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This is Bloomberg Business Week Daily reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead with insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus global business, finance and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Hi everyone, welcome to the Bloomberg Business Week Weekend podcast. Well, this past week earnings from the King of the AI, Bellweather's amid nervousness over the artificial intelligence build out and spend. Also concerns regarding credit stress and private markets, plus the start again Tim. Finally, finally of some US government economic data.
We're just getting caught up when it comes to the releases.
We are, and they're coming in funny ways and on funny days like it's throwing us awfully.
It is it is, but it's okay. We'll bring you all the updates as we get them. So this our on the US labor market, We're going to catch up with the CFO over at upwork. Also some of those risk concerns about the spending in circular financing of the AI buildout. We've been talking about that a lot. Also the not so transparent works of private credit. We turned to someone who we turned to a lot during the Great Financial Crisis, the former investment banker Chris Whalen.
Plus also glad that we could catch up with the CEO of Connect One Bank Orp again on lending on the FED on affordable housing. That was a really fun part of the conversation. We did talk about rent stabilization and the business environments. His bank is involved in affordable housing in New York City, so that was a fun part of that conversation.
Plus later on how brilliant leaders unlock collective genius, crypto, feeling the pressure, and the inescapable business of beauty.
All of that to come. We begin with a look at the US labor market. Thursday, this past week, not on Friday, which is when we normally get monthly reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, released it's hotly anticipated, long long delayed September Jobs report. And what was good about this data batch tim they had actually collected i think all the data they needed to do this report just before the government shut down, so it was pretty complete.
What we found out the job growth picked up in September, the unemployment rate tacked higher, suggests that the labor market showed signs of stabilizing before the government shut down.
Meantime, the BLS also said it will not publish in October jobs report. It did, however, note it will incorporate those payroll figures into the November report. Are you keeping trying?
Yeah?
No.
This is why I'm glad I sit right next to Mike McKee, because if I ever have questions about this, I just turn around and I say, Mike, what's going on with this?
Well, and keep in mind that November report will be published in December, but it comes after the fed's fatal meeting of twenty twenty five. Did you catch that? Do you need the whiteboard screen? Do you need me to send a little note down?
No, I don't because I have ECO go on the Bloomberg term and that's all I need.
All right, Well, listen we nonetheless, as the data starts to come out finally from the US government, we relied once again on Erica Gessert. She's the chief financial officer at Upwork who talked about the labor market. Yes, of course, she also gave us an update on the company's investor day.
Our investor day was really timed perfectly for us. The reason our stock one up thirteen percent after our earnings report was at the end of twenty twenty four, we told our investors that we would take a year and really reinvest in our company and rebuild up Work, and we said that we would return to GSB and revenue growth in twenty twenty six.
Well we did that two quarters early.
What we told them then was that our results are going up into the right right now, and that is because of really three investment areas. One is AI, one is SMB expanding our relationships with SMB, and one is the outsized opportunity that we have with our enterprise.
So I want to remind everybody Upwork is a hiring platform. You can go there to find talent in development and ITAI services, design and creative, sales and marketing, admin and customer support. It's this two sided markets. So that's right. You have a good view on what exactly the type of job that companies are hiring for and then also the availability of that labor. What does that picture and that balance look like right now?
The last few years have been as we all know tough the on the job market, and you know, most companies in our industry were down double digits over the past few years in terms of both volume and revenue.
Upwork was relatively flat for the past couple of years.
So we were gaining share againstaffing companies even other online marketplaces, but still relatively flat. And it's really these investments that we've made in AI. We're actually seeing both the AI category itself increase and that is really, like I say, accelerating. So this is this is AI work on the platform, but also the investments on the front end.
So if you think about the.
Hiring process and how that works, there's a lot of friction to it, right. You know, a client comes onto our website, they post a job, they have to write it up, they have to search for talent, the talent has to write.
A job proposal.
Well, now AI does all of that for both our clients and our talent and make them find each other faster and kind of fulfill these jobs and get them done.
Those matches work, Like what percentage of the time or where is it that it's like, well not not good?
Well, no, So what the AI is doing is it's writing the job post, it's writing the job proposal, and of course that you know they're they're there can be editing, ye. But now we do have AI interviewer and and we also one of our one of our most successful, very recent launches is UMA, which is our you know, our
AI companion on our site is now recruiting talent. So so the client asked for a certain type of talent, UMA goes out within our you know, eighteen million strong talent based and identifies the right talent for that job.
Now we're seeing fil rates much higher.
Using the using the AI recruiter than with the human recruiter. Why, it's good at spinning lots and lots of data, right, and so you know, we've been building our platform is over ten years old, and we've been building this data set of you know, what types of jobs match with which talent. You know, whether client client is price sensitive or you know, maybe their quality sensitive. And so the the recruiter, the air recruiters much better at scanning across all of this data than a human can be.
Are you seeing demand stay a stable decrease or increase from the side of your platform that is looking for the workers.
Yeah, So client demand. And I think you know what we are seeing is.
Client demand has been where we have seen the biggest impact from from you know, I would say the job market and the economy writ.
Large, like if the economy is softer, then demand will go down from the prince, yes.
And and and if you think about that, if you think about you know, our our online marketplace is primarily smb customers, right and so small the small.
Medium sized business. So if you think about what's going on.
There when inflation is high, you know, you know this, this hits consumer whiles it also hits smb you know leaders and and and then also when interest.
Rates are high, they have lower access to capital.
Right, and so we do see the demand environment in terms of just pure volume of SMB hirers relatively flat in this in this you know right now.
But you know, we are.
One of the few places where these SMBU customers can actually access very high quality AI talent and afford you know, in an affordable way and quickly, and so as they're trying to implement AI work within their businesses, this contingent marketplace that we offer is one of the best places they can find.
What's your take on AI and the impact it's going to have on the labor force.
AI is not going to replace humans.
Humans with AI will replace humans without AI, right, And so we're seeing AI replace very simple tasks, but not you know, the larger, more complex work because these AI agents are not that edgentic, they have no judgment, they cannot complete the complex tasks.
So what we've seen, yeah, over well.
What we've seen over the years is jobs that are three hundred dollars in lower those have those have gone down on our platform. So about two years ago we had about five percent of our work with job three hundred dollars lower.
Now it's about three and a half percent.
But at the same time, the AI jobs on our platform, clients who engage in AI work spend about three times with our normal you know kind of platform work. Yeah, it does, and so you know, we see that growing and growing because that work is more complex. It requires humans and you know, humans using AI agents, but it requires humans in the loop.
That was Erica Gessertz CFO over at Upwork.
Okay, so the US economy continues to be front and center and what it means for FED policy so important. But also this week crucial earnings report from the largest market cap company in the world. We're talking about the king of the AI Bellweathers and Vidia.
And Vidia delivered a surprisingly strong revenue forecast. It pushed back on the idea that the AI industry is in a bubble, and I think for a lot of investors at East concerns that had spread across the tech sector. For some thoughts on the company and the warnings of an AI bubble, we lean on Dave Lee Blueberg Opinions, US technology columnist.
The question is no longer is this an AI bubble?
Right?
I think we've all come to the agreement there was a bubble of some kind, But is he going to be a bubble like the Internet dot com bubble where there was just devastation when many of these companies that had suspect balance it's turned out to be suspect companies.
Jensen Wang.
He is saying, Look, there's huge height, there's huge excitement. There's a lot of questions about how companies are going to use AI. But from where he's sitting, they're still seeing this incredibly strong demand for what they do, which is obviously create the world's best semiconductors.
