This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week.
I mean may not have an overall recession. We're having a rolling recession. To conye, roll looks pretty strongly is when it comes to jobs. The financial stories that shape our work. 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 Dow Doctor Paul Krugman, Ryan moynihan, a Bank of America, deebro Lair of the Paulson Institute, Len Hubbard of the Columbia Business.
School, Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This week, Jillian Tet at The Financial Times on investing in geopolitical risk.
In some ways, what we're seeing right now is about to the future.
Josh Bolton of the Business Roundtable on what American CEOs want in their next president.
The CEOs of the Business round Table are very concerned about the fiscal situation of the United States.
And economist Melissa Carney on the fight over standardized tests at the American universities.
Students submitted sat or ACT scores are very highly predictive of their academic performance when they get to college.
But we start with Larry Fink of Blackrock and his annual letter to investors focus this year on what he calls a retirement crisis in the United States and around the world, which is what Larry is hearing about more and more from Blackrock clients.
My letters are a reflection of my conversation with clients, So it is, and so over the past year I heard more and more conversation about retirement or retirement crisis from many parts of the world, from middle class developing countries to developed countries. The acute problem here in the United States is that we have still fifty seven million Americans who don't have any savings or any retirement plan.
So his security is a fantastic foundation for retirement. But if that's how you have when you retire, you're going to be living in poverty, below the poverty line, because it just is it's supplemental, but it's not meant to be the totality of what you have in a retirement. And the whole concept that we're aging, we're you know, we're all living longer. And I think one of the big narratives I had to reflect in twenty twenty three
was the miracles of medicine. When we talk about the drugs like a zumpec and all the different weight loss drugs, how that is extending life. It's conquering kidney disease and liver disease and heart disease and joint disease. And then there are new medicines now for dementia that extends life.
So if you think about the miracles of technology and how it transforms our lives and extends our life, there is not a dialogue in America or most places about can't we afford that longevity and our entire retirement system was based on statistics that were created fifty years ago, whereby most Americans retired between sixty and sixty two then, but most Americans then passed away at sixty seven. And today, statistically a couple sixty years old in good health one
of them is going to live over ninety. And so the other question is should we re evaluate how we work and how long we work because we all need purpose in life, and in most people get fine purpose obviously maybe with their grandchildren, their children, their community. Many people find purpose in their jobs, and the thought of retiring at sixty with thirty more years or a thirty year year life in front of you. We need to have a dialogue. We need to have a conversation. And
you know, I'm an optimist. I am very optimistic about the long term vitality of our markets. I'm bullish on capitalism. The reason I'm bullish is when I read the newspapers every morning and listen to Bloom in other news organizations, it's full of scary things.
We talk about the problems.
We talk about all the problems less, but we solve problems through conversation. And the one area where we have no conversation is is the affordability of retirement.
Should we be changing the rules so we can put our four to one case our iris into private markets.
I believe there are some great areas of private markets that are going to be great investments for retirement, and I would channel that more towards infrastructure because infrastructure has
a long maturity. It has a higher coupon, but it has a lower profile of returns and what I would say other areas of the private markets, so it has more a good corridor of returns but higher probabilities of meeting those returns, and so yes, we need to be relooking at how we think about investing, whether that is
going to be in private equity or infrastructure. I do believe we need to be putting more long dated assets into retirement and so that you could so that you could meet the returns that you need to have the pool of money that you require during retirement.
In your letter, you talk a lot about the success of the capital markets, although they've accomplished. At the same time, you do mention the problem with particularly US debt. You think it's more urgent than anytime. I think you said you can remember in your lifetime. Put those two things together. To what extent has the success of the capital markets come specifically because we've taken more debt on the public
balance sheet. We've shifted debt from private balance sheets to public balance sheets, no question.
