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tv   The Claman Countdown  FOX Business  January 14, 2021 3:00pm-4:00pm EST

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has become clearer that post pandemic worl -- charles: can you imagine that, we get back to good old-fashioned earnings and guidance? all right, ken mahoney, thank you very much. the market is meandering as i hand it off to liz claman. liz: all right. thank you so much. you know, the dow just fell out of record territory, so it could snap back there again. thanks, charles. is it tonight's stimulus speech or one key sentence federal reserve chair jay powell uttered this afternoon that's driving what we have seen today, and that's green on the screen. the bulls are not waiting around for president-elect joe biden's big rollout this evening. with trillions of dollars in aid on the line to help americans and american businesses fight the pandemic, we've got the dow, the russell and we are looking at the transports. of those three it's the russell and the transports, both set to lock in all-time highs at the
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close. look at the dow. okay, that, too. the dow needs 37 points. nasdaq needs just 73 points. we are up 39 for the nasdaq, as you can see the dow is up 49. all right. hands down, speaking of the transports, which are roaring ahead at this hour, the airlines which are in the transports, one of the top sectors absolutely crushed by covid. delta suffering through its worst year in history, but one fourth quarter metric shows the light starting to flicker at the end of the tunnel. ed bastian is getting in the seat for us. we will ask him if he's hoping president-elect biden gives airlines a lift tonight. plus, will delta soon require negative covid tests on domestic flights? it's a can't-miss interview. should government regulate the algorithms that propel news to your in-box every day? jeff flock's in the outspoken ceo of twillio, the silicon valley company that has a unique
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communication superhighway. he's here on why he thinks a crackdown is needed to lord over social media algorithms that dictate the news you read and consume. more on that in just a second. first, this fox business alert. the cdc issuing a forecast that shows 90,000 americans could die of covid in just the next three weeks. in the first two weeks of 2021, the virus killed more than 38,000 people here in the u.s. as the vaccination rollout completes about 11 million shots in the arm so far, businesses are now trying to make this move more quickly, offering to lend a hand to speed up the process. in fact, today the hotel industry asked the biden team to consider its locations around the nation as an option for vaccine administration sites. but it's the airline industry that's in a real state of contortion. while the cdc now says beginning january 26th, all international passengers coming to the u.s. will need to show proof of a negative covid test, american
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airlines issued a memo today saying it's not going to require its own pilots, flight attendants and gate agents to be inoculated. to jeff flock live at chicago's o'hare airport on how all this news across so many fronts is being received by both airlines and passengers. reporter: i'm at the international terminal. this is the arrivals area. everyone starting, as you report, in a week and a half that comes through those doors that you see there, and folks are coming through as we speak, everyone will have had to prove that they are covid-negative. take a look at what it's going to be. all people traveling into the u.s. from abroad, whether they are u.s. citizen or not, will need to have a negative test and be able to prove it or they won't get on the plane. it could be a pcr test or rapid test but it will have to be conducted within three days of their flight, and even if they have had a vaccine or even if they can prove they had covid and have recovered, they will
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still have to have proof of that test. it all starts january 26th. you know, as you ask the question, could this be something that would happen to international folks as well. i tell you, it's one of the things as we watch people come through here, people that in a week and a half will have to have proved in a foreign capital somewhere they got a test. i just want to show you a family there, nothing to do with the story, but i just got to tell you, they are waiting for a child they have adopted from overseas. they have a sign that says welcome to our family. just got to warm your heart in the midst of all of this stuff. liz claman. liz: oh, my gosh. yeah. jeff, thank you very much. jeff flock right there at the international terminal. covid-related lockdowns and fears have cratered the airline business, but a sign of hope from delta airlines. the stock jumping 3.5%. you can see it's been even higher so far during this session, after the airline gave an optimistic forecast for this
