IAC & Expedia’s Barry Diller “You’ve got to bail everyone out”
IAC & Expedia’s Barry Diller “You’ve got to bail everyone out”
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CNBC Transcript: IAC and Expedia Chairman and Senior Executive Barry Diller speaks with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” today about the coronavirus economic impact.
WHEN: Today, Thursday, April 16, 2020
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk Box”
Q1 2020 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Barry Diller on coronavirus economic impact, bailing out industries and more
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Meantime, here to discuss the re-opening of the economy and the state of streaming, travel industry and what all of this means is Barry Diller. He’s the Chairman and Executive of IAC and Expedia. And we’re thrilled to have you join us, Barry, this morning. Nice to see you.
BARRY DILLER: Nice to see you, too. I hope you’re all well.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I hope you’re well. You know, last time we saw you was in-person in the fall when we had just redone our set. So much has changed since then. You and I have emailed a little bit but I’m just curious sort of just how do see the landscape?
BARRY DILLER: Well, I see the landscape as cataclysmic. We’re in something that’s very hard to be objective about, because we’re in the eye of it, we’re inside of it. So, we can’t really see it for what it is. But, look, everybody says the same thing. There’s nothing like it before. And while we know some things, we know nothing about what’s going to happen, how we’re going to get out of it, what will have to change? Will this be some really profound difference in people’s lives in the future? But, so, I see it as everybody’s scared. The fact that we have so much media, so much information, all of it telling us that we’ve got to be scared about co-habitating with anyone. So, that ain’t good.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Barry, let me ask you this though. You bought Expedia right after 9/11. You went through with that transaction even after 9/11.
BARRY DILLER: Yeah.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Because you believed that on the other side of it we were going to go back to normal.
BARRY DILLER: I absolutely did.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Do you feel the same way about where we are right now?
BARRY DILLER: No. What I said then was if there’s life, there’s travel. I still do believe that. But this is not going to be what happened then, which was a very, very quick return to normalcy. That is not going to happen. At best, we’ll have kind of a rolling way out. As far as travel is concerned, while I’m absolutely optimistic that at some point, but I don’t think soon, I don’t think it’s until probably September, October, November, December, really get life back. And in order to travel, you’ve got to have that. So, they’re totally different situations. This is not analogous. I don’t think it’s analogous to anything. Certainly not analogous to 9/11 and to the financial crisis in ’08.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: And so, given your ownership of Expedia and your work at that company, what are you telling your employees there? How are you planning for that? What do you expect the business to look like over the next 18 months?
BARRY DILLER: What we’re doing at Expedia, somebody -- said no good crisis goes away. We’re using the time to do the things we were not able to do when we were running 100 miles an hour to keep up with our growth. So, we’re really spending truly, you know, the quality time that we’d spend other than dealing with difficulties, particularly with travel – small business or large. One day the door closes and, you know, if you’ve got a small business, you have nobody coming in and you’ve got no revenue. Well, travel, travel-related companies have no revenue. Expedia, like many large, large travel companies, has a very large cost basis. So, we haven’t yet dealt with that specifically, but what we’re doing is we’re doing planning inside the company -- so we are stronger than when we went into it. That’s all of the planning that basically we are doing.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: What do you make of the bailouts of the airlines?
BARRY DILLER: Necessary. Full stop. Look, you’ve got to bail everyone out. This is like, you know, you say when you’re picking winners, losers, you’re saying this or that. Everybody is in the same position, which is the world stopped, worldwide. And so, anybody whose income -- and you see this, you drive down streets and you see big cities, small cities and you see nothing is open. They’re ghost towns. The damage that is being done every day is enormous. Everybody needs to be bailed out – and we’ll worry about paying the bills later.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: And when you think about travel, for example, and the future of business, one of the things that’s going to be so critical, and we’re hearing this from other CEOs, the idea of testing. Maybe you’ll get tested on your way into an airplane, just so everyone knows everyone on the plane is okay. Given the travel is your business, who should pay for that, in the future?
BARRY DILLER: Pay for what? Testing and things like that?
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: All of it, yeah.
