Episode Transcript
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Speaker 2This is Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Business Week.
I'm Stacy Mannocksmith.
Speaker 3And I'm Max Chafkin.
Stacy.
This week we're gonna talk about the economic impact of the conflict in Iran.
Speaker 2We're also going to take a look at private equity, which is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives.
Speaker 3And we'll have an underrated story about an underrated presidential candidate.
Speaker 2Yes, who is very famous, has a reality show, is known for his straight talk, but is not Donald Trump.
Speaker 3All Right, before we get into the meadia conversation that we're going to have, I feel like I'd be wrong, Stacy if I didn't bring up the fact that summer's beginning, that kids are getting out of school.
It is a joyous time for many people in the United States.
As chaotic and as scary as the world is at times.
Speaker 2It's true.
And here at Everybody's Business, we have a lot of little kids, not technically on the staff, but definitely attached to the staff, and they come up a lot when we're talking as a team, but we never actually hear them.
Speaker 3Which is a shame because not only are the children in our future.
But they are an important economic force.
Right when I see my three children, I don't think you know this is my legacy on earth.
I think three consumers, the consumers of tomorrow.
Here they are, we can study them.
They are going to be what keeps our economy going and what cares for us in our decrepitude.
Speaker 2So we thought we would hear from them to ask the kids of everybody's business how they are planning to spend their money this summer.
Speaker 1Well, I have two hundreds of dollars, but unfortunately for my behalf, I lost my wallet, so I don't have any major plans.
Speaker 4I don'tly have one.
Speaker 1Makeup for Halloween like old Navy and so Flora and cocoa, like the bubble teeth place, anything that you're a bought for yourself, t shirts, necklaces, anything, jacket?
Speaker 2What are you excited to buy this summer vestball?
How much do you think it costs?
Speaker 3One dollars?
Speaker 1A big, big, big big ice cream chalk with a big cherry cat on the top.
Speaker 3Lois.
Speaker 2Do you know what a tariff is?
Speaker 4Uh?
Speaker 5Something?
Templates?
Speaker 2Do you know what a tariff is?
Speaker 4What a tariff?
Now?
Speaker 3It attacked for imports salt.
What's a tarriff?
Speaker 4I don't know.
Speaker 3Do you know what inflation is?
Speaker 1Are you talking about like balluted inflation?
We're like a different type of inflation, like that should do with money.
That's all I guessing, Wow.
Speaker 2Lost his wallets.
Yeah, it happens to all of us.
Speaker 3It's in his sock draw it's there.
But I was a little disappointed that they didn't have like a more nuanced understanding of what a tariff was.
But on the other hand, they did kind of get the essential of it.
Speaker 2I feel like almost no one understands exactly how tariffs work and what they are, And despite you know, a raft of explainer pieces having written them, I sometimes don't feel like I entirely have a grasp of tariffs.
I actually think they have a pretty sophisticated grasp of the economy and inflation like a balloon.
Speaker 3That's not wrong, Stacy, What are you gonna buy this summer?
Speaker 2What am I going to buy this summer?
I have plans to do like an ice cream crawl.
I want to try all the best ice cream in New York.
That's my love it, that's my plan.
Speaker 3That's do you have I'm gonna buy all the stuff you just heard about.
Speaker 2Oh, that's true.
Your spending plans have been laid out my small children.
Speaker 3All right, Stacy, we were planning on having a whole, very entertaining conversation about the NBA Finals.
Speaker 2Today best slave plans, but we just thought.
Speaker 3That right now, the most important story, even the most important business story, really is what's happening in the Middle East.
Yeah.
Speaker 2Absolutely, the conflict between Israel and Iran, which began on Friday of last week.
We are recording as of right now it is Wednesday, and it has just been escalating.
Israel has been intensifying their bombings and Donald Trump has started posting on social media a lot of threats that even suggest the US might join the conflict.
Speaker 3Yeah, this is a bit outside of what we usually talk about.
Neither Stacy nor I is an expert in grand strategy, even though it might seem that way sometime.
