Richmond Fed’s Tom Barkin on the Surprisingly Resilient Real Economy
31m 20s
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Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracey Alley.
And I'm Joe Wasnto.
Joe, we're still in Jackson Hole. That's right.
Plenty to talk about. Plenty.
We just got the speech from Fed share Kevin Worsh. That's right.
Which I think most people would describe as hawk-ish, although maybe there's kind of a gap
in between the hawk and the ish part. Sure.
And there's still plenty of questions about the direction of the U.S. economy and monetary policy
in general. So we should talk a little bit more about it.
We should. And beyond that, there's many theoretical questions out there.
What is the neutral rate of interest? What is the role of AI on productivity?
And all of that is very interesting. Where's the term premium at?
But also, it would be interesting to know what the central bankers are hearing about
actual businesses right now. And like, what's going on on the ground?
On the ground color. Okay. And there is one man that we go to.
For on the ground color, we have the perfect guest, of course.
We're going to be speaking with Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin.
So Tom, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.
Great to be back with you. I think it's my third year in a row.
We're here in Jackson Hole. Oh, we appreciate it.
Yeah, now when they let you outside of the hotel room, we get the two tons in the back.
So this is great. That's right. The production values have gone up, I will say.
Okay, so let's just start very simply,
Worship speech. What do you think? I mean, he does a great job. He's a great speaker.
And I thought it was a very authentic speech. I mean, Kevin laid out, I think,
how he sees the world. He laid out how he sees the economy.
The folks I've talked to, you know, appreciate the clarity and the thing.
And I personally thought he had a very accurate sense of the economy.
So I was very much aligned with what he said. And I thought he said it well.
You know, so he said, okay, inflation seems to be going in the wrong direction right now.
He described policy as not restrictive. So then you fill in the blanks.
And it's like, okay, that means rate hikes, but he didn't quite say that.
Just for you, as you see things, A, do you agree about inflation and the stance of policy?
But then more importantly, then what do we do about it?
Yeah, so the economy solid, I think he said that.
Yeah. And you can definitely see that. And the GDP numbers and the consumer spending numbers.
I mean, it's been crazy this year that gas prices went up and consumer spending accelerated.
It's been crazy that you have all this uncertainty and artificial intelligence spending has led
business investment to, you know, almost doubled versus this historic thing.
So there's a lot of momentum in the economy.
Jobs market seems to have stabilized unemployment rates low.
So all that's good.
And I'm not saying inflation is just ahead in the wrong direction.
It's just not in the right place.
Okay.
And that's how I think it's not in the right place.
I also would say the job market's good, but it's not frothy.
Yeah.
I mean, we do slow higher, low fire thing continues.
And so that's where the policy thing we'll figure out.
I've had the number one thing people have asked me after his speech is, well, I guess that makes,
you know, just September, that tells you something for September.
And I said, well, I listened to his speech.
And I'm pretty sure he doesn't like forward guidance, right?
So I don't think you should take any forward guidance from a speech from a guy who doesn't
give forward guidance.
And I think it's probably good to think about this as the problem.
No, I know.
But it's, I mean, I think you can talk about the economy in a very good way.
And then you can talk about forward guidance.
If you choose not to do forward guidance, you don't do forward guidance.
I want to talk more about forward guidance, but since you mentioned the resilience of the
economy, do you have a working theory for what's going on here?
Because I think to your point earlier, it's surprised a lot of people that even with prices,
still pretty high gas going up all the economic uncertainty consumers keep spending.
They do keep spending.
And I would compare it to coming out of the Great Recession, where at the Great Recession,
you had people who lost their jobs, lost their house, lost their car, savings destroyed,
need a rebuild for retirement.
We had five, six, seven years, the secular stagnation where people weren't spending the way
you thought they would.
I compare it to COVID.
We thought for two months it was going to be terrible.
But then coming out of it, people had money in their pockets.
You had stimulus.
You had spending, money hadn't spent.
You had equity values up.
You had home values up.
And I think you had a mindset that just says, I'm bound to determine to spend.
And so we all know the wealthy people are spending because they have more wealth.
And even those with less wealth, what I hear is a very creative consumer, figuring out
ways to find money, to spend money, to bar from the future.