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year following just a horrific 2020. so yes, the lockdowns and social distancing led to the company's worst year in history, a loss of nearly $12.4 billion. for q4, delta reported an adjusted loss of $2.53 a share. so where's the optimism in this? joining us live, delta airlines ceo ed bastian. thank you so much for coming on "the claman countdown." look, one of the most stunning numbers to me that came out of your report was your daily cash burn. you macheted your average cash burn in half from $24 million a day in the third quarter and i remind our viewers, in april you were losing about $100 million per day. what is the single most important step that you took to stem that blood loss? >> well, thanks, liz. good to be with you. two things. first, our team did a great job continuing to manage the cost of the business. we have had employees volunteer, take time off without pay, tens
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of thousands of them have. secondly, we are starting to see a return of demand as we went from q3 to q4. it was meaningful in terms of the amount of volume that we were starting to see in the business. still a long ways to go. third quarter, we were only at about 20% of prior year numbers in terms of revenue demand. the fourth quarter, we were at 30%. that ten-point jump enabled us to be able to reduce the cash burn meaningfully. liz: very good. a lot of ceos come on and make predictions and they make proclamations and don't come through. to have gone from burning $100 million down to 25, it's pretty impressive. you have said you will break even in the second quarter. when do you think, if i could ask you, that you will be profitable again? >> i think we will be profitable this summer. that requires that the vaccines become distributed at a higher pace and that we as a country
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continue to take the necessary steps to combat covid and put the virus into a contained mode. but if we can make the progress that i'm hopeful we can, that i know the biden administration is going to be spending an enormous amount of time and energy in the first few months of his administration, i think we've got a real shot at starting to approach herd immunity sometime this summer, and as a result, we will be profitable at that point. liz: we look forward to that. you are expected to get $3 billion in additional payroll support from the government this quarter, but president-elect biden tonight unveils his stimulus package. i don't know, maybe you do, but if you had his ear ahead of that, would you ask for more government help to get through the collapse in travel demand? >> no, i wouldn't. i think the most recent cares act grant is meant to cover our payroll collectively as an industry through the end of march. for delta, we did not furlough
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any employees so for us, it had no additional wrinkles attached to it. a number of the other airlines in the industry had large numbers of furloughs so we will give those employees their jobs back which will be great. for those people, as well as for our economy and our industry, so we are happy about that. but no, i think we are close to an inflection point. i think this spring, we could easily get to the point at delta of getting to that cash break-even point and then some are starting to turn a profit. so the focus is on containing the virus, getting the vaccines rolled out, getting it distributed, providing additional support to the states. right now we have -- it's very much a patchwork system with 50 different states having 50 different policies and priorities and allocation methodology, so some additional insight and information and guidance to the states i think would help us. liz: all international passengers, you just heard, because jeff flock is there at
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chicago's o'hare, are now u.s.-bound, the ones who are u.s.-bound must now be tested for covid before boarding their flights. where do you stand on making that type of requirement a domestic one as well, that passengers have, you know, a so-called covid passport that shows negative tests or vaccination? >> well, first of all, on the international, i fully support the international testing that the cdc put out the advisory on this week. something we have been advocating for some time. i'm glad the cdc did it because it's going to enable us to start to eventually reopen the borders. testing is going to be required at some point to open up international travel. we're not going to be able to go right to a vaccine, as we have all seen it's taking an extended period of time for those inoculations to occur. so i'm comfortable that we are on a good path here. it's going to be a little bumpy for the first couple months as we get the processes worked out, but testing is a great strategy internationally to keep any of the new mutations of the virus
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that have arisen around the world off our shores as best we can. domestically, i don't think that's practical. at delta, we already carry domestically over one million people a week. to be able to demonstrate covid tests or vaccine inoculations currently, it would cripple this industry. liz: cripple the industry. well, you know, i only bring that up because at some point, we need to see that herd immunity so that we can possibly make sure that we can get travel back. but american airlines put out a memo today. they are not going to require employees, including pilots, gate agents, to get vaccinated. what's delta's plan about requiring its employees who are out there on the front lines, whether it's, you know, at the gate or on the flight crew, to make sure that they are required to get a vaccination? >> well, we are going to strongly encourage it. we are working with the
