This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week.
The global push into infrastructure, breaking the IPO logjam, in tech.
The financial stories that shape.
Our work, cutting inflation without losing jobs. Do we need rate cuts and if so, how many? Investing in the time of geopolitical turmoil.
Through the eyes of the most influential voices.
Ten Rogueff Economists of Harvard, former fdicehead Shiela Bert ge CEO, Larry Culp, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daily.
Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
Equity markets up, interest rates on their way down, and underlying it all, a growing federal deficits and an AI tech revolution. This is a special edition of Wall Street Week, looking back on the first half of twenty twenty four. I'm David Weston. We talked with investors and who those investors listened to through the year, and we'll revisit some of the most memorable conversations with Mary Daily of the San Francisco Fed, Mark rowan Apollo, Claire Eprono's Centerview Partners,
and Neil Ferguson of the Hooper Institution. We start with former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and an issue he's been working on since he first joined the Clinton administration back in nineteen ninety three. The growing federal debt something that hasn't gotten better, and he says has gotten much worse.
I think that the risks are even greater today because our debt GDP ratio is a proximal Sumbio estimates about one hundred percent right now. It's the highest in the history of the country except for nineteen forty six and forty seven we were coming back out of World War Two.
I think the risks are enormous, and some of them are materializing already, like higher registrates and effect on inflation in part not full, and others haven't materialized yet, but I think they're out there and sooner related will materialize if we don't correct our our physical trajectory.
You talked about some of the market indicators and even forces that you saw in ninety three that sort of pointed you in a direction at present Clinton, in the direction of really making the death set of special issue. Are we seeing those indicators of their forces today in the markets.
I think that we are seeing the effects, but it's unfortunately from a political point of view. David I don't think they're getting connected in a meaningful way. In a meaningful way with deficit reduction, sure interested. I mean the long the tenure was about I think one and a half percent, say two years ago, and now it's about four and a half percent. Now, that's a lot of factors that go into that, but I think part of it is our fiscal situation and the effect that's had
on inflation. I think it's been an aggravator of or if you will, an effect on inflation. And I think there's a general concern about the imbalance between supplying demand for savings and the excess demand that's created by our deficits. But it's not Unfortunately, from political point of view, I don't think the dots are being connected the way they were back in ninety two to three when we acted. Ninety three we acted, but ninety two when Predident Clinton was putting his plans together.
Talk these days, when we talk about the FED about the neutral rate and debate about whether it is the neutroraid higher. And I guess my question is does the deficit and the debt normally, all the things being equal, drive the neutroid higher?
I think over time, But I think you can also have a long period of time. And we had a long period of time, actually a long long period of time during which all of this was having little effect, and then all of a sudden, the ten year went, as I said, a moment ago, from roughly one and a half to roughly four and a half. And I've been around markets, and these policies were for five decades now.
And there's certainly our periods when you can have a long time when reality is out of or what's happening is out of sync with reality. But that doesn't go on forever, and when it corrects, it can correct savagely. A good example was the Eurozone, the sovereign Eurostone crisis. For years, the Greek bonds trated roughly speaking parody with ghivlier take with German buns, and then all of a sudden exploded. And I think it's a good example of how what isn't sensible ultimately doesn't continue.
There's the politics of it, which I want to talk about. Before that, let's talk about the approach taken to it. Let's talk about, for example, the Biden administration. We can talk about the Trump instriction. If you walk with the bidminstration. When you were there back in the nineties, you came from Golden Sachs, you had other people there who knew the markets pretty well. There was a healthy dose of how are the markets reacting this? What does that do
for us? Do we still have that or is it more ideologically driven because some people think we've sort of shifted the orientation, particularly the Democratic Party, more toward protectionism, more toward populism.
Well, you've asked multiple questions. I'll give you. I'll give you my view. I've given a lot of thought to this, and I know the people there pretty well. If you look at the proposals, but I want to respond to something you said that it's a little different. Well, i'll give them that in a second. If you look at the proposals, the major policy proposals that President Biden made, they were all paid for in the proposals. Now, ultimately
they had to go through Congress. When they went through Congress, they came out some of them paid forwards and some of them not. I think he's ok. I think he's actually pretty good on this. I think there are other issues were I might have a different view than he does, or maybe I would have a say it an altered view rather than a different view. But I think on fiscal stuff, actually he's got a pretty good sense of it.
