The Exchange from the New Statesman. Weekly, in-depth, long-form interviews with guests, including Salman Rushdie. Would you say you are in the 11th Hour of Life? I hope I'm only in about the 9th or 10th. Ai Weiwei. So if you were to put on an exhibition called Ai Weiwei, The Last Work, we shouldn't believe it. Actually, you shouldn't believe anything I said. And Masha Alyokina from Pussy Riot. Is there a world in which you could ever go back to Russia? Politically, we exist there. Physically, we do not exist there. Covering politics. The most governmentally illiterate Labour Prime Minister in history. Culture. I'm not in the mood to take any risks lately. Society. Should education be a commodity? No. And philosophy. Sex is both personal and political in public. Listen wherever you are listening to this. This is the Bloomberg Money Podcast. I'm Tom Keen with Scarlet Fu. Join us each week for a smart look at the forces shaping your financial life on personal finance, on retirement, and wealth management. We will explore how people are earning, investing, and building wealth. We are live Fridays at noon Eastern on Bloomberg Television. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen, and is always on the Bloomberg Terminal and the Bloomberg Business App. We've got a Bloomberg panel and Sarah Worthy's here to get us started. David Gura is with us. Lots to talk about with him. Really closer to the election in November. Mandeep Singh hasn't slept in three days. He joins us with Bloomberg Intelligence. You two were just together. Yes, we were. Were you on the technology show? Well, yeah. Thank you. Big listing just took place. Thank you. And with us today is Catherine Greifeld. Katie Greifeld, expert on ETFs. And, you know, I got out the surveillance Rolodex and the Bloomberg money, bolt-on Rolodex, and I said, who knows about Trump accounts? And we had exactly one person within the system ready to look at Trump accounts. Are you going to have a Trump account with a newly issued child? I mean, it's for children, kids born between 2025 and 2028, so I'm in the sweet spot here. She gets $1,000. She gets like an extra $1,000. I would never say no. But critically here, grandparents can put money in? Yes, but only up to five grand a year. A year? Yes. But they can do that until the kid's 18 or 20 or that? Theoretically. This is a building account. It goes into ETFs. How big a deal is this for Eric Belchunas' world? I mean, he's just been on fire this week, as Scarlett Fu knows well, since we co-anchor ETF IQ with him. I mean, it is really interesting that the five initial accounts that were selected were ETFs. There's one default account to start. The ticker is SPYAM. It's a State Street S&P 500 ETF. The annual fee on that account is just two basis points. That's 0.02%. And that's pretty much, I think, why it was chosen. It's super cheap. So maybe Greifeld is going to win. There you go. The ETF market is extraordinary. I mean, it just builds out and builds out. What I think is cool is if the Trump account extends out into the like the Gura offspring. So it goes from one to two years. You know, they build it out of that. Well, the industry loves what's happening. And we really see that with State Street and all the other ETF issuers as well. Of course, when we talk about ETFs, I want to bring in Mandeep here, especially with the start of SK Hynix trading. There are a lot of ETFs that are really tied to SK Hynix's performance and memory chip makers as a whole. And this just kind of supercharges that obsession. It does. And look, we heard quite a few new terms today from the chairman's interview. Memory as a service. That really caught my attention. You know, we talk about memory in the context of a commodity and, you know, with booms and busts. He sounded a lot more confident in terms of, one, he has visibility to this cycle in terms of extending through the end of the decade. and also new things like memory as a service where they're thinking about new business models in terms of kind of just being the memory provider and kind of doing something more than that. SK Hinex just going out to a new high. Keep talking, Mandy. So wait, South Korea is kind of the epicenter of the AI trade right now, right? I mean, they are really where the market is booming. The South Korean stock market, the KOSPI, is the world's best performing index. There's a lot of retail participation in that market. And that's kind of spilling over to the rest of the world. It is. And look, when it comes to HBM, you have to look at the exposure. So SK Hynix has told us they have 57 percent market share. So if that is the hot part of the AI market, then they have a much bigger market share than a micron, which is being on a tier. I want to bring the two of you in. This is way too technical. He lost me with HBM. HBM, yeah. All that. The two of you. I want to talk about this. The political shtick of this is we're going to employ America. Do you believe that the Asian manufacturers can come over here and get the quality of employment that they have in Asia? I think, again, based on the chairman's comments, it sounded like it's going to take a couple of years just to set the initial $35 billion investment kind of show some results. Do you want to answer my question? Do we have the bodies, the intellect, the drive to be as quality of employees as we see in Asia? No, I think we may be better off on the infrastructure side, but in terms of the talent side, there is more work to be done. This