This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. I'm Tom Keene, along with Jonathan Farrow and Lisa Abramowitz. Join us each day for insight from the best and economics, geopolitics, finance and investment. Subscribe to Bloomberg Surveillance on demand on Apple, Spotify and anywhere you get your podcasts, and always on Bloomberg dot Com,
the Bloomberg Terminal, and the Bloomberg Business App. Henri Out a trace with us right now director of Economic Policy Research if out of Partners, but far more political economic policy as well. When an election starts five hundred and sixty days out, Henrietta, what's the gridlock look like? What is the new gridlock after the election is engaged?
The new gridlock is, basically, we get this debt ceiling past us, hopefully in the next month or two, and then we move pretty much exclusively to and there will be a focus on trying to craft a bipartisan bill, any attempt to differentiate the Republicans from the Democrats on that front, and I suspect they'll both be job owning about what could come on the China front, including Tariff's investment restrictions. Heading into seven that's what will.
Be, so that'll be the legislative debate. But does China fold into election results? The maxim I've always heard is that domestic issues are far more important in an election dash. Does China play into the election dash?
I think so.
You have nearly eighty percent of the US population who believes that China is something of an enemy to the United States, so it's a very popular boogeyman. I think you have to question what the underlying macroeconomic data is going to look like.
What's unemployment?
You know, if it's still in the three and a half even four percent range, it's not going to be that striking topic like it has been in years past and we were at eight nine to ten percent. If inflation has come down and it similarly is not in the eight nine to ten percent range, you're going to have an opportunity to focus on foreign policy because domestic politics or domestic economic policy data will have a cooler temperature.
It will be big enough to occupy headlines every single day, so you can have an opening for China to be a conversation.
A lot of shift right now when it comes to geopolitics, a lot of shift when it comes to economics, and there's not a lot of shift. When it comes to the most likely matchup for the twenty twenty four election, it is President Biden.
He is in the running.
That is what he said earlier this morning with the official announcement, and former President Trump.
This is the likely matchup.
What does that say to you that it's the two known entities going at it again.
You know, it's really interesting.
I'm trying to find a great way to say this, but as an analyst, you know, we're always looking for some sort of nuance or edge to share with clients and help them have a little bit of extra juice going into any kind of a.
Big event like this.
But realistically, we have a pretty solid run rate to work with Democrats the midterm elections in twenty eighteen by
an overwhelming majority. Democrats won the twenty twenty presidential election, picking up Arizona and Nevada, Georgia even we won the special elections in Georgia twice, and then in twenty twenty two ran in a super high inflationary environment coming out of the pandemic in a race that Democrats had no business winning, and the minority party lost in the most epic blowout since the nineteen thirties.
So it's really difficult to.
Try to find a rationale for not knowing the outcome of the twenty twenty four presidential election cycle. We've seen this fight literally four times now and each one ends the same way. So it's difficult to find a way to explain or convince anybody, including my own brain, about how you can see Republicans win in this environment with the same candidate.
How much is this Democrats winning and how much is this Republicans losing with respect to where the balance of power is in that party.
I would definitely look at the key states. I mean, all our clients know, and y'all know, it doesn't matter what the national data is. It's really about key states and the electoral College. So look at Arizona, look at Pennsylvania. In those states, Joe Biden is ahead by four points one point, and that's the outcome.
Of the cycle.
So you might have some scenarios where certain states are going more aggressively for Trump, but mostly it's going to be a national referendum in key states against the Republican caucus and their policies.
Henry and I've brought up twice today a question of progresses or liberals within the Democratic Party. I mean, in the republican concept. There's this idea Republican in name only. Is Joe Biden a Democrat in name only?
I think that if you were to pull a Bernie Sanders or some of his supporters, they would say things along those lines. But it's really difficult to look at the track record and see a one point nine trillion dollar Cares Act bill passed in the first month of his administration, the Chips Act, which was bipartisan by Parson,
infrastructure bill, and then the Inflation Reduction Act. There is establishment, democratic, democratic and name only agenda items like Chips and the but then there's also those progressive items green energy tax credits that are very expansive. And then obviously the one point I joined down the COVID relief bill, which had a lot of progressive agenda items in there.
