What You Need to Know About the Delta Variant

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. All Right, Well, among the COVID headlines that we're watching on this Wednesday, concerns about when it comes to the delta variant, it's trajectory, it's impact, it's spread. We're trying to understand it, even for those

of us who have been vaccinated. We've also heard from a dornaust chairman vowing to keep testing the drugmaker's COVID vaccine against variants and advised against putting our guard down as new mutations continue to emerge. That coming from our Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst event. Well, back with US and form voice Dr Dave Westerner, he's professed or biology, david'son college. He's with us once again on the phone from David's in North Carolina. Dr west are good to have you

here with us. When you hear delta variant, what do you say? I calts like to be back. Yeah, it is worrisome. Um. I think this variant, there's clear evidence that it's much more transmissible than the the alpha variant, which had been the predominant variant. UM. As we saw in the UK, it spread rapidly and quickly became the

major variant in that country. Um. And right now I think about new infections in the US are caused by by delta and that number certainly is going to do that proportion certainly has going to increase in the near future. What does that mean for those of us who are starting to love the world reopening. We're vaccinated check check check, our families vaccinated check check check, and we're going to restaurants.

We're living again. That's how it feels. Yet with a cautious eye on what might happen, I don't know in a month, in two months, in six months. How do we need to look at this. Yeah, I'm with you there, completely carroling. When the CDC change their mask sidelines, I was all too happy to leave my own home when I went to the coffee shop, are or the grocery store. Um. You know, I think we can't let our guards down

completely just yet. I think that's what this this variant is is showing us UM for fully vaccinated people, the vaccine is still highly effective against this variant. It's probably less effective against this variants than the original strain, but still really effective. UM. One of the questions that's still out there though, is you know, if you are vaccinated, can you have an asymptomatic infection and potentially spread it to other people who are not vaccinated? You know, I

think that question has not been completely addressed yet. Um. And then we have a whole cohort of people who are unvaccinated, especially the younger kids. Vaccines are only available to people who are twelve and and up. UM, so the the younger younger people, people under twelve. UM. I mean, I I'm worried about a big spike in cases among

younger people. Well, and I do want to have some family members with some underlying health issues, and the question is well, wait, should I go back and start wearing my mask, because maybe I'm a little bit more vulnerable even if I get even though I'm vaccinated, if I get this stronger variant, could I be at risk? Right? I think that's a reasonable concern to have. You know, there's there's conflicting data so far about whether this variant

is more severe than the other variants. UM. There's a report from Scotland UM publishing The Landsa just a few days ago in which the researchers concluded that people infected with Delta were twice as likely to be hospitalized as people infected with the previous variant Alpha UM. And that's really troubling UM. But but I think the jury is still out on that. I mean, that was one study

of relatively small number of number of people. UM. But yeah, I think for for all of us, whether you're UM have underlying conditions or not, it's worth being concerned about the transmission this variant. Do we also need to think about and even more potent variants still emerging. That's the possibility. I mean, virus is mutate all the time. You know, I think we've talked about that before, and you know, in the United States, we have a fair amount of

vaccination somewhere in there. UM. Other parts of the world you have really really low vaccination rates, and we see the virus um spread occurring dramatically. UM. Anytime the virus is spreading and being transmitted from person in person, the emergence of a new variant is a very real possibility. So, yes, Delta is not the last variant we're going to see. How much are you also thinking about booster shots? A s Having conversation with some colleagues earlier, who again we're

embracing Wow, I'm going out. I'm really enjoying this UM. But do I need to think about when it gets colder again here, certainly on the eastern portion of the United States. Is something going to happen again in the fall? Potentially? Right? I think? Sorry to be such a bummer. I'm an optimistic I have that concern, especially as it gets colder, we get into the fall, the early winter, and people

