Single Best Idea with Tom Keene: Sarah Wolfe & Rebecca Patterson
04:30 Share

This is an iHeart Podcast.

Join us in Seattle, July 14th and 15th for Bloomberg Green, two days of powerful conversations and meaningful connections. We'll explore what's next in the climate economy, clean tech, policy, and greener living. Featured speakers include Jane Fonda, Brian Gellert, and Vinod Khosla. The title sponsor is Amazon. Official airlines are Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines. Learn more at BloombergLive.com slash GreenSeattle. That's BloombergLive.com slash GreenSeattle.

Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. The single best idea is to have a good weekend. It is a celebration of America with all the emotion. It was really great to learn. Actually, I used AI today.

to learn about... I'd read it in Rick Atkinson's book. My book of the summer is volume two of Rick Atkinson's wonderful American Revolution trilogy, the third book to be written. And I remember in the first volume the emotion of a very sweltering Philadelphia as Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. So I used AI today to figure out the graph house in Philadelphia with some nice background. This whole AI thing is...

really jaw-dropping, to say the least. We use AI on Jobs Day, and part of that is to try to look not at the immediate data, but at the noise around it. There is no greater noise now than immigration and the changes in immigration tied into our American labor economy.

Sarah Wolf, Morgan Stanley. I think you're getting the immigration story coming through in the household report. If you look at the participation rate, it's come down now for about two months. And that's actually, as expected, helping keep the labor market tight, even as we're seeing this slowing trend in payrolls.

So the unemployment rate, for example, last month would have been up to 4.6% if the participation rate hadn't fallen. Yeah, it's definitely taking out labor supply. Right now we have the participation rate 62.3%. That helped bring the unemployment rate down to 4.1%, even though the number of unemployed in the household survey was negative 200,000.

So, of course, we need to smooth out the household survey data. But I do think that's an important story. Amazing to watch Sarah Wolf in our studios using the Bloomberg terminal to look at the linkages of economics with finance and investment in real time with a jobs report, particularly looking at Fed expectations.

changing in real time. I'm joined to have Rebecca Patterson with us today, her expertise on foreign exchange, her work with the Council on Foreign Relations. Patterson, always citing smart people,

Brad Setzer publishing in the last 24 hours at the Council on Foreign Relations on Pacific Rim dollar dynamics. Here is Rebecca Patterson on that weaker dollar. There's one story that I think would be good for people to read with their lobster roll this weekend. My colleague at CFR, Brad Setzer, published a piece yesterday on balance of payments looking at the Asian currencies and what he calls a reverse Asian financial crisis risk.

I have not had the chance yet to read this piece. I just read the top of it. But the idea is that a lot of these currents have become very undervalued. And if they have to revalue and everything that comes with that, the owning of U.S. treasuries by Taiwan life insurers, et cetera, you could have global ripple effects across asset classes.

So I think that would be useful reading for anyone who's thinking about contagion. Rebecca Patterson there of the Council on Foreign Relations, also board member at Vanguard. We are halfway through the year and one of the benchmarks of this new digital experiment was in November of last year saying, where would we be on the 4th of July?

And it is absolutely stunning, the growth that we've seen in YouTube. It is new. We're learning every day. It is absolutely humbling to look at digital.

the different ways of digital, the consumption of digital, what people care about, what we see. There's a thing called time spent listening or time spent watching. And it's absolutely humbling the amount of time that people generate each and every morning to Bloomberg surveillance. That's, of course, on radio and on YouTube. Subscribe to Bloomberg Podcasts at Apple, at Spotify, at YouTube Podcasts. This is Single Best Idea.

Join us in Seattle, July 14th and 15th for Bloomberg Green, two days of powerful conversations and meaningful connections. We'll explore what's next in the climate economy, clean tech, policy, and greener living. Featured speakers include Jane Fonda, Brian Gellert, and Vinod Khosla. The title sponsor is Amazon. Official airlines are Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines. Learn more at BloombergLive.com slash GreenSeattle. That's BloombergLive.com slash GreenSeattle.

This is an iHeart Podcast.