Should the Fed Stay Independent? & Disney Parks Get Even Bigger
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, former President Trump wants to have more say over the Fed's interest rate decisions. Then, happy summerween, everyone. It's not October, but retailers are already gearing up for spooky season. It's Monday, August 12th. Let's ride. Let's ride.

So a few months ago, I ran into this guy who owns horses. He asked me where I worked. I told him about the podcast. Then he hit me with a fantastic question to receive. Hey, we have a new filly who's about to start racing, but she doesn't have a name. Any ideas? And being the good company man that I am, I said, name her Morning Brew. And sure enough, he followed through and get this R-rated.

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Actually won by five lengths. So a very good maiden debut. So shout out Avril Racing. Shout out our Morning Brew. Oh, it was our first race? It was our first race. First race ever. We're undefeated. We're going to the Kentucky Derby, baby. Now a word from Morning Brew Daily's sponsor, Beehive. So Beehive could be the greatest newsletter platform in the world, which it is, with all the bells and whistles. But if it's not easy to use, then what's the point?

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There are certain things that just shouldn't mix. Oil and water, long runs in Chipotle, Steph Curry in the French, and politics and monetary policy are definitely on the list. But some recent comments from former President Trump are calling into question the Federal Reserve's independence.

Last week, Trump said that he thinks the president should have more say over how the Fed sets interest rates. Now, the general consensus on this idea is that central bank independence is very important because politicians are always going to prefer low economy-juicing interest rates, even though that can lead to inflation. But for Trump, his argument is rooted more in the

personalities involved. He thinks that he, rather than Jerome Powell, would make better choices around monetary policy because of his business background. I made a lot of money, Trump said. I was very successful and I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman. It's not just Trump either. There's some momentum building in the GOP. J.D. Vance endorsed this idea yesterday, which is making some people a little bit nervous. It absolutely is. Let's hear what J.D. Vance had to say. He said...

President Trump is saying, I think, something that's really important and profound, which is that political leadership of this country should have more say over monetary policy of this country. We should have America's elected leaders having input about the most important decisions confronting our country. So that's what Trump and

Vance are saying. The other side, which is many investors, many economists, many former Trump administration officials, is saying this is a terrible idea. This is what places like Venezuela do. This is not what the United States does. This is not what our Western allies do that have strong institutions and are looking out for their economy long term. This has been very hard fought because back in the 70s, President Nixon did try to put his thumb on the scale of Fed of the Fed's

interest rate decisions. And it led to a spike in inflation because, as you said, presidents always want to have low interest rates because that means a hotter economy. But a hotter economy also means inflation. So if you do not want inflation, which we do not want, sometimes you got to have higher interest rates. And look, President Biden probably and any other president in his position would have been on the phone with Jerome Powell over the past year and a half being like, please lower interest rates.

These high borrowing costs are squeezing consumers. It's really bad for the economy. We're slowing down here. But the fact that the Fed is separate from politics allows the Fed to look out for the economy long term. Many investors and bankers say this is what

it should be. Yeah. I mean, if we want to dig into more to the arguments for presidential influence, you could say potentially that economic coordination is a good one because you can lead to better fiscal and monetary policy coordinating together, leading to a

Better just effective economic management of the economy, especially during crises. Same thing for maybe policy consistency. If you can create this more coherent, more predictable economic strategies by having them work closely together, technically that's a good thing. But obviously there's a ton of arguments against it. Historical precedent is probably just the easiest one because you're right. Nixon is the example that you point to to show how –

this can go awry very quickly because it's just the incentives are all aligned to keep interest rates low, even though if that's not in the best interest or that's not what the data is saying you should do. Right. And Trump has had his issues with Jerome Powell in the past because when Trump was president, he appointed Jerome Powell and then-

You know, it seemed like every single day he was tweeting something criticizing the Fed for not bringing down interest rate. He called Powell and his colleagues at the Fed boneheads and wondered who was the bigger enemy of America, Jerome Powell or Chinese President Xi Jinping. And so Trump acknowledges like I used to have it out with him. He's questioned whether he'll if he is elected, whether he'll keep power.

