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Hello and welcome to The Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money. I'm Matt Levin and I are at the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.
And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.
Katy, we traveled into the future. Yes, five minutes ago. We're recording a money Stuff episode for I'm going to say September.
Thirteenth, possible Friday the thirteenth, the thirteenth.
And now.
Still before Friday the thirteenth, we're recording an episode for I'm going to guess Friday the twentieth.
You're so right, Yeah, yeah, seven days to thirteen, you get twenty all.
Right, So here we are.
We asked for questions.
From eight days ago.
Yeah, we asked you for questions, and boy did you deliver our inbox flooded.
We haven't delivered yet.
Well, no, we haven't delivered.
But you did.
Singing mail Bag, mail Bag. It's our first real mail bag.
Episode, first all mail bag episode.
Yeah, so let's dive right in. A writer who asked to stay anonymous asks why are private markets the new public markets? And is it bad that private markets are the new public markets. It's a topic we explore frequently, and I guess we should talk about whether or not it's like a good development.
I feel like my like Poddot answer on this is, like why are the new public markets? Because there's so much money in private markets to that, like, if you wanted to raise a lot of money, you went to the public markets because like the best way to reach people was to like advertise broadly. But now like there are a lot of rich people. Financial markets are very globalized so that you can call the rich people in Saudi Arabia instead of having to like get the rich
people in America. And technology is such that it's like pretty easy to care emphasis all the people with a lot of money, and so it is much less necessary to go out to public markets to raise a lot of money because like it is relatively straightforward to access giant pools of money in the private markets. And other than the money, like private markets are a lot easier, Right, It's like you don't have the same disclosure rules, you don't have the same like governance rules, you don't have
the same getting sued by shareholders. It's a lot easier to stay private in many ways. And if you can access as much money as like you know, open Ai or SpaceX can access in the private markets, then they sort of become the default place. And then our questioner also asks, is it bad that private markets in the
new public markets? I mean, the standard story is that the point of public markets is in part to like allocate capital of the best uses or whatever, but it's also in part, like, there are a lot of people who have like retirement savings, and you'd like them to have adequate retirement savings. True, and like you know, this block market is a way to invest in like the
growth of the economy. Right, you can stakes in big companies, and as the economy grows, the value of your stakes grows and you end up more than keeping pace with inflation and have a lot of money to retire on.
And if all of the cool, fast growing, innovative small companies that will become large are in the private markets and the public markets are just for kind of older, more stable companies that are no longer growing dynamically, then that's worse for retirements for ordinary people, because only essentially rich people and like institutions can access the fast growing companies, and people say this, you know, Jake Clayton, when you around the SEC was fun of saying things like this.
People sometimes then make the further leap of like, therefore we should let retail investors have more access to private investments.
But like, perhaps they're an ETF from Apollo.
Sure a nice callback to eight days.
Ago too, roughly minutes.
Ago time as a flat circle.
It's a concept, the concept, but.
The problem is that like if you give retail investors access to private like there's no such thing as private markets or like a public market. It's like you can buy all the stocks on the public market because they just trade publicly. The private market there's no market, right, It's just like you can invest in SpaceX if Elon Musk likes you, you can invest in open Ai if open Ai calls you. If they don't call you, you
can invest in a different private company. But like if you're just like a random person, the private company opportunities that you get are not as good as the ones that you know, Warren Buffet gets or whatever. And so the problem of like ordinary retail investors not having access to like the best private market investments is not sold by giving them access to the worst private market investments.
Right, it's made worse. Well, the follow up question that someone DM me about is can companies just stay private forever? I mean the answer in a lot of cases is yes. But I mean do you think about open ai, what it has? One hundred and fifty billion dollar valuations? Spacexi, forget what they're at. But if you're in that position, is there any pressure to go public?
I mean, companies stay private forever? Right? I mean, yeah, Coke Industries has been private for decades or whatever. Everyone in this room is gesturing at the room or to suggest another private company that exists. Yeah, you know, like the big names are like open Ai, SpaceX, and Stripe. Yeah, like these big, like Silicon Valley venture funded tech companies.
