WHEN: Today, Thursday, January 19, 2023
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” “Squawk on the Street” and “TechCheck” – Live from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcripts of CNBC interviews which aired on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET), “Squawk on the Street” (M-F, 9AM-11AM) and “TechCheck” (M-F, 11AM-12PM) today, Thursday, January 19th for Davos 2023 in Davos, Switzerland.
Interviews included: JPMorgan Chase Chairman & CEO Jamie Dimon, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, Semafor Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith, Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson, Illumina President & CEO Francis deSouza, BMO Capital Markets CEO Darryl White, Hewlett Packard Enterprise President & CEO Antonio Neri, Morgan Stanley Chairman & CEO James Gorman, World Central Kitchen Chef & Founder Jose Andres and Breyer Capital Founder & CEO Jim Breyer.
Links to video of the interviews are included below.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
Interview with JPMorgan Chase Chairman & CEO Jamie Dimon
Videos:
DIMON ON THE ECONOMY
JAMIE DIMON: Part of that storm cloud’s hit. Rates went higher than people thought. You know, the stock market’s down 20%. IPO market disappeared. And the economy of course, we all talk about it. It’s like the weather. We don’t really know. I hate guessing about that. We should have a little humility. I’ve never seen anyone actually do it well. But the real issue for the world is Russia, war, Ukraine, energy, trade, and that is serious. And that’s still out there. Hopefully it’ll all mitigate and go away, but it may not. So as a risk manager, you kind of prepare for some of that.
DIMON ON RECESSIONS
DIMON: The way we run the company is to serve clients day in and day out through thick or thin. I know there are going to be recessions, ups, downs. I really don’t spend much time worrying about it. I do worry about poor public policy that damages American growth. I worry about a lot of stuff but not about, you know, what the weather is going to be like. And of course, I don’t want a recession because it hurts average Americans. I’m not for it, but I have to be prepared for it.
DIMON ON CREDIT WORTHINESS
DIMON: We should never question the credit worthiness of the United States government. That is sacrosanct. It should never happen. Of course Democrats can blame the Republicans and Republicans can blame the Democrats. I don’t care who blames who. Even questioning it is the wrong thing to do. That is just a part of the financial structure of the world. You know, this is not something you should be playing games with at all.
DIMON ON RATES GOING HIGHER THAN 5%
DIMON: I actually think rates will go higher than 5%.
SORKIN: Higher than 5%?
DIMON: That’s my own view because I think there’s a lot of underlying inflation which won’t go away so quick.
DIMON ON UNIVERSAL PROXY
DIMON: We’re driving companies out of public markets because of litigation, regulation, disclosures, compliance. And now we’ve got the universal proxy, where someone could get under proxy with one vote that you own for one second, I’m told. And do you want boards to be dominated by special interest groups? I think that is a huge mistake and a lot of companies won’t go public for this.
DIMON ON BACK TO WORK
DIMON: We have a lot of people back to work fully and some working hybrid, and some jobs it’s okay, but it’s got to be ok for the company and the clients, not just the individual. We shouldn’t be feeding the squeaky wheel here.
Interview with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin
Video:
Interview with Semafor Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith
Video:
Interview with Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson
Video:
HUDSON ON RSV AND RSV VACCINE
PAUL HUDSON: If you look at RSV for example, there is a clear problem across the world in particularly United States very difficult to get an emergency care for a newborn at the moment in the United States. Obviously, obviously is really a problem to be able to do something about it, hopefully to have something approved before the next RSV season. You can imagine what it’ll mean to parents and infants.
HUDSON: We’re ahead of schedule. We have 27 clinical for the next, let’s say, 2 months. And importantly, we’re one of the few companies that has no patent expiration beyond 2023. For every step we take at Sanofi, it’s a really positive step forward, not just for patients, priority one, but for—
HUDSON ON VACCINE DISTRUST
HUDSON: You know, I think we have to accept that the whole industry work together to try and do the right thing to try and get the world back to normal. I think it’s natural that people want to debate and ask questions further down the line. I think people trust us every day, you know, also this year, we’ll launch a medicine for hemophilia to give people a normal life. I can tell you, those patients trust us. They want to breakthrough, they want to live a normal life and when you’re first in class, best in class, and you’re bringing hope to people who haven’t had it before, it’s game changing
HUDSON ON OLD DRUGS FOR NEW USE
HUDSON: It keeps finding itself applicable to change people’s lives in new diseases. We keep breaking new ground we keep establishing ourselves as the gold standard for patients.
