US Revokes Waiver Allowing Iran Oil Sales After Tanker Attacks

21:29because right now there isn't enough compute and they think that diversifying away is important. With respect, DeepSeek just raised$7 billion in its inaugural fundraising round. They're tiny. $7 billion is nothing in terms of what you have to spend to get a program like that on track. It can take a really experienced team anywhere from 18 months to 36 months to bring a chip to market. And so this is distant future stuff.

21:54Carol Massar:Okay. Do we have access to DeepSeq in their programs? Do we have access? So one important thing is that DeepSeq largely focuses on open source model and materials. So yes, you would. But all I'll do is reflect on industry that I speak to. They would be hesitant to make use of the model or have their data exposed to it. That's kind of a personal preference thing. All right. Two more companies we have to get to. Oh my gosh, let's go. All right. SpaceX. Yeah. Oh, that's what we really teased that you were going to come on. Wall Street is bullish. Is that at all surprising? Surprise! The news story is that those banks and brokerages that were involved in the IPO process are now free to initiate sell-side coverage.

22:37And unsurprisingly, they're all bullish. And what's interesting, if there is any point of interest, is like Tate Morgan Stanley, I think, but various others. In their price targets, very small portions of it, the dollar value account for the space business. It's all the future AI business. And that's pretty uniform across the sell side's view.

22:55Carol Massar:Raymond James has a$800 price target. So they could see if it grows into it, you're talking about a valuation of about$10 trillion. But you know what? When it's Elon and everything, superlatives always follow. Before we go, I've got to ask you about Rivian. This is a company you know so well. We did see and we see the share price tumbling after the company says it's going to sell 75 million shares to fund equity contributions. this is related to U.S. Department of Energy this has to do with shared dilution I'm assuming but what's going on at Rivian? I see them on the road Rivian had a really good second quarter delivery numbers and they raised their outlook very slightly for how many vehicles they'll deliver this year in literally the four trading sessions that followed their stock went up a lot and what I'm told by company insiders is they were opportunistic they were like hey guys the stock went up quite a lot we should use that and we'll come to the market and do an offering They need cash partly to, there are milestones that the Department of Energy set them against a very large loan.

23:54They need to make their own contributions before the DOE will give them money. So they need the money, right? They have cash, but not as much as they once did. And yeah, they're just being opportunistic. It is dilutory, hence why the stock is now down 16, 15 % in response.

24:10Carol Massar:I mean, I get it, but I'm just curious behind it. We don't need AI. We have Ed Ludlow. Can we just create an Ask Ed Ludlow? I mean, I just didn't ask Ed, but we just did. Ask Ed. Yeah, I mean, we have the Bloomberg terminal with wonderful data. And, you know, Bloomberg has certain tools that we're allowed to use that I think help the reporting. Did we leave anything out today? Well, you should take fish oils and omega-3s for the brain function, generally speaking. Yeah. Not advice, just my own personal choice each day. Ed has a perfect sleep score. Did you know that? I got a 76 on Aura overnight.

24:41Carol Massar:Oh, my God. I can't believe you're even here. Yeah. All right. We got to talk about it. Thank you. We got to talk later. or Ed Ludo, host of Bloomberg Tech. Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions, buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index.

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25:58Carol Massar:The Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit returns to Singapore on July 22nd. Our fifth annual Asia-Pacific Summit will explore how business and finance leaders are shaping the next phase of globalization by strengthening resilience and driving a multi-speed energy transition across Asia's diverse markets. Join us for solutions-driven discussions and networking opportunities. Thank you to our summit advisor, Bangkok Bank. Learn more at bloomberglive.com slash SBS dash Singapore. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App.

26:39Carol Massar:or watch us live on YouTube. Hey, I just want to check shares of Walmart because that stock trading at just about eight-tenths of a percent. It was at more than 2.6 % earlier in the session. Walmart released a statement saying it's cutting prices to help shoppers save money, listing products from corn and beef to snacks and soft drinks. President Trump kind of weighing in on this. He praised Walmart for the move. Yesterday, he urged other retailers to follow suit, touting the move as a boon to U.S. consumers. And I feel like, once again, we're reminded, politics and the economy, yes, we know they go hand in hand.

