This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week.
And we may not have an overall recession, We're having a rolling recession. To kind of roll looks pretty strongly it is when it comes to jobs, the financial stories that shape our world. Three major regional bank failures send shockwaves through the banking system. We're all trying to figure out what to make of generative AI.
Through the eyes of the most influential voices.
Welcome down, Doctor Paul Krugman, Ryan moynihan, a Bank of America, deebro Lair of the Paulson Institute, well Then Hubbard of the Columbia Business School.
Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
A strike settles, the FED decides, the Treasury bar short, and a war in Gaza enters a new phase. This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. This week's special contributor Larry Summers of Harvard and former Biden Chief economist to Celia Rouse on the jobs numbers, the FED decision, and what comes next for the US economy.
This was a favorable number, but I don't think anybody should overinterpret it.
I think we.
Are seeing the slowing of the labor market, which has been long in anticipated.
Some might say, what took so long?
Cars are Steve Rattner of Will Advisors on the auto settlement.
And that's the yun and the yang for the unions to think about, because if General Motors and Stalantis and Ford can be competitive with Tesla, then they're gonna lose jobs.
And kk ours Henry McVeigh, I'm investing in Asia as the Chinese economy comes back down to earth.
When you think about China as a global growth engine, used to be one third of global GDP growth, it's clearly not that engine there.
Global Wall Street. It spent yet another week keeping one eye on the war unfolding between Israel and Hamas. As Israeli troops moved into Gaza, calls.
For cease far are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorists, to surrender to barbaras.
That will not happen. And still it was hard to see any light at the end of this long tunnel.
We're sending in between fire and eight hundred trucks a day. Right now, we're up to almost sixty.
We're trying to get to one.
Hundred this week. That is the bare minimum of what's needed.
But even as we followed more tragedy in the Middle East, there was some good news as the UAW announced the third and final tentative agreement with the Big three automakers.
Today's historic agreement, because you had another piece of good economic news showing something I've always believed, worker power.
The Fed came out with its much anticipated rates decision, and as anticipated, didn't budge with Chair Pal saying they will take it one step at a time.
We're going meeting, my meeting, We're asking ourselves whether we've achieved a stance of policy to the sufficiently restrictive to bring inflation down to two percent over time.
Over a treasury they came out with their borrowing plans for the next quarter, which came in a bit light and a bit short.
The problem, of course for the Treasury Department is that people are criticizing them for not turning out earlier. They have to pay more, so they are kind of locked in here.
And artificial intelligence was back in the news, not that it was ever really out of it. As President Biden signed a new executive order.
To realize the promise of AI and void the risk we need to govern this technology.
On Thursday, a jury in southern Manhattan needed only a few hours to convict Samuel Bankman freed on all seven counts.
Sam Bankman free perpetrated one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, a multi billion dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto.
We respect the jury's decision. We're very disappointed in the result.
On Friday, US jobs numbers confirmed a slowing of the US labor market, adding one hundred and fifty thousand new jobs rather than the one hundred and eighty thousand that had been expected, and the unemployment rate ticked up just
a bit to three point nine percent. To help us understand these jobs numbers and the FED decision from earlier in the week, we welcome the person who until recently interpreted them for President Biden, and as of the first of the year, we'll be taking the helmet the Brookings Institution. She is doctor Cecilia Rouse. So, doctor Ross, thank you so much for being with us. You're an economist to
give us put these in perspective. We're looking for some slowing in the economy, in partly because we don't want that overheating with the inflation. Do you think we're seeing it yet?
I think we are seeing the slowing of the labor market, which has been long anticipated. Some might say what took so long? But what we see is that employment growth remains healthy. Like if we were to talk pre pandemic, an average job growth if we look over the last three months has been just over two hundred thousand jobs a month. This month it came into one hundred and fifty.
That number will be revised, but what we see is healthy job growth, which is consistent with an economy that is powering along, but which is coming down from the very high growth we had as the economy recovered from the pandemic. I think these numbers will be welcomed by the Fed. As I said, I think many economists will see this as the natural of the economy getting back to normal.
Well, no offense to the economists such as you, but you've been off on some few things recently, and let me talk about that specifically, the relationship between the labor market on the one hand and inflation on the other. We thought we knew what that was, that it seemed to really the relationship went away. That Phillips currency knew really flat. Where are we now? Do we have a theory about what the labor market means for inflation?
