A historic tech rout ripping through most of Asia, as the third-worst day for U.S. stocks since 2020. Japan has entered a bear market, Taiwan getting hammered as well, but China and Hong Kong seem to be putting up a fight. So is it the sell-off contagion, or a buying opportunity? This is Insight with Haslinda, where we dive deeper into the stories that matter with crucial insight. We have a heavyweight line-up. The investor once dubbed the Michael Jordan of tech analysts tells us whether the AI rout has further to run. A veteran analyst joins us on oil and the lingering risks on Iran. We discuss where investors can find safety. Peter Kim of KB Financial on whether Korea can bounce back from this massive crash, and one of India's biggest financial names explains whether India can provide an escape from the AI unwind. All of that and more on Insight.
Asian markets have been rocked by a brutal tech sell-off, but the first signs of a fightback are now emerging. The Kospi's early plunge triggering a second circuit breaker, while the Nikkei enters a technical bear market. Nasdaq 100 futures seem to be rebounding, and China and Hong Kong are recovering. Yet sentiment remains fragile with volatility spiking. Let's bring in Anthony Stephens for more. What are we seeing right now?
It has been a wild Friday. We started at the lows. The market was actually shut — Korea was shut for 20 minutes right on the open, and now the government stepping in and talking about reducing the margin requirements for the next three months. You are starting to see the market pull back. A remarkable show of force from the Korean retail that did get dinged and ridden the drop all the way down. Flip the board and you can see on a single-name level, there's a lot of damage out there in core positioning. We are well off the lows but still in popular Taiwan positions. SoftBank, which is very exposed to the U.S. AI infrastructure boom, you have a huge move here at 9%. That is not bad compared to how it opened. All of the China exporters to the U.S. around the optical space and the fintech circuit board space getting hammered as well. The only place that is benefiting is the Hong Kong consumer internet space. You can see consistent strength as we head into the Singles' Day online shopping holiday. You might want to have a strong showing there, and that is helping sentiment across the board, even in Australia. You continue to see the consumer stabilize around here as the safe haven. This rotation is what is driving markets. The most important thing is going to be the volatility unwind, and that shows no sign of stopping.
Stick around. Our next guest has a track record as one of Wall Street's most accurate, highly decorated tech stock analysts and hedge fund managers. Let's bring in Dan Niles. A shellacking basically for tech stocks. Is this an inflection point, a healthy correction, or maybe we don't know yet?
I think you don't know yet. I think with where we are on the trade for AI, the start at the end of 2022, it is obviously years. There were some signs there were going to be a problem because let's not forget, Texas all the way back in August stopped permitting connections to their grid, and Texas was arguably the most aggressive at adding data centers. This has been brewing for a while. This is a good thing that it happened because quite honestly, you had too much rampant speculation in the markets. This is going to shake out some marginal players. I am sure you talked about there are some big hedge funds in the U.S. that look like they are going to be folding, which is a good thing. It will create a healthier market going forward because at the end of the day, agentic AI, whether it is OpenClaw in January or Meta which came out in September, we are at the very early stages of that. I think this will turn out to be much like what you saw in 1997 or 1998, where you have an Asian currency crisis and the Russian bond default. The semiconductor index went down both times in the middle of 1997 and 1998, and it finished both of those years up, and then ripped in 1999 higher. That is how I am thinking about things right now.
That is great perspective. I am just wondering, has anything fundamentally changed in the last 48 hours?
Absolutely. This is why I was warning going into the midterms that this could be — and there was a podcast I did on Tuesday and I said I was terrified of the midterms. This is exactly why, because Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania all flipped Democrat. That is where you have 50% of the incremental data center capacity coming online, and when you have the newly elected Texas governor saying, 'Hey, I want a moratorium on data centers,' you've got a problem. So yes, things have fundamentally changed from 48 hours ago, and that is why you need to reprice all of these securities. The good thing is for Asia, this is actually a very good thing because these big hyperscalers in the U.S. are going to — you probably saw putting $15 billion into Malaysia. They will put these plants in Asia and say, you know what, these return queries might take an extra second longer than before, but when people are waiting 15 seconds for a query result or doing an overnight query, who cares about an extra second? Unfortunately, what the U.S. states are going to lose, Asia will probably pick up unless we get a lot smarter over here. Hello?
