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Our Head of Asian Gaming & Lodging and Hong Kong/India Real Estate Research Praveen Choudhary discusses the first synchronized growth cycle for Hong Kong's major real estate segments in almost a decade.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Praveen Choudhary, Morgan Stanley's Head of Asian Gaming & Lodging and Hong Kong/India Real Estate Research. Today – a look at a market that global investors often watch but may not fully appreciate: Hong Kong real estate. It's Tuesday, January 27th, at 2pm in Hong Kong.Why should investors in New York, London, or Singapore care about trends in Hong Kong property? That's easy to answer. Because Hong Kong remains one of the world's most globally sensitive real estate markets. When [the] cycle turns here, it often reflects – and sometimes predicts – broader shift in liquidity, capital flows, and macro sentiment across Asia. And right now, for the first time since 2018, all three major Hong Kong property segments – residential prices, office rents in the Central district of Hong Kong, and retail sales – are set to grow together. That synchronized upturn hasn't happened in almost a decade. What's driving this shift? Residential real estate is the engine of this turnaround. Prices have finally bottomed after a 30 percent decline since 2018, and 2026 is shaping out to be a strong year. We actually expect home prices to grow more than 10 percent in 2026, after going up by 5 percent in 2025. And we think that it will grow further in 2027. There are three factors that give us confidence on this out-of-consensus call. The first one is policy. Back in February 2024, Hong Kong scrapped all extra stamp duty that had made it tougher for mainland Chinese or foreign buyers to enter the market. Stamp duty is basically a tax you pay when buying property, or even selling property; and it has been a key way for [the] government to control demand and raise revenue. With those extra charges gone, buying and selling real estate in Hong Kong, especially for mainlanders, is a lot more straightforward and penalty-free. In fact, post the removal of the stamp duty, [the] percentage of units that has been sold to mainlanders have gone to 50 percent of total; earlier it used to be 10-20 percent. Why is it non-consensus? That is because consensus believes that Hong Kong property price can't go up when China residential outlook is negative. In mid-2025, consensus thought that the recovery was simply a cyclical response to a sharp drop in the Hong Kong Interbank Offered Rate, or HIBOR.But we believe the drivers are supply/demand mismatch, positive carry as rental go up but rates go down, and Hong Kong as a place for global monetary interconnection between China and the world that's still thriving. Second, demand fundamentals are strengthening. Hong Kong's population turned positive again, rising to 7.5 million in the first half of 2025. During COVID we had a population decline. Now, talent attraction scheme is driving around 140,000 visa approvals in 2025, which is double what it used to be pre-COVID level. New household formation is tracking above the long‑term average, and mainland buyers are now a powerful force. The third factor is affordability. So, after years of declines, the housing prices have come to a point where affordability is back to a long‑term average. In fact, the income versus the price is now back to 2011 level. You combine this with lower mortgage rates as the Fed cut moves through, and you have pent‑up demand finally returning. And don't forget the wealth effect: Hang Seng Index climbed almost 30 percent in 2025. That kind of equity rebound historically spills over into property buying. As the recovery in residential real estate picks up speed, we're also seeing a fresh wave of optimism and actions across Hong Kong office and retail markets. So big picture: Hong Kong property market isn't just stabilizing. It's turning. A 10 percent or more residential price rebound, a Central office market finding its footing, and an improved retail environment – all in the same year – marks the clearest green lights this market has seen since 2018.Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

Seth Bradley interviews Travis Smith about the evolution of Tribevest and why the private markets are hitting a critical inflection point. Travis shares how his background at Morgan Stanley and early experiences pooling capital with family exposed the lack of infrastructure in private investing. They break down why independent capital aggregators are becoming essential connectors between investors and operators, and how professionalism, compliance, and technology now determine who succeeds in capital raising. Travis explains why treating every raise as a “capital raising project” is key to scaling responsibly and why operators who build these systems now will dominate the next real estate cycle. Travis SmithCurrent role: Founder & CEO, TribevestBased in: Columbus, Ohio Say hi to them at: https://www.tribevest.com/ | LinkedIn Visit ⁠www.tribevestisc.com⁠ for more info. Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/BESTEVER  Join us at Best Ever Conference 2026! Find more info at: https://www.besteverconference.com/  Join the Best Ever Community  The Best Ever Community is live and growing - and we want serious commercial real estate investors like you inside. It's free to join, but you must apply and meet the criteria.  Connect with top operators, LPs, GPs, and more, get real insights, and be part of a curated network built to help you grow. Apply now at⁠ ⁠⁠⁠www.bestevercommunity.com⁠⁠ Podcast production done by⁠ ⁠Outlier Audio⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Global Head of Thematic and Sustainability Research Stephen Byrd discusses Morgan Stanley's key investment themes for this year and how they're influencing markets and economies.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley's Global Head of Thematic and Sustainability Research. Today – the four key themes that will define markets and economies in 2026. It's Monday, January 26th, at 10am in New York. If you're feeling overwhelmed by all the market noise and constant swings, you're not alone. One of the biggest hurdles for investors today is really figuring out how to tune out the short-term ups and downs and focus on the bigger trends that are truly changing the world. At Morgan Stanley Research, thematic analysis has long been central to how we think about markets, especially in periods of extreme volatility. A thematic lens helps us step back from the noise and really focus on the structural forces reshaping economies, industries, and societies. And that perspective has delivered results. In 2025, on average, our thematic stock categories outperformed the MSCI World Index by 16 percent and the S&P 500 by 27 percent. And this really reinforces our view that long-term themes can be powerful drivers of alpha. For 2026, our framework is built around four key themes: AI and Tech Diffusion, The Future of Energy, The Multipolar World, and Societal Shifts. Now three of these themes carry forward from last year, but each has evolved meaningfully – and one of our themes represents a major expansion on our prior work. First, the AI and Tech Diffusion theme remains central, but has clearly matured and evolved. In 2025, the focus was on rapid capability gains. In 2026, the emphasis shifts to non-linear improvement and the growing gap between AI capabilities and real-world adoption. A critical evolution is our view that compute demand is likely to exceed supply meaningfully, even as software and hardware become more efficient. As AI use cases multiply and grow more complex, the infrastructure – especially computing power – emerges as a defining constraint. Next is The Future of Energy, which has taken on new urgency. Energy demand in developed markets, long assumed to be flat, is now inflecting upwards. And this is driven largely by AI infrastructure and data centers. Compared with 2025, this theme has expanded from a supply conversation into one focused on policy. Rising energy costs are becoming increasingly visible to consumers, elevating a concept we call the ‘politics of energy.' Policymakers are under pressure to prioritize low-cost, reliable energy, even when trade-offs exist, and new strategies are emerging to secure power without destabilizing grids or increasing household bills. Our third theme, The Multipolar World, also builds on last year but with sharper edges. Globalization continues to fragment as countries prioritize security, resilience, and national self-sufficiency. Since 2025, competition has become more clearly defined by access to critical inputs – such as energy, materials, defense capabilities, and advanced technology. Notably, the top-performing thematic categories in 2025 were driven by Multipolar World dynamics, underscoring how geopolitical and industrial shifts are translating directly into market outcomes. Now the biggest evolution comes with our fourth key theme – which we call Societal Shifts – and this expands on our prior work on Longevity. This new framework captures a wider range of forces shaping societies globally: AI-driven labor disruption and evolution, aging populations, changing consumer preferences, the K-economy, the push for healthy longevity, and challenging demographics across many regions. These shifts increasingly influence government policy, corporate strategy, and economic growth – and their impact spans far more industries than investors often expect. Now crucially these themes don't operate in isolation. AI accelerates energy demand. Energy costs shape politics. Politics influence supply chains and national priorities. And all of this feeds directly into societal outcomes: from employment to consumption patterns. The power of thematic investing lies in understanding these intersections, where multiple forces reinforce one another in underappreciated ways. So to sum it up, the most important investment questions for 2026 aren't just about growth rates. They're about structure. Understanding how technology, energy, geopolitics, and society evolve together may be the clearest way to see where opportunity, and risk, are truly heading. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

In the second of their two-part roundtable, Seth Carpenter and Morgan Stanley's top economists break down the forces influencing growth across different regions.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Seth Carpenter: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Global Chief Economist and Head of Macro Research. And yesterday I sat down with my colleagues, Michael Gapen, our Chief U.S. Economist, Chetan Ahya, our Chief Asia Economist, and Jen Eisenschmidt, our Chief Europe Economist. And we spent a lot of time talking about monetary policy around the world. Today, let's go back to them, talk about the real side of the economy. It's Friday, January 23rd at 10am in New York. Jens Eisenschmidt: And 4pm in Frankfurt. Chetan Ahya: And 9pm in Hong Kong. Seth Carpenter: Michael, let me start with you, back on the U.S. And when I think about the U.S. economy, we have to start by talking about the U.S. consumer. Walk us through what investors need to understand about consumer spending in the U.S. What's driving it, what's going to hold it up, and where are the risks? Michael Gapen: I think the primary thing to remember here is that the upper income consumer drives about 40 percent or more of total spending. So, there can be higher inflation that eats into real labor market income growth. There can be inflation dispersion, which hits lower income households more than upper income households. We can have tariffs that get applied to goods and lower- and middle-income households buy goods more than upper income households. But when asset markets continue to appreciate, when home prices hold on to their prior gains, sometimes that doesn't matter in the aggregate statistics because that upper income household keeps spending.I do think that's a lot of what happened in 2025. So, there is a K-shaped economy. I think one of the main risks about the U.S. is that its expansion is narrowly driven. We think that will broaden out in 2026. If we're right, that inflation comes down and we're past, kind of, the peak effect of tariffs, then we think that lower- and middle-income household can have a little more residual spending power. And you might get the consumer operating on two fronts, rather than one. Seth Carpenter: Another part of domestic spending that gets a lot of attention is business investment spending, CapEx spending. First would you agree with that statement that CapEx spending last year was characterized by AI CapEx spending? Second, should we feel confident that that underlying sort of momentum in CapEx spending should continue for this year? And then third, what's it going to take for there to be a broadening out, maybe like what you said about consumers, but a broadening out of investment spending so that it's not just the AI story that's driving CapEx. Michael Gapen: I do agree that the primary, almost exclusive story in 2025 for business spending was AI. So, when you look at residential and non-residential spending, unrelated to AI, that I think did feel the effects of policy uncertainty in a changing environment. what keeps kind of sustainability around business spending? Obviously, it's a multi-year investment story around AI. There's a level versus growth rate argument here where you can have a heck of a lot of CapEx spending. May not always show up in GDP because some of it is intermediate goods, some of it is imported. But that doesn't diminish, I think, the quality of the overall story. What gets business spending to broaden out, I do think is related to whether consumer spending broadens out. Most business spending kind of follows demand with a lag. So, AI is a different story, but there's a cyclical component to business spending. There could be a housing related component, if mortgage rates come down and stimulate at least a little more turnover in the housing market. So, if the recovery does broaden out, we see greater real income growth in low- and middle-income households. The labor market stabilizes. Maybe mortgage rates come down a little bit, then I think you could get carry through momentum to non-AI related business spending. That would look more like a cyclical upswing for the economy. May be a heavy lift, but that's what I think it would take to get there. Seth Carpenter: So, Jens, let me come to you. We talked yesterday about the ECB possibly easing more on disinflation. But when I think of disinflation, I think of a weak economy. And that's maybe not really the case. So, I guess the first question to you would you characterize euro area economic growth as strong, or a little bit more complicated? Jens Eisenschmidt: A little bit more complicated. And that's always the right answer for an economist – I think it depends. Well, it is strong in some quarters. And these quarters will change from where it has been in the past.So concretely, we think the German economy has most potential to catch up and actually accelerate, and that's due to fiscal stimulus mainly. While we have other quarters, the French and the Italian one, which will be below potential and so weak – each of them for their own reason. And then we have the Spanish economy, which performs exceptionally and is really strong, but it's only a small part of the euro area economy. If we had everything together, I think the outlook is an economy that's accelerating mildly and only towards the end of our projection horizon, which is [20]27. So, in say two years, hits growth rates that are above potential. Here we are really talking about quarterly increments above 0.3. So, we are currently between 0.1 and 0.2. So, you sort of get the picture of a mildly accelerating economy that goes from 0.15 to 0.035 say in the span of two years. Seth Carpenter: One of the key narratives in markets is about fiscal policy in Germany, potentially driving growth. I know in equity markets it's been a key investing theme. So how excited should people be about the possibility of fiscal policy in Germany driving a resilient European economy? Jens Eisenschmidt: Pretty excited, I would say, in a sense that the positioning of the German government for its economy is actually exceptional in terms of the amount of fiscal space that exists and that has been made available. It's just that, of course, the connection of that sort of abstract excitement that we economists have to what actually happens in markets is sometimes a little bit loose; in the sense that equity [markets would like to see everything coming online tomorrow, and that's going to be a more drawn-out process. So, to my point before, it will take some time. We do have implementation lags. We do have lags in say, for instance, on defense procurement. There is maybe not as much capacity in the economy to deliver into everything. But the direction of travel is clear and up. So, from that perspective, I have no doubts that the future is better for the German economy over the medium term for all the reasons mentioned, but it won't be immediate. And we have just seen in recent headlines, Germany is the most trade exposed European economy. If we get more friction in global trade, that's not great. So, you could even have short term, more negative news on GDP than positive ones. Seth Carpenter: Chetan, I'm going to turn to you. Yesterday when we talked about Asia, we focused on Japan. But, of course, when it comes to the real side of the economy, the big mover in Asia is China.So, let's talk a little bit about how you see China evolving. What the key themes are for China. Last year in particular, we talked a lot about the deflationary cycle in China and how it was protracted. It wasn't going away. That policy was not sufficient to drive a huge surge in demand to push things away. Are we in the same place for China in 2026? What kind of growth should we expect and what sort of policy reactions should we be expecting from China? Chetan Ahya: Well, I think the macro backdrop for China we think will still be challenging in 2026. But at the same time, we expect the micro positives to continue. Now on the macro backdrop, when I say it's going to remain challenging because the number one issue that we are focused on from a macro perspective in China is deflation. Now we do expect some easing of deflationary pressures, but [the] economy will still stay in deflation in 2026. And on the micro front what we've seen is that China is emerging from a situation where it is making inroads into advanced manufacturing, and that's enabling it to increase market share in global goods exports. And it's also one of the reasons why when you see the numbers coming out from China on exports, they seem to be outperforming. Even just the latest month number as we saw, China's exports were surprising on the upside relative to market expectations. And that's the micro story – that you'll see China continuing to gain market share in global goods export. And that supports the corporate micro positive story. Seth Carpenter: We know collectively that export is a key part of China's economy. The productive capacity, as you point out, important for China. When you think about exports from China, the currency has to come in. And recently the renminbi has been appreciating. Lots of questions from clients here or there. How important is the renminbi in reflating or rebalancing the China economy? Can you walk us through a little bit some of these considerations about the role that the currency is playing now and over the next few quarters for China and its economic outlook. Chetan Ahya: Yeah, that's right, Seth. Actually, I've been getting a number of clients calling me and asking whether PBOC is going to allow a significant appreciation in RNB. We've seen it appreciate quite a lot in the last few days. And then whether this will mean China's economy will rebalance faster towards consumption. Look, on the first point, we don't think PBOC will allow a significant currency appreciation because, as I just mentioned earlier, the deflation problem is still there. It's not gone. While we see reduced deflationary pressures, as long as the economy is in deflation, it'll be very difficult for PBOC to allow significant currency appreciation. And what we are also watching on RMB is to see what is happening to the trade weighted RMB. The RMB basket, if you were to call it. That interestingly has been in a stable range since 2016, and we don't think that changes. We've learned from Japan's experience in the nineties that if you have deflation problem, you shouldn't be taking up currency appreciation. And we think PBOC pretty much follows that rule book. On the rebalancing part, look, I think when you have deflation and if currency appreciation is going to add to deflation pressures, that will mean corporate sector revenue suffers. They will actually be cutting wage growth and therefore that has a negative impact on consumption. And so, in our view, instead of helping rebalancing currency appreciation with China's current macro backdrop, we'll actually be making rebalancing more difficult. Seth Carpenter: And of course, we're used to China being a key driver of the economy, not just in Asia, but around the world. But if we think about then broadening out from China, what should we be expecting in terms of growth for the other economies in Asia? Chetan Ahya: For the other economies in the region, I think the most important driver will be what happens to exports more broadly. In 2025, Asia did benefit from better tech exports, but because of tariffs and also what was happening in the U.S. in terms of its own domestic demand, we'd seen that there was significant weakness in non-tech exports. So, from an outlook perspective in 2026, we think that that non-tech export story turns around and that will help the recovery in the region to broaden out from it just being tech exports to non-tech exports, to improvement in CapEx, job growth and consumption. So, I think that the whole region is going to see the benefit from this turnaround. But particularly the non-China part of the region will be seeing a meaningful improvement in their export growth, real GDP growth and normal GDP growth in 2026. Seth Carpenter: I'm getting ready to wrap things up. But before I do, I'm going to ask each of the three of you, one last rapid-fire question. Michael, I'm going to start with you. AI is on everyone's lips. If we were to see a rapid adoption of AI technology across all the economies. What would it mean for the Fed? Michael Gapen: Well, I think that would mean a substantial uptick in productivity growth. Maybe closer to 3 percent like we saw in the tech boom in the nineties. So faster real growth. But probably still disinflation. You can argue the Fed could even lower rates in that environment. It may take them a while to figure it out [be]cause they'd be balancing incoming data that shows a lot of strong growth. But probably further evidence that inflation's coming down. So, if it's supply side driven, then I think you could still probably get some rate cuts out of the Fed to normalize policy as inflation comes down. But I'd be thinking those cuts could even come much later. Seth Carpenter: Okay, Jens to you, a lot of discussion in the news about possible additional tariffs from the U.S. on Europe in some of the negotiations. Suppose some of the announcements, 10 percent tariffs rising to 25 percent tariffs later. Suppose those were actually put in place. What does that mean for European growth? Jens Eisenschmidt: So, I would say 10 percent additional tariffs, we have a framework for that. Pointing to drag on GDP growth somewhere between 30 and 60 basis points. So roughly half of what we think 2026 will bring in growth. Now, for sure the answer is additional tariffs are not great for growth. Big question mark here is though whether we get any retaliation from the European side, which we think this time around if we get additional tariffs from the U.S. side is more likely. And that would just increase the downside risk for Europe here from that additional round of trade or tariff uncertainty. Seth Carpenter: Chetan, I'm going to end up with you. When we think about China, when we think about policy, what do you think it would take for there to be a fundamental shift in policy out of Beijing to get a real full blown, demand driven fiscal stimulus? Or is that just not in the cards whatsoever? Chetan Ahya: Well, in our base case, we don't think that's likely to happen in our forecast horizon. But if we do get a big social stability challenge emerging in China, then we could get that big pivot from [a] policy response perspective, where policy makers move towards consumption. And our recommendation there is to boost social welfare spending, particularly targeted towards migrant workers, which could be taken up if you get that social stability risk event materializing. Seth Carpenter: Mike, Chetan, Jens, thank you so much for joining today. And for the listener, thank you for joining us. If you enjoy this show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or a colleague today.

Morgan Stanley has projected the weight loss medication market to reach $150 billion globally by 2035. The use of GLP-1s, such as Ozempic, have increased drastically since 2019. At the same time, new research shows that the use of these drugs still comes with the risk of judgement and social pressures that all relate to weight stigma. An Oregon-based group, Body Liberation for Public Health, wants to help end these stigmas. The group is advocating for body liberation, which is a movement aimed to dismantle the systems that have created weight stigmas and bias, as opposed to the body positivity movement, which encourages acceptance of all body types. Debbie Kaufman is the creator of the project. She joins us to share more on what body liberation is and why it’s important to incorporate it into public health.

