How We're Getting The Vaccine To Our Patients: Heal's Dua

and on Bloomberg dot com. Dr do A Dr Rene do A is founder and chief medical officer of a company called Hell h e a L. It provides on demand telemedicine as well as some in home dr house calls, and Dr do A joins US Now. Dr do A, how will your company and companies like a deal with the distribution of the vaccine? Do you have orders in? Do you expect to be contacted? How does it all work so so far? Thanks first of all for having me on this show. Uh, first of all, it's it's

kind of been an interesting roll out. You know, about a week ago, I was concerned that the logistics and the routing of getting this vaccine around we're going to be there very difficult. It seems that piece by piece these items are falling into place. I was asked to fill out some paperwork on the CDCs website to apply for not just my medical teams, but also our patients that we serve um to to to try to acquire enough vaccine for those those members of the team in

each and every one of our markets. I'm waiting to hear back, but I've been consistently following up as well to see what's going on. I've also been seeing that the hospitals on which I'm on staff are trying as well to have a rollout process, and there have been glitches with accessibility to you know, sign up forms and email addresses and so that that's also been a very interesting perspective as well. It's, of course, as expected, rushed,

but certainly hopefully will happen this month. So DR do you know, it seems like what we're hearing in terms of the rollout is healthcare workers, folks in our retirement homes and so on, to get getting to those critical populations initially and then out to the broader populations over time. What is your best guess as to when the average American out there will have access uh to this vaccine. So the goal is to have a hundred million people vaccinated in the first part of so I think that

by the end of summer, the average person will be vaccinated. Now, keep in mind this vaccine is for those folks sixteen and up, so we still have work to do for children. Is it fine to let children be are among the last to get this vaccine or should they be earlier? I think with children we see a very interesting infectivity. So you've of course read in the news and seen in the news that children have died because of COVID.

They've certainly been infected, they're certainly carrying and transmitting. But I think what we've also seen is the population suffering the most are those that are elderly and immuno compromised. And of course my colleagues on front lines are being exposed, um in their efforts to keep people safe. So I

would say those are definitely the right priorities. So Dr Derot, you know, in this country at least, uh, there is a sizeable percentage of the population that just doesn't feel comfortable with the old concept of receiving vaccines for you know, the measles amongst and other things. Um, how do we as a society, you know, get those people to accept this vaccine and take this vaccine. It's such a challenging question. We we deal with it in the routine vaccines such

as MMR as you described. And so this concept of herd immunity, where enough people are vaccinated so that as a population we are all protected, is the most critical

piece to our survivability. The amount of lives we have lost with COVID is tragic, is an understatement, right, So we all have to do our part, and even while we are being vaccinated piece by piece, you know, population type by population type, until we are all vaccinated effectively, we won't have herd immunity, which means we do need to wear masks, we do need to uh physically separate, and these measures will go on and on until we

are safe literally from each other. At this point, Dr Dooan, would you feel comfortable if you had vaccine going out in company or would you still be worried that you might be able to pass it on? So I I plan if if I am able to get the vaccine, I plan to take the vaccine. I plan to vaccinate all of our medical teams and immunocompromised and elderly patients, and I will hope that as doing in doing so, we are doing our part to protect our communities, and

that's exactly our plan forward. Sorry, should be a little more clear. What I meant was, would you be worried that you could still be passing on the virus? Well, well, so there are two vaccines that are required. The first dose is reportedly effective, but you want a second dose. But yes, I would continue to physically separate and wear

a mask. Not so much because I am worried about me transmitting though of course every vaccine takes time, as you know, to ramp up and build the immunity, but additionally because others around me are not yet vaccinated, and if I am carrying during that period of of immunity building, I don't want to infect them. Dr Rene Do, thank you so much. We really appreciate your thoughts and your expertise.

Dr Rene Do a founder and chief medical officer of Hell joining us on the phone from Los Angeles, giving us the latest on these vaccines which are just beginning to roll out across the US. We're waiting for modarren and later this week to receive it's FDA approval UH and that can join the Visor vaccine in the marketplace.