BARRY DILLER: It will be absorbed, I think, in the cost of business. But, you know, what has to happen, it’s the fear has to stop -- the fear of associating with people. You know, plenty of friends of mine who say, I’m not going to go to the theater, I’m not going to do this because I’m afraid. Actually, right now, people are saying even though we’ve been isolating for three weeks, you can’t come over to my house, which is kind of nuts to me. But the fear is the next thing that’s going to have to thaw. Until that happens, whether you test people on the way in or whatever you do, at some point everybody has to be comfortable being a foot away from other people. And if that fundamentally changes, then a huge amount of our infrastructure -- which I don’t think will happen.
BECKY QUICK: Barry, I just had a question about what you were saying about how people say, Okay, even though you’ve been isolated for three weeks, you can’t come over to my house. I think that goes to the idea that not everyone treats isolation or treat social distancing the same. I know people who are staying home but they go out to stores, maybe they go to restaurants, maybe they have certain things they do that I wouldn’t feel comfortable with. And Ithink that’s our biggest problem is, you’re only as safe as your weakest link. You can’t tell or know exactly what somebody else’s standards are or how safe they are going to be.
BARRY DILLER: Yes, but you kind of have to get over it. You go into a theater and you’re sitting literally within inches of people. You go in thinking that no one is going to come in with an enormous toxicity, whatever that is. No one is going to come in who has some terrible communicable disease and sneeze on you. You kind of just trust in that. You’re going to have to get -- we’re all too frightened right now. We’re going to have to get over it. Or everything will change.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Hey, Barry, wanted to pivot the conversation and talk about media and also the state of advertising given the IAC business. How do you see that – over the next 12 months?
BARRY DILLER: We’re kind of the tale of two cities for me. On one hand, I have IAC, which is advertising, home services and – and all of that, you know, of course, it’s hurt some. But it’s kind of stable. And IAC is very well-capitalized. And so, I have all these hungry players in my company who want to go out and buy things that are very aggressive and think of this opportunity. While on the other hand, I have Expedia which has no revenue. So, you know, a bit of a weird constant imbalance. As far as advertising is concerned, well, why would you -- I mean, at Expedia, for instance, we spend $5 billion a year in advertising. We won’t spend $1 billion in advertising probably this year. You just rip that across everything. There you are.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: And so that’s the travel industry. The question is, how hard do you think it’s going to hit other media businesses?
BARRY DILLER: Well, of course, it’s going to hit --
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Even some of the big --
BARRY DILLER: Travel industry is a proxy. Yes, there are some things that are worthwhile advertising during this period. Basics, things like that, which -- Look, we haven’t seen, economically -- I mean, people -- why anybody is pouring over these first-quarter numbers is clueless to me. The market can go up in the atmosphere – but getting to the second quarter, you’re going to see advertising across the boards. Why would it sustain?
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Barry, you just said something very interesting, which is you didn’t understand why the market could go up in this environment. What do you think the fair value for the market would be in this environment?
BARRY DILLER: How the hell would I know? No one knows these things. But when we see the damage that is being done everywhere, what we’ll really see in the second quarter from the first quarter, how can you get fair value? How can you get fair value for a company, and you know, again, I absolutely believe a year, two from now this will be over. One way or the other this is over or we’re over. So, but how can you value that today? I don’t think you can do it. I certainly can’t.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: In the media space that you lived in for so long, Netflix just passed Disney in market cap yesterday.
BARRY DILLER: Yeah.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: We’ve had lots of conversations about streaming and the future of big media. I’m wondering how you see all of this shake itself out and what the pandemic does to that whole space?
BARRY DILLER: Well, I think streaming, it will have an effect on it for sure. Again, you go a few more months and while people say, one of the last things I’ll cut is my subscription to entertainment which I desperately need to get through the day. That will eventually take its toll. People will not have the discretionary income to afford it. But it doesn’t change the dynamics of anything. You’ve got the competitors. Streaming is taking over the world. Hollywood is irrelevant. The only companies that have a true path, absolute clear business model path forward have nothing to do with the history of the entertainment business. Amazon and Netflix. Everybody else, good luck to them. I mean, they may be able to build subscription services that may be profitable, but that world has changed forever. I think this pandemic has nothing to do with -- other than earnings are going to be much less for a while.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Right. You talked about opportunities during this pandemic, or at least that there are people within IAC thinking about that. Are there places that you imagine you might try to invest some money over the next 12 months?
