YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Alpert

lines on the record: 100
first: 2015-02-08
most recent: 2015-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Dan Alpert's two cents at a conomonitor dot com. And, you know, I'm a fellow at the Century Foundation, so I could be found there as well.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1989, suddenly you had the Berlin Wall and the Chenamin incident. You had massive industrial policy in China. You had democracy flowing in and markets flowing in to Eastern Europe. And this was a situation that we really cannot repair other than by looking to mechanisms that are not oriented towards this underlying premise of there always being shortage. We live in the age of oversupply.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's agrarian in this nature, right? So you then sort of ramp forward into this completely different environment, which, by the way, I would argue probably would not have happened. And he is, in fact, in the broad scheme of things temporary if you didn't have this massive situational change by having all of these post-socialist economies suddenly emerge. I mean, I like to draw that.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what we've proven in this great recession and thereafter is that the velocity of money is anything but constant. Again, it's the view of an economics of shortage versus an economics of oversupply. You have a condition going back as long as we can remember in modern economic thought that's probably about a hundred years even before getting back to the people who are sitting there with agricultural economies. But you look at sort of the post-industrial revolution view of economics. It was always governed by something that quite frankly was inherited from the agricultural view, which is that most of economics is about shortage. There's always a shortage of supply relative to demand.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The simple answer is there's no demand for money. There's no demand for money because there's no demand for new infrastructure. The demand for new infrastructure, there's no way of creating it. There's no demand for new plants. There's no demand for new equipment. If they're going to be built, they're likely to be built outside the United States where labor is cheaper. So the demand for capital side is really the sort of bigger answer, but then you look at what's gone on in the field of economics. You know, when Milton Friedman, Bless his heart was creating monetary theory or at least expounding upon monetary theory in his heyday, all of his equations held the velocity of money constant.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“75 years. A long time. So we have bridges all over this country that are so old, they're falling apart, require enormous amount of maintenance each year, which is also a cost borne by government. And by replacing them, we can get all of these great benefits and unblock this capital that's being stranded in sovereign obligations. It's actually kind of collective lunacy. It is.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean the irony, of course, is that again, talking about the blockage aspect that I was saying before, you have this huge amount of what I'll call stranded capital that is sitting there not being employed for productive use. So not only is this not just a question of tax versus spend, it's also a question of why shouldn't we be in a situation where we are deficit spending, borrowing money that costs almost nothing, to do things we know we need to do eventually. You're going to have to do”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But everybody likes that message. And it's an easy way to get elected. And so you have this Red State, Blue State Division really fundamentally over that issue. It is the actual way in which small government theory or Jeffersonian Jacksonian theory metastasizes into this complete shutdown of the political system in the United States.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And tell people we're going to cut your taxes, which is popular. Who votes against? We're going to cut your tax. No, no, I'd rather have you increase my taxes. At least a smart person will remain neutral.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, and again, it's very, but the reason, and this is what I'm coming back to, the reason the right gets it wrong is because of the underlying product that they were able to sell to the electorate. And it has nothing to do really with economic growth other than the fact that they have this theory, right, this curve that they say is going to produce greater growth at lower tax rates. But it's lower tax rates themselves that they're able to sell, and they became very good at selling this product. In fact, didn't need to understand anything about economics. In order to stand in front of the American people or in the UK or in Kansas or anywhere.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they did in the first term, Reagan, was reasonable. What came after was absurd. One of the things Bruce Bartlett is a great guy to listen to. Love, love his stuff. He's got a new book.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In response to a giant tax cut. Right. From half 70 to 50. Right. They didn't cut it down to where we are today. And the second thing they did is that they did deregulate some of the guild industries like financial services.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“took control of government and changed people, actually did things that I would argue in at least, and certainly I have friends who believe this as well who are in the Reagan administration. And the first Reagan administration cutting the tax on income above one hundred eighty eight thousand dollars a year from seventy percent to fifty percent was probably the right thing to do. That's a huge thing.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between people who really don't like government and people who really believe in something called the efficient market hypothesis. I'm with you, Keith Cowan. And these people during the 1980s, the Reagan years,”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the dollar is appreciating. So it's very, very hard for me to understand where the big disconnect is. And quite frankly, I do think it does rest in one place. Let's hear. I'm enthused to hear. It does. It is a 30-year argument that we've been having actually more like close to 40.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, you look at it as a, at some point as a cash substitute, you might as well take the interest. It ain't much, but you might as well take it, knowing that the guy on the other end of that bond owns a printing press and is always going to be able to repay you. You have all these inflationistas out there saying, but you're going to lose purchasing power. How in an era of deflation? We have the most incredible environment in the world where we have all these people running around shouting about the potential for inflation because we flooded the world with cash and in fact inflation is dropping like a stone.