♪ carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. jason: i'm jason kelly and we

are here in bloomberg headquarters in new york. carol: stocks up, but us business is having a crisis of confidence and the result could be a recession. jason: the fourth democratic presidential debate but the first since the impeachment inquiry. we will break it down. carol: the online trading commissions are now a thing of the past, but big brokers have a plan to make up that money. jason: here is editor joel weber on what to look for in this double issue. joel: the cover story is all about tesla's autopilot which may be you have heard about it because it is a advanced cruise control that might put tesla on a path towards having self driving vehicles. carol: big ethical questions about how to get there, because you will probably lose lives along the way. joel: that's right. tesla has a rough draft of something it things will become the future. it's on the road right now. when you are driving next to a tesla, the driver could be an autopilot pilot -- in

already. because of that there has been death. the deaths don't look like normal deaths. but there is a bigger ethical question which maybe it is all worth it. jason: moving to china, in the headlines, who is selling what to whom, and you have a resurgent or emergent may be name competing with nike. joel: that's right. you maybe haven't heard of it in the west. one person who has heard of it is clay thompson, with the golden state warriors, who signed two years ago a huge deal with this company. it is so interesting. we can talk about trade war and the nba being the most recent one. one of the things we were talking about is what is a different way we can talk about china and the trade war and the nba? because hereame up is a company that is uniquely chinese, only been around since 1991. cannot business scale i nternally within china and see

it grow internationally? carol: now china really wants to present brands to the world. joel: that's right. this is a homespun brand and doesn't have the same history nike or adidas has. how can you create something from the ground up? carol: what about austin car? you keep sending him to cold places. joel: he is our arctic correspondent. [laughter] joel: he found high-speed internet in alaska. via the northwest passage. not everything is as it seems. it turns out the real entrepreneur and driving force behind the project was good at forging signatures to the tune of $1 billion in contracts. carol: a lot of signatures forged. jason: yes, this is something that is moving ahead, a going concern even though the founder is in jail. joel: she is doing time, but turns out the idea was good and now people are able to get high-speed internet in a place they would not have had it. carol: let's get to d.c. for a

breakdown of the presidential debate in ohio. teague is back with is here to help us understand everything that is going on. great to have you back. a big week for the democrats and notably the first of the democratic presidential debates where the i word took center stage. what did we hear? ryan: the first part of the debate was an in-kind contribution to the impeachment effort. everyone onstage agree donald trump should be impeached. it was interesting that they had slightly different takes. some of them talk ukraine. bernie sanders wrought up a mall -- emolument.

they all have strong feelings. tom steyer and elizabeth warren, people pushing for it the longest, should have benefited more but did not appear to. carol: they spent a lot of time talking about impeachment. i also feel it is a big shift from september. everyone is going after elizabeth warren. ryan: if you did not think she was the front runner, according to the polls, you definitely thought she was in terms of how how many people -- how many people threw haymakers at her. they came out swinging against her proposals, questioned her directly. she got into a back and forth biden, andieg, others. there were people attacking biden and even defending biden. cory booker saying his son had done nothing wrong. jason: so, ryan, what do we think happens next in terms of the winnowing of the field or at least clarity about what the front pack looks like? ryan: you know, this race will essentially be frozen for a

little while, while the impeachment thing plays out. it is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. it is hard for the candidates to unveil anything new or get new policy or whatever. that could benefit those of them who like going door to door and doing the grassroots stuff in states like iowa where that helps, but the national conversation now is completely distracted. jason: coming up, it could be the worst thing the u.s. economy have to fear is fear itself. something we have heard about from the likes of the biggest bank ceo's. carol: we will look at the risks of a recession that is like no other. and, if you thought the bank of japan pulled out all of the stops on stimulus, it is taking a stab at pushing up on business yields. that's right. jason: this is bloomberg businessweek. ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i am jason kelly. carol: join us every day on the radio at 2:00 wall street time. you can catch up on our daily show by checking out our podcast and you can find us on bloomberg.com. jason: you can find us online at businessweek.com and the mobile app. carol: to the economics section, the question of recession. when will it arrive and how bad will it be? jason: there are signs this long expansion may be starting to lose steam. economists are not seeing the fundamental indicators that predict the downturn. carol: instead, it seems to be all about sentiment. we spoke to our editor about what makes this different. >> usually, from history, we know they are triggered by a spike in inflation, followed spike in interest rates as the fed intervenes, and that

