What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Economic Problems in Europe

In so many conversations, there's a widespread view that Europe is falling behind. Or it's in trouble. It has been two years since the publication of the Draghi report and the problems the report identified about European competitiveness are far from solved: Demographic challenges, rising energy costs, and a lagging tech sector still cast a shadow over Europe. But according to the economist and policy analyst Dominik Leusder (who also writes the Leusder of Last Resort Substack) the Draghi report might have mismeasured the true scale of Europe's issues, and he asks if the popular narrative of European decline is an accurate one. We also speak about whether Europe needs a frontier AI model, why long, wine-soaked lunches are not a good way to measure productivity, and the state of Europe's vexed relationship with China as a trade partner and competitor. Read more: EU Plans Import Cap on Chinese Hybrid Cars to Protect Sector https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-07/eu-prepares-import-cap-on-chinese-hybrid-cars-to-balance-trade?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Alibaba’s Joe Tsai Says Open Source Is Europe’s Best Shot at AI https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-07/alibaba-s-joe-tsai-says-open-source-is-europe-s-best-shot-at-ai?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News http://bloomberg.com/ subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter http://bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots https://discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  If you're a business owner, you need a card that can keep up. With the Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business American Express Card, everyday purchases transform into miles you can use towards future travel. So business as usual can lead to a well-deserved getaway. And for a limited time, card members can earn 200,000 bonus miles, the highest miles offered this year. Whether you're traveling for business or planning your next adventure, now's a great time to make every purchase go further. Apply today at www.delta.com/podcast. Offer ends November 4. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply.

• 1:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Hey, Odd Lots listeners. The Odd Lots tour continues, and our next stop is in Chicago.

• 1:48Tracy Alloway?

  That's right. Joe and I will be at the City Winery Chicago on October 15 for a live Odd Lots recording. Tickets are on sale now at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 1:58Joe Weisenthal?

  And of course, a special thank you to Barclays for supporting Odd Lots Live.

• 2:02Tracy Alloway?

  So that's October 15 at City Winery in Chicago. Get your tickets now.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Bloomberg Audio Studios.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:30Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I think a comment that you've made a few times over the episodes is like, no, no, no, it's not. It's like, we have these conversations. And then usually or frequently, whether we're talking about trade or AI or anything, there's usually, oh, and it seems like Europe is getting the short end of the stick here. Or it seems like it's all going to end up being kind of bad for Europe.

• 2:50Tracy Alloway?

  Well, yes, I would say that.

• 2:52Joe Weisenthal?

  You have said this.

• 2:53Tracy Alloway?

  I'm sure I have in the past. However, what I would say is if you are bullish on AI and its ability to boost productivity across the board, in my mind, you have to be bullish on Europe because there is no region out there, perhaps, more motivated than Europe to try to eke out every extra ounce of output per work hour. Like, if you want a long lunch in France, if you want to, you know, take a long vacation in August, you should be very, very interested in AI. And if you think those gains are going to be like widely spread through businesses in other countries, you know, think about Europe.

• 3:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Did you purposely just say this? Did you see the red headline that just hit as you were talking?

• 3:33Tracy Alloway?

  No.

• 3:34Joe Weisenthal?

  It's so surreal. So we just got a red headline the moment you were saying that. BMW targets shedding a fifth of manager roles with the help of AI. I don't think that could be more perfect because, A, this is, it's the two sides of the coin. So it's like, you have a lot of like big industrial behemoths in Europe that in theory, like you're like, I remember, we've talked about this for years, actually. You know, if AI is going to diffuse across the economy suddenly, maybe these companies can be more lean, et cetera. But then this also gets to two things. Okay, what does that mean about jobs themselves? And then also, it's like, okay, maybe they can modestly trim some of their management layers with the help of AI. But can that actually make these European car companies

• 4:18Joe Weisenthal?

  competitive with the Chinese companies? I don't, that still seems like a tall order at the trajectory. But it's very funny that you said that the second that that headline crossed the terminal.

• 4:28Tracy Alloway?

  Plugged into the zeitgeist, I guess. One other thing I would say, speaking about the zeitgeist, and since you mentioned China, we are recording this on September 30. And Europe seems to be gearing up to take some sort of action against China in order to boost their competitiveness against it. We're not entirely sure just yet what that's going to look like, but people are definitely talking about it.

• 4:50Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, there's like this very deep concern about all of the industrial behemoths, a lot of the German chemical companies, the German automakers, et cetera. And like, you know, five, 10 years ago, they were like riding high. And then suddenly, in a few years, people are talking about potentially existential risk to them and so forth. And it's sort of wild to me, you know, thinking back to how much the mood has changed from, say, the first Trump administration and even the Biden administration, when, you know, the idea of like, you know, there was the European anger at the Inflation Reduction Act and so forth. And, you know, just this, this concern that the trade issue that was sort of really catalyzed by the US and Trump a decade ago

• 5:35Joe Weisenthal?

  is now just sort of, it's becoming just very mainstream.

• 5:38Tracy Alloway?

  Well, you used the word diffuse the benefits of AI. Again, I think, you know, the idea of having to compete seriously against China and take actual steps to do so has diffused across many places in the world.

• 5:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Very well put. All right, well, I'm very excited to say we do have the perfect guest, someone who's writing I've admired for a long time and who has interesting takes about all these things, including debates about European economic productivity, whether they're falling behind, et cetera, nuanced positions on various trade questions. We're going to be speaking with Dominic Loyster, economist, policy analyst, former researcher at LSE, and author of The Loyster of Last Resort Substack. So Dominic, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 6:21Joe Weisenthal?

