Audio length: 00:42:17

Transcript:

S2: LOWE Welcome to the Old Bulb, new Bob edition of Slate.

S3: Money or Guide to the Business and Finance News of the Week? I’m Felix Salmon of axios. I’m joined by Anna Shemenski of Breakingviews. Hello. I’m joined by Emily Peck of HuffPost. Hello. And yes, we are going to talk about Stuntz. Stocks went down. We’re going to talk a little bit about stocks went down because we have to because stocks went down. But we’re not going to talk too much about stocks went down. We can talk a bit about Corona virus. We’re going to talk a bit about Bopp’s, but we’re going to talk a lot about Bob’s.

S4: Actually, there’s two bobs now running Disney. And we get to talk a lot about Disney and what that means and why they need to Bob’s to run it. And most exciting need to be honest.

S3: We’re going to talk about French Ponce’s, because there’s the most French Ponzi scheme you’ve ever heard of. And it’s glorious. And we’re going to dissect that. We also have a slate plus about before they work week. All of that coming up on Slate Money. So that was a fun week. While there was so many headlines about the stock market, apparently. In case you’ve been under a rug, it went down.

S5: Does go to. I got some alerts about that on my phone.

S6: I’ve been in long method’s discussions with a bunch of people at axios about when and why and whether we should alert stock market movements and send out alerts and that kind of thing. Because on the one hand, everyone seems to do it. It seems to be a thing that people do. And then on the other hand, that’s a little bit of like, why are we doing it right?

S1: Yeah, I have a rule. What’s your rule should only be based on percentage, not like just number of points. So we. Yes.

S6: So we have this 3 percent rule now that if the stock market moves 3 percent, we should move it. But let it be like one of the weird things is that people alert it like six hours after it falls 3 percent. When the market closes because of having the closing is important for some reason. But the more interesting question is why do people get much more exercised about fast drops than slow drops and about fast drops and slow raises? Because we’ve had like incredibly strong and powerful slow rise like 10 years and it hasn’t been generating these kind of headlines.

S1: Well, of course, anything that’s out of the ordinary that’s based on uncertainty. I mean, this is panic. So, of course, people are just like kind of the natural human reaction is to feel like this is far scarier than just like, oh, things are continuing to keep getting slightly better.

S7: Yes. Sudden drop is much more scary than a gradual decline, like walking down a little hill. You know, it’s OK. But, you know, falling off a cliff is more troubling, I suppose.

S3: And I think I think one of the things that’s going on this week is that the panic associated with the Corona virus has become intermingled with the stock market. And suddenly they seem to be pretty much the same thing in the mind of Donald Trump.

S5: Yes, I think his reaction has been. Interesting that the president of the United States seems less concerned with the impending public health crisis, which the CDC said this week, like expect coronavirus to come here and we’ll have to deal with it and get ready to deal with it. And instead of the president saying we’re doing everything we can to deal with it, we’re mustering, you know, all our resources, da-da-da. He’s trying to reassure people that the stock market’s going to be OK. I think he’s trying to maybe even reassure himself that the stock market is OK. And and I was saying before he came in, like Americans are concerned with, like not getting sick and like not dying, not dying would be good and like getting an alert on my phone about the stock market.

S7: It just adds this feeling of like chaos and panic and doesn’t actually serve a purpose like a normal.

S3: One of the things that seems to be happening in the mind of Donald Trump is the. This is like an attack on his presidency. Yes. And it’s like. And he should he should belittle it and deny it and do all of the things that he does to like blame it on the criminals who attack his presidency. And you can’t just go around belittling and denying something like Corona virus that doesn’t really get you very far.

S1: Although I think he has tried to somewhat blame it on the Democrats like that. They are like creating all this fear as a way to kind of bring him down.

S7: And I think it’s really sad and telling that he created a coronavirus task force. And who did they put on the Corona virus task force. But Steve Manoogian and Larry Kudlow, as if what are they going to do?

S1: How are they going to help me noted health experts? It’s just it’s it doesn’t give you much confidence.

S3: But I a little known fact. Larry Kudlow is a epidemiologist with an expert expert in infectious diseases.

S1: But it’s fitting it’s fitting in the sense, because as we’re just saying, he doesn’t really care about the effects of the virus in terms of how it affects people’s health. He cares about it and not even how it affects the economy, but how it affects markets, which I think is interesting.

S3: So so the big question, which we should be asking is. Is this stock market fooled, belated though it is, because stock coronavirus has been a big story for all year. Pretty much, but certainly a month in the stock market fall is just like a week old. But is this a rational response to supply lines being cut? The people staying home, all of the potential effects that a major pandemic could have on the global economy? Or does it feel a little bit jittery and panicky?