causes an unwinding of either economic successes or financial excesses. this time inflation is low, the fed is cutting, and we don't see any bubbles. stock prices don't seem to be out of sync considering rates are still low. so what is going on? why is there so much talk about recession? as we joked around this week, we said it is geopolitics, stupid. it is an external shock that is self-induced because we started this trade war, but it is causing uncertainty that businesses are not investing, not spending on new capacity because they are afraid supply chains will start unwinding. carol: and, lower interest rates by the federal reserve. they are already low, but lowering them will not necessarily give businesses confidence. christina: it doesn't change the outlook.

it weaken the dollar but it doesn't materially change what we call the fog of the trade war. jason: we talked so much about the strength of the consumer amid all of this. there is this notion that, at some point, businesses curtail spending, they curtail hiring. people start to get more worried about their jobs or promotions or bonuses or raises. but, we don't see any signs of that yet. how is the consumer looking? christina: the consumer is feeling good, because they were late to harvest the fruits of this tenure expansion. -- 10-year expansion. companies and investors felt it first. wage growth has been picking up in the recent year. hiring, even though there has been a little bit of wobble, it been a high, sustained

pace. we don't see yet the consumer has lost their nerve. that is going to be one of the things people are looking at. hiring and how companies -- because the feeling is that, at some point, the trade war may cause companies to start dialing back on hiring. carol: we have more on sizing up the recession risk. what are we seeing? >> the chart that shows us where we stand, looking at the bloomberg economics recession indicator. it shows the probability of a downturn in the next 12 months. relative to last year, we are slightly elevated, but if we take it back and look at a historical basis, specifically the great recession of 2007, the odds are lower. what this tells us, risks may be higher, but at the end of the day, it is not time to fully panic. jason: it is stark when you look back at the previous recessions, the spike was more pronounced leading into it.

thank you so much. when you are worried about unconventional concession, you wonder if conventional monetary policy can do anything to stop it. carol: the bank of japan has tried everything to get their economy moving and they are not done tinkering. we hear from editor christina bad -- cristina lind blad. it is desperate innovation, because it is like by necessity they are leading the world into this new area and trying to basically nudge up growth. this is a country that brought us negative interest rates and qe, quantitative easing. now they are doing something which could be a possible. -- be impossible. carol: don't tell us that yet. tell us how long japan has been and why they are the negative poster rate child. they have been doing this a long

time. cristina: they tried sending rates negative. when they did not succeed, they did qe in 2001. way ahead of everybody else. jason: remind us, also, because it is important, the economic backdrop for japan, because when we think back, you go back to the early 1990's, late 1980's, this was an economic behemoth americans were terrified of in many ways. the intervening couple decades have been ugly -- had been ugly economically. cristina: there was a big property bubble, asset bubble, and then deflation set in. they have been fighting deflation. not just deflation, but the country is aging rapidly. growth has downshifted in a permanent way. they have been trying to kind of sort of juice the economy by any means possible and they have

succeeded. they used to be this pattern of falling into recession every other year. this latest attempt, basically, is designed to attack a problem that is basically twofold. one, it is confidence, confidence of consumer and business. the issue is yields, on long-term bonds, have fallen to a level where it basically -- the message that it gives to the markets, to consumers, is that, out of the long-term, we still don't see any inflation, we don't see much growth, so bank of japan wants to nudge up long-term yields also for another reason. there are 40 million pensioners in japan. that number is only going to keep growing. those people are being utilized in their savings by the low yields. the question is, how can you

nudge up yields on long-term maturities while, at the same time, telling the markets that you are in a stimulus position and want to keep short-term rates low? so, it is -- carol: it is an experiment. cristina: it is, but some people believe it cannot be done, because -- the thing is, the boj has said they are willing to even stop buying certain kinds of bonds with maturity of 20 years and over. the feeling as though, when they do that, other actors may step into the market to buy. then, basically, they will be foiling their attempts to have prices go down and yields go up. carol: the concern is that by keeping long-term rates so low, the signal it sends to the world at large and the folks in their economy is that the outlook is not great, so they tend to be savers rather than spenders,

