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This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. I'm Jonathan Ferrow, along with Lisa Bromwitz and Amrie Hordern. Join us each day for insight from the best in markets, economics, and geopolitics from our global headquarters in New York City. We are live on Bloomberg Television weekday mornings from six to nine am Eastern. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify or anywhere else you listen, and as always on the Bloomberg
Terminal and the Bloomberg Business app. Joining us now a man with experience of all of this, the former Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. Speaking McCarthy, Welcome back to the program, sir. It's good to get your thoughts. I want to lead with a question that a Marie asked a little bit earlier on the program. When you're herding cats on Capitol Hill, is it easier or harder when the President of the United States is Donald Trump?
Oh, it's so much easier.
President Trump is stronger today than he was at any time as career. President Trump is stronger in the House. Remember, just to get this bill out of the House, they all said they weren't going to vote for it. President Trump came down to a conference, told both sides from Salt, it's over from the Freedom Caucus.
That's over.
Everyone who said they wasn't going to vote for it voted for it in twenty four hours.
So this bill is going to get passed.
The only thing that's holding up when this bill gets passed is the weather in DC and the attendance of how that people get here.
Well, yeah, people now have to come back to Washington when they thought they were going to have this week off. Speaking McCarthy, So you think the Freedom Caucus will fold again? Will they fold by July fourth?
I believe so. I mean, think about this.
Mike Lee, Rick Scott, Ron John all voted for this bill in the Senate and they're not going to vote for it.
So if they don't want to.
Vote for and they vote no, they're sitting with the Democrats and want to increase taxes.
They have no place to be.
What they want to do is get the attention they always crave.
So they talk about that now.
But how many times can you cry wolf and say you're not going to vote for something, and in twenty four hours vote for it. They have done this numerous times. They want the President's attention. They say this so they can go down to the Oval Office and see the president, then go back home and say they saw the president.
So do you think the rule vote which comes first will pass because we can't see the bill on the floor until that goes through.
I believe yes, it'll pass. It's all going to come down to attendance today. How many people could make.
It to DC.
A lot of flights will were canceled. So do they have to delay it a day or not? But this bill will pass. Remember, it already passed the House, it has now passed the Senate, and you've got the July fourth deadline holding right behind you. There's a lot of pressure mounting here. President Trump has done a tremendous job on this, but he has become the speaker in the same timeframe. Every time he's leaned into a bill it's been able to pass.
He's the closer, he's the speaker in chief. How concerned are basically just congressmen and women about being torched on truth?
Social like Thomas Massey, Well, you look at Tom Tillis, I mean Tom Tillis, who had a lot inside this bill, was pushing people to put more inside the bill, turns around and decides not.
To run for reelection.
I think that plays on the mind of a lot of individuals, and people are now being able to look at the bill. At first, they're always arguing about what's wrong, what's they're not really looking at what's positive. That you're not raising taxes, You're actually getting the economy moving again. You're keeping your promises for those who are sitting in salt districts. And you had a list of there are people who are leaning no. Nick Layloda, he said he's
for this bill. That's a big movement for because he actually improved salt for his district when it was ten thousand is now forty thousand. He can go back home and champion what he was able to achieve.
At the same time, he votes as a victory.
At the same time, though there really won't be a cap. The cap expires at the end of the year. So don't you think the salt calcius does have some.
Level goes after five years.
No, from the same standpoint, it wouldn't go totally go away, or people going to let these taxes all go away. He'd been able to achieve something while keeping taxes low. If he wanted salt to go away, raise taxes on all of his individuals and play that way, that's not why people elect him. They elect him there to go legislate, and that's exactly what he did. He improved the life of his constituents, and he can champion that and actually be celebrated back home.
Each of the constituents were trying to improve the life of their region from an overarching federal perspective, which is a federal law.
Do you think that this is a good bill.
Yes, this is a very good bill, because what would happen if you did not pass this bill. Your taxes would go up, the economy would spur a little down. I mean, this is exactly keeping the promise. And if you want to put it in perspective, this bill is exactly what President Trump campaigned on.
