19Speaker 1: vallees to seventy dollars and beyond. Do you see a
- 10:23Speaker 1: balance sheet that's pretty much pristine, no debt at all.
- 10:26Speaker 1: You see oil production costs which by our estimates perhaps
- 10:31Speaker 1: a quarter of ex On and Shell, the two biggest
- 10:33Speaker 1: publicly traded companies oil companies in the world. But there
- 10:37Speaker 1: are probably negatives for investors, and the one that probably
- 10:40Speaker 1: needs highlighting more than any other is is the tax regime.
- 10:44Speaker 1: What we discovered is that saudio Abia has imposed a
- 10:46Speaker 1: new tax regime, a royalty regime, which takes a share
- 10:50Speaker 1: of every single dollar the company owns earns sorry um,
- 10:54Speaker 1: and that that take rises of oil prices. So it
- 10:57Speaker 1: goes up once I'll get to seventy, it goes up
- 10:59Speaker 1: a and to once ago to a hundred to investors
- 11:03Speaker 1: may feel that really limits for them the upside of
- 11:05Speaker 1: any rallying oil prices if they were to invest in
- 11:08Speaker 1: a company like this when it went public. Now, what
- 11:10Speaker 1: are we talking about in terms of actual profits? I
- 11:13Speaker 1: believe what do they say about the almost thirty four
- 11:16Speaker 1: billion dollars in income for the first six months. That's
- 11:19Speaker 1: according to what Blimberg News has seen. Yeah, that's right,
- 11:23Speaker 1: and that was in seventeen when prices were a lot lower.
- 11:26Speaker 1: And to put that in perspective, I mean they produced
- 11:28Speaker 1: ten million miles a day. Excellent Shell between them probably
- 11:32Speaker 1: produced somewhere about seven million miles a day, but those
- 11:36Speaker 1: two companies made just seven point four billion each. So
- 11:40Speaker 1: you can really see that the low costs that Aramco
- 11:43Speaker 1: have to pump their ta million miles a day from
- 11:46Speaker 1: these giant fields under the Society desert mean that it's
- 11:49Speaker 1: far more profitable than its nearest piers in among the
- 11:52Speaker 1: western all major's. Excellent Shell. Now, the Saudi crown Prince
- 11:56Speaker 1: Mohammed been a salmon who has justly been visiting the
- 12:00Speaker 1: United States in the last couple of weeks. What is
- 12:03Speaker 1: he said about about Saudi ARAMCA I mean, he he
- 12:10Speaker 1: has while he was in America all along his our
- 12:14Speaker 1: start again him and forgive me he made He made
- 12:17Speaker 1: selling Saudi Aramco doing an I p O a centerpiece
- 12:21Speaker 1: of his reform for the kingdom, and he said that
- 12:24Speaker 1: it might be worth as much as two trillion dollars
- 12:26Speaker 1: and it would be key to key to change in
- 12:29Speaker 1: the economy of the kingdom of preparing it for the
- 12:31Speaker 1: oil age. I mean, he's still stuck by that. What
- 12:33Speaker 1: has changed that he says they'll only sell it when
- 12:35Speaker 1: the time is right, when oil prices right. One thing
- 12:39Speaker 1: that I'm struck by is how much flexibility does the
- 12:42Speaker 1: Saudi Arabian government have to love the additional taxes or
- 12:47Speaker 1: take additional profits from the company. It has all the
- 12:51Speaker 1: scope that it wants. I mean, it can change the
- 12:52Speaker 1: tax regime whenever it wants. And I think you're rightly
- 12:55Speaker 1: st highlight that that's probably going to be a key
- 12:58Speaker 1: concern for investors if they look at this company. Clearly,
- 13:01Speaker 1: the primary role of Saudi Aramco is to support the
- 13:04Speaker 1: fiscal uh power of Saudi Arabia, and if they need to,
- 13:09Speaker 1: that's going to take presidents over looking after minority investors,
- 13:14Speaker 1: and that you know that maybe we'll be enough money
- 13:16Speaker 1: for everyone, but that's going to be something for investors
- 13:19Speaker 1: to think about as they assessed the risk of this investment. Well, Kennedy,
- 13:22Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining us, and congratulations, really
- 13:25Speaker 1: really fascinating story at William Kennedy, Managing editor for the
- 13:29Speaker 1: E M e A Energy and Commodities Team, UH for Bloomberg.
