Sign New Hampshire Banking Forbearance Agreement Safe

Industry sign banking new hampshire forbearance agreement online

[Music] welcome to global connections with robert segal presented by the american friends of ravine medical center our monthly leaders forum addressing vital issues facing society the economy real estate medicine technology and science my name is dr joshua platt i'm the executive director of american friends of ravine medical center a 501 c 3 national charitable organization based in new york city we at afrmc represent israel's premier hospital ruby medical center patak tikva in greater tel aviv the hospital serves 1 million patients annually from all ethnic and religious backgrounds with the same compassionate care please support our mission join our community of friends visit american friends of rabbit medical center online afrmc.org via our website and social media outlets on facebook twitter instagram linkedin and youtube our host and moderator for global connections is robert segal the former host of all things considered on national public radio for 30 years today's global connections topic is how do we emerge from this economic crisis special guest dr stanley fisher former vice chair of the u.s federal reserve and former governor of the bank of israel abby joseph cohen advisory director and senior investment strategist at goldman sachs jonathan gregg president and chief operating officer at the blackstone group and dr michael drescher director of emergency and trauma medicine and israel's rabbi medical center and now global connections with robert siegel thanks josh our panelists are as always an exceptionally accomplished group economist stanley fisher has a resume that is unique mit professor chief economist at the world bank deputy managing director at the international monetary fund uh vice chair of the federal reserve and governor of the bank of israel also the list of his mit doctoral students is a virtual all-star team of economists and he is our lead-off panelist stan fisher welcome to global connections thanks very much uh first if our national leaders were to ask you to tell them in a nutshell uh what the government should do to navigate the economy through this uh economic crisis brought on by the pandemic what would you say that issues which are important particularly on trade and especially on what we do in our in our economy to keep our food systems reasonably clear and not being a source of further difficulties and further further further diseases coming out of the food system are you worried by the increase in the debt by well by the trillions nowadays not especially um i think it's being exaggerated at the moment uh when the interest if the interest rate was zero it wouldn't matter at all uh if we had a larger debt um it isn't quite zero but it certainly is is certainly isn't the six percent or something that i grew up with as a graduate student and it's very much closer to zero and so i'm surprised that the way we're dealing with the debt burden which is still being measured by the ratio of debt to gdp but the burden of that is much less than it was when interest rates were much higher and we should be measuring it by the burden of the interest and other costs of uh running the debt and not by the the size of the debt relative to gdp and that makes a very big difference but what what do you say to a um a deficit hawk or a skeptic who says the interest rate is zero but there's still the principle that at some point uh we're uh we're obliged to pay and if it mounts up some year we have to have a tax increase to address these new burdens well i'd say that's that's quite right the overall burden of the debt is significantly less when the debt is about 100 of gdp uh than it would have been if uh the debt was uh 58 was let us say 70 of gdp so we're just paying much less to run to borrow that seems a reasonable thing to have to uh take into account back in the spring i heard a lot of people saying uh the uh the the recession the lockdowns the job losses were caused by something extraneous to our economy by a virus we got the virus under control we'll go back to business as it was and business was pretty good uh at the beginning of all this uh more recently it looks like the economy is really changing uh during this pandemic as it as it lasts longer and longer the way we travel the way we uh recreate should should the point of government policy be to get us back to where we were uh or should it be to uh look at what's changed and encourage the adaptations well with a small change which is some of the things that have happened now are going to change the the amount of debt that we need the amount of borrowing that we need and we've got to take that into account uh i don't think there'll be as many uh nice trips to uh france for conferences as they used to be and similarly on uh similar uh parts of the life of the traveling economist will be different uh in the future and this can become much more serious because they're going to be developments of new drugs and those drugs could be very important and we need to take that into account so it won't be exactly the same and we'll have to take account of that now much of that could be done through the market uh of the and done by the uh fight without the help of the government but we certainly needed the government intervention to get the new drugs if they arrived to arrive quickly and to arrive in some sense with some sense of timing you feel that we're hurting for the lack of a fiscal a more active fiscal role by the by the congress i think we'd do better if we had a more active fiscal role we're we've got a lot of unemployment at the moment and it may come down in two years but we don't have to suffer for two years by not so as not to use fiscal policy one lesson that some people at least thought they took away from the past several months is that uh certainly in the healthcare sector just-in-time production uh really isn't the safest way to go and indeed complex global supply chains may be too fragile when we're counting on other countries for masks and pipettes and glass vials and the like i mean do you expect there to be more economic nationalism both both of our both presidential candidates are running about you know talking about buying american more and building more in