Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at seven am Eastern on Apple car Play or Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts, or watch us live on YouTube.
We're starting off strong way lead chief investment strategists at some firm I think I've heard of at Blackrock, I don't know something, or Blackrock, I think I did do something. They manage some money there. We're going to chat with her and get her thoughts on these markets. Mark Valentino, head of Business Banking at Citizens Bank, on kind of Black Friday sales and kind of how they're shaping up and how the retail sales outlook is for the holiday season.
Alysta Russen, Chief Extecnive Officer l tech Ai on growing stress in the opaque private credit market.
And we'll talk about that private credits to.
People are a little bit concerned about what's going on on their Bloomerk Surveillance is brought to you by cone Restinc. The new office in San Francisco. Cone Resnek is expanding to help Bay Area businesses optimize performance and manager risks put their industry expertise to work for you. Whaley joins us here global chief investment Strategists at black Rock Walley.
Twenty twenty five, Boys, you just look at the numbers.
The top line numbers, smp F fifteen percent, the NASDAG up twenty percent, fixed income give me high single digit total returns. Pretty much a solid year for investors. How about twenty twenty six. How are you guys kind of framing twenty twenty six?
We have positive risk heading into twenty twenty six. Our outlook is called pushing limits, and it's really about making sense of large numbers being talked about and what do we need to believe to justify this huge amount of AI spent.
So currently, when we look at the.
Incremental revenue of these big tech companies heading into twenty thirty end of this decade, they fall short of justified this huge amount of capex. You know, we're talking about credible estimates pointing to eight trillion dollars of spend by twenty thirty. Those are huge numbers. So right now, the forecast for short, but the potential of AI goes beyond existing business lines. So if we have a situation where
growth breaks out from the historical two percent trend. Never happened before for sustained period, but now possible.
Because of AI.
And also if we have a situation where tech companies keep a good share of the additional revenues being created as tech is applied to other sectors, then the numbers can add up. But you've got to be leaving some pretty incredible and unprecedented things to justify this unprecedented amount of capex spent.
I'm looking at Bloomberg mag seven total return Index up not twenty four percent so far this year? Are you expecting the same caliber of returns to continue into next year? You expect tech to be the leader as we look into twenty twenty six.
I do expect concentration first before broader diffusion. When we think about the AI trade, we're talking about an environment where there is going to be more leverage, there is going to be more scrutiny over the individual company fundamentals. So if you think about the latest correction in tech and more broadly in risk assets, actually you see greater differentiation. Right.
You see Alphabet doing.
Better because of the model Gemini three and TPU, and you see Oracle doing a bit worse because of negative free cash flow as well as greater indebtedness, so greater differentiation concentration before broadening out. And I'm paying very close attention to if there are new revenues being created on top of existing business lines to really understand if the wrong way of AI is as big as people are hoping.
For, if the AI expectations may be ahead of themselves at this stage, are you pulling back from some of those names here? Are you hedging some of that secure at this point? Are you trying to diversify away from that a little bit?
Well, that's the thing. There is no place to hide. There is no proper diversification in this environment. So one of the key themes in our outlook is diversification mirage. We call it a mirage because the old diversifiers are not reliably working and this last twenty four hours of
price action is case in point. So you know, we look at a seemingly mixed diversified portfolio and we think that it is a proper diversification, but that would be highly misleading because the whole market is being driven by just a handful of singular principal components and AI being one, So we can't get away from making big calls active calls, and where AI is heading towards and investment decisions made in the guise of diversification may well end up being
huge active bets. So let's make those bets very intentional ones rather than unintentional ones.
So when we think about AI and all the energy that's needed for this, it's going to get a lot of energy. How are you thinking about the energy sector?
That is a constraint that is binding already. So as we think about the AI ambition running up against constraints, which is why we frame the outlook on pushing limits. There are three types of limits. One is energy and the physical limit, and we're running up against those limits already.
