This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week.
I mean 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. No end, insight for war in Gaza, for inflation, and despite it all, for strong markets. This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. This week we'll talk with Richard has of Centerview Partners on the
uncertain path for US foreign policy. In an uncertain world, we could be a great power.
You need to be predictable and reliable, and right now I'm not sure that's consistent with the reality of American politics.
And with Bob Steele, a parrella Weinberg on the global surge in infrastructure investing.
There's a special role for the private sector that I believe can do, in many cases a better job of organizing, executing, planning, and delivering on the ambition that government has outlined.
But we start with inflation, the subject global Wall Street has been focused on for the last three years. Back in twenty twenty one, some were warning us inflation was about to come roaring back, including Jillian Tat as the Financial Times.
If you do have a big fiscal steamers package from Joe Biden's incoming administration, and if that coincides with the pandemic vaccine gradually spreading across the country and reducing the pandemic fears, you could have those two factors coming together and create quite a big upsearch and growth later this year.
And our special contributor Larry Summers of.
Harvard, My guess is that at the end of the year, inflation will for this year come out pretty close to five percent.
Even as Fedchair j Powell at the time was telling us they couldn't really see that inflation yet.
We expect readings on inflation to move up.
That's called base effects.
That'll be a temporary effect and it won't really signal anything.
But by March of twenty twenty two, the FED had changed its tune and undertook a series of rate hikes, adding five hundred basis points over seventeen months.
Inflation is much too high, and we understand the hardship it is causing, and we're moving expeditiously to bring it back down.
Whether they expecting inflation to be a problem or not, pretty much everyone was surprised when the Fed's tough medicine didn't seem to phase the jobs market, taking a soft landing that seemed like a long shot and turning it into what may be the likely result.
Nobody expected this.
If we look back, we had inflation that went up during COVID, a FED raised interest rates, Inflations come down very consistently, so that was kind of expected. What didn't happen was unemployment didn't go up, growth didn't slow down.
Then this week we got a reminder that we aren't past the inflation dragon yet, as USCPI numbers came in surprisingly hot, holding at three point nine percent year over year, way above that two percent target. To take us through the CPI numbers is the person who has warned us about the risks for three years now. Our special contributor Larry Summers of Harvard. So, Larry, thanks all very much for being with us. I suspect that you being right
about this is not really good news necessarily. But where are we right now in your estimation inflation. It's certainly not at the five or six number level, but it doesn't look like it's getting out to two.
Look, it's always a mistake to over interpret one month's number, and that's especially true in January, where calculating seasonality is difficult. I think I think we have to recognize the possibility of a mini paradigm shift. The soft landing paradigm. With the assumption that inflation was headed down to two in a tranquil, healthy real economy has certainly been called into
question by these data. There had been a strong assumption that housing was headed towards being a major inflationary force. That doesn't show up in these numbers on owner occupied housing, And as I've looked carefully at these numbers, I think
there's good reasons for that. The idea is that when we judge the cost of owner occupied houses, we try to estimate what it would cost to rent the residents in question, and many people have done that by looking at at all rentals, but most rentals are apartments and those don't have much to do with the price of owner occupied housing.
If you look at the data focus.
On single family housing houses with lawns and suburbs and the like, you don't get nearly as deflationary picture. The model I've been using for several years now with my co authors at the NBER is still looking for three four percent owner equivalent rental inflation through the remainder of this year. That's thirty percent of core CPI inflation. If it's running at three and a half, that uses up a lot of the room there is, and under a two percent inflation target, I think the Fed is going
to have to be very careful. They were never right to be focused on March for a cut. I had been saying that that seemed pre mature, and they they and the markets.
Have come around on that.
I think that may is odds off at this point and probably should be odds off.
And gosh, I think we've.
Got to recognize what no one's talking about. There's a meaningful chance, maybe it's fifteen percent that the next move is going to be upwards in rates, not downwards in rates. You know you use a metaphor, David, that I used to use on this show. The worst thing you can do when the doctor prescribes you antibiotics is finish part of the course.
Feel better, give up on.
The antibiotics because you don't like taking them, and see what happens. The disease tends to come back, and it tends to be harder to go after the second time, and interst rates elevated to contain inflation are like antibiotics.
So I think the FED has.
To be very careful in this environment.
And I think that.
Many people who confused what they wanted with what was real were in much too much of a hurry to declare that we were obviously in a phase of major easing.