Let's just use a statistic, and I think when I talk about this statistic, I get frightened. In the year two thousand, the US deficit was eight trillion dollars. Today it's thirty four trillion dollars. So twenty three years later, we increased our deficit by twenty six trillion dollars. So for the first two hundred and thirty odd forty years, we increased our deficit the eight trillion, and in the last twenty three years we went we increased it by
twenty six trillion dollars. I think that speaks volumes of what's happening in our in our in our country today. The problem with these type of deficits is and now with and I believe higher interest rates for longer, the cost of financing our deficits are going to erode more and more of our of our disposable income as a country.
And I do believe there we're getting to a point where our public debt is going to start up, crowding out private capital, and we're going to have structurally higher interest rates.
That was black Rocks Larry think if growth is the goal, one of the most effective policy tools forgetting us there, is it public investment? Is it private investment? Trade policy? Tax policy. Glenn Hubbard advised President George W. Bush on these questions as chair of the Consul of Economic Advisors. He is now dean emeritus at the Columbia Business School and author, most recently of The Wall and the Bridge. So welcome back, Glenn. Always great to have you here,
So let's talk about growth. Because everybody talks about it, I'm not sure anybody does anything about it. But if that is our goal that we want to get to growth, what drives that the most? From your point of view as a matter of policy.
Well, to me, that's the biggest question in economic policy data, and I think growth is super important for our living standards, for ability to do anything. There are policies that work, but we also have to remember to get social support for those policies. A lot of economists line up policies and all the angles that you listed, all correctly, but without thinking about social support. We need to do both.
So we've had the bide adminstration now which has tended to favor to some extent public investment. We have in the Inflation Reduction Act, we have it in the Infrastructure Act. What is the role of public investment in order to get growth going?
Well, public investment can play a big role in growth, but I don't think it's the type that we're seeing in the present industrial policy. I think of it as could we invest more in basic research for ideas in general, for technology, for climate change mitigation, whatever you want, could we put applied research centers around the country. Could we do more in defense where we know we're going to have to build up and use defense research spillovers in
the private sector. All of those make sense to me. The Inflation Reduction Act less.
So when it comes to industrial policy, what did the Trump administration do the first Trump administration? There may be another one.
Well, Interestingly, one very successful piece of industrial policy in the first Trump administration was Operation Warp Speed. Because there you have the government in essentially a public private partnership guaranteeing demand, expediting things. That strikes me as this kind of holistic approach that I'm mentioning. It's a smaller case, but a very important one.
I think it's a.
Mistake to use the sort of big spending industrial policy as opposed to that kind of partnership or research support.
Some might say that President Trump when he was there used big spending in the form of tax cuts, because that is a form of expenditure, after all, Was that effective in getting private investment? Because I've read very mixed things about that.
Well, I think it is. I mean, most of the scholarship I've seen on the Tax Cut in Jobs Act of twenty seventeen that you're referring to does indicate quite substantial increases investment. Why is it mixed? Because remember, at the same time, we also had a protectionist policy tilt that's very anti investment and anti growth. But the pure
effects of the tax cut were there. And I would think that the next Congress and the next president, whoever's in those various chairs, are going to have to figure out what to do about the Tax Cut and Jobs Act because many of its provisions are expiring.
Well, you took us to trade pretty quickly. What about trade? What is the role of trade policy and and growth?
Well, unfortunately, this is one where both of our candidates are offering a fairly protection US trade policy to the country. We need openness and markets. We need markets for American exports. We need to be open here to other goods and services unless there's a national security interest. But we also have to bring everybody along. And I would hope that either a President Biden or a President Trump would realize that and pose real world policies, not just tariffs.
We recently had another distinguished economists here, Paul Romer, who had an approach to trade that was a bit different from what I'd heard before, which is basically be protectionist when it comes to goods, importing of goods, but not when it comes to capital and ideas. Essentially, you say, come build it here, train our workers up, and we keep our jobs where we don't lose them to China, as many people think we did around two thousand. Well, but this is.
What's curious about some of the president debates. We are having foreign investment in the United States and the jobs here, Yet we're questioning Nippon Steel and US steeltioning foreign automakers being in the United States. Why we're hiring people here. We're building things here. So I agree, Glenn.