One is financing limits, and right now we actually don't see that being a constraint because even though leverage is going higher and big Tech they have issued one hundred million dollars of that just the last quarter, which is higher than previous years, the starting point is very healthy, right, so there is room to leverage up. There is a feature is not a constraint at this moment. And then
there is the political constraint. We're talking about impact of AI on jobs and what that means in terms of the policy response regulatory response. So these are the constraints, but right now the one that is buying is energy. So when we talk about credible estimates taking copecks focus up to AID trillion dollars by the end of the decade, the consideration for energy may well bring that back.
So as we step back and think about twenty twenty six, I guess geopolitics we have to think about that a little bit. We still have an active situation in Ukraine. The Mid East has been quiet for the last several months, but still doesn't feel like that's settled by any stretched imagination. Then we have ongoing tensions between the US and China, but it seems like the markets kind of discounted all of that.
I mean, is that something we need to worry about for twenty twenty.
Six because it seems like a black swamt could come out of anywhere.
Yeah, So we assess the impact of geopolitics on markets, we need really firmly established a transmission mechanism, right So, so far, a lot of the geopolitical flare ups have been good opportunity for market or participants to buy the deep and you look at how markets have down there has been
a good strategy. So if we see the impact of a geopolitical event having a lasting effect on oil price, for example, and then feeding through to inflation, inflational expectations, not just the twelve month expectations, maybe even longer expectations, and then there is a proper feedback loop. But if we're talking about a very swift spike and then coming back down, then that's not something at least from a
longer portfolio construction perspective, we bake that in. You look at geopolitical risk, premium is very flat at the moment.
So when we think about geopolitics, what if you make of potential opportunities when we think about energy or defense for that matter. I mean we've been seeing a large bid in European defense.
That's right.
So for Europe so far this year, we have approached investing through a very selective way. We like industrials within that defense, we like utility, and we also like financials because of cheap valuations as well as its potential to be disrupted by AI.
So defense as.
An evergreen theme, especially given the commitment of natal countries to increase their defense spending that is structural. We think that there is definitely a place for strategic kind of allocation to this theme. But it has round out quite a lot in terms of price so far this year. So we're actually rotating within our European tactical US our location from industrials defense into healthcare as a sector that actually has great valuation opportunities as well as also open
and ripe for AI disruption. But strategically, yeah, definitely we want to have exposure to that despite the geopolitical headgelines or because of geopolitical hedgelines, because the strategic direction of travel is very clear.
Really, I love the black Rock offices over in London there they were right next to our old Bloomberg offices and Finsbury Circus.
Now we're over Queen Victoria Street.
But not too far from your new The new office a great part of town in the city of London. Love it, love it, especially around this time of year.
The city of London is just awesome.
Way Lee, Global, Chief Investment Strategists for black Rock, thanks so much for joining us.
We appreciate it to stay with us. More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast. Catch US Live weekday afternoons from seven to ten am Eastern Listen on Applecarplay and Android Otto with the Bloomberg Business app, or watch US Live on YouTube.
Meredith Whitney darkins a door here.
She is the chief executive officer of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, longtime voice on Global Wall Street. Meredith, we're kind of right in the middle of the holiday shopping season.
How do you think the consumer's doing out there?
Well, it seems as if the retail results have been idiosyncratic. But I can tell you what I've become very nervous about is what has powered the US economy for the last five years, which is is what I call the avocado toast generation. So it's between twenty four and thirty eight, so it's the older gen Z and the younger millennials, and.
They've really hit a wall.
They started hit a wall the summer, so they've been powering spending, spending at Chipotle, Sweet Greens. I mean, the idea of spending a twenty bucks for salad or a brito bowl. You don't see me in line at a Chipotle, but I'm not round bagging it, but at any rate.
So the restaurant started to talk about the fact that this demographic was really struggling because of the resumption of student debts, and we went further into that, and if you look at what the avocado dost generation have, they's actually have amassed a lot of debt over the last five years. So they've got twenty eight percent of all consumer debt. They've got about three hundred dollars less or more into their spending.