So you know, the reality is that in economics there's not a fabulous theory and one theory of inflation, and I think that is part of the challenge.
Another part of the challenge is what was the source.
We know that we had unprecedented supply challenges due to the pandemic, both in terms of getting goods to people manufacturing goods because people have a part of that process and with the pandemic they couldn't show.
Up to work.
And then we also know we had unprecedented demand because of the remarkable support that the federal government here and abroad provide to consumers and businesses to get them through the pandemic. So we know we had this mismatch of supply and demand. The question is which was going to win in terms of regularizing faster.
So I think this goes back to we hadn't.
Seen inflation for a long time, economics doesn't have one solid, well established theory of inflation, and the fact that we had an unprecedented shock to our domestic economy and the global economy. What we're seeing now is monetary authorities stepped in, the federal government stepped in. They pulled back appropriately, and the economy is getting back to normal.
Another big development this week was the Federal Reserve decision and the press conference, the news conference from Chair Pow And when you were with the one as you would always say, that's their business. I stay out of that. But now you're not at the White House anymore. I'm not going to ask you to tell them what to do. But are you sympathetic to what I take to be a chair Pole's position, which is, we just don't know right now. We've got to take this meeting by meeting.
I can't predict out too far because we're in uncertain territory. Is that the way you see the ecount right now, because it's grown awfully strong considering all those increases in your rates that you referred to.
Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to charb. Howell's view of how to proceed. One thing we know is that our economic models have the economic forecasting has been rather imprecise through this pandemic.
It's tricky business.
Again, we hadn't had the kind of shock both to the supply side of the domestic and global economy and then this demand support. We just hadn't seen that, and so the economy is not behaving the way that many economists predicted. So I think he and his colleagues are right to say, Look, we remain at the We stand at the ready. We understand that inflation is costly to everyone. At the same time, we understand that there are huge benefits to a strong labor market and a full economy.
So we are going to wait.
We don't want to be sit back on our heels, but we are going to take this eating by meeting as we watch all of the data and assess what's the best way forward.
And finally, we look at all these data sort of week by week, month by month, quarter by quarter, but there's also the longer term trends. And when it comes to the labor market, something you've done a lot of work on is the role of women in the workplace and particularly childcare. Tell us about why we should be focused not maybe for this week or this month, but a longer term on that part of the labor market.
Yeah.
So this was a speech given in Washington, d c. Sponsored by the one hundred Foundation. This is Adam Smith, three hundredth birthday, birth year, And the point I was making is that as women have entered the labor force and women disproportionately care for children, men are obviously can be caretakers as well, but if we just look at the data, women bear the disproportioned share of that care.
If we want to have a robust labor market, which we know we need to do, we have falling fertility, we have an aging demograph, we have an immigration system that is not replenishing. If we're going to have a robust labor market, we need everybody who wants to work to be able to work and to be able to do so productively.
The reality is children need to be careful.
So in order for people to be able to balance work and family, they.
Need to be able to provide for childcare. So there is an.
Externality there that means that there are benefits that go beyond the family but to the rest of society, both in terms of the benefit and economic growth, but also in terms of making investments in children and high quality childcare have benefits to the rest of us throughout their lifetimes. So there's a role for government in providing or subsidizing high quality childcare. Labored on top of the fact that childcare is expensive and that happens at a time when
families and workers are not at their peak earnings. You can't take out a loan to pay for childcare, so again we have a problem in our credit markets. Again a potential role for government. And finally that it's very costly for providers, and so most providers, not the big chains, but the little providers where most children are cared for, are barely getting by, and we know that their workers
are paid very little. More than fifty percent of childcare workers receive some form of public assistance, so there's high turnover, not consistent with high quality childcare.
So this is a market that could use help.
It's a role that the government should be actively involved in, whether it's provision, subsidization, but the point is that it's critical if we're going to improve and maintain our economic growth, which benefits us all.
Doctor Ross, thank you so very much for being with us. The best of luck as you take over the helmet Brookings. That is doctor Cecilia Rauss. Coming up, we'll go through how the market reacted to all the news this week with Scott Kronert of City that's coming up next do on Wall Street Week on Bloomberg.
This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. The market had one wild week as the SMP five hundred added five point eighty five percent to end up at forty three point fifty eight, though that is still below the median year end number of our Bloomberg ls, which is at forty four to thirty five. The Nasdaq was up six point six percent, while the yield on the ten year gave up a full twenty eight basis points, falling all the way back down to four point five seven.