I think on the proposals that they had three major bills I were chips and infrastructure and in the original propose, and then of course for that build back better and all of those. If you look at the and I this is correct because I looked at them. All of those the proposals were fully paid for Dad to go through Congress, and in Congress they in some cases they lost the paid for us. You know, you mentioned I forgot how you put it now before, but did you
say populism or progressive? Yeah, populism. If you look at at what has been referred to as industrial policy, and they referred to those industrial policy, it's their label, but it's not it's not picking winners and losers. Now it may be in the minds of some of those people, but if you look at those proposals, and I have talked to their people, that there's a lot I think they actually make a lot of sense on a purely
economic basis. Their externalities. They basically dealt with shortfall, with insecurities in our system, in our ascuse me in our economic system with respect to our economic security or economic function, our geopolitical or national security functioning that markets were not going to meet and had to be met by government. So that I think is not industrial policy in the
traditional sense, and let's pick winners and losers. It was let's fill holes that the private sector simply isn't filling, and those are holes of economic inial security.
So from your perspective, the overall approach, you don't take much issue with. No, do we end up with where we are, where we have increasing deficits in increasing debts.
Oh we a minute, what I talked about with the proposals, No, I think we're in a terrible place because unfortunately, once you get to legislating, there isn't the will. There's a lot of talk, but the talk is always divided politically between the Republicans who refuse to raise taxes and the
Democrats who won't deal with titlements. How I think there was a reality to this, and that is I do think when we eventually get to doing this, or if we were to do it, you know after the next election, which the Good Lord would hope we will, but I wouldn't bet on it about sixty percent or something. Of the increase in the debt from to twenty twenty two was because of the tax cuts, So if it hadn't been for that, the debt, instead of being one hundred percent CDP, would be about sixty percent.
That was former Secretary of the Treasury Bob Rubins. Private equity slowed down a lot in response to over five hundred basis points added to interest rates and a good deal of uncertainty about where the economy is headed. But it's starting to pick back up and the much anticipated
FED cuts expected this fall should only help. When we talk with Blair Efron as cent of You Partners earlier in the year, he predicted that when the year is over, it will prove to have been a good one for his core business.
I think private equity will be a very strong driver in twenty twenty four. If you think about the years a preceding twenty twenty three, with basically forty percent of the market, there is such a large group of companies that are looking for liquidity and coming from private equity that I do think it'll be a very active time. And again that goes directly to the financing markets as well.
The financing arena will be more liquid than it was last year, and we're seeing most of the private equity world think about being more active, and frankly, to their credit, they slowed down activity at a moment when they should. You know, it's so last year it was much easier for corporate to look at something and not think they had private ecret competition. This year, when we see companies we're selling, the interest is both corporate. We already saying it corporate and private equity.
How much of your business immersion exersition is driven by essentially the need to reform parts of a sector. I mean, I'm thinking of one that I come out of media right now. There's a lot of pressure right now for some of the big media companies to really think about the cards they've got and how they deal with them, how they get rid of some how they pick them up. How much of em andy is really driven by these big companies saying, you know, we got a really restructure today.
I think it's most of it. Transformation is happening so quickly and it's so disruptive that every company is saying, here's my portfolio to day, but where's it going to be tomorrow. So even you talk about your world media, it used to be traditional media with three networks. Now it's traditional and non traditional players. Apple, Google, Amazon are as active as Disney, Comcast, Paramount gaming. What is technology? It's all becomes one industry. If I go across any industry,
that is what we say. I look at the pharma world. The fact is life sciences is one of the biggest areas out there. Why because we have such innovation going on in this country. So many companies you never heard of five years ago on internet heard of that have become really important to five years later. That this becomes a window when you can about R and D for a big farmer company, it's interesting in many ways to buy then build. So I would say that every business
is being challenged in ways it never was before. And it's causing CEOs, It's causing boards, causing season leaders to constantly rethink their ideal portfolio, recognizing there is never an end state portfolio anymore. It is always going to be evolving. And the good news is we have a as talented
and experienced a group of leaders as ever. So when a CEO undertakes M and A today, chances are strong that he or she is going to end up doing a good job in the right thing to the company, both strategically and financially.