What about this so called crowding out phenomenon.
Well, it's certainly a factor. I think the bigger issue for deficits in debt is the future tax burdens that they imply. In a global capital market, interest rates themselves don't have to go up that much in response to US borrowing. That said, we have to pay it back, and business people understand that. You and I understand that as individuals, those are our future tax burdens. So it's
definitely a problem. In a good economy, we're running mammoth deficits the most recent Congressional Budget Office report says it's just going to get worse.
We need to change. So let me beef specific here, put a target on this. We had Larry Fink issue his annual Chairman's letter, a long chairman's that's right, but we read every word of it, and one of the things he said is the thing we need to do on the deficit is grow our way out of it. He was saying we need to grow at three percent real growth, three percent real growth in order to go to the deficit. Is that realistic? We can get closed?
So a lot depends on what you assume about productivity, growth's response to artificial intelligence. So I think it might be possible. Technically, you can't grow your way out of the deficit. Our entitlement programs are linked into the real economy. But I certainly agree with mister Fink that yes, growth is the number one thing that we could do, and there are a set of policies we've talked about some of those that would push us in that direction.
Coming up, geopolitics loom larger in investor's minds than they have four years. We talked with Jillian Tett at the Financial Times about investing in a troubled world, and.
Entire generation was weird on the idea that if it's not in a model or in the balance sheet, it doesn't matter.
That's next on Wall Street Week on Bloomberg.
This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This is Wall Streetweek. I'm David Weston. Investors are facing a sharp rise in political and geopolitical uncertainty, and yet markets seem to be assuming everything's just fine. To take us through this apparent disconnect, Welcome back now, Jillian Ted, columnist and member of the editorial board of The Financial Times and provost of King's College, Cambridge. Jill, great to have you back with us.
Great to be here, particularly these crazy weird times exactly.
And you wrote a column just recently actually about TikTok, and you think it's about TikTok and social media, but it went beyond that to talk about how capricious governments, certainly China but also the United States are and how investors have to sort of accommodate that absolutely.
I mean, what I was really trying to talk about in the TikTok column was the fact that we have this paradox in markets. On the one hand, you have market soaring on the back of a pretty good short term economic outlook, a lot of relief about the so called soft landing and excitement about the idea the Third
World cut rates later this year. But at the same time we have really quite unprecedented levels of medium to long term geopolitical risk and domestic political risk, and TikTok is one example of that in a fairly extreme form, because until a couple of years ago, there were a lot of big private capital players who assumed this was going to be one of the hothest things in the
tech landscape. People were talking about it potentially being the most lucrative and profit generating trade that they've seen for a long time. But of course now we know that Washington is considering forcing TikTok to essentially be banned if byke dances parent doesn't sell off TikTok to an outside player, And so suddenly geopolitical risk has come in and spot the party. And that's a metaphor for what's happening or what could happen in many many asset classes and in
relation to many types of securities going forward. And my concern is that investors are simply not realizing the magnitude of that risk.
Julie, we all know you for your work at Financial Times, how you've covered international finance for many, many years. At the same time, I want to go back to your original training because I love to talk to you as a social anthropologist. That's where you have your PhD. Apply that if you can to investors, what are they missing here? Is it because they're wishing themselves to success and just saying,
let's make believe there aren't these problems. Is it because it's just too difficult to try to discount this geopolitical risk in China or the United States?
I think the key thing in Bester is are missing right now? Is that if you look back at the second half of the twentieth century, that was an era when we saw the rise of all kinds of intellectual tools that were very useful for navigating the world, like balance sheets, like economic models, like opinion polls, and all of those rows on the back of the computer revolution and the fact that it became possible to crunch huge amounts of
data for the first time on a large scale. Now, the problem with all of those tools is that although they're incredibly useful, they're only as good as what you put into your model, onto your balance sheet, onto your opinion poll, and what you leave out can sometimes matter enormously.