So we think about.
COVID stimulus as being a massive stimulus impact on the consumer. It was eight hundred and fourteen billion student debt four bearance, four hundred billions, So COVID stimulus went out to one hundred and sixty five million Americans. Debt four bearans went out to fewer than forty million Americans with fifty percent of the of the spending power. So this demographic had a massive amounts of discretionary spending power and that's not going to come into the economy. And so I think
you see names. I was surprised by urban outfitter being so strong because that caters to a very avocado toasty type demographic. But I think you're going to see more and more pressure throughout this year and into next because a they have got a tremendous amount of debt, they have no equity, and they have no way out. And what's going to happen is this. The Treasure Department has this top program where it's going to garnish tax refunds, and the Department of Education is aggressive on the twenty
percent serious delinquent and charged off loans. They're going to start pulling this back and that's going to hurt them a lot. And obviously we know the low end is really uh is really strained.
So what's the elasticity of this consumer group which I would call the Mata generation.
Oh, that's avocado toast generation. I think it works, or.
You call the fresh fresh coffee generation option, Yeah, it's true. The elasticity is going to come down to I don't think there's a lot of elasticity with this demographic that has so much debt.
So the debt gets worse.
So the student debt is the one part of the economy that has the highest delinquencies, the highest charge offs. I think that's going to bleed into auto lending because the avocadoast generation owns thirty five percent of the auto debt outstanding, So that's going to make a crowded out so you're going to see it factor in the elasticity I think is really interesting in terms of one factor.
One trend that we've been tracking very closely has been home equity loan extraction and that's been the fastest growing loan category of any consumer loan category, and that started in twenty twenty the sum in Earnest the summer of twenty twenty four. And what's really interesting is historically that's home equity loan extractions have been used for home renovations, but now they're increasingly used for cash management. So since twenty twenty two, there's been over a fifty percent rise
in home equity extractions use of cash management. Now that is every week we look at this, I pull it through Bloomberg and it continues to accelerate. Now it's only available for the prime market, so if you have any type of credit ding on your credit score, you can access the equity in your home. But avocado toasters by and large don't own homes, so they have no equ tap. And if they do own homes, they've got high LTVs. Right, because they have an owned homes that long, so they
don't have much equity to tap. So that feeds into very little elasticity in this group. And then you think about when you look at twenty twenty six and people get excited about one beautiful bill tax refunds.
Well, if you own a.
Bunch of student debt, you're going to get tax refund garnishment. So I don't see it's a great question. I don't see a lot of elasticity within this group. Now that said, there's still so much money swashing through the system, but it's at the high end.
You know, this case shaped economy. Meredith, Is it something that's always been out there?
Is it more.
Pronounced in the last ten or fifteen years? And it wasn't the pacity you think, because it just seems like it's really pronounced these days.
Yeah, there's without a doubt it's gotten so much more pronounced in the last really since the Great Financial crisis. And you know, it's said by probably the most esteem person in this bill that you have you can have you know wage, you know, you can have income disparities, but when it reaches a breaking point, it's not good for society and I think at this point it's reached a breaking point. So the BA puts out numbers whereby you see who controls what amount of spending over the
course of the years. And I've been going back to early two thousands and you can see in terms of spending how much the low end contributes, how much the high end contributes, and that's just been diverging. So the most recent number shows the bottom forty percent contributes only twenty two percent of spending, whereas the top forty contributes sixty two percent.
That was much more.
Uh, that wasn't equal, but it was much more even let's say seventeen years ago.
So in terms of the lower end consumer, where is the majority of their money going? I was hearing anecdotally even during Black Friday sales, people were actually purchasing necessities.
Yeah.
Yeah, So I think so tomorrow and Thursday, the Dollar stores report, and I think that'll be a really good insight into the lower end. Now, Walmart is not the lower end. Walmart is everybody in the shopping experience is just so spectacular that more and more people go to Walmart.