- 13:49Speaker 1: We are joined now by Bob mulroy, chief executive officer
- 13:52Speaker 1: of Partner Therapeutics, also former founder and chief executive of
- 13:56Speaker 1: Merrimac based in Boston. Bob, thank you so much for
- 14:01Speaker 1: being with us in congratulations. Your first drug, lu Keen,
- 14:04Speaker 1: I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, was just approved by
- 14:06Speaker 1: the FDA to treat acute radiation sickness. I am a
- 14:10Speaker 1: little concerned, however, about the sort of fact that this
- 14:13Speaker 1: drug exists and the fact that the U. S. Department
- 14:15Speaker 1: of Health and Human Services office actually began stockpiling this
- 14:20Speaker 1: drug in case of a nuclear attack. Is that the
- 14:24Speaker 1: main purpose of this drug, so lucine isn't actually an
- 14:27Speaker 1: older drug, and its purposes really to help restore your
- 14:31Speaker 1: entire immune system and so in diseases where you might
- 14:34Speaker 1: have in affections, it's very important. Um. And in the
- 14:37Speaker 1: case of a radiation sickness, which you could occur from
- 14:40Speaker 1: a nuclear accident, but that could be a leak at
- 14:42Speaker 1: a power plant, it could be from a radioactive mind
- 14:45Speaker 1: that's deep in the ground. So there are many different
- 14:47Speaker 1: possible sources of radiation sickness. But but the US government
- 14:51Speaker 1: did after nine eleven make a decision to stockpile drugs
- 14:54Speaker 1: that could help in a public emergency, and lucine is
- 14:57Speaker 1: one of those drugs. So how many people do they
- 14:59Speaker 1: have doses for? So I'm not sure that that's public information.
- 15:03Speaker 1: I know that they are targeting, uh, you know, covering
- 15:06Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of patients with the stockpile over time,
- 15:08Speaker 1: and what they've done today, I'm not sure that's public.
- 15:10Speaker 1: But um, you know, we're excited that this new approval
- 15:14Speaker 1: and the new data that's been shown with luke. I'm
- 15:15Speaker 1: where it's the first drug to be shown effective at
- 15:18Speaker 1: treating patients who have been exposed to radiation forty eight
- 15:20Speaker 1: hours after an incident. Is really important because in an emergency,
- 15:25Speaker 1: you can necessarily dose everybody right away. You've got to
- 15:27Speaker 1: get the drug and the medical treatment to the potential
- 15:29Speaker 1: patients who have been exposed. Um so luka I really
- 15:33Speaker 1: is a is a breakthrough in that area. Just tell
- 15:36Speaker 1: people a little bit about your background, because you're the
- 15:39Speaker 1: former chief executive of Merrimack that ran into some issues
- 15:43Speaker 1: that caused you to leave and you had to cut
- 15:46Speaker 1: the workforce there. Tell us about why you decided to
- 15:49Speaker 1: put together Partner Therapeutics and the strategy behind Partner. Well,
- 15:55Speaker 1: I've been in the industry for twenty five years and
- 15:57Speaker 1: I love drug development. And after leaving Merrimack, I partnered
- 16:01Speaker 1: with a gentleman named Debashi's Road Chattery who ran oncology
- 16:04Speaker 1: at exactly at Sergeon, Well he was chief medical officer there,
- 16:08Speaker 1: but he ran oncology at Sinofie and Glaxo and and
- 16:11Speaker 1: we've been good friends for years. And what we saw
- 16:14Speaker 1: was a trend in the industry where um, the larger
- 16:17Speaker 1: companies were focusing on fewer and fewer targets, particularly in
- 16:19Speaker 1: the immunotherapy space. But there weren't a lot of companies
- 16:22Speaker 1: thinking about what would you need to make those immunotherapies work.