And the story of the last few years is that what has been left out, what has been a footnote in the balance sheet, or an externality to the economic model, like medical risk, like environmental issues like social upheaval, like rapid tech change, or now domestic politics and geopolitics, those issues that were not included in those fancy computerized models are suddenly becoming the model in a sense, their most important.
And from a cultural perspective, an entire generation was reared on the idea that if it's not in the model or in the balance sheet, it doesn't matter. And now they're waking up and realizing with the shock that's wrong. That was no surprise to the people who were investing before the eras of model making and balance sheet fine tuning, but it is a surprise now because of this cultural pattern.
Jenny, I want to pick up on one thing you refer to as political risk as we face election here in United States, serre elections around the world, but we've tend to focus on the presidential one here, and is there a new element of uncertainty in misinformation because I know you've done a lot of work on that subject. There is, by the way, which may tests back into TikTok, because that's some of the objections about TikTok.
Absolutely, the issue of misinformation is a classic issue which was not appearing on the economist model or even frankly on many politicians or political models in the past, and the issue cuts both ways. On the one hand, there really is a very real risk that AI and other types of tech digital technologies will end up manipulating or meddling with the whole voting process in a way that
discredits potentially the outcome in November. The other risk, though, for investors, is that fear of that causes some very unpredictable and potentially capricious reactions from Washington that could potentially hurt the tech sector. And what we see in the last year or two is a tech sector boom dramatically on the idea that these extraordinary technological breakthroughs around AI would keep generating more and more profits and enable American
business to boom. That may be the case, but anyone investing in tech today has to think about the ways that the growing politicization of tech could essentially upend their models and projections for the future as well. And yes, TikTok Byte Dance is an extreme case, but it's certainly not the only one at the moment that's out there that investors need to think about.
Jillian's always such a great treat to heavy on Wall Street. Wee, there's Jillian Tech of the Financial Times and King's College, Cambridge. As we move closer to the presidential election in November, Global Wall Street focused on what the differing economic policies of the two front runners, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump could mean for business. For his views,
we welcome back now Josh Bolton. He's president and CEO of the Business Roundtable and former chiefs staff to President George W. Bush. So, Josh, welcome back. Good to have you. Before we get into what November might mean for business, let's talk about where we are right now. I know quarterly you do a survey of your CEOs. Who are your members? Where do your CEOs think we are as an economy right now?
David, thanks for having me back. Our CEOs are in a pretty comfortable place. Every quarter, we ask them about their expectations for sales over the coming six months and their plans for capex and hiring over that same period, and we combine the results into a headline index that is basically a pretty good barometer of CEO sentiment, and the CEOs in the Business Roundtable their sentiment for the
coming six months is pretty good. For the first time since the third quarter of twenty twenty two, that headline index is above its historic app ridge. So it's not exuberant, it's not going gangbusters as far as our CEOs are concerned. But they see things as in pretty good shape for
the coming six months based on economic fundamentals. And it seems to me, David, that the one thing that might throw them off of that optimistic outlook is something that happens in something dramatic that happens in our politics or our geopolitics.
So let's talk about that specific because as I say, you had experience in the White House, you know whereof you speak, how much of a difference does it make who is in the White House? No matter who it is, can the president really affect the economy substantially.
Well from the standpoint of our businesses enormously, and in particular during periods when the tax code is open for renegotiation, when there are potential trade deals on the table that might or might not happen depending on who's in charge. The regulatory environment is dramatically influenced by who's in the White House. So all of those things can really affect the business outlook from the standpoint of our country's biggest corporations.
Let's take those three that you've mentioned, starting with taxes and the difference as we perceive it right now between the two front runners, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Joe Biden has said he wants to increase taxes and specifically on corporations. Presumably President Trump would want to renew the so called tax cuts, the Trump tax cuts. So how does business perceive the alternative between these two individuals.