As we build this vaccination population well, we got some weaker than expected retail sales this morning, suggesting once again that there is a lot of stress in the economy, particularly with the consumer of the question is what can the folks in Congress do? What can the Federal Reserve? Dude kind of ease the pain. Danielle di Martino Booth CEO and Director of Intelligence at Quill Intelligence, also a former advisor at the Dallas Federal Reserve, any Bloomberg opinion contributor.

Also she's the author of a book entitled fed Up, an insiders take on why the Federal Reserve is bad for America? What do you expect, Danielle, thank you so much for joining us. What do you expect this Federal Reserve which is bad for America? As per your book? What do you expect to hear from the Fed chairman of this afternoon? Well, it'll be interesting to see what he has to say. I think he's finally going to

get the stimulus that he wants. I I I suspect that it's not near the price tag that he was hoping for. Uh. You know that the Fed wants to commit to capping longer maturity treasury yield, and it wants to buy longer maturity treasuries to hold those prices down, but those those yields won't seem to come up enough for them to to launch yield curve control um. So

Bloomberg's I I Red Jersey did some fantastic work. I hope everybody thought on what some of the possibilities would be in terms of just the numb the amount of bonds that that the FED can buy if they were to, if they were to buy the entire Tips market, which would be crazy, it would destroy the structure of the kIPS market. There's nearly seven hundred billion more that they could buy there. You know that that would continue to

pump up the inflation narrative. Or they could go from you know the seven to twenty area on the yield curve in terms of treasury maturities, and that there's another seven hundred billions they can buy there. But again, I think what the Fed wants more than anything else, And we'll be looking to Janet yell and to see if she doesn't push this is is the supply of longer maturity treasuries itself to increase because those buckets are relatively small.

What happens if we get stimulus, but it's nine billion or below, so less than the you know, the trillions that Democrats wanted, but also you know, not enough for states to to get some of the pie. Well, and I think I think you hit the nail on the head. They're vunny because you've seen all of these job cut announcement announcements come out of whether it's Washington, d C.

Or San Francisco or New York around their transportation authorities. Uh. And that's just going to make a bad problem worse if you think about it, because so many of the lower income workers who can't work from home are going to have the means by which they transport themselves to work, uh cut that much more. So. You know, the Republicans have been very articulate in saying this is not a

stimulus package. We anticipate that the economy is going to accelerate because of the vaccine being distributed throughout throughout the country. So this is not stimulus, this is just pure relief. Well, you know, this is also a foot race between now and then and the damage that's going to be inflicted on the economy because of this spike in hospitalizations and fatality. The question becomes one of is their stimulus necessary the minute Joe Biden takes office. Yeah, that's kind of where

I wanted to go, Danielle. What do you think it's got to be presumably on the top of us to do to do list for those first one days. What do we know about Joe Biden his administration kind of what they're thinking about in terms of fiscal stimulus. Well, I certainly think that they would be huge advocates for getting as much aid to states and locality as possible.

And you know, if I'm an a Biden administration, it's difficult to do any planning, just as if just as it's difficult for most of us to plan out whether or not inflation or is coming or not because of these two senatorial runoff elections in Georgia. And that's how critical they've become. They will be the determinant of the size of the next stimulus package and it's composition and how aggressive it can be. Yeah, it's a it's it's

going to be a difficult winter, Danniel. What do you think is priced into this market given that we've only gone up or sideways, we've barely gone down since mart Well, I think the market is is certainly pricing in a best case scenario in terms of the the economy being fully reopened by the time spring rolls around. That is

where I feel these markets are priced. For a friend of mine, PHILLIPA Done, did some fabulous work looking at the Schiller Cape price to earnings, the longer term price to earnings ratio on the SMP back and right now stocks are trading in the percentile historically. So you know, I have to say that that that the stock market right now is priced such that we are a fully open economy in the headed into Q two. Um Daniel,

what do you think of Janet Yellen as a Secretary Treasury. Well, you know, I've been openly critical of Janet Yellen because in in higher testimonies, in statement she has she has spoken to the fact that she didn't really understand the makeup the structure of the financial system and did not see the crisis coming as we were headed into the

last crisis. Uh. You know, she's a labor economist by training, and I have my I have my my doubts as to whether when the repo overnight repo crisis cropped up at the end of last year when that was what we were talking about. I don't know how well equipped she is because of her background and I should say lack of background in the financial markets in being able to tackle something like that, especially because you have another

pure academic running the New York Fed, John Williams. So I think somebody who was savvier to the structure of the markets, the plumbing of the financial system which we've we've discovered is so critical to the execution of quantitative easing or quantitative tightening and the ability for the normalized monetary policy. I would have preferred to have seen somebody who was much more familiar with the makeup of the markets.