Here to explain it all to us to Scott Cronerd, he's City US equity strategist. It's gott great to have you back with us. So why don't you explain because it was quite a wild weekend as the week went on and got wilder and wilder.
Well, I think, David, let's just start with, you know, two words interest rates. So to put some context into what happened this week, let's consider the following since the end of July. So over the past three months, you've seen the nominal SMP the nominal tenure ye'ld move from roughly four percent to approaching five percent as recently as a week or so ago. In the mean time, really yields moved from roughly one and a half percent up to two and a half percent. This had a couple
of profound impact on the SMP. First, what it did was increase the concern regarding the economic readthrough to rising rates. Second, yes, it had some valuation influence on the broader market, but then third it also increased the concern about even higher rates and the implications that may have for our growing
deficit situation. So this week, essentially what happened to your point, you took ten year yields down and the response to some of the economic data fed commentary, and essentially you snapped the rubber band that had been getting stretched pretty wide, as the SMP had pulled back roughly ten percent over that timeframe.
And you have a chart that will put up for our television audience actuation showing that rubber band snapping back, which is a relative yield between stocks and bonds. Essentially to simplify the chart that will show it to the audience.
Yeah, essentially, what's been happening here is as rates have backed up, are cross asset valuation work has increasingly favored fixed income or bonds. And so essentially, as you look at the opportunity and say a five year ten year yield versus the expected return on the S and B five hundred or US equities, it's increasingly skewed in favor of, Hey, why didn't I stay in bonds, whether it be short term be money market funds where the Fed funds rate is,
or longer term out to the ten year yield. And so our point here is that that concern, we think has kept a lot of flow headwind on US equities, and again, combined with this pullback in ten year yields this week, you've triggered a snapback that has had the effect of drawing money back into equities very quickly.
Scott, it strikes me through that really lucid explanation of the week, there wasn't that much reference to the Fed and what they're doing the rates. I mean, sure, we had a news conference with Chair Japal and they came out of the decision not to do anything, But how much of this is really a matter of federal funds rates? As opposed to other macro factors right now.
Yeah, So I think the federal funds situation, I think most investors have gotten comfortable that if we're not at a FED fund peak, we're awfully close, right, And so whether the Fed decided to put another twenty five basis
points on or not was certainly relevant. But in our view it's kind of paled in comparison to what's been happening within the bond market internals, where this move in the ten yere yields is probably more indicative of the rate that you would use for evaluating future projects and a company by company basis, how you think about this again stock versus bond math, and increasingly how you think about the longer term valuation set up for equities, and
so yes, Fed funds is very important here. Our focus for the past month or longer has really been more so on the ten year yield component as the culmination of all these issues that are coming into play right now.
Really great to have you with us. That's Scott Croner of City. UAW has tentative agreements with all three major US automakers. Did the uawhad, Sean Fain says, didn't leave any money on the table from his point of view, to take us through those deals and what they may mean for the industry. Welcome back now, Steve Radner, Chairman and CEO of Will Advisors, which invests the personal and philanthropic assets of Michael Bloomberg. He is, of course our
founder and majority shareholders. In addition to so many things you've done in your career, you're also the lead advisor to President Obama for the Presidential task Force in the Auditors. So you know this business terribly Well, what do you make of the deals as they've been described so far for the Big Three?
Well, I think we have the details now, have packaged. It's this stick I was just reading it. I think it's a good outcome for both sides. Actually, I think the union got what they want, most of what they were much of what they wanted, and much of what they deserve, which are substantial pay increases. They got cola cost of living adjustments, back, the right to strike in
certain places, things like that. And I think from the standpoint of the companies, what's really important is that there was no backsliding on world rules, on all the restrictions that made it hard to manage those companies before we restructured them in two thousand and nine, and they also did not go back to define benefit pension plans or company paid retirey healthcare, which of course everybody would like workers to have, but simply isn't in the playbook anymore in today's economy.
What about that flexibility because earlier on Walls Reetvik, you weren't warned about those work rules because you had to deal with those back two thousand and twousand and nine, there were some agreements such as, for example, the right to strike as I understand it, for any individual plant closing. Do you think this will still give the auto companies enough flexibility to deal with a really changing environment in autos.
