Let's party like it's NVIDIA earnings report day!

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0:15Hello, dear listeners, and welcome to Sunday Night Football. Oh, that's so good. What are you doing? I'm practicing my American accent, but I don't know, you caught me. This is actually Indicators of the Week. That is amazing. Can you do your American accent for the rest of the episode? I don't know. You sounded very unenthusiastic about that idea. Okay, we'll bring on another great American, Kenny Malone from Planet Money. Hi. Yes, I'm here to talk about football season. You're sorry, South African, Kenny. I'm sorry. I thought I'd give it a shot. But yes, football season is almost here, and that's a little bit why I'm here.

0:55Yes, you're going to be talking about how private equity firms are now allowed to invest in NFL teams. We're also going to be going to an NVIDIA earnings party. And we will look at how publishers are trying to keep their books in Florida school libraries. We throw around the old pigskin after the break. Hike, hike. Blue, 42.

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2:16That's Vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. This message comes from NPR sponsor Veeam. AI promised intelligence, but it also exposed everything people couldn't see. Veeam and Security AI bring protection, governance, and AI trust together to accelerate safe AI at scale. Learn more at Veeam.com. It's Indicators of the Week. Darian, you're up first. My indicator is 50, which is more or less the number of people I saw at an NVIDIA earnings call party in an Irish pub in Manhattan on Wednesday. Paul, I'm going to go back to you. Wait, hold on.

2:57Can we unpack that for a second? Earnings call party. So famous chip maker NVIDIA, a party to watch their earnings call? Yes, just like a sports game. So, yeah, picture a bar with the TVs blaring, but, you know, you've got the financial cable channel CNBC playing instead of ESPN. Lauren Bellick, an equities analyst, organized it with decorations matching the NVIDIA logo. Yeah, I bought these green beads, and I've got green and white and black balloons. Beads? Is it like a Mardi Gras party? No, it's an earnings call party, but like Mardi Gras beads? Is that what we're looking at here? So there was palpable excitement here.

3:35Good energy here, good vibes, and, you know, hoping for the best on earnings call.

3:45The earnings were released. NVIDIA's second quarter earnings were$30 billion, more than doubling from a year ago. And yet, maybe because of concerns about production for NVIDIA's next-generation chip, the share price actually started to sink. Zane Siddiqui is a software engineer who owns NVIDIA shares. But now it's down a little bit. Uh-oh. Yeah. This is your savings. It's definitely going to impact if I can buy a beer or not, for sure. Well, it's 2%. Ouch. Yeah, that's a little more. That's scary. That's 4 % almost. Yeah, 4%. Down 4%. Yeah. It's kind of like being in a stadium when the home team has lost the sports game.

4:31Yeah, it's gotten a lot more quiet. Oh, 7 % now. Oh, yeah. This party really took a turn. Jeez. Yeah, the initial rambunctious vibes kind of faded away. My favorite part is when Darian says sports game. Which makes me truly believe he belongs more at this earnings call party than at a sports game. You don't call it sports games? No, we don't. They call them sports ball games. I think that's the term. Sports ball games, yeah. So the stock price was deflating. The bar slowly petered out after that. And I guess even having this earnings party and the share price falling illustrates that even though NVIDIA is doing amazingly well, the expectations are just so big that it would take this Herculean effort to meet those sky-high hopes for the company.

5:23Well, Darian, I cannot believe you found this. It sounds like the most Manhattan way to spend an afternoon. It was great. Waylon, tell us about books in Florida. That's what we're going for. That's right. Okay, my indicator is five, as in the big five. This is the nickname given to the five major English language publishing companies. And this group is in the news this week because they filed a lawsuit against Florida education officials. Florida enacted a law last year that was designed to, among other things, keep books with sexual content out of school libraries. And the big five publishers say in their lawsuit that this is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

5:59Right. There's been a lot of news from around the country about alleged book banning and censorship in schools and libraries. So what exactly are the publishers objecting to here? They are suing over two specific parts of this Florida law. One limits books in public schools with any content that, quote, describes sexual conduct. And the second one prohibits books that contain, quote, pornographic content. The publisher's lawsuit says this criteria is too vague and even unconstitutional. What's that famous quote from a Supreme Court justice about obscenity? Something like, I know it when I see it.

