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tv   Maria Bartiromos Wall Street  FOX Business  October 19, 2019 9:00am-9:31am EDT

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too fuzzy and out of focus. i'm jamie colby. thanks so much for watching "strange inheritance." and remember -- you can't take it with you. [ gunfire ] xtraordinary. madison, great to see you, have a great weekend. appreciate it. before we go, a quick programming note, you can catch me every weeknight at 5 p.m. eastern time hosting my own show, it's called bulls and bears right here on fox business. have a great weekend, everybody. here's maria bartiromo. ♪ ♪ >> from the fox studios in new york city, this is maria bartiromo's "wall street." maria: happy weekend, everybody. welcome to the program that analyzes the week that was and helps position you for the week ahead. coming up in just a few moments, my exclusive interview with a media giant. >> match is a cash flow machine. its cash flow is huge, 800 million on 3 billion or something which is really extraordinarily high margins. so we would not cause indebtedness at match to be beyond any kind of rational threshold.
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it would be crazy for us to do so. maria: the chairman of iac and expedia, barry diller is here. we're getting into streaming and a lot of media questions for barry diller coming up. but first, joining me to discuss the week that was and to look ahead saratoga ceo, chris overbeck, thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you. maria: you've had an increase in assets under management, your best year ever? >> best quarter ever. maria: congrats on that. what drove that? >> it was just a combination of things, you know, good credit performance, we had some equity gains in our portfolio and a lot of originations, raised a lot of equity in the stock market, so everything's in a good, healthy position x we're well positioned. we can grow our assets by another 50%. maria: and, chris, we've got a couple of items that are, obviously, going to be important to that and to investors or this week and looking at the next week. brexit is one where boris john
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sonthis he's got a great -- johnson thinks he's got a great deal. >> if it goes through, i think it might because there's, obviously, been a lot of turmoil, and there's a lot of momentum in the status quo over there. but if you can get a resolution here and people can get back to work and start moving to the next reality, you know, i think that'd be ad good signal for the world. maybe it'll impact some of the trade deals that are held up, and if everybody decides let's settle up and move on, i think it would be very positive. but, you know, as a business person, i think it would get done. as politics, we don't know. maria: yeah. and then there's china, and then there's usmca and, of course, a federal reserve meeting in about two weeks. are you expecting the fed to cut rates? what's the impact there? >> well, i think the fed has a difficult decision because there's no inflation, so there's no real reason to worry about inflation and raising rates. there's been a manufacturing contraction for our third month in a row, manufacturing
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contraction. railroad traffic is down. so a lot of symbols, signals there. just this month consumer sentiment -- consumer spending's down a little bit. a lot of that's auto, so we still have a lot of momentum in the economy, but there's a lot of straws in the wind, if you will. maria: yeah. a lot of uncertainty that causes managers to sit on cash. >> exactly. and so, you know, the old adage an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so maybe a cut at this time might preempt what could be bigger problems down the road. maria: do you think a china deal, the one that we've heard about in the last week, that it is going to stick? that they will sign it? and what's the impact there? nobody really knows, but the president said he is expecting shi slip ping and himself to sign a deal at apec which is just in about a month. >> well, you know, it's -- the broader context of the deal, right, if you're china, you're saying am i going to wait out until the next election and see if i get someone other than
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donald trump to negotiate with and maybe get a better deal, how much pain am i going to get between now and then, or does it make sense to make a deal? the whole world is pretty much lined up that china needs to adjust its relationship with everyone and, hopefully, yeah, they come to terms with that. china's got a tremendous economy, and if they reach a regular weight deal, they still can be -- maria: you make a good point, because it's how much pain can you take. this week we got news from china that the gdp came in up 6%, they told us, but it was weaker than expected. does that hit the u.s. economy as well? >> well, the u.s. economy has the benefit of being largely consumer, as long as the consumer's employed and confident, you know, we can kind of ride a little better maybe. they're more of an export-driven economy, so, you know, they're trying to be more consumer, but they're very export-driven. i think there's a lot of pain there the, but they can take pain better than we can, and they don't have an election coming up. maria: you've got to about a billion dollars under management, how do you allocate
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capital in this environment where you do have all these uncertainties? >> most of our assets are in senior secureed credit, so we're focusing on secular growing businesses mostly in the united states. the united states economy's good, and there's a lot of innovation going on, a lot of growth companies, smaller, middle-market companies. even if we had a recession, they would still be growing. there's lots of improvements -- maria: where is the growth, chris? what would you say are sort of the growth areas of in this economy right now in terms of where you're allocating capital? >> let's take education. there's a tremendous amount of improvement in the software underpinnings of education, you know, in terms of, you know, using a computer, using e-mail, using, you know, sort of package solutions to curriculums in schools. that's rolling out. colleges are seeking to get a broader use of the intellectual property they've developed, and a lot of their alumni are taking
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correspondent courses and things like that -- maria: and you're finding companies that are doing that? >> oh, yeah. and they're growing tremendously, and it's a great revenue opportunity for the -- maria: great to have you on the show. chris oberbeck. don't go anywhere, my exclusive interview with media legend barry diller is up next. >> facebook dives into the world of online dating. can they compete with match? >> it's our business. for them it's a little side business. >> barry diller gives his take to maria when "wall street" returns. ♪ ♪ 2,000 fence posts. 900 acres. 48 bales. all before lunch, which we caught last saturday. we earn our scars. we wear our work ethic.