- 16:26Speaker 1: And so we said, well, let's try and work on
- 16:27Speaker 1: the elements of the components you need to get immunotherapy work,
- 16:31Speaker 1: and so one of the key components is stimulating the
- 16:33Speaker 1: immune cells that immune therapies can trigger. And Luken we
- 16:37Speaker 1: saw it was a key ingredient to that. And if
- 16:39Speaker 1: you think about luke on, it's only one of two
- 16:42Speaker 1: drugs and combinations with immunotherapy that have been shown to
- 16:44Speaker 1: work in cancer. Now, if you happen to be a
- 16:47Speaker 1: patient who is undergoing or undergone chemotherapy or bone marrow transplant,
- 16:53Speaker 1: how would Lukin figure into your life. So today Lukens
- 16:59Speaker 1: approved to treat patients with with a m al acute
- 17:01Speaker 1: Milo leukemia or under a bone mile transplortation transplantation. And
- 17:06Speaker 1: what happens in those cases is you need to uh
- 17:09Speaker 1: in amail for instance, the cancer is against the immune
- 17:11Speaker 1: system and destroying immune cells. So UH Luken can help
- 17:16Speaker 1: reconstitute and rebuild your immune system. UH when you're getting
- 17:20Speaker 1: chemotherapy for treatment, so you don't have an infection, so
- 17:22Speaker 1: effectively replace the cells that are cancers that are geting
- 17:25Speaker 1: killed by the chemotherapy. The same is true with bone
- 17:27Speaker 1: mile transplantation, where you have to regrow or restimulate or
- 17:30Speaker 1: replace that immune system. Because many of those patients they
- 17:33Speaker 1: don't die of the cancer, they'll die of infections as
- 17:35Speaker 1: a result of the cancer reducing their immune systems effectiveness.
- 17:39Speaker 1: Lukin restores the immune systems so that they don't they
- 17:42Speaker 1: don't suffer those effects. I want to talk about the
- 17:44Speaker 1: process of getting the drug approved by the FDA, because
- 17:46Speaker 1: there's been talk that the FDA is trying to expedite
- 17:49Speaker 1: approvals in response to the to the cries for cheaper medications.
- 17:54Speaker 1: Did you find that it was a faster process than
- 17:56Speaker 1: you've heard and experience than in the past. It was
- 17:59Speaker 1: a very fat process for us, but but not one
- 18:01Speaker 1: that's a typical today. We applied for something called priority review,
- 18:04Speaker 1: which is available to any drug that is deemed to
- 18:07Speaker 1: be important to the public health, to a particular treatment
- 18:10Speaker 1: of a condition where you really have a breakthrough therapy opportunity,
- 18:14Speaker 1: and so we applied for a priority review in the
- 18:16Speaker 1: f d A granted that priority review and review the
- 18:20Speaker 1: drug in essentially a six month time frame as opposed
- 18:22Speaker 1: to uh, you know, typical twelve or fourteen months. What
- 18:25Speaker 1: are you working on now? What's in the pipeline? Well,
- 18:28Speaker 1: for luke On what's exciting about it is that uh
- 18:31Speaker 1: uh emunotherapy, which is the latest wave in cancer is
- 18:35Speaker 1: is a really important growing area and lucan is in
- 18:37Speaker 1: a whole number of trials, including a big Phase three
- 18:39Speaker 1: in frontline melanoma today as well as in trials with
- 18:42Speaker 1: cancer vaccines. And in the second area, uh, lucan has
- 18:46Speaker 1: plays in a very important role in the immune system,
- 18:49Speaker 1: where we're finding out that our diseases like Alzheimer's and
- 18:51Speaker 1: Parkinson's that have a big immune system component and potentially
- 18:54Speaker 1: in those indications that there have been early dated in
- 18:56Speaker 1: Phase two showing if you can restore the immune system
- 18:59Speaker 1: you can benefit those diseases as well. Just real quick,
- 19:02Speaker 1: any any wish for an initial public offering anytime in
- 19:05Speaker 1: the near future. Well, right now, we're going to focus
- 19:07Speaker 1: on on on growing lukine of the business and working
- 19:09Speaker 1: on building our pipeline of other drugs um but uh,
- 19:14Speaker 1: we'll see how things go. And just to offer the opportunity,
- 19:18Speaker 1: you did pick up a manufacturing plan from Santa Few, right,
- 19:20Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. So we did acquire a biological
- 19:24Speaker 1: manufacturing facility outside of Seattle, Washington, which helps make lucine.
