The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Prof G Markets: Margin Calls, Private Jets, Meta Teams Up With Microsoft, and Unpacking the Fed

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

This week on Prof G Markets, Scott explains why margin calls may have played a role in John Foley's departure from Peloton. He then offers his thoughts on Meta’s continued pursuit of the metaverse, and shares his experience of owning and selling a private jet amid a red-hot private aviation market. Finally, in this week’s unpack, we answer a question some listeners might be afraid to ask: what is the Fed? Show Notes: Foley’s Margin Calls Meta and Microsoft Private Aviation What is the Fed? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. This week's number, 76,000. That's how much a pair of Levi's from the 1880s sold for at auction. The jeans were recovered from an abandoned mine shaft. The buyer, a 23-year-old vintage clothing dealer. My cargo shorts actually speak to me. What do they say? I'll hold all your shit. You just focus on making friends. Welcome to PropGMarkets. Today, we're discussing margin calls,

Meta's partnership with Microsoft, private jets, and finally, an unpack on the Fed. Here with the news is property media analyst Ed Elson. Ed, what is going on? Let's start with our weekly review of market vitals. The S&P fell for six straight days before a rapid but fleeting turnaround on Thursday. The dollar remained strong with expectations of continued interest rate hikes. Bitcoin fell below 19,000. And the 10-year treasury yield rose above 4% again. Shifting to the headlines. The yen fell to a 24-year low against the dollar

after the Bank of Japan said it would maintain its loose monetary policy. UK Prime Minister Liz Truss fired her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, after a chaotic few weeks in Parliament. US mortgage rates rose to 6.92%, their highest level in two decades. And the inflation numbers for September came in higher than expected. Overall inflation rose 0.4% month over month and core inflation, which measures everything but food and energy,

rose 0.6% for the second month in a row. Core inflation is now the highest it's been since 1982. Scott, you've been saying for a few weeks now that you think inflation will start coming down soon. Has your stance changed on this news? It hasn't, or my stance hasn't changed. I still think it's going to come down, and it may not be for a couple months. And just to review, a dollar that is historically strong should make foreign imports much less expensive, bringing down prices. I think our victory, and I say our

loosely because it's mostly the Ukrainian people's victory, but pushing back on Putin, I think the progress there will continue, which will bring more stability to energy markets, bring the prices down. Sort of the perfect storm of inflation that we've been registering, where there are too many dollars facing too few goods, the clouds are going to clear around that storm, if you will. Also keep in mind that number, there is a 30-day lag. So that registers inflation in September. It's very hard to time this stuff. And there's a lot of X factors here. But I think by call at the end of this year, we're going to start to see inflation come down. And then mortgage rates hitting almost 7% is a big deal

because there's just no getting around it. That's got to hit the housing market hard. Now, having said that, I would argue, while it's painful for a lot of people over the short term, it's good for people your age. In about five to 10 years, if lightning strikes and someone decides they actually want to hang out with you for more than a few hours at a time, you're going to decide you want to buy a house. And housing prices need to come down. It was getting to the point where people your age really had very few prospects of ever aggregating enough capital to buy a home. So I think a serious correction in housing is overdue and over the long run will actually be good. A few weeks ago, we discussed the management shakeup at Peloton,

including Chairman John Foley's resignation from the board. We also speculated over why Foley may have left. Well, the Wall Street Journal may have found the answer. According to the newspaper's reporting, Foley received several margin calls on his Peloton holdings before he left the board. Scott, could you briefly explain what margin calls are and why they might have played a role here in Foley's exit? Sure. So margin is when you borrow money against your existing stockholding. So say you own $100 in Peloton stock and it's trading at $100 a share and you own one share and you say,

okay, Goldman Sachs, I want to borrow $50 against the value of my equity. And they say, okay, we'll let you borrow $50. You pay two, three, 4% interest. And then that individual might use that money for living expenses. They might use it to buy more stocks in different companies. They might use it to buy a yacht. A lot of the most famous tech people never sell their shares because they register a capital gain. Instead, they just borrow against their shares. And this works really well when a market's moving up, because if can finance your lifestyle but with just margin borrowing, you never pay that 23 or 36 percent taxes when you recognize a capital gain to pay for your lifestyle. Now, what works really well in an up market is really ugly in a down market. Let's imagine we borrowed $50 to buy a yacht or other stocks against $100