Still be fair, He's got a produciary responsibility. He's not going to sit right like. He's got to be careful in terms of how he quantitifies or qualifies his business. And the numbers, many would say, yeah, there is still strong demand.
Still a strong demand. I think that it was interesting to see the reaction to the earnings because the immediate reaction was wow, this really pushes back on the idea as a bubble. The problems we were still worried about before the earnings they still exist despite the earnings being so strong.
What is your take on why the collective market sort of recognized something here? There's no catalyst, at least to my knowledge that you know, no new information came to light.
One of the defining parts of this new bubble so far has been, you know, whenever there's a slight clue as to the future AI, the reaction needs to be overstated. So you remember that that afternoon, that morning when Deep Seek was released. The reaction to back in January, I mean just devastating when everyone was sort of panicking, and then when people really thought about it, they were, well, you know what, maybe this isn't so bad after all, the same as being I think could be said for
sort of positive moves. And look, nobody was coming into in videos earning thinking oh this could be you know, these could be bad or what everyone was expecting to be a great quarter. Now it's stronger than some people had thought, obviously based on the analyst estimates beforehand. But the dynamic that people are worried about isn't so much how Nvidio is doing, but how are their clients doing when they buy all this computing power? Is it going
to be worth it for them? And that's where that's where.
The ROI ultimately the ir yes provate margin.
I mean, you know, whatever we talk about bubbles and the you know, the nineteen ninety nine and late nineties, really two thousand, what people come on who were there tell us they're push back is yes, but these companies are now profitable.
I think, you know, no one's and I said this in my column, no one's calling in video the next pets dot Com, right or the risk of that. But in Video's clients could be the next pets dot Com. Open AI. You know, there's a company burning billions of dollars with an unsure way of getting that money back. Core Weave was a catalyst for a lot of the worries around, you know, just data centers in general. They're
still finding it very hard to build data centers. It's going to be a big problem finding the place to build them, finding the energy to power them. There's a lot of unknowns that you know, it could could be at play here. And when we compare it to that dot com bubble, I have to say I wasn't covering it because I was a child.
All right, I was covering it. And I will say there is a difference, and we talk about this that there are companies with earnings, So I'm trying to understand the demand is there, and you're saying, we get it. They can't build the data centers fast enough. They don't have the energy to power them. Is that enough to mean that this is not a real thing and that AI is not going to impact us in this spend continues?
The timeline is the question, right, because when we look back at the dot com bubble, they say, well, what about Amazon, Right, there's a real company change the world.
Not profitable, not profitable, not profitable.
Exactly for years and years years, and I didn't recover from its dot com slump for another eight years. After nineteen eight years. I noticed that Cisco twenty five years only recover on the dot com crash this week, and so sure AI could be as big as the Internet or even electricity, as some people are saying, whether or not there'll be a slump in the meantime that could take a huge amount of time to really recover. I think that might be one of the concerns that people should should be having.
That was Dave Lee, Bloomberg Opinion US Tech columnists. After the company's learnings call, CEO Jensen Wong sat down with Bloomberg Tech co host ed Ludlow. They talked about the results. You can catch that online on the Bloomberg terminal and at Bloomberg dot com.
All right, coming up, we kind of stay with AI. We talk big AI bets, uneasy economy, and credits starting to buckle.
That's a question mark.
Because I think we're trying to figure it out. He was a go to voice for us during the Great Financial Crisis. We leaned on him so much. Chris Whalen joins us.
Next, you're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Weekdaily podcast. Catch US live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app, or watch US live on YouTube.
All Right.
With Nvidio earnings this past week, it was no surprise that the AI trade and debate over a boom or bus remained front and center, although I need to say that I feel like the idea of a boom was
more front and center following and Video's earnings. Keep in mind, though, fears of an AI bubble bubbled up earlier in the week before Nvidia reported, and that was because of warnings from investors or continued warnings from investors really who believe the AI led rally has run too hot and that the industry could be due for somewhat of a correction, maybe even just a normal correction. Rothchild and co Redburns Alexander Heisel downgraded Microsoft and Amazon for the first time
since initiating coverage on the two names. That was back in June twenty twenty two. That was according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This got a lot of attention this past week, tim it.
Did it move the company stocks too. Meantime, Tech bohemoths continue to spend so much on AI. Just this week, Microsoft and Nvidia announced that they would invest up to a combined fifteen billion dollars in the Open AI rival and Thropic. It's these types of deals that have investors increasingly concerned about so called circular financing within the AI spend and build. We should remind everybody the Microsoft portion of this is pretty significant, given that Microsoft has such
a big ownership stake of open Ai. Yeah, and Anthropic is open AI's rival, so it's like the owner of your competitor investing in the competitor.
Amid all of this and questions around market and possible financial and credit stress, we leaned on a familiar voice. Chris Whaleen was a go to for us during the Great Financial Crisis. He is chairman of whale and Global Advisors, a former investment banker, also editor of The Institutional Risk Analysts. It's a weekly newsletter that looks at the intersection of financial markets and public policy. This is a guy who spends a lot of time looking at financial balance sheets.
The loss rates on many of these assets. Carol, and thank you for having me is quite astounding. Remember that you had not just big private equity firms diving into private credit, but you had retail firms selling this to individual investors for the past couple of years. I think it just speaks to a decline in standards in the investment world. I've been an investment banker for thirty years, member of FINRA, and I've got to tell you most of my astute clients, the banks I really have respect for,
don't see anything that they like. They're using their private markets to off credit risk. They're selling assets to raise cash, and I think that's frankly and very consistent with what Jeff Gunlock is saying, which is that there's so much out there that needs to be fixed and the loss rates could be rather considerable. So I think it's only getting started. You saw the story in Bloomberg about Blue Owl.
We're going to see a lot more of that, So, you know, just take that example and multiply it across the entire spectrum of private equity. What an interesting statistics I saw it in the last couple of weeks is that something like two thirds of the existing private equity firms are never going to be able to raise money again because the losses on their portfolio are so profound, so I think we're seeing something episodic. And as good Luck said, this is a commercial story this time. This
is not about consumers and mortgages. This is purely institutional.
So the well, the question I have is how it manifests and do you believe it manifests in some sort of crisis. Does it become something that is systemic and has an effect on the entire financial system? Is it that big of an issue?
It is that big, But remember this is institutional investors, so a lot of it goes on behind the scenes, lawyers and bankers sitting in conference rooms trying to figure out how to extract value from a situation. So when it impacts a public company, yes, when a bank has to fess up about a loss. You just saw one with Blackstone, a telecom company, which is going to cost them one hundred and fifty million dollars. Looks like the
whole thing was a fraud from the word go. But over time, yes, you're going to see more disclosure from the public players, but the amount of loss is going to be much larger than what the typical investor, the typical media person actually sees, because so much of it is private like give you an example, it is a really great publication called The Real Deal that covers commercial real estate can't even begin to cover all of the
things that are going on. If you just read their headlines every morning, you get a sense for just how much restructuring there is going on in some pretty important and well located assets here in New York City and other cities around the US. And it just continues. And yet the funny part is you have new investors jumping in to buy these assets after they've been marked down, thinking that they're getting a deal.
Well we'll see, you know, well we will see, right. I mean, does the AI spending frenzy play.
Into this, Oh very much. I covered Silicon Valley for years. Carol is a banker, and I have a lot of respect for real technologists as opposed to salespeople. I don't think AIS it's described to most investors today, is going to amount to anything except the convenience for consumer users of the Internet. When you talk about real intell diligence on the part of a machine that is based on its ability to observe and integrate new information, that's not
what we're doing here. We're simply taking existing language, existing words, and putting massive horsepower behind search. Okay, well they summarized the first page of Google results. That's it.
