Techlash Takes a Turn on Apple

You can also listen to our radio show at two pm Eastern Time on Bloomberg Radio, or watch us on YouTube search Bloomberg glovel News. Hey, one thing we want to bring to your attention. Uh it went public video spack and it's back back by venture capitalist investor Jamaal Polyopatia. It started trading today on the NASDAC. We're talking about the fintech social finance are so far raising roughly two point four billion dollars to fuel growth at the company.

Let's get into it with so FI CEO Anthony Nod, a former ce and CFO over at Twitter from a Goldman Sax partner overseeing tech and media. He joins us on the phone in San Francisco, Anthony, great to have you here on Bloomberg Business Week on Bloomberg Radio. Congratulation. Why do this through a spat and spack and not a traditional I p O. UM? You know, I think each company has to evaluate the different ways to go public based on their facts and circumstances, and for us

this was a great option. We had a few things to consider. First, UM, we we wanted to convert our capital structure, where that was largely preferred shares to common shares. That wasn't necessity for two reasons. One, order to file with the Battle Reserve for a bank charter, we needed of comment act that could become a public company. We also needed to make that conversion. We also had two

capital needs. First, um, we had bought Galileo in March of two thousand and twenty UM and with that came a seller note and that note was going to be doing March at two thousand twenty one, So that was one capital need. A second capital need was to finance the bank if and when we were able to achieve a charter. UM and so we were raising private money at the time, and we got approached number investors that wanted to put even more capital into the company and

also considered UM supporting us in and going public. And so what we ended up doing was choosing a private round with t ro Price who invested three in seventy five million dollars. Then we closed that on or about December. We launched the PIPE confidential pipe process on UH and we're able to complete that by the thirty one and then announced the combination of those two and the third leg of the soul, which was a SPAC merger with Social Capital Head of Sophia five UM on January four.

And the combination of those three pieces made it a unique approach for us to raise capital and go public at the same time, and it was the right outcome for us versus a regular way I p O or directs. Well, no shortage of spacts out there, so why Social Capital Head of Sophia founded by Chamatia Patia. We're approached by a number of different um UM SPACs and UM we were confident that we're ready to become a public company.

We knew we would have to go through a pretty detailed, more detailed process from a diligence standpoint than going public because it's a merger UM, and we thought that Tamas team brought one, first and foremost a strategic UM perspective to the table for us and that we could partner

on different strategic opportunities over time. Number two, UM they had great experience in conducting the type of diligence of a company like US, as they've done with other companies, to make sure they brought the credibility to the PIPE investors when they made when they made the announcement and brought us to Pipe investors. UH. Three they had great experience and executing spects and so the combination of strategic value, UM the diligence process that we knew would bring incremental

credibility to the PIPE investors. And then three UM expertise and having done this before were the three factors. And while we was social it was a tough decision. We brought three options to the board that came down to the wire and the board chose Social Capital. So you guys are all in their student loans, a personal loans, there's home loans or insurance, small baz financing, UM investing. There's a lot on your platform. Will crypto be part

of it at some point? UM Today we do offer within invest the ability to buy single stocks without commissions, fractional shares which we pioneered, robe advisory accounts which we've created ourselves. UM. We also have UM five so far e T s UM, and we do offer cryptocurrency. We

offer eighteen different coins. UM. We do it in a very appropriate way and that we disclose to the volatility of that asset class and the risk that you could lose all your money every time you put in a bye word that is disclosed before you hit the hit the bye button. UM. It is an asset class that our members one and you want to provide cercified selection for them. Hey, Anthony, and we've got about a minute

and then we'll come back and talk some more. But because you have an array of services that you can offer folks on the platform, what do you think is going to be the best growth opportunity provide the best more jins for you. Where is going to be the big business in your view? You know, we design each one of the businesses to be best in class from a consumer value proposition, but also best in class unit economics, and so we designed them all to be attractive on