Powell even on Powell's term expires in 2026. There's not a lot of precedent in firing a Fed chair before their term ends. It's unclear whether he'll do so or whether he'll want to do so should he retake the president. But this is just alarming. A lot of bank chiefs like Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said, think if you look around the world's economies, you see where the Fed central banks are independent and operate freely. They tend to fare better than the ones that don't. And you can point to places like Venezuela or

where the leader of the country has more say in economic policy, and he's more interested in looking out for himself and his political fortunes rather than the long term of the economy. So that's why they have a separation of Fed and state, and the general consensus is that is where it should stay. And Powell is obviously very against this idea as well. He came out and said that the Fed would never be influenced by politics again.

His big thing is like we look at the data, we go where the data is telling us, and we balance the risk based off that and not on anything else. Yeah. And we should just say Trump's opponent Kamala Harris also said she couldn't disagree more strongly with Trump and that the Fed's independence is sacrosanct. Big word.

Toby, the Olympics are over. What the heck are we going to talk about? Well, here's one idea. How much of a smashing success it was, especially for the folks at NBC who paid billions to broadcast the Olympics. Might seem like a distant memory, but remember the Tokyo Summer Games in 2021 were a complete dud. And NBC was wondering if its premier sports property was going the way of the Academy Awards with declining cultural relevance and plummeting viewership.

Were the Olympics over? Now that Paris has wrapped up, the answer is clear. The Olympics has got its groove back. Viewership was up 76% over Tokyo. If the Summer Olympics were an original streaming series, it would rank second in total viewing time this year. The gold medal men's basketball game between the U.S. and France was the most watched final since Atlanta in 1996.

People were totally glued to their screens for the past two weeks. Some of the rebound you could chalk up to a more accessible time zone in Paris and the lack of COVID, well, minus Noah Lyles. But NBC also made savvy coverage decisions, leveraging its streaming service Peacock and celebrities like Snoop Dogg and its Gold Zone program to juice interest. Toby, best Olympics ever? It really does feel like it. I mean, I'm always going to have the nostalgia of 2008, but this truly was. It felt like so much more energy around it.

And it speaks to really streaming coming out on the global stage. This was finally a time where the format really seemed to shine. All the ability to act as your own producer and choose what you wanted to watch. The fact that they didn't gatekeep everything. Remember, in years past, Olympics have tried to squish everything into prime time because that's when they thought most viewers would want it. It would be more lucrative for them. But this time, instead of doing an either-or strategy, they said that they did a both-and and they just tried to give fans...

every piece of content that they could possibly want. And I think you saw that in the fact that you never flipped on Peacock and couldn't watch what you wanted to watch. Gold Zone was obviously a massive, massive success this year with Scott Hansen coming in and orchestrating being the architect of kind of all the most important events of the day. So just truly, I think it was finally where we saw...

where streaming has been pushing us and what it could lead to in terms of an entertainment product, and I couldn't have been more excited about it. Right. People were just not overwhelmed with the suite of options. They like having that control. You'd go onto Peacock, and you'd find the event you'd want to watch, and it was readily available. If you didn't want to choose, you could flip on GoldZone. And the biggest problem

Thank you.

relaxed rules around athletes posting on social media. And so they did, and everyone was glued to the athletes' stories and seeing them post after they won the gold medal. You just really got these amazing, genuine reactions. And that also juiced viewership because NBC said that 36% of their viewers tuned in after watching events in social media clips. So it was a huge boost of viewership just by people seeing the athletes on social media first and then saying, oh, I'd love to watch them perform

So I'm going to go on NBC or Peacock. And I really do love that they just fully embrace the spirit as well because Snoop Dogg was obviously this omnipresent force for NBC this Olympics. And some people at NBC were like, what are we doing here with Snoop? Like, is this actually a good idea? But the fact that he is just genuinely so passionate about the games, that just shines through in the coverage in general. So that was a great call. He was clearly one of the faces of this year's Olympics, along with a lot of other social media stars.