S1: It’s publishing the great dancer, but a little bit of both. Like, I think that because this is going on for so long and because recently we’ve been seeing the spike in cases outside of China. There is now concern that this could actually, you know, last into potentially the next quarter and actually be disrupting the supply chains, actually have an impact on the real economy, not just market could. It could affect the supply of Diet Coke. Yes, it does look like medications really over.

S7: Blew that. Did you read that article? There was an article online on Fox and it said Coca-Cola warns of Diet Coke shortage because of coronavirus. Then you read the piece and it’s like there might be a shortage of some of the various chemicals used to produce Diet Coke, but Coke says it’s probably gonna be fine. So if that’s what we’re worried about, it doesn’t seem like it’s much to worry about. On the other hand, there are bigger things.

S1: Yeah. I mean, I think like because it’s also you know, China really isn’t a lot of ways the linchpin of the economy like what they buy from other countries. If you’re looking at a lot of e.m economies and how they’re affected by China, like this is a big deal and it comes after a period where we were already having some China weakness. So I think that part of this is actually a little bit of a rational comedown from what I would call a little bit of irrational exuberance to be very clear about this.

S3: Stocks are down, but they are still at objectively high level. Exactly. The market is still strong and pricing in pretty healthy economic activity in the future because ultimately stock prices are basically a bet on what is going to happen in the future.

S1: Yeah, and also just maybe a tad of a wonky thing, but like also last year, you know, almost 30 percent return was mostly from multiple expansion. And that is basically you’re bringing returns from the future into the present. Right. So if you’re looking at what we can expect now, you’re not gonna expect the market to go up that much.

S3: And just to finish that thought, if we just go back down to where we were, say, this time last year, that’s a long way to fall. And yeah, that would be a big windfall.

S5: Yeah. I have a couple of questions and thoughts. My first thought is if the is truly being affected by Corona virus in the economy is truly being affected by coronavirus. Isn’t that just a short term problem? Because eventually people get sick, may get better and supply chains and lines resume and hotels fill back up.

S7: And, you know, people go back outside this conferences.

S3: You know, happened it assumes. Well, there were two different parts to that question. The first one is that, you know, are you assuming that Corona virus will be a temporary thing, which comes and then goes? And I think that’s the base case scenario, that basically these kinds of flu like viruses tend to go away in the summer.

S4: But if it doesn’t go away in the summer and then it researches in the fall and it looks like it’s in so many countries now, in so many continents now and so many people now, that it might well, it probably will come back in some way in the fall and then next winter and then it’ll become a permanent thing. And that could be really bad. And then the second part of it is, yes, you know, previous scares like sors and whatnot have seen that kind of what they call V-shaped recovery. It goes down, it goes back up again. But that’s no guarantee that we’d have the same kind of V-shaped recovery this time.

S1: Right. And then in the longer this goes on, the less likely it is that we’re gonna have just this kind of massive V-shaped recovery. And also when you’re talking about services that people aren’t doing. It’s not like I can see four movies, you know, because I didn’t see the movie this time, you know? I mean, you I never recover those losses. You can never. I mean, they’re still widely full losses.

S4: But, you know, I mean, travel is interesting. Travel has been increasing steadily. Again, like this is one of those things where we’re at levels which we have never seen before, especially travel from China, has been hitting unbelievable records, which were unthinkable just a few years ago. Do we assume that Chinese people are going to start traveling again? To the degree that they were, you know, before this virus, it is possible.

S5: But then it is also possible that they were I think a lot of this might hinge on what happens in the U.S. because it seems like what the turning point was for markets this week really was the CDC warning, making people in the U.S. be like, oh, my God. And I think if it hits here and we have the the same, you know, the hotels closing people and schools closing, whatever, all that stuff is going to be a really bad sign for the economy in the market.

S4: I can tell you as someone who lives in Chinatown, that I have my own tiny. Many local recession going on right now. Restaurants are super empty. There’s a lot of genuine hardship like people are wondering how they’re going to make rent. Either the merchants does. You know, this is the thing that exists on the ground, not just in Hong Kong, but also in bits of New York City.