So the American people voted for that.
He won the popular vote, something a Republican president has not done in more than thirty years. He says, no tax on tips. It's keeping his promise and it's the first thing people look at.
And even if you didn't.
Vote for him, you respect that you kept your promise.
That's a change.
You said you'd secure the border, you secured the board with all the respects, said you would move it to make sure the tax would done. Yes, whatever respect you want to give me, I'll take.
I'll give you loads of respect.
There's a real question right now about the deficit increasing and the fact that there is a perception and it was edified by the Congressional Budget Office saying that essentially this would take money out of the pockets of the lowest income individuals in the United States and it would add to the higher income individuals significantly in the form of tax cuts and other potential benefits. That isn't necessarily one of the agenda items that was promised on the campaign trail.
Correct.
Well, all due.
Respect to you, if you look back at the tax bill that we're keeping in place, what happened after it was placed. People actually got more income, Companies gave thousand dollars checks to their employees. So the CBO can score it one way, but we know what reality is. We know what we're seeing right now as well, where the S and P five hundred set a new record. So I think that lives much stronger to the American public than anything else. When they keep their promise, the economy stronger,
the border is secure. You're watching the Middle East go to a place we haven't seen in a long time, trying to end war in Ukraine. Yes, the world is a much better place because we elected President Trump, and yes he is keeping his promise and this aligns exactly with that, and America will be stronger for it.
Speaking McCarthy, I'd love to talk to you about your relationship with both President Trump and your friend Elon Musk. Are you being called in to try to mediate this feud we see?
I have not been called in, and I just know when two bulls fight, the only people who lose is the ground underneath it, and I don't want to be that turf. One thing I do know is when those two work together, there's nothing we can't achieve.
So in the same mindset, I think.
People need to take a deep breath. Let's get back to where we were before. Let's put America first and find the way that we make everybody stronger.
Speaking McCarthy with respect and thanks, Thank you, sir.
I appreciate your time as all.
Thank you, Thank you, buddy, Thank you very much. The former Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy that Cisco's president and chief Product Office a G two ptal, saying we're on the verge of a second major inflection in the development writing AI. Agents will produce original insights and help us solve problems that we might never have dreamed of solving before. In this sense, I think agentic AI is the single most important technology leap of our lifetime so far.
G two joined us now for more from Cisco, and he's quickly becoming like AI therapist Guto. Welcome back to the program, sir. That last line is pretty strong, G two. Bigger than the Internet, Bigger than that that big.
That's one of these technology. Firstly, Jonathan, thank you for having me. I am sorry I couldn't be there in person. I'm in these beautiful London Bloomberg offices. So let me just say, if you take a step back, we are in the second major phase of AI. Where we used to be the past two and a half years. What we've experienced is chatbots intelligently answering questions for us. We're now squarely in the second phase, where agents will be
able to conduct tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously. On behalf of humans, and it's going to completely unlocked potential that we haven't seen before. And I'm pretty excited about the potential of what this is going to be able to do to solve problems that we have not been able to tackle as of yet. That's probably the most under hyped part of AI in my opinion.
Well, let's get into that that phrase unlocked potential. I'm thinking about unlocking potential for who people who are in the stocks, people who run the companies, or people who actually work at the companies and run the operations. The difference between say, job replacement and job enhancement. G two, what's the difference between the two?
You know?
So, the way I think about it is there's a definitive pattern and history of the way that technologies get to get adopted. First, the first phase is when people are fearful of the technology, and then they flourish with them. And we are currently in this mode of largely being skeptical of AI, thinking it's going to take our jobs. And like I said to you the last time I saw you, Jonathan, I worry less about AI taking my job. I worry about someone using AI better than me. That's
probably going to take my job. And we should make sure that we democratize the use of AI for every person so that we can actually unleash our potential. And that, in my mind is an area that we don't talk enough about right now, which is what are the unsolved problems that we have not been able to solve because of original insights of AI that we will be able
to solve today. Think about the kind of new businesses that people will be able to start, the kind of you know, diseases we'll be able to solve for now. I'm not delusional. It's not that this comes without any risk. Security and safety is a huge risk. We ought to make sure that we actually get all over that and band together as a community to make sure that we
can solve those risks. But I'm a net optimist of AI rather than thinking that it's going to take every job that's available for humans right now.