27:13And it becomes even more important when we have an election. We do have midterms coming up. And on all of that, our Bloomberg Economics team is out with research, again, reminding us that the midterms are really an economic stress test. They always have the best research and the best graphs, too, Carol. Like graphs that you wouldn't expect to make.

27:34Carol Massar:They tell really, really good stories. Hey, let's get to it with Stuart Paul. He's Bloomberg Economics, U.S. and Canada economist. He's here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Emily's right. I mean, charts, pictures, they tell a great story. Tell us about this research that you guys did. Well, as we head into the midterms, we're thinking about what we can do to predict the midterm elections. And there are really three ways of examining the intersection of economics and politics. You could start with the economic aggregates and really do top-down modelings. You look at things like GDP growth per capita.

28:05You look at inflation, which affects everybody. And you can fine tune a model to forecast, let's say, control the House of Representatives. You can also then look at state level economic data, which we've done to examine economic conditions in major swing states, especially those that have hotly contested Senate elections, which we've done also. But what we have right now is an examination of the voting blocs that really shepherded President Trump into the White House. So in the 2024 election, he was really shepherded into the White House by really strong turnout, particularly among young men.

28:43He gained a lot of share with black and Hispanic voters also and with rural voters. And so if we could dig into the data and see just how those voting blocs are doing, we can have a feel for the coalition, whether that will that coalition will be there to help the GOP retain control in the midterms of the Senate and House. Okay, so we have a lot of different elements to pull on. Maybe we'll start with jobs for specifically that voting block. How is the labor market for these young men that did turn out and vote for Trump? Not good. Not good. That's the long story short. Not good. Young men really turned out for President Trump in 2024.

29:21But if you look at the industries that are dominated by men, and particularly young men, those industries have shed about 225 ,000 jobs since the president took office. All of the job creation that we've seen has really been in industries that are primarily dominated by women, things like health care and education, services like that. If you look at some of the other portions of the coalition that brought Trump to the White House. Young men have seen fewer jobs. They've seen more unemployment. One thing that's favorable, though, is that black and Hispanic voters have seen lower unemployment under Trump.

29:57And that's one thing that could cut in favor of the GOP this election cycle.

30:02Carol Massar:I want to ask you about young men, because I feel like this has been a problem in the United States for some time, Republican or Democrat in the White House. Is that fair to say? I think so. I think that it's relatively unique to see the volume of jobs shed in some of the industries that we have, particularly information services. One of those that is dominated by young men construction. Again, not a lot of jobs added. We've seen job losses in manufacturing, trade, wholesale trade, transportation services, warehousing, all of those industries that have a lot of backbreaking labor. frankly, they have been industries that have been losing jobs under Trump, despite the fact that we've seen a lot of onshoring.

30:42A lot of this is downstream of policy. It's just that the consequences of reshuffling the global commercial order are being felt pretty acutely by young men in the labor force.

30:53Carol Massar:I just want to follow. So manufacturing, it is coming back into the United States. I think what are we realistically seeing? There's a great story in the Bloomberg, and we're hoping to bring it to everybody maybe later in the week. But it's about, I think, a glove, a medical glove manufacturer who's been trying to do this coming off the pandemic, and we saw how stressed we were in not having medical supplies, and just how difficult it is to do stuff in the United States. Are we really seeing, before we get back to your research, manufacturing jobs come back? We have not seen a boom in manufacturing jobs.

31:24There has been some increase in manufacturing employment in some of the important swing states. If you look at gross exports in the swing states, We've seen a little bit of additional trade activity, production and trade activity in states like New Hampshire, Alaska, and Georgia. But those Rust Belt states that we were expecting to see revitalized by a manufacturing renaissance, we really have not seen that in any significant way. If you look at the industrial production data, which I'm doing every month, if you look at the industrial production data, there is a boom in industrial production, but it's relatively concentrated.

