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A
The following podcast contains explicit language. Hello, welcome to the Prudential Management edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. There was a lot of news this week and so I, Felix Salmon of Axios will help you interpret it, understand it, navigate it, along with the amazing Emily Peck of the hypothetical and Anna Shymansky.
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B
I'm not amazing.
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A
Anna Shymansky is going to. I can feel it in my bones. She is going to be very pro capitalist this week.
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B
Get your emails ready.
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A
There's a twinkle in her eye. You know, I feel this was the week, in case you missed it, that Teen Vogue put out a tweet saying we can never end poverty until we abolish capitalism. So, you know, don't forget that.
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C
How did I miss that?
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B
AA comrades over there.
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A
Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is woke people. So thank you Teen Vogue for letting us in on this important piece of political insight. And happy birthday. I need to say this to happy 18th birthday, you're an adult now. To Felix Diemer in Sri Lanka, who is going to be, you know, a good anti capitalist crusader if we get our way with things. Or maybe pro capitalist if he listens to Anna. Happy birthday. Either way, Felix. And let's jump. Let's talk about Robin Hood, which is this wonderful idea of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. That's what Robin Hood did, except for somehow it's got co opted as a stock trading app. We're going to talk about too big to fail financial institutions and specifically the non banks. How many financial institutions are too big to fail? And also non banks. You might be surprised at the answer to that question. But Emily, let's start with Sears because as everyone expected, they filed for bankruptcy this week.
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C
That's correct. They filed for bankruptcy. 125-year-old American institution. I think the New York Times called Sears the original everything store because they used to sell everything to everyone in the United States and through their catalog and then grew into this huge retailer that meant a lot to a lot of people and then slowly has been declining for 20 years. Even before he, hedge funder Eddie Lampert took the helm at Sears and then in some people's opinion drove it into the ground. It wasn't doing very well.
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A
He drove it into the ground. He merged it with Kmart in one of those classic if you tie two rocks together, then maybe they'll float mergers. And then what he proceeded to do was basically an enormous amount of financial engineering which may or may not have helped ESL investors investments, which is his Hedge fund, in fact, almost certainly didn't help ESL Investments, but certainly didn't Sears. Because while he was dividending out and selling off assets and generally doing all manner of financial engineering, trying to sell off property and lease it back and all of this kind of stuff, he was clearly under investing in all of the stores to the point at which absolutely no one wanted to walk into them anymore. Because the minute you walked into them, you just wanted to slit your wrists, right?
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C
Empty, empty shelves. There weren't things to buy in the stores. He was starving them that much. One thing that the Times again mentioned in a story yesterday was one of his laments was his effort to install Internet cafes in Sears had failed. And I just thought that's, that's your idea, that's your strategy for bringing sears into the 21st century as an Internet cafe. Like, it's just so misguided to anyone who actually shops in stores that are Sears, like, like middle class, big box type retailers. Like, this guy didn't know what he was doing, I think is the problem.
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B
And I think this is important because he, Eddie Lampert, did quite well initially with investments in AutoZone and AutoNation. He did incredibly well. And so then there was the idea that, well, if I did this here, I can replicate this anywhere. And he tried to replicate that with both Kmart and Sears. And the issue was he may be a good investor, I'm not entirely sure, but he's a pretty lousy CEO. And it doesn't seem like he had much of an interest in being a CEO. He was basically a remote CEO.
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A
He gave himself the job of CEO for as far as anyone could tell, he wanted to be CEO for about three months. And he wound up staying on for like five, six years. He finally stepped down this week when he filed for bankruptcy, which everyone's like, yeah, he should have done that five years ago. But even when he wasn't CEO, he was micromanaging the CEO, so he was effectively the CEO.
- [05:16]
B
Right. Because I think what's interesting about esl, his fund is that they're not only the biggest equity owner of CEO, Sears, also the biggest creditor. Which I think is kind of interesting about the Sears story is that yes, Sears does have a bit of debt, but it's not the same as like a Toys R Us story where you had a PE firm come in and do a, you know, leveraged buyout. This is different. What happened was because he was under investing in the store and they started to decline, revenue started to decline, they needed money. So where Were they getting this money from esl, which is interesting. And I would say maybe Eddie Lampert's doing like his only good investment out of this entire thing is he did create this thing called Seritage, which is this basically real estate fund where he bought Sears real estate because fundamentally their real estate is probably the most valuable thing they have. And then some of it he leased back to them. And then he was able to. Sears was then paying him. But he. What he also did was he used some of that real estate to create the types of environments with stores and entertainment venues that people actually want to go to. And so there's an argument to be made that although that certainly didn't help Sears, it may not be the worst thing long term for those properties or for his fund.