But the dollar store it's not exactly the case. But I always say people drive to Walmart and walk to the dollar stores, and the dollar stores may benefit because you've had consolidation at Party City, and some of the things you may go and get, you know, wrapping paper and birthday items. But on essentials, it's really catch as catch can, and I think surely people are going to
be buying basic essentials. I think what's also interesting is because chains like McDonald's have offered more value and really captured the value meal, people are eating more out more because it's cheaper to eat out than homes, and that always shifts.
For a while.
When they were going away from the value value meals, people were buying more essentials. It all depends, but I think it's it is clear that over fifty two percent of households, probably a lot over fifty two percent of households are barely getting.
By Meredith, thank you so much for joining us.
Meredith Whitney, Chief executive Officer of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group and Lawrenceville Class of eighty seven.
Eighty eight, first class of girls to.
Drive class girls to graduate from the Lawrenceville School for like two hundred years as all boys. It was after my time, unfortunately, but it was a great thing because it was a one of the greatest things that ever happened to lawrencevill schools having girls comes in because the boys dress better, they sit up at their desk, They're no more screwing around.
Because the girls came in, they were smarter than us. Positive influence.
It was unbelievable. They lifted the school dramatic. It's the best decision of schools ever made. And I have to admit Lawrencell did it the right way. They invested in the school before the girls got there, so when the girls got there they felt like I think they felt like they were part of the team there at.
The Carlisle Hotel. It was amazing and they were so welcoming. It was just an incredible educational experience. And I loved it because if someone had a problem with someone as a pylon.
Yep, exactly right. Aaron Whitney, thank you so much. We appreciate it. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from seven to ten am Eastern Listen on Applecarplay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube.
Cameron Dawson joins us here in studio. Cameron, we've had a little bit of waffling in the market over the last several weeks. Is that just a little bit of I don't know, We've had such a great run coming off the April lows that maybe we're just stepping back and reassessing here, or we have something different going on out there.
Do you think we would categorize this as a very healthy digestion simply because we saw such a powerful rally, mostly in September and October in some of the most speculative portions of the market. So to see some rationality come back in, we would see it as a good thing.
The reality is that you.
Are still rising GDP forecasts, you're still increasing EPs forecasts, which would tell us that this kind of correction and churn is more short and shallow, versus something that's deeper and more protracted, which would come.
If you were cutting forecasts. So, of course we've just entered December. I'm really stopping from saying ho ho ho. But we always talked about the Santa Claus rally, right, and this usually happens in the back half of December when we see a rally into year end.
How are you thinking about that right now?
Of course it is December second and we are seeing some shakiness, But what's your view.
Yeah, we've been thinking that if there was one thing that could bring Santa Claus to town, it would be positioning and the fact that if you look at things like the Deutsche Bank Consolidated Positioning Index, it's still just right below neutral and even discretionary investors are only in the twenty six percentile.
So what's the consolidated positioning thing? What does that mean?
It's a Deutsche Bank index, and it's been very very helpful in understanding when institutional investors are either all in the market or very short. It's one of the things that since the April lows, it actually got down to the first percentile. So we've been making the argument since that time that as long as investors were underweight this market, that dips would be bought because people would need to
chase into into the strength. And so that is the setup into your end, which is that the chase could be on mostly because you also have the backdrop that EPs forecasts are still going up, so you have a fundamental reason for people to get longer this market.
What about as we talk about dip buying, how are you thinking about retail traders right now in this environment?
That's an incredibly different story. Retail investors are all in. If you look at the AAII allocation, it's at seventy and a half percent.
That's the peak that we got to back in.
Twenty twenty one, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty four, all times that were then followed by more market kind of weakness. You've also seen a lot of growth in finram margin loan balances. They were growing at a pace of thirty five percent over the last six months. To put that into context, going back to twenty twenty, we were only growing at a pace of thirty percent. So you actually have margin loans growing faster today than they did at
a time when rates were near zero. So what you've seen is households move into a full risk on allocation, whereas institutions have much more sat on the sidelines.