All eyes have been on President Trump's address at the World Economic Forum. Michael Zezas, our Deputy Global Head of Research, and Ariana Salvatore, our Head of Public Policy Research, talk about potential implications for policy and the U.S. outlook.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michael Zezas: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Deputy Global Head of Research for Morgan Stanley. Ariana Salvatore: And I'm Ariana Salvatore, Head of Public Policy Research. Michael Zezas: Today we're discussing our takeaways from President Trump's speech in Davos and what we think it means for investors. It's Wednesday, January 21st at 1pm in New York. Michael Zezas: So, Ariana, over the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot of news about policy proposals coming out of the U.S. and from President Trump around affordability, as well as some geopolitical events around the U.S. relationship with Europe. And investors really started looking towards President Trump's speech at Davos, which he gave earlier today, as a potential vehicle to learn more about what these things would actually mean and what it might mean for the economic outlook and markets. Ariana Salvatore: Yeah, that's right. I think specifically investors were looking for the President to focus on affordability proposals pertaining to housing and some commentary around Greenland. Remember last weekend, President Trump proposed a 10 percent tariff on some EU countries related to this topic specifically. So obviously that did feature in his speech. What did we learn and what do you think are the most important things for markets to know? Michael Zezas: So, maybe the most important headline we got was President Trump appearing to take off the table the use of force when it comes to an attempt to acquire Greenland. And that would seem to, therefore, take off the table the idea of a broader rupture in the U.S.-EU relationship. Both the security relationship vis-a-vis NATO, as well as the economic relationship which could have been ruptured with higher tariffs on both sides, anti coercion measures around trade, and that would be of obvious economic importance. Europe is obviously a major importer of U.S. goods. Not as big as Canada or Mexico, but still pretty significant. So, anything that would've created higher barriers between the two would've had meaningful economic consequences for the U.S. outlook. Ariana Salvatore: Yeah, that's right. And we've been saying that the bilateral trade framework agreement between the U.S. and the EU is actually pretty tenuous in nature, right? So, this doesn't yet have formal backing from the European Parliament. They, in fact, delayed a vote on this exact deal, kind of on the back of these Greenland headlines. So how are we thinking about, you know, what's been priced into markets and maybe what this could mean for something like the dollar going forward? Michael Zezas: Yeah, so it's important to point out that we're not out of the woods yet in terms of potential trade escalation on both sides around the Greenland issue. However, it seems like that bigger tail problem of a decoupling might have gone away. And so, what you saw in markets so far today was that some of the actions over the past, kind of, 24-48 hours with equity market weakness. You know, the S&P was down about 2 percent yesterday. The dollar was weaker. It seemed like more term premium was being baked into the U.S. Treasury market. A lot of that appears to be unwinding today. Said more simply, the idea of a kind of riskier investment environment for the U.S. is getting priced out. At least today, it's getting priced out. And it all makes sense when you think about if there was less of a relationship between the U.S. and Europe, there would be less demand for U.S. dollar holdings overseas. And that's the type of thing that should manifest in a weaker dollar and higher term premia, steeper yield curves for U.S. Treasuries. Ariana Salvatore: Yeah, and that dovetails really nicely with the work that we just put out with the FX team, kind of highlighting some of the policy factors as push factors for countries to move away from the dollar. We think that's happening marginally. We think it's not really a risk in the immediate term, but some of these policy drivers can actually create dollar weakness over the medium to longer term. Michael Zezas: Of course, to the extent that we get news that this is a head fake and that tensions are re-escalating, you'd expect some of those trades to start pushing markets back in the other direction again. Now, President Trump also talked quite a bit about domestic policy, largely about affordability, and some of the policy proposals he's put forward over the last couple of weeks. Was there any new details that you heard that you think are meaningful for investors? Ariana Salvatore: So, the short version is nothing really new, and the reality is that a lot of housing policy in particular is actually out of the hands of the executive. And even if you do see congressional action here, it's likely to be marginal. A lot of housing policy is done at the state level, and even bipartisan efforts to address both the demand and the supply sides of the equation have faced some resistance in Congress. That doesn't mean they can't reemerge. But we would need to see a very large decline in the mortgage rate to get noticeable effects on economic indicators like GDP, inflation and employment. And in terms of what this means for the housing outlook, the programs talked about so far should push sales marginally higher but have little impact on our expectations for our home prices. Now it's important to note that the president didn't spend that much time of the speech talking about housing affordability proposals, as was telegraphed ahead of time. And since that, the head of the NEC Kevin Hassett has said they plan to announce more details on housing in the coming days. Michael Zezas: Got it. So, on the two pieces here that investors have really focused on, which are capping institutional ownership of single-family homes and potentially capping interest rates on credit cards, it sounded like the president talked about he would go to Congress for authorization on those things.Is that right? And if so, how plausible is it that Congress could actually deliver those authorities? Ariana Salvatore: So, here's where I think it's really critical to understand the role that Congress has to play in all of these policy initiatives. So, there are not only political constraints, but there are also procedural ones. If we were to see Republicans kind of push for this 10 percent cap, for example, that likely would have to go through the reconciliation process. And that process, as we know, comes with a number of limitations because something like a 10 percent cap wouldn't have much of an impact on the federal budget in terms of revenues or outlays. We think it's most likely not going to be permissible under that framework. So, understanding that the first filter here is Congress, and the second filter is these procedural limitations that exist in and of themselves is really important context for understanding the president's proposals on housing.Michael Zezas: So, is it fair to say the starting point is that we think Congress is unlikely to act on these things? And what would you have to see that might make you think differently? Ariana Salvatore: I think where we're looking for signals from Republican leadership in Congress – because as of right now, it's been our thinking that a second reconciliation bill ahead of the midterm elections is not feasible. It's too difficult politically, it takes a lot of time, but if you see enough of a push from the president, we do think that can start to become feasible. Again, we have to keep in mind these procedural limitations and where the rest of the party falls on these issues. But I think they're possible if the administration pushes hard enough for them.Michael Zezas: Got it. So, even though we don't think it's likely, we obviously want to prepare in case that happens. When it comes to housing, it seems like our team has said institutional ownership of single-family housing is quite low, 1 percent or less. And so, restrictions there wouldn't necessarily change the game on home prices. What about the 10 percent cap on credit card interests? What are the broader ramifications that our colleagues see? Ariana Salvatore: Yeah, so I'd say generally speaking, when it comes to consumer credit affordability policies, our strategists think that these could actually translate to a benefit for consumer ABS performance because they tend to be a tailwind for a consumer that's struggled with rising delinquencies and defaults post-COVID, right? However, there are some specific proposals like this cap on credit cards, and that's likely going to have a negative consequence because it's going to limit credit access for consumers, especially for those carrying a balance. So, probably a little bit counterintuitive to the overall affordability agenda that the administration's trying to go for. Michael Zezas: So, lots of interesting stuff coming out of the speech. Lots of things we have to track over the next few weeks and months. It certainly doesn't seem like it's going to be a boring year two of the Trump term for investors. Ariana Salvatore: Certainly not, and not for us either. Michael Zezas: Well, Ariana, thanks for finding the time to talk. Ariana Salvatore: Great speaking with you, Mike. Michael Zezas: And as a reminder, if you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us wherever you listen. And share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

Our Global Chief Economist Seth Carpenter joins our chief regional economists to discuss the outlook for interest rates in the U.S., Japan and Europe.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Seth Carpenter: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Global Chief Economist and Head of Macro Research. And today we're kicking off our quarterly economic roundtable for the year. We're going to try to think about everything that matters in economics around the world. And today we're going to focus a little bit more on central banking. And when we get to tomorrow, we'll focus on the nuts and bolts of the real side of the economy. I'm joined by our chief regional economists. Michael Gapen: Hi, Seth. I'm Mike Gapen, Chief U.S. Economist at Morgan Stanley. Chetan Ahya: I'm Chetan Ahya, Chief Asia economist. Jens Eisenschmidt: And I'm Jens Eisenschmidt, Chief Europe economist. Seth Carpenter: It's Thursday, January 22nd at 10 am in New York. Jens Eisenschmidt: And 4 pm in Frankfurt. Chetan Ahya: And 9 pm in Hong Kong. Seth Carpenter: So, Mike Gapen, let me start with you as we head into 2026, what are we thinking about? Are we going into a more stable expansion? Is this just a different phase with the same amount of volatility? What do you think is going to be happening in the U.S. as a baseline outlook? And then if we're going to be wrong, which direction would we be wrong? Michael Gapen: Yeah, Seth, we took the view that we would have more policy certainty. Recent weeks have maybe suggested we're incorrect on that front. But I still believe that when it comes to deregulation, immigration policy and fiscal policy, we have much more clarity there than we did a year ago. So, I think it's another year of modest growth, above trend growth. We're forecasting something around 2.4 percent for 2026. That's about where we finished 2025. I think what's key for markets and the outlook overall will be whether inflation comes down. Firms are still passing through tariffs to the consumer. We think that'll happen at least through the end of the first quarter. It's our view that after that, inflation pressures will start to diminish. If that's the case, then we think the Fed can execute one or two more rate cuts. But we have those coming [in] the second half of the year. So, it looks like growth is strong enough. The labor market has stabilized enough for the Fed to wait and see, to look around, see the effects of their prior rate cuts, and then push policy closer to neutral if inflation comes down. Seth Carpenter: And if we go back to last year to 2025, I will give you the credit first. Morgan Stanley did not shift its forecast for recession in the U.S. the way some of our main competitors did. On the other hand, and this is where I maybe tweak you just a little bit. We underestimated how much growth there would be in the United States. CapEx spending from AI firms was strong. Consumer spending, especially from the top half of the income distribution in the U.S. was strong. Growth overall for the year was over 2 percent, close to 2.5 percent. So, if that's what we just came off of, why isn't it the case that we'd see even stronger growth? Maybe even a re-acceleration of growth in 2026? Michael Gapen: Well, some of that, say, improvement vis-à-vis our forecast, the outperformance. Some of that I think comes mechanically from trade and inventory variability. So, . I'm not sure that that says a lot about an improving trend rate of growth. Where there was other outperformance was, as you noted, from the consumer. Now our models, and I don't mean to get too technical here, but our model suggests that consumption is overshooting its fundamentals. Which I think makes it harder for the economy to accelerate further. And then AI; it's harder for AI spending to say get incrementally stronger than where it is. So, we're getting a little extra boost from fiscal. We've got that coming through. And I just think what it is, is more of the same rather than further acceleration from here. Seth Carpenter: Do you think there's a chance that the Fed in fact does not cut rates like you have in your forecast? Michael Gapen: Yes, I do think... Where we could be wrong is we've made assumptions around the One Big Beautiful Bill and what it will contribute to the economy. But as you know, there's a lot of variability around those estimates. If the bill is more catalytic to animal spirits and business spending than we've assumed, you could get, say, a demand driven animal spirits upside to the economy, which may mean inflation doesn't decelerate all that much. But I do think that that's, say, the main upside risk that we're considering. Markets have been gradually taking out probabilities of Fed cuts as growth has come in stronger. So far, the inflation data has been positive in terms of signaling about disinflation, but I would say the jury's still out on how much that continues. Seth Carpenter: Chetan, When I think about Japan, we know that it's been the developed market central bank that's been going in the opposite direction. They've been hiking when other central banks have been cutting. We got some news recently that probably put some risk into our baseline outlook that we published in our year ahead view about both growth and inflation in Japan. And with it what the Bank of Japan is going to do in terms of its normalization. Can you just walk us through a little bit about our outlook for Japan? Because right now I think that the yen, Japanese rates, they're all part of the ongoing market narrative around the world. Chetan Ahya: Yeah, Seth. So, look, I mean, on a big picture basis, we are constructive on the Japan macro-outlook. We think normal GDP growth remains strong. We are expecting to see the transition for the consumers from them seeing, you know, supply side inflation. Keeping their real wage growth low to a dynamic where we transition to real wage growth accelerating. That supports real consumption growth, and we move away from that supply side driven inflation to demand side driven inflation. So broadly we are constructive, but I think in the backdrop, what we are seeing on currency depreciation is making things a bit more challenging for the BOJ. While we are expecting that demand side pressure to build up and drive inflation, in the trailing data, it is still pretty much currency depreciation and supply side factors like food inflation driving inflation. And so, BOJ has been hesitant. So, while we had the expectation that BOJ will hike in January of 2027, we do see the risk that they may have to take up rate hike earlier to manage the currency not getting out of hand and adding on to the inflation pressures. Seth Carpenter Would I be right in saying that up until now, the yen has swung pretty widely in both directions. But the weakening of the yen until now hasn't been really the key driver of the Bank of Japan's policy reaction. It's been growth picking up, inflation picking up, wanting to get out of negative interest rates first, wanting to get away from the zero lower bounds. Second, the weaker yen in some sense could have actually been seen as a positive up until now because Japan did go through 25 years of essentially stagnant nominal growth. Is this actually that much of a fundamental change in the Bank of Japan's thinking – needing to react to the weakness of the yen? Chetan Ahya: Broadly what you're saying is right, Seth, but there is also a threshold of where the currency can be. And beyond a point, it begins to hurt the households in form of imported inflation pressures. And remember that inflation has been somewhat high, even if it is driven by currency depreciation and supply side factors for some time. And so, BOJ has to be watchful of potential lift in inflation expectations for the households. And at the same time, they are also watching the underlying inflation impact of this currency depreciation – because what we have seen is that over period workers have been demanding for higher wages. And that is also influenced by what happens to headline inflation, which is driven by currency depreciation. So, I would say that, yes, it's been true up until now. But, when currency reaches these very high levels of range, you are going to see BOJ having to act. Seth Carpenter: Jens, let's shift then to Europe. The ECB had been on a cutting cycle. They came to the end of that. President Lagarde said that she thought the disinflationary process had ended. In your year ahead forecast and a bunch of your writing recently, you've said maybe not so fast. There could still be some more disinflationary, at least risk, in the pipeline for Europe. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on in terms of European inflation and what it could mean for the European Central Bank? Because clearly that's going to be first order important for markets.Jens Eisenschmidt: I think that is right. I think we have a crucial inflation print ahead of us that comes out on the 4th of February. So, early February we get some signal, whether our anticipated fall of headline inflation here below the ECB's target is actually materializing. We think the chances for this are pretty good. There's a mix why this is happening. One is energy. Energy disinflation and base effects. But the other thing is services inflation resets always at the beginning of the year. January and February are the crucial month here. We had significant services upward pressure on prices the last years. And so just from base effects, we think we will see less of that. Another picture or another element of that picture is that wage disinflation is proceeding nicely. We have notably a significant weakness in the export-oriented manufacturing sector in Germany, which is a key sector of setting wages for the country. The country is around 30 percent of the euro area GDP. And here we had seen significant wage gains over the last year. So, the disinflationary trend coming from lower wage gains from this country, that will be very important. And an important signal to watch. Again, that's something we don't know. I think soon we have to watch simply monthly prints here. But a significant print for the first quarter comes out in May, and all of that together makes us believe that the ECB will be in a position to see enough data or have seen enough data that confirms the thesis of inflation staying below target for some time to come. So that they can cut in June and September to a terminal rate of 1.5 percent. Seth Carpenter: That is, I would say, out of consensus relative where the market is. When you talk to investors, whether they're in Europe or around the world, what's the big pushback that you get from them when you are explaining your view on how the ECB is going to act? Jens Eisenschmidt: There are two essential pushbacks. So, one is on substance. So, 'No, actually wages will not come down, and the economy will actually start overheating soon because of the big fiscal stimulus.' That, in a nutshell is the pushback on substance. I would say here, as you would say before, not so fast. Because the fiscal stimulus is only in one country. It's 30 percent. But only 30 percent of the euro area.Plus, there is another pushback, which is on the reaction function of the ECB. Here we tend to agree. So far, we have heard from policy makers that they feel rather comfortable with the 2 percent rate level that they're at. But we think that discussion will change. The moment you are below target in an actual inflation print; the burden of proof is the opposite. Now you have to prove: Is the economy really on a track that inflation will get back up to target without further monetary stimulus? We believe that will be the key debate. And again, happy to, sort of, concede that there is for now not a lot of signaling out of the ECB that further rate cuts are coming. But we believe the first inflation print of the year will change that debate significantly. Seth Carpenter: Alright, so that makes a lot of sense. However, looking at the clock, we are probably out of time for today. So, for now, Michael, Chetan, Jens, thank you so much for joining today. And to the listener, thanks for listening. And be sure to tune in tomorrow for part two of our conversation. And I have to say, if you enjoy this show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or a colleague today.

Many aspiring business owners believe buying a franchise is a shortcut to success, but Cliff Nonnenmacher explains why that assumption leads to costly mistakes. In this episode, Cliff joins Russ and Joey to share his journey from Wall Street investment banking to building, scaling, and exiting multiple franchise businesses.Drawing from decades of experience, Cliff explains why most people fail in franchising, not because the model is broken, but because they skip proper valuation, due diligence, and execution. He breaks down why buying at the right price matters more than brand recognition, how a poor "skills fit" destroys profitability, and why execution (not hype) creates real opportunity.The conversation also explores how successful investors think about exits before they ever buy, and the red flags that signal a franchise nightmare. Cliff shares real examples of buying failing franchises for pennies on the dollar and then selling for significant multiples.This episode is a must-listen for anyone considering franchising as a path to cash flow, business ownership, or long-term wealth creation.Top three things you will learn:-Why valuation and execution matter more than franchise brand names-The most common mistakes that turn franchises into financial traps-How to structure a business from day one with a profitable exit in mindAbout Our Guest:Cliff Nonnenmacher began his career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. After leaving his Wall Street career in 2003, he acquired a Master Franchise for New York and Connecticut, diving headfirst into franchising. Since then, Cliff has owned and operated various franchise and non-franchise businesses. He has also developed well-known domestic and international brands.Cliff has over 25 years of experience in franchising, finance, and business, and has been involved in every aspect of the franchisor-franchisee relationship. He now uses his extensive knowledge to assist corporate executives in building generational wealth, diversifying their investment portfolios, and navigating career transitions through franchise ownership.Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the hosts and guests and do not constitute financial advice. Always consult a licensed professional for financial decisions.This episode is sponsored by a podcast show partner. We may receive compensation if you use links or services mentioned in this episode.The hosts may have a financial interest in the programs or services mentioned in this episode.Connect with Cliff Nonnenmacher:-Website - Franocity.com

Bonus Episode for Jan. 21. The big banks kick off earnings season with gangbuster investment-banking and trading operations. Their results offer a picture of a resilient consumer, but executives warn of a slew of geopolitical risks. Wall Street Journal lead financial reporter AnnaMaria Andriotis discusses what stood out in reports from Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, as well as regional banks such as U.S. Bancorp. David Uberti hosts this special bonus episode of What's News in Earnings, where we dig into companies' earnings reports and analyst calls to find out what's going on under the hood of the American economy. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here we go again – Tariffs and retaliatory tariffs DAVOS – Elitists are Meeting Suicide Coaches? Hedge funds – finally a good year! PLUS we are now on Spotify and Amazon Music/Podcasts! Click HERE for Show Notes and Links DHUnplugged is now streaming live - with listener chat. Click on link on the right sidebar. Love the Show? Then how about a Donation? Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter   Warm-Up - Here we go again - Tariffs and retaliatory tariffs - DAVOS - Elitists are Meeting - Suicide Coaches? - Hedge funds - finally a good year! Markets - Silver and Gold - ATH - Selling off after Greenland threat - Netflix - Saga continues Davos - 2026 - Economic Confab that often brings out the elite (elitists) - Many watch for their key points and do the opposite - Trump going, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi not - Why is Zelensky going? - Kushner, Bessent, Little Marco will be attending with Trump - Did you know - Larry Fink is the interim Co-Chair. - The CEOs that you would expect that love the limelight ) (Jensen, Nadella etc) World Economic Forum Report (Davos) - Due out Wednesday - expected to show that geopolitical confrontation is the top concern this year - Rising Inflation - Economic Downturn - Asset Bubbles - High debt burdens - Any of those could be any year and anyone in the world that is breathing could have made that list WEF List NEXT - Greenland - Sell or Else! - Trump promises 100% that he will impose tariffs and follow through - The tariffs will start at 10% on Feb. 1 and shoot up to 25% on June 1, Trump said. - Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland - Supposedly in response to EU allies moving troops into Greenland - Greenland protests with - Make America Go Away hats - 200% tariff threatened in champagne and wines (Mad at Macron) Oh - and Gaza - The new Board of Peace - Trump names himself 'Board of Peace' chair under October plan - Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, former British prime minister Tony Blair and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. - Supposedly Putin has said he was also invited to be on the board. - Purpose? Officially, the Board is mandated to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict... Saks - bankrupt - Chapter 11 - Problems really got worse after they agreed to purchase Needless Markup (aka Neiman Marcus) - Amazon filed an objection to Saks Global's bankruptcy financing plan on the grounds it could harm creditors and push the tech company further down the repayment pecking order. - Amazon The tech company invested $475 million into Saks' acquisition of Neiman Marcus in December 2024,  a stake it said is now effectively “worthless.” - Amazon threatened more “drastic remedies” if Saks doesn't heed its concerns, including the appointment of an examiner or a trustee. - Amazon initially invested because it thought Saks would start selling its products on Amazon's website and the tech company would offer technology and logistics expertise.| - Amazon's attorneys: “Saks continuously failed to meet its budgets, burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year, and ran up additional hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices owed to its retail partners.” Suicide Coaches - “This year, you really saw something pretty horrific, which is these AI models became suicide coaches,” Benioff told CNBC's Sarah Eisen on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum's flagship conference in Davos, Switzerland. - In 2018, Benioff said social media should be treated like a health issue, and said the platforms should be regulated like cigarettes: “They're addictive, they're not good for you.” - “Bad things were happening all over the world because social media was fully unregulated,” he said Tuesday, “and now you're kind of seeing that play out again with artificial intelligence.” China - China 2025 new yuan loans 16.27 trln yuan, lowest since 2018 - Dec new yuan loans beat forecast - PBOC announces targeted monetary policy easing - "From the asset side, amid the property market adjustment, the private sector including households and firms showed insufficient willingness to add leverage, while government bond issuance was ramped up to stabilize leverage and the economy." - Now what is happening is that $ that used to go into real estate is heading for stocks/risk assets. - Chinese authorities tightened rules on margin financing, signaling unease over the pace of a rally. - - Under the new rule, investors must now provide margin equal to the full value of the securities they buy on credit, up from the previous 80% threshold. - - - Regulators made the move to rein in potential froth in financial markets, with a fund manager saying it sends a clear signal that they want a slow bull market, not an overheated one. --- Under the new rule, investors must now provide margin equal to the full value of the securities they buy on credit, up from the previous 80% threshold, according to a Shenzhen Stock Exchange statement. The move, which applies to Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing bourses, underscores regulators' efforts to rein in potential froth in financial markets. More China - China's population of 1.4 billion continued to shrink, marking the fourth straight year of decrease, new government statistics show. The total population in 2025 stood at 1.404 billion, which was 3 million less than the previous year. - After the one-child policy - now government is pushing or more births - Measured another way, the birth rate in 2025 — 5.63 per 1,000 people — is the lowest on record since 1949 - Government tactics range from cash subsidies to taxing condoms to eliminating a tax on matchmakers and day care centers. Bank Earnings - Generally pretty good! - Yield curve is helping in a big way - steepening - Goldman beats, BAC beast Morgan Stanley bets etc. etc. - Goldman: The company said profit jumped 12% from a year earlier to $4.62 billion, or $14.01 per share, on gains across its capital markets businesses. - Morgan Stanley: Last Thursday reported fourth-quarter results that exceeded Wall Street expectations on the back of strong revenue from wealth management. Fed Chair - Over the weekend, Hassett thinks Trump is right not to have him in that position (What a sap! Good he is not in running anymore) - Rick Reider and Warsh are front-runners - Who ever kisses the most ass should win - Warsh would actually be a good pick - experience and smart guy that is level headed - Meanwhile - all of a sudden Trump says he is not looking to fire Powell (maybe h wants him to resign) Netflix/Warner Brothers Update - Netflix now plans to pay $27.75 per WBD share entirely in cash to acquire WBD's streaming platform HBO Max and the Warner Bros. film studio. - In reaction tot he hostile takeover bid from Paramount/Skydance - The last offer was unanimously approved by the BOD - NFLX Earnings ..... --- Earnings per share: 56 cents vs. 55 cents, estimated ------Revenue: $12.05 billion vs $11.97 billion, estimated - Stock down AH Inflation (Did we talk about this?) - Even though we are told there is little inflation... - Consumer Price Index increases 0.3% in December - Food, rents were the main drivers of consumer inflation - Underlying inflation rises a moderate 0.2% - Food prices surged 0.7% Planes! - Boeing outsold Airbus last year - First time since 2018 - BA stock made an ATH last week Bond Vigilantes - Danish pension operator AkademikerPension said it is exiting U.S. Treasurys over finance concerns tied to America's budget shortfall. - The move comes amid increasing tensions with the U.S. over Greenland as President Donald Trump pushes for control of the island. - AkademikerPension said it plans to have closed its position of around $100 million in U.S. Treasurys by the end of the month. - 10 YR yields moved up again to 4.3% - What if.....??? (Mutual assured destruction?) Hedgies - Hedge fund investors posted gains of about 12.6% last year, the best returns since 2009, according to data compiled by Hedge Fund Research Inc. - Funds run by industry giants such as D.E. Shaw & Co. and Millennium Management posted double-digit returns, with Bridgewater Associates' Pure Alpha II fund scoring a 34% gain. - Hedge funds secured net inflows of $71 billion during the first three quarters of last year, a major reversal after a decade of outflows, with the industry's giants being among the major beneficiaries.     Love the Show? Then how about a Donation? ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE THE CLOSEST TO THE PIN CUP 2025 Winners will be getting great stuff like the new "OFFICIAL" DHUnplugged Shirt!     FED AND CRYPTO LIMERICKS   See this week's stock picks HERE Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter

Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer Ted Pick speaks about the current dealmaking environment. He speaks with Bloomberg's Jonathan Ferro from the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our co-heads of Securitized Products Jay Bacow and James Egan explain why recent U.S. government measures won't change much the outlook for mortgage rates, home prices and sales this year.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Jay Bacow: Jim Egan, I see you sitting across from me wearing a quarter zip. As old things become new again, my teenager would think that is trendy. James Egan: I think this is one of, if not the first, times in my life that a teenager has thought I was trendy, including back when I was a teenager. Jay Bacow: Well, as captain of the chess team in high school, I was never trendy. But Jim… Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jay Bacow, co-head of Securitized Products Research at Morgan Stanley. James Egan: And I'm Jim Egan, the other co-head of Securitized Products Research at Morgan Stanley. Today, we're here to talk about some of the programs that are being announced and their implications for the mortgage and U.S. housing markets. It's Tuesday, January 20th at 10am in New York. Now, Jay, there have been a lot of announcements from this administration. Some of them focused on affordability, some of them focused on the mortgage market, some of them focused on the housing market. But I think one of them that had the biggest impact, at least in terms of trading sessions immediately following, was a $200 billion buy program from the GSEs. Can you talk to us a little bit about that program? Jay Bacow: Sure. As you mentioned, President Trump announced that there would be a $200 billion purchase of mortgages, which later was confirmed by FHFA director Bill Pulte, to be purchased by Fannie and Freddie. Now, we would highlight putting this $200 billion number in context. The market was probably expecting the GSEs to buy about a hundred billion dollars of mortgages this year. So, this is maybe an incremental a hundred billion dollars more. The mortgage market round numbers is a $10 trillion market, so in the scope of the size of the market, it's not huge. However, we're only forecasting about [$]175 billion of growth in the mortgage market this year, so this is the GSEs buying more than net issuance. It's also similar in size to the Fed balance sheet runoff, which is something that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant mentioned in his comments last week. And so, the initial impact of this announcement was reasonably meaningful. Mortgage spreads tightened about 15 basis points and headline mortgage rates rallied to below 6 precent for the first time since 2022 on some mortgage measures. James Egan: Alright, so we had a 15 basis point rally almost immediately upon announcement of this program. That took us, I believe, through your bull case for agency mortgages in our 2026 outlook. So, what's next here? Jay Bacow: Well, we have a lot of questions about what is next. There's a lot of things that we're still waiting information on. But we think the initial move has sort of been fully priced in. We don't know the pace of the buying. We don't know if the purchases are going to be outright – like the Fed's purchase programs were. Or purchased and hedging the duration – like historically, the GSEs portfolios have been managed. We don't know how the $200 billion of mortgages will be funded. The way we're kind of thinking about this is if the program is just – and this is a podcast, not a video cast but I'm putting air quotes around just – $200 billion, it is probably priced in and then maybe and then some. However, if the purchases are front loaded or the purchases are increased, or maybe this purchase program indicates possible changes to the composition of the Fed's balance sheet, then there could be further moves in spreads and in mortgage rates.But Jim, what does this mean to the mortgage market writ large? James Egan: Right. So, when we think about what you're talking about, a 15 basis point move in mortgage rates, and we take that into the housing market, the first order implication is on affordability. And this is a move in the right direction, but it is small from a magnitude perspective. You mentioned mortgage rates getting below 6 percent for the first time since 2022. When we think about this in the context of our expectations for 2026, we already had the mortgage rate getting to about 5.75 in the back half of this year. This would take that forecast down to about 5.6 percent. That has a very modest upward implication for our purchase volume forecast, but I want to emphasize the modest piece. We're talking about [$]4.23 million was our original existing home sales forecast. This could take it to [$] 4.25 [million], maybe as high as [$]4.3 [million] with some media effect layered in. But any growth in demand, when we think about the home price side of the equation, we think we'll be met with additional listings. So, it really doesn't change our home price forecast for 2026, which was plus 2 percent. So very modest, slightly upward risk to some of our forecasts. And as we've been saying, when we think about U.S. housing in 2026, the risk to our modest growth forecasts, 3 percent growth in sales, 2 percent growth in home prices. The risk has always been to the upside. That could be because demand responds more to a 5 percent handle in mortgage rates than we're expecting. Or because you get more and more of these programs from the administration. So, on that note, Jay, what else do we think can be done here? Jay Bacow: I mean, there are a lot of potential things that could be done, which could be helpful on the margin or not, depending on how far they are willing to think about the possibilities. Some of the easier changes to make would be changes to the loan level pricing adjustments and the guaranteed fees, and mortgage insurance premiums, which would lower the cost in the roughly 10 to 15 basis points. There are some other changes that could be put through which we think from a legal side which would be much more difficult to make retroactive. That would be either allowing you to take your mortgage with you to the next house, which is what we call portability. Or allowing you to transfer your mortgage to the new home buyer, which is what we call assumability. We think it's extremely difficult to make that retroactive, but that could have some larger impacts, if that were to go through. Now, Jim, speaking of other impacts, mortgages spreads have tightened 15 basis points. What does that do to some of the other sectors that you cover? James Egan: Right. We do think there is a portfolio channel effect here that could be good for risk assets broader than just the agency mortgage space, even though that is clearly the primary impact of that $200 billion buying program. Securitized credit, we think is one of the clear beneficiaries of that tightening, given the relationships it has to agency mortgages. The non-QM mortgage market in particular – one that we're looking at for positive tailwinds as a result of this. Jay Bacow: All right, so we got a big announcement. We got a pretty quick market move after that, and now we're waiting to see what the next steps are. Likely going to have a marginal impact on housing activity, but we got to keep our ears and our eyes open to see what else might come. Jim, always great talking to you. James Egan: Pleasure talking to you too, Jay. And to all of you regular listeners, thank you for adding us to your playlist. Let us know what you think wherever you get this podcast and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today. Jay Bacow: Go smash that subscribe button.*** Disclaimer ***James Egan: It's a shame it's not a video podcast. What a great cardigan.