So that to be fair, just to be and to make sure I understand this right, you're arguing that what we're seeing right now with llms such as chat GPT from open Ai and Claude from Tropic, that's the extent of the innovation that we're going to see when it comes to the investment in AI.
The head of AI at Meta, who's a really smart man. I was watching some of his videos yesterday over the weekend, and you know, he just dismisses this entire phase. And I understand what he's talking about. I used to cover companies that did what we call natural language processing, where we were trying to teach Cooter's words and then be able to integrate those words. We're not even doing that with AI. We're just simply throwing muscular search at it
and saying, Okay, what's the top ten search results. Let's build a summary. That's not intelligence. So I think a lot of the spend, and you've heard this from other people, is going to end up being wasted when it comes to AI.
That's a lot of that's a lot of money, and that's a lot of big bets in your.
Video in the interview. Don't get me wrong, I've made a lot of money in the video. Sorry, go ahead. Well I don't think it will generate revenue proportional to the spend. Let's put it that way.
So okay.
So I made a lot of money on Nvidio, don't get me wrong. And I love that stock, I love the company, but I think, you know, the desire for investible assets has just overwhelmed these opportunities. We see inflation everywhere we look in the financial markets today, and that is defined as too much money chasing too fear opportunities.
I just want I want to push back a little bit, Chris, Like you know, I've been talking about this piece that was on sixty minutes about the founder of Anthropic Yeah, dar Amadae, right, and he talks specifically about how like AI in healthcare. And I've talked to doctors too. We were at Boston Children's about the use of you know, they can't keep up to date on everything and that how AI can data points and so on really come together to help create in terms of diagnoses, treatment and
also in terms of innovation. But on the day saying on sixty minutes, basically he's talking about this thing of condensing. Basically, let me just look what he says, the compressed twenty first century, that's the phrase he uses just to describe what could happen. He says, the idea would be the point that we can get as systems to this level of power where they're able to work with the best
human scientists. Could we get ten times the rate of progress, and therefore compress saw the medical progress that's going to happen throughout the entire twenty first century in five or ten years. I realize it's his book, but I mean those of us who've started playing around with it are kind of blown away with it in terms of what it can do. But again, do you think it's just a productivity tool or something more that maybe creates.
It's this stage. Yes, it's remember in the old days where it Chris Wilde was one of the early advocates of AI, and he said, well, it's not intelligence, it's simulated cognition, and he was right, but then he had so many people throwing money at him to go to conferences and speak that over time he adopted a more liberal, more you know, I guess accepting view of this technological phenomenon.
But to me as a writer, when I use AI, use Google, for example, it's it's nice if you know what you're looking for specifically, but I'll always ask the machine two or three times the same question differently worded, yeah, and you always get different outputs. So let me give you another example. Imagine using AI for a mortgage lender to deal with customers who are calling, you know, for a variety of reasons, and you want to use it to try and sift through those inquiries answer the ones
that you can in a reliable fashion. Also use it to do submations of phone calls that have to be reviewed and okayed before they're finalized. Right, These are all valid functions, but ultimately, all we're really doing here is summarizing. And that's what computers do. They sort, they do summations and averages and everything else. But it's not intelligence. It's not the ability to learn on the fly, and particularly without a monitor and a companion, if you will, in
a human sense. So for a lot of companies, say look at the horsepower, they look at the speed and the robustness of these AI tools, right, but they don't quite get there in terms of rolling it out because of the high error rates. Well, so that's the thing.
Okay, Tim and I are like fighting who gets to ask the next question? Go ahead, Tim, because I'm gracious.
So are you out of Nvidia then? Because if this doesn't amount to.
Everybody seems to be getting Yeah, a lot of people.
I got it a long while ago. I wrote it up, then I got out, then I got back in, and each time it went up so much it got to be such a big percentage of my portfolio when I had to sell.
Well, the thing I want to ask you, Chris, is how does this end? Because I'm looking at Amazon did a big their first US dollar bond offering in three years, looking to raise twelve billion, but attracts about eighty billion of a fifteen.
Billion the size of the US dollar bond offering fifteen billion.
It's like, and Meta did it? So how does this end? I mean, I mean it when we turned to you so many times during the Great Financial Crisis, and this was something that there was so much fomo and people you know, didn't want to miss the games. But we know how it all ended. So how do you I don't want to be alarm, I want to be smart here. How does this potentially end the AI component? Who's impacted?
I think you're going to see a correction in some of these valuations simply because they've gone up so much in a relatively short period of time. Let me give you another interesting example company I actually like a lot. So Fi so far is the best performing bank stock in the United States. It has been for the last eighteen months. You know what the next one is? By the way, among big banks city the rest of the big guys have fallen behind. So why did so Fi
do so well? Well, slowly, they're growing into their overhead. Their overhead was massive. It's still too high relative to the size of the bank. It's about fifty billion dollars in assets now. But they had a tech component, a silicon valley component, a little bit of bitcoin, you know, all of these pieces that made equity managers love it, and they drove the thing up over one hundred percent over the last twelve months. I think stories like that
are going to cool off. I think Bigcoin, frankly is in big trouble because it was kind of co opted by Wall Street when you see ETFs with bitcoin, Yeah, it's not a good thing. This was supposed to be a means of exchange.
Remember, well, you know, I.
Think all of these markets are going to have to retrieve a little bit, Carol. Will they go down way much like two thousand and eight. No, because there's still too many dollars chasing these opportunities.
Yeah, there's a lot of liquidity out there. Chris so so glad already. Where my team is like, when can we get Chris back?
Thank you so much.
Really, I to rebook out. We have lots of follow up questions.
We have lots of follow up so far. By the way, it's up almost it's up about seventy four percent year to date. City groups up about forty percent comparison. JP Morgan also having a good year, but again of about twenty five percent year to date. Chris Whale and thank you, Thank you so appreciate it. Chris's chairman of Whale and Global Advisors.
This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on Apple car Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station. Just say Alexa played Bloomberg eleven thirty.
All right, So we continue to try to make sense of the US economy. As we've been discussing, growth is slowing, the job market is cooling, Inflation has eased from its peak but still above target. The Fed is still cautious again, and credit conditions show stress in places, even while banks
overall look resilient. And I got to say, we are spending so much time you and I and I feel like when we do our planning calls in the morning of just are there cracks when it comes to credit and any kind of financial stress.
Well, one person that we regularly go to for his view on the economy and rates and building is Frank Sorrentino. He's chairman and CEO of the publicly held New Jersey based community bank Connect One Bank Corp. It's a very company of Connect One Bank. It counts small businesses and construction companies among its customers. It's got locations in New or Is, New York and Florida. And what's unique about Frank is that he has a background as a builder.
He actually studied construction in college. So we always like to talk to him about supply and demand when it comes to those physical things buildings and homes.
We are at this moment where we're trying to figure out I feel like I can say this a million times this year, like where we are in the US economy, what's ahead? What kind of clarity do we have? Tell us about your business? And where you're seeing.
Left the nice calm part of the pool and now we're into the rapids and the more turbulent it was, and when you look back before Liberation Day. But okay, certainly, you know we're seeing a lot of people have a lot of apprehension about where we stand right now. Right so small businesses have a lot of concerns. There's so many things going on, there's so many different data points to look at or not look at, or not have information in front of them. But you know, I know,
I know, we've talked about this before. I keep and I believe we're on a robust footing here with our economy.
