Latest / Bloomberg Intelligence / Fed Minutes, Meta, Rivian, and Student Loans (Podcast)
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- 0:00Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bloomberg Markets Podcast. I'm Paul Sweeney, alongside
- 0:04Speaker 1: my co host Matt Miller.
- 0:05Speaker 2: Every business day we bring you interviews from CEOs, market pros,
- 0:09Speaker 2: and Bloomberg experts, along with essential market moven news.
- 0:14Speaker 1: Find the Bloomberg Markets podcast called Apple Podcasts or wherever
- 0:17Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts, and at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast.
- 0:21Speaker 3: We've got a good block of time here and we're
- 0:23Speaker 3: gonna need it.
- 0:23Speaker 4: Daniel D.
- 0:24Speaker 1: Martino Booth joins us here on our Bloomberg Interactive Broker's studio.
- 0:28Speaker 3: You know her, you know her work.
- 0:30Speaker 1: CEO and chief strategists at QI Research. Daniel, thanks so
- 0:34Speaker 1: much for joining us here, Boyd. A lot of economic
- 0:36Speaker 1: data coming out over the last several days. I don't know,
- 0:39Speaker 1: the economy seems pretty darn strong to me. I'm not
- 0:42Speaker 1: sure if the recession talk is off the table. What
- 0:45Speaker 1: does our Federal Reserve do?
- 0:47Speaker 3: Look at some of the eco data we've seen over
- 0:48Speaker 3: the last several days.
- 0:50Speaker 5: Well, you have to bear in mind, I'm of the
- 0:52Speaker 5: mind that the Federal Reserve wants a reason to keep
- 0:54Speaker 5: raising rates. Okay, and we follow one metric at QI
- 0:59Speaker 5: Research the most closely because it's got the least noise
- 1:03Speaker 5: in it, so not statistically not seasonally adjusted continuing claims.
- 1:09Speaker 3: Okay, So I'm gonna make this really simple.
- 1:11Speaker 5: Last September, there were zero states in the United States
- 1:13Speaker 5: of America that had rising year over year continuing claimants.
- 1:17Speaker 5: So the number of individuals in zero states in terms
- 1:21Speaker 5: of rising beneficiaries. Okay, last September, forty six states as
- 1:26Speaker 5: of this morning's data have rising continuing claimants. That's ninety
- 1:34Speaker 5: ninety four percent of the population.
- 1:35Speaker 3: Wow, Okay, so what's that tell you that?
- 1:38Speaker 5: And it's been gradual, by the way, this is not
- 1:40Speaker 5: like from September and a light flipped on in July.
- 1:43Speaker 5: It's a very gradual move. And it tells me that
- 1:46Speaker 5: even though the data is not fast moving, that seasonality
- 1:50Speaker 5: is really giving a lot of trouble to a lot
- 1:52Speaker 5: of these other data sets. And it just tells you
- 1:54Speaker 5: that there's been a steady, a steady degradation in the
- 1:58Speaker 5: US economy viewed through the purest prism of people continuing
- 2:03Speaker 5: to claim jobless benefits. Not initial, they're not they're not applying,
- 2:07Speaker 5: they're they're collecting.
- 2:09Speaker 3: What is eighty I don't know what to do with
- 2:10Speaker 3: ad you.
- 2:11Speaker 6: Know, you know, what do you do with ADP?
- 2:12Speaker 3: I tell you what with ADP?
- 2:14Speaker 5: You go, Look, we've had about four hundred and we've
- 2:17Speaker 5: we've had about three hundred and forty eight thousand last
- 2:19Speaker 5: six months NFP non farm payrolls YEP ADPs three hundred
- 2:23Speaker 5: and sixty three last six months. Okay, fine, it's caught up.
- 2:27Speaker 5: Moving on some of that. Some of the aberrations in.
- 2:29Speaker 3: The data are bizarre.
- 2:31Speaker 5: Leisure in hospitality, mining. Did we discover copper in America?
- 2:36Speaker 7: Mining?
- 2:36Speaker 5: Because that was a huge pop in mining. So and
- 2:40Speaker 5: we've seen the Baylor, We've seen the Baker, Riggs, Hughes,
- 2:43Speaker 5: rigcount I can't speak this one. I've had too much coffee.
- 2:46Speaker 5: We've seen rig counts come down. Okay, So there's no
- 2:49Speaker 5: reason to think that there's a whole bunch of shale
- 2:51Speaker 5: formation that's pulling people into the energy patch.
- 2:55Speaker 1: So you think the economy is weaker than some of
- 2:56Speaker 1: the underlying some of the headline data is showing.
- 2:59Speaker 5: I think the economy is weaker if you look on
- 3:01Speaker 5: a grant.
- 3:02Speaker 3: When I give the Fed some reasons that just to
- 3:04Speaker 3: pause if not, I.
- 3:05Speaker 5: Don't think the Fed wants to pause Okay, I think
- 3:07Speaker 5: the Fed is looking for reasons to keep going. I
- 3:10Speaker 5: think if you pay attention to how they will not
- 3:13Speaker 5: discuss the balance sheet. We're not talking about quantitative tightening.
- 3:17Speaker 5: It's like Voldemort. They won't talk about it. But they
- 3:20Speaker 5: can't have quantitative tightening. They can't continue to shrink the
- 3:22Speaker 5: balance sheet. If a discussion is even entered into about
- 3:26Speaker 5: easing where rates are they have to keep rights high
- 3:29Speaker 5: to keep shrinking the balance sheet.
- 3:30Speaker 8: So we're getting all of this labor data ahead of
- 3:32Speaker 8: tomorrow's important jobs report, and it's interesting. I'm looking at
- 3:35Speaker 8: Ecogo and the terminal and it looks like the unemployment
- 3:38Speaker 8: rate it's actually going to tick down from three point
- 3:40Speaker 8: seven percent through three point six percent based on analysts
- 3:43Speaker 8: that we're pulling in the terminal. You look at the
- 3:46Speaker 8: when it comes to non farm payrolls about two hundred
- 3:48Speaker 8: and twenty five thousand. What is your take on what
- 3:52Speaker 8: we could see tomorrow and obviously how that could potentially
- 3:55Speaker 8: relate to how US stocks are moving on the back
- 3:57Speaker 8: of this type of data that clearly not even just
- 3:59Speaker 8: the stuf Bock market, but looking what's happening with a
- 4:01Speaker 8: two year and the.
- 4:03Speaker 5: Two year really is where it is all at at
- 4:05Speaker 5: this point, right, you know, I think I can't tell
- 4:10Speaker 5: you what NFP is going to do tomorrow. I had
- 4:13Speaker 5: a friend of Mit, Peter Sheher, he's a good friend
- 4:14Speaker 5: of Bloomberg's, you know, he made the comment, what are
- 4:17Speaker 5: the statistically speaking, what are the odds that fourteen months
- 4:20Speaker 5: in a row all the economists missed the estimate?
- 4:23Speaker 3: And what are the odds?
- 4:24Speaker 5: I mean, the bls will tell you that forty two
- 4:27Speaker 5: percent of the jobs created in the last forty two
- 4:30Speaker 5: months are against a backdrop of the fastest bankruptcy cycle
- 4:35Speaker 5: since two thousand and nine. So how do we have
- 4:37Speaker 5: a birth death adjustment that adds forty two percent net
- 4:40Speaker 5: net of all non farm payroll jobs. Forty two percent
- 4:43Speaker 5: is not a small number over the last twelve months
- 4:45Speaker 5: in the aggregate, assuming that this is all berths, when
- 4:49Speaker 5: you can pull up BCY, go on the terminal and
- 4:52Speaker 5: see the biggest number since two thousand and nine.
- 4:55Speaker 8: So when you see the two year at a sixteen
- 4:58Speaker 8: year high, what do you think the bond market it
- 5:00Speaker 8: is telling us.
- 5:00Speaker 5: It's telling you that Fed's going to keep raising rates
- 5:03Speaker 5: come what may.
- 5:05Speaker 1: So we've got ninety percent priced in for the next meeting,
- 5:10Speaker 1: they go again after that, you think it's September.
- 5:13Speaker 5: I think it really becomes data dependent at that point,
- 5:16Speaker 5: unless there's going to be an investigation launched to the
- 5:18Speaker 5: Bureau of Labor Statistics, because they're already questioning the inflation data.
- 5:22Speaker 5: That's a matter of public knowledge. So I mean, barring that,
- 5:26Speaker 5: you don't get to forty six states with rising continuing
- 5:29Speaker 5: claimants without somebody starting to notice that there's a problem
- 5:32Speaker 5: in the country.
- 5:34Speaker 1: So what is the I mean, what is your overall
- 5:37Speaker 1: take of this economy that there is in fact more
- 5:39Speaker 1: weakness than the I guess the headline data would show.
- 5:43Speaker 3: But yet they're still going to rate raise rates.
- 5:46Speaker 5: It's the butt Yet remember the employee Retention credit they
- 5:50Speaker 5: advertise all the time. It just pumped twenty eight point
- 5:53Speaker 5: eight billion dollars into the US economy in the month
- 5:56Speaker 5: of June alone. It's been about twenty billion dollars a
- 5:59Speaker 5: month now for about eighteen months. There's a massive form
- 6:02Speaker 5: of COVID fiscal stimulus that continues to make its way
- 6:05Speaker 5: into this economy. You see it in international travel. But
- 6:08Speaker 5: his tourist and slack came out in his morning note
- 6:10Speaker 5: this morning and said the US consumer slowing. I think
- 6:13Speaker 5: it pained him to say that, But if you look
- 6:15Speaker 5: beyond the recipients of this employee retention credit, kind of
- 6:19Speaker 5: the wealthiest, the highest income earners, you're seeing decided signs
- 6:22Speaker 5: of slowing in consumption.
- 6:24Speaker 8: So then with this jobs report tomorrow, we have CPI
- 6:27Speaker 8: on July twelfth, so next week, and then we'll have
- 6:30Speaker 8: the FED meeting on July twenty fifth and twenty six,
- 6:34Speaker 8: So those are the last major data points before that.
- 6:37Speaker 8: Is that enough for them to decide to potentially hike Oh?
- 6:41Speaker 5: I think it is.
- 6:42Speaker 9: I really do.
- 6:43Speaker 3: Again.
- 6:44Speaker 5: He's focused on an inflation metric of his own design,
- 6:48Speaker 5: the core CPI net of shelter, and it is a
- 6:51Speaker 5: slow moving animal. We've gone back and looked at it historically,
- 6:54Speaker 5: prior to the pandemic, it was usually running at about
- 6:56Speaker 5: two to three percent, but two percent was a rarity,
- 7:00Speaker 5: that isolated metric that J. Powell has conceived out of
- 7:04Speaker 5: thin air. So in that he's looking at that, I
- 7:08Speaker 5: think that it's very conceivable. We're you know, O Mayr
- 7:11Speaker 5: Sharif is saying, you know, look for used cars prices
- 7:14Speaker 5: to come down, you know, look for shelter to continue falling.
- 7:17Speaker 5: Look for that next CPI print to be very bond
- 7:20Speaker 5: market friendly unless Ja Powel's just going to look through
- 7:24Speaker 5: it as you go forty eight hours into blackout right
- 7:27Speaker 5: before the next for.
- 7:28Speaker 3: MC, what are one of the many reasons we're like
- 7:30Speaker 3: speaking to you is you rip out some data points
- 7:32Speaker 3: that quite frankly, I've never heard of.
- 7:34Speaker 1: What are some of the data points that you and
- 7:36Speaker 1: your team are kind of looking at here to get
- 7:38Speaker 1: a sense that maybe aren't on eco go.
- 7:40Speaker 3: So we actually.