Dan, let me pick up on that. You picked up on how Asia will benefit. We are seeing the sell-off in Asia as well. Take a look at Korea, the likes of Samsung, SK Hynix — they are massively down. Surely that has to do with the concentration risk as well, no?
Absolutely, but you have to remember the U.S. — the biggest stocks in the world get crushed in the United States, of course Asia will get crushed behind it. Yesterday, you had a move that made zero sense, which you had with the midterms. Names like Caterpillar on the construction side, GE Vernova, Bloom Energy — all these different companies in the AI infrastructure trade going down, and investors thought Microsoft, Amazon, Google, they will be worth more. That does not make any sense. Today, you saw people adjust to the fact that this is a fundamental change from what was happening 48 hours ago, and they started repricing everything. Yeah, Asia should have gotten hit. This is not a one-day thing. This is going to take a period of six months, a year for all of this to play out because we will have to see how things evolve in the U.S. with the states like Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania. Do they put these data centers completely on hold with the moratorium, or does it take longer? Depending on how that plays out, that is when the benefits are going to show up because the hyperscalers are going to say, all right, we are going to put these plants in Asia, but it will take some adjustment for that to happen because this sweep in particularly red states with big data center concentrations, that was a surprise. 50% of all incremental data centers are going into Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania — they all flipped.
If I can pick up from your thought. Is this the end of stock market equity exceptionalism, and how long will it take for the capex-dependent places like Korea and Taiwan to recover if American hyperscalers build elsewhere?
I don't think it is the end because at the end of the day, these companies are U.S. companies. They are going to decide we will put more plants overseas. So benefits will obviously accrue to the supply chain or data centers that they put in other countries. But the biggest players — Microsoft, Google, Amazon — they will obviously be the ultimate beneficiaries of this going forward. The neo-clouds will be in a tougher spot because the other thing you have to watch — I talked about this at the same time we had the data center issue — is you've got a big amount of pressure on token prices because you do have amazing open-source models coming from Asia. Also now in the United States with NVIDIA or the open-weight models coming from Meta, you've got some really good alternatives. We were putting a tremendous amount of pressure on token ASPs. Token units are still going up a lot, but you can see this with the slowdown in revenues, for example, with Anthropic where Q2 revenues were up 145% or so sequentially, but Q3 revenues were up only about 43% sequentially, and Q4 revenues look like they may be up somewhere around 20%, give or take. You are seeing revenue growth, which ultimately has to fund this, starting to slow down dramatically at the two big native AI players, which are Anthropic and OpenAI. That brings up the second issue, which is you have to put a lower multiple on a lower growth rate, and funding costs have gone up a lot where debt is much more expensive if you are a marginal player. Even if you were doing an equity offering, the discount you will have to give it will have to be much greater if you can get the deal done at all, much like with others that have pushed out IPOs. It is getting a lot more challenging. We're going to have to pick stocks, which is great if you are a professional investor because before, you could buy anything that said AI 30 times and it would go up. That is not a healthy market. The S&P 500 is down 6%. Who cares, right? That is not that big of a correction. It is a problem if you didn't manage your risk well and ran 3x levered semiconductor stocks and then got crushed. As I said earlier, this happened during the internet build-up as well, so risk management is something that investors have ignored for the last several years. It's good this is happening because it will make a healthier market long-term versus these violent swings you saw over the last six months or so.
How important to you is OpenAI, Anthropic, these IPOs on the LLM side as a clearing event, given the hedge fund risk has come off so significantly? Are people still positioned to load up on this stuff, and how is it looking with increasing competition with China? We saw Tencent launch a model that is comparable. Pricing has been falling in tandem. With this environment where data centers are slow, are people going to put risk into these LLMs going forward, and how do you view that rotation within the AI trade?