S5: And then my thing, I’m gonna write a piece, I think today that you guys can look for that listeners can look for online, but really about how, like Donald Trump’s says many crazy things. We actually said one really good piece of advice this week in his press conference was like, if you’re sick, stay home. But the problem in the U.S. is a lot of people can just stay home. They don’t have paid sick leave. And if they don’t go to work, they don’t get paid. Or if they don’t go to work enough times, they get fired. And then meanwhile, people should go to the doctor, presumably. But again, like it’s the beginning of the year and a lot of people have these very high deductible health insurance plans where, you know, you have to spend like a thousand two thousand more dollars out of your pocket before you get covered. And at the beginning of the year, all your deductibles have reset themselves. So a lot of people, especially now, won’t go to the doctor unless it’s like dire, simple, essential for infection is higher here because of how lame we are about the healthcare system in the United States is almost designed to exact this kind of thing.

S3: I was reading, you know, the thing we’ve all seen the headlines now about, like, you know, someone goes in to get tested for growing a virus. It comes back negative and then they get like a fifteen hundred dollar bill. You know what? That’s not the way that you treat a highly infectious disease.

S7: Right. And when you had I think it was Azar, the the HHS director who said if they find a vaccine, they they get it up to market. And he was asked like, will you make it affordable for people? He said, no. Well, no. You think he didn’t he wouldn’t want to mess up the market. He doesn’t want to mess with the private markets like that, like he should have said. Absolutely. Yes. Like we will do all we can to keep Americans healthy. But like, that’s not the way it works here. We don’t do all we can to keep Americans healthy. It’s crazy.

S4: It is true that we do a.

S8: Old Bob, new Bob, old Bob, new Bob. That’s right, Felix. You Bob’s for the price of two, Bob, as you might have to buy for the price of millions and millions of dollars.

S3: The old Bob was making 47 million dollars a year and is still making 47 million dollars a year. He didn’t get a pay cut for his no longer being CEO.

S7: And you’re talking about Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney, who just announced he was stepping down.

S3: Well, stepping up, I think is probably a better word. Stepping to the side, ascending. We have talked on this show before about the bizarre weirdness that is the executive chairman job. And guess what? Bob Iger has become the latest bizarre, weird executive chairman just for those of us who have short memories. Executive chairman is an oxymoron. Basically, the executive means you’re an executive, which means you report to the CEO and chairman means you are the CEO’s boss. So you are both working for the company and therefore for the CEO while also the CEO is working for you. It’s bizarrely circular and it’s basically a way of CEOs to not be CEO anymore, but still be in charge. Which makes no sense.

S7: Yeah. And it’s also just bad corporate governance. Wait. But hang on. I’ve read an article. First of all, I just need to say it’s annoying to me that the position is just chairman, like no one is even pretending that a woman has this job. OK, put that aside.

S4: The planet Corey called herself executive chairman. That was the job she gave us.

S5: Yeah. And someone sent me on Twitter an article that was about, I think, SHAPIRO becoming the first female chairman of the FCC, which anyway. So. But beside that, the article made the case in the journal that executive chair is actually like a good thing for corporate governance because it allows someone with experience to sort of like mentor and guide a new CEO through.

S7: Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. Everyone’s saying that like, oh, this isn’t a big deal because Bob Iger will like, essentially mentor and train the other. Bob, Bob. Patty says named Chapati Jay Peck in his new role, although he’s mixed when there are 27 layers at Disney.

S3: And, you know, no one no one does their best work with like the former CEO breathing down their neck and second guessing everything.

S1: Right. I think if not, I think both from a management perspective, this makes no sense and seems like a really bad idea. Like me trying co-CEOs, like a horrible idea. And it’s also it’s bad from governance because the board is suppo- is the one who’s like voting on the CEO’s pay package. They’re not supposed to be like mentoring the CEO. Is a different job. It’s a different role. They’re supposed to be looking out for shareholders.

S3: And Bob Iger, to be clear, is. The most actively involved. Executive chairman. I’ve ever seen. Because he’s not just doing this kind of a morph as executive chairman job, which no one really knows what it means. He’s actually giving himself a real job on top of that, which is head of creative. And he’s like, I’m going to be in charge of everything creative at Disney, which includes basically everything important as all of the movies, you know, all of the TV shows, all the fun stuff. And and on some level, both people who work. If you’re like a film producer at Disney. Who are you working for? Are you working for Jay back? Who is the CEO of the company? Are you working for Iger? Who’s the head of Creative? It’s basically impossible to tell.

S1: Yeah, I mean, I think Iger has done a very good job. I mean, I would think give him credit. He has done an exceptionally good job and in this role. But I think this decision is a not good and I feel like it could actually hurt his land. And he has done.

S7: I mean, he has done a remarkable job when he started in 2005. Does he had two movie studios. Now it is eight movie studios, including Lucasfilm. So all Star Wars stuff. Pixar, which is like a cash cow and Marvel like it’s an enormous cash cow. Yeah, a juggernaut like it wasn’t when he started is really amazing.