G Two that's pretty extreme prediction. There is this question of who potentially benefits within the labor market and who is left behind. And I wonder at Cisco, you talk to a lot of companies, how are they preparing their workforces and are they aware of how much retraining is necessary to keep their humans relevant.
Yeah, I think there's You know, the most organizations right now are thinking about how is each job going to get reconfigured and what are we going to need to do to make sure that the augmentation of AI to a human makes the human more productive. What we want to do ultimately is make sure that AI can reach its full potential the humans can reach their full potential with AI. So, for example, at Cisco, we are hoping that there's going to be a lot of code that
gets written autonomously. That doesn't mean that we're going to have less engineers. That means that the engineers will provide more insight, more oversight, and they'll actually think about new ideas because we are currently so constrained with engineering talent that we're not able to prosecute all the ideas that we have. And now we'll be able to actually get more through put capacity as a result of having AI
being a companion for every engineer. And so I feel like every single job will need to get reconfigured slightly, will need to have be adjusted. But this is no different from any other previous technological revolution that we've had. With the Internet, you had to have the same with the personal computer. There was the same kind of reconfiguration
of jobs. And yes, some of those will those will go away, and there'll need to be some retraining, but frankly, there'll be new jobs that emerge that we haven't seen up until now that allow us to actually move even faster.
One of the.
Issues, and one of the differences now versus the Internet or the industrialization or even the engine when it came out, is the speed of how quickly this is getting implemented, of how quickly the development is going. And we're getting to phase two before some people even understand the potential of phase one. By the time we get to phase three, they're going to be a whole host of people that
don't even realize how behind they are. Just how big is that mismatch in terms of the speed of the evolution and how behind a lot of the workforce is to meet it.
This is actually a really important point, Lisa, because the speed of the pace of change is something that we've never seen before. And frankly, that's why sitting on the sidelines and waiting for this thing to kind of play out before you jump in is exactly the wrong strategy.
What we need to do is make sure that everyone's actually getting dextrous with the use of AI, because there's only two kinds of companies in my mind, those that are going to be extremely dexterous with the use of AI and others that will actually really struggle for relevance. And we want to make sure that there's more and more companies that are in the first category, not for second.
And so I do feel like speeds an important dimension and in order to tackle that, every company just needs to make sure that they're actually thinking about getting and not sitting on the sidelines, but immersing themselves and experimenting with AI as quickly as possible so that they can get an instinct, they can get some kind of judgment of what this is going to look like over time.
T Two, You're not just working with companies, you're also working with governments. From page of Wall Street Journal today is talking about how China's AI companies are basically challenging US superiority. Who is doing it well, who do you think is winning this race?
Well?
I think right now, you know, while US is in the lead, China is actually catching up fast. And so we need to make sure that we continue the base of innovation that's there, and what you want to see is that the US companies are becoming some of the standards for infrastructure buildout that might be all around the world for safety and security all around the world.
You want to make.
Sure that that happens. And that's why it's so important that you know the companies that win and the countries that win with the AI race are the ones that are also going to win economically. They're also going to win from a national security standpoint, So there's a lot of benefit to making sure that you're kind of immersing
yourselves in an AI. I was recently in the Middle East, Lisa and we announced a partnerships with the Saudi government, with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as with the United Arab Emirates, where we're going to help with data center buildouts. And if you think about what the constraints of AI are, there are three things. There's power,
there's compute, and there's networking capacity. Those are the constraints, and we need to make sure that this infrastructure gets modernized and that we have American companies that are helping in participating in these massive data center buildouts, which actually provide the infrastructure necessary for everyone to be able to have access to AI.