Because you see it in terms of what loan generation or what are our clients.
You know, they discuss the issues of you know, not being sure what to do next yet when you ask them how are sales. What's going on? You know? Are you are you are your revenues up? Are you thinking about expansion? Are there opportunities? Are you looking to hire people in our market? Anyway, in the New York metro market, which is the market we represent, we're finding that people, the businesses, business owners here are doing quite well and
they're continuing to do well. And there's so many inputs that are helping that AI is helping in a lot of cases, just the amount of capital coming into this region, the amount of construction going on, the amount of of heavy and highway work, just you name it. The manufacturing. I think today there was a fact that came out about New York manufacturings on the rise that was actually a little bit of surprise to the most, not to me.
Our our clients are telling us that business is continuing to improve, yet they have trepidation about you know, where they where they settle right now. However, interestingly, if you ask them where they think they'll be in six months from now, everyone says they think they'll be in a better place.
Oh so everyone is counting on.
The economy getting better, right and or at least their their conception of what better may be from where they are today.
What I say is.
They're in a good economy now and it's going to continue to do better now. There's also the tale of two different stories here. There are some parts of our economy that are not doing as well as others, and I think we saw some of the reaction to that relatively recently in some of the political events that have occurred. So I think we do need to take a look at this. This what's the distribution of where wealth is being created and not created.
As a New Yorker, it's nice to hear that things in the New York City area are are looking good, but it also makes me think of the changing politics of the city and Mayor elect zor On Mamdani. And you know, this is not a political question, It's simply a question about how people should plan for the future.
We reported that aids to President Trump have spent the days following Mam Donnie's victory in New York reviewing federal funds that benefit the city to potentially suspend or cancel, a White House official said, highlighting the threat of retribution over the Democratic Socialists. When if we were to see in New York City or New York state funding cut off for some of these projects. Would that have a big effect on the economy?
Look, I would believe the answer would be yes, it will have some effect on the economy.
Because you mentioned some infrastructure projects.
Sure, I don't know how big that would be, and I don't know what the you know, it seems to me in this economy, at least over the last twelve months or so, there seemed to be so many inputs that have been maybe going in one direction, maybe a negative way, and something else turns around and comes back to the other the other direction. So, look, New York has always been New York, and we've been through all different types of political environments, and there have been ups
and downs. But if you chart the growth of New York from sixteen oh nine or whenever when the first settlement started here through to today, it has been an uphill, NonStop, you know, economy, And so I have every confidence that New York is going to continue to be the place to be. Are there challenges here today about affordability and who can live here, and you know, some of the changes that need to be made, Absolutely, I think we'll get those things right. One thing I have learned from
this administration. There are a lot of threats that are made and a lot of you know, there's a lot of saber rattling. At the end of the day, though I think our president loves the city of New York. I can't see him doing anything that's generally going to.
Be harmful to the city.
Frank correct as if we're wrong. Though, we were talking with some of our folks who also cover like the banking area and are interesting is you do have some exposure to rent regulated We do properties or apartments I think via your cre lending. So with the mom Donnie win here in New York City, how do you feel about that exposure and what he has said about, you know, his pledge to freeze rents.
So look for those, you know, for those properties that we're trying to convert from rent regulated or rent stabilized rather to market rent. Those properties are going to have some challenges going forward because that's not going to happen. And part of that was the two thousand night let's not forget the twenty nineteen law made that change. And it was interesting, right the candidate everybody wanted to win, which was Andrew Cromwell, he's the one who signed that law.
So everybody's afraid of coming in. But yet you know, it was the it was the one who ran against him that brought that law to pass. For the for the balance of the rent stabilized properties that are out there that are already cash flowing and have been underwritten under those terms, I think they're going to be fine.
As a matter of.
Fact, the current mayor elect has spoken many times about programs possibly to lower property taxes for some of those property owners and come up with insurance programs to sort of help out to keep the rents at a lower rate. So if that's true, and you know, if there's going to be some level of negotiation around what to do or how to do it to keep the rent increases lower, I'm all for it. That's great. What we have found over the years is that there have been rent increases.
There was just one past recently for I think about three percent that went into effect in October. And let's not forget that the current mayor has six picks still on the Rent Guidelines Board and they're not you know, they are supposed to look at the economy on the ground today, where are expenses you know, the city does raise your taxes and your sewer fees and the cost of everything else goes up, so rents should go up appropriately as well, you know, based on inflation. So I
do think there'll be a give and take there. And you know, at the end of the day, look, I think having a for sable apartments is a very very great thing for our city. I'd like to see us be able to do more in that regard here in New York City.
Why don't we do more? And I guess I asked that we would.
Need a very long program to get into what. You know, there are cities and towns. New Rochelle is an example of that where they've taken the opposite approach, which is, let's build as many apartments as we can possibly build. Let's let the developers go build. And they did that, and you know, the laws of supply and demand, they're sort of like gravity, right they they you can't you can't undo them. And so they built a lot of supply.
Guess what happened to the rents? They came down, they didn't go up.
They we had the Mayor Yadira Ramos Herbert on a few months ago talking about this and the zoning changes. You a background as a builder, you actually went to college for this before you were a banker. And I think it's fair to say that all I'm not gonna say all economists. Most economists would agree the way to decrease housing prices is to build more housing. How do
you do that in New York City? And our developer is going to do that in New York's Like, what would developers need in the next administration order to do that apart from zoning changes? Like, what would they need to hear from city Hall that says you guys can go ahead and build and build more houses.
Well, we would need zoning changes, We would need the ability to build housing that is affordable to build. You can't add on all of these issues. Yeah, listen, you know, I come from a union family, so I love, you know, unionized workforces. But if you're going to force every small apartment builder to build using union labor, you're going to drive up the cost. If we're going to force buildings to not be able to use certain types of natural gas appliances, or they got to meet certain.
Environmentals that New York City has based and builders have faced here.
And so they keep adding all of these things on and it makes the projects unaffordable, and if they're unt affordable, they don't get built.
Just one last question, because I've got it we're Bloomberg. We do have a last FED meeting December. What are you expecting? What do you think we do need? Based on you said, pretty upbeat? Just got about forty seconds.
Okay, if the Fed's got a tough job ahead of them. On the one hand, you know, unemployment and the employment structure in the economy is giving some mixed signals. Yeah, you know, larger businesses maybe hiring, smaller businesses maybe laying off. That could be temporary in that camp. I do believe that the smaller businesses are going to catch up soon. I do think there is I don't think there's a lot of inflation built into the economy. I think the
terriffs are sort of skewing some of those numbers. I think they're going to have a tough call. My hope would be that they continue on the path and they cut rates another twenty five basis points in December.
Well, just another excuse for Frank to come and hang out with us again and get to the round. December tenth day when we get that decision from J. Powell and the Federal Reserve.
You're just up the street, so come back soon.
We'll do.
Frank Sorrentino, Chairman and chief executive Officer of Connect One Bank, joining us right here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio.
Listening to the Bloomberg Business Weekdaily Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Plenty ahead in our second hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, including how looking Good became a four hundred and fifty billion dollar industry, and how one retail behemoth is giving strip malls the major glow up. We're talking old to.
Beauty plus well. Hear from the behavioral psychologist with alternative thinking on what makes great leaders. It may just be time to throw out all those management books, at least according to John Levy. He's the author of Team Intelligence, How Brilliant Leaders Unlock collective genius, and he joins us a little later.