is a political football in Washington, isn't it? Yeah, but I was struck by how agnostic the chairman seemed in talking about this. He said, once the best talent anywhere, and he's focused here on the U.S., he seemed gleeful to say there'd been this $35 billion investment and said there's the prospect for much more investment in the U.S. going forward here. We kind of look at that in juxtaposition with what we heard from Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary yesterday, saying he's kind of tightening the screws on the SSK Hynix and Samsung as well to do more in the United States. And to me, yes, there's the kind of talent and resources side of this, Tom. The other facet here is, will that be effective? Is he going to be able to? Is the administration going to be able to get these companies to do more in the U.S. by sheer will? I think that's a really good point, especially because, Mandeep, this listing is to fund the buildout of factories in South Korea. Isn't that going to be a problem, David Guro, for this administration, that they're raising money in the U.S. to build more factories in Korea? Yes, and they have this, correct me if I'm wrong, I think like an $800 billion commitment or $800 billion won commitment to do more work in South Korea. I think he was saying this would be kind of complementary to this, that he is focused on the U.S. as well. But, yeah, that is part and parcel of this. How much of this is going to be raised in the U.S. and stay in the U.S. versus go back to South Korea? And when it comes to the factories, you also have to think about what is leading node versus what is, you know, technology that is more mature. I doubt they're going to set up their leading node factories, you know, being the first one here in the U.S. to do that. It will be more advanced, like the mature nodes. What are you looking at, Bloomberg, this weekend? What are you looking at in Washington this weekend, besides everyone worried about the senator from Kentucky? Yes, Mitch McConnell's still ailing. We're looking at, obviously, the conflict in the Middle East. We had the president saying today the ceasefire is off formally, but the talks continue. What can be accomplished here? We have Michael McCall, the chairman emeritus of the House Foreign Affairs Committee joining us, and the chief of naval operations as well. So get a sense of how things are. In the control room, they have Greifeld's people saying, we haven't spent enough time with Katie. Can you save me? Yes, absolutely. And Katie, I know that you are on top of all the ETFs. There's going to be leveraged ETFs tied to SK Hynix that is going to be a big deal next week. Oh, big time. I mean, you think about all the different issuers trying to get out their products out there. Not that SK Hynix, the way it trades, needs leverage on top of it, But certainly that is the gold rush going on in the ETF industry. I will point out, you know, you think about U.S. appetite for exposure to SK Hynix. We have, you know, one facet to look at that. It's an ETF called DRAM, which we talk about a lot. It launched three months ago. It's already more than $20 billion in assets. And I was chatting with Eric Valchunas, of course, before this show. Right. It trades about as much as Apple. So this is an extremely popular trade right now. And you're seeing that in the retail investors. Yeah. I don't have time to talk to you. I have time to talk to you. I have SpaceX below 149. Is it going to 135? I mean, is it like BitDog where we're 110 and we're enjoying 60? And so we're going to have SpaceX fail. I'm not comparing it to SK Hinex, but this isn't good, right? Well, I would say that SpaceX, I've been thinking about it as a really interesting petri dish because you have all the index inclusions. This is the most the general public has ever cared about index methodology. But you also have the lockup expertise starting off this month. So it's going to be some really interesting forces all coming together on SpaceX. I'm not sure if you can say right now it's trading on fundamentals. Has the Tom Kean triple leveraged all cash fund made a transition to ETF land yet? We did a 15% gross after 300 basis points. We came in to 12% in that clean last quarter. Put it in the Trump account. It was great. Actually, we could do that. To the three of you, thank you. But particularly to Mandy Singh and Anurag Rana and all of our tech people, your leadership on this has just been absolutely superb. Randy Krosner is a math prodigy out of Brown University. He owns a high ground in financial economics in America. So good at a very young age, he became a governor of the Federal Reserve System, foundational to the University of Chicago Booth School, and particularly their expansion over to Europe. We're thrilled he could join us today. Randy, thank you so much for being with us. I'm not going to mince it. It's about inflation. Bring up the chart right now. Randy, I'm glad you're remote because you'd be in tears if you saw this chart. It's the inflation we're living. And the idea here, thank you, John Taylor of Stanford, is we need 2% inflation. Okay, well there's 2% inflation, it's the green line. And the answer is the presidential moving average, four quarter moving average is elevated, COVID and all the rest. Randy do you on a first order basis have a real conviction we can get back anywhere near two percent inflation Oh I think we can It not going to happen in the next quarter It not going to happen by the end of the