The White House’s Brian Deese on Supply Chains and Biden’s Economic Agenda

ever seen it as wide as it is right now. No, it's funny. We talked about how you should never call a turning point um in the broader economy, or at least we used to, but it does actually feel like we entered a new environment over the past year or so. And of course the big questions here are to what agree our supply chain constraints coinciding with booming demand and

and creating the inflationary pressures that we've seen recently. Well, we have a great guest to talk about what's going on, and of course the policy responds, and I want to jump right into it. We're gonna be speaking with Brian Deese. He is the director of the National Economic Council serving President Joe Biden is a top advisor on policy on getting things done. So, Briandes, thank you so much for

coming on odd lots. Thank you for having me. So let me just start with like the simple first question, which is do you and or in the White House have a you on what's driving this elevated inflation. Well, I think in order to answer that question, we have to step back and look at their trajectory of the economic recovery to date, and as you noted, we are seeing a lot of historical first first in many years decade. Start of the macro side, we're seeing strongest growth in

forty years. On the labor market side, we're seeing we saw in labor market outcomes that are the strongest on record, and in that context we're seeing it's in it's in that context that I think we have to understand the elevated price pressures that we have seen. So to to get to your question, I think that if you look at where we are in the economy, by most measures, the U. S economy is not running beyond its potential or capacity. If you look at you know, sort of

the projection from pre pandemic levels. We're getting close to potential in a number of places, and we have moved back to that trajectory faster than most folks participated. What you have seen that particularly, I think breaking down the price story is a historic compositional impact on the demand side.

So you know the shift the composition impact of significantly elevated demand for good, A lot of that shifted from services, and then a supply shock on the supply side, both to labor supply and also to the broader supply chain

as well. And so you know, when we think about the drivers and the inputs into where elevated prices are, those are the two places we principally focus on, which is the compositional side on demand, and so that leads us to spend a lot of time thinking about looking at is as as everybody is these days, the questions of that, how that normalizes across time, and whether it's normalizing and trying to assess that um and then on the supply side, what we can be doing sector by

sector and also in the in the aggregate to try to address those supply side issues, some of which operate very immediate, short term, near term and you guys spent a lot of time focused on issues like that, some of which are more medium and long term, but sooner we start to address them, like building semiconductor capacity in the US, the better positions we will be. So that's

how we understand the dynamic. But in a more capstone way, we find ourselves in a place where what's unique about the United States right now is unlike almost any other G seven country, any other industrialized country, we are facing the challenges of elevated prices from a position of historic economic strength. So whether it's in GDP, or it's in labor market outcomes, or it's in real income outcomes for

the economy, we are stronger. We're in a stronger position than almost ever any industrialized country to address elevated price issues that every country is addressed. So you mentioned going sector bi sector there, and of course one of the biggest components of inflation has to be higher energy costs, and we've seen oil prices shoot up recently. At the same time, despite those price increases, we haven't really seen much of a reaction from US shale in terms of

boosting capacity. What's the White House's impression of what's going on in the energy space right now, Why won't producers actually increase production? And is there anything you can do to encourage them? And I guess also, how would you

square that with the administration's clean energy goals? Well, I think in terms of the in terms of energy markets and impacts on consumers in the US, one piece of that is is obviously natural gas and home heating and otherwise where we've actually seen a bit of moderation and a reduction and projected cost impacts over the course of this winter. Some of that has to do with the market development, Some of that has to do with the weather um and being a bit moremer than other I expected.

On the oil market side, I think this is where you are you're going. I guess I'd say a couple of things. Number One, we are now seeing and if you're following recounts, you're seeing significant uptick over the course of even the last couple of weeks, and most forward projections suggests a significant ramp up over the course of the first half of two in terms of US domestic production.

I will leave to oil market analysts to really unpack that, but certainly from what we hear and what we see that reflects a market reaction from a market that pulled back in the face of getting historically chopped down during the pandemic, and a lot of pressure on capital discipline in that sector, and also a reflection of current prices leading to bring production back online. So there's a question of this sort of timing of that, but I think that the ramps certainly over the course of the last

several weeks here is you're seeing that come online. But what's driving the price of oil is global developments, a commodity set on a global market. You know, we we have we have a market that doesn't clear competitively to have supply reflect demand. And one thing we've seen over of course of this the last half of is that the supply of oil on the global market was not being allowed to meet the strong recovery in demand globally,

including in the United States. UM. And you know that the reason for that is because supply of oil globally is controlled and modulated by by OPEC. And so that's why the President has invested the time and the energy and our our entire administration and working diplomatically with oil producing and oil consuming countries to try to address those issues.