But of course my opinion doesn't count because most of most of the political world knows that she will be able to cross that aisle. Well, there's also Chris Waller, who has not gotten through sanergy yet. So this particular meeting goes ahead without two governors as a vacancy to and Chris Waller, and uh, well see if that gets resolved as well next year. Um, Danielle, I presume you know a FED without all of its governors is not a fully functioning FED either. Well, you do want to

have all of the voices around that table. I would say, Vannie, though, that the leadership structure, those at the very top of the FED right now are extremely familiar with one another, so I wouldn't I'm not too I'm not too particularly

worried about that. One thing I would watch out for with today's meeting, in particular, is that we forget the last time that FED had Quie running, that they put unemployment rate targets out there, and they had to continuously move the goal post down further and further because they realized the markets could not be weaned off of que. In fact, at the time, J Powell himself said that

Quie had become habits forming to to the market. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to put another target out there, like the unemployment rate today that we that we didn't see some dissenting voices there on that committee. Danielle's thank you for that. Always some sobering advice there from daniel D. Martino, Booth CEO and Director of Intelligence

at Quill Intelligence, coming to us from Dallas, Texas. Well, we've been talking about the consumer whole year, really, but this morning we got retail sales data that we're a little bit less positive than we were anticipating so advanced month of a month, they were down one point one percent. Economists were looking for them to be just down point three percent. The control group was down a half a percent.

Economist were looking for that to be positive. Let's bring in somebody who handles consumers money their cash, and through his bank allows them to keep that cash on deposit if they wish. Brendan Coughland is head of consumer banking at Citizens Bank, and he's coming to us from Providence, Rhode Island today. So, Brendan, what have you seen with the amount of savings in your bank right now and whether it's increasing or decreasing. Yeah, we've seen very healthy

savings by the consumer. Uh. We're certainly not out of the woods yet with the economy, and Q one is certainly going to be a bit rough until the economy fully reopens. But the consumer has been very resilient through all this. In fact, much better than expected. Savings are really piling up through stimulus and with the economy shutting down in general, spending as you as you teased, and the open has been a little off. Having said that, what we're seeing is a real recovery on both credit

card spending and debit cards spending. So debit cards spending is actually up about fifteen percent right now year or a year on a dollar basis, and flatish on units. So customers aren't going to the grocery store two times a week, they're consolidating that into one one trip, and

they're spending a little bit more. And credit cards have actually come all the way back up to slightly positive year over year, So we're seeing consumer confidence come back a little bit in their behaviors around spending, which is certainly a good sign. Brendon, what are you seeing in terms of credit quality out there right now? Yeah, I have been, isn't lea surprised non credit quality And as I said a second ago, we're certainly not out of the woods yet, but we um we do have very

positive indicators on a relative basis on credit. So at its worst, we had eight percent of our portfolio in forbearance, which means uh, the customers taking a break from making their payments. That has geared down to about one point five percent, so the vast majority of customers have left

forbearance status. At the same time, our delinquency rates have actually gone down, not up, and so as these customers have migrated back into repayment, the vast, vast majority are landing on their feet, which is a very very good fine. So the remainder of customers are going to transition off through December and into January. So we'll have to help them make sure the remainder land on their feet. And certainly, uh, some of the stimulus talks out there could really help

make sure that's the case. What kind of loans are being asked for brendon Our companies that are looking for you know, fresh or extend the lines of credits, still doing that, or you know, have they decided to just close their business and mortgages. Yeah, so um um. On the commercial side of the bank and with our small businesses, certainly we saw a lot of them draw down at the height of the anxiety in April and May a

lot of that has gone back away. Liquidity is very strong with our businesses, both in the mid corporate and small business space. Um so that's kind of coming back to normal. We on the consumer side, we've seen actually pretty significant loan demand this year, and it's really led by two spots. Of course, mortgage is booming. We're having