  So AI is going to be great for Europe, right? Because then during the working hours, as Tracy said, the workers can get more output, then they can expand their lunch breaks and their vacations in August.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, if you look at how Europe has done in the last, you know, last few decades of the booming tech sector elsewhere, despite never having been the major innovator itself, maybe very early before the 90s, Europe may have contributed some of the foundational research that of course, American companies are very good at extending and commercializing. It seems that consumers have pocketed the welfare nonetheless by lower, with lower prices for like tech goods and services. And that's despite the fact that US tech companies have pretty decently entrenched moats in Europe, legally entrenched ones. And I think with AI, it's going to be much the same. That's my impression at least.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  I think it's probably true that Europe will not be able to create a frontier model anytime soon. And I think it's a good case that it shouldn't try to do so and that it should instead focus on this issue of sovereignty of being, not being dependent on either the US or China for its tech stack, which it currently is very much, and on focusing on whatever actually suits the business needs of most European corporates. My impression, talking with people who are in this field or who regulate AI at the European level, in their opinion, you know, near frontier models like Mistral

• 8:00Speaker 05

  are totally fine for the vast majority of business needs of most European firms. And the interesting fact, of course, that the fact that Mistral is launching models with a Chinese chassis, so with basically with the weights of a Chinese model, because Europe doesn't have the compute to actually train their own weights, raises all sorts of other dependencies, I suppose. But so far, I'm pretty sanguine on Europe when it comes to the AI race.

• 8:29Tracy Alloway?

  So if Europe has gained from a lot of technological developments in recent years, why all the, why all the hand wringing over competitiveness? And when you see something like Draghi's competitiveness report, which I think came out, what, 2?

• 8:45Joe Weisenthal?

  2022, 2023?

• 8:48Speaker 05

  24, late 24.

• 8:49Tracy Alloway?

  24.

• 8:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 8:51Tracy Alloway?

  It shows you how much has happened since then. But when something like that comes out, like, what is the basis for the existential angst, I guess?

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, in a way, that was the last sort of, it was one strand of a set of arguments that was pretty much, that were quite similar. They're all about, you know, in relative terms, Europe is falling behind and it's losing a competitiveness race versus the US. Jamie Dimon has been making these remarks frequently. He's saying, he came to Europe last year and a couple of events this year as well, and said, you're losing because you, European GDP was 90% of the US 10, 15 years ago. Now it's 70%, and this is not good. Now, there are a couple of reasons to, you know, that it doesn't really matter if that were true. Because as I said,

• 9:43Speaker 05

  you have to, it's a very producer-centric view of competitiveness and also of welfare, because the debate is kind of relating competitiveness to future welfare, saying if you're going to fall behind on competitiveness, and we define competitiveness by, you know, output or output per hour and otherwise labor productivity, your living standards are going to go down in material terms relative to the US. And you're not going to be able to maintain your social model. That's, I think, the main part of the Draghi report. My understanding that this is, I think there's a different case for why Europe may not be doing well economically in its own terms. But even if you accept that this sort of relative decline is relevant,

• 10:26Speaker 05

  I think there's a problem with the data. So the Draghi report was published in November 2024, I believe, was commissioned by the European Commission. It's obviously authored by the Hero of the Year crisis, former ECB President Draghi, who's also a distinguished economist in its own right. It argues a lot of things that I think I agree with, that many other people would agree with, that Europe has to, you know, remove internal barriers to trade and the movement of capital and credits. It has to, you know, try to get capital investment up. It's quite, it's very, very low compared to the US in particular, and it's falling behind in, in the tech sector in particular.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  So Draghi, this is obviously written well into the AI boom. Draghi is emphasizing the tech sector as the main driver of the, the American productivity advantage. It's just the question of how the, how big that advantage really is. And I think that the centerpiece of the report is this notion that the productivity ratio, so GDP per hour in PPP terms, has gone from ninety something percent to seventy or eighty five percent, depending how you measure it, since nineteen ninety five, when the, the tech boom in the US begins. And that implies a downward trend, a very sharply downward trend, and that it will continue if Europe doesn't do X, Y, and Z. And I think that's where the problem lies because it's, I don't think there's really

• 11:54Speaker 05

  enough evidence to actually suggest that's true, really, even if you accept that Europe might have not been, not have grown as much as the US in recent years.

• 12:16Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got ten minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next, about the time it takes to grab a coffee. So search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful, can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 13:24Speaker 06

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 13:53Speaker 07

  Wise is the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. If you've ever sent money internationally using a traditional bank, there's a good chance you've paid more than you realized. Hidden fees, exchange rate markups, and extra charges can quietly add up before your money even arrives. There's a better way. Try Wise. Wise uses the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google, helping you avoid the unwelcome surprises that often come with international transfers. Whether you're sending money to family overseas, spending while on your holiday abroad, or paying bills across borders, Wise makes moving money simple, transparent, and straightforward. Wise offers 24/7 customer service and runs over seven million daily checks to spot and

• 14:36Speaker 07

  stop fraud, and most transfers happen in under twenty seconds, which means your money arrives in less time than you've been listening to me. Join millions, saving billions. Be smart. Get wise. Visit wise.com or download the Wise app today. Ts and Cs apply.

