AMERICA HAS AN ELECTRICAL COMPONENTS CRISIS

@tracyalloway and I talked to @NNNIncome about the ongoing scarcity of switchgears and transformers, and how you have virtually complete buildings going empty because they can't get one critical missing part.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… As @NNNIncome explained there are basically five companies that make this gear. And thanks to booming demand (chips, AI, electrification etc.) they're still absolutely slammed.

He ordered a switchgear a year ago, and was just told it'd be another year's wait.

BREAKING:

BOOOOOM. 303K new jobs created. Unemployment rate falls to 3.8%. Prior months revised higher by 22K.

Economists were expecting 214K jobs and a 3.8% unemployment rate.

bloomberg.com/news/live-blog… 2-year yields move higher

BREAKING:

IT'S A BEAT. 199K JOBS. UNEMPLOYMENT RATE FALLS TO 3.7%. LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATE RISES.

Economists had been looking for 185K job gains, and an unemployment rate of 3.9%

bloomberg.com/news/live-blog… 10-year yields are spiking

👁️ 👁️ 👁️

NEW ODD LOTS: It's the most sci-fi episode we've ever done.

@tracyalloway and I talk to @worldcoin CEO @alexblania about the plan to use eyeball scanning orbs to let us prove our humanhood and collect UBI in a world where AI changes everything.
bloomberg.com/news/videos/20… @tracyalloway @worldcoin @alexblania I've been fascinated by the Worldcoin orb ever since it its inception.

The company was cofounded by @sama, whose work at OpenAI is contributing to the environment where we might feel the need to get their eyeballs scanned, in order to biometrically prove that they're not a bot.

I've been kind of following markets in one way or another for 25 years now, and I still don't know that much. But one thing that's true that I've observed is that every time the animal spirits get going, people start buying $PLUG

Wrote about it in yesterday's newsletter. This has got to be one of my favorite charts ever.

$PLUG share price (white) vs. $PLUG market cap (yellow)

TRANSCRIPT:

Full text of our chat with @pahlkadot and @allafarce is out.

If you're interested in State Capacity and "can governments build things" and all that stuff, there's so much in here that's eye opening and insightful on these questions. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… @pahlkadot @allafarce I don't even know where to begin with the various fascinating parts of this conversation, because there were so many.

One darkly hilarious nugget is that during the UI emergency in 2020, California hired people like crazy, and the effect was to slow claims processing down.

NEW ODD LOTS:

What really happens when governments build software?

UI systems, the Obamacare website, Treasury Direct, Tax filing pages

@tracyalloway and I had an incredible conversation with @pahlkadot and @allafarce about why it often goes so bad.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… @tracyalloway @pahlkadot @allafarce So many interesting lessons and insights between the two guests about state capacity, complexity, management, politics, budgeting constraints, institutional capture etc. And why up until recently Treasury Direct made you use a virtual on-screen keyboard

https://twitter.com/dbkahn/status/1664329368016158720

WHAT PEOPLE GET WRONG ABOUT THE 14TH AMENDMENT

In the newsletter, I wrote about the two supposedly "serious" options in the event of no deal, the big legal misunderstandings behind them. Based on our chat with @ArnabDatta321 and @IrvingSwisher

Sub here

bloomberg.com/account/newsle… @ArnabDatta321 @IrvingSwisher One other thing I've been thinking a lot about since yesterday is what a failure it is not to have started on the consol abilities sooner. One advantage it has over the coin is that they could have been issuing them easily this whole time with the infrastructure in place.

*SPECIAL BONUS ODD LOTS*

The White House is doing what it said it wouldn't do.

@tracyalloway and I talked to @IrvingSwisher and @ArnabDatta321 about how Biden said they wouldn't negotiate on the debt ceiling.
And now they're doing exactly that.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… The failure of the strategy goes back basically 6 months.

By not prepping any sort of contingency when the Republicans won the house -- The White House was left without any kind of offramp or credibility in its insistence on a clean hike.

TRANSCRIPT:

Here's CME CEO Terry Duffy's exact words on the latest Odd Lots about how his company is in a strong position to leave Chicago anytime it wants in response to tax hikes or other policies it doesn't like.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Another comment that I thought was interesting from Duffy was on the debt ceiling.

Duffy is a registered Republican, but seemed to take it for granted that the McCarthy bill from a few weeks ago was a non starter.