First up this hour, the Great Crypto Crash of twenty twenty five, entered a new phase on Wednesday, as bitcoin plunged to its lowest level in seven months, extending the more than one trillion dollar wipeout across the digital asset world. The day before that, on Tuesday, investors pulled more than half a billion dollars from Black Rocks I Shares b coin Trust, the largest single day outflow tim since the funds debut.
The total market cap of cryptocurrencies peaked at about four point three trillion dollars. Now that was a little over a month ago back on October six. At now hovers around three point two trillion dollars, and much of that change reflects paper losses, not real world cash. Leaving hands to talk all things crypto, we were joined by Zach Pandel, head of research at the crypto asset manager Grayscale Investments. Also Isabelle Lee Bloomberg News cross Asset Reporter.
And just one more thing. Grayscale recently filed for an IPO, so we know the company manages about thirty five billion in assets with more than forty products giving exposure to over forty five tokens.
Well, what I see is a repricing of technology related assets across the board, whether it's some of the AI names, satellite companies, quantum computing stocks, and crypto has been part of that story. So it really hasn't been a crypto specific sell off. It's been a frontier technology sell off, and so I see macro drivers behind that rather than crypto specific.
But if we look at them to sell off and then ASZAC worked out about the roughly six percent from all time highs, I mean we're down thirty percent.
Yeah, Bitcoin modest for the big indexes and some of the megacap names. You see much larger declines at Bitcoin and some of the again frontier technology type of names, and crypto is that sort of space. On the one hand, Bitcoin is a major asset, a two trillion dollar asset, much of the asset class though still early stage technologies. I think it's fair to characterize it, and it's definitely
been trading with that part of the market. I think that has to do with concerns about the US economy, questions about the FED policy, much more than what's happening in crypto specific.
Well, how do you see gray scale and or just crypto in general, Like is it a safe haven, is it a cryptocurrent? Is it a currency, Is it a commodity? Is it an asset? Like? How do you like? How do you really define it?
Crypto is a four trillion dollar alternative asset class today, so it's a mid size alternatives category, and investors think about putting in their portfolio in that way alongside hedge funds, private equity, infrastructure bets. Crypto fits in that way with the same.
Amount of risk or now not necessarily.
It's definitely a higher volatility alternative and it should be considered that way, but that fits very well for many investors with longer term portfolios. They're looking for many different ways to take risks in markets that don't have the same correlation with public market equity. Sometimes that means it outperform socks. Sometimes that means it underperformed. Sock has been a great diversifier overtime.
I know Issille wants to jump in here in a second, but I just want to get one more in And that's on this conversation. The idea of some of the other assets that you mentioned. Okay, if we're talking about alternatives, you know, maybe we're talking private credit, maybe we're talking real estate. Sometimes those are hard assets like real estate. Sometimes they are assets that produce cash, like private credit returns.
You know, your loan money to people, they give you money back at a higher interest rate.
You hope, you hope.
Yeah, we'll see if that happens in the future. With bitcoin. That doesn't exist. There are no cash flows with bitcoin.
That's right.
So we call it the crypto asset class. We could call it the blockchain asset class, because that's what it's all about. Blockchain technology. That's what stitches together everything in the crypto asset class, and it has a diverse range of use cases digital money like bitcoin, digital finance applications like decentralized finance, stable coins, tokenization, all the things we've been talking about this year. It is all of those different things, and it will compete in some ways with
commodity markets. In some ways it'll compete with equity markets. And so it is hard to give a tight answer because it is its own unique thing. A four trillion dollar blockchain based digital finance and money asset class is how we think about it.
So Grayscale is an early mover actually when it comes to offering crypto funds, namely bitcoin and Ether. They scored a legal victory. That's why we have this very successful dozen or so bitcoin ETFs that we have seen ether ETFs, dogecoin, Carol tim everything. Really, how has the proliferation of ETFs shape the market? And do you think it's for better or for worse?
Well?
Absolutely for better. I mean it's broadening access to this asset class to a much wider range of investors and allowing them to access it in ways that's convenient for them the same reason that they use ets for other purposes. You can include it in tax advantage accounts, it makes taxes easier, it makes estate planning easier. All of these reasons are why the ETFs have been so popular.
But what do you what is your response when people say the whole premise of bitcoin is to be decentralized, and now the biggest holders of ibit is Blackrock as Harvard, although we know that's not really a conviction bit It could just be because of basis trade and all of that, but Blackrock all those big issues grey scale.
Yeah, that's right. The premise is that bitcoin mining, which provides the security for this network, is decentralized, and if for some reason that were to be questioned in the longer one, investors should question a bitcoin, because that's the thing that really matters, not who is holding the asset, and the same ways for gold. Nation States hold gold as a decentralized asset for store of value, and they keep it in the basement of the New York fed
here in downtown Manhattan. So it's just convenient to hold it in this same place. The ETFs or gold, it doesn't. That's not what gives it its values. Really, bitcoin mining that's core.
To the value.
I've actually seen some of that gold, by the way, I visited FED yeah years ago, and I got to go underground and see the gold. They weren't They wouldn't allow us to take pictures.
I bet it's there.
It's there, but it didn't count it.
Why not just buy cryptodirectly? Like if the whole idea is this to be this kind of pure straight to it, very different from what the financial system has been, Zach, Why do I need you guys or anybody else who's kind of a middle man or middle individual.
The premise of this technology is taking intermediaries out of the financial system, and we're going to drive huge efficiencies in the financial system over time through tokenization, stable coins, all these different use cases. However, there will be a lasting role for certain types of intermedia as we think, including fund managers and others, and we are just providing a convenient way to access these access for many types of investors. Again for taxes more as state planning for
tax advantage accounts, it makes it much more effective. But self custody, holding your crypto yourself is a core part of what the asset class is all about, and we certainly would encourage more sophisticated investors that have an understanding that to please go for it.
But don't crypto. For cryptocurrencies to have value, don't we have to really be using them to do things. And we're still no fans. But I'm still I don't know, still using dollars. So like I'm just trying to understand, Like I understand blockchain, like if you buy a house and you have you know rather than you know, the ownership and so on and so forth is all there the papers, I understand the blockchain that value, but.
That hasn't happened yet, by the way, But we're still doing old school titles.
That's right, thank you, titles, But I don't quite still yet the transacting that I will be doing. I think there's been research that it's still a lot of folks who want to keep things, you know, under the radar illegal activity. I'm trying to understand.
So I think you're going to be using stable coins, and we had, you know, a lot of people hearing more about this this year because we had a key piece of legislation in July, the Genius Act, which provided a comprehensive regulatory framework for it stable coins here in the US, and over time, you will see many more payments use cases for this technology. You will also see
stable coins on corporate balance sheets. You will see stable coins as collateral on the major US derivatives exchanges, so you will see this dollar based blockchain based dollars ubiquitous in our system relatively soon.
But if people are.
Using our companies are using stable coin or stable coins as collateral, aren't they just saying they're using treasuries as collateral.
Blockchain technology, again is to take intermediaries out of the financial system.
So those stable coins are backed up by treasuries depending on where you buy it. But for the most part, if we're talking about the most well known stable coins like USDC backed up by treasuries.
Yeah, absolutely, then for one backed one for one and that is written in the regulation, and that's a very important piece of the whole story. If these technologies are going to be ubiquitous in the financial system, they need to be safe for consumers, safe for the financial system as a whole. That's why this regulation in July was so important.
So as aechair, Paul Atkins conceded that he promised a token taxonomy. For the longest time, people have been confused whether crippoint is a security or commodity, and so this moves away from the fact that almost every digital token acts like a stock or something like that. How do you view that Because the lawyers have talked to some viewed it as a win, but some didn't really.
