Interest Rates Are Going to Normalize, Blain Says

it going to more likely help Tesla? Is it going to more likely help European carmakers. They also say that they're going to increase some of their agricultural purchases, and the US is saying that they're probably not going to impose some of the pariffs that they had talked about earlier. My question is with all of this, what's tradeable here? Right?

I mean, how how much you actually rely on these sorts of tea leaves that are coming from Washington, d C. And here to answer that for US is Bill Blaine. He is Mint Partners, a fixed and come strategist and head of capital markets. Bill come on in here, can you just give us your sense of whether any headlines that we've gotten with respect to China and U s trade negotiations have actually made you want to trade anything. Um,

good morning. It's all part of the ongoing narrative. I suppose it's very easy to find negative confirmation bias in practically anything that's to do with global geopolitical news these days. So when you do get something that sounds positive, like your Treasury secretary saying the trade war is over, or the Chinese making such a conciliatory gesture, you would expect that markets would go soaring high words on the good news.

But in act, that rally we had yesterday in the US stock market was just about the least convincing thing I've ever seen. Volumes were tiny, and it petered out during the day. John, that's a technical term. Is that? Is that a technical term? Bill? What? Which one? Which one of my many? Yeah, least convincing lest least convincing ever since last week? But what what was I'm convincing about it? Bill? And what's I'm convincing about? The moves

that we've seen in the volume was absolutely tiny. It opened up much higher and then just range traded through the day. So do you think this is it? Bill? Do you think the market is unconvinced of what can happen with China in the United States? So ultimately is your view that what happens with China in the United States isn't of importance at this point? People always overestimate the effects del politics or politics. What you need to do is draw what the long term is going to be.

And I'm actually very positive on the long term. What's really going on in terms of the US China called trade war, is about negotiating new terms of trade which are long term going to be very very positive. We're going to see the issue of IP addressed. We're going to see a complete change in the way that trade has done, not just between China and the US, but we're going to see negotiations all around the world, especially here in the UK where we need to make new friends. Yeah,

you have quite quite something positive in your porridge. You know, in your morning note that you put out last week, you you blamed us. You said that we just like bad news because it's what sells, and then people are focusing on that um but that we've got it all wrong and things are great. I wouldn't say things are great, but things are far less bad than than a lot

of the negative bias would have us believe. Al Right, so give us a sense, given the fact that we do have a strengthening dollar, that we have seen you know, some increasing jitters and emerging markets and some other places. You know, is that wrong? I mean, do you think that that we can just have, you know, yield rise and you know in the US and ever else, stay calm and this is all fine and a great normalization

or does anything keep you up at night? Oh gosh, there's so many things keep me up at night just now. Lots of things to worry about, and there are so many inconsistencies in this market. But if we we go to the basics, there's three things I think like the basics of where we should be market wise. Just now, it is clear that interest rates are going to normalize. We are into a bond bear market. The problem is

parts of that bear market don't yet realize it. So we've got the incredible situation where investment grade bonds issued by the most likely people to pay you back are actually the worst performing part of the market, whereas the high yield market, ie those who are least likely to pay you back are outperforming the people who will pay

you back, and that just doesn't make any sense to me. Um, then we've got people worried about stock markets because if bond rates rise, that's bad for stocks, where we were

a long way from that being a real concern. But then I think we're also seeing completely new parts of the market marriage for instance, the alternative sector investing in real assets, which provides you with natural inflation hedges because you own a real asset, and that's very important in the world where we see the oil prices have now effectively doubled since the low. And remember when oil prices hit forty dollars, we were all telling ourselves this was

the new long term future for oil. Well, guess what. We're back up to eighty and I guess we're going to go higher from here because the world changes, and the world is an incredibly complex place, and it is changing. And let's pick up on the first point, the issuing credit right now, it's not just that junk is outperforming, it's the junkiest part of junk that is outperforming. It's been the triple cs. What is the message, the signal that someone experienced in the world of credit like yourself,

takes from that this year. Um, well, what's signal? Well, you know what, John, I've been doing this so long that nothing surprises me anymore. What worries me more than high yield is why people are involved in high yield. Now. There are lots of people who understand high yield perfectly.