their own. UM. We do get incremental benefits when people take the second, third or fourth product with us, but they have to stand on their own both from a value probably to the consumer and the unit economic standpoint for us financially uh and and the reason why we do that is we want to meet the member where they are with what they want what we make money out. Anthony, I want to talk a little bit about profitability and so far's path to profitability. You currently lose money more

than two million dollars in nineteen twenty each year. What is the path to profitability and when do you get there? Well, we achieved positive ebada UM in the fourth quarter of two thousand twenty is our first quarter of positive ebada since we embarked on such an ambitious strategy to become a one stop shop and opperenceive suite financial services products

on on one app UM. So we made a smiff amount of investment in two thousand, eighteen and nineteen and started to bear fruit of that investment two thousand twenty, hitting positive ibadat in the fourth quarter of twenty UM and again in the first quarter of two thousand and twenty one UM then on a trailing told month basis UM we as you'll see in our financial disclosures. We've we've also achieved positive BADA so from a profitability standpoint as it relates to non gap metric of IBADAD, which

we think is the best measure for cash flow. We've gotten to that point now each one of our businesses is not profitable or our lending business is very profitable. It's a it's a you know, very very well growing business UM. You can see the growth rates for the business in our filings, but it's a it's a high grower but also very profitable. Our technology platform is a high even higher grower business UM with great profitability as

well with about thirty percent margins. And then our financial serve this business which consists of SOFI invest so far money and so by credit card UM. That's an acquisition business where we recoup the customer opposition costs we make in year one over the you know year and a

half the two years after we acquire them. So on a per account basis, we may be hitting profitability, but because we're acquiring more customers than we currently have that are profitable, it shows a loss in that in that business, which has also seen in our financials. But we focus on unit economics reach one over our business and ProLAN economics to make sure that overall these businesses can be

great unit economic businesses individually and in total. And so we're balancing both growth at a high rate with profitability in the overall mix. One thing I'm wondering, Anthony, is whether you guys UM, who are your users who are on the app, if they're buying so fi shares and kind of showing support for the platform that they're trading on, are you seeing that activity. We've definitely seen robust demand

for so far. Invest you can buy individual stocks without commissions, fractional shares which we pioneered, cryptocurrency, and robo accounts, and it's the only place you can buy all four asset classes. If you want to buy UM, robo account, cryptocurrency and stocks on any other platform, you'd have to use at least two different apps to do so. And so we're

one stop shop even within invest. And we've seen robust demands since we launched, and that's only increased as interest rates have basically gone to zero and fed funds rate UM and the stay at home economy has also increased the amount awareness of the importance of investing in he so investors on the app are buying so Fi shares, that's what you're seeing. Sorry, I apologize, I thought you meant, uh, Sofi invest and it's increased popularity because really it's just

so Far as it rates to so Fi shares. I haven't had a chance to look at the trading volume today of our investmentbers that are buying it. We'll get that data at the end of the close today. My my comments just to be clear, we're about the interests and so Far invest as a as a product as

opposed to so Far the stock. I appreciate that. Hey, what do you what do you make of the meme stock frenzy that we're seeing and and to what extent can you talk about what you're seeing on the platform right now in terms of the way that that that that people are trading shares at AMC and and other meme stocks. Yeah. First, in our platform, we're pretty unique in that we're really targeting beginning and novice investors and

they're quickly coming up the curve um. But less than one percent of our so Far invest accounts trade more than three stocks in a day, which is a great sign that people are focused on their long term as opposed to day trading, and we try to educate them and not only that, but also dollar cost averaging. We've enabled Functionality to do recurring investments UM so that they're they're buying through the volatility over time as opposed to trying to time the market. That we're proven to be

successful um as released the meme stocks. It's just another phenomenon of the increased interest in and retail investing because it's just become more accessible with being able to buy fractional shares and no no commissions. But people need to be educated on how to invest in a long term and make the individual choices for themselves. We actually don't offer options in margin jet. It's something that's in our longer term roadmap. We're not really critical to our investors today.