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A
Well, there was this. There's this whole concept of power malls. This is a, you know, a big thing in the retail space, which is that the old fashioned shopping mall, which is a big building with a whole bunch of stores in it, has given a way to kind of fake quasi neighborhood type things with some residential in them and like weird like Main street facsimiles and like, as you say, possibly like a movie theater. All this kind of stuff where you feel more suburban. I don't know, it doesn't make any sense. But yeah, if Seritage or whatever he called it is getting into the power mall space. Power malls have been doing very well of late, you know, the retail apocalypse notwithstanding. And as illustrious producer Max Jacobs had noted, like, you know, the former Sears store in Oakland, California was leased to Uber. You know, I'm sure Uber was paying more than Sears was, but that fell through eventually. The thing that this reminds me though, of more than anything else is one of the most infuriating stories of the past year, which I wrote about a little bit for Slate, which is the death and weird rebirth of Interview magazine, which was exactly the same kind of story. Basically, Interview magazine was owned by this gazillionaire called Peter Brandt. Interview magazine was losing money. Every time the Interview magazine needed money, they got it from Peter Brandt and they got it in the form of loans. So that what happened when Peter Brandt finally decided that he didn't want to pay any of the freelancers or the people who'd worked for him for many years is he simply declared bankruptcy and declared himself to be the lead creditor. And because he was owed virtually all of the money that Interview owed, he then wound up taking it back from himself at a very low price, installing his daughter as the publisher and then resuscitating it and just stiffing everyone who was owed money except for himself.
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B
Yeah, and I think this is interesting in the case of Sears because, like, although I don't think this was like the long term plan of Eddie Lampert, I think at the beginning he actually thought this thing could work. But it does seem like at a certain point he realized that this was definitely not going to work. So he was just essentially trying to take assets away. But the issue that he may have, he may have some trouble in terms of bankruptcy negotiations because the other creditors are going to be much less apt to want to play ball because you have a lot of those guys that got in, they bought essentially at par. They. The, the debt that they owed and it's now trading in the teens. So. And if you look at the deal that he tried to push through that they didn't accept, which is this debt for equity exchange, everyone was like, why on earth would we do that? And it really benefited esl. It didn't benefit anyone else. I think that he could run into some trouble there.
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A
He almost certainly will run into trouble because absolutely none of his plans to see a so far have worked out. None of his financial engineering has worked out. He gave a speech, he actually flew to headquarters, which is something he only like once a year. He gave a speech to the assembled management ranks saying, hey guys, we really need to knock it out of the park this holiday season, otherwise we're just going to end up in liquidation. And you're like, sears is never going to knock it out of the park this holiday season. It's just not going to happen. Which means ultimately that they're going to wind up in liquidation. As you know. As you say, Anna, this is not a Toys R Us situation. This is not a case of a bunch of private equity companies who don't want to take control of the organization, just letting it get liquidated. But I have to say I agree with you that the most likely outcome here by far is liquidation. And that means that somewhere in the order of 70 or 80,000 people are likely to lose their jobs.
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C
One thing I thought was really interesting just looking, because it's 125-year-old institution, American institution, so a lot of interesting history was coming out over the past week. One interesting thing that I learned via this economic historian from Cornell, I don't know if you guys saw this, his name is Louis Hyman and he did this tweet Storm and then appeared on the, on the media podcast talking about how back during the Jim Crow era in the south, black people were really shut out of being consumers. They had. They were in these very rural towns, and the only thing around was like, the local town store, and you would go there. I don't. Town store doesn't sound right. But anyway, you go to the shop, the general store, right? And, you know, some white guy's behind the counter and the black person has to wait till all the white people are served before they get to buy anything. And you can't just pick stuff up and bring it to the counter. You have to interact with this white person behind the counter who may or may not decide you're worthy of being sold certain products. Like, you're literally shut out of being a consumer in the Jim Crow South. And then the Sears catalog comes along and it goes to everyone. It goes to these people who are shut out of being consumers, being, like, full members of society, and they get to buy whatever they want from the catalogs. And it was actually this, like, very political thing and this very democratizing thing. And it made me kind of think, like, I know I kind of poop on capitalism a lot in here, but, like, it can be really wonderful sometimes.