Let me approach it differently. I look at it in terms of who are the ultimate winners going to be. I think the ultimate winners will be — you both will say at some point in the next year, 'Hey Siri,' or whatever Samsung phone you have, 'go do this, this and this.' You are not going to tell it to use ChatGPT, Anthropic or Gemini. Your smartphone will go ahead and do that. If you are 25% of the world that uses Apple, Apple will ultimately be the winner because you want to get whatever you want to get done, done. You don't care what agent does that for you. The other 75% of the world is sitting on an Android operating system on those smartphones, so I think Google will win. On consumer, I see those two winning, and enterprise will be Microsoft because with all these concerns about AI killing 10% of us and it's going to cause mass unemployment and the security risk, people are very comfortable saying 250 million Microsoft licenses for Microsoft 365, I would just run Copilot inside that, and I think Microsoft will win enterprise. As for the LLM players, I think you will see those get commoditized over time underneath this because Android and iOS, you are not going to care what models they end up using. I like to make this analogy of you don't need to go to the corner store in a Ferrari. You can go in a Ford. We don't need Anthropic or OpenAI to summarize your emails. You can use a cheap open-source model to do most things. It is the top 5% or 10% of things you need those models for.
I just want to jump in. The question people are asking now is where to put your money. If you were to hazard a bet for the next 24 months, what is the one asset which will outperform the rest?
That's a great question. How about the Nasdaq 100? I think the only way to play AI is by diversifying your technology portfolio, and after that, QQQs do that and you just put it away.
I find it amusing that he says that is a diversified portfolio. If you look at the weighting inside the Nasdaq 100, it is massively top-heavy, which is the same problem you have with the S&P 500. It has changed over the last week with the falls we have seen, but at one point, the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 are all AI-related names, and they were almost 40% of the S&P 500. Then you have all the names underneath it like Caterpillar — you know, you pick your favorite, the energy companies that are all around the AI trade. That does not get you diversification. You will have to pick stocks versus buying the Nasdaq 100, because the players within that, you will have some really big winners, I think. Google, Apple, Microsoft —
So what is your top pick?
Well, I told you the three I like. I like Google, I like Apple on the consumer side, and I like Microsoft. Those are my long-term picks.
Thank you so much for your assessment today, and to our very own Anthony Stephens. Still to come, oil headed for its biggest weekly loss since April on hopes the Iran war is winding down, but our next guest thinks fresh U.S.-Israeli strikes are coming. Keep it here with us. This is Bloomberg.
Welcome back. Oil is on track for the biggest weekly loss since April, even as prices rebounded slightly from the sharp sell-off that followed the U.S. midterm elections. Trading has been volatile as investors weigh the prospects for an end to the months-long war with Iran. Our next guest has been pioneering oil market analysis since the 1990s. It has been quite surprising that oil really eased by that much, on speculation — and it is purely speculation — that we will see an end to the war.
The first thing you have to do is see what would be the price of oil if there was no threat of war at all. The fundamentals of supply and demand, the flows through the Strait of Hormuz, the lower inventory levels tell us the price is between $80 and $90. That is the right price. Anything above that is a war risk premium. Some of that has disappeared now because people think that because of the new situation, possibilities of a deal, that the premium is gone, so we are back to non-risk premium prices.
Is the market assessing it the wrong way, and where should prices be from your perspective?
Supply-demand analysis indicates $80 to $90 is the right level given the low inventory levels. I think next year this time, the price would be $65, $70 — substantial overproduction and oversupply in the market. We are looking downward, and we have to remember that just before the war started, we could get to $60 a barrel oil, so everything has been pushed up because of the war situation.
You are tracking the developments in Iran closely. What is your reading? Are we close to a resolution? Is President Trump likely to ease off?