And we obviously have you know, really pressing challenges that are affecting risk sentiment and the risk premium and global oil markets now around Russia, and it's provocative actions with respect to Ukraine. So all of those things are weighing. I think in terms of your final point, I think that what's going on in the US market right now

is is the market responding to demand. And I bet the President's vision for a long term clean energy future is really the long term answer to this, to this issue that that gas prices are higher now than they than they should be, We're gonna work to try to do everything we can to try to bring them down. We recognize that, you know, in practice, that hits typical families, It hits their budgets, It makes people uncertain and uncomfortable

about the economic environment. We're gonna do what we can in the very immediate term to try to address that. Over the long term, the right strategy is to put the United States in the leadership position of driving towards zero carbon, clean energy technologies and be the global innovation hub for innovation and exports of those technologies and of

those capabilities. And whether that's on the the you know, the transportation side, which is driving most of oil consumption, around electric vehicles and the infanture to facilitate the transition to electric vehicles, or whether it's on the power sector side and driving the innovation around not only wind and solar,

but carbon cap true sequestration, hydrogen other answers. In this context, the President's clean energy strategy is grounded in the idea that we can and must have a an industrial strategy that positions the United States as the locust of innovation on that front. And I think that that is a long term strategy where we need long term incentives to

drive that transition. And it's absolutely the right thing to do and and and not inconsistent with an approach that also is looking at how we can take immediate measures to make sure supply and demand are aligning in the market today. Let's talk about supply chains. Is basically a year ago that the White House issued Executive Order on

America's supply chains. Ay, are there speci civic things you can point to that have been done in the last year where you could say, yes, this is working better than it was prior to the EO, and be what can still meaningfully move the dial as people think about the economy, I guess at the shortened medium term. Yeah, So we are releasing, on the occasion of the one year anniversary of the President's executive order, a raft of

longer term supply chain strategies across the federal government. This effort and the reason why, if we step back, the reason why the President prioritized signing an executive order on supply chain resilience a year ago was a recognition that the issues that the pandemic had exposed and highlighted were fundamental to national and economic security. And we're not going to be solved overnight, and and we're going to be through a different approach at the executive branch in federal

level to this over time. So a year later, I would note a couple of things. This year has been has been a story of progression and adaptation. First in responding to real time, evolving supply chain challenges that reflect the unique and historic nature of this pandemic affected recovery. That's a lot about the work that we have done working with the logistics and transportation logistics supply chain to try to unstick bottlenecks at ports and freights and others.

You guys have covered all of those issues. But that's one big piece of where we have learned a lot. We have made a lot of progress to your point about you know, we have, we can we can see that progress tangibly. There's a lot of different ways to think about that, but the way that I most think about that is how far have we been able to

bring that dwell time down? Which your listeners are familiar with, but to those who aren't, what share of containers are sitting on ports on the dock for more than one days? That dwell time since we launched the port actually and efforts about five months ago that that twal times come down. So that's a sort of concrete manifestation significant increase in

fluidity through the ports. But the second thing that we have been doing in the supply chain context is trying to demonstrate that we can actually build greater resilience in our industrial base here in the United States. And that is a longer term project, but I think if you look over the last year, we have really made historic progress on that front. You know, you can see that in the macro three sixty seven thousand manufacturing jobs created last year in the US. That's the highest in decades.

But we can also see it in companies making decisions to build and expand domestically in sectors and at a scale that we haven't seen for some significant period of time, which reflects I think both you know, the policy environment, but also their wreck ignition that supply chain resilience takes on an increase importance. So you know, we've seen that in semiconductors, electric vehicles, aircraft batteries, We've seen that across

the board. And third, we have a national national security strategy that now says we have long term things that we need to do as a country to protect core national security areas like pharmaceuticals and critical minerals, and now the the US government actually has a viable long term strategy to address those. Last point on your question, though, is where can we where can we continue to really make progress and move the dial. Absolutely, we have some

very practical things we need in the short term. Semiconductors is a front end center. We've seen historic investments by the semiconductor and manufacturers to come to the United States. But what they're all saying is unless we move to have a long term public investment strategy to bist sector that is all going to be short lived. So we have we got to pass there's a bill that has asked the House and pass the Senate. We've got to

get a version of that to the President's desk. That would give us a historic fifty two billion dollars in public and capital to invest to build that sector and build supply chain resilience in that sector across time. I belabor that on semiconductors because if you want to think about supply chains, you know they are component in everything, but they're also relevant to every supply chain. We've made a lot of progress on that front. We know what we need to do. We just have to get that done.

