Bloomberg Opinion's Eduardo Porter discusses El Salvador's controversial iron fist policy that raises complicated questions about democracy. Columnist Lisa Jarvis says, if you never got COVID, thank you genes. She joins to explain. Kathryn Edwards says assertions of racial bias against white men are not supported by unemployment data. And Faye Flam joins to talk about rising temperatures. Hosted by Amy Morris.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast. Catch us Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Bloomberg Opinion I Amy Morris. This week we look at questions about COVID. Why are some people more at risk than others? Why are some people struggling with long COVID while others remain asymptomatic. New research shows the answer could be in our genes. And then we talk about the Supreme Court decision impacting affirmative action on college campuses. How could this apply to your workplace? And there are some who argue that white men face a hiring disadvantage. We'll check those numbers, and then a look at the oppressive heat that most of the country and the world is going through. Oceans near Florida are topping one hundred degrees. Hospitals are result acording to ice filled body bags to lower patients temperatures. Where is this coming from? And have we reached a climate change tipping point? But we begin with l Salvador. The Central American country has the second lowest homicide rate in the region, But at what cost. In May of last year, more than seventy one thousand Salvadorans were behind bars. That's more than one percent of the population. Let's talk about this with Bloomberg opinion columnist Eduardo Porter. Eduardo covers Latin America, US economic policy, and immigration and joins US. Now let's just start from the beginning. Is this a human rights issue?
Well, yes, indeed it is. The mass imprisonment of a large share of your population involves and has involved, in the case of Salvador, a lot of wrongful imprisonment. You know, people that are just being swept up in massive raids and the abuses of prisoners that in some cases have left to prisoners dying. And so yes, clearly this is human rights problem.
So but is it working though.
Well, if you mean reduce if working means reducing crime, well yes it has reduced crime. And that's what's made it so politically popular because Elsadodor was a country that has been crime ridden for years and years and years, and murder rates have come down really drastically over the past few years. So yes, if that's your measure of success, and I understand why many people see it as thus, Yes, it's been successful.
On the other hand, though, you may wind up sweeping innocent people into that net. When they go out and round people.
Up, you sweep people into the net, you abuse these people's rights. You lose any sense of accountability in society because the forces of repression, you know, the police and military basically don't have to answer to anybody as long as they're putting a bunch of people in jail. And that is not very compatible with democracy actually, because you need accountability in a democracy, you need respect for basic civil rights, and that's what suffers.
You mentioned that Salvadoran's for the most part like it, that this is politically popular. But is this what they had in mind? Is this what they wanted?
Well, you know, I guess the answer is the first door answer is yes. I mean, if Bukele is so popular that that he's going to run for president again, even though his constitution, the Salvadoran constitution says you can't run twice in a row. And it's just to point out this isn't popular just in El Salvador. People from other bits of Latin America are looking at El Salvador and liking it and liking the reduction in violence. And you know, so you have politicians in other countries in Ecuador, for instance, in Honduras that are that are you know, trying or talking about trying something similar.
That leads me to my next question, then how bad was it in El Salvador? If this seems to be a viable answer, and this seems to be more politically popular, this more draconian and dramatic step.
Well, just I mean the sense of how bad it was. In the year twenty fifteen, the murder rate in El Salvador topped one hundred per one hundred thousand people in the population, So it's one out of every thousand people in Salvador were killed in twenty fifteen. So that's a lot of murder, that's a lot of homicide, and that it was the highest in Central America, and I'm guessing it probably the highest in the hemisphere, and if not one of the highest in the world. And so the Bukelist strategy has brought it down to where last year the murder rate was seven point eight per one hundred thousand Salvadorans. So he brought it down by more than a factor of ten times. I mean, it's you know, it's just seven point eight percent of what it was in twenty fifteen. So that's kind of like the measure of the change that most people see in their lives. So now streets that used to be like war zones where you couldn't send your kid out play in the yard or anything, well now you've got kids playing in the yard and families doing picnics and stuff like that. You know, so there has been a change, and hence the political popularity of the strategy.
Let's talk about the sustainability of this. They can't keep this up, can they? This very iron fist take on crime.