america do you do you expect a change in that in that attitude well i don't think that attitude which is probably inherent to everybody who hasn't studied economics is is necessarily wrong in this case and yes there are certain aspects of what we need in terms of keeping uh keeping uh weapons of uh that can be used very quickly and by weapons i mean true i mean medicines uh and whatever else will keep the uh keep keep the disease from go growing growing as rapidly as it has in some country in some parts of this country and certainly in other parts of the world and so we'll have to take a care take a look at that and make sure that we've got reasonable uh production capacity but we should also take into account we need reasonable people in the government you cannot say we've got a terrific uh way of producing uh this uh these uh things and we started and we've spent money and we've got everything uh working for this and then saying oh we don't need it i haven't had a problem with it for the last 100 years and that's what we did i have one question that goes back to your days in israel i'm just curious given the the news of the israeli normalization with uh well also with the kingdom of bahrain but more important with the united arab emirates uh is that something that that you think uh would be extremely helpful economically to the israelis or is it of greater diplomatic political importance well it's uh obviously most important as a political development and it means that gradually among the uh arab countries the uh fear of israel is declining and the fear of their fellow arab countries is also declining and they feel more able to choose their own course so that all is uh is very good uh as as you implied bahrain is very small uh but united arab republic uh emirates are uh are not that small their populations about the same size as israel and uh that matters but there's not a lot of trade that goes on between these countries and they tend to trade with the uh larger countries of the world they tend to import from europe and and uh states yeah well stan fisher i'd like to china and china uh uh i'd like you to please stay with us for the q a which will be in about 25 minutes stanley fischer thank you very much uh our second panelist on uh navigating the new abnormal of the pandemic economy is abby joseph cohen of goldman sachs for many years she was the chief global strategist there in in late terms she was the market maven uh in her current role as an advisory director she's writing about long-term uh economic issues abby joseph cohen uh welcome to this global connections forum on navigating the new abnormal hello robert thank you uh first question why are the markets i'm talking about the stock market for example so relatively buoyant when there are tens of millions of people unemployed businesses especially small businesses being shuttered uh all around us is it just fed policy or that uh you you can't invest in anything that pays more than than a half percent anyway why why why is the market uh doing so well well clearly federal reserve policy is an important part of this but let's back up a moment while many people think that the economy and the stock market in particular are identical twins they're not they're not even cousins sometimes perhaps they're distant cousins there are very big differences between them one of the differences has to do with time horizon the stock market is what we refer to as a discounting mechanism stock prices are related to what investors think will happen not now but in the future there's another big difference right now in composition when we look at the stock market for example i think many people are aware that recent stock price movement has been very much tied to a very small number of securities mainly those in technology perhaps pharmaceutical whereas it doesn't really reflect the entire economy rather it reflects the stocks specifically in the stock market and there's another big difference as well and that's valuation which is how much are you willing to pay for something there are some companies out there that are great they have wonderful stories but sometimes those stories get priced a little bit more than than they should so you're right to ask the question you did this is a time of significant economic duress for many people the unemployment rate while it's come down is still very high in the city of new york it's in excess of 15 percent so we do have many people who remain in trouble we have many companies particularly smaller ones that are still digging their way out and so the stock market which reflects some of the largest best managed and most successful companies in the united states not necessarily a good reflection for the rest of what's happening in the united states now that we're six months or so into the pandemic i wonder which of the changes around us strike you as probably going to be passing emergency measures that we all lived through for whatever it was one year two years however however long and and what strikes you as perhaps uh a change or two that that are going to endure and that we're we're learning to do now and we're going to keep on doing you know uh stanley mentioned a few of those changes that i think will endure and one of those has to do with the way we approach our business relations and also how we travel i think we've all learned that we don't need to be face to face all the time sure it's nice but business does not have to be conducted in that manner we don't need to be jet setting about um clearly um as an economist at goldman sachs i spent more than my fair share of time on airplanes and that sort of thing is not quite as important as it was uh in part because the people on the other side no longer expect it it's okay to show your respect show you kavod to the other person electronically and i think that is a change that was probably going to happen anyway uh but the covet pandemic has advanced it dramatically and of course we've seen it in our social relationships uh as well uh so many people participated in high holiday services this past weekend electronically perhaps it felt a little odd but it was better than not having those opportunities at all so that was one change the other big thing that we need to look at very carefully is that the pandemic brought to the surface