Inflation Cooling, Buffett weighs in on Banking Crisis, Twitter & X Corp.

0:01Stop waiting for customers to fall into your funnel. It's 2025, and the same old strategies are, well, just kind of old. That's where Amazon ads can make a difference. Brands using four Amazon ad solutions saw dramatically higher growth compared to limited approaches. Our latest Marketing Brew article breaks down how they can help you reach customers everywhere they are, from prime video to Alexa to shopping with consistent messaging. Read the whole thing at marketingbrew.com slash amazon dash ads. Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I am Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Let's run through what we're going to talk about today.

0:37We have a big inflation report, so we'll discuss that and what it means for stocks and the economy in general. We'll also reveal the latest must-have collectible for any billionaire. So if there are any billionaires listening, take notes. Then, Neil, we have a heck of a headline to unpack. Does Twitter no longer exist? We'll find out. Finally, we'll finish up with a feel-good story about a little-known Massachusetts college landing a$300 million donation. What a tasty lineup, Neil. Let's ride.

1:18All right, so Toby and I did some networking last night. We shook a lot of hands, put on name tags, talked to people we didn't know. I signed a baby too, I think, which was an interesting part of the night. I never knew that was a part of networking. Absolutely. It was a great time. Fun to meet people. And our friends put it on. But I just went through the same question. I had the same conversation with 15 people. It was, oh, where do you work? Oh, nice, nice. You in the city? Oh, love that neighborhood. Yeah, I'm over in Union Square. So how do you know the host? It was that, like, 20 million times.

1:54I'm getting the chills just thinking back to how many times I did have that exact conversation. I just made up everything differently every time. Yeah, yeah. I also, we lost our voice a little bit because we talked to so many people and they're like, we got to go. And the music was loud. I know I never had to use my voice before for work. And I was like, well, I can't talk. Protect the moneymaker, Neil. Ooh. Okay. Let's get into the news. You know, people ask how we get out of bed every morning early. Well, this is it right here. The March inflation report, which is technically called the Consumer Price Index.

2:27It measures the change in prices across the economy, essentially measures how much we pay for stuff. It dropped this morning and it's like one of those movies that ends mostly happy, but still leaves you with a little bitter taste. And you said maybe a beautiful mind would fit. So that's that's what this morning's inflation report was. TLDR is that inflation came down more than expected last month, which is obviously good news. Consumer prices edged up point one percent from the previous month and five percent from a year ago, which is less than projections. Many economists, though, don't really look at the numbers I just mentioned, so kind of forget those.

3:03Those contain energy and food prices. Those fluctuate very dramatically all the time and make the data messy. So economists mostly look at what's known as core CPI, which takes out food and energy. And so here are the core CPI numbers. They were up 0.4 % for the month and 5.6 % from the previous year. Still, the main takeaway from this is that inflation is coming down, but there's still a lot of inflation. But it is good news because as seen by stock futures, which are absolutely spiking this morning. Yeah. Thanks for the rundown, Neil. I always look forward to it because once inflation data drops, everyone's kind of parsing through it, figuring it out.

3:42So thanks for breaking it down. I do want to hit on the volatile food and energy component. So one of the reasons why they take out something like energy is because if we think back to March of 2022, which is what we're comparing this month's data to, energy figures spiked because Russia invaded Ukraine. And so that's the data that we're comparing this month's to. So you can see why economists kind of remove energy sometimes because stuff happens. Right. A war broke out that really affects energy prices. So that's why we're kind of tossing that out sometimes. It's an interesting point about comparing things to a year before.

4:18Literally anything that happens, and it says like, oh, up 5%, down 5%, up 40%, down 40%, you should always think about what the benchmark was previously. Because I remember we were talking yesterday about Apple's shipments were down 40 % in that first quarter. Well, the year before, it spiked way more than usual. So you have to really think about what you're comparing things to in these year-over-year comparisons. Yeah. There's also, let's just dive into a couple of the more nitty gritty data. Food inflation actually stayed flat month over month. So that's been something that it's been a big talking point.