year. But I do think that within, let's say, a year to 18 months, we can be pretty close. OK, so when we talk about two percent inflation, the Fed focuses on core PCE, which backs out food and gas, not the headline inflation number. The new Fetcher, Kevin Warsh, prefers the Dallas Fed trimmed mean, which moves that takes out the outliers. So kind of like a judge in figure skating, you throw out the top score and the bottom score. So my question is, Randy, for consumers, this can feel like a very narrow way of measuring inflation. You remove food, you remove gas, you remove the outliers at both ends. It leaves you something in the middle that doesn't reflect anyone's lived experience. And then making policy based on it. Is this something that can or should be fixed? So I always joke that it's only an economist who could think about the consumer basket as excluding anything about eating. So you would starve to death and anything about driving or keeping your house warm or cool. So the reason for doing that is not because of likely concern about people, but it's really looking for what is going to be the best metric for seeing where inflation is going, rather than looking at inflation in the rearview mirror, because we're, of course, always getting data from the past, not from, you know, we want to figure out what's going on in the future. So the idea behind it is, starting in the 1970s, was to take out the high volatility sectors, things like food and energy, because that's a lot of noise. It's not necessarily telling you where things are going. Trim mean, in some sense, is a version of that, because if you think about what taking out food and energy is, You're just saying, well, we always want to trim out the volatile food and energy sectors because we think of those as outliers. The Dallas Fed approach is saying, well, we don't know from month to month what the extreme is going to be. So let's trim those out because if something is moving a lot one month, it might be coming back the next month. Randy, I want to cut to the chase. Brown University tuition since COVID has gone from $74,000. They're top and ticking it this year at $97,000. That's what our viewers in personal finance, retirement, that's what they feel. And the worry here is a sustained inflation where we don't get legitimate real wage growth. Is that a risk for our savers, our personal finance in America, that we don't get legitimate wage growth? That's a real risk, and that's really the key thing, and you really put your finger on it, because the key is how much are people making relative to how much things cost. So if your wages are going up at 10 percent and inflation is 5 percent, you're feeling pretty good because even though prices are higher, you still have really strong purchasing power. But if it's the opposite, that prices have gone up 10 percent and your wages have only gone 5 percent, you're pretty upset because you can barely put food on the table. So that's really the relevant thing. And that's what Kevin is focusing on because he's saying, well, I'm very optimistic about what AI is going to do, increasing productivity and increasing real wages. Of course, that's a bet. But, you know, that's what he's focusing. We don't have time for this on Bloomberg Money, but I'm just going to say I was blown away by everything about the worst task forces, except Krosner's not on there. Why is Randy Kroszner not on the task force? You know this. Let's go to it right now. Adam Posen and Peter Orszag, it may be my essay of the year, the risk of higher U.S. inflation. Orszag and Posen push against Hatsi as a Goldman Sachs. A tighter labor market reflecting the effects of the shift in immigration, monetary policy, looser than commonly appreciated, and inflationary expectations. inflation, they would suggest Scarlett is drifting higher. Right. I mean, what it comes down to, Randy, is that a meaningful segment of the population, the hollowed out middle class, young people in particular, they've lost faith in the ability of the Fed to do anything on reducing inflation. They've gravitated to things like crypto or prediction markets as a solution. From their point of view, the system is broken and they might as well bet on low probability, high impact outcomes. How problematic is this behavior for, the stability of the economy, the stability of the financial system. And you also see with meme stocks, too. That's another example of people taking the high-risk bets. And maybe it'll pay off, but it's awfully risky. So I think there is a breakdown of trust, and I think that is a real problem. We saw that because inflation went up so high when the Fed was saying transitory, transitory, transitory, as inflation kept spiraling higher and higher. And Kevin Warsh has made it really clear when asked about these sorts of things that I'm not getting into that game of saying what's transitory or not. What I'm going to do is try to get big picture trends in the economy. Where broadly is inflation going? What are the key drivers behind inflation? And what is the role of productivity growth? So that's what he's going to try to do to restore faith in the Fed rather than those short term predictions. That although the Fed is probably the best predictor of anybody, they're still not very good. Randy, your advice here. I think of Booth School in Chicago. Steve Lovett, Freakonomics, everything that Becker did. I mean, the heritage here of our system economics. Do you have a confidence that we will solve our