a stellar year in UH in mortgages. The market could hit four trillion this year in mortgage originations, which is incredibly high, probably the largest year on record for mortgage originations just given the speed of rate drop that happened. And citizens is doing quite well UM in in the mortgage space taking market share. We're we we will potentially get close to fifth billion in mortgage originations UH this year, so very very strong year. The other product that has

stimulated a ton of demand is student loan refinancing. As rates drop, a lot more customers have been placed in the money, if you will, so there the rates offered today are much better than what they have today, and they're refinancing and restructuring their debt for payment savings, and of course, refinancing your student loan debt or your mortgage is in some ways a form of stimulus for the customer to put extra money in their pockets every month

and be able to help stimulate more spending and some of the savings that we've seen customers accelerate. Brendon talk to us about digital banking. I for one, has really ramped up my digital banking game during this pandemic. I'm suspecting other people have as well. Do you expect that to be a big trend going forward? Yeah, I do. Digital banking has been a trend that's been increasing for some time now, and this UH, the COVID period has

has massively accelerated UM digital banking activities. So our digital metrics are up over and a relatively short period of time, our brick and mortar banking is down about the same amount UH and and so what we're seeing is that customers are engaging with the digital UM mobile app to do their transactional banking much more frequently. They still want to talk to humans when they have a big life event, when they want to talk about retirement or their mortgage.

So it's very very important our brick and mortar strategy and our human interactions will be foundational to our our strategy and the industry going forward. But digital banking is accelerating at quite a clip, which which poses a lot of questions for retail banks. What should be the size of your brick and mortar network? UM, You know, do you have to upscale your colleagues to have them step up to more advice based banking versus transactional banking is

all that moves to a self serve model. Wow, Brandon, thanks so much for journeyings. We appreciate it. Brendan Coughlin, head of consumer banking for Citizens Bank. It is based in Providence Road Island, giving us a sense of that growth, Vonny in The shift to from bricks and mortars to digital is just a fascinating and it seems like it's going to be long term for sure, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens to all those hs BC branches that are closing down. Will other banks

make a bid? But you know, will there be any need? If there's going to be such a shift from big and mortar to digital, what's what will become of that? Realist exactly? I know, Just again speaking for myself, I've stepped up and done a lot more digital banking more than I did pre pandemic. Well, big in the US technology companies think Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, they've been facing much higher levels of regulatory scrutiny. Here in the US.

We have the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice looking at those big tech names. Now that European Union it wants new powers to curb tech companies dominance. To get some more color on this, we welcome Alex web European technology and media columns for Bloomberg Opinion. He joins us on the phone from London. Alex, thanks so much for joining us here. That the European Union has long

had a history of tightly monitoring US technology companies. What are they looking to do now for some of these big tech giants. So there are two proposals to regulation which are called spectively, the Digital Markets Act and the Innitial Services Act. And one will classify big companies essentially that there are ones you can think of um as gatekeepers and will there then subject them to particular rules which will make it harder to do some acquisitions and

protect smaller companies that operate on their platforms. And the punishments that they can be imposed are fines of up to ten percent of revenue and your revenue and in the worst case scenario, forced divestments of businesses, which but that it was a very extreme scenario. Letters, So it's sort of coming added from all sides. If you like, I mean it will be successful. How can the companies block some of this from happening? Well, so Firstly, it's

gonna be passed. It's gonna be passed by the European Parliament and the Council. That's likely to take about a year, and then it will take another six months to come to effect. There is going to be a huge lobbying effort on the part of these companies. Um, it is not a question of really blocking of the European Parliament or the European Commission. It's a question of actually just ensuring that you're buy by the rules and then the europe then there will be no impetus to actually force

a breakup. You know, the way that these rules work is that if you give a regulator the power to break a company up in an ideal world, they don't need to because the threat of the breakup is enough to change company's behavior. And that is you know, we have seen time and again instances of the big tech companies pursuing seemingly anti competitive behavior. They're now being pursued for that in the US as well as in Europe

and Australia and elsewhere. And this is just giving the European Commission more power and more tools to punish the companies when they overset the mark because clearly the deterr and hasn't been adequate until now. So, Alex, I'm old enough to remember the European Union really coming down on Microsoft about twenty five years ago, and I think investors learn from that that, you know, the European Union, it's not that big a deal. It's a fine here, it's a fine there. It's not that big a deal. Why

