We explore the GOP's focus on Hunter Biden and the political implications of their investigations. Bloomberg Opinion's Jonathan Bernstein joins. Columnist Lisa Jarvis joins to discuss the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade one year later. Columnists Conor Sen and Justin Fox also discuss their columns on stagflation and work productivity. Amy Morris hosts.
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 the economy and the unique market dynamics that are making it so hard to pin down trends. And we're going to take a look back at the end of Roe v. Wade and how that's impacted women's health since then. Plus we are seeing a drop in productivity. Output per hour in the US is lower than last quarter. But it's not time to panic, at least not yet. But first, Republicans were angry about President Biden's son, Hunter Biden's plea deal on tax and gun charges, with some alleging that the Department of Justice during the Biden administration has been politicized and weaponized. Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke out about those out delegations.
This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy and essential to the safety of the American people.
But Attorney General Merritt Garland statement did not appease Republicans much, who maintained that the Justice Department and FBI are biased against the GOP. Let's now bring in Bloomberg opinion columnist Jonathan Bernstein. He covers politics and policy.
Now.
Jonathan, in your column on the Bloomberg terminal, you call the Republican reaction to Hunter Biden's plea deal an example of the paranoia that script many in the party, paranoia about what walk us through that.
Well, the story here is that Republicans have now decided that the entire criminal justice federal criminal justice system is biased against them, and their proof of that is basically that, well, sometimes Republicans getting dubted for things, and sometimes Democrats don't get indibted for things Republicans. And there's no evidence here, there's no case to be made. But you know, nobody who knows the FBI thinks the FBI is full of communist rangth yeah, or even full of Democrats. You know, there's a long history of the FBI going after liberal organizations and I don't think I think, yeah, in the past some liberals have been paranoid about the FBI. But but currently, you know, because they are committed to believing that Donald Trump is innocent of everything. You know, why would and people like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Hunter Biden in this case must be guilty of everything. Evidence notwithstanding this must all be a bought by the deep state against Republicans.
Okay, I'm going to pick this apart a little bit and kind of dig into it. First of all, is this about the Biden administration specifically, or would this apply to any administration that doesn't necessarily agree with the party line or anyone who doesn't agree with the Republican party line. Let's start there.
Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I don't think it's specifically about the Biden administration. I think you know, what it seems like to me is that what you have over more than fifty years, but increasingly in the last say ten years, and especially with Trump, is the breakdown of the belief among publicans, among movement conservatives, in the whole notion of neutrality. And you see that with what they you know, originally with the idea that the liberal media was out to get them. And you know, there's a lot of academic studies of this, and it turns out that there's not really, you know that the mainstream media, that the New York Times, that Bloomberg, that CBS News are not particularly liberal. They do have biases, but they are generally biases that have to do with journalistic norms and self interest, not a plot to get conservatives. And what's happened over time is that they have extended this from well, the neutral media is out to get us too, now the bureaucracy is out to get us, and to the FBI is out to get us, and the Justice Department professionals are out to get us. So I don't think it has to do with the Biden administration or Hunter Biden in particular. It's that that's their way of understanding and explaining the world, and it's a real dangerous way of thinking about the world.
I want to get into that danger, into that risk. But I want to ask also about the rhetoric that you were just explaining. It is becoming more standard rhetoric that justice isn't blind. It's oh yeah.
I think both parties are susceptible to this, but Republicans by having the elite Republicans, by having highly visible Republicans repeat this over and over for fifty years, that it's a partisan bias. Have convinced themselves, convinced their rank and final voters, and convinced a lot of other people too, neutral people that oh, yeah, you know, the media, while they're liberal.
Let's get into the risks. Now you mentioned how this could be very dangerous, is it? Did you mean for democracy, the country, the party? What did you mean?