With respect to monetary policy.
So, Larry, let me continue your analogy to a disease, and perhaps what we have here is we're not recovering fully to two percent. On the other hand, the fevers not spiking up to five, six, seven percent the way it was before. What happens that we have just a low grade fever at the three to three plus level. What does that mean for the economy.
Gosh, German Powell has said so many times two percent, two percent, two percent. As you'll recall from our previous conversations, I didn't think it was a great idea to have had so specific and tight a target, but we've had one, and we've set it, and we've repeated it a large
number of times. If we decide that two sort of has lost its meaning and it's not something we have to accept when there's strong political pressures to ease, if we send that signal, I wonder why anyone would believe that we're going to stick with two and a half or three or whatever it is that we settle into. And then when that feeds into expectations.
It'll get harder to hold the level we have.
And of course we are headed into David, as populist election period is you or I can remember in our lifetimes, and we usually think of the FED as a bulwark against populism, not as a reinforcer of populist pressures.
Let's continue on the subject of that populist election, as you call it, and specifically respect a fiscal policy. You and I have talked before about the deficit and the debt that is mounting here. I know you've just helped want something new called the Tax Reform Project, and in the introduction that you talk about that issue of the debt and the deficit, but it's somewhat of a new approach. There are a lot of people who have tax policies, but we haven't heard from the practitioners.
Yeah.
So I'm supporting my former student and wonderful colleague, Natasha Saren at the Ye Law School, who's the driving force. She's focused on IRS reform, and we're focused on IRS reform.
Just to enforce the tax law we have.
And there was important new research showing that from the IRS, showing that if we're able to carry through on the eighty billion dollar program that was part of President Biden's Recovery Act, that can pay off ten to one in eight hundred and fifty billion dollars of revenue collections, in addition to making our tax code fairer. And that's where tax reform discussions should start.
And finally, Larry, there's a lot of talk about commercial real estate, particularly in the office space area. Obviously, the increased interest rates and failure to return to the office on some parts is really putting pressure on the valuations. So clearly there are some people who are hurting because
of the reduced valuations. But my question is is a matter of individual banks for that matter, as well as owners being hurt or is there a potential for a more systemic problem here with commercial real estate.
I think that this is something that our Central Bank is right to be looking at, and right to be looking at with an awareness that almost always in the past we have acted too slowly to force banks to stop distributing capital, to force banks to raise.
New capital where that's appropriate, to.
Force banks to fortify liquidity. I think it would be much more productive for our central bank to be focused on the question of real estate portfolios in the banks they supervise what the genuine value and credit worthiness of those assets is. I think that would be a much more productive focus for the Fed than some of the more abstract and politically driven arguments about various kinds of
capital charges on the largest banks. The second set of arguments is an important one to have, but I think it's less urgent.
Than the first.
Okay, Larry, thank you so very much for joining us again. That's our special contributor here on Wall Street Week. He is Larry Summers of Harvard. Coming up, we'll take a look at how the markets responded to those CPI numbers with Lisa Erickson of US Bank Wealth Management. That's next down Wall Street Week on Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Well Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio. This is
Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. Infrastructure has gone from the boring building of roads, bridges, and water systems to be all the rage, not just the United States, but all around the world. Bob Steel Pirella Weinberg helped put together one of the biggest deals in recent years, BlackRock's purchase of Global International Partners for twelve and a half billion dollars. But when we sat with Bob, we started with the larger contexts.
I try to think about this with a bit of an on ramp into the conversation. You know, for thousands of years we had an agrarian economy. For a little more than one hundred years, we transitioned to an industrial economy, and now we're in the stage of moving to a knowledge and global economy. And each one of those economies required a different set of foundational infrastructure in order to
allow the economy to succeed. And so there are lots of transitions going here, and there'll be lots of spending required to organize that transition. You're right, there's an energy transition underway, but there's also a transition with regard to how we move goods and services in a global economy, Ports, airports, things like that, and the digital infrastructure required too. And we all grew up where we built a highway system
in America to move cars. Now we need the digital infrastructure to move data, which is the equivalent of in my mind, of the highway of knowledge for the future. So all of these things are coming together. Yes, energy transition is a large part of it, but I think it's much more than that.
Well, given the size of it, it's too big for either the private sector to do it by itself, or for that matter, for government to do it by itself. What is the relationship to you, to the private and the public as we move into this transformation you describe in infrastructure, Well.
