Welcome to a special holiday edition of Bloomberg day Break. US markets are closed for President's Day. I'm Nathan Hager, and coming up on today's program, what's ahead for earnings from the world's number one big box retailer, Plus how to prepare for a second Trump presidency, why the obvious market bets might not be the right ones, And we speak to a big name in architecture and design here his take on getting workers back to the office. That's
all straight ahead on this show. First, let's begin with a conversation on earnings from Walmart. The companies do out with fourth quarter results on Tuesday. Here for a preview is Bloomberg Intelligence Senior analyst Jennifer Bartashis, who keeps an eye on all things retail for us. Jen great to have you with us on the holiday. So this is a holiday quarter for Walmart. Shall we say it's going to be happy returns?
In general? I think it was a very strong holiday season for Walmart. When consumers are in that placed directly into Walmart's strength. And when we look at what we observed in the stores, you know, we saw a lot of you know, customer engagement with with Walmart during the entire quarter from Black Friday all the way through, and so there's every reason to think that they should they should have a pretty good quarter.
Are we going to see the kind of markdowns around the holidays that could eat into margins?
Well, actually, I think that, you know, Walmart has done a very good job of changing the way they plan for holiday and being much more measured with regards to inventory. When we really run into problems with markdowns, it's when there's just too much inventory and they're not able to
sell through it. In our channel checks when we've been in stores, we actually didn't see a very high level of markdowns, which is very very promising, and that means that they really probably sold through the majority of their holiday inventory according to plans, so that should have very little impact on gross margin at least for the quarter.
So what are we thinking that we're going to see in terms of the sales mix. When you think about a holiday quarter, you're thinking about a lot of big ticket gift items. Possibly at the same time, Walmart has a lot of those staples that it sells throughout the year. I'm thinking about groceries and other lower cost items. So what are we thinking in terms of a sales mix around a holiday quarter.
Well, even for the holiday quarter, I think their sales mix still skews to the consumables. If you think about Thanksgiving fell in the quarter, that's a huge food holiday. We saw traffic spike at Walmart as people were going in to buy ingredients for those celebrations, and they just
sell so much food. But the good news is that because inflation has been moditoring moderating a little bit, and because Walmart was really quite outspoken and with regards to holding prices study from last year, especially on holiday like holiday related foods, there may been a little extra money in people's pockets to actually buy into the higher margin
part of the store, which is general merchandise. And while we didn't expect to see a lot of big tickets sales, we do expect that they'll have done a little bit better on things like apparel, beauty items, things that are smaller level indulgences but make good gifting items.
It would be interesting to see if we do get that kind of mix, because even though inflation is coming down, it is still at pretty elevated level. So I wonder what you're thinking in terms of what we could see when it comes to consumers possibly trying to buy items that sort of protect them from inflation at a place like Walmart.
Well, you know, with regards to inflation, you know, we are seeing some disinflation in food, but it's not across every category. And so what we're continuing to see customers and consumers gravitate to value and so, you know, where they feel that they're getting a good value. Walmart has been pretty aggressive in rollbacks where they've seen inflation come down,
and that generally attracts consumer attention. And so the inflation, this inflation we're seeing is more on the food side of the business at this point, and so we you know, we just we we do see that as a positive, but it's still going to be a little bit of time before things really smooth out.
And of course Walmart has a fair amount of competition in the food space, not just from its more traditional competitors, but even now from Amazon, which is of course a huge competitor for Walmart. Just across the board, Where do you see Walmart in terms of market share against some of those other really big competitors in the retail space.
Well, Walmart does have the lion's share of market share, especially in grocery. But you know, there's there are never ending threats with regards to competition in this space. Because it's a very low margin business and because it is an area where everybody needs to buy food and basic essentials, there's just a lot of competition. Amazon has definitely been sending indications that it wants to step up its game and that it wants to become even more kind of
double down in grocery. There are some big pieces of that strategy that we need to understand a little bit better and how quickly that will materialize. Because Walmart's really big strength is that they have all their stores right, It's easy for people to stop in, it's easy to do click and collect and place orders online and pick it up at the store, and then they also have
their marketplace. And so for Amazon to compete effectively, they also they really need to solve that problem of how you compete with that many physical stores, and that'll take some time for Amazon to to to figure that out.
On the general merchandise side, though, one of the other things that we're watching carefully is the rise of like Tamu and Sian, and because these are direct competitors, more on the marketplace side and more on the general merchandise side, so we are seeing a lot of competitive dyce across the board for Walmart.