You can see the finding money in the growth of private label, the move to Walmart and dollar
stores, if you look at their results.
But people aren't carrying insurance.
There's a story in the journal a couple of weeks ago about more people living from home.
You know, you and I think more people living from home, oh my God, my kids are coming back.
I think, wait a second, those are people not paying rent.
They're using that money to spend on something else.
And I've talked to auto lenders who talk about people being 60 days to liquid, not 120 days
to liquid because they don't want to, they need to find the money, but they don't want
to lose their car.
I've talked to gas providers who say people aren't paying the gas bill during the summer because
no one's going to have a problem with gas in the summer.
It's the winner that matters.
So people are finding ways to effectively borrow from the future, savings rates down.
And I think that's what's keeping the spending going.
And underneath it all is this just positive energy to keep spending.
And I really do think as long as the markets are healthy and people have jobs, they're going
to keep finding ways to spend.
That was a very good sort of summary of one of the engines of the economy that's clearly
continuing to fire.
We traveled with you.
It was that 2023 or 2024 that we were in Mount Erie.
The 2024 I think.
2024.
And at that point, one of the things, you know, we were talking about sort of rural housing
issues, rural child care issues.
But also in one of the things that came up was the scarcity of skilled trades.
Yeah.
And now I have to imagine it's much worse because every, you know, if you're skilled electrician
who probably are working, at least in theory, the AI boom, et cetera, we talked to Austin
Goolsbee yesterday, or I'm lost time, we talked to Austin Goolsbee maybe two days ago.
And he's like, yes, we hear a lot of people complaining about the date, scarcity of skilled
trades and the AI build out.
People are always complaining.
Now, he wasn't sure how much is actually related to data center and AI construction.
What's your read on the scarcity of parts, materials, and labor for general things and
the degree to which AI investment is crowding out and making life more difficult for other
types of industry?
Yeah.
So it's been a monumental construction investment cycle.
700 billion announced in one week, I think at the beginning of February alone.
And for sure, if you're trying to find switch gears or transformers or electricians, they
are very hot and in very short supply.
So there's no doubt in my mind that there are constraints being put on it.
I think the overall construction cycle that was fascinating because office buildings aren't
being built, multi-family starts are way down.
You do have industrialists starting to come back, home buildings okay, not great.
And so I do think there's been a big movement in terms of construction from one sector of
the construction market into another sector of the construction market.
Now how much of that is crowding out, I think is a good question because when I talk to
people and let's say multi-family construction, they'll tell me you can't pencil it out.
And they want to talk about interest rates.
And of course, I say well, is it really interest rates because we had the same interest rates
in 0405 and you were building lots of buildings.
And then they'll acknowledge that construction costs are up and labor costs are up and they
have to put more equity into projects and all that kind of stuff.
And so it's more than that, but you could argue that all this data center construction
is making it more expensive to do this other construction, which means they're not doing
this other construction because it's more expensive.
So there's a chicken and egg question in there.
Just within your district, I know you travel around and as we said, you like to talk to
people on the ground and actual businesses.
But what are the most notable impacts of AI that you're seeing so far, whether it's on
something like the labor market in the low higher, low fire environment or prices?
Well, so it's interesting, I mean, the number one impact is a political impact.
And what I mean by that is every Chamber of Commerce meeting I do, every town hall I do,
I'm getting questions about jobs and water and data centers and all the rest of it.
It's really quite striking.
And you can see when you travel, the issues on people's minds by the questions.
they ask. In terms of the economy itself, I don't think it's having this massive productivity
impact quite yet. Outside of just a couple areas where there really is a structure where
you can substitute an agent for, like call centers, programming. I mean, you see it there.
There's some, you know, heavy documentation, compliance documents. But by and large,
the productivity boom we're seeing, which is significant, I think has really been driven
by O22 when you had people short workers. And so they invested in automation, they invested
in new staffing models and different operating processes. And they're reaping the benefits
of those today. And people are enthusiastic owners, executives are enthusiastic about AI,
workers somewhat less so. But it's still being very much used as an extra added, get my job
done better, get my job done, you know, faster kind of thing. The one place you see it that was
on the hiring side because, you know, this may not be true for Bloomberg. But in everywhere else
in the economy, people are saying, you know, I don't know what the future looks like. Maybe I don't
need to hire as much. I wonder whether AI can do that job. And so why don't you leverage and see
if you can't fill the job using AI first and then we'll hire later. That's happening, you know,
at some scale. And so I do think that's the place, you know, where it's most relevant.