Let's think about it together.
First of all, it's up to government and our elected officials to organize the projects and the rules and regulations for how the economy should be set and that's their job is to lay out what's the destination or the blueprint.
And I think that, but when you get to implementing that, I believe there's a special role for the private sector that I believe can do, in many cases a better job of organizing, executing, planning, and delivering on the ambition that government is outlined that the government's going to write the rules on energy transition, what are the requirements for cars,
what are this and that? But it's up to business to respond and work with government in order to lay down the tracks to accomplish this and take us to the destination that our elected officials have organized in response to what we all think and need.
The government has laid down a lot of infrastructure track in the last three years through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and the Chips and Science Act.
I think that the three examples you gave of legislation and direction from the federal government are all in the right way, and they're serving as a stimulant to basically encourage this type of investment. We know that the Chips Act, while controversial, is going to bring new focus to the
semiconductor industry. In the United States, and the group on behalf of Secretary Romundo that's organizing that are working hard to make sure the money is allocated in the right way to the right place, so that when we come back in three to five years, we've really made progress. And think about that for a second. It was a government organized project. The government's brought in outsize advisors to help them allocate the capital.
The capital will.
Go to companies who now are going to be managing that way. That seems to me like a good combination of interest and skills where hopefully we'll make progress on this, but it's going to take a long time.
Whatever the efforts of the US government, it's not alone in pushing hard on infrastructure, particularly when it comes to chips, and particularly when it comes to China.
You know, it's easy to imagine a fantasy world in which no one's subsidizing, but that's just.
Not the world that we live in.
And in fact, China started as semi connecer subsidies first and twenty fourteen sheet called to Conductors of core technology, and China started setting up its first government backed investment funds to pour money into the chip industry.
And so whether you're the.
US or Japan or Europe, You've got to act with that as a fact. That's just a given, and you're going to devise your policy around that. And I think one of the reasons why the US Congress passed the Chips Act was because they realized that there were US firms, US based firms that were getting more money in subsidies from foreign governments than from the US government. And so given those circumstances, it wasn't a surprise that the US
companies were moving manufacturing overseas. And so given the scale of Chinese subsidies, I think a lot of governments are saying, we may not like industrial policy, we'll be skeptical of it, but what is the alternative.
Given the size of the need and the opportunity, the government alone can't drive the transformation and infrastructure that's needed. Including large nonprofit foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation.
Every big company out there should be a big part of this transition. If you run a food company, you should join a coalition we're helping to establish that wants fifty percent of your supply chains to be from regenerative agriculture, agriculture that actually sequesters carbon and avoids releasing unnecessary carbon into the atmosphere, and those types of transitions are going to be fundamentally commercial transitions.
One way to let the marketplace direct all this capital to the most effective uses is through a voluntary carbon market.
So I think these are very practical issues. Now combine that with governments and NGOs who are trying to come up with realistic solutions, and they need concessionary capital. They need first lost money. This is where I think that the voluntary carbon markets can help, because companies that are making every effort to get to either carbon neutrality or net zero nonetheless can't get there because the infrastructure isn't in place or technology isn't in place.
When it comes to global investment in infrastructure, it's not just a need. Major players see it as a ripe opportunity. As we saw in the recent acquisition of Global Infrastructure Partners by black Rock.
This is going to be the golden age of infrastructure investing, both in terms of the need for capital as well as investors who want that capital. Okay, and so the question we asked ourselves was how can we accelerate the pace at which we're getting things done? Investing new assets as well as getting.
Pension funds, wealth funds'.
Asset managers to give us additional capital. And so if you look at the marriage between ourselves and Blackrock, Rob Commuter said it was one plus one equals four. I'm not sure whether it was four or five oh three, but he's certainly had right that one plus one is more than two. As Larry said, perfect mirror images of each other. They have a great infrastructure business, but very complimentary with us. We do large cap transactions, they do
mid cap transactions. They have a terrific infrastructure of debt business. It's primarily investment grade. OS is primarily below investment grade. They have an infrastructure solutions business, which we don't have. So you put these two businesses together, we can go to governments, We can go to companies large, small, medium size and offer them an integrated solution.