would this be any different. It just seems like the European Union is doesn't have much power beyond just leveling some fines. Well, I think that's exactly the problem, that that previously they have concentrated UM on remedies, which are as you say, finds, rather than behavioral remedies, which seek to change the way the company's clus in the name behave, and the US has leaning historically a lot more on behavioral remedies of trying to change the way that those um,

those those companies go about their business. UM. Now, if behavior remedies in extreme don't work, then you lean on structural remedies where you can force companies to divest their businesses and um that is something where the European Commission has has been wary about taking actions in the past that this gives them, in extreme cases, the power to do it in the future. So the fine could now

be up to ten percent of revenue. Is that enough of a deterrent for the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, I mean other finds They've been quite happy to pay and carry on with their business. But would a ten percent of revenue fine really dentist their balance street? So we're just in of itself. Know, these companies average free cash revenue each year. If um, they you know, break rules, then they could place a one off fine center revenue

or um, you know, daily finds of revenue. And if they continue to to break the rules, that's when the Commission has said that they will consider forcing divestments of business. And that's when it starts to get you know, there's sort of the really start to get really serious essentially, and that is something that inevitably these companies will want to avoid. Alex you know, is there a sense across Europe broadly defined, why there hasn't been more technology companies

uh kind of created across Europe? I mean, yes, we have a couple of big big ones like SAP and so on and ericson, but just generally speaking, why the technology companies. Development across Europe has been not nearly anywhere as it's been, say the United States, even in just Silicon Valley. I mean it's a very simple reason. Really, there are any number of big factors. You know, the Silicon Valley of course has standard and you know, concentration,

eventual capital all usk the same. But also the US has one single addressable market that speaks the same language. You know, you can launch in the US and you are immediately in front of three million people. Um In Europe, you know, there are a bunch of different app stores for Apple, there are a bunch of different languages that are spoken. There are you know, as much as it's theory a single market and practice it can be a little bit more complicated than that gives American companies a

huge advantage. And the companies that have proved successful are the ones from Europe that have scaled immediately into the US. Think about Spotify, Swedish company now the biggest music streaming company in the world. So that I think is the singular answer that is part of the US for the europe to compete. I'm sure the teams of lawyers at all these big companies are looking at all of the

different options, including actually divesting parts of their business. Alex, do you know about any of these discussions or any of the parts of any of the businesses that might be up for discussion. Well, it's it's unlikely that these

companies going to voluntarily divest businesses. There was a report in the Journal earlier this year that there had been discussions at Google informally about perhaps selling part of their advertising businesses, business that places ads on third party websites that you know, would maybe addressed some of the concerns about an acquisition that Google did more than a decade ago, which beefed up that business and in hindsight looks as

though it probably shouldn't have been passed. Um doesn't look as they Facebook is they're going to sell voluntarily? What's that for Instagram? Absolutely not, But there maybe are things around the edges which as a sign of good will or to take defang some of the plan incended to defang some of the attacks room from regulators, that might be feasible, but nothing significant. So just real quickly, is there an expectation that this will pass? Alex, Yes, absolutely,

there's huge political will behind this In Europe. Opposition perhaps some Ireland, unsurprisingly given that a lot of these companies

have their European HQs there. But broadly speaking, um, this is something that you know there might be changes, and there will be changed with the course the next year, but the trust of it looks like it will get through European Parliament and of course, as we know, the European Union and I TRUST chief Margareta Vestiga is well versed in all of this language and well well able to take on these companies. Alex, thank you for all was giving in touch with us on what's going on

with these major major Silicon Valley companies. Alex Web is European technology and media columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. But of course a lot of that has to do with the big American companies as well. As he said, they're all based in Europe to they've headquarters in Ireland and some of them in other parts of Europe as well. Thanks for listening to Bloomberg Markets podcast. You can subscribe and listen to interviews at Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast platform

you prefer. I'm Bonnie Quinn, I'm on Twitter at Bonnie Quinn, and I'm Paul Sweeney. I'm on Twitter at pt Sweeney. Before the podcast, you can always catch us worldwide at Bloomberg Radio