retirement system, the next go around of Social Security reform and indeed retirement reform? I think it'll never be fully solved. We've had patchworks that come every decade or so when we We see that the Social Security Trust Fund is going to run out of resources. And the most recent report says it's coming pretty soon, 2030, 2032. And so it's really, it's not purely economics. It's really political economy. What will the politicians be willing to do? So one of the obvious fixes is to increase retirement age. when this was first implemented by Roosevelt, people's expected lifetime was much, much shorter than it is today. Yes. And we've moved things up a little bit, but not nearly as much to reflect the much better health outcomes that people have. Totally. And so there are a whole variety of things that could be done to address that. Randy, I got to go. We got to get you in New York next time for Bloomberg money. Governor Kroszner, Professor Kroszner, of course, always forever with the University of Chicago. We're going to migrate here to the equity markets. this continued bull market coming up. Cameron Dawson, a new edge author. What am I going to focus on? Scarlett's got a list of questions. I'm going to focus on my need to rebalance. I'm unbalanced. You're unbalanced? I need to rebalance. Especially as we head into the second half. Cameron Dawson next. It's Bloomberg Money. Stay with us. A new chapter in global growth is being written, and much of it is happening in Africa. Africans need to invest. There are deals to be done and business to be won. I'm Jennifer Zabasaja. 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. Ridding the world of something like HIV is possible. Population growth is so enormous in Africa. Listen to Next Africa on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. On a Friday, Bloomberg of Money, Tom Keen with Scarlett Foo. Scarlett? Well, SK Hynix, the Korean memory chipmaker, surging above its offer price in its U.S. debut. So let's go now to B-Tech anchor Ed Ludlow, live at the Nasdaq. And Ed, you got to speak with the chairman of SK Hynix. What did you learn from him that's relevant to retail investors looking to bank big on SK Hynix? Three things. Big, big investments in the USA are coming. They're committed to $35 billion, and that number is going to get much, much, much, much bigger. This was an ADR listing that wasn't just about the proceeds. He's coming for the talent, Chairman Che. He wants to see American engineers powering their position in the memory market, which is number three. They got 57 percent, 7 percent market share and high bandwidth memory. That is the chip, the thing that everyone cares about in this AI story right now. The main thing is that the U.S. retail investor is sophisticated and educated about what goes into a server design in a data center. They know how critical that HBM is. And that's why SK came knocking at the Nasdaq. Fantastic. Thank you for that round of SK Hynix, of course, trading in its market debut here in the U.S. Ed Ludlow, B-Tech anchor, joining us from the NASDAQ. It is time for banking on books. And my book is Strangers, a memoir of marriage by Bell Burden. First published in January now and it's 12th printing. This is a financial horror story. Yes, 12th printing because Bell Burden's husband walked out on her and the kids at the start of COVID. She had quit her job to raise the kids. Her husband worked and managed a family finances. That was not a good setup for that situation. And there's also this fascinating overlap with privilege and status because she's New York society. There's trust funds involved. There's withering glares from married couples at the tennis club. It reminds me of everything Whit Stillman did. Whit Stillman defined the Upper East Side la-di-da world. La-di-da world. She just absolutely nailed it. Well, this was a fantastic read. And it's so interesting because it sparked a lot of conversation among people, certainly in New York, because she's a New York society woman. And that gets to what we've done here at Bloomberg Money. The Bloomberg Money team wrote about this book and how it's sparking all these discussions everywhere about marital finance. Nikki Waller leads that coverage for us here at Bloomberg, and she joins us now. And Nikki, this is something where women in book clubs are talking about it, and they are taking more control of their finances and taking a deep dive into financial planning to understand their household finances. It's just as you said. People are reading this book as a cautionary tale and a horror story, and they are phoning their financial advisors and saying, I need to crack open the books on my finances with my husband or partner. And this is the case where women often out earn their husbands or they're at parity, except when they take time off to have kids and they kind of lose some ground here. So there this extra urgency and this once there was a stigma about talking about all of this before getting married but it not becoming the case anymore It more practical now It is less of a stigma but even so the numbers show that a lot of women close to half are entrusting their husbands with all of the financial decision Why? We all have our horror stories and our families of this. I have multiple horror stories of, I'm the man, I'm smarter than you are, leave me alone, just trust me, I'll give you the passwords when I die. That's the status quo still. Yeah, and we have really smart people. I mean, take Belle