Eric Hansotia, Chief Executive Officer at AGCO, discusses growth, technology and sustainability in the agriculture industry. theSkimm Co-Founder Danielle Weisberg talks about their Show Us Your Child Care initiative. Bloomberg News Chief Correspondent for Global Macro Markets Liz McCormick and Bloomberg News Cross Asset Reporter Denitsa Tsekova provide the details of their Businessweek Magazine story Hedge Funds Turbocharge Volatility in Cratering US Bond Market. And we Drive to the Close with Amanda Agati, Chief Investment Officer at PNC Asset Management Group.
Hosts: Carol Massar and Mike Regan. Producer: Paul Brennan.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
This is Bloomberg Business. Wait inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio. Well shares at Adco. Check it out, everybody, They're up our third day, They're at more than six percent in that time. Company reported earnings yesterday morning, of which third quarter just at EPs was a big beat. Third quarter net sales in line with expectations, and the maker of tractors and combines also said it still sees fiscal year net sales of about fourteen point seven billion, slightly above street estimates, with fiscal year just ADPs of about fifteen dollars seventy five cents a share. That's fifty cents above the company's earlier forecasts. Three analysts nonetheless cutting their price targets on the company by an average of three and a half percent since it reported yesterday. So let's get to it. We have a great guest. We have the CEO, Chairman, President and CEO at ADCO, Eric Hansotea. Excuse me, Eric Hensotia, He's on zoom from Duluth, Georgia, and he joins, us, forgive me, forgive me. I'm trying to race to get to you. So I apologize. Eric. Oh you good, no problem, Really great to have you here with us. First of all, how are you? And I do have to ask you about the FED? In an environment where the FED says, you know, we could still continue raising rates, we're still worried about inflation. Does that kind of mesh with the outlook that you see? Well, your first question was how am I doing great? Just couldn't be happier with the progress that our company is having relative to our strategy. We're going to have two billion more in sales this year, We're going to grow margins significantly relative to the and it's all in line with our high tech focus on being the industry leader and smart farming machines relatively to the FED. You know, interest rates do weigh on farmers' minds. These are big as they carry a lot of technology. They're expensive machines, many times half a million to a million dollars, and so they often finance those machines, and higher interest rates are part of the part of the decision. I'm expecting that we're you know, at a high plateau and that we're more likely over the coming year to have red rates go down then up, and that would be welcomed by our customers, you know, Eric, I'm looking at the revenue growth of ag CO over the years and really some impressive growth there. Twenty twenty one is up, twenty two, twenty twenty two up fourteen percent, sixteen percent. This year, it does, at least according to analyst estimates, look like you might be in for a dip in revenue last year. And I'm wondering what's the what's driving that? Is that entirely an interest rate story or is there is there something else going on? It's actually very little related to interest rates. Agriculture often is not connected, not correlated highly with the regular GDP growth. It's more tied to the agricultural agricultural economy. So the price of corn, wheat, soybeans, and that's a function of how much green there is in the world. For the last two or three years, there's been green shortages and so green prices have been high. That means more profit for our farmers. Now they've had a great year this year in terms of harvest and so there's a little bit more stock prices have come down a bit, and that's really more what drives farmer profitability and then turn their interest to purchase equipment. Hey, Eric, what I wonder is longer term how you guys think about the business, how you plan, because I wonder if things like weather, climate change, demographics globally, is that more significant in terms of how you think about the growth longer term? And if so, what does that maybe indicate to you. Yeah, that's a great point, Carol. So we see three macro tailwinds plus this weather factor. So let me touch those real quickly. Number One, we're moving from eight billion people to ten billion people between now and twenty fifty. Number two, emerging economies are adding more meat to their diet as they do that. That's a multiplier on the demand for green chicken is a two to one multiplier, beef is a ten to one multiplier. And then third is renewable fuels, so ethanol in the United States. But now the next one is renewable diesel. Ethanol consumes forty percent of the corn crop today. Renewable diesel is likely going to grow to that same kind of proportion over the next few years. Those are all macro tailwinds that cause the farmer to have higher yields and more pressure on higher yields. And then weather is another one. We're having more severe droughts and more severe floods every year that reduces the overall global global ability to produce cream. So you add those four factors together and the farmers are pushed to have higher yields while using less inputs, less fertilizer, pesticide, chemicals and things like that, and so there's a big squeeze for productivity. Using our technology, we're using artificial intelligence on our now to be able to use vision systems so identify the difference between a weed and a plant as a machine's going through the field and spray only the weed, saving like seventy percent of the chemical and a lot of automation of features throughout all of our products. Can you say, I'm assuming you've been using AI for a long time though, right, Yes, we have. Across many of our machines. We use AI to understand the variation in soil or crop and have the machine learn over time to be able to optimize itself real time in the field. It's amazing because when you think of AI. The last thing I think most people think of is farm labor. Do you think of machines though, I think a machine. Well, Eric made a great point and I wanted to ask about this. Is right at the beginning, you said that technology aspect of your business is so important, and again, if you're not really familiar with ACO, you might not think about that. But one thing I wanted to ask about, Eric, and full disclosure, I'm not an expert on tractors. In fact, I hire a kid to cut my own grass, so I'm really I've driven a tract, this big one. There we go. So I'm coming at this from a pure ignorance state of mind. But I would think that self driving technology would be easier to implement on the farm with a tractor. But from my understanding is it's not really I wonder if you could talk to us a little about where you are with that type of technology. You know what we see it anytime soon? Or is it just, for whatever reason, too complicated to have self driving tractors. It's a great topic. It's at the heart of our strategy is putting technology on machines to have the machine be smarter and be able to do more things for the customer. I talked about the sprayer. We're automating all our functions on all of our machines. We've increased our engineering spend by sixty percent over the last three or four years since we started a strategy. We've bought six tech companies. We just announced the biggest AGG tech deal in history with Trimble agg where is over a two billion dollar deal to bring those to their technology and our technology together. So technology is a big deal. Now let's talk about the autonomy question. Already, guidance, which Trimble is is one of the world leaders in is used by farmers once they get into the field. They get into the field and they already turn on auto steer, which is a satellite driven guidance, tip the steering wheel out of the way and the machine steers for itself. Now it's still supervised today, but most large AGG has is the machine is doing the steering for itself. We've committed when we were in Wall Street last week last year, we committed that by the end of the decades, so twenty thirty, we would have the full crop cycle, meaning planting, spring, tractors, harvesting, all autonomous with no driver in them, and by twenty twenty five we'd have a retrofit kit that would be able to be put on an existing machine to make it autonomous. So it's a more contained environment. There's not so much other traffic and other things in the way, and you can stop. You don't have a lot of other traffic around, so you can if there's runs into a situation hasn't seen before, the machine will just failsafe mode is stop and then you can remotely view into it and restart it. It's like about right, there's lots of move there's a lot of space around you. Autopilots work really really well. Hey, in twenty twenty four, what do we expect for your company? Do you see higher prices due to inflation continuing And just got about forty seconds. Yeah, yeah, prices are going to moderate. You know, these last couple of years, we put a lot of pricing into the market, more than our a little bit more than our cost. We expect to still put more than our cost into the market because of all this technology we're bringing in the value it generates. But inflation is coming down pretty significantly for us, and so we think it'll be much more normalized. You know, we haven't given guidance, but it'll be more in the mid to low single digits than where we've been before. Any any kind of peak ten seconds in terms of the ag machinery market, do you see any kind of peeking out just very quickly. Well, we've still got strong demand going into next year. Our order boards are out six or seven months on large egg. We're sold out for our seasonal products. We're all through Mighty Year twenty four, so we still see twenty four as a good year, although getting more normalized. All right, love it, listen, come back soon, so appreciate it. Eric Hansodia He is chairman, president CEO at AGCO on zoom from Duluth, Georgia, So appreciate your time. On this Wednesday, you're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube. All right, we're going to switch gears a little bit off of earnings. Talk about the skim. It's a non partisan digital media company catering to women. It's a subscription newsletter company to offer up things like the daily Skim Skim Money. There's also a podcast and a lot more in terms of what they do the privately held company. Their investors include GV which was formerly Google Ventures. Also Disney. We just heard Denise talk about Disney when it comes to the Hulu ownership. Ventures is another investor in the company. We talked with both of the founders back in March, and great to have back with us this time around. The Skim co founder Danielle Weisberg. She's on Zoom in New York City. Danielle, how are you. I'm good, Thanks so much for having me here today. Before we get into some specifics, I always like to talk perspective. You guys have been around for more than a decade. It's been a few months, about six months or so since we last talked. Talk to us about, you know, how business is doing this year, and just talk to us about how you see the environment right now. Yeah, So you know, listen, you guys are in this day in and day out in terms of public companies, and I think that when it comes to this environment, we know ADS spending has been really up and down. It's been tenuous. I think that when those budgets flex, the biggest thing that you can rely on is a direct relationship with a sought after customer. And at the Skim we have been representing millions of win women for over a decade. Our audience is the people that you want to reach and that you need to reach. They are the ones that are making ninety five percent of household purchasing and spending decisions. So while the overall media landscape continues to have challenges, we've certainly felt that, but at the Skim, what we come back to again and again is what you can't duplicate and what you can't just start overnight, which is a real direct relationship with a group of women who look for look for us every single day. How big is that group? Just remind us in terms of your reaction base over twelve million women. Wow, that's a lot. That is a lot. Are you just remind me to only subscription based or no, there's ad dollars that comes in. No, we have a differentiated revenue model. So we have sponsorship, we have subscription, and actually our fastest growing line of revenue has been commerce. Danielle, at the Skin, you have a very interesting initiative going on called show us your Childcare, Talk to us a little bit about what that is, what the goal of that is. Yeah, so it's a good day to talk about it because there was I don't know if you guys saw this, but there was a report today where we were finally able to look at data in comparison to childcare costs in twenty nineteen. So the price of childcare is up thirty two percent. That means that many families can't afford to both work, and that price search outpaysd overall inflation. I mean, when you look back this year, how much time have we spent reporting on inflation and thinking about what that is doing to families and the decisions that they're having to make, and think about then what it means to say childcare costs are going beyond that. And again this isn't new. This child share share childcare crisis has been in existence for years and the pandemic only made that worse. And in fact, the only time that there has been an investment the US has ever made a sizable investment in childcare was during the pandemic. And when that pandemic era funding expired, which it did, there were no other solutions offered. So it's leaving about three point two million children and their families without childcare options, and that is absolutely just unacceptable. We have an economy that more and more relies on parents, both of them to work, and to do that, you need to make sure that your kids have proper care. Right Listen, you're preaching to the choir. Nobody's going to like get. We totally agree. We talk so much here, I feel like about the lack of affordable daycare or childcare, if you will, for many, many millions of Americans. Other countries seem to have figured it out. You guys, have a partnership and talk to us a little bit about it with moms first. You're partnering also with companies such as Verizon, MasterCards, show Banni on this. Tell us what specifically are you are doing to kind of impact this problem or the situation. Yeah, So we launched hashtags show us your Childcare. And this is the second real civic action campaign that we've lost that we've launched. The first was hashtag show us Your Leave. And what we believe is really matching areas with there is a disconnect for what the government is doing so. Again, childcare has not been something that's been solved by Democrats in leadership or Republicans, and so because of that, we again have really needed the private sector to step up. And I think that this is a time when there's not one right way to know how to support your business through a childcare cliff. But how best do you think the private sector can do it? I think many would argue, yeah, maybe the government doesn't need to be involved, that there are private sectors that have definitely been very profitable and that as a benefit, or to help out their workers to make it easier, or in a tight labor force, bring more workers in to actually provide childcare. So what are the one or two things that can really make a difference here. Well, the first is use it to attract and retain talent. So this is a big way to make your policies transparent. Use our hashtag show us your childcare. And that's where we've gotten over eighty companies such as Pinterest, Shobani, ww ets, Verizon to make their policies transparent. And what that does is it really virtue signals that you care about families and that you are going to put your money where your mouth is. But what any of those companies actually do, That's what I'm curious about. What do they do that actually helps people with their childcare needs. Yeah, so it's everything from flexible work hours to cash stipends to put towards childcare costs. One of the things that we do at the SKIM is team up with a partner VB to make sure that there's backup care options. So we offer kind of a bank of credits those days when you have normal childcare but you need a plan B your childcare provider is closed or someone sick. So it really runs the gamut to onsite childcare centers. And again, you know, it's going to depend on the size of your business how much you're able to invest. But there are different things out there, and we want to make sure that that's part of the conversation when it comes to benefits. And I imagine there's a pretty good economic incentive for some companies to get more engaged with childcare. Is that a selling point of this initiative? And Daniel just got about twenty seconds. Yeah, I think it is, and I think overall as a society, we should all make sure that we have a growing workforce that we have nice things like social securities, and to do that, we need to make sure that women stay in the workforce. So I think overall there's a benefit there, but there's also investing employees they'll stay longer. All Right, we got to run, Thank you so much, A very timely issued something we've been talking about. Bloomberg. This give co founder Danielle Weisberg on zoom in New York City. This is Bloomberg. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app, and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa playing Bloomberg eleven thirty. Yeah. One man's loss is another one's game. That is definitely cocky. Attention of the hedge fund industry on this FED decision day Wednesday, if you will, the US Treasury, you know, trade is definitely on our minds, Mike. The funny thing is it's been on our minds a lot this year, amid big swings in the trade volatility in any given day, we've seen tremendous swings. Yeah. Absolutely, and it's fascinating to see sort of new classes of hedge funds get involved in the treasury market. You know, there's certain macro funds that are always president there. But whenever I see the name long tail Alpha, you know, a tail risk catch fund, I know something's gone wrong somewhere when these guys are actively involved in the trade. So I think that's the case with the story. Well, let's get to it, because it's a story that is reported out in the new issue of Bloomberg Business Week. Let's get into what's going on, as I said in the upcoming new issue on newsstands tomorrow, already online a Bloomberg dot com slash business Week, and of course on the Bloomberg terminal. So let's get to it. Bloomberg News Chief correspondent for Global macro Markets, Liz McCormick is with us. She is on zoom in New Jersey, and also with us is Bloomberg News crossauset reporter Denisatsakova. She's here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Guys, so great to have you here with us. It is in BusinessWeek, the upcoming new issue, which will be out on newsstands tomorrow. Denise, let's start with you. I'm curious about the conversation in the newsroom. Joel has a tendency they'll kind of walk around the newsroom and like kind of poke people about stories. How did this story come about? What was the conversation or did you know one of you say like, you should see what hedge fund guys are up to, So tell us how this came to be. Yeah, so it came back to that theme. We've talked a lot about price sensitive and price incentensitive buyers, so we wanted to look into who are really those new buyers, and hedgephone's a big part of it. And obviously, like if you think of just generally trading treasuries and think of it as the safest market and kind of a little bit slower moving market compared to I don't know, compared to equities, currencies, I don't know. So the conversation came, how has the day of those people changed? And this is what we ask them, So won't tail Alpha ven year's day is very different? You know. The first anecdote is he wakes up every two hours to check the prices, and you know, it's being there on your Bloomberg terminal or whatever. You check your prices all the time and following every little move and then every small data release is very important and potentially it can make you move things. And obviously, like some of those traits have voice trades, sometimes you have to be in the and look at all those releases together decide where you have to make moves. And you can imagine this is very different than I don't know, five years ago, when the FED was such a big important buyer and prices maybe weren't as sensitive to those things. Yeah, this is why I'm not a tail risk hedge fund. That that well, well, I want to bring listen to this conversation, Liz, because we talk about the extreme volatility that we see in the US bond market this year. So are they playing our hedge fund guys and gals, if you will, playing a significant role in that volatility? Well? Yeah, right? Is it circular? Right? And they like the volatility, they come in, they create more volatility, right, So it kind of feeds on itself and then more it becomes and I have to do a shout out. I know Tracy Alloway at some point did a story treasury is trading like a meme stock, so we have to book that one up. But that it becomes like, you know, what was it? Oh, I think Mike Reagan must have edited one of these stories we did where there was other things that were like the hot things that was crypto. And now look at this treasuries even today, look at the yields across the curve. It's like down, you know, over fifteen bases points. It's crazy. So I think hedge fund's coming in because there's more volatility and trading than that adds to it. But they do kind of on the flip side say hey, we're adding to the liquidity, we're you know, making markets. And Deniza knows. Today we had the refunding today and they had their barring committee, which the Treasury always does look into different things. One of them was like the demand base, and they brought up things that were in our story, not that it was from our story, but that the buying base has changed. You know, you have less commercial banks, foreign central banks, you have more households and hedge funds you know, involved in the treasury market. So it's kind of interesting that they brought that up today. Mike did call it a meme stock by the way early. Yeah, I really wanted to take credit for that, but of course Liz Tracy's way ahead of me as usual. But Liz, you know, one of the sort of standard bread and butter hedge fund trades when it comes to the treasury market is something known as the basis trade, which basically looks to profit between discrepancies in the price of bond futures and the actual bonds trading in the cash market. That seems to be kicking into high gear this year, and there's a bit of a backlash to that from the government and some scrutiny about what hedge funds are doing. I know, it's created its own backlash to the backlash, Ken Griffin coming out and saying, why do they care about this? This is sort of an innocuous trade that actually helps save taxpayers money in the bond market. Walk us through the basis trade and why there is scrutiny of it right now? Yeah, in fact, you're front running another story I have covered. Helpful get it out before you do. But yeah, it's been interesting. Like you said, we've had the FED, the BIS, A lot of regulators say hey, we'll worry the side of the size of this basis trade is gotten as jig as it was like in March twenty twenty, and we know what happened then. But yeah, normally this is kind of like you say, picking pennies up under steamroller. You're shorting the futures, you're buying the cash. If you take it to you know, to expiration of the futures, they should converge and where they see some discrepancies, some price discrepancies, that's why you'll do that trade. Where the risk comes in is that most of that is done using leverage, meaning using the repo market to finance the treasury side. So you have the risk that's what happened in like twenty nineteen, that repo rates go crazy for whatever reason and you just can't keep funding this trade. On the flip side when volatility picks up, as you know in futures, you tend to get margin calls. It's just part of the metrics. And so if you started getting margin calls on the short side, so you know, things can just go awry on both sides and all of a sudden, you know you just can't keep in this trade. Then there's a mass exit. That's the way that there's a problem when everyone's running on the same way, right and no one can get out. And remember Mike, in twenty twenty, we had people saying, hey, I had a good trade, I couldn't even get out of that because there's just no liquidity, right. Well, that's what I wanted to ask. Don't we want it to be a little bit of a sleepy market that you know, foreign central banks and the Fed and others you know, use and can count on to be kind of trade a certain way. I mean, don't we to some extent they need to care about the composition of buyers or are we just glad that there are buyers in this market. We do care about the composition for sure, and obviously, like just to give perspective, So those big traditional buyers, including the FED, commercial banks, foreign buyers used to count for seventy five percent of the ownership of the treasury market. That number now is fifty five percent. So this is a very big drop. And speaking to different experts who've been following this for a year, a lot of people saying that in a case where there's a little like a slightly bigger shock, probably there will be very sharp moves, and the market is more fragile to those moves that and it was in the past because obviously hedge funds are a big part. They're very price sensitive, but mutual are also growing fast, pension funds are growing fast. They're not necessarily moving as fast as hedge funds obviously, but are sensitive to macro events. So all those different participants are a lot more likely to react on who knows the next banking news or oil prices or any of those little things. But hedge funds have always been a part of this market, right, it is now there a bigger part we know, percentage wise. Yeah, they have tripled in the past year. So currently they own two point three trillion, which is close to ten percent of the treasury market. Which makes me wonder if he gets sleepy again, Mike, do they just run in the other direction right to make money? Yeah, and it makes me You know, the dirty word in macroland is are you a tourist in this market? Yeah? Are you really a macro fund who's used to this trade and knows what to do? Or are you taking riskue you're an equity manager, you know. I've seen a few headlines out this week Bill Ackman with shortening treasuries, he's changed his mind. He's now covering that shere Stan, Truck and Miller are a very wealth known hedge fund manager used to work with George Sourez without saying he's very bullish treasuries. So is that at least the tourist sort of mentality. Does it seem like the consensus is we've seen the peak and yields, it's now time to back up the truck and start going along the treasury market? Do you think? I think the peak is for sure, very important, but it's also very important that for a very long time it was the direction of trouble was very sure. And obviously like the Fed is likely to continue rowing off its bounce sheet, so them being a smaller portion of it guarantees more volatility, whether those traits are whether short bonds will still be a successful trade. Obviously this is this is going back to the debate where we've seen the peak, but the fact that they're more say realty value trades or or you know, basis traits or things where you can exploit that volatility stace. No matter whether we've reached dot peakids I wonder too, Liz, come on back in. I mean what you make for someoney who's also followed this, you know for a long time in terms of the bond market and treasury trade to see a greater role of hedge funds. I do wonder, listen. They love volatility, right, they want things to move. That's how you make money and quickly for investors. But I do wonder does that potentially, you know, or could it spell trouble? We always talk about right, these changing rate environments, and you know, as the tide goes out, like we get to see all the problems and we you know, could it create some kind of crisis many or otherwise in the future. Well, I have to say, and I wouldn't be doing a good service. And maybe Treasury Department will still talk to me if I do mention that. John Josh Frost, to the Treasury Department Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets, said publicly in a press conference. Listen, we still have a very diverse buyer base. We're not lying on any one type of investor or group of investors. So they're saying, hey, we're doing fine. But to your point, Carol, I think that is why regulators worry like they're zoning in on leverage of things, but you don't want a massive positioning and with one group of investors, who if they go the other way, you just create this groundswell of movement and they take everyone else out in the process. So I think that's the risk when any trade gets too big, especially when it's leveraged, that's a problem. But like I said, Treasury saying, we're okay, we're looking at all this, but we still have enough folks that want to buy our stuff that we're not concerned. But like, who knows well to see what happens for now? How? Yeah? Yeah, Well, let's I wonder you know that that expression crowded trade comes to mind with a story like this. I mean, is there enough diversity in sort of the trades going on or is there a risk of crowding in certain trades, especially you know when you look at how the yield curve is really steepened pretty aggressively in the last couple month, you know, is that potentially a crowded trade or you know, are there any pockets of crowded trades we should think about in this market right now? Well? I would say I think the biggest one is the basis, even though some people argue there's reasons it's not as big, But I keep saying, like Denisa says, it's this debate have yields peaked and that I think people keep getting burned, you know. I mean, we've seen a massive fall today, but that yields have peaked, let me just load up, bring up the truck and buy them, and then yields go up again. And so I think that's where the risk is that people are trying to just can't seem to time this market right, you know. So that's creating the extra volatility, not just from the hedge funds but just regular macro funds, et cetera, thinking it's time now. Maybe they're okay in the long run because this will come back. But I think that's the risk that people just can't seem to get a clarity for sure where rates are going. Yeah, right, exactly. The crystal ball is really muddy right now, Deniza. Just to bring it back to how you guys kick off this story the founder of long Tail Alpha and talking to him, does it feel like it's a trade he plans to be in for a long time or is it something he's like, Yeah, this is maybe a one or two your thing or I don't know. Yeah, I think this is not including the story. But he actually said that probably the best time for this trade is yet to come. As cliche as that is, but this is something we've also heard. We talked to people, of course, I mean, what else could he say, But we also talk to people like who are selling trading algorithms and who very you know, have a very good perception where the basis trade is growing, and they're saying that in the past three months they've seen the most demand they've seen for these type of things, and obviously they have interest in saying that this will continue to be strong. But this is this is a thing we're saying. So for sure, there are numerous players in this space that are saying that as long as there is uncertainty of peakios, as long as the FED is rowing off his bounce sheets, as long as we see that volatility, uh, there may be more appetite for those things. Feels like we could see some more volatility, guys. Thank you so much. Bloomberg News process that reporter Deniza Zakova along with Bloomberg News, she correspondent for Global Macro Markets Liz McCormick. This story in the new upcoming issue of Bloomberg Business Week, on newstands tomorrow, already on the Bloomberg and already online at Bloomberg dot Com. I'm brother Marco, the journal. Now about you. Let me drive? No no, no no, no, please going to drive, honey, please, I'll do the gravels. Let's wat I want to try it. It's good question that try. This is the drive to the clothes dot com tek we'll buy around fold it on Bloomberg Radio and a very good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Bloomberg Business Week live in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio, streaming on YouTube than Bloomberg Originals. It is a FED Wednesday, as you've been listening on TV and across Bloomberg channels. FED Wednesday, the first day of November, and the FED holding rates at a twenty two year high for a second straight meeting, and the FED Chief Jay Powell asking should we be hiking more? Which I feel like sets the tone. I'm Carol Masser. Tim Stanovec is off today and with us as Bloomberg's Mike Reagan, and I do feel like Mike. There was a lot of things where they He kind of continued to remind us that inflation is still elevated, and I feel like they might not be done yet. Yeah, I mean, and I don't think he said anything too new today really changed the outlook for interest rates at all. But we do have this really wild rally in the stock and the bond market right now, So I wonder you know how much of that is sort of people caught on the short end, short selling both stocks and bonds before this and now having to cover. I'm not one hundred percent convinced you can trust this as sort of the markets interpretation of what he's saying. Right you think about how they were positioning ahead of all of this and thinking it was going to be a lot more negga, Yeah, and so often, you know, we see these reactions in the market the day of a FED press conference and then wake up the next morning and wait a minute, everyone, wait twenty four hour cycle that hasn't happened before this year. It's a really good point. But we are seeing equities hold and it's pretty broad based buying. Let's get back to the markets. It is a FED Wednesday. Stocks are ralling. We've seen yields back off, and lucky for us on our drive to the close on this FED Wednesday is Amanda Gotti. She's chief investment officer at P and C Asset Management, joining us once again out there on zoom in Philadelphia. Amanda, there's a rally underway in stocks. Yields have backed off. I think Mike makes a great point that maybe some investors were caught off guard expecting a much more negative tone or negative description statement whatever from the Federal Reserve. Do you discount the trade today? Oh? Absolutely, I discount the trade. I mean, there's no question that sentiment has been pretty lousy in the last you know, four to six weeks. Yields of move rapidly higher. We think very crowded positioning at one end. So there's a scurrying around that's happening here into the close today to reposition. But I'm not sure that we learned a lot of new information. I mean, I think it's hard for me to say that Powell had his hawk costume on for Halloween. Maybe it was a little bit lighter of a tone than he has been recently. But the door is still very much open for additional tighter policy from here. So we think this rally is going to be short lived. And I know you're in Philadelphia, and I think we should make a deal not to discuss the Phillies at all during this interview. Thank you, I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, me too. But I wonder, as October, for all the wrong reasons, I was in a hotel with the Arizona team when they lost. Uh yeah, am I wrong? Well they lost, they lost a few games in Philly, but they ended up winning the series. Hey, we're not going to talk about it, Carol, all right, Okay, still too soon now, I mean, you know, we're going to talk later in the show about sort of this wild year of volatility in the bond market. And I wonder, just as a professional in these markets, what's it like coming in every day and seeing these wild moves in the treasury market, you know, this market we were so accustomed to being quiet and sort of boring, you know, And what do you think is needed to calm it down? Well, it's a great question. It's almost an unanswerable one at the moment here. I think as investors we've been conditioned to a hashtag high volatility regime for quite some time now. I mean, think about the last three years of unprecedented challenges and return negative returns in the bond market, so we're starting to get conditioned to this. But I think at the end of the day, it's all a function of this unprecedented policy accommodation that came in at the onset of the pandemic and now this unprecedented unwinding. At the end of the day, it's just going to take a lot longer. I keep saying longer for longer. It's not higher for longer, it's longer for longer. Everything about this is just going to take longer to normalize than what investors would like. And I think it's, you know, again, kind of just hammering the same thing that I feel like Mike and I kind of agree in terms of what we got from Japwell, the risks of doing too little. They're worried about that, even though he's stressed right out of the gate, we've got a dual mandate and that eventually maybe some of this will start to work its way into the labor side of the equation. The risks of doing too little is certainly I feel like top of mind for him, absolutely, and we agree with that that's why we continue to think that the door is potentially open for some tighter policy ahead. I think the key question is whether the market has done the Fed's job for it or not. And he even acknowledged that a little bit that with the I think the market has done enough of the job for the FED at this point. I think it's done enough at the moment. I mean, think about the you know, one hundred bases points that we've seen a move here in the longer term portion of the curve. It's been a very violent move, no matter how you slice and dice it. And so I think for now we're definitely in sufficiently restrictive territory. But there's still plenty of ammo from an economic data perspective to go further here. Economic growth continues to come in pretty strong. Ism report today gave a very polar opposite story here, but US consumer is still very strong, inflation not to the long term target, So I think there is room. I think we just need to, as Pale said, let some of the lagged effects of this policy work its way through here. But we are definitely in restrictive territory for sure. Yo. I meta one of the themes this year is the yield curve, you know, the difference between yields on shorter term debt and longer term debt. And we've been living with this inverted curve for a long time where the shorter maturity debt is yielding more than the longer maturity debt. We have seen this very aggressive steepening in the last few months, and you had a really interesting point in your note to us talking about that steepening of the curve, and it's a very unique thing that's happening, this bear steepening of the curve while it's inverted. What's the takeaway from that, Well, I think it's an interesting dynamic because we of course have this inverted yield curve, it's been consistently inverted for the better part of a year plus, but we're also having this bear steepening phenomenon. And usually when you see that start to come into the equation, it's like, oh, here's the signal for something's going to crack in the backdrop. But it's actually only happened once in the last fifty years where we've had both of these dynamics in play that you don't usually see them together, and so the one time that we have in history was right before the nineteen sixty nine nineteen seventy recession began. And so one data point does not make a trend. It's not a perfect guide or predictor for what's to come next. But we do think the net effect is just a lot of pressure on high valuation stocks and the long end of the curve too. All right, we've got to run. Hey, listen, Amanda, Thank you so much, so appreciate. Amanda A. Gotti of URPNC. 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