All of which supports your view. The twenty twenty four looks like it'll be a lot strong in twenty three y three emergent acquisitions. What does that say for a cent of you partners? Are you hiring an if they are, you are hiring? What sorts of people you're hiring? Because it looks very different than did certainly ten years ago, maybe five years ago, because of something innovasion, not to speaking for example generative AI.
Boy, that's a great question.
First, we are hiring, so anybody has a resume, let us know. We're always hiring.
The skill set we look for is.
Probably different than you would think. We want people who can think critically, who can analyze situations, who have judgment, have an ability to make difficult problems distilled into more simple problems, and it's less about whether you can make a great model. I do think when AI over time will replace some of the skill sets that we see
traditionally done in stem coding. For example, I'm not sure that burs I'd be advising my kids that learning how to be great coders is going to matter in ten years. What will matter is do you have judgment? Do you have an ability to think critically as I mentioned and ask questions that need to be asked, that you can see situations? What am I missing? And I think that that is a skill set that people are going to find is increasingly important. And also the skill set that
says I'm gonna have three careers. What do I need to know to have three careers of my professional spend?
That was Blair Ephron of Centerview Partners. Coming up. The United States is doubling down on chip production. We talked with San Francisco Fed President Mary Daily about how her district is helping to lead the way and not just in Silicon Valley. That's next on Wall Street Week on Bloomberg.
Seen through the Eyes of Experts gives you a better view.
Stocks just keep moving higher.
And at Bloomberg, our market vision is twenty twenty.
There's still supply chain issues out there. The inflation debate continues. Bloomberg Radio.
The Bloomberg Business appened Bloomberg Radio dot com. This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This is a mid year special additional Wall Street Week we reviewing some of the best interviews we've done so far in twenty twenty four. One of the big themes of the year has been the United States investment in microchip manufacturing, and when we think tech, we tend to focus on Silicon Valley. But Mary Daily, the FED president whose district includes northern California, told us that that is only the beginning of the story.
It is not just Silicon Valley. You can go to Oregon. That's the home of chip manufacturing and has been for two decades or more. We have silicon slopes in Salt Lake City, a burgeoning community even in periods, and people think of it as northern California, but La has a considerable amount of tech, and Boise, Idaho is building itself up as a tech center now. They all do different kinds of things. But to suggest that Silicon Valley is the only thing out there is really a misnomer.
So an important contributor to you're part of the economy, which is a substantial part of the economy. Is tech. Is it growing?
It is growing now. It's interesting because there's been some layoffs in tech. There's been some rebalancing of companies, and that makes people afraid that tech is falling. And I always remind people there's a difference in growing less quickly than you used to or you might want to, and the level and tech is still a very good investment. There's a lot of interest in it. There's a lot of jobs out there available to it. And with the AI and generative AI boom of interest, we're seeing a
lot of investments in that space alone. And again it's not just in the GENAI, it's in autonomous vehicles, it's in predictive learning models and what that can do for businesses. So there's just a lot of interest and I think it's fueling those booms.
So tech has been driving the equity markets for a while now, and it's very exciting. How do you avoid a bubble?
So tech goes through times of overvaluation and times of repricing, and we've seen a variety of those over time, and I think that's just a sense of the enthusiasm for the idea and then the understanding that there's a practice that has to go with it to make it live right. So the companies, a lot of companies I lived through the dot com boom. A lot of companies had great ideas and high valuations, and then of course only a
handful of those ideas were really lasting. And so I'm I think there's just a normal amount of run ups and come downs that go on in tech. But the fundamental idea of tech is it continues to grow through that.
What is the reason why you have such a concentration of tech in your district. I mean, we tend to think on Silicon Valley as being close to Stanford and Berkeley and some universities. Is it the educational system there, is it some other factors? Just critical mass.