Burden. She is an Ivy League educated corporate lawyer, and she still handed this over. And I think a lot of this comes back to the gendered ways we think about money, that this is men's work and this is women's work. And it's kind of cool to hear from these women who are cracking the books, and even their husbands are saying, well, finally. There is a broader trend, and this is something you guys wrote about, too, of young couples signing prenups. This idea that it's not just men or the wealthy partner in the group. Everyone is kind of inquiring about this and looking into this to protect whatever assets or liabilities that they come into the marriage with. And there are so many reasons for this. People are marrying later in life. We talk about this all the time. They have more investments, more stockholding. So it's not like getting married at age 20 or 21 and both partners have very little. People are coming into marriage with their own kind of book of business. Frozen eggs, also one of the assets that people have to kind of delineate. Student debt in terms of liabilities. These are all things to consider. Pets, social media followers? Pets and social media followers as part of your prenup. I bet that came up in the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelsey prenuptial agreement. Did you like the wedding? I mean, did you get a time? I haven't seen any pictures. I've only seen other people's outfits. I thought you went. It was a limited invite list. It was a limited invite list. We'll have to see. We were advantaged because Cam Dawson was with us the day of the wedding, and she knows every Taylor Swift lyric there is to know. Does she? Which is almost as good as her equity knowledge. Here at Bloomberg Money, we like to talk to people with deep knowledge, what is known as domain knowledge. Cameron Dawson owns the absolute high ground on the equity markets at New Edge Wealth. I'm thrilled to have a year for a two-hour conversation. We're going to squeeze in in next to nothing. How bull market is this bull market? Oh, it is certainly a bull market, not just within prices, but certainly within the earnings. And that's why this market has been so powerful and resilient to everything you've thrown at it this year, is because unlike prior times when you've had things like energy shocks and geopolitical crises and you would see earnings estimates get cut, you've seen earnings estimates go up 20% on a 12-month forward basis this year, which is why this market has been able to shake off any kind of negative news. On a personal finance basis, are we enjoying it or are we totally out of whack where our allocation should be? Well, if you look at the aggregate allocation metrics out of something like American Association of Individual Investors, what you can see is equity allocations are at all-time highs at 71% allocation. So this gets you back to prior highs that we saw in times like 2021 or 2018. So certainly this looks like an individual or a household area that is all in on equity. You see a very different story when you look at institutions, where institutions are the ones who've been sitting on the sidelines. Something like Deutsche Bank's consolidated equity positioning is just in the 41st percentile. So it's a tale of very different cities. Households are all in. Institutions are on the sidelines. Interesting dichotomy there. You look at the S&P 500. We've had three straight years of double-digit gains. The S&P is up about 10.5% now. When we're in this long-running bull market like we have right now, do individual investors tend to turn more conservative, stay with what's worked, buy and hold? Or are they more willing to go out on a limb and consider moving some assets into uncorrelated securities or products, maybe venture into private assets? Well, I think there's two different questions there. Because the first one is, do people start chasing the hot dot when it comes to market leadership? And one of the reasons why the quality anomaly exists, why if you look over the long run, the quality factor has actually added a lot to portfolios from a return basis and not added to risk is because people do tend to chase the hot dots in markets like this. They want the non-profitable tech company. They want this shiny new object. But what you find is that just as fast as those kind of assets go up, you have the same kind of problem where they can have very deep corrections on the other side. When we think about allocating to private markets, that's where you're looking and saying, look, we've had 15 years of effectively double the average returns for public markets. So we need to diversify the return streams, diversify the income streams. And you need to look to private markets in order to find those different sources of ways to get to overall portfolio diversification. Can we go Matthew on a Friday? Go Matthew. Let's go Matthew. Here it is right now. This is one of the most famous money must reads out of the Wall Street Journal years and years ago, 2003. Back in the archives. Mark Horowitz, yeah. As an extreme example, consider the equity allocation of 1793. Today you would be 99% equities, an all-stock portfolio over time, much riskier than a classic 60-40. Cam Dawson, explain the best approach on the X axis to proper retirement allocation. Well, I think that there has to be a very holistic approach to the entirety of somebody's not formulaic, not formulaic. And I think that this is the big issue within wealth management is that most people