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This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston bringing you stories of capitalism this week. As luxury brands fight to regain their momentum, does a secondary market help or hurt? And what the facts show about deregulation and its effect on growth and productivity. Plus when a so called zombie company can come back from the living dead. We tell you the story of the return of Barnes and Noble, but we start with a story of true conflict when the approach of the largest country in the world seems
at odds with the fifth largest economy. When President Trump met with Indian Prime Minister Mody earlier this month, the tone was cordial, but it was a step back from the so called bromance that started in Trump's first term, and what the two men said were their core interests appeared to be in true conflict. I will very simply put America first, Make in India, make for the glow. Until now, the Indian growth story has been one of the biggest of the post pandemic world. Its growth rate
touched eight percent. Its benchmark stock index, the Nifty to fifty, has outpaced the S and P five hundred since the start of twenty twenty one, at least until recently, and investors have started to look elsewhere. Indian equities saw almost twenty one billion dollars of foreign inflows in twenty twenty three, but they plummeted to just one hundred twenty four million dollars last year, and investors have withdrawn more than twelve billion dollars so far this year. So has something gone
wrong with the India growth machine? And if so, where are we seeing a slowdown or just a blip. Rasher Sharma is the chair of Rockefeller Capital Management and author most recently of The Rise and Fall of Nations.
Ever since I've been investing in this country for over three decades, which is that this is a country that consistently disappoints the optimists in the pessimists.
Yet over the.
Long term it's a very good equity market story. In particular because even after the Indian stock markets big correction over the last few months, the only stock market in the world in the last thirty to forty years which has produced comparable returns to America has been India. So it's this very steady compounding story. But yeah, there are times when people get a bit ahead of themselves, the
excitement gets a bit too much. I think we may have reached that point last year when India became the most expensive equity market in the world, literally even more expensive than America at the top. So that was just telling you that the excitement had gone into a head. And what we have seen in the last few months is a bit of a reset where the optimists are getting a bit disappointed.
Now.
After sort of thinking that maybe India can break out and grow at seven to eight percent, there's a realism setting in that India's trained growth rate is closed to six percent rather than seven to eight percent, a pretty decent growth rate, and that they'd still need to carry out some positive reform steps to even keep a six
percent type growth rate going. So I think what we're seeing just now is a return to that old reality, so to speak, which has been the case for India for thirty to forty years, that it's a country which steadily compounds, steadily grows.
But that might not be enough to reach Prime Minister Motive's target of making India a developed nation by twenty forty seven. Ragharam Rajan is a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India.
I think we're reverting around the six percent now. The blip downwards recently has more to do with the fact that we had elections across the board last year and spending on infrastructure, which has been a big part of the growth story, has sort of faltered over this period. I think that will come back, so we'll get back to six now.
The question for India is six.
Enough, And unfortunately the answer is not, because we're also a country that's growing old, and we do want to grow rich before we grow old, and that's unlikely at six percent.
The Indian government has stepped up efforts to re energize growth, announcing tax cuts in its annual budget in an effort to boost middle income spending.
We have a lot of young people and as a result, the dependency ratio, the number of very young people who can't work and very old people who can't work, that's falling.
And this is the.
Time that every Asian economy has experienced a burst of growth, still growing at the old six percent and not enjoying that burst. Something is not working as well as it should, and that's jobs.
What you see around India is not enough young.
People have jobs, not enough jobs are being created, so in a sense, we're not making full use of our capacity even at six percent growth.
Some foreign companies have seen potential in the growth of the Indian market as an alternative to China. Apple has been slowly growing iPhone production in the country, while more recently Tesla stepped up hiring in India ahead of a possible entry into the market. This so called China plus one strategy of India being a substitute for manufacturing in China may have worked in the past, but some question
whether it will in the future. Ridika Bachra is Mahindra Group's Vice president of Americas and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
What I have come to realize in the last twelve months is there is a strange realization with the Indian policy makers that they cannot sell themselves anymore as a China plus one strategy. It has to be much beyond that, because if you look at it, the Indian consumer is not only inclined towards luxury and lifestyle products unlike a lot of other emerging markets, but also has a very strong middle class consumer base which is also price conscious.
So if you put these things together, where India is trying to sell itself as not just a China plus one strategy, but an innovation in manufacturing hub with a skilled workforce, with a solid consumer base, and trying to differentiate itself with available worker versus available skilled workers. I think it's a great story to tell.