It's hard for me to say how long, because there's been regimes where this kind of policy has been sustained for a very long time. I'm thinking of the Philippines under Rodrigo du Tete or Polka Game in Ronda, where you know, iron fisted policies have continued for many, many years now.
But those are countries you don't necessarily want to be compared to.
Yeah, man, I don't think you wanted to be compared to old Salvador, you know. In the last few years, I mean, the level of violence in this country is also intense, and so I guess it all it depends on what the political what the political response is. I would agree that right right now, about one percent of the salvador In population is in prison. That's a huge It's like one out of every hundred people. Imagine that in the United States, for instance, one out of every every one hundred people in prison. Now, I find it very difficult to contemplate how you can sustain that over time, and especially if you feel you have to ramp up from there or you get to two percent of the population. I mean, these are enormous, insanely large numbers, and if they come with the kinds of abuses, it leads to death and so forth. I think the political pressure of the political argument might change if people start perceiving, you know, perceiving themselves vulnerable. I think that people that saw themselves at risk from the crime and the gangs and the streets, that are now happy that they can that the streets are no longer a war zone might turn a little bit less, you know, it might turn somewhat against the policy if they perceive the cost that this might bring in that you know, their kid may be vulnerable to being being caught up in a raid and put in jail because he was out at the wrong time, at the wrong place. You know, these kinds of consequences that come with the iron fists sort of policy. So, I mean, in the end of the day, it's hard to say how sustainable these things are. And I also think it depends on what else you can bring to the conversation. What other strategies you can put there, you know, to compete with this the seeming success of this one, right, Is there another way? Is there a more sort of like democratic, less at risk of abusing human rights, less, you know, less violent strategy if you will, to bring security to peace and security to the streets.
That's exactly what I was going to ask you about. If there are any other options either on the table there that they would be considering, or that human rights groups might be trying to pitch to them, what else is out there that would work?
Well? Look, I mean let's go to like the total other extreme end of the table, like you know, Scandinavia or whatnot. You can have societies with you know, with low levels of crime and no human rights abuses, and you know where you don't put it one percent of your population in person, so that it is possible to have another kind of equilibrium. Certainly it is, and that's what one should aspire for now. In countries like El Salvador and Honduras and maybe Ecuador, and the draw of these very very authoritarian, iron fisted policies I think come also because they don't see anything else on the table that seems to work, you know. But I do think that it behooves us that might you know, that might kind of like be a little bit appalled at the level of violence in policies like the one in El Salvador to come up with with new with new ideas. And I do think that new ideas will require setting up very strong justice systems where that can adjudicate you know, crime from innocence, you know that, and do that can give people due process. I mean these sorts of uh of justice kind of reforms I think we are very important. And these countries, countries like Olsalabad, are countries where not not not uh this is not a coincidence. Countries in where these justice systems are very weak or due process is not always to be had, where you know, corruption is very is very high, and so reducing corruption and creating a more functional justice system with due process I think is an essential path to a different kind of criminal justice system that might be that might be less violent and also successful.
The size of the country or the wealth of the country, would those be factors?
I would answer yes. You know, Salvador is a very very small country. You know, putting if you think of it, let's say, consider Mexico and another very violent country. Putting one percent of the population in a country of one hundred and thirty million people requires really, really a lot of investment in prisons. I mean, so it just the numbers just become too mind boggling to consider. And it's also a country with like two hundred criminal groups, so when the problem is more complex. So I think that there is an issue of size that allows us to work in El Salvador that it wouldn't work in a bigger country like Mexico or Brazil or Argentina.
All Right, we're going to have to leave it there for now. Eduardo Eduardo Porter a Bloomberg opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy, and immigration, and he is the author of American Poison. How racial hostility, destroyed our promise and the price of everything. Coming up, we're going to ask why a COVID infection may hit people so differently. Some barely get the sniffles, others are just flattened. Look at new discoveries in genetic research. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast. Catch us Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. And even as COVID becomes more like background noise for the rest of us, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Why does one family member suffer a hacking cough another might not even have a sniffle. Why does long COVID affect some people and not others. Why are some people flattened even if they're vaccinated, with fatigue and exhaustion, while others are just able to push right on through. There's a cluster of new studies suggesting some of the answers might be genetic. Bloomberg opinion columnist Lisa Jarvis covers biotech, healthcare, and the pharmaceutical industry, and she joins me, Now, Lisa, always a pleasure, let's talk about this. Mild cases, asymptomatic infections of COVID haven't really been studied like some of the sickest patients in the hospital. So my first question is why not? And secondly, how does that skew maybe what we thought we knew.
