YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Goodman

lines on the record: 76
first: 2024-11-08
most recent: 2024-11-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sense of place is going to draw a reader through, and it's going to unfold like a story that we might tell somebody who's not deciding to think about finance or economics. They just want to know something interesting. And all that backstory that I've developed by doing my reading, by looking at reports, by talking to experts and asking questions that might be dumb, that's going to come to life now through this great example that I've come up with.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The power of one or two deeply reported cases is much greater than the overreporting spreading too thin that I think most of us when we're young tend to do. We don't have the judgment developed yet to say like I'm going to stay right here and I'm going to dig deep into this. We're constantly worried, well, what question will my editor ask that I won't have an answer to? Therefore, I have to cover the landscape. I have to talk to 12 companies. Actually, it'd be better if you spent more time with two carefully selected companies. And that oftentimes the thing that can elevate a story to one that people will really remember is like, well, I got enough that I could write. I now know the story. I've got my data. I've got some quotes. But no, now I'm going to go find a character. Now I'm going to go find a place where the...”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really Strong recommendation faster than Buck It's real simple just write find something that allows you to just write and write and write because there's just no substitute. You can't develop the muscles without doing it. It's as simple as that. And writing on deadline is super useful, covering a beat is incredibly useful in terms of helping you develop judgment. But whatever you're doing that involves finding stuff out and writing will make you better at it.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fantastic. Yeah, I like his fiction. I think Bonfire of the Vanities is really entertaining, very insightful book in lots of ways. I'm a sucker for Michael Lewis. Anything he writes. Yeah. Absolutely. The Big Shorts certainly is amazing. I love to moneyball a big baseball fan.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is like from World War I into the 1970s. And it's just so significant in terms of affecting the politics and, of course, race dimensions and class and American culture. And it's just a beautifully written book. I've always loved Steinbeck. I was very influenced early in my career by Norman Mailer's nonfiction. I like this idea of the best work is the reported stuff that unfolds like a novel, the executioner song had a great effect on me. Tom Wolfe stuff, I feel like I'm just dating myself now.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, which is this fantastic narrative history of the black migration from the south to northern cities, which is a period that I realized I just don't know enough about, but it's just so important in terms of public.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And every time I would talk to him about a story, I would come away with like a new understanding of the historic significance of whatever it was that I was covering. And I've always tried to think about every story as like, what does this mean as like a letter to somebody in the future? What does this signify that's broader than just the thing that I'm writing about that I thought the Washington Post in that period was very good at?”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, thanks for that. I had a couple of old school newspaper people I sat next to in the first newsroom I ever worked in, which was at the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska. It was a columnist named Mike Dugan and a reporter named Sheila Toomey. They were veterans and I just listened to them working their sources on the phone and giving them a hard time holding people to account. And I just thought it was so thrilling that it really affected how I go about it how dogged they were. When I got to the Washington Post, I was lucky enough to spend time with Steve Call, who's one of the all-time greats.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I had a senior leadership position in the newsroom, it was so interesting, there's a merger in the last season of succession where you've got like the public facing synergies, magic. And meanwhile, you've got these two characters who are screwed and they're just desperate to consummate this deal as a way to kind of wipe away their problems and keep the whole Ponzi scheme going that was so true to me in terms of what I lived through. I'm willing to, you're right. These are not sympathetic people.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a guy who lived through one of the most grotesque mergers of all time, which is AOL purchasing hotter. Yeah, yeah. Well, I wasn't at Time Warner. No, this is what's left of AOL, buying HuffPost.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was always very funny so well acted, obviously, just really well written. So well written. And I also rewatched Succession.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's certainly a change to the talking points. McKinsey now talks about Justin Case instead of Justin Time. But we got to watch to see if these lessons will really get learned because the shareholders' interest is still with us.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After that, there's a good chance you won't be around to get the praise whenever the inevitable next shock materializes that will reveal that that's a good strategy.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got your product. Walmart says, Where are you making it? And if your answer is only China, you have a problem. They want to hear well, what's your backup plan? You know, we don't want to get stuck waiting for container ships to come in to LA to serve our customers in Oklahoma City. So are you making it in Mexico? Are you looking to India? Are you moving some stuff to Vietnam? There's got to be a greater mix. And that is happening to an extent, but I am dubious that it will continue to happen the longer away we get from the pandemic for the simple reason that you're an incentives guy. I'm an incentives guy. The incentives for a publicly traded company are still quarter by quarter lowest possible cost. So if you're the CEO of a company and you're saying, well, let's spend a little more for redundancy. Let's have a second factory in Mexico. If you're diluting next quarter's earnings or the quarter...”