Alex Cooper was also a person involved, Kevin Hart. So I just think that they embrace the spirit very well. They embrace the more is more approach and yeah, just impeccable vibes and I'm going to miss it a lot. I'm actually like getting emotional thinking back through it all. Let's talk about the medal table at the end of the

day. The U.S. had the most medals by far with 126 total. 67 of those were won by women. And I also think that's another factor here is the interest in women's sports leading to a, you know, more people interested in watching them.

This was the first time ever that two countries tied for the most gold medals.

It's a fun factoid to have. I'm sad because our track and a high jumper could have shared a gold medal and it would have propelled us to 41 gold medals. He chose to jump it off with the New Zealander. He ended up losing. So that's why we ended up tying. I mean, you could point to a million different instances, but that one stings a little bit. Meanwhile, we have to look ahead to Los Angeles, which is in 2028. And the mayor there said that, you know how the Paris cleaned up the Seine River ahead of the Paris Games?

Well, Los Angeles wants to make it a car-free games, and they want you to access their venues exclusively by public transportation. Good luck. For this next story, I want to take you all back to last September. Disney had just announced that it planned to pour $60 billion into its cruises and parks over the next decade. But rather than fanfare, that announcement was met with a little skepticism because without specifics, it felt more like an empty promise.

Well, over the weekend at Disney's D23 Expo, Bob Iger and co. laid out the details and they are fun. The company is building four more cruise ships to almost triple the size of its fleet. Magic Kingdom is getting major upgrades with an area devoted to Disney villains, plus a deeper dive into the Cars universe, both contributing to what will be the park's largest expansion in 53 years.

There's a new Avatar attraction coming to Disneyland in California. Disneyland Paris is getting its first Lion King themed ride. Awesome Spider-Man rides are coming to Disney Shanghai in Hong Kong. The project list seems to go on and on. But even with all those announcements...

it still doesn't add up to that $60 billion number, which means there are some more secret rides, hotels, and shopping areas to come. Neil, last week, there was a lot of hullabaloo around Disney's parks business, facing some headwinds, so it's hoping these details will get people hyped to spend $22 on a turkey leg again soon.

Can't wait. Yeah, I mean, this has been in the works for a while, but we haven't received the details at all. Disney holds this D23 event every two years, and two years ago it was a different place in Disney. Bob Iger was not CEO. It was Bob Chapik, who had been ousted by Iger, and now Iger's back. There was a lot of promises, but not a lot of details. And then this year they explained all of the details, and people were so excited about

One aspect of this I do want to focus on is the cruise ships because that is very interesting. Disney is really bullish on cruise. I mean, they have five ships now and they have plans to build 13. So that is a huge expansion. Their current fleet operates at more than 90% occupancy, but they only have 5% of the cruise market. So they think they can grow that and they think this is a great place to introduce cruise

people around the world to their characters without building a theme park there. So take a country like India. They don't think there's a business case for building a theme park in India, but they can have a cruise ship stop there or embark from there. And that's a great way to get people in the Disney ecosystem. So they're absolutely bullish on cruises. And we've seen the cruise industry in general just be absolutely the comeback after COVID has been huge this year.

I think they're also threading the needle well between a mix of new and old inspiration for some of these expansions. I mean, they're working on a Monsters, Inc. themed roller coaster, but they're also building a ride through the Encanto experience. They have the Lion King water ride coming, a major Spider-Man roller coaster, but they also have its first Cocoa themed ride. So that's where Disney just...

has such a deep bag of characters that they can go to. So you can see that they're satisfying maybe an older generation because we know Disney adults are very much a big thing, but also introducing some of these newer properties to their parks. And again, we had a segment last week about how the entertainment division finally turned a profit and streaming is doing well and that the parks is maybe, uh,

a little bit, but the experiences division is so, so important to Disney. It produced 69% of its income in the last fiscal year, 2023. So it's still going to be the big money maker. So you have to invest money into them. Now we hope you had a great weekend because our winners of the weekend certainly did. And they are coming up next. Church's original recipe is back. You can never go wrong with a rich man.

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Welcome to our winners of the weekend, the segment where Toby and I pick two people who partied harder than the USA basketball teams. My winner is the Hollywood power couple of Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. Their movies went head to head at the box office this weekend and the loser had to take out the trash.