Well, business very much welcomed the tax cuts that passed in twenty seventeen. They had a lot to do with the prosperity that we enjoyed before the pandemic and that we enjoy now. Is a reasonable tax environment. Prior to twenty seventeen, the United States was among the highest tax jurisdictions among developed countries. The twenty seventeen Act didn't bring us to the head of the pack, but it put us in the middle of the pack where it's possible
for US companies to compete. In twenty twenty five, a lot of those provisions that brought us back into a competitive range are going to expire, and there will be a big debate about what to do with a whole range of tax provisions on both the corporate and the individual side, And the occupant of the White House is going to have a lot to say about whether taxes
go up or remain roughly roughly where they are. The composition of the Congress for that purpose is also going to be very important, and as close as it looks like polling suggests that our presidential elections will be the control of both Houses of Congress is also very much in doubt.
Josh, As you know so well taxes in Washington, amount of revenue. I mean, if you cut taxes, you lower revenue as well. Typically, how concerned our business CEOs studios of incorporations about our debt and deficit situation? Because there's a lot of concern on.
Economists point yeah, And as a former budget director, I'm concerned as well. The CEOs of the Business Roundtable are very concerned about the fiscal situation of the United States. But from their perspective, the United States doesn't really have a problem that we're under taxed, certainly on the corporate side.
We have a problem of overspending. And if you look at historic data about taxation, tax revenue is a percentage of GDP and government spending as a percentage of GDP, you see that the tax revenue over time is reware in a relatively historically average place in how much of our GDP taxes are taking. What's gone way out of whack is the spending.
I'll concerned as the business community with increased terrors, particularly some of those ones which are about like fifty sixty even one hundred percent on Chinese products.
Yeah, that would be it would be highly disruptive. The United States cannot operate in the modern world as its own bubble of a protected economy. We are in a global economy, and we damage our own prosperity and our own future competitiveness if try to protect ourselves by tariffs or any other measure from a global international trading environment.
Nobody knows that better than the big companies that are members of the Business Roundtable because they operate in Most of them operate in many countries around the world, and they need to be able to compete.
Josh, thank you so much for being on Wall Street Week once again. That is Josh Bolton of the Business Roundtable, coming up the fight over standardized tests. Are they helping or hurting us make sure the right people get into college? We ask economists Melissa Carney of the University of Maryland. That's next 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. Matching prospective students with the right college opportunities has never been more important for the students and for their future employers, which has led to greater scrutiny of the standardized tests used to screen applicants, with some colleges turning away from the SAT and the ACT and some schools returning to them after giving them up. Thig us through the pluses and
minuses of standardized tests. Welcome back now, Melissa Karney, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, Lissa, great to have you back with us. So, first of Larnias has the most basic question, do they work? Do SATs and acts? Are they accurate in predicting success in post secondary education?
Yes, is the short answer. The data that comes out of college records has revealed very clearly that students submitted SAT or ACT scores are very highly predictive of their academic performance when they get to college, much more so than guidance counsel, recommendation letters or even their high school grades.
In some sense, the fact that the test scores are more predictive of college academic performance than high school grades is not surprising given how much variation there is across high schools and grading standards and academic rigor, and of course rampant grade inflation has made grades less meaning meaningful, And so test scores are just very predictive and a really important signal that colleges have access to when they're looking for the right match, the right academic match between
students and their level of academic rigor.
What about the claims that I've seen that there's some cultural bias to these standardized tests, and by the way, they disadvantage students coming from less fortunate families.
Yeah, there's a couple points to make here. First, researchers who have looked for this finding that the test scores are very predictive of academic performance in college for students from different backgrounds, and so that counters the idea that it's not helpful for students from less advantaged backgrounds or it's biased against them. The second really important fact here is that college admissions officers don't consider standardized test scores
in a vacuum. They're very open and transparent about the fact that they evaluate these in the context. The bar for what would be considered an impressive score is higher for students coming from more advantaged backgrounds than less advantaged backgrounds, and so that's really important to realize that admissions officers
are contextualizing the scores when they're submitted. And by the way, this is why the move to test optional or test blind made it particularly difficult for kids from less advantaged backgrounds to signal to more academically rigorous schools that they were prepared. It's actually a particularly important signal for kids from less advantaged backgrounds to be able to deliver to university or college admissions officers who might not know their high school very well, for instance.