S3: Has been. I think uniquely, I cannot think of any other company that has been so unbelievably good at M&A. That what what he did, what I did. And you have to give credit to Kevin Mayer here, who was the architect of the M&A strategy and who everyone assumed would be the next CEO was. They went out and they spent relatively small amounts of money, like single digit billions on Marvel and Pixar and the Lucasfilm. And those things turned into just absolute juggernauts with the best acquisitions you could possibly imagine. And also, it’s not like those businesses could have done that on their own. They needed that Disney machine behind them. So it was a really strong strategic move for all concerned. Now what worked out really well. Now the other really big one was 21st century Fattah’s. That one was late orders of magnitude, at least an order of magnitude bigger than all of the rest of them combined. And the jury is still out on that one, although.

S7: And the fun facts. che- Pack was running Disney theme parks, which we haven’t really discussed because it’s not sexy, but it’s almost half of Disney’s income is from the park, though. It’s also the lowest growth, lowest revenue growth. But he, like, drove it. I think we recently talked about rising prices. Yes. He he’s said every year he does another ticket price increase. And.

S3: And one of the things that Disney does very well is it really does get all of its different teams working to strengthen each other. So the Disney theme parks do well precisely because you have like Lucasfilm and Star Wars. So they put a Star Wars attraction into Disney World. And so then everyone wants to go to Disney World to ride the Star Wars attraction and they all feed into each other. You know, even unto, you know, Frozen on Broadway and all the rest of it. So it all they’ve done a great job of creating these massively lucrative IP franchises. And you know something? You know, whether it’s whether it’s Star Wars or Frozen or Coors or anything like that, you find them in all manner of different formats. You find them in theme parks, you find them in on Broadway, we find them. It’s not just your movement anymore. And there was an ad for Elsa on my banana.

S9: Why is there an ad? There’s always Disney ads on bananas. It’s like a fad. I see them all the time. You see them all? I’ve never seen one.

S7: Oh, yeah. And sometimes when we get those little red cheeses, you Dems, little baby baby bells. And they’ll sometimes have like Toy Story wrappers and stuff like that. Yeah.

S3: It’s it’s you can’t get away from it. Remember when like United painted all of its planes after Star Wars? No. And they had like that that little video you have on the seatback showing you how to use a seatbelt because no one knows how to use a seatbelt. With all Star Wars themed. Yeah. Interesting. So Disney has this kind of omni channel ubiquity and that is all part of the strategy. And again, you can definitely think Iger and Mayer for that.

S7: I have this one theory that’s not really fully formed. I’ll just bring it up now because where else can I talk about it? But you know, the HBO guy Plepler, who left. Yes. While back, he was kind of like not an Iger figure, obviously, because it’s not comparable, but like he was like the creative boss type who led HBO to sort of transform itself into these great, like, shows and stuff that that kept HBO in the conversation kind of a thing. And then and then he left because they merged with AT&T and everyone was like, well, now it’s like a bigger thing. And Plepler was creative guy. But they need more of like an operation, the kind of person to do the job.

S5: And I was kind of thinking, is there a parallel with Iger? Like he was so focused on creative. And a lot of the pieces about him this week said, you know, Disney is too big to have a creative type running the show. They need more of an operations person like are these entertainment companies becoming so big that like these creative roles, they just don’t even make sense anymore?

S9: I see. I’m not entirely convinced that Iger is some kind of guy. I’m with you.

S3: And it’s weird to me that like that he’s given himself that head of creative job because I’m not sure he’s qualified for that. And then on the conference call that Disney Corp. put out, announcing the succession, someone asked him, it’s like, wait, are you going to hire a chief creative officer? He’s like, yeah, I don’t think we need that. I mean, if you don’t need it, why are you giving yourself that job? It’s so. And plus, like the thing about all of these IP franchises, whether it’s Star Wars or Pixar or Marvel, you know, Avengers and all of that, is that creative? Right. You know, after sequel after sequel, that is kind of a lack of creativity which is going on that understanding markets and what people want, which is important.

S1: But that’s not necessarily creativity.

S7: Right. And Iger was the creative mind behind the show. Cop Rock, I don’t know if the numbers that but it was created. Creative. But it did not do that.

S4: I mean, Disney is famous for its Imagineers. You know that it does have this legacy of genuine creativity and it does every so often come up with something genuinely new. Frozen one.

S3: Frozen one. Exactly. So I just not. It’s very unclear to me what I get thinks he’s going to be doing in terms of creative.