This goes to sort of back to James Madison and how he explained democracy, And if you go back to the seventeen hundreds, there was this assumption that democracy couldn't work, and that was because there had been a long history of you know, going back to Rome, but then especially since then, of you know, small republics were established and they would function for a while, and then the losers in that local democracy would say we're not willing to lose, and they would have a coup. They would even invite foreigners to invade and take them over. Because if you have a majority and a minority, and those seemed fairly permanent and you're in the minority, democracy is sort of a losing game for you. There's no reason to participate and to endorse the democracy. And so people thought democracy couldn't work and James Madison said, well, you know what, all these city states that tried democracy that were republics and failed, their problem was that they were too small. And everybody assumed you had to be small to be democracy because you had to meet in one place and you had you know, you have to be able to do things in person. And he says, no, we're going to have representation so we can have a large scale country, and we're going to have in a large country. We're not going to have a natural majority because people in you know, on the coast of Maine are going to be concerned with fishing, and people other people are going to be concerned with farming, and other people are going to care about religion, and other people are going to care about whatever abortion or civil rights or something else, and most people won't care about most issues. And that's sort of what we have so that you know, if you lose on one issue, you may have some other issue you care about that you can win anyway. So no natural majority. The problem is if natural majorities come to exist, and one way that can happen is if you have one issue that suddenly everybody cares about, and that's sort of the story of the Civil War, everybody cares about slavery. There has to be a winner, there has to be a loser. The losers in the South say, well, in that case, why should we be part of your country? And because they're geographically separate, they get to try to have a civil you know, right. But what we have now isn't like that, and it's not ideology. People aren't sort of liberal and conservative. I don't think that's all aboutic But what we do have is strong partisanship. And we have Republicans encouraging small strong partisanship by saying there's nothing else in the world. Everything is already partisanship. If you're losing, it's because the Democrats are winning, and that's not true. But if everybody believes it, it becomes it becomes its own truth. And then elections become super high stakes and you have a possibility of a permanent winner and a permanent loser, and democracy just doesn't work under those circumstances.
One last question for you, and I don't know that you wouldn't have the answer to this, but how do we go back? How do we get here? How do we get back?
It's a great question. The good news is that most of this is phony, right, It is true that most people in their worlds, like you know, one of the one of the you know, the media isn't or at least the neutral media there are. There are partisan media, right, There's a democratic aligned media, there's Republican aligned media. But there's a lot of media that's not that's real, and they really are neutral in the between the parties. Academic academia, most academics have strong biases, but they're not partisan. Months they care about things, you know, about their academic training and their the academic stuff that they care about. You know, most of the FBI, or in fact, as far as I know, all of the FBI, is not partisan. They do have strong biases because all bureaucrats have care about doing things their professional way, and so if you cross that, you may wind up getting prosecuted for something that somebody else did a similar thing, but it didn't hit the FBI that way, you know. And that's the same with local cops and sheriffs or what have you. They have biases, but they're mostly not partisan biases. So some of it is just sort of accepting that the world is more complicated than just democrats and Republicans. Unfortunately, the Republicans have find that this sells very well among their audience, and it's very hard to see how they stop doing that. But you know, well, they they're coming up against reality all the time and that may have some consequences for them.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion colonist covering politics and policy, and Bloomberg Opinion continues with a look at the Goldilocks economy and why these latest market trends are so hard to pin down. This is Bloomberg.
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You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. Last spring was hard on the US economy. Markets fell, inflation spiked, and stagflation was the word of the day. But investors who thought stagflation was here to stay were wrong, And now perhaps they shouldn't count on the Goldilocks economy to stick around either. Let's get more insight now. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Connorson is founder of Peachtree Creek Investments and joins me now. Connor, always a pleasure, Thank you for bringing us your insights. I want to ask you, first off, how short sighted we are when it comes to predicting end dates inflation.
I think the challenge that everyone's having is that we're dealing with huge impacts still from the pandemic economy and the lags associated with the boom and the bust that we saw during that, and those lags are different for growth in inflation, and so right now we're just now finally getting the benefit of the sort of deflationary side of the pandemic bust. So auto inflation is likely to come down over the next six months. Rental and shelter inflation is finally going to show up in the CPI data, and that's great news, but it's also a little bit of a false comfort if growth remains as strong as it appears to be at the moment.