Whatever the theory, foreign investors have not always had an easy time investing in India. Just ask Olkswagen. They were hit with a record one point four billion dollar tax bill from the Indian authorities for alleged tax evasion, and the German automaker raised questions about the very survival of its India unit.
Well, because I think it's still a very difficult place to do business on the ground. David, this is something which you know, we have felt for a long period of time that to negotiate the Indian landscape is toff given the regulations that you still have in place, given the fact that you can have the tax authorities or other people come up and present bills to you in a.
Way that you don't really know.
A lot of the state chief ministers in India realize this, and I think this is something which we need to focus on, which is that a lot of the attention is on more the center and what DELI is doing and what initiatives they're taking. But India is a very federal country and you have so many state chief ministers with a lot of power to do what they have
to do on the ground. And I think what we need to see in India foreig and we see some signs of that is much greater so called competitive federalism, where the states compete with each other to get foreign investment because a lot of these regulations and the tough environment it is to do business in India is something that some of these state chief ministers need to make friendlier and not just the center.
Whatever direction it's going right now, what is the current state of competitive federalism when it comes to economics? Are there certain states that it's more conducive to invest into in India today than others?
Well, that's been the case in India for a while now that if you look at India, about twenty percent of India's population is in the southern states, and yet those states account for more than thirty percent of India's GDP and the per capita income is also a lot higher. Now there are states in the south, such as Karnataka, which we know well because of Bangalore, which is the tech capital of India for all practical purposes. And what we see there is that places like Bangalore and Karnataka
tend to attract much greater foreign investment. And generally some of the southern states like Karnataka and Telangana and Tamil Nadu, those states have attracted much more foreign investment over time.
There is a historical reason for why South has managed to sort of lead from the front, and those reasons are the ports that are situated in southern area. They were the most important reason for traders to come to India to begin with, and that led to a huge amount of trading community moving and living in South of India.
In the recent past, we see inphasis taking a lead in ensuring that they become the global service providers for technology and that started in South of India and Bangalore, and one thing led to another where a huge amount of other tech companies started sort of launching based out of South India because of the skill availability of engineers in the southern part of India.
But even if India is moving to loosen restrictions on foreign investment. It is slow progress and Rajah and warrens they might be focusing on the wrong sectors. Prime Minister Motor is pushing to grow the manufacturing sector. Does that make sense.
I think the days of growing manufacturing to get strong growth in jobs are over. I think it's as true of India as it is of the United States. And the reason is simply this that increasingly manufacturing is becoming much more automated, much more dependent on machines. If you look at an assembly plant for cell phones in India, it's a sequence of machines, not a sequence of people
sitting soldiering stuff onto motherboards. So the kind of jobs that traditional sort of low skill manufacturing assembly, electronics assembly and so on generate.
They far fewer today. But there are other problems.
Every country wants to expand its manufacturing and is growing protectionist against manufacturing manufactured goods coming from somewhere else. So the space for manufacturing exports is also shrinking. India has other opportunities in services. It's been a giant in service exports in recent years.
That's where it should focus its attentions.
More on Modi's push to build up India's own manufacturing base comes as President Trump looks to bring back economic activity within US borders. It creates a dilemma. Both leaders talk up their relationship with one another, but can modis made in India and Trump's America first be reconciled and if not, which will prevail.
Every country is turning nationalists now, and everybody is also has a certain sense of manufacturing fetishism. They want their own manufacturing industries, and of course this collides.
I think the.
Way to reduce this gap is by recognizing that each country has specialties and by working to ensure that there is more trade on those specialties. So, for example, lots of oil and natural gas being manufactured in the United States, India could buy more.
There are defense products.
That are manufactured in the United States, India could buy more.
So I think rather than seeing.
Deficits trade deficits as a problem, see it as part of a process of collaboration and just make sure that the playing field is level for both sides. I think that's something that can be worked on.
Coming up, Luxury brands are looking to get their mojo back, but do we have too little of them or too much? That's next on Wall Street.
Week you're listening to Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio. This is Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This is a story about too much of a good thing. Every brand lives and breathes for exposure, but sometimes it can be too much. Luxury brands have reaped the benefits of consumers the world over seeking them out, but now the red carpet may be getting pulled out from under them, and my colleague Danny Berger tells us why. It may be because they are too available to too many people in too many places.