There's some demand for it, but we will add it over time, but it's not the highest priority. So that's also pretty unique. Alright, great stuff, UM, Thank you so much, Anthony, and hopefully we can catch up with you a little bit later this year for an update on the business. Anthony Nodo, he's chief executive officer, It's so FI and former CEO at Twitter, joining us on the phone from San Francisco, of course, going public trading on the nasdack Vias.

Back today, you're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Hey, listen, we want to talk about a story online at Business Week that we do want to bring your attention to. It's about the shine coming off the golden child of tech. That golden child, of course is Apple. So let's get

into the story. Bloomberg News reporter Joe Light with us on the phone from our Washington, d C. Bureau along with Bloomberg Business We get our Joe Webber right next to in our interactive broker studio. Apple. Yeah, it does feel like over the last couple of years they have escaped the scorn of the White House and regulators. Yeah, you know, that tech clash thing has been for real and everybody has felt it and Apple hasn't. And then all of a sudden they got dragged into sort of

a mud fight. And that mud fight is you know, just basically wrapped with the the epic lawsuit where Tim Cook actually took a stand, but it also just has made it feel like, oh wait, maybe maybe the luster has come off this this golden child of sorts. So so, Joe, what it's that epic fight is not the only thing that Apple has been been fitting with. What where does Apple find itself? Yeah? No, no, Apple is kind of getting hit on four fronts. You know. The first, as

you mentioned, is this epic lawsuit. Um. The second, they were hauled in front of Congress in April to answer questions from lawmakers around it's up store and kind of accusations that it's you know, anti competitive, that they're not allowing enough competition to put programs on the iPhones. Then they've in May they faced you know, kind of two issues they face. Um uh, as he said, Tim Cook, he actually took the stand in the epic trial and

facing those antitrust accusations. And then the New York Times came out with an investigation about some of Apple's activities in China, which just brought a new way of scorn from lawmakers who you know, say that Apple was kind of sacrificing some of the privacy of its users in China in order to gain access to that to that market. So, as he said, it was kind of nothing at all for a few years. You know, during the Trump administration, Tim Cook had a very good relationship with Donald Trump.

And now now all of a sudden, you have all these things kind of hitting the company at once. So what could go ahead to say? I always thought that was unusual, Like Tim Cook and Donald Trump, like I tried to get my head around. I'll never forget him standing next to the President and not correcting him when he was making statements about the factory in Texas a few years ago. Um, Joe, I'm I'm wondering about potential

worst case scenarios here for Apple. Among the many challenges that you you spoke about, what's the worst case scenario for for Apple here? Is it? Is it Epic prevailing in this fight? Um? So yeah, so so the Epic lawsuit. I mean, Apple could potentially, you know, lose some of its power over the App store if Epic wins. I mean, the worst case scenario for Apple is if it starts getting hit with antitrust lawsuits from governments, you know, whether

it's the whether it's the federal government. The Bloombergs reported that is as uh as late as January, UM d Og investigators were interviewing a developer on the app store, so clearly they're doing some sort of investigation around that. Um. Some seat governments have also brought lawsuits against those other companies, against Amazon, against Facebook, against Google, and if it starts getting hit with those sorts of antitrust lawsuits, I mean,

that's where the real real pressure comes. I mean all this lawmaker stuff. You know, they say mean things, but very rarely does it actually result in some sort of legislation. But um, you know, these federal enforcers are a completely different story. I think, I think you're right there, Like, you know, it sounds good to talk mean and you know, but it's another thing to actually like wheeled a stick Joe.

But you know, one of the things that I wonder here is do you feel that, you know, is it worse for Apple that you know, face something you know, on a one on one basis, or to be sort of part of like a zone defense where you've got you know, they get wrapped up in things that might also affect the Amazon's and another and facebooks of the world, you know, other tech companies. Well, I mean, I guess I guess you'd much rather be, you know, kind of one in a crowd of people who are are facing iro.

I mean, you know, in the same way like you know, you want to be like if you're a zebra, you know, you kind of want to be in the middle of the herd and kind of blend in and hope that you're not the one the lion takes down or whatever. But the you know, once they start facing this one on one scrutiny, you know from these enforcers. I mean, one of the lessons we had from Microsoft, which faces ny I trust scrutiny. Um, you know, like twenty years ago.