try to make everything institutional and homogenous. They try to treat everybody the same. But just as we talked about with things like financial planning and wealth strategy and something like prenups, those considerations have to be reflected in the portfolio. Those liquidity needs have to be reflected in the portfolio. So having the right allocation is not just going on the efficient frontier. It's actually doing the holistic work to understand somebody's complete balance sheet in order to get the mix of assets that allows them to withstand volatility. Nikki, help me here with all your experience on this, from John Templeton to William Bernstein to all of rebalancing and the formulaic approach. It's a cottage industry of reallocation along the way, rebalancing, isn't it? Yeah, no one makes money if you just leave everything alone. That's very well said. She said the quiet part out loud. She just cuts to the chase. She said the quiet part out loud. I mean, it's an industry thing, right? I mean, one of the most interesting stories we're seeing this morning is that J.P. Morgan built an AI that can outdo the 60-40 portfolio. These are really good points. And I guess that... Wait, Gabby Santos was on the other day. Is she out of a job? Is Gabby Santos out of a job with AI? I think Gabby Santos will always have a job. But the ways that people are using AI to trade and beat the formulas we've always had, this is something to watch. I want to go back to that point, Cam, where you talked about tailored portfolios, tailored allocations, and tailored approaches to managing your portfolio. Does that mean things like model portfolios, which are kind of cookie cutter, don't make sense for wealth investors? I think that as somebody's wealth grows and as they get even more complicated, typically we do see complications or certainly expand as the amount of assets do grow, that we find that we have to tailor different portions of the portfolio to have the right kind of allocation. because if you have high liquidity needs, having something that's invested in completely private markets makes absolutely no sense. So instead of treating an allocation like going to a big golden corral and putting everything off the menu, you really have to choose the things that are having the right functions for what you need. How much of our certitude about this, what Nikki Waller deals with every single day, the myths that we have, the foundations was built on the great moderation where it was just price up, yield down forever. And then in 2022, we hit a wall. Well, and I think that all of these asset allocations, these mean variance optimizations are all built on one very problematic assumption, which is that you'll have standard normal outcomes, that you will have predictable outcomes. Could you see, did you, would you tear up over that standard normal outcomes? We're going to go Gaussian in a moment. Finish up and save the interview. So I guess what it comes down to is any portfolio, especially one tailored for an individual, needs to account for emergency liquidity. Yes. Where does that come from? Well, I think that it's building out a certain degree of a cash side of portfolios to meet the liquidity needs over a shorter period of time. Having an income generation part of the portfolio that has income sources from different sources. So this is not just fixed income, bonds generating income. It's looking at something like potentially private credit, if you can absorb the illiquidity there. In certain areas, do it carefully, GP stakes. And so you have to think about diversification, not just within the overall asset class, but what you're trying to achieve by each asset class. Was becoming a ballerina years ago, seriously, you're like really good at it. Was it expensive? Oh, extraordinarily. It was like stupid expensive. I mean, my parents told me that they spent all my college money on doing that, so I had to figure out something else for college. That's what we're going to cover next. Thank you. So, Kim Dawson, thank you so much for being with us. Fabulous. I'm going to feature my Twitter feed and LinkedIn feed I'm going to be doing this afternoon. It's off of Kim Dawson's work. It's on rebalancing. Coming up, what are we going to do on Bloomberg Money? We're going to talk about youth sports in the expense. Soccer, ballet. Hockey. Nikki Waller, did you play a sport in your youth? Poorly, I played softball. She played softball and her parents spent money on it, I'm sure. Yeah, Lisa Mateo's the whole softball thing as well. Is hockey the worst? I think so. Yeah. Well, the travel part is the worst. Youth sports. Stay with us. Get the latest headlines from our nation's capital every weekday. Hi, I'm Joe Matthew. And I'm Kaylee Lines, inviting you to join us for the Balance of Power podcast. Every weekday, we deliver unbiased insight and analysis on the latest news from the White House and Capitol Hill. Along with in conversations with lawmakers and the people making policy and shaping our world Get the straight story without the spin Listen and subscribe to the Balance of Power podcast on Apple Spotify or anywhere you listen France winning last night in a World Cup match against Morocco, Spain, and Belgium facing off tonight in the quarterfinals. Is this all you guys watch at home now? It's like ridiculous. Would it go away? It's changed our lives. It's really enjoyable. I love watching Telemundo, to be honest. Oh, yes, because it's a whole different experience. It's a whole