Odd Lots - How To Analyze The Currency Markets

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

With assets like stocks and bonds, there are clear techniques you can use to value them. But what about currencies? They don't produce cash flows. They don't offer any particular claim on assets. They're all priced relative to other currencies. So how do you go about determining their value? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa, play the podcast, Odd Lots on Amazon Music. Oh, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weissel. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, have you ever noticed, like, we've had all this market volatility lately? And regardless of what we're talking about, it feels like the action that we see in the trading of the U.S. dollar is central. to almost every conversation that we have. Yeah, that's true. It certainly feels like, well, from my position in this part of the world in Hong Kong, very close to China, it feels like a lot of the emerging market, volatility and weakness has definitely been pinned on the dollar recently. Right, exactly.

And it's also kind of weird because basically everything is priced in dollars. So I've always had a hard time wrapping my head around what is a move in the U.S. dollar. versus what is other stuff moving around priced of the U.S. dollars. Does that make sense? Oh, no. This sounds like a currencies episode, and you know that currencies are my least favorite thing to talk about, because, as you point out, everything is always relative.

Right. It's kind of like if you're standing on Earth, then you say, oh, the sun is rising and the sun is falling, depending on the time of the day. But we know that in the universe, the sun doesn't actually move at all, and everything moves around it. And I've always sort of kind of thought of the dollar this way.

Like sometimes we talk about the dollar going up and down, but sometimes it seems like it might make sense to just talk about everything else that's priced relative to the dollar. And the conversation always kind of hurts my head. I would broadly agree with that. And of course, the financial system revolves around the dollar and the dollar holds that very special position in the financial system, which is that it is the world's reserve currency, which gives it an extra layer of companies. complexity. Isn't that fun? Yeah. So both of us get our head hurt by currency conversations and trying to wrap our head around the role of the dollar in the financial system. So I'm very

excited about the guest we have on today. We're going to talk about how to think about valuing currencies, how to think about valuing the dollar with a long time veteran expert in the world of currencies. He is Mark Chandler. He's a managing partner at Bannickburn, Global Forex, and he is going to break it all down for us today. So, Mark, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I don't know about your headaches, but I can tell you this, that there's two types of people I think in the world, people who give headaches and people who get headaches, and I'm a giver. You're going to give us both headaches? Both headaches. I thought you were going to be here to relieve our headaches. That's the incredible thing is how complicated foreign exchange is.

And I think that you put two currency strategists and you'll get three different opinions. And I think that that's the challenge. I think that you guys hit it in the sense that currencies are central, the dollar is central, but valuation, you know, when you think about stocks and bonds, there's a clear model of the valuation, either an earning stream, free cash flow, breakup value, replacement costs, all more or less agreed upon models to evaluate equities. You can do the same thing with fixed income. MBAs, economists can project the future value of the earning stream. But it comes to currencies in their pure form, they don't have an earning stream. You can turn them into a deposit and then they have yields

and then we can talk about interest rate differentials, but in their pure form. We live in an era of fiat currencies where money has no value except the value we give it. It's not backed by gold or silver anymore. It's not backed by commodities. They're free-floating for the most part of the major currencies.

And so valuation becomes much more elusive. I think that's what a source of headaches for people. Not only all the other problems, but the valuation. I think you've hit the nail on the head why both Tracy and I get headaches talking about this topic. Okay, so on that note, I mean, you just mentioned, Mark, that unlike a stock or a bond that generate some sort of cash flow, currencies aren't really doing that. So how do you go about valuing currencies and does the value of a currency have to come from it moving up against something else? That's a good question.

So how do we evaluate currencies? I think there's, even among economists, there's a few agreed upon tools that give one a handle on very. I use WCRS on Bloomberg, and that'll give you... Thank you for the plug. That'll give you the change in the day, but towards the bottom of it, you get purchasing power parity, PPP. I think of this sometimes as the famous one that everybody's familiar with probably is the Big Mac. And the idea is that the Big Mac should sell for roughly the same amount in various countries.