There is an expectation among your venture capital investors and among your employees that they'll be able to cash out their stock, right, Like they bought stock or they got paid in stock, and they want to cash out. And the ordinary way to cash out is you do an IPO and then they can sell their stock. Those companies have found a way to avoid that, which is they do tender offers. They raise money from new investors and
they use it to buy back the old investors. It's not as good, it's not as nice for the investors. It's more complicated. It's more work and like more managerial attention possibly than just letting stock trade on the open market, but you avoid magorial attention to other things like disclosure. I don't know. I mean, my vet is like these companies probably could they have it forever. I think they
have some pressure to make it easier to sell. But you know, like if you're an open AI employee and you want to sell your ten million dollars of stock and the company says, we're not going to go public, but we'll do a tender, and like it'll be a little bit of administratively annoying, but you'll probably get your ten million dollars. That's fine because you like you you got so much money from like working at this hot startup. Right if in ten years they're not growing fast, you know,
it's like more administratively annoying to not go public. But yeah, you get a lot of runway if you are a hot startup and there's so much money in the private markets to let you cash out early. Investors.
Well, we've gotten through one question. Great, so let's move swiftly along here. Jeff writes, howdy, you've spent a lot of time talking about regulatory finds. For example, the SEC collected almost four hundred million dollars in twenty twenty three as a result of off channel business communications. My question is where does that money go. The off channel communications example isn't necessarily harming anyone in particular, so I don't imagine it gets paid out as restitution to victims.
Right off channel communication that means like people texting about work on their cell phones, which as SCC's big inforce and parity. I write a lot about the SEC being like a machine for generating fines, right and like the cell phone stuff is such a good way to generate fines because every single bank has employees who have texted about work, and so you can find all of the bank's you know, nine figure sums the answer to the question. So the SEC is funded by fees that it charges
for registration of securities. The SEC has a budget, then goes to Congress for its budget, but then the government doesn't pay for it like the securities industry pays for it, like companies registering securities pay for it, so the sec is like free to the government sort of. And it last year had like a budget of like two billion dollars like employees and stuff, and it collected about five billion dollars in fines. She's like pretty good return on capital.
Most of that I think is like what is referred to as discorg min which means like you made money illicitly and you have to give it back. Some of that is going to be discord to victims, right, Like a lot of that is like you stole money and you have to give the money back that you stole. But there is like a lot of money left over for the sec A lot of that goes I think they paid out like nine hundred million dollars through victims,
and they paid at six hundred million dollars the whistleblowers. Nice, they pay a commission.
Not a bad business all these.
Fines, right, Like you know, six hundred million divided by five billion is like you know, they pay like like twelve percent fees to the whistleblowers who bring them the fines, and then the rest just goes to the treasury, just goes back to the U. S. Government. It's a revenue source for the US government. I don't know that the SEC thinks of itself that way. I think they must think of themselves you have a higher yeah, protecting investors
and like upholding the rule of law, whatever. But I like to think of them as doing a certain amount of like you know, revenue maximization, and they're good of it.
Good for them.
We have a question for me, so I'm.
Going to read this question, okay. Paul asks Katie what is the value of writing a big story as Katy did last week?
Last week, which is actually weeks ago.
Katie wrote a big story about single stock single stock she got so many questions about, and a big story at least one that is widely circulated and cited in financial media. It was cited by such luminaries as the Money Stuff Newsletter, True and.
Cliffs really just the two institutions care about the most.
Anyway, what was the How did you feel about that? Well?
First off, I am glad that we got so many questions about average details. Yes, because we end up talking about ETFs A loted on this podcast, and I feel like that is a lot of my influence. So I'm glad that people are somewhat interested, right, It.
Would be a shame if everyone's like, like one note is less ets.
Yes, please stop talking. I think it's pretty human. It's fun to see the hit count on an article that is widely circulated. It's also nice when people talk about the thing that you wrote about, because usually when I pitch an article on a topic that I find cool and then people read it a lot and talk about it a lot and tweet about it and also think
it's cool, that is gratifying. And also just when you write an article that has an impact, it tends to open up communication to people that you would like to talk about, who you would think are interesting, so you get more inbound from interesting people.