What's worrying me is the number of yield tourists who ten years ago would be buying triple A sovereign paper, who are now buying triple C paper, and even worse, are buying triple B paper that one little step above junk status in the expectation that it's an investment grade piece of paper. Now they're going to get a terrible shock when interest rates really start to bite and we start to see an awful lot of companies going into a downgrade cycle because we are still lagging when it

comes to downgrades. So to what extent, Bill, is there significant right risk in high yield that perhaps people aren't appreciating. That's a very very good question. My own view is that there is significant risk that a lot of zombie companies that have been there are highly levered in the bond markets and the leverage lending markets are going to experience difficulties, but that could be overcome if we see real economic performance that enables these companies to do better.

My warrior is that we are going to remain in this kind of new normal, slow recovery rather than stellar growth environment, and that's very negative for a lot of over leverage companies as rates starts to seriously rise. Bill Blank, great to catch out with you. A good friend of mine from back in London who haven't been able to speak to for a long long time. So Bill, we finally got to do it on radio live. Bill blame Mint Partners, Fixed incomes strategist and head of capital Markets,

always greing to catch out with you. It's not a pop quiz as such. But of the twenty eight point nine million automobiles sold in China last year, do you know how many were imported? Uh? No, I do not, but I'm going to guess a smart proportional. It was four point two percent. There you go, by the way. Four So I don't think that we fully appreciated the intimacy of your connections that you catch up with people. Well, I've got to do so I have no time to

pick up the phone. There's real life, those lovely heart to hearts that if you don't know Bill Blaine on pretty much every credit desk in London, if you've been around for a couple of decades, at some point you've worked with Bill builds that well connected in credit markets in the city. So it's always great to get bills

inside because so many people have worked alongside Bill. So we'll have listeners in the city of London right now in a world of credit that probably no Bill at some point from somewhere, and they'll be catching up with him the same way that you are. Precisely, I'm ready pleased to say that joining us now is a giant

in advertising. He ran USLS for Google. He is the former CEO of a o L. He now serves as the CEO of OATH, overseeing a o L and Yahoo for the Rising, it's Tim Armstrock, the OATH CEO, and Tim, I didn't realize that you're a journalist back in the day, Back in the day Boston Local News point five years ago. So should we start there and have a chat about journalism just to begin, Are we seeing the death of

click bait? Is that finally happening. Tim. I think what you've seen is you're seeing a flight to quality right now. And one of the great things that's happening on the Internet mobile right now is as the services are getting more and more focused on not having fake news and really consumer trust, that's going to have all the algorithms change underneath how news gets distributed, and you're going to find that journalism as going to come up in the ecosystem,

you know, very quickly. Back in two thousand nine, Google release something called the Panda release on the Web Index which put higher quality up and I think what you're seeing now is the quote unquote Panda release for the rest of the Internet and social and so I'm very bullish. Even if you look at this all the services in the last six seven months, all of them have been putting higher quality journalism up to the top of the

consumer front end. And that's great, great for journalism. Um, there's a dirty secret though, that quality journalism actually costs money, and you're seeing an increasing number of outlets, including this one, recognized that and start charging people to see their articles. And wondering how that challenges you from a distributor model, given the fact that so many headlines lead to pay walls. Yeah,

so we're in a process right now. Our our future will have advertising models and also subscription models for content UM. But I would also say one thing that's really great about what you just said is that consumer time is really important, and I think consumers optimize their time around it. So if consumers willing to pay for content UM, I think that's a good signal. And second of all, I think on the ads model, the quality UM will force

advertising to get higher quality as well. Overall, so this whole whole trend will have improvements on both sides of the business. You talked about subscription model, and one thing the number of outlets have tried to do is pull together a bunch of the major media outlets and offer a sort of joint subscription to all of them. That's struggled to get all of them on board. I'm wondering, have you tried that, are you going to try that? What progress is there to be made in that front. Yeah.

One of the things that we're heavily thinking through is a much deeper membership model where where members will uh you know, basically get more and more benefits from us. And we have a billion consumers, so we have access

to a lot of consumer scale. Um, the biggest thing that we want out of the future of the media system and journalism is to basically have we're big investors in high quality journalism is for our journalists and our partner We have about forty publishing partners for all of the biggest scale access they can and whether that's paid, whether it's a subscription model, or whether it's through ads.