Absolutely not. Not only are we not close to a resolution, we are worse off than we were before during the MOU. They see that Trump has become weakened, so they've increased demands and made requests that the U.S. can never grant.
Are you expecting a resumption of attacks on Iran?
Two things are happening. One is that the blockade is very effective. Iran is exporting almost no oil. By the end of November, they will be starving because there will be no money coming in. No money for proxies, no money to pay soldiers, no money to do anything, so that continues by itself, and that is unlikely to stop. And Trump has a short window between now and January 3 when the new congressional people come to office. Netanyahu also has a two- to three-month window when he is still prime minister until they can find a resolution to the leadership. If they want to do something, it is now or never, and I think they will in the next week or two.
In terms of flows through Hormuz, what are you seeing? We know crude is still flowing, but the refined products have seen some challenges.
If crude is going about 80%, including the pipelines, about 80%, 85% of their pre-war level, the products are now 30% to 40%. So they are doing better, and there are a lot of funny deals going forward between groups which allow their ships to go forward. Some countries did not have anybody attacking their ships because they have made arrangements. I think the product side is not as good. The LNG side is the worst. Less and less of it is going out. The spot price of LNG today is equivalent to $200 a barrel.
Let me pick up on that because we are headed towards the winter months. How bad might it be?
It depends how cold it will be. Based on last year's performance, it will not be so cold, so it will not be disastrous, but if it becomes cold, energy prices will hit $300, $400 a barrel equivalent. That is a much, much bigger deal than what happens in the oil market.
Thank you for your time today. Still to come, Frontera's CEO joins us from Shanghai. The company behind a quarter of New Zealand's exports has plenty riding on this weekend's election. We will ask how it plans to address concerns over emissions costs. Keep it with us. This is Bloomberg.
Unexpected for us. People are really starting to question if we will get that productivity data, profitability dividend, and what happened in the midterms provided a catalyst for a big downward draft.
If the Democrats were to follow up with clear guidelines and a roadmap as to how they will constrain the rollout of AI and data centers, then clearly we are in for a period of extraordinary volatility and a derating of AI equities.
AI is not going away. The investment cycle is certainly not going to wait, even though we have had these wobbles. The wobble is a function of maybe a little bit of a reality check.
Some of our guests on the outlook for the AI trade amid a global sell-off in technology shares. Let's go to New Zealand, where a conference is underway at a pivotal moment for investors, with a market sell-off that has hit hedge funds hard. Haidi Stroud-Watts joins us live for more. What is the mood in the conference as the market sell-off has hit hedge funds really, really hard?
It is pretty constructive, actually, but you can imagine, what a time for around 500 attendees to come together to talk about their investment theses, to make their stock picks. There has been a handful of AI-related picks. NVIDIA has been one of the latest stock picks we have seen, including chipmakers, but there has also been what has been characterized as AI-agnostic picks as well, like Disney, or ones where they are relying on the human aspect, for example, to be able to bring returns. It is about saving time because clearly, the market turmoil going on in the background cannot be ignored, but at the same time, there's a lot of soul-searching from investors over the fundamental unraveling of the superstar trades we have seen over the past few weeks, months, and over the past year. If you look at the stock picks from last year's conference, about half of those have not done very well. That is really some cause for reflection, but we will talk more about that throughout the course of the rest of our coverage here, but also, as we are about to discuss, there's a lot of political implications, global and local, that we are dealing with, too.
That's right. That election New Zealand has to deal with. What is expected from that?
It has been interesting because we were here covering the last election in 2023, and I remember at the time sort of laughing because it was characterized as this election race between two men named Chris. It is still those two same-named men in this election. This is truly an economy-focused election. Specifically, it is a cost-of-living-focused election. This sounds very familiar. We have just seen that play out in the U.S. midterms. We see some of these pressures play out in Australia. What makes it different when it comes to New Zealand is the cultural politics does not seem to be as divisive or as polarized as we have seen in some of these other political systems. Neither of the major parties are polling particularly well. They are both sitting under that 30% level, which might be due to the specific nature of how the political system and electoral system works. It will be down to the minor parties to be able to effectively form a government. We are watching that closely, but there has been very little — people are really concerned about the cost of living, about the energy prices, young people concerned about the cost of education, so very much domestically focused issues, even if some of them are internationally driven, for example, when it comes to energy costs. But there is not a great deal of peripheral events or topics at play here for this election.