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, in an environment in which the cost of recycling money, and I think that's the way you have to look at it, the sovereign debt rate is at the level it is because we are not recycling money. We've actually created a blockage in where money is supposed to flow. We've created this black hole of sovereign debt where people are parking their money that is not too different than holding bundles of cash. If you look at the cash in your wallet, you'll see it says Federal Reserve Note.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I know about infrastructure is that if it starts costing businesses too much money to ship their goods and you can't get workers because the bridges are out, the answer is scream bloody hell, they're going to get the consensus will be. So we're going to do”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the simplistic sense is that those people who are making it believe that they will one day have to pay that money back. And what I'm saying is that they're never going to be in a situation where they're going to let the bridge fall into the river.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But here's the thing. It's astonishing. If you really think it through, what is driving that argument? What's driving that argument?”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that is actually a very interesting thing you mentioned because that's the fourth benefit of infrastructure construction. You actually create greater efficiency in the economy.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we actually use that kind of money for infrastructure building, created additional jobs in the United States, which would ultimately create additional demand for their building, for their goods and services.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you're going to sit on your money. It is only us as a country, as a nation, collectively, that can decide to do otherwise, not by taking your money. You can keep your money. But we're very happy to take not taking use your money where it's being parked in those treasury bills and put it to productive use. And by the way, all of the people that buy our bonds outside of the United States who depend on US demand to sell their goods and some of their services, those people would kiss us on the You know what in Macy's window before.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“by a cheaper source outside the country. And so you ask yourself, well, here we have the ability to round trip some of this money after all they're buying bonds. The Chinese are buying our bonds. Everybody else is buying our bonds, which is why interest rates are at the level that they're at. And all we're missing is the connecting piece, which is what's known by, which was what economists call the collective agent, right? If I'm depending on Barry Ridholtz to make an investment decision, I pretty much know what Barry Ritholz is going to invest in right now. I certainly know your point of view. And I know that you're not going to step in and build a giant plant that doesn't need to be built because you have cheaper resources of labor elsewhere. You're not stupid.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Move about the concert. Some upward pressure on wages and you cure the problem. Now, this is really a critical issue. Here we have, in addition to all of the other problems that we have, we have an enormous amount of polarization of wealth and income. So we have people who are sitting on enormous amounts of money, who are putting that money in treasuries and municipal bonds anywhere that they're not going to lose it and sometimes in cash. And those people have no desire to reinvest because there's no demand for private sector goods that's not being satisfied.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's even cheaper. So it cost me that kind of an interest rate. It's a little higher for 20 years, but still very, very low. And you have that kind of borrowing cost in order to present value of the work you know you're going to have to spend the money anyway. So you do it today. You create massive influx of both primary benefits in terms of paying workers' wages, secondary benefits in terms of paying to procure steel and what have you that you need, creates other jobs. And then, of course, tertiary benefits because all those people spend all that money or a lot of it.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those rates, you can pretty much go out and build whatever you want and actually be in the money on the trade. And here's why. If I have a bridge I know I'm going to have to rebuild twenty years from now. I know that either by obsolescence or by increased volume that it needs to carry, or for whatever reason, I know I'm going to need to rebuild it or expand it. And I take that work and I present value it to today and I do that work today creating massive amounts of economic stimulus. And it costs me one point eight percent to borrow.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Based on what's going on in the Bloomberg terminal right now, and since I don't have it up in front of me, my guess is that the 10-year Treasury bill probably closed it around $1.8, $1.81.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And paid their taxes. Yeah, they would attract investment because people would want to use their labor pool, which would be very cheap to use. And hopefully that would work itself out. But it'd still be massively painful and within Greece itself public opinion is not supportive of that. So it's very hard to get a consensus for Gregory.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easier for the exiting country. The problem in Greece is you have a country that doesn't make very much. Now, in theory, if they exited and they had a redenominominated currency,”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, unfortunately, they have yogurt. Tourist olive oil, but they don't have a lot of hard exports, and one of the problems with exiting for them, I mean, if it were Spain or Italy you're talking about Italy, it would be easy. I don't know if it'd be easy.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Become equity owners. That's classic. And in fact, what's going on right now in Europe, you can look at what Varifakis is doing in Greece. He's trying to pull off a classic debt equity swap, right? He's got all this debt outstanding that he can't pay, and he's basically running around Europe right now telling the finance ministers of Europe, look, here's what we'll do. If we come out of this, and our GDP rises, we'll give you a piece of it. But we're not going to owe you this money anymore.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was trying to explain the notion of currency. Who wouldn't take that fiat currency? Anybody would take Warren Buffett's napkin.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually wrote a piece once called Warren Buffett walks into a bar. And it was about Warren Buffett not having any money in his wallet, so he decided he'd write an IOU on a napkin.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the way to go. And one of the benefits of nationalization, there are many, many detriments, and I'm glad to a certain extent we didn't do some of that. But the notion of allowing managements to continue on in management.