So you can make thank you so much, Henry out Tre's director of economic policy Vada Partners. There. We have a wonderful guest with it that John's going to bring in. But you know, John, it's going to be important. Newburger. Berman is going to focus today on the four pm earnings Thursday. On the four pm earnings tomorrow, every set there will be shifted from financial media over to Manchester
City will not be watching Meta earnings tomorrow. How big a game is that tomorrow that's going to constract Global Walls.
Told, this is six pointer? Don't we schouse epic? It's a six pointer? How big is this for Arsenal? For the gunners?
It's huge. I was at Hibury when I was four, so I have a you really, I really was. My dad was teaching at the London School of Economics and he dragged me along to Hibury and I'm super excited about Wednesday. So we'll have the three broombroog screens going and one will have the matron and the rest will have Meta.
I had to say to Tom on Friday when they were throwing the game against Southampton away. I said, Tom, you need to understand the phrase bottling it? Are they bottling it?
They choking a little. It's tough to lead the whole year from the front, and it's been remarkable and we'll we'll know tomorrow. We'll know tomorrow.
Top of the league Arsenal going up against Manchester City, the top two the face down tomorrow, so you won't be watching meta earning, so I imagine you'll be looking at Google and Microsoft a little bit later. These tech names have had massive moves here today. Lisa talked about meta of something like seventy to eighty percent so far in twenty twenty three. Are you expecting the numbers to validate the moves?
I think the two stories this afternoon will be a little different. Microsoft's are going to be all about Azure and the enterprise slowing and the large enterprise companies have all kind of looked at their cloud spend and decided to rationalize a little bit. But then on Microsoft, it's going to be telling the long, long term story around open Ai and their forty nine percent investment there. We've done the math on some of that. The maths not easy.
You know, the AI market will be over a trillion dollar market in by twenty thirty and Microsoft's magnificently positioned there and can add at least maybe twenty percent to their top line over the next five to six years. So I think Microsoft is going to be You're going to look through the valley to the next peak, so to speak, kind of ignore the shorter term headwinds and
focus more on the longer term opportunity. Where Google, I think it's they haven't provided the sizzle that Microsoft has as as relates to open AI, So I think there we're looking for a lot of clarity around their longer term strategy. I think they magnificently position there as well. But unlike Microsoft, we're going to be thinking through efficiency and optimization as it relates to their to their cost structure.
They sell at two vastly different valuations. The point I'd make maybe more generally about technology that maybe sometimes gets gets lost. The by and large, the resiliency you've seen in earnings out of the index, so to speak, is because these businesses have magnificent income statement flexibility. And the challenge with the financial companies is they they don't have income statement flexibility. They are tied by their balance sheets.
And so I am quite optimistic that the very large index contributors will will deliver earnings that are high quality and they're protecting they're protecting their cash flows. This year the market shifted, as you know, from rev you to what matters, which is cash in the.
Bank, which they have magnificently displayed.
Will open AI be the new blockchain.
I mean, basically, have we already fully priced in just saying chat GPT and then seeing your stock sore.
I don't think we have, and we certainly haven't at Microsoft, and we certainly haven't at Google because Google sells it ten times EV to enterprise value. That is not evaluation. That suggests a lot of good news is priced in. I like the analogy to the to blockchain. We think the efficiency opportunity for people that adopt AI is two
x on the margin line relative to the blockchain. So we're talking If you thought blockchain was a was a two hundred basis points improvement to efficiency for companies adopting it, we think open ai is probably five hundred basis points. Think through the efficiency of that, and think through the productivity.
I want to focus on your courage to own a few things on a big were down. I believe twenty four percent last year in one portfolio, and maybe that was a little worse than others because you had big tech owning. I want to talk about the street. Focus on that these stocks are too big, too dominant, and people are diversifying away. Peter Lynch called it diversification in general. Are people diversifying away where they should own more of big tech.