But this conflict has economic implications, and really important economic implications, both for the people who are in the Middle East who are affected by what is happening, but also the markets, of course, and that's why we want to bring in John Authors.
He's a Bloomberg opinion columnist.
Markets editor, and he's been writing about this in his newsletter Points of Return.
He is here with us right now, joining us from Madrid.
Speaker 4I believe, hey, John, Yes, I am indeed in Madrid.
Speaker 3Let's be with you, so John, on Tuesday morning, this was before President Trump had put out a series of increasingly aggressive truths posts on truth social saying unconditional surrender all caps or we know exactly where the so called supreme leader that's in scare quotes is hiding.
He's an easy target, he's safe there.
We're not going to take him out kill, at least not for now.
You basically said at that point that the markets hadn't reacted very much to what was actually like a kinetic conflict.
There were bombs flying in both directions, and yet the markets were barely moving.
Can you talk us through your sort of thinking?
There is that observation still true?
Speaker 4That observation is still more or less true.
Basically a fairly dramatic response to the news which broke Friday morning, American time, all of which was corrected back on Monday, with the exception of the oil price, which is still somewhat higher than it was.
And that makes sense because the risk of a Middle Eastern conflagration is that it affects the supply of oil, that it affects the ability of Western companies to access the product, and also obviously its price.
Speaker 3Like a regional war between two potentially nuclear powers, could have a bad effect on the global economy.
Is what you're saying?
Speaker 4Nuclear war would be bad for the stock market.
Yes, I will stand firm on that position.
Speaker 2Yes, I do have a question about the impact on specifically oil markets, because Iran has a huge amount of oil.
It's one of the biggest producers in the world, but they've also been under sanctioned that was actually put in place by Donald Trump in twenty eighteen.
There aren't very many places they can even sell their oil right now.
It's mostly to China.
So I was one wring why you were expecting to see a bigger global impact given how restricted things are.
Speaker 4Okay, I was expecting that question.
So twelve month moving average of Iranian oil exports to China, that's increased tenfold since twenty twenty two, and it's currently higher than it has been.
The Bloomberg data I'm looking at goes back to twenty fifteen.
It's comfortably higher.
Exports to China than there have ever been at that point.
You know, I think I'm right in saying still the world's biggest consumer of oil.
That's quite a big problem.
That does potentially mean that one of the most alarming possibilities facing us is much less likely to happen, which is that Iran could close the Straits of Hormos, which would basically mean that most of Saudi Arabian oil and most of Iranian oil couldn't get out of the Gulf.
But as substantially all of the oil they sent to China goes through the Straits of Hormos, that would be a very dangerous thing for them to do that China really does not want them to do that.
Speaker 2Yes, and the Strait of Hormus is a strait between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
It is the only cea passage from the Persian Gulf out into the open ocean, and so much of the world's oil goes through there.
Speaker 3Very small band of water that Iran effectively controls.
Stacy, Can we just talk a little bit about what the economy of Iran is like apart from the question of oil exports, and like what the sanctions have meant for people who live there and for the country as a whole.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean this really got started in twenty eighteen when President Trump pulled US out of the we had an Iranian nuclear deal and put in the highest level of sanctions against Iran and also threatened sanctions against anybody who did business with them.
At the time, it was just really devastating because Iran was doing a lot of business with Japan, It was doing a lot of business with Italy.
We had I mean, ge Boeing had like multi billion dollar contracts there.
All of those things to appeared overnight.
People lost their jobs.
Right now, fifty percent of Iranians live below the poverty line.
I mean, is this a very highly educated population.
Iran has everything to have a real powerhouse economy.
It really hamstrung them for the lives of people there.
Inflation forty percent, like price is going up.
I mean, it decimated the economy.
Speaker 3It just fascinated weird paradox here, which is that you can at once be cut off from large aspects of the global economy and still be a global actor.
So like Iran is basically a pariah state as far as like the US is concerned.
You know, we're not selling them consumer goods.
US companies aren't doing business here.