Is Microsoft ultimately one that case. But because of the pressure, because they didn't want to be seen as to um, you know, growing into other businesses that could face even more anti competitive scrutiny, they missed out on some business. You know, people say that that's what gave Google the opening to become the giant that it became. So that that's the sort of you know thing that Apple is gonna want to avoid, you know, fight this scrutiny while

also being aggressive in innovating in business expansion. But you know, you also make a good point that you know, ultimately, even the pressure, the political pressure that Apple and some

other tech companies have faced. You know, it's uncomfortable. It gives great fodder for us to talk about on radio and on TV and in Business Week magazine and online, but ultimately didn't really hurt them to find too much financially, right, yeah, so so so Ultimately, the thing, the thing that you know, I'm sure Apple executives are gonna want to avoid is where they decide, you know, not not to do something.

You know some you know what, one of their one of their attorneys or even executive in his own mind says no, we're not gonna we're not going to expand into that business line because we know that you know, such and such an investigator that will be just another thing for this investigator or for this lawmaker um to uh to yell at this about um so that that's the sort of kind of you know, self editing of their business business that that could ultimately be the effect

of you know, all this scrutiny. Well, Joe, I think that another challenge to think about from an ant trust perspective for for lawmakers is when it comes to Apple, is how do you actually separate apples businesses or break up apples businesses It's not like Amazon, where you could, you know, like Elizabeth Warren has done in the past, called for breaking off Zappos or in some cases people have said, and it's Gott Galloway on our show said, you know, the company A w S could be separated

from Amazon or or Facebook divesting from What's App for example. It's not that simple with Apple's business, No, and and and one of the points that um, you know, Tim Cook made in this testimony a couple of weeks ago was that, you know, the user experience in the app store is it is pretty positive, right, Like they don't face some of the male malware or security issues that

more open systems face. So when um uh, you know, if if lawmakers or investigators ultimate or courts you know, ultimately cause Apple to open up access to its marketplace, I mean, one of the one of the arguments Apple makes, and one of the things these people want to avoid is making the user experience you know, actually worse, because you know, the whole point of bringing bringing you know, bringing more competition to a marketplace is supposed to be

that you make pricing and the experience you know better for consumers. If you actually have the opposite effect in bringing these cases. Um, you know that could cause a you know, a backlash to some of the anti dress enforcement. Yeah, I'm just thinking about you know, we're an Apple household because it's it all works together seamlessly, and you do

wonder if you start pulling it apart, what happens? Music to Tim Cook's here's Carol Kinching, Kinching, Joe Light, thank you so much for porter of Bloomberg News joining us from our Washington d C. Pure Check out his story and many others at Bloomberg business Week dot com. Till Webber, our editor of Bloomberg Business Week, joining us here in studio. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and

Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. It's Bloomberg Business Week, Tim Sinback and Carol Masser in the Interactive Broker Studio in New York. Bloomberg Business Week is brought to you by s c I Asset managers don't get results that are off the charts when their solutions are

off the shelf. Learn how sci is operating platform can turn infrastructure into a competitive advantage at se i C dot com Slash I m s so Tim this story among our most read on the Bloomberg at this hour about how employees are quitting instead of giving up working from home. This is on a day when Deutsche Bank launched its new remote working policy. So we've got a lot going on when it comes to how people come

back to work. We're figuring it out. I guess as we go here with more Anders Melon, he is wealth reporter at Bloomberg News. He's in our interactive broker studio. There is there was no playback playbook for the pandemic. There's no playbook for how we come back to work, right, That's right. I think every company is trying to figure out how to deal with this. Well, employees do, right,