The Wealth Formula Podcast is one of the longest-running personal finance podcasts still standing. For more than a decade, I've shown up every single week to talk about investing, markets, and the forces shaping the economy. What's interesting is how much my own thinking has evolved over that time. Early on, I was more rigid. I was—and still am—a real estate guy. But back then, I didn't give much thought to ideas outside that lane. I was dogmatic, and I didn't always challenge my own beliefs. Time has a way of doing that for you. I've now lived through multiple market cycles. I've watched the stock market melt up to valuations that felt absurd—and then keep going. I've seen gold go from flat for a decade to parabolic over a year. I've seen interest rates sit near zero for a decade and then snap higher at the fastest pace in modern history. And I've learned, sometimes the hard way, that diversification is about survival and that every asset class has its day. One lesson I learned that I am thinking a lot about these days is: ignore major technological shifts at your own peril. Back in 2014, I first started hearing people talk seriously about Bitcoin. At the time, I dismissed it. I listened to the critics, was convinced it was a scam, and didn't take the time to truly understand it. That was a mistake—not because everyone should have bought Bitcoin, but because I ignored a structural change happening right in front of me. Bitcoin went from a cypherpunk expression of freedom to the largest ETF owned by BlackRock. Today, the dominant story is artificial intelligence. And whether you love stocks, hate stocks, prefer real estate, or focus exclusively on cash flow, you cannot afford to ignore AI. This isn't a fad. It's a general-purpose technology—on the scale of electricity, the internet, or the industrial revolution itself. That doesn't mean it's easy to invest in. It's hard to look at headline names trading at massive valuations and feel good about buying them today. But investing in AI isn't about chasing a single company. It's about understanding second- and third-order effects: energy demand, data centers, productivity gains, labor displacement, capital flows, and how blockchain and decentralized systems intersect with all of it. What experience has taught me is this: you don't need to be first to invest—but you do need to be early in understanding. If you wait until something feels obvious, most of the opportunity is already gone. This week's episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is focused squarely on AI and blockchain—what's real, what's noise, and where the long-term implications may lie. Listen to this episode. You'll come away smarter. And years from now, you may look back and realize this was one of those moments where paying attention really mattered. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast. Coming to you from Montecito, California. Today we wanna start with a reminder. We are in a new year and we are already doing deals, uh, through the Wealth Formula Accredit Investor Club. You can go and sign up for that for free. Uh, wealth formula.com just hit investor club and you just get on there and, and you’ll get onboarded. And from there, all you gotta do is wait for deal flow and webinars coming to your inbox. And, um, you know, if nothing else, you learn something. So go check it out. Uh, go to. Wealth formula.com and sign up for Investor Club now onto today’s show. Uh, the, it is interesting. I don’t know if you are aware it’s a listener, but we are, wealth Formula is, uh, probably I would say one of the, certainly in the one of the top longest running personal finance podcasts still. Standing. Uh, I’ve been around, well, I think the first episode was on like 2014, so it was a long time, but in earnest, you know, at least for over a decade. And, you know, during that time, I’ve shown up every week, every single week. Don’t Ms. Weeks, but none, none. Isn’t that incredible? I’ve shown up, uh, talked about investing and talked about very way markets are working, forces, shaping the economy, all that kind of stuff. But you know, as you can imagine, as a. As a younger individual versus, um, my crusty self. Now, you know, a lot of my own thinking has evolved over that time, you know, back then. And I, you know, I think this appealed to some people, but, um, you know, I was really dogmatic. I’m a real estate guy, right? And I still am a real estate guy, but back then I wouldn’t give anything else the time of day to even think about, you know, and, and, uh, I, I, you know. I was dogmatic and didn’t always challenge my own belief systems. Um, I’m different now, right? I’ve softened And time is a way of, of changing all of that dogmatic stuff for you. You know, I’ve lived through multiple market cycles. I’ve watched, well, I’ve watched the stock market, which I, which I always maligned, you know, melt up to valuations. Uh, that felt absurd. And then keep going higher. I’ve seen gold, which was kind of ridiculous for the longest time. I watched it for like a decade, just pretty much flat, and then it goes parabolic. Over the last year, I’ve seen interest rates sit near zero for a decade and then snap higher. Uh, not even as time, just launch higher at the fastest space in modern history. And I’ve learned sometimes I guess, the hard way that diversification is about survival and that every class, every asset class has its day. Just like every dog has its day. And um, you know, one other lesson that I learned that I’m thinking a lot about these days is ignore major technological shifts at your own peril. So what am I talking about? Well. It’s kind of a, it is a technological shift, whether you think it about not, but Bitcoin. Okay. Back in 2014, I first started hearing people talk seriously about Bitcoin, and at that time I dismissed it. I was, uh, I was listening to critics beater Schiff that constantly called it a scam, said it was going to zero and so on. I didn’t, I didn’t take the time to truly understand it, to try to understand it the way I understand it now, that makes me a believer in Bitcoin. That, of course was a big mistake, not because, you know, everyone should have bought Bitcoin and, uh, back then, well, they, you know, would’ve been nice if they did, but because fundamentally I ignored something that was a structural change happening right in front of me. And since then, Bitcoin went from a cipher punk expression of freedom to the large CTF owned by BlackRock today. The dominant story is actually artificial intelligence. Now, whether you love stocks, hate stocks, prefer real estate focused exclusively on cab, whatever, you cannot afford to ignore ai. It’s not a fad. It’s a general purpose technology and a technology shift, and the scale of electricity. The internet bigger than the internet, bigger than the industrial revolution. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to invest in. I mean, I’m gonna go invest in AI and make a bunch of money because I mean, what does that even mean? It’s hard to look at headline names, trading at massive valuations like Nvidia and all that right now, and saying, oh, I’m gonna go buy that. Who knows? That’s gonna work out. When I talk about investing in AI isn’t really just investing in stocks or any individual company or data centers or whatever. It’s about understanding. The second and third order effects, energy demand. You know, as I mentioned, data centers, productivity gains, labor displacement, capital flows, and how blockchain and decentralized systems intersect with all of that. It is very, very complicated. Um, but it’s really important to start to try to understand, you know, an experience that stop me is this. You don’t need to be the first to invest, but you do need to be early in understanding. If you wait until something feels obvious, usually the opportunity’s gone by then. And you know, the thing about AI is even if you think it’s obvious now. The reality is that most people haven’t really caught on. Maybe they played with chat GPT, but I don’t think they’re understanding what this whole, you know, this thing is gonna do to our world. Um, anyway, so that is what this week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast, uh, is about. It’s about AI and also, um, a little bit about, you know, bitcoin and blockchain and that kind of thing. Um, we’re gonna talk about what’s noise, uh, you know, where the long, what the long-term, uh, implications are all of this stuff. This is a show that, uh, I really enjoy doing really, really good stuff. Um, so make sure you listen in. We’ll have that interview for you right after these messages. Wealth Formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net. The strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying you compound interest. On that money, even though you’ve borrowed it, that result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique. It’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its backbone. Turbocharge your investments. Visit Wealth formula banking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today. My guest on Wealth Formula podcast is Jim Thorne, chief Market strategist at Wellington. L is private wealth with more than 25 years of experience in capital markets. He’s previously served as chief capital market strategist, senior portfolio manager, chief economist, and CIO. Uh, equities at major investment firms and has also taught economics and finance at the university level. Uh, Jim is known for translating complex economic, political, and market dynamics into clear actionable insights to help investors and advisors navigate long-term capital decisions. Uh, Jim, welcome with the program. Thanks for having me Buck. Well, um, Tim, I, I, I, uh, had been following a little bit of, uh, what you discuss on, uh, on X and, um, one of the things that caught my eye is, you know, your, your narrative on, on ai, a lot of people are tend to be still sort of skeptical of AI and what’s going on, uh, with the markets. Um, uh, but at the same time, uh, there’s this. Sense. I think that ignoring AI altogether as an investor is, is, is downright potentially dangerous. So, uh, at the highest level, why is AI something people simply can’t dismiss? Well, we live in an, uh, uh, you know, many other people have coined this term, but we live, we’re living in an exponential age of, of technological innovation. And, you know, AI and I’ll just add into their, uh, blockchain is just the normal evolutionary process that, you know, for me started when I left graduate school and came into the business in the nineties where everybody had this high degree of skepticism of the computer and the, the, the phone, the, the. And the internet. And so, you know, what we do is we go through these cycles and there are periods of time where the stars align. And we have a period of time where we have what I would call an intense period of innovation where I would suggest to you that. People are skeptical. Skeptical, and yet at the same point in time, they very early on in the, in the, in the trade, call it a bubble when it’s not. And so I think it comes from the position of ignorance. One, I think two, fear, and then three. If you think about if you are an active manager, I in a 40 ACT fund, um, you know, and you’re sitting there with, uh, you know, mi. Uh, Nvidia at, you know, eight or 9% of your index. And that’s a big chunk that you’ve gotta put into your fund, uh, just to be market neutral. So there’s a lot of people that hate this rally. There’s a lot of people that are can, going to continue to hate this rally. But the thing I anchor my hat on are a couple of things. Look at if this is no different than the railroad. Canals, any major technological innovation, will it become a bubble? Yes. Just not now. So, so let’s follow up on that, because a lot of people think, or are talking about the, do you know the.com bubble, uh, comparisons, and you’ve argued that that sort of misses the real story. So, so where are we getting it wrong right now? Are those people getting it wrong? In the nineties buck, you’d walk into a bar and there wouldn’t be ESPN on there’d be CNBC on people were getting their jobs to become day traders. Folks didn’t go to the go to university because they were basically getting their white papers financed. You had companies that were trading off of clicks. So I lived that. Anybody who is of a younger generation has no idea what a bubble is, and it’s specious and pedantic for them to use that term when they have no clue about what they’re talking about. But you did mention that it could become a bubble. How do we know when it does become a bubble? Oh, it’ll become a bubble. Well, when, when, when you know, the, what, what I am looking for is, you know, when we, when the good investment opportunities start to dry up, when liquidity starts to dry up. So what I, it’s not about valuation, to me it’s about liquidity. So in 2000, what, and I’m roughly speaking, what went down was you had all these companies that were trading at Strat catastrophic valuation, this stupid valuations, and you walked in one day and they didn’t get financing. And if you read the prospectus or you followed the company, you knew that they were not going to be free cash flow positive for another two or three rounds of financing. All of a sudden you walked in and everybody goes, oh my God, this thing, you know, trading at 250 times sales. And everybody went, yeah, of course. And so what it was is, was when does liquidity dry up? So I’ll give you a date, um, you know, with Trump’s big beautiful bill act. 100% tax deductibility of CapEx and that goes until Jan 1, 20 31. So to me, that’s a very motivating factor for people to, um, invest. The last thing I would say to you in more of a game theoretic context book is, look, if you are a big tech company and you don’t invest in ai. You are ensuring your death. Yahoo, Hela Packard. I can go through the list of companies that cease to invest, so they’re looking. If it was you and I when we were running this company, I would say, dude, we gotta invest because if we don’t have a poll position in this next platform, whatever it is, we’re done. We’re toast. And I think that’s why you’re seeing all these hyperscalers spending as much money as they are. ’cause they get this, they saw it. So, you know, you framed ai not necessarily as a a tech trade, but as a capital expenditure cycle. Can you explain that to people? Well, what we need to do is we need to build out the infrastructure of ai. Then, and that’s the phase that we’re in right now. So it’s more like we’re building out all of the railroads, the railway tracks and the railway stations across the United States back in the 18 hundreds. And then we’re gonna go through that building phase. And then as that building phase goes, some companies, some towns, are going to basically realize and recognize what’s happening and start to basically take ai. Bring it into their business model, into enhanced margins. Right. So right now we’re building it out. I mean, you know, we all focus on the hyperscalers, but the majority of companies, pardon me, governments. Individuals, they haven’t used AI and, and what is interesting about this is back in the nineties, they were talking about how the internet had to evolve to be much more. You know, uh, have critical thinking in, in, in it. And it was more explained when you went to these conferences, as you know, you know, think about this. You’re hearing this in 99, okay? Not today. You go in and you ask Google or dog pile at the same time, or excite, okay? You would say, I wanna go to Florida in the third week of March and I wanna stay here and I wanna spend this amount of money and I wanna rent a car. Plan it for me. And they would come back and they would tell you that it would come back and it would, it would, everything would be there. And you would have your over here and all you would have to do is drop your money and you had your thing planned. So none of this is as, it’s aspirational, but we’ve heard it before. And in technology, what happens is it’s not like it’s new. We’ve been talking to, I did machine learning in in graduate school. Ai, you know, I did neural networks and I’m a terrible Ian. This isn’t, you know, Claude Shannon wrote about this in 1937, right? But it’s about when does it hit, and so it was chat GBT. Can we argue, was that right? As an investor, it’s stop arguing, start investing. Then what you’ve gotta figure out, which is the question you ask, is when does the music stop? I think it goes until the end of the decade. You know, one of the things that, uh, is interesting about this, uh, AI investment, uh, it’s, it’s unfolding in a higher interest rate environment. Why is that detail so important? Understanding its significance? Well, it’s the cost of capital, right? And so this phase that we have right now. It’s funny you say that, right? ’cause our reference point is zero interest rates, right? Yeah, yeah. Right. That’s right. So, you know, you know, so, so think about this, what it happens right now. Now we’re in the phase where you’ve got these hyperscalers that instead of taking all their free cash flow and buying bonds and buying back stock, are increasing CapEx because there’s a great tax deduction on it. So you get a lot of, so we’re in this phase where, for where, where a lot of the money is, you know, was. Was, let me, let me be clear, was a hundred free cashflow. Now we’re getting these guys, these companies like Oracle and what have you, you know, starting to issue debt and look at debt isn’t bad as long as the rate of return on debt is higher than the interest rates. And so, you know, you know, I, I would say historically speaking, for a lot of these high quality names, the interest rates are not, uh, at levels that will stop them from investing. Right. Right. You know, you’ve written that, um, productivity is ultimately the real story behind ai. So why does productivity matter more than the technology headlines themselves? Well, let me just put it this way, right? So we’ve grown, I grew up, I, I joined, I’m up here in Toronto, right? So I’m gonna give it to you in Canadian dollars, right? So I joined, I joined here. You know, I grew up here, went to the states, came back home. Growing this company I joined when we’re about three and a half billion. We’re getting close to 50 billion, and we’re the fastest growing independent platform in the country. I’m a one man band, right? I use three ai. In the old days, I’d have four research assistants. Where’s the margin in that? And so I, that’s how I see it. And let me be clear, it’s, you know, this isn’t we’re, it’s not perfect. But if I wanted to say, instead of you, but hey, write me a 2000 word essay on the counterfactual of what happened with railroads up until 1894 when the, when the bubble popped, give me a f, you know, a a thousand word essay and, and just a general overview. I can get that in less than five minutes. Michael Sailor is writing product on ai, which, which, which you would take, which you would take. He’s in his presentation, say it would take a hundred lawyers. So it’s gonna be more about those. And it’s, it’s no different than Internet of things or, you know, it was, uh, Kasparov that talked about this. Gary Kasparov talking about the melding of, of technology in humans. He would ran, run this chess tournament called freestyle. You could use a computer, you could use, you know, grand Masters. You could use whatever you wanted to compete. And who won? Well, who won it Was that those teams that were generalists that had a little bit of that, the knowledge of the computer and the knowledge of the test. Uh, o of chess, right? That’s what’s gonna happen. So this isn’t we’re, as far as I’m concerned, we’re not, yes, there’s going to be some d some jobs that are going to be replaced, but that is always the case in technology. I’m not a Luddite, okay? I am not Luddite. But the same point in time. I, I would suggest to you that it, it is just a really, for me, it’s a, helps me. Do research no different than when I was an undergrad and they went from cue cards in the, the library at the university to actually having a dummy terminal and I could ask questions in queue. You know, it stalked me from having to go to the basement of the library and going to microfiche. Right. Have helping that way. Now can it, can, will it do other things? I’m sure it is, and I’ll lead that to Elon Musk and the crew. You know, that’s above my pay grade. But for me, I see it as a very helpful way of, you know, allowing me to process and delineate. Much more information a a and not have me waste so much time trying to figure out what got went on in the past or, you know, QMF. Right. You know, summarize me the talk five, you know, academic papers in this area, what are they saying? And then they gimme the papers. Right. It just speeds the process up. Yeah. You know, um, one of the things that I’ve been sort of talking about and thinking about. Is that it’s hard to not see AI as a very, very strong deflationary force. Um, how do you think about that? Yeah. Technology is deflationary, right? Doubt about it. And so I look at it this way, Ray. Um, so I work at the financial services industry, okay. You know, Mr. Diamond of JP Morgan is talking about how they are starting to embrace blockchain and ai. They are going to cut out the back end of that in the, the margins in that, in that company by the end of the cycle are going to be fantastic. People just do not get in. You know, the financial services industry is built on a platform. Of the 1960s, dude. I mean, they’re still running Fortran, cobalt. So you know what I, how I look at this is much more as a margin type story, and there’s going to be a lot of displacement. But at the same point in time, I look at Tesla and automation and ai. And you know, people look at Tesla as a car company. I look at Tesla as an advanced manufacturing company. Elon Musk could basically go into any industry and disrupt it if it wanted to. Right. So that’s how I look at it. And so, you know, the hard part is going to be, you know. Nothing. If we get back to where we were, it’s not going to be perfect, right? Because here’s, here’s where the counter is, here’s where the counter is. Right? If you, if, if you think about, and we’re, I’m gonna take Trump outta the equation and ent outta the equation right now, but if we just went back to the way things were before COVID, we would have strong deflationary forces. Okay. Just with demographics, just with excessive levels of debt. Just with, you know, pushing on a string in terms of, in terms we couldn’t get the growth up, you know, and, you know, and the overregulation of financial institutions. Trump and descent are basically applying what’s called supply side economics, and they’re deregulating. It’s says law, which is John Batiste, that says basically supply creates his own demand and it’s non-inflationary. But really what they’re going to try to do is they’re going to try to run the economy hot and they’re gonna try to pull this way out of the debt. And if you do that and you deregulate the banks. And allow the banks to get back to where they were before the financial crisis. Okay. You know, and, and the Fed takes its interest rates down to neutral, expands the balance sheet. Then I don’t think we’re gonna go back to the zero bound in deflation. I think this thing’s gonna run hot for a long time. And I think it, the real question is, is, is is 2 75 in the United States the neutral rate? I think it is. Uh, but as, as, as Scott be says, and, and, and, and, and let’s be clear, buck, the guy’s a superstar. Okay. Guy is a legend. Just you sit there, just shut up and listen to him. Okay. They keep up, right? Well, so they’re gonna run it hot, but where we are is, in his words, mine, not mine. We’re still in this detox period, you know what I mean? We still got the Biden era. We still got, you know, a over a decade of excessive ca of Central Bank intermediation. That needs to get, you know, go away. So what I say, and what I’ve been writing about is 26 is going to be the year that the baton is passed back to the private sector. Let’s get rates down to 2 75. That’s, I mean, I’m going off the New York Fed model. That says real fed funds, the real, the real neutral rate is 75 to 78 basis points. I think inflation’s at two. That that gets you 2 75. Get the rates there and then get the balance sheet of the Fed to the level so that overnight lending isn’t loose or tight. It’s just normal. And then step back, go away and let Wall Street and the private sector create credit. Create economic growth and let’s get back to the business cycle. And if we do that, we’re gonna have non-inflationary growth. It’s gonna be strong, but we’re not going back to the zero bound and we’re gonna grow our way out of this. And so that’s where I get really excited about. This is a very unique time in history. A very, very, very unique time in history where, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last because of the compression that we have now because of the, you know, we live in such a digital world, but let’s say it’s five years demographic says it’s to 33, 32 to 33. That’s, you know, that’s how long this run is. And, and to me, uh, AI is a massive play. I, I, to me, blockchain is a massive play and to me it’s to those countries and companies that get it is, whereas investors, we wanna think, start thinking about investing. Yeah. You mentioned, um, non non-inflationary growth. Can you drill down on that a little bit just so people understand a little bit where. Usually you think of an economy running super hot, you, you think automatically there’s an, you know, an inflationary growth. So I want you to think in your mind into your list as think in your mind. Go back to economics 1 0 1 with the demand curve. In the supply curve, okay? And there are an equilibrium. And at that equilibrium we have a price at an equilibrium, and we have an output as an equilibrium. Okay? Now what I want you to do is I want you to keep the demand curves stagnant or, or, or anchored. Then I want you to shift the supply curve out. Prices go down, output goes out. We can talk all this esoteric stuff, you know, you know Ronald Reagan and, and Robert Mandel and supply side economics. But it’s really your shift in the supply curve out, and that’s what, and that’s what BeIN’s doing. I mean, this is a w would just sit down and be quiet. He’s talking about, you know, what is deregulation? He’s pushing the supply provider. Oh, hold on. My phone. My, my thing. And what did, since the two thousands, what did, what was the policy? It was kingian, it was all focused on the demand curve. Everything was focused on demand. And so all we’re doing is we’re, we’re getting the keynesians out. I use 2000 ’cause that’s when Ben Bernanke really came in and was very influential. Let me just say he’s a very smart, I learned so much from reading. Smart, smart, smart, smart guy. But his whole thing was Kasan. He came from MIT, his thesis supervisor was Stanley Fisher, right? We’re going back to, you know, Mario Dragons thesis supervisors, Stanley Fisher, all these guys came from MIT, Larry, M-I-T-M-I-T, Yale, and Princeton. Whereas previously it was the University of Chicago. It was Milton Friedman. It was, it was supply side economics. We’re going back, they’re going back to supply side economics and right now we need it. We need balance. But my god, what did we end off with? We ended off with four years of mono modern monetary theory. Deficits matter. That’s insanity. You had mentioned a little bit, uh, you, you’ve talked about blockchain a few times here. Talk about the significance. I mean, it’s sort of, you know, blockchain was a thing that everybody was, everybody was talking about it, you know, three, four years ago, but now it’s all about ai. But you know, now you’ve got, um, but in, but in the background, blockchain has grown, uh, adoption has grown. Uh, tell us what’s going on there, and if you could tie it into the significance of, of where we’re at today. Yeah. Um, uh, Jeff Bezos gave a wonderful speech, I think in two thou, early two thousands, where he basically talked about the fact that, you know, once this innovation is led out of the genie’s, led out of the bottle, whether or not, you know, buck and Jim, like it as an investment, the innovation continues. And so after the internet bubble pop, right? Really smart guys like Jeff Bezos, uh, Zuckerberg, you, you, the whole cast of characters, right? Basically built it out. Okay. And it wasn’t perfect and everybody knew it wasn’t perfect. I mean, that was the whole thing that was so bizarre. But they knew it wasn’t perfect and they knew that they needed to solve some problems. Right. And you know, it was a double spend problem. I mean, the internet that we were dealing with right now was developed in the 1950s and so on and so forth. And so, you know, that always stuck with me. Right. A couple of things stuck with me because I’ve lived through a couple of these cycles. The first one is Buck. When the, when Wall Street coalesces around something just shut up and buy it, right? I mean, I, I spent too much of my life arguing about whether dog pile and Ask Gees was better than Google. Wall Street said Google was the best. Shut up. Invest, right? And so, so look, blockchain solved the double spend problem. Blockchain solved all the problems that the original iteration of the internet could solve, and everybody knew it was coming along okay. So it’s a decentral, it’s decentralized, right? Uh, does, does not need to be reconciled. So no. Not only do you have another iteration of the internet. You have basically introduced into society the biggest innovation in accounting or recordkeeping since double entry. Bookkeeping accounting was introduced in Florence, Italy centuries ago by the Medicis and, and buck. All this is out there like, so this is a profound, right? So think about you’re in an accounting department and you don’t have to reconcile, right? So look. The first use cakes was Bitcoin. And what was the, what was the beautiful thing about it? Well, first off, it grew up by itself. And secondly, it’s got perfect scarcity, right? And so let’s just full stop. And I mean, yes, gold and silver had the run that they should have had decades. So I had been waiting and listening to people, gold bugs, talking about this type of run since the nineties. Okay. Um, but look, you know, and the problem with fi money, right? I mean, this is, this goes back decades. It’s an old argument. The way you solve it is, is Bitcoin. That’s the solution. I mean, forget about it. I mean, if they’re gonna whip it around and do all this stuff, fine. But the other thing that people miss and Sailor hasn’t, and Sailor is brilliant, is look. Bitcoin is pristine collateral in 2008, in September. What caused the, the system to stop was the counter. We could not identify counterparty risk for near cash. It was a settlement problem. Anybody you talk to Buck that says it was, you know, the subprime this and it, yeah, that was crap. I get that. But when the system shut down is you had a $750 million near cash instrument with X, Y, Z, wall Street firm, and you did this for three extra beeps and it was no longer cash. Guess. And guess what? Your institutional money market fund broke the buck. That’s when the system blew sky high. When the money market broke the buck and it was a settlement problem, blockchain and Bitcoin solved that. Sailor knows that, look where Wall Street’s gonna go. They understand now that. Bitcoin is pristine, collateral and capital that is 100% transparent. Let’s lend against it, and that’s what Sadler’s doing. That’s why Wall Street hates the guy so much, right? Think about that. Think of where is he going after he’s going after all the stranded capital on Wall Street. And, and the whole point is he’s sitting there going, I’m too busy for this. And you’ve got all these other people that are gonna live off of other people’s ignorance. Meanwhile, Jing Diamond knows exactly what he’s talking about. We can identify, if I hear one more person on me in, in the meeting say, I don’t know. You know, you know, uh, micro strategies balance sheet is so complicated. Really. Compared to JP Morgans, I mean, you know what his capital is. It says Bitcoin, like, what are you guys talking about? But hey, fucking in this business, people make generational wealth on ignorance of people who think they know what they don’t know. So, you know, just going back to Jamie Diamond, you know, he spent, I don’t know how long. Throwing every insult, uh, he could towards Bitcoin. And now they’ve really kind of, they haven’t backtracked. I think he’s, he’s, you know, his, his, um, I think the way he phrases is the blockchain’s a real thing. He never seems to really say the word Bitcoin, uh, in this regard. Um, banks in general, where do you think they’re headed with this stuff? I mean, I, you know, right now, again, you can kind of see even. Um, I think, you know, some of the big advisory firms suddenly recommending one to, you know, one to 4% of people’s portfolios in Bitcoin. I mean, this is all, I mean, gosh, I, I’ve, you know, been talking about Bitcoin since 2017. This is in unbelievable transformation in less than a decade. Where do you see this going in the next five to 10 years? It’s called the, it’s called, what is it? It’s called, I’m gonna call it the Evolution of Jim. Me, you know, in my business and, and, and, and you know, the thing I have book is I’ve survived and I’ve gone through a lot of cycles. I’ve done a lot, you know, and you ask yourself, you scratch your head a lot and you’re, and you, but you’re continually doing objective research and you’re this, if you, this is why I love this game so much. Right? So let’s just go stop for a second. Let’s get some context. Right. My first summer job, one of my first summer jobs, I worked in the basement of a bank in the in, in downtown Toronto, right up the street from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And my job was to let guys in with beak, briefcases into the cage, into the big vault, to basically bring in certificates. Okay. And, and what? Stock certificates. And so remember, you know, and I remember my grandfather when we, when he died, look at, we couldn’t sell the house because he didn’t believe in the banks. And we were finding certificates all over the house in the walls. Okay? Right. So in the 1960s it was bare based. The whole industry was bare based. And there was the volume in Wall Street started to pick up to the point where they couldn’t handle the volume. There was a paper crisis where almost a third of the companies went down bankrupt because of the cage. The cage. Okay. So basically what happened was, to make a long story short, they came out with, they came, Hey, why don’t we get two computers At one point in time, they said, okay, crisis. Let’s solve it. Well, why don’t we get these two computers and we can solve, or we can sell trades among, amongst each other. Okay. And then we don’t need to have guys riding around Wall Street with bicycles and big briefcases. Okay. And then what we did was, what we did was we sat there and said, well, why don’t we have a centralized clearing, and we’re gonna call it DTC or CDS, depending on what country you’re in. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna offer paper, we’re gonna, we’re gonna issue paper rights to the underlying stock that was developed in the early 1970s. That’s the system that we’re on right now. There are a lot of faults with that. Let me give you, when you’ve talked about the GameStop a MC situation, when you have a company that’s basically have more shares outstanding short, sorry, more shares short than outstanding, that shows you that the old system doesn’t work. It’s called ation. The paper writes to the underlying assets, it, it doesn’t match up. There have been guys that make a career outta this and write books about this, right? Dole Pineapple. They had a corporate, a corporate event, right? Hostile takeover. 64,000 for 64 million shares, voted, I think, and there was only 3,200 on. We all know this, so this has to be solved. The way you solve it is you tokenize assets, and this was talked about a decade ago, and they know about it and true tofor, they, and if you’re thinking about it, it’s totally logical, right? But if we allow this innovation to go full stream ahead, we’re wiped out, right? So what did they do? They delayed. They delayed. And as you know, you could talk about, it’s called Operation choke 0.2 0.0. Right. You know, the Fed overreached their bounds, they de banked people. I mean, this is why, why Best it’s going after them. They, yet they stepped over their constitutional mandate. Right. The federal, the Fed Act is not, uh, does not supersede the US Constitution. Elizabeth warned the whole thing. They did it. Okay, so let’s not complain about it. So now Atkins is gonna, we’re gonna have the Clarity Act come out and they’re gonna basically deregulate New York Stock Exchange already there. They’re gonna put everything on the blockchain and when you put everything on the blockchain, trade a settlement. There’s no hypo. Immediate settlement. Immediate, which is a benefit if you can get your act together because it, you know, for Wall Street firms you need less capital, right? So it’s a natural evolutionary process. And then you sit there and go back in history, if you and I were writing it, we’d sit there and go, well, should we be surprised that the incumbents right, the status quo pushed back on innovation? No, there was a guy, there was a prophet, um. At, at Harvard, his name was Clay Christensen, and he wrote this wonderful book called The Innovator’s Dilemma. You know, why does, why don’t companies evolve, or why do they go bankrupt? It’s because they cease to evolve and the status quo doesn’t allow the evolution of the companies to take place. Right? Well, that’s what happened in RA. We’re gonna complain about it. No, it, it is what it is. It’s water under the bridge. And so what I think is happening is, you know, Mr. Diamond is basically saying. He’s pragmatic, he’s a realist. And now he’s saying, we gotta evolve. And hey, by the way, now I’ve gotten to the point where I think I can make a tunnel. Think about that. Yeah. Think about his own stable coins, right? So his own stable coins. And, uh, well think about this. If you trade like internal meetings, right? And I’m hyped this hypothetical, right? I go, fuck, don’t screw this up this time. And you’re gonna go, Jim, what are you talking about? I go. We want a nice bread between bid and ask in these financial price. We don’t wanna go down to pennies. Okay? Can we go back to the old days when we were, you know, trading in quarters and sixteenths and so we can make some skin in the game? I think you’ve got the deregulation of the banking industry where the banks are gonna, they’re fit. It’s gonna be baby steps. But what’s gonna happen is they’re gonna basically say, stop taking all that capital that’s sitting at the Fed, making four or fed funds rate overnights wherever it’s four half, 3 75 right now. And you can now trade it. Go back to prop trading, which is what they did. And they’re gonna start off, they will start off with, its only treasuries. Eventually they’ll be able to expand throughout our lifetime. So the old way you gotta look at it is, you know. We’re bringing the ba, you know, we’re putting the band back together, man. Right. And the banks are gonna deregulate, they’re gonna deregulate the banks, they’re going to innovate, they’re gonna be able to use the capital, their earnings profile going out into the end of the decade. It’s, it’s gonna be monstrous, it’s gonna be, you know, it, it’s, it’s, and, and that’s how I get, you know, when people say, where do you think the s and p goes? You know, I say, you know, 14,000, you know, double from here by the end of the decade. And he goes, well, what about ai? I go, well, they’re gonna, that’s important, but it’s the banks. I think the banks are gonna have a renaissance. Yeah. Yeah. Um, one thing just to get your thoughts on, so when you look at the banks, you talked about sort of the inevitability of tokenization. Um, the stock exchange, uh, we talked about stable coins. I mean, another great way for banks to make money. Uh, essentially where does that, how, how does that help or hurt Bitcoin adoption? Because Bitcoin is a sort of a separate, separate, you’re not, you’re not building on Bitcoin as much as you are, say, Ethereum, Mar Solana or, you know, some of the, some of the blockchain things. So, so is it just that. Is it just a, an adoption issue? Because you live in a, in a different world. You live in a world of blockchain and Bitcoin is, its currency. It’s weird, right? Because I, I’m writing this feed like, so Buck, where are you right now? Where, where, where are you located? I’m in Santa Barbara. You’re in California. So, yeah, so I’m in Toronto, right? Uh, you know, I lived in, worked in the States for, you know, a decade, a couple of decades, and I’m back home and it’s like, man, they don’t get it. Right, and, and, and, and what am I talking about? Well, well, this, this is the, the thing that you’ve gotta understand is this, right. Ethereum was invented by Vladi Butrin in this town, Joe Alozo, who’s the head of one of the largest Ethereum groups. Father is a dentist at Bathurst and Spadina. We’re up here and people are saying, oh, you know, president Trump don’t talk about being a 51st state. We act like a colony, duke. We are a, you know, we forget about calling us one. We are. So, look, it, look, there is no doubt in my mind that Ethereum is going to have a place and, and we’re going to use it. Seems like we’re going to use Ethereum and that’s the smart contract, you know? Um. And that’s fine. Um, you know, but going back in time. But, but remember, there’s not per, there’s not perfect scarcity there. So I like Ethereum, don’t get me wrong, but I look at Bitcoin and I look at the, I look at the scarcity, and I also look at the fact of, you know, what sa, what Sailor, if you sailor did a presentation in the middle of next year and all hell broke loose. What he did, and it’s, you know, and of course I’m hypothesizing. He basically went to New York and said, I am going to create fixed income products and I am going to give yields. On those products, and I’m coming after the stranded capital that sits on Wall Street that you guys have been ripping on for years. In the middle of last year, staler went public and declared war. Okay. Are we surprised that Jim Shane Oaks came out and everybody came out basically guns a blazing. Are we surprised? But what he, what Sailor did and put and slammed on the table is it’s pristine capital, it’s transparent capital. And what are you willing to pay for that? And now you GARP banks trading at. We have no idea what their capital structure really is. Honestly, we have an idea, but it’s very opaque, right? You know, the high quality names are trading at two, two to, you know, two times tangible book. You’ve got fintech’s companies trading at four to five times, right book, and you know, what’s Sailor doing right now? Diluting his stock so he can buy as much Bitcoin as he wants because he sees the next game. He says the hell with what you guys think the next game is going to be. Wall Street’s going to realize that Bitcoin is pristine capital and there’s only 21 million of it. What do you and, and what just happened today? What did Morgan Stanley just file a treasury company. So everything you and I are talking about, they know they’re smart guys, right? They’re real, they’re not. That’s, this is the whole point. They’re really, really, really smart. Okay. They see they’ve gone through the history. They know. Okay, so you’re sitting there, you get around the room, you say, so wait a minute. Wait. Whoa, sailor’s over here. And he’s basically saying he’s gonna give you a a pref that’s basically backed by Bitcoin charging 10%. And he’s going after our corporate clients. I mean, and what’s the pitch Buck? You’ve got a hundred million dollars. Okay, you got a hundred million dollars in the kitty. Okay, buck. What happens is you need $10 million a year for working capital, which is in cash, which means you’ve got $90 million sitting there idle. Hey, buck, I can give you 10% on that. You go to Jamie, he’s giving you two. What are you gonna do? Yeah. I think one of the issues right now is I the, the perceived risk profile of that. Right. Uh, you know. I tend to agree with you about the, uh, pristine nature of Bitcoin s collateral, but just in general, the perception. I don’t know that, that that’s. That’s the case. Well, you gotta go back to the fact that, do you think Bitcoin’s going to zero or not? No, of course not. Yeah. ‘ cause the Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero. There’s no, then, then that are, there’s Bitcoin could go to zero. There’s no, I mean, I don’t think, I mean, non-zero probability, of course, right? I don’t think it is. And if that has been, if it has been selected and now you have Wall Street coalescing it, I haven’t even mentioned the president of the United States or his family. Right. Uh, or the Commerce Secretary and his family, right? Or if you go to New York, wall Street, right, they’re all talking about it, right? So, I, I, you know, to me, I, I, the question about micro strategy, to me it’s not. That it’s a treasury company and it’s got a pile of Bitcoin. What does he do with it? Does he become a bank? Like why does it, this is me. I’m pitching him. Right. Hey, Mike, why don’t you just become a FinTech, say you’re like a FinTech company and you’ll get, and you, you’re gonna instantaneously trade it five to six times book. Why don’t you, why are you, you’re talking like you’re attacking them, but you’re still, you’re still a software company with a, with a big whack of Bitcoin that you are writing pres. Right? So, and, and so that’s, that’s how I look at it. I think the wave is too big. We are going to digitize. And the other thing that we didn’t really touch on with respect to AI and blockchain, and I’m gonna paraphrase the president. Right. Um, Mr. Trump is, look, um, it’s a matter of national security, duke, and when I hear that, I go back to the nineties in the eighties when I was in late eighties when I was an undergrad. Right. And it wasn’t China, it was Japan. And, and you know, what happened was, you know, it, it’s funny, Al Gore did deregulate so that. The internet could become for-profit. We all stood around and said, you know what the hell could, how do we make money on this? That’s, you know, what do we do? And then what did we do? We, we, we threw a ton of money at it and the United States controlled it. And what did we get out of it? We got out, we got, you know, all those companies. Right. The last thing I would say to you, and this is much more of a personal story, is I, when I was younger, I was in New York and it was 2000 and I was at the Grand Hyatt, and it was a tech, it was a tech conference and, uh, Larry Ellison Oracle was there and he gave a, he gave a, he gave a a, a fireside chat. Then, um, we go to a breakout room and, you know, in a break, I don’t know about if you’ve been to one, but you go to a breakout room, it’s a smaller room at the hotel, and you know, sometimes you got 25 people, sometimes you got 50 people, right. And, you know, I went to the, I went to the breakout with Mr. Allison ’cause of Oracle and I went in there and it was absolutely jammed and I was sweating and he just looked at us and he just ripped us. He AP Soly, just, I still have the scars today. I’m talking to you about it. Okay. He called it a bubble. He called it a bubble. He, he was early in calling it a bubble. I never forgot that. And then you sit there and see what he’s doing right now. Where he’s levering up the balance sheet. Now, to me, having survived in this game for such a long period of time, and I call it a game, it’s a game of strategy, whatever, you know, how does that not, you know, I would say to you, we were, your office was next to mine. Fuck. I remember New York, he’s loading the goose loaded in. He go in, he’s borrowing money from his grandmother. He’s, you know, what is going on. And he’s really stinking smart. You know, he’s, he, Larry Allenson just doesn’t do, and people, oh, he’s in, you know, he’s, no, he’s not, he’s, he’s like the mentor of all of these guys. You know what I mean? So there’s a, to me, there’s a discontinuity that these need to believe that we’re still early on because you know, what, if Larry’s, what do we take when Larry or Mr. Ellison is leveraging up to me, it’s profound because I’m anchoring off of my bias to the New York, the New York high at, at the Tech Co. I think it was, I think it was at Bear Stearn. I couldn’t remember Bear Stearns or Lehman. But you know, one of those I carry that experience on with the rest of my life. I do. It’s like, what is Larry thinking? Right? So he’s leveraging up buck. That’s all I know. He’s a priest or guy. Well, that’s probably a good place for us to stop, Jim, uh, chief, uh, market strategist at Wellington Elta Private Wealth. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much and be safe. You make a lot of money but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Hope you enjoyed it. Uh, and, uh, as I said before, do not ignore ai. This is something that you need to start using. Have your kids start using it. Uh, make sure that they, you know. They use it every day because this whole world is turning AI and it’s gonna happen. You know, it’s gonna happen in, in a blink of an, uh, blink of an eye. And the world is gonna change and there are gonna be real winners out there. And the winners are gonna be people who knew where there was, was going and kind of used it in their mind’s eye as they looked on navigating how. You know how to allocate their money. Anyway, that is it for me. This week on Wealth Formula Podcast. This is Buck JJoffrey signing off. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit wealth formula roadmap.com.