S4: But what he said he was going to what he how he explained this on the call was basically we have done the strategy, the the big acquisitions strategy of by Marvel biopics, by Lucasfilm, by 21st Century Fox, have everything everywhere, have the theme parks, everything there is in place. And now it just runs itself. There’s no more M&A to do. And so I can just let JP run all of that in the kind of operations he way. And now I get to have fun playing with minions.

S10: So that seems like always what happens before everything falls.

S7: Yeah, that seems like a bad idea. I mean, you need someone in charge. You can. I’m sorry. I’m saying let’s think outside the box. Like you need someone who’s thinking ahead because what sanches run it.

S1: What’s working right now is not necessarily what people are going to want and what is going to work in five or 10 years. And the reason that Disney is where they are is because they were thinking ahead. And so their strategy now is and doesn’t sound great.

S3: And there are two massive, massive plays that Iger made very recently, which no one knows whether they’re going to be successful and whether they’re going to work. How one of them, as we’ve said, is 21st Century Fox, which was like a existentially huge acquisition. And we don’t know how that’s going to play out. And the other one is Disney Plus, which is brand new and seems to be getting off to a quite good start. But again, no one knows if it’s actually going to be able to, you know, be it remotely as many houses as Netflix, be that popular and so on and so forth. So that strategy, like he says, is still in place. But really two of the biggest parts of it, still super babies need a lot of tending. So David SIEGEL is my favorite writer at The New York Times. I love him and he’s moved to London and he came out with this spectacular story about the French Bernie Madoff. How awesome was it? It was a great story. And there’s this one twist. You start reading it and you’re getting into it. And then about a third of the way through your jaw just drops. What in actual fuck should we spoil it and say what it is?

S7: Because when I came across it, I was like, that’s what Felix was taught. Yeah, I think we have to. Okay.

S3: Okay. So there’s this amazing character called Gerard Liberty who pommes ifyou’d like read books and manuals, manuscripts, which is the most French thing probably. And it was so glorious. I love this story so much. It is much more interesting in a way than just a story about Gerada Liberté and his company, which was Storyful Maestro Phil, which was a glorious name because I would say probably two or three times a week someone comes up to me and says, Hey, Felix, have you seen this company that securitising paintings or securitising this securitising belly was big for a while?

S9: cash-flow Right. Bonds were real.

S3: Guns were real like. But there’s these people coming out.

S4: And there’s a big story in the Wall Street Journal about this guy who was buying up a Basquiat painting at auction was going to slice it into a hundred thousand slices and sell off each slice to, you know, a thousand bucks or whatever. And none of it makes any sense. And this Astro Phil company in France was the first and pretty much the only. Company in the world to ever have any seeming success with this strategy of buying a product with no cash flow. In this case, manuscripts, giving people a little baby slice of those manuscripts and then saying that they’re going to appreciate in value and then we’ll sell them for a profit. And then you get to make money and they add an extra.

S7: He said he would buy them back at a. So, so, so so this is that is our share.

S4: This is how it turned into a Ponzi. And so most of the companies in the US, which are trying to securitize best-kept paintings or anything like that are quite sensibly not promising future returns.

S1: They’re not exactly. Not eight point ninety five percent future returns.

S3: Yes, very. That is a very made off like. No, that. Right. It’s like Madoff famously plummeted about 10 percent a year. Liberty with something about 9 percent a year. It’s not so high as to be unbelievable. And so people actually weirdly feel safer with the single digit returns.

S4: And they would if there was a big double digit return, if they were like, we’re going to, you know, quadruple our money in five years, everyone would be like, no, that’s ridiculous. You can’t do that by buying manuscripts. But because it was like modest was 9 percent, the people believe that’s a decent return.

S9: But yeah.

S3: And so. The people believed him also because he actually paid like all Ponzi scheme is when people went back to him with their pieces of paper and said, I want my 9 percent return on this. He paid them or he paid some of them early on and he paid a little bit of money and he promised more money later. Like it wasn’t that people weren’t getting any money back from him.

S7: And one thing I thought was interesting is that he did this again with manuscripts and rare books, which David SIEGEL points out. The prices don’t change. There’s only about twenty five hundred people in the market for these kinds of things. It’s not like art, which can like people can get really excited about a certain artist and the price of their paintings could go up and down like it’s a very steady sowhy market.

S3: We had a whole mini series on Slate, many of the swag series of all of these things silver, wine, gold, bitcoin, cause that people invest in his investments and want to get some kind of a positive return from it never occurred to us to do like read. But reading manuscripts because people don’t buy rare books and manuscripts as an investment. It’s just not one of those things.

S7: Not like them. They’re not flashy like you don’t put a manuscript. SIEGEL says, like you don’t put a rare book at out for display. You keep it in like a dark place that’s like kind of cold and you don’t show it to anyone. It’s like the exact opposite of, like, you know, a flashy car or a cool painting.

S1: And it’s like I’m not the type of alternative asset that’s going to appreciate in value enough to securitize it. So the French kind of kindness, your friend, unless you’re French, that history.

S7: So the French kind of like caught onto this guy and you could like reading along and like they’re catching on to him and his money is kind of dwindling away. Dwindling away. And then all of a sudden, oh, my God, this man, this French Madoff dude, he wins the freaking lottery.

S9: Wins it. Wins the like 100 million dollars or two hundred and fifteen million dollars. He wins. It will go unreal. And I’m reading this and I’m like, wait, did he fake it like that? But it’s like, no, apparently like the universe is just really, really bizarre.

S11: Like everyone’s grandmother, he played like his kid’s birthday is every week. And finally, it pays off, you know. It says in the piece, like, he checked the numbers like a bunch of time. He couldn’t he couldn’t believe it either. Like, what are the odds? But even that money couldn’t save he.

S3: He made two hundred and fifty million dollars. It just is a windfall. He wins the lottery. And he’s just like, yeah, the Ponzi is still going down.

S10: Well, my favorite part of the whole story, though, was that apparently you had people like say like the Ponzi wasn’t actually insolvent. It was just as the government had kind of realized, like, OK, that this isn’t legitimate. But then apparently people were mad at the government because they like they were still getting arbitrary.

S3: They always are. This is absolutely textbook. When Ponzi is go down, the investors in the Ponzi blame the government and not the Ponzi. This is in not one hundred percent. I don’t think it happened in Madoff, but it happens with basically all of the others. It’s absolutely standard, because the great thing about Ponzi is, is that some long as they keep on going, they keep on going as long as you can find more suckers to buy in. It actually works.

S9: Most things are is aren’t they really start? No, it is. It is funny. I was kind of thinking about it. If you have like certain companies that like aren’t actually generating any money. Yeah. Like they just keep getting just like we were some similarities here.

S7: There are similar. If you had to do a Ponzi would do you have anything you would.

S4: I think I think, you know, office sharing needs to be like a very I can tell you my own favorite Ponzi scheme.

S10: Well, we can get into this more in another allas the Lebanese government, the way their financial system works. It’s amazing. And it is essentially a the way they get dollars. It’s basically a bundle.

S3: It is Ponzi esq, but it is reliant on. One of the weird things about the Lebanese diaspora is it’s incredibly global, incredibly wealthy. And there’s just this constant sucking.

S1: Well, there was no when they were and then they were also getting money from other Gulf participants. And then once that started to stop. Now, this is part of the reason they’re having this massive financial crisis. Anyway, we’ll talk we’ll talk about that more. Another. OK. All right. All right.

S4: Next week, you can come in with all of your questions about Lebanon.

S10: OK. I can say, yes, a bond payment. Well, they’re going to postpone it, but they have the bomb payments supposedly on March 9th.

S4: So after March 9th, we will see whether they make their bond payment. And then we will talk about Lebanon. All right.

S7: All right. I’ve heard it here first.

S3: So let’s have a numbers round guy go. You can go. Yes. What’s your number?

S1: Three hundred and thirty thousand dollars. That was the fine assessed to one Steven Seagal.

S3: So what has never been said, like the main obvious way to work out what cryptocurrency to invest in is to ask yourself, where would you be?

S9: Yes. And I also love that the name of this was Bitcoin with two eyes. The day I was like, I kind of feel like people invested in that. Like, I don’t feel too bad for them.

S7: So today, listeners, you’re listening to this on my number is twenty nine. Because it’s leap year. Saturday is February 29th, which is also my half birthday. Yes. Which only comes every four years. But I’m telling you this because there is this amazing. It’s I guess it’s a blog or a website called Ask a Manager. And four years ago, she ran. Maybe the weirdest and craziest, nuttiest question from this woman who is a manager asking for advice because her company gives people the day off on their birthday. Oh, wow. And this one worker’s birthday is on February twenty ninth. So the letter writer says so she only has a birthday every four years. What? And she says this woman is mad because she only gets her day off every four years. And the manager says, I don’t see what she’s so upset about. And it’s just the nuttiest letter I’ve ever seen. So I’ll put the link in the show notes and everyone can read it.

S4: That’s a classic. Read it.

S3: Am I the only thing I might be also for just giving her a quarter of the days off that everyone else gets?