Yeah, So there are various advantages people coming from families that have more wealth have, But one of them is this incredible industry that's grown up around preparing for the SAT and SAT act. I'll just go to my personal experience. As you know, I'm involved in a charity in Yonkers helping the public schools. So you go across the border to Bronxville, those kids are all getting tutoring, which costs a fair amount of money, not so much in Yonkers. Doesn't that skew the system?
Yeah, but admissions officers are aware of that. So what they would see from a kid coming from Yonkers who likely doesn't have access to that kind of tutoring or preparation. Really, they're not going to evaluate the scores the same. The report coming out of Dartmouth about why they're going back to requiring tests is very clear on this. So they use the example of a student from an advantaged background, a high income family, a school that sends a lot
of kids to selective schools. A fourteen hundred on the SAT would not have helped that student gained admission to Dartmouth.
But for a.
Student like your student from that you brought up from Yonkers, A fourteen hundred would have been very helpful to them in earning admission. The problem is when the schools went test optional, kids from different backgrounds were equally likely to withhold a score of fourteen hundred, presumably for because kids from less advantaged backgrounds don't have access to the savvy college counselors who are more tuned to how the game is played and would have told them, no, this score
is helpful for you. You're not being compared to the overall average or distribution. And so that's why the kids who were most harmed by the elimination of the test score requirement were really high achieving kids from less advantage backgrounds. And that's a big part of the reason that schools like Dartmouth and Brown and mat and Yale are saying they're going back to requiring these tests.
Certainly, getting the right student into the right college is a starting point, but it's not the ending point. They also have to succeed once they get there. They have to make it all the way through, and the tracker there that I've read is not so great about a lot of children making all the way through and particularly ones from less advantaged families. What can we do to make sure they succeed once they get there.
I think this is really important. So, for instance, the University of California school system is still test blind, and people who are championing that have pointed out that those schools are now enrolling more students from underrepresented minority groups
less advantaged backgrounds. But the problem is if that access is coming at a cost of less academic match and so you're bringing in students who are less likely to thrive, and you're undermining the match between the academic preparation of a student and the academic rigor of a particular campus. So getting the match right is critically important. We don't want to throw out signals of the match quality and then students who are disadvantaged when they get to college.
You know, work has shown that a lot of students need a lot of support systems, and you want to be able to make sure that students are being well served by the campuses they're at. That's a different problem. And by the way, there's a related problem here, which is the fact that students from different backgrounds are much you know, they have different levels of academic preparation by the time they're eighteen. That's not the fault of standardized
test scores. That is a reflection of rampant inequality and class gaps and opportunities and schools and family background and all sorts of things that affect a student's likelihood of excelling in college when they're eighteen. And so again, throwing out the metrics that show us these gaps exist don't mean the gaps don't exist. They just make us make it harder for us to identify them and know.
Where to put our efforts. Give us a sense of how big a problem it is in the Ivy League schools as opposed to those state schools like I came from.
I'm really glad you brought this up, and I'm proud to teach one of these flagship state universities, University of Maryland. But so let me be clear, all of the media emphasis and even our public leaders talk about what's happening in admissions at these private elite schools the Ivy League, all eight schools combined, serve less than one percent of the ten point eight million students enrolled in four year
institutions in this country. So whatever these schools are doing in admissions, whether it comes to their testing regime or legacy admissions, is really not that material to the story of higher education in this country. I mean, it's very frustrating to me how much attention we give these schools, given that the flagship universities, the University of Michigan, University of Maryland, the Sunny System, the Unity System, they serve so many more students than all of the ivy's put together.
But here's another way to look at this. Over the past thirty years, our country has produced a million more college for your college degree holders than in nineteen ninety. Okay, so we went from just over a million to just over two million. Do you know how many more degrees were granted by the ivs combined, an additional thirty five hundred.