Do we like that? Do we like the retailers getting in there?
So look, clearly we're seeing the perils of high leverage and getting unwound, mostly in things like the cryptospace There was a great article on the terminal this morning talking about how some of these leveraged ETPs to things like strategy are down eighty ninety percent, and so clearly there are signs that there was a lot of froth and a lot of speculation that was going on in certain
cohorts of retail traders. An article in the Journal yesterday talking about how servicemen in the US are trading stocks and so is this the same as the shoeshine person telling you stock tips back in nineteen twenty nine. Not so sure, But clearly there has been a speculative fervor in certain pockets of the market.
So speculative burger definitely, and focus here, But how are you thinking about defensive sectors? Say, maybe healthcare utilities?
Yeah, it's interesting.
There's a great function on the terminal called RRG, the relative rotation graph, and what you can see is that as you have seen a rotation out of things like the mag seven, which is tech, telecom communication services, and consumer discretionary, that has benefited utilities, it's benefited healthcare. Now the big question is is healthcare is rally reflecting just the fact that it was very underloved under owned and very cheap, or is it actually reflecting a more defensive
bid within this market. I think it's more the former than the latter. Not necessarily, this is a market where everybody's looking for safety.
Keron, I still think earnings matter, and I think we've had very good earnings this year, the second quarter, the third quarter, really strong earnings.
Here are the earnings at a level that can support this market?
Here?
Do you think? I thought it was really interesting a couple days ago you had Max Kuttner on and he was arguing that you've seen earnings in the third quarter go up so much that now the fourth quarter is implying a sequential decline, meaning that the fourth quarter earnings estimates are likely too low, or at least are a very low bar.
To jump over.
That implies to us that there's still room for four Q earnings to be revised higher. That is usually a good environment for risk taking. Maybe not on a day to day basis, but usually that is supportive for things like equities to continue to rally.
We've been hearing a lot from retailers as of late, and it's been a bit of a mixed picture. But I mean, we did have black Friday that it just passed, and we saw a lot of strength in the consumer there. How are you thinking about the retail space right now terms of investment opportunities and just more broadly.
Yeah, that Black Friday growth certainly was encouraging, but it came with a few important caveats. It is not inflation adjusted, which means that you have seen big price increases for certain goods, so it's not necessarily reflecting volumes, and in certain areas, volumes were likely weaker because prices had gone up so much. And also you had this big search and buy now, pay later. And the big question is how much are people reaching and adding to leverage in
order to be able to fund their spending. And what we have seen is that there's still room and aggregate for households to add to leverage. Maybe not in some of the lower income side of things, but if you look at broader household leverage ratios, they're nowhere near where they were back prior to the Great Financial Crisis.
For example, I.
Can actually make some money in the fixed income market in twenty twenty five. Here, I mean, I'm looking at the GO function on the Bloomberg terminal. I'm seeing kind of mid to very high single digitortal returns across the fixed income space here?
How do you think about that?
Yeah, isn't it incredible?
Way?
I mean, we've had rallies and everything, and for a while Muni's were sitting on the sidelines, but they had a great November as some of those supply demand dynamics became more favorable. I think the question as we go into twenty twenty six is what's going to happen with the treasury curve? Do we see upward pressure on longer term bond yields because of what's going on with fiscal deficits,
because of what's going on with sticky inflation. We're now at a tenure treasury that touched near four percent last week.
That seemed very low given the piece of inflation that we have.
So I think it's a question of do we have that same kind of total return potential as we get into twenty twenty six, simply because the starting point is much lower yields today, and.
As we've been talking about bonds, just the rate market more generally. Of course, we do have the Federal Reserve meeting this month. What are your expectations heading into that?
Meeting.
So we do think that they will cut, and that is what the market is pricing and I think it checked this morning in ninety five percent.
Probability that we're going to get to cuts. We are going to get a cut.
