Odd Lots - How A Post-Keynesian Economist Sees The Markets Right Now

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

Srinivas Thiruvadanthai is the Director of Research at the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, and one of the most interesting commentators on markets and the economy. He's also an economist who fits into the post-Keynesian school of thought. The post-Keynesians -- a group that has a growing following -- argue that the economy is not self-correcting, that central banks have limited influence on the economy or inflation, and that large government debts can be a stabilizing force. In our conversation, he explains his world view and how he uses it to interpret markets right now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal and unfortunately Tracy Alloway.

My co-host is off this week, so I'm, of course, extremely sad about that. But I'm very excited about my guest today, and so it kind of makes up for Tracy being gone. He's a previous guest on an earlier Odd Lots episode. Today I'm going to be speaking with Srinivazir Vodonti. He is the director of research at the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center. Fascinating person to talk to about all kinds of things, economics and markets and global macro. He's a fascinating voice on Twitter, knows so much about everything. And I just am very excited about having a wide-ranging discussion about the economy, about the unique approach that he brings

to analyzing it and applications of that two markets. And I'm just very much looking forward to talking to Serena Vaz. Thank you very much for joining us. Oh, thank you, Joe, for the very kind introduction. Yeah, no, I'm not being sarcastic or facetious or anything like that. You really are one of my favorite people to talk to and to follow your work. Tell me just before we get started for people not familiar with the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center or your background. I mentioned that I think you do bring a sort of unique perspective to the analysis of markets and economics.

But what is sort of the main base that you operate from ideologically? Yeah. So we use what's called the profits perspective, which basically comes from the idea that for the capitalist economy, profits are central. They are what motivates businesses to hire and to invest. And so how do we look at, how do we forecast where profits are in the aggregate where they are going? Because they're central to the direction of the economy. Why is this unusual? Because I think if you were to say, oh, the capitalist system is all about where the profit is,

I think a lot of people would hear that and say, well, yeah, of course, that's capitalism. That makes total sense. So what is it that makes that a unique approach at all? But most of the time, you're absolutely right. But most of the time, if you look at people forecasting the economy, they are looking at it from a real economy perspective where they're trying to forecast consumption plus investment, plus government spending, plus net exports,

and they are looking at aggregate output gap and things like that. You rarely ever see profits being in the aggregate sense. The people who are interested in profits and earnings are the macro strategies and the top-down strategies and the bottom-up people, of course, were putting up profits from company perspective and then adding it up. But you rarely ever see people talking about forecasting earnings in the aggregate and what that means. Right.

So you get company analysts, and of course they're very focused on earnings and earnings per share and growth. And then you get macro strategists, who, as you say, talk about interest rates and the output gap, the Fed and trade and all this stuff. but what you don't get is people looking at it from a big picture perspective, looking at those overall profit flows, is what you're saying. Absolutely. Got it.

And tell me about your background. I mean, you have a PhD in economics. One thing I find interesting about following your stuff is I feel like there's a lot of people who have that, who have trouble bridging economics to markets. So you have theoreticians and you have people who talk about the sort of economics in the abstract. but they tend not to be, or you often don't think of them as necessarily applying that to the study of markets and to actually make trades and investments. Tell us about your background and how you bridged that.

Those two practices. So before I came to do my PhD, I actually worked in banking in India. And it was actually not a conventional bank. Back then, India had what is called industrial credit bank. So it was more geared towards financing long-term project loans. And it so happened, I joined when India embarked in one of its major liberalization programs in 1991. That was a start of my career. So it was a huge deal when I came in.