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governors in each of our main cities and states in which we operate to enable the delta employees to get as high on the priority list as we can. here in georgia, we are hoping to be able to start the vaccine distribution the first part of february for our employees here in the state of georgia. we're not in a position to have made a decision as to whether we are going to require it. i think it will be required, frankly, for international travel at some point. it's not there yet because there's not enough vaccine to go around. but collectively, we are going to do everything we can to encourage it and hopefully, the vast majority of our people take it. liz: good. yeah. well, to the faa order announced last night in the wake of what started happening in airports and on flights around last week, pre and post capitol hill riots, senator mitt romney was harassed on a flight, not on your airline, senator lindsey graham was surrounded and heckled by trump supporters in a
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terminal, screaming at him, really kind of pushing him around after he had decried president trump's role that he perceived in the deadly violence. you know, you are banning passengers heading to d.c. from checking firearms. what do you think about what the faa is doing here and they are going to do this until about march 20th, i believe. >> i fully support the faa administrator making that decision. in fact, we talked yesterday and i told him i supported it. we have a significant challenge ahead of us and we are all on high alert at the present time, certainly over the next few weeks, as we watch the events of d.c. continue to unfold. you described senator romney's incident. that was actually on a delta flight out of salt lake city. i did talk to the senator a couple days ago and made certain that he was okay, he was just --
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he's a great man and he said this is what you face sometimes in politics. but we were able to identify the six people who led that effort, and they have all been banned permanently from delta. so we are not taking this with anything other than the high degree of severity it requires. liz: wow. wow. yeah. so banned completely. that's very interesting. you know, i do think back to sully, you know, about that flight that landed right here in the hudson, and i think to myself that flight crew, they have enough on their hands trying to make sure that passengers remain safe, so to make them, turn them into on-air police is just -- it just seems so problematic and such a distressing situation. do you feel that the faa should keep that no tolerance policy beyond march 20th and just have it as a permanent thing?
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>> i think the faa will monitor it and decide based on how the events unfold, but i think they are sending a strong signal to individuals that want to disrupt the safety of air travel, that it will not be tolerated. i completely endorse that and support that. and hopefully, that message will get through to anyone looking to create a disturbance. liz: ed bastian, ceo of delta, i really look forward to hearing from you. once again, your next earnings release, whatever it may be, you are always welcome on the show. thank you so much. >> thank you, liz. good to be with you. liz: any time. delta airlines moving higher by about 3.5%. when he went before a crowd today, of course fed chair jerome powell was asked when the fed will hike interest rates. he uttered one clear message. you are about to hear it. and our floor show traders will
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join us on whether it's time to fight the fed's low rate long game. with the closing bell ringing in 45 minutes, the dow hovering just above the flat line. it turned negative a second ago. we'll be right back. metastatic breast cancer is relentless, but i'm relentless every day. and having more days is possible with verzenio, proven to help you live significantly longer when taken with fulvestrant. verzenio + fulvestrant is for women with hr+, her2- metastatic breast cancer that has progressed after hormone therapy. diarrhea is common, may be severe, or cause dehydration or infection. at the first sign, call your doctor, start an anti-diarrheal, and drink fluids. before taking verzenio, tell your doctor about any fever, chills, or other signs of infection. verzenio may cause low white blood cell counts, which may cause serious infection that can lead to death. life-threatening lung inflammation can occur. tell your doctor about any new or worsening trouble
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liz: all right. so we're kind of indecisive once again with about 42 minutes left to trade, but the markets popped intraday when fed chair jay powell explained when we might see an interest rate hike. here's what he said. >> we're no longer going to raise interest rates just because, for example, if unemployment were to be well below again, well below our current estimates of the natural rate of unemployment, that wouldn't be a reason to raise interest rates, unless we see trouble in inflation. liz: now is not the time to raise rates. maybe that's why goldman sachs says the s&p 500 will go up 14% this year. let us get to the floor show. tim anderson, larry shover.