- 7:41Speaker 5: Follow weekly data from light Cast. They started tracking the
- 7:46Speaker 5: data as of January twenty twenty to get a benchmark
- 7:49Speaker 5: for which types of job openings there are in the nation,
- 7:52Speaker 5: so jobs with minimal education required, I mean they needed
- 7:56Speaker 5: a new scale in order to track how many job
- 7:58Speaker 5: openings there were for lee, your hospitality, bus boys, you
- 8:02Speaker 5: name it. That's recently through the week of June twenty
- 8:06Speaker 5: fourth come down to zero, so there are effectively no
- 8:09Speaker 5: job opening Using a benchmark of January of twenty twenty,
- 8:12Speaker 5: I follow trueflation very closely truflation. We actually were able
- 8:17Speaker 5: to get their full data set back to twenty twelve.
- 8:20Speaker 5: We ran a correlation analysis with the headline CPI last Friday,
- 8:25Speaker 5: ninety seven percent since twenty twelve. The correlation where it's
- 8:29Speaker 5: trueflation today two point two percent. Okay, it's thirty million
- 8:32Speaker 5: real time prices. It's a daily inflation print, but a
- 8:35Speaker 5: ninety seven percent correlation since twenty twelve. With headline CPI
- 8:40Speaker 5: tells you exactly where inflation is headed.
- 8:42Speaker 1: So inflation's headed lower, much lower. And isn't that good
- 8:45Speaker 1: news for Jpal? And that's what he wants to see.
- 8:47Speaker 5: Ran, It's not good news for that Jpal That Japal
- 8:50Speaker 5: wants to continue shrinking that balance sheet, oh Man, and
- 8:53Speaker 5: he wants a reason to continue shrinking that balance sheet.
- 8:56Speaker 5: So he's going to focus on job openings remaining high,
- 8:58Speaker 5: even though work out of the Dallas Fed shows that
- 9:00Speaker 5: ninety percent of those job openings are written for the
- 9:03Speaker 5: specific purpose of poaching your closest competitors employees so you
- 9:07Speaker 5: don't have to spend the money training them. The other
- 9:09Speaker 5: ten percent actually reflect organic demand in the economy for
- 9:14Speaker 5: new job openings. That's being reflected in indeed dot com
- 9:17Speaker 5: as well. You're seeing in d dot com job postings
- 9:19Speaker 5: have come down tremendously over the last twelve months. That's
- 9:22Speaker 5: another big one that we follow. And again it's a
- 9:25Speaker 5: weekly data set and they're speaking to thousands and thousands
- 9:28Speaker 5: of companies across the country. That's what you want. You
- 9:30Speaker 5: want people who are speaking to people on the ground.
- 9:32Speaker 8: And so even though we see the Fed's preferred gauge
- 9:35Speaker 8: PCE moving in the right direction, to you, that's still
- 9:38Speaker 8: not enough when you're looking at what's happening with the
- 9:40Speaker 8: strength on the labor's side.
- 9:41Speaker 5: And I'm going to quote Powell here, until the job
- 9:43Speaker 5: is done, yep, until we get to two percent.
- 9:46Speaker 3: And two percent, what is the two percent number? That
- 9:48Speaker 3: is the core x.
- 9:50Speaker 5: He's looking for core PCE to be two percent. That
- 9:53Speaker 5: is typically the gauge that you're talking about internally.
- 9:55Speaker 3: Okay, all right, and we're not there yet.
- 9:58Speaker 10: No, we got no excluding food and energy.
- 10:01Speaker 5: But he's going to keep you also, like to house weeds,
- 10:03Speaker 5: we get data out today at just after four o'clock.
- 10:06Speaker 5: You're going to see a big chunk of quantitative tightening
- 10:08Speaker 5: when that data hits late after the bill today.
- 10:10Speaker 1: All right, Danielle Dee Martine Booth, thank you so much
- 10:13Speaker 1: for joining us. He know, Danielle de Martino Booth, she
- 10:15Speaker 1: is the CEO, and she is the chief.
- 10:18Speaker 3: Strategist at QI Research.
- 10:19Speaker 1: She's also did a stint at the Dallas Federal Reserve,
- 10:22Speaker 1: so you know about the Dallas Federal Reserve and how
- 10:24Speaker 1: the central bankers think across the board. So I always
- 10:27Speaker 1: appreciate getting some of Danielle's thoughts here.
- 10:31Speaker 11: You're listening to the Team Ken's live program Bloomberg Markets
- 10:35Speaker 11: weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the
- 10:38Speaker 11: iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on
- 10:41Speaker 11: demand wherever you get your podcasts.
- 10:45Speaker 8: To our next guest, Michael Green, portfolio manager in chief
- 10:48Speaker 8: Strategists at Simplify Asset Management. Michael, thank you for joining us.
- 10:52Speaker 8: Before we get more into what you're going to talk about,
- 10:55Speaker 8: as far as what you like about sectors in the
- 10:57Speaker 8: S and P five hundred, I have to get your
- 10:59Speaker 8: take as far as these massive moves in the bond market,
- 11:01Speaker 8: especially with the two year treasury trading round its highest
- 11:04Speaker 8: level in about sixteen years.
- 11:07Speaker 12: Well, I have to confess that I actually see the
- 11:10Speaker 12: current level of the two year as being remarkably attractive.
- 11:13Speaker 12: But I have been wrong in thinking that for a
- 11:15Speaker 12: while now. So you know my general belief is that
- 11:19Speaker 12: the economy is slowing. The inflation problem is for seeing
- 11:23Speaker 12: in the ism services today is largely one that's in
- 11:27Speaker 12: very mirror, and the risk that we're actually creating and
- 11:29Speaker 12: through interest rate policy is the higher level of interest
- 11:33Speaker 12: rates themselves are actually now the key risk.
- 11:36Speaker 7: This is exactly what we saw with the banking system.
- 11:39Speaker 4: Earlier in here. I think it's working its way.
- 11:42Speaker 12: Through the corporate sector where we're seeing a dramatic rise
- 11:45Speaker 12: in bankruptcies.
- 11:46Speaker 4: The odd thing for me is simply that it's not
- 11:48Speaker 4: reflected in spreads.
- 11:49Speaker 7: It doesn't seem to be reflected in.
- 11:51Speaker 4: Any way in the federal reserves calculations, and candidly, when
- 11:55Speaker 4: we look at the job.
- 11:56Speaker 12: Data today, certainly coming from the ADP, I have to
- 12:00Speaker 12: confess that I'm pot off sides in terms of that strength.
- 12:04Speaker 4: I cannot reconcile the data.
- 12:06Speaker 7: If I look.
- 12:07Speaker 12: At the numbers for twenty twenty three on a non
- 12:10Speaker 12: seasonally adjusted basis and compare them to the data from
- 12:14Speaker 12: twenty twenty two, they're lower.
- 12:16Speaker 4: In every category. So oddly we.
- 12:19Speaker 12: Have this seasonal adjustment factor that again is raising its
- 12:23Speaker 12: head and just making me really question whether the data
- 12:25Speaker 12: that we're receiving is accurate.
- 12:28Speaker 1: So I guess let's let's look at it the economy
- 12:32Speaker 1: from a different way.
- 12:33Speaker 3: Earnings, corporate earnings.
- 12:34Speaker 1: I'm looking at the you know, the earnings for the
- 12:36Speaker 1: S and P five hundred consensus of analysts about two
- 12:39Speaker 1: hundred and twenty two dollars per share for this year.
- 12:43Speaker 1: How much risk, if any, do you see in that
- 12:45Speaker 1: earnings number for corporate America.
- 12:48Speaker 12: Well, I think that there's a remarkable disconnect between the
- 12:51Speaker 12: expectations data and the actual data that we're experiencing in
- 12:55Speaker 12: the gap form, right, so they generally accepted accounting principles
- 12:58Speaker 12: earnings for the S and P or down one seventy nine.
- 13:01Speaker 12: That's off of a level of about two zho nine
- 13:04Speaker 12: from last year. It shows no dynamic that would suggests
- 13:06Speaker 12: that the rebound that analysts are forecasting is in play.
- 13:11Speaker 4: Much of what I would argue we're seeing is basically.
- 13:13Speaker 12: An attempt to ignore the one time costs associated with
- 13:19Speaker 12: either unemployment or layoffs.
- 13:22Speaker 4: And in many ways, again, it just feels like data is.
- 13:26Speaker 12: Being created to match a narrative of rising prices with
- 13:29Speaker 12: the reality of rising prices and stock markets, versus what
- 13:32Speaker 12: we're actually seeing empirically in the.
- 13:34Speaker 8: Economy, Michael, the S and P five hundreds trading around,
- 13:37Speaker 8: it's the lowest level in about a week. Something I
- 13:39Speaker 8: was curious about when we're looking at some of this
- 13:41Speaker 8: stronger than expected labor data, is this potentially a reason
- 13:46Speaker 8: for certain stock investors to sell after what was a
- 13:49Speaker 8: very strong first half.
- 13:53Speaker 12: Well, I think that there is very much a focus,
- 13:56Speaker 12: correctly on what the FED is going to do, and
- 13:59Speaker 12: so we're.
- 14:00Speaker 7: Clearly seeing, as you let into the.
- 14:01Speaker 12: Discussion here, indications that interest rates are moving higher. That
- 14:06Speaker 12: Lori Logan came out today and said she expects additional
- 14:09Speaker 12: interest rates going forward. I think, broadly speaking that that
- 14:14Speaker 12: is really what's powering the market as of this immediate
- 14:17Speaker 12: sell office, compared to kicking gains or anything else.
- 14:21Speaker 4: You've seen a fairly significant a balance of.
- 14:24Speaker 12: Disconnect between the S and P five hundred, which is
- 14:27Speaker 12: obviously market cap weighted and dominated by the large market
- 14:31Speaker 12: cap names, and what we've seen in said the Russell
- 14:34Speaker 12: two thousand, which is not up nearly as much on
- 14:37Speaker 12: a year today basis, and in fact the equal weighted
- 14:40Speaker 12: Russell two.
- 14:40Speaker 4: Thousand is barely up for the year.
- 14:42Speaker 12: So this has been an environment in which the vast
- 14:44Speaker 12: majority of stocks have been relatively weak, even as a
- 14:48Speaker 12: few MEGGA cap names, Apple, Microsoft, and Video et cetera
- 14:51Speaker 12: have been very strong.
- 14:54Speaker 4: In my view that that would represent mostly.
- 14:57Speaker 12: A you know, flow store, effectively money going into AI
- 15:02Speaker 12: and technology space driving performance as compared to any indication
- 15:07Speaker 12: of real economics display.
- 15:09Speaker 1: Mike, I'm sensing a distinct tone of cautiousness in your
- 15:14Speaker 1: view of the markets and the economy. How are you
- 15:17Speaker 1: allocating your portfolio these days? Stocks, bonds, what sectors, that
- 15:22Speaker 1: type of thing.
- 15:23Speaker 12: Yeah, I know, as I indicated, I absolutely have been
- 15:26Speaker 12: caught in the wrong positioning on this last move. I
- 15:30Speaker 12: genuinely look at the two year bond at five plus
- 15:34Speaker 12: right now and say, I can't believe that we're being
- 15:37Speaker 12: given this opportunity in an environment in which it seems
- 15:40Speaker 12: very clear that at least the economy has slowed dramatically.
- 15:46Speaker 12: Whether it continues to slow it is really the question,
- 15:49Speaker 12: and I see few opportunities for continued growth and expansion.
- 15:55Speaker 4: Today's ADP is obviously a wrinkle in that.
- 15:58Speaker 7: But you know, again, I just think.
- 16:00Speaker 12: The data that we will receive from ADP today is wrong.
- 16:03Speaker 12: Can't fully explain it, but that's what it appears to be.
- 16:06Speaker 7: Where the non.
- 16:07Speaker 12: Seasonally adjusted data is showing a significant divergence from the
- 16:11Speaker 12: seasonally adjusted data. That's true for the claims data, that's
- 16:15Speaker 12: true for the unemployment data, that's true for.
- 16:18Speaker 7: The ADP data.
- 16:20Speaker 8: Something that struck me just looking at the industries within
- 16:23Speaker 8: the S and P five hundred, more of those cyclically
- 16:25Speaker 8: related corners of the market are leading to clients when
- 16:28Speaker 8: you're looking at energy, also materials, technology down a little
- 16:32Speaker 8: bit under one percent. Also the NAZAQ one hundred down
- 16:34Speaker 8: more than one percent. But when you think about the
- 16:37Speaker 8: correlation between bonds and what's happening when it comes to
- 16:41Speaker 8: technology stocks in particular or growth shares, would you expect
- 16:44Speaker 8: them to be more pressured given what we're seeing in
- 16:47Speaker 8: the bond market.
- 16:49Speaker 13: So I'm not a.
- 16:50Speaker 12: Huge believer in this idea that growth stocks or large
- 16:52Speaker 12: cap growth stocks in particular have a quote unquote high duration,
- 16:55Speaker 12: in other words, a high degree of sensitivity and interest rates.
- 16:58Speaker 12: I think we've obviously seen that, you know, with the
- 17:01Speaker 12: strength of the Apples and the Microsoft's on a here
- 17:03Speaker 12: to day basis, where despite the fact that we have
- 17:05Speaker 12: much higher interest rates, they continue to push higher. If anything,
- 17:10Speaker 12: I think that there's an explanation that has much more
- 17:13Speaker 12: to do a kind of portfolio allocation dynamics than any
- 17:16Speaker 12: sort of fundamentals around interest rates and valuation.
- 17:21Speaker 7: Again, you know, I.
- 17:22Speaker 4: Would just lean towards the direction that what we're worried.
- 17:25Speaker 12: About at this point is the FED continuing to be
- 17:28Speaker 12: overly aggressive with the hikes that are already in the system,
- 17:32Speaker 12: not in any way reflected in the underlying data that
- 17:35Speaker 12: we're receiving. Yet, as that moves forward, if the FED
- 17:39Speaker 12: continues to hike for pauses in its response, that creates
- 17:43Speaker 12: conditions under which.
- 17:44Speaker 7: A slowdown could actually.
- 17:47Speaker 12: End up being much more severe than it's currently being
- 17:49Speaker 12: priced in or versus expectation, and that unfortunately continues to
- 17:54Speaker 12: be my rising rates case. If the FED is simply
- 17:57Speaker 12: behind the curve in the opposite direction again, ism prices
- 18:00Speaker 12: paid data would suggest that the inflation story as well
- 18:04Speaker 12: behind us.
- 18:04Speaker 4: We see this in Europe with the CPI the producer
- 18:07Speaker 4: price indexes turn negative.
- 18:09Speaker 12: We're just seeing data that they suggest that the inflation
- 18:13Speaker 12: story is no longer the operative dynamic.
- 18:17Speaker 4: Doesn't necessarily mean that that's right, though, all right, So.
- 18:21Speaker 1: Real quick there, Mike, what do you think we're going
- 18:23Speaker 1: to hear from our feder Reserve at the next meeting
- 18:24Speaker 1: and maybe even the meeting after that.
- 18:27Speaker 12: Well, I think it's hard to argue with the market, right, So,
- 18:29Speaker 12: when the market suggests that they are more than eighty
- 18:32Speaker 12: five percent probability of going, and historically it's been about
- 18:35Speaker 12: seventy percent, it's been very rare for the Fed not
- 18:38Speaker 12: to take advantage of that. I would expect that they'll
- 18:42Speaker 12: ultimately hike, and that they'll indicate, as the data suggests
- 18:45Speaker 12: certainly today, that the economy continues to represent strength. I
- 18:50Speaker 12: don't really think that they're focused on the inflation story
- 18:53Speaker 12: as much as they are focused on or the direction
- 18:55Speaker 12: of inflation story, which is clearly downwards, as much as
- 18:59Speaker 12: they are focused on the idea we've got to get right.
- 19:02Speaker 12: That is going to be the real question is, you know,
- 19:05Speaker 12: do they continue to hip until we get to two percent?
- 19:08Speaker 4: Which right, just that they're going to be way behind
- 19:11Speaker 4: the curve opposite direction. All right.
- 19:13Speaker 8: Michael Green, portfolio manager in chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management,
- 19:18Speaker 8: thank you so much for joining us and getting your
- 19:20Speaker 8: purview here.
- 19:21Speaker 11: You're listening to the tape Can's our live program Bloomberg
- 19:24Speaker 11: Markets weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the
- 19:28Speaker 11: tune in app, Bloomberg dot Com, and.
- 19:30Speaker 13: The Bloomberg Business App.
- 19:31Speaker 11: You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our
- 19:34Speaker 11: flagship New York station. Just say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
- 19:40Speaker 1: Let's get right to our next guest at Mona Mahadgen,
- 19:42Speaker 1: senior investment strategists at Edward Jones. Mon A crazy, crazy
- 19:46Speaker 1: day in the markets here. I love to get your
- 19:48Speaker 1: sense of kind of what the economic data is telling you,
- 19:51Speaker 1: and what do you think it's telling the Federal Reserve.
- 19:54Speaker 14: Yeah, great points there, and look, I think there was
- 19:57Speaker 14: some really market moving data this morning that we think
- 20:00Speaker 14: highlighted a few trends. First of all, the services part
- 20:03Speaker 14: of the economy continues to remain remarkably resilient. We saw
- 20:07Speaker 14: that not only with the ADP jobs report, where we
- 20:10Speaker 14: were up four hundred and ninety seven thousand jobs when
- 20:12Speaker 14: we expected just two hundred and twenty five thousand, but
- 20:15Speaker 14: really what drove that was the services sectors, including areas
- 20:19Speaker 14: like leisure and hospitality. We also got the Ism services
- 20:22Speaker 14: data this morning, which continued to show an upward trend
- 20:26Speaker 14: rather than what many had expected to be a little
- 20:29Speaker 14: bit more moderation. Now. On the positive side, both the
- 20:33Speaker 14: ADP and the ISM services data did show some cooling
- 20:37Speaker 14: in inflation. ADP data wage gains came in at six
- 20:41Speaker 14: point four percent, still elevated, but following a trend lower
- 20:44Speaker 14: over the last several months, and similarly, the ISM prices
- 20:48Speaker 14: paid component came in below expectations. And so hopefully the
- 20:54Speaker 14: message is that, yes, the economy has remained resilient, but
- 20:57Speaker 14: the inflation data continues to show of moderation. Now. Of course,
- 21:02Speaker 14: from a FED perspective, I think this gives them another
- 21:05Speaker 14: green light to move forward in July at least, and
- 21:09Speaker 14: we heard a little bit of dissent and debate when
- 21:12Speaker 14: we got the minutes yesterday. I think this certainly kind
- 21:16Speaker 14: of adds to the case that they could do one,
- 21:19Speaker 14: perhaps two more rate hikes ahead, but they are closer
- 21:22Speaker 14: to a pause than they have been in recent history now.
- 21:26Speaker 14: I think the other big part of the markets today,
- 21:28Speaker 14: of course, has been what's happening with yields, and the
- 21:30Speaker 14: upward moving yields close to now highs for the year
- 21:34Speaker 14: does put some downward pressure on equity markets, particularly those
- 21:37Speaker 14: higher valuation parts of the market as well.
- 21:40Speaker 8: And we've heard from FED chair Pale as well as
- 21:43Speaker 8: other members of the Central Bank and were referring to
- 21:46Speaker 8: this as far as at least two more rate increases
- 21:48Speaker 8: this year. If we do end up seeing another one
- 21:50Speaker 8: at the end of this month, what would need to
- 21:52Speaker 8: happen with the data between now and then when we
- 21:55Speaker 8: have the Federal reserves following meeting in September, after the
- 21:58Speaker 8: July meeting for them to end up maybe potentially having
- 22:01Speaker 8: two consecutive rate increases.
- 22:04Speaker 10: Yeah, it's a good point.
- 22:05Speaker 14: And look, we do get a lot of data between
- 22:07Speaker 14: now and September, and of course this month alone, we'll
- 22:09Speaker 14: get an additional set of CPI and PPI data next week,
- 22:13Speaker 14: will of course start earning season towards the end of July,
- 22:15Speaker 14: and we'll have that July rate hike or rate decision
- 22:19Speaker 14: at the end of July, So the Fed and the
- 22:23Speaker 14: markets will have to digest quite a bit. Our view
- 22:26Speaker 14: is that over time we will continue to see inflation
- 22:29Speaker 14: moderate and so perhaps the one rate hike that the
- 22:32Speaker 14: markets are pricing in could be a final rate hike
- 22:35Speaker 14: for the Fed.
- 22:36Speaker 10: But if the.
- 22:37Speaker 14: Economy does continue at this pace, especially in the services sectors,
- 22:43Speaker 14: that could keep services inflation elevated. Keep in mind, the
- 22:46Speaker 14: FED has broken down inflation into three core buckets, which
- 22:50Speaker 14: are goods inflation, which have shown signs of rolling, over
- 22:53Speaker 14: housing shelter inflation, which we do think over time will
- 22:58Speaker 14: see cooling. That there's a lag there, and real time
- 23:01Speaker 14: data is showing some cooling and we think that shows
- 23:03Speaker 14: up over time. But it's really that third bucket, which
- 23:05Speaker 14: they categorize as non housing services inflation, that has yet
- 23:10Speaker 14: to show meaningful signs of moderation. So they'll be watching
- 23:13Speaker 14: that closely. And I think if that continues to show
- 23:16Speaker 14: signs at least of stabilizing moving lower, we'll have one
- 23:20Speaker 14: rate hike ahead of us. If not that, the second
- 23:22Speaker 14: one is on the table.
- 23:23Speaker 8: So then, as a strategist, what is your outlook for
- 23:25Speaker 8: the second half of the year after we had such
- 23:27Speaker 8: a strong first six months?
- 23:30Speaker 14: Yeah, absolutely, Look, it was a stellar first half of
- 23:33Speaker 14: the year with the SMP up over fourteen percent. You know,
- 23:36Speaker 14: keep in mind, there have been some positives and reasons
- 23:39Speaker 14: for optimism. The economic data is coming out ahead of expectations.
- 23:43Speaker 14: Inflation as we noted is showing signs of moderation and
- 23:46Speaker 14: the FED maybe towards the end of its rate hiking cycle.
- 23:49Speaker 14: But we'd be cautious to extrapolate that strong move higher
- 23:52Speaker 14: in the first half to a straight line up in
- 23:55Speaker 14: the second half of the year. Now, history does tell
- 23:57Speaker 14: us when you are up over ten percent the first half,
- 23:59Speaker 14: it bodes well for the second half. In our view,
- 24:02Speaker 14: we do think bouts of volatility maybe likely, especially if
- 24:06Speaker 14: the economy starts to show signs of cooling. But will
- 24:09Speaker 14: we get another bear market or meaningful downturn that we
- 24:13Speaker 14: see is unlikely at this point, and in fact, we
- 24:16Speaker 14: think those bouts of volatility could be used as opportunities,
- 24:20Speaker 14: especially as investors look towards twenty twenty four, where you
- 24:24Speaker 14: could get a meaningful bounce back in earnings, better inflation,
- 24:30Speaker 14: and have FED that not only is pausing, but they've
- 24:32Speaker 14: told us they might start thinking about pivoting lower as well.
- 24:35Speaker 14: So really want to start positioning for what we think
- 24:38Speaker 14: could be a broader based market rally and participation towards
- 24:41Speaker 14: the back half of the year, and both in equities
- 24:45Speaker 14: and in bond markets as well.
- 24:47Speaker 1: So do I think about small MidCap stocks Mona. They've
- 24:50Speaker 1: historically lagged some of the bigger cap names, but if
- 24:53Speaker 1: this thing's going to broaden that a little bit, maybe
- 24:55Speaker 1: small and midcaps.
- 24:56Speaker 14: Yeah, it's a good point. And look, small caps have
- 24:59Speaker 14: meaningful lagged in the first half of the year, so
- 25:01Speaker 14: we certainly think there is room for catchup now. When
- 25:03Speaker 14: we look historically, small caps tend to do well when
- 25:07Speaker 14: the economy is re emerging from any sort of softness
- 25:10Speaker 14: or downturn. They tend to lead on the way up.
- 25:12Speaker 10: And so when we think about what we.
- 25:14Speaker 14: Call a recovery basket, that could certainly include areas like
- 25:18Speaker 14: small cap stocks, like cyclicals, and we're starting to see
- 25:21Speaker 14: some strength in industrials, materials, perhaps even financials in that basket.
- 25:26Speaker 14: International equities tend to do well in that environment. Those
- 25:29Speaker 14: we think can compliment what we're seeing right now, because
- 25:33Speaker 14: we do think the story behind AI and growth sectors
- 25:37Speaker 14: does have a long term secular tailwind behind it, although
- 25:41Speaker 14: a lot of it has been priced very quickly upfront
- 25:44Speaker 14: as well, So we think a complement of both the
- 25:47Speaker 14: growth and the more cyclical parts of the market will
- 25:49Speaker 14: work better As we head towards twenty twenty four.
- 25:51Speaker 8: We only have about forty five seconds left. What's the
- 25:53Speaker 8: top question that you hear from clients?
- 25:57Speaker 10: Yeah, you know, I think it's still the big one.
- 25:59Speaker 14: Around recession, we tend to hear a lot more, especially
- 26:02Speaker 14: now that the Fed is continuing to raise rates. And
- 26:05Speaker 14: we do think that what we're seeing now is a
- 26:09Speaker 14: potential for cooling in the economy, but perhaps not your
- 26:12Speaker 14: typical two back to back quarters of negative GDP growth.
- 26:15Speaker 14: We think a softness to below trend growth is likely though,
- 26:19Speaker 14: sometime in the second half of the year.
- 26:21Speaker 1: All right, Mona, thank you so much for joining us.
- 26:23Speaker 1: We really appreciate getting some of your time. Mona ma Hodgen.
- 26:25Speaker 1: She's a senior investment strategist at Edward Jones.
- 26:30Speaker 11: You're listening to the team Ken's are Live program Bloomberg
- 26:33Speaker 11: Markets weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com,
- 26:37Speaker 11: the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen
- 26:40Speaker 11: on demand wherever you get your podcasts.
- 26:44Speaker 1: Threads is a thing. I'm there for what it's worth starting.
- 26:47Speaker 1: Let's take a little tech round table here. Let's bring
- 26:49Speaker 1: in Deep Seing. He covers the tech for Bloomberg Intelligence
- 26:52Speaker 1: and Ed Ludlow. After a very difficult zoom situation this morning.
- 26:57Speaker 1: He is our technology guy out in San Francisco, joints
- 27:00Speaker 1: US as well, so we got it all.
- 27:01Speaker 3: Covered for you. Mandie. Let's start with you here in
- 27:05Speaker 3: our studio here.
- 27:07Speaker 1: What is Metal looking to do here? Is this going
- 27:09Speaker 1: to be a business for them? Is this a real
- 27:11Speaker 1: competitor for Twitter? To just give us the business case.
- 27:14Speaker 6: The business case is they want to add that dimension
- 27:16Speaker 6: of real time public conversations that are going on related
- 27:20Speaker 6: to politics, related to breaking news, and that weren't happening
- 27:24Speaker 6: on Instagram. Probably they were happening on Core Blue app.
- 27:28Speaker 6: But they've been losing engagement, so it's an engagement play
- 27:31Speaker 6: for them to keep users on their family of apps,
- 27:34Speaker 6: and they've done a great job of adding reels content.
- 27:37Speaker 6: This is another dimension. And look, they don't need to
- 27:40Speaker 6: focus on monetization right now. If they're able to get
- 27:43Speaker 6: that engagement in terms of getting the core creators from
- 27:47Speaker 6: Twitter to threads, that'll be a big win for them.
- 27:50Speaker 8: And is this likely to be a big player here
- 27:54Speaker 8: or what kind of hurdles are ahead for it?
- 27:56Speaker 6: Well, the hurdles is, you know, the interest graph and
- 27:59Speaker 6: the followers that Twitter has over the course of their
- 28:03Speaker 6: last fifteen twenty years. You know, people have accumulated their
- 28:07Speaker 6: followers and they like to see a certain curated feed
- 28:11Speaker 6: when it comes to the home screen. Well, right now,
- 28:14Speaker 6: when you go to Threads, they have an AI generated
- 28:17Speaker 6: feed and there are a lot of brands and I've
- 28:20Speaker 6: tried to you know, viewed a lot of them. I mean,
- 28:22Speaker 6: that's not the experience you want to have. And that's
- 28:24Speaker 6: where scale and network effects is what drives social media
- 28:28Speaker 6: engagement and early movers have always had an advantage. What
- 28:32Speaker 6: TikTok did was great in terms of leveraging AI to
- 28:35Speaker 6: come up with great recommendations. That is the playbook here
- 28:39Speaker 6: for Meta is to use their user graph as well
- 28:42Speaker 6: as AI to drive the curated content feed.
- 28:45Speaker 3: All right, Ed, When I think of cutting edge technology,
- 28:48Speaker 3: I think of Ed Ludlow.
- 28:49Speaker 1: I think Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley out there in
- 28:52Speaker 1: San Francisco. Ed, what's the buzz if anything out there
- 28:56Speaker 1: in the valley about what our good friends at Facebook
- 28:59Speaker 1: are trying to do here?
- 29:00Speaker 15: Yeah, and the adoption has been really interesting to track.
- 29:03Speaker 15: I was signed up to Threads as us the number
- 29:06Speaker 15: one hundred and thirty, two thousand and nine. Wow. So
- 29:10Speaker 15: I made it in in the initial batch. I mean
- 29:12Speaker 15: it's Bloomberg's tech editor Sarah Fryer was like number two thousand.
- 29:16Speaker 15: You know, overnight she's a player, and overnight we hit
- 29:19Speaker 15: the ten million mark. And my understanding is that we're
- 29:22Speaker 15: closer now to thirty million users on the platform. But
- 29:26Speaker 15: I find Mandya's commentary really interesting. There are clearly ux
- 29:29Speaker 15: differences right between what you get on the threads platform
- 29:33Speaker 15: what you get on Twitter. It's very simplified right now.
- 29:36Speaker 15: There are a few, you know, there's no sort of
- 29:38Speaker 15: ad stream on it. The biggest piece of use for
- 29:41Speaker 15: me in the last twenty four hours was a post
- 29:43Speaker 15: by Zuckerberg basically suggesting that a billion users is possible,
- 29:47Speaker 15: and you know, to jump from thirty million to a billion,
- 29:51Speaker 15: you know, I think a number of SALSIH analysts this
- 29:54Speaker 15: morning kind of see difficulty in getting to that scale.
- 29:58Speaker 15: But think about it this way, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, if
- 30:03Speaker 15: Meta onboarded just one out of every ten users on
- 30:06Speaker 15: its existing platforms, it would already eclipse what Twitter's monthly
- 30:11Speaker 15: or installed active user bases. So you can kind of
- 30:14Speaker 15: see them eclipsing Twitter a billion hard to.
- 30:17Speaker 8: See men deep something I'm curious about is, especially when
- 30:21Speaker 8: you think of Meta and the cost cutting efforts that
- 30:23Speaker 8: it has clearly gone through, and it stocks up more
- 30:25Speaker 8: than two hundred percent since early November, how much could
- 30:29Speaker 8: this potentially either support that stock price or is it
- 30:32Speaker 8: just too early to be seen when you're looking at
- 30:34Speaker 8: cell side.
- 30:35Speaker 6: Well, so, in terms of incremental revenue, I think, look,
- 30:39Speaker 6: this is not going to move the stock a Twitter
- 30:42Speaker 6: had revenue of you know, around six billion when before
- 30:45Speaker 6: they went private, and even if they are losing revenue
- 30:49Speaker 6: and you know, Meta can lier ads over time, You're
- 30:54Speaker 6: not buying the stock here with the hope that you know,
- 30:58Speaker 6: this product is going to generate two three billion dollars
- 31:01Speaker 6: in incremental revenue. But what it can do is drive
- 31:05Speaker 6: that engagement because ultimately, if you go to Twitter right now,
- 31:09Speaker 6: their average time spent per user is around twenty seven
- 31:12Speaker 6: to thirty minutes every day for the daily active users.
- 31:16Speaker 6: If they can take a share of that, that'll be huge. Again,
- 31:19Speaker 6: the cumulative effect of social media when you think about
- 31:22Speaker 6: you know, meta is what people spend their time on
- 31:26Speaker 6: the core blue app, Instagram and WhatsApp. You add another
- 31:30Speaker 6: dimension to it. It helps with their AI it helps
- 31:33Speaker 6: with the overall advertisers, and that is what meta is
- 31:36Speaker 6: after here.
- 31:38Speaker 1: All right, So, Ed, what's the feeling in the valley
- 31:40Speaker 1: about Elon Musk. What's his response going to be? What's
- 31:44Speaker 1: the future of Twitter? How do you think this plays up?
- 31:48Speaker 5: You know?
- 31:49Speaker 1: He Oh, by the way, I just did my first
- 31:52Speaker 1: post on threads telling people to go to YouTube to
- 31:55Speaker 1: watch our streaming.
- 31:57Speaker 3: So I am multidad. I will tasking out.
- 31:59Speaker 15: I will I will repost that. Just give me a second.
- 32:02Speaker 15: I'm on air with you right now. Look, I mean
- 32:05Speaker 15: Elon's tweeted. He said it is infinitely preferable to be
- 32:09Speaker 15: attacked by strangers on Twitter then indulge in the false
- 32:12Speaker 15: happiness of hide the pain Instagram. And I think his
- 32:16Speaker 15: point is that historically Instagram is a photo based app
- 32:20Speaker 15: where you give the perception that your life is very
- 32:22Speaker 15: different to reality. I guess from a happiness perspective. Linda Yakarino,
- 32:27Speaker 15: who is the new Twitter CEO, has tweeted in the
- 32:31Speaker 15: last thirty minutes. I wouldn't call it cryptic, but I
- 32:34Speaker 15: would say that she really emphasizes what she feels is
- 32:37Speaker 15: good about Twitter. She doesn't specifically name or call out threads,
- 32:42Speaker 15: but you know, they're essentially the same thing. I'm a
- 32:44Speaker 15: big meme guy, and you guys will have seen that
- 32:46Speaker 15: Zuckerberg tweeted. He did his first tweet in since twenty twelve,
- 32:51Speaker 15: eleven years, and it's the classic Spider Man pointing at
- 32:55Speaker 15: Spider Man. The reference to episode nineteen B at the
- 32:58Speaker 15: nineteen sixty seven animated series is called double identity. They're
- 33:02Speaker 15: the same platform, and I you know, Mandy may disagree
- 33:05Speaker 15: with me, but to all intents and purposes, they're the same.
- 33:08Speaker 15: And that's probably ahead of the cage match upset, mister Musk.
- 33:13Speaker 8: So do you think that it's likely that Meadow would
- 33:16Speaker 8: be able to take a big chunk of users when
- 33:19Speaker 8: it comes to Twitter? Obviously, as you know, there's been
- 33:21Speaker 8: problems that Elon has had to go through when it
- 33:24Speaker 8: comes to the Twitter platform over the past year.