There was enormous turmoil and also enormous excitement. So, you know, I could see from ground up in a way that, that, you know, banking, finance, you know, balance sheets, Those things are very, very central to how the economy operates, and it's very different from the theoretical models of economists. But, you know, there is obviously something to learn from the theoretical models of economics as well. So I was able to bridge that gap. The other fortuitous thing is I went to Washoe, Washington University, where Hyman Minsky used to be there. By the time I went there, he had already left. And he had mentored Steve Fazari, who happened to be one of my advisors,

and who I am still in touch with, and he's one of our advisors here at the Levy Forecasting Center. So I also got the Minsky perspective, and coincidentally, Minsky also was very involved in banking. He was a director of Mark Twain Bank for 20 years, I think. So, you know, I think the understanding of finance and banking as being very central to the functioning of the economy is what helps me bridge the gap between financial markets and between the theoretical economics. Yeah, I love this idea that I think people might have some concept of what a bank does, but I love this idea that, as you put it, both in your own experience and in Minsky's experience, actually working for a bank and really seeing what a bank does is incredibly helpful

and something that a lot of people just don't appreciate. Yes, yes, absolutely. And, you know, many people are very proudly, proud that they're ignorant about banking. Many economists, they think that you don't need to understand any of that. All you need to understand is money, and that's it. And I don't understand how they can understand money if they don't understand banking. Well, what is the main thing you learn when working at a bank that most economists don't get it? So the critical thing about when you work in a bank, you realize that banks are driven by expectations of credit losses.

And in that scheme, you know, the interest rate mechanism is not so important for the capital spending decisions of businesses. You know, when you actually go down to the trenches and you are looking at a project loan and you're trying to make various scenarios, you really, realize that the interest rate is swamped by all other factors. You know, the difference between scenarios is so huge that interest rates is a very, very, very tiny, insignificant factor. More important, from the business perspective, they don't really care that much about the cost of capital. Their hurdle rates are so much higher than the cost of capital that most of the time the decisions are strategic and hardly based on the calculus of, okay, the interest rate is half a percent lower, so I'm going to invest in this project. That's not how the world operates. I notice this, you know, when you read through

regional Fed manufacturing reports or other surveys of business leaders, it's just incredible how rarely they bring up interest rates as an important aspect of their business decision. So you read about all kinds of things, sometimes regulatory, trade, commodity prices, other aspects of the global economy. And it seems to me that, you know, we spend an incredible amount of time on the centrality of, say, the Federal Reserve, and are they going to hike four times or three times this year or how many times next year? And there just seems to be a remarkable lack of interest in that when you actually just read what business leaders are saying. Yes. And in fact, I think the Federal Reserve itself has a paper, which is a survey of business, uh,

hurdle rates, and over 20 years, they've shown that hurdle rates have not changed much at all for capital spending decisions. Whereas, you know, we've seen interest rates come down a lot in these 20 years, right? So, yes, I mean, it's not at all relevant in the conventional way that it's modeled in economics. But, of course, monetary policy is very central, and it operates more through balance sheets and through balance sheet effects. Right. So we think of, people think of the interest rate that the Fed control is some sort of dial where they can turn it down or up to get the economy hotter or cooler. But it's really just one lever among many and it's a minor one. And the idea that they have this much control is something you learn is overstated. You know, before we did this, while we were, before we scheduled this podcast, you had a really interesting thread. on Twitter, and I would encourage everyone who's listening to follow you. And you talked about

things that we've learned in the post-crisis era that the post-Kanesians have gotten right. And, of course, Hyman Minsky, who you mentioned is associated with the Post-Kanesian School of Economics. What is post-Kasianism? People have been talking about this more. But if you had to sort of describe the school of economics, what is the central idea? Okay, so the Post-Kinstein is a really big tent, and there are so many people disagree about what the basic fundamentals are. But from a purely practitioner's point of view, and that is relevant for financial markets, I think here's the way I distill it and I use it for myself, the way I organize my thoughts, is the economy is, it's a financial economy at the end of the day. And money, credit, and balance sheets matter. You cannot treat it like a barter economy and then add on money.

money and credit. And money and credit are endogenous to the system. The second critical point, which I think all post-Gainsians agree, is that demand matters and demand matters not just in the short run. Most of the time, the economy is operating in a slack. So the demand constraint is a binding constraint. And the number three thing, which I would say, again, is also critical that most post-Cainsians would agree, is that the investment and saving decisions, are separated and saving does not, therefore the act of saving does not automatically create investment. On the other hand, because money and credit are endogenous, investment creates its own saving. And because most of the time we are operating in a slack, investment creates its own saving.

And I think the last point, which is a more a Minskian point, but I think most Post-Kensians would agree with also is that there is a tendency towards instability and of the capitalist economy. And fiscal deficits and government debt are stabilizing mechanisms, whereas very rapid rise in private debt is a destabilizing. Right. So one recalls during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, obviously there is a school of thought that said the government just needs to get out of the way and markets will. find a clearing price at which the assets are truly valued. And then once we find this price,

then the economy can grow healthy from there. And Minsky and the other post-Kanesians would say that there is no natural stabilizing effect in the economy and that ultimately what is needed is large government deficits and a government to play a substantial role in the economy, and that that ultimately would be the stabilizing force. Correct. Just going back to your experience in banking, I wanted to hit back on this point about how savings doesn't lead to investment. Because I think most people probably have that it's a wonderful life vision of what a bank is where you put money in a bank and then the banker can look at all the money in the vault and say, okay, I have this much to lend out. But as you point out, that's really not the mechanism at all.

It's completely misleading in terms of the constraints on where investment comes from, the decisions, and whether a bank will make a loan in the first place. Right. So if you think about it, I mean, if you go to the principles of macro, and the first thing that when they go to money and banking, they will teach you that, okay, somebody comes and brings in $100 and deposits in the bank, and through the deposit multiplier, now that gets into new loans, Wila, and we have credit increasing. The question is, where did the original $100?

come from? You know, they never asked that question. Where did it come from? Is it, did we, who gave you their $100? We are talking about money here. It's not, my act of saving did not create $100. You know, so that's a fundamental question. In reality, what actually happens, and which by now pretty much everybody agrees in the, in fact, the Bank of England has been on this drumbeat for a while now, is that when banks, when you go to the bank, when a company goes to the bank for a loan, and the bank evaluates the loan, and makes a credit. It does not go for looking for deposits. And then when the bank creates a credit, it automatically creates a deposit in the company's name for that amount in the company then uses

that loan the deposit to make whatever it wants to purchase, capital spending and other things, which then, that money then goes to somebody else's bank account, which then becomes their deposit. So the money doesn't get extinguished that way. So it's precisely the opposite. Rather than, and you said this already, but just to restate that, rather than someone's savings, then creating the money available for a new loan, it's that the loan creates the money, and then that becomes savings either in the form of the company or more likely if they're going to make an investment in the income of whoever that company is spending that money on. Yes, absolutely.

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And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast feed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments. Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. I want to get to in a moment how we can apply some of these ideas to the market and the economy right now. But before we do, one area I really am personally curious on that I feel like I don't have a great understanding of is inflation.

And I think one of the things that you said, and we've sort of touched on this in our discussion already, is, you know, the central bank's ability to generate inflation is massively over. overstated. We just see it empirically in the post-crisis era, all these banks completely unable to hit inflation targets despite desperate attempts and all kinds of innovations. What is the sort of, what is the post-Kanzean view of where inflation comes from? Because it appears that the mainstream doesn't have many good answers right now. I'm not sure that post-Kancians have necessarily a great answer. I think because there are many, many different people having different views about inflation. within the post-Kencian school, I think that's one of the places where I think there is, I wouldn't say that there is a very strong answer that explains every single phenomenon except narratives,

you know, which can always be post-hawk. So, I mean, in fact, my own view of inflation, I would say is a very narrative one, and it is post-hawk to some extent, because I think it is a complex phenomenon. I think there is an economic aspect to it, but there's also a political aspect to it and which is what makes it very difficult to analyze. We can understand that, you know, if there is, as a slack in an economy, dwindles, eventually at some point some inflationary pressures build up. But the fact that we can already are hedging it by saying eventually at some point tells you that it is a very complex phenomenon in and of itself. On top of that, you do have institutional context, whether there are unions and what do, is there bargaining power,

what is the structure of the economy, the structure of competition. So so many other things get into the mix that trying to mathematically try and forecast inflation is a very, very tough job. Yeah, I like that you mentioned that about Slack because intuitively, I guess this idea, okay, you're running low on resources, whether it's labor or some other capital good and that could drive up prices. But on the other hand, I always thought like that's what capitalism was for, which was, well, if you're running low on trucks or running low on some resource, then you come up with some innovation to address that. So it's not totally intuitive to me the mainstream story that lack of slack should be the major driver of inflation because, you know, we're always trying to solve our slack problem, I guess you could say. That is absolutely correct. I mean, your point is very correct. And, you know, see, that's, that's, that's, that's, where this inflation story becomes very complex is that for a business to start deciding,

okay, this slack, this tight labor market is permanent and therefore I need to address it by automation or trying to labor-saving devices, they need to be convinced that this is a rather permanent state of affairs, right? So, and then they need to, so to be convinced, you need to have a situation of tight labor markets for a while before businesses decide to do that. especially if the memory of having slack labor markets is very strong, which is what we have right now in the US, right? Because the memory of slack labor markets over the last 10 years is so persistent that even when there is tight labor markets, businesses will not really believe that this is a permanent

state of affairs. And they will try to resist wages. They will also not try to, you often hear businesses saying that there are not qualified workers. Of course, you're not going to be able to get workers plug and play that you had the opportunity when unemployment was 8%, right? I mean, you need to find workers who you need to train. But the reluctance to train, which is an investment, is a mindset that comes from the adaptive expectations of the last 10 years that I don't want to spend money on training because you didn't have to do that until now. I almost wonder if there's an analogy to banking. It's like

where does a dollar come from? It comes from investment. Where does a trained worker come from? Yes. It's kind of similar. You might have to. You make the hiring first and then the trained worker becomes second. Finally, I want to, you know, one of the debates that, and it's become this massive political debate and people don't know how to address it, inequality. I'm curious what is your view or what is the post-Kanesian view on what the origins of wealth inequality in the economy are? Well, wealth inequality has been there for a long time. let's focus on income inequality, which is an easier thing to deal with.

I think most of the time, if you look at the economy, I mean, growth and inequality are actually fairly very well correlated, I mean, inversely correlated. When you have strong growth, inequality tends to decline. And most of the time, that's because strong growth trends to drain the slack and does give workers some bargaining power. You know, I mean, you have seen some wages increasing, you know, in the economy. And it does give workers some bargaining power. And that is, that's especially the workers who are most vulnerable, you know, the most marginally

attached type of workers, they are the ones who start getting good raises relative to everybody else when you have a strong economy. And if you go back to, you know, the golden period of capitalism, according to post-Cainsians, which is not necessarily what everybody agrees on, from 1947 to 73, the lower end of the economy actually got relatively high wage gains relative to the upper end, especially the top 20%. And so there was what the economy is called the great compression, the biggest decline in inequality. But it was also a period of very robust growth.

I mean, the strongest 25 years in the entire history of developed markets. So I think growth solves a lot of problems. I think a focus on inequality, I'm not trying to dismiss inequality as. and phenomenon that shouldn't be addressed directly or indirectly. But I think if we focus more on how can we get growth going, I think a lot of the problems around inequality will tend to melt away. It doesn't mean it will completely go away. And there may be other direct mechanisms which we may or may not want to address

and that depends on one's political persuasion. But I think from a purely objective analysis, if you're concerned about inequality, try to address growth and a lot of the problems will go away. Well, let's apply some of these ideas. And so we've talked about some basic concepts, this idea that the market or the economy is not naturally self-correcting, that interest rates are pretty overrated as a major determinant of the economy or business decisions, that the correct approach to see the world is through the profits perspective and so on. So apply that now when you're thinking about markets these days. what do you see as the interesting phenomenon or opportunities based on this lens? Okay, so let's look at the profits perspective as applied to the U.S. economy, and then we'll look at other economies.

So here we were coming into 2018, and we got a massive fiscal stimulus. It's not just the tax cut, but also the sequester removal of the sequester spending caps, which is going to add about $150 billion in spending. So the profits perspective tells you that the flow of funds that go on to profits, deficits is one of them. Now, obviously, there are adjusting mechanisms. If the government spends more and runs a bigger deficit, the other sectors might be contracting that to some extent, you know, the perfect Ricardian equivalences.

If the government runs a deficit, the private sector completely saves it. In real world, that never happens. So what you see instead is a big rise in profits. That's why we've been beating the drum on saying that profits are going to be really strong in the US economy. And they were, not only was the first quarter strong, which people expected because we got the tax cut. But the second quarter, which has taken a lot of people by surprise, has been even stronger.

And that's because the sequester spending caps were removed and it took time for the spending to build up. So that's one direct application. And the other one, which when we look at emerging markets, which we identify, which we identify is one of the issues with the emerging markets, a structural issue, is that if you think about what drove the emerging market boom of the 2000s and what happened to them since then, is they had, their current accounts were, balances were expanding, improving because they were growing their export share in the developed markets thanks to outsourcing and things like that.

And because they were running such high exports, they were also investing in the capacity to cater to those exports. So if you think about both investments, so the current account balance is a direct increase in profits. The investment, if you think about what an investment is, investment for the company that is making the investment is a balance sheet transaction. Whereas for the company that is selling the capital good,

it's revenue and profits. So the investment generally leads to higher aggregate profits. So they were having the best of both worlds. Since the crisis, developed market growth obviously has been structurally weaker, and the emerging markets have also saturated their export potential in the developed markets. So since then, they have had to move more towards a domestic demand-led growth, which means that they have to now create profits domestically in some sense. So an investment that is geared towards domestic demand.

Now, think about what's happening when you are trying to create domestic final demand. You have to then create the credit in your own economy. Now, many of them do not have a financial sector that is sophisticated enough to deliver credit in a responsible way over long periods of time. And initially, they were very successful from 2010 to 2012-13, in fact. But the effects were already starting to show by 2012-13. And one perfect example is India, but Brazil is also another one. and India is still dealing with the excess and bad lending that was done during those years. And once that model was exposed, what they have now been floundering with is to figure out how to grow,

and they have not been able to grow. So they are back to the old iron constraint, which is that they can grow only fast as their exports grow, which is basically another post-Gaensian insight. It's called Third Wall's Law. Basically, it says that the BOP constraint, you're, you're, you're, can't grow much faster than your exports, because if you do, then your imports start growing and your current account starts to worsen, and then you come under some kind of currency pressure and capital flight.

How do you analyze the potential impact of a trade war from the profits perspective? Okay. So most of the time, people are looking at trade as, okay, exports are X percent of GDP, how much will exports fall, and what impact can it have on the economy? and most of the time the analysis will be, it will be very minor or half a percentage point, which is not insignificant, but not recessionary. But also tied to those exports are the financial structures and more important, the investment, right, that is tied to the exports.

This may not be huge for the U.S., but it's certainly huge for countries like Mexico, Korea, China, India, countries that have much more open trade. The U.S. is a relatively closed economy in that sense, not because, We have tremendous trade barriers, but because our domestic economy is huge. And so in those places, if you look at all the investment that is behind those export industries, now all those investments look shaky. And all the financial structures behind those investments, whether it is equity or debt, now also starts looking shaky.

So then people will now be reluctant to make further investments in export capacity for sure, but they also will be not so sure that the demand will be there for the domestic investment because all the people employed in the export industry, their incomes are insecure now. And number two, you don't know what the final trade arrangement is going to be. Until then, there's going to be uncertainty about where should I locate my supply chain, what is going to be that tariff structure. So those things are going to constrain investment. So the decline in investment is a much bigger deal, which we cannot really, we can try to have some bounds on how much investment can get affected.

But ultimately it depends on animal spirits. And there is also feedback loop. You know, the worse investment does, the worse the economy does and so on. The key insight here is that everybody knows that if trade barriers go up, that you could look at a country like Mexico and it's like this is not going to be good. for them, but that if we're just looking at the share of exports as a percentage of GDP or so forth, we're missing a big aspect, which is all of the income that they would get from people building factories in Mexico with the idea of exports and then the sort of all the knock-on effects from that lack of income and the job instability and so forth. Absolutely.