So when you talk about false comfort, let's talk about that a little bit. Where do you see it going or is that the point you can't really It.
Sort of gets to that stagflation every point from last spring, when at that time you had growth slowing from the other side of the pandemic, but inflation was ramping up because of the lags in shelter inflation and things like that, and so you know, everyone was thinking, well, the Feds raising rates, growth is slowing, inflation is spiking, and it's going to be a disaster. It's kind of the mirror image of that. Now where growth is resilient. We see the housing market picking back up. We see in tech that AI is leading to a new boom, and we're getting that deflationary benefit from autos and shelter. And the concern is that we could see growth be really strong over the next six months and people respond favorably to this decline in inflation, but it's really just the deflation we're getting is sort of baked into the cake, and we could see inflation pick up again on the other side of that.
Can I pick that apart just a little bit? Because we've seen these unique market dynamics in the past few years. Why has it been so hard to get a handle on this?
I think we just never in a modern era haven't seen an economy adjusted to a two to three year pandemic. And we had a huge amount of fiscal stimulus that went into the system as well. So it's things like last year how we saw manufacturing sentiment tick down, and in a lot of times that tick down has been a leading indicator recession, but it was really just that consumers were shifting their spending from goods to services, and our retailers didn't need as much stuff as they did in twenty one, and people sort of overreacted to that. And in the housing market, we saw the spike and mortgage rates make people think that we were going through another two thousand and eight, when instead people have owned mortgage rates just decided not to sell our homes. And so it's been tough to sort of use historical playbooks to figure out the economy rather than sort of looking at the very unique things we've been going through.
Right, you actually have a column about this on the Bloomberg terminal, and you are able to use housing as an example as to why this seems so. I don't know if volatile is the word, but unpredictable is probably a better term to use for that. My question for you is a little more esoteric now, and it's about because of the pandemic, all of this happening is this just where it is now? Like have we just fundamentally changed the whole model and we're trying to figure out what that model is or is there a way for the pendulum to swing back.
I think there will be a time when we finally aren't looking at pandemic comparisons anymore, and that time is probably middle of next year, perhaps when sort of the rental sort of shelter impact of the pandemic is really behind us in the inflation data and auto supply champion have normalized, the auto industry has normalized, and so maybe by the middle of twenty four we can finally just talk about the economy as it is without having to go back to twenty twenty or twenty twenty one. But we still have another year or so of these weird sort of abnormalities to flow through the data, flow through the system. And until we can get there, we have to just sort of look at what's going on and not rely too much on sort of the past three receptions or how things typically work in economic cycles.
And we are talking with Bloomberg opinion columns Connor sent about the goldilocks US economy. Connor, that's your word that you used in your column on the Bloomberg terminal, when you refer to it as a Goldilocks economy, what do you mean by that.
I'd say, historically, goldilocks term and economic speak has been sort of solid growth but not aver inflationary, And right now we have sort of pretty resilient economic growth. We continue to see great job growth, and we see inflation coming off. And I think we're going to see inflation come off really, really hard on the back half of this year because I expect autodflation and shelter inflation to really accelerate, and we could start getting some monthly inflation numbers that actually look consistent with two percent. But that's just because we have this auto and shelter inflation coming out, which we've been expecting for a while and it's finally going to be showing up in the data. But at the same time, if you see the stock market at all time highs again and the housing market picking up again, it's unlikely that that two percent inflation would be sustainable in the longer term.
Let's insert the Fed in here for a moment. We have heard the FED chair talking about trying to get to that two percent number, and even saying that we're anticipating a couple of more hikes coming up in twenty twenty three. From where you stand, just the what do they call it, the hawkish pause that we've just experienced versus the hikes that maybe down the road. How does that play into this dynamic?
Well, I do think we'll get at least one more hike in July. But I think a lot of what they're doing isn't so much what they're definitely going to do or what they definitely believe, but what their view is that inflation expectations can get unanchored and a lot of this is kind of unpredictable, and so they don't want to let everyone believe that thing's in our under control and start buying stocks and houses again. So they're using this language to try to hold people in check, keep people scared of recession, keep people worried, because they really want to see those good inflation prints before they feel comfortable with backing off. And I don't know about giving me all clear, but just sort of backing off as hawkish posture.