So one big component of some of these supply chain strains has to be infrastructure, especially places like the ports. How is the administration actually regrouping when it comes to infrastructure spend and the build back better plan? Is there going to be another push and what might that actually

look like? Your questions is absolutely on key because if we think about the areas where we can most affect ofaly operate on the supply side of this economy to actually increase capacity and give us the ability to actually move produce more goods and services with more fluidity and actually expand our productive capacity outside of the labor supply issues. Our investing in improving our physical infrastructure is right there

at the top of the list. And the good news is that because of the infrastructure law that the President shurput through and we passed, you know, bipartisan why last fall, we now have a historic set of tools to actually make these infrastructure investments in the right way. This was a bill, and we have a strategy that is not about short term stimulus. It's not about shove already at

the expense of other objectives. This is about how can we actually build a modern supply chain, physical transportation supplied chain across the economy, and how can we do that in a way that's comprehensive. So, you know, if you fix the ports, but you don't fix the roads and the bridges. If you you know, fix the airports, but you don't fix the uh, the interchanges, you don't actually create a new environment where there's it's more attractive to

invest and build here. You don't create an environment where you actually get those benefits of reducing cost in terms of the whole supply chain. But we now have those tools right, So historic investment imports historic investment in in airports, in roads, in bridges, and also in areas where we know we are behind the game, like high speed internet.

You know, getting high speed internet operating across the entire economy and bringing all segments of the country into the twenty one century economy of you know, strong internet able to economic activity is a huge potential way to expand our capacity to bring more people in to contributing to our economic capacity, and we now have the tools. So on that front are big focus is implementation, implementation, implementation.

We need to demonstrate that we can do things well, and the President has been very clear and given us clear direction. We brought in Mitch Landrew as our partner in all of these efforts to try to demonstrate that

we can do this effectively effective use of money. We can build things in the United States, again where we have to demonstrate that we can do things on time and under budget, and we also need to demonstrate that we can do these things in a way that actually brings all parts of the country and more people who have been left out of prior big public investment campaigns into that into that process. So we're bullish about the

ability to do that. We often get the question of, well, you know, those investments are not going to happen overnight. You know, how does that affect people who are worried about you know, the cost of good for shipping right now? I think you guys know, But what we're seeing in real time is some of these things can actually have our real impact act really quickly. But some of these things are five or eight year undertakings that we want

to do right. So we want to you know, we want to rebuild all the major bridges in America that are those bottlenecks for commerce and have a huge economic impact across time. But we want to do that right. This is a once in a generation opportunity to get that done and build back better. Yeah. So I think if you think about you think about the intersection between the theory of what we can get done that big public investment strategy around physical infrastructure, and we think about

the economic challenge of the current moment. The other thing that we want to do, in addition to operating on the supply side to make our infrastructure ready made for the twenty century, is we also want to make things more affordable for typical families who are you know, on the one hand, benefiting from an economy that has a historically strong job market, but on the other hand are really having to deal with higher prices and the impact that that has of the grocery store or the gas pump.

And so if you think about what are the best ways go right at making things more affordable for families, it is look at the bulk of what a family's typical budget is. So typical family in a month spends about six of their disposable income on healthcare, prescription drugs, childcare,

and housing. We now have proposals that would go right at reducing costs for those for those families, reduce the cost of prescription drugs and cop out of pocket costs, reduced the cost of childcare, which will have a positive labor supply impact by helping more parents more women get back to work, and also reduce the cost of energy.

Because to the question you were raising before, Tracy about our energy strategy, the clean energy tax credit provisions that we have been pushing for the principal impact that they would have would be to actually lower utility bills for consumers. We have of the CEOs of the largest utilities in recently to have a conversation about this, and to a single to a person, what they said was, if you pass these long term in centers, we will accelerate the

transition to zero carbon energy. But the way we'll do it, both practically and legally, is will pass on those benefits to consumers, because those tax credits flow right through to consumers bottom line. So we view those core investments, which are the core components of the Build Back Better bill that passed the House, as meeting the current economic moment

of making things more affordable for people. And we can do that in a way that won't add to inflationary pressure because it won't add to aggregate demand because it will be paid for and actually would reduce the deficit across time. So that's you know, we think there's a compelling economic logic. We think that for anyone who is of the view that high price now are the top priority and we need to focus on making things more affordable.