Yeah, I do. I think the thing that the union has to be careful about is, as we've talked about before, the INN and the Yang, is that when you increase pay increase costs to the companies. They're talking about eight or nine hundred dollars a car potentially of increased costs. What can happen then is the jobs can move, that the next plant doesn't get built in the US, it gets built in Mexico, and that the right to strike
does not prevent that from happening. And that's what's been happening in the auto industry for the last fifteen years, the number of the jobs I've been moving. It's not a coincidence that the big three companies essentially don't really make small cars in the US anymore.
They cannot afford.
They simply can't make them with any kind of reasonable profit margin given the cost structures they have. So we all want workers to do more, but we don't want it to cost jobs. And that's the thing we have to be really careful about.
Come back to your point of at a competition moving to Mexico, moving to right to work states, there's also a competition from non union producers, for example of teslas, you know, for electric vehicles. Does this put the Big three at a substantially greater disadvantage to the Teslas of this world and also some of the Japanese automakers, who, as understand, also don't have unions.
Yeah, it does.
No getting around that if you increase your costs of a car by eight or nine hundred dollars, you're at a disadvantage. And I get to mention Tesla because it
wasn't really around in two thousand and nine. I was thinking about Mexico and the southern transplants, but Tesla is absolutely a factor in this, and companies like Tesla that don't have unions and pay substantially less, and again that's the yin and the yang for the unions to think about, because if General Motors and Stillantis and Ford can't be competitive with Tesla, then they're going to lose jobs. They're
gonna lose sales, which means losing jobs. And you can have the right to strike all day long, but if if the company ends up closing a factory or reducing the number of shifts, that's what's going to happen.
What do you make of the question of the shift in power toward labor. There has been historically shift away from labor toward capital overall and certainly the private sector particularly. Are we seeing a fundamental shift back again, or are we seeing essentially a peak time when labor has the most power and it may well come down from there.
I think somewhere in between. I think we're definitely seeing a shift back. If you look at a chart showing stays lost to you'll see that relative to five years or ten years ago, there's been a significant increase in days loss to strikes. We all know about the ups drivers and the screenwriters and the auto workers, but you'll also see the days lost or nothing compared to what they were back in the seventies and eighties. So we're not anywhere back in that zip code. I think this
is a healthy development. Actually, I think that capital has benefited too much at the expense of labor.
You're in a.
Situation now where people's real wages still have not recovered given the inflation we've had, but corporate profits have remained quite strong. And I'm happy corporate profits have remained quite strong, But I think companies can ford to do more.
Okay, Steve, thank you so much for Rebecca. Great to have you on. Willsh Reek. That is Steve Retner of Willet Advisors coming up. China's economic miracle may be a little bit less miraculous. What does that mean for investors in Asia? We ask Henry McVeigh of KKR.
Now you get to China and it feels more disinflationary, and Japan feels more inflationary. There's a repositioning of global macro economic trends within Asia.
That's next on Wall Street Week on Bloomberg.
This is Bloomberg Well Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
China. Until recently it was an economic miracle, having grown its economy more than any nation in history.
China is not just a rising power. China has risen.
China is now seriously rivaling in the US in virtually every domain.
But recently things have gotten a bit rougher for the rising Middle Kingdom, led by challenges in its huge real estate market.
A commercial regisling market in China has had a huge policy correction, and I think we are at the bottom of the market, but it will take quite a while for that market to recover and gain momentum.
Which is spread to the broader economy.
It's to be acknowledged that the current state of the economy is under pressure in China, and that's also something that we see coming back through in our results.
And it doesn't help that its main economic rival, the United States, is pulling back at least in some areas like high tech.
So we intend to continue with a major trade relationship with China. But we have said and this is the small yard, high fence, the d risking strategy that we are not going to permit the sale of advanced semiconductors AI chips into China that could be used for military advantage by the PLA.
Which raises questions for investors about whether China is their go to destination as it once was, or whether other places in Asia may offer more attractive alternatives.
I think that you think some other signs of life and other places like Japan is doing much better. It's done much better this year. I think some of the emerging markets outside of China have done relatively well.
Money has slowed into impact this year, into Taiwan, into Korea, into the rest of the emerging world, but particularly India has been the biggest beneficiary.
And to take us through the prospects of investing in Asia today, wilkinsony who knows the area terribly well and has a lot of money at work there. He is Henry Vay. He is KKR CIO of the balance sheet. So welcome Henry. It's really good to have you on.
It's great to be here.