- 19:28Speaker 1: But we're hopeful other products that we're bringing into the
- 19:30Speaker 1: pipeline they can make for us as well, and so
- 19:33Speaker 1: we'll have. An important capacity in today's world is the
- 19:36Speaker 1: ability to supply product reliably to patients and too physicians.
- 19:40Speaker 1: Uh and and that's a critical thing as as capacity
- 19:43Speaker 1: industry gets constrained with all the development. Thanks very much
- 19:46Speaker 1: for being with us. Bob mulroy is the chief executive
- 19:48Speaker 1: partner Therapeutics. They are based in Boston, home to a
- 19:51Speaker 1: Bloomberg one of six one Boston New Report int thirty
- 19:54Speaker 1: in MetroWest and the South Shore. There seems to be
- 20:11Speaker 1: escalating fissure between the left and the right in the
- 20:16Speaker 1: United States? Is it the same among chief executive officers
- 20:20Speaker 1: of American companies? Here to talk about that and the
- 20:22Speaker 1: consequences of these fissures is Joe Minerrek, Senior vice president
- 20:27Speaker 1: and director of Research at the Committee for Economic Development,
- 20:31Speaker 1: also a former chief Economists at the Office of Management
- 20:34Speaker 1: and Budget during all eight years of the Clinton administration. Joe,
- 20:38Speaker 1: thank you so much for being with us. You co
- 20:41Speaker 1: authored a book last year, Sustaining Capitalism, Bipartisan Solutions to
- 20:45Speaker 1: Restore Trust and Prosperity. In your conversations with executives, do
- 20:51Speaker 1: you get the sense that they are trying to foster
- 20:54Speaker 1: more bipart partisanship, or if you've seen the partisanship sort
- 20:58Speaker 1: of spread to the c suite. We have something of
- 21:03Speaker 1: a self selected audience. I don't want to overstate this,
- 21:07Speaker 1: but uh, the folks who engage with us at the
- 21:10Speaker 1: Committee for Economic Development believe in bipartisan solutions to the
- 21:16Speaker 1: nation's problems. I think that that. However, I think I
- 21:19Speaker 1: can assert that that is fairly representative of the business community.
- 21:23Speaker 1: When you have problems in business, Uh, they're not republican
- 21:27Speaker 1: or democratic problems. There are not republican or democratic facts.