So I always find it like super gratifying when I am right about a thing where I'm like, this is ridiculous in our care and of interest only to me, and then like that gets me the best feedback and be like, oh I love this. Right, it's really satisfying that I got like there are people like me out there, you know, Yeah, it.
Is really nice. And also I mean I can see my hits, so like it's instant gratification for something that you know if you write that story. I mean, it didn't take me too long, but I probably worked on it for like a week and a half and then just got the instant gratification always feels good. Yeah, yeah, you don't mean you read spikes on the terminal every single day that you publish. I read spiking is when you get a certain amount of spikes and a certain
amount of time. And Matt always reads spikes, so we have a rea. I have read spike alerts, So, Justin writes, both Icon and Acman have been living rent free in my mind lately thanks to Matt's columns, And it made me think about how it would be funny if Acman took an activist position on i EP. Given the history of public feuds between the two and the recent precipitous fall of that stocks price, could this actually play out? That would be amazing. I go back and I watched that CNBC cliff.
It's like the most famous piece of financial television ever.
Probably watch it once a month. It's just so good just to remind myself, like, what who is on?
Is it? Akman was on and I kind of called the.
Inner Vice versas I think Akman was on an Icon called it and they just let it run.
I definitely said that I want to be friends with with you, Bill, I wouldn't And I wait, you say you'd like to be friends so that we could invest together, cal I have no interest.
Do you think I want to invest with you?
Okay, let's fees. Would you let me move on?
Earth, Let's move on.
This is like ten years This is like more than ten years ago.
I know, but I watched it to remind myself. What like peak financial television looks like.
The greatest fight financial television ever. It's so good. I don't think they've like.
Any they have like, yeah, they've appeared on stage together.
They're friends, but let's for the purposes podcast together would not be so good. Can we just give up our seats.
To be icon show? Yeah, we'll just leave them alone in this box of a room.
That would be so good.
Yeah.
But failing that, iep is I kind of Enterprises, which is Carla CON's probably traded company, which has had a precipitous fall because a short cellar accused it of being a Ponzi's game, and it like lost a lot of its bibe. The answer is no, Acman can't really do much activism in IEP just because Carla Kon owns eighty five percent of it, and so that's not much activism do.
Now he had margined a lot of that stock and had his bank seased and sold his stock, then there might be something there, but that would be a bigger problem for him than that just Bill Ackman being in the stock. But the real answer is question is no, Acman can't do that, but the reverse is possible. True, And in fact, Elliott built an activist steak in Bill Ackman's European public vehicle in like twenty seventeen, which like he has talked about, Like I think.
He revealed it on a podcast this podcast with Carl not this podcast. I think it was Lux Friedman.
Yeah, And so like it's a little unclear exactly what happened because it's just like his version of the story and like they didn't actually do any activism because I think basically they were building a stake and like, yeah, Akan was able to head them off, but I don't know. I was looking idly through the filing for Pershing Square USA, and it sort of looked like there were in that many anti activist protections. So if he does end up taking that thing public. God Will wants the bar against
his iep' stot to try something. It'd be fun.
I mean, my fantasy lineup is psh IPOs trades it a discount. Boas Wysteine does activism.
Right, But I think and Black are they're friends their friends.
I know, Well that's the thing, like, is Boas morally obligated.
To do close unfund activism wherever the opportunity for Maybe maybe he is.
That's what I'm saying.
I have a podcast with them.
Yes, yes, Jeff. I wonder if he said the same, Jeff. Jeff asks, So, whether I'm in the long or short micro strategy leverage gtfs, I'm guaranteed to lose money over the long term. Is it possible to borrow these shares to short them? And isn't this a guaranteed money maker?
No, you're not guaranteed to lose money.
You tell him, Jeff, what do you It happens.
To be the case that this micro strategy ETF that Katie wrote about low of these two weeks ago, it's like a triple levered ETF. That micro strategy was up a lot over the year, and the ETF was down a lot. Because the way the math works is that if you leverage a vital stock enough, then even though the stock goes up, your triple levered stock can go down. But that just you know, was kind of bad luck.
And in fact, lots of other triple leverty ETFs, including the in video one, like go up when the stock goes up, like normally goes up, and the stock goes up, and it has to be things have to go pretty wrong for it to go down when the stock goes up.