DAMIONMLK Day:Incoming Walmart CEO John Furner:Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy reminds us blahblahblah. During our annual MLK Day Celebration, we reflected on blahblahblah. We care for people. Blahblahblah We strive to be honest, fair, and courageous. And we put others first in the work we do to help people live better.When we lead with care, show respect and do what's right, we honor Dr. King's legacy through action and continue building a Walmart that reflects our purpose and values.Walmart: $27,408,854, the fiscal 2025 annual total compensation of our median associate was $29,469, and the ratio of these amounts was 930:1.By 11:14 AM: He has earned $29,469 (the median worker's entire year of labor).Total Earnings by MLK Day: ~$1,425,000That $1.4 million is equivalent to the lifetime earnings of 48 median Walmart associates (assuming each works for one year at $29,469)As of January 20, 2026, the combined net worth of the Walton family has reached a historic $513.4 billion, according to the latest Bloomberg and Forbes data.As of January 2026, the Walton family collectively receives approximately $3.4 billion per year in dividends from Walmart.Per Day: The family earns roughly $9.27 million every day just by owning the stock.Per Hour: They earn about $386,000 per hour, 24 hours a day.King was literally campaigning for a living wage in Memphis when he was shot by the FBI. your move, walmart CEO John Furner WHO DO YOU BLAME?WestJet reverses cramped seating layout after viral videos show passengers' knees pressed against seats.In the reconfigured layout, which rolled out in late October on select Boeing 737s, space between rows was reduced to 28 inches to accommodate an extra row of seats. WestJet also made economy class seats non-reclinable, offering passengers the option to pay extra for adjustable seats.In a news statement, the company said it will reverse what it called the "densified seating" by removing the additional row of seats.WHO DO YOU BLAME?Samantha (Sam) Taylor was appointed WestJet Group Executive Vice-President and Chief Experience Officer March 2025. Sam joined Sunwing in March 2020 as Chief Marketing Officer. Sam's portfolio is accountable for critical touch points in the guest journey and includes leading all Marketing, Guest Experience and Contact Centres for WestJet and Sunwing Vacations. MMStakeholders!Customers: WestJet's rollout of the reconfigured seats has sparked widespread outrage among travelers and even crew members.Employees: Reuters reported that pilots and flight attendants have raised concerns over the new configuration's comfort and safety, specifically whether passengers could safely evacuate the plane in an emergency due to the confined seating.Journalists: Reuters reported that pilots and flight attendants have raised concerns over the new configuration's comfort and safety, specifically whether passengers could safely evacuate the plane in an emergency due to the confined seating.Labor Unions: Alia Hussain, president of the union local representing WestJet cabin personnel, said: "It created a hostile working environment for us as cabin personnel."Onex Corporation, WestJet's publicly traded ownersWhich is really founder and board Chair Gerry Schwartz (annual Chair fee of $1 million), who maintains 100% control of the Multiple Voting Shares (MVS) of Onex Corporation, which effectively grants him 60% of the total voting power in the company.This control allows him to elect 60% of the members of Onex's Board of Directors. While he also personally holds a significant portion of the Subordinate Voting Shares (SVS)—roughly 11.3% as of late 2024—the primary mechanism of his control is the MVS class.All stupid U.S. dual class dictatorships who do not do this!!The "Sunset" Provision: In May 2023, Onex shareholders approved a plan to implement a "sunset" on these special voting rights. Under this agreement, Schwartz's multiple voting rights are scheduled to expire three years after the effective date of the amendment (roughly May 2026).Current Status: As we are currently in early 2026, Schwartz remains the controlling shareholder. Upon the "Event of Change" later this year, the Multiple Voting Shares will convert into Subordinate Voting Shares, and he will lose his absolute control, shifting the company toward a more traditional governance structure.Matt Damon says Netflix wants to make action movies differently to account for shorter attention spansHow the art of filmmaking is being subvertedThe "Say What You Do" Rule: Writers are frequently being told to eliminate subtext. In traditional filmmaking, if a character is sad, you show them staring at a cold cup of coffee. Now, streamers often request that the character explicitly say, "I'm just so sad right now," or have another character ask, "Why are you so sad?"The Reason: If you are looking at your phone during a silent, emotional shot, you miss the story. If the character says it out loud, you can follow the plot without looking at the screen.Heightened Audio Cues: If you've noticed that modern movies have very aggressive sound design—sudden loud bangs, dramatic musical stings, or high-pitched notification-like sounds—it's often intentional.The "Audio Hook": These sounds act like a "ping" to pull your eyes back from your phone to the TV. It's a literal alarm clock for your attention.The "First 10 Minutes" Mandate: In the past, a movie could have a "slow burn" opening (think 2001: A Space Odyssey). Today, Netflix and other streamers use data that shows exactly when a user hits the "Back" button.The Note: Writers are told that a "major event" (an explosion, a death, or a massive hook) must happen within the first 2 to 5 minutes. If the "inciting incident" happens at the 20-minute mark, the data shows they will lose 30% of the audience to TikTok.Centered Framing: Cinematographers are increasingly being told to keep the "important" action in the center of the frame.The Reason: This makes the content easier to view on a mobile device if the user decides to switch from the TV to their phone, or if they are watching a cropped "clip" of the movie on social media later.Increased "Recapping": Have you noticed characters summarizing what just happened more often?The "TikTok Brain" Fix: Because people are multitasking, they often lose the thread of the plot. Streamers now encourage dialogue like, "So, let me get this straight, we have to get the key from the vault before the guard returns in five minutes?" It's a recap for someone who tuned out for the last three minutes.WHO DO YOU BLAME?Netflix: Ted Sarandos & Greg Peters (Co-CEOs of Netflix), Reed Hastings, Jay HoagDrug CEOs (re: The Algorithm): Passive Viewing: Data shows that up to 94% of people use a phone while watching TV.TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: TikTok is widely considered the pioneer of the "Short-Form Video" era. Its algorithm is specifically designed to provide "intermittent reinforcement" (like a slot machine), which studies suggest can reduce the ability to focus on long-term tasks.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Zuckerberg pivoted Facebook and Instagram (Reels) to aggressively compete with TikTok. Critics argue this transition turned a platform for connection into one of "passive scrolling" that further erodes focus.YouTube CEO Neal Mohan: Under his leadership, YouTube Shorts was launched to capture the short-attention-span market. Even YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has recently warned that these short videos are "shrinking kids' attention spans."Smartphones: Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs MMStanford: The "Father of Persuasive Tech": B.J. FoggStanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, run by B.J. Fogg, taught many of the founders and early employees of Instagram and Facebook.The "Fogg Behavior Model" taught engineers how to use "triggers" and "rewards" to change human behavior through software. He provided the scientific framework that allowed tech companies to treat the human brain like hardware that could be "hacked" for maximum engagement.Trump calls NYSE Dallas expansion plans 'unbelievably bad' for New York: Trump says move poses 'big test' for newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani. WHICH HYPOCRISY DO YOU BLAME?The Free Market BullshitTrump and Texas leaders have long championed the freedom of businesses to flee blue-state regulations. However, now that a prestigious icon like the NYSE is actually expanding to Dallas, Trump has pivoted to calling it "unbelievably bad" for New York.The Anti-Woke /Anti-ESG scaremongeringTexas frames itself as a "Sanctuary from Socialism," yet the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) is being used to bypass ESG transparency. While railing against woke mandates, these leaders are creating their own ideological silos—demanding a protected market where management isn't held accountable by shareholders for social or environmental impacts.Texas AG Ken Paxton described BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard as an "investment cartel" that was "illegally controlling national energy markets" and "squeezing more money out of hardworking Americans."Paxton sent a formal warning to Larry Fink and other CEOs, stating that their "radical environmental policies" and "race-based quotas" (DEI) would face severe enforcement actions if they prioritized "politics over consumers."Lead by example: Trump quits NYC and Musk's Dexit to Y'all StreetThroughout his 2024 campaign, Trump consistently compared New York unfavorably to states like Florida and Texas: as an example, he pointed to the lack of state income tax in Florida as a reason why "everyone is leaving New York." Elon Musk's Dexit from Delaware/California is sold as a strike for freedom, yet his empire is built on nearly $40 billion in government subsidies and contracts. He moved to Texas to escape over-regulation (re: his pay package and people being mad about nooses in his factories) while simultaneously heading the most over-regulatory body ever: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).Leader name calling and scaremongeringTrump's pre-bromance attacks on New York's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani (communist lunatic" and a "Marxist"). Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson (UPenn, Harvard, Princeton): "un-American socialist impulse" and explicitly marketed Dallas as a "sanctuary from socialism" for businesses looking to Dexit New York. The Elite vs. Common Man NonsenseDespite bullshit Y'all Street populist framing, the Texas Stock Exchange is backed by the world's most powerful financial titans. There is no common man victory here; it is the CEO class moving the financial capital to a jurisdiction with fewer labor protections and less oversight.The Big Four Anchor InvestorsBlackRock: (managing ~$14 trillion), despite being the primary target of "anti-woke" and anti-ESG rhetoric from the same politicians who support the TXSE.Citadel Securities: Led by Ken Griffin, this firm executes roughly 1 in 4 of all stock trades in the U.S. Left Chicago for Miami.J.P. Morgan Chase: Jamie Dimon. Joined in 2025 during a $90 million funding round and holds an observer seat on the board.Charles Schwab: handles over 50% of U.S. retail stock orders.MATTWalmart International CEO Kath McLay to step down - WHO DO YOU BLAME?Half exiting CEO Doug McMillonMcLay was under McMillon her entire tenure at WalMart, raised to CEO of the international divisionClearly a protege - passed over for the new CEO?Incoming CEO John FurnerThe white guy who became CEO is such an interesting new story, but Furner started as a sales clerk and has been with the WALTONS a long time through Sam's Club as CEO, another Walton jointFurner/McMillon/Walton family named David Guggina CEO of Walmart US (passing McLay), Chris Nicholas replace McLay, Seth Dallaire was made chief growth officer… rounding out an all male promotion cycle of new execs - no women in major positionsMaybe McLay read the tea leaves - women got chief legal and chief of people, like everywhere else, but leave the big jobs to the swinging dicks.The compensation and management development committee, who according to the company charter, ir responsible to “periodically review and recommend to the full Board succession planning practices for the Company's CEO and other executive officers.”Carla Harris (chair) - black woman with “multicultural” in her job description at Morgan Stanley who apparently didn't apply “multiculturalism” to Walmart executive search?Marissa Mayer - yes, THAT Marissa Mayer, who is on the board of Starbucks with Brian Niccol and AT&T where Randall Stephenson was CEOBrian Niccol - CEO of Starbucks, with no conflict by having Marissa Mayer on the same boardRandall Stephenson - ex CEO of AT&T, with no conflict of interest by having Marissa Mayer on the board. Also on the board - Tom Horton, ex CEO of American Airlines who was… CFO of AT&T under StephensonShishir Mehrotra - who worked at Google via YouTube when… Marissa Mayer worked there (she was in search/maps)Kath McLay, who just couldn't cut it at Walmart anymoreAn SEC official has said (implied) you don't HAVE to vote your proxies as an investor - WHO DO YOU BLAME?Brian Daly, who gave a speech titled (Re)Empowering Fiduciaries in Proxy Voting on Jan 8 in which he argued that not voting doesn't necessarily violate fiduciary dutyGamblers: “Not voting makes sense in many situations. Look, for example, at quantitative and systematic managers, who often operate models that merely seek exposures to identified sources of alpha.”Index investors: “But it may be appropriate for these categories of investment advisers (and the Boards that exercise oversight over this function) to consider whether taking positions on fundamental corporate matters, or on precatory proposals, is consistent with their investment mandates.”Hedging himself: “So, there is no stock answer to the “Must I vote?” question... Instead, it is important that advisers and clients have a fair amount of latitude to decide what works in their individual cases.”Threatening using proxy advisors: “And if we are raising issues for consideration, I will also mention, because the President did, that there is real concern out there that habitual adherence to a proxy consultant's recommendations could pull an adviser into a Section 13(d) group.”Investors, because no matter what Brian Daly suggests, investors almost never vote against management and neither do proxy advisors, so what the fuck are we talking about?Cost, because Daly points out, “And in assessing proposed votes, investment advisers might utilize the Fiduciary Interpretation's concept of a “reasonable inquiry into the client's objectives.” If an investment adviser routinely follows a proxy advisor's stock recommendations without a tailored engagement or independent analysis, is this “reasonable inquiry?” Maybe, but it is certainly worth thinking about. And, to go back to the first question, if the voting process is so burdensome that it requires extensive external resources, why is the adviser voting at all?”John Chevedden, along with Jim McRitchie, without whom we have maybe half the shareholder rights as SP500 companies, and who the no-action data is now showing is disproportionately getting responses for exclusion from the SEC (as if to double down on the idea that we can ignore those commie socialists entirely, but we want to tell you explicitly you're totally legally cool and there's no threat if you exclude Chevedden). Chevedden might be the reason investors were voting at all - maybe now they won't have to?

In this insightful episode of Alternative Allocations, Tony talks with Paul Jodice of Morgan Stanley about the evolving landscape of alternative investments. Advisors are seeking incremental alpha, differentiated yields, and enhanced diversification in their portfolios, and Paul shares his expertise on how they're turning to alternative investments to meet these needs. The conversation delves into portfolio construction, market outlook, and the drivers of advisor adoption. As someone working closely with advisors, Paul offers valuable insights into the strategies and challenges of integrating alternative investments into portfolios. Paul Jodice is Co-Head of the Global Investment Manager Analysis (GIMA) team, which provides manager analysis and due diligence on alternative and traditional investment strategies. As co-head, Paul primarily leads the evaluation and manager selection for alternative strategies. Previously, he was an investment officer and head of the Private Equity research team within the GIMA group. Paul joined Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in 2017. He began his professional career with Cambridge Associates (Boston/Singapore) in 1999. He joined Merrill Lynch in 2006, the Abu Dhabi Investment Company - Invest AD (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) in 2007 and Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2015. Paul graduated from Babson College with a BS in Investments and Economics. He received his MBA from the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. Resources: Paul Jodice | LinkedInAlternatives by Franklin TempletonTony Davidow, CIMA® | LinkedIn

Send us a textEpisode 2 of Inside the Family Office: Live Investor PanelReal family office practitioners and allocators share how they structure deals, protect families, and think about wealth: Isaac, a former Morgan Stanley advisor who now runs a multi-family office and investment bank in L.A., walks through how his team allocates across public and private markets. He explains why secondaries and “cleaning up cap tables” are attractive right now, how he thinks about SPVs and fee layers, and why infrastructure and process matter more than chasing the latest hot sector. Isaac also pushes back on “country-club investing” and urges families to only back deals that truly fit their objectives, liquidity, and decision-making capacity. Dr. Cook reinforces the critical – and often neglected – role of back-office infrastructure in family office success.