GT just before you go, we're focused on payross this week at least has been doing a great job over the last week or so just bringing up highlighting continuously repeatedly, how difficult it is for graduates to get a roll at the moment. And I just wonder how this is going to impact high rink at the entry level over the next several years or so. As companies figure this out, then invest a lot in software, invest in the current staff to learn how to use some of these things.
But I'm not sure they're going to hire up the same pace G two. And I wonder what your experience is now, both within Cisco and looking out speaking to other companies.
You know, John, you and I talked about this last time as well. I actually tend to learn so much from the people that are AI natives that are just coming out of them out of the educational system, because they think they use AI very differently than folks that have been around for a while. And so I actually don't think it's a good strategy to not hire entry level candidates and just think that AI is going to replace those jobs. Frankly, I feel that you have an
entry level candidate. With AI as a companion, you can start to see meaningful levels of compounding of value. And so I do feel like there's two categories of people that are actually doing really well with AI. The early entrants who've actually been AI native that know and have a very different instinct for how to use AI. And then the second ones are the highly experienced group of
people that are using it well. What we need to do is we need to make sure that we train the people in the middle so that they're all not fearful of AI, but they're in fact starting to think about this as an accelerant to their personal productivity as well as the productivity of the companies.
You're slowly converting.
Me G.
So it's wonderful to catch up. Enjoy London, So glad John, We'll see with New York soon. GT for town there at Cisco, Welly of black Rock Rights. In a world of weak macro anchors, mega forces like artificial intelligence are the new long term anchor for achieving durable returns.
Why joint us now for more? Wykenmonic, good morning.
Is it getting harder to find a long term macro anchor in this environment.
Well, long term macro anchors have been lost. You look at inflation anchors, you look at long term growth anchors, you look at long term physical anchors, you look at even anchors in institutional confidence like the safe haven status of the dollar, but maybe also independence of the fact. So it's really hard to find long term macro anchor, which is why we actually think that it's easier to think about tactical as a location because of the mutable
laws around us that and global supply chain. Paradoxically, there is greater certainty in our assessment in the near term than in the long term, which is the opposite of what has been always the case, which is why we're moving k targets in terms of the budget deployment from longer term strategic as a location towards tactical as location. This is one of the best tactical investment environments.
So what's the tactical approach currently for you and the team?
Right now? We are investing for the here and now, which is to recognize that so far this year we have focused a lot on tariffs, and we're still focusing on tariffs, which is very different from Trump term one where we had text cuts first and then we had tariffs. But now focus is going to shift also towards text cuts, also towards deregulation, potentially unleashing animal spirit. And yes, tariffs
headlines are still flying around. But we do think that because of the constraints and immutable laws that I just talked about, we're going to get to some sort of lending spot, not likely derailing the tactical kind of risk con view that we still have. So right now, we still like US equities, and I would observe that at this juncture is no longer consensus and speakture investors across the world, Europe, the APEC. I would think that it's
more divisive right now, but we still like it. The condition for sustained rest of the world europe outperformance over US haven't been met, which is why we're not We haven't chased the European equity our performance beyond closing the underweight too neutral earlier in the year.
So you keep mentioning the immutable economic laws, and I think this is a really important point, and in the outlook that Black Rock put out, you did right. We think commutable economic laws to prevent or return to a maximal stance. How much does this just mean fade the extremes, fade the tail risks, because they always will come back to the center based on math.
That's exactly right. If we faded extremes, which we did think about kind of how we up risked immediately after April ninth, then we would have captured and we have the twenty more than twenty percent ready from the April trove. So it's really recognizing that even though headlines can be very scary sometimes for markets, there are things governing how quickly things can change from status quo in the very
near term. So if we want to close trade deficits and we lose a lot of the reliance on foreign funding, and given that the US has the highest financing needs among G seven in terms of percentage of GDP and one of the shortest average that maturity, there is something that cannot really be messed around with, which is why we believe, especially at times of a huge amount of uncertainty in market narratives, this strategy is rewarding and effect has worked really well this year.
