YouSaid · the spoken record

Liz Hoffman

lines on the record: 125
first: 2023-07-28
most recent: 2023-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Know you never know why some, I mean, this is true at a daily journalism job or a book. You never really know why anyone is talking to you. And, you know, again, because of the way this book came together, I had to kind of go out and say, here's what I'm trying to do. I think you have a good story to tell. By the way, that you shouldn't assume that any of the people in the book spoke to me, their stories are the ones that I tell. But it's a little bit of a kind of layer. All right, like what are the important stories? Where can I get people to talk to me? And then you kind of throw things overboard where like one of one or both of those isn't quite working.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted the CEO who was younger. I wanted a company that was in a different place in their life cycle. And Airbnb was on the verge of going public, which is just such a naturally high stakes thing. And, you know, we can talk about the Airbnb story, but I fully thought they were left for dead, which is why I'm a journalist and not an investor.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tech was the scaffolding on which the pandemic story hung, I think, but not to me anyway at the time, an important part of it. But I did want a company that was, in addition to kind of making sure that you're checking boxes on sectors and really getting a picture. At the end of the day, books are character driven, these kind anyway. And so you're going to end up sort of essentializing these CEOs into archetypes that are carrying a narrative that's sort of, you know, buzzing underneath the story that they're telling.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturer is an example, sure. And I wanted people have asked me why is Airbnb in the book if you have Hilton and did you want a tech company? And the truth is at that point, I really didn't think, and I think it ultimately was the right call. I'm not sure that tech had a uniquely interesting pandemic. Not at all. No, despite being the reason that we kind of all got through it, I'm not sure Apple had like an incredibly compelling story. Right, if any.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is important? So, some obvious ones therelines obviously important, right? Travel, obviously important, finance important was this a little unclear then how that would all shake out. I know I wanted a big sort of multinational industrial.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad blood. Perfect example. John Kerry Roo at the journal crushes Tharono's story and says, Of course I should write a book. This was a little different, right? This is nobody's beat at the journal or elsewhere is every company on the planet in the entire economy. And in part, I think the reason that I thought I was maybe in a good position to do it was I thought it would be more of a financial story. If you remember early on, right, the markets are going crazy. There's people are always kind of solving the next crisis by looking at the last one and there's this concern that it's going to be 2008 all over again. And I thought the banks would be a bigger piece of it, honestly, than they. It turned out really to be a story about a crisis in the real economy. So then, you know, that summer, you're looking around and you're thinking, okay, like some accommodation of”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is, you know, most reporters who write a book have a beat, and a huge thing happens on their beat, and they crush it, and then they write a book about it, right? Think about whatever you're.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got planted. I spent a couple weeks talking to publishers and agents as one does and tried to write a proposal and see if anyone would buy it. And then they did. And next thing I knew was, you know, summer or fall of 2020 and I had a book deal.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, at heart, I'm a narrative journalist. I like to tell stories and collect facts and present them in ways that people can understand and grab onto. But really, the origin story of the book was I'd done a story for the Wall Street Journal that published the first Saturday in April, and it was a TikTok day by day of the month of March, and I'd feed from, you know, worked with lots of colleagues around the newsroom. And it was day by day from the seat of, it was the month that the economy shut down. We'd never seen it before. We thought that was an important story to tell. And it's two dozen CEOs, investors, policymakers from all across the economy. And it was just incredibly clear coming out of that. We just barely scratched the surface, right? That this was fundamentally just like the kind of yarn that reporters dream of, which is its narrative, it's tense. There's a lot of drama. There's high stakes. Things really mattered. And so that's, I think, where the germ sort of.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expression and timing, right? And so he says, I think the market is not aware of the risks here. Okay. How to express it? And most people think of Bill his bread and butter business, his activist concentrated stock investing, but he's a bit of a background in macro too back from 07, 08, and he actually decides to do this in the credit markets where spreads are incredibly tight. Investors are assigning basically no risk premiums to corporates or governments or junk over investment grade. And he said, all right, well, when things get bad, that's where it's going to blow out. And he shorts the entire credit market. And it only takes about two and a half weeks for people to realize that he is right and he's holding an incredibly valuable piece of paper ends up turning about $27 million of swap premiums into $2 billion plus in profit.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next question. Yeah, so Bill, a bit of a dramaphobe, but he, you know, in mid-February, he has been reading, he's a voracious consumer of everything's kind of a funnel to him and turnalizes it. And these investment theses. And he is starting to get very spooked in late January, mid-February. He goes to London School of Economics, and mid-February gives this talk and is asked about the coronavirus. And as he's sort of getting ready to answer this kid in the front row, just like very innocently coughs or something, and Bill kind of like leans back, yeah, jumps. And it's one of those like dumb little things that we would all kind of, you know, later you would look back and be like, oh, that's what did it for me. And he comes back and says, okay, I think we are dramatically underestimating this. And so the key components of any investment are like thesis.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know in my reporting, these are people who should have had the best lines of sight in the world, they run global businesses, they've got regulators and government officials on speed dial. They sometimes are regulators and government officials. And they were totally blindsided. And, you know, there's two ways to look at that. One is celebrities. They're just like us, right? Like these guys bumped along in the dark just like the rest of us. The other is, I don't know, I found it a little unsettling. These are people who really should be able to see around corners. They're paid a lot of money to see around corners, and most of them didn't.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I start the book kind of in earnest at Davos 2020, which will to me just go down as like the most absurd gathering of human beings in history. And it was this private dinner that actually being hosted by my then employer, the Wall Street Journal, though I was not invited, they don't let the reporters into the fun stuff. But it's a bunch of CEOs with Steven Manuchin, the Treasury Secretary. And they're all yakking about this, the big theme that year, as it often has been since then, was ESG, and they're all talking about the kind of corporate babble that you hear at these things. And Stephen Manujin, Treasury Secretary, stands up and says, you guys, you're looking at the wrong thing. There is a city of 11 million people in China that's on lockdown. This is the end of January of 2020. And I start there because...”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like wiping down the airline seat, feeling a little foolish doing it. And so came back to the office on a Monday, Wednesday. We were told, you know what, we're going to try a work from home on Thursday. This is Thursday, March 12th. Never went back”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So I think really what happened was, and I tried, we'll talk about the book in a bit, but I tried to kind of recreate that slowly and then all at once feeling, right? If you remember, you know. Yeah, but markets peaked would turn out to be a peak on, I think, February 18th or 19th. Things are, you're starting to see it a little bit in the repo market. You're starting to see commercial paper credit get a little rickety. Spreads are widening. Stocks are still kind of hanging on. And then it was really, you know, the last couple of days of February and the first week of March where, I mean, things just went crazy. And I remember, you know, to give you a sense of the fact that I try not to Monday morning quarterback this stuff. I was coming back from a family vacation on March 8th in the Gulf and sitting there, not a mask in sight. I remember my sister-in-law had stolen some extra wet naps from Chick-fil-A.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't say that it was ever clear to me from the health perspective. I'm not a health expert, but you know, you would see these health experts. Well, even from a”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, go back to early 2020. I mean, every beat was a COVID beat pretty quickly, too, right? At that point, I'd been covering, as you mentioned, investment banking, Goldman Sachs, for a couple years. And again, I'm probably pretty lucky I had the sense at the time that maybe that story was at least that chapter of it was a bit played out. You know, that February, March markets started to go. I mean, this started as a financial story, I guess, is the how I got involved, which is that markets woke up to it very quickly and things got hairy very fast. And basically every reporter at the Wall Street Journal at the time became a COVID reporter. That's”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, but they were reincorporating in Canada, and there was a lot of sensitivity around that. And I remember that one came together pretty quickly, if I remember, which is pretty unusual, but like Friday or Thursday to a Sunday scoop.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the journal is an incredible seat from which to do that, there's a lot of institutional privilege that you bring to the job every day there. You know, when I got hired in 2013, M&A was dead. Part of the reason actually I think that I got hired was that I was covering kind of messy wonky legally complicated M&A had gone sideways. You know, it ended up in court and that was at the time what the journal thought was a blind spot for them, which they were very good at breaking deals but didn't totally understand them or lost sight of them after they came out. And then as it turns out, a switch flipped in the market in 2014 was a record. 2015 was a record. None of them still stand, right? They've been eclipsed by 1617. And then, you know, again in 21. But, you know, it was, there were big deals falling out of the sky. And I don't know. I always say it's better to be lucky than good, though if you can be both, that's helpful. But yeah, some of those were fun. Burger King Tim Hortons, I remember very clearly because it was in the middle of those waves of kind of”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No idea. But, you know, working at a trade pub is such a great training ground, right? Because you got to get really smart fast and you have to know what you don't know and find out, you know, because the rears are incredibly sophisticated. So anyway, I covered M&A for them for about two years. I don't know what God smiled on me, but I got hired by the Wall Street Journal in 2013.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I moved to New York in 2010, working for a legal trade pub, a competitor of Bloomberg Law, Law 360, where I was hired your career is just a series of lucky breaks. I was hired to cover, I think, securities litigation or insurance regulation, something like truly technical and tedious. And then my recollection, anyway, this is the myth that I'm going to create was that my first day, they said actually we're thinking about launching a corporate law vertical. Do you want to cover M&A? And I said, I don't know what that is, but yes, that sounds better.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was called Wednesday Journal, and they ran a bunch of weekly newspapers and a monthly parenting magazine called Chicago Parent. That was truly my first job was running, was their web editor. I mean, it was really grim times in 09.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It worked for ESPN. And, you know, it was really, frankly, just like beggars couldn't be choosers. I graduated in 2009. The first job I had was at a family-owned media company outside of in the West suburbs of Chicago.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a powerhouse. No, but thought I wanted to cover sports actually. I played sports growing up and I really liked that kind of reporting, which is sort of really beat reporting at its most basic, right? And then, you know, at some point, well, I went to grad school because I graduated college in 2008 and was shockingly enough. Yeah, having trouble getting a newsroom job. And I said I'll go get a master's and things will be better in 2009 because these are one-year programs. Right. So obviously economically minded from the jump, but no, I really wanted to be a sports reporter, and then at some point it occurred to me that even if you do that and you get to the pinnacle of that career, your reward is to live in Bristol, Connecticut.”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. I started out as a sports reporter in college. Really? Division three athletics, if that's your thing, what to talk?”
2023-07-28 · Masters in Business · Liz Hoffman on the Pandemic Stories Impacting Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source