You know, one thing that's clearly working in, I guess, the Fed's favor when it comes to the
dual mandate is the housing market is pretty, you know, it's not very hot. That's sort of most of the
numbers there are going in the right direction, so to speak, from a getting inflation back to
target perspective. But how confident are you that that will persist, especially if we've had
softness and construction? Then eventually, do you have any anxiety that eventually then that
turns into housing tightness again? Oh, I think that's highly likely, you know, at some point you
won't have it. You've got a whole generation of people who really want houses and the prices
aren't quite right for them. At some point, you know, they'll have their second kid and they
need a bigger house or they'll and so the demand will come. And then if you don't have the housing
inventory, you know, whether it's rental or single family, then the prices will go back up.
I will say we sort of got in the mode a few years ago that I think we should back off of trying
to take the inflation data in part set, you know, and take this part out of it and this part out of it.
It's very tempting to do that and to find it to torture it and get the answer you want.
And I was getting, for a while, you know, when rents were coming, where market rent numbers were
coming down faster than the CPI rent numbers. I was getting emails from real estate developers saying
you've got your numbers wrong and the rents are coming down faster. Well, I'm not getting those
emails anymore, you know, they're not saying, hey, let's take the article that Apple, you know,
your Apple phone just got more expensive. No, I mean, so you don't want to overpass it. You want
to say overall, there's about a money in the system. There's an amount of goods people are trying
to buy, you know, with that money. Maybe prices of housing came down, but maybe prices of something
go up and you're looking at inflation as a total basket. That's how I like to think about it.
Yeah, so Worch was talking about this yesterday, you know, he was talking about looking at the breadth
of inflation and things like that. And I'm curious, do you still see, he was also talking about a
lot of the one-off shocks that we've seen. So the Iran war and the impact on gas prices and things
like that is the overall environment, just more inflationary in general when we see these one-off
shocks that just seem to keep coming, right? It's like this month, it's this one thing and okay,
maybe it'll fade away into the background after a while, but then the next month, there's another
thing on the way. It seems like it. And I think the question is, is normal today or was normal 10
years ago? And I think normal may be a lot more like today than it was 10 years ago. If you think
about the environment at 10 years ago fracking and what that did to help bring energy prices down
and demographics, which meant you had more workers and kept wage costs under control and e-commerce
and, you know, which was bringing prices down for stuff, you know, you bought online. And there
were just a bunch of globalization access. All these factors, which were, I think, bringing inflation
down, I don't think it's ridiculous to imagine that 10 years later, you might have a bunch of
factors that would be bringing inflation up. Now, the inflation we realize in time depends on what
we do about it. So just because, you know, I like to use the analogy of sailing, you know,
you just sail differently if you've got the wind behind you that if you're sailing into the wind,
you can still get there. You just have to, you know, tighten your sheet. And I think that's the
kind of risk we've got if you're in a world with an ever continuing sense of inflationary shocks,
you just have to lean against that way.
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So obviously, one of the things that came up in the speech, and again, we know that
Chairman Worsh is not a fan of forward guidance. There's going to be these task forces, etc. that
may revisit some of the feds approaches to communications, etc. Would you be on board with say,
you know what, we don't need dots anymore. We don't need to have press conferences like for most
and feds history, the chair didn't ever press conference. Would you in your mind should all
of these things be on the table? Should you be talking to us right now? Yeah, seriously.
So there sort of, there were some of us that said the theory of a great mind is being able to hold
two opposable thoughts at the same time. So I hold the following two thoughts to be very clear.
One is, if we're relatively transparent about how we think about things,
that helps build credibility with the public, it helps build trust in the institution,
and it helps markets do some of the work for you. That's the famous Bernanke theory.
I also 100% agree with Chairman Worsh when he says, sometimes if you give too much forward guidance,
you get stuck in it, and you end up having to make a suboptimal decision because you've misguided.