We do not think that the FED, though, will give guidance as to what they want to do in twenty twenty six, meaning this FED will not It'll be a meeting by meeting.
They will commit to a rate path.
But that may not matter as much if we get the nomination for who's going to be FED shair, because what that creates the potential for is that shadow FED kind of commentary. If we get, for example, Kevin Hassett coming in and saying being nominated as FED chair and saying, hey, we're going to three percent, the market will price that in with greater certainty. However, there is a big caveat and catch there.
If you get.
Somebody like Hassett get nominated, The question is can he rally the troops of the FED to vote in in line with what he is pushing for. And that remains a big question simply because he's an outsider and probably has the perception of being the most politically captured candidate that Trump could choose.
Camer Let me tell your clients, how do you talk to them about alternative investments, whether it's private equity, private credit, hedge funds.
Is that something that comes up a lot.
Oh, it's incredibly important, mostly because a lot of our clients can tolerate illiquidity. But we think it's really important to be highly selective within each of those asset classes. So take private equity, for example. Instead of going into things like high valued growth equity and large cat buyout, we've been focusing on things like lower middle market secondaries GP stakes, things that we've found to have are a much more attractive return profile, less sensitive to the capital
market cycle. We've been focusing a lot on venture. Over the course of the last year, we've been doing a lot of work in infrastructure, as well as more uncorrelated assets, so things that would FI fallow a little bit more on the esoteric side of things, things like water rights and litigation finance. The idea being is that we want to make sure that our alternatives do provide a source
of diversification. So if your alternatives are relying on something like the US consumer and consumer lending, which some of the asset back finance does you're not really getting the diversification you're going for.
Cameron, has been a really interesting year as we think about currency, specifically the US dollar. I'm looking at the Bloomberg Dollars BOT index down about almost seven percent on pace to end the year. With that decline here, how are you thinking about the US dollar? Is this the place to be right now?
Yeah?
Well, the dollar fell primarily at the start of the year and has now been flat for the last six months.
And what you saw was the dollar poke.
Its head up above the two hunder day moving outage back last week and start to fade lower. The question we have is that a false breakout. What we're looking as international money market futures show dollar positioning, and what you can see is that they were deeply, deeply negative, deeply underweight at the beginning of the year, which coincided with the low and the dollar. That underweight positioning has now been closed, but there's still a lot of room
for investors to get more long the dollars. So if you see a little bit more dollar strength, that could cause more dollar length in positioning, which could then feet on dollar strength and thus we get more of an upside, but that still remains to be seen as the technicals still raise a few eyebrows.
What's your twenty twenty sixth theme? Have you written something like that?
Oh?
Man?
So we play the I like to go with the price is right kind strategy, so that when we go last, you know, if you want to win the price is right, it's really best to go last.
So we always wait till the second week of.
January to publish our outlet because what we like to know is what everybody else has said, and then we can get a sense of where consensus is.
Call it cheating or call it wise.
So what do you I mean? It seems like, you know, I'm not sure what's changed here. I feel like we've got a decent earnings background. I feel like we've got fedis cutting interest rates. I get my economy still growing. It feels like twenty twenty six could be another decent year if unless something crazy happens.
It also feels a little bit like back to the future because the same questions are qualms that we could have about this market and this economy are the same today as we had this timeline last year. You could look at high valuations. You could look at concentrated equity positioning. You could look at the fact that peripheral labor market data is weakening and does that turn into an even weaker labor market. All observations that you could make this time last year you.
Could make today.
Do they become more accurate in your concerns today after the strong rally that we've had versus what they were last year?
All Right, I don't know.
It seems like a pretty decent backdrop for me. Cameron Dawson, We appreciate getting a few minutes of your time, Chief Investment Officer at New edgewelth joining us here.
Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from seven to ten am Eastern Listen on Applecarplay and Android Otto with the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Time for newspapers with Lise MITTEO Ah, you've been waiting for it.
Okay.
Have you heard of slop bowl fatigue?
I have not. Now it's a thing. Now you have, Now you will, Okay.