It's it's a big question. We have the growth strategy, a large cup growth strategy that was down twenty four percent last year. We felt great relative to the large cap growth indices. I think it proved out the high quality, defense and nature of how we proceed with growth. I think I gave you the analogy with with with Microsoft. He as a company that can add you know, twenty to city billion dollars to their revenues over the next five years, and they're running at two hundred billion dollars
of revenue today. I don't know many companies that that and operate at that scale with that type of opportunity. And I think when you think through when you think through Google, the challenge there is going to be can It's a little bit of the innovator's dilemma. Can they can they understand the threat that AI provides to their core search business, which is kind of a ninety two
percent monopoly business while capturing the opportunity of AI. Not different to how Netflix kind of attack themselves as they went from you know, physical delivery of content to digital and you've got a factor in valuation. Look in this environment, I think you've got to quality up. You've got to own income statement flexibility, you've got to be mindful of the balance sheet, and you've got to own businesses that if the tide was to go out, you feel really
good about their next three to five year positioning. And I think you just find that today in the large companies that are that are going to be massive beneficiaries of all the compute spans. And that's going to take place with AI. Microsoft magnificently positioned, so is Google, so
is Amazon, so is Meta. These folks own the largest computers in the world, and they're going to rent them out to everyone else, and everyone else is going to enjoy a five hundred basis point margin improvement over time. And that's going to be very good for for for the economy. It's going to come with lots of headwinds, no doubt, lots of regulatory scrutiny for sure. But but but net net, it's it's it's it's it's massive.
I didn't hear around VMH or as up in quality. That's all we're hearing about Europe, luxury players, all of that good stuff. Then why you're not there?
I think I mean we we're not there necessarily with that specific wonderful high end retail them. My wife's there in shades spades. We were recently in Europe and there is a currency heads, you know, currency of trash, so to speak. So I'm familiar with the power of that brand. They've bought a remarkable company. They've got to go through, uh, you know, they've got to figure out which of the five favorite kids are are going to run on the show.
But I think this morning from Pepsi and McDonald's, you saw what quality and innovation and convenience and value delivered.
Charles character can segue from Lewis Wooten.
I know less about McDonald's from both all of that, but it's just quality and and so.
McDonald's in the.
It's a function of who the consumer is. I mean, the consumer of McDonald's ses tremendous value, as does as does the LVMH customer in a different way.
You were acclaimed on Whole Foods. Amazon. Whole Foods is now thrown on a towel. They're going to go low price, lower price. Is it going to work?
I don't know if they're going to do that precisely in your honor was back there on Saturday, just buying a few things for dinner. Look, they have made wholesome food affordable for all of America. You know what gets lost with Amazon is they now have relationships with three thousand local producers. That's way up from when Whole Foods was a standalone company. And if you're a prime member, you're getting value with Whole.
I don't know about you, but when I go into Whole Foods to get dinner, I could have bought ms scaff.
It's not perfectly cheap, but it hasn't It hasn't come down that much relative to fifteen seconds you pay for quality.
Do you miss Highbury?
I do miss Highbury And I haven't yet been to Emirates.
Into the Amates a couple of times, and my.
Guess is the seating at the Emirates is a little bit no comfortable.
Those old stadiums I think a Fenway and Boston. Just the romance of it.
It's great.
I wish that kept them.
Can talk to mister Levy. Canter's got you mass to.
Help him parachute in and parachuting and sports. I'm not sure, but as a quality right now, something well that's.
A thank you everyone.
Right now in banking, and surely expert on is Christopher Merinack JOINSUS director of Research Jenny Montgomery Scott Philadelphia and in Atlanta this morning. Christopher, you know you and I do the same thing when you get the Key Friette Bank Index out of twenty two banks, and it's real simple. Were the latest tobacco? They're priced back to nineteen ninety eight.
How many others are there like FRC? Do you do you look at them as a discreet disaster or is there enough of them out there to affect something like the twenty two banks and the KBW index.
I think First Republic stands on its own, Tom, I really think that it's at once opportunity. Unfortunately that was hit by friendly fire and they have really struggled clearly for the quarter. Deposits worse than we thought. As you said, I think the conference call did not go well. I think the market didn't like the lack of questions, and I think there's real changes the company has to make.
The answer is combinations. The basic thing we've had is four thousand banks, whether it's twenty two larger regionals or not. When do we start to see the mergers that are just to have to come.
Well for First Republic, it could happen very soon. I mean they need to do something. They either need to strength the balance you do, they need to find a buyer. They're going to have to raise capital either way. So if they sell the company, that avoids that, but they're going to have to take action as soon as today. I'm not sure they can wait a whole lot longer.
Christopher, who would want to buy a firm like this when they can get the deposits some other way and they're taking all the liabilities.
Well, there could be the attitude that you want the wealth management business and the clients that they have, even though they did lose advisors precipitously towards the end of March and also here in April. I think trying to get that business would be very attractive to a Goldman, Sachs, to Morgan Stanley, to perhaps even JP Morgan. You'd have to have some regulatory relief if you're JPM to get that done from an asset perspective, but it's not impossible.