32:02It's in things like aerospace. You see some of it in vehicles, but a lot of that depends on supply chains, which get affected by the availability of, let's say, aluminum. And so while we do see some additional industrial production because of things like onshoring and friendshoring, we are not seeing the manufacturing renaissance that could bring any sort of a revitalization to the Rust Belt. It's just not in the data. What about data centers and the build out there? Wouldn't that bring jobs? Some. We are seeing some jobs added in, let's say, construction of data centers. But, for example, thinking about construction jobs, every month we hear from Kevin Hassett when the jobs report comes out that construction is the thing that's going to precede manufacturing.

32:48For the build-out of data centers, this 21st century technology, we are seeing construction jobs added. But we're seeing just tens of thousands of jobs in the construction industry. In the years that preceded President Trump, the last few years of the Biden presidency, we saw a major boom in construction jobs under the CHIPS Act. That's what was really driving construction. That's what was really contributing to the labor market and tightness in construction there. We were seeing literally a couple hundred thousand jobs added per year over the two or three years preceding President Trump. It's not the it's not protectionism.

33:24It's not the reshuffling of the global commercial order. And that's why I like, ahead of the midterms, looking at state-level data, because protectionism and trade policy has really diffuse costs, but has really concentrated benefits. Everybody feels the pain from tariff-induced inflation or war-induced inflation, higher energy prices. But what really matters from a political perspective is if the benefits of those protectionist policies and of conflict, whether it's a trade war or a kinetic war, whether those benefits are being felt in the states that are most politically valuable. And it does not look to be the case as though states like Maine, Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Georgia are feeling any of the benefits of the policies that have been some of the cornerstones of this administration right now.

34:16Carol Massar:We say it a million times. You go back to the Clinton race initially. You know, it's the economy. Stupid, right? Like, ultimately, do these policies help more Americans? And it matters in those swing states, right, that really kind of help determine an election. So I guess we'll see. That's right. All right. Good stuff. Good research. Something to think about. As we like we were just saying with Conrad de Quadros in the last hour, we're kind of going to go from we're going to get ready for earnings and we have Jackson Hole and then we start counting down really in a big way to the midterm. So a lot on the minds of investors.

34:48Carol Massar:Stuart, thank you so much. Thank you. Stuart Paul, he's Bloomberg Economics, U.S. and Canada Economist joining us right here in studio. Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index.

35:23You approve of the workflow and your agent handles the risk. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by public investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

36:05Carol Massar:Hi, I'm Carol Masser with a helpful tip to keep you plugged in throughout the market day. Subscribe to the Stock Movers Report from Bloomberg. These are short audio episodes, five minutes or less, delivered right to your podcast feed. Stock Movers fills you in on the day's winners and losers on Wall Street and tells you about the news and data that's driving those gains and losses. Why spend all day watching tickers scroll across your screen? Subscribe to Stock Movers today on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 Eastern.

36:41Carol Massar:Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Or watch us live on YouTube. Hey, in less than one month, we're going to get a quarterly financial update from Wayfair, a company which pitches itself as a destination for all things home, has a key technology history and infrastructure at its core, even as the company more recently is opening up brick-and-mortar stores and continues to shop around for more properties to do so. The company and its chief financial officer, Kate Gulliver, are the subjects of the latest episode of Chief Future Officer on Bloomberg Television.

37:14Carol Massar:The episode drops on Wednesday. We think about the cash on cash returns of the store. So based on the capital investment that we are making, you know, when do we get that payback? What does that look like? We look at the four wall economics of the store. So the sales within the store, how does that, you know, how's the margin looking there, the sales associate cost? And then we look at the sales that are happening outside the store that we can tie directly to the store and the overall halo effect that we think we get from the branding. Do you have a map in your office of some sort with pushpins in it and saying, here's all the places we want to be?

37:46Carol Massar:Like, how big do you think this can be or do you expect it to be? We have customers all across the country. Basically, if you mapped population center and our customers, they would overlap. So most population centers are going to be good locations for us to have a store. The goal is to create a frictionless connection between online and offline commerce, a sort of virtuous circle. It's working well so far. When customers who have seen us online come into the store, they're generally a bit surprised by actually the breadth of what we offer. How does technology help in kind of making it seamless online to store and vice versa?