One of the things we're innovating right now on the front end a lot is how do we have more consumers on more types of high quality content more constantly. In the summer, we're gonna launch for super channels and news, sports, finance, and entertainment, and that will give our partners plus our content direct access on mobile to some of the highest

quality journalism in the world. We just announced to do with Samsung two weeks ago to put our brands directly on Samsung phones, and so you know, our we're a company that's investing in what you're talking about, So our job is to get it on the biggest distribution we possibly can. Seem it just feels like we're a bit of a tipping point at the moment. With Mark Zuckerberg on his apology tour on the way they've used data and the way they've essentially made money through advertising as well.

Have we reached a tipping point? Have we reached saturation so to speak? After years of immense growth of places like Google, Facebook, etcetera. Are we there now? Yeah? We'll just say, you know, there's something physical happening this week in the digital world, which is GDPR, you know, launching in Europe. And that's a that's a real physical change the way that the internet and mobile works in Europe. It's also going to cascade across the rest of the world.

So what you're seeing in Europe this week of the reviews with Mark Zuckerberg is really the start of what I would say is I would call it almost reverse commerce with consumers, where consumers have had all their data on servers and now data is going to start to be transferred back to the consumer. We built our dashboards a year ago thinking this was going to happen globally, so we're we're our business model in the future will allow consumers to own their data transact on their data,

and that's a super important change. And by the way, that's why this week is getting a lot of attention, but there's actually a big physical change that many people don't know about happening this week. Well, you talk about transact on their data. I want to pick up on that because that's a really compelling point. In other words, people might be able to get paid for giving their

data over to certain advertisers. That might take the revenue away from you, right because advertisers can just go direct to the consumer, uh and pay them. How concerned are you about that? UM and our business model, We're not concerned. To add, businesses between a probably eight hundred billion and trillion dollar industry, much of it is built on not direct to consumer right now, going through really large third parties, we can be one of the largest directed consumer businesses

and facilitate that. So I think our model actually is going to get advantaged in this change because we have access directly on people's mobile phones. We have access directly to a billion consumers, So you're going to offer them money by way of the advertisers act as a broker

for them kind of we uh. We believe in the future there will be more economic models for consumers to to make money or get value directly from their data, which is not at scale out there right now, so so we we I think that's one of the things that we're hopeful that that will innovate. Tim what the advertisers sank you at the moment. If you take Facebook as an example, a couple of months ago, people were worried if they were in the stock whether the advertisers

would run UM. Next sign of that actually happening, what do they signed to you? So the advertisers, you know, again the big digital players. If you're an advertiser, you have pretty much have to be in digital state with consumers. So I think over time a lot of the advertisers will say they want to have some of the changes they've been talking about, but the reality that they're continuing

to spend um. I was just on the phone yesterday with our new president CEO, Guru uh with the head of strategy Form, one of the largest brands in the world. Actually when we're taught, we had this exact conversation with them, and that you know, the brand said to us, there's three things they're really interested in. One is direct to consumer relationships. Two is using their data effectively. They have tons of data but don't know how to use it.

And three is how do they basically add non commoditized value. Some of the digital channels they go through take all the value away from them, and the consumer thinks the platform has the value and not the brand. So you know, our business right now is to take those three items direct the consumer data and how to decommoditize the ad system and build that. And that's a differentiator from us from Google and Facebook. Let's wrap things up by talking

about your business. It's been a year, I believe since oath came about and I laughed at you want to air and said, really, Tim, And you said to me, give it time, you'll get used to it. And I guess I've got used to it a little bit. Do you have your three word oath yet? I don't? Should I have? You have to have one? Yea, you have to have a Mine is never give up you guys, You each everybody in your company have Everyone has an oath, and not just everyone in our company. Now our partners

and customers are starting to come up with them. They laugh. No. They By the way, if you go around people meaningfully, on their email signatures or on the walls around the office, put their oath up and you would be a surprised. How you know, thirteen thousand people come up with three word ohs that are just amazing and very personal to them. So it's actually become a big part. What would it be,

Let's go, mets, let's go. That's a perfect One's gonna have to come up with a com Well, next time I come back, I promise I'll have that house business doing. What are you excited about at the moment? UH, Super excited about what we're doing, both on the brand experience the side. So we have tech Crunch Disrupt coming up in September and San Francisco. It's at the Mosconi Center, which is the largest convention center there. So that's gone from a startup when we bought it now to being

one of the most influential tech brands. We have can coming up with all the global advertisers in France. A couple of weeks we're launching a new UH add uh system basically there. So we're excited about all the work that's gotten done and more importantly excited about the fact that the companies came together. You know, we have a clear strategy of building brands people love and UH. I think as you go through the summer and into the fall.