But then we also got a question from then, if a leverage single stock fund produces worse long term returns than the volatile underlying stock, then would you get better returns than the underlying stock if the fund gave you less than one hundred percent of the stock's daily returns e g. A fund that gives you fifty percent of the daily return of micro Strategy. I think the answer is yes.
That's really interesting.
I think if you you can create that yourself, right, you create that by like taking one hundred dollars and putting fifty dollars of it into micro Strategy stock and just keeping the other fifty dollars in cash, and then you have half as much volatile as micro strategy, and then the key is you keep it fifty to fifty. You rebalance each day. So if micro strategy goes down, so you have like forty five dollars of micro strategy,
then you rebalance. You put two to fifty into micro strategy, so now you have forty seven to fifty of cash forty seven to fifty of micro strategy. Micro strategy goes up, on the other end, you sell micro strategy and keep some cash. So each day you always start fifty to fifty. And what that strategy is is just buying low and selling high. Right, It's you're sort of assuming that micro strategy will be like more volatile than directional, like it'll
bounce around a lot without going anywhere. And if that's true, then each time it goes down, you'll buy. Each time it goes up, you'll sell, and you'll make money over the long term. That happens to work sometimes, but it's just a guess on what the stock will look like. If the stock is very volatile that doesn't go anywhere, that'll make money. But if the stock goes up a lot, you'll be sad that you did that instead of.
Just buying the stock, Well, might as well launch it.
You don't even need to have you just need to I mean fine.
This week, you mean this week last week? What are your favorite types of stock malfeasance? Is that how I see malfeasance? To cover? Short cellar witch hunts, no shorts. That was one sentence, short cellar witch hunts, gnarly bankruptcies, insurance fraud, question mark which one?
Well, I always love clever ones, right, I love the Spotify or you're talking.
Nah, that's about you mean the one that we covered last week last week?
Yeah, the Spotify one from last week last I love clever ones. I love things that like use leverage. So like, there's some really good insurance frauds where like the thing to notice about insurance is like, this is true of a bank too, and it's maybe more intuitive with the bank. A bank is like a pot of a billion dollars with like one hundred million dollars of equity, right, like a bank. You can buy control of a bank by buying its stock, and the stock is just a tiny
fraction of the value of money in the bank. Right. The bank is mostly leverage, and so if you buy a bank stock, you control all that money in the bank and then you can give it to yourself. And of course, of course, of course banking and regulation, I mean banking and insurance, there's regulation to stop you from doing that extremely obvious straight but people find ways, mostly an insurance sometimes in banking too, but like insurance, you
buy this little insurance company. It has this big pot of premiums that it's written and like money that it controls, and then you give that money to yourself. Yeah, and it's great, It's very clever. The other thing I really like to write about is Evan writing about it a
lot recently. It is fake takeover offers, because you think it's like the stereotype of fake takeover offers, which is that it's like you buy a stock, you put out a fake press relief saying that you're buying the company, the stock goes up, you sell the stock, you make money. And in fact, there are a lot of cases like that. In almost every case they don't make money because they are bad at it, and they like don't sell in time,
and so they lose money. It doesn't matter. That's like regular front But there are a lot of cases of like fake or quasi fake takeovers where they're not trying to do that where they just want to go on television. Yeah, just want to be a big shot, you know, they want to like have a little merger negotiation.
So which I say, just start an AI company, you'll get on TV.
I know. But I'm so sympathetic to as like an m and a guy. Like it's like, I understand it's fun to negotiate a merger and like, if you don't have the money to buy a big company, just pretend you have the money to buy the company.
Who are we talking about?
Lots?
I know, but recently in the past three months, who did that.
Here's the guy who tried to buy a Virgin Orbit. Yeah, and he went on television a lot.
Yeah, and he was bad on TV.
Many of them are it was stressful.
Well, they don't have media training because they're not legit. They don't anyway, they're so excited to be there. Yeah, I get it, I got it. It is amazing before you know, closely paying attention to money stuff. I wouldn't have thought that there would be plural that many plural.