And if they don't, it's because of a currency misalignment. It's kind of a basic approach. And the idea is that currencies ought to equalize. A currency should move to equalize a basket of tradable goods. So whether you do with an iPad or you do with a Starbucks cappuccino, you do it with the Big Mac, you get roughly the same general thing. And that is that the value of a currency is based on what it can buy. So let's talk about the famous Big Mac index and just really drill down because I think you made an important point

that I want to make sure people understand. A Big Mac pretty much everywhere, whether it's Tokyo, whether it's Zurich, Switzerland, whether it's New York City, whether it's somewhere in China. It's roughly the same ingredients. Probably there's some tweaks here and there, but there's some flour or there's some wheat and there's beef, and there's a certain amount of human labor that it takes

to assemble a Big Mac and the pickles and the tomatoes. So they're roughly the exact same product everywhere. And so what can you tell if a Big Mac is much more expensive at a given moment in, say, Switzerland than it is in China? What does that tell you about currency valuation? So the economists would argue that where the Big Mac is more expensive, it's where the currency is undervalued. And so you go around to find out where the Big Mac is cheap, and that'll tell you where the currencies are rich. And so I think that I had a colleague once who came to New York from London and was amazed at how cheap the Big Macs were. And that's all he ate while he was here. But no matter how many he ate, it didn't help

bring the prices into alignment. He himself wasn't able to close the arbitrage gap. Exactly. Just shy. But I think that that's- Wait, wait, wait. Okay. So I have a question on this, and sorry to belabor the Big Mac point, but wouldn't some of the currency fluctuation come from differences in, say, labor costs between countries? Exactly. I think you hit Tracy on the key point is that these kind of purchasing power parity only measure the price of goods. So there might be implicit in there. Some economists will use, instead of the Big Mac,

they'll use measures of inflation. And there you can use something such as, like, unit labor costs. So you depreciate the currencies by some kind of index based on unit labor costs, and that gets around that problem that I think you're right about. If you think about the labor, say Chinese labor, Mexican labor compared to American labor, especially as we hiked minimum wage

and we were talking to say $10 or $15 an hour to make a big Mac compared to a few dollars in some other countries. But the other problem with the purchasing power period of the economists have tried to come up with new models to address this is it seems that in modern production the cost of capital is important.

So in some ways then the cost of capital is not really picked up. And that I think gets to your point, Tracy, not just about labor costs, but cost of capital. Rents. In Hong Kong, maybe you have high rents. like Manhattan's just an island, people have to build up. So maybe rents are elevated, that'll raise the cost of doing business, including selling Big Macs or Starbucks cappuccinos.

So ultimately, although people do like models such as the Big Mac Index, it only gets you so far. Because while there are certain baskets of tradable goods like wheat or beef, that really should equalize everywhere. In any given location, there are enough local idiosyncratic things that that is just not enough to tell you whether a currency is going to go up or down. Exactly. And to your point, you can look at the variance of Big Macs around the world, or you can look at the Big Mac variance within the United States. And the variance in the United States also cannot be accounted for by simply a currency

misalignment, you'd imagine. So when economists have come up with these, and it's also available on the WCRS page for you, is they call it, you've got real equilibrium exchange rates, which try to make sense of both the current account, the trade balance as well as capital flows. The idea is here that currencies ought to equalize bring the capital account or the current account into balance. And so this would be another measure. So you'd incorporate then not only the differential in the differential in the current account and the capital account to bring that into another model. And they more or less tend to all point

the same direction. Currencies that are overvalued like the Swiss franc. It's still overvalued almost no matter how you want to look at it. What it really determines is the magnitude of the overvaluation. So shall we talk about the dollar? Because as Joe mentioned in the intro, there has been a lot of attention focused on the dollar recently, maybe more so than usual. How special is the dollar? How special is the dollar? Can I say very? I mean, and by that I mean, the foreign exchange market, this is why I really like it. The average daily turnover, $5.3 trillion a day. That comes on the Bank for International Settlements that does a survey every three years. $5.3 trillion a day.

That means in one week does enough turnover in the foreign exchange market to cover world trade for a year. You know, and so it's a huge market, and the dollar is on one side of roughly 90% of the trades. Why is it so big? I mean, if you say the size of the trade in currencies dwarfs actual world trade, Is it just speculative trading? Like what drives these massive flows?