We have these practical answers right now, healthcare, prescript and drugs, childcare, energy, We can we can we can act on that, and so we're gonna give a State of the Union here in a couple of days, we're gonna get through getting a funding bill hopefully done so we can fund its operations, and then we'renna try to make real progress on those policies and try to deliver on that other piece of

making these more affordable for families. Bryan, Obviously, so much of the discussion and just this moment really is all about things going on on the supply side, in particular physical infrastructure, which we've been talking about, and when is

this going to ease? There are a lot of people and even some of the market, and Tracy has written about this, pointing to corporate behavior and increased margins, and people probably within the White House who believe that it's greed and that we don't necessarily need to have the price increases we have right now, even with the disruptions, because a lot of it can be explained via corporate greed. Is that a factor in your mind, simply changing corporate behavior?

And are their policies that theoretically could be put in place to discour ridge companies from trying to opportunistically expand margins.

I'll tell you where our focus has been on that front, which is it's interesting the President has for some time, including before he, before he ran UM and before he before he won the presidency, has been focused on the question of the intersection between corporate consolidation and our economic potential UM and it's been concerned and compelled by the growing body of evidence that actually demonstrates that in many industries the trend of consolidation has actually had negative attended

impacts for the economy that manifest in higher prices and less and fewer options for consumers, and also for negative outcomes in the labor market as well. And so that's technical, there's a there's a there's a study by an expert at n y U that tried to put that in dollar terms and basically said that consolidation over the course of the last couple of decades has basically reduced by

about five thousand dollars a typical families economic outcomes. That takes into account both the impact on the price side and also the impact on the wage side as well. So that has been a persistent concern of the President and a persistent priority of the administration. That is separable from the question of whether consolidation and or corporate behavior

is responsible for the current inflation. There you know. I think our view is that those issues of consolidation have been operating over the course of years and decades, and so they're not the principle of primary driver of current pricing trends. But we do believe that that by addressing those issues we can have a really positive impact on the supply side of the economy and actually produce better

outcomes across time. So there's a nuance there, but I think it's an important one, which is no, are we're not out there making the argument that says, you know, that the dominant reason why we have high prices today is because we've seen corporate consolidation over the course of

the last two decades. But at the same time, those who say this argument is all kind of you know, is all without merit, and therefore we should look through the negative attended impacts or the and the positive opportunity we have for more innovation, more economic growth, and lower prices for consumers by addressing these consolidation issues. We think

that you're missing something very important. I mean, setting aside the longer term consolidation that you just described, we have seen a very wide variety of companies over the past earning season come out and say that they're raising prices to offset costs. And one of the things that could be worrying if you're concerned about an inflationary spiral is that the companies that have been doing that have been

rewarded by shareholders. You know, obviously, the idea of raising prices to offset costs sounds great to people who are interested in profits, and if you can do that without actually getting pushback from consumers, then that would seem like a really great thing. Is that dynamic where you do start to see more and more companies raising prices? Is that concerning to the administration? And is that something that they would be looking into? Certainly, certainly it's a concern

and it's something that we are paying attention to. At the same time, I think that if a company's strategy is to ignore or downplay long term investments in its own competitive positioning and and doesn't have a viable strategy for long term profitability, and it's trying to ride the wave of short term price increases at the expense of its stakeholders, it's unlikely that that's going to be a

successful strategy across time. And you know, are that's certainly been how our capital markets have responded in the past, so certainly a concern. Absolutely. I think we're trying to look at the question of the underlying trends and where are there issues in our policy apparatus that have encouraged dynamics that actually end up producing worse outcomes for the economy.

So the reason why I went to the point about consolidation is that that is a you know, a well documented problem that policy has actually exacerbated very significantly, and we need to do something about. If you look at the you know, the long term trend away from companies making more investment in in capital and R and D, you know, the troubling increase in buy backs for example, that's an issue that we think should be addressed by policy.

And you know, we we have been pushing, for example, to try to normalize the tax treatment between buy backs and dividends, to try to eliminate the current implicit incentive for companies to you know, opt towards share buy backs.