The conversation you had with Larry and Bayou highlighted this idea. Our firm was the advisor, one of the advisors on that transaction, and I think what you're seeing and what Larry and Bio talked about, was that there's a global demand for capital, private capital to go with government capital
in order to organize these large and important products. And now, David, the scale of these projects is so large, they're just a small handful of firms that can provide the capital, of which the combined Blackrock GIP combination will be one of the leaders. But there's different types of capital. The way I think about it is the government can provide some of the foundational capital to size the risk so
that it's appropriate for private capital to come in. Some of these projects are so big and they're subjects to change by the population and by legislators and regulators. That's not the right risk for private people to underwrite. That should be underwritten by government. And then private capitals should come in to work with the projects once they're defined, and that's what the infrastructure investors have been able to accomplish.
And so providing the private capital, and I think also private capital speaks to the issue you were just talking about, is where do you get the discipline to manage the projects well, to make the hard decisions and allocate capital in the right way. I think that when private capital is part of the equation, that brings that skill to the table and ensures that the project turns out in a better, more efficient more focused fashion than if it were just a government project.
And that GP expertise in putting together and running big projects was an important part of what Blackrock saw when it made its twelve and a half billion dollar investments.
They invest in major and larger projects than what we did in infrastructure, like Gatwick Airport and Sydney Airport, but they're particularly superb in the operational efficiencies of these investments.
They improved the quality of service.
And so if you think about what we have brought at Blackrock over the last eight years in infrastructure, what GP has been doing since two thousand and six, the two organizations look like a perfect match. And then you overlaid the cultural connection, and we always underestimate the cultural connection.
Though GIP, now combined with black Write is one of the biggest global infra structure players, it is far from the only one.
It's not just GIPS, not just black Rock. If you look at pro logis, if you look at really any large company investing in infrastructure or logistics looking at two areas. One is clean energy and energy transition in order to reduce costs and increase reliability and reduce risks. And also AI obviously and those are getting more and more intentwined, and inter relationship between AI and clean energy I think will be an interesting area to watch.
When we're talking the trillions of dollars that will be needed for infrastructure investment around the world, you simply can't get there without major roles for the private sector and for the markets.
I trust the marketplace and business on behalf of the marketplace with their ambitions to organize how to pursue the path, and so that'll be the idea. We know that we have an issue with greenhouse gases, and we know we have an issue with the carbon aspect of the economy. Now, as I said when I started, there were one hundred years of the industrialization of America and the driving energy
form came from hydrocarbons, and that was successful. It lowered the price of energy, and we know low energy prices and energy availability are very progressive positive aspects for growing the economy. And we became connected to that form of energy and it accomplished a lot of great things. Now we're at a point we recognize that's not the right
path for the future, so we're going to pivot. We know the large generators of greenhouse gases, we know its transportation, we know it's heating, we know its industrial, we know all the different things that are and we're going to have to make adjustments to each one of those things by public policy, and then I think the marketplace can respond by helping to organize it in the right way.
Coming up, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, military pressure from whoever wins the White House in November, they will face a range of challenges and opportunities. We go through them with Richard Hawes, a Center View partner.
Our ability to set a model that the rest of the world respects, that's questionable.
That's next on Wall Street Week on Bloomberg. This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. Whoever is elected President of the United States in November, they will face a daunting list of foreign relations challenges, and in some ways, the two most likely candidates, President Joe Biden and Foreign President Donald Trump, have distinctly different policies when it comes to dealing with the world. To give us a sense of the challenges and the approaches, welcome back now, Richard
Hawes of Set of You Partners. Richard is President Emeritus of the Council Foreign Relations, and he writes a weekly newsletter. I recommend on subsect. It's called home in a way, Richard. Great to have you back with us. Great to be back, David. So, first of all, talk about the campaign. Traditionally it's thought that are not elected based on foreign policy.
Is not going to be true.
This time, for better or worse, that will be true.
I actually think Joe Biden's done a pretty good job on foreign policy.
I might have one or.
Two areas I disagree, but whatever you think about it, I don't think voters are going to have that. Foremost in their minds might be questions of his age, or mister Trump's legal issues, maybe questions of the border, or inflation,
you name it. What's so interesting, David, though, is even though most voters won't vote on the basis of foreign policy, whoever's elected, given what you said in the lead in the differences, this election will have enormous consequences for the world and for America's relationship with the world.
Yeah. One of the things that strikes me George W. Bush did not run on foreign policy, and yet he ended up being a foreign policy president, whether he wanted to or not. So give us a sense of some of the differences you think on some of the key issues warn Ukraine. Continuing, You've got Middle East, you've got climate, you've got China. What are some of the differences between these two people.