So it's when you go to like the fast food fast casual and you stand in front of the counter and you point out what you want and they have a bowl of either rice or lettuce and they just slop everything inside of it. Okay, so people are apparently getting tired of it. Think like Chipotle, Cava, Sweet Green, like they all slash their financial targets. So instead of instead, what they're doing is they're choosing things with more texture, things like sandwiches or tacos. You know, they can fill
you up, they cost a little bit less. And Bloomberg spoke to Steve El's he's actually the founder of Chipotle. He left the company in twenty twenty. He started this new like counter company called counter Service. They have a location in Manhattan. But he's saying, yes, they are a bowl free zone. People want more handheld and that's apparently the new trend.
So I mean it can be messy, I guess, but I don't know.
I just always amaze, like how much they put on it.
Yeah, I said, I want to walk in.
It's like what I like, the first time I was at Sweet Green, I had to be schooled by somebody because I didn't know how to order, and you know, I was the old guy holding.
Up the line.
So there was a young Bloomberg person behind me who saved me. I think the person she's like, sir, this is this is how you want to do it.
They're looking out for one another exactly.
But I'm just the deli guy. I'm old school here. Okay.
So you like the handheld sam which are the go to It's easier to take home.
Don We live in a part of the world where we have great delis, so you take advantage of it.
Desizza, that's it.
That's all you got.
Okay, So this one's interesting. Bosses are going to new extremes to get their workers to use a I.
Okay.
So, for example, companies like IBM, they're paying cash, they're
awarding points that are resuemable for gift cards. They're giving out merch invitations to like showcase their solutions at company events to kind of put them on a stage and present this because companies invested all this money into AI systems, but their workers are kind of hesitant because some of them saying, well, AI is going to make their job disappear faster, so they don't really want to go, or they don't have the time for the training or some
people are saying they don't want to share their AI tactics because that gives them like a little competitive edge, you know. So maybe I don't want to share it because I want to.
Back in the day, when I'm starting on investment banking, was I was a good modeler, so I could model really well and know all the macros for the Excel spreadsheets things. I felt like I had like an edge there for two or three or four years, but then that skill became less valuable as you get further in your career. But I think AI, I mean, you have to embrace it, don't you. If you're a young person coming up, that's the.
Thing too, Like you, I feel like you do have no option.
Exactly.
So yeah, it's just interesting because like they're giving bonuses for people who do do it. Okay, there's a brownie point exactly.
All right.
So this one stuck out to me because we all have, you know, the smartphone, right, but this one is a trifle phone. Okay, So this is from Samsung. It's their first trifle smartphone, the Galaxy Z trifle so basically has two hinges and it collapsed, you know, it opens up to like a ten inch display, So it's like a little mini tablet. Yeah, you got to look at the picture. Four hundred and fifty dollars.
Okay. It starts in South.
Korea, that's where it's launching on December twelfth, and then it'll kind of make its way to the US, China, Taiwan, Singapore.
United Arab Embrates.
So if you look, oh yeah, see if you're watching YouTube, there you go.
That's what it looks like.
This.
It's kind of cool. I mean, big screen.
I'm just afraid it's going to break, right, it's like a tablet at this point it becomes a mini tablet.
Right, Yeah, it's a stimulating I don't know, if.
You're watching shows or movies and stuff, that's.
Gaming exactly exactly.
That's it. It's not about the film anymore.
This seems basically a camera slash TV that you can make a phone call on.
Did you fold it back up when you want to put it to your ear for a yes, yes you do.
It folds back up to the regular size. But actually Huawei actually came out with the first Trifle back in like twenty twenty four, but it's the first first hand I'm sung so kind of interesting. And I know people are sounding off on the YouTube on the YouTube chat and they're saying, yeah, they're afraid that it's going to break, so yeah, shoot, all.
Right, not for the kids.
All right, newspapers, thank you very much for We appreciate that the trifold phone.
I'm happy with my iPhones.
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