6:32So is this Florida parents and lawmakers are seeing it in lots of kids' books is like what's going on here? Yeah, including some literary classics. Like some of the books named in the lawsuit as examples are Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and novels by contemporary authors like John Green. He wrote The Fault in Our Stars, which is a big bestseller. John Green is actually one of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit, along with Jodi Picoult and some other pretty prominent novelists. Any response from the state of Florida? I reached out to the governor's office. I have not heard anything back. But in February, Governor Ron DeSantis said, quote, the state has empowered parents to object to obscene material in the classroom.

7:10He also said that some people are abusing this process to try to get the Bible pulled from libraries, which, I don't know, maybe parents are objecting to Song of Solomon because I don't know if you have read that book in the Bible, but it is spicy. Are you serious? Are you going to do a book club, Planet Money Book Club, Song of Solomon? About Song of Solomon? I mean, if you're ready. Yeah, it's like at least— I'm not. I assure you I am not. It's at least two chili peppers on the Weyland Wong chili pepper scale. And now to you, Kenny, to wrap this whole thing up. Tell us what your indicator is.

7:40Yeah, okay. So I have an indicator related to the old private equity. Very active in the modern economy. I mean, I assume we've done lots of private equity indicators these days. Yes. So for those of you who might not know, these are massive investment funds that buy up shares in a company, sometimes entire companies, and they're trying to basically squeeze profits out of them. Right. So private equity groups have been slowly buying up chunks of our lives. You know, your favorite grocery store, your beloved regional hospital, a veterinary clinic. Well, now we can add your favorite football team.

8:16because on Tuesday, a group of NFL team owners voted to allow private equity to buy up to 10 % of NFL teams. And that is my indicator, 10 % private equity football teams. Do they get to rename the team so you'll have like the Buffalo Bridge loans? No, no. I wish they would. They should hire you. How about the Lexington leveraged buyouts? I'm so good at this. I have a feeling I'm going to be talking through Waylon doing these for the rest of the episode. But unfortunately, Waylon, the NFL is only barely opening the private equity door on this one. There are all kinds of restrictions. So for starters, only a handful of investment firms have been approved.

8:56They're limited to that 10 % stake, and they are barred from involvement in any team operations or whatever. So we don't see them forcing a right sizing of the O-line or whatever euphemism would be for laying off players. I mean, that's the hope, yes. I should say that the NFL is the last major American sport to allow this to happen, which was news to me. I didn't really know. So it's happened with basketball and baseball. Yeah, like everything. And all of those sports have made the plunge. They all allow partial private equity ownership. And in fact, according to Sportico, women's soccer allows full private equity ownership.

9:31Like PE can fully own a team. But the NFL has always been sort of like quaint about this. They seem to like the idea of, you know, real people owning teams or whatever. Yeah, real people. You know, like your everyday person who can just afford an NFL team. Exactly. And it is funny because this is part of the reason the NFL took this leap. Teams have become so valuable that it is incredibly hard to sell a team to like a regular old rich person now. Like the Washington Commanders just sold for about$6 billion. and the main guy who bought it said that unless you're one of the wealthiest 50 people, writing a$5 billion check is pretty hard for anyone.

10:11Opening up the pool of people who can help make a team buying bid would theoretically help. You know, I should say the guy who bought the commanders, Josh Harris, do you want to guess where his fortune came from? Does it rhyme with live at secretary? I actually need to think through that, but I believe that is correct. Wow, let me get out my rhyming dictionary. He's from private equity. Darian, do you mind doing the credits in an American accent? Okay, okay, okay, okay. This episode was produced by Cooper Kass McKim with engineering by Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez. It was fact-checked by Sarah Juarez.

10:47Cake and Cannon edits the show, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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