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not making tube socks in the Carolinas again. But instead of making it all in China, we'll make them in Central America. We'll make them in Mexico. We'll make them in India. So there's a hedge against reliance. I mean, it's not that we're abandoning China, by the way. I mean, China's going to continue to be a very significant center of manufacturing. It's that there's a sort of portfolio rebalancing. I would put it to you this way. We've talked a lot about Walmart. 15 years ago, if you were a product that you were trying to get on the shelves of a Walmart superstore and you flew down to Bentonville, Arkansas to pitch the Walmart buyers on your product, you have to go see them. They don't come see you. It's like visiting the Pope. And you get your appointment and they would ask you, where are you making this product? And if your answer was something other than China, you had a problem because they would assume that you couldn't be getting the lowest possible price, you weren't making it at the most efficient scale. Well, now if you go to Bentonville,”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, getting a lot. Arizona getting a lot of this investment into these emerging future-facing industries. In other industries, especially where labor costs still matter, it's unlikely that this stuff's going to come back to the U.S.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're going to get more resilience, you know, over the next decade or two. Globalization is not over, by the way. My book is not a call for making everything in America. That would be extremely expensive. It would be wrenching and disruptive. It is a call for greater actual resilience alongside this kind of ruthless efficiency. And it's not real efficiency as we've discussed. It's really about catering to these metrics. So, you know, in strategic industries like semiconductors, medicines and the medicine supply chain, electric vehicles, where the Biden administration is now handing out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, we do see a real construction boom and actually it's been interesting to see that a lot of the investment is going into places that were hit hardest during the so-called China shock, North Carolina, Michigan.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Yemen opening fire on vessels headed toward the Suez Canal, effectively shutting the canal, making ships that are going from Asia to Europe go the long way around Africa. That analysts tell me that probably increased cost for shipping companies by maybe 40%. Diesel costs and more labor costs. Well, shipping rates are up three and four hundred percent. That's fatter margins. So when there's a shock to the system, if there's no competition, that gets expressed as pricing power, which means we all pay more.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And my favorite example of this recently is we just had this dock worker strike on the Eastern Gulf Coast of the United States. And there were all of these breathless stories, but this is such a terrible time for the shipping industry. You know, they can't move any of this cargo. Well, guess what happened after they settled the strike? The stocks of the companies that are publicly traded plummeted. Why did they plummet? Because anybody who understands the container shipping industry gets that engineered scarcity is the name of the game. And when there's a shock to the system, if you can't move cargo, they're going to jack up freight rates globally way in excess of their underlying cost. So the market said, oh, no, the strike's over. We're back to normal. That's my chance to sell off in the same way that we've got the Houthis.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But beneath a lot of this, it turns out, is market concentration and various forms of collusion. I mean, oh, what a coincidence every time one airline lifts their fare from New York to LA. The other ones, go ahead. How interesting that this just happens to be how it works out, every single time. You know, why is that? We don't have enough competition and there's no transparency in the marketplace. And everybody knows that if you walk into the casino thinking that you're the smartest guy, well, you're the sucker because there's a lot of data operative behind you. And that's the world that we're living in. This is not competition most of the time.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the question is, and this is something I get into in detail in the book question Are we talking about an industry where there's truly competition or not? If there's competition, then you're limited in how much you can jack up prices because presumably your competitor will say, well, I'll accept a slightly lower margin for greater market share. That's actually free market capitalism.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the thing is, this was not a surprise to anybody listening to the earnings calls because the executives of companies like Kroger, you know, the giant supermarket chain, publicly, well, you know, we're having to shell out more. There are all these supply chain disruptions. Our prices are going up so unfortunately our costs have to go up. Meanwhile, they're telling Wall Street analysts, this is fantastic. This is the greatest opportunity we've ever had to jack up our margins because everyone's rising, lifting their prices collectively. So nobody's going to point the finger at us.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To restaurants, to consumers, grocery chains and the like, they are benefiting anytime there's a shock to the system. So they're getting record high retail prices or wholesale prices that are translating into retail prices. At the same time, the cattle ranchers are going out of business because they're getting a smaller slice of the dollar that we're spending on beef. And they're working the system so they get the Trump administration in the first wave of the pandemic to drop an executive order that says slaughterhouse workers are essential workers, have to continue showing up even when local public health authorities say actually these slaughterhouses, they're super spreaders. What I discovered in researching the book is at the time that, so I tell the story this one woman, Tin I, who's an immigrant from Myanmar who actually dies in a JB, well, she contracts COVID and dies, the first wave, she worked at a JBS slaughter.