Morning Brew Daily - Inflation Just Won't Quit & Taylor Swift Coming to the Big Screen

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Episode 138: Happy almost Labor Day Weekend! Toby and Neal discuss how the Fed is grappling with rising inflation and give a preview of Friday's jobs report. Also, a technology company wants to fix McDonald's ice cream machines and Apple wants customers to fix their own iphones. Plus, Taylor Swift is bringing her Eras Tour to a big screen near you. The guys share their stock and dog of the week and also get into why the US isn't the corn exporting powerhouse it used to be. And finally, which tropical destination is riding the AI wave, but not for the reasons you think. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Listen to Founder's Journal Here: https://chartable.com/podcasts/the-founders-journal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew Daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today's pod will ask the economy to turn and cough as we give it a physical ahead of this morning's jobs report. And somebody needs to check in on Corn Kid because the U.S. is no longer the world's largest exporter of corn. Then the days of going to a McDonald's and hearing that their ice cream machine is broken may be coming to a close. Plus, you truly won't believe how much money a small Caribbean nation is making off the AI boom. It's Friday, September 1st.

Let's ride. It's the first day of September, Neil, we made it. And I actually have a theory that I want to push your way, that it's the best month of the year. Now, hear me out. It's the best weather where you get slowly off-boarded from summer. The temps are coming down. And on that note, sweaters are making a comeback. Big sweater guy.

It also has the best sports by far. The NFL is back. Champions League is back in soccer. Obviously, college football as well. This is the month that new iPhones come out if you're into that sort of thing. And also, you can sing the Green Day song. wake me up when September ends. So that's my case.

Take it or leave it. I don't disagree. Oh, so you're on my side. Yeah, I've been pushing this. It's a great month. You know, everyone starts talking about, you know, the language changes from moist to crisp. Everything gets a little more crispy. But you could say October has all of those things, but even more so of them.

NFL heats up. MLB playoffs. So I don't know. I feel like October could be even better than September. Halloween is got to be one of the best holidays of the year because it's just a party. I still think I'm like a summer guy, though, because there's just so many good memories still from growing up and going to school and getting off for summer break. So even though September might be the best month, I'm still a solid guy. Already backtracking.

All right. It's our Friday. It's Friday. So we have to do our Friday segment, fast week, slow week. Toby. You know my theory on this. Anytime there's a long weekend, it exerts a gravitational pull on the week. That's the super moon.

It speeds. That could be the super moon, too. I looked at it last night. It was beautiful. and I soaked it all in. What about you, fast or slow week? I think it's a slow week because every single day felt like Friday. Like, I can't believe we're actually at Friday because I came into work on Tuesday and I was like,

happy Friday, everybody. So it has been a very slow week. All right, let's get into the news ahead of Labor Day weekend. To kick things off, we are going to be putting on our latex gloves and giving the economy a checkup to see how things are going, especially considering that the government will drop the August jobs report in just a few hours. Get super hype about that. In general, I am glad to report a clean bill of health.

A major inflation report that dropped yesterday showed that while price growth is still higher than the Fed would like, it's on the right trajectory down to its 2% target. I know we've been saying that for so long. It was a very solid inflation report, though. Meanwhile, consumers spent more money than expected last month on things like restaurants, toys, games, recreational equipment, and live shows. And that's important considering that consumer spending drives 70% of the entire economy. That's more good news. Finally, let's go to the job market front. We are expecting the economy to have added about 170,000 jobs in August with the unemployment

rate holding steady at a super low 3.5%. If these projections turn out to be true, and they're often as right as Skip Bayless, it would be really good news for Jerome Powell. He wants to see the labor market slow down, but not go into reverse to achieve his soft landing of bringing down inflation without sending the economy into a recession. Toby, it's just hard to see any major alarm bells here. I know. It is crazy because I went back to a year ago

because the Jackson Hole Summit just happened over the past weekend. And I looked at Jerome Powell's speech from last year. And it was so dire. It was basically saying that he said many Americans will experience pain and lose their jobs, but he was very forthcoming with that and said, like, hey, I will do this in order to get inflation back under control. And then we fast forward to the last couple of jobs report.