• 14:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, why don't you explain what you see as the issue with the data, then? The core disagreement. So, okay, total GDP in, you know, dollar terms was at ninety percent, now it's at seventy-five or eighty percent. That sounds like decline. It sounds like, quote, "falling behind," unquote. That sounds alarming. I can understand why Draghi wouldn't like to see that trend. Why, what's the other spin on the same numbers? Or why do you think that's not the complete story?

• 15:25Speaker 05

  So I think you can definitely make, I mean, there's a fundamental difficulty with comparing economies. If you think that's important to organize your policy efforts around, you might want to have a, you might compare yourself to your peer economies, and you can do that statically, so that every given year you can compare yourself or as a ratio. So what is the US's share of global GDP, what is Europe's share of global GDP? But the specific statements that people make, including Jamie Dimon, everyone else, Draghi, you're also quite online, so you know that this is a constant theme online as well, is there's a trend, there's a level trend over time.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  And the problem is that because economies are very different, because they measure economic activity quite differently, we can't actually say anything about levels over time. So just to, to get to the actual source of the beef, which is the PPP adjustment of the GDP figures, you can't obviously just look at nominal GDP and exchange rate, at market exchange rates, like Dimon does, for instance, because all you're measuring is how the dollar has fluctuated over time, right? It doesn't do with real output or anything. So you need to control for these exchange rate fluctuations, and you control for things like differences in working hours between the US and Europe, which are institutional,

• 16:50Speaker 05

  they're political choices about how you want to utilize labor inputs, how you want to trade productivity gains for later time. The US doesn't have any statutory limitations on working hours, and Europe has consistently decided to work less, but has remained employed at the same rates, basically. So this is totally a choice to try to, to work less. And if you, if you adjust for working hours, and if you adjust for the relative price levels, which is what purchasing parity should do, so in other words, what does a French

• 17:27Speaker 05

  euro, how many French euros do you need to buy a dollar worth of consumption, basically? You, you, you, these are constructed by the World Bank, and you have sort of a, now you have a comparison that allows you to compare price levels across time, in theory at least. The problem is with the Draghi measure, which is a frighteningly common measure, but I think is well documented to be the wrong measure, but it, it does so by fixing prices at a given year. So basically, it's measured in, in the Draghi report in two thousand and ten dollars.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  So PPPs are expressed as in international dollars, which is a synthetic currency that has the same purchasing power as the US dollar. And it's benchmarked to a PPP year in which people have gone around and collected prices in different countries and created these ratios that are consistent with each other. But if you fix a certain, if you fix prices to a certain year, you have to use something to extrapolate between these different benchmarks, and the Draghi measure uses the real growth measures that the national accounts produce, in the US and the European countries. What happens as a result is that you get this upward trend, so that shows as a decline

• 18:54Speaker 05

  over time, that you don't see in PPP measures that don't use the national account's real growth rate, but that use relative inflation ratios. So how is the inflation ratio and inflation rates, how are they compared to the US inflation rates in Europe? And the problem is that we calculate those real rates differently. So in the US, what the, the BEA does more aggressively than the, than the European offices for economic analysis is that they adjust prices, particularly in the tech sector, this is why this is very relevant for Draghi's particular argument, much more aggressively for improvements in quality.

• 19:37Speaker 05

  So if the, the computers I'm currently on, a MacBook, for instance, sells at the same or a similar nominal price, even though the specs are much better, that's then, that's measured as a, as a decline in the quality adjusted price. So the same amount of nominal spending on tech services or goods shows up as more real growth in the, in the US than in the EU, because... Applying that deflator more aggressively means that the inflation in that sector is lower, so real growth is higher. And that might amount, we don't know exactly how much it is, it might amount to 0.2 or

• 20:17Speaker 05

  0.3% annually, according to some studies, but over time, if you, it compounds every year, and that creates this wedge between the EU and the US, and it's, that is, at least in theory, to a large part, you just simply these method, method differences rather than actual economic, um, underlying productivity growth. And that's, I think, the, the main issue. And then from there on, I think the, the, the other issue is, well, should we then look at the economy in purchasing power terms at all, or should we look at it purely in real growth terms? And that's a, that's a whole different, um, discussion altogether. And that's, I think, where the discussion has been going, um, between Paul Krugman

• 20:59Speaker 05

  and some European economists who are sort of trying to argue between each other over whether we, we should reform and become a bit more like the US, which would result in, you know, loosening labor regulations, cutting welfare spending, and of course, um, making it easier for tech startups and so on to, to, um, to spend and invest in everything.

• 21:21Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, can you say a little bit more about political choices here? Because it does strike me when we make these comparisons that it, it often feels very apples to oranges. And if, as you say, the US is choosing, basically, to work more, and European countries are choosing to use productivity gains so that they can, you know, go enjoy an extra glass of wine to redeploy that cliche or whatever at lunchtime, then, then it might make sense to focus on, on real growth and output for the US and something else for Europe. So how do you, I guess, incorporate political economy differences when it comes into the, when it comes to these different stats?

• 22:04Speaker 05

  What the GDP discussion ends up as, I think, is, do you think PPPs are more reliable than, than real growth measures for measuring the relative performance over time? Um, and it really depends on whether you think these, these differences in deflaters between countries are actually that, that severe and why they actually occur. Um, but you can, of course, um, and, and we end up, by the way, with, with the notion that we don't have a good measure to compare trends over time. So whatever your judgment call is, the, the, that sort of robust, the thing that's presented as a robust stylized fact in the Draghi Report, but also by Diamond and other people, is simply not, no such thing.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  It's not, it's not established by any sort of solid economic data. What we can do is we can use PPPs in current prices, um, to compare, um, level snapshots. So we can say, in the year 2024, what is, uh, GDP per hour, um, purchasing power adjusted in the EU and in the US? Um, that is not, that comparison, I think, puts the US slightly above the, the Western European aggregates. I also show that if you actually then exclude, um, the, the top 10% of the income distribution, that advantage goes away entirely. So the US is slightly richer in aggregates, but, but not, at least on this measure, but

• 23:32Speaker 05

  not quite as, at the level of Germany and, and, and some of the sort of lower, low countries, Nordic countries, but it's very top-heavy.

• 23:40Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  And indeed, the bottom, the bottom half is actually significantly worse off than any single European country but for Portugal. Um, now, we can say, well, this is the most defensible output measure, in my view, comparatively, but we can say, well, maybe, maybe people care about income, you know, money in the bank, and maybe politically we're so different that people don't care about leisure time that much, and people are fine with living in a more top-heavy society. How much money do UK, UK individuals, the US individuals and households actually have? Because, I mean, consumption is, is a, a large part of what we could define as material wellbeing, right? So I think it makes sense to look at, um, consumption, particular, what's called actual

• 24:26Speaker 05

  individual consumption, which is, I think, it was, I think, a better measure than income because, um, income is hard to compare as well, it's, uh, measured differently, but also, uh, actual individual consumption includes in-kind benefits, it includes, um, the, the benefits of publicly provided healthcare and so on and so forth. So it should control for these political differences, Tracy, that you were hinting at, and the fact that in Europe, um, there are sizable welfare states and greater, you know, larger protections and, and a greater amount of public good provision. Um, if you adjust that for working hours, uh, the, the, the US is pretty, um, unremarkable.

• 25:11Speaker 05

  And what you also have to do, because of these political differences, you have to look at, uh, the way these consumption figures are distorted by some of the things that the US is completely unique in. I choose, I think, healthcare as an example in writing about this because it is quite unusual, it's the only advanced country that doesn't have a publicly funded system, um, despite it being very well established for many, many years, um, by American economists, that actuarial insurance or private insurance doesn't work for healthcare for various reasons, and you end up with very high costs and, and poor provisions. And indeed, the US spends much more on, on healthcare, um, both as, as, as, spends,

• 25:55Speaker 05

  I think, much more, 5% more at least, as a share of GDP than most other European countries. It's a function of, um, having this private system, um, that costs a great deal and still doesn't provide the same kind of coverage or quality. The, it's, it's, I think, um, quite useful to look at, um, empirically how, uh, healthcare spending actually compares to other OECD countries over time. And one model that I run myself on this is that the, the, the, the, the US spends around 50% more on healthcare per person than you would expect, um, relative to what advanced

• 26:40Speaker 05

  countries actually spend on healthcare, um, what their consumption implies, in other words. So the level of consumption that you have, so how rich you are, in other words, predicts a certain amount of spending, but the US residual, say, the difference, is 50% higher. And in total, that results in around between 1.7 and around 1.9 trillion dollars a year that are spent in excess of what would happen, what you would expect of a country, um, at that income level. And, uh, the difference is, I think this goes back to these political economy differences, the reason is prices, really, and the fact, which is well established by people like

• 27:22Speaker 05

  the, you know, Uwe Reinhart, the great Princeton professor and, uh, health economist, that the US prices per unit of care are just much higher, and, um, utilization is very, very poor, and outcomes are generally worse if you look at, um, average life expectancy and mortality rate for certain procedures. So this is part of this political economy, which is more dominated by rent extraction and middlemen. So prices are high in the healthcare sector because you have hospitals, insurers, um, you know, these trade associations that can take a cut, um, administrative costs, and all these things which make a large part of the income distribution, the top 10 or 20%

• 28:06Speaker 05

  very wealthy, but create these enormous costs for, um, much of the rest of the population, especially those uninsured, which are, I think, I think 27 million by some accounting, and, um, even those who are insured by their employers, um, have large out-of-pocket costs. And the, the headline is, well, some people object to using purchasing power parities to actually adjust for output figures because, and indeed, income figures, because they say, well, it's kind of hiding something that makes the... That is actually a sign of strength. In other words, they assume that the reason why costs in the non-tradable sector like healthcare

• 28:47Speaker 05

  are very high is because, well, you have this very powerful productivity growth in the tech sector and elsewhere and very high incomes. And people are sort of wage arbitraging themselves into the non-tradable sector. And it's their high incomes that are inflating those prices in healthcare, legal services, education, whatever.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  That assumes that these prices are not a function of rent seeking, which unfortunately, I think the preponderance of the evidence shows they are.

• 29:16Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, Joe, I keep thinking back to the episode we did recently with the authors of, what was it, Main Street Millionaires? And if you looked at their list of like top earning professions in the US, how much of that was an industry like healthcare or legal services? That you could tie either directly to rent extraction or some form of regulatory capture? Where, for instance, you know, a dealer has the rights to a particular locality or something like that?

• 29:45Joe Weisenthal?

  On some level, when I think about how crazy our health and healthcare system and health insurance system is, I'm even more impressed by the rest of the US economy that we have this sort of, that we have this, you know, big, what's the?

• 30:02Tracy Alloway?

  We've succeeded despite of hobbling ourselves?

• 30:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, the albatross around our neck, healthcare, and still we do OK. It actually kind of makes me impressed. So, you know, let's go back to the cliche about the long lunches with wine. Because I actually think this is, you know, it's a joke, but it's also real. So the diamonds of the world, et cetera, and they say, you got to stop with the long lunches and work hours. And then the dominics of the world say, no, like, we're just as productive, we're very close to as productive as you, and we enjoy life and we convert that leisure, that productivity into more leisure, which is arguably what the whole point is, et cetera. But then the counter would be like, that's just cope. And I, yeah, like, in the sense that, like, yeah, I know people who live a leisure life

• 30:47Joe Weisenthal?

  and stuff in Europe, and they take nice, long August vacations, et cetera. But I'm only getting access to an elite slice because I work in media and journalism and finance, and I don't really have a good look into like the broad European middle and lower classes, et cetera. Is there, like, in your view, does it diffuse, like, this thing? I know it from, you know, my elite contacts like you and elsewhere in Europe, but can we substantially say that the broad European middle class does in fact have, you know, substantially more leisure and time than their counterparts here?

• 31:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there are some asterisks here. So especially in countries like Spain and Italy, there are a lot of informal hours that are not captured by the headline figures. There are adjusted series for that, but my own crunching with numbers says it doesn't make that much of a difference. For the bulk of the European economy, the richer parts of the European economy, so there's Central Europe, the Lowlands, Low Countries, Nordic Countries, they do work much, much less.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  And if indeed it meant that Europeans were employed at lower rates, it would be concerning. And it would probably point to the fact that, oh, this is a labor market failure, and people may not be able to work, or they're not working because they're getting diminishing returns. But there's, again, there's good empirical evidence, including where people who co-authored the long-run productivity figures that go into the Draghi reports, that show, well, actually, it's sort of a substitution effect where productivity is causing hours to go down, and hours going down is actually increasing productivity. So it's not really, there's no evidence to think that, so first of all, it is real, people do work less, and it's no reason to think that that's somehow a sign of dysfunction

• 32:37Speaker 05

  underlying it. I think I would also just say it's kind of Econ 101. So labor is a disutility, and it's precisely that because leisure time, the value of leisure time is greater than nil. So if you assume those, you're sort of contravening very basic macro principles. I know, what I should say is that there's good reason to suggest that Western Europe is quite, is probably more wealthy than the US in the aggregates, even if it has probably declined relatively over the last six, seven years. And I do think there's robust evidence to show that. But of course, internally, there are huge differences.

• 33:19Speaker 05

  So I think we should care that Europe, in its own terms, has been doing incredibly poorly over the last 10, 15 years, but that's due to policy choices, especially macro policy, which the US does comparatively very well.

• 33:35Speaker 05

  And of course, there are internal differences. We should care that the Italian South is extraordinarily poor and has been declining in absolute terms, even when the entire economy has been stagnating for 20 years, unique in the G7 economies. But we shouldn't care, for instance, that Michigan, in the US, we shouldn't, you wouldn't care that Michigan has been outgrown by California for 20 years, even if Michigan has been doing well and it's been diversifying its economy. And this, I think that is, I think, the main takeaway between when comparing the EU as an aggregate to the US. Like, we have our own problems, but the relative picture shouldn't matter that much, I don't think.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  Like, there's a lot of work to be done, but it needs to actually mean becoming more like the US, which may not be politically amenable to most people here anyway.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful, can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 35:24Speaker 06

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 35:54Speaker 07

  Wise is the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. If you've ever sent money internationally using a traditional bank, there's a good chance you've paid more than you realized. Hidden fees, exchange rate markups, and extra charges can quietly add up before your money even arrives. There's a better way. Try Wise. Wise uses the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google, helping you avoid the unwelcome surprises that often come with international transfers. Whether you're sending money to family overseas, spending while on your holiday abroad, or paying bills across borders, Wise makes moving money simple, transparent, and straightforward. Wise offers 24/7 customer service and runs over 7 million daily checks to spot and stop fraud.

• 36:36Speaker 07

  And most transfers happen in under 20 seconds, which means your money arrives in less time than you've been listening to me. Join millions, saving billions. Be smart. Get wise. Visit wise.com or download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply.

• 36:55Speaker 08

  The world of business is constantly evolving. Every day, new challenges, new opportunities, new ways of working. Comcast Business keeps you totally in step with secure AI-backed networking built to power the way modern business gets things done today in more than 100 countries around the world. That's some serious muscle. And get this, Comcast Business powers over 90% of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. Behind it all, network engineers, cybersecurity specialists, support teams, thousands of experts answering your call at 2 AM like it's 2 PM. Always on, always ready. That's a lot of coffee.

• 37:37Speaker 08

  One partner powering how business gets done for companies of every size all around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business.

• 37:49Tracy Alloway?

  Do political choices or concerns/incentives start to change in our current era, though, such that maybe it was acceptable that Europe didn't have to be on the front line of technological advancements, making its own frontier models, or, you know, making massive productivity gains in the same way as China or the US? But now that there's renewed security concerns in the region, now that we've had years and years of worries about resource allocation and choke points in the global economy, that actually, if you really want to re-industrialize, if you want to build some sort of resource

• 38:30Tracy Alloway?

  security, if you want to build up your defense industry, that actually, economic growth starts to matter and strategic tech development starts to matter in the same way?

• 38:40Speaker 05

  I mean, one thing ahead of, I mean, just to make one other thing clear, economic growth matters. I mean, even advanced countries in the long term.

• 38:47Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I realized as soon as I said that, I shouldn't have said economic growth. But the idea of, I guess, relative gains start to matter more.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  I think they do matter, not necessarily on output, but obviously there are relative shifts in Europe's competitive position that have a consequence for employment and long-term productivity prospects. And, you know, the US is, of course, it has a sectoral advantage in tech and other places, pharma, for instance, but really the EU is, I think, quite stronger in, you know, manufacturing, your merchandise trade. And unlike the US, it's still, it's the biggest economic bloc that's still open to the world economy because there haven't been real tariffs instituted so far.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  And that, I think, opens up the question of how is Europe doing competitively with regard to China? And we talked about AI. People in the Europe-US discussion have sort of shifted the goalposts a few times by saying, well, if I get about PPPs, forget about real growth, then whatever, even if there hasn't been any decline, relatively speaking, so far, Europe is sort of renting the future and will miss out on the big, you know, capital expenditure generating technology of the day, which is AI and these frontier models.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Again, I don't think that the sort of near frontier models are really bad and that they can service most of the needs of European corporates, but I don't think that there is a competitive race specifically in the era, in the area of AI. But I think that in legacy manufacturing sectors and other high-tech manufacturing sectors, there is, of course, and it is still a large part of value added in Europe, particularly in countries like Germany, of course, which is the largest chunk of European GDP and which is currently experiencing, I think it's fair to say, what looks like a disorderly decline in industrial employment.

• 41:03Speaker 05

  So the first China shock, so to say, was positive for Germany, but it was the provider of high-tech manufacturing goods for China and it benefited from Chinese demand more than any other European country. This is now flipped entirely. China has moved up in value chain while remaining in other parts of the manufacturing value chain. I should also mention that IP transfer, legal or otherwise, to China is by far the greatest from Germany. And the fact that the industrial heartland of Central Europe still is declining at this

• 41:43Speaker 05

  rate because it's still exposed to China, and China, I should also mention, is undergoing domestic inflation, particularly export price inflation after the export bubble, after the housing bubble burst. It has intensified this network of subsidies for the manufacturing sector. It's, you know, experiencing its own sort of dislocations domestically, like half of the economy, a third of the labor force works in the big economy. So it's weakening domestically, demand for cars and other manufacturing products is going down or trending down, and it's become quite reliant on export, net exports for annual GDP growth.

• 42:27Speaker 05

  A friend of mine and a friend of the show, I think Brad Setzer, has done great work on sketching out the empirical position here, both in terms of what's going on in China domestically, so that more than half of GDP growth might depend on net exports, and on what the effects in Europe are. And it does seem that, according to my own work, Germany alone has shed over a million jobs in the manufacturing sector since 2021. So since we see that big shift in Chinese industrial policy, of course, it coincides with the energy crisis, and that hits Germany very hard, too, because this is a different discussion, but European energy policy is appalling for many reasons, and it has damaged

• 43:12Speaker 05

  its own prospects quite a bit. But I should say that these employment figures are also actually understating the extent of the shock, because if you look at the chemical industry, you mentioned earlier, Joe, which is one of the crown jewels of the German industrial sector. Among the biggest big five sectors, employment has fallen the least there, even though it's most exposed to both the energy crisis and Chinese trade. I looked into it myself, we don't have a Chinese trade number for volume, they don't

• 43:52Speaker 05

  publish the appropriate price indices, but it seems that trade values for chemical exports have been sharply down in both Germany and China, while trade volumes for chemicals have been sharply up from China and, of course, down from Germany. And it corresponds also to the main export destinations of Germany. So China is exporting more to those destinations, Germany is exporting less to them, whereas Chinese imports from Germany and Europe are sharply down, and exports, too, are sharply up in many other sectors as well. And in that sector, employment has been studied, but only because the labor market is so dysfunctional,

• 44:35Speaker 05

  so because they're labor hoarding, because they can't find qualified employees. So really, it's sort of masking the extent of all of this, and this has led to some really sharp divisions within Europe about how to respond to China and what will happen, especially after the US, I think, actually sought this confrontation with China over trade, and I think quite thoroughly had to concede defeat last year.

• 44:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's talk about, like, okay, I don't know, if you just talk to random trade ministers in Europe today about the global trade picture, maybe the optimal degree of openness, et cetera, what are they saying in September 26th, if, that they, you know, versus what they would have been saying in, say, September 2016? Or maybe, or maybe, maybe we should say September 27th or September 2017, since by that point, Trump had already been the president and sharply sort of changed the global conversation, appalling Europe in many ways. But how have they all become either a little bit more Trumpist?

• 45:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Or who is the guy that wrote Death by China? The economist Peter Navarro? This is the thing that's crazy. So Peter Navarro, years ago, writes Death by China, and in 2016, everyone was like, oh, he's a crank, he can't be anywhere near the White House. And now I feel like everyone is a Navarroist on some level. It feels to me like complete Peter Navarro victory in that there's so much consensus is basically, yes, the sort of his death by China narrative. Maybe they put a little bit more spin on it to make it sound more, more, you know, more professional, but it feels like in both Europe and the US, everyone has become a Navarroist.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think you could actually even say that the fact that this door was opened by Trump and his advisers first, it became politically unpalatable for other people. So the actual evidence of the effects of China, the worsening of China's mercantilist turn in the late 2010s and 2020s, was ignored for a while because it was associated with a different political camp.

• 46:49Joe Weisenthal?

  To put it, yeah, that's one way to put it, yeah.

• 46:53Speaker 05

  I should add that the Europeans are also very much stuck in the past when it comes to thinking about trade. So the US policy sector is much more open to changes and ideas, but in Europe, another friend, and I think also a recent former guest on your show, Adam Tooze, I think put it, the Europeans are the Taliban of neoliberalism, at least with regard to their attitudes towards trade, and that has certainly inflected their position on China, and it's one of the reasons why they took so long in actually doing something about this. A couple of my friends, Brad Setzer, whom you know, of course, and Sunda Tordua, have,

• 47:36Speaker 05

  were, I think, almost single-handedly responsible for pushing that consensus over the last 18 months, at least in Germany and elsewhere, towards getting people to recognize that. This is a problem, by the way. No, you can't hang on, it's too late to hang on to visions of, you know, level playing fields in international trade, you have to do something before this gets out of control. And it has, it is, it has, it's now showing to have real political consequences in Germany electorally with regard to these regional elections, in which the far right is doing very, very well in these elections, and the incumbents are polling very poorly, because

• 48:15Speaker 05

  the far right has been, has managed to frame the issue of industrial decline, not really around China, but around, well, a failure of the incumbents and a failure of, you know, green policies and energy policy, which play a role certainly, but there's evidence to believe that this is mostly driven by the external trade shock at the moment. So people are doing something now. You may not be surprised to know that nothing really has happened, though, despite there being a lot of noise. So the main, the main, the core of the European efforts to counter Chinese trade is the so-called Industrial Accelerator Act, which is proposed earlier this year, it's currently in review,

• 48:58Speaker 05

  and it's, it might be implemented earlier mid next year, that shows you how long the timelines are in Europe as well. It's suffering from internal divisions, so there was the more protectionist camp around France, and the initially more skeptical around Germany, because Germany, obviously, is also, you know, there's a lot of exporter interest in Germany that are opposed to any sort of trade restrictions, plus they're quite conservative around these issues. There are also internal divisions, like the labor unions in Germany also don't disagree on these things. And of course, the problem with European politics, as opposed to the US and particularly China, is that it has this terrible sort of joint decision trap where. Domestically, there are these aggregation problems where you have

• 49:43Speaker 05

  internal coalitions. And of course, at the European intergovernmental level, you have 27 countries that all sort of hate each other, but all have different

• 49:54Speaker 05

  veto powers. And you operate in a situation where you have to have

• 49:59Speaker 05

  sometimes you have to have unanimous voting or qualified majority voting. And eventually, you have a lot of consensus bargaining and you end up with very self-optimal policy outcomes that are often too little, too late. The policy responses are slow, dysfunctional, and even if they produce something, it regresses to the lowest common denominator.

• 50:19Speaker 05

  The that Industrial Accelerator Act is could have teeth in that it has these buy Europe provisions, it has certain provisions on that essentially has formulated only, not in name, but they only really only China clears those hurdles in terms of what exports are like imports are actually allowed. That's there. That's the attempt to actually protect the German and the European auto market in particular. Some people say it doesn't have enough scope. But China, of course, has immediately gone the offensive on this matter, immediately filed a request filed a complaint with the European Commission, very interestingly, actually outlining their own position, saying, our capacity utilization rate domestically is normal for

• 51:01Speaker 05

  economies that are that are still growing and that are not yet adjusting to, you know, being driven by internal demand. So there's sort of a concession that these imbalances domestically in China are real and are seen as a real problem by Chinese authorities. And I do agree with that. And I also think that it's a political economy obstacle for Chinese policymakers to do something about this.

• 51:25Speaker 05

  To sort of lower the temperature a bit, there's a separate mechanism in Europe called the the trade and investment consultation mechanism. It's between the European Trade Chief Chief and the corresponding minister in China. It's supposed to deliver, or was supposed to deliver something now ish. So I think in early October, there's going to be a meeting in Beijing.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  Nothing concrete has come of it, really, apart from some assurances around rare earths, which are quite vague and Europeans have been a bit unhappy about it. And there's some sort of Franco-German thing about monitoring these imbalances. Nothing much has happened. My worry is that

• 52:13Speaker 05

  either the because there's a separate part about the foreign exchange mechanism. So happened that that Rat Setor again, and Shaheen Vele have written about is really a lot of a separate issue is that China, in addition to industrial policy, is also really resisting any appreciation of the yuan. And that is further contributing to the imbalances.

• 52:39Speaker 05

  The Europeans are also slowly thinking about, you know, countering China on on revaluation. My fear is that they're, you know, strategically, their

• 52:53Speaker 05

  their escalation, their willingness to escalate might outrun their ability to actually be resilient to Chinese responses, retaliations to whatever they end up doing. And the Chinese have shown that they're unlike the fairly dysfunctional European process that I just outlined. Their retaliation has been institutionalized, rapid,

• 53:21Speaker 05

  really

• 53:23Speaker 05

  extensive and increasingly comprehensive. So they, for instance, I think in late July,

• 53:31Speaker 05

  the Commission, the Europeans placed a few more Chinese entities on the sanctions list because they were supporting deemed to be supporting the Russian war effort. The day after, the Chinese responded by immediately putting a whole bunch of major European industrial firms on the same, the equivalent entity list that they have. And and we don't have that kind of ability to respond. And and I think a likely scenario is that the EU does something eventually next year that because of these problems in finding decisions, it will be too little

• 54:09Speaker 05

  that the to actually do something about the situation and that the Chinese will respond with some sort of concession.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  Because I think it's clear that because indeed they are dependent on export growth and the EU is a very big market, the only big market open at the moment. But that's a concession will not be, it will not really change the momentum behind the shift in industrial activity, but that the EU will accept it because it can't actually find a consensus at home for anything else than they propose. And that probably will not really change anything about this. And then that's, I think, the best scenario. The worst scenario is a full-blown trade war.