At least we know that the winner is called Chris. Thank you so much for that. Speaking of the New Zealand economy, Fonterra is one of the largest companies in the world that accounts for about 25% of New Zealand's total merchandise exports. Let's cross to Shanghai where Minmin Low is standing by with the company's CEO.
It is great to be joined by the CEO, Richard Allen, of Fonterra. We just talked about the New Zealand election and how it has been a major focus among investors. How concerned are you about a potential change in government, and what sort of policy implications it could mean for farmers?
Any election is a big topic. It is a big decision for New Zealand. We know we have a proud history of working across all governments. We have been around for 155 years. We continue to work with whatever government is in power to showcase the role of New Zealand, to generate revenue for farmers, bring that back, and contribute to New Zealand. It will be a big day, but whoever they are, we are comfortable we will be able to work with them to continue to drive growth.
Fonterra has been doing pretty well. Can you give us a breakdown of how your Greater China sales have been doing year on year?
Greater China has long been a strategic market for us, represents about one-third of our business, and we continue to see the evolution of our business. Over the last 10 years, we have grown our value-added portion of our business — products into bakeries, restaurants — and we have seen dairy growth in that channel. But in our ingredients business, growth of things like proteins to support healthy aging. For us, it is about evolving the products we sell in this market, but it is a really important market and will continue to be so.
How big is the sales growth you expect in the next few quarters, and particularly when it comes to the new products, the bakeries, supply, and all that? Are you facing a lot of competition given how the macro outlook has been very depressed so far?
In Greater China, there is always a lot of competition. That is great. Keeps us on our toes, keeps us innovating. We see growth across China, but for us, it is a lot less about volume growth and more about value growth, and working with the right customers through China where we can support them in creating products that delight consumers, be it restaurants or a large multinational brand, we support them across the spectrum. But value is our key strategy.
Given the deflationary pressures and price competition, are clients pressuring you to lower your costs?
There is always pressure, right? There's always pressure to ensure the products we deliver to customers mean that they can produce products that are profitable for them, that delight their consumers. The customer will not be a customer for long if they are not making money, right? Our job is how do we take dairy and help them create products? That is where we rely on innovation, doing smart things with dairy to add it to customers' products to delight customers.
Pricing power-wise, you are still commanding a premium in this market?
Prices move daily. It is a very dynamic market. We are very much focused on the quality and functionality of our products. We are certainly not the cheapest in the market, but we are competitive with respect to what you get when you use our products. Things like grass-fed, the fact that our cows spend 350 days a year on the grass outside. Those things matter to consumers, and that is where we are adding value.
We are seeing more Chinese customers going into the processing business, manufacturing cheese products. How do you fend off domestic competition?
It is a natural evolution of an industry. The industry here has grown tremendously. They are really innovative, they work hard, they adopt fast, and the quality of the product being produced is always improving. For us, though, we focus on our strengths. We focus on those that really value dairy the way we make it. Producing natural, nutritious, functional dairy products, that is what we focus on, but there has been awesome evolution in the Chinese dairy industry.
You have six application centers that are commercial kitchens and test labs for you in China. What new innovations are you seeing, and are you able to use China as a testbed and scale ideas that originate in China to the rest of the world?
Our commercial kitchens have a bakery kitchen, a pizza kitchen, a hot kitchen. They primarily support our food service business. China has been the largest component of our food service business for some time, right? We locate them strategically in different regions to allow us to take our dairy products and localize them for the local flavors, the local foods that are needed in the region. China is very diverse. We just opened a new application center, so it's like, how do you take the best of what we know within dairy and bakery products, and then localize it for more traditional dishes in their region? But China continues to play a role in innovation regionally across Southeast Asia and even wider. Things like the birth of the sea with the cream and cheese topping, that was born in China, and you can find that now right around the world. We pick up things in other parts of the world and are able to bring them to China.
What is your future strategy in China? Are you planning to expand more with new application centers?
We will continue to support growth and continue to work with customers where we can find mutual ways to win and ensure that when we use our dairy products, it allows our customers to get ahead and to delight their consumers. We will continue to look at ways in which we support them. Alongside our application centers, we work with a number of distributors across China to support them in setting up their application centers so they can go out there and work with their customers. We will continue to work behind this market. We need to evolve how we do that. China is changing fast. For us, it is always looking for the right way to ensure our customers stay here.
Thank you very much. Definitely a fast-moving market that is keeping you on your toes.
Did someone say mala? I am all in. Up next, we are live from the conference in New Zealand unpacking the AI sell-off and if it is a blip or a bubble bursting. Keep it here with us. This is Bloomberg.
Welcome back. You are watching Insight. One stock we are watching is Adani Ports. The company announced it will acquire a key liquid storage provider in Europe in a deal that gives the company a foothold in a major energy hub. Let's go to the conference in Queenstown, New Zealand, where our own Haidi Stroud-Watts is standing by.
Thank you. We are sort of coming to the second half of the coverage. We have heard some really interesting stock picks, and against the backdrop of all this has been the market meltdown in AI and tech. Let's talk about the bigger picture now. It is a little bit windy, it is a little bit loud with planes taking off and landing just behind us, but a lot to talk about. Let's start with how incredibly exhausted you must be in terms of having the remit of covering geostrategy and geopolitics.
It is a pretty full-time job. When you have to look at how everything happening everywhere fits into the picture and supports the big picture view or forces you to change it, it is a very tiring job.
Is there a jumping-off point? You have said in the past everything is to do with U.S.-China. Is that how you view each individual construct?
In the simplest terms, absolutely. You have to start with fundamentals and the foundation from which everything builds. There are regions that can be so deep down in the substrata that you are not looking directly, but still interrupt at times. At others, it is very directly about that. Others are the special sauce that goes on top, but that is the combination you need.
What is the special sauce?
Vast amounts of reading across an awful lot of different topics. Not just financial market metrics. You have to look at not just geopolitical moves and obscure geopolitical news that can have a domino effect, and not just obscure political news to try to see what the trends may be going forward, but what is happening in society, what is happening in culture. All kinds of things could be indicators of trends.
None more fascinating perhaps at the moment than the shift we see in the U.S. with the markets clearly still percolating through the impact of the midterm results. Is it meaningful in terms of the next two years but also beyond?
Potentially, it is extremely meaningful. We have already had a very violent market reaction in two different ways. First, oil markets collapsed because everyone thought it would mean peace in the Middle East. I don't think it does — spoiler — that is what markets thought. Then you have the sell-off in equities when everyone thought maybe Democrats do not have the same policy towards AI as Biden did, and you saw the sell-off in the tech sector. But we don't know what Trump and the Democrats are going to do over the next two years. Will they cooperate? Will they have some kind of consensus? Will the Democrats put forth spending deals and Trump say, 'I'm not a traditional Republican and I will sign them'? You have to look at these things, and that is just domestically. Geopolitically, what does it mean around the world to have a Trump who can still act on foreign policy, but everyone knows he is much weaker and may not have the platform to continue from 2028 forwards?
It sounds like the risks are heightening, especially if you talk about a White House where it sounds like key parts of the administration — if he will be losing key parts of his administration. If the president feels like he is weakened, cornered, unsupported, does that give rise to more risk?