BARRY DILLER: Oh, my god, yes. Look, of course, there’s opportunity. You just have to have a long view, be sure-footed, you have to look at things not only as they are but as you think they will be. But we’re looking at some very large potential acquisitions for IAC. And, of course, it’s the environment where if you are inquisitive, you’re going to do the thing that for many years everybody has asked for. Oh, my gosh, everything is other inflated, prices are crazy it, you can’t buy things for this or that without these huge premiums. Well, you know what? That’s all gone. So, if you have capital, you know, what could be a better time than to exploit what is, you know, a terrible downfall for many companies?
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Barry, we’ve often talked politics with you over the years, and I’m curious what you think is going to happen politically in this country as a result of this pandemic and what you think its impact is going to be on business? Because you start to think about the enormous debt that we’ve taken on, the questions about taxes, corporate taxes, individual taxes, buybacks, dividends. How do you thin that changes?
BARRY DILLER: Well, again, I think as far as buybacks are concerns -- if you have plenty of capital and you don’t have a huge cost base that you will service with no revenue, then for sure, buy back your stock. Politically, this is again, of the many unknowns, I don’t know. You know, we currently have an administration as infomercial. So, I don’t know if whether in the end, people say, Please, no more of that. I’ll take any alternative. Or whatever I can’t -- of course I can’t predict. I can predict it. Because I actually think the infomercial administration ends in November. But as far as long-term, the damage that’s being done can’t be assessed right now. It’s going to have a huge political impact. Whether that tilts you this way or that way, I can’t really tell. This is not short-term, the effects.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Barry Diller, we appreciate you spending time with us this morning. It’s always an education. We are hoping you stay safe.
BARRY DILLER: Thank you. Wish I could be less bleak. I am very long-term. Thank you.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Okay. I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Becky?
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Spread & Containment
The Coming Of The Police State In America
The Coming Of The Police State In America
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
The National Guard and the State Police are now…
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Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.
Many citizens who rely on this system for transportation might welcome this. It’s a city of strict gun control, and no one knows for sure if they have the right to defend themselves. Merchants have been harassed and even arrested for trying to stop looting and pillaging in their own shops.
The message has been sent: Only the police can do this job. Whether they do it or not is another matter.
Things on the subway system have gotten crazy. If you know it well, you can manage to travel safely, but visitors to the city who take the wrong train at the wrong time are taking grave risks.
In actual fact, it’s guaranteed that this will only end in confiscating knives and other things that people carry in order to protect themselves while leaving the actual criminals even more free to prey on citizens.
The law-abiding will suffer and the criminals will grow more numerous. It will not end well.
When you step back from the details, what we have is the dawning of a genuine police state in the United States. It only starts in New York City. Where is the Guard going to be deployed next? Anywhere is possible.
If the crime is bad enough, citizens will welcome it. It must have been this way in most times and places that when the police state arrives, the people cheer.
We will all have our own stories of how this came to be. Some might begin with the passage of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Some will focus on gun control and the taking away of citizens’ rights to defend themselves.
My own version of events is closer in time. It began four years ago this month with lockdowns. That’s what shattered the capacity of civil society to function in the United States. Everything that has happened since follows like one domino tumbling after another.
It goes like this:
1) lockdown,
2) loss of moral compass and spreading of loneliness and nihilism,
3) rioting resulting from citizen frustration, 4) police absent because of ideological hectoring,
5) a rise in uncontrolled immigration/refugees,
6) an epidemic of ill health from substance abuse and otherwise,
7) businesses flee the city
8) cities fall into decay, and that results in
9) more surveillance and police state.
The 10th stage is the sacking of liberty and civilization itself.
It doesn’t fall out this way at every point in history, but this seems like a solid outline of what happened in this case. Four years is a very short period of time to see all of this unfold. But it is a fact that New York City was more-or-less civilized only four years ago. No one could have predicted that it would come to this so quickly.