• 54:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Dominic, we could go on for a very long time. I we could talk a lot more about the 27 governments that all hate each other. We could talk about how Eastern Europe and it's the different, probably different perspectives than Central Europe and so forth. But that was fantastic overview. Really appreciate you coming on Odd Lots and let's do it again sometime.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having me, guys. It was a pleasure.

• 55:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I thought that was a really interesting conversation. You don't really get, I thought that, you know, cliche nuance, you know, actual nuance that like, there is a lot of aspects of the conversation that are either misunderstood or something like that. I feel like I actually learned something in that conversation.

• 55:40Tracy Alloway?

  I like the line, the value of my leisure is above zero, because mine certainly is. But once you start framing it that way, then like the set of economic choices that are being made start to look exceedingly different, right?

• 55:53Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I do. I totally think that. And that like, if, right, like, if you actually take that idea seriously,

• 56:00Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Joe Weisenthal?

  then, yes, that's really good. That's sort of the goal. We want to like have high productivity or we want to have wealth so that we can enjoy life. It's kind of crazy how this like

• 56:13Tracy Alloway?

  Otherwise, what are we doing?

• 56:14Joe Weisenthal?

  What are we doing here? What's the point of all this?

• 56:16Tracy Alloway?

  This brings me to a question I've been asking everyone when we were out in LA. And I'm sure, actually, you're going to San Francisco soon.

• 56:25Tracy Alloway?

  What exactly, like, there's, there's going to be this huge wave of money hitting San Francisco, thanks to all these IPOs that are being filed and just like general stock market buoyancy. What is everyone doing with that money? Like, I get that they buy nice houses and maybe a nice car, but other than that, like, what is, what's the consumption?

• 56:44Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it's just like people who are in that are just going to, they're not going to do anything with their money. They're just going to keep like staying up on ChatGPT vibe coding thing until 3 AM or working. No, everyone in this space, they just talk about, oh, I'm working more than ever. It's a, there's some sort of, we need to coin a new paradox or something like that.

• 57:03Tracy Alloway?

  But I do think, one thing I will say is, a lot of this depends on your worldview.

• 57:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Tracy Alloway?

  Like, your very deep, basic worldview. And I think there is, you can argue that, like, okay, Europe has come up with this social welfare system where leisure is valued above zero, all of that, in an era of like absolute trade gains and in an era of neoliberalism. And I must say, only Adam Tooze could get away with.

• 57:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, they used to be the Taliban of neoliberalism. Yeah.

• 57:35Tracy Alloway?

  But now, maybe things are changing and maybe priorities start to change, too. And that, I think, is like an actual, real vulnerability for some of the arguments being made here.

• 57:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally. And I think it's sort of like, it'll be an interesting sort of chapter for the history books.

• 57:54Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 57:54Joe Weisenthal?

  If, if like, okay, there are these industrial giants in Europe that are core to wealth and the ability to have a welfare state, et cetera. And it turns out that they like sort of got obliterated by sort of open trade. And the reason they got obliterated is because everyone refused to recognize the competitive pressure because Donald Trump was the first person to really talk about it. And it was too much to stomach that to be on the same side of a sort of perspective as Donald Trump. And therefore, like, that would be a, you know, that's, that's a good, that's a whole book. It's not just a chapter. It's a whole book.

• 58:32Tracy Alloway?

  Trump was not the first person to talk about it.

• 58:34Joe Weisenthal?

  But I think he really mainstreamed it in a very serious way.

• 58:38Tracy Alloway?

  Sure. He memified it, for sure.

• 58:39Joe Weisenthal?

  For sure. Yeah.

• 58:40Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 58:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 58:42Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 58:48Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest, Dominic Loyster, at New Left Eviews. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Arman, Dashil Bennett, at Dashbot, Cale Brooks at Cale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, check out our newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com/oddlots. And you can chat about all these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 59:14Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we talk about the nuances of Europe's economic decline, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

• 1:00:07Speaker 06

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  If you're a business owner, you need a card that can keep up. With the Delta Sky Miles Reserve Business American Express Card, everyday purchases transform into miles you can use towards future travel. So business as usual can lead to a well-deserved getaway. And for a limited time, card members can earn 200,000 bonus miles, the highest miles offered this year. Whether you're traveling for business or planning your next adventure, now's a great time to make every purchase go further. Apply today at www.delta.com/podcast. Offer ends November 4. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply.

• 1:01:13Speaker 09

  If you listen to financial news, you know, a lot of time is spent thinking about what's next, the next opportunity, the next investment, the next move. But sometimes what matters most is being ready for what you never saw coming. For more than 75 years, Cincinnati Insurance has worked with independent agents to help protect businesses, homes, valuables, and more. Because planning for the future isn't only about knowing what's next, it's about making sure you're ready for what you can't predict. Let Cincinnati Insurance make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at C I N F I N dot com.

• 1:01:50Speaker 08

  For big business, AI opened up a world of promise, but that world of promise turned into a world of pain. Costs spiraling, data trapped, security and governance risks multiplying, and ROI out of reach. That's why enterprises turned to Boomi to connect data, apps, and AI, helping them operate securely, efficiently, and at scale. Boomi turns a world of AI pain into a world of AI gain. As Boomi says, we got you. Head to Boomi.com. That's B O O M I dot com.