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A
It's a bit like, you know, if you're black, it's a lot easier to get an Uber than it is to get a cabin.
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C
Yeah, exactly. And like an Amazon, too. It, you know, there's a lot of downsides and lots of things to be cynical about about Amazon, but it has a similar kind of effect in a lot of. A lot of rural areas where you lack access to goods. Like, it opens up worlds for people sometimes. And I thought that was really cool.
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B
I would just say that going back a little bit to the Uber example, though, talking about Sears, I mean, I agree that a long time ago, Sears served a really, really relevant purpose and they were a very, very important company. And I, I don't mean to diminish the. What it's going to do to the people who are going to lose their jobs, but this is what happens as economies change, as new industries come in. And yes, we can have a larger argument outside about why we should have a stronger safety net to try to protect people when these things happen. But my point is that what was happening with Sears was a really great innovation at the time. Now times have changed. Same thing. What happened with Uber has been a great innovation at the time. And so things change. So I don't think that when people are talking about how, like, oh, know, as though somehow like, Sears should be saved because it has this long history that's where I push back.
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C
Yeah, well, I wasn't saying that.
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B
No, I was not saying you were saying that.
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C
Anyway, just, I was thinking a lot about that because a lot of people wrote about Sears as if it was another, like, retail is dying story. But when you dig in and you look at how badly Lampert ran that company, it's not as simple as retail is dying. Because there's plenty of big retailers who aren't dying. Like, I go to Home Depot. I live in the suburbs. I go to Home Depot. I go to Target. These are thriving. These are thriving companies. They're doing fine. Walmart is doing fine. There was no reason Sears couldn't have adapted to the times. No reason. I go to Target. It's a big store with a lot of crap in it, and it's fun to shop there. Like, you can do it. He could. If he had been smart about retailing, he could have saved that company. It's not an inevitability that it goes down. It's just not on.
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A
On which note, a request to all you Slate Money listeners out there. We are talking about having a suburbs edition of Slate Money. I really, I'm looking to this one. So the question is, is there someone in particular who's super smart on the subject of the suburbs? Who we should have on for that show? Let us know. Slate Money, slate.com Robin Hood. Is there a theme song we can sing? I don't, I don't know that.
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B
Like the 1990s. Like Kevin Costner, Prince of Thieves.
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C
Interesting.
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A
So imagine Kevin Costner stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, but doing it in the guise of a stock trading app. Is that more or less what we're talking about?
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B
Pretty much.
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C
But it was like stealing from the rich and giving to the slightly less rich. Millennials with phones.
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A
Robinhood is a fascinating phenomenon. This app, its main claim to fame is that when everyone else was charging $5 to trade stocks, Robinhood would allow you to trade stocks for $0. And this caught on for obvious reasons among the sort of day trading community and also among millennials with phones. And now they are competing quite, you know, aggressively against the Charles Schwab's and E trades of the world, who previously were growing partly by being cheaper than the, you know, their old competitors have, you know, Merrill lynch or whoever, but partly just by spending millions of dollars on super bowl ads. And that's not something that Robinhood does. It's kind of interesting to me just as a way of, like, how do you get market share in what is ultimately a highly competitive and commoditized product. But anno. They're in the news for a completely different reason right now.
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B
Yes, because it turns out that they get about half of their revenue by selling their orders to high frequency traders.
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A
Payment for order flow.
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B
The.
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A
This was a very, very weird story which Bloomberg ran because payment for order flow is just how retail stock trading works. It's not a Robinhood thing. It is, everybody does it thing. Like whether you're Merrill lynch or Charles Schwab or E. Trade or anyone. Do you Send every like $300 stock or directly to the stock exchange to try and get hit at national best bid or offer? No. You. You net them out and make sell to market makers.
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B
Yeah, that's. That's quite normal. I think part of the interest here was both that you have Robinhood positioning themselves as this kind of like anti. You know, we're taking down the system, taken down the big guys and then almost all of their money is coming or not almost all their money, about half of their revenue is coming from selling these orders to high frequency traders who we can have a larger discussion about, tend to be somewhat demonized. And so I think that's part of where the anger came out. But I do think it's mostly because people don't quite understand how the markets currently work.