In this week's episode of WSJ's Take On the Week, Telis Demos and Gunjan Banerjii—in her final appearance as regular co-host—are joined by incoming co-host Miriam Gottfried. Our trio get into the high-stakes bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Bros. Discovery and why Netflix shareholders may be skeptical of the deal. Then the hosts dive into the historic rally in gold and silver, and whether the debasement trade is back after news of an investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Plus, they look at what upcoming earnings might reveal about how President Trump's affordability agenda is playing out. After the break, Telis and Miriam are joined by Monica Guerra, head of U.S. policy at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, to discuss how investors should position themselves for a midterm election year. Guerra explains that gridlock in Congress has historically led to market outperformance. She also shares a bold prediction that the Supreme Court could strike down President Trump's tariffs. This is WSJ's Take On the Week where co-hosts Telis Demos, Heard on the Street's banking and money columnist, and Miriam Gottfried, WSJ's private equity reporter, cut through the noise and dive into markets, the economy and finance—the big trades, key players and business news ahead. Have an idea for a future guest or episode? How can we better help you take on the week? We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at takeontheweek@wsj.com.To watch the video version of this episode, visit our WSJ Podcasts YouTube channel or the video page of WSJ.comFurther Reading Why Democrats Aren't Threatening Another Shutdown This Time The Winners and Losers From 2026's Mix of Tax and Benefit Cuts For Years, Powell Avoided Fighting Trump. That's Over. Gold Breaks Through $4,600 on Fed Concerns, Haven Boost Democrats See Path to House Control in 2026 For more coverage of the markets and your investments, head to WSJ.com, WSJ's Heard on The Street Column, and WSJ's Live Markets blog. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter. Follow Miriam Gottfried here and Telis Demos here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Head of Research Product in Europe Paul Walsh and Chief European Equity Strategist Marina Zavolock break down the main themes for European stocks this year. Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Paul Walsh: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Paul Walsh, Morgan Stanley's Head of Research Product here in Europe.Marina Zavolock: And I'm Marina Zavolock, Chief European Equity Strategist.Paul Walsh: Today, we are here to talk about the big debates for European equities moving into 2026.It's Friday, January the 16th at 8am in London.Marina, it's great to have you on Thoughts on the Market. I think we've got a fascinating year ahead of us, and there are plenty of big debates to be exploring here in Europe. But let's kick it off with the, sort of, obvious comparison to the U.S.How are you thinking about European equities versus the U.S. right now? When we cast our eyes back to last year, we had this surprising outperformance. Could that repeat?Marina Zavolock: Yeah, the biggest debate of all Paul, that's what you start with. So, actually it's not just last year. If you look since U.S. elections, I think it would surprise most people to know that if you compare in constant currency terms; so if you look in dollar terms or if you look in Euro terms, European equities have outperformed U.S. equities since US elections. I don't think that's something that a lot of people really think about as a fact.And something very interesting has happened at the start of this year. And let me set the scene before I tell you what that is.In the last 10 years, European equities have been in this constantly widening discount range versus the U.S. on valuation. So next one's P/E there's been, you know, we have tactical rallies from time to time; but in the last 10 years, they've always been tactical. But we're in this downward structural range where their discount just keeps going wider and wider and wider. And what's happened on December 31st is that for the first time in 10 years, European equities have broken the top of that discount range now consistently since December 31st. I've lost count of how many trading days that is. So about two weeks, we've broken the top of that discount range. And when you look at long-term history, that's happened a number of times before. And every time that happens, you start to go into an upward range.So, the discount is narrowing and narrowing; not in a straight line, in a range. But the discount narrows over time. The last couple of times that's happened, in the last 20 years, over time you narrow all the way to single digit discount rather than what we have right now in like-for-like terms of 23 percent.Paul Walsh: Yeah, so there's a significant discount. Now, obviously it's great that we are seeing increased inflows into European equities. So far this year, the performance at an index level has been pretty robust. We've just talked about the relative positioning of Europe versus the U.S.; and the perhaps not widely understood local currency outperformance of Europe versus the U.S. last year. But do you think this is a phenomenon that's sustainable? Or are we looking at, sort of, purely a Q1 phenomenon?Marina Zavolock: Yeah, it's a really good question and you make a good point on flows, which I forgot to mention. Which is that, last year in [Q1] we saw this really big diversification flow theme where investors were looking to reduce exposure in the U.S., add exposure to Europe – for a number of reasons that I won't go into.And we're seeing deja vu with that now, mostly on the – not really reducing that much in U.S., but more so, diversifying into Europe. And the feedback I get when speaking to investors is that the U.S. is so big, so concentrated and there's this trend of broadening in the U.S. that's happening; and that broadening is impacting Europe as well.Because if you're thinking about, ‘Okay, what do I invest in outside of seven stocks in the U.S.?' You're also thinking about, ‘Okay, but Europe has discounts and maybe I should look at those European companies as well.' That's exactly what's happening. So, diversification flows are sharply going up, in the last month or two in European equities coming into this year.And it's a very good question of whether this is just a [Q1] phenomenon. [Be]cause that's exactly what it was last year. I still struggle to see European equities outperforming the U.S. over the course of the full year because we're going to come into earnings now.We have much lower earnings growth at a headline level than the U.S. I have 4 percent earnings growth forecast. That's driven by some specific sectors. It's, you know, you have pockets of very high growth. But still at a headline level, we have 4 percent earnings growth on our base case. Consensus is too high in our view. And our U.S. equity strategists, they have 17 percent earnings growth, so we can't compete.Paul Walsh That's a very stark difference.Marina Zavolock: Yeah, we cannot compete with that. But what I will say is that historically when you've had these breakouts, you don't get out performance really. But what you get is a much narrower gap in performance. And I also think if you pick the right pockets within Europe, then you could; you can get out performance.Paul Walsh: So, something you and I talked about a lot in 2025, is the bull case for Europe. There are a number of themes and secular dynamics that could play out, frankly, to the benefits of Europe, and there are a number of them. I wondered if you could highlight the ones that you think are most important in terms of the bull case for Europe.Marina Zavolock: I think the most important one is AI adoption. We and our team, we have been able to quantify this. So, when we take our global AI mapping and we look at leading AI adopters in Europe, which is about a quarter of the index, they are showing very strong earnings and returns outperformance. Not just versus the European index, but versus their respective sectors. And versus their respective sectors, that gap of earnings outperformance is growing and becoming more meaningful every time that we update our own chart.To the point that I think at this rate, by the second half of this year, it's going to grow to a point that it's more difficult for investors to ignore. That group of stocks, first of all, they trade again at a big discount to U.S. equivalent – 27 percent discount. Also, if you see adoption broadening overall, and we start to go into the phase of the AI cycle where adopters are, you know, are being sought after and are seen as in the front line of beneficiaries of AI. It's important to remember Europe; the European index because we don't have a lot of enablers in our index. It is very skewed to AI adopters. And then we also have a lot of low hanging fruit given productivity demographic challenges that AI can help to address. So that's the biggest one.Paul Walsh: Understood.Marina Zavolock: And the one I've spent most time on. But let me quickly mention a few others. M&A, we're seeing it rising in Europe, almost as sharply as we're seeing in the U.S. Again, I think there's low hanging fruit there. We're seeing easing competition commission rules, which has been an ongoing thing, but you know, that comes after decade of not seeing that. We're seeing corporate re-leveraging off of lows. Both of these things are still very far from cycle peaks. And we're seeing structural drivers, which for example, savings and investment union, which is multifaceted. I won't get into it. But that could really present a bull case.Paul Walsh: Yeah. And that could include pensions reform across Europe, particularly in Germany, deeper capital…Marina Zavolock: We're starting to see it.Paul Walsh: And in Europe as well, yeah. And so just going back to the base case, what are you advocating to clients in terms of what do we buy here in Europe, given the backdrop that you've framed?Marina Zavolock: Within Europe, I get asked a lot whether investors should be investing in cyclicals or value. Last year value really worked, or quality – maybe they will return. I think it's not really about any of those things. I think, similar to prior years, what we're going to see is stock level dispersion continuing to rise. That's what we keep seeing every month, every quarter, every year – for the last couple of years, we're seeing dispersion rising.Again, we're still far from where we normally get to, when we get to cycle peaks. So, Europe is really about stock picking. And the best way that we have at Morgan Stanley to capture this alpha under the surface of the European index. And the growth that we have under the surface of the index, is our analyst top picks – which are showing fairly consistent outperformance, not just versus the European index, but also versus the S&P. And since inception of top picks in 2021, European top picks have outperformed the S&P free float market cap weighted by over 90 percentage points. And they've outperformed, the S&P – this is pre-trade – by 17 percentage points in the last year. And whatever period we slice, we're seeing out performance.As far as sectors, key sectors, Banks is at the very top of our model. It's the first sector that non-dedicated investors ask me about. I think the investment case there is very compelling. Defense, we really like structurally with the rearmament theme in Europe, but it's also helpful that we're in this seasonal phase where defense tends to really outperform between; and have outsized returns between January and April. And then we like the powering AI thematic, and we are getting a lot of incoming on the powering AI thematic in Europe. We upgraded utilities recently.Paul, maybe if I ask you a question, one sector that I've missed out on, in our data-driven sector model, is the semis. But you've worked a lot with our semi's team who are quite constructive. Can you tell us about the investment case there?Paul Walsh: Yeah, they're quite constructive, but I would say there's nuance within the context of the sector. I think what they really like is the semi cap space, which they think is really well underpinned by a robust, global outlook for wafer fab equipment spend, which we see growing double digits globally in both 2026 and 2027.And I think within that, in particular, the outlook for memory. You have something of a memory supercycle going on at the moment. And the outlook for memory is especially encouraging. And it's a market where we see it as being increasingly capacity constrained with an unusually long order book visibility today, driven really by AI inference. So strong thematic overlay there as well.And maybe I would highlight one other key area of growth longer term for the space, which is set to come from the proliferation of humanoid robots. That's a key theme for us in 2025. And of course, we'll continue to be so, in the years to come. And we are modeling a global Humanoids Semicon TAM of over $300 billion by 2045, with key pillars of opportunity for the semi names to be able to capitalize on. So, I think those are two areas where, in particular, the team have seen some great opportunities.Now bringing it back to the other side of the equation, Marina, which sectors would you be avoiding, within the context of your model?Marina Zavolock: There's a collection of sectors and they, for the most part, are the culprits for the low growth that we have in Europe. So simply avoiding these could be very helpful from a growth perspective, to add to that multiple expansion. These are at the bottom of our data driven, sector models. So, these are Autos, Chemicals, Luxury Transport, Food and Beverage.Most of these are old economy cyclicals. Many of these sectors have high China/old economy exposure – as well where we're not seeing really a demand pickup. And then lastly, a number of these sectors are facing ever rising China competition.Paul Walsh: And I think, when we weigh up the skew of your views according to your model, I think it brings it back to the original big debate around cyclicals versus defensives. And your conclusion that actually it's much more complicated than that.Marina, thanks for taking the time to talk.Marina Zavolock: Great to speak with you Paul.Paul Walsh: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

Anthony and Piers return to break down a busy start to 2026. They cover Wall Street's Q4 earnings, where Morgan Stanley shines amid a wave of tech-led bond issuance, while J.P. Morgan and Goldman show mixed results.They also dig into Trump's proposed cap on credit card interest, his DOJ probe into Fed Chair Powell, and the implications for central bank credibility. Oil markets react to rising tensions in Iran and developments in Venezuela, while the latest US inflation data shows progress but risks remain.Plus, why 2026 GDP growth could surprise to the upside if inflation and wage pressures stay in check.(00:00) Intro and Overview of Key Topics(01:36) Bank Earnings: A Mixed Bag(03:39) Morgan Stanley DCM Boom(11:01) BlackRock $14 Trillion AUM(14:09) Trump's Proposed Credit Card Cap(18:19) Powell and the Fed Investigation(22:16) Geopolitics: Iran and Venezuela(27:59) CPI Trends and Economic Outlook(32:11) Wage Price Spiral

On today's episode, we discuss how collapsing national currencies—from Iran's rial to Venezuela's bolívar—are driving ordinary people into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a last‑ditch store of value. Mark explains why institutional players like Vanguard and Morgan Stanley are finally recommending small crypto allocations, how ETF filings and FOMO are pushing Bitcoin higher, and why none of this should be confused with personalized investment advice. From there, the conversation moves to practical home tech: VPNs, Starlink, and why reliable local storage and good passwords still matter more than shiny gadgets when the internet goes dark. James and Mark also kick around Elon Musk's AI and robotics ambitions—Grok, xAI, Optimus, and full self‑driving Teslas—debating whether a Unix‑like, tightly controlled “Apple‑style” stack will prove safer than a more open, Windows‑like ecosystem for autonomous vehicles. A creek‑flooding scenario near James's house becomes a case study in what current self‑driving systems still miss, forcing humans to override software that cannot yet reliably interpret brown, moving water across a road. That leads into a broader discussion of how many edge cases engineers must sample before regulators will bless truly driverless cars, and why early adopters will inevitably be the ones whose mishaps teach the machines. Throughout, they keep circling back to a core theme: in both finance and transportation, new tech may be transformative, but ordinary users still have to live with the bugs, crashes, and unintended consequences of bleeding‑edge systems. Don't miss it!

Rocket Lab (RKLB) nearly hit $100 on Friday after Morgan Stanley upgraded the space tech company. George Tsilis talks about the company's satellite business as a main catalyst to the positive price action even as some analysts sit on the sidelines. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

Our Global Head of Fixed Income Research Andrew Sheets looks at the implications of the U.S. government's efforts to ease regulations, from bank balance sheets to asset valuations.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Global Head of Fixed Income Research at Morgan Stanley. Today, a core theme of easing policy, and the latest iteration in the U.S. mortgage market. It's Thursday, January 15th at 2pm in London. Central to our thinking for the year ahead is that we're seeing an unusual combination of easing monetary policy, fiscal policy, and regulatory policy – all at the same time. This isn't normal, and usually this type of support is only deployed under much more dire economic conditions. All this is also happening alongside another large supportive force – over $3 trillion of AI- and datacenter-related spending that Morgan Stanley expects all to happen through the end of 2028. This broad-based easing is a global theme. Equities in Japan have been rallying on hopes of even a larger fiscal leasing in that country. In Europe, we think that Germany will continue to spend more while the European Central Bank and Bank of England cut rates more than the market expects.But like many things these days, it's the United States that's at the heart of the story. We think that the U.S. Federal Reserve will continue to lower interest rates this year, even as core inflation persists above its target. The U.S. government will spend about $1.9 trillion more than it takes in, even after adjusting for tariffs as tax cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act kick in. But my focus today is on the third leg of this proverbial three-legged stimulative stool. While easing monetary and fiscal policy probably get the most focus, easing regulatory policy is another big lever that's being pulled in the same direction. Regulatory policy is opaque, and let's face it can be a little boring. But it's extremely important for how financial markets function. Regulation drives the incentives for the buyers of many assets, especially in the all-important banking and insurance sectors. It can set almost by definition what price an asset needs to trade at to be attractive, or how much of an asset a particular actor in the market can or cannot hold. Regulatory policy tightened dramatically in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, but now it's starting to ease. Our U.S. bank equity analysts expect that finalization of key capital rules later this year – an important regulatory step – could free up about [$]5.8 trillion – with a T – of balance sheet capacity across the Global Systematically Important Banks. In mid-December, the office of the comptroller of the currency and the FDIC withdrew lending guidelines from 2013 that had discouraged banks from making loans to more highly indebted companies. And just last week, the U.S. administration announced that the U.S. mortgage agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would buy [$]200 billion of mortgages to hold on their own balance sheet; a significant move that quickly tightens spreads in this key market. For investors, we see several implications. This simultaneous easing across monetary, fiscal, and now regulatory policy supports a market that runs hot and where valuations may overshoot. And in the specific case of these agency mortgages, my colleague Jay Bacow and our mortgage strategy team think that this shift is now very quickly in the price. Having previously been positive on agency mortgage spreads, they've now turned to neutral. Thank you as always for your time. If you find Thoughts on the Market useful, let us know by leaving a review wherever you listen. And also tell a friend or colleague about us today.

Carl Quintanilla, Sara Eisen, & David Faber kicked off the hour with fresh jobs data boosting stocks - as tech stocks surge in early trading thanks to strong results out of the world's biggest semiconductor manufacturer. The team broke down both stories and their market impact with one longtime market veteran, before also diving into the banks this morning as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley gain post-results. Also in focus: U.S.-Iran tensions simmering after new sanctions were announced during the hour - hear veteran energy expert Helima Croft's take on the action... and a deep-dive on what's next in the DOJ's Powell probe with former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who calls Fed independence "one of the underpinnings of our economy". Squawk on the Street Disclaimer Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Carl Quintanilla, Jim Cramer and David Faber led off the show with the rebound in tech, sparked by Taiwan Semiconductor posting a Q4 earnings beat and boosting capital spending guidance thanks to strong AI demand. President Trump clearing the way for Nvidia H200 chip sales to China also lifted sentiment. In a CNBC Exclusive, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink joined the anchors at Post 9 and talked about issues including the Fed, AI and investing in America. They also discussed BlackRock's earnings beat and record assets of more than $14 trillion. Also in focus: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the last of the big banks to post earnings, oil prices fall on news involving Trump and Iran.Squawk on the Street Disclaimer Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From Wall Street to Main Street, the latest on the markets and what it means for your money. Updated regularly on weekdays, featuring CNBC expert analysis and sound from top business newsmakers. Anchored and reported by CNBC's Jessica Ettinger. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

En el episodio de hoy de VG Daily, Juan Manuel de los Reyes y Andre Dos Santos repasan una mañana cargada de resultados y macro, conectando cómo se está moviendo el “riesgo” en mercados. En el bloque de bancos, se analiza por qué Morgan Stanley se apoyó en la fortaleza de Wealth Management (con ingresos y activos en máximos) y cómo Goldman mostró tracción en trading y gestión de activos, pero con el ruido puntual de su salida del negocio de Apple Card.  Luego se analiza el reporte de TSMC, que salto fuertemente luego de mostrar ganancias y elevar el tono con un plan de capex 2026. Finalmente, se aterriza en China con un dato de un superávit comercial récord cercano a $1.2 billones en 2025, pese a una caída de exportaciones a EE.UU., reabre el debate de “overcapacity”, dumping y el riesgo de más medidas comerciales. 

Market update for January 15, 2026Follow us on Instagram (@TheRundownDaily) for bonus content and instant reactions.In today's episode:Investors drop tech and rotate to small capsTSMC delivers blowout quarter and signals even more AI-driven spending in 2026Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley post strong earnings as trading and deal activity surgeOil prices slide as geopolitical tensions around Iran ease, pulling energy stocks lowerTesla moves Full Self-Driving to a subscription-only model as it leans harder into software revenue

Shares of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs hit new highs after reporting results. Barclays lays out which stocks in the space are a buy. Then, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster on the newly announces Iran sanctions and what to expect from the President's meeting with Venezuela's Machado. Plus, TSMC surges after earnings. How those results are reenforcing optimism for the AI rally. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our Head of India Research and Chief India Equity Strategist Ridham Desai addresses a big debate: whether India stocks are poised for a recovery after underperforming other emerging markets in 2025.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Ridham Desai, Morgan Stanley's Head of India Research and Chief India Equity Strategist. Today: one of the big debates in Asia this year. Can Indian equities recover their strength after a historic slump? It's Wednesday, January 14th, at 2pm in Mumbai.India ended 2025 with its weakest relative performance versus Emerging Markets since 1994. That's right – three decades. The reason? A mid-cycle growth slowdown, rich valuations, and the fact that India doesn't offer an explicit AI-related trade. Add in delays on the U.S. trade deal plus India's low beta in a global bull market, and you've got a recipe for underperformance. But we think the tide is turning. Valuations have corrected meaningfully and likely bottomed out in October. More importantly, India's growth cycle looks poised for a positive surprise. Policymakers have gone all-in on reflation, deploying a mix of aggressive measures to revive momentum. The Reserve Bank of India has cut rates, reduced the cash reserve ratio, infused liquidity and gone in for bank deregulation which are adding fuel to the fire. The government has front-loaded capital expenditure and announced a massive ₹1.5 trillion GST rate cut to encourage people to spend more on goods and services. All these moves – along with improving ties between India and China, Beijing's new anti-involution push, and the possibility of a major India-U.S. trade deal – are laying solid groundwork for recovery. Put simply, India's once-tough, post-pandemic economic stance is easing up. And that could open the door to a major shift in how investors see the market going forward. India's macro backdrop is also evolving. The reduced reliance on oil in GDP, the growing share of exports, especially in services, the ongoing fiscal consolidation – all indicate a smaller saving imbalance. This means structurally lower interest rates ahead. And flexible inflation targeting, and volatility in both inflation and interest rates should continue to decline. High growth with low volatility and falling rates should translate into higher P/E multiples. And don't forget the household balance sheet shift toward equities. Systematic flows into domestic mutual funds are evidence of this trend. Investor concerns are understandable, but let's keep them in context. More companies raising capital often signals growth ahead, not just high valuations. Domestic investment remains strong, thanks to a steady shift toward equities. India's premium valuations reflect solid long-term growth prospects and expectations for lower real interest rates. On the policy front, efforts to boost growth are robust, and we see real growth potentially surprising to the upside. While India isn't a leader in AI yet, the upcoming AI summit in February could help address concerns about India's role in tech innovation. What key catalysts should investors watch? Look for positive earnings revisions, further dovishness from the RBI, reforms from the government including privatization, and the long-awaited U.S. trade deal. But also keep an eye on key risks – slower global growth and shifting geopolitical dynamics. So, after fifteen months of relative pain, could India be on the cusp of a structural re-rating? If growth surprises to the upside – and we think it will – the story of 2026 may just be India's comeback. Stay tuned.Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

Bitcoin has spent the opening weeks of 2026 trading sideways, but beneath the surface a second phase of institutional adoption is taking shape. This episode unpacks why Morgan Stanley's move toward a Bitcoin ETF matters, how this “round two” differs from the first era of arm's-length distribution via ETFs, and why structured products signal deeper strategic intent from Wall Street. The conversation then turns to the fragile state of U.S. market structure legislation, the fight over stablecoin yield, and why regulatory clarity is now the gating factor for the next wave of adoption. Finally, the episode explores the growing influence of ratings agencies on Bitcoin-linked products and what that means for institutional demand as the window for a true inflection point rapidly narrows. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

Scarce Assets: Alex Pron explains why wealth managers are finally embracing Bitcoin, how Wall Street distribution changes the market, & why long-term conviction matters more than cycles.---

Our U.S. Thematic Strategist Michelle Weaver and U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst Chris Snyder discuss a North America Big Debate for 2026: Whether investments in efficiency and productivity will spark a transformation of U.S. manufacturing. Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michelle Weaver: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michelle Weaver, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Thematic and Equity Strategist. Chris Snyder: I'm Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst. Michelle Weaver: Today: Will 2026 be the year of U.S. Manufacturing's transformation? It's Tuesday, January 13th at 10am in New York. U.S. reshoring has been an important component of our multipolar world theme, and manufacturing is one of those topics we have always had our eyes on. We've been making some big predictions about a transformation in this sector, so it makes sense that it features prominently in the big debates we've identified for North America in 2026. In the last few years, there's been a steady stream of investments in automation controls and upgrades across U.S. manufacturing. And this is happening against a backdrop of shifting global supply chains and lingering policy uncertainty. Now, the big market debate is whether these investments will generate a whole wave of greenfield projects – that is brand new, multi-year construction initiatives to build facilities, factories, and infrastructure from the ground up. Chris, what exactly is driving this current wave of efficiency and productivity investment in U.S. manufacturing? And how long term of a trend is it? Chris Snyder: I think what's driving the inflection is tariffs. The view that has underpinned my U.S. reshoring call is that I believe companies have to serve the U.S. market. The U.S. accounts for 30 percent of global consumption – equal to EU and China combined. It is also the best margin region in the world. So, companies have to serve the market, and now what they're doing is they're going back and they're looking at their production assets that they have in the U.S. and they're saying, how can I get more out of what's already here? So, the quickest, cheapest, fastest way to bring production online in the U.S. is drive better productivity and efficiency out of the assets you already have. And we're seeing it come through very quickly after Liberation Day. Michelle Weaver: And you think these investments are an on ramp to larger greenfield projects. What evidence do we have that this efficiency spend is setting the stage for a ramp up in new factory builds? Chris Snyder: I think this is absolutely the leading indicator for greenfields because this is telling us that the supply chain cost calculation has changed. What all of these companies are doing are saying, ‘Okay, how can I get products into the U.S. at the cheapest cost possible?' What we're seeing is the cost of imports have gone higher with tariffs, and now it's more economically advisable for these companies to make the product in the United States. And if that's the case, that means that when they need a new factory, it's going to come to the United States. They might not need a factory now, but when they do, the U.S. is at least incrementally better positioned to get that factory. Other data that we're seeing; I think the most interesting data that's come out of all of this is the bifurcation in global PPI or producer price data. If you look at it on a regional basis, North America markets saw PPI go higher in 2025. They were all the tariff exempt regions – U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Every other region in the world saw PPI down year-to-date. That means that these companies and factories are having to lower prices to stay competitive in the global market and sell their products into the United States. That tells us also where the next factory is going. If you have a factory in the U.S. and a factory in Malaysia, and your U.S. factory is pricing up, that means the return profile is getting better. If your factory in Malaysia is pricing down, it means the returns are getting worse and you're pricing down because it's over-capacitized. That's not a region where you're going to add a factory. You know, what I like to say is – price drives returns, and supply is going to follow returns. And right now, that price data tells us the returns are in the United States. Michelle Weaver: And, for people that might not be familiar with PPI, can you explain it to everyone? It's sort of like CPIs cousin, but how should people think about it? Chris Snyder: Yeah, yeah, so PPI, Producer Price Inflation, it's effectively the prices that my companies, the producers of goods are charging. So maybe this is the price that they would then charge a distributor, who then the distributor ultimately is selling it to a store. And then that's, you know, kind of factoring its way into CPI. But it starts with PPI. Michelle Weaver: And what are some of the key catalysts investors should be looking for in 2026 that could confirm that this greenfield ramp is underway? Chris Snyder: The number one, you know, metric I think the market looks at is manufacturing project starts. Every month there's data that comes out and says how many manufacturing projects were announced in the U.S. that month. And what we've seen coming out of Liberation Day is that number on a project value has gone higher. You know, it hasn't totally inflected, but it has pushed higher. The thing that has inflected is the number of announcements. So, this is not like two or three years ago where we had these mega projects. What we're seeing right now is very broad. And to me that's more important because that shows that there's durability behind it. And it shows that this is because the economics are saying it makes sense. It's not necessarily just because, okay, I got an incentive and I'm trying to follow alongside that. Michelle Weaver: Mm-hmm. The market seems skeptical though, pointing out that the ISM manufacturing purchasing managers index has been shrinking. This could be a sign that demand isn't strong enough to justify building new factories right now. How would you address that concern? Chris Snyder: Yeah, no, I mean, you're definitely right. Like the biggest pushback on the reshoring theme is the demand for goods is not very strong. Consumers are not in a good place. So why would companies add capacity in this backdrop? That's never happened before. Companies only add capacity when they're producing a lot and the utilization goes up. This is not a normal cycle. Throughout history, the motivation to add capacity was when your production rates go higher, your utilization hits a certain level, and then you add capacity. So, it always started with demand to your point. The motivation right now is tariff mitigation. And you do not need higher demand to support that. The U.S. is a $1.2 trillion trade deficit. So, that more than anything gets me confident in the theme and the duration behind it. And I think it's a very different outlook when you look across the international markets. They're the ones that need to find incremental demand to justify investment. Michelle Weaver: And given the scale of U.S. purchasing power and the shift in global capital flows, how do you see these manufacturing trends impacting broader performance in 2026? Chris Snyder: We published our outlook and we're calling for the U.S. Industrial Economy to hit decade high growth levels in the back half of [20]26 and into [20]27. And this is a big reason why. We think about this a lot from a CapEx perspective. And we're seeing the investment, we think that ramps into larger greenfields. But we're also seeing it in the production economy. If you look at the delta between U.S. consumer spend and U.S. manufacturing production, that has really narrowed in recent months. And that tells us that we're increasingly serving U.S. demand through domestic production. So that's another factor that's going to drive activity higher and it doesn't need a cycle. And I think that's what's really important. And I think that is what creates this as a more secular and also durable opportunity. So obviously reassuring is something that's, you know, very close to me and important for the industrial economy. But as you think about the multipolar world theme more broadly, how do you think that evolves in 2026? Michelle Weaver: Yeah, absolutely. Last year the multipolar world was an incredibly powerful theme. And when investors were thinking about the multipolar world last year, it was largely about how are companies going to mitigate the risk of tariffs in the near term. We had the policies come out and surprise everyone in terms of the breadth and the magnitude of the tariffs we saw. We had a lot of policy uncertainty around what is that final level of tariffs going to look like. And a lot of the reaction was really short term. It's how can we use our inventory buffers to try and preserve our margins? How much of these additional tariff costs can we pass off to the end customer? How can we insulate ourselves in the near term? I think this year it's going to turn to more longer-term strategic thinking. Reshoring and a lot of the greenfield projects you were talking about, I think will absolutely be an important component of the multipolar world this year. I think we're also likely to see a greater emphasis on U.S. defense. With the action we just saw in Venezuela. I think we're going to see more of that defense component of the multipolar world starting to be expressed in the U.S. It was a big part of the expression of the theme in Europe last year, but I think it will gain relevance in the U.S. this year. Chris Snyder: Yeah. And I think the next chapter in U.S. industrial growth is just getting going. It's taken 25 years for the U.S. to seed roughly 12 percentage points of global share in manufacturing. We don't think they take that much back. But we think this is a very long runway opportunity. Michelle Weaver: Mm-hmm. And as we watch for the next wave of greenfields, it's clear that efficiency and productivity investments are more than just a stop gap. They're a longer-term theme and they're a foundation for a new era in U.S. manufacturing. Chris, thank you for taking the time to talk. Chris Snyder: Great speaking with you, Michelle. Michelle Weaver: And to our listeners, thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen to the show and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