Well, actually, China is one of the areas that differences might not be that great. They're pretty tough on China economically, not so clear about geopolitically, Mister Biden is tough, not clear about Donald Trump on trade. Need the one of them as much of an enthusiast for trade. As you've noticed, both wanted to get out of Afghanistan. But that probably
ends most of the similarities Ukraine. Obviously fundamental differences. Joe Biden has really made that the centerpiece of his foreign policy. More broadly, the centerpiece of his foreign policy his allies. It's an ally first approach. He sees allies as giving us a real comparative advantage, a way of leveraging American power. Donald Trump sees allies as an albatross, as free rioters. He doesn't much care about them, doesn't much care about
Ukraine's fate. That's probably the biggest single difference. Climate change, though, is also fundamental. Last time mister Trump was in he took the United States out of the so called Paris process. Joe Biden did the ira very much once in America, more than pull its weight in the climate area. Middle East is more complicated. Not clear that either would have a whole lot of influence over this Israeli government. Mister Biden may try to have more influence. Not clear though
that it's leading too much. When mister Trump was president, he wasn't much interested in the Palestinian issue. Joe Biden, however, is big difference, big difference there Iran. Neither one is quite sure what to do. Iran is getting closer to nuclear weapons capability. Donald Trump somewhat argue he'll pave the way to that by pulling the United States out of the nuclear agreement. Joe Biden wanted to get the United
States back in. It didn't work either way. Who's ever elected, He's going to have to deal with an Iran that's probably on the so called threshold of a nuclear agreement. Plus should make a really good point more broadly, you don't know what's going to happen.
Richard's such a treat having you on Wall Street Week. Always thank you so much. That's Richard has of Centerview Partners. The markets reacted to those CPI numbers this week as the S and P five hundred. We gave up four tens percent, but still ended over five thousand, which puts it ten points above the Bloomberg El's year end median number of forty nine to fifty. The NASDAC lost one point three percent, while the yield on the tenure was up ten basis points to end the week, it's just
about four point three percent. To explain the market's reaction, we welcome down Lisa Erickson, head of Public Markets at US Bank Wealth Management. Lisa, thank you so much for being back with us. So we heard from Larry about what happened to the economy. Tell us about how the markets reacted to those numbers.
That we got really certainly a seesaw week in the market. And to your point, on the back of those hot CPI numbers, the market really had a tough reaction. And if we were to step back and really think about what was driving that tough reaction, it really would be well captured by the words growth inflation puzzle, and what I mean by that is really up to this point, and as mister Summers had mentioned, we really had a situation where the market was looking at everything in a
very goldilocks fashion. We've had inflation coming down, and yet growth has remained in the Okay zone, slowing a little bit, but generally beating some expectations. And really, what happened with that Tuesday hot CPI print is a market finally realized, oh my goodness, it's not necessarily a straight line down on inflation, and therefore the Fed may not be able
to cut interest rates as quickly as we think. And so really that there was that difficult reaction on Tuesday, and then again today when some of those more tough PPI numbers as well also rattled markets to a little bit.
We've been in a bull market when it comes to equity. Is how much of that is because of anticipated cuts the fake ause you heard Larry say, I don't think it's any time to cut anytime soon. In fact, there's even a chance fifteen percent chance the next move will be up the market, I suspect are not prepared for that.
Well, certainly when we have looked at the data and analyzed really what's been driving markets really over the last many months, it has been highly correlated with the fact that rates, our expectations have been very sanguine, and so that really has been a very recent driver actually until really the more recent past, when some of these positive surprises that we're getting on macroeconomic indicators indicating growth being
better than expected has then further carried the rally. But again, both of these things are still very much in focus, and again I think what you see from the reaction this past week is that again if we continue to see concerns that inflation may throw off that FED rate cut path that the market was expecting, we can have a pretty tough reaction.
We've certainly have been in a bold market, a lot that's been driven by that magnificent seven whatever you want to call them. How concentrated is the drive in the markets at this point or are you seeing some dispersion.
Well, certainly, throughout twenty twenty three and most of this year to date, we have continued to see leadership to your point, really from the largest stocks within the market, as well as very concentrated in terms of more secular
growth names, particularly technology. Now, what's been interesting since we've flipped the calendar on twenty twenty four is we've certainly had some spouts of smaller companies and cyclical companies really trying to come back to the fore but they really have not been able to maintain a steady run at it,
such that the leadership again remains very concentrated. And that is one of the reasons why even though we recognize the macro fundamentals have generally been okay again with inflation coming down and growth doing okay, we have not really feelt like there's an all clear signal because when you look at how the market is reacting to that, again, it's very concentrated and we haven't seen a sustained rally to broaden out the breadth of participation.