I have to say. It's the thing I noticed more recently. The other thing about it is like it's a continuum with real takeover offers, because very few people offered to buy a company saying I've got a pot of cash right here sufficient to buy the company. They're like, if you engage with me and we negotiate a deal, I will get financing, Like someone will lend me the money about the company, or I'll be able to sell them. I'll be able to raise this money. But like I
don't have it now. I have to talk to you about the merger first. Yeah, and like that can be very legitimate, and like that's how Elon must bought Twitter, right, I mean, it's like a real thing. It's how most big dollar em and a gets done. It's like you started without having all the money lined up, but like there's a continuum down to the guy with like literally one dollar in his bank account calling up Version Orbit and I could probably get the money he couldn't write.
But it's like it's all on to continue.
God bless.
All Right, what's up now?
It's a question for me. Okay, your questions are very intense. This is a good question for me, though I have a real answer.
Thomas also asks Katie, what's your pitch for the next great cat based business financial fundamentals need not apply.
So I have a real answer for this, and I'm going to steal it from my husband. But we've been talking about this for a while.
And discusses.
Yes, let me tell you. So you know cat trees, Matt, Yeah, I know cates. Have you ever had a cat? No?
Oh?
Well, okay, so I've.
Had a dog who was really interested in cats.
Okay, so that doesn't count. But cat trees, if you have a cat, you have to get a cat trick.
You know.
They're usually beige. They usually have some scratchy posts and little platforms that the cat can hop up on because cats like to go hi. We end up buying a cat tree every couple of years because they get gnarly or just like your cat is bored of them.
Okay when I say that, I know about cat tries. When I lived in Brooklyn, yeah, every so often a cat owner would buy a new cat tree, and yes, throughout the old cat tree on the street, and my obsessed dog it would sniff it and sit by it and lurk hoping there is a cat inside.
Yeah, I get that.
I'm aware of the discarding.
They're probably really stinky of cats. Yes, yeah, because the cat spent so much on their cattery, but you have to switch them out every few years because they get grody and your cat gets bored. Modular cat trees okay, so that you can mix and match, and it's also good. I saw a TikTok recently. I should stop revealing how much time it's been on TikTok, but I get a lot of like cat behavioral videos, like a lot of Jackson Galaxy.
I'm nodding, not knowledgeably.
A lot of Jackson Galaxy and stuff. And someone made the point that you should make every day a little bit different for your cat, because your cat stays in your apartment and you want them to be fun and stimulated. And I think it would be nice if you had modular cat trees that you could switch up easily so that your cat encounters something new more often than every couple of years.
Thank you.
We have so many great ideas that we just never execute a lot of great ideas.
I was a little worried that you've disclosed it on them now. Fortunately this podcast will air eight days after, so you have eight days to really act.
Yeah, okay, to work l w ass. How can you both be a broker and a dealer, as in SEC registered broker slash dealers. Isn't being both at the same time a problem? A straightforward conflict. I e. Some trades you broker and some trades you take a principal position.
This question, it's so on my wavelimp, How can you be both a broker and dealer?
Are you l W did you write in No?
I just like it's just a good you know, like it's a it's a good phrase, like an SEC broker dealer. Everyone's a broker dealer, but like right, those are differently something. A broker is someone who like matches up a transaction, so like you want to buy someone else wants to sell. I sit in the middle. I take a commission. I sell from them to you.
Right.
A dealer is someone who like trades directly with the customer. So you want to buy, I'm like, I'll sell it to you, right. And many businesses in the world are dealer business right. Like if you want to buy a car, you go to a car dealer and they'll sell you a car that they own. And many businesses are broker businesses.
Right.