S7: Yes. Not understanding the problem. And in addition to the day off, workers apparently also get a gift certificate and a cake. And the `where’s part of the letter possibly actually is the fact that the woman says we don’t make a big deal out of it. We just put the cake in the lunchroom and anyone could come eat it if they want.

S11: What’s what’s that? I’ve never. Everyone knows off his birthday cake. Everyone comes over and it’s like this awkward conversation and maybe even singing like you don’t just put a cake in a room and lie quietly devout. That’s weird. The whole thing is, I really wish this is real.

S9: Yes. You know it’s real. You can’t make this stuff up. Make it.

S3: Do I do the feeling so sad? No. Or do I do the Federal Reserve? No. Do the. Felix says he likes the sack. We can always do federalism. The Federal Reserve? No. Yeah. It’s like, you know, are they going to cut before then? You know, if they do cut before the next meeting. I told you so.

S4: If they don’t. Of course they weren’t going to. The Felix you said numbers 25 25 is Section 25 of the German Nationality Act, which is what the chap at the German consulate told me that I should have read before I became a U.S. citizen in 2016. I went into the German consulate this week to renew my German passport because I’m a proud European and I don’t have European nationality on the grounds of being British anymore because Britain is not in the EU anymore. So I was like, that’s okay. I am still European. I am still a German citizen and I want to have a passport. So I went into the consulate. Of course, like any other country, you just mail in the passport and they send you a new one. The Germans are much more bureaucratic. You need to make an appointment. You go into the consulate, I go into the consulate, I hand off my passport and they say, oh, yeah, we’re not giving you this passport back because you are not a citizen. I’m like, what? And they said, you are not a citizen because you naturalized as an American. And then automatically under section twenty five of the German Nationality Act, you lost your German citizenship when you did that. Like what? Like, I could have like murdered a bunch of people, you know, done any number of heinous things. And I would have remained a German citizen. But the thing I did was fail to read section twenty five of the German Nationality Act. And now I’ve lost my German nationality so they wouldn’t have it.

S5: Becoming an American citizen was the problem. Yes. So if you could go back in time, would you have not become an American citizen to remain a European citizen? All right.

S3: If I could go back in time, what I would do before I became an American citizen was I would go up to the German consulate and ask for. This is gonna be fun. A Beiber Hilton’s good name and Google. Yes. OK. And a Bible Hulton guy named John is a piece of paper that they give you saying you want to become an American citizen.

S4: That’s OK. You can keep your German citizenship. And if you get that before you naturalize, then it’s all fine, but you need to know about it in order to ask for it. And that also is in section actually that Section 17 of the German nationality. So I didn’t know about this. And so now I need to basically try and persuade the Germans that if I had applied for one of these things before I naturalized, then they would have given it to me. This is a process that takes three years and has a relatively low chance of success. Yeah. So anyway, if anyone listening to this was under the misapprehension I’m a European citizen, I am now not sad note.

S2: I think we’re going to just wrap this up for the week.

S12: Thank you for listening to Slate Money. And thank you for e-mailing us. It’s late money and sleep. Thank you to Jessamy Molly for producing. And we’ll go to you next week on Slate Money.

S4: Emily, tell us about the four day workweek.

S5: Well, what it is you see is that you work for four days a week.

S3: Is this the rotavirus?

S7: No, it’s not coronavirus related. Though I did want to talk about working from home. But like, what is there to say? But the four day workweek is sort of gaining in popularity as a concept right now. Shake Shack is doing a 32 hour week without cutting people’s pay from 40 hours. Washington State kind of floated a proposal, didn’t really go anywhere for a four day workweek. Microsoft over the summer in Japan did an experiment with four day work week just in Japan. And they claim there was a 40 percent increase in productivity in part of their experiment. They didn’t only make the work week shorter, they also, like, mandated that meetings be shorter. So you could have an hour long meeting anymore. You had to have a half hour long meeting, which, yes, of course, that sounds amazing.

S3: So when you see an improvement in productivity, is that. Over what people were producing in the five day week, or does that take into account that only working for four days, it’s over.

S5: The productivity of the five day work week, they were doing more?

S10: Yeah, I mean, as time went the it makes sense.

S3: It reminds me of Google’s 20 percent time, right? The idea there was basically four days a week. You work on Google and then one day it doesn’t need to be a whole day. But like 20 percent of your time, which is effectively one out of five days, you get to work on whatever you want. And that’s an interesting, a ridiculous.

S7: But then I thought, I’m sorry, one last thing. Then a lot of articles about it made the point like before the New Deal, labor laws, people worked for longer than 40 hours a week and then they got to 40 hours a week. And like the world’s end, productivity has been going up. We cannot. We know that it’s all been fine. So 40 hours is kind of arbitrary. What I’ve days is kind of arbitrary y enough where it is.