Until recently, China was sort of the economic miracle. It was the one place you went to invest. Now we hear from a lot of investors, maybe not so much given some sloat on growth, some uncertainty with the government. Where are you in China right now?
So I think from a growth standpoint, China used to run in a nominal GDP, which is real GDP plus inflation, about twenty percent, which is a huge number. Today that's about six percent, so it's down by a third.
So when you think about China.
As a global growth engine, used to be one third of global GDP growth, it's clearly not that engine.
There.
You know, this is my third trip I just got back this year and what I would have been going since ninety five, so we do have some comparing contrast. What I would say is, I think the story on what's growing in China's actually misunderstood right. One is that housing. I think people know that it's not growing, and I think that's been well documented. What they're missing, though, is the growth drivers. What you're seeing is a huge growth
surge in the decarbonization or the energy transition. And the second is really around industrial automation. Most investors have been focused on consumption upgrades, which is certainly an attractive area, but there's a real shift in the underlying momentum of the economy. I'd say the economy actually bottomed in April. That was my second trip, and what we saw was some slight improvement when we were back there recently.
So, as you say, historically it's been sort of export driven as well as housing property. Now it's shifting over. You've got the climate change issues, green issues. You also got industrialization and sort of the monetization of there is the government behind that because one of the questions always is how's the government going to come out of this? Because the government shifted on some things like tech for example.
Yeah, Look, I think tech has been well documented remains a complex area for a variety of reasons, both in the United States in China. On the decarbonization that is a massive part of the economy. It's already ten percent of the economy, it's growing forty percent year every year, and it goes across multiple different areas. Industrial kind of what I would say is digitalization. That's phase two of the exports story that you mentioned. It's really about how
to create automation. Right when I first went to China and China joined the WTO, labor costs were forty four times cheaper than the US today. That's four and they actually have a negative growth rate for Chinese locals that are in the age group twenty to.
Fifty, so they need automation.
One of the areas that we spend time learning about was actually robots a year every year. That's growing seventy five percent year every year that business in China. Second is civil aviation is growing about forty percent year every year. These are not typical industries that China has been affiliated with in the past. I think form about global You know, we're a global firm. We're very local though in Asia,
including China. But we've got eight offices around Asia in about seventy or eighty billion dollars across a variety of asset classes in Asia. And what you need to understand is not only investing in China, but how is it connected.
What we see as.
A local investor is that intra Asia trade is escalating massively, and so a lot of people think about us China trade is the only avenue.
You're missing the bigger story.
Just as we hear from some investors, we're not as enthusiasts we had China anymore. I hear a lot of enthusiasm about Japan. What's going on there?
Yeah, Look, our view. We've been in Japan for a long time.
We did one private equity transaction seven years and then we've done probably fourteen or fifteen in the last couple of years. A lot of these have been around corporate carb outs. The final legacy of abonomics will be that corporate reform is accelerating and that's leading to big companies Hatachi, you know, Panasonic, companies like that that are starting to look to sell subsidiaries to create growth and value creation.
That's kind of theme one where we've been active. Second is we did make an acquisition in the real estate market in Japan and that's starting to create value, which is can you unlock some of the real estate value that was maybe suppressed in a deflationary environment. And then the third is you're seeing more activism and I think KKR has really emerged as a kind of a white Night and more of that. What I would say is
activist market. So things are accelerating. You know, it's somewhat ironic, which is we used to go to China and people talk about inflation as a constraint, and then the constraint in Japan was deflation. Now you go to China and it feels more disinflationary and Japan feels more inflationary. So it's really there's a repositioning of global macro economic trends within Asia.
Well, that was one of those I asked, do you think inflation's back to stay in Japan?
I do, I do. I think there's this cyclical in the secular.
The cyclical is around food and energy inflation, which I actually don't think is good inflation. I think the wage growth is actually very constructive, and so that's what you're seeing. That leads to more spending, It creates confidence. The offset of that and where we focus as a firm, it's back to this industrial automation concept, which is you need to get productivity gains that allow wages to grow without
margins being pressured. And that's what we're seeing. You saw this from the Prime Minister when he was in New York. What did he talk about. He talked about Capex in Japan was at a record level. That Capex is going back into creating productivity into a workforce that probably needs more automation, needs more sophistication. So you've got to watch all parts of the economic story together. You can't just focus solely on inflation component.
