Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines: “The 10 highest sales days in our company’s history have all occurred within the last 30 days.”
Dave McCormick, former CEO of Bridgewater, on his book Superpower in Peril: “The thesis of the book is that America’s in decline by any measure — economically, national security, spiritually — I lay out the case. Decline isn’t preordained, but neither is renewal. It depends on what we do.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, on the company’s new GPT-4 successor technology to ChatGPT: “I don’t want to make it sound like we have solved reasoning or intelligence, which we certainly have not. But this is a big step forward from what is already out there.”
Bill Cassidy, senator (R-La.) and a member of the Senate Finance Committee: “Can you allow a bank to mismanage its own assets so terribly and there be no consequence? … The Fed was warning them. Jay Powell said this is what we’re going to do, sending that clear message, so I don’t think you can excuse management.”
Richard Clarida, global economic adviser at PIMCO and a former Fed vice chairman, on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank: “I don’t think of this as being equivalent to Lehman, or 9/11, or Iraq invading Kuwait. But whatever your views were on the odds of a recession before this, they’ve probably gone up.”
Bill Gates, philanthropist and co-founder and chairman of Microsoft: “AI is going to empower people in incredible ways, but I’m especially excited about its potential to make the world a more equitable place. AI can help expand access to health care in underserved communities, improve education in the United States and around the world, and even help us avoid a climate disaster.”
Elizabeth Warren, U.S. senator representing Massachusetts: “My views on Jay Powell are well known at this point. He has had two jobs, one is to deal with monetary policy, one is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both. I don’t think he should be chairman of the Federal Reserve. I’ve said it as publicly as I know how to say it.”
Kevin Warsh, former member of the Fed board of governors, commenting on the years of near-zero interest rates: “Nothing is more expensive than free money. Free money causes a huge amount of complacency in markets, among banks, among regulators — it’s the misallocations of capital from where the money should be going to the hottest, least productive, riskiest thing. We’re starting to pay the price for it.”
Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines: “Quantum computers do have a very natural place — and that is to power supercomputers. The most natural place for them, I think, is in supercomputing infrastructure and cloud infrastructure.”
Jürgen Eckhardt, chief executive of Leaps by Bayer: “Nobody knows how long this sort of nuclear winter … of biotech financing is going to last, right? We all hope it’s going to recover quickly, but, you know, we’ve seen these situations last for more than just a couple of years.”
Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs: “You have to think of the value of the way our banking system is structured in this country. It’s not like any other country in the world. We have over 4,000 banks, most countries have a few large banks, and they distribute their bank branches around the country. In the U.S. we have banks in the communities, banks in industries, banks that cater to a particular demographic.”
Arwa Tizani Kelly, space commentator for Relativity Space: “No one’s ever attempted to launch a 3D-printed rocket into orbit, and, while we didn’t make it all the way today, we gathered enough data to show that flying 3D-printed rockets is viable. We just completed a major step in proving to the world that 3D-printed rockets are structurally viable.”
Barry Sternlicht, CEO of Starwood Capital, on Jay Powell’s interest rate increases: “He is using a steamroller to get the price of milk down 2 cents. It’s time we change the conversation. There’s good inflation and bad inflation. Good inflation is wage inflation. We should be having parties.”
Ruchir Sharma, investor, author, fund manager: “Right now for the first time in my memory, we have an international financial crisis in which the dollar has been weakening rather than strengthening.”
Ana Lai, senior director for real estate at S&P Global Ratings: “We expect office assets to underperform other real estate property types over the next two years given expected pressure to net effective rents and occupancy levels. Growth for the rated office REIT sector will likely be muted overall … with office landlords wielding limited pricing power.”