I think there is a bit of critical mass, and there's a number of research studies that say, you know, these network effects are large. So one of the things we've seen is, and you see this anywhere in the country, really is that people might start in Silicon Valley, they might start in Austin, Texas, they might start in Boston, but then they move, you know, family things take them other places that we have a lot of lovely states
to live in. So people go other places and then they build those tech centers around them because they have the expertise, and you certainly that's what happened in Salt Lake City. It's a tremendously desirable place to live. People moved from California oftentimes worked with the population, very well educated population, very enthusiastic population, and so they took this up and you see this forming. And I think there's
a natural progression of any kind of an industry. But there is a great enthusiasm in the West for tech. And it's not just in California the coastal states. I always remind people that the twelfth district has the inter Mountain States, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona. Those states are equally
enthusiastic about tech. I was visiting UNLV University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and they have a big, vergeoning tech center and entrepreneurship in tech, and it just reminds us that so many good ideas are taking place and so many people want to work in that space, that it can be anywhere in the United States, not just Silicon Valley or.
Another area that's really prominent in your district, and that it is commercial real estate, which has gone through a bit of a tough time, at least parts of it have, and part because of the increase in the interest rates give us your sense about work. Commercial real estate is in your district today.
So one thing that you learn quickly in the twelfth District, and i'd say other places in the country, is that commercial real estate's a big name for a lot of different segments. So if you're an industrial and warehousing space, you're feeling very good about things right now. If you're in retail space or even multi family housing out in
suburban areas, then you're feeling really good. You're confident. The place where you're seeing weakness and everybody knows it is in the urban cores of particularly cities like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco. LA is doing a little bit better, but you can find pockets of this in LA and that has to do with the fact that a lot of
people are still working from home in those communities. Those big office complexes that were built up for those individuals to work in, they just aren't They're not filled, and so there will be a repricing and a resettlement. The thing is, we've known it's coming for a while, and I see private equity money, venture money sitting on the sidelines ready to come in when the price is right.
So there'll be some repricing, there'll be some loss of valuations, for sure, but it doesn't seem today to be the kind of disorderly adjustment that you would worry about. It's something that is more orderly. Even though it might be certainly going to be painful for those involved, it's as likely to be as disruptive. So even though I'm saying all of that, it's something we have to keep our eyes sharply focused on. So it's a primary area where I am spend a lot of time talking to people
about it to see how are people feeling. But today they feel a little more positive than they did back in November October when the ten year had gone up close to five.
That was Mary Daily, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve. We've spent a good part of the year so far with presidential candidates talking about what to do about too many people coming across the border between Mexico and the United States. But Neil Ferguson says we're overlooking the much longer and more disturbing trend, the decline in birth rates through much of the world that threatens economic growth by
giving us too few workers. We talked with them about how big a problem it is and what could be done about it.
Well, David, when you and I were young, the world worried about a population bomb. There was going to be a Malthusian crisis, named after the great eighteenth century political economist Thomas Malthus, where overpopulation would lead to famine and disaster. And it was those ideas back in the sixties and seventies that led to some pretty drastic population policies, not
least the one child policy in China. Well, fast forward to the twenty twenties and it turns out that the law of unintended consequences has struck again, and we now are facing significant population declines, not only in Asian countries that drastically reduced family size, but right across the globe
except in Africa. And it looks as if, although you can debate the exact timing, humanity will peak in the twenty sixties, will get to the maximum population, probably some way before below the ten billion mark, and after that population is going to decline and decline pretty steeply. This is most easy to illustrate with the case of China, where the population is forecast to decline by half by fifty percent between now and the end of the century.
But it's not just a Chinese story. Ultimately, it's a global story. And this is one of these trends that I think most people haven't fully grasped because that's just a little bit out of the average person's planning horizon the twenty sixties.
So what happened?
Why is it that we have, in fact, the fertility rate's going down the way they are in so many countries around the world.