And I think it's fair to say that's part of the 2021-2022 story, which is we had very strong
forward guidance in place, and it was very hard to get your way out of it. So I can hold both those
thoughts at the same time, and I hope to keep coming and talking to you as long as you'll have me.
>>What about like Dawson's specific techniques? >>So we'll have to debate the techniques and I'm
sure we will. My view on the SEP is I really like doing the SEP. I mean, I like negotiating,
arguing, debating with my team. My policy bias next to my economy bias, and it often happens that
I've gotten a little out of whack. I still think the policy ought to be that, but I'm not really
thinking about it in the right way. And we have those debates, and I feel really sharpens my thinking.
So regardless of whether we release it or not, I plan to keep doing an SEP because I think having
your own forecast and working against the forecast is a pretty healthy thing. Now it should be
release it. The one thing I don't like about the SEP is I think the dot plot itself is a picture
that overwhelms the story. And I've said this in other forums, but if what comes out as I go do a
Chamber of Commerce in Greensboro and somebody says to me, well, I see the Fed promised two more rate cuts
this year, then that's not good communication because that's not what we've done. We've done a
set of forecasts independently. And so good communication to me has to communicate well. And if what's
happening is that picture is swamping the narrative, then we're going to think differently about
the picture. >>So I take the point that there's a risk with forward guidance that the Fed could get
boxed into a certain decision in a suboptimal way. But that said, and I also take the point that
there's a distinction between forward guidance and the reaction function in general. But all of that
said, at some point, if inflation is above target, you would think the Fed needs to act and
Worsh kind of insinuated this in his speech. He talked about, well, inflation's been above target
for what was it 65 months or something. And he said that is squarely on the Fed. When you hear
something like that, I mean, you were in the room. You were at the Fed for part or all of the past 65
months. What do you think? What's your reaction? >>Well, I'm definitely a 100% insistent on getting
inflation under control. And I think it's fair to hold that mirror against what we're doing and ask
ourselves the question of whether we're doing it the right way. I think there are two ways you could
look at where we are today. You can take a 65 month view or you can take a, I'll get
the months right, 47 month view followed by an 18 month view. Okay and if you do this second,
which I'm not arguing for, I'm just saying it's a perfectly defensible way to do it,
is you say inflation happened, maybe we were a little slow, we raised rates, inflation came down,
if you go to March of 2025, you've got 2.3, 2.4% inflation and everything seems to be headed
in the right direction, the economy's moving, the labor market was a little weak, the plane
is going to land and then of course you've had this series of external shocks whether it be AI
or tariffs or oil price increases and that's taken inflation right back up but you could argue in
that and then we'll bring it down. That is an argument, it's a colorable argument and it's not a
65 month argument, it's a 47 and 18 month argument. On the other hand you say don't give me your excuses,
it's been 65 months and it's been over and you know maybe rates aren't that restrictive and maybe
you have to think about, and that's the argument I'm sure we're going to have. What are manufacturers
in your district saying about tariffs these days? It feels like it's become behind AI and oil shock,
we don't even talk about trade. It's a lot quieter than it is now but I mean it depends
what sector you are. I mean if you're a steel or aluminum manufacturer that's created a price
umbrella that's helped your industry, if you're somebody moving operations into the country,
you know there's a real argument there. The people who are the most unhappy about it are the
people who it affects the most and the ones who are most poignant if I could put it that way are
the foreign manufacturers who have assembly operations. Many of them are in South and North Carolina
and they say no we've actually moved manufacturer to the US but you know what that actually means
is they create their components in Europe and they ship them to the US and then they assemble them,
they're still getting tariffed and so you have those sorts of you know stories out there. You know
quietly what's happened on the tariff side is the numbers went up the collections were never as
big as the numbers were and then the Supreme Court ruled and they've put through all these refunds
so one of the reasons you're not hearing a lot about it is for the last three or four months
people have been collecting refunds as opposed to paying more tariffs and when you're collecting
you're not talking about it quite as much right you know when it's working to your advantage.
Are the refunds stimulative in your mind? I mean it's a decent chunk of money it has to go small.
They're very positive for earnings. If you read through the earnings reports of the people who've
gotten the refunds you hear they're going to reinvest it in the customer you hear a lot of that.