Are we going to continue to see some passing phases as we claw our way out of the pandemic? Aftermath. I mean, you're predicting maybe middle of next year we'll get more of a sense of normalcy, but between now and then more waves of different phases that we haven't really seen before.
I think so, because again, if you look at sort of the market rent data, market rents are now about flat year every year, and they continue to fall, So I think we're going to see negative rent growth. Sort of if you were buying or renting an apartment in the third uarter of this year, it's going to be cheaper than it would have been a year ago, and that's not going to show up into the CPI shelter data until early next year, middle of the next year, So we could see again some false comfort where if all of a sudden it looks like shelter inflation is two or three percent rather than sixty seven percent, you'll see overall core inflation be very low, and you could get again people thinking that we're getting solid growth with following inflation, and that's just not going to be the reality for the long term.
So what is it that investors are getting wrong when they try to make their predictions. Is it because they're looking at the old model, the pre pandemic model, and this is how it usually is, so let's go this way and things are just too volatile.
Now, Yeah, I think the mistake people have been making for a whiles they feel like the only way to get inflation down is by crushing growth, and that any decline in inflation would only happen if growth slows down. And I think we're just getting supply side deflation because of these pandemic impacts, and sort of steady or even accelerating growth with decelerating inflation is something we could get for two or three quarters. But it's just a quirk of the pandemic and it's not really any kind of new world where we've figured out sort of economic utopia. But we should just take the did as it is, but not get too comfortable.
Okay, So how do we change that trajectory?
Then?
If we keep making the same stupid mistakes because of the new model that we're having to deal with, even if it is a temporary model, how do we get ourselves out of the rut?
I would focus on sort of watch autos to see when the auto supply chain is fixed, and at that point we could have more confidence about where auto inflation is going to go, and the same thing goes with the rental market. I would focus more on what's happening with real time rents and vacancy rates, because that ultimately is where shelter inflation is going to go in the long run, and the shelter inflation data we're going to get over the next two to three quarters is already baked based on what's happened in the rental market early in the first half of this year, and so it's really just sort of thinking about growth sort of as as it's going to be, not just again this inflation data, which is really not telling the story of what's happened in the economy today.
Connor, thank you. Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Connorson is founder of Peachtree Creek Investments. Coming up, it's been more than a year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade.
We'll take a look at the continuing fallout. This is Bloomberg Opinion.
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This is Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. It's been a year since the US Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortion, and we continue to monitor the fallout. Vice President Kamala Harris marked the anniversary at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, condemning states that have implemented full abortion bans, prompting her to ask, how dare they?
We?
All of us are now called upon to advance the promise of freedom, including the freedom of every woman to make decisions about her own body, not the government telling her what to do.
And beyond that, we are getting a better idea of how that decision is taking a toll on obgyns and other healthcare providers as well as women. And what's becoming more clear is that abortion access can't be excised from medical treatment without impacting and ultimately reducing the quality of other forms of healthcare. Joining us now with more on this, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Lisa Jarvis. Lisa covers biotech, healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. Lisa, let's talk about the impact of healthcare for women where this is showing up the most so far.
A big impact obviously is on reproductive healthcare, no surprise there. But it doesn't just mean that that's necessarily affecting women who have a pregnancy that they would like to terminate, but women who have a pregnancy where they have a complication and it is threatening their life or the life of the child. And you know, I just wrote a column that talks about how that could expand into other areas a.
Reproductive healthcare and healthcare in general.
Because doctors are less interested in working in states with these kinds of restrictions.
Let's talk about that. What sort of position does this put a physician in? How are they able to navigate and manage this?