So when it comes to expanding access to higher education, the story is just not at the elite private schools, and so we need to be talking about what's happening at the state schools, the public schools, their lack of funding. That's where the real story is.
And finally, Melissa, we just had a new budget proposed with the federal government. You spend a lot of time looking at that. I know you're concerned about the deficit and the debt that we're building up at the same time, what did you see in that budget, if anything, that could help this problem of really making sure we're supporting kids coming from less fortunate families.
What I would have liked to see in the budget is a much bigger allocation of funding towards spending on kids, towards spending on less advantaged groups. I mean, we spend more on interest on the debt at this point than
we do on all federal programs aimed at children. If we want to equip more students to be in a position to thrive in college, if we want to close class gaps, to build up our workforce, we need to be shifting the budget not just away from deficit spending and interest payments, but really to have a more dedicated focused on forward looking investments, and that means in kids and younger generation in this country. That's what I would have liked to have seen in the budget.
Melissa. It's always a treat to have you with this. Thank you so much for joining us. That's MOSSA Carney of the University of Maryland, one of the great leaders of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill said that the price
of greatness is responsibility. We've been watching as some people striving for greatness are being held responsible, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who found a way to get the Congress to keep the government funded, only to be confronted with one of his own Republican colleagues trying to kick him out of his job.
We need a new speaker. This is not personal against Mike Johnson. He's a very good man and I have respect for him as a person, but he is not doing the job.
Or President ge of China who aspires to greatness by making sure he holds the reins of power in his economy, but may end up bearing responsibility for its slow and growth. I think this is all about state control.
You know.
Sheijinping is all about control, and right now China is all about Sheijinping.
This week we saw the price of greatness in the corporate world, as Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun announced that he'd be stepping down after a series of problems with Boeing planes undermined confidence in his leadership, especially from his airline customers.
Everybody's worried about boeing, we've got to get Bowing back to the point where it produces an impeccable product.
And Nelson Peltz continues to do his dead level best to hold Bob Eyer responsible after years of great performance as Disney CEO, as his proxy battle comes to a climax at the annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday.
This really is a story not necessarily about Nelson Pelts, so Disney is actually sort of pushing that that line, but really is more about the governance the company itself.
But perhaps the strangest example of someone trying to hold a leader responsible comes from NBC, which last Friday announced it would be adding Ronald McDaniel as an on air contributor, just two weeks after she stepped down as chair of the Republican National Committee. In the memo, staff, the NBC senior vice president of Politics said that quote, it couldn't be a more important moment to have Ms McDaniel on the team. Well, other members of the NBC team begged
to disagree. Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough and Miko Verziniski all very publicly objected in some pretty strong terms to what their leadership had done, and so NBC promptly reverse course and decided that Ms McDaniel would not be joining its team after all. Look, let me do with the and in the room. Yes, I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation because I don't know what to believe. Trust me, this isn't the first time that those in the newsroom have
challenged decisions made by leadership. When I ran ABC News, there were any number of times that my colleagues took issue with things I was doing, everything from giving Leonardo DiCaprio a role on an Earth Day special to using digital technology to cut the size of some of our crews in the field. I even had some internal pushback when I brought George Stephanopoulos on, and it came from
none other than Peter Jennings, the journalists journalist. Peter told me I was making a big mistake because George had not been trained in the craft, and even worse, he'd spent time in the Clinton White House several years before. Looking back on it now, the issue seems almost quaint given the first rate reporter, interviewer, and anchor George has
become and in fairness to Peter. After he'd worked with him for a few months, he came back to me to say he'd been wrong, that George had the instincts and the work ethic of the best journalists in our newsroom. But then again, I'm not gonna ware that George Stephanopoulos ever challenged the legitimacy of an election that he'd lost.
We should all be concerned about the care, custody, integrity of every ballot. But that's all I'm saying. And you know what, this is a viewpoint of a lot of Republicans, and they think Joe Biden's the president, but they also think there were problems and both can be true.
That does it for this episode of Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston. This is Bloomberg. See you next week.