are indoors more, UM, in more crowded indoor settings. Are we going to see a resurgence in in cases when kids are back in school, et cetera. UM. In terms of boosters, the information so far suggests that the vaccines um provide fairly long lasting protection. What's long, but it's long. But yeah, we only have six months a year's worth of data so far. We can't say these vaccines protect for two years because the vaccines haven't been deployed for for that long. Um, and I think it will get

that data as time goes by. A booster shot very well maybe, Um I think that champ to get a yearly booster for instance. Um. Dr western just real quickly about seconds. I mean, how will we know when and if we need a booster? Are we just gonna start seeing cases pop up and we'll and we'll just figure it out that way. It's gonna be kind of random, just quickly hopefully not random, but you know what I mean, like, how do how does how do you guys assess that

we're gonna need it? And just quick? Yeah, their studies ongoing where the researchers are measuring the antibody level and people who had been vaccinated and they're looking for a decline in that antibody level. Okay, you always cover so much, Thank you so much and clarify so much. Dr Dave Westerner, Professor of Biology at Davidson College. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim

Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Well the fourth annual highst issue of Bloomberg Business Week magazine. It is at this week, hitting news stands tomorrow, online and on the Bloomberg. One of the stories is also among our most right on the Bloomberg Today. It's about the fall of the billionaire Gucci Master. You know you want to know more. Here with more is Business Week freelance writer Evan Ratliffe. He is on the phone in Delaware. Evan, it is an

incredible read, an incredible individual. First of all, tell us about who is the billionaire Gucci Master? Thanks the bill. The Billionaire Gucci Master is a guy named Ramona A Boss is his real name. He went by Ray Hush Puppy online or his handle was hush Puppy Um. He was an Instagram influencer. He had a couple of million followers. He was known for his portrayals of luxury. He was always photographed in designer clothes, standing in front of rolls

Royces Ferrari's that he had bought. Living a very opulent lifestyle. He lived in Dubai. He had been born in Nigeria, that he had moved to Dubai and Uh, that was who he was for the world. He was kind of a small, small celebrity. He hung out with other celebrities. UM. But as it turned out, he is alleged to be also involved in in some of the big cyber scans of the last few years. I have to say for those of us have to Ron Bloomberg Radio, but we're also on YouTube, and those who are on YouTube can

can see. We're just showing some video of him running into a helicopter, sitting down. I think it was a helicopter, maybe it was a plane. I think, wearing a lot of Louis Vuitton, a little Louis Vuitton next to him, and eating something on what looked like a private plane. What did he do that put him uh and gave

him a place in the heist issue? Well? His his reason for being in the heist issue is that he is alleged by the US government UH to have participated in some of the largest cyber scams of the last few years under the name business email compromise scams. That's what they're called. UM. And he's alleged to be a person who moved large sums of money as part of these scams. And some of the targets of the scams were enormous, including they were trying to steal a hundred

million over hundred million dollars from a Premier League soccer team. Uh, they were stealing from businesses in the US, law firms, other businesses, and they were tracking him. They eventually arrested him in Dubai, and he's facing trial in Los Angeles. And I want to bring in the editor of Bloomberg business Week, Joel Webberg. This is just a fascinating tale. But it's not a tale, it's true. Yeah. I mean that's the best part of the about the heist issue.

And you know, Evan um this, as I've tweeted earlier, you know, in the history of the HIGHST issue, this goes down is like maybe one of the very best HIGHST stories. One of the things that captivated me about it is this idea that you know, b EC scams, which I know you you you just briefly hit on here. They're bigger than ransomware, and like no one wants to talk about them because there's such a big problem. Like like,

put put that in perspective. I mean, to think about this being bigger than ransomware is a little bit of a mind blower, right, yeah, yeah, I mean it really flies under the radar a bit because it's just it's it doesn't hit the news for one reason. You know, ransomware is very dramatic. You know someone's being held office or behalf for money, and b EC scam is a

more it's a or technical scam. We can go into how it works exactly, but part of the problem is that if you just transfer money to a scammer and you've been tricked into doing it, no, no company wants

to talk about that. If you're a public company, you might have to disclose it them if the number is large enough, but no one else is going to talk about that because then you lose the trust of your customers, of your suppliers, of your clients, like you're completely incompetent if you're doing this, when in fact it's a very very clever way to extract money for company. Okay, so let's just talk about it a little bit more because it is so simple, right, that's the problem with it.