I mean, it's a very difficult position that obgins are being put in in states with restrictions or bands. Essentially, they're being asked to not do their job in the way that they were trained to do their job and do what's best for the patient. A lot of times they're trying to navigate a very confusing legal area that's changing day by day and they have to ask permission or a lot of times people are being more conservative with their treatment rather than doing what they would naturally do. And so what that means is that if someone has a complication that threatens their life, that will eventually threaten their life, they're asking the pregnant person to wait until they're in trouble essentially to come because they're worried that the physician is worried that they could be legally liable if they perform an abortion before the state considers that to be life threatening.
You know what's interesting is I was going to ask about that, apart from providing healthcare in a timely manner, if this also puts physicians in some sort of legal peril. There's a lot to tease apart here.
Yeah, I mean I spoke with one physician who was working in Tennessee at the time that the band went into effect. There they had a trigger law, so that went into effect last summer, and she worked with women who are at high you know, who have high risk pregnancies, and essentially was shipping all of her patients to another state because the way the law was written, it was putting her at legal risk and she was afraid she was going to have to make a decision that you know, would be for her own benefit, but to the detriment of her patient, possibly costing her patient, you know, their lives.
So she was shipping people to other states to be treated.
Are physicians sticking with this? Are they moving their practices? Where are they winding up? Are they just staying put? What happens to them?
Yeah, it's a good question and something I'm really worried about. This particular physician ended up going to Colorado because she just felt like she couldn't practice safely in the state of Tennessee. Every physition that I've spoken with knows someone who is leaving or considering leaving. I think the biggest impact seems to be right now that we're seeing, at least data wise on where people choose to train. So we already know that from the match data that's you know, kind of where medical students get paired up for their residencies. That OBGYN students there was a ten percent dip in applications in states with the most restrictive abortion laws, so they're just not interested in going to those places. I think on two levels as doctors and then as humans, because a lot of those people are of reproductive age themselves, you know, considering having families and would be going to a state where they themselves might face some of these same decisions.
And we are talking with Bloomberg Opinion columnist Lisa Jarvis about how women's healthcare providers are impacted a year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and in addition, how women's healthcare is being impacted overall. Lisa, you said something that's really interesting about how some physicians are moving their practices and that some physicians, when they are going through those match programs and when they're in medical training, opt to stay away from areas that have the most restrictive abortion laws. That sounds like if you extrapolate this out, there is a real have and have not situation that's going to be breaking down in the United States based on women's healthcare, which is strange, is it not.
I mean, you know, it already kind of exists because we know that the states that have instituted some of the most restrictive abortion laws are the same states where maternal mortality rates are the poorest.
So you know, women already a dangerous place to give birth.
Or be pregnant, and that is going to get worse if you don't have doctors who want to work in those states, and so you know, I think that can extend into other forms of reproductive health care and healthcare in general for women.
If doctors don't want to work in those places.
So how are women managing? Then if it doesn't it create a backlog though in those places where they are providing the abortions, it seems like not only you're not able to get the health care that you need in State A, but if you do go to State B, you're gonna have to wait.
Yeah.
No, that's definitely true. Although I wrote a second piece that is about kind of sanctuary states and the gargantuan effort that's going into helping people navigate to get to places where they can get healthcare. I mean, it's not going to be possible for everyone, but you know, there's just a large network of agencies organizations that are helping pay for travel, pay for hotels, pay for meals places in for I live in Illinois, which has become one of these haven states. Places clinics have opened up new facilities in the last year to meet that demand for people who are coming. But it's going to get harder because you know, a larger swath in particular in the South states that previously had been able to perform abortions on people whose lives were at risk. That's becoming less possible because each month's new laws are being passed, stayed, and then passed. So I mean it's becoming a situation where there are going to be haves and have nots, and to get care, people are going to have to travel, which feels very unreasonable.
How far is this going to go?
Though?
I'm wondering if if, like so many things in history, are we going to see the pendulum swing the other direction and maybe this comes up before the courts again, or are or is it now the law of the land. Like I'm trying to sort of project out into the future where this is going to go.
Yeah, I mean, your guess is as good as mine, Amy, I mean, I hope so.
But I really I worry that even.
If a woman dies from being pregnant, which not being able to get the care they need to end the pregnancy, that that's not going to change things because we've already seen so many instances and stories of women who have been forced into situations where they get very, very sick before they get the care that they need, and it doesn't change.