- 21:32Speaker 1: They are not republican or democratic solutions. Business leaders tend
- 21:36Speaker 1: to be focused at solving problems, facing facts, and uh,
- 21:42Speaker 1: coming out at the end with success and our perception,
- 21:46Speaker 1: my perception is that the folks I talked to are
- 21:50Speaker 1: trying to find a way to solve the nation's problems. Well,
- 21:54Speaker 1: Joe interact, I beg your pardon is is there a
- 21:58Speaker 1: development of a parallel economy or a parallel government? Because
- 22:03Speaker 1: in your book you talk about how that that lawmaking
- 22:07Speaker 1: is polluted by special interest lobbying, re election fundraising demands,
- 22:12Speaker 1: and revolving door job appointments. That seems to be pretty
- 22:17Speaker 1: contradictory to what you're describing when you talk about business leaders. Well,
- 22:22Speaker 1: I'm talking to business leaders who want to try to
- 22:26Speaker 1: find solutions. And I find that many business leaders, even
- 22:30Speaker 1: those who don't engage with us directly, do have a
- 22:34Speaker 1: sense of the need to face facts when they are
- 22:37Speaker 1: dealing with issues with respect to their own businesses. So
- 22:41Speaker 1: we do have, I believe, an opportunity to work with business,
- 22:46Speaker 1: to have business cooperate with government to try to find
- 22:51Speaker 1: ways to solve the problems that we face today. I
- 22:54Speaker 1: know there will be differences with respect to particular issues.
- 22:58Speaker 1: It of course gets very tricky when you have business
- 23:03Speaker 1: leaders from different parts of a particular industry where there
- 23:08Speaker 1: are issues of regulation or issues of alternative technologies, where
- 23:16Speaker 1: you have the potential to have one side win and
- 23:18Speaker 1: the other side lose. But the business community, by and large,
- 23:23Speaker 1: in my experience and the people with my work, try
- 23:27Speaker 1: to find a way to solve problems. And right now
- 23:31Speaker 1: we have some very big issues that we need to address,
- 23:33Speaker 1: and folks I talked to are willing to do that.
- 23:36Speaker 1: So let's talk about some of the big issues and
- 23:38Speaker 1: just wearing your hat as the head of the committee
- 23:40Speaker 1: for Economic Development, but also as the as the senior
- 23:43Speaker 1: vice president of the agency, but also with your former
- 23:47Speaker 1: role at the o MB. How concerned are you about
- 23:50Speaker 1: the deepening deficit in the US. We have been on
- 23:55Speaker 1: a path where our debt has been growing faster than
- 23:59Speaker 1: our elective income. The debt to GDP ratio, which is
- 24:04Speaker 1: economist jargon, has been rising, and that has been going
- 24:09Speaker 1: on for uh, just about two decades now. That is
- 24:14Speaker 1: not sustainable. We can't continue along that path. And the
- 24:20Speaker 1: longer we wait, the bigger build up of debt we
- 24:24Speaker 1: will have. And that to me is a matter of
- 24:28Speaker 1: enormous concern. Uh. It's a matter of concern for me personally.
- 24:33Speaker 1: I have two daughters and three grandchildren, and I have
- 24:37Speaker 1: a hard time looking at them in the eye sometimes.
- 24:40Speaker 1: You know, I can imagine my grandchildren saying, ten twenty
- 24:43Speaker 1: years from now, you know, why didn't pop a deal
- 24:46Speaker 1: with that? I thought it was supposed to be something
- 24:49Speaker 1: he worked on. Uh. And that's that should be worrisome
- 24:53Speaker 1: for everybody. The head of a corporation wants to leave
- 24:57Speaker 1: a corporation behind. UH. That is sound. And I've spoken
- 25:02Speaker 1: of business leaders telling me that they consider the nation's
- 25:06Speaker 1: fiscal and balanced to be the greatest threat to the
- 25:08Speaker 1: future of their businesses. Really, that's that's really, you know.
- 25:12Speaker 1: It's It's interesting though, because if you hear some economists
- 25:15Speaker 1: and some members of the current administration, they'll say, if
- 25:18Speaker 1: you look at the deficit with respect to the GDP
- 25:20Speaker 1: of the nation, UH, it's not so big of it.