So tell us what you found out. So we are finding out that there are some people that feel so strongly about this that they're actually quitting their jobs, in some cases with other employment lined up and in some cases not, or they're looking for remote only opportunities because they just don't want to go back to the office. It's generational though, as you guys point out in your story, a survey of a thousand adults in the US show

that would consider quitting if their employers weren't flexible. But among millennials and Gen Z that figure was that's a acording to a poll by Morning consult On behalf of Bloomberg News. Right, so, I think it's hard to paint with the braun brush. But but I think generally, you know, reporting shows that younger generations tend to be more you know, I think more fondly of remote work, see the benefits of it, whereas older generations tend to be more of

the office first. Well, younger generations may not have kids or mortgages either. No, I mean I do wonder about, you know, kind of where you are in life that determines kind of your your bargaining position on all of this. But unders as you guys day in and day out report on this, we have constant conversations around the office about what companies are doing. And I do feel like there's just not one one format fits all. I mean, is hybrid here to stay or or what I think

companies themselves are asking that too. I feel like right now everybody's just looking at everybody else to see who's making the first move. Um. I think many looked to Jamie Diamond, who of course made a very strong statement last month saying that should be in the office. I'm sick of zoom calls, and with that you get a trickle by the financial firms following. So it's financial firms that are like, if we focus on them, I feel like there's more of a push to be kind of

back in the office. I mean, I would say so definitely from from the bigger ones. But like you we may have said earlier, Deutschebank came out today saying that there's a hybrid model coming. So I feel like again, it also might depend on who you consider your competitors to be, because if you're tech focused, or want to be tech focused, or if you have tech focused workers, then you're competing with an industry where remote first has been decades in the making, and who might be more

prone to go fully your remote Well. I wonder how much power employees have right now and how much power the worker has right now, And I use the term worker totally understanding there are different types of workers in this economy. We have more than a million people who are still unemployed, and there are many businesses that say

they're having trouble finding workers. But based on the people you talk to, how confident are they can find another job after quitting depends a bit of what on what industry you're in, UM, But like you're saying, there is a lot of movement going on at the moment um,

surprising amount of movement according to some experts. And with that, of course comes openings for UM and also companies are seeing this as an opportunity to perhaps attract people that would be hard to get otherwise because you can all of a sudden offer up this perk that you're larger, perhaps wealthy arrivals. We'll just will not do unless you

don't have that perk right right. Well. It's also interesting in the story that you guys report UM about how only about US office workers are back at their at their buildings according to an index of ten metro areas compiled by the security company Council Systems. We're still kind of early in on the game in terms of people were turning back to work. Our office feels a little bit more normal, but there's still a lot of missing workers. There definitely are, But I think I would think that

will remain the case throughout the summer. I feel like towards the end of the summer companies will probably have put in place more solid policies for this and decided which route they're going to take, which, in turn also workers will have had a couple of more months to think through what they really want to do and perhaps

move as well. I'd also wonder two orders, if it means that these larger companies that have been vocal proponents for for working from the office, for cultural reasons, for business reasons, they might change their tune a little bit if they start to see that not necessarily peers or competitors,

but other companies that attract their workforce don't do that. Yeah, we spoke to um one professor down at Texas A and M University who said that thing that if you are a company and you think that the world is not changing, you might be right, but you're taking a pretty big risk in making that assumption because you might just start seeing your people jump ship. Yeah exactly, Or is this somebody said to me earlier Listen, it may go back to the way it was like its We

just don't know at this point. But it's interesting because you guys talk to a lot of individuals, and one of the things that people want is more time, like you lose time in commuting. I know that is certainly the case from my world, Like, there's things you do benefit by by not having to go to the office, totally commute, child care, having more flexibility, freedom to work kind of when you want, as opposed to set hours.

It's something that you know, we've shown for people that work from home for for a year that you know, it's something that we can manage largely, and many people are just not willing to give up those benefits. One of the things that I wonder too, is though as some people come back to work, others don't. I mean no doubt about it. If you're in the office, you can easily get face time with the boss, if your boss at the office, if your bosses at the office.