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C
Well, actually because I read the story in Bloomberg about this and I thought it was confusing. So I called Simone Foxman, who's one of the reporters who did the story, and I was like, can you just explain your story to me? And one of the things she said that I thought was interesting and maybe Anna or Felix, you can explain this to me, was that no one really knows. Like once these high frequency traders like Citadel and whoever else buy these trades from Robinhood, they do stuff to make money with the trades, but no one knows quite what they do.
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A
We know exactly what they do. Yeah, okay.
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C
That's what she said.
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A
This is the point at which we geek out about market structure. And geeking out about market structure is one of the geekiest things we will ever do on Slate Money. So bear with me a little bit. But basically there are, call it 13 different stock exchanges in America. People think There are only two, the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. That is not true. There are another 11, which.
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B
And they're all New Jersey, plus a.
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Bunch of dark pools and yada yada yada. But there are lots and lots of stock exchanges, nearly all of which don't have any stocks listed on them. They just exist to trade stocks. Their job is to constantly publish at any given moment in time what is the highest bid price for any stock and what is the lowest offer price for any stock. And then what you do is you aggregate all of those highest bids and all of those lowest offers across all of the different stock exchanges and you find the highest bid of all of the exchanges and the lowest offer of all of the exchanges, right? You then publish that on something called the SIP Don't Ask, and that is called NBBO National Best Bidder Offer. That is the absolute best price you can buy or sell at at the market. And if you are a retail trader, if you are just using your E Trade or your Robinhood or any other account, what they promise you is you get NBNO or better, you will. And that is basically the best execution that anyone can possibly hope for. Now, there is always a little spread between the bid and the offer, right? And so if I am Night Capital Citadel, one of these high frequency traders, if I just match all of those at MBBO or maybe a tiny bit better, then I make that spread and I make a little bit of profit. I make that. The difference between the bid and the offer is my profit. We know basically where they're getting their profit from. It's that.
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C
And she kind of said that this is also. They don't. It is a bit of a black box though, still, even though we know that they're doing this.
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A
And then the other part of it is that retail investors are basically the dumb money. So if you are matching, if you're just sitting there hitting the NBBO on every single trade coming into the stock exchange, there's a bunch of very sophisticated institutional trading algorithms who will pick you off and completely, you know, make you lose money. But the complete random sort of flow of retail order flows from normal human beings is not sophisticated and it's not trying to pick you off. And so you know that you can take the other side of that trade every single day and you can make money, you know, 300 days a year. And it's a nice, predictable, profitable flow.
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B
And just to be clear, the markets are super liquid. If you're looking at the difference between bid offer spread that have declined significantly, and a lot of that has to do with the decimalization of the, of the market and a number of other things. But a lot of it does have to do with electronic trading. And so when people talk about, you know, the market's rigged, it's like, well, the market's always been Rigged to a certain extent, if you want to argue about there being fees in like intermediary fees, but in a lot of ways, fees are actually significantly lower than they used to be.
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A
Fees are lower. And the high frequency. High frequency trading is bad on a couple of levels. It's bad in terms of creating weird sort of systemic risk about flash crashes and that kind of thing. It's also arguably bad for large institutional traders who get funded.
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B
Yeah, this is actually kind of, I think when you're talking about high frequency trading, where it's a little bit more interesting is that like, if you have, if you're a big institutional investor and you're trying to buy like a hundred thousand shares of something and you put out that order and it's going to go to a bunch of different exchanges and what can happen is that this, you'll get like 20,000 shares that will be filled at the price you're actually asking for. And then the high frequency trader, they see that order, the bigger order, they buy up all the other shares and then sell to you at a higher price.
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A
So, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to come out in defense of high frequency trading, but I will say that the only person it's almost unambiguously good for is the little guy. And. And I went into a lot of depth without like nerding out too much about this. I wrote a very long review of the Michael Lewis book Flash Boys for Slate.com so if you look that up, I kind of go into sort of chapter and verse about this there.
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C
But one thing people were saying, one of the criticisms was that a place like Robinhood would sell your trades to whoever pays them the most. So you might not get the best deal or the best execution on your trades because their interest isn't in their. Their customer, isn't you.
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B
Yes.
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A
And it's certainly true that you are unlikely to get much better than nbbo. And so maybe if Robinhood was not selling to the highest bidder but instead requested slightly better execution, they might get you a slightly, you know, an extra tenth of a cent per share better than NBNO, than they're getting you right now. But ultimately NBBO is still a pretty good deal.
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B
Yeah. But the only other thing I'll say, and this is a somewhat legitimate criticism of Robinhood, is a little bit of the lack of transparency.
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A
Yes.
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B
So just overall and in their SEC filings, the way that they showed like what they were actually getting paid was different than every other firm so that they could make it appear that they were getting less than they actually were.
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A
And I was, I mean I was literally years ago when they first started, I was back and forth with their PR guy going like, I just assumed that everything you were making was payment for order flow. And he's like, no, no, no. It's like, it's. That's really not all of it. We do get some, but like we also. And I'm like, whatever. But yeah, I think that that, per Anna's point is absolutely true. The news here is really like the sort of two facedness of Robin Hood. That what they're doing in reality is not what they say that they're doing in public. And that's never a good look.
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C
I mean, there's something incredibly cynical about calling yourself Robin Hood and being in the business of trading stock.
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A
And plus there's something really bad in general. And you know, they make the world worse place because they encourage people to trade stocks. And trading stocks is not something anyone should be doing. Like human beings should not be trading stocks.
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B
Retail investors should not.
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A
Yeah, normal human beings, which is the people that Robinhood is aiming at, should not be doing that. They should be like buying money that.
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B
You know you can lose. And you're just doing it in the same way that you would gamble.
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A
Exactly. It's like, it's like playing golf. It's like a way you spend money to enjoy yourself. But like they are encouraging people to trade too much and that is bad. Okay, let's talk about the Financial Stability Oversight Council because there is nothing more interesting.
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B
We're already so wonky today.
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A
Emily has now officially fallen asleep.
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C
We're so deep in the weeds right now, but this is important stuff. It's not the weeds. It's very important.
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A
So Emily, because you're the person who has fallen asleep, can you explain what the financial stability of the Psych Council is?
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C
So I'll just briefly wake up to say that the Financial Stability Oversight Council was created as part of Dodd Frank after the crisis as a way to oversee too big to fail institutions. And the ones we're talking about today are the non bank institutions that were deemed too big to fail. And There was only four of them. AIG, MetLife, G Capital and Prudential. And then slowly they all lost the designation.
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A
Mostly for good reason. Like GE is not a too big to fail financial institution as we talked about last week. It is now just a poorly run power company. Poorly run power company. So like that it fell off the list for good reasons because it sold off its.
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C
But Metlife sued to get rid of the designation and it won. And then Trump became the president. And instead of appealing the ruling and fighting to keep MetLife with the Sifi designation, the Trump people were like, no, we're good. We can lose it.
- [25:41]
A
I love the way that they don't actually call it too big to fail. They call it SIFI because that's like a euphemism. It stands for systemically important financial institutions. Right. But it means too big to fail.
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C
And the news this week is the last one standing. The last too big to fail non bank institution financial institution Prudential lost its designation. So now there are no, Everything's fine, guys. Well, everything's fine.
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B
Well, in terms of non bank financial institutions.
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A
And so I did a little bit of homework on this one. I have a long, I'm leading my Axios Edge newsletter with this because I really found this fascinating. And I feel like no one wrote about this enough. And I looked at the official report, which is like 65 pages long, explaining why it no longer needs to be considered too big to fail. And there's no actual reasons in there, partly because all of the interesting stuff has been redacted. So you have no idea what they're talking about. But what they did say, you know, among other things, is you can, you can look up Prudential on the stock market as a publicly listed company. It has a market capitalization of about 42 billion, which doesn't sound super large and isn't super large. It also has, get this total life insurance that it is written on human beings around the country, nearly all in America, of $3.7 trillion. That's contingent liabilities of $3.7 trillion. If 1.1% of those people died, that would wipe out all of Prudential's market cap.
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B
Yeah. And I do think it's kind of, to me amusing when you have some of the firms that will say, but the, you know, the scenarios you're asking us to consider, like, those are things that are so unlikely to happen. You're like, yes, that's the entire point. Like the whole financial crisis is very unlikely to happen.
- [27:37]
A
And you know, unexpected mortality events, they happen. I mean, we. The example I give in my newsletter is the AIDS crisis. The AIDS crisis took out a huge number of healthy men in prime earning years. And it just so happened because of like, you know, coincidence basically that most of those men didn't have life insurance. If those men did have life insurance, if most of the gay men who died in the AIDS crisis did, had did have life insurance, virtually every life insurer in America would have been wiped out.
- [28:14]
B
Wow.
- [28:15]
A
And no one likes to talk about this. And who regulates life insurers? Who. Who regulates insurers? It's done on a state by state basis. So Prudential is mainly regulated by the New Jersey Insurance regulator. And we.
- [28:26]
B
That makes us. Awful. Very safe.
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A
We should all feel perfectly reassured by that.
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C
So this is really. This is a bad thing that was just done. They should not have lost their designation. I'm convinced now. Felix has convinced me. I mean, this is just the Trump administration again, just weakening financial regulation and sort of like picking away at Dodd Frank like little termites in the House, you know, just like, taking pieces away. And it seems like making us a little less stable.
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B
Yeah. I mean, I think I've been on record of, like, not always being a fan of a lot of financial regulations, and I do think there are parts of Dodd Frank that did overreach a little bit, but in this instance, I don't think there's a strong argument that they're not as iffy. And I do think that this is more just the Trump administration basically being like, all regulations are bad, thus, you know, we're just going to get rid of everything. And not only that, they also are trying to shift. So it's more based on risky activities that they're managing as opposed to risky institutions. And that's important because if they kind of move more in that direction, that could hamstring future administrations and future regulators in their ability to regulate large firms. So I actually think that's almost. That's one of the more important parts of this overall story.
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A
Okay, I think we shall move straight into the numbers round. Why not? Anna, do you have a number?
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B
I do. It is 80%. So that is the decline in home sales in Shanghai and Beijing over Golden Week, which is a holiday in China basically solely created to encourage consumption. This is an 80% decline from the previous Golden Week.
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A
So Golden Week is. Is that a week that you normally have to buy a house? Is that the idea?
- [30:04]
B
Yes, it is actually very common.
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A
A consumption good. It's just like, oh, it's Golden Week. I should buy a house.
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B
No, quite literally, like, this is something that happens. Like, it's.
- [30:14]
A
And because in Japan, Golden Week, no one buys anything.
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B
Well, that is. That has not been the case in China. And this is part of a larger trend of what we're seeing more softening in real estate, which there are a lot of reasons for that, partly because of different government policies, but real Estate has been a big driver of growth in China. So this is just another kind of indicator of where things are getting dicier in China than I think we fully acknowledge.
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A
My number is 2.8%. This is the. For those of you. For those of us, not me, I'm not quite old enough yet who are drawing Social Security.
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C
I'm not either. I feel like you were just looking at me like I maybe was.
- [30:56]
A
No, no. If I was eligible, I would still not even take it because, you know.
- [31:01]
C
You should wait as long as possible.
- [31:02]
A
Wait as long as possible. The cost of living increase in Social Security is set every year by a complicated formula. It was zero in 2016. And a lot of pensioners were very upset about this because they said they needed more money, which was fair enough. It was 0.3% in 2017. Where is it this year? For 2019, it is 2.8%. So there you go. Well done, old people. You got a raise.
- [31:35]
C
Yeah, old people.
- [31:36]
B
Because they vote.
- [31:37]
C
I am. I have a percentage also.20%. That is the percentage of retail space in Manhattan that is currently vacant, according to some data that the New York Times ran a few weeks ago. They ran a spread of photos of streets with empty storefronts on it. And I guess part of the reason is the rents are kind of too damn high.
- [31:56]
A
The rent is too damn high.
- [31:58]
C
Too damn high. And so stores are shuttering. And it's just sort of an interesting little coda on our Sears conversation about the changing face.
- [32:06]
A
So in Manhattan especially. And I put this in my newsletter, too. It is all about the rents. Because the big headline this week was McNally Jackson, the bookstore on Prince street is having to move.
- [32:19]
C
Oh, I didn't see that.
- [32:20]
A
The landlord raised the rent on it to $150 a square foot, which is insane. The national average is about 17. Right. So that's what we're talking about here. My favorite data point here is this building called 55 Mercer street, which is a little storefront on Mercer between Princeton Spring. For any of you who know soho in New York, which is, you know, a nice shopping street. It's not on a corner or anything like that. This is a building where one of the main investors is Mr. Gary Cohn, the, you know, of Goldman Sachs and the National Economic Council, stealer of documents. And he was renting out his storefront at 55 Mercer to the couples, which is this French fashion brand for $650 a square foot. And then they were like, we can't make any money because we're spending $650 per square foot on retail. And so, yeah, these things wind up going empty because the landlords are so greedy.
- [33:21]
C
Yeah. They'll eventually have to back down a little bit. I mean, it can't stay at 20%.
- [33:25]
A
Rents will come down and that's good. Right.
- [33:28]
C
But I think part of it too is like they're waiting for these big chain stores to come in. Right.
- [33:32]
A
It used to be the banks, but yeah. No, it's also the chain stores. It's also like Zara and H and M who pay like enormous amounts because they consider it to be advertising.
- [33:41]
C
Right. It's their marketing budget. It's not. It's not quite the same thing as.
- [33:45]
A
Well, it's all part of omnichannel is that you don't actually need to make money on your retail stores on a store by store basis, just so long as they help your broader brand make money.
- [33:57]
C
Sears should have opened something in Soho.
- [33:59]
A
I guess that was like. That was the weird thing about Ben.
- [34:02]
B
In a Sears in the last 25 years.
- [34:05]
C
I did some back to school shopping for my kids in Sears a couple of years ago.
- [34:09]
A
But this is also like the weird thing about.
- [34:11]
C
It was weird there.
- [34:12]
A
Interview that it was weird there in.
- [34:14]
C
The 90s who couldn't find anyone to pay for. Sorry. Pay for the clothes. You have to walk around.
- [34:20]
A
Yeah. Try and find the cash. And you can never find the cash register. Which is also like one of those weird things that department stores do. Like, you know, putting the. Making sure that the up escalator is on the other side from the other up escalators if you want to go and see if to walk through the store. Also forcing you to walk through the store to pay for things, you know, these stupid tricks which are annoying at the best of times. But then when the Internet comes along, you're like, no, go away.
- [34:44]
C
I'm out.
- [34:44]
A
I'm out. Which is like. Eddie Lampert gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal where he was like, I saw the Internet coming. Yes.
- [34:52]
B
What?
- [34:52]
C
No, you didn't. Well, then you messaged me.
- [34:54]
A
If you saw the Internet coming, there are obvious things you should do, which is make your stores advertisements for the brand. And he did the exact opposite. He made the stores. Shit.
- [35:05]
C
Sorry.
- [35:06]
B
One last fun fact. Eddie Lampert and Steve Mnuchin were college roommates.
- [35:10]
C
Yes. Oh, and Steve Mnuchin was on the board.
- [35:12]
B
Yes.
- [35:13]
C
For like a decade under Lampert.
- [35:15]
B
Yeah. It's a very independent board. They're college roommates, Steve.
- [35:18]
A
Mnch. Oh, and we will do. We'll give like the tiniest, tiniest round of applause to Steve Mnuchin for finally pulling out of Davos in the desert so brave, a week and a half after everyone else, but not after.
- [35:32]
C
And then Fox Business, finally, after Mnuchin, they're like, okay, okay, we won't go. Peter Thiel is still going.
- [35:39]
A
He's still on the advisory board, but it's not clear that he's going, and it's not even clear that he's on the advisory board. It's very murky. The whole thing is incredibly murky. And I can tell you, as someone who works for a news organization which has been really trying to stay on top of who's staying and who's going, almost no one will say that they are going. And some people who were on the list, you know, may not be going, but just might not be saying that they're not going. And it's, it's very hard to tell what's going on. My guess is that Peter Thiel, as, like, an openly gay man, doesn't particularly love traveling to Saudi Arabia in the first place anyway. But who knows anyway, if this is the week? So if you're in Saudi Arabia for the future investment conference, do send us an email from there and let us know who's there and what it's like and what is the mood of the conference, because there aren't going to be any journalists there. We can phone up to ask. Otherwise, tune in next week for the special Brexit edition, which I will be recording from London with a very special guest. Thanks for listening to Slate Money. If you want to listen to the Slate Plus, I think we're going to have a quick chat about Facebook because it's always fun to talk about Nick Leg and otherwise. Tune in next week. Many thanks to Max Jacobs for putting the show together and we will talk to you next week on Slate Money.