So the Senate is working on legislation exactly on this topic and I think will clarify a lot of these issues for investors over time. Look, bitcoin is a commodity. It's a digital commodity, and that can maybe be hard to understand, but that's what it is. It's a digital commodity like gold or copper or silver, it just in
digital form. But there are other crypto assets that look more like a claim of some kind, and I believe we will see more of that, that it will be common for large corporations to issue tokens as part of their capital structure. Alongside equity debt, preferreds and other hybrid instruments. You will see tokens and so there's a lot of different uses. It's all based again on that same technology, but it's hard to put one label on all these assets.
I just feel like there's a bunch of smart people here and a lot of smart people at Bloomberg, and we constantly are having conversations like kind of I feel like a toddler. Why why like why is this needed?
Well, that's why Zach is here to explain to us all the questions that we have that toddlers would ask. Hey, you know, I mentioned political tailwinds, and one thing that I wanted to get your view on is obviously, the regulatory environment is much better for cryptocurrency companies right now than it was during the previous administration. I mean, look
at prices as you know a result of that. But the Trump family and the Trump family's connections to the actual crypto industry, how do you view that.
Look, it's not a crypto friendly administration. It's a crypto friendly nation or crypto friendly voter.
I don't know if I don't necessarily agree with that, because here's why I don't agree with it and pushback on this feel free. But yes, a lot of the pro crypto candidates won in twenty twenty four, but the messaging that the crypto community pushed in their districts wasn't crypto messaging. Like if you look at the ads for Bernie Moreno, who won in Ohio, it wasn't about crypto. It was about other issues that resonated with those voters. So I don't necessarily see it as a crypto friendly nation.
Is that what you meant by crypto friendly nation? Like these people were voted in.
What I mean is that holders of the technology, users the technology are bipartisan. That is a global asset class and we see comparable things happening all over the world. That Democrats voted for the Genius Act and the Clarity Act that passed the House, and I think will again vote for market structured legislation in the Senate. And this is really a key issue for US as an industry that it continues to be partisan so that any changes are and they last well beyond anyone individual.
So the essentially you're saying is it doesn't really matter at this point. The administration doesn't really matter because these laws have been put into effect. It doesn't matter who SEC chair is.
In the long run, doesn't matter because this is innovative technology that's going to transform the financial system. And how the politics shake out over time is hard to predict, but I have no doubt that in ten and twenty years time that the technology and the assets will be everywhere in our financial system and will have to clean right everywhere everywhere.
And now you see Democrats as on board as Republicans were.
Last year, increasingly on board, and I think that that's because their voters care about these issues. In our own survey data, slightly more Democrats hold crypto assets than Republicans, so we see it clearly as a bipartisan issue. I think again, you see that in the House and Senate also, Zach.
I do wonder. I know, Isabel, you wrote about the coming IPO, and you know, I know you're probably limited in what you can say, but I do wonder about the market volatility that we're seeing, and this is a big week. We're going to get Nvidia earnings, which will certainly play into the AI trade and enthusiasm or lack or pull back that we've seen in that. But we'll market volatility, possibly change your timing on all of this and maybe delay it.
Yeah, as you know, I'm in a quiet period, so we're limited to what we can say, but as soon as we have more to say, we will offer that. Look, what I would say is, in the longer run, I'm incredibly enthusiastic about where this technology and where this asset class to do. I wouldn't spend all my time on it if I wasn't, And it's hard to predict the short term in any asset class. I think it's a very great long term bet for many investors too. Allocate the crypto.
Will you have more information on the ipo TBD? All right, just check in. Thank you so much.
We really enjoyed this.
Zach Pandele He's head of research over at grays Scale Investments in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio, along with the amazing Isabel Lee Crosshouset reporter here at Bloomberg used as well. Thanks for coming me.
This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Listen live each weekday starting to Eastern on applecar Play and the Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station Just Say Alexa played Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Elon has it, so too does President Trump and Steve Jobs also as well.
We're talking about leadership. I mean, these are all leaders. John Levy thinks about leadership a lot. He argues, though, that one thing all leaders have in common is not the thing that we're told when it comes to these executive coaches or these business school courses, like you know, empathy or humility, those sorts of things. He says, it's something else. John Levy is a behavioral scientist and New
York Times bestselling author. He's got a new book out, Team Intelligence, How brilliant leaders unlock collective genius.
Let's think about it like this, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, right, they weren't great at creating psychological safety or even getting consensus among their leadership. People still hold them up as
these examples of amazing leaders. The problem is that what we've been sold is that, and mostly through universities like Harvard Yale, and so on, is that we have to have these essential skills if you want to be a leader, and if you pay them a whole lot of money, they'll teach you those skills and then you'll be a certified leader. Congratulations. The problem is it just doesn't track. When we really started looking at this, there was only one trait that was common across all leaders.
What is it?
It's that they have followers. It's so self referential and it's kind of ridiculous, and so we really wanted to ask the question, then, Okay, what causes us to follow someone? Generally people say, okay, it's vision and charisma, but that doesn't make sense. There are plenty of people who have no vision and no charisma, still people follow them.
Yeah.
So the answer, it turns out, comes down to this. Do you remember how you felt when you were in high school on Sunday at six pm? The Sunday scaries. Now, why do you think about this? You were free, you were at home, but you felt anxious. Friday at one o'clock you were in class. But how did you feel?
Great?
Yeah, so exciting, ecstatic, And that's because human beings don't relate to the present. They relate to the future that they believe they have. If you can make me feel don't live in the moment, definitely not. We believe we tend to have this association right now to what we think is about to happen. And so in high school on Sunday, what was going to happen was school the next day, Or if you're about to leave for vacation, you might be sitting at work, but you're wildly excited.
The reason we follow somebody is because when we interact with them or their media, they cause us to feel that there'll be a new and better future.
That's it.
So that's fascinating. So let's take it to somebody.
President Trump is that kind of his success or is today? It's because of that.
I would argue that people in general vote for whoever they feel will cause them to have a new in better future, whether it's President Trump or it's investing into Elon Musk's companies. Listen, when you read the reports of what he's like as a boss at Elon, right, it's not the type of boss that we exemplify.
I mean, you know it might not even have to read reports of what he's like as a boss. You could just follow him on social media and you had a good understanding of his personality.
And when you do, you have to ask yourself like, is this really the person I'd want to be reporting to? And the answer is maybe not. But what he's amazing at is he has a handful of super skills that nobody else has.
Right.
He thinks at scale and moves faster than anyone in our society. And those super skills are so profound that when we interact with him, people will either say, hey, we'll give him a trillion dollar bonus, right, or we will come and work for you, or we want to launch things into space. But it's not because he's charismatic.
Right, I mean, look at the example of when he pieced together the Doge team. What was the what were the qualifications that he put out there? Right, you have to work eighty hours a week, You're not going to get paid, Yeah, and you know you sign me up. He had people from all over the country who not just wanted to work with him, but believed in his mission.
Yeah. It's really kind of fascinating. So the things that we get so being nice and generous is not necessarily things that are going to make a good leader.
It's I want to separate two things. Okay, let's separate being an effective leader from having followers. Having followers just means that people feel that you'll have a new and better or they'll feel doesn't mean you will correct, because you could have somebody who's incompetent leading a bunch of morons. Frankly,
and get nowhere. When we actually started looking at the research of what causes teams to be really effective, it came from a woman named Anita Williams Willie, and what she found in running a whole series of experiments is that none of the things that we actually thought actually make a team more effective. Right, So IQ of the smartest person no effect, average IQ, no effect. How much people liked each other not a great predictor.