But you wonder if at that point whether that will have some sway on some of those workers who stay at home and said, well, wait a minute, I might miss add on some opportunities because it's just the way the world works. Yeah, and it's especially could be especially perilous. One expert, and it's to me if you're a younger worker, you're new in the game, and being at home could

be very isolating. You don't get FaceTime, you'll learn from older colleagues, so there could be drawbacks for for younger workers. I just think it's interesting because I think you go back six months, eight months, and everybody said, Okay, this is changing, our workforce is going to be changed forever.

Or you go back a year and workers were scared to quit and trying to find another job because they didn't know if they were going to get laid off in the next three weeks, which I think means equals we still don't know tb D. Anyways, great reporters, great reporting, and it's a great read. It's among the most read on the Bloomberg terminals. So Unders, thanks for stopping by. Thank you appreciate it. Unders Melon, he's wealth reporter here at Bloomberg News. Check him out at Melan Anders. Unders.

I always do that wrong, Melan Unders on Twitter. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week a journal. Yeah, but you let me drive? Oh no, no, no, no no, Ann, Please, I'll do the right rivel. I want to drive, just drive, question trying. This is the drive to the Globe community. Thanks, we'll drying us to dawn on Bloomberg Radio. All right, just got about ten and a half minutes left into today's trading session. It is the first trading day of

the week and the first trading day of the new month. Okay, let's get to with Aaron Kennon, co founder and chief executive officer at Clear Harbor Asset Management roughly one billion in assets under management, on the phone from Stanford, Connecticut. Aaron, good to have you here. You know, it's interesting. I always love knowing about the assets under management, and I think it was up from the last time we talked to you. Is that just appreciation or is it new

money coming in? I'm always curious. Well, it's a bit of both. Carol, good to be with you again. And uh, certainly the tail winds of the market have assisted. But you know, the work that we do in advising families and individuals and non for profits has been uh an endeavor of ours where we have great passion and a lot of you know, individuals during this time of uncertainty and economic tumult have sought advice and we have thankfully been the recipient of some of that. What kind of

advice are they looking for? What are the questions that they come to you with. That's a great question. Tim you know, it's everything from gosh, I just sold this tech stock that I bought it almost zero several years ago. And is there any way for me to you know,

sort of allocated in a tax efficient manner. You know, maybe it's through an opportunity zone fund or some other strategy, or if it's a non for profit, it's you know, a question about you know, can you take a look at our investment policy statement and are we you know, looking through corporate governance issues correctly? And how about our capital allocations strategy? And do you think it represents our

risk tolerance and our long term objectives? And you know the same for families, um, whether it's planning for retirement, planning for college, or just trying to preserve wealth relative to this great inflation debate. So all of these issues we be tackled here at Clear Harbor. Hey, how many more people Aaron are saying, you know what, it's been a crazy year. I think I'm going to retire earlier

because we've done this story at Bloomberg. I've certainly been talking with individuals of my own family and elsewhere who are like, you know what, you know, how much is just too much? At this point? And maybe I should

just retire. It's interesting because I look at the labor participation rate and that sort of speaks to the issue that you you raise, which is some people are certainly doing that, and they're looking at themselves in the mirror and they're realizing life is short and perhaps now now is a great time to retire. I'm not seeing that here,

to be honest, at the firm. I mean, we have many retirees as clients, but I think those who are working are are you know, for the most part, doing it because they're they're they're driven to achieve their their long term family financial goals and there to some extent passionate about what they do. So we're just not seeing that to a great extent. All right, let's get into the knee gritty of the trade and what you've been seeing as far as trends over the last few months

and what you see looking forward starting with inflation. The transitory or to be transitory or not to be transitory, that is the question. And what's the answer. Well, you know, I think there's a lot of nuance here that that requires um peeling back the onion a bit. I mean, certainly we've had a huge supply Chaine disruption the likes we haven't seen in our lifetime, and uh now we're seeing demand. We're back as the economies of the United

States and the global economy generally generally reopen. And that requires you know that the notion that the supply chain is going to normalize overnight, I think is is a naive one, and that the idea that there's going to exist a supply response from every important input is also

just not possible. So you look at something like oil where supply can come back online over the course of weeks, months, and quarters, and relative robust fashion UM versus copper, which is an important input has always been an important input, and even more so now that we're talking about the renewable initiatives in the economy e V, which requires three times more copper, for example, than a combustion engine vehicle UM that requires about an eight year period of time

to bring a full mind supply online. Of course, you have recyclable UH copper that can come online, you have a mine expansion that can occur over let's say a two year period. But if you want a robust supply to come online and and something as important as copper, it can take as long as eight years. So the point there is that inflation variables are are very nuanced.