Explaining why in all kinds of different contexts, couples have chosen to reduce the number of children that they have below the replacement rate. Now, it's typically said that the average couple has to have two point one children. Yes, I know, there's no such thing as point one of a child, but just above two for us to maintain population, because obviously there are some people who die prematurely, perhaps
even in childhood. So the replacement rates two point one per couple, But all over the world, couples have taken that number down below to Indeed, in countries like South Korea, the frescility rate is below one on average, and so the one child family has become pretty much the norm in East Asia, and it's rapidly spreading around the world. Population in the United States has continued to grow only
because of immigration. It's not because of natural increase, because in the United States, as in most western countries, the average fertility rate fell some time ago below two point one. Now why is that? I mean, there are all kinds of explanations that you can advance. Maybe the attitudes of women change to family size because women began to pursue
more ambitious careers in the wake of feminism. Or maybe it's just that as society has become more economically advanced, people decide to spend their resources not on having more children, but on having more vacations, are acquiring yachts and mansions. There are a bunch of different explanations at work here.
I was drilling down into the South Korean case, and the answer that I got from the South Koreans I talked to was, well, it's just so expensive to raise kids in soul these days, we spend a fortune on educating our one kid, we just can't imagine doing it for two. And you know, you have to ask yourself what the rationale is for a society that invests so heavily in education, that the fertility rate falls to below one.
I mean, that's a society that's going to be very highly educated until it goes extinct, which happens, you know, pretty quickly.
If you reduce.
Your fertility rate down to point five or point six.
It begs the question of quite if anything governments, through their policies can do to affect this. Obviously, we have the one chart policy in China and they're trying to change that. Not so easy.
Governments have been trying to do this since nearly one hundred years ago. Was Mussolini when he was the Italian dictator, who talks about a battle for births, and all kinds of incentives were created by the totalitarian regimes of the mid twentieth century to increase the birth rate. None of it works. It would seem that once people have got down to two children, it's extremely hard to get them back up to three. When they're down to one, it's
hard to get them back up to two. So I think it's very hard to find any evidence of a successful economic policy that changes the decision making that couples make about family size. And this is a big problem. If you're cgnping and staring at this dramatic decline in population. It's already begun. I mean, the workforce is already shrinking.
And so the one child policy, which was one of the more dramatic interventions the Chinese Communist Party did back in the days of dungsilping, has been replaced by a three child policy. But I can assure you the number of Chinese couples I know who are planning to have three children is tiny, and it's highly unlikely in my view, that China will be able to increase the fertility rate
back above two. If you assume that the fertility rate stays where it is in a country like China, then actually the population will fall even faster than fifty percent between now and the end of the century. And the thing that's.
Really striking, David is.
If you look beyond twenty one hundred into the next century, what's really amazing to me is how quickly global population could decline. We shot up from two billion back in the early nineteen twenties to where we are today with astonished speed, and indeed the last one hundred years was one of those periods of population explosion. You can see why people in the nineteen seventies started to panic about it.
We'll get this.
If you fix that for them so much that fertility falls well below the replacement rate, then the population of the world could fall with almost comparable speed.
That was Neil Ferguson of the Hoover Institution.
Coming up.
It's been quite a year for American higher education as on campus demonstrations turned into a job.
Hazard for college presidents.
We talked with Mark Rowan of Apollo, one of the outspoken critics of what went on. That's next time, Washtreing Week on Bloomberg.
This is Bloomberg Well Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This is Washing Week and a special episode looking back on the year so far. I'm David Weston. American college camp spent the spring in turmoil as demonstrations against Israel's war against Hamas turned into encampings and presidents of major universities were called before Congress to explain what had gone wrong.
Mark Rono Apollo has been a strong supporter of his alma mater at the University of Pennsylvania, but turned to be one of its most vocal critics, and we talked with him about what triggered the change.
Look, I think we've actually seen a lot of change take place over time. So I have a very favorable memory of my experience at the University of Pennsylvania campus. But think more broadly, US universities were the where and are the envy of the world. We can destroy that, we can lose it. Why are kids there? Why did we think they were there? Be exposed to different points of view, learn how to think, critical reasoning, critical thinking, maturation.