But certainly I think the wealth management business would be the ticket that would be most attractive here.
I was struck this morning, Christopher, when I came in that all the other regional banks are being punished as well. It's not just First Republic, it's even those that have reported earnings and came in better than people we feared, whether it was Western Alliance, whether it was Zions, whether it was any of the others.
Still they are lower. What does that tell you about what is going on there?
But also more broadly about sentiment, Well, banks are leverage vehicles.
They work off of trust, and I think the confidence and trust has slipped with the First Republic news, and I think we just have to get through this air pocket today and this week. Most of these companies are very strong on capital, They have liquidity. They simply have question marks with the confidence given the deposit run that happened in the system in March, and so we're still kind of working through that. Think of it as a
lou and the patient's not completely healed yet. I do think that banks have to consider raising capital just to show that they can. It would be a sign of confidence. That to me is where this ultimately goes. Maybe we're another six or eight weeks away from that, but I think that's the answer to the problem.
And christ I think we've all forgotten this happened at the very end of the first quarter in the month of March, and I'm trying to work out what that might mean for profits coming forward from here Q two, Q three, Q four. What do you think that's going to look like?
So for First Republic, I think it's a break even at best, because if you reset their funding costs again in the second quarter, it definitely takes away a lot of the profitability. We also think they have to strength the balance sheet, and that obviously hurts the revenue side. If you sell securities, sell loans, etc.
And then capital of course.
Comes under pressure as you're going to have to sell those assets at a loss. So that definitely puts pressure on the revenue line and the earnings for sure. But I think there's a case for the company to break even. It's just a challenge to execute. And I think the thing that we worry about is that this is a company that has been a growth oriented company, not one man's for profitability.
They haven't had a.
Quarter above a one percent hour away since twenty sixteen. It's just not been in their DNA. They've been a growth oriented bank, and it's a it's a very hard pivot for them to do.
Does that mean they need new dataship?
Not sure about the leadership.
I think it's a change in mindset.
I think that they can do this if they.
Change from a growth company into a profit company and make that immediate. I don't think it's impossible, but it is a mindset change that would be relatively vague in their history.
Listen, months changed, Tom forced on them after the events of the Last Stand a few weeks.
You know, I'm thinking Johnavan to Charles Dickens novel eighteen thirty England, where the banks were not growth vehicles.
I'm not sure to regulate to one banks to be growth vehicles anyway.
I at leasta get out to surveillance, Cork, I'm going to need it to protect the innocent here. I think it's it's what I would say is the zombies are going to get rolled up. How many First Republics are out there is an important question.
I've seen people refer to this bank as a zombie. I'm not going to reselves yesterday, Chris, thanks to that. Good to catch up, Chris Famronak. There of Jenny Montgomery Scott.
As we lean forward with Charles Canter here of Newburger Berman, we do better with RBC Capital Markets. Rishi Jaluia. Now he's a software equity analyst, forget about it, expert on Microsoft. Here we go, folks on the big stock you don't own. Rishi twenty six percent per year total return over the last ten years. The free cash flow blowout pre pandemic is absolutely stunning. I mean, the cash flow growth out five years to a model twenty twenty four is off
the chart. Is the story priced into the stock now or will there be constructive surprises forward?
Yeah?
Thanks so much for having me. You know, I think the big story around Microsoft is if we put maybe the near term macro aside.
Is really AI.
And as we've outlined, we really think the opportunity with generative AI for Microsoft is a call option on the stock.
It is not priced in today.
We actually needed to make money off Microsoft stock apps in any AI story. But really that's where you gets legive growth up and I do not think that's priced in. You know, if you think about all the different ways throughout Microsoft's portfolio that can that it can benefit from generative AI, be it in Azure, from their agreement with open Ai, be it competitively with the Microsoft through sixty five suite, and the integration of co pilot throughout, be
it in their security, be it in GitHub. I think there's so many ways Microsoft can benefit from generative AI, and I think that's the next leg of growth up.
Here, Risha, I want to go to that. Okay, the free casual in numbers, folks is thirty eight billion dollars pre pandemic, and they went out to seventy three billion dollars modeled off for two twenty four. That's the existing company with two hundred thousand employees. Rishie explain how AI is different than other new things, the bright, shiny new concept, and that it's a call option on Microsoft that has real durability.
Yeah.
I mean, look, this is the fourth big technological change in my lifetime, right, going back to the Internet, going back to mobility, the cloud, and now AI. And I know we've been talking about AI for so long, but chat GPT was that watershed moment that gets AI widespread
throughout the ecosystem. This is like when Netscape for the Internet came out, or the iPhone for mobility, and that is where we really think this has so much potential not just for revenue, but to your point on the bottom line, for free cash flow for Microsoft, that we
can see that number continue to move up. And because of Microsoft's first mover advantage, because of how far ahead of others open AI is, and because of how quickly every other company is having to move to have a generative AI strategy, we believe Microsoft will be an outside beneficiary of that.
And if you look out throughout the entire.
Portfolio of Microsoft's products, all the growth rates will be significantly different. Everyone's going to be talking about as your growth rates, and you know, it seems it's realistic to me that that's going to accelerate to probably twenty percent
growth over the coming quarters. But if once you start layering in the benefits from generative AI, because this is so much more resource intensive, not to mention, you'll probably have an entire trillion dollar economy built on open AI, just like you had a trillion dollar economy with the iPhone and a trillion dollar economy with AWUS.
I think that as your number goes back above thirty.
Percent growth, Rishie, how much smaller can some of these big tech companies be on a headcount level based on some of the efficiencies that everyone keeps talking about with artificial intelligence.
Yeah, I think that's a great question.
I would say, you know, number one, for Microsoft, I think in contrast to a lot of the other big tech they didn't over hire at the same rate. I know they have done a riff. Some of that was eliminating under performing employees, some of that was actual cost savings and reallocating of employees. But I'd say Microsoft maybe had more responsible hiring practices and a lot of other big tech companies that have had to do significantly bigger riffs, And if you benchmark.
Their employee efficiency relative to other companies enterprise software, they were very high even prior to the riff.
Now, in terms of the cost savings from generator AI, I think that's a big open ended question. You know, we can talk about innovation and what general AI brings there, but there is also It makes developers significantly more effective, it makes marketers more effective, salespeople more effective, and I wouldn't be surprised if we could see a company be able to get away with significantly lower headcount.
I'm talking double digit, right, ten.
Percent plus lower headcount as a result of really embracing and leveraging generative AI on the back end. You know, that's maybe more of a three year story than a near term one. But absolutely every company I talked to is trying to use generative AI for greater operational efficiency, efficiency, and then I think the terminal margins across enterprise software and really across big tech has to be a higher long term now because of this, just.
Real quick here, Who's going to win the generative AI game? Will it be Google or will it be Microsoft?
Yeah, it's it's early to tell, but I think Microsoft has such a huge lead from their early investment in open ai, from the fact that open ai is an arms length transaction. You look at the advantages you have in chat, GPT versus all the other systems out there, including Bard and Claude and any others that have been out there, I think Microsoft has a huge advantage.
It is theirs to lose.
Richie Great to get your perspective on a case story. A little bit later on this afternoon, Ritchie Delury of VOMBIEC.
Joining us.
Now.
The gentleman from Auburn, Paul Jacobson joins his chief financial officer at General motors. Paul drive the Hummer EV. It clocks in at eighty five thousand dollars marked up to the proper Paul Jacobson level. It's maybe, oh one hundred and four ninety five thousand, whatever it is. The answer is, you boosted the range on a nine thousand pound vehicle? Does America want that? Is there real demonstrable evidence that Broad America wants to drive EV?
Well, Good morning, Tom and Lisa and John, Thanks so so much for having me. First of all, let me say thanks to the GM team for an excellent quarter and the confidence that we have going into the year. You know, when we're looking at EV's you know, we have really strong demand for everything that we've produced so far, and when you look at the order back logs and the ramp up of cell capacity, we feel good about our ability to ratchet up production to meet that demand.
But you know, consumers are speaking with their commitments to us, and we feel good about the products, the vehicles that we're producing. The Hummer EV is just a great vehicle engineered by our team. Here we go and customers can't get it fast enough.
You know, I look at this, Paul, and it is unit and price. Mister Musk is playing with price, it seems like on a weekly basis at Tesla. How I was talking to our David Welch in Detroit, it's real simple. How do you adapt to Tesla's price strategy. Is it something you react to, is it something you ignore.