Reinvestment in the customer occasionally is price but I think it's a lot more marketing store
refits you know staffing levels so positive earnings are stimulative I mean companies do less likely
to do layoffs more likely to hire more likely to invest so it is stimulative but is it coming through
to price I think in very targeted ways but not in a massive system wideway. Well this was also
going to be my next question because there was a debate about the tariff pass through into price
and I think some people would have said when the tariffs were first announced well consumers are
stretched companies aren't going to be able to pass them on but now we've seen consumer spending
just you know stay resilient as we discussed earlier how are you thinking about that pass through
ability now. So the B2B companies I talked to to a person they're convinced they're passing it
through tariff costs have come in I've had to pass it through I know they don't like it on the other
side but what am I going to do we have to do it and they tell me they've been pretty successful
at passing it through if you're a B2C company back in April of 25 you would have said oh yeah I've
got to pass it through a lot of them had trouble passing it through easier if you serve wealthy
customers harder if you serve less wealthy customers but those people who sell into the major
big box retailers they tell me they're having a devil of a time trying to pass it through
and the mindset of those retailers is I need to find some price to give to my customers so you
know I think the consumer pushback is very real it's most real B2C it's most real load of moderate
income you know B2C and then you might say you just told me earnings were good how's that
happening and that's where the productivity stuff comes in there's been very little wage pressure
and people are really driving productivity again through the set of things I think that they
launched three or four years ago those big box retailers they're truly our strongest soldiers
of the fight against inflation holding the line on prices on behalf of the customers well that's
another you know I was talking about all the disinflationary stuff in the 2010s the rise of the
big box retails the rise of private label brands all those things you know help keep prices under
control and help keep spending okay you're saying we didn't know how good we we had I want to
actually go back to just because it's still in the news these days you mentioned you go around and
people talk about data centers and stuff like that and the picture that like I always have in my
mind I haven't done any like on the ground reporting on this topic but the picture I have in my
mind is a lot of people very anxious about it and then a town manager or mayor like trying to
explain to them oh it's going to bring your property bill down or actually you have plenty you
know then the people are said is that more or less the shape of it that you have some people either
at the business community or the town management community that says that this could be a good thing
and they're trying to persuade the citizens that actually could be like is that more or less right
here's the thing if I have a manufacturing plant in my hometown yeah then the kids of the
people who work in the manufacturing plant are on the baseball team and on the football team
and on the hockey team and if you have a data center they don't have very many employees
yeah so people don't really know so the data center thing is exactly what you described you've got
the economic developers talking about how great this is for the tax base and the citizens saying
whatever version of I don't like what it's doing to water I don't like how it looks I don't trust
AI you know it's been politicized in that way but I think at its core it doesn't it brings
tax dollars but it doesn't bring enough workers yeah after the construction for the citizens
to have friends who work in the data centers yeah and so there's no political base I I tease
sometimes that they ought to name an elementary school after you know Microsoft or Google or
whoever and say you know here's Google alone they just brought you this you know if you're going
to market they just brought you this elementary school but that does not how people think about it
is there a point at which the political pushback against data centers because becomes a big enough
economic issue that the Fed has to pay attention to it because if you think about price pressures
in the economy a lot of them are coming through on the construction side because of the data center
build out if you think about growth components a lot of people will say that AI build out is a big
driver of that well I like to say we're going to grow the AI footprint of this country massively
but we have no idea how massively we're going to grow the data center footprint massively we have
no idea how massively we're going to grow the energy but and the one thing we know is we're going
to get those numbers wrong and so we don't know whether we're going to get the number too many
or too few and so you know there could be a backlash on data centers and maybe that'll be the
perfect thing to do economically because we won't over build the way we would have otherwise
over build or maybe they're won't and now we're going to under build so yes it could have a big
impact but I do not have I need AI forecasting skills to help me figure out how big this thing's
going to be because you're trying to meet a very significant moving target have you tried asking
chat GPT what it thinks just type it in just ask I've also asked chat GPT to try to write a speech
for me and I didn't think it did a very good job it could never it could never capture your voice
have you been back to mount areas since we've been there I've been through not I haven't stopped
but I've definitely driven I think we should like we and I was in Greensboro just to say I was thinking