Luxury brands are everywhere, from the bags we carry to the clothes we wear, down to the shoes we step into every day, but luxury brands are at a crossroad. LVMH seen as a bellweather for the luxury sector, sort close to two hundred and fifty percent between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty four, but it's since fallen around twenty percent from the highs of last year, with a recent bounce offsetting some of those losses and leaving investors struggling
to try a path forward for the luxury brands. Joelle Grunberg is partner at Mackenzie who leads the firms apparel, fashion and luxury sector in North America and co authors a yearly report on the state of Luxury.
When you look at economic profits of the luxury industry, it basically nearly tripled between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty four. So it's really been amazing years, and I think at some point everybody started believing this was the new normal and started to expect that this would continue. But as we all know, you know, at some point things stabilized or normalize, So as we know, in twenty twenty four, things slowed down in a significant way for the luxury industry.
It has been a tale of different stories. In all fairness, not all the rounds, not all the corporations have suffered in the same way, and some are doing great in fact. But what we think is that twenty twenty five will overall be a year of normalization. We obviously see continue to see growth, but I would say in a more muted way, and it will also significantly depend on the
region and the market. It would also depend on what category you mainly operated, and it also depends, I would say, on again the situation of the round overall, because some runs are doing much better than the others.
Armez is one of those brands outperforming its luxury peers, but they are very much the outlier. Just last week, Armaz reported a jump in fourth quarter revenue, while LVMH and Karen posted declines, and Grundberg says there's a range of global headwinds challenging the luxury sector.
Two main factors contributed to the huge growth that we've seen since twenty nineteen. One first factor is clearly the rise of prices in luxury. Most of the rounds have increased prices in a very significant way, more than double digit every year, and so that has contributed to eighty percent of the growth in revenue of these companies. The
second factor is the pool of China. As we all know, the Chinese customer has been a very very strong contributor to the growth of luxury globally, and so that you know, pool has been extremely strong and is slowing down right now. And what has happened in the past year and a half is that the aspirational luxury customer, and more specifically in the US, has been challenged because there's been a lot of people losing their jobs and so therefore there
have been much more cautious and on pause. So part of the explanation is linked to that aspirational customer being a bit more on hold.
You know, that perfect storm has resulted in some aspirational customers being priced out of the first hand luxury market. We're very happy to receive them.
Maximilian Bitner is the CEO a Vestier Collective, a platform for pre owned designer and luxury products founded in two thousand and nine, aimed at making fashion more sustainable and a more strained consumer means. The second hand market is seeing significant growth, expected to reach three hundred and fifty
billion dollars globally in twenty twenty eight. That's up from one hundred and ninety seven billion dollars in twenty twenty three, with Vestier estimating eighty two percent of its orders prevent a first hand purchase.
We definitely do cater to the demand of the aspirational customer, as certain brands are more affordable, more accessible than they would be in a first hand store. And I think we've especially seen this over the last one or two years. You know, in a period of economic uncertainty, which in parallel has seen luxury brands increase prices you know, significantly
over the last four or five years. When I joined vis Year at the end of twenty eighteen early twenty nineteen, you know, I recognize the incredible brand and community, but I also recognized the need for us to build a scalable, profitable business you know, for the next twenty thirty forty years. Even the last two years, the business has proven extremely resilient,
growing with more than twenty percent revenue growth. So the business has been you know, throughout the up and down cycles of pre COVID COVID post COVID remained extremely resilient, which is great for us to see.
Vestier is not alone in writing the second hand wave. The Real Real and Rebag offer similar services, and Rebag's reach got a lot bigger this year when it partnered with Walmart to sell its catalog of about twenty seven thousand items on the retail giant's website, targeting the aspirational customer. What might seem like a threat to luxury retail, in reality could be a mutually beneficial relationship.
I think overall, the mood and the attitude of luxury brands have dramatically improved over the last five six years towards secondhand because you know, fundamentally, we are not cannibalizing their sales. If anything, you know, we pay homage to their brands by showing to the consumers, both the buyers and the sellers, how much value is retained in these products that they're buying firsthand.