The proof points we've gone through a construction zone into something that will look like a finished product. And UH, just really excited about the thirteen thousand people and the billion consumers we have and putting them at the center of everything that we're doing. I promised to come up with a three word if I gets cans um with the See there you go. Tim, never never give us. I always learned something when Tim joins us and whenever

I list since to him. Truly a jihant in advertising, and I mean that sim is trying to catch up with you. Thank you, sim Anstrom, the o CEO. Since the March Lows, the shares of Facebook have gained more than twenty and today members of the European Parliament are going to get the chance to question Facebook Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about everything from Cambridge Analytica as well as Europe's new privacy rules. Here to help us understand what's

going on at Facebook is David Kirkpatrick. He is the author of The Facebook Effect, and he is also the chief executive and the founder of Teconomy. David Kirkpatrick, what do you believe Mark Zuckerberg will try to get across to EU regulators. Hey, thanks toim Well. I think the main thing he's going to get across is please don't mess with me, um. And what he will do how

he will do that is by saying he's sorry. Um. It's I think some of his testimony has already been reported publicly where he's planning to apologize and say they need to do better, that they're taking responsibility, blah blah blah. It's pr one oh one, and an effort simply too, I would say, deflect attention and try to minimize the

significance of the inquiry. Generally, So, David, uh, some pretty negative on Facebook and you have been and with respect to their data disclosures, their data usage and uh and sort of the lack of a quick fix to some of the problems that people have pointed out for many years. And yet what should they be doing right now that would put them in better standing? To you? They should

be much more transparent than their beings. They should be having a much more ongoing dialogue where they're much more open to really explaining, taking input from They should be asking others what they should do rather than saying what they're that they're going to do the right thing and leaving it to an opaque process for that to be determined. And I want to clarify I'm actually not negative on Facebook.

I'm I consider myself quite knowledgeable about them, but I think among their critics, I'm somewhat unusual in that I still argue Facebook as fundamentally a very positive force in

society and has a lot of wonderful characteristics. But I believe that when it comes to their political impact and also to a similar in a similar way, their impact on the privacy of individuals, they have been extremely cavalier over an extremely long time, and they refuse to even think about taking to even use the word responsibility until the Russian electoral manipulation scandal arose in the United States UM and the Cambridge Analytica thing that followed UM and

and they've really changed their tune for what seemed to me to be pr reasons rather than a genuine desire to take stock of and take responsibility for the inordinate

weight they have in public discourse around the world. They are in an absolutely unique position as a commercial company that is in effect the public square in many many countries and that is probably fundamentally untenable, but at a minimum, it is something that requires a much more robust dialogue between the company and the public, which they have been resisting and continued to resist. David Kirkpatrick, is it at

all possible? And I'm just you know, I have no detailed knowledge of their own technology systems, but that the company is just technically overwhelmed by their success and the scale of the issue. I mean, I read last I guess it was the last plow weeks that they took down something like a half a billion accounts and I was staggered by that number. And yet that doesn't seem to be a big deal when it comes to their

daily operations. Are they just over their heads? Well, that's a great question, Tim, And that number shocked me also considering that they claimed to have two point two billion active users. They did say recently that they took down half a billion fake fake accounts is what they said they took down, and that was the first time they'd ever disclosed the number of fake accounts they were taking down.

It seemed discordant with the active user number. And I don't again, though they won't really answer questions about things like this. This is just the kind of thing I mean, it doesn't really make sense. It's almost impossible for outsiders like us to assess what capabilities they do have because they are very high handed and they have extraordinary high opinion of their own technical competence. And from their standpoint, they would say, oh, no, we're not overwhelmed, absolutely not.

But in reality, I think looking in from the outside, it's easy to imagine that they may be. And here's an example where I think they are. If I might just slightly take a different subject slightly, um, look at the way they've expanded in literally every country around the world.

Then look at the fact that in many many of the countries where they refuse to update their growth in any way, where they simply allowed themselves and encourage themselves to grow rapidly, they have absolutely no local language expertise.