So when you look for the economy to grow in Japan, you have to make up for some of the demographic issues and the workforce issues that you just referred to. Do you think that it's possible for CAPEX to be enough to make up for some of the challenges they have with an aging population.
I think one is there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
Japan's done an incredible job of actually bringing women into the workforce, and if you think about childcare costs in Japan, they're four times cheaper than they are in the US. That's a massive competitive advantage. Second of they've actually gotten males fifty five and older to come back in the workforce, and they're starting to get some small signs on immigration. So we're not looking for, you know, ten percent real
GDP growth in Japan. What we're really looking for is some improvement from really on a nominal basis which was deflationary to inflationary, some positive nominal GDP growth, and then we're looking for corporate reforms, and so I think investors have to separate the.
Earnings from GDP.
The best ronment for KKR is actually, can you help companies grow their earnings when GDP growth is actually somewhat slower, and that means that the central bank doesn't have to overtighten.
And that's really what you get in Japan. I mean, our founder is Henry Cravis and George Roberts saying internally they pioneered the private equity business and they said, if we were twenty two, we would go to Japan right now, because that's actually where you're seeing some of the real movement and creating some opportunities in private equity.
That's saying something. One last one India. We hear a lot about a boom coming in India, yasually they don't have that demographic problem that we talked about with Japan. Yeah, what's going on in India?
India?
I actually there are two things that are going on in India. One is the exports are actually picking up and some of that as you've seen some reshoring into India, So when you look at their export momentum, it's actually quite strong. And then second is similar to Japan and similar to China, there's a global capex cycle where they're seeing their infrastructure investment in particular go up.
That's a big.
Deal and they're really great. Tavin wealshreet than for having me. It's great to tell you. As Hendrik Faye of KKR coming up, how are you going to keep them back in the office after they've worked from home? Maybe try a little magic. That's next Don wall Street Week on Bloomberg.
This is Bloomberg wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
Finally, one more thought. Aristotle taught that pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Judging by what we're seeing these days, it's no wonder we aren't seeing much perfection in the work because a lot of employees don't seem to be getting much pleasure from doing the work. Auto workers have spent weeks off the job demanding they get a larger share of the fruits of their labor.
This contract demonstrates the incredible power that workers have when they are not afraid to use it.
They were the latest of this series of work actions around the world, starting with a major strike against the trains and schools in England at the beginning of the year. This is really the biggest school night to strike actually we've seen in the UK for a decade, and then German airport workers shut down the nation's major airports in the spring.
You have the Services Union VERDI and also the rail Transmit Union EVG.
So they started these strikes at midnight tonight.
It is, you know, disrupting all kinds of travel.
For much of the year, Hollywood has been saddled with strikes, first by the writers and then by the actors.
This has been a very difficult time obviously going doing this. And the goal here is to get people back to work. The goal is to get the town opened up. This is not just hurting our industry, it's hurting every other business that supports our industry.
And then just this week, technology workers at the New York Times walked off the job to protest they're being required to come back into the office instead of working from home. Fans of working from home think employers should see working from home as an opportunity rather than a challenge.
Now, the question is we have this amazing, once in a lifetime opportunity to recreate it in our within our own creativity.
And Steve Schwarzman says he understands the motivation, whether or not he agrees with the result.
People got used to, you know, staying at home, and it was actually more profitable for them to stay at home because one they didn't work as hard, regardless of what they tell you. And the second is they don't spend money to commute. You know, they can make their lunch at home, they don't have to buy expensive clothes, and so their incomes are higher.
Given all the worker discontent, it is no surprise that employers are trying to come up with some creative ways to keep their workers happy or at least happier. Everything from the World Bank upping its subsidy for communing costs and cutting the costs of childcare, to a British office building a Sheffield constructing a circular slide employees can take to get from the third floor to the ground floor
seven seconds, has reported in The Wall Street Journal. To the latest and perhaps the grandest word came this week that Ken Griffin is paying for twelve hundred of his Asia employees and family members to travel to Tokyo's Disney resort for a three day celebration of the company's anniversary,
and will cost mister Griffin a pretty penny. As Bloomberg reported this week that the costs for a week long trip for a family of fourd to Disney World back here in the United States has gone up to twenty five thousand dollars and could go as high as forty thousand dollars. But no matter the cost, it looks like, at least for Citadel's Asia employees, their dreams really may come true. Where are your Jeans Come True? That does it for this episode of Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston.
This is Bloomberg. See you next week.