It hasn't changed anything so far.
In a situation like that that you just described, do you see the States intervening or I don't know. I'm just trying to think if there's any other recourse for women like that.
I mean, I'm hoping that at some point things settle a little bit and that hospital systems feel less afraid, doctors feel less afraid to make decisions that they had made for decades before these laws were passed, and that that becomes less of an issue. But I also hope that, you know, people walk back some of the more restrictive laws that are forcing doctors into these terrible positions.
Have you been able to talk to any doctors about this.
I have, you know, and they're really upset because they feel like they're not able to treat patients in the manner that they were trained to treat patients. You know, it's antithetical to know their training, to have their whole purpose is to help people and do no harm, and it's been very tough for them.
So let's hope.
Let's hope that some of these laws get walked back a little so that they can do their jobs.
Bloomberg opinion columnist Lisa Jarvis. Lisa covers biotech, healthcare, and the pharmaceutical industry. Since productivity news has not been great, output per hour is slipping. Labor productivity a little less than one percent lower than a year ago, the fifth drop in a row. Bloomberg opinion columnist Justin Fox now joins us and brings us some perspective. Justin, thanks for taking the time with me today. Now you say in your column it's not time to panic yet. When will it be time to panic?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
I think.
Basically, this is the longest run of negative one year productivity growth since they started measuring in the forties, which sounds really bad. The one thing is it follows this really big leap early in the pandemic when basically everybody, you know, companies laid off everybody and then realized within a few weeks that, oh, they still have lots of business, even restaurants doing takeout, and so there were these huge gains in productivity because output rebounded and all of these people were out of jobs. And now what we've been doing for the past couple of years is sort of adjusting and companies hiring people and sort of fitfully getting back to more normal. And so, yeah, either this recession that people have been predicting for the past two years is going to happen and then productivity will at least initially fall a little more, or we're about to see that expansion takeoff. Productivity should start rising and then I don't know. I mean, it's even if it's got a long ways to go to be close to even the levels of like the late nineties, early two thousands, but it's not a disaster right now if you look at it over slightly longer time horizon.
Why is this happening? Is this yet another quirk of the pandemic?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just this people there were such massive layoffs and then so many people, especially in my restaurants and other services. I think with the expanded unemployment benefits and with the various cash payouts during the pandemic, they didn't have to go back right away, and I think a lot just reconsidered and we're like, I'd rather do something else. And so there's been this This is what got called the Great Resignation, and then to some extent quiet all these labor market phenomenon a lot of it just traces back to there was just this sudden, huge disruption to how the labor market work in the US, and we're still figuring out who needs to hire, how many people, and how much they need to pay them to actually get them to stay, and so that that's having all sorts of strange impacts on the economy, which comes out in the productivity numbers, which are simply the big The main ones we look at are just real output, which is basically GDP divided by how many hours people are working.
How long can we maintain this? I mean, what's the risk if we continue to find this falling productivity?
Productivity? Rising productivity is what is sort of the miracle of the last two hundred years or so that has brought us from poverty to affluence or at least mass affluents. And you know, Paul Krugman's line is that productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it's almost everything. It's what causes living standards to increase. And when you sort of look at us economic history of the past half century, it was a pretty sharp decline in the seventies and eighties, and there were lots of you know, people's slimming standards decline too, And you know, it's really hard to tell from quarterly or annual numbers what actually is going on. But I guess my main point is i'd sort of seen some people saying very dire things about the productivity numbers of the past few quarters, and I just it feels too early to have any confidence about what's going on with that, and just watching sort of at a more micro level at what's going on it. When you go to a restaurant, you can sort of see what they're struggling to figure out what the right amount of service to give is, how much can be automated, and things like that, and I think that's happening across the economy.
Bloomberg Opinion column is justin Fox and that does it for this week's Bloomberg Opinion. We're produced by Eric Mullow, and you can find all of these columns on the Bloomberg Terminal. We're available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast as platform. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up. I'm Amy Morris, and this is Bloomberg