But there really wasn't a loser. Movies featuring both husband and wife made tons of money. Lively starred in It Ends With Us, a romance drama based off a best-selling Colleen Hoover novel, and that brought in a stellar $50 million in its debut. On the other side of the nightstand, Reynolds, Deadpool, and Wolverine passed $1 billion at the global box office three weeks after its release, becoming only the second movie to hit the mark

this year. Very fun trivia fact, the last time a married couple went one and two at the box office was in 1990, and I'll take a beat if you want to pause the show and try to think about who it is. Okay, for the just tell me already crowd, it was Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2, topping the charts, and Demi Moore in Ghost coming in second. So yes, Reynolds and Lively are probably having their private chef go a little extra with the truffles tonight, but

besides those two, I think another clear winner of the weekend was Colleen Hoover, whose popularity in the book publishing world seems to have translated very well to the big screen. Yeah, you're talking about the Hollywood power couple, but I'm talking about Colleen Hoover, who is just an absolute juggernaut. In 2022, she held six of the top ten spots on the New York Times'

best-selling paperback list. At the same time, she's sold more books than the Bible that year. There are over 44 million posts on BookTok discussing her work, and she's the second most followed person on Goodreads behind only Stephen King. It Ends With Us, too, is probably her most popular novel. It sold about 7 million print and e-book copies.

It's been on the New York Times bestselling list for 131 weeks and it's currently at the top. She really is just an absolute powerhouse. It came out in 2016. And it was the bestselling novel of 2022 and 2023. So she's an absolute powerhouse. She has...

has this really incredible story. I was a social worker in Texas, self-published her first book in 2012. And then during the pandemic blew up on a book talk, which has been such a powerful force in the publishing industry, which has really elevated a lot of no authors that no one had ever heard of to become, you know, uh,

an author now that can be adapted for a movie that makes $50 million, starring Blake Lively. So really just a remarkable rise by Colleen Hoover. She is a little divisive about her portrayal of domestic abuse. So that maybe is also juice sales as people want to find out what the heck they're going to get when they open her book. And it doesn't seem like you exactly know, which is part of her popularity. My winner of the weekend is Colin Huang, the founder of Taimou, who just became China's richest person.

Huang's path to the top spot on China's billionaire rankings was anything but smooth. The former Google engineer started his entrepreneurial journey tinkering with various gaming and e-commerce ideas that were moderately successful. And he actually retired at one point where he spent a year at home to just think about his next move. That next move happened to be starting a company called Pin Duo Duo, an e-commerce platform that made a name for itself by selling dirt cheap products.

That catapulted him to a peak net worth of $71.5 billion before it all came crashing down as the pandemic-era e-com boom cooled off. But like Sha'Carri Richardson and her 4x100 anchor leg, pin Duo Duo made a surprise comeback spurred by an expansion outside of China under the name Taimou.

Neil, Huang is now worth $48.6 billion, good for the number one spot in China, which is a lot harder to come by these days given the country's recent crackdown on the tech sector and the billionaires that it can produce. Also got his master's at University of Wisconsin. Shout out the Badgers. One thing is I don't think I would want to work for him because there's a very demanding schedule. I mean, I work a lot, but this seems a little insane. Pete, you have to work from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

6 days a week plus overtime. So he's gotten a little criticism for that very intense work schedule, but it has translated into an incredibly booming business PDD as it's, uh, abbreviated posted and 90% jump in revenue last year. They are huge spenders in American media. Remember they had these Superbowl commercials that had every, that were huge, uh,

for sparking American public interest in the platform. They're always at the top of the app store. They were the top spender on Meta last year in terms of their entire list of advertisers. Teemu spent the most. They spent $2 billion in advertising in just 2023 alone. And Amazon is spooked and is trying to adopt a lot of the business practices and the models of

Taimou and its rival in China, Xi'an, by going straight to Chinese suppliers and sending it over to Americans for cheap. It might take a little longer than you might get with Amazon Prime, but people seem to be amenable to the fact that, hey, I just want to get something cheap. I don't care how long it takes. It's working well for Colin Hong, number one in China.