Right Well, the first question, why haven't they been studied? Part of it is those are much harder people to study. So if you have a severe case of COVID and you're in the hospital, we've got you in the system and we can collect samples, we can analyze those things. But if you have a mild case, you may not even report it to your doctor, and so it's harder to track and get in particular genetic information from you. And so one of the things that people have been able to do in order to get around that is use the Bone Narrow Registry. That is a place where people have already signed up, they've already handed over their genetic data, and that has allowed researchers to get at some of these questions around what's going on with asymptomatic or mild COVID.
So have we now that we've been able to study that group, have we been able to learn more about how COVID behaves or or did it show us how much we didn't know already?
Right?
Well, I think the thing that came out of that is that you know, essentially, Maybe I'll just describe what the researchers did, which is that they had people download an app and they reported their symptoms if they tested positive. This was before we were all vaccinated, which is important because once you get vaccinated, it kind of complicates how you would interpret the data. And they found that people with one copy of a certain gene were two times as likely to be asymptomatic, and people with two copies were eight times as likely to be asymptomatic.
And another thing they found.
Was that eventually, these genes that increase your chances of being asymptomatic have to do with proteins that show your immune system little bits of viruses or bacteria or fungi to let them know that that's a foreign invader. And if they had these genes and had been exposed to a common cold, they were much more likely to be asymptomatic. So what it's teaching us essentially is that we kind of there's some background information that you might be getting if you had a garden variety cold and you had these genes and your T cells, which have a long kind of memory, remember how to recognize them and do a good job of shutting it down. That's important both for understanding how our immune spawn responds, our immune system responds, but also for how we think about designing vaccines, how we think about designing future treatments, whether it's for COVID or another virus.
I want to get into that in a second, but a quick question you just made me think of. So genetics, theoretically, depending on what our gene makeup is, could help us fight off this virus and other viruses as well. It depends on what our gene makeup is. But then isn't there a flip side to that coin where genetics might also allow COVID to linger into long covid. Is that also part of the genetic makeup?
That's right.
So we're seeing a few new studies, and these are all preprints, which means they haven't been pure viewed yet. But I think there's a growing collection of studies. It's starting to point to certain genes that increase your susceptibility for long COVID.
The researchers that found one of these genes, fox P four.
That gene had already been shown to increase your chances of having severe COVID and actually your risk. It increases your risk more for long COVID. And that's a gene that has to do with your lungs. It's found in your lines. And you know, I think all of that again helps us think about, you know, what is the virus doing once it enters your body, how is our immune system responding? And how do we design treatments in vaccines to combat that.
And we are talking with Bloomberg Opinion columnist Lisa Jarvis about why COVID seems to hit some of us harder than others, and it's all about the genes. So, Lisa, this research just the beginning, and you alluded to this earlier that this can go some pretty amazing places. Are we thinking about maybe preventives or new vaccines. What's the end game? Do we have one?
Well?
I think, you know, first, let's hope that we keep pushing. I'm better treatments in vaccines, that's challenged. But one thing that the asymptomatic study teaches us is that it turns out our T cells, those memory cells that kind of swoop in and shut down you from having symptoms, could be an important thing to target with the vaccine we've been Our current vaccines target the antibodies that we make and try to get our immune system to remember how to make antibodies against COVID. That's sort of your frontline that prevents you, in theory, from getting the virus at all. But maybe we just get the virus, but our immune system knows really well how to shut it down afterwards, and we activate these T cells. So it could be a different strategy. People are working on that, but I think it could point to that's something we should make a further investment in.
Sort of like an immunotherapy.
I mean, all of the vaccines are doing that, but this would be essentially instead of targeting our antibodies, it would be targeting our T cells, which just acts. They don't operate to prevent the virus from infecting our cells. They operate after the virus has infected our cells and would quickly swoop in and shut it down.