- 33:26Speaker 15: Oh thank goodness. I thought you were going to ask,
- 33:28Speaker 15: is it likely that Muskan Zuckerberg actually like each other
- 33:31Speaker 15: in a cage? You know, I think that what I
- 33:36Speaker 15: noticed anecdotally. I was on it for hours yesterday. It
- 33:39Speaker 15: was a bit cringe fair. I sent many threads. I
- 33:42Speaker 15: really engaged with people. A lot of what people were
- 33:44Speaker 15: talking about is that they wanted the tone of Threads
- 33:48Speaker 15: to be a pleasant place, a nice place, and many
- 33:51Speaker 15: of them explicitly referenced the idea that they felt that
- 33:54Speaker 15: Twitter was not that way. And so you know, this
- 33:58Speaker 15: is also playing out on Twitter in parallel, by the way,
- 34:00Speaker 15: the irony lots of people on Twitter are talking about
- 34:02Speaker 15: you're only going to threads as a vote against Musk
- 34:05Speaker 15: himself because you don't like him or his personality. I don't.
- 34:09Speaker 15: It's how can any of us quantify what kind of
- 34:13Speaker 15: driver that will be for Thread's growth. I think Mandy's
- 34:16Speaker 15: points on the future of the content on the on
- 34:19Speaker 15: the Threads platform is the key bit.
- 34:21Speaker 1: Hey, let's just quick change gears here. I know you
- 34:24Speaker 1: spoke with the CEO of Rivian yesterday, Ed, what's the
- 34:27Speaker 1: key takeaway there?
- 34:28Speaker 15: Yeah, I mean two pieces of news. One, the court
- 34:31Speaker 15: has just gone is the first time the supply chains normalized,
- 34:34Speaker 15: and that was evidence by their output. They've made some
- 34:37Speaker 15: tech fixes and they're really starting to ramp now and
- 34:40Speaker 15: they basically suggested that they will outperform their guidance, which
- 34:43Speaker 15: would be interesting. Professor's The other is there that he
- 34:46Speaker 15: told me they're trying to negotiate with Amazon to get
- 34:48Speaker 15: out of the Amazon's exclusivity to buy the commercial vans
- 34:51Speaker 15: from Ribbean. So they say that those talks are going
- 34:54Speaker 15: well and that if there's a successful Ribbean can start
- 34:57Speaker 15: selling these electric delivery bands that other players and and
- 35:00Speaker 15: as we know from this program, right, electrifying last mail
- 35:03Speaker 15: delivery in the logistics space is a big market opportunity.
- 35:07Speaker 15: So that was a really good takeaway. Check it out
- 35:08Speaker 15: on Bloomberg dot com.
- 35:09Speaker 1: All right, great stuff at Ed Ludlow doing all the
- 35:11Speaker 1: tech stuff for Bloomberg Technology and Bloomberg News out there
- 35:15Speaker 1: in San Francisco. Man, you've seen, of course senior technology
- 35:18Speaker 1: channels for Bloomberg Intelligence.
- 35:20Speaker 11: You're listening to the tape catch are live program Bloomberg
- 35:23Speaker 11: Markets weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the
- 35:27Speaker 11: tune in app, Bloomberg dot Com, and.
- 35:28Speaker 13: The Bloomberg Business app.
- 35:30Speaker 11: You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our
- 35:33Speaker 11: flagship New York station. Just say Alexa, play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
- 35:40Speaker 1: This is not necessarily tech, but you think about the
- 35:43Speaker 1: tech enabled boxes that end up on your front door
- 35:45Speaker 1: every single day, and everybody knows what I'm talking about
- 35:48Speaker 1: let's get a sense of like the business of the
- 35:50Speaker 1: box business, Ryan Fox. He covers a carrogated market for
- 35:53Speaker 1: Bloomberg Intelligence. So Ryan, give us a sense of just
- 35:58Speaker 1: kind of the stuff you covered, DoD Me just give
- 36:01Speaker 1: us a sense of the industry that we all touch
- 36:03Speaker 1: every day because it lands on our doorstep every day.
- 36:06Speaker 16: Yeah, so the average American is going to call it
- 36:08Speaker 16: a cardboard box. In the industry, we call it a
- 36:11Speaker 16: corrugated box, nice anadetically, like ninety five percent of consumer
- 36:16Speaker 16: goods right in these boxes every day. So it's a
- 36:19Speaker 16: very good indicator of what's going on in the economy.
- 36:23Speaker 16: And well, for the last year, we've seen a gradual
- 36:26Speaker 16: decline in box shipments by producers of those boxes going
- 36:30Speaker 16: to brands who.
- 36:32Speaker 8: Are the main players in that space.
- 36:35Speaker 16: Yeah, many players are going to be International Paper West
- 36:38Speaker 16: Rock Packaging Corp. At least domestically here in the US.
- 36:41Speaker 8: And you mentioned a slow down. What was the catalyst
- 36:45Speaker 8: to that in what would that also mean for the
- 36:48Speaker 8: trajectory of the economy.
- 36:50Speaker 16: Yeah, So initially the slowdown, it was linked to these
- 36:56Speaker 16: the de stocking narrative that's been going on for about
- 36:58Speaker 16: the last year. Most of the producers are saying their
- 37:01Speaker 16: customers were pushing back, that they had plenty of inventory.
- 37:07Speaker 16: Things weren't moving very quickly, and some of it we
- 37:10Speaker 16: saw in our data. We saw that first quarter of
- 37:15Speaker 16: twenty twenty two, lead times to get boxes went out
- 37:20Speaker 16: on average like four and five weeks, And this was
- 37:24Speaker 16: a huge departure from the norm. The average lead time
- 37:27Speaker 16: to get boxes is like three to five business days,
- 37:30Speaker 16: so to have something about five weeks on average was
- 37:32Speaker 16: just astronomical. So when you think about a manufacturer and
- 37:35Speaker 16: how they have to place their orders, this caused them
- 37:38Speaker 16: to change their ordering. Some manufacturers during the pandemic had
- 37:43Speaker 16: even gone to AI platforms that were initiating automatic orders
- 37:47Speaker 16: even when they maybe didn't need them, and so at
- 37:50Speaker 16: some point in the second quarter they found themselves sitting
- 37:53Speaker 16: on a lot of boxes that they didn't really need.
- 37:56Speaker 16: And so producers saw that slowdown at the end of
- 37:59Speaker 16: the second quarter going into the midyear, and it really
- 38:03Speaker 16: just slowed down from there.
- 38:04Speaker 1: All right, but where are we now versus pre pandemic.
- 38:08Speaker 1: There's a lot more boxes out there, right, Uh, well,
- 38:13Speaker 1: I'm getting so many a day.
- 38:15Speaker 13: All right.
- 38:16Speaker 3: Here's my thing. I'm really good at breaking down the
- 38:19Speaker 3: box as soon as it comes in and we empty it.
- 38:21Speaker 1: I'm breaking that box down. I'm the opposite, and I'm
- 38:24Speaker 1: putting it in recycling. But really it's got to be
- 38:26Speaker 1: like way higher than pre pandemic.
- 38:29Speaker 16: No, So we're actually after the first quarter we were
- 38:33Speaker 16: tracking with twenty seventeen as far as the volume of
- 38:37Speaker 16: boxes it was going out. Our data indicates that through
- 38:41Speaker 16: the second quarter we're probably still on that pace, maybe
- 38:44Speaker 16: even a little bit behind there, and it's not looking
- 38:47Speaker 16: good going in the second half.
- 38:48Speaker 1: Really, wow, I never would have guessed that, Hey, go
- 38:51Speaker 1: following up on that, because I'm a big recycler, and
- 38:54Speaker 1: I think this is every time I break down a
- 38:55Speaker 1: box and put it into recycond I feel like I
- 38:57Speaker 1: might be part of a scam here that it doesn't
- 38:59Speaker 1: want to work. Tell us how the industry recycles boxes
- 39:02Speaker 1: and stuff.
- 39:03Speaker 16: Sure, So, first of all, about over ninety percent of
- 39:07Speaker 16: all of the recycled boxes that we get, and really
- 39:10Speaker 16: all recycled commodities are going to come from commercial and
- 39:13Speaker 16: industrial sectors. So we're going to be thinking about Walmart's
- 39:16Speaker 16: and Kroger's and Albertson's and big retailers like that. That's
- 39:19Speaker 16: where most of the old what we call old quirdated
- 39:22Speaker 16: cartons or OCC, that's where they come from. Curbside recycling
- 39:27Speaker 16: is really not great. It's about seven to eight percent
- 39:32Speaker 16: of the total, and it represents about two million tons
- 39:36Speaker 16: a year. Americans just aren't great at recycling.
- 39:39Speaker 3: I'm really good at it, but I just so does
- 39:42Speaker 3: International Paper take my box and then redo it and
- 39:45Speaker 3: send it back out to me?
- 39:46Speaker 8: That's what I was curious about, because do they do that?
- 39:49Speaker 8: Or also are there renewable basic materials that go into
- 39:52Speaker 8: tissues and other personal care products?
- 39:54Speaker 16: Yeah, so OCC is a very highly sought commodity. It's
- 40:00Speaker 16: we export about ten million tons a year of to
- 40:03Speaker 16: other countries, but internally, we consume about twenty five million
- 40:07Speaker 16: tons of old corgated boxes every single year, and we
- 40:11Speaker 16: make new boxes out of them.
- 40:15Speaker 3: Do I play these stocks? Do? I? I mean, do
- 40:17Speaker 3: I play it on? I mean, if I'm Mike, is
- 40:20Speaker 3: my call on International Paper? Just how much stuff is
- 40:23Speaker 3: getting shipped around the world.
- 40:27Speaker 16: That's a great question. I mean, I don't know, I
- 40:33Speaker 16: don't know the right answer to that. They're they're traditionally
- 40:37Speaker 16: very very stable companies. I mean, like I said, with
- 40:40Speaker 16: ninety five percent of the world's goods that consumers buy
- 40:43Speaker 16: riding in these boxes. It's it's not like they're going
- 40:45Speaker 16: to go away anytime soon.
- 40:47Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I don't know just about my household.
- 40:49Speaker 1: It just seems like, you know, Tom Keane's always complaining
- 40:52Speaker 1: about you know, his doormans.
- 40:53Speaker 13: What are you getting delivery?
- 40:55Speaker 3: I don't know. It's it's shampoo comes. I mean, you
- 40:59Speaker 3: don't go to the store anymore. You just click. It's crazy.
- 41:01Speaker 3: So I don't know what's.
- 41:02Speaker 16: Going on, all right, So we did some math on
- 41:05Speaker 16: it and the average America. So if we were to
- 41:07Speaker 16: take the volume of boxes that are made in average year,
- 41:09Speaker 16: divided equally across everybody in the country, it's about twelve
- 41:13Speaker 16: hundred square feet per person per year.
- 41:15Speaker 1: So there, Well, I'm telling you all right, Ryan, thanks
- 41:18Speaker 1: so much for joining us, Ryan Fox, he is thanks.
- 41:21Speaker 1: Corgated market analysts with Bloomberg Intelligence.
- 41:25Speaker 3: Learned a lot there. But I don't know. I feel
- 41:26Speaker 3: like I'm a good recycler, but you know, Ryan's telling
- 41:29Speaker 3: me that I'm just it's not that big a deal.
- 41:30Speaker 8: Think I'm ordering I'm Juney boxes.
- 41:33Speaker 3: I'm not moving the needle. But anyway, good stuff. To
- 41:36Speaker 3: catch up on that part of the business.
- 41:37Speaker 11: You're listening to the tape Cat's are Live program Bloomberg
- 41:40Speaker 11: Markets weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the
- 41:44Speaker 11: tune in app, Bloomberg dot Com.
- 41:46Speaker 13: And the Bloomberg Business App.
- 41:47Speaker 11: You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our
- 41:50Speaker 11: flagship New York station Just Say Alexa, playing Bloomberg eleven thirty.
- 41:57Speaker 1: Just met and Paul sween here in a Bloomberg Interactive
- 41:59Speaker 1: Brokers studio. This week, the Supreme Court struck down the
- 42:02Speaker 1: Biden administration's student loan forgiveness plan, which would have done
- 42:05Speaker 1: away with it as much as twenty thousand dollars per borrower.