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tim, is it time to fight the fed or just keep piling into equities because interest rates are so low and the fed is going to keep propping up equities? >> larry zweig became famous for his universal if not golden rules of investing. don't fight the fed and don't fight the tape. now t tape doesn't exist the way it did decades ago but i would certainly never suggest that investors think that well, maybe the fed's wrong this time and let's take the other side of that trade. it's certainly not going to be a straight line and it's not going to go up the same amount every day, you know. jerome powell basically said, the refreshing thing about him is he speaks english as a first language, not some academic dialect of fed-speak, he
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basically said the phillips curve is dead, at least when we have very low levels of interest rate so sure, the -- liz: okay, you are now speaking fed-speak. the phillips curve, in a tiny snapshot for our viewers. >> well, the phillips curve would be that if you have -- there's a trade-off between very, very high levels of employment and interest rates, and when you have an extremely low unemployment rate, rates are going to spike because the demand for labor is going to go up and it's going to drive up the cost of labor and that's going to drive up the cost of inflation but the difference is today, labor is a much lower percentage of cost for most businesses than it used to be. liz: okay. larry, you kind of started laughing. yeah, you do not fight the fed or you don't fight the tape but at some point, don't you put in
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some type of guardrail system to your portfolio that protects it from what could be, as byron weam said yesterday, look for a 20% correction in the first half. >> yeah. what's to stop that from happening, when you consider the enormous shifts in fiscal policy, politics, economics. you have a global supply chain and trade, that's still working itself through the system and also just a barrage of capital inflows that will and has, at least history suggests, creates bubbles. we could have a correction but who's going to guess it? the fact is the fed has more control than ever over nominal interest rates and they are going to stay at the lower bound in my view until 2024 and the efforts to suppress real rates will continue, so that they have been able to stave off disinflation but they have not been able to create demand-linked inflation. that's what we're looking for. i think a balanced portfolio
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makes sense. liz: okay. don't fight the fed. by the way, the nasdaq had been up 91 points. it's now red, down just one point. that's a decent enough swing that we are watching here. little bit of bearishness coming in. the dow is now down 11, 10. johnson & johnson confirming that in trials, its single shot covid vaccine candidate has proven safe and effective in creating an immune response to fight against the deadly virus. j & j saying they will be able to fulfill their 2021 vaccine supply promises with its u.s. distribution on track for march. okay. it's coming. stock up nearly 2%. and fewer than four hours away, president-elect biden unveils his plan to boost vaccine distribution in the u.s. we are going to crunch the numbers on the big bucks biden is planning to unleash in the fight against covid. 37 minutes before the closing bell rings, the russell is up 45
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liz: fox business alert. chinese tech titans that trade here in the u.s. dodging the delisting bullet in today's pop stocks. the trump administration will now no longer target alibaba, baidu and tencent as part of an effort to prevent u.s. investors from owning stock in chinese firms that the administration said had ties to the country's military. with no more suspicion swirling around them, alibaba jumping 3.8%, baidu5.8%, tencent above $81 a share. beyond meat stocks sizzling as taco bell dips its toe in the plant-based pool. the mexican food chain now working on a meatless product set to be tested this year. you got beyond jumping 12.6%.
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now at $141 and change. yum brands which of course is the parent of taco bell is up about 1%. the ipo puppy love in full slobber swing. petco surging in its first day of trade, moving higher by 54%. not bad after last night's upside pricing of shares, $18 apiece. today's action biting in earlier into chewy, the rival there. but into the close, chewy has turned around, up about 1%. the competition, though, is far from over for both of these names. bark box's market entry via spac is still on deck. talk about a posh premiere. posh mart more than doubling in its nasdaq debut. the second-hand e-retailer pricing shares at more than expected, $42 last night. it's at $97 even right now. the company's valuation soaring past the $3 billion mark. competitor to real real, it's also getting a lift from posh's