Americans haven't been losing their jobs. We've been adding jobs to the economy. Inflation has slowly been ticking down. So I just like to see that contrast between the doom and gloom of a year ago to where we are now. So you're right, clean bill of health, Neil. Well, he tried to hit the brakes on the economy. They raised interest rates to 22-year highs. They could go higher.

That's the big question now is whether there will be another interest rate hike for the rest of 2023. That's what investors really want to know. But yes, overall, it does seem like the pain has not yet been inflicted on a Americans, this, I don't know, we're kind of celebrating that, but it could still happen. You see a lot of retailers last week report that delinquencies were rising and consumers were trading down just a bit. They're like, you know, everyone's feeling pretty good, but we're seeing a little of that pain.

So we'll see how that plays out, especially as the student loan repayments start up again. And then always on the economic front, we have to talk about mortgage market. And for the first time in a few weeks, the mortgage rate did tick down. I think it's still above 7%. Yes, it's 7.18% the week ended August 31st, so it's still incredibly high. The last year at this time was at 5.66%. But that has been putting the skids on the housing market, which is also a main economic driver. Yeah. And then finally, the one thing I'll be looking for at this, when this job report comes out, is where wage growth is because wage growth is such an interesting. You love wage growth. I know. Because if it ticks up too high,

then that reignites fears of inflation because consumers will spend too much and prices will go up. But also, we want consumers to continue to spend. So it is this really delicate thing where you don't want to see negative wage growth because that's a huge bummer. And it puts a damper on consumer spending. But if you see too much, then the economy heats up too much. So again, we say Goldilocks all the time. But we're looking for that. That's sweet spot.

Okay, I'm putting you on the spot. 170,000 jobs are we going above or below that? Okay, well, I feel like those numbers are always a little, you've got to take them with a grain of salt. Of course. They always get revised later. And so I do. Before the revision. Okay.

I'm going to say, I'm going to say over. I'm an optimist. Like, let's be honest. I'm always going to take the over on these things. So that means do you have to take the under? I'll take the under. Okay. I'll do the inverse.

Oh, no, the inverse to be. I just jinx the economy. Gosh, dang it. All right, Neil, let's move on to our next story, which is about McDonald's's infamous ice cream machines. It's a well-known joke at this point that McDonald's ice cream machines are seemingly always broken. But it's also not just a joke. At any one moment, 10% of his machines are down. And a big part of that is because the machines are only allowed to be fixed by their manufacturer, Taylor, due to an agreement it has with McDonald's. But I fix it, which is this online community and e-commerce site that sells repair parts, is petitioning Congress to let it make a device that helps make these machines easier to fix. Right now, they are being stonewalled by a copyright act, which prevents people from circumventing controls or digital locks to access copyrighted to work, which, believe it or not, applies to ice cream machines in this case.

But long story short, I Fixit is doing the Lord's work and is taking on this annoying copyright law to fight for the right to repair these machines, something they've successfully done so far for things like Xbox, tractors, and smartphones. Neil, no one could be more on I Fixed's side than... I know. I still think there must be, I didn't, you know, dive into this, but there must be, there is a reason for the copyright law, you know, to protect patents and to protect, you know, IP for a company that developed, you know, commercial, commercial things like, like this ice cream machine. But this is just truly crazy. The thing I think about with this is what incentive does McDonald's have to not make this a better product to keep 10% of these offline? You see the incentive for Taylor, which is its partner because it makes $350 every 15 minutes on repairs of McDonald's ice cream machines, which they're probably doing 24-7 because they're always broken. But I'm just thinking about what is the business?

McDonald's is not a stupid company. It's huge. Why do they let, why do they choose to let their ice cream machines stagnate and not work? And they've made fun of it themselves. They posted on social media, like making fun of the fact that their ice cream. ice cream machines are broken, but it feels like they're not taking advantage of what they could to actually get these things repaired. Yeah, yeah, McDonald's is definitely on the side of like, let's make these things easier to repair.