- 42:09Speaker 1: And remember, House also used the deal to raise the
- 42:13Speaker 1: nation's debt sailing to force borrowers to start paying back
- 42:15Speaker 1: their loans in October, which is sooner than planned. So
- 42:18Speaker 1: it's really tough on that student loan forgiveness front. Let's
- 42:20Speaker 1: get the latest on what that could beat economically. We
- 42:23Speaker 1: welcome Claudia Sam, founder of Some Consulting, former senior economist
- 42:27Speaker 1: at the White House Council of Economic Advisors, so she
- 42:30Speaker 1: knows about this policy stuff.
- 42:31Speaker 3: Laudia, thanks so much for joining us here.
- 42:33Speaker 1: Give us your view of what kind of we saw
- 42:36Speaker 1: from the Supreme Court and from Congress over the last
- 42:38Speaker 1: couple of weeks as it relates to student debt and
- 42:41Speaker 1: loan forgiveness and that type of thing.
- 42:44Speaker 17: Student loan forgiveness not making it through the Supreme Court.
- 42:47Speaker 17: I don't think that should be a surprise to anyone
- 42:49Speaker 17: using executive powers to do four hundred billion in spending,
- 42:54Speaker 17: and yet it came. This was the second of two
- 42:56Speaker 17: blows to student borrowers this uh that week, and you
- 43:01Speaker 17: mentioned in the repayments start sooner and for a lot
- 43:05Speaker 17: of people that is going to be a hardship, right,
- 43:07Speaker 17: like for you know, the time that they've not been paying.
- 43:10Speaker 9: That really eased up some space.
- 43:12Speaker 17: It's coming back somewhat sooner than the administration said it
- 43:16Speaker 17: was going to end too. But this is this is earlier,
- 43:19Speaker 17: so you're not getting this the forgiveness to help smooth
- 43:23Speaker 17: over the period of adjusting, and you are getting your
- 43:25Speaker 17: payments back sooner. So there's you know, it was not
- 43:29Speaker 17: a good couple of weeks for people with student loans.
- 43:33Speaker 8: So with interest beginning to accrue in August and then
- 43:36Speaker 8: those payments needing to be paid in October. How does
- 43:39Speaker 8: that affect consumer spending? And obviously the trajectory of the economy.
- 43:45Speaker 17: Right, So it's clearly not good for the for the economy.
- 43:49Speaker 17: It is the case that you know, the people themselves
- 43:53Speaker 17: who are in these situations have student loans. This deeply
- 43:56Speaker 17: affects them. And yet the amount of money we're talking about,
- 44:00Speaker 17: like the new payments, it's really not the kind of
- 44:03Speaker 17: magnitudes that really move the needle on GDP, like in
- 44:07Speaker 17: the sense that oh, this would or demand and make
- 44:09Speaker 17: it like, oh, the Fed doesn't have to do as
- 44:11Speaker 17: much because these payments are expiring. So I think with
- 44:15Speaker 17: this policy, the macro lens is less important than the
- 44:20Speaker 17: people side of it.
- 44:22Speaker 1: Isn't there already something along the lines of the Public
- 44:25Speaker 1: Service Loan Forgiveness program? Can you tell us with that
- 44:28Speaker 1: is how that works and how that might you know,
- 44:31Speaker 1: help more people kind of deal with their student debt.
- 44:34Speaker 17: You know, In my piece I made the point is like, look,
- 44:36Speaker 17: we're at a time where you've got a moment of
- 44:38Speaker 17: reflection and how you go forward. President Biden said he's
- 44:41Speaker 17: going to try and keep figuring out how to do this,
- 44:44Speaker 17: and it's also a time where they could take stock
- 44:46Speaker 17: and say, hey, let's look at some other forgiveness programs,
- 44:49Speaker 17: what didn't go well, what did go well? And the
- 44:51Speaker 17: one example that I talk about are these the debt
- 44:54Speaker 17: forgiveness to people who work in a public service of
- 44:58Speaker 17: any form.
- 44:58Speaker 9: You can think of.
- 44:59Speaker 17: As teachers, doctors, firefighters, right, any like, there's a pretty
- 45:07Speaker 17: there's a big group. And in fact, the group that
- 45:11Speaker 17: would qualify for these loans is big in terms of
- 45:14Speaker 17: jobs of the economy. It can almost be twenty five
- 45:17Speaker 17: percent of jobs. That's not to say all those people
- 45:19Speaker 17: are eligible and they have student loan debt, but this
- 45:21Speaker 17: is not a trivial subset. And one of the things
- 45:25Speaker 17: that they have really struggled with that the Biden did
- 45:29Speaker 17: not is setting up a plan where people actually get
- 45:32Speaker 17: the benefit at the end. Right, they have a low
- 45:35Speaker 17: take up rate and they have a low success rate.
- 45:38Speaker 17: But it's a complicated program. You got to pay back
- 45:40Speaker 17: ten years, you know. So there are things there that
- 45:43Speaker 17: but the Biden's forgiveness plan, sign up for it was
- 45:47Speaker 17: so fast and massive, so there's lessons to be learned there.
- 45:52Speaker 17: And I mean there are functional parts of that student
- 45:54Speaker 17: loan setup.
- 45:55Speaker 9: So that could also. I think there could be.
- 45:57Speaker 17: A real exchange of ideas that would be fruit full,
- 46:00Speaker 17: both for the forgiveness plan we actually have and the
- 46:04Speaker 17: thinking about what would be next for a student loan forgiveness.
- 46:08Speaker 8: When it comes to the inflation front, there were concerns
- 46:10Speaker 8: about macroeconomists about how the potential forgiveness could potentially spur
- 46:16Speaker 8: a spark in inflation. What do you think this means
- 46:20Speaker 8: when we're looking on the inflation front moving forward.
- 46:24Speaker 17: We're talking about basis points, right, like, you know, yes,
- 46:27Speaker 17: it will probably have an effect. Yes, it probably did
- 46:30Speaker 17: allow spending to be a little higher as the you know,
- 46:33Speaker 17: you didn't have to do the payments with.
- 46:35Speaker 9: A student loan debt.
- 46:36Speaker 17: That's forgiveness. That's even less applical because it's spread out
- 46:39Speaker 17: over ten years like the whole process. And it's yes,
- 46:43Speaker 17: it will have an effect on demand, depending if it's
- 46:45Speaker 17: there or it's taken away. And yet this is not
- 46:49Speaker 17: that's not the argument that should bring down a program
- 46:52Speaker 17: like this is the inflationary effects.
- 46:55Speaker 1: So, Claudie, we have received a lot of economic data,
- 46:58Speaker 1: including today that's just this economy perhaps is stronger than
- 47:01Speaker 1: people think that perhaps the recession is not right around
- 47:04Speaker 1: the corner. I would love to get your recession outlook,
- 47:07Speaker 1: maybe talk talk to us about something called the Psalm rule.
- 47:11Speaker 9: Yeah, what's that? Yeah.
- 47:14Speaker 17: So I've said several times last year when when the
- 47:18Speaker 17: recession talk was really getting going, and it's like, we
- 47:20Speaker 17: need to we need to hope that that labor market
- 47:24Speaker 17: is as strong as the FED keeps complaining that it
- 47:28Speaker 17: is right, because if it's strong enough, it can buffer
- 47:31Speaker 17: and you know, slowly, there are other things related to
- 47:34Speaker 17: the pandemic, to the war in Ukraine that as those
- 47:38Speaker 17: work through, we could have inflation come down without the
- 47:42Speaker 17: FED doing more and more and more. But they're going
- 47:45Speaker 17: to keep pushing. So the labor market being strong is
- 47:48Speaker 17: good for people without a doubt, but it also can
- 47:53Speaker 17: just buffer us so that we slowly rebounce, we slowly
- 47:57Speaker 17: get inflation back down, as opposed to you know, bam,
- 48:00Speaker 17: there's a recession and everything falls, including inflation. So I
- 48:05Speaker 17: think it's the labor market is extremely important in that regard,
- 48:08Speaker 17: And in terms of my recession outlook, I really am
- 48:14Speaker 17: kind of on the fence right. For a long time,
- 48:16Speaker 17: I was optimistic that we could have of soft landing
- 48:21Speaker 17: in some maybe softish type landing. When we had the
- 48:25Speaker 17: disruptions in the banking sector, I think that caused more
- 48:28Speaker 17: concern that, you know, we may really not pull this
- 48:32Speaker 17: off because there's the FED has put a lot into
- 48:35Speaker 17: the system in terms of raid hikes, and they have
- 48:37Speaker 17: bank failures putting more in.
- 48:40Speaker 9: So it's kind but I agree with you.
- 48:41Speaker 17: As the latest data on the economy comes in, it
- 48:44Speaker 17: looks pretty good.
- 48:46Speaker 8: And especially on the back of that ADP data that
- 48:48Speaker 8: we got this morning Jolts, and then ahead of tomorrow's
- 48:51Speaker 8: jobs report, what's surview as far as the drink of
- 48:55Speaker 8: the labor marketing and what it can mean for the
- 48:56Speaker 8: Fed's decision later this month.
- 49:00Speaker 17: So I think we're going to continue to see an
- 49:02Speaker 17: expanding labor market. I mean no, not every month, right,
- 49:06Speaker 17: we could have a big downside surprise this time, because
- 49:08Speaker 17: you know we've had upside. But I think you know,
- 49:10Speaker 17: when you look broadbrushed and you look like recent months,
- 49:13Speaker 17: not just like today and you know tomorrow kind of picture,
- 49:17Speaker 17: I think we're seeing what the FED said it wanted
- 49:19Speaker 17: to see, which an economy slow it just like people
- 49:22Speaker 17: not spending so much, not you know, people coming back
- 49:25Speaker 17: to work so they don't have to pay the wages
- 49:27Speaker 17: quite so.
- 49:27Speaker 9: Much, so we'll know more.
- 49:30Speaker 17: We're going to know a lot more about the labor
- 49:32Speaker 17: market by Friday.
- 49:34Speaker 9: But at the end of the day, the Fed is
- 49:36Speaker 9: going to look at at inflation.
- 49:37Speaker 17: Are they get one more CPI before their meeting, and
- 49:40Speaker 17: that is going to take precedent over anything else that
- 49:43Speaker 17: they're learning because inflation is too high.
- 49:45Speaker 1: So, I mean a lot of folks will say. We
- 49:48Speaker 1: had Danielle Di Martino Booth from QI Research Consulting in
- 49:51Speaker 1: here earlier today and she was saying she thinks the
- 49:54Speaker 1: economy is much slower than the headline data is suggesting.
- 49:57Speaker 1: Some of the data that she looks at. Is your
- 50:00Speaker 1: sense at the economy is in fact slowing down and
- 50:03Speaker 1: is it material?
- 50:04Speaker 17: Well, if you think about the increase in perils this
- 50:07Speaker 17: year compared to last year, they have slowed down. They're
- 50:10Speaker 17: still really good, you know, in terms of relative to
- 50:14Speaker 17: before the pandemic. So I mean getting two hundred thousand
- 50:18Speaker 17: jobs a month, that was that was pretty standard before
- 50:21Speaker 17: the pandemic.
- 50:22Speaker 9: So we need to get and I.
- 50:24Speaker 17: Think we're moving this way. There's enough rebalancing that we're
- 50:27Speaker 17: starting to see things get kind.
- 50:30Speaker 9: Of back to quote unquote normal.
- 50:33Speaker 17: And that, and I think the labor market has behaved
- 50:37Speaker 17: much more in that way than inflation has been a
- 50:40Speaker 17: lot harder for people to square the data.
- 50:44Speaker 1: All right, Claudia, thank you so much for joining a
- 50:46Speaker 1: Claudia Salm founder and independent economists, some consulting, former sector
- 50:51Speaker 1: chief at the Federal Reserve Board, former senior economists at
- 50:54Speaker 1: the Council of Economic Advisors at the White House, so
- 50:57Speaker 1: lots of experience.
- 50:59Speaker 11: You're listening to catch a live program Bloomberg Markets weekdays
- 51:03Speaker 11: at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the tune in app,
- 51:06Speaker 11: Bloomberg dot Com, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can
- 51:09Speaker 11: also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New
- 51:12Speaker 11: York station. Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
- 51:18Speaker 3: It's Thursday. Let's get to our good friend, Barry Ridholts.
- 51:20Speaker 1: Always well dressed, always carries himself very well. He's a
- 51:23Speaker 1: host of Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Has also
- 51:26Speaker 1: got a day job Chairman and chief investment Officer Reholts
- 51:29Speaker 1: Wealth Management. Barry, I have no idea what to talk
- 51:31Speaker 1: about today, so I'm gonna throw out a word and
- 51:32Speaker 1: you just kind of react inflation? What's going on out there?
- 51:36Speaker 1: How should we think about it?
- 51:37Speaker 18: It peaked over a year ago, it's coming down, and
- 51:41Speaker 18: the areas that are not coming down. You could blame
- 51:45Speaker 18: the FED for causing a shortage of homes for sale
- 51:48Speaker 18: and higher apartment rentals. Other than that, everywhere we look
- 51:54Speaker 18: we see either falling prices. Look no further than the
- 51:58Speaker 18: used car wholesale market, and use car price market has
- 52:02Speaker 18: come down to luxury goods. The index that Bloomberg tracks
- 52:07Speaker 18: of luxury watches have peaked and fallen twenty twenty five percent.
- 52:11Speaker 18: So wherever we look, inflation is rolling over. The three
- 52:15Speaker 18: sticking points are labor and I don't see how higher
- 52:19Speaker 18: rates are magically going to make a million more workers
- 52:21Speaker 18: uppear in the United States, semiconductors same and housing. And
- 52:27Speaker 18: housing is where the Fed is actually making the situation worse. Perversely,
- 52:31Speaker 18: the FED is causing higher inflation, and the sooner they
- 52:35Speaker 18: realize that.
- 52:36Speaker 3: How are they doing that, we'll all be what do
- 52:38Speaker 3: you mean by that? How are they doing that?
- 52:39Speaker 4: All? Right?
- 52:40Speaker 18: Two major ways. The first is owner's equivalent rent is
- 52:44Speaker 18: the largest part of CPI. What is it? It's effectively what
- 52:48Speaker 18: it costs to rent your house if you wanted to
- 52:51Speaker 18: rent it out. And when mortgage breaks go higher and
- 52:54Speaker 18: there's an insufficient supply of single family homes and home
- 52:58Speaker 18: prices go up, guess what happens to rental units. They
- 53:01Speaker 18: go up also, second, there would be many more homes
- 53:05Speaker 18: for sale. Perhaps he's in the price pressure we've seen
- 53:09Speaker 18: both in purchase and rentals. If people didn't feel locked
- 53:13Speaker 18: in to Hey, I have a three and a half
- 53:15Speaker 18: four percent mortgage. If I go out and get a
- 53:18Speaker 18: new mortgage at six and a half seven percent, it's
- 53:21Speaker 18: going to cost me a whole lot more for not
- 53:23Speaker 18: a whole lot more house. We're better off staying where
- 53:27Speaker 18: we are, says so many homeowners. And Hey, we'll add
- 53:30Speaker 18: a pool, we'll redo the kitchen, we'll we'll just do
- 53:33Speaker 18: some renovation, which, by the way, indirectly contributes to all
- 53:37Speaker 18: these rising prices for contractors. So many people have been
- 53:41Speaker 18: doing that over the past couple of years. They're making
- 53:43Speaker 18: that more expensive. If you want lower inflation, not only
- 53:48Speaker 18: should the FED stop raising rates, they need to think
- 53:50Speaker 18: about sliding back a cut or two in order to
- 53:55Speaker 18: stabilize the rental market, which they are directly disrupting.
- 54:00Speaker 8: And your latest column on the terminal is about how
- 54:03Speaker 8: more inflation expectations silliness that you're writing about. So you're
- 54:08Speaker 8: thinking that we aren't going to see higher inflation. But
- 54:12Speaker 8: given what you were just talking about when it comes
- 54:14Speaker 8: to especially shelter in housing, how you have different components
- 54:16Speaker 8: when you're looking at inflation metrics, especially with CPI right,
- 54:20Speaker 8: because shelter is more like around a third of the waiting,
- 54:23Speaker 8: very different than say when you look at PCE right,
- 54:25Speaker 8: which is a very different waiting there.
- 54:28Speaker 18: That's exactly right. So first, forget expectations. When we look
- 54:32Speaker 18: at goods prices, not only have they stopped going up,
- 54:36Speaker 18: many of them have come down in price, and quite
- 54:39Speaker 18: a few have fallen to levels that were pre pandemic.
- 54:43Speaker 18: When we look at lumber, when we look at a
- 54:45Speaker 18: number of industrial metals, when we look you know, pretty
- 54:48Speaker 18: much across the board, even energy, where are we sixty
- 54:51Speaker 18: eight seventy two a barrel? That's what it was in
- 54:55Speaker 18: two thousand and six. So I'm okay with oil being
- 54:59Speaker 18: the same price for twenty years. Yeah, it fell, it spiked,
- 55:02Speaker 18: it collapsed again, but it's hard to say that we're
- 55:05Speaker 18: really paying way too much for energy prices, natural gas
- 55:08Speaker 18: prices can continue to drift lower despite the Russian invasion
- 55:12Speaker 18: of Ukraine. So when we look at what's actually happening,
- 55:17Speaker 18: prices are either no longer going up, or going up
- 55:20Speaker 18: much more slowly, or actually coming down. But the Fed
- 55:24Speaker 18: likes to do this thing called inflation expectations. They survey
- 55:28Speaker 18: a few thousand people and they say, where do you
- 55:32Speaker 18: think inflation will be in five years? And there really
- 55:35Speaker 18: is one honest answer to that, How the hell do
- 55:39Speaker 18: I know anything else besides that is a lie. So
- 55:43Speaker 18: when people say we think inflation is going to be
- 55:45Speaker 18: appreciably higher in five years, all they're really revealing is
- 55:50Speaker 18: their experience the past three to six months, and human
- 55:54Speaker 18: psychology is that's on a leg. It took people a
- 55:56Speaker 18: little while to recognize while why inflation it's order to
- 56:00Speaker 18: tick up, which is why inflation expectations throughout the first
- 56:04Speaker 18: half of twenty twenty one were like, yeah, we're inflation's fine,
- 56:07Speaker 18: just as it was spiking upwards, and then last summer,
- 56:11Speaker 18: when it had peaked and reversed, people maintained their same,
- 56:14Speaker 18: much higher inflation expectations for a few years. Humans are
- 56:18Speaker 18: terrible at predicting and random people telling you what CPI
- 56:22Speaker 18: will be five years from now. I know there's been
- 56:26Speaker 18: a lot of medical experiment with psilocybin and magic mushrooms.
- 56:29Speaker 18: I didn't know it had actually reached the FMC research
- 56:32Speaker 18: department because that's the only explanation for this sort of survey.
- 56:36Speaker 1: All right, Barry, we're getting to the dog days of summer.
- 56:39Speaker 1: What are you driving these days?
- 56:42Speaker 18: So in the last year, I picked up it's funny
- 56:46Speaker 18: to talk about this without matter around.
- 56:48Speaker 13: I know.
- 56:48Speaker 3: I picked up an old.
- 56:52Speaker 18: Nine to eleven or nineteen eighty eight Cabrio that the
- 56:56Speaker 18: previous owner had just beaten the hell out of They
- 56:58Speaker 18: had been racing it, and they had modified it. So
- 57:01Speaker 18: I was able to pick it up for really deep
- 57:04Speaker 18: down inside, I'm a value investor, so anytime I get
- 57:07Speaker 18: a chance to pick up a Cabrio cheap, I did that,
- 57:12Speaker 18: and I've slowly been bringing it back to stock. And
- 57:15Speaker 18: as we're working on the car, by dumb luck, it
- 57:17Speaker 18: turns out that it's the M four ninety one Special Edition,
- 57:22Speaker 18: which is the nine to eleven Turbo. It has everything
- 57:25Speaker 18: the turbo has minus the turbo, so the whale tail,
- 57:28Speaker 18: the fat fenders, the big tires, beefed up, suspension and breaks.
- 57:33Speaker 18: It's just the turbos were known as widow makers. They
- 57:36Speaker 18: were notoriously dangerous. So this is everything minus that, and
- 57:41Speaker 18: I actually just brought it in. The last things I'm
- 57:45Speaker 18: having done is the suspension return to normal. And that's
- 57:50Speaker 18: kind of my fun summer driver. You could pick up.
- 57:52Speaker 18: Everybody looks at these expensive cars if.
- 57:55Speaker 3: You do get them at a decent price.
- 57:57Speaker 1: All right, Barry, thanks so much, Barry Ridults there getting
- 58:00Speaker 1: us the car talk.
- 58:01Speaker 11: You're listening to the tape. Can's are live program Bloomberg
- 58:04Speaker 11: Markets weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the
- 58:08Speaker 11: tune in app, Bloomberg dot Com.
- 58:09Speaker 13: And the Bloomberg Business App.
- 58:11Speaker 11: You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our
- 58:14Speaker 11: flagship New York station. Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
- 58:19Speaker 1: All right, here is a story that I've been sending
- 58:22Speaker 1: to all of my Harvard buddies. They're not happy for
- 58:26Speaker 1: a variety of reasons, and I'm blaming our next guest,
- 58:29Speaker 1: Janet Lauren. Janet Lauren, higher education financi reporter for Bloomberg News.
- 58:33Speaker 1: Harvard targeted by Massachusetts Bill on legacy admissions. Janet, give
- 58:37Speaker 1: us a back story here, what's going on.
- 58:40Speaker 9: So this bill.
- 58:41Speaker 10: Has been introduced, it's been there was a committee last week.
- 58:45Speaker 10: But the question is is it going to have an impact?
- 58:48Speaker 10: So the question is does the state the state would
- 58:51Speaker 10: like to tax schools based on their endowment pur student,
- 58:55Speaker 10: and we know that there's a school with a quite
- 58:56Speaker 10: large endowment in Massachusetts. It's a big target. And this
- 59:01Speaker 10: would give schools, community colleges money based on formula foreign
- 59:07Speaker 10: Downman per student if they have legacy admissions. And that
- 59:10Speaker 10: means if your parent went to school there, do you
- 59:13Speaker 10: get a preference? And also early decision and why does
- 59:15Speaker 10: early decision make a difference. Typically students who apply earlier
- 59:19Speaker 10: tend to be wealthier. They're not necessarily waiting to compare
- 59:23Speaker 10: financial aid packages when they get them in March. So
- 59:26Speaker 10: the question is Harvard again is always a big target.
- 59:30Speaker 10: There's been legislation in Massachusetts before to try to TAXI
- 59:33Speaker 10: ing down and also at Yale to tech and they
- 59:36Speaker 10: have not been successful. There are huge drivers of money
- 59:40Speaker 10: universities and the Higher Ed Association in Massachusetts said, look,
- 59:44Speaker 10: if this goes through our students, our citizens are unfairly
- 59:49Speaker 10: targeted because these policies potentially could go away.
- 59:52Speaker 8: What historically has been the catalyst to prevent those types
- 59:55Speaker 8: of policies from actually going through.
- 59:58Speaker 10: Well, you know, firmative action in the Supreme Court decision
- 1:00:02Speaker 10: has really prompted this. If the Supreme Court says you
- 1:00:07Speaker 10: can't give a preference for race, why should you have
- 1:00:10Speaker 10: a preference for wealthier applications? Is what is what this
- 1:00:13Speaker 10: is is bringing.
- 1:00:14Speaker 1: Out interesting I noticed in your reporting that the Massachusetts
- 1:00:19Speaker 1: bill or the second richest college in the state, Massachusetts
- 1:00:22Speaker 1: Institute of Technology MIT, wouldn't pay anything because it doesn't
- 1:00:26Speaker 1: use binding early decision policies or legacy preferences.
- 1:00:29Speaker 10: Yeah, I didn't know that. Yes, that is true. MIT
- 1:00:31Speaker 10: has long had a policy not having legacies. But you know,
- 1:00:35Speaker 10: MIT was one of the first schools to actually bring
- 1:00:38Speaker 10: back the SAT and MIT is a Yes, they're pretty
- 1:00:41Speaker 10: different because you kind of have to do the work,
- 1:00:45Speaker 10: so it doesn't really matter if your parent went there.
- 1:00:47Speaker 10: They're looking for kids who can excel in math and
- 1:00:50Speaker 10: science and that's not going to be just anybody. And
- 1:00:53Speaker 10: they also many of the schools do not have binding
- 1:00:56Speaker 10: early decision policies. Harvard Yale, Princeton stand at MIT. You
- 1:01:01Speaker 10: know that was done more than a decade ago to
- 1:01:04Speaker 10: take out that advantage. In fact, several years ago schools
- 1:01:07Speaker 10: actually abolished early decision like Princeton and a few schools
- 1:01:11Speaker 10: followed that, and they said that they were actually losing
- 1:01:13Speaker 10: kids because they do like to shore up where they're
- 1:01:16Speaker 10: going to school as early as possible.
- 1:01:18Speaker 8: How have these poor community colleges been impacted in the
- 1:01:21Speaker 8: past when these policies haven't gone through.
- 1:01:23Speaker 10: Well, community colleges are really quite underfunded. You know, I
- 1:01:28Speaker 10: was talking to one bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts
- 1:01:31Speaker 10: where they have more than ten thousand students, and you know,
- 1:01:35Speaker 10: their goal is to get kids to graduate associate's degree,
- 1:01:39Speaker 10: ideally transfer to a four year college. And you know,
- 1:01:42Speaker 10: the worst scenario is when you have some college you've
- 1:01:45Speaker 10: taken on some loans and then you don't finish and
- 1:01:48Speaker 10: they are, you know, traditionally quite underfunded.
- 1:01:50Speaker 3: It's interesting because we're just talking to John Talker about this.
- 1:01:53Speaker 1: You know, going to a community college for a couple
- 1:01:55Speaker 1: of years and you can transfer all your credits to
- 1:01:57Speaker 1: stay in the state of New Jersey to Rutgers, which
- 1:01:59Speaker 1: is a state universe of New Jersey Sunday. And then
- 1:02:03Speaker 1: you can graduate with a Rutgers degree with only really
- 1:02:05Speaker 1: two years of a Rutgers tuition.
- 1:02:07Speaker 9: Yes.
- 1:02:07Speaker 10: Well, and really the biggest issue when you're talking about
- 1:02:11Speaker 10: student loans is when you have some college you and
- 1:02:14Speaker 10: you don't have the degree, but you're carrying this loan
- 1:02:17Speaker 10: burden for a long time. And certainly people think about
- 1:02:19Speaker 10: community college is an alternative to having a couple of
- 1:02:22Speaker 10: years of less expensive school, and as you said, transfering,
- 1:02:24Speaker 10: you're still having the Rutgers degree. And plus you know,
- 1:02:27Speaker 10: real experience.
- 1:02:29Speaker 8: As far as putting into perspective just how challenging is
- 1:02:32Speaker 8: it and how many students end up not actually being
- 1:02:35Speaker 8: able to accept and go to a university like Harvard
- 1:02:38Speaker 8: just because of the increasing cost, Like say, if you
- 1:02:40Speaker 8: don't have that kind of connection there where you're part
- 1:02:43Speaker 8: of a family and an alumni group like that.
- 1:02:45Speaker 10: Well, Harvard for a long time has been trying to
- 1:02:48Speaker 10: increase its financial aid and targeted to lower income students.
- 1:02:52Speaker 10: So our story last week talked about the incoming class
- 1:02:55Speaker 10: twenty five percent have incomes of eighty five thousand or less,
- 1:03:00Speaker 10: and that's something that they've been particularly trying to target
- 1:03:03Speaker 10: in the last several years.
- 1:03:04Speaker 1: How important are the legacy programs to the universities. I mean,
- 1:03:07Speaker 1: it's a broad discussion point, but it seems like they're
- 1:03:13Speaker 1: quite important for just I don't know, support and all
- 1:03:16Speaker 1: that type of thing.
- 1:03:17Speaker 10: Well, the University of Pennsylvania used to say, look, if
- 1:03:20Speaker 10: your kid wants to go here, you went here. You
- 1:03:22Speaker 10: have to apply early, and that that's the only place
- 1:03:25Speaker 10: where you're going to have an advantage in the early
- 1:03:27Speaker 10: decision process. But colleges like to you know, preserve their communities,
- 1:03:31Speaker 10: They like to encourage alumni to donate, and you know,
- 1:03:34Speaker 10: you may we had a comment in one of the
- 1:03:36Speaker 10: stories earlier this week that legacy programs do encourage people
- 1:03:40Speaker 10: to donate. You know, you're giving to your college for
- 1:03:43Speaker 10: thirty years with the hopes that your kid might get in.
- 1:03:45Speaker 10: That's you know, that is some revenue that schools don't
- 1:03:48Speaker 10: want to curtail. And certainly we're also talking about wealthy
- 1:03:52Speaker 10: donors too.
- 1:03:53Speaker 8: Right, And what's the likelihood that when we're talking about
- 1:03:57Speaker 8: these admission policies that they would actually.
- 1:03:59Speaker 10: Likely go through time around? I mean, that's that's a
- 1:04:02Speaker 10: good question. You talk to the higher ed lobby, you
- 1:04:05Speaker 10: talk to observers, and they say, well, it's not that
- 1:04:07Speaker 10: they have zero chance. Maybe they're you know, but before
- 1:04:10Speaker 10: they had zero chance. Maybe it sounds a little bit
- 1:04:12Speaker 10: more interesting with the Supreme Court. But you have to
- 1:04:15Speaker 10: understand that colleges in massachuse there's a lot of rich
- 1:04:18Speaker 10: colleges in Massachusetts, and you cannot undermine the power of lobbyists.
- 1:04:23Speaker 10: Colleges for a long time resisted the federal tax on endowments.
- 1:04:27Speaker 10: It's something that a lot of Congressmen were interested because
- 1:04:30Speaker 10: you know, Harvard has fifty billion dollars, Yelle has forty
- 1:04:33Speaker 10: one billion dollars. You know, these are these are massive
- 1:04:38Speaker 10: asset allocations and they're a rich target. But ultimately, you know,
- 1:04:42Speaker 10: except for the federal endowment tax that went through in
- 1:04:44Speaker 10: the Trump tax cuts of twenty seventeen, they've never been successful.
- 1:04:49Speaker 1: Talk to those about another topic that I know you're
- 1:04:50Speaker 1: familiar with, which is we're seeing here the rich get richer,
- 1:04:54Speaker 1: whether it's endowment or students or and maybe you know,
- 1:04:57Speaker 1: the poor get poor in terms of some of these
- 1:04:59Speaker 1: underfunded schools, under endowed schools literally going out of business.
- 1:05:04Speaker 1: How's the playing field these days? What's happening out there
- 1:05:07Speaker 1: what a higher education folks think is going to be
- 1:05:10Speaker 1: the trend.
- 1:05:10Speaker 10: Well, there are a couple of trends. The first one
- 1:05:13Speaker 10: is you had a pandemic money that certainly helped gave
- 1:05:17Speaker 10: a huge lifeline to colleges for several years, and that's
- 1:05:21Speaker 10: going away. You have what we've been writing about for
- 1:05:24Speaker 10: a decade, demographic shifts. There are just fewer eighteen year
- 1:05:28Speaker 10: olds out there, there's fewer kids to go to college,
- 1:05:31Speaker 10: and kids tend to go two hundred miles away from
- 1:05:35Speaker 10: their homes, and there's a lot of colleges and areas
- 1:05:37Speaker 10: that are constrained, such as the Midwest and the Northeast.
- 1:05:40Speaker 10: So you have all these issues converging at the same time.
- 1:05:43Speaker 10: With the prices expensive, our people making different decisions not
- 1:05:48Speaker 10: to go to college. So you know when the price
- 1:05:51Speaker 10: tag could be seventy eighty thousand dollars. Now, keep in
- 1:05:53Speaker 10: mind that's not actually what most families pay because most
- 1:05:57Speaker 10: of the smaller liberal arts colleges they do they do
- 1:06:01Speaker 10: offer aid, so the sticker price is really not what
- 1:06:03Speaker 10: they're paying. But it's a good question. We're starting to see.
- 1:06:07Speaker 10: There was a college in New Jersey that has now
- 1:06:11Speaker 10: since merged with Montclair State. Bloommen was Bloomfield College, Right,
- 1:06:15Speaker 10: So I think you're starting to see more of that,
- 1:06:17Speaker 10: and you know, as you see schools looking for debt
- 1:06:22Speaker 10: and their ratings are constrained.
- 1:06:25Speaker 8: Yeah, right, especially when you think of just in the
- 1:06:27Speaker 8: context of COVID as well, what you were mentioning the
- 1:06:30Speaker 8: haves and the have nots and how that can exacerbate that.
- 1:06:35Speaker 15: Well.
- 1:06:35Speaker 8: Great, Well, thanks so much for taking the time to
- 1:06:37Speaker 8: speak with us. Janet Lauren, higher education finance reporter at
- 1:06:41Speaker 8: Bloomberg News, talking to us about obviously this was a
- 1:06:44Speaker 8: big topic you were looking forward to speaking to Paul
- 1:06:46Speaker 8: as far as how Harvard is targeting this Massachusetts bill
- 1:06:49Speaker 8: on legacy admissions and what that could mean obviously for endowments,
- 1:06:52Speaker 8: but then also on the poor side of things, we
- 1:06:55Speaker 8: were talking about community colleges.
- 1:06:56Speaker 1: Yeah, and I just I kind of feel like the
- 1:06:58Speaker 1: well resourced families will find a way around whatever blockades
- 1:07:03Speaker 1: or you know, kind of challenge to put up by colleges.
- 1:07:05Speaker 3: And clearly some of these things.
- 1:07:06Speaker 8: Right, they have historically done in the lobbying efforts.
- 1:07:09Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, we thought about the Supreme Court
- 1:07:12Speaker 3: case coming down people somebody said wrote in being a
- 1:07:16Speaker 3: really good essay writer is not going to become even
- 1:07:19Speaker 3: more important because you want to say, you know, as
- 1:07:21Speaker 3: a you know, as an underprivileged blah blah blah blah,
- 1:07:24Speaker 3: I overcame these and that's kind of the way to But.
- 1:07:26Speaker 8: Then you also have to kind of think about the
- 1:07:28Speaker 8: haves and.
- 1:07:28Speaker 10: The have notz.
- 1:07:29Speaker 3: Yep, Absolutely, it's been a big, big issue.
- 1:07:32Speaker 1: But again, the community college schools have been such a
- 1:07:34Speaker 1: great route for so many people over so many years.
- 1:07:36Speaker 3: You'd like to see that continue.
- 1:07:40Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Markets podcast. You can
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- 1:07:49Speaker 3: I'm Matt Miller.
- 1:07:50Speaker 2: I'm on Twitter at Matt Miller nineteen seventy three and
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- 1:07:54Speaker 1: Sweeney I'm on Twitter at pt Sweeney. Before the podcast,
- 1:07:57Speaker 1: you can always catch us worldwide at Bloomberg Radio.