Yeah, sure. So one point is that trade is a big part of it, but it's a relatively a small part of it. Capital flows are much bigger than trade flows. And capital flows, you think about the internationalization of portfolios, buying foreign bonds and stocks compared to the trade. I didn't think up between the U.S. and Canada, for example, among the two largest trading partners in the world, capital flows are much bigger than the trade flows. And the capital flows require currency transactions, but also hedging.

But also think about how the industry works. So you are a Bloomberg, you decide you're getting some revenue in Mexican pesos. And so what do you do with that Mexican pesos? Well, maybe you would hedge them by selling pesos in the forward market or the futures market to protect you from a depreciation of the peso. But then also you have an order for, say, $100 million. You give it to your favorite bank. and that that bank might break it up into smaller pieces, give it to other banks.

So in some ways, foreign exchange trading is like passing a hot potato around. Who's got the risk? Who's managing the risk? And you get paid to manage the risk. That actually brings me to a question that I meant to ask earlier, but it's sort of a nice pause. So you mentioned you get paid ultimately to manage the risk, to hold the hot potato of currency risk. Tell us a little bit about your career. You've been analyzing this for a long time, and I assume you've talked to a lot of people in exactly that position who feel that they need to manage that risk. Just tell us, step back and sort of tell us about your experience in this market. Sure. So when I first got out of school, the only thing I'd do is right. I had two graduate degrees. I knew what unemployment was, but I wouldn't have a clue is what unemployment meant for interest rates or currencies. And the first job I had was as a journalist on the floor of the Chicago market.

Interim Exchange covering the currency markets. And I just read this book called The Dollar and its rivals by an Italian economist, Parabani. And he sort of argued that the currency markets in the modern world is where nation states fight out national interest. Wars are deadly and they're messy and they're destructive and we want to avoid those. And so how can nation states compete? And so from Parabani's views that I really took early in my career is that the currency markets is that arena in which the national companies, national corporates, national financiers would fight

out national interests. And from being a journalist, I found out that the markets reward people to have an opinion. And it's funny about having an opinion. You don't have to be right. The idea is not so much being right, but sometimes it's offering a, I think you had recently sent out a tweet or a note about how poor economists are at forecast in the future. Sort of like that old Yogi Berra story about how difficult it is to forecast, especially about the future. And I think it's true, but I think that the value added of strategists like myself,

and I don't claim to any great track record in forecasting the day-to-day moves. But I think that the value added comes from trying to explain the framework how these different variables are interacting. So providing a framework of which variables are important, which aren't important, trying to help people navigate this minefield. And so from there I just became from one analyst's job to another, banks, hedge funds, and I've oftentimes gotten to trade myself. whether it's at prop desks, at a hedge fund, or having a small fund myself.

And I find that analyze the market is one thing. And trading it is a different set of skills. Like, does it really matter fundamentally whether the euro is at 11325 or 113.55? Not really, but it could matter a lot to your daily P&L or to your own position. And so knowing like stops, technical analysis, what are short-term movers like market positioning, put-call ratios versus long-term fundamental drivers. I think it's hard for, especially earlier in my career, I thought it was very difficult to manage both having a short-term view. I think the dollar is going to fall, but a long-term view, I think the dollar is going to go up.

How to manage those. I think that's tricky as well as then taking positions with your views or having to take a position against your views. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. Christina Ruffini will bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews.

All the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays, we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you. wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television.