And yet John, like you're saying, there are a lot of interdependencies, starting with the oil exports to China, you know, the strait of horror moves like there are ways in which if something bad happens in Iran, it will affect all of us.
Speaker 4Yes, Iran has more than ninety million people in it.
It's actually quite an advanced economy.
You cannot remove it completely from the global picture.
It will have a very significant influence, and it has ways of exerting that influence.
Speaker 3One of the things you brought up in this newsletter that I mentioned from a couple of days ago was that basically markets never go down, and when there's a global conflict like that, it really has to be bad on like historic proportions.
I think in this piece you said, you know, Hitler invading France, that was one where there was like a protracted decline the nineteen seventy three Young Kapor War when Israel's neighbors attacked it, you know, a surprise attack.
I mean, on one hand, it's kind of comforting, like wow, stock market traders are just like very chill.
It also just it strikes me as a somewhat dark observation, and it feels like what you've been kind of writing about and pushing towards.
Is this idea that this confidence that everything's fine may be misplaced.
Speaker 4Well, I certainly feel that it is.
I'm paid to try to find where people might be getting things wrong.
It is unquestionably true that for the most part, markets can deal with geopolitical shocks in the short term.
Many geopolitical shocks aren't that clear at the time and take a long time to take an effect, so there is in the jargon there's a tail risk.
But on average, when you have a shock that creates a big sell off, it's over inside a month, And because traders know this, it's widely known.
There then becomes an assumption this is what I believe, This is what they are assuming without realizing that all geopolitical shocks can be ignored.
Because most geopolitical shocks can be ignored, you are making an assumption if you don't think that this is going to be more like the Yong Kippur War than like the Six Day War, which had almost no impact on the markets when it happened.
Speaker 2I was wondering if you wouldn't mind kind of playing out some of these tail risks that you're seeing some of the potential fallout from a conflict short obviously of nuclear armageddon, but between Iran's oil exports and the Straits of Hormones, Like, what are some risks that you're seeing looking at this.
Speaker 4One interesting way to look at this is that Iran wants the US to restrain Israel rather than to take it on, and very counterintuitively, the way to do that might be to start attacking oil infrastructure to start expanding the war.
And that I think is one of the great concerns is that Iran is weaker than it was before, but it could close off the Straits of Hormus if it's genuinely has reason to believe that the US is thinking of assassinating their supreme leader.
Things are getting very serious.
Maybe they do play that desperate card of closing the Straits of Hormos.
Speaker 2And that cuts a lot of the world off from a lot of the world's oil.
Speaker 4That cuts off most Saudi production and Kuwait and Iraq and Iran, which is a lot.
So that is the single racist concern out there.
Also, the idea of whether you get attacks on other countries, whether they try to limit production in other countries.
Given that the degree of hostility there is between Iran and the other countries in the region, that's a Machiavelian response that makes it very hard for the US to continue to push on.
And then the other big tail risk that I think is what scared people on Tuesday after you had those Donald Trump tweets, was oh, Lord, he's really thinking he's going to change the regime here.
This fear that it will create a new fiscal drag on the US, that all of a sudden there will be this massive new overseas commitment requiring money, feeding into all the worries about fiscal policy.
That it's possible that the US is about to be dragged into an extremely expensive mistake.
Speaker 3John, you brought up Trump's statements in your newsletter this morning.
You wrote a really interesting sentence.
These gyrations you're talking about, the market gyrations, oil going up, oil going down, have happened with no obvious, concrete new developments, driven instead largely by the newsflow produced by the president on social media.
Isn't that all we have?
Though?
Like when you say the news flow produced by the president of social media that you're just talking about the news, right, I mean, it's all just Trump's tweets.
Speaker 4Okay, this is turning into rather an enjoyable meta conversation at this point.
You don't need to be as old as I am to remember a time when there was more to news than what one seventy nine year old man had on social media.
Speaker 2Not just any seventy nine year old man.
Speaker 4I mean, he is, unfortunately, it's the most powerful.
I think what you play into here, though, is that under the old rule of doing politics, that's not the kind of brinkmanship behavior that happened in general.