Right.
Do you need to trust each other sure, or think that somebody is competent? Yeah, but you don't necessarily need to want to invite everybody you work with your wedding or something like that. The single greatest predictor the number of women on the team. Yeah, And I want to be clear, it's not because they're women. It's not a chromosomal thing. We're not out of a job. Don't worry
he was looking at me. Yeah, it's because women index higher on emotional intelligence, and so there are plenty of men with high emotional intelligence, plenty of women who don't have any.
But this makes a better Wait. So more women on a team means.
What that on average, you have more emotional intelligence on the team, and then the team can function better because they can coordinate better, and then they outperform because when you have a single person sport, it's all about pure talent, right or activity. But when you have a group, you've gone from taking your shots to passing either information or the ball. Now, if I can't communicate with you, we are not going to be able to work well together.
Having that high emotional intelligence on the team means that we know when to push on a topic and when not to, who to call on even if they're being quiet, and get the information out.
Your behavioral well, what is your credential in this? Because you've studied behavioral science, but you know there are entire curricula that are dedicated to teaching leadership that ostensibly have evidence backed you know, elements that are backed by studies that say this is the right way to do things. And you're essentially saying that's not really the right predictor here.
We have been looking at the right thing. What's the evidence that you have when it comes to number of followers or people who are actually following this charismatic personality that says this is the right outcome.
So let's separate a few things. On the team stuff. There's a bunch of research I mentioned Anita Williams Willie, and there's several studies that back the same thing that teams with more emotional intelligence outperform on the leadership side. When you actually look at all of the studies on people who've gotten MBAs versus those who didn't, they find that there's absolutely no improvement in performance whatsoever having an
NBA versus not compared. And there's like several of these studies on the three year mark, five year mark, seven year mark. There's no evidence in better management skills or anything like that. And so the skills that we're told are essential, we might not really be able to train them in the way that these programs are running.
The reason I ask about your reason, I know you want to jump in, but the reason I ask about the credentialing here is because you have this background and having these dinners hosting thousands of people over the last ten years, fifteen people years, four thousand people. These are private influencer dinners where you have had Nobel laureates, Olympians, Grammy winning musicians all at different times show up and
be together. What are the takeaways that you've been able to gather from getting this disparate group of people together and having them interact with one another.
So there's kind of two main things that I've really noticed. The first is that all of them are at the top of their industry, whether they're commanding the International Space Station or they're running a major company, and none of them have the same characteristics at all. Malala does not produce results in the same way as a military commander, but people follow and will go very far in both
cases right to support that cause. The second is, and this is kind of a wilder thing that people don't really notice, is that no matter how successful people are, they tend not to feel like they fit in or belong because the CEO knows that they've had three great quarters, but if the next two are off there, they might be out of a job, and the olympian knows that maybe they won at the last Olympics, but who knows if even qualify at the next one, and then no
one will care. And so no matter what, there's this absolute factor that people feel a great desire to want to fit in and belong, which brings me to my real desire to understand is clearly those leadership traits didn't matter, and if there's such a great desire to belong, it's because human beings tend to be best with each other. So let's try and understand at our core what will
allow us to be best with each other. And that's what the book explores, which is what are the characteristics that makes teams smarter than the sum of their parts?
Okay, so why if that is our driving force? When I look at Congress, and I know you layer politics on things, and things change. But if we are better.
They cannot be studied.
If we are better as a group and a community, and yes, indeed right they have to vote on things, and so when they work together, things can actually move forward, or at least move Why does that not work its way out?
So that's I think a great question, And I want to be very clear, I don't study politics.
I'm not actually and full disclosure, like you lay politics on everything and.
So a little bit different.
I'm under the impression that things changed, and this is what I've been told after Newt Gingridge was in Congress, because he really pushed for less cooperation and also for people to spend more time in their home districts. Now, when that occurs, then we have something called the mirror exposure effect. The mere exposure effect is simply here's the funny thing. Have you ever what would you consider the greatest painting of all time?
What people will say Mona Lisa exactly?
Do you know?
Why?
Isn't it the perfectly symmetrical.
That's what they'll tell you, But that's frankly not true. In nineteen eleven, a man walked into the Louver on a Monday while it was closed. The Louver was protected by eleven mostly drunk legionnaires, and walked into the Renaissance section, ripped the smallest painting he could off the wall, took it out of its frame, and then wrapped in an workman's bock and walked out.
That was a Mona Lisa, wasn't it.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Newspapers around the world spread images of it, and that's the first time almost anybody had ever heard of it. It was not considered a great painting. Three years later it was returned once again. Newspapers around the world rejoiced. And it was a way too. It was the build up to World War One, so it was a way to make fun of the French government and it's incompetence at the time. Now, human beings tend to like and
trust the things that they're familiar with. And when you see you're the person who might be across the aisle picking up kids at school and your kids are in the same class, and you're at the same birthday parties, and you've developed familiarity and trust and all these other factors outside of that voting room, then suddenly you tend to treat people with more humanity and have a greater ability to work with them. And so much like the
Mona Lisa is not really a great painting. If you actually speak to historians, the lack of that mere exposure and the trust that develops from interacting outside of these traditional negotiations, Yeah, we've lost a lot.
Of that well.
And we always bring up Alan Greenspan saying years ago about how when he was in Washington people. Actually Democrats Republicans went to cocktail parties together, and so you know, you have a glass of wine with somebody and yeah, you know you kind of relate. You're much more relatable, if you will, John, this was really really fun. Hopefully we can catch up again in the future.
I'd be honored.
Thank you for having Yeah, John Levy. He's a behavioral scientist New York Times bestselling author. His new book is Team Intelligence, How Brilliant Leaders Unlock collective genius. Joining us right here in studio.
Were you invited to one of the secret dinners?
Ever, it's secrets, so I can't tap.
Oh okay, yeah, same same.
You are listening to the Bloomberg Business Weekdaily podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to day five pm Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Let's talk about Alta Beauty because by some measures, it's the largest beauty retailer in the country. Yes, larger than Sephora. Even though you see those stores everywhere, especially in like high density areas. So true, but sometimes Alta hides in plain sight. Its stores primarily populating suburban and ex urban shopping centers instead of thriving high end malls in pricey urban shopping districts.
All Right, it is a story about Alta, how big it is, what it's up to. It is the cover story of the December issue of Bloomberg business Week. It's written by Amanda Mull. She's Bloomberg BusinessWeek senior reporter and she joins us in New York City. We've been dying to talk to you about this, but it is true. When I think cosmetics and stuff, you know, I think about the explosion of Sephora, But Alta beauty, I feel like it's been a quiet sleeper.
It's massive, yeah, I think, especially for people who live in dense urban areas, and especially perhaps New York City also sort of hides in plain sight. It opened its fifteen hundredth US location just a couple of weeks ago. That's more than twice the locations that Sephora has in the US. The typical Alta is ten thousand square feet, which is twice the size of the typical Sephora. And
it's been around since nineteen ninety. It has sort of like quietly grown over the years and in the last five or six years, it's had like a real growth spike. In twenty nineteen, right before the pandemic, it's annual revenue with six billion dollars, and in twenty twenty four it had increased all the way to eleven billions. So it's a booming business even though you might not notice it every day.
What does it say about how Americans shop for beauty products? Because Sephora, for example, this is actually a case, like a Harvard case study in business school, like the experiential part, the way that they built these stores out, how do American shop when it comes to ALTA.