we do a revision house striking the questions we would be asking now versus maybe like in 2027
like I don't know what your schedule is like absolutely because I'm curious about you know
the state of housing obviously I'm curious how that big textile manufacturer that was doing
the synthetic textiles is doing I'm curious about the carport companies like there's just
a bunch of things would be fun to go revisit that no we'd love to have you back and I'm in West
Virginia next week if you guys have any time we'll take you there I'm on vacation
well okay speaking of AI we've mentioned productivity quite a lot already but there is this
assumption that at some point you you might get this big productivity boom and so maybe that
gives the Fed a little bit of room when it comes to things like our star and the neutral
rate of interest how far ahead should the Fed be looking when it comes to expecting that
productivity boom because he in the here and now you know it's not that evident and in the here
and now it's it's most tangible impact on the economy is higher prices I think it's really hard
to make a forecast of what it's going to do a year two three years from now like I say the range
of possible outcomes very wide in addition how that outcome pays out in terms of prices or
borrowing rates because you know you could be crowding out capital or labor employment is a big deal
and so you know and I think Kevin said this yesterday you could have models of this thing that
end up looking very inflationary and you have to move one way or things that look you know very
distressing for the economy you have to go another way and there's 18 different versions in
between and so you know we can argue about the direction but I think you've got to get you know
some more confidence before you could make too much policy based on an assumption I just have
one last question and I know you're going to play it coy like uh so I will not ask you you know
what are we doing at the next meeting no no not even um have the two worst meetings felt
substantively different than problem meetings we have it's we've been these meetings for a long time
yeah they're you know relatively structured and how they go I believe you know as part of these
task forces we're going to take a fresh look at everything we do including these meetings
but by and large they've looked like the meetings we've had and okay the chair has shown up and
you know led very well and I think uh you know he does like this idea of a family fight is a phrase
he likes to use and you know he's encourages that kind of debate we certainly have that is the
nature of the debate feel any more open or different or would you say that Palo meetings were
We're also a family fight.
- There are a lot of different families.
families. Okay. Good to know. I'm thinking of that. What's that Russian quote? Yeah, all unhappy.
What's something like one? Yeah. Well, I had my last question was going to be something related,
but we know that one of the distinctive things about you and the way you fill the role as
regional Fed president is that you like to gather anecdotes and on the ground color. Are there
particular anecdotes or data series that Warsh is interested in versus Powell? Like, are there
particular things when you come to him and you say, you know, I was talking to the cardboard
company yesterday and they mentioned this that he's really interested in. Well, so what I try to do
is I try to come up with a synthesis that backs off from individual anecdotes. I think the anecdote
doesn't everyone likes a good story, but it doesn't really move policy. But if you can synthesize,
you know, like we're talking about consumers spending and where the B2C and the B2B, both Jay and Kevin
in my impression have been very attentive to that. You know, they live more in a cloister. I get
to go out a lot more than they get to go out because the press falls them everywhere. And, you know,
and so, you know, I think they really do want to hear what's happening there. And then the
challenge in the commitment I try to make is to tie it to whatever the issues are we have on
the ground. So, you know, productivity has expanded. What's driving it? How long is it going to last?
We've talked about that. Inflation, you know, underlying inflation. What's happening in the
consumer world in the bit? I think I try to tie it to those things and then bring a synthesis.
And that's where I try to do it. And I think they're both very appreciative. At least they tell
me that. All right. Well, Tom, thank you so much for coming back on all blocks. And hopefully,
we can all do another road trip in New York. We'll see you next year here and maybe in the
mountain area. Really look forward to it. Thanks, you guys. I love chatting with Tom. You know what I
thought was really interesting is his description of the creative ways consumers are continuing to spend,
which actually I don't think has gotten the attention probably it's deserved, right? Because there's
so much talk about, you know, the inflationary impulse from all the business investment happening
right now. And then people talk about oil, etc. But the de-saving or the disaving and
the going into debt and finding ways to continue to consume. We hear about it a little bit. We talk
about it and we talk about BNPL and stuff like that. But maybe that's the thing we should be
paying more attention to. I always thought this strong consumption was like maybe sort of like
a nihilistic response pandemic experience. But you actually you don't see it that much in the
savings rate, right? Like I think the savings rate has gone down, but it's not like no it's not
plummeted, right? No, it doesn't feel like the sort of spending that you would expect before
like the upcoming hyperinflation where everyone's going out and buying silver candles. Well,
you probably buy silver candles to let everyone out. Yeah, I'm sure you do. We know what I'm saying.