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strong performance. you don't often see that. real real is up 9.25%. taking a quick look at yesterday's ipo rock star debut. affirm is definitely affirming its place in the market for the second day straight, up 10% after jumping a dramatic move yesterday. stock's now at $107.50 a share. trillions of dollars could be on the way to consumers' pockets in just hours, as president-elect joe biden reveals his $2 trillion stimulus plan tonight. vaccine makers jumping at this hour as investors expect the biden team to call for big spending on covid-19 shots. an additional $1400 in stimulus checks for americans. where are they going to spend that money? we know from the last time around with stimulus checks, target, best buy, lowe's, all these names are now getting a boost at this hour in the potential consumer spending thought to come. let's go to the white house, where blake burman is standing
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by. blake, clarify for me, where is the $2 trillion number come from? i was hearing one and a half, one. reporter: important to note, the biden team itself has yet to put out its official proposal and all the details within it but you can look at what's happened here in washington over the last few weeks or so. remember, the last deal that was signed, $900 billion, negotiated between democrats and republicans, but democrats wanted $2.5 trillion more than that, so it stand to reason that when democrats get control, full control of washington, in just six days' time, there could be a multi-trillion dollar package put forth up on the hill, and having the backing of the 46th president at that time. in fact, when we heard from president-elect biden last week, teasing the announcement that he will make later this evening, he didn't shy away from talking about trillions of dollars in economic stimulus. listen. >> consensus among leading economists, left, right and center, is that in order to keep the economy from collapsing this
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year, and getting much, much worse, we should be investing significant amounts of money right now. reporter: so what could be in the proposal? well, the president-elect last week specifically mentioned things like expanding unemployment and rental assistance. he also supports direct payments and expanding the child tax credit along with sending money to state and local governments, things that democrats have been talking about and wanting for quite some time. we also heard from the president-elect on twitter last night, liz, as he reacted to the record surge in covid-19 deaths. he wrote the following, saying quote, we're in the teeth of this crisis and we need to take immediate action to get the virus under control. that's why tomorrow, meaning tonight, i will be laying out my vaccination and economic response package to beat covid-19 and build back better. liz? liz: yeah. you heard the cdc saying we could see 90,000 people die of this in the next three weeks alone. blake, thank you. keep us posted. blake burman bringing us the dollars and cents of that story of stimulus. meantime, netflix cobra kai,
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i'm so into it, may never die but citi is predicting the original streaming giant could see its subscriber game crane-kicked in the face by disney in the next three years. for now, netflix winning the battle as far as stocks are concerned. netflix up 47% since the close yesterday, right, or just year over year, rather. walt disney up 21%. all right. the company opening up every line of communication possible for netflix and its customers, the company twillio seeing a dramatic 219% surge of its own. the ceo coming up next to give us his plan to keep the momentum going and his controversial take on the biggest tech battles of 2020, still raging in 2021. closing bell, 27 minutes away. dow once again green, up 12
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liz: we want to get to this breaking news. delta airlines ceo ed bastian just told us he fully supports that cdc rule that requires that travelers entering the u.s. must have proof of a negative covid-19 test prior to boarding. here's what he said when we asked him if that should apply to domestic travel in the u.s. listen. >> domestically, i don't think that's practical. at delta, we already carry domestically over one million people a week. to be able to demonstrate covid tests or vaccine inoculations currently, it would cripple this industry. liz: all right. that's delta airlines ceo ed bastian. you're looking at the stock, up about 2.33% to $41.38.
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he also said that he believes they will return to profitability by this summer, as herd immunity kicks in. we thank him for coming on the show. with now 22 minutes left to trade, twitter and snapchat are getting blocked by investors at this hour. both social media stocks sinking after permanently banning president trump from their social media platforms, but is more regulation than that actually needed in the social media and online news world? twilio is the business-to-customer superconnector and its ceo jeff lawson says social media news algorithms should be getting perhaps a good once-over or twice-over look from the u.s. government. joining us right now, twilio ceo and new author, jeff lawson. you've got this book about, you are so big on the software writers because that's really your piece and that's where you guys all come from, but what do you mean by this?
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are you saying that now the government should regulate, the actual algorithms that start pushing stuff to everybody's in-boxes and news feeds every day? >> well, the most basic belief that i have is that our government and the people who make legislation and regulations should understand the technology. when you watch those congressional testimonies that we have seen over the past several years, it becomes very apparent that the people who make laws and regulations don't really understand the details of what's happening in the algorithms, in the technology, even social networks. so what i really think is needed is for our government to understand how the technology works, understand the impact it's having both positively and negatively, and then make wise policy decisions. liz: i don't think they are ever going to understand it, jeff. they have a lot of trouble wrapping their minds around these types of very technical industries and they don't even know what they want. you see both democrats and republicans, they can't even get on the same page about section
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230. republicans or at least donald trump had said get rid of it. then you have some democrats who also say get rid of it. others say wait a minute, you got to give a liability shield to the twitters and social media outfits of the world because they are just the so-called platform upon which other people jump and put their thoughts. so why do you have any belief that the government would do a good job regulating this? >> well, you need first of all, folks who are knowledgeable. i don't expect every senator to get knowledgeable about the iner workings of social networks but they have got staff, they've got experts. that's the people they should be having on their teams advising them as they write this legislation. i do think that you need the platform protections section 230 provides, but you also need to understand in which scenarios should those protections apply and in which scenarios maybe they don't apply. i think that's the work. it's not an all or nothing. it is understanding the technology, while the law was written 25 years ago, great, what's evolved since then, let's
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understand how technology is operating in practice today 25 years later and make the wise adjustments that are needed to protect the things we should but also understand what things maybe aren't a matter of that safe harbor type protection. liz: got it. got it. give me a sense right now about your business. basically, if we were sitting there in a morning meeting talking about what twilio does, they are basically this massive i want to say broadband sort of information superhighway that enables your business customers, you have got some of the biggest names in the business, airbnb, all these other names, we can put them up, but you in essence allow customers to interrelate and speak with these companies through every form of communication, right? how's it going? >> well, it's going well. when you think about companies need to engage with their customers, and in the digital era, the digital economy, they do that using digital communications. twilio provides the customer
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engagement platform that allows companies to build great experiences between the products that you use from that company or customer service and with you, their customer, over channels like voice, text messaging, video, e-mail and more. liz: you have just written this book, after developer, how to harness the power of software developers. it almost seems like software developers today really have some power. when you look at what happened with apple, of course, whether it was, you know, when you talk about how you had the basecamp guys coming in leading the charge saying stop charging us so much at the app store because you guys have a monopoly with this, then of course the fortnite guys, it's a new world, isn't it, for software developers? what do we expect as we look ahead to this brave new world, i guess? >> well, you know, i think of software developers, there's two types of things you speak of when you say software developers. one is companies who write software, fortnite or basecamp or apple or anyone else.
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the second one are the actual human beings whose job it is to write software. my book is really about how do you unleash the capabilities, unleash the raw creative ability of those developers to help you reinvent your business, to help you succeed in the digital economy. when i say that, i'm talking about the individuals, the human beings, the people who work for your company who can help you succeed or not in all of the digital economy that every company needs to compete in and to win. liz: yeah. yeah. really quick because we've got to run. do you think that apple needs to change its app store model to accommodate all of these complaints? >> i think that it's a business, economic relationship between them and their customers. the customers in this sense are the highest use of built software. if that deal is working out in the economic sense between them and their customers, great. if it's not, then we will see changes come about.
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this will get raised in pr and by customers who can't get fortnite on their phone. this is a commercial difference between two companies and we will see it play out with customers and with economics. liz: classic capitalist battle. jeff lawson, ceo of twilio, thank you for joining us. come back again. we like having you. thank you. >> thank you, liz. liz: the trump administration's final plays in the fannie and freddie saga are imminent. charlie breaks it next. and i sat down with cameron mitchell, ceo of multi-million dollar restaurant empire cameron mitchell restaurants. cameron was a high school dropout and dishwasher at a restaurant when he suddenly one night at age 18 had an epiphany and said you know what, i'm going to completely change the trajectory of my life. today, he owns and operates more than 50 restaurant locations, crediting all of his success to his always say yes attitude.
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his story is going to blow you away but more importantly, it may inspire you to take that sort of jump that you have always wanted to do when it comes to changing your life. it's on my everyone talks to liz podcast. latest episode available on spotify, apple, google. closing bell, 15 minutes away. slightly below the flat line, down five points. stay tuned.
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liz: in just a matter of hours, apparently, we may have more information on the future of mortgage giants fannie mae and freddie mac. to charlie gasparino with details of what, a possible announcement here? charlie: yeah. what we are hearing from sources in the mortgage industry, people that have been briefed on what the treasury is planning to do,
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is that it could come after the closing bell. so be prepared after the closing bell for some news on a fannie and freddie reform plan, that could impact both stocks. these are heavily traded penny stocks, but they are heavily traded. people bought them on the notion that the treasury go in there and recapitalize them, release them, the shares would be worth more because the treasury would somehow alter the agreement with the shareholders where the treasury gives back the shareholders some more money. it is really unclear that any of those sort of drastic moves are going to happen here, when we get this plan being released by the treasury, not just treasury, treasury secretary mnuchin, but also fha chief mark calabria. from what i understand is damping your expectations on something major here, that conservatorship, which is direct
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government control, is off the table. there's going to be broadly, some sort of plan to recapitalize them and possibly release them from government control in the future. i don't know -- i don't think, this is the best i'm going to say, that the trump administration and mnuchin, calabria, are going to go so far as to say shareholders are, you know, that the government's paid back, the government totally paid back its shareholders, you know, will benefit from this whatever is ruled here. as you know, the government owns 70% of fannie and freddie, casualty of the financial crisis, government takeover. there's court cases charging that the government's role here is unconstitutional. that will be heard -- that case has already been heard. the supreme court's going to deal with that later in the year. but today, from what i understand, these are going to be minor changes and that is all up to two things. it's the biden administration, what do they want to do, and the courts. do the courts basically rule in
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a way that makes the federal government pay back shareholders for money that it's suing, because it said the government took all fannie and freddie's profits. these are big-time questions. i do not think they are going to be answered in this bill, in what's going to happen here. this is going to be much more of a sort of milquetoast measure. it will be the last thing that mnuchin and calabria do, at least mnuchin, before he leaves office. calabria's term technically ends in 2024. he may be out sooner, but that's where we are right now. then the biden administration, biden is going to approach housing a lot different. they are going to want expansive housing policy so they will probably want to keep fannie and freddie where they are and make -- and help banks make more loans to homeowners. that's where we are right now. again, unclear exactly where they are going. i keep hearing if you are a shareholder don't get your hopes up too high on something that is massively shareholder positive. but we have to see when it
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comes. again, the rumor is tonight, after the bell, but who knows. it could bleed into tomorrow. back to you, liz. liz: charlie gasparino, thank you so much. all right. we have suddenly taken a leg down on the dow. we are lower by 65 points. we are coming right back with our "countdown" closer.
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♪. liz: gang, we've got four 1/2 minutes the closing bell rings. we're seeing a selloff in the final minutes. dow down 60, nasdaq 25. we're still at a record for the transports. there is that. remember we profiled last month a company called zebra technologies. they make smart labels so intelligent they let covid vaccine shippers know if the vials stayed at the right temperature along the supply chain? today's "countdown" closer says
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names like that will have staying power well past the pandemic. bill studebaker says snap emup. you like robo companies too, do you? >> we do. robotics, health care innovation shined in the last year. they are three trends that are emerging. automation will boom in 2021 with china leading the growth. we have logistics warehouse automation going to soar. the pandemic has transformed the global supply chain. systems are emerging. as we look at the landscape in 2021 we're pretty encouraged. liz: you know zebra had a great month. it had a great year. it is up double-digit percentages. this company has been in the frid with the bar codes -- rfid, et cetera. where do you see it? it is up 65% already this year. do you want to wait for a entry point?
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>> it has been a tremendous stock. take advantage for the need of speed of fulfillment. that is driving growth in warehouses, many emerging technologies are companying transparency. they clearly are. anything from amazon technology was used to track the package from depart to arrival. when you look at covid, technology is taking center stage with the vaccine rollout. in order to track temperature changes and spoilage. that is really important because spoilage -- liz: oh, yeah. that is the important aspect. some of these need to be at subarctic temperatures. you like rockwell. your third pick i find interesting, ambarella. it is having a big name today. >> when i was on [inaudible]. leader in video processing is at a inflection point last month. they are a a.i. company with computer vision capabilities.
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this is tracking major players in auto and security industries. we think this is just the start of their ability to roll -- [closing bell rings] liz: great to have you, bill. robo global. russell transporthitting records. connell: losing gains. stocks lost trade in the final hours of investing. investors watching for more stimulus which we're about to hear from tonight. dow hit all-time highs in the trading session. the dow closes down by about 69 points. s&p 500 settling 14 points lower. we saw weakness in tech stocks. nasdaq was down today. overall the weakness in the tech world seemed to drag down markets this afternoon. facebook, microsoft, apple all trading lower today. those are the closing numbers. i'm connell mcshane. welcome to "after th

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