which you can't jumpstart the economy then. cristina: if it is flat on its back for that long, you got to think is my retirement safe? i shouldn't be spending. carol: everybody is watching. this low rate or negative rates world in places they never thought would happen. u.s. has quite not gotten there yet. but how do we come -- but we wonder how we come out of this ti negative r lorates and what is the outcome? we are all watching japan. cristina: we all used to be afraid of japan as a competitor. now, we are afraid we will become japan. jason: coming up, trading commissions are dead, but e-trad ers will live on. carol: diversity and investment banking, there is an algorithm for that. jason: this is bloomberg businessweek. ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i am jason kelly. carol: and i'm carol massar. you can listen to us on the radio, sirius xm channel 119 and a.m. 1130 in new york, 1061 in boston, washington, dc. jason: and in london, on dab digital, and the bloomberg business app. a big shakeup in the world of online stock trading. commissions are at the largest brokerage houses, going to zero. carol: that is a big hit to revenue, but these companies have other ways to make money. here's mike regan. mike: it has been trending towards zero. when you think back to the 70's it cost $200 to trade a stock. it is mind-boggling today.

schwab came in -- there was regulation change in the 1970's which ended this fixed price commissions and allowed brokerages to set their own commissions. schwab said i am going to cut mine. i will cut that she said i will cut mine to $70, and the discount brokerage era was born. computers took over in the 90's, and it chiseled away at the fees. it was like $13 to trade on schwab in 2005. less than five dollars recently. new startups were coming in. robin hood allowed investors to trade for free. some brokerages started allowing certain etf's to trade for free, so it was clear this pressure was building. to me, the interesting thing, if you are a customer of one of these firms, the important thing to ask is, how are they making money if they are not charging me a commission? that is what we get in to in the

story. carol: we definitely saw stock prices go down, so we thought how are they making money? , they have other ways. mike: don't worry about them. the sort of line we use in the story, if you don't know how company is making money, chances are you are the product. it is what is true of facebook and google, free services but it is you, your eyeballs, and your personal data that is valuable to the companies. for schwab, for one of the most -- and for all of the discount brokerages -- one of the most important ways they make money is on the cash you currently do not have invested. jason: they make money with your money. mike: they make money with your spare money, the dry powder as they call it on wall street. schwab has $3.7 trillion in client assets on its platform. as of august, that is. $265 billion is cash. it is not invested in the markets. a small chunk of a huge pie that allows schwab to invest it

out and make money off of that idle cash. interestdo pay clients on that cash, but it is relatively low. as much as half of 1% -- .5% on big balances and 0.1%. yields are low. you can make better return on your cash elsewhere in money market funds, traditional bank deposit accounts, but it is not convenient for a trader. people will keep some amount of cash in there in case they see a stocking want to buy. schwab is happy to take it and reinvest it. and, there is other ways they make money. carol: they make loans to folks that want to do traits, too? is that part of -- mike: marginal lending. if you want to lever up, there is services like that. you want to short a stock, they will loan you the securities and charge you a percentage on that.

one of the interesting ways these companies make money and it has been controversial in the industry, it is called payment for order flow. if you or i place orders to buy and sell certain stocks, there are companies like citadel, virtue financial, electronic market makers call them -- a few years ago, they would be referred to as high-frequency traders. they will buy up to order flow from these companies and match it internally. they don't even take it to the stock market. say, jason, you want to buy a for $10, and carol is selling it for $9.99, and they will internalize that and make a cent per share. if you do it enough, the pennies add up. jason: that is one example of the evolving relationship between technology and finance. carol: jason, there is another

fascinating tech story this week. as bangs try to do better on dni, they are turning to ai. erik schatzker joined us to explain. erik: it is about time someone brought artificial intelligence to the recruiting process, because this industry, for all of its efforts to become more diverse and inclusive, is still dominated by white men who are typically elite college educated. that is going to need to change. it needs to not just because of changing times, but because these firms, like so many other companies, recognize the bigger your talent pool, the better the quality of your recruiting, and, ultimately, the better your employees. we are talking of investment bankers, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring.

companies worldwide applies to -- the same logic, as i say, it applies to companies worldwide applies to wall street. the challenge is volume. it is difficult to fan out across hundreds of universities in the united states and open up the recruiting process to the degree that it can capture everybody, unless you put technology to work. that's what this tool is designed to do. it is a screening process that surfaces candidates, regardless of skin color, background, or of skin color, background, or any other trait that might sway a campus recruiter. carol: tell us about the algorithm. you said it takes out any kind of color, ethnic background, sex. erik: unconscious bias is the word used in the recruiting industry, because, if you sit down with someone, you might find that person appealing for reasons other than qualifications. that person may sound like you. that person may enjoy some of

the things you enjoy. that person may have played lacrosse. if you played lacrosse, you might be more inclined to want to hire that person, work with that person, but that person may not have all of the right attributes to become a top-performing banker. he or she might be appealing to you as a human being. and, that is not a good way to recruit. so, you bring artificial intelligence into the process by designing a model. the model is built using the characteristics of the top-performing employees at each firm, having candidates fill out comprehensive profiles, and then running the profiles against the models. that is the algorithm in action .nd it spits out a score the higher the score, the better the fit the candidate is for that individual firm. the models vary by firm. not every firm is looking for the same things or values the same things.

and, not all bankers, at one firm, do the same things as bankers at another firm. you need to customize it to make it effective. jason: tesla is on the cover and it is all about whether regulators should be steering their effort to test autonomous cars. carol: plus, bringing high-speed internet to the arctic sounds like a good idea, but, in the hands of one entrepreneur, it became a scam. jason: this is bloomberg businessweek. ♪

carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." jason:

still ahead, while china battles with the nba, a chinese sportswear company is getting set to take on nike. very timely. carol: plus, for those who like to ski and luxury, pursuits looks at the hottest hotels and coldest -- in the coldest places. jason: tesla wants to be the first company to put an autonomous car on the market, and they have been putting their self-driving software, called autopilot, into their cars since 2015. technologyrimental is getting -- >> you would think it would be relatively easy to tell because there is so many miles they have already got under their belt, and tesla has such good data about what all these cars are doing, it is constantly talking to these cars. actually, it is a mystery to outsiders exactly how dangerous

this technology is. regulators have basically, up until now, not taken any action. they open a defect investigation that closed without ordering a recall or forcing tesla to make changes. but, it is actually quite hard to figure out how safe these cars are. cases,d of positive tesla says humans are always supervising these cars, so you have all of the safety of a human driver, it is just the car is doing things to help you, almost like and select brakes or something. it is just an additive safety feature. but, the skeptical case says, when you take so much responsibility away from the into a they get lulled sense of complacency and get distracted. it is difficult to pay attention

to supervising a system that appears to be working perfectly well on its own. and this is a problem airlines have had for a long time, autopilots on airplanes is so good they sometimes get distracted. the pilots zone out. jason: you mentioned regulators. what's the issue with regulators? have they not caught up to where the technology is? , essentially,ully comprehend where to go next? what happens with them? zach: this is a different issue that federal call regulators are used to. straightforward problem for them is, you know, company makes tires and the tires fail, people get in accidents. something you can identify on a test track, right? brakes don't work, steering

doesn't work, something like that. that is a straightforward problem regulators are welcome to handle. ans is a little more like experiment to pharmaceutical. there is potential life-saving opportunity, but it also might have deadly side effects. you have to weigh those things. it's hard to know that on a test track. you have to put it out into the real world to find out how it is going to react when another car does something weird. carol: i love the parallel you make that we have a model for this industry for the self-driving vehicle industry, and that is the drug industry because they do go through various phases of testing, and they test ultimately on people to see if it works. sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, right? zach: right. there are people who are following the autonomous car industry saying you need to equip regulators to act like the fda does, and have a series of phase tests overseen by some of

the outside of the company. someone who can say, is this safe enough we are willing to test it on the road, and isn't safe enough that we are willing to move it outside of this one jurisdiction to a broader jurisdiction, and in every step of the way, make sure peoples'safety isn't being too compromised and you are getting the data that will lead to the right conclusions. right now, it is not clear regulators really know any better than we do how safe autopilot is. carol: more from the featured section and a story that might send a shiver down your spine. jason: it's about a project to bring high-speed internet to alaska. the northwest passage, by way of cables underneath the arctic sea. it would have turned an entrepreneurial fantasy into reality, except for one catch, it was a gigantic fraud. carol: reporter austin carr

takes up the tail. >> the vast majority of the internet, anything you are streaming, it all goes underwater from different servers around the planet, so all of these massive companies like google, facebook, amazon spend billions building undersea fiber-optic cables that connect asia to the americas, to europe. that is how all of the data gets around the planet. they also all go along similar past through the atlantic and pacific, places easier to construct. this company called quintilian came up with the idea to build through the arctic, through the northwest passage, because that is a 4300 mile route shorter than other routes around the planet. that would speed up web speeds faster than what you see from traditional routes. quite an do this is audacious goal and do usually with a entrepreneur big vision. there was one, but it is a complicated story. austin: elizabeth pierce is an unlikely founder for a company.

she had a background in telecom companies but was working hr, not necessarily someone who had executive experience or done startups before. she saw this opportunity and went after it. if there's one thing i talked to about three does ardent people for the story you know her, they say she -- dozen people for the story that know her, they say she was working so much she was getting sick. at the same time, it doesn't take just the tenacious unspent newer, it takes possibly hundreds of billions of dollars andonnect this to asia others. that is not what she had. she had to raise $270 billion just to build the alaska segment of the cable alone, and that is where the story begins. carol: but she did get the money, how? austin: [laughter] through forgedey contracts, you could say. basically, what happened, for a couple of years, she was staking

her career on this and wanted to build this network, but cannot find the funding. they partnered with larger companies, had sought funding from smaller alaska telecoms, but never enough that would reach a major capital of hundreds of millions of dollars. at the same time, a new york investor comes along, cooper investment partners, backed by ukrainian oligarch -- a ukrainian oligarch, run by stephen cooper, the ceo of warner music group. suddenly, they are taken by elizabeth. she starts showing them contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, $600 million, and aggregate of one billion plus -- $1 billion plus of revenue. jason: it feels like a good old fashion scam. she was forging signatures, and then faxing in these contracts saying we won the deal, amazing. austin: and this went on for several years where nobody had any idea.

this was a small team in alaska, but the employees at quintilian did not know what was going on. she was the only one talking to investors. she would keep her doctor -- documents in a private cabinet. she used her personal google drive to share all of these contracts with their investors, and nobody else had the password. carol: i think about the big or wider internet telecom industry watching this happening, and i'm wondering if there was a lot of scrutiny about what she was doing from the outside. austin: that's the most insane part of this. if you look at the different communities that they were serving in alaska, a place i went to, this is a tiny place, basically two to three restaurants, one is called arctic pizza, and it is very expensive. carol: [laughter] time, theythe same somehow convinced these investors there was tens of millions of dollars from these tiny native communities that

would be poured back into the network before it is build out to the larger asian network pipeline. jason: this is still a company that exists, has a new ceo, a guy with a military background, i believe. a pretty serious individual. austin: once the fbi got involved, they are arrested -- they arrested elizabeth pierce. to cover her tracks. when they log on to see where the contracts were, it said elizabeth peers has deleted 78 files, which is a bad paper trail. after she went away, they did bring aboard this ceo, a former army vet, a seasoned telecom executive, who i got to spend time with, and i was impressed. for as many difficulties they had to deal with, he came aboard days after she resigned from the company, and was later arrested, and he had to complete the fiber-optic network in alaska, which took a ton of ships, and