They've kind of been held hostage by this deal with Taylor the manufacturer. And it was really funny. So I fix it is this online community. And they posted a video of they literally bought the same ice cream machine and broke it down. And they said it consists of very easily replaceable parts. They said there's three printed circuit boards, a motor and a belt. Like there's truly not that much going on inside of it. But when you try to fix it, you keep getting these errors that they call nonsensical,

counterintuitive and seemingly random, even if you spend hours reading the manual. So it is like this thing where Taylor made it intentionally complicated to fix. And I fix it was breaking this down. Like, listen, this is what I do. I have no idea what this error machine is telling me. So do not get mad at the poor McDonald's worker who says, sorry, man, the ice machine's broken. It's tough for the franchisees here, but I just want to zoom out to this is part of a broader movement called Right to Repair.

And consumer advocates are pushing for companies to kind of open up the black box a little bit and let consumers, people, regular people and third party vendors fix their devices. And Apple is one of the main antagonizers here. But it's reversing its course. And it's now supporting a California Senate bill that requires manufacturers to allow their customers to fix. broken or damaged devices. So you see the momentum building in favor of consumers here being like, all right, well, my iPhone, you know, my iPhone is broken, which it isn't, that's why I have an Android. But I have to go to a licensed Appleman, Apple repair person to get it fixed. And I just wish I could have the tools and the manuals to do it myself. And so you're starting to see this go across

a variety of industries. And John Deere also agreed to let people fix tractors themselves. And that's like a $500,000 purchase that you're waiting on a John Deere person to fix it. So you're starting to see momentum in terms of the right to repair movement. I'm all on board. Let's get those ice cream machines up and running, please. I've never had enough. I love it. They're so good.

What is what do you get? McClory? A little ice cream, no, little ice cream cone, sauce serve ice cream cone. Vanilla? Yeah, it goes. Apparently the vanilla at McDonald's is pretty good. Yeah, I've never had it. It's lovely.

All right, let's move on. Just when you thought you've run out of ways to pay Taylor Swift. She goes and drops another batch of tickets for you to buy. These tickets are for a movie version of her heiress tour, which will arrive on the ominous day of Friday, October 13th. It could be a way for everyone who is priced out of seeing her tour live in football stadiums to glimpse her record-breaking tour without breaking the bank. Tickets for adults are priced at 1989, if you know, you know, just a fraction of what it costs to see her in real life, which can run over $1,000. AMC, which ran the ticketing, knows all too well that any mess-up on its part could result in a congressional grilling. a la ticket master. So it said it boosted its backend systems to five times their previous

max capacity to handle the surge in traffic to its website yesterday. Still, to cover its tracks, it also said it was aware that no ticketing system in history seems to have been able to accommodate the soaring demand from Taylor Swift fans when tickets are first placed on sale. Toby, this is going to be super fun. I can't imagine anyone is actually going to be sitting down during this quote unquote movie. I know. I've been seeing these jokes of like, POV, you go to the movies and Taylor Swift is playing in the next movie theater over and you just hear the people singing. I do think it will disrupt the movie experience. I also, I think Taylor is doing really well in terms of windowing here, which windowing is where- It's like a kind of a Hollywood term where you publish the same work on different media at different times.

So it's a delicate balance because you don't want to oversaturate the market, but you do want to continue to keep the momentum going. And like the example is when a movie leaves theaters and moves to Blu-ray, which feels like- moves the Blu-ray? I know. This is, this was, it used to be like the, or the moves to DVD or whatnot. That used to be like a very big thing in Hollywood, like when do we release it? How do we keep the sales going? But now people are saying, like, look at Taylor.

Like she gets windowing. She's keeping her momentum going in different ways on different platforms. So I literally was seeing takes from like Hollywood execs or people saying Taylor gets windowing better than the industry does. Wow. So how much do you think this is going to make? I know. Well, so they're playing... Not that we're good at movie predictions. I know. They're playing it four days a week at all AMC theaters nationwide.