Now, what is, you know, right now, obviously this year, probably for a few different reasons we've seen selling in emerging markets, pretty ugly year for EM. Again, going back to this idea that there's no natural stability mechanism in the economy. They're not just going to bounce back for the sake of bouncing back. Are there any flows in place or any countervailing forces in place that will mitigate that at some point? Well, you know, I mean, I think they're not, I mean, except in places where there is real risk of political instability. I think they will eventually find some bottom. I mean, the emerging markets, one of the things that they have, the word itself was coined in the 80s,

you know, and the reason why it was coined is people saw some glimmer of hope even amidst all those Latin American crises and everything. And some of those are actually true in the sense that I have seen it in my lifetime, lifetimes with India, is that there has been an emergence. Part of the reason is you have shed the socialist practices and generally, the workforce has become educated, you know, there are a lot of good things that have happened in the long run. So there is obviously a place where they will settle and I don't know where that is. But I do think that to make the next transition to a higher growth again, there they need to be able to find a way to have a domestic financial system that is sophisticated enough to be able to deliver credit domestically. And that's a harder challenge than doing some cyclical rebalancing.

That's the problem. I mean, the previous challenge they addressed as soon as after the Asian crisis. They figured out, look, we can't depend on IMF and all these to give us reserves when we need them. We need to have a huge buffer. And they went about building the buffers. And every emerging market economy today has pretty much large buffers. So they don't have the conventional currency crisis. So they solved that problem.

But now they have to make the next big leap, which is to have a financial system that is capable of delivering credit in a responsible way. Not that we have covered ourselves in glory, but remember, we had the biggest financial crisis since the Depression and 10 years down the road. We are the strongest economy in the world now. How much of that, you mentioned India and other countries in which you just sort of see an improvement in education and better policies. when you think about the maturation of an emerging market financial system, how linked are those two things in terms of this sort of basic human development being necessary for the emergence of a stable and sound and expanding strong financial system? That's a very good question. I actually never thought of it that way, but that's an excellent question. I do think that ultimately, if you, to have a, sophisticated financial system, you have to have a large domestic investor base that is invested mostly in financial assets. So if you look at the U.S., most people's saving, a lot of people

may not have any saving, but most people's saving is in that form of financial assets, aside from their home, right? Aside from real estate, most of it is in the form of their 401K plans or CDs and, you know, their mutual funds or whatever it is, right? So you have a very large domestic investor base and a domestic financial base for financial instruments. Most emerging markets, that's not the case because it's cash economy and most people, their investments are either in real estate or they are in gold in India, like, for instance, you know, those kind of things.

And even the real estate in the developed markets is actually financialized because if you look at the amount of credit behind the real estate and the mortgage markets, that's not the case in the developed markets. Most people own real estate outright. So there's not a sophisticated financial market behind the real estate. So once you create a large domestic financial base, you automatically then create demand for the domestic sovereign debt, which then becomes. the safe asset in that currency. That's what allows then the government to do countercyclical fiscal policy, you know, all the MMT stuff, which doesn't work in most emerging markets because the government debt is not considered as a safe asset, because there's not a big domestic financial base. There's no manufacturing it overnight. It just sort of needs to build up organically

over time. Yes, absolutely. Before we wrap up, I want to go back to the U.S. real quickly, you mentioned that contrary to the expectations of many Q2 earnings have been phenomenal once again. Q1 wasn't just a one-off. Do you expect further sustained strong earnings, strong profits in the U.S. going forward? I think through the end of the year probably, I mean, I don't want to look too far out. Profits look fairly solid. I mean, I don't think they're going to maintain the second quarter pace a year-over-year basis, but they are still going to be very strong.

All right. Serena Vise, I really enjoy talking to you. I learned a lot there, and there's just, I really like your ability to sort of take these big theoretical ideas and make them incredibly concrete. And there aren't many people who can do that and also actually apply them to market. So appreciate you coming out. Thank you so much. Well, here's again where I would typically banter with Tracy and ask her what she liked about the conversation. but I would just say that I liked the whole thing.

And that's about it. So this has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. You can follow Tracy on Twitter at Tracy Alleyway and definitely follow Srinivos on Twitter. I honestly think he's one of the best people on there and also one of the most underfollowed,

given all of the pearls of insight that he regularly has. every day. Follow him at T-S-3, T-E-A-S-R-I. And follow our producer on Twitter, Tofer-For-For-Hez-T, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Lévi. She's on Twitter at Francesca Today. Thanks for listening. I'm Francine Lacquois, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lackwa from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always

better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacquois wherever you get your podcasts.