Connect with Early Riders // Connect with OnrampPresented collaboratively by Early Riders & Onramp Media…Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering capital markets, dealmaking, early-stage venture, bitcoin applications and protocol development.00:30 - Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF Filing12:30 - Rumble and Tether's Crypto Wallet Launch18:07 - Walmart's One Pay Bitcoin Integration29:49 - Early Riders Team Updates31:58 - The White Paper: A Manifesto For All Future Capital Allocation34:26 - Building Bridges: Traditional Finance Meets Bitcoin36:47 - The Bitcoin Standard: A New Era of Capital Formation38:46 - Debasement and the Search for Sound Money43:30 - The Future of Venture Capital: Aligning Incentives47:03 - AI and the New Age of Entrepreneurship55:24 - Onramp for Everyone: Expanding Access to BitcoinIf you found this valuable, please subscribe to Early Riders Insights for access to the best content in the ecosystem weekly.Links discussed:https://bitcoin.docsend.com/view/aan9dw6fkd2z746ehttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-09/walmart-backed-super-app-onepay-hits-4-billion-valuation?embedded-checkout=truehttps://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/morgan-stanley-is-betting-big-on-digital-assets-workplace-services-and-private-markets-how-they-tie-together/ar-AA1TP8N5https://x.com/sytaylor/status/2009236033603244517?s=20https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-12/stanchart-said-to-prepare-crypto-expansion-with-prime-brokerage?embedded-checkout=truehttps://x.com/faryarshirzad/status/2008898606317687058?s=20https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2007666720656511233https://decrypt.co/353693/morgan-stanley-registers-bitcoin-solana-funds-sechttps://corp.rumble.com/blog/rumble-and-tether-launch-crypto-wallet-for-creator-economy/Keep up with Michael:https://x.com/MTangumahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mtanguma/Keep up with Brian:https://x.com/BackslashBTChttps://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-cubellis-00b1a660/Keep up with Liam:https://x.com/Lnelson_21https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-nelson1/

Our Chief Fixed Income Strategists Vishy Tirupattur discusses the calm market reaction to the latest developments in Venezuela and the potential implications for oil, stocks and bonds.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Vishy Tirupattur: Welcome to thoughts on the Market. I am Vishy Tirupattur, Morgan Stanley's Chief Fixed Income Strategist. On today's podcast, I will talk about the markets' response to the complex political developments in Venezuela, and examine the opportunities and risks it presents to the markets. It is Monday, January 12th at 11 am in New York. Despite the far-reaching geopolitical implications of last weekend's developments in Venezuela, the financial markets have been strikingly calm. Oil prices have barely budged, global equities have rallied, and the reaction in the safe-haven markets – U.S. Treasuries, for example – has been fairly muted. So what explains all of this? Let's start with oil – the commodity most exposed to the situation in Venezuela. The near-term supply appears very manageable. As Morgan Stanley's chief commodities strategist Martijn Rats notes, the market entered 2026 oversupplied, and inventories remain flush. That cushion explains why Brent prices have barely budged, and why Martijn sees prices sliding into the mid-$50s in the coming months.The bigger story is medium term. The prospect of reviving Venezuela's oil industry tilts production risks higher. Despite holding over 300 billion barrels, the world's largest reserves, [the] current output of Venezuela is just 0.8-1 million barrels per day, making it the smallest producer among the major reserve holders. More Venezuelan barrels hitting global markets could keep prices soft, even against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions. For oil, the near-term price risk is low while medium-term price risk leans bearish. Let's talk about energy stocks. In line with the expectation of our equity energy analysts led by Devin McDermott, energy equities have largely responded favorably, reflecting the potential for increased oil supply and specific company opportunities. U.S. refiners stand out as poised to gain. A post-Maduro Venezuela could mean higher crude exports of the heavy, sour oil that these refiners are built to process. More imported heavy crude is a clear tailwind for U.S. Gulf Coast refiners like Valero (VLO) and Marathon Petroleum (MPC), potentially lowering their input costs and improving their margins. Similarly, Chevron (CVX), the only U.S. major still operating there under a sanctions waiver, is also poised to rally on the back of this. So for energy stocks, while [the] geopolitical story is complex, the market's message is straightforward. The prospect of greater supply is good news, and some companies appear uniquely positioned to gain as Venezuela's next chapter unfolds. Nowhere has the market reaction been more dramatic than in Venezuela's own sovereign debt. As Simon Waever, Morgan Stanley's global head of sovereign credit strategy anticipated, prices of Venezuela's defaulted bonds – both the government bonds (VENZ) as well as the bonds of state oil company PDVSA – soared to multi-year highs following the weekend's events. The bond complex has already rallied over 25 percent since last weekend to reach an average price of about $35, thanks to the increased likelihood of a creditor-friendly transition. A clearer path for a potential debt restructuring deal improves the prospects for future debt recovery. We expect further upside as the markets price a higher recovery rate if Venezuela's oil production increases further. So what's the bottom line: Last week's developments in Venezuela are a major geopolitical event, but the financial market reaction reflects both the contained nature of the shock and the prospect of constructive outcomes ahead – more oil supply, creditor-friendly debt resolution, etc. Oil markets are signaling that global supply can weather the storm, equity investors are cheering beneficiaries like refiners and seeing the broader risk backdrop as unchanged, and bond investors are selectively adding Venezuela's beaten-down debt in hopes of an eventual recovery. For now, the takeaway is that this political event has not affected the market's positive momentum – if anything, it has created pockets of opportunity and reinforced prevailing trends such as ample oil, and strong credit appetite. As always, we'll keep you informed of any material changes. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.Important note regarding economic sanctions. This report references jurisdictions which may be the subject of economic sanctions. Readers are solely responsible for ensuring that their investment activities are carried out in compliance with applicable laws.

Dan Nathan and Guy Adami host a special edition of the RiskReversal Podcast where they introduce a new segment called 'He Said, She Said,' featuring Jen Saarbach and Kristen Kelly of 'The Wall Street Skinny.' The episode explores the upcoming bank earnings, focusing on major money centers and investment banks like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley. Discussions include the impact of recent economic data, monetary policies, and fiscal initiatives on market dynamics. They delve into specifics like price-to-tangible book ratios, interest rates, and debt issuance calendars. The hosts and guests share insights into the current market sentiment, the role of inflation, expenses in the banking sector, and the broader economic implications. The episode also highlights the importance of storytelling and clarity in financial education and market analysis. —FOLLOW USYouTube: @RiskReversalMediaInstagram: @riskreversalmediaTwitter: @RiskReversalLinkedIn: RiskReversal Media

In this week's episode of the Coin Stories News Block powered exclusively by Ledn, we cover these major headlines related to Bitcoin, macroeconomics, and global finance: Trump proposes a 10% cap on credit card interest rates Trump targets Wall Street firms buying single-family homes Government plan to buy a large amount of mortgage bonds to push mortgage rates down Defense budget could jump to $1.5 trillion MSCI keeps Bitcoin-holding companies in its indexes (for now) Morgan Stanley moves into Bitcoin: ETF, trading and wallet plans ---- The News Block is powered exclusively by Ledn – the global leader in Bitcoin-backed loans, issuing over $9 billion in loans since 2018, and they were the first to offer proof of reserves. With Ledn, you get custody loans, no credit checks, no monthly payments, and more. My followers get .25% off their first loan. Learn more at www.ledn.io/natalie  ---- Order my new intro to Bitcoin book "Bitcoin is For Everyone": https://amzn.to/3WzFzfU  ---- Read every story in the News Block with visuals and charts! Join our mailing list and subscribe to our free Bitcoin newsletter: https://thenewsblock.substack.com  —- References mentioned in the episode: Trump Bans Institutional Investors from Housing  Trump Announcement on Institutional Housing Ban Trump's Ban on Corporate Homebuying Blindsides Wall St. Trump Proposes to Raise Defense Spending by $500B Trump Instructs $200B of Mortgage Bond Buying Lyn Alden's Tweet In Response to Defense Spending Trump's Defense Spending Plan Could Raise Deficit Trump Restricts Defense Companies from Stock Buybacks Trump's Announcement on Defense Sector Restrictions  Trump Instructs Freddie and Fannie to Buy Bonds Trump's $200B MBS Order Asserts Power Over Market Erik Vorhees's Tweet on Credit Card Interest Cap Trump's Announcement on Credit Card Interest Cap Ackman: Trump's Credit Card Cap is a "Mistake" MSCI Decides Not to Exclude DATs from Indexes  MSCI's Announcement on Bitcoin Treasury Companies  Nate Geraci's Tweet on Morgan Stanley ETF Matt Hougan's Tweet on Morgan Stanley ETF Morgan Stanley Plans to Launch Crypto Wallet Morgan Stanley Files to Launch Spot Bitcoin ETF ---- Upcoming Events: Join as at Bitcoin Day in Naples this week! Use code NATALIE for discounted passes: https://bitcoinday.io  Strategy World 2026 in Las Vegas on February 23-26th - Use code HODL for discounted tickets: https://www.strategysoftware.com/world26  Bitcoin 2026 will be here before you know it. Get 10% off Early Bird passes using the code HODL: https://tickets.b.tc/event/bitcoin-2026?promoCodeTask=apply&promoCodeInput=  ---- This podcast is for educational purposes and should not be construed as official investment advice. ---- VALUE FOR VALUE — SUPPORT NATALIE'S SHOWS Strike ID https://strike.me/coinstoriesnat/ Cash App $CoinStories #money #Bitcoin #investing

Today, on the Two Mikes, we welcomed our great friend Chad Stewart, of Britfield. Chad Robert Stewart has twenty years of experience as a global strategist, marketing consultant, creativity specialist, financial analyst, and prolific writer. Chad's areas of expertise are global strategy, film and media production, innovative education, and international marketing. Chad has worked at Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch. A few of the companies he has consulted with include Cisco Systems, Disney, Moen, PepsiCo, Pratt & Whitney and Royal Bank of Scotland. He received a Bachelor of Arts in British Literature and European History from Brown University; did post-graduate work at Harvard University; earned an M.B.A. from Boston College; and is pursuing a Master of Science in Advanced Management and a PhD in Strategy at Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University. Now based in San Diego, he is a strong supporter of education and the arts; an adjunct professor at Fermanian School of Business, Point Loma Nazarene University; and Past President of the Board of Directors of the San Diego Ballet. Chad enjoys world travel, reading, riding, swimming, sailing, tennis, and the Arts. SPONSORS Our Gold Guy: https://www.mygoldguy.com/twomikes www.TwoMikes.us

2026 could be a historic year for the IPO market with over $3.6 trillion in expected valuations hitting the public stage. In this episode, we break down the hottest and most talked-about names in the pipeline: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Revolut, Canva, Databricks, and TikTok US.We discuss what makes SpaceX such a unique and defensible business, why OpenAI's losses and leadership noise might be red flags, and how Anthropic is quietly building a much more sustainable AI model. Plus, the strategy behind Stripe's long-awaited listing, Revolut's super-app ambitions, Canva's AI monetisation push, and the jaw-dropping TikTok U.S. deal that could become one of the biggest financial giveaways of all time.We also dive into who's really making money here with banks like Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs all fighting for billion-dollar fees.Bullish or bearish, overhyped or undervalued, this is our full take on the biggest IPOs to watch in 2026.(00:00) 2026 IPO Landscape Overview(02:07) SpaceX: Trillion Dollar Debut(11:59) OpenAI: Timing and Challenges(16:02) Anthropic: A Different Approach(21:12) ByteDance and TikTok: The Crony Bonanza(25:31) Databricks: Data Intelligence Platform(28:45) Stripe: Payments Powerhouse(31:26) Revolut: Challenger Bank(33:37) Canva: Design Tool with Potential

Our Global Head of Fixed Income Research Andrew Sheets takes a look at multiple indicators that are pointing on the same direction: strong growth for markets and the economy.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Global Head of Fixed Income Research at Morgan Stanley. Today I'm going to talk about an unusual alignment of signs of optimism for the global cyclical backdrop and why these are important to watch. It's Friday, January 9th at 2pm in London. 2026 is now well underway. Forecasting is difficult and a humbling exercise; and 2025 certainly showed that even in a good year for markets, you can have some serious twists and turns. But overall, Morgan Stanley Research still thinks the year ahead will be a positive one, with equities higher and bond yields modestly lower. It's off to an eventful start, certainly, but we think that core message remains in place. But instead of going back again to our forecasts through the year ahead, I wanted to focus instead on a wide variety of different assets that have long been viewed as leading indicators of the global cyclical environment. I think these are important, and what's notable is that they're all moving in the same direction – all indicating a stronger cyclical backdrop. While today's market certainly has some areas of speculative activity and excessive valuations, the alignment of these things suggests something more substantive may be going on. First, Copper prices, which tend to be volatile but economically sensitive, have been rising sharply up about 40 percent in the last year. A key index of non-traded industrial commodities for everything from Glass to Tin, which is useful because it means it's less likely to be influenced by investor activity, well, it's been up 10 percent over the last year. Korean equities, which tend to be highly cyclical and thus have long been viewed by investors as a proxy for global economic optimism, well, they were the best performing major market last year, up 80 percent. Smaller cap stocks, which again, tend to be more economically sensitive, well, they've been outperforming larger ones. And last but not least, Financial stocks in the U.S. and Europe. Again, a sector that tends to be quite economically sensitive. Well, they've been outperforming the broader market and to a pretty significant degree. These are different assets in different regions that all appear to be saying the same thing – that the outlook for global cyclical activity has been getting better and has now actually been doing so for some time. Now, any individual indicator can be wrong. But when multiple indicators all point in the same direction, that's pretty worthy of attention. And I think this ties in nicely with a key message from my colleague, Mike Wilson from Monday's episode; that the positive case for U.S. equities is very much linked to better fundamental activity. Specifically, our view that earnings growth may be stronger than appreciated. Of course, the data will have a say, and if these indicators turn down, it could suggest a weaker economic and cyclical backdrop. But for now, these various cyclical indicators are giving a positive read. If they continue to do so, it may raise more questions around central bank policy and to what extent further rate cuts are consistent with these signs of a stronger global growth backdrop. For now, we think they remain supporting evidence of our core view that this market cycle can still burn hotter before it burns out. Thank you as always, for your time. If you find Thoughts on the Market useful, let us know by leaving a review wherever you listen. And also, please tell a friend or colleague about us today.

Prediction markets are turning into real-time intelligence, and policymakers are already reacting. In this week's Weekly Rollup, Ryan and David unpack the Venezuela “Maduro” trade, the debate over fairness vs. public signal, and Polymarket's expansion into real estate markets. They also cover Bitcoin's lowest-vol year ever, Solana's DEX surge, Ethereum's stablecoin settlement ATH, Morgan Stanley's crypto ETF filings, Zcash's governance blowup, Lighter's massive $LIT airdrop, Vitalik's “trilemma solved” claim, Wyoming's state stablecoin, and Strategy's path toward major indices. ---

Dan Nathan and Guy Adami host Mike Wilson, Chief U.S. Equity Strategist and CIO at Morgan Stanley. The conversation covers the impact of inflation on stocks, the Federal Reserve's stance on interest rates, and the current state of the employment market. Mike emphasizes the Fed's priority on funding the deficit and job growth over controlling inflation. The discussion includes the role of AI in corporate productivity, sector-specific investment opportunities, and the intricacies of the IPO and M&A markets. Mike also addresses potential deflationary forces, equity risk premiums, and the broader economic implications of industrial and consumer good sectors. Throughout, they highlight the importance of staying tactical and adaptable in investment strategies. —FOLLOW USYouTube: @RiskReversalMediaInstagram: @riskreversalmediaTwitter: @RiskReversalLinkedIn: RiskReversal Media

Bitcoin holds around ~$90K as Brady and John frame the current range as a “higher floor” era with potential upside catalysts still intact“Healthy hopium” segment compares Bitcoin adoption to the internet's S-curve and revisits how skeptics routinely dismiss exponential technologiesDiscussion of long-horizon Bitcoin returns using a “wealth table” framing: short-term noise, long-term trend clarityLynn Alden's view: recent selloff lows may hold as liquidity conditions improve and excess “Bitcoin treasury company” activity gets washed outETF adoption story accelerates: Morgan Stanley launches branded Bitcoin and Solana ETFs, notably skipping EthereumBank of America/Merrill opens advisor access to multiple spot Bitcoin ETFs with a framed 1–4% allocation for suitable clientsETF flows remain resilient: outflows are modest relative to the drawdown, suggesting a stickier, longer-term holder baseMacro/politics: Supreme Court tariff case is approaching a decision, with markets likely reacting in a messy, sector-specific way rather than a clean “tariffs on/off” binaryHousing policy: Trump floats MBS buying to compress mortgage spreads and proposes restricting institutional purchases of single-family homes, with questions on feasibility and real impactDefense policy whiplash: conflicting announcements trigger sharp moves in defense stocks, highlighting policy-driven volatility risk Swan Private helps HNWI, companies, trusts, and other entities go beyond legacy finance with BItcoin. Learn more at swan.com/private. Put Bitcoin into your IRA and own your future. Check out swan.com/ira.Swan Vault makes advanced Bitcoin security simple. Learn more at swan.com/vault.

