YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Atwater

lines on the record: 89
first: 2023-11-22
most recent: 2023-11-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, to navigate what's ahead. So if we think about that, then it becomes, what does that really mean? And to be successful in that, I need to feel that things are predictable, that there is a sense of certainty to what will happen next. And that could be because I can extrapolate from the past, but I need to have a vision of a clear road ahead of me.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is a big lift. But I think, first of all, we have to come up with an accurate definition of confidence. Because we end up getting caught up in a lot of confidence theater, you know, the appearance of entertainers and sports figures, sort of the bravado of culture. And we also mix it with self esteem and self confidence. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about our feeling relationship with the world around us. And in the”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so your point then confidence fell. It depended on which side of the political spectrum you were on because at that moment you had confidence among Republicans being impacted by the failed attempt. At the same time you had Democrats feeling vulnerable because of this underlying sense of threat. And so you saw in the data January 2021 is not a pretty sentiment indicator of mood, just given what was happening.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The FBI has subsequently revealed Stories, feelings, actions exist in equilibrium, Barry, and that was absolutely a situation where the stories and feelings naturally manifested in that behavior. I look at that moment not any different than I look at.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other follow, and there was a lot of that going on. Freeze, and there was a little bit of that. And then the last one, if you'll pardon my French, is the F word, where we just say F it. And so we should have been expecting All of that to manifest in that moment. The groups had been primed for it. I mean, you go back and look at the messaging.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What led to that? Let's keep the politics out of it. I'm just looking at sentiment. To me, no one should have been surprised by what happened.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I look at January 6th a little differently. January 6th is what happens when a large group sees a sense of powerlessness and uncertainty and feels defeated and needs to act”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and part of that is to those at the bottom, it was a necessary oxygen mask. But think about where that money went. It went to rent, it went to car payments.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. But again, it occurred at a major low-inconfidence. Again, these spontaneous social movements are wonderful pinpoint moments that highlight when consumer confidence is low.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About this notion of stacked vulnerabilities, where it's not one thing those at the bottom are struggling with, it's multiple things one on top of the next, on top of the next, on top of the next. And so when you look at the social movements like Black Lives Matter that occurred when confidence was terribly low, you have this triggering event that On the surface was relatively minor. I mean, we'd seen so many instances of people being, but...”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Supermarket staffers Food prep, you know, all the factory, you know, the chicken factories in Delaware, they didn't close. And so to me, it's not a surprise at all that where we're seeing work stoppages and strikes and protesters are highly concentrated in people who felt intensely vulnerable during the pandemic and saw the rest of the world living a life that was unattainable to them. And so what concerns me, Barry, is not the depth of consumer confidence falling. It's the duration of it. You can hold your breath underwater, whether it's 10 feet or 100 feet for a short period of time. But eventually you got to breathe. And so all of the focus and sentiment is missing the compounding effect of duration. And I talk a lot.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and we have a delivery system today that is extraordinarily enabling of that from Amazon to But let's talk about those that were serving those at the top.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the pandemic only heightened that. You mentioned the K-shaped recovery because that phrase is an evolution of something that I started writing about in March of 2020, which was the work from home confidence divide. Talk about an awkward mouthful. But you could see even before the month was out that those who could work in an office and migrate to home”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have job scarcity. They have relative health scarcity. They have mobility scarcity. I mean, the abundance that those who have gained over the past 50 years, they now see as having come at their expense. And this is something that we see a lot when confidence is low. We acquire what I call zero-sum thinking, where I now attribute my misfortune to your gain. That's interesting, that you somehow benefited at my expense.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so you had, I mean, think about the concerns that folks had in the early 1960s. You have the issue of civil rights. You have Stonewall, gay rights, civil rights, women's rights rights.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It isn't if you measure it in terms of economic conditions, but confidence is about vulnerability, relative vulnerability. And I think that there are a lot of Americans who feel, especially vulnerable, they feel culturally vulnerable. They feel religiously vulnerable. They feel in terms of issues of gender. And so I think that what a lot of our Quote unquote, economic confidence indicators are picking up is vulnerability that is far more fundamental to people's lives. And I think one of the mistakes that economists have been making is they're attributing too much of these indicators to economic connections rather than to the social and political connections that we're seeing that are quite profound.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of sentiment. And so, you know, when people talk about well, where did Donald Trump come from? When you look at consumer sentiment by political category, it becomes very evident what was behind that. You know, eight years of Republicans feeling the same way they felt the weekend Lehman Brothers collapsed”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has gotten far worse. You know, the last time the parties felt the same. Was really the great financial crisis coming out of that. You saw recovery on the part of Democrats, but no recovery whatsoever among Republicans, which”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there are indicators to me to all levels of the economy. So if I want to look at the upper middle class, I'll look at a carnival cruise line because travel... Requires us to plan, to have again a strong imagination of the future. We're going to foreign places. We're committing it's not an insignificant amount of money. And so that becomes a great bellwether for me in terms of how are those that are not.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the car companies want to deliver Uber luxury to everybody at the top. I mean, I spend a lot of time looking at LVMH because I think there's no better real-time indicator for the financial elite.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Maybach is one of my favorite indicators because it sort of comes and goes at these extraordinary moments in history.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just long, long, beautiful Big engines, you know, you look at the hummer, that was a classic, that would be an indicator of huge sentiment.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have to give credit to Mark Eleshevsky, who works with Bob Prector on socioeconomics because Mark did this fabulous study that shows that cars are soft, they're round, their colors are bland, even the woody, if you think about that's another low confidence indicator. And then you go to the other extreme and you have chrome. Very angular.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could see this sense of permanence and power that nothing was going to be able to raise interest rates at that point. And so you had a story that perfectly aligned with negative interest negative yielding interest rates that was overlooked because of the excitement that was happening in the markets, bond prices at record highs.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I can also look at the behavior of bond investors. And look at the stampede that took place two years ago into negative yielding bonds. And the stories that went along that and the confidence that investors had.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the media does a great job of letting me know what those stories are. Twitter and social media does a spectacular job. So does Google. I mean, Google searches. I'm a big user of Google Trends. It helps me to see what's the crowd interested? Where are the stories we tell? And the word choices. So recently I see the word relentless being applied to the rise in interest rates as we're coming to an end of the third quarter of 2023. Well, relentless is a word that doesn't show up. In stories until it's beginning to feel like something significant is about to happen.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I look at it very qualitatively. Because mood is a feeling, and so the qualitative pieces matter more than the data to us. We always have to interpret data. And so our feelings determine how we interpret. 65 degrees can feel both warm and cool. But what I try to do is to look at the stories, and stories are a great indicator of how we feel because our imagination of the future, the stories we tell, perfectly mirror how we feel. Confidence is forward-looking. And so my imagination of what's coming is going to be a reflection on my mood right now.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Todd Harris. Todd Harrison. And I had been writing for Minionville and I listened to Bob talk. And he said something that I had not paid much attention to before, which was a reversal in causality. Which is we tend to look at events causing us to change our feelings. Bob's recommendation and the foundation for sociomics is look at the mood before things happen. And suddenly it made so much sense to me that, of course we act as we feel. And if I could then figure out what is consistent in those actions and connect them to feelings, then that might be something really useful as whether it was in consulting or trading to be able to connect preferences to the choices we make and how we feel.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always feel sorry for the daily news writers when you see major market reverses because to watch them contort themselves to create a comfortable narrative. It's humorous. Right.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's entirely reflexive. And so I say a lot our confidence level, our stories, and our actions exist in equilibrium at all times. I don't care which is chicken or egg. I just know that if I talk to Barry Ritholz and I know what you're doing, I know what your story is and I know how you feel. And I can pick one of the three and pretty well deduce what the other two are likely to be.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The crisis isn't done. We're moving a lot of risk from the private sector to the public sector, but we have an eliminated risk. And at the same time, everybody saying things are getting going to get worse, and now the market starts to turn up. And that combination of the crowd saying things are only going to get worse and the market going up was a game changer for me.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So far, so good. So, this was 2006. For the first time in my adult life, I had the opportunity to move away from the trees and start to see the forests. And to see what was happening in the mortgage space, to your point, Ninja Loans and the wildness there. And then to watch as sentiments started to fall how things started to come apart. And I ended up advising some hedge funds because my background as a bank treasurer, I dealt with a rating agencies. I'd securitize stuff. I mean, I knew how things go bad having spent a lot of time in troubled banks at my time at JP Morgan. And so what interested me as Lehman collapsed and what was going on was this sense that”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Level fall. Yeah, I would say that my interest didn't arise until the great financial crisis. I had left the industry. I turned 45 and my son said halfway, dad, you're halfway to 90. Kind of hard.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was an organization that had grown by acquisition. And so the mindset was always buy revenue cut expense, buy revenue cut expense. And so long as you can keep doing that. You leave some fundamentals undealt with. And when you stop the roll-up, Then you have to look at how do you integrate it or in some cases spin things off. But I'll tell you, my timing couldn't have been worse, Barry. I took that job in early 2000 and basically rode the market down. And I'll tell you, nothing teaches you more about how things work than watching them not work on the way down. And so it was really eye-opening to see how overconfidence turns into panic as we went through the dot-com bubble.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Folks who could look at the patient holistically. And so one of the first things I did in that job was to identify who can be the point person so that you can cross-sell and deliver a much fuller array of products than just the single products we were offering.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Bank One had merged with First Chicago. The merger was tumultuous. And so the board ultimately brought in Jamie Diamond. I talk about it merging with Jamie. Because this combination was a terrible cultural fit. It was almost viewed as a Tiffany by his Walmart combination. The egos were not happy with it. And Jamie did a great job of sort of reminding people that the enemy was outside the business. But he quickly uncovered where the merger had not executed the way it meant to. One of those was in the client wealth management area where we had lots of great Skills in terms of trust and private banking and all of these elements but no general practitioner. It was like we were running a hospital with no”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“JP Morgan to actually go work for first USA, one of the credit card companies. And part of that was this clear view of the trajectory that securitization was going to change the business. You know, little did I realize that a year later we'd get bought by Bank One because Bank One needed desperately to have a credit card business. And so my career made another pivot to go from the treasurer of a startup credit card company to being the treasurer of the eighth largest bank in the country.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, my job basically became how do we outthink them? Because there was no way we could outmuscle Merrill. And so we had to be better at structuring, finding ways to make things less expensive, bring something else to bear.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have a very traditional finance background. It started at JP Morgan right out of school, went through their bank training program, wanted a foreign assignment, and the next thing I knew I was in Delaware. And what I ended up doing though was the beginning of what we call asset-backed securities today, pulling together credit card loans for Sears, for MBNA in First USA car loans. And if you remember your history, banks at that point were just beginning to compete with the big Wall Street firms and commercial paper and asset-backed securities were the first securities that the Fed gave banks permission to underwrite. And so suddenly we were having to compete with Solomon, with Bear, with CSFB in their territory.”
2023-11-22 · Masters in Business · Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source