If you're thinking of intervening militarily, you do not talk about it.
You certainly don't broadcast it to however, and a million followers.
Donald Trump has one of the things from the tariff situation, the number of different tariffs that have been announced and I guess their news because he said he's going to do them, and they never happen.
I remember one weekend, it's about four months ago.
Do you remember there was going to be a fifty percent tariff on Columbia.
Yes, And it lasted about five or six hours.
I was sort of desperately swatting up on the Colombian economy, just like I've been swatting up on the Iranian economy.
But it's like if a tree falls in the wood with nobody to see it.
If a tree doesn't fall in the woods, but somebody tweets about it, does it mean that the tree has in fact fallen?
Speaker 3You know?
Speaker 4I mean trying to sort of invert it.
But if we're living in a reality where the news is every time the resident vocalizes something on his mind, that's not normally how leaders communicate, and markets don't normally have to deal with this huge dilemma of do I take this seriously or don't IY.
Speaker 2We're really excited to have Megan Greenwell with us.
She is a Bloomberg BusinessWeek contributor and author of the new book Bad Company, Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.
Welcome Megan, Thank you.
Speaker 3For having me Yeah.
I was super excited about this conversation, not only because Meghan's book is great.
You are investigating how private equity affects people's lives or communities the economy, but also because this topic is super noosy.
Right now, we're at this moment where private equity, after being this ridiculously successful asset class from an investor perspective, is facing all these challenges.
Places like Yale are trying to get out of their investments in private equity, trying to their holdings in private equity, and meanwhile, the private equity industry is desperately trying to bring the rest of us regular people into the asset class via their four one K is trying to get these businesses into your retirement plans, into my retirement plans, and I thought we could talk about that as well.
Speaker 2Yes, definitely a lot to discuss, Megan, before we get started, would you mind defining private equity for us?
What is private equity and how does it work?
Speaker 6Private equity bundles money from various types of investors, so university endowments, public pension funds, ultra wealthy individuals, investment firms, whatever.
But then they combine that money together with huge bank loans to take over companies and what they call leveraged buyouts.
So often people confuse private equity and venture capital.
Venture capital is investing in startups and taking a piece of that company.
Private equity, for the most part, is executing these leveraged buyouts to take over companies wholesale.
Speaker 2They want to take them over in order to.
Speaker 6I mean ideally they'd like to take them public.
Speaker 3I mean they need to sell them basically either selling them to the public via an ito.
Speaker 2Saving houses where you're like, we're going to buy this house, We're going to install a new kitchen, fix, shine it up, and then sell it for triple what we paid to.
Speaker 3Yeah, except a lot of the time these are kind of either declining businesses or businesses that are healthy but in shrinking industries, or businesses that are troubled in one way or another.
Right, And the whole point of the private equity firm is they're going to very quickly, and you said it in your answer, like turn things around, cut costs, and then it'll be worth more and that and they will get paid along the way, and then also, hopefully if everything works out, sell for a higher price than they bought for.
Speaker 2And what kinds of businesses are they in right now?
Speaker 6One of the interesting things about reporting this book was seeing the evolution of which businesses they used to be in versus which ones they're in now.
So I write in the book a bunch about Toys r US, which which was acquired by two private equity firms or IP Yes, two private equity firms and a real estate trust in two thousand and five.
And at that time retail was huge for private equity.
They really wanted in on big retail chains because they were under threat from Amazon, but there was some thinking that a bunch of them could still be saved.
What ended up happening was a bunch of them were saved, but not the ones owned by private equity.
But now, for the most part, private equity is largely out on retail.
Now you see a ton of private equity in hospitals, veterinarians, dentists, preschools, all of these kind of like recession proof industries because like your kid has to go to preschool and your grandma needs to go to a nursing home regardless of how the economy is doing.
So you can really like trace that evolution over time and also see how they use the same playbook in retail businesses like Toys r US and now are using it in businesses like hospitals.
Speaker 3I mean, the whole argument of this book is that private equity and the way it does business is bad.