some underlying problems in the economy and perhaps they were kept a little bit subterranean because overall the economy was growing and so on but what we have seen very clearly is that so many of our fellow american citizens basically are not doing all that well economically we see for example that the median wage in the united states adjusted for inflation has continued to move lower over the last 20 years this is not a great thing we have seen this widening of income inequality there are many reasons for it i don't know that we want to spend so much time delving into all the many reasons but there are a few buckets for it one has to do with educational opportunity the other has to do with the investments we make as a nation are we investing enough in education are we investing enough in research and development some of the work that we published recently is actually quite discouraging along those lines the united states first century was the leader in terms of investment in r d both in terms of dollars but also as a percentage of our economy we're still number one in terms of dollars although china's getting close in terms of being number two but in terms of how much of our overall economy we dedicate to r d investment we're number eight um that's not where we want to be i've read that number in your uh in your report and it's uh it's pretty discouraging uh and if if there is to be some uh mood of redressing the inequalities that have been laid bare very starkly during the past several months if there is actually to be a forward long-term thinking uh move toward more investment in research um essentially we're talking about uh a uh a a more robust federal government a return to a robust role by the federal government and if i'm sorry if i could just interject for a moment you had this interesting exchange with dr fisher about the budget deficit and one of the important things we need to look at is not just ability to pay for that deficit but what did we use the money for and over the past few years we've been using it less and less for r d by the way r d helps not just technologists and scientists it helps the people in the new industries that get created as a consequence of those investments we've also not invested in infrastructure and one of the reasons that we have seen rural areas in the united states lag behind urban areas for the past 10 years has been that they've not had the infrastructure spend they have broadband coverage of just about 60 percent as opposed to 95 to 99 in most cities uh you you you as you speak i'm i'm thinking of uh of a part of the country where as a as a as a journalist i would find myself every other year and even numbered years and so it's the area between west virginia western pennsylvania and southern ohio around the ohio river where once steel mills well coal mines uh dug out coal steel mills made steel uh up the river they they went on barges and and we made all courts sorts of things like cars and trucks out of uh out of that the area is dead i mean it it's uh and and much of what happened in the election four years ago was a a revolt of of workers in those in those areas saying uh no no one's thinking about us uh uh how do you how would you tell those people here's a policy which shows we're thinking about you and we want to see you have a crack at the 85 000 job you used to have not the 40 000 job driving for the county that you could have instead i think focus really needs to be on what will the new growth industries be and what will the job opportunities be so for example uh jobs in the solar energy area um and other forms of alternative energy we they're actually many more of those jobs now um than there are in things l ke coal or the petrochemical industry in the united states including fracking um and and so this has been an area of growth and these jobs pay well uh if we were to focus more on r d and investment in new technologies this would actually in my view create new jobs uh the investment in broadband as one form of infrastructure would allow some of these hard-hit communities to become places where there could be jobs in call centers or in other types of jobs and in communities industries rather that require that sort of interconnectivity what we've heard from so many companies who sought to put warehouse facilities or other facilities in these communities is they couldn't do it because they couldn't get those facilities online with the rest of their operations so those are just among some of the things to do and the other aspect and again here too i'll harken back to something stan mentioned before is health one of the things we're seeing in some of these hard hit areas where there have been permanent losses of jobs and permanent reductions in income is that the health outcomes are actually quite poor and so we see for example that while uh longevity uh expected a life expectancy in most of the united states has been rising it's been declining in these other areas some of it has to do with drug use some of it has to do with poor access to medical care and that's something that i believe should be addressed and can be addressed through a more active federal intervention abby joseph cohen of goldman sachs she was goldman's chief global strategist for many years and is now an advisory director there i'd be stick around for the q a in a few minutes and thanks for your remarks uh next navigating the new abnormal economy in particular dealing with real estate our third panelist is john gray mr gray is president and chief operating officer of the blackstone group the big private management firm that invests heavily in among other things real estate it's also invested in hilton worldwide and john gray is the chairman of hilton uh john gray welcome to global connections great to be here robert thank you uh first uh the overall question as you look at what's happened over the past half year and as you've made business decisions uh what changes in the economy do you figure are our passing emergency measures and what do you think are changes that are likely to endure and be with us for many years well i think human behavior uh tends to be stickier than sometimes we think in moments like this i remember after 9 11 you know people said we weren't going to be in buildings over 10 stories we weren't going to get on planes we weren't going to go back to lower manhattan and of course all of that reversed very quickly this time some of the changes may be more permanent in nature but things like travel which the other panelists have discussed i think people want to get out i was doing some telemedicine earlier with a nurse and the first thing she said was oh you're in new york i can't wait to get back to new york once kovitz passed i think business travel will come back maybe it'll be slightly different i think it comes back we want to go to sporting events and we want to go to music events i think that will all come back once there's a perception of safety i think people will return to cities right now you know people aren't renting apartments they're not going into their offices i think again that changes there may be some modifications some remote work but in general people come back then i would say there are things particularly in the virtual world which have been accelerated that may not uh come back shopping would be one of those i think we've been watching the movement of goods online for some time there's been a step function increase that i don't see going back in the same way and that will have profound implications for shopping malls but for the most part i think once we get back to normalcy people will go back to living their lives in many ways like they did before but but i mean a lot of people are saying you know working from home isn't so bad and their bosses are saying productivity isn't that much less with people working from home uh so the value of office space uh is suddenly uh you know reconsidered uh and uh for the for the employee the value of living in the city well why not go to an outer suburb where there's a lot of open spaces those aren't decisions you unmake uh you know every couple of years well there's no question in the short term office space is going to be under enormous pressure and there will be some functions particularly functions function maybe some technical functions that can be done remotely but i think a lot of what we do in office buildings involves collaborative work it involves training many jobs are sort of apprenticeship in nature our investment business requires people really interacting we've managed to do a lot of zoom but we have some of our people back today because it's helpful to be together it's helpful to build a culture so i do believe we may not have the same intensity of use but i still think we'll have plenty of people in office buildings and as an investor the opportunities emerge when the perception of something gets so out of whack so i think over the next 6 12 months people will have very negative views of office buildings in their future similarly negative views about cities and my expectation is that'll create opportunities if you look at london over hundreds of years pandemics fires bombing whatever every time they say it's over it goes from strength to strength but i'd be willing to bet new york comes back yeah okay and i i wouldn't bet against that but in terms of real estate i mean hilton closed the times square hilton uh recently that doesn't sound like a judgment a vote of confidence in in say tourism to new york city it sounds like you figure things are things are gone for a while yeah i won't comment on a specific hotel but hilton is the manager franchisor doesn't close these but but the hotel business in particular is under enormous pressure now obviously because there's very limited travel particularly international travel meetings corporate travel but urban hotels in america and places like new york and chicago and san francisco face very heavy pressure because there was lots of new building prior to the crisis airbnb exists which impacts leisure travelers and then these hotels tend to have very high labor costs so it is possible unfortunately that a number of the older sort of grand dom hotels in these cities could potentially not reopen and that's a negative but i think you'll see many hotels reopen just like restaurants will reopen and these cities will come back i'm not saying that asset values haven't declined in the short term i'm just saying if you take a longer term perspective people will want to come back to these cities does is longer term is that another way of saying after the vaccine well sure after the vaccine and then it'll take time because companies will have taken losses they'll be hesitant it'll take a while to book things but in the fullness of time if you said do i believe the cash flow of some of these assets in 2024 25 will be back to 2019 levels yeah i'd say that seems reasonable so i think the key is to separate things that are transitory as you pointed out to things that are more permanent and that's where i'd say the retail i'm much more concerned about blackstone owns a huge number of single-family homes that it's turned into rentals uh through the uh it's invitation uh housing i guess is the is the venture and i should i should note that blackstone has has denied this but you were actually criticized by a u.n human rights rapper but one thing was aggressive eviction so evictions is a subject nowadays at one point governor cuomo put a ban on foreclosures and evictions during the pandemic the president has a somewhat i think more vague and narrow executive order about evictions and foreclosures what's happening out there are people are people falling behind on their rent are they are they months in arrears what's what's going on well it started by saying as a firm whether we own single-family rentals or multi-family rentals we are always very focused on being great landlords treating tenants well and we dispute those uh comments but the landlord-tenant relationship is not one of the easiest ones in the uh yeah what i would say is in the near term frankly since the crisis everyone was highly concerned about lack of rental payments the reality has been much better for our portfolio it's been in the high 90s percent wise which is everyone would be surprised by but that's a function i think partially because of the stimulus checks partially because people say hey a roof over my head in this environment is really important and and also um people are not spending the way they were before right they're not out shopping they're not traveling and so they have money to cover their rent we've seen a lot of strength in consumer credit that we didn't anticipate so housing and rental housing has been better and in those cases where people are really you know facing hard times landlords like us have have tried to be as helpful as possible in this context so the good news has been the sort of wave of both evictions or foreclosures that were anticipated hasn't come to pass and that's certainly a good thing for our society but but has it not come to pass uh because of uh of forbearance uh because of covet 19 or because people are actually making the payments actually more on the rental side and frankly on the on the mortgage side payment rates have been much higher than i anticipated and i it's a variety of factors but that's been a positive sign and consumers overall if you looked at credit card payments if you looked at pretty much auto loans anywhere you'd expect to see weakness in consumer finance it's been healthier than you would expect and i just want to before moving on i just wanted to run past you what abby joseph cohen said and ask you if you agree abby was giving the the bright side of what we've learned about about uh what we can do without being face to face as you've said there are reasons for bringing people into the office uh and i wonder i i mean i've had this conversation with everyone from business people to psychiatrists and how are they managing their relationships uh in in the age of zoom uh how much has it changed for you that is are you willing to say that uh business can be done with a lot less face-to-face contact i would say some elements of business yes but uh we think about what we do as a team sport you know when you're underwriting real estate or companies infrastructure you've got a bunch of people with different expertise you're coming together you're trying to finance investment you're dealing with your investors raising capital it's a complex sort of ecosystem and it's better together i'm not saying that this doesn't work we managed to make it work in the first half of the year we raised nearly 50 billion dollars from our investors we deployed 11 billion dollars in public securities when the markets went off in march we can make it work but if i want to build the best firm with the best culture and be as creative as possible it's better together okay john gray hang in there we're going to be taking questions from the attendees in a moment thanks john gray of blackstone [Music] we have checked in on past global connections with dr michael drescher who runs the emergency department at uh rabin medical center in padhaka in the greater tel aviv area in israel about israel's experience of corporate 19 mike drescher who divides his time between uh peta and and hartford connecticut uh joins us once again for a few minutes and uh you know the first time we spoke in the end of june israel was on top of this thing as you told us it played to israel's natural strengths it's a relatively small country only one big airport uh pretty secure borders the next time we spoke school had resumed and there was some some outbreaks now it seems as though i mean you your your hospital is now taking overflow patients from from jerusalem hospitals yes yes that's correct robert uh we um have opened up in two uh wards that are dedicated to covet patients one of the awards is in our parking garage we have an underground garage underneath our emergency department it's of course no longer a parking garage it's been turned into a full-fledged uh hospital ward which has been something to see but yes we have been taking from areas of the country which are harder hit in terms of the severity of their of illness and bringing them to uh to bailing i mean a harder hit as in they they don't have the hospital beds for them uh correct well harder hit in the sense of uh more uh ill people but also in in in fewer beds per per uh per capita per sick person the uh that the bad news about covet 19 in israel is that the cases the number of cases have risen the good news is your mortality rate in israel seems to be quite low by our standards in the certainly by our standards in the states uh yeah well the one thing that's uh what puts israel in a bit of a different position is the is the age the general age of the population we have probably the highest uh level of children per family in the western world so there's a lot more young people and young people as we know in the era of covid are not as severely affected they are they are infected but they're not um as severely ill by any means and so we have a lot more infected people but but fewer uh but fewer fatalities as a result of that um a much younger population in general i mean the biggest families in israel tend to be haradi families of the very orthodox families and that appears to be where the the greatest outbreaks have been in hardy neighborhoods yes over the past few days really or reached the days we've been seeing a kind of a leveling that is the the general population has become more infected but it's still true that the hot spots have been generally in harmony neighborhoods and also in some of the arab uh areas for perhaps for other reasons but those really have been the outstanding uh neighborhoods or towns that have been affected i i asked you this the first time we spoke and i'll ask you for an update have you learned more about this disease since if you know in the in the past couple of months have israeli doctors learned more that informs the way that they're treating people better absolutely the answer is yes we uh a lot of the burden on the medical system of this of this disease is is the logistics of it that is there are people who are very ill who require intensive care etc but there are a lot of people who are not particularly ill but the way in which they need to be dealt with in order to keep the disease from spreading uh requires a lot of logistics requires of course personal protective equipment requires isolation we have us every emergency department in the country including ours in the rabine medical center has a separate wing for suspected people with covalent now they don't all have covert so we need to keep people isolated one from the other we have a separate area for people who have been identified as positive for the disease but this all requires a whole new setup of how we have patients flow and how we take care of uh how we take care of patients so in addition to having intensive care internal medicine awards for patients who are significantly ill we also have the whole system needs to be set up for dealing with this and we've learned to do it well we've learned to take care of people are we have a significant number of uh staff who have been either in isolation or have gotten ill but not from by and large not from patients in the hospital from the surrounding area from families schools et cetera like the rest of the population mike drescher dr michael drescher head of the emergency department at the ravine medical center thanks and hang in there with us in case we get some questions about about the disease and we have several uh questions already this is one for stan fisher uh and whoever else would like to answer what's the best economic policy to follow with china the best thing that can be done is trying to r verse our policies i'm not sure that uh we're going to keep we're going to do that so we're in a very difficult situation with china and we better recognize that and we better try and uh try and reverse some of the uh aspects which are unnecessarily hostile but uh trump uh is a fairly aggressive guy and she is probably a fairly aggressive guy as well so we've got two players in this game that are not looking as if they're going to find it desirable to be good friends uh abby joseph cohen what are the main this is uh from another anonymous attendee uh what are the main for the stock market and the economy's recovery between a biden or a trump presidency one wonderful question uh let me see if i can walk very carefully through this answer i'm going to begin by agreeing with something else that stan said earlier and that is the number one factor is going to be how the health situation plays out um if the pandemic shows signs of being out of control um if it appears that government policy is not getting uh things under control because there are there's limited mask wearing inadequate social distancing and the disease incident rate doesn't go down that's the worst possible baseline case for the economy so for the economy to truly recover we need to have i think a more proactive approach towards health and i would suggest that mr biden and his administration would do that not just a question of the messaging from a prospective new president but also uh the attention paid to the science of the matter recognizing uh that we have learned a great deal as a global health community over the last nine months and we ought to be applying that uh in an important way uh number two we'll be looking at policy um in terms of monetary policy i think the federal reserve deserves an enormous amount of credit uh for having stayed the course having recognized uh that they needed to be if you will the adults in the room um and needed needing to attack using the sailboat this sailing term when fiscal policy was was not doing the job appropriately with regard to fiscal policy i do think there'd be differences between a second trump administration and a biden administration now do we really know uh what either would uh put forth no we don't nor do we know what the new congress would agree to um until we know whether uh one party is in the white house and who's controlling the senate which party's controlling the house a lot of this is very speculative so all i can go on are some of the guidelines that each admit each candidate has put out there um i would say that mr trump's proposals for second term are shall we say very skimpy that is we have very little information about what he would do or what he would do differently mr biden is out there talking about reversing uh part of the uh tax cuts that were implemented um um in 2017 uh enact in 2017 implemented in 2018 and the changes that they've put forth make sense to me uh basically uh an increase uh in the corporate tax rate um still would be lower than it was before but raising it somewhat uh raising taxes on individuals with income of four hundred thousand dollars and more and so on so nothing particularly uh grievous if you will um for most um but also uh biden administration has made some proposals with regard to shoring up social security and also medicare there's also a big difference in terms of the treatment and this will be the last comment a treatment in term policy treatment in terms of the affordable care act i think many people are aware that the trump administration is in court right now trying to get a rid of the aca and the coverage for roughly 20 million americans during a pandemic what the biden campaign has proposed and who knows what would actually get passed would be a shoring up of the aca number one and number two also the possibility of lowering the retirement age and eligibility age for medicare from 65 to 60 years of age this might be very helpful for people who find themselves perhaps retiring earlier than they had expected to because of the economic distress uh related to the pandemic there are a couple of questions for for john gray uh our questioner asks blackstone mentioned that they're starting to see distressed deals is that a leading indicator of what's to come how is this different from 2008 so yes after you have a sharp downturn you begin to see distress materialize first obviously we saw in march asset prices went down but we've seen the stock market come back in private markets it takes longer so if you own a business with too much leverage or a piece of real estate it's a while you use your reserves to pay your debt service then you hit the wall maybe you file bankruptcy you go into foreclosure that process takes time um in 0.809 the whole process took much longer the the size of the issue was so large the financial system itself was under stress as everybody recalls the real economy got dry dragged down in this case the financial system was actually in pretty good shape going in and the real economy got shut down by the virus so we don't have nearly the same level of distress it's much more focused in this select group of industries we've been talking about travel real estate energy retail but we will see more of it it'll take several years to work out and there will be opportunities to buy assets at prices that are significantly below where they were before the key thing will be is something cyclically impacted we own a water park business that i believe once it's safe people will take their kids back to water parks versus say uh department store chain or movie theaters or other businesses that are really secularly impacted and the pandemics accelerated i think you've got to differentiate between the two but if you do that i do think there'll be some interesting opportunities to invest well a follow-up question from one from an attendee is what specifically will take the place of retail venues in the new real estate economy uh that is street level stores malls and the like if if the old retailers are gone my own idea by the way is mega restaurants where there's huge that there's space between all the tables what do you see you know well it's interesting if you go to china or other place china's actually advanced relative to us as it relates to mobile technology and e-commerce their malls have a much smaller percentage that sell physical goods so it's much more cooking class it's much more entertainment centers restaurants i think you'll see more of that more service retail nail salons the spaces in many cases i think we'll get occupied the biggest power center boxes may not the biggest department stores but you'll find new uses the rents will come down but the movement to e-commerce will continue and so that is a trend that is so tough to fight we have seen sectors like supermarkets and walmart and costco hang in there because they provide a really essential function but many traditional retailers will face real headwinds and then you'll see more of a showroom approach if you think about apple it's it's doing a lot large volume of sales in a small space and you could see companies who have a small number of locations smaller sizes because you no longer store goods on premise so retail will reinvent there'll be other uses but it's going to require a lot of capital and the rents will likely be a lot lower i was just curious abby joseph do you have any any thoughts on the the the look of american retail real estate in the future um i think that john has made some very interesting points we also need to distinguish between urban centers and other parts of the country i think in urban centers we may see that some of that space is taken over in terms of service establishments but not necessarily retail service some of it could be health care related some of it could be the sort of service industries per se that we see what i do worry about is in some of the less urban areas of the united states where there have been uh job losses um and it's not yet clear what the new jobs uh will be you know one of the things about cities and one of the reasons i remain optimistic about cities is that there's an ecosystem uh people want to live um where there are many different uh types of activities they want to live where there are employment opportunities and entertainment opportunities and so on in some of these more rural areas uh where there has been dramatic loss of population over the last 20 to 25 years it's not quite clear to me uh how some of this real estate is going to be used in the future um we see some of it uh being used for warehouses we see some of it being used for distribution centers uh but those by and large are not good paying jobs uh we have a question for uh dr drescher how are israeli hospitals partnering during this crisis partnering with each other yes so as as mentioned before um we are in the rabin center taking on patients where there is overflow from uh for instance a colleague of mine from jerusalem who called up and said listen we are we're looking for places to put our positive covid patients and so that is one way there have been other uh in terms of um when as they as the entire laboratory system protesting got ramped up there were centers that were ready and there were centers that were not so a lot of places were sending off their lab their lab needs to to other places uh so those are those are two examples there has and of course at the level of national kind of policy and uh presenting uh the situation to uh the political powers that be of course that's been another kind of collective activity of the medical community so there's been various ways in which it's been it has been a national effort to some extent uh there's been very little uh competition or or backbiting or or anything like that with it it's been quite a collective uh effort with each person each community taking care of its unique local uh problems but there has been collaboration across uh various areas implicit in that israel like the united states the leadership said handle this locally uh as opposed to we'll run everything out of the ministry here uh well that's not exactly true there has there's been a lot more uh ministry of health involvement uh even from the outset in terms of directing there's been at least an attempt at it you know there's been a lot of uncertainty nobody's has had a road map from the outset to say uh this is the way things are going to go but there's been quite a lot of effort of central uh at least guidance as to which way to take this the army also i should say has taken quite a the home front command has taken uh in some areas a lead in helping to organize the response sam fisher you you uh raised your hand yeah this is a question for for the others um we don't uh i haven't heard anything about progress with vaccines do we know what's going on well uh uh do we know beyond the fact we have what four vaccines into phase three trials uh whoever wants to pick up and uh uh and who knows more dr drescher you you well i will i will say that you know there's a lot of hope out there and there's a but very thin on actual um uh knowledge as to what when things are going to happen optimists are saying uh this fall winter uh now what does that mean does that mean that we're you know is there going to be a vaccine that has been shown to work even if so what is the distribution of that going to be how fast is that going to be going out to populations most of the vaccines that are underway now are two stage vaccines which are going to require three weeks between vaccine between uh applications in any case so i don't think that there anybody can say for sure i'm i'm quite optimistic that by the beginning of next year there's going to be a large degree of there's so much there's so much need for it there's so much motivation economically for people to get it through i believe that it's going to happen and there's stage three trials are happening are underway as we speak so i think it's going to happen and as a as if as a physician um explain what the utility is of a vaccine that is 50 effective or 51 effective and gets fda approval on that on that basis how much does that change the magnitude of the problem that you face with an infectious disease well it's a game changer because uh the the disease and of course depending on the infectivity of the disease the percentage of people who need to be immunized is higher as the disease is more effective but if you have a disease which is effective to some degree but you can reduce fight by half or by some other percentage the number of people who are who are susceptible or vulnerable you reduce the likelihood that this disease can can uh can pervade can be pervasive in the population and um and reduce and bring it to the point where there's a famous number which is an r efficient coefficient which is how ineffective this disease is you reduce that or coefficient to less than one the disease eventually goes away at least for that that period of time that that immunization is around like the flu or like any other that would mean that on average a person with the with the the uh the virus uh would would uh pass it on average ten people would pass it on to fewer than ten other people that would correct potentially there's a there's a uh the disease dies out that way and the more people who are not uh who are not going if you have five people in a household and four of them are immune the likelihood of passing from that household to another household is markedly less is the question by the way for stan fisher about um uh about the united arab emirates deal which was is that normalization changing anything economically or is it simply making things quote more public that is was israel doing business with people in the uae anyway just off the books or or uh out of the spotlight let's say well you used to hear people saying for quite some time oh i've been kids to the uae and i go there all the time and i have a room in a hotel and all that sort of stuff and it existed was my conclusion after listening to that story many times um but having something which is well concealed is probably always less good than having something that is open and that can be uh explained to everybody and it's it could be very important it's uh it's in some sense the first example of the two countries just getting together and figuring out they may they may get benefits from it aside from not having to shoot at each other yes that's always a it's always an improvement uh when when we can when we can avoid that i'd just like to hear from each of you just in a in a quite a quick round yes or no i'm just curious in your gut do you think that next year at this time if we were all to get together the same of us and talk about what's going on uh that things will be radically different and better than they are right now or do you think that uh come 20 21 or 57 82 whatever i'm not sure what what year that's going to be uh that things will be pretty much as they are now if if not worse mike drescher i think you were saying you expect things to get better yes i do i'm going to take one minute before that robert just as somebody who's from the actual uh ravine medical center and to thank josh plout and to thank all of you folks for for making this happen i mean this is really uh this is an exceptional group of people and i really want to say on behalf of the medical center thank you very much to everybody for making this happen having said that i also want to say that yes i'm optimistic i think that there is going to be there is going to be a vaccine i think people things are going to come back people are going to have the same needs and desires that they had before and i think that we're going to be sitting in a very different position uh in a year from now than we are today stan fisher are you that optimistic about a year from now i don't i don't know enough to uh to know okay fair enough abby joseph cohen um there's an awful lot we don't know um i think the election outcome in the united states will be critically important and i will just repeat um a comment and logo that we have hanging in my home which is trust science um and i think if we have leaders who don't trust science it's goin to take us quite a long time to get to where we want to be john gray optimistic i'm in the optimism camp i think a year from now we'll have a vaccine it'll be mostly effective we'll go back to life um there'll be a lot of weddings and bar mitzvahs and i think we'll all be a lot happier and i'd get to meet these great people in person so thank you for having me thank you very much for joining us thanks to all of our guests dr stanley fisher abby joseph cohen jonathan gray dr michael drescher and many thanks to as mike dresher mentioned many thanks to joshua plout also nate bonzani and roni giubigano from american friends of the ravine medical center and our video and zoom director bobby grandon thanks to our program sponsor which is the american friends of ravine medical center which is a c 501c3 national charitable organization representing in the united states israel's largest hospital rabbin medical center in patatika in greater tel aviv the website of the medical center is www www.afrmc.org i'm robert siegel and this has been global connections navigating the new abnormal stay healthy and stay safe we would be pleased to send a complimentary dvd of this program to anyone who wishes to support jbs with a tax deductible gift of 36 double high or more simply visit the jbs website at jbstv.org and click on the donate button to make a donation by paypal or your credit card and please indicate the program for which you would like a dvd or you can send your tax deductible check to jbs post office box 360 stanford connecticut zero six nine zero four or you can call the jbs pledge line at eight three three my jbs tv that's 833-695-2788 and again please remember to indicate which program you would like to receive with our compliments we thank you for your kind support