in stock and our stock goes down 40%, all of a sudden, you owe Goldman Sachs $50, and they look at your account and say your account is only worth $60, and they are uncomfortable with that ratio. Because if your stock just goes down a little bit more, you owe them more than you have in your Goldman account. And banks have a general rule that we will never lose money or be caught with you owing us money and not having the ability to pay it back. So you will get something called a margin call.

And essentially they call you and say, you need to sell some stock and bring your ratio of the value of the shares you own to how much you owe down. It's basically for selling and you never want to be a for seller. Foley had pledged three and a half million Peloton shares as collateral for personal loans. Those shares have fallen 90%. So he's gotten a lot of margin calls where it is really embarrassing and difficult and might have played a role in his departure is that when the CEO gets margin calls and has to sell his

shares, he has to report these sales. He has to file, I think it's called a form four, and everybody sees that the CEO of Peloton is selling shares even though it's down 80%. It's very embarrassing. It's a bad look for the company. It kind of reflects poorly on him in terms of personal management. It happens more than you think. So margin calls are common. But when you have too much and you register these kind of declines in a single stock, margin calls can get very ugly. And I think that's what happened here.

I know when that hotline bling, that can only mean one thing. I know when that hotline bling. Two big updates on the metaverse. First, Meta is launching legs. Avatars on Meta's VR headsets will soon have full bodies with legs. Until then, every avatar is still a floating legless torso. And a second, more substantive update. Meta is partnering with Microsoft to make a suite of products such as Microsoft Office,

Teams, and Windows accessible through its VR headsets. This is all part of Meta's push to bring virtual reality to the workplace. What do you think, Scott? I personally think that the Oculus, the Quest, and overall the Zucksucks vision of the metaverse will go down as the biggest technology failure so far this millennium. Meta is down more than 60% year-to-date because I believe the market senses this.

40% to 70% of users report feeling nauseous after just 15 minutes with that thing on their head. Meta reality labs registered $6 billion in losses in the first half of 2022. Supposedly, if they maintain their current strategy and plan, they're planning on investing around $60 or $70 billion. I think this is wonderful because I think Meta, unlike the rest of big tech, I believe is a net negative for society. And I just couldn't have planned a better strategy to put Meta out of business than for them to decide to reinvent the company around a massively expensive vision for the future that just doesn't pan out. So I'm here's to hoping there's enough signs of success that they continue to pour good money after bad. FlexJets, a leading competitor to NetJets, is planning to go public via SPAC merger.

The SPAC deal will be led by Todd Bowley, who owns the LA Dodgers and also my childhood favorite club, Chelsea FC. FlexJets offers fractional ownership of private planes and is projected to register more than $2 billion in revenue this year, up more than a third from 2021. And this is coming as the overall private jet market booms. U.S. corporate spending on private jets rose 35% in 2021. And in Europe, private jet traffic is up 30% from pre-pandemic levels. So, Scott, where is all of this demand coming from? So it's sort of the perfect storm of good things for the private aviation industry.

When the pandemic initially broke out and we had sort of a hot minute of the stock market decline, the market took a little bit of a hit at its private jet aviation, but then it ripped back. It's really moved from a business that serves the super rich to a business that serves not only the super rich, but also just the wealthy. In some, people have a lot more money. They saw their stock market portfolio boom, and they also saw increased fear around being in places that were supposedly real kind of COVID super spreader events, and that is an airport. And also you're seeing just corporations spend more. Meta spends $1.6 million on private jets just for the ZUK, and Lockheed

Martin spent $1.1 million on private jet charters for their CEO. Now the market is getting crowded. There's a lot of competitors in the space now, Wheels Up, NetJets, Blade, VistaJet. But there's an entirely new cohort of entrants who would never have thought of flying private who are now considering it. And you have never seen the private aviation market this strong. You had a plane, you sold it. Can you explain the thinking there? Why you bought it in the first place? What it's like to own a private jet?

So I've been fascinated with aviation since I was a kid. One of my fondest memories is my dad used to take me to John Wayne Airport. It was called Orange County Airport back then. And it was literally just like a restaurant on a big runway. There was no security. And we'd go and we'd sit on the runway and he'd cover my ears with his hands and watch planes take off. And I could tell him the difference between a 737 and a DC-9. And I can still look up into the sky and tell you what model aircraft it is. So I've been fascinated with aviation my whole life. I've also wanted a private plane my entire adult life. In the realization of a dream, I bought a plane about three or four years ago. I bought a Challenger 300, which is what's called a super midsize aircraft.

And the math and the rationale or the way you rationalize the irrational is the following. I did, I went through my calendar pretty specifically and said, okay, if I have my own plane, given my travel schedule, I can spend 13 days more a year at home. If I have to go speak at WASA, the plumbing fixtures company in Wisconsin,

it means going there the night before, being there that day, and then spending the night there because there's no flights in the afternoon. Whereas if I have my own plane, I bomb up at seven in the morning, I speak at 11, I'm on the plane at one, and I'm back home at three. The cost of the plane after tax benefits was about a million bucks a year. So the way I did the math, or again, see above huge rationalization, is that over 10 years, I would save 130 days or have 130 days with my family or approximately five months at home that I otherwise wouldn't be at home. And I do everything or try to do everything through the deathbed test. And I also want to acknowledge, first off, this is a huge conversation of privilege and

what I'm even self-conscious to have. And I'm a little bit worried about even saying these things or acknowledging I have a plane or had a plane. But the math I did was that at the end of my life, will I want the $10 million back or the five months back? And I think the answer is that I would be happy with that trade. It was a lot of money for me. I'm not a billionaire. But at the end of the day, what a plane is, is it's a time

machine. It's just more time with family and friends. So why did you sell it? The reason I sold it is that I moved to London and I had too much plane for Europe. And that is the majority of cities that I'm going to in Europe are an hour, hour and a half away. But I have too much plane for Europe. And that is the majority of cities that I'm going to in Europe are an hour, hour and a half away, but I have too little plane to get across the pond. Something that's different now, Ed, is I think a lot more about my carbon footprint and being in the back of something sucking 300 gallons per hour or spewing that kind of carbon into the air just felt, I don't mind being indulgent, but it felt borderline irresponsible, reckless, and like I was turning into an enormous asshole. And also, the catalyst for the actual

sale was I got an unsolicited offer to buy the plane for $14.7 million. In addition to that being a huge number, it's more than I paid. Planes for most of their history or most of the history of private aviation depreciate between 4% and 8% a year. And I was looking at a 20% or 30% gain. And I've been around long enough to know that markets are cyclical and that that was an anomaly and I should hit the bid and sell it. So this trade wasn't genius. It was just I got really lucky on this one. But to own a plane and have it go up in value is really an anomaly. Okay, we'll be right back after a quick break with an unpack on the Federal Reserve. Thank you. What learnings have shifted their career trajectories? And how do they find their next great idea?

Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robison, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life.

So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with Prof G Markets. An important part of our mission here is to go beyond reporting the week's market news and explain what's happening and why. We want to answer the questions people are afraid to ask. Sometimes those questions can be pretty basic. For example, take the Fed, which we mention on nearly every episode of Markets. We know the Fed has something

to do with interest rates, but how well do we understand the simple question, what is the Fed? Profit Media's Mia Silverio took to the streets of New York to ask people that question. Here's what we heard. The Federal Reserve is a... Uh, geez. To be honest, I have no idea. I'm sorry. This is where the government holds its savings. And, you know, sometimes if Uncle Sam's like,

hey, we need a little bit here, we need a little bit there, they go, oh, let's see what's in the Federal Reserve. Let's see what we have reserved. So let's call the general knowledge mixed. For more, here's Prof G Media's editor-in-chief, Jason Stavis, with this week's edition of The Unpack. in that they have characteristics of a commercial bank, they take deposits, they make loans, but also characteristics of a government agency. They act as a regulator by setting and enforcing rules for how banks are run, they produce data and reports, and they implement government policy. Now, modern central banks like the Fed evolved out of simpler national banks, which European nations chartered mainly to issue government debt. The Bank of

England was created in 1694 to raise money to go to war with France. Napoleon created the Bank of France in 1800, largely to finance his war with England. You get the idea. These national banks, though, they proved useful and governments expanded their capabilities. So by the 19th century, leading economies had banks that looked similar to our modern central banks, with one significant exception. The United States came very late to central banking. We've long had a strong skepticism of centralized power, and so until the 20th century, banking in the United States was lightly regulated, and the federal government had limited means of intervening

in the economy. This led to all kinds of economic volatility, thanks to a variety of currency schemes, changeable interest rates, and frequent bank failures. So what changed? The panic of 1907 was the wake-up call. So a failed attempt to corner the copper market led to a stock market crash and a series of bank failures. And it would have been much worse, but for the timely intervention of financier J.P. Morgan. Morgan made loans from his personal fortune to prop up the struggling banks. After that, even traditional opponents of central banking realized the nation needed a source of reserve financing. And they preferred a government-controlled body instead of just relying on the goodwill a source of reserve financing, and they preferred

a government-controlled body instead of just relying on the goodwill of J.P. Morgan. They were still suspicious of centralized power, though, so we ended up with a system of regional banks rather than a single central bank. This was the birth of the Federal Reserve System. So are there still regional Federal Reserve banks? There are. Twelve of them, in fact. They implement coordinated policies but operate as independent banks. They are the part of the Fed that does traditional banking services, like holding deposits and making loans. Except their customers are a select group. Only commercial banks and the United States government can bank with the Fed directly.

It's the banker's bank. So how does Jerome Powell fit into all of this? Powell is the head of the Federal Reserve System itself. He's technically the chair of the Board of Governors, which is a seven-member body, each of whom are appointed by the president to a single 14-year term. That board oversees the Fed's broad range of administrative responsibilities, such as regulating commercial banking, issuing currency, and handling the federal government's accounts. If this podcast were called Prof G Banking, we'd talk about them a lot more.

But where the rubber meets the road for markets is monetary policy. Specifically, the Fed is charged with what's known as a dual mandate. The mandate is simple, keep inflation low and employment high. Those two objectives are generally seen as representing a balancing act. The Fed wants to put enough money into the economy to encourage economic growth, but not so much that it causes high inflation. Okay, so this gets to my big question about the Fed, which is when we talk about the Fed, we're mostly talking about its role in setting interest rates. And I understand that interest rates can make money cheaper or more expensive to borrow. But how is that the same as controlling the money supply?

Does the Fed actually create money? The Fed controls the amount of money in circulation indirectly. But for the most part, it's not responsible for actually creating money. In the day-to-day economy, commercial banks are the primary creators of money. They create money every time they issue a loan. So if you think about how a loan really works, you go to the bank and you want to borrow $50,000 to start a business. The bank doesn't go into its vault and hand you $50,000 in cash. It simply adds $50,000 to your account. Well, poof, it has created $50,000.

It's real money. You can withdraw it and spend it on salaries and equipment, raw materials. Now, a customer comes along who wants to buy your new product. So that customer goes to its bank and gets a loan of its own. Poof, more money is created, some of which eventually finds its way to you. Money in a modern economy is just a spiral of debits and credits. Can money be destroyed?

Yeah, through the same mechanism as loans. So when you pay back that $50,000 to the bank, that money disappears, just as it materialized when the bank loaned it to you. However, in a properly functioning economy, the total money supply continues to grow, since you've used that $50,000 to do all sorts of productive things, which have spurred more loans and hence more money creation. And that's important, because those economically productive things are what makes the system work.