It's bad for the economy.
It's bad for these businesses.
Can you just lay that out for us, Like, why you think that's the case that the subtitles private equity and the death of the American Dream.
Speaker 2That doesn't sound bad.
Speaker 6So I think private equity is really good for private equity firms and pretty good most of the time for their investors.
Though it's complicated and it turns out to be very bad for the companies they acquire and their workers and the communities that rely on them.
And one of the biggest reasons for that is when they take out these loans to acquire a company, the debt for those loans is assigned not to the private equity firm that made the decision to take them out, but actually to the company it's acquiring.
So if I come in and buy Toys r Us.
In this case, what happened was Toys r US was purchased for something like six billion dollars and five five point two billion dollars of that was loans, and only Toys Rs itself was responsible for paying that debt back.
And Toys RS had always been a very fiscally conservative company.
They did not have a lot of debt.
Ever, now all of a sudden, they were just buried under interest payments and their private equity owners were not helping them repay that money.
And so the reason toys Rs went out of business was not Amazon.
It was the fact that they didn't have any money to compete with Amazon or anybody else because they were so buried under interest payments.
Speaker 3Well, it's kind of like how if you're an investor flipping houses, you might borrow against the property that you're flipping, right, Yeah, it's exactly like that.
I guess.
The difference is that a lot of these businesses have an importance to the community that maybe viewed from the thirty thousand or fifty thousand whatever, far away view of a bunch of Wall Street investors, it just looks like an asset and an asset that you can maybe try to optimize if it if it fails, you know, who cares or whatever.
But up close, there's like a real human cost.
Yeah.
Speaker 6So in the case of toys Rs, I focus on this woman who was supporting her family of five single handedly on a toys Rs salary, and when she and thirty three thousand toys Rs workers lost their jobs, their contracts guaranteed severance, but because it was a bankruptcy brought on by these huge loans, they didn't get any severance.
And so now all of a sudden you have this situation where all of these people are out of jobs and cannot feed their families.
Meanwhile, you know Toys Rs.
Yes it's a big box store, but it was an important part of a lot of communities tax revenue wise, also like seemingly dumb little things like sponsoring the local Little League team.
Speaker 3You said that private equity has been good at making money for private equity investors.
I'm curious the Trump administration and in particular the people running the sec for Donald Trump, are very interested in basically getting rid of the barrier that prevented normal people.
Do you think that that actually makes sense for a normal investor.
Speaker 2Well, and we should say that right now from what I understand, for one case, can't invest in private.
Speaker 3Actually four to one CA's.
But like regular people, regular people, you have to be what's called an accredited investor, meaning you have to like show that you either have like a decent amount of sophistication or wealth or both.
Speaker 2And there's a push now to kind of get rid of some of those barriers let people in in private equities go again, Oh, totally.
Speaker 6Private equity has to disclose very little about how it operates, where it's money it is going, or even how it's performing.
So if you are not a very very highly trained, very obsessively observant investor, I would be very nervous about getting involved in private equity.
Speaker 2So do you think that, for one, CAS will start getting into private equity?
Speaker 1So?
Speaker 6I mean, private equity is very exciting about this possibility because it would give them literally trillions of more dollars at their disposal.
And so if you're looking to fund other private equity acquisitions, you know you're a bank or something that starts to look pretty good too.
It would give private equity so much more power in our economy, and it is already so powerful in our economy.
So yes, I think it is very likely to happen.
Speaker 3What's your sense of why private equity firms are suddenly like, really excited about getting retirees money instead of just having pension funds and university endowments and the sort of you know, quote unquote institutional investors who in the past have been their main source of capital.
Speaker 6Part of it is.
The private equity industry is just worried right now their rates of return have gone down.
Yale is now pulling a bunch of its money out of private equity.
Speaker 2They have a big endowment, they're huge investments.
Correct, why are they pulling out?
Speaker 6They are pulling out because they are concerned about, you know, having their money in their long term, whether it's going to pay off well enough for them long term.