Norma Kamali rose to the top of high end fashion with the iconic Sleeping Bag coat that she designed in nineteen seventy three. Since then, the New York based designer has proven her ideas fresh and innovative time and time again. Like Bittner, Kamali sees the value of secondhand markets in luxury fashion.
I think anything that's a creative process that's fun is good for people, right And if in that secondhand you get a great better price and you get a brand that you haven't been able to buy before. There's a whole cult of people who look for Norma Kamali vintage and it's fascinating to me. But I see how great that is because in that generation, there's something I did when I was that age that is connecting with them.
Would you say, Norma Kamali is also luxury.
Luxury to me is something that is accessible, affordable, and will last in your wardrobe forever. It can't be a purse that you spend thirty thousand dollars on and sort of collect in a closet with other purses.
How do you strike that balance then, of being both accessible but not oversaturated.
In the market.
It's an important thing to do, and I think first of all, knowing your distribution, being careful about the distribution, make sure the distribution is to your customer, the person who connects with you. And we have a global distribution and we could still be reaching many, many more people.
There's no question that more consumers are exposed to and have access to luxury than ever before. But at least one icon of the industry admits that change is inevitable.
We start this.
Conversation with this idea of luxury doesn't mean exclusivity. Do you think some of those secondhand apps are also changing the conversation.
That reguly totally. I think the fashion industry clearly is going through a huge, huge change, and it's long.
Overdue, it really is.
And I think when an industry can have a lot of variety and a lot of choices and a lot of price ranges.
Then it's healthy, healthy for the consumer, but a challenge for the luxury brands to overcome as they look to rediscover the growth of the last five years.
This is a story about unintended consequences. Sometimes even the best intention to government regulations can do more harm than good. But then again, cutting back on regulation can also do real mischief.
We did the right thing, that was a very important thing to get right finis and it was also a waste.
I mean, number one, it was a bad group of people running it.
If the CFPB is not there examining these giant banks to make sure they are following the laws on not cheating consumers, who is doing that job?
I can say, no other federal regulator.
So which is it? Is government regulation holding the US economy back? Or is it an important foundation for much of the economic benefits we've reaped? And if it can be both, how can we tell the difference. Jeff Myron is Director of Undergraduate Economics at Harvard and the director of Economics Studies at the Cato Institute.
I don't think there is a definitive study on productivity and regulation. There are many studies of individual industries, of specific time periods, of special cases, but those are all relatively small pieces of information. Finding an overall clear assessment is pretty hard. I think many people would point to key environmental regulation in the United States, the Clean Air and Water Acts, as having been quite successful, but even
those are not without some degree of controversy. One certainly finds that as a result of those acts, which are passed in the early nineteen seventies, air got cleaner, water got cleaner. But if you then go the next step and say, were those improvements worth the extra cost, because of course putting restrictions on what firms do and what cars can do raises the cost, and there the assessment is still probably beneficial overall, but not so obviously not
so dramatic. So even for one of the relatively clear successes, I'd say there's still some room for reasonable people to disagree about how effective they were.
Myron has harsher criticism of food and drug regulation, where there has been mission creep delays and political and legal tangles.
So the very first major attempt federal attempt to deal with dangers of drugs and food was all the Pure Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh three, and it did something very mild. It said that medicines and food substances had to include a list of the ingredients on a label on the outside of the package.
That's pretty innocuous.
Even if you're a hardcore libertarian, it's be hard to get too exercised about that. But that notion that the government was going to protect people from dangerous products evolved into creating the Food and Drug Administration in nineteen thirty eight, which then had the power to keep things from being
on the market at all. That's a much higher bar Now we have the current system, which involves years of delay, sometimes billions of dollars in testing before thinks can go on the market, and that probably prevents some bad drugs from ending up on the market, but also delays all the good drugs from getting on.
The market.
Coming up. They are called zombie companies for our reason. There are more companies who don't make enough to pay their bills than you might think. But we bring you the story of one of them that came back from the dead Barnes and Noble. That's next on Wall Street Week.
You're listening to Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio. You're listening to Bloomberg Wall Street Week with David Weston from Bloomberg Radio.
This is a story about the corporate living dead. Companies that don't make enough money to cover their debt after year, many of them ultimately giving up the ghost end of an era.
Off for retail Giant, bed Bath and beyond.
We have breaking news the party is over.
As count retailer Big Loss is closing all of its stores nationwide.
The annals of business are full of stories of companies that fought the good fight but ultimately lost. The number of business bankruptcies in the United States is on the rise, up over seventy percent in the past two years, and corporate delinquency rates are the highest they've been in eight years. Bankruptcy usually is the end of life, at least in the company's current form, but maybe you've noticed that some stick around, and there's a term for them, zombie companies.
Vincenzo Spizato is a partner at Carne, writing a yearly report on zombie companies and their effect on the health of the overall economy.
A zombie company, it's fundamentally a financially unsustainable company with these are companies that are not producing enough operating profit to pay the interest on their loans, and they've been in that position for at least three consecutive years. So when we talk about a zombie, it's not a company that had a bad year or a startup or anything
like that. We're talking about sustained material underperformance. These are publicly traded companies that have been in business for at least ten years that have revenue for each of those ten years. These are real companies that are having profound financial issues.
You study these zombie companies, how many are there?
Just looking back to put this in perspective, in twenty ten, there were under two percent of publicly traded companies globally. We've seen around ten percent annual growth since then, and so we're up to around six percent of all publicly traded companies globally. Six out of one hundred are currently zombies. So we're talking about an not insignificant number of companies. It's sort of all industries, all company sizes, they're sort of everywhere.
In twenty twenty three alone, Arney identified eight hundred and twenty seven new zombie companies, taking the total number to almost twenty five hundred globally, with real estate and manufacturing leading the way.
A lot of zombies are companies that should not have gotten financing to begin with, given the sort of easy access to capital that we saw coming out of two thousand and eight and the financial crisis, and those are companies that are going to be very difficult to turn around.
Normally we think those companies get weeded out, you.
Would think so, and yet a lot of times they'll carry that interest forward, the interest payable as a loss. Capital markets are incredibly rewarding and have been very forgiving recently, particularly coming out of the financial crisis. There's been just real easy access to financing to a lot of companies that one may argue shouldn't have actually received that financing at such low interest rates that they were able to sort of kick the can on the issue and move
things forward. So a lot of zombies have in fact business for a long time. Many of them do ultimately they either go bankrupt, they get acquired, or every once in a while they're able to turn themselves around.
One of those so called zombie companies that's come back from the dead is the well known bookseller Barnes and Noble, back in twenty ten, it teetered on the brink, closing hundreds of stores and laying off thousands of workers, and then in twenty eighteen became a full blown zombie.
We've definitely seen an increase in the number of people coming through the door, that sense of discovery. You know, it's a different experience, you know, to go from table to table or day to day and find something new.
I think people have attachments to to like their neighborhood or their corner books. So even if it's like a larger company like this, it feels warm to be able to come to an actual location and do exploration in person.
I think there was a number of things that went on Amazon came and that took a chunk of the easy sales disappeared, a fear that people were no longer going to read physical books, they were just going to read ebooks, Kendall, Nook and all of that. As people lost confident in books, they then started selling other things, which then compromised the ability to present.
Really good bookstores.
Publishers panicked books. That has panicked, everybody panicked, and I think when you lose your compass, then you go off in really in the wrong direction, and it was that it was a fundamental loss of confidence. And it happened not just in the United States, so it happened pretty much worldwide, and most large books selling chains got themselves into big trouble.
Elliott Management stepped in with a six hundred and eighty three million dollar takeover and appointed James Daunt as CEO, and the resurrection began. Since twenty nineteen, foot traffic has increased seven percent at Barnes and Noble, and the company has opened one hundred and thirteen stores across the United States, with another sixty due to open this year. When you came in, what did you do? I mean, what were your priorities? What did you focus on?
First?
Can't sort of dodge around this in any euphemistic way. We had to cut costs, and that meant reducing dramatically the head office structures healthfully. My other core principle was to allow the booksellers in each store to get to grips with and start working.
On their bookstores.
Now, if you do that, you need far less central direction because you're letting the guys in the stores do the work. So we were able to reduce our costs substantially and then turn to the individual bookstore teams and say sort out your stores. And we just started to sort of preach that message and put a few practical steps in place when COVID came along. So we then had a pandemic when all our stores closed. Turns out to have being actually a huge stroke of fortune.
Why was it a huge struggle fortune?