Where do you stand possible opportunities for investors on either the fixed income side or the equity side right now?
Well, certainly, even though again we don't see a necessarily a fat pitch in terms of being over enthusiastic on for example, or overly pessimistic as well, within certain areas, we do see some opportunities. So if we take the fixed income markets, for example, we do see some really interesting opportunities to pick up extra income. A great area
for example is non agency mortgages. These our securities that are backed by mortgages that are not necessarily sponsored by the US agency market, but nonetheless have very strong fundamentals behind them. And as we know, the housing market has continued to be supported by quite a bit of demand for people wanting to move into their own ownership, and as we continue to track the credit supporting that, it's
very strong. And yet these securities offer some nice extra yield, again just because they are a little bit more complex market for investors to understand. So that's just one example of an area where again there's some extra yield that could be picked up with very strong fundamentals.
Always good to have extra yield things. Thank you so much, li so always great to have you with us. That is Lisa Erickson of US Bank. Finally, one more slag. The German World War II General Irwin Rommel said, don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning. I learned that lesson at my first Annual Shareholders Medium Capital Cities ABC. I was a brand new general counsel and I was proud that we'd won the battle of keeping a shareholder initiative off the ballot after taking it
into the SEC. As I sat in front of hundreds of shareholders on the dais with the chairman, CEO and CFO. I watched in dismay as person after person stood up and told us we should be ashamed for not putting their idea on the ballot for the meeting, and every one of those shareholders won a nun's habit or a priest's schollar. It turned out that the initiatives had come from a group of Roman Catholics, and my chairmen and
CEO were devout Catholics. As we walked off that stage, the CEO said to me, quietly but firmly, make this go away, which of course I did. This week we had more than one example of people fighting battles with questionable results even if they win. Farmers from the United States to India to Spain are up in arms about higher costs on climate regulations, with the most militant in France, where they shut down the capitol.
We share the goals, for example, the protection of nature, because we all live in nature and with nature, and the best ambassadors for nature are the farmers themselves, and important is for us that we find common solutions.
But it's not clear what farmers will gain given what climate change is doing. To their livelihood.
If you take, for example, the Western United States everything west of my house in Colorado, the combination of specialty products or a portfolio of different types of products which are having different price and supply and demand dynamics exacerbated a course by terrible drought conditions unevenly distributed across the entire Western United States, the story there is of a net decline of net farm income on I can sayalidated basis.
We've known all about Elon Musk's odd battle with Bob Eiger for not advertising on X, but then again, Bob may now be picking his own battle with an important partner of his. Reports are that the NFL is none too pleased with plans for ESPN to form a joint sports streaming service with Fox and Warner Brothers Discovery, something put together in secret. At the same time, the reported of the NFL was considering an investment in ESPN.
Is certainly an unusual situation.
They haven't decided who's going to manage it yet, but you can imagine they'll be fights over controlled and payments and strategy and things like that.
Of course, the most renowned picker of battles may be our former President Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his skepticism on NATO. This week, the former president raised the decibel level by taking on pretty much all of NATO, saying he told at least one NATO member that he would welcome President Putin's attacking them if they didn't meet their commitments for defense spending.
They said, you got to pay up. They asked me that question.
One of the presidents of the big country stood up, said, well, sir, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us? I said, you didn't pay you delinquent? He said, yes, let's say that happened.
No, I would not protect you.
In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.
And then there was the biggest battle of them all. That is, of course, the Super Bowl or Everyone expected a knock down, drag out fight to the finish between the San Francisco forty nine ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, which is what we got with the Chiefs winning in overtime. But what we might not have expected was a separate battle on the sidelines between Chiefs star tight end Travis
Kelcey and his coach Andy Reid. He subsequently quipped that rather than cursing him out the way the lip readers said he had, he really said something much nicer.
I was just telling him how much I love him.
But in the end, despite picking a battle with his coach, mister Kelsey did get the big reward of a kiss from none other than, of course, Taylor Swift. That does it for this episode of Wall Street. I'm David Weston. This is Bloomberg. See you next week.