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, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. So that analogy of currencies being sort of financial warfare is really interesting. Does that mean that the inevitable state of currencies is always, one of aggression. And does that mean that someone is always out there trying to unseat the dollar as the sort of center of the global financial system? Yeah, it's a good question. I do think that,

I think that's partly what Bitcoin was about. I remember when the euro was born, people thought the euro was not going to replace the dollar. Every so often, someone tells me that the Chinese RMB is going to replace the dollar. I sort of think that an important turning point took place in 1995. That was when Robert Rubin took over at the Treasury from Lloyd Benson. And that was the beginning of the strong dollar policy. And I know there's a lot of confusion of what a strong dollar policy means. We had one Treasury Secretary who suggested a strong dollar was one that was difficult to counterfeit. Now, I, I mean, that's good, it is a good, interesting explanation. But I think that the, here's what I think it really means. I think

that starting in 1995, the U.S. said, we will not weaponize the foreign exchange market. Remember the crash in 1987? A couple months before that, James Baker threatened to judge. Germans, if they didn't stimulate the economy, he'd let the dollar fall. Lloyd Benson, early 95, threatened the Japanese. If they didn't reduce their tariffs, I think, on cars, he would let the dollar fall against the end. The U.S. had weaponized the foreign exchange market, or had acted as a weaponized the dollar. And after 95, there's been an agreement not only for the U.S., but through the G7 and then ratified by the G20, not to use the currency markets as a weapon. And that's the way they say it is something like that the market determine exchange rates. So it's not that the policy is to have an

always strengthening dollar. It's that we won't use the dollar explicitly as a tool to sort of gain trade advantage, which of course raises the question is the era of the strong dollar coming to an end. Trump clearly talks about the currency market different than his predecessors, I think it's safe to say. Yeah, I think that Trump veres on trying to read. weaponized the foreign exchange market, but I've noted that other policy makers haven't taken his bait yet. There's some stuff around the edges, but nothing that I would describe as really weaponizing the currency markets. Even some of Trump's comments, I'd say, because they were ignored, it takes two to tango, because his comments were ignored, I think it helps me that people are

trying to, like, look beyond those kind of provocations. But I do think that it is possible that would go back into the sort of dog-eat-dog world, and we weaponize the foreign exchange market. And I think there's talk about that. That's why I'm so sensitive when I see people talking about currency wars. Because it's sort of like an arms control agreement. We could blow each other up, Russia or China. We can blow ourselves up many times over. But we've agreed not to use certain types of weapons.

I think that's the same thing in the foreign exchange market. The arms control can break down with a different leader, with a different set of circumstances. I mean, there did seem to be some confusion. Maybe there still is. But certainly in the first few months of Trump becoming president, it seemed like he himself was confused about whether or not he wanted a strong dollar or a weak dollar. Do you think he's leaning towards one side now? And what's the difference between the two?

Or what does a strong dollar mean for the U.S. economy versus a weak dollar? Well, I think that, I can't really speak to Trump's state of mind. Who can? But I tend to think that he's just more opportunistic. Sometimes when a strong dollar looks like it's going to, as a vote a conference in America, he likes it, and when he sees it, sees U.S. corporates complaining about a strong dollar and impact on earnings, he doesn't like it so much.

But generally, I think that what people I think want, it's not a strong dollar or a weak dollar, but they want a dollar that's, like, appropriate for where we are in the business cycle. I mean, why do other countries accumulate treasuries? They typically accumulate treasuries because they're preventing their currencies from strengthening, which is preventing the dollar from weakening, which is preventing, say, other macroeconomic adjustments. And so I would think that what we want now, just given that the U.S. economy is still growing relatively quickly,

while Europe slowing down, in fact, Germany had a contraction in Q3, Japan, which is the world's third largest economy, contracted in Q3, China is slowing down. The Fed is tightening. No other major central bank is tightening as aggressively as the Fed. And so I think in these circumstances, the dollar is going to go up. And one of these sort of methodological things that I look at, besides interest rate differentials is the policy mix.

Tight monetary policy, or tighter monetary policy, looser fiscal policy. I look for countries with that policy mix. That policy mix is associated with stronger currencies. That's what Reagan Volker had. That's what Germany had when the Berlin Wall fell, that led to a super Deutsche Mark, that led to the collapse of the exchange rate mechanism,

and then the birth of the euro. And so I look for countries with this kind of policy mix, and to the extent the U.S. pursues this policy mix, I still like the dollar. But to Joe's point, that might be coming to an end. I see some reports that suggest that maybe after exploding the budget deficit in the U.S. through these tax cuts and spending increases, now it looks like some political forces, including perhaps the White House,

is not going to come back and try to cut some benefits to try to help balance the budget. So if the U.S. goes from tighter monetary, looser fiscal to the opposite, Fed pauses, maybe has to cut rates, government goes from fiscal expansion, to fiscal tightening, that might be trouble for the dollar. So big picture, and you mentioned the Reagan Volker era, one of the things that you and I have talked about when you've come on TV a few times is this idea of like three recent big dollar bull run. So Reagan had a really big dollar bull run.