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plenty of fish, iac owns 80% of the match group. i spoke with barry diller, the chairman, about his plans. >> iac historically has been kind of an anti-conglomerate. in other words, it builds up businesses, and then it spins those businesses out so that they can be independent. so rather than a holding company like berkshire or someplace else, we basically either buy, build, invent, whatever businesses. when they get to a sufficient size where they, in a sense, deserve independence, we spin them out so that they can go on with their own independent life and not be part of some big mega-company, which is not a healthy way -- except if you're the genius of warren buffett -- to manage anything. or at least i don't think it's a good way to manage something. maria: you've done it with ticketmaster, expedia, etc.
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9. >> yes, yes. maria: have you gotten any sense of what the shareholders say, the minority shareholders, the board? what kind of response have you gotten? >> well, what they -- in a situation like this, the match, which is right now a public company, we own 83 or 4% of it, but match has its own board. they will hire -- not hire, they have, they've made a special committee of the independent directors, the other directors at match are all iac. so those independent directors have now hire advisors, and -- hire advisors, and they will negotiate with iac on the terms of the separation of the shipoff. spin-off. and that's a normal process we've gone through the many times. we have made them a proposal, which i think, yes, we filed it the other day. so we formally made them a proposal. now discussions will start, and within months they will be on their own. maria: is there any reason to
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believe this is a worry here about the leverage being take on in terms of increasing debt levels? is there any reason to expect that the board, the independent board, the special committee, will push back on that? >> i think they might. i think there always is pushback in these things. but the truth is we would not add debt to match if match was not very, very capable. match is a cash flow machine. its cash flow is huge, $800 million on $3 billion or something which is really extraordinarily high margins. so we would not cause indebtedness at match to be beyond any kind of rational threshold. it would be crazier for us to do so. we're all going to be shareholders of match. and so while these things end up being negotiated, and of course that'll be an issue, but it'll get solved. maria: what about the growth
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story of match now? >> ridiculous. maria: yeah, okay. it's still in a ridiculous phase in terms of growth? >> it's just quite amazing. this tinder, you know, when we started it -- and this was something rarely in a large company do you birth something from the ground, and this was actually started here, i think in this building. and that it would grow to be basically worth probably close to 18, 17, 18, 19 billion on its own and at various points i thought, well, this is gonna -- it's had such a skyrocket, eventually, you know, they don't necessarily fall to earth, but they do lose their trajectory. match keeps going -- i mean, tinder keeps going. maria: one of the reasons that facebook came out recently and said we're going to double down our efforts on online dating. >> good for them. maria: is that going to be competition? >> well, you never know. competition could come from any
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place. i've never been -- when facebook announced, you know, the markets are so reactionary, facebook announces they're going to do this at some point -- maria: match trades down. >> match traded down i think 15 or 20%. it's kind of climbed back up. then facebook announced it's coming to the u.s., it then takes another hit. the truth is we have not yet seen competition from facebook. and i thought, as i thought at the beginning, it's our business. for them it's a little side business. and history has shown, there are exceptions, that if it's your main thing you do, you tend to do what others -- you tend to do it better than others who are, so to speak, dabbling. and also i don't think that's facebook's main purpose. maria: how would you characterize the backdrop in terms of housing and the consumer right now? >> well, i think it's good. you know? i mean, you know, things -- we are so reactionary today, you know, as i talk about some of
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these things where the market just drops your stock because of this or that instantly and then builds it back up over a period of time because they say, oh, i guess we weren't right about that. or conversely the other way. so weaver in a really reactionary -- we're in a really reactionary period about many, many things. the economy though, the base economy is so strong in this country. i mean, in every area. and will we have a recession? of course we will. we've always had. but short of some cardiology misevent, i'm very optimistic. maria: so you're at a 51-year low in unemployment right now. it's about jobs, right? >> yes. and look, the truth is -- and i think it is an issue about income inequality -- i think the only solution to income inequality, i don't, i do not think it's in taxes. although i think we probably should have revision in the tax code, for sure, like any other bird brain. but it really is in wages.
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workers need to be paid more. maria: stay with us, more of my one on one with media legend barry diller. ♪ >> the streaming wars heat up. can amazon and disney dethrone netflix? >> will they ever get to netflix's size? i can't imagine it. >> more of maria's one-on-one with barry diller when "wall street" returns. i am totally blind. and non-24 can make me show up too early... or too late. or make me feel like i'm not really "there."
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instance, what disney is doing is not sound for disney. and they're doing it, and i have great admiration for bob iger because he made a determination that he had to have direct engagement with the consumer, and the only way to do that is through streaming. so it's not like he put his little toe in the water. he put both feet, both legs and the whole body in the water, and he's going for this completely. and disney has such appealing content that i think they'll do well. will they ever get to netflix's size? i can't imagine it. it seems incomprehensible to me that that will happen. maria: even though they've got marvel, lucas, pixar -- >> that's okay. so what in i'm not saying they're not going to get subscribers, but they're not going to get to the level of netflix worldwide. netflix has been in this -- look, it is, when you think of
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it, it's such a radical miracle that six years ago they invested in what was thought to be an obscene amount of money in a single program called "house of cards. " okay? six years ago. they put down $150 million for -- which no one at that time could even conceive of. but their guts and really the extraordinary thing -- this company, not very well capitalized, but starts in the streaming business and then makes such big bets that they change the entire entertainment business and change the hundred-years-old hegemony of these, you know, major entertainment companies. so that they've done this, and then they said right away we're going worldwide. so they planted their little flags in every place in the world years ago. maria: so do they have to spend
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$13 billion in a year to keep up? >> they have to spend it for a while, for sure. it's all overspending. all of the money that's going into this is deficit money. i mean, meaning -- in other words, you're not going to get a return on these dollars. you're not playing for the short game. so the thing is can you get enough subscribers over the next couple of years to be able to then actually cut back on your program expenditures, probably raise some prices too and make this come out in terms of the economics. i think that's a trick, but i think it's doable. the thing is that the prices that have -- this competition has made a, this is a land rush to get programming. finish. maria: are you surprised at what's taking place, barry? you and i watched the internet boom and the internet busts, and now you've got some real survivors like an amazon.
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you surprised at what amazon looks like today? >> no. i'm not really surprised because early on jeff bezos' concentration, fanatical concentration on serving the consumer when no one else really in his area, arena was doing so with such consistency. and because of that plus just a genius of a kind of ambition that is really wildly rare, amazon, there's nothing -- no. amazon, we actually tried to buy their bonds when they got into trouble, and if it weren't for -- which owned a piece of our company at the time, we would have done so. i've been an admirer of amazon for 20 years. maria: but stay on this tech space for a second because you look at a bag to, you look at a facebook -- google, you look at a facebook, these companies are
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more powerful than they ever have been, that's why you see washington saying we might want to break them up. >> well, i don't believe breaking them up makes any sense. what i do think if they have to have -- there has to be sensible regulation. when these companies get to the size that they are, then, in fact, like any monopoly, they much sensible regulation. so for google, we spend -- at expedia we spend 3.5 billion, we probably spend 2.7, we spend 3.5 billion in marketing -- maria: yeah, they want your advertising, but they also want your customers. >> we spend multiple billions of dollars, and that's fine. we spend the money, they give us customers. what we don't like is then them competing with us in our own business. so we think that's kind of wrong. maria: do you have a thought on china and what's going on between the u.s. and china? what's your reaction to all of this? the fact that the nba is over here defending what the general
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manager of houston rockets said, and then china's bullying them, and they roll to oaf. and then -- >> you could kind of say it was inevitable, you know? china has been growing, china has more people than any place else, also has a regime that can basically say it here and it comes out there. they don't have to depend upon staying in office, so to speak. and they're very competitive. and so we are seeing the results of them getting very strong and wanting to get stronger, and they will keep doing it and push back against that. it's good and healthy for the u.s., i think, and for everybody else because that kind of, that kind of economic potential imbalance -- and china absolutely does believe in one man standing, in other words, you know, we've done business in china, and in the end we basically had to sell out because, in fact, in almost every industry there's only one
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survives. that's a very competitive place to play. and you're going to seethese tee reactions. maria: my thanks to barry diller. don't go anywhere, more "wall street" right after this. ♪ ♪ my insurance rates are probably gonna double. but dad, you've got allstate. with accident forgiveness they guarantee your rates won't go up just because of an accident. smart kid. indeed. are you in good hands?
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house minority leader kevin mccarthy, my special guest. a lot happening in washington. catch the show live on sunday. plus right here on fox business, start smart every weekend 6-9 a.m. eastern for "mornings with maria" on fox business. hope you'll start your day with much for being with us. have a great rest of the weekend, everybody. i'll see you next week. ♪ ♪ gerry: hello and welcome to the "wall street journal at large." this week the leading democratic presidential hopefuls squared off against each other for the fourth time in the key battleground state of ohio for the largest debate ever, 12 candidates in all. and it's the first time they've been on stage together since house speaker nancy pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry into president donald trump. needless to say, the reactions were topic number one and, of course, the situation that
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prompted it was very prone

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