They want to buy a house, you go to a real estate agent, and they find you a house and take a commission, but they don't own the house. You know, in a lot of financial markets, there is a broker dealer model where like you want to buy a security and you go to your bank, it's the generic term, and they will either be your broker or they'll be your dealer. They'll either like find it for you or they'll deal directly off their balance sit with you. And
is that a conflict? I mean, like, yeah, of course it's a conflict, but it's also it's like it's just good service, right, Like it's like the reason that exists is because there is someone you can call and you say, I want to buy this bond, and if they have the bomb, they'll sell it to you. And if they don't have the bomb, they'll find it for you, right, And they have some amount of you know, regulatory and also just like sort of custom expectation that they will
do the best thing they can for you. You see this in like retail stock trading, where like your retail broker who is only a broker, and we'll just route
it to like a big market maker. Your retail broker will write your order to a big market maker and the big market maker will either fill it out of inventory at a better price than you could get on the stock exchange, or they will send it to the stock exchange and they'll do whatever they think is best, and they have like an obligation the best execution, and I you know, they're getting measured by their broker to
like make sure they're giving you the best price. So you know, in general, it's a good service, right, And I often think of like, like I've written a lot about private credit, and like one thing in private credit is like if you're a company looking for financing or like a private equity sponsor looking to do an LBA, and you go to a bank and you say, I want to borrow money for this LBO, Like the bank will be like, okay, we can probably find you that money.
We got to go find investors and get you that money. If you go to a private credit fund, I'll just be like, yeah, we have money, Like you take the money, right, And that's in some ways a better service. And I've written about how like banks, because they're getting into private credit, because they can like broker private credit treds banks, they should be able to offer you either we'll give you the fundinancing, or we'll send to get to the financing, right.
And I think there's like some of that in real banking, And like that's a broken deal a model, right, that's like for some price, we can just give you the money, we can just face you on the trade, and for some other price, we can find someone else to face you on the trade, and we'll do both because we're
like working for you however we can. It obviously raises the possibility of conflicts, because like what you could do is the opposite, right, what you could do is if it's the best deal for you, you take it, and if it's not the best deal for you, you send it to someone else. But you know, that's why it's a regulated business.
It's a good thing you wrote yourself that question, because that was an interesting answer there.
This is a long one.
Anonymous asks why does there need to be an actual stock to borrow when shorting seems like there would have been a more direct derivative contract that mimics the risk slash rewards slash cash flow structure of a short but without having to worry about the actual shares of stock floating around to various parties. Is that the key that three slash four parties each brings something unique to the deal in releaship into the short cellar and derivatives contracts
aren't typically coordinated between multiple parties. If this does in fact exist, please don't make me look stupid on air.
Okay, Okay, So there's two points here. Yeah, one is like what is a derivative? So, like, are there derivative contracts to short stocks? Yeah, Like there's puts and there's totally turn swaps, like you can if you're a big hedge on you want to short of stock, you can easily go to a bank and say I want to get short the stock on swap. So the derivative absolutely exists. But that doesn't matter because like a derivative is like you go to a bank to say I want to
get short the stock on swap. The bank says, fine, we'll charge you for it, and we will go hedge that derivative by shortening the stock ourselves. So you still need the shares of stock to borrow because you can't like manufacture the short out of nothing. The bank is not going to just make that bet against you, like on its own account. It's going to hedge that bet and the way it hedges it by shorting. Now it doesn't have to hedge by shorting. It can hedge by
finding someone on the long side of the swap. Right, So, like, if you want to get short on swap, the bank can find someone wants to get long on swap and they can match you up and then no stock needs to be borrowed. But why would someone want to get long on swap rather than by buying the stock themselves. The answer is, I mean they wouldn't, right, because like then they're taking credit risk and it's like weird, and it's like harder to get out of. It's just more inconvenient.
The reason they do it is like if they get long on swap, they could get paid more than by owning the stock themselves. But that ultimately sort of leads you back to the stock borrowing market. Right, If like a stock is difficult to borrow, then it's going to be just as pricey and difficult to get short on swap.
So you get short via derivative as it would be to get short in the cash market, because like everyone involved knows that, And like if you get short on swap with the bank, either the bank has to short the stock, which is expensive for the bank, so I won't do it, or the bank has to find someone to get long on swap, and the person getting long on swap knows that the stock is expensive to borrow and they could make a lot of money by owning it in cash and lending it out in the stock
borrow market. So it doesn't work. The derivative contract doesn't work. They kind of were expected, like doesn't solve the problem. Which the problem is there are some stocks that are hard to borrow, and therefore you can't short them. You can't for the most part, practically get around that by using derivatives. You know, you can do options, you can like sell put options on the stock, or byput options on the stock, but again the pricing is going to
be affected by the borrow market. The second part of the question is like why do we have that as a rule, and why not just allowed naked short selling?
