U.S. Unemployment Rescue Left Millions Without Help

You can also listen to our radio show at two pm Eastern Time on Bloomberg Radio or watch us on YouTube search Bloomberg Global News. But among our virus headlines, we talked about some of them about the US rising to the top of Bloomberg's COVID Resilience ranking for the first time. It's really a measure that indicates how all countries are handling the pandemic. Your pin nations are also moving higher on the list as I opened for the summer. But we did report that the UK today saying that

I had the most new COVID cases since January. So they continue to struggle through here with how though the health care system continues to grapple with the pandemic. Jennet Elkin, she's president CEO at Icon Medical Network. She joins us on the phone from Dallas, Texas. Janet, nice to have you here on this Monday. How are you. I'm good. Nice to be heard, Carol. Well, tell me a little bit about what you are seeing when it comes to health care systems dealing with the pandemics still but getting

a little bit more back to normal. But also, as you know, other medical needs arise. What does that mean for demand for healthcare workers? Well, for healthcare workers overall. Obviously there's a high demand UM we saw for nursing during the because the height hopefully it was the height of the pandemic. But now we're seeing physicians staffing really warring back. Obviously people were not going to the doctor

unless they had to and really putting off surgeries. But what was already high and demand to begin with, just really not enough physicians is causing almost really a crisis point with especially with more physicians retiring now. Well, and that's interesting. Where are we kind of generally speaking, in the United States when it comes to UM people wanting to be us because we know who we've seen the

Ebbs and Flowers here. Well, it's not. I think it's not so much a question of the wanting to become doctors, it's that they want a different life, different lifestyle. You know. The The A m A recently published something that for the first time ever, less than half of all active physicians are not working in the smaller private practices. They've moved, like everything else, right to the large systems because it's

just too expensive for someone in private practice. That's making a real demand difference, because I think the loyalty is different when it's not like just someone in a one person shops, so to speak. And so we're finding that there's they want more choices and they want a more flexible lifestyle like everybody else. Does that mean that they're gravitating or continuing to gravitate towards major cities, And what does that do for rural communities. I'm just curious about that. Well,

it's always been difficult oly for the royal communities. Right now I think even more so. Um, we recently did something because we staff temporary um positions for physicians in Arizona, where there was a very rural town. They opened up a new mine, which meant they doubled the population in just a few weeks between that and the pandemic. We had to get people, but how do you get them there?

So we did a telehealth project where we had overnight hospitalists that use laptops and they brought the laptop from patient to patient. But it was a way to get them served. Yeah, how's that working? How do you feel like, how do doctors? What's the feedback that you're hearing about telehealth? I think it's not obviously going to take over the industry. There's sometimes where you have to lay hands on people,

right and you have to actually see them. But I do think that in some areas where we have such critical shortages, like psychiatrists, where I'm sure we've all read the articles about the demand now more than ever for mental health services, that's an area where you also really could use more telehealth, And I think it's a way of trying to be effective and efficient and just get

more people taken care of wherever they live. Yeah. I know a fair amount of people just anecdotally that when especially came to mental well beings, that for the first time, because it was much more accessible in many ways, an easier to reach out to a therapist, and I do wonder if the tables have really or things have really shifted, especially when it comes to psychiatry and mental well being in terms of professionals being able to reach a kind

of a wider swath of our population. I think you're right, and they need to because they're just Psychiatry has been in demand for a long time, but now we cannot keep up with the demand for assignments for our psychiatrists because and no one can. It's just that it's just that critical. Really, And remember also that some of the psychotrates tend to be a little bit of an older age,

and we're finding this is amazing to me. They escape to the survey recently that of all physicians are looking to do an early retirement than they used to and we can't afford that. Yeah, that's pretty why old. What about the medical community that you deal with the doctors? Are we seeing vaccinations continue to be handed out? Are we reaching those underserved areas as rural areas? Have we have we reached out there to to the people who

really do want the vaccine? Right, well, they are. I think the supply is definitely, um, you know, considerably better than it was. But I think regardless um, whether it's now or post or pre pandemic, they're just or not. You know, rural areas are not often considered really desirable for physicians to want to set up a practice or go and work at a hospital, and so that continues to be an issue. Primary care is one grant example

of that. There's just there aren't enough There aren't enough scholarships to be given to be able to get the folks there, and that's where really temporary staffing physicians helps dramatically. It's interesting. I don't often think about temporary staffing when it comes to doctors. You just assume that they're all full time positions that's at hospitals or healthcare. But it's

not the way it works. Just got about thirty seconds left. Sure, No, there's more demand for temporary and we're seeing it either new grads at a regidency, middle career and doctors are taking about retiring. What's hey, one of the last question just a few seconds. Wages are wages going up for doctors? Wages are in certain special castes um, psychiatry, cardiology, surgery. Yep. Alright, good to know, hey, Great to check in with you. Janet Elkin she's president CEO Icon Medical Network. On the

phone from Dallas, Texas. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stenovich on Bloomberg Radio. I mentioned this was a most read story. It is the most read story on the Bloomberg on this Monday. It's about President find targeting two weapons that the richest one tenth of one percent used to avoid taxes.

Let's find out exactly what's going on. Bloomberg New Senior Tax reporter Allison vers Sprill is on the phone from Washington, d C. Allison, So, what exactly are we talking about? So we're talking about the you know, details of the Biden proposals that were released late last month. You know, I think at first people kind of needed some time to dig through these. But on close inspection, you know, we learned that the Biden administrations plans would you know,

essentially dismantled these two popular planning techniques. Um, we have one that's called a dynasty trust. Essentially you can set these up and they aren't you know, incurring gift to state or generation skipping taxes for multiple generations. So the Biden plan would actually charge a capital gains tax on appreciated assets in these trusts every ninety years. Um. But because of the way it's drafted, we could see taxes come to us early as December. And then we also

have language that would charge capital gains taxes. One property is transferred into an out of trust and in talking with the Treasury official, you know, this is aimed specifically at this very common tool, um, if not complicated, tool known as the intentionally defective grand toward trust. Uh So as people start the great name yes, yeah, it's definitely a long name, definitely in a a state planning type of type name. Um. But you know, people have started to

become really concerned about some of this language. We kind of missed this earlier. Well, you know, the broad strokes of the outline that the President was talking about didn't specifically go into how trust were impacted. And then even getting into the green book language, some of it's a little bit vague. I think that Dyna dynasty trust proportion was um, a bit more obvious than some of this

other language on transfers. And you know, I'm told that the second piece of that could affect even beyond um. You know, these intentionally defective trust that I mentioned, But we'll have to see how kind of the legislation is drafted. And you know, I R S riggs even further beyond that you writing your reporting, Allison. I mean, and it's

not just a U S thing. We're seeing it around the globe where governments are looking countries are looking to implement new taxes on capital gains inheritance basically go after the wealthy when it comes to paying maybe a greater share, a fairer share that some might argue of taxes. No, that's absolutely right. You know, we see these in uh Stockholm,

we see these in other countries. And I think the idea here is that obviously COVID nineteen has um you know, poked these massive holes in government budgets, and during that time, especially in the US, you saw that the rich weren't really necessarily impacted like the rest of uh, you know, like the rest of the country. So this has definitely been a priority in the US. It's definitely a priority of class across the globe. Alright, So what's going on

with all the financial advisors to the wealthy? You're there like wait, wait, wait, wait, what trying to figure it out, like, what what's the feedback because it's a great quote in your story one lawyer, Um, I guess that advises individuals or a tax lawyer. What they're doing is creating a whole new tax regime, and it sounds like that's what's going on. So you know, if enacted, I think people are are starting to say that they would really have

to reconsider the techniques they're using. Um. I don't think this makes plan and go away. There are always going to be smart planners that can help people get around their taxes. Um. But but these are things that have become really popular in recent years. And so you know, essentially people question is it worth using the specific tool that I've I've had in my arsenal for for the last several decades, and you have there's definitely consideration of that.

Two key words you said, if enacted right the final language, as we know, in any kind of bill or legislation, I mean, ultimately it's up to Congress how they lay it out. Definitely, and you know we've already seen so we have this infrastructure package that's now moving along that would be bipartisan that doesn't have any of these tax increases.

In it um. There has been discussion that Democrats would pursue in the budget sort of their own standalone package that would um, you know, make some of these tax increases along party line, which has obviously created some controversy. But you have to get essentially everyone, you know, every Democratic vote in the Senate. UM. There's not a huge margin in the House, and so it still remains to be seen, you know, if this gets enacted, if this gets paired back at all. So we'll just have to

see how the conversation moves forward. Hey, just fifteen seconds here. How quickly does it move forward? Is it before the summer, before the end of the year. Just is there a bit of a timeline just quickly? I would not anticipate if we're talking about reconciliation, that usually start coming together around the fall. I mean, you might have some things beginning to crystal a lot or discussions are definitely gonna be happening this summer, but you have to consider there's

the recess in August. UM, so I see most of the action coming in this fall. All right, good to know, we'll put that on our calendars. Alison vers Bill, Thank you so much, Senior Tax reporter at Bloomberg News on the phone from Washington, d C. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Well, and the current is show of Bloomberg Business Week Magazine. It's a Bloomberg exclusive looking at

the US unemployment benefits given out during the pandemic. Who got them? Really? That story from Bloomberg News Senior Trade and Globalization reporter Shawn don and he joins us from our one studio in Washington, d C. Along with Business Week nitor Joel Webber in our Interactive Broker studio in New York. This is such an important story, especially with the debate about why workers aren't coming back Joel, because

they're getting lots of benefits. This story really looks into the numbers and it's been one that I think culturally we've been aware of for a while. But what Sean donnan and Read picker Um did in this particular issue was go even bigger. And the number that they came out up with was that there were at least nine million Americans who were thrown out of work by the pandemic, and they didn't receive unemployment benefits UM despite there being

billions trillions of dollars that flowed into the system. And as they were reporting that, obviously that big of a number sticks out to you, and then you start to wonder, why so so, Sean bring you in here? Why what happened? What went wrong? Well, I mean the answer is that, and we've all learned this in the in the last year, is that the unemployment system in the United Stage is

just in really lousy shape. And it's everything from being overloaded with unprecedented amount of claims or UH as I like to think of people reaching out for for help UM and UH also old I T systems and just trying to to process these applications and also getting caught up in this question of fraud that's been hanging over

the system as well. There there's been a lot of you know, when you dig into this system, a lot of state officials talk about the high number of fraudulent claims that they've seen, but you scratch the surface a little bit and you discover there's also a lot of

innocent people who have been accused of fraud. I look, I was on the phone this morning with someone who reached out to me after after seeing our story, and who says, you know, they've been waiting six weeks for their latest unemployment benefits after having after getting benefits for without any problem for most of the last year. Uh. And the reason is that the state of Maryland says they can't verify uh their identity, even though this person has sent all sorts of ideas uh their ways. So

it's just it's a system that's overloaded. But it's a system that also in a lot of places seems to be kind of biased towards assuming that someone reaching out for help may not always be doing so, uh, you know, with the right intentions. What's great about this story by you and read shall one is that, right, we often see headlines, we see numbers, but we forget that there are people behind those numbers. Take us to either barbed

story or raised story. You actually get into their details. Yeah. Look, I I just got an imimo in the last hour from Barbashbrook as well in Indiana. And Barb is like a lot of people in this country, and that she kind of cobbles together a living on a couple of different, uh part time jobs. Before the pandemic, she worked twenty hours a week at Dollar Tree, and she worked twenty hours a week or so as a cashier in the food court in Eli Lily's, one of their office buildings

in Indianapolis. Uh And when the pandemic hit, she lost that job in the food court because no one was going to the office anymore. She applied for unemployment, and she was told that she wasn't eligible for unemployment because she made more than a d twenty one dollars a week at a Dollar Tree where she worked as a cashier. And that is more than she would have received in benefits from the state of Indiana just to make up

for her lost income at the food court job. Now, you just got to back up for a second there, imagine trying to exist one dollars a week, first of all. Second of all, the benefits that she would have been entitled to with the federal top up at the time would have been more like seven dollars a week. That

would have completely changed Barbashbrooks experience in this pandemic. And then it kind of gets almost into a weird kaf Gaysk tale where a few months after she was denied benefits, all of a sudden some money turned up in her bank account from the state of Indiana, um, and she sent most of it back right away. It took the

state a couple of months to acknowledge that. And now they've accused her of being overpaid these benefits and at one point in March they were threatening to garnish her wages and her tax were turns um and she's you know, she reached out for help and she didn't get the help she needed, and then she got caught up in this bureacratic nightmare. And you know, the message and her email just an hour ago to me was you know,

I'm never going to apply for unemployment benefits again. That's the big lesson from here is that there's no one there to help me. Another another lesson or inside and interested in as you mentioned Indiana there, Sean, and it really reveals what a patchwork quilt of a country we have, because every state has its own systems and its own problems that they have to wrestle with her. What did you learn on that front? How inconsistent are the states? Look,

I mean there's huge inconsistency in the states. And this is the you know, the Grand Bargain that was struck in a new deal was for the states to control a lot of how unemployment benefits are paid, and that means they get to decide how much is paid on on on a weekly basis basis. So you have some states that will pay you a hundred bucks or so a week, up to eight hundred dollars a week in the maximum level in Massachusetts. That's even before this federal

top up that we've had during the pandemic. And then you have also states that are incredibly strict in terms of who they will give benefits to. If you lived in Arizona and you worked thirty hours a week at the minimum wage job, you would not be eligible for unemployment benefits because you would not hit their minimum income threshold. In Indiana, you know a third of the people who applied for benefits in that state, Uh, we did not

receive any benefits. So what your I always think about when you do something like this and you guys went through a ton of data. Uh, it's not always perfect, right because the reporting isn't always perfect. Um, where's the problem is it that we need federal guidelines on this or what do we need? What is the problem? How

do we fix this? Because we're going to have another crisis. Yeah, no, absolutely, And I think that's the that's the real thing that's exposed here is that the system that we have is too narrow in terms of who it defines UH as being eligible for benefits. So we need to think about how the economy has changed and we need to broaden out the system to catch more of these people who

are there. And we also need to understand that, um, we need to get this money out there two people quickly because that money has actually been hugely effective in reducing a lot of the broader economic damage that we've seen in this pandemic. This is a great way to get money out there when it works. The problem is it just doesn't work enough and for enough people. Well, it's an incredible read, and I know you guys did, like I said, going through all the data points. Sean,

thank you so much. Really appreciate you bringing it to us. Sean donn And, Senior Trade and Globalization reporter at Bloomberg News from our bureau in d C. Joe Weber, editor of Bloomberg Business Week here in our interactive broker studio. Important story. Absolutely, And when that you know that there's

the wrestle with the amount of data. Only imagine there is a part right at the end of the story that talks about here's a here's a really hefty paragraph to understand how we actually like dealt with the numbers, which is what it's all about. All right, chel, thanks, I'm rom journal. Yeah, but you let me drive? Oh no, no, no no, no home, honey, please, I'll do the right drivel. I want to drive, just drive by the question trying. This is the drive to the globe. Give me thanks.

We'll drying us down on Bluebird Radio. All right, just about ten and a half minutes left in today's trading session. We have definitely seen a leg up when it comes to the S and P five hundred and the NASDAC just off their highs of the session. It really is, though, generally speaking, risk off trade today, except if you happen to be in the text base, if happened to be a chip stock, and we know that. We also saw some of those big tech names, specifically Facebook, pishing past.

It's one trillion dollar market cap, So let's get to it and let's talk about the drive to the close. Joining us once again is one of our favorite guests here, and we're talking about Tom Plum. He is president chief investment officer at Plum Funds based in Madison, Wisconsin, joining us on the phone from there. I talked about this all the time. His balance fund consistently a top performer.

It has been pretty much all of its peers in the past five years, returning on average annually fifteen percent. Forgive me, Tom, I have a ton of notes around me and I couldn't find we're I wanted to go. Nice to have you back with us. How are you? It's great to talk to you. It's that kind of a Monday. I'm just gonna put it out there. So this marketplace, what have you been doing? Have you been buying? Have you been selling? How do you see it? Are

their opportunities? Well, Caroline, like we've talked in the past, um, the market initially had the cyclical bound economy, and those were the stocks that really were performing first part of this year as they rebounded from some real significant problems caused by the pandemic. But now we're starting to see a little bit of moderation of the growth rates that we'll see, and we're starting to discern between value companies and value traps because I think that there's a lot

of areas of the economy. They are still going to be stressed, They're still going to have some difficulty growing, and there's going to be some companies that are going to do pretty well because they've weathered through this and they've you know, as we've talked in the past, we

prefer growth stocks. But the fact that some of these financials, for example, now that they're going to be able to deleverage, that loan quality has not deteriorated and we we see more loan demand pick up, they could actually start to become true values and see some growth in their stock prices even from these levels. So what name you like

is JP Morgan. We did have a headline today that they are buying a stake in a digital bank C six in uh move into Brazilian the retail space there, the retail banking sector there specifically, so expanding their reach. I'm guessing you're gonna be watching for some of the headlines after the clothes today to see what they do with that extra extra cast cash post the FED stress tests.

What is though you're thinking about JP Morgan, Well, you know, basically the best company out there in the financial the major banks that we've seen, and they they have excess capital. And when we go back to the times at the bank stocks were the leaders um that was back in the eighties and early nineties and even the early parts of this decade century when they were de leveraging, when they had high quality growth and they didn't have to

continuely borrow more money at expensive rates. So the return of capital through dividends and through UH stock buybacks is going to be something that's going to fuel true growth. It's one of those things that like a Warren Buffett has always liked about certain companies like Coca Cola for example, it makes sense at this stage and those type of companies that have been well capitalized whether through this, I think they can be growth stocks. Again. That's interesting. So okay,

so you're thinking about that about JP Morgan. Another financial that you like is Discover Financial tickers d F ACID. It's actually had a pretty nice bounce this year. It's up about you're also talking about a dividend five year net growth of about nine and a half percent. Is

it the dividend story again that you like or what? Well, it's the it's the conversions of the reopening story with the structural move to digital wallet, So UM Discover was significantly impacted because a lot of their urchranses are through restaurants, UH and retail their point of their point of sale where you're in contact with the person on the other end who's UM. You're buying your product from your at the restaurants. So the reopening of the economy is going

to help them significantly. And then the fact that they have real high capital ratio and then we'll be able to start to return some of that. They also have a network that we think is valuable and can be used as all these companies are trying to build up their digital wallets. It's a lot of financials that you like,

I'm just looking to your list. MasterCard is another one, and that's again what As the economy reopened, whether it's services, whether it's good, people are gonna be using their cards more, and especially they're going to use them at restaurants, They're going to use them for business traveling, entertainment, and they're

going to use them for cross border transactions. Those three areas were very weak for master Card last year, even though they showed revenue modestly increasing because of the online purchasing and things and the digital wallet that we've talked about.

But we expect them to see a real cyclical rebound and they're probably going to have earnings maybe even revenues up the quarter that we're in, and we're looking for the whole year for the earnings to be up almost So here's a little bit of a different company ol Uh and this is a company that had its I p O earlier this year. Tell us about the thinking on this one, Well, it's online ordering, So that's what it stands for as the interface between the restaurants and

the on demand world. They've got. They're basically Switzerland for those companies, those restaurants that don't want to develop their own apps and their own interfaces. This is a company that then can put you together with door Dash and cavir that and get it you combined with your ordering system on at the restaurant with clover and toast and processing your transactions. So it's wedding the the person who

wants to buy something. You want to go to a fast food or any type of restaurant and order your food. We've all gone there. Now you see the line. You can skip the line if you've pre ordered that's what this company does. And uh, basically that's the world where now people are not going to sit in line to go to your subway or something like that, when when they can use this app and and get in out do whatever they want to do. Yeah, it definitely plays into what we've seen over the past year in the

changing world. Hey, um, Tom just got about thirty seconds left here. One name it or not even a name. But you are the crypto world. We're all obsessed. And you say, don't confuse crypto technology with cryptocurrency, just quickly explain that, Well, you know, crypt crypt drole currency is basically,

I think somewhat of an artificially created shortage story. And you know, if you call back and you don't have to live the Tulip bubble, but you can go back to twenty five years ago to the brute beanie babies, and you can see that when you have artificially restrained um supply and then you have a story, it becomes a fan, it feeds on itself, but it doesn't have

any real sustainable value. Yeah, it's it's difficult to think that you would actually use a bitcoin to buy something at Starbucks that you're going to drink and disappears, and well, it's certainly something we talked about a lot. Tom Always get to check in with you, Tom Plumb, He's President, chief investment officer at Plumb Funds from Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks

for listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Download the podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Bloomberg dot com, and you can also listen to our Race You show at two pm Eastern on Bloomberg Radio or watch us on YouTube search Bloomberg Global News