So in countries like Myanmar, for example, UM, which is one that's been very well documented, or Sri Lanka where they have no local language speakers speak that the monitor content their their service has been used in extremely toxic political ways, even as they're accepting large amounts of advertising revenue from the government from bad actors, from good actors from all spectrums of the political scene, which that's the way they work. Aybody advertises on Facebook. They have no

ability to monitor that. To me, that's fundamentally irresponsible that they let themselves grow in that way and they don't have the capability to manage it. So in that sense, they are overwhelmed. So, David, you raise a really interesting point, and I want to build on that because Bloomberg News Report today talked a little bit about what Zuckerberg plans to emphasize when he does testify in front of European officials. He plans to emphasize his investments in an artificial intelligence

research lab in Paris and data centers in Sweden. Given the fact that your point, perhaps they may be a little overwhelmed or not capable of monitoring things appropriately at this point in the eyes of many who are concerned, is this the right tac to take? Well, it's a good tax to take, but it's not sufficient. It's it's definitely a good direction. They do contribute to the economy massively, and obviously they will capture the attention of European legislators

to that degree. There. You know, they say they employe ten thousand people in the EU. But let's keep in mind these this company is gonna make close to twenty billion dollars in net profit this year. I mean, these guys are not hurting. They could do anything they want, and they you know, of course, there are a huge political and and and economic force, and they want to

brag about that. But again it's a matter of what is sufficient what is insufficient, And I think it's very complicated because we've never seen a commercial company with this combination of political and social power and profits. I mean, either one of them. We haven't seen either one. We've never seen a company with net margins at a fifty five billion dollar annual revenue runway, and we've never seen a commercial company that has this kind of weight in

the social discourse around the world. These are bizarre, unprecedented developments that the world has to take stock of much more methodically, and the company is resisting that. That's my point, David, thank you so much for joining us. Dovid Kirkpatrick David Kirkpatrick, the Techonomy chief executive, talking about Facebook's apology tour. He

lows J C. Penny dynamic. Today you can see j C. Petty shares uh down more than four percent as it announces that it's CEO Marvin Ellison is leaving abruptly, taking the top job at home improvement retailer lows Low shares up just a bit. I want to bring in puna'm goyle who covers all these things for us for Bloomberg Intelligence and Punam, what's your reaction to this? Do we have any sense why Marvin Ellison is leaving j C. Penny?

I mean, I mean, look, I think you know, for him, he's had such an extensive background in the home space with home Depot that this probably is a great opportunity for him to go to lows Um. That said, you know where that leaves j C. Penny is in a bit of a tight spot because now what right he's he's implemented all this diversification with the extension of big ticket appliances, furniture and so forth. Who's going to come in and take a position? Um and and what will

they do? Will they keep that vision or will they change it completely similar to Ron Johnson did prior Now, Marvin Allison is in a sense returning to the home improvement world because previous to his employment at j C. Penny. He was in charge of the Home Depot's US stores, that is correct, and he worked for Target previous to that. Correct, So he's got all the experience necessary to make Lows a real powerhouse. Well, I mean he has the experience

that he could transfer to loads very easily. Will affix Lows or not? As a separate question, so there's a question whether Ellison was truly effective j C. Penny. He joined in, assumed the top job. A year later, the company still hasn't done well. In fact, if you ask most people when the last time they went to low J. C. Penny was, they probably would shake their heads, squint their eyes and thank or I'll say, what is J C. Penny? Uh So, so why hasn't he been successful? You know?

And I guess it's not that he hasn't been successful. He stopped the bleeding at G C. Penny. Right, If you look prior to two thous fourteen, seems your sales were declining in the high single digits a double digit range. He um turned them positive in the following two years, but that was because of easy comparisons. In seventeen, really sales were just unchanged, so he didn't grow sames to sales, and that's really where the issue is, and and part of that comes from just not being able to turn

apparel um. Fifty percent of j C. Penny sales are more come from apparel. He's done a great job at home in Sephora and Salon and so forth, but at the end of the day, it's really apparel. It comes down to apparel, and that's where he's been slow to make good progress. Well, would the progress that he had made involved downsizing j C. Penny even more? I think so. I mean, my view has been that j C. Penny

needs to trim more stories. We had that announcement of of a little over a hundred doors um prior to last year, and you know, since then they only announced eight story closings for this year and the sleep still over a hundred stories is too big in my view, is j C. Penney going to finally go under? Ever? I don't know. You know, your guest is as good as mine on that. I mean, like, honestly, this just to view this from from the credit market standpoint for

a second, because uh, that's my my home turf. I mean, people have been trying to short j C. Penny forever and you go to the derivatives traders. I mean J C. Penny is the risk trade. If you think the world's going to fall apart, but bet against j C. Penny. It will be the first shoe to drop. It has failed. Somehow, this thing crawled along and yet it has you know, at this point from a brand recognition standpoint, I don't know.