"The VFX team at Electric Theatre Collective and creative agency Blitzworks used a mix of live action shots, digital effects and AI to create the commercial and its complex transitions." creativebloq.com/news/coca-cola…

https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1658015653071052803

I'd love to know more concrete details about the degree to which "AI" was used in this vs. what was called CGI, and how much money was saved and/or new capabilities introduced.

BIG NEW ODD LOTS:

Last week @tracyalloway and I sat down for an exclusive interview with CME CEO Terry Duffy.

He says his firm is prepared to leave Chicago "if we had to", as new progressive mayor Brandon Johnson enters office.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… According to Duffy, the CME owns zero real estate anymore in the city of Chicago, and that all of its office leases have language that allow the firm to break them under certain political conditions

BREAKING: BOOOOOOM

IT"S ANOTHER HUGE BEAT. 253K NEW JOBS, UNEMPLOYMENT RATE FALLS TO 3.4%

Economists had predicted 185K new jobs and for the unemployment rate to rise to 3.6%.

bloomberg.com/news/live-blog… futures slip modestly

BREAKING:

*FED OMITS PRIOR LANGUAGE THAT SIGNALED MORE HIKES AHEAD

*FED RAISES BENCHMARK RATE 25 BPS TO 5%-5.25% TARGET RANGE "The U.S. banking system is sound and resilient." federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pre…

TRANSCRIPT: Full text of our fascinating conversation with Penn State forestry professor Calvin Norman on the looming shortage of barrel-suitable white oak, and the existential threat that poses to the bourbon industry. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… I think there are two things that make the economics really interesting.

One is that there doesn't seem to be great incentives for sound forestry management. It's costly and there's no obvious, imminent payoff from focusing on things like invasive species, or controlled burns...

THE LOOMING SUPPLY CHAIN CRISIS THAT COULD WRECK THE BOURBON INDUSTRY

On a new Odd Lots @tracyalloway and I talk to Penn State forestry professor Calvin Norman on the decline of white oak trees, and what it means for the barrels crucial to making bourbon
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Among the things we discuss:

- Why white oak, and only white oak, is suitable for bourbon aging
- Why it's hard to re-grow or regenerate suitable white oak trees at scale
- Why white oak is on in decline in the first place
- The importance of forestry management...

I'm loathe to jump into this discourse. But just Fwiw, I never had a bluecheck, but I was one of the actual subs to the old Twitter Blue, in part for this reason, cause I want the site to be sustainable.

But that was sunsetted. So I automatically went from payer to unpayer.

https://twitter.com/WhitlockJason/status/1649362116858486786

And the reason I have no impulse to pay now is not cause of Elon or anything like that. It's that the site's gotten worse. Tweetdeck (how I mainly use the site) being made worse. Harder to know who's "real" or not anymore. Links to certain things being throttled etc. It's worse.

We've posted the full scripts of our 3-part series on the NY weed market.

Reading back through these, my main takeaway is how blown away I am by the complexity of these markets, from both a regulatory and operational perspective.

Here's Part I bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Here's @GoBlueCdn in Part II, talking about how for years, the marijuana plant has been cultivated for specific (largely covert) conditions, making it a brand new challenge for farmers attempting to grow consistently at scale. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

POT LOTS:

Everyone knows there's marijuana being sold everywhere across NYC, despite there being very few actual licensed dispensaries

So @tracyalloway went out and talked to sellers, regulators, lawyers, entrepreneurs, VCs etc. to understand how this market is evolving 1/ @tracyalloway Part I looks at the basics of the birth of this new industry in NY, and elsewhere around the country + Canada.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

NEW ODD LOTS:

The NYC Landlord Who Says The Golden Age Of Being A Landlord Is Over

@tracyalloway and I talked to @SoBendito who explains the political and economic shifts underway, and why he's getting out of being a residential landlord.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… @tracyalloway @SoBendito Should be a fun one for everyone. Renters. Investors. NIMBYs. Rent control advocates. All of 'em.

Ben talks about how landlords had it easy for decades and why it's changing now, as the world wakes up to tenants' rights, the need to build more, and other shifting conditions.

NEW ODD LOTS:

The return of Citi's Matt King, who sees a $1 trillion liquidity drain still coming to the market.

This was a special episode, because he brought a ton of charts to his conversation with me and @tracyalloway which you can see here: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… @tracyalloway So you can scan these charts and follow along. Or you can watch the full episode on YouTube, where he pulls up the charts as he talks to us.