38:24The biggest thing is for the customer on the front end that she can be in the store, that she can actually shop here, go back home, complete that purchase. And if you look at these sort of price tags and everything, they're all these digital tags. That's because they're the exact same prices they are online. So you're not going to be surprised that you saw something in the store and then you decided to purchase it online, that it's somehow different and that the offering is different. It's actually very consistent. But when she's here, she can have her app open and everything that she's doing here can be very similar to what she's doing at home.

38:55And I think that consistency is quite important.

38:58Carol Massar:All right, everybody, that is Wayfarer's Kate Gulliver in a preview of the upcoming episode of Chief Future Officer. It does premiere Wednesday, tomorrow, July 8th at 930 p.m. Wall Street time. You're also going to be able to find it on Bloomberg.com and, of course, on YouTube. Ahead of all of that, Kate is kind enough to find some time for us stopping by. She is the chief financial officer, also chief administrative officer. She's responsible for Wayfarer's finance, legal talent, real estate, and corporate affairs teams. She joins us once again from Boston. As I like to remind everybody, you're a pretty busy individual, Kate.

39:28Carol Massar:Thank you so much. Thank you. I know it's a busy season. I know earnings are coming up in less than a month. I got to say, every time I am with you, I learn more about the company. And, you know, we've talked about this before. Certainly, it's covered in the episode. But share with our audience, once again, why it's so important for Wayfair, which at its heart started as an online platform, that it has to have stores. Why is this so important? And you talked to me about it, certainly for the episode. Yeah. So first, thank you for having me, Carol. It's great to be back. You know, what we've shared a bit before is how much of this category remains offline, remains shopped in stores.

40:08When we think about sort of the$400 billion market that we play in, we think, you know, somewhere 25-ish percent of that is shopped online and the remainder is shopped offline. And even as that online penetration grows, a significant portion will stay offline. And so if we want to meet our customer where she's at, enable her to shop in all of the ways that she shops, which is offline, online, maybe in a social format with a friend, we think that stores are an important element of that. And so for us, it allows us to get closer to that customer and provide her yet another experience. And when we think about, you know, the key pieces that you need for stores, many of them we've built over the last 25 years.

40:53The brand, the technology behind it, the supplier relationships, our customer portfolio. And so we're able to take all of that and leverage that as we expand the store network.

41:06Carol Massar:So, you know, one thing I'm curious to, and I know you can't talk too much because we've got earnings coming up, but the more that you guys are in stores, continue to build out, it's now, what, a couple of years since the first store in Illinois. Does your conviction behind this strategy, is it proven? Does it increasingly continue to make more sense in terms of that kind of loop between the stores, the platform, and more? Yeah, so we spoke about this a bit on our last call, which was in May. At that point, our store outside of Chicago in Wilmette had been open for just about two years. That's our large format Wayfair store, 150 ,000 square feet.

41:46And then we'd recently opened our Atlanta store, which is where we filmed the episode. And then actually since then, we've also opened our Columbus store just a few weeks ago in Columbus, Ohio. It's a slightly different format. That's a 70 ,000 square foot store. And so what I think you're seeing, we've announced several other leases. There's another store set to open in Denver later this year, one in Westchester early next year. And that's just a handful of sort of, you know, what we're starting to roll out. And I think what you're hearing from us is, yes, we you know, we are seeing these work.

42:20And what we're really seeing is that the customer is excited about the in-store potential and then the integration with that in her overall shopping. experience. So she can come in store, she can touch and feel the product. Importantly, she can work with a sales associate, she can develop a quote to think about maybe redoing a bathroom or, you know, perhaps getting some new outdoor furniture. And then she can go back home and she can think about it and she can complete that purchase, you know, at her leisure at home or in the store if she chooses to. But the overall experience is very consistent and very comprehensive.