I don't know, but but I've been hearing that about Spears for a decade and that's right, so so so I don't have an answer for that. But you know, to his credit, I mean, yes, as long as they can keep re cash fold positive. You know, I'd ask your credit the animals stock question. But I think I think the key is really if sales declined from here, then I think they're in a little bit of more trouble.

But if they can hold study, close more doors, improve the apparel pad, I think that's really the opportunity here. I guess what I'm trying to get at here is, let's say they close more stores than they have to beef up their presence online. What do they offer at this point, uh that Amazon can't or that any other retailer really cannot offer, with possibly even better, better computer programming and a better display and a fresher start and

less overhead. I mean, the the the advantage they have as their private brand right and if um, you're a shopper of St. John's Bay, you can't get that on Amazon. So as long as they continue to drive traction and their private brands, there's a place for those brands, and someone will be looking for them and shopping their stories. They just need to really amplify that more. And I

think that's what struggle has been. UM. We think the apparel reset could provide them some opportunity there, but with this shake up and Marvin Ellison leaving, they're just a huge distraction in front of them, and and that gets me concerned. Well, can you turn your attention now to what's going on at Lows? What are the issues there? I mean, are they going to have to offer a greater variety of window blinds or maybe they're going to have to beef up their selection of frigid air or

whirlpool appliances. What is the issue at Lows? So um Lows whose team a shock covers you know, talking to her, it's it's more a competitive issue, right the home depot is a pretty big competitor of theirs, and they're doing really well, and cutting prices isn't necessarily always the answer. So Marvin, I don't think he needs to diversify the product base. Really is what he did in J. C. Penny,

which is bringing new categories. I think there's going to be execution UM issues that he'll need to work through there, like what I mean, what are the specifics of those? Maybe price? You know, UM, A lot of it comes down to price and promotions. Alright, I want to I want to shift gears a little bit because while we are sort of ragging on J C. Penny and I'm being a little unfair, but I just feel like people have been waiting for this thing to die for a

long time and it really hasn't. UM. I want to shift to Coals because they reported earnings and they demonstrated that the turnaround is gaining some steam, shares rising as much as six percent and early trading. So what are they doing right that J C. Penny is doing wrong? Sure?

So Coles Um Coles induced many two completely different stories right here, we have UM Saintster sales were up by three point six percent earlier this morning, and that was encouraging, and that's why the shears probably traded up pre market. But as you're listening to the call which I was on earlier m prior to talking to you, you know, a lot of that three point six percent came from a shift in the friends and family event. And that's where the question is, So how much of it was

the friends and family versus structural growth in the comp number? Yes, so I should point out that now the shares are down more than five percent after that that call. But so that are we basically just seeing a time when discounting is everything. Still discounting is still everything. But it really comes down to execution and having the right products

and driving traffic to the stories. You know, with the shift to online with Amazon and everything else that's going on in retail, the struggle is really to get the traffic in and then to improve conversion by having the right product. And for apparel, you really need to have something exciting, something different, and you need to provide some sort of experience to get that consumer to stay engaged

with you. Putnam is It also worth noting that if you go to calls, you see a huge number of third party brands, whether it's Doctors or Glory of Underbuilt or even Adidas Plus. You find them doing a lot with third party offerings. For example, Carnival the cruise line offers their cruises through Coals, whereas if you go to j C Penny, it's trying to promote a lot of j C Penny brands, although there are some ads for Sephora, but by and large it's j C Penny exclusives. Yeah.

I mean, all department stores have high private label penetration, which is their own brand. So for Coals and j C Penny it's still a large percentage of their sales. And UM j C Penny probably a little more than Coals, but UM Coals, as you know, just launched under our Marina partnership, so they're they're trying to beef up their national brand presence, which helps them get more traffic into the doors. Um for j C Penny to focus on the national label side has been more with big ticket items,

whether it's home furniture or stuff like Salon and Sephora. Alright, well, I guess we're gonna leave it there. I want to thank you very much. Punam Goyle our Bloomberg retail analysts for Bloomberg Intelligence. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast. Subscribe and listen to interviews on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, or whichever podcast platform you prefer. I'm on Twitter at Tom Keane before the podcast. You can always catch us worldwide. I'm Bloomberg Radio