Is that what they're getting today? I think in some places it is what they're getting, and in some classes it is what they're getting. But what I saw at the University of Pennsylvania and when I spoke out against, was a dominant narrative that was taking hold on our campuses. Call it a post colonial education, call it what you will. It gave rise to an institutionalization of a point of view, that there were favorite groups and disfavored groups, that there
was acceptable speech and non acceptable speech. I'm not sure that's the job that we all signed up for, or that's the university that we signed up for. Where we're watching today on these campuses is nothing more than the outgrowth of twenty years of bad management. If you have a dominant narrative on campus. Do you have academic freedom?
Do you have freedom of speech? I have seen over the past few years, as I've really stepped up my involvement, professors, department chairs who are afraid to speak their mind because their thoughts, their speech goes against the dominant narrative. What we're watching today on campus is we're told are leftists. We used to think leftists were liberal. This hardly seems liberal. This actually seems illiberal in the most extreme way. Why haven't they been cleared out? Wen't listen to Ben Sas
at the University of Florida. We're all about free speech, We're all about the right to protest.
But there's a time and.
A place and a way you violate and trespass. There are consequences. Why would we not deal with them everywhere and that way. Certainly, protests that were inconsistent with the narrative that we find on our comm campuses have and will be dealt with in that manner. Speakers are regularly shouted down, Professors, euers, the administrators who did not react in that way without that kind of moral clarity, They now have encampments. Once you have encampments, you have the
potential for violence. You have other considerations that come into play, but make no mistake, outside agitators, not mostly students, trespass danger to our the rest of the students and the rest of the community.
This is what twenty years of a dominant nonce has done.
These are not corporations, but if they were corporations where you distrusted good degree, I would say there's a failure of management in some I'm not saying necessarily at all, but in some a fundamental failure management.
Having seen it for the insight, where is the failure?
The failures in multiple places, but I think it starts with me and with us as trustees. We were asleep at the wheel for twenty years. Part of our job was to provide balance. I do not think the popular frame of a campus today where trustees and alumni are fighting professors over academic freedom, is actually correct. I actually think the appropriate frame is university administrators who maintain this dominant narrative are fighting professors for academic freedom. Trustees and
alumni are here to provide balance. We have been asleep at the wheel. We have not done what we were supposed to do. We did not object as these dominant narratives took hold, and it is our job I believe to support long term excellence in education, academic research, freedom of expression, freedom to disagree. That's not what we have on many of our campuses today. We've got a long way from academic excellence.
How is that corrected without the trustees overstepping their boundaries?
I mean, you know what I know.
When you sit on the board, there are certain things you really need to do. You don't want to run the thing day to day. You don't have trustees there to be micromanagers. How do you have the proper role for the trustees without overstepping boundaries.
There's a question of overstepping.
I think the danger right now is far from trustees overstepping the bount I think trustees, for the most part of these big institutions, myself included, have failed to act. We have not done our job in the most fundamental way. I don't think we are anywhere close to the line of overstepping our boots. Most universities operate in a shared
governance manner. Transparency is often the best disinfectant. I do not believe at the University of Pennsylvania or many of these campuses, the vast majority of professor actually believe in this dominant narrative. We as trustees can assure anonymous polling representation across the faculty, lots of other things that we can do in addition to just exercising common sense. But ultimately the job of a trustees is to pick a leader and to provide that leader with some notion of
strategic plan. Picking good leaders goes a long way to developing a strategic plan goes a long way. And as you said, it is not the job of the trustee or the alumni for that matter, to run these universities.
This is best left to professional administrators.
This all comes against the backdrop of increasing questioning of the price of a college education and whether it's worth it, whether you get to return on investments user as the value at least in cell of these institutions actually gone down of the investments, and will there be a market correction as people start to say, you know what, it's not worth it to send might kid. I'll pick on a college right now, Columbia when they can't graduate a commencement.
Very unfortunate situation. I don't want to say value has gone down. I think value has been dispersed. So if I look at our industry as a microcosm, we thirty years ago we hired from a very narrow subset of universities. You know what, there are fifty great places. There are not eight or ten great places. There are fifty great places.
So we're watching the value of an education democratized. We are, as an employer, and I know our peer group as employers, increasingly going to places that we had never gone to before.
Why because the end product is exit and it is not.