Clinton had a dollar bull run. I think we first started to talk about the current bull run, really definitely under Obama. and it's continued through Trump. Big picture, like, how long could it go? And what drives sort of multi-year sustained shifts in the price of the dollar? Yeah, that's one of the things I really like about the foreign exchange market, in some ways, it's forgiving.

And you have these long-term trends. And unlike, say, current, unlike interest rates or bonds, which are much more tied to the business cycle. Yeah. Currencies, because, as you were saying, currencies are partly relative value, how do we know it's the dollar moving, not the euro? Right. Or how do we know it's the dollar, not the Mexican pay? So I think that's where the art of it comes in and it.

try to look at what the context of it matters. So in my view, I'm anticipating the dollar to continue to be relatively firm through the middle of next year. Around the middle of 2019, I expect the Federal Reserve to pause. And when the Fed pauses, we don't know what the Fed pauses, we don't know it's going to pause in the sense that, so they say they're June meeting and they don't high grades in June. Is that a pause? Or how do we know they won't hike rates in July? So the federal have to indicate to us that they're pausing. And sometimes in the past, the Fed has done that by hiking rates 50 basis points, or cutting rates 50 basis points, or cutting rates 50 basis points to sort of end it with an exclamation point. But I'm thinking this time the Fed just

pauses, lets us know they pause. And around that same time, I think we'll see other countries, for example, the ECB is talking about raising interest rates possibly at the end of next summer. So around the time the Fed pauses, theoretically the ECB could raise interest rates. And I think that there goes my big divergent story. And there goes what could be the tipping point, the end of the big dollar super cycle. So if that were to happen, would those moves, the corresponding moves in the FX market, would those just be telling us something about where those respective economies are in the business cycle? Yeah, I think that not just a business cycle, Tracy, but I also would think about like monetary policy.

You know, I think that sometimes that interest rates and currencies are both prices of money. So I think that in general there's two explanatory models that economists or strategists use. One is the external balance. countries with a trade deficit or current account deficit ought to have weaker currencies, so the theory goes. And countries that have strong trade surpluses or current account surpluses like China should have appreciating currencies. That's sort of one model that currencies ought to equalize or bring into equilibrium trade accounts, external accounts. The other model, which I tend to emphasize, focuses on interest rate differentials, yield curve shapes, policy mixes. And right now the U.S. premiums, you know, sometimes people talk about.

about this exorbitant privilege the U.S. has, having the dollar as a reserve currency. But oftentimes that exorbitant privilege was lower interest rates. But right now, the U.S. is having much higher interest rates, almost record high interest rates against Germany. It's got near record high interest rates against Japan. There's no privilege here. The U.S. is paying a higher interest rate because the market's demanding it because of strong growth, higher inflation, and lots of supply. And so in those change, I think we have to be sensitive to that. Watch those changes.

and change to view on the currencies. Let's tackle one of the big questions that you alluded to earlier, which is the perennial obsession with, will the dollar one day be dethroned by another currency? Or maybe in theory, will we live at a sort of multi-reserve currency world where there's no single dominant currency? And of course, right now, if there's one currency that people talk about, as theoretically one day posing a challenge to the dollar. So obviously the Chinese currency, although it's nowhere yet.

What would it take for that to happen for whatever that means? I don't even know what it means for sure, but whatever that means for the dollar to be dethroned in some way, what would it take for that to happen? Yeah, sure. I think about this a lot because, I mean, not only are we living in a time where the U.S. power, we seem to rise of other countries, where the U.S. share of world GDP is not what it was, say, 20, 30 or 40 years ago. So under what conditions can the dollar be dethroned as the numerary as the number one currency? I had two scenarios. One is if the U.S. abdicates. And in some ways, that's what some people think.

