Publications

Talking Points: Quotations from people in the news
- March 1, 2022: Vol. 9, Number 3

Talking Points: Quotations from people in the news

by people in the news

Talking Points: Quotations from people in the news

 

Kyle Bass, founder and CIO of Hayman Capital Management: “If the U.S. national security or human rights policy was left up to corporate America, we’d all be speaking Chinese tomorrow.”

 

Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors: “We are looking further down the road at opportunities to extend fully autonomous vehicle technology to personal transportation. … GM and Cruise are gaining significant technological expertise and experience, and we are working to be the fastest to market with a retail personal autonomous vehicle. In fact, we aim to deliver our first personal autonomous vehicles as soon as the middle of this decade.”

 

Abigail Spanberger, democratic congresswoman from Virginia and a leading backer of the TRUST in Congress Act: “The goal of this bill is to say, ‘you have no control over where your stocks do or don’t go, you have no control of whether or not you’re buying or selling stocks to benefit yourself with information you know because you’re a legislator.’”

 

Ed Bastian, Delta Air Lines CEO: “We closed out the year strong; we had a profit of $170 million in the fourth quarter, a solid profit number, and we’ll be the only airline that’s profitable throughout the back half of 2021. So, our people have done a tremendous job — it’s one of the reasons we also announced that we’re going to be making a special profit-sharing payment to our people of roughly $100 million, which equals 20 percent of the profit of the back six months of the year.”

 

Li Daokui, economist and Chinese government adviser: “I’m afraid that the operation and development of China’s economy in the next several years may be relatively difficult. Looking at the five years as a whole, it may be the most difficult period since our reform and opening up 40 years ago.”

 

Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of asset manager GMO & Co.: “Today in the U.S. we are in the fourth super-bubble of the last hundred years. Previous equity super-bubbles had a series of distinct features that individually are rare and collectively are unique to these events. … The most important and hardest to define quality of a late-stage bubble is in the touchy-feely characteristic of crazy investor behavior. But in the last two and a half years there can surely be no doubt that we have seen crazy investor behavior in spades … especially in meme stocks and in EV-related stocks, in cryptocurrencies, and in NFTs.”

 

William Spitz, founder and principal, Diversified Trust: “More than 10 million brokerage accounts were opened in 2020, which seemed extraordinary at the time but Schwab by itself opened just under 5 million accounts in the first half of 2021. Similarly, Robinhood’s user base increased from 10 million in 2019 to 13 million in 2020 and 22.5 million late in 2021.”

 

Soumaya Keynes, British economics editor at The Economist: “There was a study looking at Uber drivers that found that female Uber drivers were tipped between 10 and 12 percent more than male ones, although that wasn’t the case when they were above the age of 65.”

 

Kamal Alam, an expert on Syria and its Jewish diaspora: “The Arab world has too many problems to still care about Palestine. Instead they look at Israel and Jews as models for running a successful country that feeds itself without oil.”

 

Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO, on his company’s decision to build its new mega-fabrication chip manufacturing plant in Columbus, Ohio: “We looked at 30 to 40 sites around the nation and many factors — energy, water, talent. We have all of the Midwest schools nearby. And this is manufacturing; we wanted a place that had a history and passion for manufacturing at scale.”

 

Mark Moerdler, an analyst with Bernstein Research: “Microsoft has big aspirations in gaming. Microsoft has been buying a number of studios because of what they’re trying to build with Game Pass and subscription gaming.”

 

Sebastian Mallaby, from his forthcoming book The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future: “China’s authoritarian political culture is ultimately at odds with freethinking entrepreneurship. A government with a vested interest in the status quo won’t risk upsetting the apple cart by unleashing disruptive innovation. The escalating clampdown … seems likely to drive talent out of China.”

 

David Monahan, senior managing director, JLL: “There’s a perception that there is no investor interest in malls and that none have traded over the past five years, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s been a fairly active market for the regional mall space with 30 to 40 malls trading annually.”

 

Chad Anderson, founder and managing partner, Space Capital: “As we look ahead, we see tremendous opportunities to scale mass adoption of the existing infrastructure as we look for radically new approaches to build and operate space-based assets.”

 

Chris Senyek, senior equity research analyst at Wolfe Research: “The SPAC bubble is bursting. SPAC shares are extremely volatile due to their speculative nature.”

 

Forgot your username or password?