December 3, 2025 • 30 mins
US President Donald Trump may soon name Kevin Hassett as the next Fed chair, subject to Senate confirmation. So what happens if he gets the job when Jerome Powell's term ends next year? On this episode of Trumponomics, host Stephanie Flanders, Bloomberg Economics Chief US Economist Anna Wong and Washington correspondent Saleha Mohsin unpack why Hassett has emerged as the likely pick, and what it could mean for markets, interest rates and the Fed’s independence.
For more, Anna Wong's Interview with Kevin Hassett:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECFNeNqKQOM
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I guess the potential FED chair is here too.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
I don't know. Always allowed to say that potential.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
He's a respected person that I can tell you.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Thank you, Kevin. I'm Stephanie Flanders, head of Government and
Economics at Bloomberg, and this is trump Anomics, the podcast
that looks at the economic world of Donald Trump, how
he's already shaped the global economy and what on a
(00:39):
is going to happen next. This week we're asking what
happens if Kevin Hassett gets the top job at the FED. Well,
for those who haven't been following the apprentice like competition
for the next chair of the US Central Bank, here's
a quick summary. The current chair of the FED, Jerome Powell.
(01:02):
His term as chair ends in May next year. There
are five candidates on President Trump's shortlist to replace him.
We're expecting the President to name his pick in the
next few weeks, and last week Bloomberg reported that it
was looking very likely to be Kevin Hassett, the current
director of Donald Trump's National Economic Council. Well, things might change,
(01:24):
of course, we are talking about President Trump, but right
now we thought it was worth asking, indeed what a
Hasset FED might meet for markets, for the US economy
and long term for the Federal Reserve. Whether the worriers
about this are right to fret about having a Trump
loyalist as the chair of the world's most important central bank. Well,
(01:47):
if you're a dedicated listener to this podcast with a
good memory, you might remember that our chief US economist,
Anna Wong has thought for a while that President Trump
was most likely to pick Kevin Hassett, with whom she
worked in the first Trump administration on the Council of
Economic Advisors. Well, here exactly why she thought Kevin Hassett
was the most likely in a moment, but I might
(02:09):
point out that Kevin hasse seems to have a good
opinion of Anna wall That might be one reason why
he was willing to sit down for a forty five
minute conversation with her at a recent Bloomberg event we
had in Washington. You could look it up on YouTube.
I would say it is in some parts quite a
nerdy chat between two economists. But on the subject of
the FED, Kevin Hassett did make the point that it's
(02:31):
not anything new to have a member of the president's
team move over to a senior role at the FED.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I think the idea that government service makes it less
likely that you'll pursue an independent FED basically rejects the
evidence of what is it the five Council of Ecadomic
Advisor chairfs that went on to be independent FED people.
And so I think it's a very common path for
people who have worked in the White House to go
on and to work well at the FED, and to
(02:59):
do so independently.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Well. Anna is joining me now from our New York office,
as is senior Washington reporter Seleia Mostly, who was the
one who reported last week that Hassett was now top
of the president's list. Anna, Celia, great to have.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
You, good to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Good to see you.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Now, Seleia. Obviously you can't reveal what led you directly
to write your story the other day. He's really been
high on most people's lists for a while. Why did
you press the button on saying you really thought it
was looking like him?
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It's been an interesting year when it comes to just
the FED chair selection process, if we just narrow that
lens right there. So Bloomberg News has been ahead of
the curve on this reporting in June, one of our colleagues,
Nancy Cook and Katerinas Arieva, reported that Kevin Hassett had
a great interview with Trump. They discussed the FED inside
the White House, the chairmanship role, and that's when things
(03:57):
started to kind of shift. The other part of the
narrative is that Trump does not like that there are
agencies that are outside of executive branch control. And now
he's been looking for many, many months, and you could
say years, at how he can exert some control over
the Federal Reserve. Now, traditionally that is done through personnel.
Any sitting president has the ability to choose who fills
(04:20):
the FED Board of Governors, including the chair, and Trump
is using those ways into the FED to put a
loyalist in.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
We're speaking now on Tuesday, the second of December. It's
been around in a week since you wrote that Kevin
has it was looking very likely. Has anything happened in
the last few days, any of the comments from the
President that we've heard made you change your mind or
think mcgrian might be moving again.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
If anything, the public perception matches my own perception, which
is that I feel like our report is even more
accurate this past Sunday, Kevin Hassett was on CBS's Face
the Nation, and at the end of that inner view,
he was asked directly if the Bloomberg report was accurate,
and he had a big smile on his face. Did
yours go?
Speaker 5 (05:09):
You know, I am, I'm not sure that Blueberg has
a story right. I'm really honored to be amongst a
group of really great candidates.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Excellent lament for the person.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
He had a big smile on his face and he said, no,
I don't know that that report is completely accurate. But
then he points to the positive market reaction.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
If you look at the market response to that, it
was very, very positive. We had a great treasury auction.
Interest rates went down, and so I think that the
American people could expect President Trump to pick somebody who's
going to help them, you know, have cheaper car loans
and easier access to mortgages at lower rates.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
He had key bullet points on what happened in markets
once that story hit the wires, and the one question
around Hassett and whoever Trump may choose for FED chair
has been can this person maintain credibility with markets but
still be able to cope with a president Trump, who
(06:05):
was also in the world and who could be calling
him a stubborn ox or a bonehead at any given point,
things that Trump has done to j Powell, the current
FED chair, that moment on face the nation, in the
fact that the White House, in our story on the record,
there was no pushback. It was just, well, Trump's going
to pick, who's going to pick when he's ready.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
It sounds like he was even trying to make sure
there would be any change of mind, to try and
remove any last bit of doubt from President Trump's mind.
I mean, Anna, I mentioned you've always said you thought
so that the most likely pick. Knowing how you experienced
you'd had in the Trump administration, and knowing that the
various candidates as you did, why did you think he
(06:46):
was always the most likely?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (06:48):
So the candidate we have in the pool of people
auditioning for this role are Kevin has It, Kevin Walsh,
Chris Waller, Bowman. But our criteria, my criteria for Trump's
pick is number one, loyalty, as you said, Celenia, and
(07:08):
on that count, Kevin has scored the highest amongst this
entire pool of candidate because he has a long working
relationship with Trump, and he delivered some of the key
legislation that Trump is most proud of, the text Jobs
and Cuts Act, that is a major Coudle points to
(07:29):
Kevin has It. He not only helped craft it, he
also messaged it, He also marketed. He also fought for it,
and afterwards he also defended it. And also during the coronavirus,
Kevin has It came back and partly reflecting his loyalty
and also patriotism, maybe because the reason why he left
(07:51):
CEA was because he was working long hours. This was
all detailed in his twenty twenty one memoir The Drift.
So in that book he talked about how he was
working sixty eighty hours every day in Cia and then
he suddenly felt this heart tightness in the chest. Well,
he drove himself to the hospital and turned out he
(08:12):
was having some kind of heart attack, and that was
why he has to you know exit. The reason why
he quietly drove himself to the hospital was he also
didn't want to attract any fanfare. He wrote in the book,
how like the media would have so much to write
about if they caught win of him, you know, having
this episode. So fast forward to the second Trump He
(08:32):
also helped message this.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
One big, beautiful bill.
Speaker 6 (08:36):
And the role of National Economic Council Director is more
influential than the CEA chair in the sense that you
are actually helping to create an usher do policy, where
CEA oftentimes the chair was.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
It serves more like a think tank within the White.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
House, a bit more academic.
Speaker 6 (08:55):
Yes, yeah, so in a way for any economist who
dreamed about having luins over how policies are crafted, this
has its role. His role is definitely more elevated in
this second Trump, which suggests to me that he in
Trump's mind, he is asked that his status as an
economy is also much higher.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
I suspect that his book is going to be rising
in the Amazon charts given the recent stories. Everyone's going
to be reading that. I was not aware of that story,
but it does make some sense out of one of
the exchanges you had in this conversation at Bloomberg at
the Washington offices a few weeks ago, where you talked
about how he would maybe have few hours if he
went to the FED. But you talked about a lot
(09:39):
of things in that conversation. He talked about tariffs, talked
about the budget. He was very on message, you would say,
from a sort of Trump perspective, did anything he say
make you change your view of what a Hasset led
Federal Reserve would look like? How he might affect the FED.
Speaker 6 (09:54):
I think one of the biggest issue facing the next
FED chairman and the FED overall is to determine whether
we are indeed going through a productivity boom, because productivity
boom does not show up in macro data cleanly. It
just doesn't, and in the nineteen nineties it takes several
years and after rounds of revisions before it became apparent.
(10:16):
And in that conversation with Hasset, he seemed very aware
of that. In fact, I thought he went a little
bit way too enthusiastic about accepting that the productivity boom
is already here.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
One of the interesting puzzles is that first, we're having
a productivity boom that is really unprecedented in the following
sense that when I worked with Alan Greenspan back in
the nineties, it was just at the dawn of the
computer age.
Speaker 6 (10:46):
Really, Whereas in fact, I think it is a very
polarizing issues among economists because if you survey all economists,
half of them would say there's no productivity boom. So
I think that it could be very quite likely be
that Kevin has it is right that a productivity boom
is happening unbeknownst to many macroeconomists.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
But I think it's also.
Speaker 6 (11:09):
Important for a future FED chair to acknowledge the lack
of evidence and try to like bridge together, you know,
a consensus amongst people who think differently.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
There was an interesting moment in that interview. He said,
you know, there's nothing particularly special about having a political
you know, it's obviously it is a political appointment. And
you've had economists move over from the White House to
run the FED before, which is absolutely true. But in
the past that hasn't been after a very or not
in recent times, that hasn't been after a very public
(11:45):
row between the White House and the FED, or a
disagreement that the White House has had about FED policy
which the candidate has actively sided with the president on.
And I just wonder from your perspective, I mean, you
talk to people across the economic world and markets as
well as Washington, how tainted do you think Kevin has
(12:07):
its arguments are going to be when he puts these
kind of lines that support in effect the president's desire
to have lower interest rates.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
That's an interesting question.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
I would have assumed that when Stephen Myron was nominated
to take the short term slot that opened up on
the FED board when Adriana Kougler resigned, I thought that
markets would have a big tantrum and that the Senate
Banking Committee would also have a big tantrum over Stephen
Myron going straight from the CEA to the FED on
(12:38):
leave from.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
The White House for that role.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
And there was not a blink from anyone.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Really.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
There was a couple of tense moments ooh in the
Senate during the hearing, right nothing really. Markets were also
fine with it. So we're seeing that either the FED
is like in a too big to fail category, where
like it's not possible that we start questioning their credibility
because the world cannot handle it. Therefore, we just will
keep rolling with it. And so Hassett gets through the Senate.
(13:08):
Mark Warnerer, a senator on the Banking Committee, was at
the Bloomberg Washington office recently, and this is before reading
that Hassett was a front runner, and he did remark
that I have a good relationship with Kevin Hasset. Warner
as a Democrat, right, So Hassett has relationships on both
sides of the aisle. The Senate does like to respect
any president's wishes when it comes to personnel. He has
(13:29):
the right to he or she has the right to
choose who should be nominated. They vet everyone. Now the
Senate has failed on certain events because we're seeing that
there's some ethics scandals that keep kind of popping up
at the FED, and maybe the Senate hasn't grilled candidates enough.
There's questions around other FED appointees from the Biden era
of who ended up at the FED and if they
were fully qualified. Things like that are coming up in
(13:51):
the ether. But if we have Kevin Hassett become FED chair,
that means he's Marcus have now absorbed it right. He
was right to point out there was no big reaction.
That's a big plus for him. Now it's up to
the Senate to properly vet him, but his credibility is there.
Once he's in the chair seat, he has a whole
(14:12):
FMC board. There are defense mechanisms at the FED in
place to deal with any kind of efforts to politicize
the FED. Now, Trump is a very strong adversary on
that front. But now we are testing those defense mechanisms
across the United States, across democracy, across the capital, and
(14:33):
now it's making it to the Eccles building.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
And you make the point, his is only one voice.
It's a very consensus based organization, and the know as well,
and you don't, you don't tend to have a lot
of dissent, but his will only be one vote. So
I guess one of the key things that people are
looking at is whether the president, either directly or indirectly,
(14:57):
gets to change the broader makeup of the board. And
there obviously we had this important case coming up or
judgment coming up with the Supreme Court. So just remind
us where we stand on that, because there's a sort
of key aspect of quite how many slops the president
might end up being able to fill.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
So the summer, like I said, was really interesting, and
June it was the Okay, Hassett has a great, you know,
knock it out of the park interview with Trump. In July,
we see the Bill Poulty, the FHFA director. For some reason,
he comes out with comments against Powell, saying that he
should be tried in the courts or rejected from his
(15:38):
job for the way that the FED has spent on
some of the renovations. And then by early August, Poulty
had made public some very old mortgage documents belonging to
Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee to the FED Board, that
there are some discrepancies in there. And then Trump puts
out a post on truth Social that says I'm firing
(15:59):
Lisa Cook for pause because she should not have this.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Job if she has been violating mortgage laws.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
And it turns out that there's some intricacies there, the
purp violations happened before she was Fed governor, and that
maybe they were actually above board. So that case has
gone to the Supreme Court. Trump right now is not
able to block her and remove her from the Fed.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
We have a.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Hearing in January mid January where the Supreme Court will
hear oral arguments. We're going to hear a little bit
more about that. The other very exciting thing that happened
in August, around the time that the Lisa Cook attempt
at firing happened, was that Audrina Kugler, also a Biden
appointee to the FED Board, resigned abruptly so that is
(16:40):
the slot that Steve Myron has taken that expires end
of January early February. And if it is Hassett who
gets the nomination for chair, that is probably the slot
that he gets is the seat that now Steve Myron holds.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
And then we have the excitement of j.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Powell because his chairmanship ends in May, but his term
as a governor he has two more years on it.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Now.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Traditionally usually you will see a chair just completely step down.
Palell has been through a lot. He has publicly been
called names by the President of the United States. It's
not an easy thing. I think it's taken a toll
on him and maybe even his family. He has refrained
from saying whether he will step down, and you just
(17:26):
have to wonder is he just waiting to see who
is the pick and how does those first few weeks
or first few months pan out before he decides leave,
or he could say I'm just a governor. I'm not
going to head up any committees. I'm in my office
and I'll show up when I need to go to
an FMC meeting and deal with Hassett.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
And that you mentioned it and the piece you wrote
about what a hasse FED would look like you highlight
that there are more significant shifts of direction of bed
that you could see if you saw a further step
(18:15):
or down this road, which is a potential change in
the regional fed governors.
Speaker 6 (18:20):
Yes, so regional FED presidents they get reappointed by the
Board of Governors. So there are seven individuals on the
Board of the Governors and there are twelve regional presidents.
And the deadline usually is by the end of February
of every year that ends either at twenty twenty six
(18:41):
or twenty thirty one in five year increments. So there's
an opportunity for Trump if he wants to, you know,
if he somehow could get at least four people on
the Board of Governors to reject the reappointment of some
of these regional fed The opening is twenty twenty sixth February.
(19:02):
So this is why the timing of that Lisa Cook
case is extremely important. So if the hearing happens in
mid January, as Slea said, then the ruling likely will
come way after January, after the deadline for this re appointment,
which means that likely Lisa Cooke would stay in place
(19:23):
until at least February of twenty twenty six. So regardless
of what the Supreme Court does, just because the ruling
will happen after February, it's unlikely that Trump will have
the four votes on the board to be able to
remove regional FED presidents.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
So, Silih, there was one thing that you've been talking
about that I thought was interesting, And it's very much
part of the President's kind of modus operandi that he
will spot something where some opinion is kind of quietly
changing behind the scenes, but he takes it further. You've
been spotting a bit of that when it comes to
the FED in the possible future direction of the FED.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Yeah, you know, we are at a point in American
history where the public's trust of public institutions is that
historic lows. And whether the average American thinks about the
FED very often hopefully they don't. The Federal Reserve is
part of that low, that lack of trust, and some
of that has to do, of course, with just the
continued hangover from the global financial crisis that oh, everyone
(20:26):
got these golden parachutes, the FED bailed everyone else out
except for the average man, and we're still stuck in
the muck.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
And they had one job, which was to prevent inflation,
and they failed on that.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Well, let's talk about that one, because we are at
a point where the whole generation, my generation didn't know
what it was like to face inflation, because the last
time was around the time I was born.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
In the early eighties.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
You have a generation that has never seen this. And
then you have policymakers who at the time it was
Janet Allen, the treasure secretary under Biden and j Powell.
You had Janet Allen speaking as a Treasury secretary but
sounding like a Fed official a FED chair, saying this
is transitory, and Powell also saying this is transitory. And
what that means is that the family at the grocery
(21:10):
store checkout that has to decide do we complete our
food shopping or do we buy another pair of cleat
soccer cleats for our growing teenage boy. We can't afford both.
When someone says transitory, they're saying your pain is going
to pass. It's not a big deal. So trust plummeted
even more, and so it is natural for elected leaders
to take a look and say, what went wrong here?
(21:32):
How can we do better? When it comes to trust
in this institution that is so important to America's economic
well being, in the world's economic wellbeing. So Trump has
picked up on this angst and this unhappiness with how
this is working, but in his own way, which ends
up being belligerent, is trying to fix it.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Anna. Obviously, the irony of this quite positive reading of
how you might interpret the direction the president's taking. He's
not just religuing. He's trying to push for lower rates
in an environment where people have lost their fait in
the central bank in large part because of their failure
(22:12):
to control inflation. So this just it seems like a
potential recipe for not answering those concerns and actually, if anything,
making it worse.
Speaker 6 (22:23):
I believe President Trump has mentioned, who wants rates to
be cut down to one percent?
Speaker 3 (22:29):
When you put one percent in one of your models,
what does that do to inflation? Just to remind us.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
So, first of all, you will have a temporary boom
through twenty twenty seven, So twenty twenty six and twenty
twenty seven more than three four percent GDP growth, Inflation
probably will most likely will exceed three percent, probably rising
to three point five percent. You know, on that trajectory,
(22:56):
and by twenty twenty eight could be that inflation expectations
would un anchor a little bit and you'll see credit
spreads all rising, and inflation compensation on the longer end
of the health curve probably would rise, and all that
would lead to a If the FED has not even
(23:17):
get in front of this deterioration, it will probably means
the FED will have to raise rate by even more
in order to get inflation expectations back in control. So
that would be the boom and bust cycle, classic boom
and bust cycle.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
But the best that you've just described would be just
thinking about the electoral cycle would be amazed, probably after
the presidents.
Speaker 6 (23:41):
Sometime around there. But I also have to say, Stephanie,
that that assumes productivity didn't pick up tremendously. And I
think one view that Kevin has it would be carrying
with him into the FED. It would be his conviction
that a productivity boom is happening.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
You know, we had this conversation around the impact of
tariffs a couple of weeks ago, and we made the
point that AI and Big AI investments had in some
sense protected the economy from some of the negative effects
or offset some of the negative effects of TAROT, but
Kevin Hassett would say they pointed to a real productivity
(24:20):
turnaround that was going to support the economy and make
it possible to have faster growth and lower inflation even
with lower interest rates. So how much credence do you
give in that scenario, that kind of positive AI revolution scenario.
Speaker 6 (24:35):
I think most likely what we'll see if there is
going to be a productivity boom, would be weak employment
for a couple of years, because a labor productivity boom
implies you have higher output per worker, So you could
have higher output and reduce need for workers, which is
what we are seeing already reduced need for entry level workers.
(24:58):
And in fact, I just came back from around table
today and I saw some very compelling data that shows
the right slow down and employment growth for entry level
people in their twenties. That kind of jobs slowed exactly
around the time where chat GBT was introduced. So I
think my own forecast is that likely in the next
(25:20):
year we will see pretty weak non figm payroll growth
every month, and I think that will give an opening
for the FED to keep cutting rates, because as part
of the productivity, the process of increasing productivity there will
be at first slowed down in employment, and only afterwards
(25:41):
when firms have increased profits from this productivity growth they
would invest more. So far has been very concentrated in AI.
We will need a broadening of this investment boom into
many other sectors in order to be convinced that it's
really a total factor of productivity boom. And even that
(26:03):
is not a sure thing because in the nineteen nineties
a real wage is actually stagnated even amidst this productivity boom.
So I just think that the AI element will play
a key role in determining the path of a FED
funds rate the next couple of years.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Continued AI enthusiasm but weak employment growth could potentially enable
the FED to cut more than we currently expect in
the first half of next year. But do you think,
going back to my original point about credibility, do you
think that Kevin has it if he were coming into
his first meeting in June as chairman of the Federal Reserve,
(26:45):
that he could get the majority of the board to
support a rate cut.
Speaker 6 (26:52):
Well, if Kevin has it, does enter the FED in
January first as a governor to take over the position
that Steve Myron FA Kate. Then he has about five
months to prove himself to the FED staff and FOMC
members to build his soft power, because ultimately the most
(27:12):
important trait of a FED chairman is soft power. The
FOMC has oftentimes been divided in the past. So the
division that people talk about today and for this FOMC
meeting next week, for example, where half of the committee
wants to cut, half of them do not want to cut. Well,
that kind of division we have seemed before in the
(27:33):
nineteen nineties, in the nineteen ninety five during the green
Span era, and we also saw it last year September
twenty twenty four when the committee was split between cutting
fifty BIPs versus twenty five fits. And the common denominator
there is you need a chairman who can shepherd everyone
(27:54):
toward the view he prefers. And in Kevin Has its case,
If Has colleagues were to view him with skepticism or
view his every action as a covert, as he being
a proxy for Trump, they are not going to go
along with him. And so ultimately it is soft power
(28:15):
that matters. And by the way, many of the governors
and also regional FED presidents will be staying around until
the twenty thirties, well after even the Trump administration. The
regional FED presidents, many of them are very young in
their fifties.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
If they don't get kicked out, yes.
Speaker 6 (28:35):
But again, if they missed the February twenty twenty six window,
the next opportunity is twenty thirty one. So it's very
likely all of these hawks, young hawks, mind you, they're
going to be hanging around. So I think it's really
up to Kevin has its soft power to convince everyone,
and I think one thing in favor of his likelihood
(28:59):
of is that he used to be a FED staff
and he actually does know several senior people now in
the FED board. So out of the candidates that we
talked about earlier, he is the only one who had
worked at the FED, So I think from the Fed's perspective,
they would rather have him than the other ones.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Anyone listening who wants to get a flavor of some
of the behind the scenes data analysis that Kevin Hassett
did as a staff at the FED, you should go
on YouTube and dig out the conversation he had with
Anna One because they got well into some of those
debates as well as broader topics on the fed's independence. Anna,
that was terrific. Thank you very.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Much, great to have you on, happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
And celaire as always a.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Pleasure, wonderful. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
As always, Thanks for coming on, Thanks for listening to
Trumponomics from Bloomberg. It was noted by me, Stephanie Flanders,
and I was joined by Anna Wong and Celia Mosen.
(30:11):
Trumponomics was produced by Sammersadi and Moses and with help
from Amy Keene and special thanks this week to Stacey
Wong and Dash Bennett. Sound designed by Blake Maples and
Kelly Gary and Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
To help others find us, please rate and review highly
wherever you listen,
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I guess the potential FED chair is here too.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
I don't know. Always allowed to say that potential.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
He's a respected person that I can tell you.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Thank you, Kevin. I'm Stephanie Flanders, head of Government and
Economics at Bloomberg, and this is trump Anomics, the podcast
that looks at the economic world of Donald Trump, how
he's already shaped the global economy and what on a
(00:39):
is going to happen next. This week we're asking what
happens if Kevin Hassett gets the top job at the FED. Well,
for those who haven't been following the apprentice like competition
for the next chair of the US Central Bank, here's
a quick summary. The current chair of the FED, Jerome Powell.
(01:02):
His term as chair ends in May next year. There
are five candidates on President Trump's shortlist to replace him.
We're expecting the President to name his pick in the
next few weeks, and last week Bloomberg reported that it
was looking very likely to be Kevin Hassett, the current
director of Donald Trump's National Economic Council. Well, things might change,
(01:24):
of course, we are talking about President Trump, but right
now we thought it was worth asking, indeed what a
Hasset FED might meet for markets, for the US economy
and long term for the Federal Reserve. Whether the worriers
about this are right to fret about having a Trump
loyalist as the chair of the world's most important central bank. Well,
(01:47):
if you're a dedicated listener to this podcast with a
good memory, you might remember that our chief US economist,
Anna Wong has thought for a while that President Trump
was most likely to pick Kevin Hassett, with whom she
worked in the first Trump administration on the Council of
Economic Advisors. Well, here exactly why she thought Kevin Hassett
was the most likely in a moment, but I might
(02:09):
point out that Kevin hasse seems to have a good
opinion of Anna wall That might be one reason why
he was willing to sit down for a forty five
minute conversation with her at a recent Bloomberg event we
had in Washington. You could look it up on YouTube.
I would say it is in some parts quite a
nerdy chat between two economists. But on the subject of
the FED, Kevin Hassett did make the point that it's
(02:31):
not anything new to have a member of the president's
team move over to a senior role at the FED.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I think the idea that government service makes it less
likely that you'll pursue an independent FED basically rejects the
evidence of what is it the five Council of Ecadomic
Advisor chairfs that went on to be independent FED people.
And so I think it's a very common path for
people who have worked in the White House to go
on and to work well at the FED, and to
(02:59):
do so independently.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Well. Anna is joining me now from our New York office,
as is senior Washington reporter Seleia Mostly, who was the
one who reported last week that Hassett was now top
of the president's list. Anna, Celia, great to have.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
You, good to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Good to see you.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Now, Seleia. Obviously you can't reveal what led you directly
to write your story the other day. He's really been
high on most people's lists for a while. Why did
you press the button on saying you really thought it
was looking like him?
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It's been an interesting year when it comes to just
the FED chair selection process, if we just narrow that
lens right there. So Bloomberg News has been ahead of
the curve on this reporting in June, one of our colleagues,
Nancy Cook and Katerinas Arieva, reported that Kevin Hassett had
a great interview with Trump. They discussed the FED inside
the White House, the chairmanship role, and that's when things
(03:57):
started to kind of shift. The other part of the
narrative is that Trump does not like that there are
agencies that are outside of executive branch control. And now
he's been looking for many, many months, and you could
say years, at how he can exert some control over
the Federal Reserve. Now, traditionally that is done through personnel.
Any sitting president has the ability to choose who fills
(04:20):
the FED Board of Governors, including the chair, and Trump
is using those ways into the FED to put a
loyalist in.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
We're speaking now on Tuesday, the second of December. It's
been around in a week since you wrote that Kevin
has it was looking very likely. Has anything happened in
the last few days, any of the comments from the
President that we've heard made you change your mind or
think mcgrian might be moving again.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
If anything, the public perception matches my own perception, which
is that I feel like our report is even more
accurate this past Sunday, Kevin Hassett was on CBS's Face
the Nation, and at the end of that inner view,
he was asked directly if the Bloomberg report was accurate,
and he had a big smile on his face. Did
yours go?
Speaker 5 (05:09):
You know, I am, I'm not sure that Blueberg has
a story right. I'm really honored to be amongst a
group of really great candidates.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Excellent lament for the person.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
He had a big smile on his face and he said, no,
I don't know that that report is completely accurate. But
then he points to the positive market reaction.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
If you look at the market response to that, it
was very, very positive. We had a great treasury auction.
Interest rates went down, and so I think that the
American people could expect President Trump to pick somebody who's
going to help them, you know, have cheaper car loans
and easier access to mortgages at lower rates.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
He had key bullet points on what happened in markets
once that story hit the wires, and the one question
around Hassett and whoever Trump may choose for FED chair
has been can this person maintain credibility with markets but
still be able to cope with a president Trump, who
(06:05):
was also in the world and who could be calling
him a stubborn ox or a bonehead at any given point,
things that Trump has done to j Powell, the current
FED chair, that moment on face the nation, in the
fact that the White House, in our story on the record,
there was no pushback. It was just, well, Trump's going
to pick, who's going to pick when he's ready.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
It sounds like he was even trying to make sure
there would be any change of mind, to try and
remove any last bit of doubt from President Trump's mind.
I mean, Anna, I mentioned you've always said you thought
so that the most likely pick. Knowing how you experienced
you'd had in the Trump administration, and knowing that the
various candidates as you did, why did you think he
(06:46):
was always the most likely?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (06:48):
So the candidate we have in the pool of people
auditioning for this role are Kevin has It, Kevin Walsh,
Chris Waller, Bowman. But our criteria, my criteria for Trump's
pick is number one, loyalty, as you said, Celenia, and
(07:08):
on that count, Kevin has scored the highest amongst this
entire pool of candidate because he has a long working
relationship with Trump, and he delivered some of the key
legislation that Trump is most proud of, the text Jobs
and Cuts Act, that is a major Coudle points to
(07:29):
Kevin has It. He not only helped craft it, he
also messaged it, He also marketed. He also fought for it,
and afterwards he also defended it. And also during the coronavirus,
Kevin has It came back and partly reflecting his loyalty
and also patriotism, maybe because the reason why he left
(07:51):
CEA was because he was working long hours. This was
all detailed in his twenty twenty one memoir The Drift.
So in that book he talked about how he was
working sixty eighty hours every day in Cia and then
he suddenly felt this heart tightness in the chest. Well,
he drove himself to the hospital and turned out he
(08:12):
was having some kind of heart attack, and that was
why he has to you know exit. The reason why
he quietly drove himself to the hospital was he also
didn't want to attract any fanfare. He wrote in the book,
how like the media would have so much to write
about if they caught win of him, you know, having
this episode. So fast forward to the second Trump He
(08:32):
also helped message this.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
One big, beautiful bill.
Speaker 6 (08:36):
And the role of National Economic Council Director is more
influential than the CEA chair in the sense that you
are actually helping to create an usher do policy, where
CEA oftentimes the chair was.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
It serves more like a think tank within the White.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
House, a bit more academic.
Speaker 6 (08:55):
Yes, yeah, so in a way for any economist who
dreamed about having luins over how policies are crafted, this
has its role. His role is definitely more elevated in
this second Trump, which suggests to me that he in
Trump's mind, he is asked that his status as an
economy is also much higher.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
I suspect that his book is going to be rising
in the Amazon charts given the recent stories. Everyone's going
to be reading that. I was not aware of that story,
but it does make some sense out of one of
the exchanges you had in this conversation at Bloomberg at
the Washington offices a few weeks ago, where you talked
about how he would maybe have few hours if he
went to the FED. But you talked about a lot
(09:39):
of things in that conversation. He talked about tariffs, talked
about the budget. He was very on message, you would say,
from a sort of Trump perspective, did anything he say
make you change your view of what a Hasset led
Federal Reserve would look like? How he might affect the FED.
Speaker 6 (09:54):
I think one of the biggest issue facing the next
FED chairman and the FED overall is to determine whether
we are indeed going through a productivity boom, because productivity
boom does not show up in macro data cleanly. It
just doesn't, and in the nineteen nineties it takes several
years and after rounds of revisions before it became apparent.
(10:16):
And in that conversation with Hasset, he seemed very aware
of that. In fact, I thought he went a little
bit way too enthusiastic about accepting that the productivity boom
is already here.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
One of the interesting puzzles is that first, we're having
a productivity boom that is really unprecedented in the following
sense that when I worked with Alan Greenspan back in
the nineties, it was just at the dawn of the
computer age.
Speaker 6 (10:46):
Really, Whereas in fact, I think it is a very
polarizing issues among economists because if you survey all economists,
half of them would say there's no productivity boom. So
I think that it could be very quite likely be
that Kevin has it is right that a productivity boom
is happening unbeknownst to many macroeconomists.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
But I think it's also.
Speaker 6 (11:09):
Important for a future FED chair to acknowledge the lack
of evidence and try to like bridge together, you know,
a consensus amongst people who think differently.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
There was an interesting moment in that interview. He said,
you know, there's nothing particularly special about having a political
you know, it's obviously it is a political appointment. And
you've had economists move over from the White House to
run the FED before, which is absolutely true. But in
the past that hasn't been after a very or not
in recent times, that hasn't been after a very public
(11:45):
row between the White House and the FED, or a
disagreement that the White House has had about FED policy
which the candidate has actively sided with the president on.
And I just wonder from your perspective, I mean, you
talk to people across the economic world and markets as
well as Washington, how tainted do you think Kevin has
(12:07):
its arguments are going to be when he puts these
kind of lines that support in effect the president's desire
to have lower interest rates.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
That's an interesting question.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
I would have assumed that when Stephen Myron was nominated
to take the short term slot that opened up on
the FED board when Adriana Kougler resigned, I thought that
markets would have a big tantrum and that the Senate
Banking Committee would also have a big tantrum over Stephen
Myron going straight from the CEA to the FED on
(12:38):
leave from.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
The White House for that role.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
And there was not a blink from anyone.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Really.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
There was a couple of tense moments ooh in the
Senate during the hearing, right nothing really. Markets were also
fine with it. So we're seeing that either the FED
is like in a too big to fail category, where
like it's not possible that we start questioning their credibility
because the world cannot handle it. Therefore, we just will
keep rolling with it. And so Hassett gets through the Senate.
(13:08):
Mark Warnerer, a senator on the Banking Committee, was at
the Bloomberg Washington office recently, and this is before reading
that Hassett was a front runner, and he did remark
that I have a good relationship with Kevin Hasset. Warner
as a Democrat, right, So Hassett has relationships on both
sides of the aisle. The Senate does like to respect
any president's wishes when it comes to personnel. He has
(13:29):
the right to he or she has the right to
choose who should be nominated. They vet everyone. Now the
Senate has failed on certain events because we're seeing that
there's some ethics scandals that keep kind of popping up
at the FED, and maybe the Senate hasn't grilled candidates enough.
There's questions around other FED appointees from the Biden era
of who ended up at the FED and if they
were fully qualified. Things like that are coming up in
(13:51):
the ether. But if we have Kevin Hassett become FED chair,
that means he's Marcus have now absorbed it right. He
was right to point out there was no big reaction.
That's a big plus for him. Now it's up to
the Senate to properly vet him, but his credibility is there.
Once he's in the chair seat, he has a whole
(14:12):
FMC board. There are defense mechanisms at the FED in
place to deal with any kind of efforts to politicize
the FED. Now, Trump is a very strong adversary on
that front. But now we are testing those defense mechanisms
across the United States, across democracy, across the capital, and
(14:33):
now it's making it to the Eccles building.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
And you make the point, his is only one voice.
It's a very consensus based organization, and the know as well,
and you don't, you don't tend to have a lot
of dissent, but his will only be one vote. So
I guess one of the key things that people are
looking at is whether the president, either directly or indirectly,
(14:57):
gets to change the broader makeup of the board. And
there obviously we had this important case coming up or
judgment coming up with the Supreme Court. So just remind
us where we stand on that, because there's a sort
of key aspect of quite how many slops the president
might end up being able to fill.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
So the summer, like I said, was really interesting, and
June it was the Okay, Hassett has a great, you know,
knock it out of the park interview with Trump. In July,
we see the Bill Poulty, the FHFA director. For some reason,
he comes out with comments against Powell, saying that he
should be tried in the courts or rejected from his
(15:38):
job for the way that the FED has spent on
some of the renovations. And then by early August, Poulty
had made public some very old mortgage documents belonging to
Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee to the FED Board, that
there are some discrepancies in there. And then Trump puts
out a post on truth Social that says I'm firing
(15:59):
Lisa Cook for pause because she should not have this.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Job if she has been violating mortgage laws.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
And it turns out that there's some intricacies there, the
purp violations happened before she was Fed governor, and that
maybe they were actually above board. So that case has
gone to the Supreme Court. Trump right now is not
able to block her and remove her from the Fed.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
We have a.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Hearing in January mid January where the Supreme Court will
hear oral arguments. We're going to hear a little bit
more about that. The other very exciting thing that happened
in August, around the time that the Lisa Cook attempt
at firing happened, was that Audrina Kugler, also a Biden
appointee to the FED Board, resigned abruptly so that is
(16:40):
the slot that Steve Myron has taken that expires end
of January early February. And if it is Hassett who
gets the nomination for chair, that is probably the slot
that he gets is the seat that now Steve Myron holds.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
And then we have the excitement of j.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Powell because his chairmanship ends in May, but his term
as a governor he has two more years on it.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Now.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Traditionally usually you will see a chair just completely step down.
Palell has been through a lot. He has publicly been
called names by the President of the United States. It's
not an easy thing. I think it's taken a toll
on him and maybe even his family. He has refrained
from saying whether he will step down, and you just
(17:26):
have to wonder is he just waiting to see who
is the pick and how does those first few weeks
or first few months pan out before he decides leave,
or he could say I'm just a governor. I'm not
going to head up any committees. I'm in my office
and I'll show up when I need to go to
an FMC meeting and deal with Hassett.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
And that you mentioned it and the piece you wrote
about what a hasse FED would look like you highlight
that there are more significant shifts of direction of bed
that you could see if you saw a further step
(18:15):
or down this road, which is a potential change in
the regional fed governors.
Speaker 6 (18:20):
Yes, so regional FED presidents they get reappointed by the
Board of Governors. So there are seven individuals on the
Board of the Governors and there are twelve regional presidents.
And the deadline usually is by the end of February
of every year that ends either at twenty twenty six
(18:41):
or twenty thirty one in five year increments. So there's
an opportunity for Trump if he wants to, you know,
if he somehow could get at least four people on
the Board of Governors to reject the reappointment of some
of these regional fed The opening is twenty twenty sixth February.
(19:02):
So this is why the timing of that Lisa Cook
case is extremely important. So if the hearing happens in
mid January, as Slea said, then the ruling likely will
come way after January, after the deadline for this re appointment,
which means that likely Lisa Cooke would stay in place
(19:23):
until at least February of twenty twenty six. So regardless
of what the Supreme Court does, just because the ruling
will happen after February, it's unlikely that Trump will have
the four votes on the board to be able to
remove regional FED presidents.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
So, Silih, there was one thing that you've been talking
about that I thought was interesting, And it's very much
part of the President's kind of modus operandi that he
will spot something where some opinion is kind of quietly
changing behind the scenes, but he takes it further. You've
been spotting a bit of that when it comes to
the FED in the possible future direction of the FED.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Yeah, you know, we are at a point in American
history where the public's trust of public institutions is that
historic lows. And whether the average American thinks about the
FED very often hopefully they don't. The Federal Reserve is
part of that low, that lack of trust, and some
of that has to do, of course, with just the
continued hangover from the global financial crisis that oh, everyone
(20:26):
got these golden parachutes, the FED bailed everyone else out
except for the average man, and we're still stuck in
the muck.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
And they had one job, which was to prevent inflation,
and they failed on that.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Well, let's talk about that one, because we are at
a point where the whole generation, my generation didn't know
what it was like to face inflation, because the last
time was around the time I was born.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
In the early eighties.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
You have a generation that has never seen this. And
then you have policymakers who at the time it was
Janet Allen, the treasure secretary under Biden and j Powell.
You had Janet Allen speaking as a Treasury secretary but
sounding like a Fed official a FED chair, saying this
is transitory, and Powell also saying this is transitory. And
what that means is that the family at the grocery
(21:10):
store checkout that has to decide do we complete our
food shopping or do we buy another pair of cleat
soccer cleats for our growing teenage boy. We can't afford both.
When someone says transitory, they're saying your pain is going
to pass. It's not a big deal. So trust plummeted
even more, and so it is natural for elected leaders
to take a look and say, what went wrong here?
(21:32):
How can we do better? When it comes to trust
in this institution that is so important to America's economic
well being, in the world's economic wellbeing. So Trump has
picked up on this angst and this unhappiness with how
this is working, but in his own way, which ends
up being belligerent, is trying to fix it.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Anna. Obviously, the irony of this quite positive reading of
how you might interpret the direction the president's taking. He's
not just religuing. He's trying to push for lower rates
in an environment where people have lost their fait in
the central bank in large part because of their failure
(22:12):
to control inflation. So this just it seems like a
potential recipe for not answering those concerns and actually, if anything,
making it worse.
Speaker 6 (22:23):
I believe President Trump has mentioned, who wants rates to
be cut down to one percent?
Speaker 3 (22:29):
When you put one percent in one of your models,
what does that do to inflation? Just to remind us.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
So, first of all, you will have a temporary boom
through twenty twenty seven, So twenty twenty six and twenty
twenty seven more than three four percent GDP growth, Inflation
probably will most likely will exceed three percent, probably rising
to three point five percent. You know, on that trajectory,
(22:56):
and by twenty twenty eight could be that inflation expectations
would un anchor a little bit and you'll see credit
spreads all rising, and inflation compensation on the longer end
of the health curve probably would rise, and all that
would lead to a If the FED has not even
(23:17):
get in front of this deterioration, it will probably means
the FED will have to raise rate by even more
in order to get inflation expectations back in control. So
that would be the boom and bust cycle, classic boom
and bust cycle.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
But the best that you've just described would be just
thinking about the electoral cycle would be amazed, probably after
the presidents.
Speaker 6 (23:41):
Sometime around there. But I also have to say, Stephanie,
that that assumes productivity didn't pick up tremendously. And I
think one view that Kevin has it would be carrying
with him into the FED. It would be his conviction
that a productivity boom is happening.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
You know, we had this conversation around the impact of
tariffs a couple of weeks ago, and we made the
point that AI and Big AI investments had in some
sense protected the economy from some of the negative effects
or offset some of the negative effects of TAROT, but
Kevin Hassett would say they pointed to a real productivity
(24:20):
turnaround that was going to support the economy and make
it possible to have faster growth and lower inflation even
with lower interest rates. So how much credence do you
give in that scenario, that kind of positive AI revolution scenario.
Speaker 6 (24:35):
I think most likely what we'll see if there is
going to be a productivity boom, would be weak employment
for a couple of years, because a labor productivity boom
implies you have higher output per worker, So you could
have higher output and reduce need for workers, which is
what we are seeing already reduced need for entry level workers.
(24:58):
And in fact, I just came back from around table
today and I saw some very compelling data that shows
the right slow down and employment growth for entry level
people in their twenties. That kind of jobs slowed exactly
around the time where chat GBT was introduced. So I
think my own forecast is that likely in the next
(25:20):
year we will see pretty weak non figm payroll growth
every month, and I think that will give an opening
for the FED to keep cutting rates, because as part
of the productivity, the process of increasing productivity there will
be at first slowed down in employment, and only afterwards
(25:41):
when firms have increased profits from this productivity growth they
would invest more. So far has been very concentrated in AI.
We will need a broadening of this investment boom into
many other sectors in order to be convinced that it's
really a total factor of productivity boom. And even that
(26:03):
is not a sure thing because in the nineteen nineties
a real wage is actually stagnated even amidst this productivity boom.
So I just think that the AI element will play
a key role in determining the path of a FED
funds rate the next couple of years.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Continued AI enthusiasm but weak employment growth could potentially enable
the FED to cut more than we currently expect in
the first half of next year. But do you think,
going back to my original point about credibility, do you
think that Kevin has it if he were coming into
his first meeting in June as chairman of the Federal Reserve,
(26:45):
that he could get the majority of the board to
support a rate cut.
Speaker 6 (26:52):
Well, if Kevin has it, does enter the FED in
January first as a governor to take over the position
that Steve Myron FA Kate. Then he has about five
months to prove himself to the FED staff and FOMC
members to build his soft power, because ultimately the most
(27:12):
important trait of a FED chairman is soft power. The
FOMC has oftentimes been divided in the past. So the
division that people talk about today and for this FOMC
meeting next week, for example, where half of the committee
wants to cut, half of them do not want to cut. Well,
that kind of division we have seemed before in the
(27:33):
nineteen nineties, in the nineteen ninety five during the green
Span era, and we also saw it last year September
twenty twenty four when the committee was split between cutting
fifty BIPs versus twenty five fits. And the common denominator
there is you need a chairman who can shepherd everyone
(27:54):
toward the view he prefers. And in Kevin Has its case,
If Has colleagues were to view him with skepticism or
view his every action as a covert, as he being
a proxy for Trump, they are not going to go
along with him. And so ultimately it is soft power
(28:15):
that matters. And by the way, many of the governors
and also regional FED presidents will be staying around until
the twenty thirties, well after even the Trump administration. The
regional FED presidents, many of them are very young in
their fifties.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
If they don't get kicked out, yes.
Speaker 6 (28:35):
But again, if they missed the February twenty twenty six window,
the next opportunity is twenty thirty one. So it's very
likely all of these hawks, young hawks, mind you, they're
going to be hanging around. So I think it's really
up to Kevin has its soft power to convince everyone,
and I think one thing in favor of his likelihood
(28:59):
of is that he used to be a FED staff
and he actually does know several senior people now in
the FED board. So out of the candidates that we
talked about earlier, he is the only one who had
worked at the FED, So I think from the Fed's perspective,
they would rather have him than the other ones.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Anyone listening who wants to get a flavor of some
of the behind the scenes data analysis that Kevin Hassett
did as a staff at the FED, you should go
on YouTube and dig out the conversation he had with
Anna One because they got well into some of those
debates as well as broader topics on the fed's independence. Anna,
that was terrific. Thank you very.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Much, great to have you on, happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
And celaire as always a.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Pleasure, wonderful. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
As always, Thanks for coming on, Thanks for listening to
Trumponomics from Bloomberg. It was noted by me, Stephanie Flanders,
and I was joined by Anna Wong and Celia Mosen.
(30:11):
Trumponomics was produced by Sammersadi and Moses and with help
from Amy Keene and special thanks this week to Stacey
Wong and Dash Bennett. Sound designed by Blake Maples and
Kelly Gary and Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
To help others find us, please rate and review highly
wherever you listen,
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.