What we really needed to do was work on the stores, and that's quite difficult to do if you're still also running your store. It's full of customers. Suddenly we were literally having to close our doors, but we kept the lights on, we kept the people in the stores. So we kept our experienced booksellers and they worked through the pandemic inside the stores, moving the furniture around, going through.
All the books.
By the time we were allowed to open again, we had much better bookstores, just through moving, changing, getting rid of the books that shouldn't be there, presenting better.
Low and behold.
During provid lots of people discovered reading and the joys of reading, and we opened to that re energized customer base who were coming back on to high streets with much better bookstores.
The story of Barnes and Nobles obviously a very famous one. It's a very popular one, and I think they went back to the basics. They looked fundamentally at what customers were looking for, They looked at what worked, and they spent the time focusing on the areas that were impactful.
Those keys to success. Understanding customers and individualizing stores was something brought with him from his experience owning his own independent bookstore in London, and then apply as the recipe for success to restore and reinvigorate the Barnes and Noble brand.
I have the firm belief that if you leave it to the books team, and it is a team, they will put the best possible bookstore in front of you. It is all about recommending the books to the community that you know and understand. What we've benefited from is because we relaxed and because we've let the store teams do pretty much whatever they want, trusted in their common sense, trusted in, and we have a vocational group of books that's out there. They love books, and they love talking
about books. They're not selling books, and they also love getting on social media and being quite fun and foolish about books, and fun and foolish turns out to be absolutely what you need to be doing.
So a lot of our success.
Has come from us being actually at the forefront of things like BookTok and that's our booksellers. As I always say, give it to the one with the blue hair.
And leave them alone.
It's going to go well. You don't need people with gray hair looking like me running a social media and that's when you're trying to control things that tends to be what it is. When you just let them get.
On with it, Miss you forgot something, Thank.
You, now we will have the odd sort of foolishness. And again minus, let's not ever react. We know that fundamentally our booksellers are hugely motivated in everything they do. Support them, encourage them, and when they make us really mistake, just get them back into line.
So if not all zombie companies are headed toward failure, if some like Barnes and Noble can not only come back but come back strong, how can we tell which ones are worth the effort and which ones are better off put out of their misery. Angela Demartis is an economist who studies zombie companies globally, using machine learning to identify zombies and detect patterns in which survive and which do not.
If we compare zombie companies to recover, one of the first things that we see is that there are differences with respect to leverages, so leverage ratio, but also total assets. We see that those are one of the first characteristics that change when a company is in the recovery zone
versus in the zombie in the zombie status. When we look at other factors in terms of zombies that recover from the zombie status, there are also other characteristics that play a role, not only leverage and total assets, but also for example, how they use cash, for example, how
they use equity taxes, working capital, and other characteristics. What we find is that the share of zombie companies in the United States is much lower compared to zombie companies in Europe, so their prevalence is way higher in Europe and also emerging countries, and this is mostly relate to,
for example, differences in the characteristics of these companies. We always look at listed firms and we see differences between the United States and Europe with respect to, for example, their financial structure, but also the capital structure of the company.
And also what plays a role is differences with respect to the institutions, and so this might also explain why we see a much lower share of zombie companies in the United States with respect to other European countries in which the phenomenon is way more prevalent.
Could a factor be the different ways that companies finance themselves in the United States versus Europe. My understanding is banks play a much larger role as opposed to capital markets in the United States. Exactly.
Yeah, this is one of the things that we argue is one of the main points and one of the
main difference that we see. So in one of the studies, what we do is we look at listed firms in the United States and in Europe, and we use machine learning methods to sort of develop an early worm system that is able to identify zombie companies and also separate them from the non zombies and also from the recovered and so at the firm level, for example, we see that beyond leverage and total assets, there's other characteristics that
do pray our role, like for example, working capital, for example, taxes, for example, shareholders, equity, And we do see differences between the United States and Europe that go back to for example, differences with respect to capital markets, with respect to the financial structure of the company, and also with respect to institutions.
Back in the United States, James Daunt sees only one true threat to his Barnes and Noble falling back into its former zombie status.
For a large book seller. The only thing that we can really trip up on is if we lose our confidence. That's what happened before, and hopefully it won't happen again. But if it did, if you lose your confidence and you stop being a really good bookstore, then people stop coming to you.
That does it for us. Here at Wall Street Week, I'm David Weston. This is Bloomberg. See you next week for more stories of capitalism.