That's what Trump is doing. And we see this among some other economists, too, free trade's not in U.S. interest. Having the reserve currency of the world is not in U.S. It's expensive. There's more money, dollars in circulation outside the U.S. than inside the U.S. How can you manage your economy like this? So it's possible that we abdicate. say we don't longer want to do this. And one way we would do that is by making it more difficult

to trade U.S. Treasuries, which is where the reserves are really held in. Another scenario would be if there's a compelling alternative, you know, we both use the same kind of keyboard, Q-W-E-R-T, right? And if you said to me, this is not really a good keyboard, it's not ergonomically sound, you hurt your wrist, you get Carmel's Tunnel syndrome, all these bad things happen. You've got a better keyboard. It can't just be a little bit better. It's got to be a lot better for me to make this transition. And so having something that's just as good as the dollar is not good enough. It has to be superior. And right now, I don't really see anything superior. Superior might be a country that has less of an external deficit. The U.S. has a debt to GDP of close to 100%. So he's finding me a

country that has less debt, external surplus. He said, well, maybe this country could be a better currency for the long-term store of value. I don't see a compelling alternative. And I know some Americans, they worry about China. But when I talk to Chinese officials, they know they're not even in the game yet. This is still early days. They think times on their side. But we're not going to see it. I mean, central banks move at like glacial speeds. And we're talking about the dollar being roughly six or seven trillion dollars held in reserves in treasuries versus a couple hundred billion held in Chinese currency. So it takes a long time. And I think that we really need a clear alternative. And I thought maybe some people thought Bitcoins was going to be it. I remember the

Euro. People thought now that it was an alternative. China, I just don't see something that's compelling enough to say that the depth and breadth of the U.S. Treasury market can be replaced by anybody. Well, Mark, on that forward-looking note, on that speculative note about the future of currency, thank you very much for joining us. And although I'd say you did sort of give us headaches, I do think you actually clarified some really important topics. Thank you. So Tracy, wait, do you have more of a headache now or less of a headache? I'm trying to think. I actually, I think Mark laid stuff out very, very clearly,

but I think it's impossible to fundamentally resolve the tensions of currencies, which are that they are all relative. So even when we're talking, for instance, about big bull runs in the dollar, you know, he mentioned those three historic ones, one of which we're possibly in now, it seems like the opposite side of that argument would be, well, maybe the rest of the world was just doing terribly during that time. Right. I thought that was a really interesting point about currencies as a asset class, so to speak, that's not all that cyclical with the rest of the economy.

So stocks sort of go up in a boom and down in a recession and interest rates go up, typically during growth periods and down in a recession. and that currency has these long cycles that don't correspond neatly to the data. I thought that was an interesting point. I hadn't quite thought of it like that before. Yeah, and it's definitely interesting to just think more about what the dollar actually is and how we're assigning a value to it, given that eventually almost everything ends up being converted into dollars in one way or another. And, you know, people talk about all these different financial assets from bonds to stock.

to commodities going up or going down, and all of those have some sort of tie to the greenback. And we often don't have the conversation about what's happening to the greenback itself. Yeah, and this whole idea, I actually thought that was very helpful, the definition of a strong dollar policy, because I don't think I'd ever quite heard it like that. And I do think that the way people typically talk about it is more that people want the dollar to appreciate or that an appreciating dollar is somehow the key gauge of American economic strength or might. But that is not so much that is just that we're not going to play around with it as a policy tool to win or defeat our other countries in the realm of global trade.

Yeah, that's definitely an interesting definition. All right. Well, a strong dollar policy. Okay, this has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stallwork. And you should follow Mark on Twitter. He's got a great feed. He's at Mark Making Sense. And be sure to follow our producer, Tofer Forges. He's at Forrest Tea, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. Thanks for listening. get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data to keep you informed. Yes, there are other products like this from a variety of news organizations, but they usually rerun their radio newscasts throughout the day.

That's not what we do. We create customized episodes that can only be heard on Bloomberg News Now. 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.