Four days a week on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Plus AMC is serving for the first time as a distributor. So you're going to also see it at Regal and Cinemark and other theaters. So this is going to be kind of a crazy experience. I mean, again, I'm not going to put a number on it because I'm horrible box office forecasting. But it's got to be big, right? One guy at Comscore told CNBC that it could perhaps top 100 million in its opening weekend. I feel like it's going to be much bigger than that. I mean, that's opening weekend. What if we see?

Opening weekend 100 million is crazy. What if we see a challenge for like biggest? That would just be truly insane. What? If we see a challenge for like Barbary or something, like get into the upper echelons. I mean, I think even the people who saw the tour and they're estimating that to be three million people over the course of this summer are probably going to see it again. I'm going to see it. Yeah, I'm definitely going to see it.

Finally, finally, so this was funny. They released it on the date October 13th. That was the same date as the new Exorcist is coming out, which is set 50 years after the original. And so you saw a lot of people talk about Exer Swift to be Barbenheimer 2.0, which I was always dubious of. But then a few hours later, who was a universal, moved the Exorcist up a week to October 6th.

And one of the execs there was like, Taylor wins. It is crazy to move a horror movie off the October 13th's release date. That just shows the power they don't want to compete with him. I do wish we had an Exo Swift or Exeter Swift moment, though, because it just fits so well, too. Exeter Sis, whatever. All right, Neil, before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break.

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Okay, Neil, let's head to our Friday segment, Stock of the Week, dog of the week, where we look at one stock who just spends $2.25 for reps at the gym and one that got their finger pinched between two 17-5-pound dumbbells. Neil, as... Sounds like me and you. As always, we are just humble podcasters. We are not financial advisors, so please do not take any of this as financial advice. But Neil, you won the pre-show dance battle, so you're up first today.

That's right. I'm going to go with Shopify for stock of the week. Shares of the e-commerce platform were up 10% yesterday and 20% for the week after it announced a deal with an unlikely partner, Amazon. Shopify, which powers the online stores of many small businesses, said that it's merchants will soon be able to access Amazon's buy-with-prime service. So that allows its online sellers to add that enticing prime logo to their storefronts, and also tap into Amazon's sprawling fulfillment network that gets you your package really not long after you order it.

The reason this deal is so surprising, though, is that Shopify and Amazon were not always friendly. Shopify rose to prominence branding itself as the anti-Amazon, your Canadian friend more attentive to the needs of merchants than Bezos's cold-hearted monster. But if you come at the king, you best not miss, and Shopify has not taken down Amazon far from it. And this partnership has a sign that there's probably room in the e-commerce sandbox for both the plan. Yeah, I mean, Shopify kind of changed its tune on this thing because when it first came out, a lot of people were saying, well, this directly competes with ShopPay, which is Shopify's version of kind of Amazon Prime, where it's almost like a one-click checkout as well. But now Shopify is saying, yes, this is not a zero-sum game, like a rising tide floats all boats, type of thing. And this also just brought me back to like the one-click checkout wars that we went

through a few, like in the past few months where all these startups were raising millions and millions of dollars for that one-click checkout. But it turns out like the person who's probably going to win this kind of race to the one-click checkout is Amazon. It's slowly putting its tentacles out across different platforms. So I think it's a win-win though because that that little prime badge does help all merchants because it's a good signifier. Right. Like, oh, I'm going to get this real quick. I can tie it back to my Amazon wallet. But to me, this shows Amazon's, like, power as a logistics provider. I mean, they have leased so much warehouse space. They have a fleet of dozens of planes. Like, they are up there with UPS and FedEx growing out this crazy expensive logistics network.

Shopify wanted to do something similar. I remember during the pandemic, they spent a lot of money on warehousing and building out their logistics and fulfillment network. And it was so expensive. and they ended up selling all of their logistics assets to Flexport. And they're like, Amazon, you have a moat here. Like, Amazon's paid so much money during the Bezos years, acquiring land, and, you know, acquiring fulfillment centers close to people so they could deliver. And it's showing off here where Shopify is like, we cannot compete with you here. Correct.