The banks are creating money, but they aren't creating any actual economic value. You are, with your promise to build a company that will generate $50,000 in profit. The bank is converting the value of your promise, and the hard work that will back it up, into money. You pay the bank interest, partly as a fee for this conversion, and partly to compensate the bank for the risk that your promise wasn't as valuable as you said it was. So if the banks create money, how does the Fed control how much gets created? Remember how I said the Fed is the banker's bank? It holds deposit accounts from banks. Now, a deposit is a kind of loan. When you deposit $100

in your checking account, you are loaning that $100 to the bank until you want to spend it. When commercial banks deposit money with the Fed, they are loaning the Fed that money, and so the Fed pays them interest. There's a funny thing about the Fed's interest rate, though. It sets the floor for all other interest rates. Because the Fed is backed by the U.S. government, it's the lowest risk loan you can make. Now, currently, the Fed is paying 3.15% on deposits, which means that nobody with access to the Fed, that is, no commercial bank, is going to loan money for less than 3.15%, because they can get 3.15% just by depositing the money with the Fed. The rest of the interest rates in the economy, they flow from this baseline Fed deposit rate. Commercial banks

set the rates on car loans, home mortgages, construction loans, even government and corporate bonds based on how much riskier those loans are than simply depositing the money with the Fed. So that all brings us back to the money supply and the Fed's dual mandate of low inflation and high employment. When interest rates are low, more people want to borrow money for more projects, which means more loans and thus more money is created. As the Fed has increased

the rate it pays on deposits, banks have increased what they charge for loans. This should discourage people from borrowing money and thus slow the creation of new money, which in theory slows inflation

since inflation, as Scott often says, is too much money chasing too few goods. Once the Fed believes inflation is under control, it will probably reduce rates again, thus encouraging new money creation, spurring the hiring of workers, and fulfilling the other side of the Fed's mandate, high employment. There's one more important tool in the Fed's toolbox. It can buy and sell bonds on

the open market. Before 2008, this was the primary way in which it managed interest rates. Now, the Fed uses so-called open market operations as an auxiliary means of stimulating or suppressing economic activity and as a means of responding to dramatic economic events. During the early days of the COVID crisis, the Fed bought trillions of dollars in bonds, mostly U.S. government debt. In a future edition of The Unpack, we'll take a closer look at what's known as the Fed's balance sheet, the huge storehouse of bonds that it has bought up over the years, and how it plans on rolling them back into the open market. Thanks, Jason. Scott, do you have any thoughts here? You could argue that this is the epicenter of our global economy, and two-thirds of reserve currency are dollars. So when we or

the Federal Reserve decides to pay a higher interest rate for dollars lent to them, if you will, more people want dollars, and as a result, the value of the dollar goes up. When the value of the dollar goes up, other currencies or other nations, their goods become more expensive, or at least the goods that they're importing in. So as an example, Japan right now has decided not to raise interest rates as fast as the U.S. has, which means a lot of Japanese banks and businesses are saying, I want to own dollars so I can get that higher rate from the US Fed. That means the yen goes down in value because people want to exchange their yen for dollars. And as we said earlier, the yen fell to a 24-year low against the dollar last week. But it all starts with the Fed in the United States. Okay, let's take a look at the week ahead. We're watching for data on September housing starts and building permits on Wednesday and existing home sales on Thursday. We've also got earnings from Johnson & Johnson,

Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Tesla. Scott, do you have any predictions for this week? I think we're going to see the first of many earnings disappointments start to trickle in. I think consumer confidence is down. The costs of borrowing are way up. People's mortgages, if they have variable rate mortgages, are resetting and they're going to be up. And as a result, we're going to see some fairly high profile stocks disappoint in terms of earnings. In addition, I think we're going to see a fairly dramatic continued step down in the market. Why? Because it trades right now, the S&P 500 trades at a price to earnings multiple, that is its share price relative to its earnings of around 18.

The historic average is about 16. So if you see earnings come down and you see that ratio normalize and maybe even go below 16, the clock is never at the bottom. I think you're going to see continued pain in the stock markets. That's all for this episode. Our producers are Claire Miller and Jason Stavers. Special thanks to Catherine Dillon, Ed Elson, and the PropG Media team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to PropG Markets and the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week. Let's go to Tokyo. A little sushi for the dog.

A little Japanese garden. A little roaming around. A little lost in translation, little hangout with Scarlett Johansson. That will not happen. But the dog is coming into Tokyo. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be.

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