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was ironically counterproductive. So by letting Lehman go down, which of course they felt they had to do, that created such an enormous financial crisis that their conclusion was, well, we can't lose anyone else. What they did instead of Nationalizing, which is what, you know, when I was actually sitting a few feet from this very room in which we're talking on Charlie Rose back in 2009, and those were the days in which everybody, half the people out there were talking about nationalizing. I was one of them.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to be terrible. But that's not really. Yeah, and against assets that were of questionable value. So if anything, it did not follow Badget's prescription. And we ended up with a situation in which we created enormous, you talk about moral hazard for owners or whatever. I mean, a moral hazard that we created for... banking institutions will be with us now for decades”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they stepped in early and hard, and what Bernanke did obviously as a student of the Depression is he came in and he realized the emergent nature of the situation, and he did what was prescribed by the years of study and research that he's done, which is to flood the markets with enormous amounts of liquidity and bail out institutions. But of course, when you really go back and understand the role of a central bank, you have to reflect back onto its lender of last resort function, which is really why central banks were created to begin with. The whole notion of stopping bank runs, so banks have a bank to borrow from.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not a critic of the Federal Reserve. In fact, thank God for the Federal Reserve. Well, that was the first question I was going to ask. We'd be in the Great Depression.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so you're not talking about this enormous retrenchment where suddenly you've written off half the debt or something like that. And of course, you see the same problem in Europe, the problem in Europe is different from country to country. Spain has massive household debt. Greece has massive government. That doesn't really matter. How they took the money, ultimately they took the money generally to pay to their own people, whether it was lending it to them or paying them wages for jobs that they shouldn't have paid for. But it doesn't really matter how they took the money. They ultimately took the money from mostly other European lenders who receive that money, received that money through the enormous influx of demand for their government bonds.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have to actually get to the. I mean, you realize that while people point to debt to GDP figures or debt to all sorts of debt to even debt to income, and certainly debt service costs have decreased enormously, but nominally, from the point of the bubble to today? Total debt outstanding in households in the United States has fallen by four percent.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years and it's only accelerating with the debt deflation is classically secular, right? It's not a, you can say it's cyclical because we had a bubble, right? But until we're able to remove that impediment, it's a secular impediment.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no business cycle for technology. Yes, you have plateaus, but technology continues to progress, right? That's been going on for”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bringing this all back into the macro context, right? See, now you have these three phenomena, and you have the continued development of technology. You have the debt deflation, and then you have this oversupply of labor globally. And these things are secular.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The girls in typing pools. Everybody does their own typing today and telecommunications is not something you need staff for. I mean, you look at the decline in support staff necessary to run even a large institution. It's astronomical.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that creates oversupply of labor in and of itself. We have a global phenomenon that's always been the case. I mean, there's nothing new about technology. We have a debt deflation, right? Where you have an inadequacy of demand because people are paying off debt. And then you have this global oversupply of labor that has basically made it very unattractive for people to employ individuals in developed countries.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nor the fact that we just don't need as many people to do the same jobs that we did before. We have a technology issue. And believe me, that's not being that is more than offsetting the decline in working population, right?”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, it was that it was that period of time. And you saw the labor force participation rate start to decline slightly, but it fell off a cliff after the Great Recession. This is not the same factor. This slope and that slope, I'm using my hands, are not the same slope. There's been something else going of a far broader secular phenomenon. Add to that the fact that when you talk about aging populations and don't talk in the same sentence or at least the following sentence about technology, technology, of course, has always been regarded as a sort of enemy of labor, at least in terms of its initial introduction, right? And then eventually we have people freed to do other things, sometimes more creative things, and our societies become better, etc., etc. But I don't know anyone that can look at the demographic phenomenon that are going on in developed countries.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. We actually had reverse for, I think, 15 months We had reverse migration to Mexico, which is our biggest source of immigration. So you have a big problem in that context. But when you point at the demographic argument, excuse me, it's very tempting because you have this incredible obvious correlation, right? You see that the developed world, that even China is getting older. And it's very tempting to say that that's the cause of all the problems. You go one iteration away. You go one iteration away and what you find is that Look at, for example, U.S. labor force participation. There has been some obvious demographic decline that's been going on since well before the Great Recession. Late 90s, it peaked. Yeah, well, it really was the early 2000s when you look at the stats.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're now falling. We actually fell below replacement, which is a little bit disconcerting. And when you looked at where that replacement was coming from, it was coming from a very small group of recent immigrants, mostly Hispanic. And they have now sort of become higher income and more developed than hence they're having fewer children. And that's the nature of the debt.”
2015-02-08 · Masters in Business · Masters in Business: Westwood Capital Dan Alpert (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source