And so those are the kinds of issues that we have tried to zero in on where we think that policy can we have a problem in policy can make a important contribution, while at the same time thinking about how we can take concrete actions directly from a fiscal policy standpoint to make things more affordable and to operate on the supply side, like we're talking about before. So

I want to pivot just a little bit. And I'm not going to ask you about monetary policy, because I know that no one at the Whitehouse would ever do such a thing as comments on the independence of monetary policy. But there is uh this widespread expectation, pretty obvious that we are going to have several rate hikes in at least on the current trajectory. Is there any concern about

how this is going to be managed? And I'm thinking, particularly you said earlier that we're coming at the inflation problem in the US from a position of strength, good

labor market outcomes high growth. Nonetheless, if you think about any sort of efforts at slowing the economy, not only could that impede growth the labor market, but we see things such as you know, the last hired often first fired, and the black white unemployment gap is often a casualty of slowing labor markets, and good labor markets obviously have a history of tightening. That is that a concern at

the White House. Some of these second order effects of perhaps losing momentum on some of the social justice and other societal gains that come from a very robust and hot labor market. I was, I was, I was laughing to myself, but whether we were going we were going to engage the back and forth about you asking me

about monetary policy and me not. No, I I know you would never come into such a thing, So that we can we can move right on by Look, joking aside, The President made the picks for the Federal Reserve Chair and members of the Federal Reserve intentionally. He has spoken to that, and I can speak to our confidence in share Powell and that team to make the right decisions, and the recalibration that they are actively engaged in right now is appropriate, and we fully expect and trust that

they will continue that in a thoughtful and independent way. Look, I would I think you're raising an important point, and I guess I would just underscore I don't think that the issues that you are raising are about social justice or equity alone. They are about the strength and the durability of our macro econ onic recovery. And one of the things that I think has actually gotten lost in

the debate about this economic recovery. What role has policy had, you know, we're needed spending a lot of time appropriately focused on inflation right now, is just what are the what are the conversations we're not having right now? We're not having a conversation about a protracted slow labor market leading to more and more people joining the ranks of

the long term unemployee. We're not having a conversation about you know, elevated unemployment leading to scarring, which is a sort of you know, economic technical way of saying human suffering that extends and and and and calcifies and means that you know, millions of people across the country are robbed of the economic potential of working and moving up in that way, and it is striking, you know, I mean, just to put you know, one specific thing around it.

You know, we pay a lot of attention to the question of the long term unemployed precisely because that issue of you know, scarring or history sists, you know, of making it really hard for people to get back into a position to get to economic outcomes, is a you know, long term uneployment is a proxy for that, right if you look back to prior recoveries. One of the you know, persistent drags on our economic potential as a country has been the slow plotting recovery of of of long term unemployment.

In this recovery, we have seen that dramatically we were almost back to pre COVID levels in terms of long term unemployment. You know, if you go back to two right, there's a lot of there's a lot of analogies back to that period in terms of you know, last time we've seen a lot of these economic outcomes, growth and inflation, the long term unemployment that persisted in the years after.

You know, there's there's a big body of economic research that has shown just that that had like a decade all negative impact for a lot of groups of people and a lot and geographies, and that is a macro impact for our economy as well. That's true for youth unemployment, it's true for black unemployment. To the point you said, any any the groups that are have been the most structurally or or excluded from our labor market are the most at risk when you have a weak labor market recovery.

So we think that that's really important. We think it's important for the macro economy, and we think that the progress that we have made is part of what puts us in a good position. And you know, I'll end on your point. Am I worried about it? Look, yeah, we're worried about everything. We're worried about all manner of

things that could go could go wrong. But what striking is we are in a better position than we have been in any modern recovery to actually demonstrate the benefits of that, you know, reverse history syst that pulling people having a strong labor market recovery actually pulling people into the labor market, giving them upward opportunity, and that's you know, that's something that we should all be we should all be worried about, but we should all be focused on

in prioritizing as well. So I realized we don't have that much time left. But since you just mentioned, you know, stuff we should potentially be worried about, we'd be remiss if we didn't ask you whether or not you're thinking about the situation in Ukraine and with Russia and what the economic impacts or risks to the US might actually

be if Russia did choose to invade. We're deeply concerned and we are very focused on the sustained diplomatic effort that the President has led across our allies and partners to underscore too to Putin and the the Russians the

stakes and the costs associated with with their choices. In terms of the economic context, We've made very clear to the Russians that their decision, and President Putin's decision to invade, would be met with historically strong economic costs in the form of sanctions, financial market sanctions in the and in the form of export controls as well, in a way that will be unified from the United States and our allies. They will put the Russian economy in a very challenge situation. Now.