It's like you to defend against this. I mean, it's incredibly difficult because all it takes is somebody changing a digit. If you're doing this as a day job, that all of these orders are flying around all the time, how how does it? How do they pull it off? So the way it works, and it's sort of most simplest form is it's business email compromise. Obviously, they compromise an email, and that's usually going to be they're breaking into a

corporate email account at some decently sized company. They want to hit someone mid level above, hopefully someone who's interacting with big payments, and they'll research the companies trying to figure out who that is. Once they're inside the email, they're just gonna wait. They're just gonna sit there, watch the traffic, watch what comes in and out, try to

learn how the payments work. And then when a large invoice hits, let's say a law firm has an invoice for a million dollars, then that's when they insert themselves. So they know exactly how to create a fake in voice that's gonna look real. They'll immediately send it as a follow up. They'll change the bank details to their own and say here's a new invoice, sorry, that one had the wrong bank details on it. And because they're coming from inside an email account, they have all the

details right, they have the language right. Oftentimes, people who are doing these payments just they just overlook it. Uh, they just they're doing many of these a day potentially or at least a week, and so they hit yes on the payment, they authorize it to the bank, and then it's immediately gone from the scammer bank account to another one overseas, to another one overseas, and the money

becomes impossible to trace. So hush puppy, let's bring it back to Uh, can I just say that again, hush puppy. Let's bring it back to hush puppy. Evan, what is your name? Your code name? Did you have a code name for the story? I didn't use a code name. I love Ray hush Puppy. It is just it's so enticing. I mean, it's a brilliant Instagram name because it just it conveys something that you just want to learn more

about Ray hush Puppy. And there are these robes that he wears and some of the photos that we have and it says hush Puppy on the back for the record, I was like, I want a road that says the heist issue, Like I want I want that road. Um so. So Evan, let's talk more about him because one of the most fascinating elements of this story is that um Hush Puppy came from Nigeria and Legos, which has this history of being a place where you know, Nigerian princes operated.

So so how did he, how did he come up and how did he break out of all of that? Yeah, he grew up in Legos. I mean he was, you know, by his own account, he was poor growing up. He struggled. He actually had a sister who died of typhoid, you know by his recollection, because they couldn't pay the medical bills. Um So, he was someone who very explicitly was trying to get out and he saw the wealthier parts of Legos and he aspired for that. He dreamed of that.

He was always interested in designer brands and so he did escape him eventually went to Malaysia and that's when he started building you know, his his influencing and you know the crimes that he's alleged to commit these business and compromise scams. You know, a lot of them do come from Nigeria, but it's a bit of a double edged sword because you know, Nigerians have been accused of these scams for many years, when in fact they come

from all over the world. So there's a sort of stereotype that precedes Nigerians that then you know, he reinforces and it becomes this sort of his circle would in fact, you know, obviously there's a Nigerian texting and there's all these people who are very upset that he is in factually importing that idea. Well, to get every juicy tidbit, check out the story in Bloomberg Business Week magazine. It's

online and at Bloomberg dot com. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. I am Carol Master. Tim is off this week. Well today virtually was the Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst event. It highlighted innovators, visionary scientists, policy makers, and entrepreneurs accelerating solutions to today's great problems. One of them is Sarah Manker. She's a former commodities trader who

worked for Morgan Stanley. She took what she saw, she learned from it, and she founded grow Intelligence, which gathers tons of data and then uses AI and machine learning to tackle lots of things, including some really big problems, one of them food and security. And I caught up with her and talked about it specifically what our company does in using AI to look at data and solve

that problem. Grow Intelligence is a company I founded UM in two thousand fourteen, and it really is a story at the end of the day that tells the story of what on Earth is going on UM. And I say that because, you know, oftentimes we use data to to tell stories UM, and oftentimes when we think of Earth it you know, we think of satellite images just showing us pictures of our Earth, whereas Earth is sort of this interplay between our Earth's actual ecology and our

human economy and the inter relationships between the two. And what we've done is we've built a data platform using artificial intelligence to capture sort of data around the world about our Earth as well as our human economy, connect the dots and start to tell stories about things like, you know, where the trajectory of food security is going, or how to UM become better resilient to climate change UM and and really it's a company focused on tackling

these two major problems, which is essentially around food security and climate change at global scale. You just use right that obviously impact everybody. Data collection can be good, it can be bad, right, it can be biased, So tell me how you go about it. It's garbage and garbage exactly. And so we we say curated by human intelligence, scale through artificial intelligence. And I think this is a really

important part of how we do our work. But how AI should be done, which is that you need domain experts.

You need humans that first actually assess the data in the very early days because as you're collecting data and you're getting data, you know, we get data from over forty different sources around the world and it comes to government language, private, public everything, governments, private companies that we license from trade organizations, you know, UM all sorts of and then they come in many different formats and languages, and you need and experts initially that sort of do

the assessment of the data. UM that that that documented, that that map, the definition of it, that helped create the dictionary. And then you start to use artificial intelligence to scale the mapping of that knowledge to better understand the interconnectedness that exists through the data. But it always really starts with the human intelligence component that helps was sort of the curation in the beginning, right, and then you let the machines take over. And this makes your

predictive models work better. It makes the knowledge graphs, the systems of sort of how we understand today work significantly better as well. It's a diverse group, I know, speaking many different languages. Very yes, good, right, because you're dealing with the global global issues. Yeah, I always say, um, you know, your team has to resemble the world that's attempting to Mom, I can hear your commodities background playing

into this. What was it about your background in commodities and being in the Wall Street financial community that made they kind of got you to where you are today and said, all right, there are bigger issues, bigger problems, we need the tool to tackle it. Yeah, I mean

it played a huge role. Um. I was an energy trader and in the early days of sort of energy trading, if you had an oil producer that UM would come to the market and say, you know, I've discovered oil and I need to now produce this oil, and I need some money for it, so therefore I need to sell it forward to you. And selling oil two years forward used to be a struggle by the time I left.

You know, oil producers, gas producers, et cetera could sell oil ten twenty years forward, long before it was outside

the group, outside the ground. Financial markets enabled that, and you know, for markets to develop, you need trust, you need baseline understanding, and then people have their relative competitive advantage, right, because what that does is it drives capital into markets, and capital drives innovation, and innovation drives very long term change, renewable energy, shale oil, shale gas, all of these technologies

we take for granted had to be funded somewhere. And I had seen that agriculture was and still is, frankly where maybe energy markets were in if I'm being kind, like the early nineties. So they're very behind um. And so you know, when you think of what happened in COVID last year. During COVID and all of the shocks the system experienced, when you know, people were saying, are we running out of me? You know, why are you know, certain things just flying off shelves? And is there shortage.

That was really a function of how short term the food markets actually behave, meaning decisions are still being made day to day, week to week by grossers um And if you take the most liquid agricultural market in the world, which is corn in the US, you're lucky if you can sell it two years forward. And that was Sarah Banker. She's founded to Eve Grow Intelligence. The This is a company that she founded after being a commodities trader at

Morgan Stanley. They gathered tons of data from global sources. They use it using AI and machine learning, and they address things like you heard her talk about food in security, one of the major problems that a lot of countries are dealing already. We saw it through the pandemic where companies UH and countries specifically, if they were a producer some food item, a lot of them stopped exporting because

they were trying to protect their own citizens. So she is looking at that and working with clients, and her clients, I've got to say are from all walks of life.

They are food producers, their food suppliers, their governments, and they're also the financial world because increasingly we are seeing financial instruments, just like we've seen in the E s G world generally that are looking to create investment vehicles that are tackling some of these big problems like food insecurity, and of course already we see it with climate change. So again Sarah Maker found and see if grow intelligence

from the Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst event. You can see that entire interview and more like it at Bloomberg dot com slash New hyphen Economy. These are thirty one people that we've identified at Bloomberg New Economy that are catalysts that are charting the global course out of the pandemic and really looking at creating a brighter, more sustainable future. Some of them are names you know, we mentioned formally um Or earlier, the chairman of Maderna, that individual also

at part of this event. But a lot of them are names you don't know, but they're doing some incredible work. So I highly recommend you check it out online and look at those conversations. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stenovic on Bloomberg Radio. Well, remember when traders were snapping up shares of Hurts after it filed for bankruptcy last year. Well today it actually is exiting from bankruptcy. We've got the ultimate winners of

what has happened over the past year. It's all in a story by Bloomberg's authority. She is Bloomberg News High Yield distressed at in bankruptcy order on the phone from Boston. Hey, Cat, nice to have you here. Um, I feel like Hurts was that original meme stock It really was. And what's funny is that all of the gay traders that were buying into the company, they were getting made fun of. People were saying, what, what is the rationale behind this trade?

Because on on the surface level, a company that is in bankruptcy shareholders are more than likely to be completely wiped out, getting absolutely nothing for their investment, and so to buy shares of a bankrupt company is not always the best trade. But we've seen some situations where that hasn't been the case, and it's becoming more and more frequent, even though this is not the norm. Hurts is probably

the best example of this. A year ago that the shares when when you mentioned when the Reddit traders first getting started getting into the name, the shares were around five fifty and that was considered huge, a big game. And today, just to put it into context, the company is exiting UM and the shares are valued some analysts say around fourteen dollars. So that's well over double where they were a year ago. Have we started trading yet? Unhurt? So the shares are trading right now. UM. I have

them up on my screen. They're around nine dollars there a bit, they almost got to about ten UM. But we'll see that the post bankruptcy trading UM more likely tomorrow the company, this process will be finishing or culminating, let's say today. Okay, that's what I thought. I was trying to understand the trade a little bit here as I looked at my Bloomberg it is. You know, it comes down to pure math, right in terms of these

Reddit traders and how they benefited. So so it does, but it also comes down to the business to UM. You we can't talk about this story without talking about the boom and travel that we've seen UM. This company, when it filed for bankruptcy, it was because no one was renting cars. There was there wasn't the ability or um the the need for for car rentals at the time.

Now that changed pretty dramatically as folks started renting cars to take uh you know whatever vacations or time away that they could um without having to fly or do other things that were limited. So we saw a rebound which has only continued. And then we also have to talk about the price of used cars that has also risen. Same reason people are now buying up cars because they're moving out of the city into the suburbs. They want

cars to travel to to get between places. Um. And and then there's also the shortage of new cars that are that are getting put into the market. So Hurts actually benefited from selling a lot of its fleet at top dollar and it used at cash to pay down debt, which has just benefited the company and its investors. Right, the pandemic just did a one A D for this company, or created a one e D for this company, and did change the fundamentals absolutely. I mean at the beginning,

Carl Icon was the big investor behind her. He backed out right as the company filed for bankruptcy. He wanted nothing to do with it. And now we've seen this amazing snack back. Um the road to redemption. Uh part of my no, it's perfect nice pun I really like that, kudos, Hey, but when you look at the balance sheet, it's a different company. So yeah, it definitely is. This company is

emerging with less debt. It also has UM, an influx of equity and the sponsors UM, Nighthead and Certaris, this group that also included Apollo, some of the biggest names on Wall Street. They stepped in to support the company. They saw the value, they saw the recovery, and they wanted to be at the forefront. UM and they are

behind the business. I spoke with UM the the head of of Certarists who who said that the that firm is planning on investing in her and improving its infrastructure, it's technology so that it has a stronger footing going forward. It is just, you know, staggering. I was often kid on air about Harvard Business School case studies, but this

is a great one. Who would have thought right? First of all, nobody would have predicted the health pandemic, But who would have thought that how that would have changed dramatically? A company, a brand that we've known for a long time, and it's gone through various iterations over its history. Right in terms of consolidation in the industry and people being interested or activist investors. But here's the outcome, and I guess the future is still unknown. We'll see what life

is like post pandemic. The future is unknown, and we'll be following this situation very closely. Cat, great story, uh and a great read. Cat aority. She's I yield distressed at bank respy reporter at Bloomberg News on the phone from Boston. I'm room marco a journal. Yeah, but you let me drive no, no d home, honey, please, I'll do the right drivel. I want to drive. Just drives, good questions trying. This is the drive to the globe. Give me thanks. We'll drying us down on Bloomberg Radio.

Just about ten and a half minutes left in today's trading session. It is time for the drive to the clothes. Let's get to it with managing director and see your portfolio manager, Margie Patel over at Wells Fargo Asset Management, ninety billion dollars in assets under management. She's with us once again on the phone from Boston. Margie. Nice to have you back here on Inburg Business Week on Bloomberg Radio. So it is an interesting week. We've had very tight

ranges when it comes to those major equity averages. Is this just a case of pre earnings, pre jobs report? How do you see it? Yes, it's it's a week of U macro shifts back and forth. We've had the the the value sector sort of play out when we had a little scare about interest rates moving up. Now we have the tenure well under one fifty, and so it looks like the batas pass back over to the

growth sector and some of the tech names. All right, so are there any long term plays that you should be making right now or do we need to wait to get through earnings, get into the second half a little bit, maybe even wait till the fall to get a better indication of maybe what the FED is up to. Uh our own Mike McKee talking with the Dallas FED president uh Kaplan and talking about you know, he's looking for maybe a tapering happening sooner rather than later, maybe

even later on this year. Well, they've talked about that, but I think that overall they are really committed to the same course they've been on, which is keeping short rates angrew pretty near zero, continuing to buy securities in the long end, and I don't think they're going to waiver from that policy. They continue to feel inflation is transitory, and as long as they feel that way, that's what's going to determine monetary policy, and and says the markets

will continue to move up. All right, So how do you play it right now? Well, I think it'll be interesting at mid year. I think that what you're seeing with is switching over a little bit more to growthy names is concerned that the cyclical names are played out and their growth will start to diminish in the second half. So what I'm going to be looking for is what are we seeing, especially from the more economically sensitive companies.

Are they beginning to look forward as slower earnings growth or a little pinch in their margins because of cost pressures, or will we continue to see things looking great across the board and another strong core and UH a strong rest of the year. How do we though at some point, maybe we've got to remember we fell off a cliff. We're now bouncing back or climbing up that cliff in

a big way. And that's the distortion that we are seeing in certainly the economic data points and the markets are trying to find their way through it and kind of get through that data filter through the data and understand and get some clarity when we get on the

other side. Is it going to be though a similar environment to where it was pre pandemic, Where there it was kind of okay growth, you know, that just kind of kept muddling along, but it actually turned out to be a fairly decent environment because of the low rate environment for the equity markets. Yes, that's why I think we'll see is continued um growth in the in the moderate range. And I think what you're seeing really is

a pickup and growth globally. And we aren't just where we were before the pandemic, but in some indicators like consumer wealth, we actually have far exceeded uh the levels that we had pre pandemic. So in some ways, economy unbelievably is even better off than it was before we had the COVID crisis. So that's a great foundation to keep moving forward. Right, consumer wealth has far exceeded if you happen to be part of that group, as we know.

At the same time, there's incredible gaps in this community, and it's something that the Federal Reserve, led by J. Powell, increasingly is looking at that. How might that impact his moves when it comes to policy in your view. We know they have the dual mandate, but J. Powell and company and others have talked about the importance of when we see the job market come back, that it's not just white color jobs or the high end jobs. It is much more diverse and impacts more of the labor

market spectrum. Yes, and actually we have already started to see that. We've already started to see the increase in the bottom say to quintiles of the marketplace. Actually as far as those way just actually moving up greater. Of course there are a lot lower than the top quintile, but store actually seeing that turn, and I think that's

perhaps somewhat a shortage of labor. I think it's also reflecting globally that depending on the swam back away from some of the emerging markets like China, and it will really benefit our workers long term that we're not having our wages depressed by very very cheap imports. So I

think it's good all around fundamentally. One of the things that stood out from Michael McKee or Michael McKee's conversation with the Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan is that he did talk about the virus and the vaccine, saying we still have um to weather the virus specifically, and he

did say he's watching the delta variant. How many conversations around the zoom table or the virtual table at Wells Fargo do you folks talk about specifically maybe what is next when it comes to COVID nineteen and particularly the delta variant and the impact I could potentially have in

our society. Well, the conversations that I've had and what I've heard from companies are really that their concerns about COVID, they always throw it in there is really very very much diminished just because a law of large numbers says that more than half of people at least in America have gotten at least one of the shots. Uh So that even if you have an impact from the delta variants, it's impact, it's going to be relatively small. The other

fundamentals are so strong. I think that says the economy is going to power ahead. In fact, it looks if anything like we have a labor shortage. So that says that the outlook for labor is going to be very good. How quickly does that labor shortage right itself? As are Michael McKee reminded it's not new jobs that are being created, we're basically, you know, filling the existing ones that were

lost because of the pandemic. Well, that's all fine, because it still says every month more and more people are getting hired and the average wages are moving up. So that's a great base to build on. And then I think as we move on, we'll start to see new businesses, new jobs be created and does Okay, So what keeps you up at night in terms of when you look

at the investment markets? Uh, well, I would say that we feel pretty optimistic if we would see after mid year, if we would see a dramatic slow down, because it turns out that growth is really being pulled down, maybe from COVID around the world, maybe Chinese growth, we just sload a tiny bit decelerates and that pulls down global growth. We're not worried at all about inflation. We agree with the Fed, maybe not all their policy, but we think that we won't see inflation continue at uh at this

pace for very long. We think inflational peter out like a half of the year. Uh. Why because um, I think that number one globalization always deflationary technology is deflationary and really um when you look at wages, wages are growing up three and a half percent, but a lot of what people spend the money on cars, housing, have actually gone up fifteen or twenty. So that says the consumers may in fact have their real wealth a little bit pinged as we go forward from these input pressures.

So we think that ultimately the we'll see declining inflation back to that two percent. When it comes to the fixed income market, is there a part of the market that you like at all? Well, we still like how yield, although it really isn't how yielding anymore. You're talking three to four percent. Most bonds trading at a big premium, but default rates have gone down to between one and two percent. So it's a market that doesn't seem to have a lot of risk. As long as economy is growing,

the Fed keeps liquidity flooded. We think it's the way to at least get another one or two percentage points more than higher quality securities. All right, we're gonna run, Hey, Marky, thank you so much, cutting us down to the closing bell on this Wednesday market Bittel, she's managing director senior portfolio manager at Wells Fargo Asset Management. They've got about five ninety nine billion in assets under management, joining us on the phone from Boston. Thanks for listening to Bloomberg

Business Week. Download the podcast on iTunes, Soundcroud or Bloomburn Job, and you can also listen to our radio show at two pm Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, or watch us on YouTube search Bloomberg Global News.