It doesn't feel like that, but it does sound like the appetites keep buying stuff here. He laid it
out very well. I do think going back to Mount Erie next year would be a really good idea,
because if you just think back to 2024, I mean we didn't ask a single AI-related question, right?
No, I agree in like the process something bad about us as a journalist. No, none of them were talking
about it. They weren't talking about the textile company. Are you using chat GPT in your daily
operations? I don't think they would have had a response. Yeah, I can't really remember, but they
certainly no one was about data centers the same degree, and that boom really has been basically
over the last two years. So really like since we since we were past there, yeah, we got to go back.
There's some really interesting questions out there, and we got to get some answers. Another
all-lots road trip. Sounds good. Shall we leave it there? Let's let's leave it there. This has been
another episode of the all-lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alley. You can follow me at Tracy Alley.
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez,
at Carmen Arman. Dash will be in it at Dashbot. Kale Brooks and Kale Brooks and Kevin Luzano at
Kevin Lloyd Luzano. And for more all-lots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can
find that at Bloomberg.com/all-lots. And you can share about all of these topics 24/7 in our
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then please leave a comment or like the video or better yet. Subscribe. Thanks for watching and listening.
A new chapter in global growth is being written, and much of it is happening in Africa. Africa needs
to invest. There are deals to be done and business to be won. I'm Jennifer Zabasaget. Every week on
the next Africa podcast, we track capital flows and political shifts shaping the continent's future.
The digitalization of Africa is going to power its growth. Reading the world of something like
HIV is possible. Opulation growth is so enormous in Africa. Listen to next Africa on Apple's
Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Interactive Brokers provides global investment access across 170 markets and 29 currencies, enabling investors to diversify beyond U.S. borders.
AI tools like Chat GPT are being integrated into investment research and workflow automation, allowing users to analyze portfolios, identify undervalued opportunities, and generate actionable insights.
Central bank officials, including Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin, emphasize the importance of on-the-ground economic data, consumer spending resilience, and AI-driven productivity shifts—highlighting how inflation, housing, and trade impacts are evolving amid ongoing economic uncertainty.
Summary:
Interactive Brokers expands global investing access, offering investors tools to trade stocks, crypto, bonds, and more across 170 markets and 29 currencies, enabling a truly international portfolio. AI-powered platforms like Chat GPT are increasingly used to analyze investments, automate research, and turn scattered information into actionable work—transforming how users approach financial and project management tasks. In parallel, economic discussions highlight the resilience of consumer spending despite inflation concerns, driven by creative consumer behavior, dis-saving, and strong productivity gains.
Experts like Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin stress the importance of real-world data, noting that factors such as AI investment, data center construction, and trade tariffs are reshaping the economy. While inflation remains a concern, the labor market and consumer demand show stability, with housing market dynamics potentially shifting due to long-term supply-demand imbalances. Central banks are reevaluating forward guidance and transparency, emphasizing the need for balanced communication and policy flexibility.
Meanwhile, global growth is being redefined, particularly in Africa, where digital transformation and investment are expected to drive future economic development. The intersection of technology, consumer behavior, and macroeconomic policy underscores a complex, dynamic global economic environment.
FAQs
Interactive Brokers provides access to stocks, options, crypto, futures, bonds, and prediction markets across 170 global markets in 29 currencies, allowing investors to trade beyond U.S. borders.
Yes, you can connect AI platforms like ChatGPT to your Interactive Brokers account to research investments, analyze holdings, and identify undervalued opportunities.
ChatGPT Work is a feature that allows you to take action across apps and files, stay focused on projects for extended periods, and turn goals into finished work by organizing scattered information.
Venture Global builds large-scale energy facilities in the U.S. at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional projects, delivering American energy more efficiently and sustainably.
Central bank officials note AI is influencing labor markets and productivity, with some sectors using AI to reduce costs, while others are exploring whether AI can replace human roles in hiring and operations.
Despite high prices, consumers are adapting by borrowing from the future, using private label brands, and finding creative spending methods, which supports continued spending and economic resilience.
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