What Goes Up

When it comes to the US Federal Reserve’s campaign to crush inflation by raising interest rates, Morgan Stanley Chief US Economist Ellen Zentner says this: “I have a strong view that they’re done here—but they have left the door open.”

Zentner joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the Fed’s decision this week to pause rate hikes, and what she expects of monetary policy and the US economy going forward. Cooling inflation should keep the central bank on hold until it’s ready to cut rates next year, she says. In the near term, a potential government shutdown by Republicans would bolster the case for maintaining the status quo at the Fed’s November meeting. A shutdown, she explains, would leave policymakers without all of the economic data they need to make a decision.

“In monetary-policy making, uncertainty tends to lead to policy paralysis,” Zentner says. “If we’re lacking data that the Fed can officially sink its teeth into, then that’s going to lead to an inability to make a decision about the path for rates.”

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A few years ago, an editor asked Bloomberg investigative reporter Zeke Faux to take a look at the cryptocurrency Tether, a so-called stablecoin meant to precisely track the US dollar by backing it with real-world reserves. What followed was a tour through some of the most-colorful corners of the crypto world, from Mighty Ducks actor Brock Pierce’s yacht to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s digs in the Bahamas and, finally, a hotbed for human trafficking in Cambodia.

Faux joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss his reporting, which is laid out in his new book Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. 

“There's actually these whole office towers, floor after floor of people who've been lured from, say, like Vietnam, with the offer of a good job,” Faux says. “Then when they get there, they're trapped. They're told they can't leave. They're beaten. They get electric shocks, other forms of torture, and they're just given like 10 phones each and made to try to lure people into scams from around the world.”

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From artificial intelligence to electric vehicles and travel stocks, some of the previously hot equity-market themes have borne the brunt of the selling during the market’s dip in August and September. Sylvia Jablonski, chief executive of Defiance ETFs LLC, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss why that is. She also makes the case for buying the dip. 

“Everyone kind of panics, sells off tech, sells off growth and goes back into cash, cash equivalents, staples and kind of the defensive types of plays,” Jablonski explains. But “these are actually great opportunities, especially if you’re a young person investing for the long term. These are amazing opportunities to dollar-cost average. That’s how I would characterize this market this year.”

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There’s a lot of excitement around AI-focused stocks right now, but market veteran Art Hogan urges caution when it comes to companies that are just trying to take advantage of the hype without having true ties to the industry. 

The chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how he views the artificial intelligence investment landscape, as well as other market trends.

“If we start to see the capital markets open, and we start to have a flood of newly minted companies that are AI-specific or adjacent, I would avoid that at all costs because they likely don’t have models,” he says.

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Matt Levine, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion who writes the Bloomberg newsletter Money Stuff, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss some of the hot finance topics he’s been covering and what he means when he says “everything is securities fraud.”

“I have a genre of stories called ‘everything is securities fraud,’ which is where public companies do random bad things and people sue them for securities fraud,” Levine says. “It’s indicative of this really big, interesting trend in American securities laws where everything gets sort of reflected—all conduct gets reflected—through the notion of securities fraud because it’s easy to bring cases and the damages can be really large. And so you can like litigate, you can fight over, all sorts of political and social issues by calling them securities fraud.”

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Crypto fanatics have been pining for a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund for a decade now. But as the applications piled up, US regulators repeatedly declined to approve one, citing the risk of fraud and market manipulation in cryptocurrency markets.

But with the entrance of BlackRock Inc. into the race, many market watchers are hopeful that one or more spot-Bitcoin ETFs will finally get the go-ahead. After all, the world’s largest asset manager has a strong track record of getting funds past regulatory roadblocks. On this week’s episode of the What Goes Up podcast, Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart from Bloomberg Intelligence join to discuss how BlackRock’s application dramatically changes the outlook for Bitcoin ETFs.

“When they filed, it was a whole different ballgame in my opinion,” says Balchunas. “The fact is they generally like to bring a gun to a knife fight. This is a firm who doesn’t like to lose, who knows what they're doing, and they must see something.”

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From the renewed and growing power of American organized labor to the case for minting a $1 trillion coin to end debt-ceiling brinkmanship once and for all, Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast has tried to tackle some of the most important topics related to the economy and financial markets. From Modern Monetary Theory to Bidenomics, the show hasn’t found a topic it can’t chew on.

Now, the podcast’s hosts get the chance to answer some questions instead of asking them. Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal joined the What Goes Up podcast to give their takes on some of the hot-button issues of the day.   

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The price of gold tends to do well in times of elevated uncertainty about economies and financial systems—something the world has seen a lot of in the past few years. Yet each time the precious metal rallies above $2,000 an ounce, it quickly falls back below that threshold.

Why is that? Joe Cavatoni, strategist at the World Gold Council, joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain what drives the price of gold, what buyers need to know and why that magic number has served as a ceiling. One main reason, he says, is that when prices go that high, they tend to reduce the real-world demand for gold—including from buyers of jewelry in China and India.

“These are price-sensitive businesses and price-sensitive consumers,” Cavatoni says. “So when you start seeing those types of price levels develop, that’s when you see those types of consumers back away from buying—and investors aren’t ready to step back in in the long-term.”

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A rallying stock market and better-than-expected second-quarter economic growth are just the latest developments pointing Wall Street skeptics to the possibility of a US “soft landing.” That’s where the Federal Reserve gets inflation back down to around 2% without triggering a downturn.

For more than a year, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has waged war on inflation while a chorus of adamant recession predictions has fallen flat. But even now, with inflation cooling and the economy looking to be on the glidepath, some big names remain uncertain that he can pull it off. Vanguard Group is one of them.

Joseph Davis, the firm’s global chief economist and head of its Investment Strategy Group, joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain why that is, as well as offer his reaction to the latest interest-rate increase and give his outlook for the bond market. 

“To get inflation down that last yard to 2%, you have to see a modest weakening in the labor market, which means the unemployment rate’s going to rise—although hopefully not drastically, let’s say four-and-a-half percent over the next year,” he says. “Well, that’s a hundred basis-point rise. So by definition, that is a recession. Now, anyone who thinks that that’s a soft landing is spitting in the face of 150 years of history.”

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A slow-motion crisis is unfolding in the global commercial real-estate market, thanks to the double-whammy of higher interest rates and lower demand for office space following the Covid-19 pandemic.

John Fish, who is head of the construction firm Suffolk, chair of the Real Estate Roundtable think tank and former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the problems facing the sector and what’s being done to help.  

“The biggest problem right now is the capital markets nationally have frozen,” he says of the US. “And the reason why they’ve frozen is because nobody understands value. We can’t evaluate price discovery because very few assets have traded during this period of time. Nobody understands where bottom is.”

One step in the right direction, he says, is recent guidance from federal regulators that allows lenders more flexibility when it comes to borrowers who need to refinance properties.

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