We do not take for granted that because once someone went to one of ten schools they actually received an excellent education. We do not treat people as groups. We actually treat them as individuals. Imagine the novelty of that.
As you said, Mark, I think BRANDI said that sunlight is the best disinfected.
It seems to be a lot of sunlight right now.
I college campus is Could this actually redound to the benefit of our higher education system? Actually, as we really are exposed to this, we debated publicly and we make some reforms.
Look for me, I'm an optimist, but I am incredibly hopeful that this is a moment as much as our college presidents and leaders are suffering under congressional inquiry right now. It's only because what they've done historically can't be defended. Imagine if they actually got up there and they had something to say, this is how we run it, this is our goal, this is our plan, This is how we make sure the kids are protected and also challenged.
Being called in front of Congress is only a negative if in fact you.
Have something to hide.
I think in academia we've done a very poor job in the past twenty years. We've got a lot to a lot of mistakes to rectify. But I do hope this is a sunlight disinfecting moment of going forward.
One of the things we've seen actually, as daughters now say well, we're with whole donations.
Do you think that's having any effect? Can you see any tangible effect in any of these colleges.
Yes, People generally do not support those things that are against their fundamental interest. They may do it for a small period of time where they actually don't know. I think what we've seen in the past year, donors are now on notice as to what their university or college is or is not doing, and they will elect to fund or not fund places in which they believe are consistent with their values, consistent with their principles. For me, I'm hopeful that these big institutions are going to change.
That was Mark Rowan, CEO and co founder of Apollo Global Management. Here's some of what our leaders on Wall Street Week recommended during the year.
So one day early on in my tenure, the person's a little late, so I actually go over and look at the books and it's Tokyo on five dollars a day.
So it's stuff that you leave, you know, behind.
At a hotel and it said a better breakfast.
It is a mess. And I love libraries.
I do read on a kindlenow, but I love We have three at our home in Chicago. I just love them, and I just amy and I decide that's going to be our project. So I know you find it hard to believe, but I raised one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
For this initiative pretty quickly. And there's two things.
So we redid about four hundred and fifty to five hundred books all on the presidential history, great American literature, and poetry, great American events. Then we did a section on both Japanese history, Japanese authors, literature, etc. And it's a traditional Americana, beautiful library with gold at the top, and it's all walnut wood paneling, if you can kind of put that in your mind's eye. And the books are worthy of the library, and the library is worthy of the books.
Not surprisingly, Ram Emmanuel is quite a reader. One of the books he recommends highly is about the Plight of Males in our Society Today, of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves on.
Kind of sociology. The two things that I do this one of boys and Men. I think we have a challenge at home, specifically among boys and men.
And I think I.
Always do one sociological book This year was I Went Back Bowling Alone. You know what year it came out, two thousand and When you think about where America is, you think about the opiate crisis, you think about the law of community, etc. How one professor looking at data three turns ahead, realizes where America is going?
It kind of is Gendoliac of Arnold Venture spends her life researching and then writing out her results. So she pointed us in the direction of a book about the difficulties in the creative process and how to overcome roadblocks. The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield.
So one of my all time favorites is called The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. Was a longtime researcher, which meant my job was mostly writing. Still is in many ways, and this book is basically all about how if you are engaged in any kind of creative pursuit, you have to just show up and work every day, have a routine, show up at your desk, be a professional.
Waiting for inspiration to strike is not the way any sort of any professional writer or creative is actually going to have their big ideas or get things done.
As President and COO of Blackstone, John Gray spends much of his time dealing with challenging situations, but not half so difficult as those faced by the survivors of the eighteenth century shipwreck. Told in the book he recommends The Wager, a tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder.
More recently, I read The Wager, which was about a failed British expedition to chase down some Spanish ships in the seventeen forties, and I'm often interested in these people who face incredible challenges and when they survive and that perseverance.
Shackleton was like that as well.
You know, in business and investing oftentimes things go wrong, not as bad as those books, but you learn a little bit and you want to be smarter how to deal with crises and challenges.
That does it.
For the special end of summer edition of Wall Street Week, I'm David Weston.
This is Bloomberg.
See you next week.