Just quickly, how fragile does that make this market that has become numb to extremes.
I think markets are not yet numb to extremes in that you still see headlines like whipsawing day to day market volacility. We see equity sensitivity to incoming data at
a much more elevated level compared to pre pandemic. We see rage sensitivity to incoming data like we're talking about month to month inflation print, but the long term ten years sensitivity to months to on inflation Prince is so much more elevated now, which means that markets are trying to extrapolate from incoming data what it means for the long term, which speaks to the laws of long term
macro anchor. Which is why if we have a very clear kind of assessment of the fundamental picture that allows us to play the current environment taxically and reversal strategies in the middle of wildly swinging market narratives. Has been very rewarding for our active platform.
Super thoughtful stuff. Welly, appreciate your time as always, thanks for being with us, say in New York while leader of Black Rob joining us now to discuss this and a whole lot more on the US economy. Joe Leaphone, the counsel at the Treasury Secretary Scale Bess and Joe, welcome back to the program, Sir. The words of Chairman Power, we didn't react at all. We're simply taking some time. Why is his position not a convincing one?
Let me say this, Jonathan.
The fact is that the tariffs, whether you look at the pc the CPI, import prices, all those metrics actually decelerate. So not only did the consensus get it wrong where inflation didn't pick up, it actually fell. The chair likes to look at the supercore metric, which is services excluding rents and energy, and that's actually fallen about a point point plus since last September when the Fed first began cutting.
So many metrics show that inflation pressures are actually decelerating, which obviously means that real interest rates are expanding, meaning they're rising. So I don't want to be critical the Fed per se. The president's done of his own, has given his own spiel and and made some very powerful arguments why race shou should fall. But there's no question the inflation news has been much better than anybody thought. And tariffs, as we've said many times, the Secretary Beston
has said, are not inflationary tariffs are. If they happen, they haven't impacted the domestic economy.
It's a price level adjustment, Joe.
We're still waiting for the tariff rates and the President is saying he's not moving the date next week. When I speak to individuals that are sitting on the other side of the US Trade Representative or treasure Secretary Scott Bessont, they say that they have been told and given assurances by this administration that if they are in good faith negotiations, that that deadline can be pushed back.
Is that your understanding, Well, that's what Secretary Bestin has said, and Secretary recently said about ten to twelve countries are very close to a deal. There's about another twenty that are also negotiating good faith, and Secretary vest At recently highlighted that many deals could be done by Labor Day. So does a lot of good progress. But on the terrafts, I just want to be clear. The consensus view among almost everybody was that teriffs would start to impact the
data in March. It didn't happen in March. It happened in April, it didn't happen in May. And we know there's a big number.
Associated with the revenue.
We could have three hundred billion of teriff for revenue this year.
That's coming in.
So we've got these huge increase in revenues. So they're there, and the reason the tariffs are impacting things in large part is because foreign producers, as we learn from the first Trump administration, are absorbing it in their margin.
When it comes to Japan specifically, the President said that they're spoiled, and he talked about the fact that maybe he's going to go for a thirty thirty five percent rate. On a liberation day, they only had a twenty four percent rate. Do you see any country going above April second rates?
The President is a very tough negotiator, and I'm confident that whatever winds up happening with Japan and everyone else is going to be in the US best interest. This is a negotiation, and again, as Secretary Bestins highlighted many times, as long as countries are negotiating in good faith, that's a positive and then we take it from there. But I do expect, as a Secretary said, there are deals forthcoming.
The market response to all of this has been prettym much a strug. We've seen new record highs for equity markets, except the dollar has continued to weaken and weaken too, some of the lowest levels, weakest levels going back to twenty twenty two. At what point is that a concern for you, Lisa?
First of all, a lot of that weakness is visa v.
The Euro.
