Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
See the best idea. Well, the first thing is to say, where did the first half go?
Wow?
It seems, you know, frankly, the news slows so exhausting. Excuse me. It feels like a year in the first half of two thousand and twenty four. And of course we dive into the second half, I should say, looking at three massive tumultuous elections in France, we'll talk about that in a moment, the United Kingdom July fourth, and then of course all that's gone on in the United
States in the last seventy two hours. Thanks to Jordan Fabian at the White House for giving us a morning brief of just the absolute mystery of what to do. I'm sort of centered on reading about the donors to the Democratic Party, the donors to President Biden. But I'm just saying that as an amateur, I don't have any strong pearls of wisdom. Thanks for the really intelligent comments out on YouTube today out in the live chat the minimum Snark. Appreciate that we're out on YouTube. Search and
subscribe to Bloomberg Podcast. It's our new way to do it. I'll get the six month statistics here in a bit, and we're just humbled by the response. Today we're gonna go to France and then bring it on back to the stock market. Alan Katz is one of the true reporters of Bloomberg, very important in finance and particularly in
finance reform, the criminal intent reporting of finance. And I guess that's how you wrangle yourself into the most coveted job in all of Bloomberg News, which is Paris Bureau chief. This is I mean, Eric, you just can't believe it. It's his gorgeous set of doors two blocks down from Root on Ruskreb, from the opera house, beautiful offices you go out for, you know, I mean, the lunch is there short, lunch is two hours. I mean, it's a
tough life. But within that Alan Katz, like everyone else in France right now, working eighteen hour days on this election. Alan Katz, now are Paris Bureau Chief on the impact of the French people.
If you're the financial markets, your best case scenario is nothing happens over the next three years. This is very hard for French people to accept the idea that you might spend a long time not legislating, not really doing anything. It's very different. You know, if you're American, that sort of you're like, well, actually, this way it's been for much of the time, for the last twenty or thirty years, but here it's not. France is sort of a semi
presidential semi parliamentary system. Usually the government that's the executive branch, has a majority in Parliament and can basically pass whatever they want, and so you pass all sorts of laws if you were in a situation where you had a hung parlia, which has been more or less the case since Macon was re elected in twenty twenty two. He's had the largest single party, but he hasn't had no right majority, and that's really restricted the number of laws and the things he can do and how it can
pass them. And if you had that case, like not much, you wouldn't really be able to do much. But that is not necessarily a bad thing, because France is actually pretty well run country. It's pretty organized. It would actually be rightly fine. The other thing that could happen is that the National Rally gets the majority and they could either do one of two things, either not that much or they might actually say, well, actually, now that we're in power, let's really try to do stuff.
Confused so much, that's what I take out of it. I truly I saw a fantastic graphic today from the Financial Times of the first, second and third tier results of the election of yesterday, and I honestly didn't understand. I mean, I've been doing this for a few years and I did understand the chart. I just I literally did not understand what Alan Katz was talking about. I'm trying. Thank you to Lionel Laurant and all of our Paris News bureau, Carolyn Conan and others were just working NonStop
and this incredible story on the stock market. We got to do a lot of this in July. Up. You know, it's a round number, up fifteen percent, all because of four stacks, you know, the drill. Cam Dawson gave us the first brief of the year, Cameron Dawson at Knew as Wealth. Here's Cameron Dawson on use of cash.
The calculus for using debt in order to do share repurchases is less attractive at today's rates, But to your point, credit spreads are also extraordinarily tight, so you could take advantage of say, yes, my base yield is higher, but nobody really is demanding extra compensation for credit risk. The triple be to double be spread is actually tighter today than it was in twenty twenty one, showing just how price per perfection the credit market is.
Cam Dawson and the equity markets framing out, you know what, the trends in place, solid earning, solid revenue, solid, this, this, this, and she's still on board with this. Equity market had a huge response on YouTube to the Intelligence Today of our guests Audrey Child, Friedman and Foreign Exchange with Bloomberg Intelligence and London and back to cam Dawson, some very kind words about how cam Dawson filters in the mathiness
of equity analysis as well. And I said to her, I said, okay, you're down in Florida, you're a kid. How did you get into the acuity of equity market analysis? Cam Dawson on the books she read.
More Money than God is a fantastic books of Ash Malaby about some of the great hedge fund investors. I think that books like Austerity, which is a fantastic book about politics and economics coming out of the year.
For me, it was against the God. It's Peter Bernstein, you know, on risk and uncertainty.
Wealth born wisdom Martin Biggs. Yeah, yeah, absolutely fascinating, talking about seeing through volatility. Essential reads.
Some books there to get you going. My read of the summer at the top of the list is a book from two years ago, which is more important now to give you an idea. Nvidia doesn't show up until like page two hundred and fifty. Chip War. It's just a great, great book. It's a brilliant academic out of Tufts, Chris Miller. And the answer is I can't say enough. You got a kid at home board and they're all tiktocked up. Throw Chip War at them and say this is how and why you can do TikTok. It is
a spectacular effort. I got a bunch of other books as well, but we'll leave it at that. We're too long today. It's six minutes as smart and the clock that we've got going, and I'm way over single best idea. Good morning, seven