Well, the beauty business is sort of fascinating, especially at this point in the retail lands Skate because most other sectors of the consumer economy don't really have like a thriving multi brand retail scene. You know, department stores things like that have really have really declined in a lot of places, as well as like specialty retailers like electronics stores.
But beauty is a really in person business. You know, it is a tactile, fun thing to go shop for, and you want to be able to smell perfume, you want to be able to try a lipstick on or see if the certain foundation actually matches your skin tone, which makes it a really unique opportunity for companies that want to operate brick and mortar stores, and that has been a real, a real upside for Alta. And Alta and Sephora sort of take a separate, separate approaches to
beauty really, and they are like both quite successful. Alta, you know, carries everything from drug store products to Chanel perfume and pa and Door Look gloss and things like that. Sephora really concentrates at the upper end of the spectrum. But the Alta theory is that you know, women and beauty consumers in general shop across price points. There's very few who only shop at the drug store or who
only shop from high end brands. So their theory is, if you can put that all under one roof and make it really easy for people to go to, you know, when they're out, you know, buying dog food or out shopping for a coat or something like that at a you know, at a discount store, Alta is right there and you can just drive right up, park outside, hop in, get whatever you need.
Tell us about the Alta Beauty CEO who's actually been with the company for a while in some different positions.
Yeah.
So in January, the longtime CEO, Dave Kimball, stepped down and retired and Keisha Steelman, the current CEO, took his spot. She has been with Alta since twenty fourteen in a series of operations roles. Her background is in operations and
she was most recently Chief Operator Officer. And to me, her background is sort of fascinating because, you know, you, Alta is a Fortune five hundred company, and at the tops of these companies you usually find people with very similar types of backgrounds, people with elite educations, people who went through certain types of jobs, certain types of you know, consulting firm work, lawyer work, things like that. Keisha came
up through retail from working in stores. Her first job in her career was, you know, in a Target store, and she has worked in stores and then in the corporate governance of stores her entire career. She's from a very small town in Iowa, and she's really, I think, sort of like the Alta customer. She has a particular
insight into how Alta's customers want to shop Alta. Something interesting about them, I think is that they open a lot of rural locations where you don't get Sephoras and you may not have like a target even so Alta opens in a lot of places where you know, they try to meet people where they.
Are such cool stuff. Thirty seconds here, if you say Sephora, do they give you the evil eye?
You know?
A source that I talked to for this story described Sephora Alta as phrenemies. And you know, they carry a lot of the same products. There's at the high end, especially, and I think that there's this sort of silent rivalry between them. But because Sephora concentrates so much on like high end urban real estate and high end malls with like affluent customer bases, and Alta just takes an opposite look at the at the market, so they don't overlap that much.
I went to an Alta recently for the first time, and I was kind of blown away, although I still it's just, yeah, the whole beauty industry just kind of blows my mind.
Our thanks to Amanda Mole, Bloomberg Business Week Senior Reporter. Reminder. This is the cover story of the December issue of Bloomberg Business Week. You can read it on the Bloomberg Terminal and at Bloomberg dot com Slash BusinessWeek.
The beauty industry, though overall, has several players. We talk about the growth, we talk about the profitability. We just talk about you know, consumers, they're out there spending.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about one of those companies, Sally Beauty Holding. Following the company's most recent earnings report, fourth quarter comp sales up one point three percent that beat Wall Street estimates. The company also beat estimates when it came to fourth quarter adjusted EPs and Q four net sales. Dealise Polonis is a president and CEO of the one point four billion dollar market cap Sally Beauty Holding. She joins US from Texas. Shares up more than thirty
eight percent so far this year. Denise, we want to talk about the company, but I want to start with just your view on the consumer right now. How is the consumer?
First?
Thanks for having me, great to be on.
You know.
Overall, the consumer that we're seeing is resilient, but is choiceful, So resilient in total dollars spending, but very picky about what they're going to put their money into right now, just knowing that they might have a limited, limited budget to.
Spend what are they spending it on? Then, if they have a been a budget, is it smaller things that cost less? I'm curious.
I think what we see is we see people both splurging and then being frugal. So they'll splurge on experiences, They'll splurge on special products that are important to them. I expect that they'll splurge a bit on things like Thanksgiving dinner, but they'll pull back and say, you know, if I have enough of something in my pantry, maybe I won't buy three more bottles of shampoo or three more lipsticks.
I'm going to lean in for what really matters to me.
Well, that's what I mean, though, So then I don't mean you. No. I get it that they might not spend you know, they look at their whole wallet and what they could spend on. But so what are they really spending money on? At Sally Beauty, I will.
Tell you it's Sally Beauty. The big thing is hair color. So our hair color business was up high single digits at Sally this quarter. What we're really seeing is customers who have always done DIY for their hair continuing to do so. But more and more we're seeing customers who are splitting their time that they might regularly get done in a salon, but they'll come in and do a fill in or an update, you know, to kind of stretch their wallet a little bit between those salon visits
by coloring their hair, touching up their roots. And we've also see a reinvigoration of vivid colors as people I think want some fun in their lives and want that experience of pink.
Or purple hair.
Just remind us that where you play and where you meet the consumer. You call yourself the world's largest distributor and retailer of professional beauty products. Brands that might be and probably known to most of the audience include Clairel con Air, Hotshot Tools, Wella, and more. Where do you meet the consumer because it happens at retail stories, but it also happens via salons.
Does we meet them in two spots?
So overall, we're about a four.
Billion dollar sales player that split half and half between serving a traditional consumer with Sally, which is a public consumer retail stores that are out there, and then we serve us all of the beauty salon professionals, so you know, all those folks who work as independent contractors are working
as taking care of folks. We're actually that largest distributor to that salon professional and primarily what we do on both sides of our business is everything hair, hair color, hair care, accessories, tools, you name it, that's what we do.
Hey, I am curious with tariffs and so on and so forth. The global supply team when it comes to beauty products, I think it's around the world, France, South Korea, the US, China, Italy, Japan. How has that impacted the cost of things or your business?
Yeah, I think we're quite fortunate that eighty percent of our product comes from North America and the twenty percent that doesn't is kind of split equally between China.
And Western Europe.
So we're a little bit more insulated than some other beauty players out there, which is great news for us. When we think about what's most affected for us, it's things like blow dryers or flat irons that might be coming in from China and have a little bit more of that tariff on it. But we've got some great
relationships and we're navigating it quite nicely. I don't expect the consumer we'll see any notable increase to them as we're going through the holiday selling season on those products, with the cooperation we have with our vendors and how we're trying to navigate.
Sourcing, the disconnect between Wall Street's expectations and what you delivered. I know, a big part of any executive's job is managing expectations. It was a beat pretty much across the board. Where did that come from?
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, the team just did a fantastic job executing. We've got a few key initiatives that are working really well for us today, you know, namely starting with innovation, particularly on the pro side of our business. Thirty five percent of our sales in hair care this last year came from a product that's new to us in the last eighteen months or so, and that's three times higher than it was a couple of years ago,
where that was only ten percent from newness. So that newness is resonating with our salon customers quite a bit. On the on the retail side, marketplaces we now participate with Uber eats, door Dash, and instacart in terms of kind of the non t additional marketplaces you delivered to your door in two hours. It's been a great business
growth opportunity for us. We laugh internally that the fact is there's a lot of people who have an eyelash emergency at six o'clock on a Saturday night before you know, a big party.
That was Denise Paulonis, President and CEO over at Sally Beauty Holdings.
And that wraps up the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Thank you so much for joining us.
I'm Tim Stunebeck and I'm Carol Masser.
Have a good and safe weekend everyone.
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