all of that slaying of the cable underground. then, get all of their customers back. say i know this is comfortably uncomfortable, but please believe in this network. it does work. and it does work. i got to use it in anchorage and talked to a lot of customers there. say what you will, but elizabeth pierce built to this thing despite all of her fraud. this has started to service customers, 10,000 in alaska, which previously couldn't stream things like game of thrones. carol: and she's in jail? austin: september 30, she pled guilty to eight counts of andavated identity theft one count of wire fraud. she did go to jail, but she argued in court that i'm not an evil manipulator and that those who handled the case made me out to be some sort of greedy person. she just really argues she was not. she got caught up in something, and was really advocating this network in alaska, her home

state, and it didn't go the way she wanted it to. carol: still ahead, the apparel company aiming to be china's global -- first global mega brand. jason: plus, the places you can lodge in luxury. this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

jason: welcome back. i'm jason kelly. carol: and i'm carol massar. join us for bloomberg businessweek every day on the radio. you can also catch up on the daily show by listening to our podcasts. jason: and, find us online at is businessweek.com. carol: recently, beijing's skirmish with the nba, wiley calls -- well it caused a cold war of sorts. jason: one of those that dropped its sponsorship with the league

was a sports company. they predict they will be china's first global consumer mega company. here is a look at the nike of china. >> this is the biggest brand you have never heard of. 15% shares has a of the $43 billion china market. byir goal, be number one 2025. it is also raising its profile outside of china. thompson $80g clay million over 10 years to endorse its products. the latest version of his signature stinker for the brand comes out this month. anta is combining growth within china with acquisitions overseas. it's been $5.2 billion to buy finland's honor sports, which owns rands like solomon and wilson. it also has a licensing deal to sell sneakers and sportswear from fila. all of this as up. anta's revenue sort 80% over the last 2.5 years, hoping to get

another boost when the olympics come to beijing in 2022. the trade war may help. mainland shoppers could ditch their nikes for a company being called the nike of china. weon: staying with sports, turn to track bicycles. started by his debt and a partner, they created their own brand of bikes sold around the world. jason: we caught up with the son of one of the founders, now the president of track, and we talk about his business, fitness world, and importance of quality. equality is an important issue at track, and when you take a look at it, we are involved in a sport and involved in running a business. we want to make sure we provide businesses -- opportunities for everyone, regardless of color and gender. we want to put the best team on the field, and we are serious about that. ,hen you take a look at sport we are sponsoring a women's cycling team and we are taking

our -- the portion we control and saying, hey, we will make sure they are on an equal level and be aiming example for everyone else. we hosted a world cup cycle race and it is equal prize money. first cycling event ever to have equal prize money. we made a big deal out of it, and other races, all of a sudden, are changing. people are seeing what we are doing and making changes. jason: i have to think this has to be at least partially an element of enlightened self-interest. you want to sell bikes to women as well. carol: it's great you're doing it, but what is your demographics in terms of what you sell? john: it's a lot of men, but there is a huge potential market with women. carol: right. john: women in the sport love being in the sport, and there are more and more women who should ride bikes and trek -- there is definitely self-interest year.

guilty. carol: but that's ok. jason: when you start to synthesize this again with going back to the megatrends around fitness, boutique fitness, thinking about everything we have seen, success of even like lululemon, this is women driven. the market is massive. i have to think -- and this is not a criticism, just smart business in a lot of ways. john: one of my favorite charts is the running business. if you take a look at running, back to 1980, it was something like marathoners, 95% men and 5% women. taking a look at the running business explode over the last 25 years, it is all women. today, there are more women that finished marathons than men. it went from 5% to 55%. i believe that could happen in cycling, so there is a moral issue here, and a business opportunity. carol: in keeping with that on bloomberg, we like to hear about

opportunities. where is your biggest growth market? you do sell around the world. john: we sell around the world. i have worked at trek for over 35 years and have never seen the amount of opportunities that trek has today. almost everywhere. we have so many great things going on as a business. the european business is almost three times bigger than the u.s. business. the market share in the u.s. for premium bikes is in the high 20's, and market share in europe is around six. our business in europe is growing like a weed. we have a lot of opportunities in europe. if you go to asia, massive opportunities in asia. if you take a look at electric bikes, it is booming all over the world. carol: what about the trade war's we are seeing? you do also manufacture around the world, right? is that impacting you? john: yeah. we manufacture high-end bikes in the u.s.. we have a large manufacturing facility in germany, which

supplies the european market, but we produce a bunch of bikes in china, both for all over the world and also the u.s.. we are a global company that has a global supply chain, so yeah, the tariff has had a huge impact on trek. jason: next, the best ski goggles money can buy. carol: and the swanky is places in the world to stay after you hit the slopes. jason: it is all about skiing. winter is coming. this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." jason: you can also listen to us on the radio, sirius xm, channel , 91 -- 99 point fm . carol: we turn now to this

week's pursuit section that will set you up in style for the ski season. jason: an editor told us about icy hot resort hotels. 100e went through probably different openings around the world, and a lot of times, you think about a fashionable resort. the hotel can often make the mountain. carol: right. james: we found four destinations that were constantly in the conversation. japan is one that has been coming up consistently ranked the best snow in asia. there are a lot of new developments around this area. there is a 100-room park hyatt going up in january. it is a newly developed area. places wee of the have focused on. carol: it looks like it has great views, too, right? thes: there's a mountain in

distance, it is very minimalist. there is also a 5000 square-foot ski valley in the lobby. [laughter] carol: you ski pretty regularly, right? james: occasionally. jason: i do, yeah. carol: but ski in and ski out as a plus, right? jason: it's a huge plus. in this piece, you talk about a place well known to most skiers, the little nell in aspen, arguably one of the most famous ski hotels. it is the only hotel in aspen that is ski in and ski out. they have done a total remake. james: 30th anniversary. they have renovated their rooms, done the restaurant sort of like the restaurant famous for its wine list at element 47, but you know aspen is almost as famous for its social scene as much as it is for the skiing. carol: right. james: the big opening this year is the w.

the only all season, year-round, public rooftop. carol: it looks like a w. you know what i mean? james: if you've been there, you kind of know what to expect. it has a rooftop, views of the mountain in the distance. carol: heated pool, hot tub. james: jacuzzis, cabana, a dj booth, and a dance floor. jason: there's a little part of me that even reacts to the idea of a w in aspen. carol: going mainstream or what? jason: going a little more like -- carol: commercial. jason: in the sense where it is like techno. carol: got it. jason: but that is not the vibe of -- jason: but that is not the vibe of aspen. james: we talked to a couple people in aspen, and the w opened in august, and the people who live and work in the industry say it has already

been adopted. carol: and you need goggles. james: yes. this is called the one, and ski goggles are so subjective, it is really personal. lenses,refer mirrored cylindrical shape, frameless shape? some of it comes back to basic things. do you our glasses? how big is your head? [laughter] carol: were not going to comment. james: i'm not pointing fingers. carol: [laughter] jason: you looked directly at me when you said that. carol: did i? jason: both of you did. not nice. [laughter] found ist, what we this bureau contact goggles. they are pretty that shape it equal company and they started as a bike manufacturer. carol: they look amazing. you can flip out the lenses? james: they are interchangeable

lenses, so that is one thing since fogging is such a big issue on slopes. people like to swap them out, or depending on the weather conditions changing. we like this one because there's a little button you push here and they pop out easily, but they also have magnets inside of them so they pop right back in. carol: that's nice. james: they come with two different lenses, one is infrared and another is dual, all-purpose lens. jason: bloomberg businessweek is available on used and now. carol: and also online at businessweek.com. taking a look at building, we didn't connect to everybody around the world, in terms of internet, northwest passage, digging under the ice to lay a cable to connect the world, not so easy. fraud thrown in, and it is an interesting story, but we were making progress. jason: it was a scam that has turned out to be successful, obviously under different management because that

entrepreneur is in jail. carol: your must-read? jason: i like the story about a nta -- anta in china, so timely with the kerfuffle between the nba, players weighing in, coaches, adam silver. here you have this company coming along that may be set to take advantage of the turmoil? carol: one of the global brands trying to stick out its position in the world. jason: check out the daily businessweek podcast available on apple podcast, soundcloud, bloomberg.com, wherever you get your broadcast. carol: more bloomberg television starts next. ♪ here, it all starts with a simple...

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