Bloomberg Opinion

Trump’s popularity is sinking as he approaches the 100-day mark of his second term.

Mediobanca has spotted an escape route from an unwanted takeover bid, but it will leave Monte Paschi and the Italian government with a headache. The political and business battles lines are being ever more clearly drawn. via Bloomberg Opinion  https://lnkd.in/ejTD4zHQ

100 days in, Trump has done, and keeps doing, even more damage than we feared. Here are some examples just from his foreign policy. Read the whole column: https://bloom.bg/42OeMzw And/Or watch this short teaser video Bloomberg Opinion

Last year, I visited Minnesota-based Room & Board, which had recently transitioned to something called an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan); the furniture maker is now 100% owned by its employees. Not many companies have tried to make an ESOP work. But the structure deserves more attention and consideration than it’s getting. An ESOP can give employees a true stake in a company’s success, which yields more than warm, fuzzy feelings — it can lead to increased productivity and dramatically lower turnover. And if their efforts help the business thrive, it can put significant returns into employees’ pockets. (Just ask the so-called Publix Millionaires famously minted by the grocery chain’s ESOP.) Turning employees into shareholders also has the potential to chip away at the growing US wealth gap. Over the last 50 odd years, the top 0.01% has grown its wealth nearly six times as fast as the bottom 50%. One of biggest drivers of this disparity is the fact that some 40% of Americans own no stock. Most companies perpetuate the problem by granting stock only to those at the very top of the org chart; at an ESOP, all employees get shares in the company. Here's my deep dive into Room & Board and ESOPs for Bloomberg Opinion. https://lnkd.in/ePfXpkYz

If you were on a cruise ship and learned it was sinking, your emotional response would probably be anxiety. The best way to relieve that anxiety would be to acknowledge the danger and proceed to the nearest lifeboat. The worst response would be to plug your ears, go “Lalala I can’t hear you” over the captain’s warnings and head to the lido deck for a dip in the pool. This may seem obvious. But the Trump administration’s approach to relieving children's anxiety about the increasingly chaotic climate appears to be of the “Lalala I can’t hear you” variety. It will only make our climate problem, and the anxiety it engenders, much worse. Gift link to my column for Bloomberg Opinion https://lnkd.in/eNWiWJXt

Trump keeps pushing legal limits, and his enablers keep letting him. Harvard law professor Noah Feldman explains what it'll take to finally get him to stop. Read his full piece: https://lnkd.in/ebnpDuy3

Did the "cover curse" come for Trump? John Authers thinks yes in his most recent newsletter. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eZHZX_sh Normally journalists impose the cover curse. This time, it's different. Because it didn't come from the media — or even a real magazine.

Trump's Liberation Day set off a slide in optimism among Wall Street analysts assessing Big Tech's fortunes in the year to come. ➡️ Here's my Bloomberg Opinion analysis of the lay of the land as we enter this year's first tech earnings season, beginning with Alphabet on Thursday afternoon: https://lnkd.in/eBCAnsnr

Active fund management is a big "sell", right? The flipside of this gloomy common wisdom is that buyers of active fund management businesses have plenty to choose from and can get good terms. Take this week's deal for Macquarie Group's US public-market fund manager. The buyer, Japanese bank Nomura, gets a business with decent profit margins and lifts assets under management to $770 billion. The transaction highlights some plus points about an industry seen as low-growth and structurally challenged. Dealmaking in the investment world has tended to target private capital firms for their growth potential (think of BlackRock's deals for Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) and HPS Investment Partners, LLC last year), or rival public asset managers offering cost-cutting opportunities. But this is neither a dash into private markets nor a deal predicated on slashing overlapping expenses (Nomura's existing US funds unit is small.) Why might it work? First, the business being acquired is very profitable. Active fund management gets a bad wrap, but people tend to forget that it generates a lot of cash. Second, Nomura hasn't paid a high price relative to the managed assets obtained - this is a buyer's market after all. Third, there may be some opportunities to nudge growth higher through cross-selling. Finally, the business could be a useful distribution platform for any private markets firm Nomura might acquire in the future, making the deal more strategic than it first appears. The snag is that an encore in private assets won't come so cheaply. Read my latest column at Bloomberg Opinion here: https://lnkd.in/eAvh74vs

Don’t be surprised by another DeepSeek-style breakthrough, says Catherine Thorbecke. While the world worries about tariffs, China’s AI keeps growing. Read more: https://lnkd.in/dBdzypPg