Brian Nowak: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Brian Nowak, Morgan Stanley's Head of U.S. Internet Research. Andrew Percoco: And I'm Andrew Percoco, Head of North America Autos and Shared Mobility Research. Brian Nowak: Today we're going to talk about why we think 2026 could be a game changer and a point of inflection for autonomous vehicles and autonomous driving. It's Thursday, January 8th at 10am in New York. So, Andrew, let's get started. Have you ridden an autonomous car before? Andrew Percoco: Yeah, absolutely. Took a few in L.A., took one in San Francisco not too long ago. Pretty seamless and interesting experience to say the least. Brian Nowak: Any accidents or awkward left turns? Or did you feel pretty comfortable the whole time? Andrew Percoco: No, I felt pretty comfortable the whole time. No edge cases, no issues. So, all five star reviews for me. Brian Nowak: Andrew, we think your answer is going to be a lot more common as we go throughout 2026. As autonomous availability scales throughout more and more cities. Things are changing quickly. And we kind of look at our model on a city-by-city basis. We think that overall availability for autonomous driving in the U.S. is going to go from about 15 percent of the urban population at the end of 2025 to over 30 percent of the urban population by year end 2026. Andrew Percoco: Yeah, totally agree. Brian, I'm just curious. Like maybe layout for us, you know, what you're expecting for 2026 in more detail in terms of city rollouts, players involved and what we should be watching for throughout the next, you know, nine to 12 months. Brian Nowak: We have multiple new cities across the United States where we expect Waymo, Tesla, Zoox, and others to expand their fleet, expand autonomous driving availability, and ultimately make the product a lot more available and commonplace for people. There are also new potential edge cases that we think we're going to see. We're going to have our first snow cities with Waymo expected to launch in Washington, D.C.; potentially in Colorado, potentially in Michigan. So, we could have proof of concept that autonomous driving can also work in snow throughout [20]26 and into 2027 as well. So, in all, we think as we sit here at the start of [20]26, one year from now, there's going to be a lot more people who are going to say: I'm using an autonomous car to drive me around in my everyday practice. Andrew Percoco: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess, what do you think the drivers are to get us there, right? There's also some concerns about safety, adoption, you know, cost structure. What are the main drivers that really make this growth algorithm work and really scales the robotaxi business for some of the key players? Brian Nowak: Part of it is regulatory. You know, we are still in a situation where we are dealing with state-by-state regulatory approvals needed for these autonomous vehicles and autonomous fleets to be built. We'll see if that changes, but for now, it's state by state regulation. After that, it comes down to technology, and each of the platforms needs to prove that their autonomous offerings are significantly safer than human driving. That is also linked to regulatory approval. And so, when we think about fleets becoming safer, proving that they can drive people more miles without having an accident than even a human can – we think about the autonomous players then scaling up their fleets. To make the cars and fleets available to more people. That is sort of the flywheel that we think is going to play out throughout 2026. The other part that we're very focused on across all the players from Waymo to Tesla to Zoox and others is the cost of the cars. And there is a big difference between the cost of a Waymo per mile versus the cost of a Tesla per mile. And we think one of the tension points, Andrew, that you can, you can talk about a little bit here, is the difference in the safety data and what we see on Tesla as of now versus Waymo – versus the cost advantage that Tesla has. So, talk about the cost advantage that Tesla has through all this as of right now. Andrew Percoco: Yeah, definitely. So, you know, as you mentioned, Tesla today has a very clear cost advantage over many of the robotaxi peers that they're competing with. A lot of that's driven by their vertical integration, and their sensor suite, right? So, their vehicle, the cost of their vehicle is – call it $35,000. You've got the camera only sensor approach. So, you don't have lidar, expensive lidar, and radar in the vehicle. And that's just really driven a meaningful cost improvement and cost advantage. On our math about a 40 percent cost advantage relative to Waymo today. Now going forward, you know, as you mentioned, I think the key hurdle here or bottleneck, that Tesla still needs to prove is their safety. And can they reach the same safety standards as a human driver? And, you know, the improvement that you've seen from Waymo. You know, to put some numbers around this. Based on publicly available data in Austin, Tesla's getting in a crash, you know, every about, call it every 50,000 miles; Waymo is closer to every 400,000 miles per crash. So today, Waymo is the leader on safety.I think the one important caveat that I want to mention here is that's on a relatively small number of miles driven for Tesla. They've only driven about 250,000 miles in Austin, whereas Waymo's driven close to, I think, a hundred million miles cumulatively. So, when you look back, I think this is going to be the kind of key catalyst and key data point for investors to watch is – how that data improves over the course of 2026. If you track Waymo – Waymo's data improved substantially as their miles driven improved, and as they launched into new cities.We'd expect Tesla to follow a similar trend. But that's going to be a huge catalyst in validating this camera only approach. If that happens, Tesla's not limited in scale, they're not limited in manufacturing capacity. You can meaningfully see them expand… Or you can see them expand quite quickly once they prove out that safety requirement. Brian Nowak: I think it's a great point because, you know, one of the other big debates that we are all going to have to monitor in the AV space throughout 2026 is: How quickly does Tesla completely pull the safety drivers, and how quickly do they scale up production of the vehicles? Because one of the bank shots around autonomous driving is actually the rideshare industry. You know, we have partnerships; some partnerships between Waymo and Uber and Waymo and Lyft. But Tesla is not partnering with anyone. And so, I think the extent to which we see a faster than expected ramp up in deployment from Tesla can have a lot of impact. Not only on autonomous adoption, competition with Waymo, but also the rideshare industry.So how do you think about the puts and takes on Tesla and sort of removing the drivers and scaling up the fleet this year? What should we be watching? Andrew Percoco: Yeah, so they've already made some strides there in Austin. They've pulled the safety monitor. They haven't opened that up to the public yet without the safety monitor. They're still testing, presumably in that geography. They need to be extremely careful in terms of, you know, the regulatory compliance and making sure they're doing this in a safe way. Ultimately that's what matters most to them. We do expect them to roll it out to the public without the safety monitor in 2026. Whether or not, that's the first quarter or the third quarter – is a little bit tougher to predict. But I think it's reasonable to assume whatever the timeline is, they're going to make sure it's the safest way possible to ensure that there's, you know, no unintended consequences as it relates to regulation, et cetera. I think one, also; one important data point or interesting data point here. You know, we model, I think, a 100 percent CAGR in miles driven, autonomous miles driven through 2032. You can talk a little bit about, you know, what the implications for rideshare, but I think important. It's important to contextualize that would still only represent less than 1 percent of total U.S. miles driven in the U.S. So substantial growth over the next, call it six or seven years. But still a massive TAM to be tapped into beyond 2032. And I think the key there is – what's the cost reduction roadmap look like? And can we get robotaxis to a point where they are cheaper than personal car ownership? And could robotaxis at some point disrupt the car ownership process? Brian Nowak: Yeah. And the other more important point around rideshare will be how much do these autonomous offerings expand the addressable market for rideshare and prove to be incremental? As opposed to being cannibalistic on existing ride share rides. Because you're right that, you know, even our out year autonomous projections still have it less than 1 percent of the total trips. But the question is how much does that add to ride share? Because in some scenarios, those autonomous trips could end up being 20 to 30 percent of the rideshare industry. This matters for Uber and Lyft because while they are partnering Waymo and other autonomous players across a handful of markets, they're not partnered in all the markets. And in some markets, Waymo is going alone. Tesla is going at it alone. And so when we look at our model and we say as of 2024, Uber and Lyft make up 100 percent of the ride share industry based on the current partnerships, which includes Waymo and Tesla and all; and Zoox and all the players, we think that Uber and Lyft will only make up 30 percent of the autonomous driving market. And so it's really important for the rideshare industry that when, number one, we see AV's being incremental to the TAM; and two, that Uber and Lyft are able to continue to add more partnerships over time to drive more of that overall long-term AV opportunity and participate in all this rideshare industry over the next five years. Andrew Percoco: I think it's really clear that the future of autonomous vehicles is here and we've reached an inflection point; and there's a lot of interesting catalysts and data points for us and for investors to watch for throughout 2026.So Brian, thanks again for taking the time to talk. Brian Nowak: Andrew, great speaking with you. And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

Morgan Stanley makes a major bet on crypto adoption by filing for in-house Bitcoin and Solana ETFs, a sharp reversal that signals real demand inside its massive wealth management network and another step toward crypto becoming table stakes for traditional finance. The episode also covers MSCI's decision to keep MicroStrategy in its indexes, the resulting rebound across crypto treasury companies and miners, and why index inclusion still matters so much for price action. Finally, there's an update from Washington, where a crypto market structure bill heads toward a contentious committee vote, with stablecoin yield, AML provisions, and banking lobby pressure setting up one of the clearest regulatory showdowns yet. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

Jeff Park is a Partner & Chief Investment Officer at ProCap Financial. In this conversation, we break down the outlook for 2026, how bitcoin is positioned within global markets, and what shifting capital flows mean as major institutions like Morgan Stanley enter the space. Jeff also shares insights on geopolitics, artificial intelligence, and why these forces are increasingly shaping bitcoin and broader financial markets.=======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/=======================Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at ⁠https://uphold.sjv.io/K0RXra.⁠ This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I'm compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital.=======================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers, with more than $15 billion in client assets across an expanding suite of investment solutions—including the world's largest crypto index fund—plus products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. In addition to managing assets, Bitwise helps investors stay informed about the fast-moving crypto market. Every week, CIO Matt Hougan breaks down what's happening in crypto in five minutes or less. Read the latest at https://experts.bitwiseinvestments.com/cio-memos. Certain Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit https://bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures to learn more.=======================Timestamps:0:00 – Intro1:59 – Bitcoin setup for 2026: positioning, flows, leverage4:35 – Volatility + drawdowns: are bear markets changing?7:49 – The “ideological investor” & 3 forces shaping 202613:48 – Venezuela bitcoin rumors & geopolitics driving markets20:15 – Gold/jewelry drama & verifying what's real23:06 – AI content & implications for the next generation34:05 – Morgan Stanley launching Bitcoin ETF & Solana ETF

Our Chief Fixed Income Strategist Vishy Tirupattur is joined by Dan Toscano, the firm's Chairman of Markets in Private Equity, unpack how credit markets are changing—and what the AI buildup means for the road ahead.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Vishy Tirupattur: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I am Vishy Tirupattur, Morgan Stanley's Chief Fixed Income Strategist. Today is a special edition of our podcast. We are joined by Dan Toscano, Chairman of Markets in Private Equity at Morgan Stanley, and a seasoned practitioner of credit markets over many, many credit cycles. We will get his thoughts on the ongoing evolution and revolution in credit marketsIt's Wednesday, January 7th at 10am in New York. Dan, welcome.Dan Toscano: Glad to be here.Vishy Tirupattur: So, to get our – the listeners familiar with your journey, can you talk a little bit about your experience in the credit markets, and how you got to where we are today?Dan Toscano: Yeah, sure. So, I've been doing this a long time. You used the nice word seasoned. My kids would refer to it as old. But I started in this journey in 1988. And to make a long story short, my first job on Wall Street was buying junk bonds in the infancy of the junk bond market, when most of what we were financing were LBOs. So, if you're familiar with Barbarians at the Gate, one of the first bonds we bought were RJR Nabisco reset notes. And I've been doing this ever since, so over almost four decades now.Vishy Tirupattur: So, the junk bond market evolved into high yield market, syndicated loan market, CLO market, financial crisis. So, talk to us about your experiences during this transition.Dan Toscano: Yeah. I mean, one of the things these markets do is they finance evolution in industries. So, when I think back to the early days of financing leveraged buyouts, they were called bootstrap deals. The first deal I did as an intermediary on Wall Street as opposed to as an investor, was a buyout with Bain Capital in 1993. At the time, Bain Capital had a $600 million AUM private equity platform. Think about that in the scale of what Bain Capital does in private equity today. You know, back then it was corporate carve outs, and trying to make the global economy more efficient. And you remember the rise of the conglomerate. And so, one of the early things we financed a lot of was the de-conglomeration of big corporates. So, they would spin off assets that were not central to the business or the strengths that they had as an organization.So, that was the early days of private equity. There was obviously the telecom build out in the late 90's and the resulting bust. And then into the GFC. And we sit here today with the distinctions of private capital, private credit, public credit, syndicated credit, and all the amazing things that are being financed in, you know, what I think of as the next industrial revolution.Vishy Tirupattur: In terms of things that have changed a lot – a lot also changed following the financial crisis. So, if you dig deep into that one thing that happened was the introduction of leveraged lending guidelines. Can you talk about what leveraged lending guidelines did to the credit markets?Dan Toscano: Yeah, I mean, it was a big change for underwriters because it dictated what you could and couldn't participate in as an underwriter or a lender, and so it really cut off one end of the market that was determined by – and I think the thing most famously attributed to the leveraged lending guidelines was this maximum leverage notion of six times leverage is the cap. Nothing beyond that. And so that really limited the ability for Wall Street firms to underwrite and distribute capital to support those deals.And inadvertently, or maybe by plan, really gave rise to the growth in the private credit market. So, when you think about everything that's going on in the world today, including, which I'm sure we'll talk about, the relaxation of the leveraged lending guidelines, it was really fuel for private credit.Vishy Tirupattur: So private credit, this relaxation that you mentioned, you know, a few weeks ago, the FDIC and the OCC withdrew the leveraged lending guidelines in total. What do you expect that will do to the private credit markets? Will that make private credit market share decrease and bank market share increase?Dan Toscano: I think many people think of these as being mutually exclusive. We've never thought of it that way. It exists more on a continuum. And so, what I think the relaxation of those guidelines or the elimination of those guidelines really frees the banks to participate in the entire continuum, either as lenders or as underwriters.And so, in addition to the opportunity that gives the banks to really find the best solutions for their clients, I think this will also continue the blurring of distinctions between public market credit and private market credit. Because now the banks can participate in all of it. And when you think about what defines in people's minds – public credit versus private credit, in many cases it's driven by what terms look like. Customary terms for a syndicated bond or loan versus a private credit loan.Also, who's participating in it. You know, these things have been blurring, right? There's a cost differential or a perceived cost differential that has been blurring for some time now. That will continue to happen, in my opinion anyway.Vishy Tirupattur: I totally agree with you, Dan, on that. I think not only the distinction between public credit and private credit, but also within the various credit channels – secured, unsecured, securitized, structured – all these distinctions are also blurring. So, in that context, let's talk a little bit more about what private credit's focus has been and where private credit focus will be going forward. So, what we'll call private credit 1.0. Focused predominantly on lending to small and medium-sized enterprises. And we now see that potentially changing. What is driving private credit 2.0 in your mind?Dan Toscano: Well, the elephant in the room is digital infrastructure. Absolutely. When you think about the scale of what is happening, the type of capital that's required for the build out, the structure you need around it, the ability to use elements of structure. You mentioned several of them earlier. To come up with an appropriate risk structure for lending is really where the market is heading. When you think about the trillions of dollars that we anticipate is needed for the technology industry to complete this transformation – not just around digital infrastructure, but around everything associated with it.And the big one I think of most often is power, right? So, you need capital to build out sources of power, and you need capital to build out the data centers to be able to handle the compute demand that is expected to be there. This is a scale unlike anything we have ever seen. It is the backbone of what will be the next industrial revolution.We've never seen anything like this in terms of the scale of the capital needed for the transformation that is already underway.Vishy Tirupattur: We are very much on board with this idea as well, Dan, in terms of the scale of the investment, the capital investment that is needed. So, when you look ahead for 2026, what worries you about the ind ustrial revolution financing that is underway?Dan Toscano: Given all that's going on in the world, this massive capital investment that's going on globally around digital infrastructure, we've never seen this before. And so, when I look at the capital raising that has been done in 2025 versus what will be done in 2026, I think one of the differences that we have to be mindful of is – nothing's gone wrong while we were raising capital in 2025 because we were very much in the infancy of these buildouts. Once you get further into these buildouts and the capital raises in 2025 that are funding the development of data centers start to season, problems will emerge. The essence of credit risk is there will be problems and it's really trying to predict and foresee where the problems will be and make sure you can manage your way through them.That is the essence of successful credit investing. And so there will definitely be issues when you think about the scale of the build out that is happening. Even if you look just in the U.S., where you need access to all sorts of commodities to build out. And you know, people focus on chips, but you also need steel and roofing, and importantly labor.And as we talk to people about the build outs, one of the concerns is supply of labor supply and cost of labor. So, when you run into situations where maybe a project is delayed a bit, or the costs are a bit more than what was expected, there will be a reaction. And we haven't had that yet. We will start to see that in 2026 and how investors and the markets react to that, I think will be very important. And I'm a little bit worried that there could be some overreaction because people have trained themselves in 2025 to think of like, ‘I'm operating in a perfect environment,' because we haven't really done anything yet. And now that we've done something, something can and will go wrong. So, you know, we'll see how that plays out.I am very fixated in 2026 on the laws of supply and demand. When I think about what's going on right now, we usually have visibility on demand. And we usually have some level of visibility on supply. Right now, we have neither – and I say that in a positive way. We don't know how big the demand is in the capital world to fund these projects. We don't know how big that can be. And almost with every passing day, the supply – and what we're hearing from our clients about what they need to execute their plans – continues to grow in a way that we don't know where it ends. And the scale, we're talking trillions of dollars, right? Not billions, not millions, but trillions.And so, I look at that – not so much as something I worry about, but something I'm really curious about. Will we run out of money to fund all of the ambitions of the Industrial Revolution? I don't think so. I think money will find great projects, but when you think about the scale of what we're looking at, we've never seen anything like it before. And it will be fascinating to watch as the year goes on.Vishy Tirupattur: Thanks Dan. That's very useful. And thanks for taking the time to speak to us and share your wisdom and insights. Dan Toscano: Well, it's great to be here.Vishy Tirupattur: And to our audience, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share thoughts on the market with a friend or colleague today

Our Deputy Director of Global Research Michael Zezas and our U.S. Public Policy Strategist Ariana Salvatore discuss the implications of the U.S action in Venezuela for global markets, foreign and domestic policy.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michael Zezas: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Deputy Global Head of Research for Morgan Stanley. Ariana Salvatore: And I'm Ariana Salvatore, Head of Public Policy Research. Michael Zezas: Today we're talking about the latest events in Venezuela and its implications for global markets.It's Tuesday, January 6th at 10am in New York. So, Ariana, before we get into it: Long time listeners might have noticed in our intro, a changeup in our titles. Ariana, you're stepping in to lead day-to-day public policy research. Ariana Salvatore: That's right. And Mike, you're taking on more of a leadership role across the research department globally. Michael Zezas: Right, which is great news for both of us. And because the interaction between public policy choices and financial markets is as critical as ever, and because collaboration is so important to how we do investment research at Morgan Stanley – tapping into expertise and insight wherever we can find it – you're still going to hear from one of – and sometimes both of us – here on Thoughts on the Market on a weekly basis. Ariana Salvatore: And this week is a great example of this dynamic as we start the New Year with investors trying to decide what, if anything, the recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela means for the outlook for markets. Michael Zezas: Right. So, to that point, the New Year's barely begun, but it's already brought a dramatic geopolitical situation: The U.S. capture and arrest of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro – an event that can have far reaching implications for oil markets, energy, equities, sovereign credit, and politics. Ariana, thinking from the perspective of the investor, what's catching your attention right now? Ariana Salvatore: I think clients have been trying to get their arms around what this means for the future of U.S. foreign policy, as well as domestic policy making here too. On the first point, I would say this isn't necessarily a surprise or out of step with the goals that the Trump administration has been at least rhetorically emphasizing all year. Which is to say we think this is really just another data point in a pre-existing longer term trend toward multipolarity. Remember that involves linkage of economic and national security interest. It comes with its own set of investment themes, many of which we've written about, but one in particular would be elevated levels of defense spending globally, as we're in an increasingly insecure geopolitical world. Another tangible takeaway I would say is on the USMCA review. I think the U.S. has likely even more leverage in the upcoming negotiations, and likely is going to push even harder for Mexico to put up trade barriers or take active steps to limit Chinese investment or influence in the country. Enforcement here obviously will be critical, as we've said. And ultimately, we do still think the review results in a slightly deeper trade integration than we have right now. But it's possible that you see tariffs on non-USMCA compliant goods higher, for example, throughout these talks. Michael Zezas: And does this affect at all your expectations for domestic policy choices from the U.S.? Ariana Salvatore: I think it's important to emphasize here that we're just seeing an increasingly diminished role for Congress to play. The past year has been punctuated by one-off US foreign policy actions and a usage of executive authority over a number of different policy areas like immigration, tariffs, and so on. So, I would say the clearest takeaway on the domestic front is we're seeing a policy making pattern that is faster and more unilateral, right? If you don't need time for consensus building on some of these issues, decisions are being made by a smaller and smaller group of people. That in itself just increases policy uncertainty and risk premia, I would say across the board. But Mike, let's turn it back specifically to Venezuela. One of the most important questions is on – what this all means for global oil markets. What are our strategists saying there? Michael Zezas: Yeah. So, oil markets are the natural first place to look when it comes to the impact of these geopolitical events. And the answer more often than not is that the oil market tends not to react too much. And that seems to be the case here following the weekend's Venezuela developments. That's because we don't expect there to be much short-term supply impact. Over the medium-term risks to Venezuela's production skew higher. But while Venezuela famously holds one of the largest oil reserves in the world – it's about 17 percent of the world's oil reserves – in terms of production, its contribution is relatively small. It's less than 1 percent of global output. So, among the top 10 reserve holders, Venezuela is by far the smallest producer. So, you wouldn't expect there to be any real meaningful supply impact in the markets, at least in the near term. So, one area where there has been price movement is in the market for Venezuela sovereign bonds. They have been priced for low recovery values and the potential restructuring that was far off. But now with the U.S. more involved and the prospect of greater foreign investment into the country's oil production, investors have been bidding up the bond price in anticipation of potentially a sooner restructuring and higher recovery value for the bonds. Ariana Salvatore: Right. And to that point, our EM sovereign credit strategists anticipate limited spillover to broader LatAm sovereign credit. Any differentiation is more likely to reflect degrees of alignment with the U.S. and exposure to oil prices and potential increases in Venezuelan production, which could leave Mexico and Columbia among relative under underperformers. Michael Zezas: Right. And this seems like it's going to be an important theme all year because the U.S. actions in Venezuela seem to be a demonstration of the government's willingness to intervene in the Western Hemisphere to protect its interests more broadly. Ariana Salvatore: That's right. So, it's a topic that we could be spending much more time talking about this year. Michael Zezas: Great. Well, Ariana, thanks for taking the time to talk. Ariana Salvatore: Great speaking with you, Mike. Michael Zezas: And as a reminder, if you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please take a moment to rate and review us wherever you listen; and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

After 968 episodes and nearly a decade, I'm pausing the Goal Digger Podcast. Season one is complete, and I'm so excited about what comes next. I've been searching for women who stepped back at the height of their careers not from crisis or failure but from peace, intention, and pure joy. Those stories are rare, so I'm modeling it in real time: what it looks like when a woman makes a conscious, celebratory choice to step away from something that's working because she's designed her life to have that freedom. Here's what lights me up about this: the through line of my entire business has always been about getting back your time. Me being able to make this choice right now, to pause a thriving seven-figure revenue stream while my business continues to run beautifully, is the ultimate proof that everything I've taught actually works. This is the goal we've been digging for all along. I'm not disappearing, I'm expanding. My courses, email list, and programs are still thriving and I'll be even more present and creative in those spaces. Will there be a season two? Maybe. I'm wide open to whatever magic emerges. Stay connected on my email list where I'm personally writing weekly: https://jennakutcher.com/penpals If you've been wondering what it looks like to build something meaningful, enjoy your success, and choose what comes next from a place of abundance and possibility, this one's for you. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/a-new-chapter-for-goal-digger Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.