But once the lockdowns happened, all bets were off. Here we had a policy that most directly trampled on all freedoms that we had taken for granted. Schools, businesses, and churches were slammed shut, with various levels of enforcement. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, and there was widespread confusion about who precisely was in charge of designating and enforcing this.
It felt like martial law at the time, as if all normal civilian law had been displaced by something else. That something had to do with public health, but there was clearly more going on, because suddenly our social media posts were censored and we were being asked to do things that made no sense, such as mask up for a virus that evaded mask protection and walk in only one direction in grocery aisles.
Vast amounts of the white-collar workforce stayed home—and their kids, too—until it became too much to bear. The city became a ghost town. Most U.S. cities were the same.
As the months of disaster rolled on, the captives were let out of their houses for the summer in order to protest racism but no other reason. As a way of excusing this, the same public health authorities said that racism was a virus as bad as COVID-19, so therefore it was permitted.
The protests had turned to riots in many cities, and the police were being defunded and discouraged to do anything about the problem. Citizens watched in horror as downtowns burned and drug-crazed freaks took over whole sections of cities. It was like every standard of decency had been zapped out of an entire swath of the population.
Meanwhile, large checks were arriving in people’s bank accounts, defying every normal economic expectation. How could people not be working and get their bank accounts more flush with cash than ever? There was a new law that didn’t even require that people pay rent. How weird was that? Even student loans didn’t need to be paid.
By the fall, recess from lockdown was over and everyone was told to go home again. But this time they had a job to do: They were supposed to vote. Not at the polling places, because going there would only spread germs, or so the media said. When the voting results finally came in, it was the absentee ballots that swung the election in favor of the opposition party that actually wanted more lockdowns and eventually pushed vaccine mandates on the whole population.
The new party in control took note of the large population movements out of cities and states that they controlled. This would have a large effect on voting patterns in the future. But they had a plan. They would open the borders to millions of people in the guise of caring for refugees. These new warm bodies would become voters in time and certainly count on the census when it came time to reapportion political power.
Meanwhile, the native population had begun to swim in ill health from substance abuse, widespread depression, and demoralization, plus vaccine injury. This increased dependency on the very institutions that had caused the problem in the first place: the medical/scientific establishment.
The rise of crime drove the small businesses out of the city. They had barely survived the lockdowns, but they certainly could not survive the crime epidemic. This undermined the tax base of the city and allowed the criminals to take further control.
The same cities became sanctuaries for the waves of migrants sacking the country, and partisan mayors actually used tax dollars to house these invaders in high-end hotels in the name of having compassion for the stranger. Citizens were pushed out to make way for rampaging migrant hordes, as incredible as this seems.
But with that, of course, crime rose ever further, inciting citizen anger and providing a pretext to bring in the police state in the form of the National Guard, now tasked with cracking down on crime in the transportation system.
What’s the next step? It’s probably already here: mass surveillance and censorship, plus ever-expanding police power. This will be accompanied by further population movements, as those with the means to do so flee the city and even the country and leave it for everyone else to suffer.
As I tell the story, all of this seems inevitable. It is not. It could have been stopped at any point. A wise and prudent political leadership could have admitted the error from the beginning and called on the country to rediscover freedom, decency, and the difference between right and wrong. But ego and pride stopped that from happening, and we are left with the consequences.
The government grows ever bigger and civil society ever less capable of managing itself in large urban centers. Disaster is unfolding in real time, mitigated only by a rising stock market and a financial system that has yet to fall apart completely.
Are we at the middle stages of total collapse, or at the point where the population and people in leadership positions wise up and decide to put an end to the downward slide? It’s hard to know. But this much we do know: There is a growing pocket of resistance out there that is fed up and refuses to sit by and watch this great country be sacked and taken over by everything it was set up to prevent.
Government
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People with inadequate…
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Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.
A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.
Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels
Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.
In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.
According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.
But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.
“When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”
The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.
“It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”
The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.
1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID
COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.
Uncategorized
February Employment Situation
By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…
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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert
The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.
Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.
Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.
The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.
The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.
Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.
As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.
Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.
The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.
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