Like Sidney McLaughlin-Lavrone with three hurdles to go, fall is bearing down on us faster than expected. Go shopping at a Home Depot or a Michael's right now and you'll see holiday merchandise creeping into aisles like Michael Myers stalking a victim. It's part of a broader summerween trend where

where retailers stock their stores full of holiday goods way in advance of trick-or-treating season in an attempt to lure shoppers into spending more money. Home Depot had its famous 12-foot skeletons up for sale as early as April this year. Michaels dropped its first Halloween-themed collection of the year in late June, and Costco is already slinging seven-foot animated werewolves and pumpkin scarecrows. The reasoning is simple. Halloween brings in the

Yeah, this is just a product of people being willing to pay for Halloween stuff.

I mean, there is a broader consumer slowdown. We've talked about it for the past weeks. All these retailers and companies are saying, yeah, we're seeing a weakened consumer. We need to drive value. People aren't showing up to our stores as much. But when it comes, there seems to be an exception, and that appears to be

seasonal goods and holiday goods. People are making those discretionary purchases for things like Mother's Day or July 4th or Valentine's Day. Seems like inflationary pressures or budgetary pressures just don't necessarily apply to when you're just decorating your house. And maybe that's because

We just love it so much that we always set aside some money to decorate our house for Halloween. Over half of Americans do anticipate decorating their yard or their home for Halloween. So it's become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon in recent years. I think social media has a large part to do with it, with that 12-foot skeleton that just sells so great for Home Depot and every other retailer is trying to copy it with those huge decorations that people put on their house. But it's become very clear that the Halloween has become one of the biggest shenanigans

shopping seasons of the year and retailers are going all out. Yeah, we've seen so-called holiday creep for years now. I mean, Black Friday discounts began earlier and earlier every single year. It happens with all these major holidays. But I think you're right about the social media aspect as well, because this

holiday summer ween seems to have been assembled in like a social media lab. It drums up both social media's insatiable desire to just showcase that you're doing fun stuff. There's this dead period of holidays between like August or July to August. So people just wanted to create one. And then also just retailers online

are going to feed into it as well because it's going to help their bottom line as well. Technically, Summerween came from a Disney show called Gravity Falls as well, and that started as well. So there's just a lot of different elements that fed into summer becoming the new de facto start of Halloween. And I can smell pumpkin spice lattes right around the corner. I think they're coming sooner than we know. I think the 22nd, that's what Starbucks is hinting at.

Okay. It is Monday, so here's what you need to know for the week ahead. And let's just go straight back to retail because there's some big reports coming this week that will tell us the health of the U.S. consumer, which is so crucial to the U.S. economy because it drives 70% of...

our GDP. So those reports are July retail sales data on Thursday and Walmart and Home Depot earnings over the course of the week as well. And so far this earnings season, yeah, companies have just offered so many conflicting messages about the health of the U.S. consumers. So Home Depot,

Walmart and the retail sales will give us a lot of information. And are we going to see the summer wean boost or is it too early for summer wean to make itself known? And then at some point this week, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has pledged to reveal her economic policy platform. Many people have pointed out that Harris does not have a policy section on her website. So we'll be keen to hear what she has in mind and how it differs from President Biden's economic policy.

strategy. We've also heard her come out and endorse getting rid of taxes on tips, too, which is a policy that Trump has also spoken out in favor of. And I feel like we need to send her our episode that we did on that because despite its popularity amongst people, it's very unpopular amongst economists. So I can see why she and Trump are kind of saying it on the campaign trail, but it's maybe not the most economically sound policy. And they both did it in Las Vegas, which is home to a lot of hospitality workers. So that is not a coincidence.

In sports, the Olympics are over, but the Premier League returns for a new season on Friday. Can anyone stop Manchester City? They've won four straight titles. My head says no, Manchester City is inevitable, but my heart also says no, they are too good. But my soul, that also says no, Holland is far too good as well.

And then finally, Post Malone goes country with his latest album, F1 Trillion, dropping on Friday. I wish he dropped this a little earlier because some summer country post, that's just good vibes right there. Well, he'll take us into the Halloween season. Let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Monday. For any questions, comments...

Disney World travel tips, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Ed Lewis is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and Makeup is already thinking about their Halloween costume. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.