Bloomberg Intelligence Senior analyst Jennifer bartashis Thanks for this, Jen, really good having you on with us, and we'll be looking out for those earnings from Walmart. They are due out tomorrow around seven am Wall Street time, but before that, roughly an hour earlier, we expect results from Home Depot and those details could give us a check on the housing and home improvement markets. So here to discuss those numbers before they come out, is your reading covers Housing
for Bloomberg Intelligence. Thanks for being here, Drew. Of course, we know just how challenged the housing market's been with high mortgage rates and high listing prices. How could that play into the results we get from Home Depot on Tuesday.
Sure, So heading into the results, the bar is pretty low for home Depot. If you recalled, during their last earnings release, they guided to same store sales being down about three to four percent for the full year, So that's kind of what we're expecting to see in the fourth quarter as well. If you look at some of the data on retail sales. You'll see that when you look at home centers, the market's still declining in the
low to mid single digits. So it's still a challenging environment, but I think the attention has really started to shift to twenty twenty four. And on that note, we would expect that they're going to suggest probably a remodeling market that's relatively flat next year, and that would be similar to some of the commentary that we heard from some of their suppliers. So better trends in the second half, first half, but still a little bit of a challenging market out there.
You wonder, well whether that outlook for the second half could stay as resilient if we continue to see interest rates at the levels that we're at right now. In this expectation in the market that maybe the Fed's not going to be able to move as quickly as we might like. I mean, that could play into the outlook for home depot as well, couldn't it.
Yeah, that's a great point because part of the reason that we think the second half will get better is because we're assuming in our base case that mortgage rates fall down to somewhere six and quarter six and a half percent as we get through the year, and the idea is that would boost existing home sales. And as we know, people that move tend to spend significantly more
than people that don't move. So to the extent that interest rates remain high, you know, we have seen a lot of volatility, and with that hot CPI print we had recently, we actually see mortgage rates back above seven percent. So to the extent that rates remain high and volatile, that could certainly impact existing home sales and ultimately demand for remodeling spending.
And to the point about home remodel spending, you got to wonder what the appetite is for a big home projects right now that home depot caters to with inflation where it is, I mean, how can you game that out?
Yees. So, we have seen a pullback in big ticket discretionary purchases. That's really been one of the drivers over the last couple of years that's really helped boost sames source sales, and that's where we're seeing a pretty big pullback, declines in the mid single digit range. We don't think these projects are necessarily being destroyed, but they're being delayed.
So we do think that as existing home sales start to pick up and we get to the tail end of twenty twenty four and into twenty twenty five, we do expect to see a rebound, and one of the reasons is because what we're seeing with home equity. Home prices are up more than forty percent over the last couple of years, and homeowners are sitting on record home equity. On average, average home owner has about three hundred thousand
dollars in equity. So we do think that that big ticket market will start to unfreeze towards a tail end of next year and into twenty twenty five.
Yeah, that'll be an interesting point to see whether that home equity continues to keep the consumer going like we've seen, there's been so much resilience in consumer spending despite inflation. When it comes to this quarter, though, Drew, how much of a factor does seasonality play in? How do companies like home Depot typically do in a holiday quarter?
Yeah, so when you think of home Depot, traditionally their strong season is in the spring. That's you know, where they make a lot of money. But that being said, home Depot and those, you know, the broader home improvement industry has really started to lean more into the holiday because they've seen a lot of demand from consumers. You know, that includes Halloween where they've had great success, you know, great great deals on Black Friday, and they've continued that
into the Christmas holiday. You've see them expand their assortments and can consumers have really reacted positive, positively. So it's not an area where you would traditionally think of a home improvement retailer like home Depot really leaning into, but it is. It is something that they've got more involved in over the last couple of years.
And you can't help but notice the inflatables that time of year that put out on the lawn. Now, I know you've done some research over at BI on the growth opportunity that home Depot could get out of the professional contractor segment as opposed to DIY customers. Is that something that home Depots moving into more aggressively and can we see that reflected in the results as well?
Yeah? Great question. So in the near term, the professional contractor is still out out performing the DIY customer. But if we step back and we look big picture, home Depot generates about fifty percent of their sales from the professional contractor on the other hand, Lows generates about twenty five percent, so that's been one of the key drivers of relative performance for Home Depot. But what's interesting is we kind of look down the road a little bit.