All right, Neil, let's move on to our dog of the week, which is the Vietnamese electric vehicle maker, VinFast. Neil, the V in VinFast has to stand for volatile because, holy, only this stock has been up and down. The stock went absolutely nuclear, jumping 688% in the two weeks or so after went public via SPAC on August 15th. At one point, it was valued at over $200 billion, more than GM, Ford, Volkswagen, all the big automakers. But this week, it fell back to Earth, dropping 44% in shedding $83 billion in market value on Tuesday. And if we want to dig into the fundamentals for an answer to this volatility, there really isn't much. to look at. It sold just 24,000 cars globally in 2022. Its net loss reached nearly 600 million in the

first quarter of this year and is expected to keep on growing. This is just kind of par for the course at this point for EV makers if we think about the likes of Rivian, who also jumped out to this massive valuation out of the gate after going public despite selling very few cars. But Neil, this company is wild. It's a contender for both stock of the week and dog the week every single week that it's been public so far. Yeah, we did it for stock of the week two weeks ago. We, you know, we're screening this movie in a few weeks called Dumb Money, and it's all about meme stocks of yesterday year. And this does kind of feel like one. But investors are betting that, you know, I don't know who's actually betting on this, but they're betting that it will become the next Tesla.

I mean, it's still worth over $100 billion. It's still the third most valuable automaker, even after this plunge. It's crazy, though. Okay, so here's one of the reasons why it's so volatile. It's not just necessarily that they're betting on the company. That's true. The Vietnam's richest man who is the founder of this company, he or one of his subsidiaries, owns 99% of outstanding shares through various holding companies. 99%.

So there is 1% float or 1% shares available for trading. So anytime there's any momentum, any direction, it just spikes massively. The volatility spikes. I can't believe that it's legal to have 1% of shares outstanding. is available for trading. So that's kind of why we're seeing these massive valuations go up and down. At one point, Fam Not Vung,

who is the founder of the company, was on Bezos's heels as like third or fourth richest fan in the world. And now he's shed like $60 billion in net worth because his fortune is just so tight. His fortune, it goes up and down by $80 billion every day. All right, we have to move on.

All dynasties must come to an end, Toby, the Tim Duncan-era Spurs, the Big Bang Theory on CBS. and now the U.S.'s top spot as the world's biggest corn exporter. For more than 50 years, save an outlier year in 2013, the U.S. has exported the most corn in the world because, of course, we did. America is basically synonymous with corn, amber waves of grain and all. But in the agricultural year that ended yesterday, the U.S. lost its crown to Brazil. Last harvest year, Brazil shipped 32% of the world's corn compared to just 23% for the U.S. So what is causing this shift? Many reasons, from a

strong U.S. dollar making our exports more expensive, trade war with China, rising labor costs, and also using more corn here at home instead of shipping it abroad. So at a high level, we're just not as competitive in the global agricultural marketplace as we used to be, which is why the U.S. has lost the number one spot for not just corn, but also wheat and soybeans in the past decade. Toby, I'm really worried about corn kid. I hope he's okay. And I'm also worried about you. Are you okay? Because I love corn? You love corn. I do love corn, but thanks for checking in. It's rough news to take on a Friday morning that the U.S. is no longer the world's top exporter of corn.

Here's the thing, though, we are still producing a lot of corn. We're just not exporting it as much, as you mentioned. Around 40% of U.S. corn goes to domestic supply mills, and a lot of that corn goes to making ethanol, which has been like a very, very long and steady climb up as a big part of the fuel industry. And then also, corn, I didn't realize, you can store in silos almost. indefinitely like it keeps very very well and so that being the case a lot of US kind of producers are just sticking in silos and waiting for prices to be right to actually sell it so there are all these factors where our corn production is going up to

the right but our exports are going or flattening out a little bit because we've just been used to that at home yeah well it's just always funny to think about how little corn is the kind you eat right it all goes I don't know the fraction but the share is probably in very much in the single digits, probably in the low single digits of all the corn that's produced here, the one that winds up in our dinner table. Are you, okay, are you butter or salt? Oh, or both or neither? I'd lather that thing up. Are you kidding me? I want to have sticky fingers. Yeah, corn was always a big deal for me because I had like braces growing up to. And so for a while, like I couldn't eat corn. And so as soon as I got the braces off, like we had a big corn like blow out.

I ate a lot of it. So that's a core memory for sure. Um, it is a, it is a, it is a, it is a, a of a crazy decline though for the U.S. to no longer be number one because we also used to use food as kind of this geopolitical weapon of sorts where we could exert our influence because yeah we were the biggest exporters of grain of soy of corn and

like when the Cold War was happening we bailed Russia out actually and used it as like a leverage point because they their food production wasn't where it needed to be and even now like China is still a big buyer from us but they've been trying to move

to cozy up with Brazil actually because they're a big thing. So food has always played a massive geopolitical role. So it is a little, I don't want to say alarming, but just kind of a shift from the last 100 years of like the U.S. food. Right. But now we're doing the same thing in energy because we freaking make so much natural gas here and we are now a net energy exporter. So I think maybe we're just shifting with the tides.

Food is not as important as an export anymore in terms of a geopolitical tool. but energy is arguably just as important, and we're exporting a lot more of that now. So look for that to be the next point of leverage for the U.S. Yeah, natural gas. I mean, Saudi Arabia does that for us when they buy golf and stuff. It's the new corn. Natural gas is the new corn.

Okay, Neil, for our last story, the small Caribbean nation of Anguila must be watching Gary Vee videos because it is pulling off one heck of a side hustle right now. So this island that's half the size of Washington, D.C., rode the dot-com bubble way better than most of us when it lucked into the country-specific. Dot-A.I. website domain back in the 90s. Fast forward to today and every startup under the sun is getting into the artificial intelligence game and subsequently snagging. Dot AI domains left and right.

Wait until you hear these numbers. The amount of AI domains doubled in the past year to 300,000 and Sensing Gwila gets paid by domain registers every time a new one pops up, It's looking at revenue in the $25 to $30 million range. The country brings in just $107 million in revenue each year. So this is a legitimate revenue stream for them, Neil. Sometimes it's just better to be lucky than good, I think. I think so.

It's happened all over, too. I mean, this has happened with .a.i right now. But there are other countries that have lucked into, just by virtue of their name, have lucked into popular domain endings. Montenegro, there was this in the early. 2010's there was a proliferation of dot me. So Montenegro made a lot of money from that. There's a lot of dot CO which is very helpful to Colombia. And then another big one

is dot TV which was which was tied to the proliferation of Twitch Twitch Twitch TV. So Tuvalu which is also just a very small island country got 112 of its annual gross national income from licensing its domain to tech companies. So these this is not like an insignificant part of their government. I mean, there's this wild quote from

the Tuvalu's Minister of Finance where they talk about the income from its domain names, and he says, it enables the government to provide essential services to its people through providing schooling and education, providing medical services, and also basic economic infrastructure. So because of

Twitch and the fact that Tuvalu has dot TV, it's actually benefiting everyone at that in this country significantly. And I just love that, especially for Anguilla, most of its economy relies on tourism. And obviously, like, it's had a very rough couple of years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so it's almost like the, you see the karma coming back around and then they get handed like this golden goose of the AI boom. So they're making

up some of that lost revenue. So just a great move. Also, they kind of lucked into, they had this pre-planned increase in what the domain registrars had to pay them. So not only did they ride this AI boom, They also wrote it to a greater degree of profitability just because they're like, yes, we're going to increase the price. And then it happened to luck out in terms of demand going up as well. So just baller moves all around from Inguila. Very cool story. That is our show for today. Have a great three-day weekend.

We'll be dropping an episode on Labor Day on Monday, but it will be a little different format than typical. You'll see. Toby and I get into some predictions, some good stuff. Yeah, it'll be fun. And as always, don't hesitate to write to us at the ewe. email address Morning Brew Daily at MorningBrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer.

Samantha Velas is back in the saddle and along with Raymond Liu is our associate producer. Eugenio Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio and it's also his birthday. Happy birthday, Billy. We won't sing to you even though you are our audio engineer. You can make it sound good, but we won't sing to you. Heron makeup is broken and we alone can fix them. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

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