The Pennsylvania State Public Employees' pension Fund recently did something similar where they downscaled the amount of money they have in private equity because even if they're getting good returns year to year, they're just worried that ay, they're not getting enough information to really know, and b they're not performing at the level that private equity is promising over the long term.
You know, they just want to make sure they're proactive in finding new sources of capital.
And part of it is this requires a regulation change.
And I think Donald Trump has really stacked his inner circle with private equity people, and it is a good time to sort of say, hey, buddy, you know all that money we gave to you during the campaign cycle, like give us this little favor in return.
Speaker 2What is the danger here?
Like, what is the real danger that you see of the trajectory we're on of private equity getting involved in kind of new industries and growing and potentially getting four one K money?
Like where does this end?
Or why is this potentially a problem.
Speaker 6I think as private equity swallows more and more of our lives, we see the effects of that in more and more ways.
Right, So, you know, classically, when private equity comes in, prices go up and quality of care goes down.
That is one thing when it's like Toys r Us or when it's my snarky online sports magazine.
That is a much bigger problem when it is a hospital.
So I write about this doctor in rural Wyoming who I followed for two years.
The hospital he worked at got taken over by private equity, and all of a sudden, you couldn't deliver a baby at that hospital.
And it's rural Wyoming, so that means you can't deliver a baby within thirty miles, and that's thirty miles through windswept canyon in a Wyoming winter.
So I do think that in very real ways, people's quality of life and actually people's real lives, you know, people's life or death is determined by this in ways that private equity firms don't seem particularly invested in, and as that continues to grow and grow and grow unchecked, we need to have a reckoning about the real world effects of this industry that doesn't really care about the rest of us having that kind of.
Speaker 2Power and is getting into sort of more personal and sensitive parts of our lives.
Speaker 6If they're in your hospital and your grandma's nursing home and your kids preschool, they're in public utilities.
Now they own a lot of landlords.
They can really run your entire life in a lot of cases without you even knowing it, and so then you don't even have the information, much less the ability to sort of push back and say no, no, I want to live my life under some different model of capitalism.
Speaker 2Megan, thank you so much for talking private equity with us.
The book is called Bad Company.
It is really it's such a great read.
Check it out.
Speaker 3Stacey, it's time to talk about our underrated story of the week.
I think the story we need to talk about this week is the Trump mobile, a new mobile trump phone that Trump is using my new mobile carrier.
I can only assume but right as we were getting in the studio, you called an audio.
Speaker 2Okay, So, Max, you wrote a feature piece this week which I have not been able to stop thinking about, and it is about someone very similar to Donald Trump in a lot of ways.
Very famous entrepreneur, hit television show, someone kind of known for straight talk, who's very much connected to our day to day lives, Mark Cuban.
Speaker 3Yeah.
The funny thing is your tea's worked whether or not we were talking about Cuban or Donald Trump.
But yeah, we just BusinessWeek published a story about Mark Cuban, and it's a profile of his latest thing, which is a attempt to make healthcare prices lower.
But it's also a look at this very unlikely political figure.
People probably remember that Cuban was sort of involved tangentially in the twenty twenty four election as a as a surrogate for Kamala Harris, although not a very.
Speaker 2When not judging Shark Tank.
Yeah, when I'm most famous for.
Speaker 3It, right, He's famous for previously owning the Dallas Mavericks, being a star of Shark Tank, being this kind of just like Donald Trump, like a kind of professional billionaire, a guy who plays a billionaire in the media, and you might think, first of all, he's not that, he's not that liberal.
He's basically a centrist.
He's a fan of Ein Ran and in case.
He is not a conventional democratic politician, and that is kind of why actually a lot of Democrats are excited about him.
Speaker 2Has he talked about running for president or has his name been floated?
Speaker 3His name has been floated, because at various times over the last ten years he has said he might run for president.
He told me in our interview that he is not interested in running for president.
This is always the lie, which is a little bit different from saying like, you're definitely not going to do it.
It wasn't what I think is called a Shermanesque denial.
It was a denial, but one that, of course you could imagine changing.
And when you look at kind of what he's doing, he is acting like someone who is at least exploring the possibility.
And that's what I heard when I talked to political consultants on both sides of the aisle.
Speaker 2Well, the thing that really struck me is the idea of the power of being a public businessman.
That was a lot of white people like Trump too.
He's just known to be a businessman.
He's a successful businessman.
He plays one on two.
And Mark Cuban also has that where you look at me like, oh, that guy knows what he's doing.
He can take care of the economy, even this election when immigration was a huge issue, Economy's always the top issue for voters, And that was really interesting to me that that was kind of Trump's superpower.
People kind of de facto trusted him, and that Mark Cuban might have that quality too.
Speaker 3Yeah.
I mean, the other interesting thing about Cuban is that he's able to simultaneously be moderate.
He said things like he wants to cut the deficit things like that, while also sounding like a populist and like that has been one of Donald Trump's like secret secrets.
Yeah, so Cuban is simultaneously sounding like a moderate while also railing against the insurance industry, sounding basically not that different from like Bernie Sanders on an issue like healthcare, although advocating very different policy positions.
And there's something like inherently funny about the idea of like a Mark Cuban who's sort of famous for, like you said, playing a billionaire on TV and also like shouting at the Dallas Mavericks from the sidelines and getting in trouble for shouting.
Speaker 2But also giving people like the little guy a shot at their dreams, funding these tiny companies.
Like, what's more American dream than that?
I love shark Tank.
It's so emotional.
It's all about business, which of course I spend all my time thinking about, and I love small businesses.
I'm just thinking, if Mark Cuban did become president, he could do like a shark tank for like bills, right, like people bring their proposals, they could shark tank the bills.
Speaker 3I would not hate that, Mark Cuban.
Stacy Vani Smith is available.
Just email the chief of staff everybody dot net if you're interested, Absolutely, Stacy.
We've had a lot of reviews come in.
Speaker 2Yes, shot, thank you everybody who's left review.
Speaker 3As you promised, and I agreed that I was going to write a haikup.
Speaker 2I promised that you would write haikus.
Speaker 3Every reviewer, yes, and I am behind.
But luckily you have stepped in and written one for us.
You want to tell us about it and then perform.
Speaker 2Yes, well.
I based mine on the economic principle of negativity bias, which means that if your salary goes up by five percent, you're like kind of happy, but if it goes down by five percent, you are furious.
And so this happens with ratings too, right Like, most of our ratings have been very, very positive and it's been lovely to see and we've been really excited.
Speaker 3But we didn't want to leave out the he because.
Speaker 2He is still still a listen.
We did get a one star review from Guy InChI and he said that there was a liberal bias.
So here is my hikup for him.
This is for you guy.
To the Guy InChI who says we are too liberal, my dad thinks so too, he does.
Shout out, shout out to shout out to you dad.
Speaker 3List keep leaving the reviews, and we are grateful there are actually a bunch of positive reviews here.
Bring us and trumpets, nors Zeig, Sean Michael Man.
We we appreciate you too, and we will have more haikups in the days that come as people leave more reviews.
Please do and we will hit you up.
We will Stacy will write you another poems.
Speaker 2No is it supposed to be you?
Speaker 3Okay or me?
Okay, I'll do it and thank you again for leaving those reviews.
Keep them coming.
This show is produced by Stacey Wog Magnus Hendrickson is our supervising producer, Amy Keen our editor, and Brendan Francis Newham is our executive producer.
We get engineering help from Blake Maple's and Dave Purcell fact checks.
A big thank you to.
Speaker 5Laura Milian Rodrigo, Riuela, Clara Ernans, Lita Raga, and of course our good friend Jeff Muscus Sage Bauman heads Bloomberg Podcasts.
Speaker 3And we got to say thank you to the parents who helped us collect that audio.
You are awesome and your kids are so cute.
I'm not talking about my kids, by the way, And if you have a story that we should be talking about, email us at everybody's at Bloomberg dot net.
That's everybody with an ask at Bloomberg dot need.
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