4:52We did, we couldn't find the specific number for eggs, but I still can't find eggs for below$6 at the grocery store. That's been a huge benchmark for a lot of people's like how expensive eggs are. And then another thing that is still kind of red hot, as we like to say, is that food away from home, which is food in restaurants, inflation is still pretty high on that. So restaurants are still bearing those inflated food costs because they have to buy food just like we do. So those are two little food nuggets that we picked up from on the report. All right. Finally, we should just talk about what this means for the Fed.

5:26The Fed has raised interest rates nine straight times now. And this inflation report does not put it off track to raise interest rates for one more time at its meeting in May. So it's April now. So next month, it seems like the Fed is going to raise rates one more time, but then it's also signaled that maybe it's going to cut interest rates over the remainder of 2023 because inflation is coming down, which is what it's trying to do. And maybe this banking crisis has done a little bit of the work that interest rate hikes would have done. Happy CPI Wednesdays, I guess. Happy CPI Wednesday. Does it always come out on a Wednesday?

6:04I don't know. We should start throwing a little bit more of a party when it comes we should next time all right that was cpi um now neil i kind of teased this at the beginning show but how's this for a beginning of of a story twitter no longer exists you heard that right twitter has officially merged with a newly formed shell firm called x corp it sounds like the x-men it's not all right who knows though um so we actually found this out under very kind of funny musky and circumstances so a right-wing twitter personality sued Twitter last year for banning her account. And through various court filings, it came out that she got a response that said Twitter Inc has been merged into X Corp and no longer exists.

6:45So what is X Corp? In the past, Elon has kind of hinted at this nebulous idea called X, which he calls an everything app. And everything app is very clearly modeled off of an existing app out of China that Tencent makes called WeChat, which started as a messaging app, But now you can do everything from Halo Taxi, order food, buy movie tickets, check in for your flight. You can send money to each other. So it truly is an everything app. So Elon's had this fixation on like turning Twitter into X, the everything app. But I see your face right now. I'm a little in my eyes. Do you think that this is actually, Elon is actually going to pull off making this everything happen?

7:26Well, he can barely pull off Twitter. I think we're going to all agree. So I don't know. You know, my parents always said walk before you run. Twitter is barely crawling right now. So I think it's a little presumptuous to say, oh, he's going to build an everything app because he can barely keep Twitter running. Yeah. He's making a zillion different mistakes, backtracks on every policy, issues, you know, very haphazard standards across various accounts. This is like the last thing I'm thinking about. Right. He did. He tweeted out once this news broke, he tweeted out X and everyone's like, oh, my gosh.

7:57Just the letter X. Yeah. My odds, Vegas, my bookmaker odds, is that he sells Twitter at a huge loss for 90 % and then that he builds anything interesting on top of Twitter at maybe 5 % and then just keeps Twitter running right now at another 5%. I might book some of those odds. Okay, but Neil, we also want to talk about a competitor, a Twitter competitor that just kind of emerged. Substack has released this platform called Substack Notes, which is, it looks a lot like Twitter, honestly. it's a feed that the writers can post on you can post tweets there's some a little different uh differences between the two some of them are one there's no character limit so you can actually really be loquacious on there and then there's a few just like you can't post videos you can only post gifs in in photos but like the idea is to a lot of substack writers use twitter to drive newsletter subscriptions and now you have this self-contained ecosystem where it's a lot easier to just one click sign up for someone's newsletter.

8:57And you were pretty impressed with it. Yeah. I mean, admittedly, I scrolled for three minutes, but it didn't have a lot of the garbage that Twitter has. And it was people just like nerding out over stuff, which is kind of what Substack is in the first place. Yeah. Should we talk about the drama of Substack and Twitter though? Right. Because when they first announced this launch, Twitter throttled Substack links. Meanwhile, everyone was like, what do you mean you're a free speech absolutist and you're doing this like little petty activity against your arrival that's not even a rival. Right, so yeah, when you would post a subsack leak, no one could comment on it, no one could retweet it.

9:34Like you couldn't even like it. So he really just undercut this entire ecosystem of subsack riders on the platform and people just like, all right, I'm out. I'm out, including Matt Tybee, the journalist who was in cahoots with Elon Musk over the release of the Twitter files. So people got a lot of satisfaction seeing them fight because they didn't like either of them. Right. Truly. Should we finally talk about, he gave this BBC interview while all of us were sleeping. Musk talked to a BBC journalist on camera, and they also played it on Twitter spaces. Just some tidbits from that. He said the pain level has been extremely high.

10:11This hasn't been some kind of party, which is quite evident. It hasn't been boring. It's been quite a roller coaster. He said it was a really quite a stressful situation. and he also said he's gonna stop tweeting after 3 a.m because he says have i shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times yes i think i should not tweet after 3 a.m i guess he's a self-aware king would we go that far i wouldn't say so no yeah still not yet a lot of twitter news uh obviously we get news like that every day so i'm sure we'll continue talking about it um okay neil let's jump to america's favorite grandpa warren buffett because the civil-haired fox was back on air this morning to kind of comfort the American public when it comes to banks.

10:52So his main message was, one, we're probably not through with bank failures, which on the surface sounds a little incendiary. But two, he followed that up by saying depositors should never, ever be worried. His exact quote was, banks go bust, but depositors aren't going to be hurt. So this is a Buffett, again, kind of saying, being the bank whisperer, he's done this in the past. He stepped in during previous financial crisis. So people listen when he talks about banks. What do you think about the message that he's sending? I mean, he knows more than me. That's for bank sharing. I've been following business news for six years now.

11:28And when we were looking at this interview, I was just thinking, this guy has, what is he, 92? He's been in business for 60 years. He's seen this before. These things come in cycles. He's experienced 60 years of watching things go boom and bust and bank failures and non-bank failures and people getting hurt and people getting help. And he's rescued Bank of America and Goldman Sachs before we were even born. I mean, not to say that I think everything he says is right, obviously. But, you know, when someone looks at something from that perspective, that historical perspective, it's a little bit assuring.

12:03And his specifics were that the FDIC, which is the kind of the backstop for banks, he said people don't understand that the FDIC costs are borne by the banks. They're not borne by the American public. Yeah, I don't understand. Right, exactly. And again, Buffett's quote was, the public literally doesn't understand that. Nobody is going to lose money on a deposit in a U.S. bank. It's not going to happen. That's pretty. Is he just saying the government's going to backstop everything above insurance? So he's saying there's basically unlimited insurance for your bank. Well, he's saying that the FDIC will step in, but then two, that the banks are the ones responsible for funding the FDIC, which is, again, something that he thinks that the American public isn't aware of.

12:46So this was just maybe we should educate them on a future episode. Right. How it works. Exactly. No, but this is this is Grandpa Warren just kind of being being the grandpa, being the person who who can whose dulcet tones soothe our fears. So do you want to talk about his Japan stuff? Yeah, we'll just touch on it really briefly. The part of the reason why we're going to talk about Warren Buffett today is that he has increased his stake in Japan's five largest trading companies to 7.4 percent, which is a hefty margin. When he a few years ago, he had just five percent. That stake was worth six billion dollars.

13:22So it's only gone up from them. And these trading houses, they're super interesting. I went pretty deep on them this morning. Basically, Japan was closed to the outside world for much of its history for 200 years. So when they opened up, they quickly had to develop these trade relationships with other countries. So these trading houses formed that have this deep domain expertise in negotiations and also just like the flow of information. So they became these really, really strong institutions. In Japan, they're some of the highest paying employers. So they're kind of like the McKinsey's. what consulting is in the U.S., these trading houses are in Japan.

13:58And I know why Buffett loves them is because they deal in the real economy. They're deeply involved in areas like commodity trading, shipping, steel, basically like the anti-Bitcoin. They actually do stuff that you sell in the real world. The one I'd heard of is Mitsubishi. Is that the same entity that makes the cars or? I don't think so because these are more focused on, I could be wrong on that. I actually didn't double check that, But it is, they're, basically what they do is deal in all sorts of commodity training. And yeah, there's like five or six major ones and Buffett wants a piece of all of them.

14:31All right. We didn't have time to get in as deep as you wanted it on the podcast, but you should make a TikTok about it later. I'll do a deep dive. Check out our TikTok, MV Daily Show. Okay, Neil, before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break.

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15:47So President Biden is in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland this week doing some diplomacy around the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, but also visiting the villages where his family is from. We're not going to talk about that, but I did want to talk about Biden may have a unique job, but he is not unique in this trip at all because Americans are traveling to Europe in huge numbers. OK, I promise that you will not go three scrolls on your Instagram over the next six months without seeing your friend doing that, putting your hand up against the leaning tower of Pisa shot.

16:18So searches for European travel on kayak, which is a travel site, are 77 percent higher than last year. Hopper said that of its U.S.-based customers browsing international destinations, 37 percent are searching for flights to Europe, which is up 9 percent from 2019 levels. So I don't know if this is a strong dollar, if this is the White Lotus effect and everyone's going to Europe to live their best lives. If they're going to protest at credit speed, catacorders. They're going to watch maybe what the Wales team, Wrexham, play. Wrexham, maybe, yeah. First of all, 10 out of 10 transition from Biden's international travel plans to talking about European travel in general.

16:57I've been in this rodeo before. One thing I do want to call out too is if you're going to travel abroad, you better get your passport in line too because there's some crazy stats around the demand for passports, which are 30 to 40 % above last year's levels, which also broke a record with 22 million passports issued. So basically the Secretary of State is telling you if you want to travel, get your stuff in line because so many other people want to travel too that your passport demand is just like 500 ,000 applications a week. Luckily, I got my passport maybe two years ago, and that's the best feeling in the world because you know you don't have to do it for the next 10 years.

17:33Right. It is a good feeling. Although, once you see your passport photo and if you look at yourself and you go like, damn, that's young, that's probably in your mind saying you probably need to go renew it. So if you're seeing a younger version of yourself too frequently, go renew it. We should talk about what this means for airlines because this is a literal goldmine. First of all, transatlantic flights are their biggest international routes in general. The biggest moneymakers, the top three U.S. airlines get up to 20 percent of their total passenger revenue from people flying from U.S. to Europe, which is pretty crazy.

18:08This is another stat. I can't really fathom this, but United is flying almost two dozen flights every day from the U.S. to London. So if you need to get to London, you should be able to do it relatively cheaply. And that's why I think a lot of people are traveling to Europe because they're realizing, at least from the East Coast, it's faster to go to London than it is for me to get to L.A. Right. And you just take a red eye. You're there at 6 a.m. It's super easy. And we love this stat about Croatia. First of all, Croatia is 25 percent of Croatia's GDP is tourism. So they need to build out their transportation infrastructure.

18:43And this one airport is considering extending its runway so that it can get more transatlantic flights. And this stat blew my mind that the Croatia only has two transatlantic flights per day. Yeah. Hey, invest in yourself. That's what they always say, right? Yes. Make yourself better. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to a new status symbol just dropped. A new collectible. Vanity license plates. So a license plate with the number seven sold for$15 million in Dubai, which became the most expensive license plate ever sold. The previous expensive plate was$14.2 million, which also is a lot. So the auction in Dubai benefits this charity founded by the ruler of Dubai to bring food to communities struggling with food insecurity in the world.

19:29But$15 million for a license plate, that's way more than the cost of the actual car. I guess it's just another way to show off your wealth. Yeah. I was digging deep into why the United Arab Emirates, it's this hotbed for these luxury or these license plates with really low numbers on them. That's like the status symbol. And so I was reading a story. There's this local businessman who was actually refused entry into a luxury hotel in 2006 because his car license plate had too many numbers. So it's that big of a symbol. Are you kidding me? So he was refused entry. So that same businessman in 2016 purchased the D5 license plate for almost$9 million and went back to the hotel and said, like, look at me now, baby.