different culture and energy, and it's just fabulous. Were you following Team USA as carefully? No. Well, I mean, after last week, you know, it was kind of a disappointment. I was really upset about that. I was not alone on that. Yeah, well, the U.S. team's loss to Belgium in the World Cup has revived this growing concern among Americans, which is the rising cost of youth sports. According to one estimate from the Aspen Institute, Family spending on youth sports is up 46% over the last five years. Our senior reporter, Randall Williams, he covers business of sports, has been following this story, and he joins us now. And, Randall, by some estimates, this is a $40 billion-plus industry that is funded by private equity. And so, no surprise, then, it's become hyper-competitive and hyper-specialized. Yeah, I mean, when private equity gets into something, of course, they want to maximize profit, and that's not always a good thing for youth sports. People think of youth sports as the level before college sports. And college sports, of course, is welcoming private equity as well. But with NIL, with a bunch of different mechanisms, it's sort of the amateur level. And I think youth sports isn't meant to be that, but it's becoming that because you can identify talent earlier on, which therefore could lead to brand collaborations and so many other things. So youth sports is a huge industry that we're seeing private equity get into and other investors as well. How has technology accelerated this? Because we talk about private equity getting in. we talk about NIL, that those are two distinct things, but technology has made it even more hyper, hyper intense. Well, it's interesting. Like when I was growing up, like my dad and my mom would have a film camera that they would shoot it for, but that was just for fun. Like I had my aspirations of going to the NFL ended at 15, but now you have people using apps like Game Changer, which you can literally just film the entire thing, create a highlight reel for your child and then email it to scouts themselves. And, of course, the supporters behind an app like Game Changer are going to pour money into it and say, hey, use our app and then you can go and market yourself. And a lot of times this NIL money that athletes are able to sign earlier and earlier can change a family's life. So the parents are pushing it and having to spend more as well. Exactly like you. I remember exactly where I was standing when I realized I would not play for the Montreal Canadiens. Are we telling the kids today, I'm sorry, name, what's it, name, image, likeness? Yeah. You're playing D3 if you're lucky. Are we within all the different sports informing the children of how special those people are playing major D1 and pro? I don't think so. Not anymore. And the reason for that is because, you know, you have low-level athletes who can make anywhere from $50 to $60 to $20 to $30 to sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a semester. And so their families are like, listen, you don't have to go to the NFL, the NBA, the MLB, the MLS, and so many other leagues anymore. You just have to go and play in college as long as you can so that you can provide for our family for a four to five year period. And then they go into jobs like us. And so it is a very interesting time in college sports where you have people who want to play for five, six, sometimes seven years in college just so they can make money in name, image and likeness. I started off by talking about the World Cup. How has the professionalization of youth sports contributed perhaps to the U.S. not being as well prepared for something like the World Cup? Because that's the criticism. Right. Right. I think that if you look at Europe and Europe has these youth camps that you think of Lionel Messi, he was with Barcelona at a very young age and then raised in that system against a lot of top tier competition. That doesn't really exist here. Of course, we have youth soccer clubs and camps, but it's not to the same level. You've never seen a 13 or 13 year old signed to NYCFC. It just doesn't happen the same way. And so because of that and because of the rising cost, you think of the travel, you think of the cleats, you think of the lodging and tournaments and all of these different fees. You have parents who are like, you know, I think I'm good. You can play a different sport or you could just go and be an academic scholar. Can anybody beat France? I think they can. I think Spain can. I think England can. I think Argentina can. But it's going to take you on your best day and you're going to have to shut down a bunch of different superstars. It's like playing against the Golden State Warriors with Steph Curry and Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. They are that level good. That was a good way to put it. Who are you rooting for? I root for a good story. So, of course, it's either. I would like to see a rematch of the 2022 final, which was Argentina and France. That is probably the greatest sporting event that I've ever watched. So, see, I'm going to be there. We're out of time. We're out of time. The control room never talks to me. They only talk to you. Because they know I listen. Luigi's vicious. I mean, you know, I have no idea. I want to ask, like, six more questions. We'll get him back on next time. We'll get him on next week. I'm around. All right. Thanks so much, Randall. Williams, our Bloomberg Business of Sports senior reporter. Bloomberg Money, where we do Shakespeare, we'll do that right now. We're doing Shakespeare? See the line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me. And no one knows how far it goes. If the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me, one day I'll know if I go, there's just no telling how far I'll go. This is not Shakespeare. This is Moana. Okay, there we go. The Shakespeare of 2026. It is. truly. And it's Friday, so of course we're looking ahead to the weekend and to next week, so for that we bring in Bloomberg's this weekend's anchor, Lisa Mateo. Lisa, Moana is at the box office. If you're going into the theaters this weekend, it's going to be Moana. Tom knows, of course, why this is tops on my list because, Scarlett, I don't know if you, I have a huge crush on Dwayne the Rock Johnson, so that's the reason for it. But this is the remake, so the 2016 animated film that's done phenomenal. So now they're doing the live action. So now you have the real actor. So you have Dwayne Johnson himself actually out there. Has Lisa taken over the show? So he's out there. My Dwayne is now part of the show. Yes, my Dwayne is part of the show. The reviews haven't been so great, but that's out there and that's at the box office this weekend. For music fanatics, okay, for those, the Rolling Stones are back there. I will listen this weekend. They're still making music. They're still making music. I'm telling you, the 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, That's what it's called. So it's 14 tracks. There's 12 original, two covers. And they're grouping up with different people. They're doing different collaborations. One is with Paul McCartney. The last album released in 2023. So this is, I know Tom's weekend is going to be spent. I will put headphones on and I will listen. And it will be with immense respect for Charlie Watts. How much does an album cost these days now? Like, I don't know. I'm just streaming it on Tidal is what I'm going to do. But the answer is how much did it cost to make this? It took them years to put this thing together. This was not some rich guy six-week project. They really put a lot of effort into it. They had to mend a lot of issues there. What else you got going on? They're still going. They're still going. So I want to go to EcoData because we have a jam-packed calendar coming up. So we start off on Tuesday, we have CPI. Oh. Yes, yes. And then on Wednesday, we have PPI. So aside from that, then we go into Thursday, retail sales is a big number. Sure. And then Friday, we have housing starts, building permits. When I was looking at the prior and then what the expectations are, the biggest kind of difference I saw was actually in housing starts. The prior was a dip of about 15%. The forecast is for a rise of about 13%. So that was the difference there. And then I also want to point out this Bank of America survey that talked about how much consumers are spending for June. And they're spending more. This is looking at credit card data. This is also looking at- Because prices are higher? Well, the reason why is because the prices aren't higher, but they're spending more because gas is cheaper, right? So they have a little bit more delivery income. And the World Cup, of course, June. So they're starting to spend more. Are you doing like 10,000 steps a day now after Nathan's famous last week? You did see that, did you? For the 4th of July, you were out in Coney Island. I was out in Coney Island for Bloomberg this weekend. Yes, I had a tray of hot dogs with me. You had a tray of hot dogs. I did not have any of them because they were in the boiling sun for so long. I was like, maybe I shouldn't eat these. But it was fun. It was a good experience. I'm a Brooklyn girl, so being back, you know, in Coney Island. And you're good. It was just nice. It was a good experience. What do you have coming up this weekend? We're talking a lot because all the talk has been about SK Hynix. So we're tapping into that. As Ed Ludlow is going through the weekend, he's joining us as well. So that'll be a good time on top of that. He's just killed it. We make jokes about it, folks, but Ed Ludlow's leadership here on all this technology. I'm looking literally right now at the SpaceX 30-year bond. I'm getting killed on it. Are you kidding me? It's gone price down, yield up, and it hasn't found a bid yet. It's ugly. That'll be a theme for Ed Ludlow on Bloomberg this weekend. Look for that with David in all this weekend. All right, Lisa Matteo, thank you so much. And, of course, be sure to watch Bloomberg this weekend, every Saturday and Sunday morning, starting at 7 a.m. Eastern Time. This is the Bloomberg Money Podcast, bringing you a smart look. Three, two. This is the Bloomberg Money Podcast, bringing you a smart look at the forces shaping your financial life. I'm Tom Keen with Scarlet Fu. You can watch the show live on Bloomberg TV every Friday at noon Wall Street time. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And as always, on the Bloomberg Terminal and the Bloomberg Business app. This week on Leaders with me, Francine Lacqua. I speak to tennis legend Rafa Nadal about how he stayed competitive despite injury. I was able to enjoy the victories probably more than if I will not have this issue. One iconic match. In my mind was, I am almost dead. And whether he misses playing. I don't miss tennis because there was nothing else to offer. Listen and watch Leaders with me, Francine Lacqua, on Bloomberg Television or wherever you get your podcasts.