So we've actually been very consistent with our pricing on our evs, and that's really a function of the demand that we've seen for them. So, you know, there's been a lot of industry noise around pricing all across the world, and it's something that we've been very consistent with our strategy and it's one that consumers are responding to over the long term. Obviously, we've got a competitor that is
posting really strong results, really strong margins. We need to make sure that we lower our costs, especially our structural costs, and we're aggressively getting after that. We announced a two billion dollar program today. We're talking about being at the high end of that range in twenty twenty three, getting about a billion dollars out this year, with the other
billion to follow next year. And it's just the first step in the process of making sure that we're competitive for the next generation.
Does cost savings mean mean layoffs.
We're actually not doing any layoffs, Lisa. So we at the end of the day, we had a voluntary severance program. We had over five thousand of our colleagues opt either to retire or to move on, and that alone is going to save us about a billion dollars in the run rate, and that's something that we think we can manage through and hit our goals on our two billion dollar program.
You reported a full year expectations, Paul, that exceeded what a lot of people were anticipating. How much does this hinge on North America and not on China? How much is this completely independent of an international story?
And very much us focused.
Well, the bulk of our business is obviously in our North America segment, and we had a really strong quarter there. Pricing is still up as we see, wholesale prices are still lapping the increases we had last year that we put through as a result of the higher input costs, and demand still remained strong. So our volumes were up about four percent, our inventories were flat, and I think the team's doing a very good job of managing through that.
We've planned for the year and We alluded to this and our guidance at the beginning of the year that we were assuming a fifteen million unit market here in the US, and we came in slightly above that. But we've got some cushion built in in case we see demand start to fall off in our expectations. But when you look at our first quarter out performance and the confidence of our cost reduction plan, we felt comfortable raising
the guide. Now, China obviously a very competitive they're still coming out of coming out of COVID, and we see demand covering, but it's also an incredibly competitive market. The team there has done a great job. We were able to maintain profitability in Q one, but we think second quarter is going to be a little bit challenging and then we start to see some improvement in the back half.
Of the year.
Given how exposed you are to the US market, Paul, what is your concern level in terms of tightening credit. We talk all about smaller banks and restricting credit on the margins, in particular when it comes to auto lending.
Are you seeing that already? How aware are you of that?
We haven't seen that affecting our consumers and our customers, and you know We obviously have a captive financing arm through GM Financial. Their credit statistics we look at them every week and they're still they're still quite strong. We've seen a little bit of normalization but really back to kind of pre COVID levels, but nothing that we've seen that gives us any area of concern right now for our consumers.
Paul, You've got a familiarity with Auburn, Alabama, and I see in Auburn there's sixty two public charging stations, but only six are free EV charging stations. Does General Motors have to provide leadership and set up a grid of electric charging stations across America?
So this is an area that we we got out to an early start on TOM as we started to build out that network, and we think it's an important piece for EV adoption across the country for sure. But we committed about seven hundred and fifty dollars to a multi pronged charging strategy. The leading piece of it was a partnership with Pilot Flying JA to help increase the
interstate system for road trip charging across the board. But we also partner with our dealers in local communities to locate chargers for those families that may not have one in their home, and really we feel like we need to provide solutions for everyone across the board. But you know, paid charging is actually something that's I've found as far more economical than even filling up your car with gas. So it's something that ultimately we're committed to.
What are you to do in the dividend, I'm absolutely fair, I've been talking about use of cash right now. I got a gross yield to one percent. I'm not even sure what dividend growth is. Describe the five year dividend growth forward for General Motors.
So we look at our dividend as an important part of our capital allocation priorities. You know, the first one is obviously investing in the business. We have a lot of capital that we are investing for the transformation, eleven to thirteen billion dollars this year alone. But we're still generating really sizeable amounts of free cash, and that's a testament to both the team as well as the demand
for our products across the board. This past quarter, we repurchased about three hundred and sixty five million dollars of stock while also early retiring one point five billion dollars of debt, so taking care of the balance sheet, being prudent with our capital across the board and a dividend is a part of that. But we also are actively using share repurchases as a tool to return capital to shareholders.
Have you noticed how much more comfortable CFOs not to when they beaten Rice?
Have you noticed that it is his voice change? Okay, yeah, it's common, Jacobson. Thank you, say for sure, General Mode CFO.
Subscribe to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast on Apple, Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live every weekday starting at seven am Eastern. I'm Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can watch us live on Bloomberg Television and always I'm the Bloomberg Terminal. Thanks for listening. I'm Tom Keen, and this is Bloomberg