The question then is how can we work to make sure that we impose those costs appropriately on the Russian economy while limiting the impact to the U. S economy and our allies as well. You know, on that front, in terms of direct impact, the United States does not have very much macro exposure at all to the impacts of these sanctions and export controls, which puts us In

in a strong position to be able to move. The two places where we have been very focused are both in energy with respect to natural gas and working with our europe European allies to mitigate potential disruptions principally for access to to gas across Europe. We on the natural gas side, we will not be it would not be a major factor in terms of US prices or or supply. But then we've done a lot of work with our European allies to to work on mitigation measures on the

on that front. And then to circle back to where you know, one of the first questions around oil markets, how we can work to mitigate the potential impact on oil markets. And the President mentioned on Monday that he has been working with allies and partners and oil producing countries to make sure that we are prepared to take any and all actions necessary to try to address the oil market issue in a way that can maximally mitigate those uh those impacts as well. So work on that

front is actively underway. All options remain on the table on that front, and so that's that's where our principal focus has been in terms of mitigation. But you know, it's a very serious, very serious situation that will have serious economic consequences, and we continue to work on the diplomatic side in in every way that we can to to to avoid the worst outcomes. Brian ds, Director of the National Economic Council, thank you so much for coming

on odline. Thanks thanks to both of you for having me. Thanks Brian, Thanks Brian, well Tracy. Obviously that was a real treat getting to speak with such a high up

White House official on the economy. You know, actually the thing is, the area that struck me most, or one of the things was this sort of and we should probably talk about it more on the podcast is and I also know it's an interest of yours, this sort of threading the needle a bit on this sort of question of corporate behavior, greed, consolidation and the current tensions now and this idea of sort of anti monopoly or pro competitive practice as one factor, maybe not acute, but

one factor that could drive pricing pressure down over the long term totally. And there's so much to say on that, and of course there's like there's a very large body of academic research on things like price controls um and it seems to be an issue, but also the solutions don't seem to work well. In fact, they often seem to backfire. The other thing that struck me was his

response to your question. That wasn't on monetary policy, but it sort of was about it does feel like we are in this weird place at the moment where people are upset about the inflationary pressures, but on the other hand, the economy itself is in decent shape and there's this

weird kind of tension there. And I think we've discussed this at one point or another recently, but it feels like one of the lessons we're learning is that in terms of politics, inflation seems to be a much bigger issue simply because it ends up affecting everyone in one way or another, Whereas when employment is at four percent, it's very hard to get the voting population to, you know, really care about that isn't care about inclusive employment and

bringing in even more people at the margins to care about that as an issue. Yeah, And I think that's right, And I think it's one of the areas that I have had to sort of reforming my thinking a bit, because obviously post GFC, the story was the other way. And I guess I'm I'm surprised a little bit that the the sort of extremely rapid labor market recovery is not seen as a sort of as as a win

publicly the same way. And I don't know, it's not obvious to me, like if the unemployment rate had sort of settled here at six percent but inflation were lower, six percent, employment is kind of high and well above where it was pre crisis. It would be interesting to know that that counterfactual we're inflation was a little bit lower, but we had unemployment six percent the assessment of the economy.

But it definitely seems right now that inflation from a sort of the public's perspective, when you look at things like consumer sentiment, et cetera. In fact, that it's a bad time to buy a house, it's a bad time to buy a car, it's a bad time to buy a washing machine, it's a bad time to buy a vacuum cleaner. It feels like that is overwhelming lead the number one issue, and that most people are just the

labor market is not top of mind. No, I would agree with that, But um, interesting times, you know, even setting aside Russia and Ukraine, which is a whole interesting time in and of itself. Interesting to see the administration unveiling, uh, some more measures on the supply chain front as well. Shall we leave it there. Let's leave it there, all right. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at

Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Wisntal. You could follow me on Twitter at The Stalwart. Follow our guest Brian Deese He's at Brian Deese n e C. Follow our producer Laura Carlson at Laura M. Carlson. Followed the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy at Francesca Today, and check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening year to