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a perfect example of this engineered scarcity is the term that I use where because one of the types of deregulation that we've had that's been so disastrous, because we eliminated antitrust enforcement, this goes back to Reagan, continues through every presidential administration on both sides of the aisle until this break under Biden, we've got four companies that are in control of 85% of the meat packing capacity in the United States. I mean, that's a number that's higher than during the Robert Baron era. So guess what? They're setting themselves up so that the cattle ranchers in selling their animals have few alternatives, which keeps prices low on the front end. The people they're paying have no pricing power, so they're getting the animals cheaper. At the other end where they're distributing.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The stores were dirty. So a lot of that was reflective of the fact that you have huge numbers of people who are just so busy doing two jobs, driving vast distances to keep the job they've got that they don't have time to think about, well, what alternate career could I pursue? That's like thinking about going to the moon. Well, suddenly the pandemic shuts everything down and you are now having to contemplate whether you want to or not some other way to feed your family. That was such a shakeup at the same time that we do have emergency unemployment benefits that are taking the edge off and allowing people to continue to just spend on their basic needs. And we have unemployment dropped so much that suddenly people who are not accustomed to thinking about alternatives. You know, what else is out there? Let's check it out. Maybe I will start a small business.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of it. I mean, certainly in the supply chain, you know, the normalcy that we're accustomed to where you click your buy button on Amazon and you wait sometimes just a few hours and somebody shows up at your door. We're invited not to think about the army of workers behind that. You know, that's based on large numbers of people being so desperate for a job, especially a job if it happens to have healthcare, that they're not looking around for anything else and they're aware that whatever else is out there probably represents a downgrade if they're able to stay in their home and support their families. I mean, we know that lots of people who are working in places like Walmart warehouses who are moving packages in giant Amazon fulfillment centers qualify for food stamps. I mean, they need a federal subsidy courtesy of us, the taxpayer, just to keep them.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of it. You know, I mean, I think we heard a lot about how your stuff's not showing up because there aren't enough truck drivers willing to do it as if these guys just lost their mojo to do their jobs. I actually spent three days riding along with a long-haul truck driver from Kansas City. It's a tough gig, isn't it? It's a, I mean, look, it's always been a tough gig. But, you know, before deregulation under Carter, people love to talk about Reagan, but a lot of this stuff actually starts with Carter in the late 70s. The Teamsters were in charge. Okay, here's another institution not to be lionized. You know, they have an unsavory history, but they demonstrate the power of having a union because you're away from your family, you're on the road, you're worried about where to park. That was always true. But these guys got paid really.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do any of that, but you don't get paid unless we call you. Well, guess what? The minute unemployment drops to historic standards, people say, you know what, I got other options. I'm going to pursue them because I don't like being treated like inventory. And you go back to Henry Ford, who understood that Henry Ford is not a figure to be lionized, right? He was a racist, he was an anti-Semite, he crushed organized labor. But he understood that if you want workers showing up, giving their all, you got to pay them. He doubled wages in 1914. Some people call them a communist. He said, I'm just a guy who wants to make product reliably. And any business premised on low wage labor is inherently unstable. We broke that connection. So ultimately, we lost, we have these labor shortages, we love to say, but we really ran out of people willing to continue to sign up for the deal of downgraded jobs.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're just going to make you flexible. You're an independent contractor now. Congratulations. That effectively means we own your time if you're a warehouse worker or you're a worker in a plant that makes something. Like you're engaged in biomanufacturing. If we need you, we need to know that we can tell you a day before that you have to show up for work. So you don't have control of your time. You can't go on vacation. You can't schedule a doctor's appointment for your job.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. But when you tell a chip manufacturer, hey, sorry, we don't need any of what you're making. We'll call you when we do. They turn their fabrication plants offline. And you can't just turn a switch on to get that going again. It takes billions of dollars. It takes lots of materials. It takes months. So once we realize that we've grossly miscalculated in terms of running the economy, we then have to wait to ramp back up. And that does go. That is an indictment of how we've done just in time. We haven't thought about suppliers as partners. They're just suppliers are just cost to be contained. And the same goes for human beings. You know, you go back to what you were saying about McKinsey earlier. One of the things McKinsey did in terms of proselytizing for lien is they turned human beings and human workers into inventory. Oh, we don't need you. Well,”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're going into the iPhone because that's the big customer. Sorry, Ford, you're last in line. Well, not quite last because it was medical device manager. Right.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A It was a big miscalculation, but it also goes back to what we were discussing earlier in terms of shareholder primacy. You know, one of the things the Toyota really valued in its own version of just-in-time is you have to take care of your suppliers. If things are bad, you don't just say, well, you know, we disown you. We don't need any of what you're making. Good luck to you. Because then when you do need them, they'll be out of business. But that's effectively what we did with computer chips. You know, why can't you find a car that's got a computer chip? Because the auto companies, well, the auto companies made a series of terrible miscalculations. First of all, they didn't understand that they didn't actually matter very much to their ultimate customers, the chip fabricators in Taiwan. They thought, well, you know, we're Ford, we're GM, we're Nissan, whatever. They have to take care of us. No, they don't. They're taking care of Google and Apple. That's most of their market. And even those companies can't get chips. So whatever chips they can make.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got limited capacity, and sorry to back up on you, but there was a massive miscalculation by much of international business as the pandemic begins, right? We get the first shutdowns in China. We then get disruptions in Europe as the pandemic spreads, and we get quarantines, people thrown out of work, unemployment shoots up to 14% in April of 2020 in the US. And people running businesses react to this as if, you know, oh, this is familiar. Okay, this is a terrible downturn like the great financial crisis and then the great”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little of each of these things all at once, but it's important to understand that the shipping industry is basically an unregulated cartel made up of international companies. They're all foreign companies. They're organized, though there are scores of them into three alliances, think like airline alliances, like your star alliance or your One World or whatever. And these three alliances, they control like 90 plus percent of the traffic across the Pacific. So in the same way that it's not an accident that you get on your United flight and every seat's taken and they're looking for volunteers because they're managing inventory so carefully, they want you to be anxious about getting space on that flight. So if you really got to make that trip, you'll pay whatever it costs. They have a similar, the shipping carriers have that relationship with the people who are dependent upon space on their ships.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collectively, are the gateway for 40% of all imports reaching the US by containership, and there's just not enough space on the docks for them to unload, so they're stuck floating for sometimes for weeks.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, involuntary warehouses. Suddenly container ships or involuntary warehouses. You know, I'm tracing in the book the passage of the single shipping container from a factory in China to a warehouse in Mississippi. This is the most important shipment in the history of this startup company based in Mississippi called Glow, run by a guy named Hagen Walker. And Hagen Walker's got this deal with Sesame Street to make these light up bath toys. And this is his first order that's big enough to fill a 40-foot shipping container. And first, you know, the price of moving a container of goods from coastal China to the west coast of the U.S. goes from like 2,500 bucks to north of 25,000 in the space of a few months. And then by the time he manages to get his stuff on board a ship, there's 50, 60, 70 ships just floating off the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. These are the two ports that...”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if you have a great relationship, I mean, I think if we were saying 80% of our face masks are made in Canada, I don't think we'd give that any thought because the likelihood that we're going to close the border seems pretty small. But yes, to be going into the pandemic simultaneously having this trade war while we're heavily dependent for really significant stuff on this country that, you know, happens to be on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. That's a problem.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, what makes it insane is we're discussing a period where we're deciding to have a trade war with China. Right. I mean,”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set of people would say, I think maybe we've overdone it with just in time. But this equation has been so good for the people running publicly traded companies that any CEO who says, I don't know, maybe we need more of a hedge against trouble, that's an invitation to go out looking for your next job. The CEO says, let's keep going lean. They know that eventually there will be a come-uppance, but with any luck, that'll happen after they've moved on, they've sold, they've cashed in their options. and a hammock with a cocktail in their hand.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is. Now, some of that is reflective of more reliable products. So some of that is the part of the Toyota production system that doesn't get talked about much, which is quality improvement. So if your parts don't break as frequently, then you don't need to hold as many. That's fine. But we know that every time there's a shock to the system, we run out of stuff. I mean, the pandemic brought that. If you didn't know that before the pandemic, you sure found out about when we ran out of, you know, everything medicine. Right. I mean, that's the title of my book. But the first supply chain disruption story I ever wrote was back in 1999 when there was an earthquake in Taiwan and we had shortages of chips and other electronics. Then, of course, the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011 and into 2012, we had massive shortages of electronics for months after. We had floods in Thailand around the same time that knocked hard drive production out of whack. And each time, people who pay attention to this stuff, and that's a fairly geek.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rebellion, revolution under Marxist-Leninist terms, and Walmart, the ultimate retailer from the citadel of Western capitalism. And this joint venture has really propelled us through the decades. And that's what is now changing.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it has had some effect, right? I mean, Chinese citizens are unhappy about polluted air. I mean, there have been a lot of moves to reduce, we don't see the progress here yet, coal-fired electrical plants, or at least move them further away from urban areas in places where the environmental destruction resulting from massive industrialization has really hit. We've seen protests. We have seen some change there. But ultimately, China has been driven by a very successful effort to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And so for the most part, economic considerations have trumped all other considerations. I mean, the Great Irony is that the driver of the kind of globalization that I'm writing about in this book at the center of it is what I describe as a joint venture between the people's republic of China, this institution forged under a peasant.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Promises that we got. Share prices do go up because costs come down. Consumers, you know, if you like the idea of being able to go to Walmart and buy a badminton set for three bucks or whatever, you got the bonanza, but we got a lot of loss manufacturing jobs. We got a real hit to the kind of psyche of American industrial eras. Our politics change, not for the better as inequality sinks in and as working people understand that their ability to support their families doesn't seem to matter very much to the people running the economy.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of this happens. We hear this from Larry Summers. We hear this from Bill Clinton. We hear this from Bob Rubin. What does happen? Bob Rubin gets to go to China with Citigroup and make, you know, as chairman and crack that market, and that's good for their share price. Of course, what happens? China does become the workshop to the world. Retailers get a crack at this giant market for a time, although we've never really gotten the market opening. That's right”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That China has made as he's lobbying for this deal that will bring China into the WTO. And he even goes to the back of the hall, picks up the baton, and conducts the People's Liberation Army Orchestra. This is the orchestra for the institution responsible for the Tiananmen massacre. Now, why does he do this? Because he comes from Arkansas. This is Walmart's home state because the Democratic Party and the Republican Party for that matter awash in campaign contributions from retailers, manufacturers who want a crack at China because it's good for business. And that ultimately drives the equation.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Political decisions that have left workers effectively abandoned when they lose their jobs. And in terms of the net, trade with China has actually been a positive for the American economy. It's a question of how we've distributed the spoils. But in terms of how that all came about, yeah, I think you got to look at Clinton, who, I mean, I tell the story in the book of how Clinton runs in 92 as the answer to George H.W. Bush calls him out for supposedly coddling the butchers of Beijing, you know, cozying up to the Chinese Communist Party after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Clinton vows that things are going to be different in his own administration, human rights are going to matter so much, and not even a decade later, he's at the Great Hall of the People. This is across the street from Tennemon Square itself, saluting his host. This is Jiang Zimin with Hillary by his side and saluting the great straw.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not so sure that it was wrong, by the way, to let China enter the World Trade Organization, though we could have put more focus on terms for labor and human rights and environment, for sure. You know, I argue in the book that, you know, most of our problems, and the problems are significant in terms of the so-called China shock that cost, you know, a million direct manufacturing jobs in the decade or so after China enters the WTO and two million if you count the truck drivers who no longer have a factory to deliver to. That's really home cooking, right? I mean, other countries, I mean, Canada is not, you know, seething with anti-trade sentiment to the extent that it is in the US because they have national health care there. We don't have national health care. We have trade adjustment assistance, but it's woefully underfunded. That's a program that's supposed to help people who lose their jobs because the trade deals transition to something else. I mean, it's our own...”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, we spend a lot of time now talking about how this supposed export juggernaut intent on killing American living standards has undercut all these manufacturing jobs in the US. I mean, it is, I'm glad you're putting the focus on companies like Walmart because it really was American and Western companies in general clamoring for a shot at the Chinese market as a way to satisfy their own concerns for low prices to make their share prices go up.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Walmart is the ultimate example of how publicly traded companies have undercut costs in the name of gratifying consumers with low prices. And they found in China the ultimate solution to their bottom line concerns. I mean, here's this country where there's no labor unions. They're effectively banned by the Communist Party. You can cut a deal with the Communist Party official to get hold of space or resources. You're tapping into the world's potentially largest consumer market for, you know, just about everything. And China, even before China enters the World Trade Organization in 2001, but especially afterwards, is the perfect place to make products at scale increasing sophistication, low cost.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His own rail and shipping lines, vertical integration didn't exactly work out, but that concept of let's understand what we're dependent on and how reliable is the supply. I mean, Ford would have been horrified to see what I saw at his river rouge plant a century later where I'm actually watching the F one hundred fifty come off the line. This is Ford's most popular vehicle, pickup truck, beautiful vehicle, amazing, you know, orchestrated assembly with some automation. But at the time that I'm watching this in January 2022, they're taking the cars and parking them in these giant lots in the shadow of Ford's corporate headquarters and across the street from Henry Ford Elementary School because they're dependent upon one supplier for the computer chips happens to be across the ocean on this island that not incidentally is claimed by China as part of its own territory. I'm talking about Taiwan.”
2024-11-08 · Masters in Business · How the World Ran on Empty with Peter Goodman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source