If you look at the FEDS Real Broad Trade Weighted Index, which is about twenty six countries, as opposed to believe that the Bloomberg d x Y I think is only six or seven.
It's a small small sample.
If you look at the Real Broad the Real Broad Trade Weighted Index, it's close to one of the highest readings we've had since the Plaza the cordback in nineteen eighty five.
So this notion that somehow there is the.
Selling of US assets that the dollars week, some major financial outlets have talked about that, it's completely incorrect. It's not consistent with the TIC data. It's not inconsistent with the recent BIS report.
We've talked about.
Some of the selling of assets in April, that brief ceradi of selling was actually due to hedging, wasn't due to lack demand for US assets. So the dollar is the reserve currency. The dollar will be strong. The dollar is still strong, and I think those concerns are greatly misplaced.
There is, though this building a worry about monetizing the debt in order to pay for some of this bill. This idea that you want to run the economy hot, this emphasis on growth in order to offset the increase in the deficit, at the same time that you're counting on inflation not to pick up. How do you sort of square that the idea that in the past, when you run the economy hot, it typically has come along with inflation, especially at times where there have been disruptions to supply chains.
Yeah.
Well, you know, in the first Stump administration, growth was nearly three percent and actually at three point four percent in the fourth quarter year on year in twenty nineteen, and inflation didn't pick up. The one big beautiful bill which is making its way through the Congress, as you know, increases supply side incentives to get growth to remain robust through capital investment, in capital deepening, inflation will continue to fall.
The inflation news has been great, and that's the thing. If you look at the bond market, the.
Equity market's rallied on a second half boom and bond market yields are down substantially.
From where they were earlier in the year, So the.
Capital markets are really responding very positively to what they expect. On the inflation side, break even inflation has been stable. So again, this notion some of that inflation is going to pick up, that growth leads to faster inflation. This Phillips curve mindset, if you will, completely wrong. We saw under the first Trump administration, as they said, very strong growth and low inflation.
And by the way, I once you.
Want to add the big problem with the CBO's numbers is they're only assuming one point eight percent GDP growth.
That's woefully at woefully too low.
If we have a seventeen point two percent revenue shary GDP, which is basically where we are now, and we grow it a much more plausible and realistic three percent, that gives you something like an extra almost an extra trillion dollars in revenue relative to what CBO was forecasting.
Back in January.
And that's not even adding the revenues that are coming from the tariff. So this notion that these deficits are going to stay super high and grow completely I think incorrect because it's based on a fallacious assumption of sub two percent growth, which is very.
Very weak.
That's the argument the President's making this morning so far. Just before you go, how much outreach is happening the Treasury and from the White House just to communicate to the public that the payrolls report might change, just the numbers. What's considered good given the amount of immigration we had over the last several years, and what's considered good now
is going to change that. Maybe one hundred k now is actually a decent number, when one hundred k a few years ago, with mass migration crossing the southern border wasn't a good number. Do we have to reframe what's good and what's bad in this labor moment?
No, I don't know.
I mean, as you know, the payroll numbers are subject to significant revision. The income numbers are actually been very good. If the compensation figures in real terms, they're accelerating, feel like at blue collar wages. Average hourly earnings for super non advisory production workers are up almost two percent the first five months of President Trump's term. That's the best five months effectively to start a new administration ever going
back sixty years. So the income trends are great. You know, a plumb rate's going to stay low. And again, if we get the one big beautiful bill, Jonathan, that is going to get rid of lot, get rid of a lot of the uncertainty that's there in the market where companies can make capital plans. Accordingly, they're not worrying about tax rates going up because again, if you look at small businesses, the pastor businesses, the Chapter S companies, they're
paying the marginal rate. So when they get some certainty on that and they create forty percent of the jobs, you're going to see the labor markets tightened and growth accelerate in the second half.
Of the year.
I Joe appreciate time as always Jonah, only that have the counselor to a twice three secondary skill plessant on the labor market.
There.
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Mm hmm.