- 25:23Speaker 1: It's not so big of a deal. What do you
- 25:24Speaker 1: say to that, Uh, If you want to measure that
- 25:30Speaker 1: by recent history, you have to understand that you have
- 25:33Speaker 1: not just lowered the bar, you buried the bar. For
- 25:37Speaker 1: the last twenty years, our budget UH position has not
- 25:41Speaker 1: been sustainable. And you want to say, well, it's not
- 25:44Speaker 1: so bad, it's better than it was in the depths
- 25:47Speaker 1: of the UH the financial crisis. That's true. In the
- 25:51Speaker 1: depths of the financial crisis, we were setting records for
- 25:55Speaker 1: the size of our deficits, you know, trillion dollar deficits
- 25:59Speaker 1: for the first time in our history. And now we're
- 26:02Speaker 1: in a position where if you start from where we
- 26:04Speaker 1: are and you draw a straight line with a UH
- 26:08Speaker 1: with a ruler in the direction in which we want
- 26:11Speaker 1: to go, in which we are now going, UH, you
- 26:14Speaker 1: will find that in we're going to have uh deficits
- 26:18Speaker 1: that are back in the trillion dollar range again. Uh.
- 26:21Speaker 1: Ten years from now, in the nation's debt will be
- 26:26Speaker 1: greater than it's gross domestic product. The debt to GDP
- 26:30Speaker 1: ratio will be over for the first time since the
- 26:34Speaker 1: end of World War Two. Uh. And now we're talking
- 26:38Speaker 1: about setting that standard in a peacetime economy, when the
- 26:42Speaker 1: economy is growing relative to of course, the the the
- 26:47Speaker 1: enormous emergency in World War Two when we we would
- 26:51Speaker 1: borrow all we needed to to finance our freedom. Uh.
- 26:54Speaker 1: We have no excuses today for that kind of behavior.
- 26:58Speaker 1: All right, So what so what do you said us
- 27:00Speaker 1: that people who are listening to you do? Earlier today,
- 27:04Speaker 1: I got the chance to speak the Congressman Dave Bratt,
- 27:06Speaker 1: Republican the Virginia seventh District, asked him about teacher pay
- 27:11Speaker 1: at the time when you're running one and a half
- 27:14Speaker 1: trillion dollar deficits according to the OMB, and there was
- 27:18Speaker 1: a disconnect in terms of trying to make any kind
- 27:21Speaker 1: of inroads into Well, you know, maybe the money should
- 27:23Speaker 1: have been spent on education. What do you do? Well,
- 27:29Speaker 1: I'm talking here and the members of our organization are
- 27:33Speaker 1: talking about bipartisan solutions. I think the first thing that
- 27:38Speaker 1: we have to recognize is that our budget problem is
- 27:43Speaker 1: so large that the only way that we are going
- 27:47Speaker 1: to solve it is if we have everyone at the
- 27:50Speaker 1: table and everything on the table. We need our nation's
- 27:56Speaker 1: leaders in the Congress and in the executive branch to
- 28:00Speaker 1: recognize that there is no way to solve this problem
- 28:05Speaker 1: where one side gets everything at once and does not
- 28:09Speaker 1: have to pitch in. Alright, everybody is going to have
- 28:11Speaker 1: to be involved. Well, thank you for being involved, and
- 28:14Speaker 1: thank you for Sustaining Capitalism, the book that you co
- 28:17Speaker 1: authored last year. Joe Minrick is the director of Research
- 28:21Speaker 1: at the Committee for Economic Development. He's all our former
- 28:24Speaker 1: chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget. Thanks
- 28:31Speaker 1: for listening to the Bloomberg P and L podcast. You
- 28:33Speaker 1: can subscribe and listen to interviews at Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud,
- 28:37Speaker 1: or whatever podcast platform you prefer. I'm Pim Fox. I'm
- 28:41Speaker 1: on Twitter at pim Fox. I'm on Twitter at Lisa Abramo.
- 28:45Speaker 1: It's one before the podcast. You can always catch us
- 28:47Speaker 1: worldwide on Bloomberg Radio.