Some are going to normalize sooner than others. I think the FED is fully aware of this, which is why I think they're far less data centric focused and much more sort of time focused, realizing that many of these supply chain issues, whether it's semi conductors, oil, uh, and and others, it will take several quarters to bear themselves out, and I think we're going to have a clearer picture by the end of the year. Tim all right, Aaron, this is kind of a wacky question, but the meme

stocks whether to see or others? How much of that comes up with your conversations with some of your institutional or are private wealth UM clients, for example, Oh the Mets. Yeah, sorry, I didn't didn't hear that. UM. Not not significantly. I mean, I think there are clearly there's a human sort of desire to you know, appear onto proverbial screens and and maybe there's a temptation to uh to chase some of these things. But UH and I understand that, but we're

not really seeing that. We're not receiving phone calls from people that want to own these sorts of things. And we are discretionary managers on behalf of clients, but we have intimate financial conversations. We're just not not seeing that to a great extent. What about when it comes to cryptocurrency, Are they asking questions about whether cryptocurrency bitcoins should be

part of their portfolio? Certainly seeing more of that um And we're having some really um interesting conversations with many clients about sort of the evolution of uh centralized you know, sort of de decentralized finance, and the importance of the blockchain and its application and why bitcoin and the THEORYUM for example, could be the beneficiaries of this, not only today but into the future. And of course we've seen

a major correction in that segment of the marketplace. But while the vast majority of our clients have zero exposure to cryptocurrencies, we are seeing a sort of incympiate level of conversation occurring here at the firm. Hey, any thoughts about the monthly jobs report and how that might impact kind of investor psyche. Yes, I mean it's been extraordinarily noisy, right, and I think it's going to continue to be because

you have a bunch of dynamics at play. One is the um the unemployment bonuses are are continuing to roll into bank accounts for millions of Americans and that will

not stop until September. So you have, you know, sort of that issue to deal with and UH, and you also have the the whole schooling concern where people are at home with their children and not everyone worse in an industry where they can you know, serve telecommute, right and so uh, we're seeing help wanted ads at restaurants and yet more people in the service sector are unemployed

now than they were pre COVID. And I think this dynamic is again going to sort itself out probably in the fourth quarter, Carol, when the bonus pop ups dissipate and UH and people get back to work. I'm wondering about I don't know, It's like the conversation has shifted so much in recent months about trying to get those

employees back to work. How closely are you watching wage inflation is a sign of of inflation being not transitory, because if we do continue to see employees sitting on the sidelines of employers are going to have to start raising those wages. That's right, And I think this is

the big question at the moment. And and and my own personal view is that the FED has been critiqued for maybe not responding, but I think they're fully aware that we have supply chain bottlenecks, and we have government fiscal policy again, you know, the unemployment bonus payments which are impacting decisions on the part of potential workers to either work or not work. Um, And of course this sort of schooling issue, right, And so I think you're

seeing wage inflation. My guess is that part is more transitory, particularly in the sort of unskilled or lower skilled service segment of the economy. Um. The facts of all this will come out in the quarters ahead. Yeah, well certainly, and we're looking for and I think investors are kind of looking forward to it as well. Hey, Aaron, thank you so much. Aaron Kennon, co founder CEO of Clear Harbor Asset Management roughly one billion in assets under management,

on the phone from Stanford, Connecticut. Thanks for listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Download the podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Bloomberg dot com, and you can also listen to our radio show at two pm Eastern on Bloomberg Radio or watch us on YouTube. Search to Bloomberg Global News