42:56And we're really seeing our customers respond to that. And we're excited by the potential here. How do you get, you know, the customer that is so used to sitting on their, maybe sitting on their Wayfair purchased couch at home, scrolling on their phone, looking for furniture? How do you get that person to come into the store? I just know that, you know, it's so hard these days for brick and mortar stores, but I totally see the potential here of why you would want to go into a store and touch the furniture. What do you tell your online customers about the stores? Yeah, it's a great question because what's interesting is that in the store, so actually more than 50 % of the customers that are in that Chicago store are actually new to the customer file.

43:41So they weren't necessarily a customer before. They're coming in for the first time and wanting to experience us in sort of a physical application. But for our existing customers who have shopped with us before, what we're hearing from those folks is, you know, they wanted to come in and experience the brand. And often what they're discovering is actually our breadth of offering is much broader than what they appreciated. So, you know, you mentioned the Wayfair couch. I think most folks that shop for a couch would think to come to Wayfair, right? They would know that that's a sort of core part of what we sell.

44:14But then they come into the store because they're curious about what sort of this feels like. And they realize, actually, that we have a very extensive storage and org offering, that we have an extensive mattress offering, that you can get kitchen accessories, seasonal decor. If you walk into that Atlanta store right now, there's a number of great seasonal accents on tables out in front that you can sort of purchase to around the 4th of July. We had a number of sort of Americana pieces there, right? And so those kinds of things that are a little bit more impulsive, a little bit more experiential, you get that flavor in the store.

44:52And we're hearing from existing customers that it's exciting for them to really understand the expansiveness of what we offer.

44:58Carol Massar:You know, and I certainly saw it ahead of Memorial Day, all those seasonal items in the front. And it's, yeah, it's just it makes sense. And it's like you walk into the store and it's if you're a shopper, you want to see that kind of stuff right off the bat. Hey, Kate, one thing I want to ask you, first of all, again, I'm reminded that you guys are, technology is really at the core of Wayfair in terms of your platform. And I think about your founder and founders. I want to ask you about AI specifically, clearly improving productivity across merchandising, advertising, catalog management, customer experience.

45:32Carol Massar:I'm just curious as CFO, as you look at the investment versus the ROI, where are you actually seeing or continuing to see kind of measurable financial impact as a result versus areas where the ROI is going to maybe take a little bit longer term? Yeah, you know, I think you framed it well, Carol, which is certainly there are places where you start to pick up, you know, individual efficiency gains and allows folks to maybe, you know, do more than they were doing before or sort of explore new areas. But what we're also quite excited about is how we think about using AI to improve that customer experience.

46:08One of the unique things that we offer is an incredibly expansive catalog, right? Millions and millions of items. Whatever you need for the home, you can find it with us, and each person can find their preference. But that also can be complex for folks to shop. And what I'm particularly excited about is how we use AI and are using AI to really personalize and improve that experience. Some of those you can find on the site today that would feel sort of obvious, I think, in some ways that it's an AI application. So the Discover tab is one I particularly like. You describe the room that you would like to design.

46:47And an AI-generated image is shown to you that matches that description. But it's all populated with products that are in our catalog. So they are all purchasable right then and there. So that's a sort of more obvious usage. Then there are other things where we've been able to use AI. You know, you talk about efficiency gains. We have millions of products in our catalog. And vetting the data around each product that, you know, comes in from supplier materials, say dimensions or the material of the product, whether it's wood or composite or metal. Right. You know, it can be hard to sort of vet all of that.

47:24AI allows you to do that at scale, which means the quality of the detailing around the product is better. And that's a much more, you know, sort of secure purchase for the consumer then.

47:33Carol Massar:I'm going to be really honest. We need one in New York City. So it's like a place I would go to unwind and just have fun. It was so much fun to walk. It'll be in Westchester. It's getting close. Kate, thanks so much. Take care. Yeah, be well. Kate Gulliver, she's the chief financial officer and chief administrative officer over at Wayfair. Be sure to check out Chief Future Officer with Kate Gulliver. It is premiering tomorrow, July 8th at 9.30 p.m. Wall Street time. Also find it on the Bloomberg and at Bloomberg.com.

48:53Carol Massar:We'll be right back. your smartphone or smart speakers. Subscribe to Bloomberg News Now today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen.