TikTok Ban One Step Closer to Happening & Taylor Swift's End of An Era

0:01Lowe's knows how to get you ready for holiday hosting with up to 35 % off select home decor and get up to 35 % off select major appliances plus members get free delivery delivery delivery delivery basic installation, parts, and a two-year Lowe's protection plan when you spend$2 ,500 or more on select LG major appliances. Valid through 10-1. Member offer excludes Massachusetts, Maryland, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Florida. Installed by independent contractors. Exclusions apply. See Lowe's.com for more details. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, President-elect Trump said he can't guarantee that tariffs won't lead to inflation.

0:39Then it's the end of an era, literally, as Taylor Swift wrapped up her two-year mega tour. It's Monday, December 9th. Let's ride.

0:53Oh my God, can you believe what happened in baseball last night? Superstar Juan Soto has reportedly signed a 15-year,$765 million deal with the New York Mets, the richest contract in professional sports history. It surpasses the 10-year,$700 million contract Shohei Ohtani received from the Los Angeles Dodgers last year. And unlike Ohtani, who deferred 97 % of that money for a decade, Soto is deferring none of it. Toby, the best part about this for Soto is he won't have to spend any of this money on movers. He's coming to the Mets from the Crosstown Yankees. I mean, the Mets top the Yankees. This really does not happen if you look at the general power dynamics between the two teams in New York.

1:35But Steve Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire, ever since he took control of the franchise in 2020, has just operated at a different label. He wasn't going to let money be the thing that made him miss out on this generational star. When Steve Cohen took control of the Mets in 2020, he said he'd be surprised and disappointed if they didn't win a World Series within three to five years. This is year number five, so he's clearly going all in. Buck is ticking, Mr. Cohen. Can't beat the Phillies. Can't beat the Phillies. Now a word from our sponsor, Sage. Sage is back. So this one goes out to all the finance pros that listen to Morning Brew Daily.

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2:42But for the rest of y 'all, visit sage.com for more info. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EBCLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

3:29Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EpGliss. Before starting EpGliss, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about EpGliss and visit epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Let's dive into some headlines from the weekend that you may have missed. Up first, get your last scrolls in on TikTok because it's looking like your favorite time-wasting app might indeed be heading for a ban. On Friday, a U.S. appeals court upheld the law passed by Congress earlier this year that could lead to the ban of the app by mid-January.

4:04The motivation behind that initial law was national security concerns. Lawmakers claimed that TikTok could fork over its data on its 170 million U.S. users to the Chinese government. TikTok's lawyers have pushed back, saying that the law violates the First Amendment, an argument that the three-judge appeals court rejected. While this does increase the likelihood that TikTok is going to get banned, TikTok has said it plans to appeal the ruling and send the case to the Supreme Court. So, Neil, it's not over yet, but it's looking a little dicey. Time is absolutely ticking. It looks like there's going to be three potential avenues here.

4:38Trump could Trump has said that he wants to keep TikTok going, but there are limited ways he can do that because this law banning it was passed by Congress back in April. So Congress would need to pass a law, another law to remove the ban. And it was passed in bipartisan fashion. So there is a lot of support among lawmakers. So one thing Trump could do is tell Apple and Google through their app stores that he won't enforce the ban. And it would be this handshake agreement where he would just be like, guys, I'm not going to send the DOJ after you can keep TikTok in your app stores. We can keep this thing going even with the ban ostensibly from Congress.

5:18But that doesn't that would probably spook Apple and Google. The second option here is that TikTok appeals to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court files an injunction blocking the ban from going into effect before January 19th. And then the final option is for TikTok to sell it to a U.S. company or a U.S. investor group. That does not seem likely, even though people like Steve Mnuchin, the former Treasury Secretary, have started to, you know, to make bids. but China will likely block the sale of this app from ByteDance. So three not great options for TikTok, and we're only a little over a month away from this being banned.

5:57And what does this mean for you, though, as someone who maybe has TikTok on their phone or something like that? If the ban goes into effect, then it is the app stores that would face fines for continuing to host it, but they're not going to go in and delete it off your phone. So you will still have, it reminds me of Flappy Bird back in the day when the developer took it off the app store. You could still play it, but what starts to happen is that TikTok no longer can ship updates to the app, so eventually it starts to get a little buggy, a little laggy. So if you have TikTok on your phone, it won't be going anywhere.

6:24It just might start to degrade in performance if this ban goes into effect. But yeah, and the final thing that you mentioned that a sale would probably be blocked by Beijing, part of the issue too is just TikTok is an extremely valuable company, likely worth over$200 billion. dollars. So a group of companies in the U.S. that could feasibly buy it is basically big tech. And there will be a lot of antitrust concerns if someone like Meta goes and tries to buy TikTok. So it is very unlikely that a sale will actually go down. They're literally going to have to throw a Hail Mary to either the Supreme Court or Trump.

6:57And so we'll see what happens. I mean, January 19th is just around the corner. Let's move on to the major developments in Syria. on Sunday, Syrian rebels seized the capital city of Damascus, capping off a surprise offensive that has toppled the authoritarian Assad family dynasty that had ruled Syria for more than 50 oppressive years. As the rebels were taking Damascus, President Bashar al-Assad resigned and fled to Moscow, where he was granted asylum, Russian state media said. Syrians in the country and many others in the diaspora celebrated the end of Assad's brutal dictatorship. It's a seismic turn of events that could shake up the geopolitical order in the Middle East and beyond.

7:37In particular, Assad's fall is a stinging blow to Russia and Iran, which had both backed his regime and poured tons of financial resources into keeping him in power. But when he needed them the most, Russia and Iran weren't there to save him, bogged down by other conflicts such as Russia's war in Ukraine. Among Western leaders, the feeling now is relief, but also apprehension about a power vacuum. President Biden called it a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their country, but added it was also a moment of risk and uncertainty. Toby, markets didn't really have a strong reaction to this.

8:13Syria doesn't produce much oil, and its economy has shrunk mightily from sanctions and civil war. But the long-term global ramifications of this are big given all the power players involved. It is a major shakeup in the region for sure. Let's go back and look at just Assad's, the younger Assad's time in power. When he was first in, came in and succeeded his father, there was a little bit of optimism because he was younger. He was kind of, he was tech forward. He, he was an ophthalmologist. He didn't really reflect the, the kind of brutal regime that his father did, but then he, and he actually still slowly started to lift some economic restrictions in the country, let in foreign banks, unshackled the private sector a little bit.

8:57So saw tourism swelling, but then he started to follow in the footsteps of his father, began cracking down on dissident political ideology, and the economy started to suffer. In result, according to the World Bank, Syria's GDP has shrank 54 % from 2010 to 2021. As of 2022, 69 % of the population was in poverty, with almost a quarter of Syrians affected by extreme poverty. So it really has been a tough time for Syria, especially economically, because you're right. It used to be a little bit more of an oil powerhouse. It used to produce around 400 ,000 barrels of oil a day in the 2008 to 2010 range.

9:37As of 2015, that reached just 25 ,000 barrels per day. So it has kind of shrunk away from the global economic scene. The jobs market did its best Dennis Rodman impression and rebounded impressively in November. Remember, we were coming off some pretty distorted October data due to the hurricanes and striking workers, but the pendulum swung back towards stability with the U.S. adding 227 ,000 jobs last month, beating expectations of 200 ,000. Those solid numbers confirmed that the 12 ,000 jobs added in October, which were eventually revised up to a 36 ,000 gain, were in fact tied to the natural disasters and strikes and not indicative of a broader trend.

10:18However, the unemployment rate did tick up slightly to 4.2%, reflecting a slight pullback in hiring, while the duration people are staying unemployed, hit more than five months, the highest since April 2022. So the general takeaway from this report, Neil, is that the labor market is healthy, albeit with a few warning signs. Yeah, this is just another ho-hum, very solid jobs report. Just thank Juan Soto hitting a gapper, you know, taking a double. So the job market is perfectly fine. It is expected to slow a little bit next year. JP Morgan expects that the U.S. will add 113 ,000 jobs a month next year, which is down from about 180 ,000 this year.

10:59So we are mellowing out in the job market. But the unemployment rate, even at 4.2 percent where it's now, that is considered historically low. You want it in the low 4 percent range. That's basically everyone who wants a job can get a job in the economy. Markets reacted perfectly well. You know, the S &P shot up to its 57th high of the year. it is now up 28 % this year. So markets were absolutely not disturbed at all. This was just another, you know, dinger to left. I think the one thing though that had some economists a little bit concerned was that people are staying unemployed for longer. And I think it does reflect the general sense out there that if you have a job, the job market is obviously good for you.

11:39But if you don't have a job, it's one of the tougher, it's a weird conundrum because again, we are adding jobs, unemployment is low, but people who are out of a job are just finding it harder to get back into work. showing some of the apprehension these companies have for hiring. So that's just potentially the one warning sign in what was otherwise a pretty solid report. That is a good point. Jerome Powell won't be needing to put up an open-to-work banner on LinkedIn come January 20th. In an interview with NBC News yesterday, President-elect Trump said he wouldn't seek to boot Powell from his role as chair of the Federal Reserve, despite his hostility toward Powell during his first term in the White House.

12:15I don't see it, Trump told Meet the Press in his first sit-down broadcast interview since winning the election. In regards to firing Powell, Trump said, I think if I told him to, he would. But if I asked him to, he probably wouldn't. Trump allowing Powell to continue on as the U.S.'s top economic policymaker should alleviate some concerns about the Fed's independence under a second Trump administration. During his campaign, Trump wondered aloud whether he should have influence over the Fed's interest rate decisions, spooking investors who consider the Fed's independence from short-term political matters fundamental to stable markets.

12:48So, Toby, looks like we're going to be hearing a lot more from Jay Powell for at least another couple of years. His term ends May 2026. Right. Remember, Trump was the person who originally elevated Powell into the role, and then it's been kind of a rocky relationship ever since with Trump not happy with the fact that Powell didn't lower interest rates more quickly during his first term. And the toying with potentially firing Powell has always been something that has spooked a lot of people on Wall Street. And I think if you zoom out, Trump does not want to spook people on Wall Street, which is why he's kind of backed away from some of that rhetoric.

13:24But, yeah, I do think that these two are going to make an entertaining duo, at least over this next term, given how they've clashed heads in the past. And then another major takeaway from that interview on Meet the Press yesterday was that Trump was posed by the interviewer. The interviewer brought up that, you know, the broad consensus among economists is that his tariffs, you know, he's pledged 25 percent tariffs on all products from Mexico and China, 10 percent additional tariffs on China, that those will raise prices. And the interviewer asked, like, what do you think of that? And he's like, I can't guarantee that that they won't raise prices.

13:58I can't even guarantee tomorrow, he said. So that's sort of an admission that, you know, the broad economic view that tariffs will lead to higher prices has he's sort of acknowledging that. So we'll see. You know, he continued to pledge that he will slap tariffs on. Those are major tariffs on those countries come his first day in office. So I think we should all pretty much brace for that. It is the end of an Eras after Taylor Swift played her final show on the Eras tour last night in Vancouver. Spanning nearly two years and 152 shows across five continents, it'll be remembered as a cultural phenomenon on par with Beatlemania or Woodstock.

14:37It was also an economic juggernaut. Even when the first leg ended in 2023, the Eras tour was already the highest grossing tour of all time, earning more than$1 billion across 66 shows. tack on an additional 86 shows this year, and the final haul is estimated to be$2.2 billion. Meanwhile, the Ares Tour drove a surge in consumer spending that helped global economies recover from the pandemic. The 2023 leg contributed$4.3 billion to U.S. GDP, while other countries cited Swift shows for boosting inflation in their official government data. Toby, the Ares Tour had this grip on culture and commerce that we may not see again for a long time.

15:18What do you think its main legacy will be? Well, I actually just first wanted to give a shout out to the sheer ability of Taylor Swift to continue this for over two years. I crunched the numbers. So the tour spanned two years. She went to five continents, 50 cities, 152 shows. If she performed at each one for about three hours each, that means she was singing and dancing up there for 456 hours, which means 18.6 days of nonstop performing. It truly was just this absolute juggernaut. In terms of the legacy, just think about all the subplots that it spun off. I mean, there was the friendship bracelets that actually ended up being the way that Travis Kelsey and her got in touch.

15:57There was this revolt against Ticketmaster for these higher ticket prices and their site breaking down. There was the concert film. There was the book that she released. There was the booming economies in every single city that she reacted to. I mean, it is still so funny that Sweden mentioned it in their official government data because she brought in higher than expected inflation when she brought her, you know, tour there. So just I think all the absolute subplots that it spun off is going to be its big legacy. Yeah, there was this new term that was coined, which was Swiftonomics. And it was just the insane secondary impacts of her tour and all of her various business lines.

16:33You know, over the course of this tour, Taylor Swift was named Time Person of the Year. She became a billionaire, the first person who became a billionaire just because of her music. and she wrote this book, which we didn't even talk about, but she wrote this book, selling it directly through Target. It sold 814 ,000 print copies over Thanksgiving weekend. It's the biggest nonfiction book release of the year. It is the second biggest nonfiction book release of all time, even if it was riddled with grammars and typos. It seemed nobody cared. She put out this movie, the Aristore movie, which shattered all records for concert films.

17:08Her merch sold like crazy. She sold a half a billion dollars in merch. So she is an economy unto herself. What is next for her though? It's probably a re-recording of Reputation. A lot of people are always excited for that. She's been teasing it at all these shows. So the Taylor Swift train just continued. Maybe a little, you know, couch time. Yeah, potentially. Up next, our winners of the weekend.

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18:31Welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where Toby and I picked two things that picked up the tab at brunch. I won the pre-show Taylor Swift karaoke competition, so I get to go first. And my winner is Southern Methodist University football team, who earned the final spot in the first ever 12-team college football playoff, which was revealed yesterday. In sneaking into the 12-slot, SMU's addition meant the perennial juggernaut Alabama was on the outside looking in. SMU's rise highlights the influence of outside money in college football. A one-time powerhouse in the 80s, SMU has been rebuilding its program and, during all the conference realignment in recent years, decided it wanted to join the Atlantic Coast Conference.

19:13To gain entrance, the small private school in Texas made a unique offer to the ACC. It would forego the conference's TV revenue, an average of$45 million per year, and would instead raise the money itself. Luckily, SMU had an ace in the hole, David B. Miller. Miller is a billionaire oil and gas mogul who helped the school's athletic department raise a record$159 million ahead of its move to the ACC. It's a couple hundred billion dollars, Miller told Yahoo Sports. I'm not losing sleep over it. Meanwhile, everyone is entering uncharted territory here. The NCAA expanded its college football playoff from four teams to 12 teams this year, offering more games, more attention, and more TV revenue.

19:56The schools are all competing for a$150 million prize pool, with the finalists collecting$20 million apiece. A lot of money on the line. SMU is interesting because they are one of the only teams, they actually are the only team in college football history to be handed down the death penalty by the NCAA. And it's not as bad as that actually sounds, but basically they were banned from competing in the sport for two years back in the 80s as a result of these recruiting violations where they were, ironically, paying players. So if only those boosters from the 80s could have fast-forward to today's college football landscape, it is a completely different world where paying players is the norm now, and you actually have to in order to compete.

20:36So I do think it is fascinating how this school that has such a checkered history has now raised a ton of money, has these oil boosters who are willing to put the money in to let the team compete on the national stage. All right, so I just want to give everyone the schedule here, what they can expect from the college football playoff. There are four teams that are getting a buy, Oregon, Georgia, Boise State, and Arizona State. A real motley crew there. I love Boise State's Bluefields, so I'm opting for them in that group. And then the teams that are playing in the first round game will be hosting them at home fields for the first time.

21:09Most of the time, in the existing playoff structure, there had been neutral sites, but now they're hosting it at home fields, which should be a lot of fun, a lot more energy. Texas is hosting Clemson. Penn State is hosting SMU Notre Dame is hosting Indiana and Tennessee travels to Ohio State there's going to be a month of college football before the championship game on January 20th just shout out to my Hoosiers I was recently asked to crown a football team that I wanted to root for a lot of you guys are listeners sent in teams to root for I did pick Indiana so I'm rooting for them the only person that I want in my corner though is Timothy Chalamet he jumped on college game day this past weekend the man knows ball absolutely blew up the internet with his picks, picked some correct Maction games as well.

21:56So I hope Lisan Al-Gayyib is on the side of the Hoosiers because the man knows how to pick them. Dating back to the 90s, the government has required companies to offer great parental leave policies, subsidized daycares, and even offered cash payments to parents. At one point earlier this year, the government launched a dating app, but this experiment, moving to a four-day work week, could try and change Japan's work-heavy culture and hopefully free up time, especially for women, to have more balance in their lives. That time is the critical point of this because the gap between men and women when it comes to housework is one of the biggest among all developed countries.

22:34Women in Japan engage in five times more unpaid work than men. That's like child care and elder care. That's according to the IMF. So the Japanese government, the Tokyo government is seeing these stats and saying a lot of women are not having kids probably because they have they just don't want to take the burden of more work because they're already working so much. So maybe a four day work week could free up time. You know, we've talked a lot about the four day work week. I've never heard of it in the in the same breath as, you know, improving fertility. So this is a new way of trying that out.

23:08Like you said, Tokyo government has tried everything for decades to kickstart more population, but it just hasn't worked. So we'll see whether this thing coming down in April will boost the population a bit. There is this organization called Four Day Week Global, which obviously advocates for a four-day work week across multiple countries. And they have found through multiple trials that men reported spending 22 % more time on child care, 23 % more time on housework during a four-day workweek. So there is data to support the fact that they can alleviate this burden on their spouses, on their partners.

23:46So the upside is definitely there. This four-day workweek organization is very interesting as well because what they do is they actually help companies figure out how to manage this. because it's not just something where you're like, everyone gets Fridays off because people, you still need the company to function on Friday. So what they do is they help create these flexible work arrangements, ensure that people have coverage throughout the week. They basically just help companies pilot this program of trying to take one day off. Some opted for like every other week. There is more nuance to it than just saying, hey, Monday through Thursday.