Yeah? Why not?
And like, yeah, I've kind of written that, like tentatively, people get really mad, get really mad. People really don't like naked short selling. They think it's like a way to manipulate stocks. There's probably some limit where it could be a way to manipulate stocks, right, where like if you could just manufacture an infinite amount of stock and sell it, you could probably drive the price of the
stock down and like maybe do some damage. I don't think that's as big a concern as people who get mad about naked short selling think it is, but it's like a real concern. It's like funny, I probably can't have like unlimited naked short selling. You also have like weird voting effects with naked short selling, yeah, because like you manufacture an unlimited number of shares and the people who buy the shares don't know if they own actual shares and they can vote, or if they own fake
shares and they can't vote. So it's a little weird. But I don't know. I've always been sort of fond of the idea that there has to be some way to allow naked short selling to because it would make markets more efficient. It would just like allow you to
bet against over priced stocks. And you see that there are certain stocks where they're hard to borrow, and I won't name any names, there's stocks that are hard to borrow and that trade at very very inflated prices where people would probably like to bet against them and be correct, but they can't do it because it's so expensive to borrow them, and if you use short stock without borrowing it, those prices would be more efficient. And I mean mostly Trump media, but also also there's a few others.
Sent Hill from Chicago. He writes, since you both acknowledge being needy, no shame in that, and wanted more questions about yourselves. How do you talk to your children and or nibblings at all about money stuff?
How do you I don't talk to my children a ton about money stuff. Now they have listened to the podcast in the car and I found it very amusing. Yeah, my sons are like, listen to I heard you talk to me and said, why'd she call you Matt Because to them, I'm not mad.
I guess you're either dad or mister Levine.
Yes, I'm my children. Yeah, but like it is just a kick for them to just hear my voice in a format that normally plays. You know, Olivia Rodrigo. I don't talk about the newsletter that much, but I do remember that I was once with my daughter and we met like another dad who is like a money stuff reader and was like I found on the newsletter and my daughter didn't like fully understand the economic model. After he left, she was like, does he give you money for writing such a good newsletter?
And I was like, ah, that sense indirectly he does, sweetie, that's really cute.
Every so often I will try to like explain a financial news her mouth. He's in story at the dinner table, but like they're a little young for that. Yeah, yeah, you talk to your siblings.
So my family are money stuff fans. They've been Matt Levine fans.
How do you talk to your parents.
More directly? How do you talk to your dad? No, but my brothers are as well. My mom likes you, but she she isn't particularly interested in the newsletter. But my parents do listen to the podcast quite a bit. I feel like my brothers listen on the side. But I said this in one of the trailers, like having this podcast is great proof that we actually are friends.
Because before we launched it, and like you would come up in our conversations, like when we were gathered as a family, I'd be like, oh, yeah, like I know Matt Levien, like we're friends, and they'd be like, yeah, okay, I talk to your dad on your phone once I know, I know, but still I feel like my one brother in particular was skeptical. And then I actually I brought you to a Capital one cafe.
And he was Capital Cafe in the Bloomberg Building.
Yeah, and he was there, and I think he truly wash like super yeah. No, he thought it was like an elaborate long con that we were actually friends.
So this podcast is a continuation of the long con.
It is great, great proof to stick it to him that I have friends and some of them are Matt Levine.
As many as one of them, yeah.
As many as one. My parents do listen to Money stuffal and I do get comments, like on episodes that we recorded weeks ago, and then like my dad has like another point that he wants to tell me about and I'm like, I cannot remember. Oh my gosh, that would be great.
All right. That was the Money Stuff mail Bag, mail Bag, thank you so much for these questions, which good. We appreciate from the bottom of our hearts. Sending us questions.
It was hard to h whittle it down, so we didn't get to everyone, of course, but keep sending us question We'll do it again.
This is great.
Thank you. And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.
I'm Matt Levian and I'm Katie Greifeld.
You can find my work by subscribing to The money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.
Dot com, and you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on Open Interest between nine to eleven am Eastern.
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The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Maserakus and Moses Onen.
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Maples, Brandon, Francis Nuinimits our executive.
Producer, and Stage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Thanks for listening to The Money Stuff Podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff