Hurt People Hurt People: SBUX, LMEs, BofA

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little behind the scenes money stuff podcast here we are waiting for me to hit send on the money stuff email a peek behind the curtain if you will

hello and welcome to the money stuff podcast your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money.

I'm Matt Levine and I wrote the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.

And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

Katie, how was France?

Oh my God, Matt, it was the best.

I went to the Olympics, as we said on the last time we did this.

I went to the Olympics as a horse.

I did super good in my event.

But in a more real sense, I went as a human and I went to go watch track and field.

It's a huge bummer not being at the Olympics.

I thought you were going to say it's a huge bummer that you didn't participate as a human.

I mean, just in general, it is a huge bummer that I am not a horse, but also that I'm not a good enough athlete to compete at the Olympics.

But then I think, actually, I have this podcast that I do every week with Matt Levine, so it's not that bad.

We do carrots and apples.

It's great.

That's true.

I get treats.

This is the Between Vacations Money Stuff podcast because I'm going to be off next week going to the beach.

That's incredible.

Yes.

So it's almost like we could have just taken August off, but instead we're doing this one.

I know.

Here we are doing this one.

Despite it being the mid-August money stuff, there is some news.

Should I tell you about it?

Yeah, why don't you tell me about it?

Okay, we're going to talk about Starbucks and their very expensive new CEO.

Yes.

We're going to talk about creditor creditor on creditor violence,

which is pretty exciting.

And then we're going to talk about Bank of America and the long, long hours that their junior bankers work.

All right.

So,

Starbucks.

Starbucks.

So this was a big one.

Basically, Brian Nichols, he was the CEO of Chipotle.

He's been CEO since March 2018.

He's moving over to Starbucks as their chief executive officer, but also as chairman of their board, which, I mean, there's so many different ways we could talk about this from governance, like you discussed in the Money Stuff newsletter.

There's also just the sheer amount of money that he's making, which is a lot.

And then there's also the fact that he's going to be a remote CEO, which is also super interesting.

Also, he invented like Dorita's Locos Tacos.

He's like a marketing guy who came up at both Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.

And I think they view him as a visionary of like funding products to market at food restaurants.

So that's exciting.

I kind of get more the inventor of the Doritos Locos taco.

I hope I got that right.

Going to Chipotle.

Starbucks is a different animal.

Starbucks has been in the hurt locker for a couple years now.

It has spawned a lot of good jokes on social media.

I saw someone tweet that they're going to start charging for extra milk at Starbucks.

Right.

Chipotle's like main thing in pop culture is like portion sizes.

And so

I don't know how you carry that over to Starbucks.

Yeah, he did work magic over at Chipotle, at least when it comes to the stock price.

I was looking at the numbers before I came to this little room to record this podcast.

And since March 2018 through Monday's close, Chipotle's stock was up something like 800% versus Starbucks.

being up like 56% over that time frame, obviously underperforming the S ⁇ P 500 and massively underperforming Chipotle.

So it makes sense that the Starbucks board was like, wow, things aren't going too well right now.

Who's really crushing it in the industry?

Yeah, I mean, it's like such a good illustration of the possibility of CEO talent, right?

I mean, it sort of seems abstract from the outside, but then like you see, like, you know, there's two companies that are in, you know, probably comparable businesses.

One is doing really well, one is doing less well.

And they picked the good CEO to run the bigger company, right?

I mean, like, you know, you talked about the money.

He's getting paid paid something like $113 million.

Like that's the valuation of his package to come from Chipotle to Starbucks.

When they announced him, Starbucks stock was up

$20 billion.

Like it was up, you know, like 20%

added like $20 billion of market cap, which is like, he's a bargain at $100 million, right?

If the difference in CEO talent and CEO skill is $20 billion of market cap, then like, of course, it makes sense for him to move.

Also, it's like interesting, you know, Chipotle lost like $6 billion of market cap, so it was like an efficiency-enhancing trade, right?

If you just go by the stock prices, right?

Like, he had sort of done his work at Chipotle.

He'd rented the ship, and him leaving Chipotle was sad, but not that sad, whereas him going to Starbucks was like extremely good for Starbucks.

So, you know, everyone's a sort of

long-term winner, I guess.

Yeah, it was a good pair trade to make specifically on Tuesday with Starbucks stock up, I don't know, a bazillion percent and Chipotle down by almost double digits.

But I mean, it's going to be fascinating to see what he does at Starbucks.

It is in the same industry.

Coffee is different from burritos, though.

And also, as you wrote about in the newsletter, he has to contend with the former CEO as well, the founder.

His name is Howard Schultz.

Yeah, he's been CEO, I think, three times now.

He keeps coming back after they're unhappy with other CEOs.

And he's a big shareholder.

He has like a lot of kind of retained influence over the board and like ability to kind of kibbits and Starbucks operations and send emails to the CEO.

I mean, one thing I wrote about is like Brian Nicol is going to have more power than the previous CEO did, right?

He's going to be the chairman of the board.

He's going to be paid a bucket of money and he's going to work from home.

I mean, he's not going to have to move to Seattle to their headquarters.

He's going to kind of set up a remote office by his house.

And Newport Beach, baby.

Yeah.

It like insulates him a little bit from the board.

It gives him a little bit more like Imperial CEO power and probably also insulates him a little bit from Harold Schultz, right?

Like, I don't know what the conversations between him and the board were like, but I imagine they were like, you can't have that guy emailing me at all hours telling me what to do.

Like, if you want the magic that I brought to Chipotle, you have to kind of leave me alone and let me do it.

And we had the leverage to ask for that.

What I wrote is like, abstractly, like shareholders want good governance at public companies, right?

And like one thing that good governance means is like there's an engaged board that supervises the CEO.

And if the CEO isn't doing well, they get rid of him and get someone else.

And that kind of looks like what happened here, right?

I mean, there was an independent board.

They talked among themselves.

They didn't talk to the CEO.

They were like, we don't like this guy.

He's not doing well enough.

We're going to find someone else.

And they went out and found someone else.

And they found a guy who, you know, made the stock go up by $20 billion, right?

So they found someone who the market seems to think is a really good choice.

But

to get him, they have to give up some of that governance, right?

Like they, they built up some governance to sort of get to the place where they are.

And then they have to spend some of that governance to get a really good CEO, right?

Because like to get a really good CEO, you're like, we're putting the company in your hands now.

And you see that with like, he's going to be the chairman of the board, but also you see it with like the pay package and the not having to relocate.

He's just like,

this is going to be a little bit more his company than it was the previous CEO's company.

Yeah.

I mean, he did agree to commute.

to Seattle as much as needed to do the job.

And I do wonder what that will look like in practice.

Well, but he gets to decide, right?

He's the CEO.

I mean, probably a lot, right?

I mean, like, he's not going to be like lazy about it, but like, yeah, he's the CEO.

The board is not going to be checking up on him every week.

Yeah.

I do think it's interesting, the juxtaposition, that he will be in Newport Beach, California, and Starbucks required of their white-collar employees that they need to be in the office at least three days a week at the beginning of last year.

I feel like that might be harder to enforce when you have a remote CEO.

But what do I do?

Well, he might change that as a previous guy's policy.

He might change the policy.

Yeah.

But it also reminds me of the story about David Solomon, the CEO of Coleman.

This is like two summers ago or something.

He went around complaining that he was at a restaurant having lunch in the Hamptons and a like associate at Colby came up to him and introduced himself and said, hi, we're good at Colman too.

You're the CEO.

And Solomon was so offended because he's like, what are you doing having lunch at a restaurant in the Hamptons?

during the week like shouldn't you be doing work and he's like telling this anecdote to everyone in this like aggrieved tone people are well but you were there too right like what what are you complaining about i don't know.

Also, like, you know, one reason to follow the coming into the office policy is like you might run into the CEO there, and if he goes by your desk and you're not there, he'll get met.

But if he's not there, it's a little easier to not be there yourself.

That's true, that's true.

You kind of don't have the moral high ground there, so we'll see if he changes that.

I do want to talk about the economy a little bit,

if you'll indulge me.

There's this great story on the terminal about CEO turnover.

So there's 191 CEOs who have left companies in the Russell 2000 index this year.

Stay with me.

74 of them were considered to be fired or forced out.

That apparently is the most at this time of year since the beginning of this data set in 2017.

So we are at a moment where it feels like a lot of CEOs are being fired.

And I think that kind of says something about the economic environment that we're in.

I don't know what exactly, but I'm putting the thought out there.

I'm sorry.

I need.

No.

I'm sorry.

I need to take one minute to send my newsletter.

I'm sorry.

Oh, my God.

Let's leave this minute in here.

Of course.

Yeah, I think we're just like, right, so we can leave both my asking for a minute and also the awkward silence and jokes during this minute and like the clicking of the keys.

This is like, this is the behind-the-scenes money stuff content that you came for.

Well, thinking more about the economy, you know, we are in the heart of earnings season, and it just feels like there are a lot of idiosyncratic issues that keep popping up, earnings calls.

Like, it's hard to paint any one industry with a broad brushstroke right now.

And it just feels like at this moment, at least people on TV keep telling me that management really matters right now because overall, things are pretty good, but there are a lot of company-specific issues to work through.

God, I wish I was a horse.

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Creditor on creditor violence, another very human story about basically trying to cut in line and extract value from other people who might have been ahead of you.

Yeah, I've never liked the phrase creditor on creditor violence.

What would you call it?

Well, the actual term that people in the industry mostly use is LMEs, which stands for liability management exercises.

When I was a banker, there was a thing called liability management, which is like you have like bonds and you like do a tender offer for your bonds and use just new bonds to pay for it.

You're managing your liabilities.

You're like repaying your old debt and adding some new debt or you're, you know, sometimes trying to restructure your debt.

But in the modern usage,

there's like a bad...

association with that phrase because when people say liability management exercises they mean calling up some of your creditors and saying hey we could use more money if you give us more money we will put you at the front of the line to be paid back.

And all those other creditors who were ahead of you in line will get put behind you in line.

And the creditors will say, wait, you can do that?

And they'll say, yes, because there's a loophole in our documents.

And like our credit agreement says that those guys are first in line, but actually we can do a thing that makes them second or third or 10th in line.

People really dislike this for a lot of reasons.

One is they get like bumped down in line.

Two, it's because like you're a lender, you're sort of like expecting a certain amount of like stability and predictability and you keep finding out that these documents that you negotiated that said that you had to be first in line actually mean you can be fourth in line and so there's this real sense of like having the football pulled out from you because people keep getting like surprised by new ways to get liability managed the other reason people don't like it is because it is this like prisoner's dilemma where if you

don't like this happening to you the thing that you have to do is do it to someone else first, right?

If there's some company that's in trouble, it's going to do this transaction.

It's going to do some sort of transaction that puts some creditors ahead of other creditors.

And you want to be the one who's ahead, not the one who's behind.

So you will like go form a club with other creditors and you will go to the company and say, hey, let's do a deal.

And so there's the sense that like no one wants this, but everyone feels forced to do it.

It's like hurt people hurt people.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Everyone is like, I don't mean to hurt the other people, otherwise they will hurt me.

And they're very sad.

sad.

But this is all answering the question, what do you call it?

And I think like the official term is liability management exercises.

But what I loved in this Bloomberg News article is that there are like firms, like credit hedge funds that are setting up businesses to, I don't want to say do this, but they're called capital solutions businesses.

And a capital solutions business is like you, you have like, you go to a company, you're like, hey, we have a solution for your capital.

We can give you money if.

And the if is always like, if you stiff your other creditors, it's not always.

It doesn't have to be.

Like you could imagine, you know, a capital solution that is win-win and just friendly but like in practice a lot of the capital solutions seem to be taking money from some creditors to give to other creditors I do like that name right all the all the really benign names are the the scary things so is this good for the companies themselves the companies where they're borrowing money from these lenders well I always love it because it's like back in the day a lot of trades like this didn't run through credit agreements.

They ran through credit default swaps.

What I mean by that is like, there were some really cool trades where a lender would come to a company and say, we have bought a bunch of credit default swaps on you.

If you just default on your debt for 15 minutes, we'll make a ton of money and we'll give you half of it.

Right.

And the company's like, okay, fine, we'll do that.

We're desperate.

And they would default on their debt for 15 minutes and the hedge fund would make a lot of money and give the company some of it.

And then the company would like live to fight another day.

And I always thought that was so cool that like a like zero-sum bet between hedge funds could create funding for a real company.

And similarly here, there's something kind of fun about like these companies can generate funding to like keep their actual business going by like sort of inter-creditor fight among hedge funds.

But mostly it's bad because first of all, these companies are not like, you know, mom and pop businesses.

They're like most traditionally owned by private equity firms who are like the sort of sharp elbowed borrowers who are going to do this.

But then secondly, like, you know, like a lot of these things end in bankruptcy anyway.

And so it's just like, who is first in line to be paid back in bankruptcy?

And so it's like, if all of these things like solved the company's problems and like made everything better, then you'd be like, okay, so like a hedge fund lost money for, you know, the greater good of the company.

But in practice, it seems that a lot of them end in bankruptcy anyway.

So I was thinking about this.

I was reading the story.

I was reading money stuff, as I do, to prepare for the podcast.

And my naive thought was, is this going to lead to lawsuits?

Oh my God, at least there's so many lawsuits.

Every one of them leads to a lawsuit.

But here's the thing I was thinking about it when it comes to crypto, because there's that notion, you know, it's in the code.

And here it seems like you're exploiting an overlooked part of the documents, right?

Like it's in the documents

and you just happen to find like this loophole.

Yes.

And this is like an interesting.

difference between debt and equity, I think.

Like in general, companies are not supposed to like treat their shareholders unfairly, right?

And like, even if like something in the, you know, certificate of corporation says you can do something, if it's really unfair to shareholders, if it like treats some shareholders better than others, if it violates fiduciary duties, you can't do it, right?

Beyond just like the language of the documents, judges are going to say you have to treat your shareholders fairly.

Traditionally, debt doesn't work that way.

Traditionally, you don't have fiduciary duty to your creditors.

And traditionally, if your bond agreements let you do some wild thing, courts are going to let you do the wild thing.

There's some exceptions to that.

Some courts will look at the bond document and say, oh, I couldn't possibly have meant that, so we're not going to let you do the wild thing.

But in general, the rule is kind of like, whatever the documents say you're allowed to do, you're allowed to do.

And so there is much more of this sort of thing in debt restructuring than there would be for like stock, because

there is this traditional rule that you're allowed to do whatever you want to creditors because they're sophisticated people who negotiated a contract with you.

And if they didn't put it in the contract, then they don't get the protection.

I think there's some sense that like one thing that could happen is that could change, right?

That courts could get less receptive to this sort of thing and

say, you know, it's just like, as a policy matter, bad for companies to always go around hosing their creditors and like treating some people more unfairly than others.

And so we're not going to let them do that anymore.

And we're going to like apply some sort of like fairness standard or like, what do people really want to reading these credit documents instead of just you know reading what they say and say oh they allow it that's like one possibility the other possible you keep reading about people like creditors trying to prevent this by you know forming groups and sort of saying we're gonna knock this off or like demanding better covenants so they can't have this happen to them and so you keep reading about these liability management exercises but there's enough grumbling from like you know people who participate in them that like maybe the industry will find some way to reduce their frequency.

Well, that's all I have to say.

Do you have anything more?

The one thing I want to say, and this is, I don't know where this goes in.

I talked a while back to a credit fund manager, and

I'm going to get this story slightly wrong, but like, he said that people would ask him, as a lender, as a credit investor, do you look first at the assets or the liabilities, right?

Like, do you look at like what this company does, what it has, like how much productive capacity it has to pay back loans?

Or do you look first at like how many bonds it already has outstanding?

And he's like, I was always an assets guy, and like increasingly the business is a liabilities business.

Like increasingly what you do as a credit investor is you look at the company's capital structure and you say, who can we hose here?

What debt can we get ahead of?

And as a lover of like complexity and nonsense, I enjoy that.

But it seems kind of bad for like the world.

I was reading somewhere like research analysts complaining about this because it's like as a credit research analyst at a bank, you have to spend all of your time thinking about liability management exercises and you don't spend as much time thinking about like, you know, does this company have the capacity to cover its debts?

And it seems like a loss in capacity when the industry is not about like finding good things to finance, but rather about like finding people to host to, you know, restructure the financing.

It seems like that's like a less good use of people's time and energy.

But I don't know if that's true.

That just like sort of as a first impression, it seems like it would be better to spend time on like growing the pie than on splitting up the pie, but like maybe that's not true.

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the Wall Street Journal this week had a story about Bank of America junior bankers being asked to like fake their hours.

So, okay.

Investment banking has always had very horrible hours, right?

And like junior bankers in particular were sort of known for working 100 plus hour weeks, and it was very hard and bad.

And over the last few years, people have complained about it, in part because it's caused serious health problems and some deaths in the industry.

And so a lot of banks responded to these complaints by instituting some sort of humane hours policy.

Exactly the details varied from bank to bank, but like people often talk about protected weekends where like you're supposed to have like one weekend a month and you get like both days off or like you're supposed to have one day off each week or whatever, right?

So it's like there's some policy that says you're not supposed to work 120 hour weeks every week.

And this has come into a lot of focus at Bank of America because a young banker there died recently after working 100 hour weeks on a deal.

And the

story in the Wall Street Journal this week is that although Bank of America has these policies to protect people from working all the time, a lot of people are disregarding them.

And in particular, like bankers are being told to fake their hours and fill out a form saying how many hours you worked.

And

you write fewer hours than you actually worked so that you don't get a call from HR saying you can't work anymore because, you know, your VP wants you to keep working.

And if you get taken off the deal, your immediate managers will be angry and sad and think less of you.

My reaction here is that there has to be a better system of tracking hours than self-reporting hours.

I was thinking about, like, we spent, I don't know, a good hour talking about that Wells Fargo mouse jiggler story where they were able to detect when people were using technology to jiggle their mouses at home to make it look like they were working.

Shouldn't there be a system whether you track how often people are batched into the office or, I don't know, how much they're using their work devices that would kind of solve this problem.

It seems like a lot of this traces back to the fact that you're self-reporting your hours.

Yeah, I agree.

I got an email from a reader saying,

do the VPs at Bank of America have mouse unjiggler software to make it look like their employees work less?

Yeah.

But right.

I mean, he also makes a point.

Like, as you said, like, if Wells Fario wants to know how much its people are working, and so it installs software to track how much they're working, so it makes sure they're working enough, right?

If Bank of america wants to make sure that people aren't working too much it could install that software too right and if it doesn't install that software that suggests something about its actual priorities right i mean like one thing that happened like

is bank of america has like a very clear policy that you can't work all the time right and hr tells people you can't work all the time you have to submit your hours everything like that but it seems to be

I don't know about universally ignored, but it seems to be ignored some of the time.

And one thing that they did in reaction to this Wall Street Journal article is they kind of said, no, we mean it, right?

And I think you get a lot of mileage out of just saying, no, we mean it, right?

Like if the CEO leaves a voicemail for everyone saying,

this policy is for real.

It's not just a fig leaf.

You have to follow it.

If you don't, I'll be mad.

That gets a lot of the way there, right?

Because I do think that a lot of what happened here is that there was a policy put in place.

almost as like a public relations thing, but the culture didn't change and everyone sort of assumed, you know, all the mid-level bankers sort of assumed the senior bankers didn't really mean it and they wanted everyone to keep working really hard.

And I think if you just have the senior banker say, no, no, we mean it, that gets a lot of the way there.

But yes, installing monitoring software could also get even more of the way there.

I think people might prefer to work more hours and not be monitored than to work fewer hours and be monitored, but I'm not sure.

I don't know.

If you really want to change the culture, the technology is there.

And when it comes to culture, I have two comments.

I mean, something that the Wall Street Journal article brought up was that this is how a lot of people grew up.

A lot of these, you know, mid-level bankers who are now working these junior bankers so hard, this is how they grew up.

And it kind of gets back to the hurt people, hurt people argument.

The other thing,

hurt people, hurt people.

I say it all the time.

But obviously, this story blew up on social media.

And I follow a lot of the accounts such as liquidity, for example, both on Twitter and on Instagram.

And like you said, Bank of America did put out this statement that they really mean it.

The reaction that I've seen so far on social media is that, okay, these are just words.

I think if they are serious about changing the culture, they'd do something.

Like they would do some action, such as either installing that technology or actually firing people.

The last time there was a big rash of stories about bankers complaining about hours, a lot of banks instituted protected weekend policies, but some banks were also said, we are going to hire more people, right?

Because that's actually often the way that you fix this problem, right?

I mean, part of the thing that is going on here is some sort of like cultural thing, some sort of like hazing thing where it's like, we want them to work long hours because one, that trains them better than if they worked a few hours.

And two, there's an acculturation and like a hazing process of like, you know, we worked long hours, they should work long hours, we should make them feel part of the firm by making them work 120 hour weeks.

But some of it is just there's a lot of work to do, right?

Fuels move fast and you need a lot of people to do a lot of work on them.

That part of the problem can be partly, not entirely, but like partly solved by just hiring more people so that you have more people to do the work.

You know, if you have a certain amount of work to do, you have more people do it and each of them can work less.

You occasionally see that as a solution, but you don't see it a ton of the time as a solution.

Should I say AI?

Should I say

is the other one, right?

I mean, and you definitely see that as a thing banks talk about.

I don't have a great sense on the ground of like how much junior bankers' lives are improved by AI.

And I do think there is a thing where like work expands to fill the time.

And it's like if you have the ability to generate a pitch book through AI in 20 minutes, you will probably be asked to generate a lot more pitch books than you would have been otherwise.

But it is probably the case that a lot of junior banker work

could be.

is being, will soon be

sort of absorbed by AI.

And then figuring out exactly what to do about that with people's hours will be an interesting problem.

Yeah.

Like the cultural stuff is real.

Like they do want them there all the time because that's how like you become a like a loyal, excited, committed member of the banking team, right?

And if like AI does all your work and you go home at four every day, like I think like your VP will be sad even if the work is good because like they wanted also like the training and hazing effect of all those hours.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how this evolves.

And we're talking a lot about Bank of America, but this isn't just a Bank of America thing, obviously.

Definitely not a Bank of America thing at all.

The Wall Street Journal did have a lot of great anecdotes in there about people who just left.

There were some people that they quoted anonymously who were still working there, which I thought was interesting as well.

But I saw something on one of the liquidity tub accounts I followed that someone did what was known as a victory lap.

This isn't something I'm familiar with.

It doesn't really exist in journalism, but you would take the car service home like like very early in the morning and then like take a shower and like change your clothes at your apartment and then go back into the car service to take it back into the office.

That just seems crazy.

I don't know.

I worked at places where.

Go on, go on.

When I was a young lawyer, I had, you know, you know, like the car service policy was like you could take a car after, I don't know, whatever it was, eight o'clock at night.

And I would occasionally take cars at 3 p.m.

because like I'd been there for three days straight and I was like, no one will question this policy, this out of policy car service.

The story about my sad hours that I tell a lot is that I once,

I had one night where I got 90 minutes of sleep and it was under my desk and it was on my birthday.

So that was a bad birthday.

That just went from sad to funny.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

I had lots of nights where I got 90 minutes or less of sleep under my desk, but only one of them was on my birthday.

Did you have a cupcake or anything?

Like, did you celebrate it at all?

They had good snacks there, so I probably had a pepper shrum cookie, it was pretty sad.

Well, on that note.

On that note, I'm going on vacation.

I'll see you in two weeks.

Yes, there'll be no Money Stuff podcast next week, because I'll be on vacation.

But we'll see you back here in two weeks with more stuff.

Send us mail.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Levine.

And I'm Katie Greifeld.

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on bloomberg.com.

And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on OpenInterest between 9 to 11 a.m.

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You can send an email to moneypod at bloomberg.net.

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The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andam.

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer.

And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast.

We'll be back next week with more stuff.

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