Absolutely. Running any country is difficult, but running the U.S. is phenomenally difficult, and it is because of the very geopolitical nature of it, which I don't think I have to spell out to you. We all recognize it on one level or another. It's like playing 3D chess or 4D chess, as the popular meme goes. It is exponentially more difficult now, and everyone who is playing the game of chess against him in different ways realizes that his attention is taken up with that and maybe his hand is not as free as it was before. Does that mean deals could be struck in some areas? That is one outcome. Does it mean they cannot and physical things will be struck, meaning violence?
Let's go back to when you said you do not think this is an end to the war in the Middle East. Do you feel that way about war as well?
Sticky toffee pudding. Trump introduced the tariffs. Biden did not get rid of them. Trump expanded them. One change I could see, and this is purely hypothetical, you could see some attempt from Trump to say, let's take tariffs down on Canada, for example, or versus Western allies, but the quid pro quo very clearly would be we all have to have a common external tariff against China, which was a logical endpoint that was clear to me as a logical outcome for quite some time. Maybe it will fall apart if anything happens. In terms of the war, the dynamic there has not changed either. Our base case has been for months that after the midterm elections we will get an escalation because Trump needs this to have a win, and the least-worst case is to continue with the blockade, which is still very bad for the global energy system. But it seems extremely unlikely that you talk about those deep layers that continue to be sticky that are going to turn around and say, yeah, okay, we can take that in the Middle East. We can have a constellation of powers not friendly to the U.S. controlling the Middle East. That seems extremely unlikely. In one shape or form we will get an escalation, possibly as soon as this weekend.
Who is winning the great strategic rivalry?
It is like an incredibly intense poker game, to use an analogy. Both sides have really strong cards and some weak cards, and the pot on the table just continues to get bigger, but we are not at the end of the game yet. It tends to finish fairly quickly and you start again with a new hand in poker, but this is the same hand going on and on. The strategies both sides are employing are very effective in different areas. If you were drawing a visual analogy, Trump would be at the table with the cards in his hands and potentially Democrats are pulling the chair away from the table.
We know Xi Jinping has a very steady seat. When it comes to AI, is either side winning? This is really the arms race, isn't it?
You can slice and dice the AI topic lots of different ways. That's not my remit. Both sides have said this is national security. They seem to think of it as a Manhattan Project in terms of dealing with problems. Whoever wins, whoever gets there first, as with the Manhattan Project, naturally has a geopolitical or geo-economic advantage. Regardless of the volatility, we say if that hypothesis is correct, we will continue to see investment, but maybe not everyone who has got into it recently will be a winner.
Policymakers — do you have enough to contend with domestic inflation, or should there be places like Australia? But you basically have to be a military expert as well, and even military experts cannot predict what will happen next.
Predicting things like wars is notoriously hard, but thank you for raising the point because it's one I made at the conference today. Traditionally, central banks would say, okay, here is our CPI remit, and you could have shocks occasionally, and be very technocratic about it. But we very transparently now live in a world in which things are knocked off course by external factors that we can see, like war, and it will not stop knocking our economies off course until those wars are finished. Central banks have to recognize these targets cannot be hit until the environment changes, and that's why controversially in the conference, the bank was set up to help finance the war against France. Central banks back then were seen as a state tool that can bring inflation down, such as it —
was measured in those days, by making sure you had the physical military power to beat opponents, to physically control supply chains, to get stuff cheap, and I think everything old is new again.
Haidi: Great to have you with us.
Haslinda: Great to get Michael every back on TV. Haidi Stroud-Watts, we thank you for your coverage. Much more still to come.
Next, we discussed if a tech selloff revives the yen as a safe haven. We talk about the exposure of Samsung and SK Hynix. Insights on how markets are digesting the tech rout with the chairman of Edelweiss, plus the outlook for Russian property.
Plenty more ahead in the next hour of "Insight." Keep it here with us. This is Bloomberg.
Things have fundamentally changed from 48 hours ago. That is why you need to reprice all of these securities. Unfortunately, what the U.S. states are going to lose, Asia is probably going to pick up unless we get a lot smarter over here about data centers, but I think Asia will really benefit.