They're tackling a new market for what they call complex pros. So these are bigger projects, think of large scale remodels and renovations, and what they're trying to do is really consolidate the number of suppliers a contractor needs to work with. So you think of a traditional contractor, maybe they're getting windows and doors from one supplier, they're getting flooring and cabinets from somewhere else. So what Home Depot is looking to do, and they've rolled this out in a couple markets,
is consolidate that relationship. They want to bring everything in house, and they're looking to be able to do this type of project in bulk. So it's something that represents a huge untapped market for them. It's probably something that's going to develop over the next several years, but as you mentioned, a big growth growth opportunity.
Nonetheless, do you think that's the kind of thing that could play into the outlook for this year that we get from Home Depot this week so.
I don't know that necessarily that it's going to move the needle in twenty twenty four. You know, we do think that the pro will probably come back with greater strength towards the end of the year. But in terms of this kind of new initiative on those large complex projects, you think that's probably more of a twenty twenty five into twenty twenty six story.
Interesting. Well, we're going to be looking out for those results from home depot just around the corner here. So thanks for this, Drew, really good having you on with us.
Thank you.
That's Bloomberg Intelligence Senior analyst Drew Redding. Up next on the program, how to Prepare for a second Trump presidency. John Authurs joins us with his opinion, including why the obvious market bets might not be the right ones. That's straight ahead on this special holiday edition of Bloomberg day Break. I'm Nathan Hager, and this is Bloomberg. You're listening to a special holiday edition of Bloomberg Daybreak. US markets are
closed for President's Day. I'm Nathan Hager. That as we get closer to the next presidential election, the question that many investors are asking themselves more and more is this how should I position for a second Trump presidency? To try to answer that question, we bring in Bloomberg opinion
columnist John Authurs, who writes on markets and investment. Great to have you on with us, John, And while none of this is a foregone conclusion, we did see how caught off guard markets were after Trump one in twenty sixteen. Are we in a better position this time around? I mean, we kind of know what we're going to get from a Trump presidency in some respects.
In some respects, I mean, I think that the big difference is that absolutely everybody knows that it could happen, whereas eight years ago most people didn't think that. The other interesting thing about last time around, though, was that the actual impact of how Trump would affect markets was very difficult to gauge. So you had the last few months before the election. Every time something looked good for Trump, the markets would sell off, and then when he actually
surprisingly won, the markets had a great boom. So that in itself makes it very hard to track what he's
going to do. I think what is intriguing at the moment, and I'll try to stay in my lane as a financial rather than the political pundit, but the belief is very strong, even among relatively more conservative outlets, that Trump two point zero is going to be different, that he's really going to do populism properly this time, that he's going to be genuinely authoritarian, that he's going to do protectionism properly this time, and that he's really going to
leave NATO, et cetera, et cetera. That is interesting how strong that point of view has become and how quickly it to shape At about the point that Rond de Santis has plainly blown it, towards the end of last year, it really became very clear that it was going to be a Trump candidacy.
Again.
It's interesting how that suddenly became something approaching a media panic, and it's hard to imagine that that would also have had an effect on the market. So we're dealing with what is with something that people can understand and can accept as a possible outcome, which is different from eight years ago. But I'm not sure that the level of
certainty about exactly what he would mean is there. I mean, in terms of his economics eight years ago, Trump's first term was basically straightforward chamber of commerce, traditional conservative republican economics, tax cuts, lower regulation, nothing that would particularly scare the market. Some of the stuff that's being talked about this time. If he really does try for something more genuinely economically populist, wouldn't necessarily be so popular with the markets.
Yeah, and some of the things that have been talked about to your point have already started to raise some eyebrows, This idea of a sixty six zero percent tariff on Chinese imports and elevated tariffs across the board for other markets. I mean, how do you prepare for something like that? Is that something that investors really do need to keep in mind in the event that the election does go Trump's way.
I think you can tell that investors do have that in mind because of what's been happening to Chinese stocks, which there are many good reasons to be relatively negative about China these days. The fact that, depending on which index you're using, they are Chinese stocks and net worth
no more than they were twenty years ago. When you think of the growth that's happened in China's economy in that period, Plainly that would make no sense at all unless people were trying to factor in some fairly considerable risk of major protectionism. Ultimately, I think the way that benefits if there is somebody to go long on, and obviously you want to be short on things directly affected
with China. At the moment, there is very unobtrusively there is a big boom in Mexico, which is extremely counterintuitive given that Trump's first policy pronouncement when he first immediately after coming down that escalator in twenty fifteen, was to attack Mexico. Mexico is probably the single biggest beneficiary of a really big tarif on China because it has much more of a chance to get to get jobs back
at on its side of the border. And it would behoove the US to make it easier to builds jobs and factories at the border, because that way people are more likely to immigrate from Central Americans stay there rather than try to cross the border.
What could it mean for the dollar the bond market if the president, if the former president does become president, succeeds in doing populism, as you say, right this.
Time, I think if he does populism right and again, politically, there are there are lots of things wrong with the way the American and Western European economies have gone over the last few decades, so it's a perfectly defensible policy choice to make. I think it's pretty straightforward that markets wouldn't like it. However, on the issue of tariffs, if he's really going to go with big protectionism, that's bad for the dollar because the foreign exchange market will generally
try to counteract tariffs. So if that if if you're making imports that much less competitive through adding on tariffs, that the the currency market will generally make them more competitive again by by changing the by changing the exchange rates. I think the very interesting subject that may come up, and which is a much more valid subject than any other,
is fiscal policy. If Trump is at the moment, there's in terms of neither Biden nor Trump has any real right to moral right to complain about the scale of the deficit at the moment, because they both started their terms with by taking actions that quite obviously increase the deficit. Huge unfunded tax cutman, you know, the the the spending that Biden did at the beginning of his turn. There does come a point, and when rates are higher, that
point is closer. When you really can't finance too much more borrowing or you can, but it just has to be at higher rates. That is one that I think there is. There's certainly a chance if if you get a Trump two point zero and he starts with a with a tax cut in a tariff and spend some money on something boosts defense spending, something like that, it's possible that you really do get a bond market strike that the you know, the bonds, bond yields shoot up.
And to your point, John, the one of the big legislative victories that Trump one point I had was a massive tax cut, as you glued to. It raises the question about whether the FED steps in to sort of counterbalance whatever might happen on the fiscal side. And even during the first go round for former President Trump, we saw him really hit the FED hard, at least rhetorically on social media. Yes, what's the potential impact on FED independence of a second Trump presidency.
That's a very interesting one. I certainly get the impression, but again we need to see how you know the difference between bark and bite. He did appoint j Powell, who, at the point that he hired him had been a FED government for I think as long as ten years. It's certainly been around for a long time. He had never dissented from any of the monetary policy decisions they
had made in the years before he could have. You know, there were a couple of plausible candidates Kevin Walsh Taylor that there were some candidates who would have very clearly really shaken the FED up, and instead he really moved. It's difficult to see anything that Jay Powell has done that you can confidently say Janet Yellen wouldn't have done. So let's get that, get that that clear at first.
It's one of the things that happened in Trump one point, oh, was that he blinked on the possibility of really shaking up the FED. And in terms of the institutions, the Senate bulked at one or two of the obviously unqualified people he wanted to put on the board. Now, if you have and I think if he does win, the
chances that he has the Senate very high. If he has a majority in the in the Senate and that majority has moved more in you know, the marga direction and further away from the you know, Chamber of Commerce institutional Republican wing, Yeah, it's possible he could really do some things to the FEDS in he could effectively change the Fed's independence by bringing on some much more radically
minded people. That that is a possibility. Again, I'm not going to tell you that the FED has done a perfect job in every respect and could not is above criticism, because that's obviously not true. I again, from the point of view of how markets would deal with it, they like the devil they know, and that would scare them. They are much happier with monetary policy being at least to some extent, free from democracy, free from the traviles of being being buffeted by democracy. So that is a
the the FED could become a very interesting question. I mean for his first year. I don't know of a way. I mean, there's you know, we now have an impeachment of Secretary mayorcus I mean, unless they want to impeach J Powell or something. I can't imagine we get two thirds in the Senate, I don't I'm not, as far as I'm aware, he can't fire Powell until his term ends a year into the next presidential ten uh. Generally speaking, if the if the FED thinks fiscal policy is too
stimulative and may tend to make inflation worse. It's just straightforwardly in their mandate. Okay, they'd better tighten monetary policy accordingly. Yeah. That that's that they're not allowed to sort of get into a you know, political flame fight about whether it was sensible to be spending more money. But they are allowed to say, we see this as increasing the risks
of overheating and inflation, so we're raising rates. That's you know, that's that's very central to the traditional punch bowl rule.
It's a lot to think about as we get closer to finding out what version of the next presidency we're going to get check. That's Bloomberg Opinion columnist John Authurs. And up next on the program, we talked return to Office. Stay with us for a conversation with a big name in architecture and design for his take on getting workers in the bill. That's straight Ahead. On the special holiday edition of Bloomberg Daybreak. I'm Nathan Hager, and this is.