I see, I see. Gosh, this is an incredible body of research, and it's interesting to see how genetics research is leading into all of this. Could researchers use what they learn here based on COVID nineteen and all that comes with it to maybe create other vaccines for other illnesses? Can they discover more as they open these genetic doors just with COVID nineteen.
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that's important about this research is that it is highlighting how important our genes could be and our susceptibility to viruses in general.
And we have some other evidence pointing to that in other.
Diseases, but it hasn't always gotten a ton of attention, and so I think one thing that could happen is this helps people recognize, hey, this is a field that matters. We should continue to invest in it and pursue it because it turns out that, you know, it teaches us a lot about you know, not just our susceptibility, but how viruses work and how our immune systems respond to them.
To that end, though, was there in your research and when what you wrote for the Bloomberg terminal? Is there any pushback against this type of research. Remember there was so much division over COVID anyway. I mean even just wearing a mask, whether to wear one or not was something on this level. With this also create pushback.
You know.
I think there's two sides to that coin.
One is people who say, like, well, whatever, I have this gene, what am I going to do about it?
Right?
But I do think it could help a doctor understands like if you're someone susceptible to severe COVID and could be hospitalized, you might want to know that and take precautions if there's a big outbreak. But the second thing is that you know, to me, I think it actually points to the opposite side. Like a lot of people make the argument like, well, COVID's not a big deal, I didn't get sick. You know, Well, it turns out maybe your genes helped you, and you don't know if you are one of those people or not. So I think in some ways it kind of helps explain some of the arguments people were using against COVID, being you know, us needing to kind of put a lot of precautions in place that we do have variability and our susceptibility to the virus, and that's why some people didn't get sick and others did.
Lisa, thank you. It is so cool to see this research in action, and your column on the Bloomberg Terminal really does just let it all out for us and helps it all make sense, even for a layperson like myself. We really appreciate you joining us today.
Oh, thank you so much, Jamie.
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Lisa Jarvis covers biotech, healthcare, and the pharmaceutical industry, and don't forget We're available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. Coming up, How the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action could have an impact beyond college campuses, Like in your office, This is Bloomberg Opinion.
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This is Bloomberg Opinion. I'm maybe Morris. A recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action specifically addressed college admissions, but there are also arguments that it could have broader implications. There is also a casual assertion by some that there is a racial bias against white men in hiring practices. The data doesn't necessarily support that, so we want to jump right into that. Catherine and Edwards is a Bloomberg opinion columnist, a labor economist, and an independent policy consultant. She joins us now to straighten us all out. It has been the conventional wisdom that being a white man makes it harder to get hired. Where does that assertion come from? And compare that to what the reality is, what the statistics show us.
I think the most important thing is that it should be our north star to lead with empathy, and when you don't get a job or you don't get a promotion, that stings. And this is not to negate that experience or to minimize what people went through when they didn't get something, but more to provide the context that the labor market to offer some pretty heavy skepticism that white men face any disadvantage. So probably the most palpable evidence of this, and I think the broadest, is that the unemployment rate for white men is lower than the unemployment rate for black men, but it goes a lot deeper than that Black men are treated the same by the labor market as white men who have less education. So the unemployment rate for a black college graduate is the same as the unemployment rate of a white high school graduate. The unemployment rate of a black high school graduate is the same as a white high school dropout. We call this a step wise reduction in the labor market, and it's not a real mystery where it comes from. Black men are deeply, deeply discriminated against and hiring, and there is ample evidence for it that has been consistent over decades, and no study has ever found discrimination against white men.
I want to get into something that you just said. You were talking about the comparisons between having an education and not coupled with a person's race. Attually found more of a definitive link, not necessarily with being white or with being black, but with being educated. That's where the definitive link is. And then when you overlay the race factor on top of it, that's where you really see the difference.
Education lowers unemployment. So the more education you have, the lower you're unemployment rate, because the more successful you are in the labor market. And that's true both if you look at all workers in the economy, or if you look within groups, so just black men, black men with an advanced degree, black men who are lawyers who have an MBA, they have a lower unemployment rate than black men with a high school degree or no degree. The problem in our labor market is that the discrimination against black men means that they don't get the same type of labor market protection or benefits from their degree that white men do because they're discriminated against. And so there's this kind of you know, almost like penalty. The black penalty is equivalent to a degree, so that you you basically like lose a degree of education for being black. That you know, not that that's with the actual process, but just that the discriminat against black men basically takes the protection that a higher degree should give them and erodes it so that they're basically treated in a labor market, not necessarily in like a microcosm decision of the hiring decision, but overall on the labor market they should have unemployment rate that is much lower given their education.
But not right.
So it's not to say that someone with to resume in front of them says, oh, well, this guy, this black guy went to college, but that doesn't count because he's black. It doesn't work like that. It's just that the racism towards black men in the labor market increases their unemployment rate above what their education would predict.
Also, I want you to clarify something else for me. With all of the research that you've done, if you don't mind the gap that may or may not persist between black and white hiring practices. The way it was explained to me once was it's not that a person of color will automatically be chosen and shown favoritism over a person who may be white when they're in the hiring practice head to head, right, when they're going through the system head to head. It's more of an opportunity for companies or universities or whatever to expand the pool. Right, So it's not so much a white person versus a black person head to head for a job, as much as it's let's make the pool bigger and pick the most qualified people from that pool. That's how it was explained to me. Is that accurate or is that aspirational?
Well, I think there's a lot that goes on in the hiring process that people don't say and don't realize, and so what the intentions are to say, Well, we just want to increase the hiring pool. I mean, that's what they say, but we don't know what's happening. So one thing that economists do, it's closest to a controlled experiment that really economists have in the real world, is they do something called audit studies where they compile resumes that are fake, and they send out hundreds and thousands of them to employers and respond to job ads, and they measure the callback rate. So these resumes are character for character identical. Right, there's no education difference. The GPA is the same. All the experience is word for word identical, but they switch the name at the top to sound black or white. So the paper that was done on this in the early two thousands is Emily and Greg versus Lakeisha and Jamal. Simply having a black sounding name on an otherwise identical resume reduces the callback rate for jobs by about fifty percent. Now is that because someone's throwing the black name out of the pile or because it triggers some very latent racial bias in how they assess resumes. I mean it applies to women as well, but something is happening in the hiring process that through hundreds of studies and thousands and thousands of resumes, there has been no change in thirty years. Black people are called back at about half the rate.
Okay, so you're hired. Do these biases also exist in salaries and wages?
Yes, so Black workers with a college degree on average make about twenty eighty percent less than white workers with a college degree, So same education, much less pay. There's lots of mechanisms that labor economists have identified to explain this. One of them is occupational crowding. You know, if it's harder for you to get a job, you're more likely to take one that you're overqualified for. And if that happens enough for an entire group, like all of black men with a college degree, you know, they end up, you know, suppressing their own wages because of the jobs that they took. And they took those jobs because it's harder for them to find one, and all this has a direct through line. You're discriminated against in the hiring process, and therefore your unemployment rate is higher because it takes you longer to find a job. It takes you longer to find a job, so you're willing to take one that you're overqualified for and paid less than you should be because it's taking you so long to find one. This is an incredibly tight story. It's supported by hundreds and hundreds of papers in research studies, economics, and it all is like a clear mechanism through our labor market. Now, when you can trast that with someone who said, no one wants to hire a white guy right now, there's no evidence, there's no through line, there's no wide result that you would see, and there's also really no diversity at the top of American company. So even incording even as late as twenty twenty one the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who gets reports of demographic data from every company with more than one hundred people in the US, just two percent of senior officers and managers were black men. If it were happening large that white men were being passed over, it have to show up somewhere and some broader statistic.
So then where does that leave the white men who do feel that they've been passed over or even being told that they are being passed over, and they have that sort of ingrained How do we handle that what does that leave them.
Let's take it on face value. You were passed over for a black man. You didn't get the job you wanted because you were a white man and they wanted to hire a black man. That action necessitates that black men were underrepresented by your employer or the employer you were aspiring to, which means this whole process is a function of discrimination against black people. They would not go in and pass over someone more qualified to hire someone who was less qualified unless they had a deep history of discrimination that they were trying to correct on the back end, in frankly a relatively lazy way. So even though you are holding the short straw, it's still the same problem that we know exists, which is that black people are discriminated against. And your group has been pretty fortunate, but you got the short straw. I mean, take the blood pumping through your veins and just pretend you're an economists and ignore it for a second and just put on this like cold hearted view. It is grossly inefficient in our laguer market to pay people less and hire them less because of the color of their skin. And you might be insulated from that historically, but you're never fully insulated from the discrimination that affects other people. This inefficiency affects all of us. When you're holding the short straw, feeling passed over, you're just feeling that discrimination in another way, and you should be mad. And how weak of a policy it is at the end of the hiring decision to choose a black guy over a white guy instead of the total lack of response against this type of well documented discrimination that we've had for thirty years.
And we are going to leave it there. Catherine, thank you so much for taking the time with us today. Catherine and Edwards a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, labor economist, and an independent policy consultant. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion I Amy Morris. This has been an aggressive summer, life threatening heat domes, biblical floods, persistent wild buyers that have been spreading smoke throughout North America. It's enough to make you wonder have we hit that climate change tipping point? Bloomberg Opinion columnist Faithline covers science and she hosts the follow of the Science podcast and joins me, now, Faye, is this it? Have we reached that tipping point?
Well?
Some ways the bad news is no. That means it could be if we do hit a tipping point, then things could change, you know, that could actually accelerate changes in you know, drought, rainfall, heating, so that scientists who study climate tipping points say, there is a distinction between extremes which we are seeing and a tipping point.
But it seems to be happening so fast. Could could it actually happen faster than this you just mentioned acceleration?
And there are ways that that could happen. If say, the Amazon rainforest gets so dry that parts of it start to catch on fire, and that can actually start a feedback loop what the scientists sometimes call a positive feedback loop, though its effect on us wouldn't be positive, but that the fire would feed more dryness, which would feed more fire, and CO two would be released, which would accelerate global warming. So you have these feedback loops. The same thing can happ and when glaciers collapse and you see a lot of ice melting that then there's less sunlight. Sunlight is absorbed, blessed, it is reflected back. So they are looking at a number of systems that could create a big, big tipping point where things accelerate more than they are now.
So is that what scientists are most worried about those feedback loops or are they watching regions?
I think different scientists are looking at different things. I talk to some that look at these sort of global scale tipping points, and they pointed to what they call tipping elements, you know, things that could could change past a point where you know you have sort of small changes, small changes, and then one small change that starts a very big change. You know that that precipitates a big effect. And then I've talked to others who look at more regional scale tipping points, either islands that have become completely deforested. One of them looked at at some models, and also at Easter Island, which had a really nice ecosystem that collapsed, and at lakes where there were that had been full of fish that became dead zones.
How do you explain this to somebody who maybe doesn't believe in the climate change concept. How do you explain to them that this is not just a weather event, this is climate.
For one, we have measurements that show that the temperatures are climbing, that they are higher, that they haven't always been this hot, So we do see temperatures climbing a lot since the beginning of the twentieth century. That can vary regionally, so there are some areas, just like the summer where I live in Rhode Island, it hasn't been particularly hot, but most of the country is hot. I just you know, if you happen to live in a place that's not getting unusually hot, and lucky you. But I would also say that Earth's climate has changed dramatically over Earth's history, more dramatically than what we're saying now. In fact, we've had huge, huge upheavals, but for most of that time, there were no humans, and we've had some ice ages and what they call interglacials that have been radically colder and warmer. When there were humans, but they were nomadic people hunted, and we hadn't settled down in cities and started farming, and that's when people become vulnerable because we have to have a stable climate to feed ourselves and we have a big population. And since people really started settling down and farming, we haven't had any big climate upheavals, so we could be affected in a big way. Yeah, the Earth has gone through big things before we were around, but I'm not sure that really matters.
Faith Leam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science and she hosts the Follow the Science podcast, And that does it for this week's Bloomberg Opinion. We're produced by Eric Mallow, and you can find all of these columns on the Bloomberg Terminal. We're also available as a podcast on Apples by your your favorite podcast platform. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are just ahead. I'm Amy Morris, and this is Bloomberg
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