20:14So it truly is like a very integral part of the culture there, which you just never would have known. Also, so the previous record for this license plate was$14.2 million for the number one license plate in Abu Dhabi, which I feel like is so much better than what was this one? P7? Well, seven may have some extra significance that we don't know about, but these are quite boring. You know, I think in the United States, you want to have like a little more fun, but this is just literally like the equivalent of a Rolex, I guess. So do you know what the most expensive, did you find what the most expensive US one?

20:48Well, there's actually, you go first. There's a vanity license plate. It's a New York license plate that says New York on it. And this is the funniest part. So it's on sale for$20 million and they threw in the car that it's on and it's this old beat up Volvo. So they're like, you get the, look at it. You get the car too. Like what great value for yourself. I did look up some of the U.S. ones and there's one in California, which is MM. Yeah. It's valued at 24.3 million. I don't think there was a sale yet, but the reason this is so valued so high is there's, it's two character plate MM, which is very rare.

21:24And then the fact that it's the same letter of M is even rarer. There are only 35 of these in existence. And then obviously I should have seen this coming, but it's paired up with an NFT. Oh my gosh. Oh God. But that just shows you that this is a collectible. This is a status symbol. I like this one. Most expensive one in Texas is called 12th man for the Aggies. That's what they call their home crowd. There's one in England that has an F1 vanity plate. That's very expensive. That looks sick. See, these are... I want to buy one of these. I feel like it's a great collector's item. Not that I can afford it.

21:59Let's start a little marketplace, Neil. A little side hustle. Okay, let's jump into our last story. So hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin has donated another$300 million to his alma mater, Harvard. And notice I said another because with that gift, he's now given over$500 million to the school. So this particular gift comes with the benefit of getting his name on a building. Hell yeah. What the billionaires always want. So the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will now be named after him. Neil, if you're a billionaire, are you dropping$300 million to get your name on a building? Probably. Well, I was thinking about what building I would want.

22:34It definitely wouldn't be an academic institution. I would give money to academia, but it would probably be a little more, I don't know, I'm just a little weirder and different. I was thinking like the Fryman Memorial Monster Seats at Fenway Park or something. Well, you really had it prepared. Neil Fryman Memorial. Why am I saying memorial? I'm like, no one, whatever, this will happen when I'm done. Like Neil Fryman Terminal at JFK. Okay. I could do that. That might be a little more expensive than 300 million, I would say. Well, we also went down a deep hole into like the biggest billionaire donations to colleges.

23:07Bloomberg, this is going to be tough to beat. Michael Bloomberg,$1.8 billion for student financial aid to NYU in 2018. Billy. That's a lot of number. That's a billion. And it still costs$80 ,000 to go to NYU. It's ridiculous. Yeah. I would donate, I think. I think it's good. Who's going to argue against donating to higher education? All right. I have a little trivia for you. What is the second? So we know the colleges that are produced the most billionaires. Number one is Harvard. What is number two? Oh, man. I'm going to say, is it going to be like an SEC school or something like that? No. I don't know.

23:43I was thinking like Tim Cook went to Auburn. Fine. Johns Hopkins. No. Son of a gun. University of Pennsylvania Paul Jobs Elon Musk and it's tie with Stanford Boring Vlad Tenev I don't know if he's still a billionaire from Robin Hood Rich Barton who's the co-founder of Zillow and Jerry Yang the co-founder of Yahoo The more you know Before we go yeah all I want is my name on a sandwich honestly I will pay Jimmy John's whatever just to get a sandwich I don't need a college I'll take a number seven Fryman please Alright that is our show for today it's gonna be 81 degrees so I'm hoping to get out of here and enjoy the sunshine.