Going to.
Welcome back to the special holiday edition of Bloomberg Daybreak. US markets are closed for President's Day. I'm Nathan Hager. Now let's bring you a conversation with a man who wants to change the face of our cities. Thomas Heatherwick is the designer behind New York's Little Island and Vessel in Manhattan's Hudson Yard district, as well as Google's new London headquarters. He says our buildings need to be more
human and less boring. Heatherwick has said Vessel will reopen to the public this year after being closed in twenty twenty one for safety reasons. He's been speaking with Bloomberg Daybreak Europe banker Steven Carrol Stephen Nathan.
Thomas Heatherwick is one of the best known names in modern building design. His studio has won more than one hundred awards. Cities from New York to London to Tokyo boast examples of his work, and he even designed the cauldron for the Olympic flame in the twenty twelve London Games. Now he wants to end what he's called a blandemic in buildings. He's written a book on the subject called Human Eyes. I've been discussing this with him and how he's applying this philosophy to his latest projects.
We talk about how nature is good and there is evidence showing that people take less time to heal in spaces where they can look out at nature, and what nature has is a necessary visual complexity. And we've had buildings for the last eighty years which are flatter and smoother, and shinier and plainer and more serious than ever in history. And what the science is starting to show is that they aren't just maybe not nice. Some people might call them ugly, but they actually your body starts to go
into stress when you don't have necessary visual complexity. But I'm not calling to go back to the past and copyhold buildings. Even some of the new buildings, they've really made an effort to put visual enrichment and detail into them, which makes it interesting to walk around. But it's not just a cosmetic thing. What we've discovered is our humanness needs places to have that interestingness.
That's a difficult conversation though, when you're thinking about where the money goes in a project. What violence should we be placing on design when it comes to a building like that versus the cast values?
The word that value really is the right word. The problem we had was that that style that came in that said flatter, smoother, shinier, more serious, plainer was fashionably good, was not good for us, but it was also a bit cheaper, and so with the Humanized campaign, we're really arguing that we need to make a step change a
bit like we've had in the world of architecture. We talk about the green premium, which is that a building you do need to pay a little bit more for it to be highly environmentally good, performing well, but unless people care about it. We've had this dirty secret in construction, which is buildings get demolished, and so the worst value is to build buildings that society doesn't care about because
they get demolished. So, for example, with commercial buildings, the average age in the UK of a commercial building is forty years, so if I was a commercial building, I would have been killed thirteen years ago. And the carbon in construction is five times that of the whole aviation industry. So they're bad environmentally, they're bad socially because they don't bring us together. Yeah, and after COVID, when the digital revolution is really kicked in, you can stay at home,
get a PhD, work by everything. Cities are dangerous places when you don't have people in them, So we need cities that bring us together and nurture the togetherness and not being scared of each other.
And does that need to go into planning rules then, is it's the question that we need to change the regulations around buildings in the same way that we do around sustainability to incorporate rules like that.
Planning's being quite basic and it's a very difficult thing to get right. But in the book we talk about the three distances you can experience buildings. If you imagine being one hundred and fifty meters away from a building, seeing it from a distance, how it fits in with the city. You then look at the street distance, which is when you're starting to be maybe only twenty or
thirty meters away. But the most impactful and the one that we've found the least regulatory support for design teams for society is door distance, because actually your emotion isn't at the top, it's at the bottom, because that's where we all are, where us as pass us by walk past, And we spend too much time talking about insides of buildings. A thousand times more people will walk past the outside
than ever go inside. So designing for buildings to be givers rather than take us I mean selfishly, as a designer of buildings, I want your great grandchildren to say about one of the buildings I've done, No, don't knock it down, let's repair it, let's adjust it, instead of saying meh, knock it down, because the carbon in buildings is it's ridiculous.
On the projects that you've worked on, look for example the Google campus, the King's Cross which people might be very familiar with in London as well. There's a fantastic roof garden going onto the top of that, which is a really interesting design feature. But again that's when you talk about perspective that's not at the street level, whereas when you walk by its street level from the images that we've seen, does it look that different from what
else that you see in the area. How would you contribute to resolving that issue.
Well, I'm actually really pleased you've brought it up because you don't know what we're doing at the ground level. It is an enormous building. It's three hundred and thirty meters long. It's the same size as a cruise liner coming into King's Cross, so as you will see and what isn't apparent at the moment behind the hoardings and the amazing thing about the building is it's lifted up two stories and so underneath we can build a village.
So that village will start to be being constructed this year and that will be a higgeldy pigglety collection of wooden sub buildings of differing heights. They tip forward at different angles, they're not in alignment, they're different colors, they have different people and community organizations as part of them. So in a sense we're going to be doing a
radical chance to reinvent High Street. But to my point, we judge buildings all the time by the top, just as you have the ground is actually where your feeling is. As you say, no one's in a helicopter looking down on the amazing garden we put on the.
Top AND's tonally they're lucky people who work there that get to use those.
Yeah, and it's wonderful. I mean we're in an incredible building at this moment. You're one of the privileged people in London who will get to be in this building, as will the people in our Google building. But your real duty, I believe as a building designer you're to some extent a public servant, and so what are you making a building give? But I don't think this is
sort of just altruistic. It means that for a Google an organization like that, what does your employee think as they walk into that building, as they tell their grandmother they work there. How do the social values of that building manifest? And for a very long time, we've had
buildings that have been takers, not givers. You know how many times have you walked down a street past a big glass lobby dead to the passer by and you can see the some luxury private world beyond and you can see the leather sofa and the marble reception desk, but it's got nothing for you. It's almost rubbing in its exclusiveness. So the Google building in King's Cross will be the opposite of that.
Okay. I want to ask you about your journey on coming to these conclusions in this latest book as well, because you know you've had these huge tryants. We've talked about some of them already. One project which has attracted criticism was Vassal in New York. It had to be closed to the public since twenty twenty one and over a number of suicides that happened there. I wonder how you feel about that project now and how you reflect on what you learned from that process.
Vessel was a project commissioned to help create the atmosphere and identity of a new district in New York that hadn't existed before. It was a very very brave piece of commissioning and an incredible investment in helping to wholeheartedly make distinctiveness in a place. But it timed very unfortunately. It timed its opening just before this terrible pandemic, something that affected the mental health of millions of people all over the world, and some of that mental health impact
was particularly felt amongst young people. That project was astonishingly compelling in how it engaged people. It was a number one backdrop on Grinder and in Tinder and all these things. And the project was built above code. The barriers all around it were built above the code that would have been needed for any normal structure. But its compellingness had a dark side, and so there were no accidents on it. It was very sadly chosen by a tiny handful of
people to to this terrible, awful thing. So this year is the year that it's going to be refitted with a protected, protective barrier. But it was this sort of dark side of its success, was this use that people had. I mean there are nearby there are levels that are just as high as many bits of the vessel which have balustrades that no one was choosing to jump from. So it's it was very sad and telling thing of
our time. It will be later this year that these the safety measures are going to be implemented by the commissioners of the project. So I'm pleased to be able to say.
That, do they diminish your design in any way? Do you think to have protective screens like that erected on to the.
No, because we've worked with them and they've been really sensitive to getting the design to have the similar quality as the original vessel structure. So it's not a kind of thing thrown on at the last minute. It's had an enormous amount of development and reflection to get it right. So my hope is that it will and there at the moment there is a sample section of it on the vessel and it looks really good, so it's it doesn't need to be at the cost of the project.
The whole point of the project is it's public. My passion, all my studios projects are public, and look at Little Island. If you get you know just down from there that opened three years ago and is just packed with people and loved and has these free performances on it and is a main place for New Yorker's fitness and visitors, and is all about the river and nature. So I think we are hungry for public spaces that are wholehearted and which sort of validate all of us.
You know.
The thing that sort of inspires me really is that there are seven point whatever billion people on the planet, and every one of us thinks we're special. It's human nature. And I think for too long we have not designed the places the public life. You know how they say you can't change what you can't measure. We haven't been measuring the biggest experiences of buildings, who are on the street outside, who will never come in.
That's Thomas Heatherwick, the founder and design director of Heathwic Studios. He's not daunted by the prospect of higher interest rates or remote working threatening the future of offices. He says he's hopeful and excited by the challenge of adapting existing buildings to new uses. And that's a question, he says, of being ingenious with what you've got.
Nathan, Thanks Steven. That's Bloomberg Stephen Carroll from our European headquarters in London. And that does it for this special holiday edition of Bloomberg Daybreak. Join us again Tuesday morning at five am Wall Street Time for the latest on markets overseas and all the news you need to start your day. I'm Nathan Hager. Stay with us. The top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now