S1: I actually think there was some reason that wasn’t just like 40. Sounds good. It’s biblical. Like, I think there was an actual reason why. Why was initially 40 hours? I mean, I think there is a lot of logic in the idea that especially nowadays I think with like technology that we have that usually you will complete the amount of work in whatever time you have to do it and you give people more time, they will just spend more time to work. And I think that that actually makes sense. And I think it would be interesting to try different experiments. But that I think it’s I do think it’s it’s notable that they did it in Japan just because Japan has this like noted culture of overwork of people actually dying from overwork. So I feel like anything you do to reduce work probably would increase productivity. I’m also always skeptical when they say increase productivity, because you know what? We’re know what that means. Right.

S4: But like there’s a lot of talk. Well, there’s a perennial sort of undercurrent of chatter, let’s say, about cutting the hours that the stock market trades. There’s really no reason why the stock market needs to trade for six and a half hours every day, because basically everyone just trades the open in the closed anyway. Like the amount of trading that happens in the middle of the day is relatively small. And, you know, if you moved it from six and a half hours to take two and a half hours, basically the same amount of trading would happen in the same amount of price discovery would happen. And you still have an opening, you still have a close and you wouldn’t have to have people sitting on their ass all day looking at the stock market because that’s just a waste of time.

S7: Yes. So much time is wasted, I think, in the white collar. I mean, you can’t someone who works slinging burgers for 40 hours a week. That’s real. Like they’re doing it for 40 hours a week. But someone who’s sitting at a desk like what we all do, like we could probably do it in four days. Right. I mean, come on. Even Anna. Well, no.

S1: So it’s interesting. So the way my current role is, I I’m not in the office on Fridays. So I work from home on Fridays. And I think this more just goes to the idea of flexibility, because I will say, like, I really enjoy the fact of having one day where I know that that’s the day that I can do a certain type of work. You know, if I need to get caught up on a book, I need to review or whatever. And I do think that just in general, you know, when we’re talking about productivity, when we’re talking about making the workplace better for women, for families in general, these are good ideas.

S7: Yeah. And there is actually a really good piece in Harvard Business Review. Last week, I think about the culture of overworked consulting company. And so these Harvard researchers went into consulting. I mean, they don’t name that consulting comes in name McKinsey, the consulting company claim to have a problem with women not getting promoted or falling out of whatever that the track to partner and stuff. And they’re like, what can we do for the women? And the. The researchers went in and what they found was that people, the consulting company, were working too many hours. But for the men, they just were like, what? This is what we do and kind of sucked it up. And for the women, they were like, this is so bad for the women. They need more flexibility. They’re moms. They want to be a good mom. They can’t work these hours. So it was like everyone was suffering from. And then the women were like, actually, it’s fine. Like we can work these long hours, but we’re made to feel guilty about it. And then they would be offered like these programs, flexibility programs. And as soon as they took the flexibility programs, they were like off tract from partnership. So I was like, everyone is suffering from the long hours. But there’s this like other layer of like bias where the women are kind of penalized yet helped with the long hours in a weird way like that. So the researcher said to the consulting companies, McKinsey or whatever, they said, you could really solve this if you didn’t make people work so many hours. It’s not even necessary. Like these PowerPoints don’t need to be 100 slide long. And the consulting guy moves like no. What we need to do is more programs for women.

S10: Yeah. This is actually like my biggest pet peeve because I think like one thing, you will never, ever help women with programs that are just designed for women. Really, they are just as encouraging online women and use them. And let’s just make everyone’s lives better. Exactly. Also, two other things and then we can end this a sleepless but one. I’ll always find it amazing because like when you deal with like a lot of like male executives, they don’t work many hours. It’s like once they get to a certain level, they just basically like, you know, stop working. They’re always they’re always gone. Whereas you don’t. See, that with women and women will always feel the need to be like, oh, OK, well, I’m going to work less. I want to work. I’m gonna work three parts. Types of no man will ever do that. He just won’t show up.

S7: Well, there is that other great study I think was Erin Reid at Boston University who again went to a consulting company. Maybe it was small ston consulting and found that men often didn’t work the long hours they claimed to be working, but they just lied about it. So like they they found like partners at the consulting firm calling in sick calls from like the ski slopes and stuff like that. They just didn’t like make a big deal out of it. They just weren’t working and kind of like faked it. And so everyone thought they were working really hard, whereas the women just like said, I mean.

S4: But the question is, if you’re calling in from a ski slope or you’re not working.