Interview with Illumina President & CEO Francis deSouza
Video:
DESOUZA ON GENOMICS
FRANCIS DESOUZA: You’re absolutely right. It feels like after a couple of years, there’s just a lot of research on the genome to understand how your genome translates into human health and human disease. We’re now at a stage where some of those discoveries are showing up in the clinic and making a really big difference in a number of disease areas. We’ve already seen in Covid for example, how genomics help us identify the pathogen at the beginning, was instrumental in the mRNA vaccines that were developed, and then today is used to track how the variants are emerging around the world. But we’re also seeing impacts in the treatment of cancer where people are sequencing a tumor to identify what treatment would be best for them. It’s used in children’s hospitals today to diagnose babies in the NICU that have genetic diseases. And so we’re starting to see a number of applications show up in the clinic, and far and away that’s gonna be the biggest part of the genomics market in the future.
DESOUZA ON GRAIL BLOOD TESTING
DESOUZA: So Grail is this really exciting technology that we developed at Illumina that has been launched in the market now about 18 months ago, and what it is, is it’s a blood test that you can take the doctor ordered blood tests that can identify if a person has one of 50 types of cancer, stage one to stage four. That’s a really big deal because we know cancer kills 10 million people a year. And we also know that if you catch a cancer early, even a deadly cancer like pancreatic cancer, your chances of survival can be pretty good.
DESOUZA ON BIOTECH SECTOR
DESOUZA: We’re seeing a pullback in the biotech sector. A whole host of reasons around that, including obviously the higher inflation and interest rates.
Interview with BMO Capital Markets CEO Darryl White
Video:
WHITE ON UNEMPLOYMENT
DARRYL WHITE: I traffic in both Canada and the U.S., almost in equal measures. Tight labor market, tight labor market. 5% unemployment in Canada, 3 and a half percent in the U.S. Everybody who wants a job has a job. That may not be the case in May or June, but there are a lot of people who can still get jobs, maybe new jobs. And the excess savings? Yeah, scheduled to run out May, June. I’d be surprised. I think it’ll last longer than that.
WHITE ON SPENDING LESS
WHITE: They’re spending less than they were, and we’ve got a chance that as we go through the summer, they’ll spend less and less and less. As long as they still have a job, I can tell you what I see in our delinquencies. They’re still paying their credit card, and they’re still paying their mortgage.
Interview with Hewlett Packard Enterprise President & CEO Antonio Neri
Video:
NERI ON SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES
ANTONIO NERI: Much better, significantly better. I think we went through a period of recover both by the addition of capacity, but also driven by the declining consumer, which allowed suppliers to shift supply to the enterprise space, particularly the IT enterprise. So I will say today here probably more than 90% out of the way.
NERI ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
NERI: I think, Andrew, we have the opportunity to use AI to solve some of the biggest societal problems. I said last year that we enter what I call the new age of insights. Last decade was the information era, this decade has to be about extracting insights from the data and saw some of the biggest challenge with this here at Davos. We actually provide amazing capabilities for advancing AI, think about supercompute power at the AI scale. Last year, we unveiled for the first time in human history, the first exascale system the ability to process one quintillion transaction per second, with 40% less energy so we are in that business and obviously we are a big provider to the United States government.
Interview with Morgan Stanley Chairman & CEO James Gorman
Video:
GORMAN ON INFLATION
JAMES GORMAN: Two things have changed recently that really matter. The inflation numbers are better, right? Clearly inflation peaked. That’s no longer a question. It’s a fact. The question is, can they get to 2%, and how hard will they try to get to 2% vs. stabilizing around 3, 4. The second thing that happened is China has made a major, major pivot. Now the focus was on the reopening which was obviously critical, but the recent pivot—
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: And the recent pivot to open up you’re suggesting.
GORMAN: No, the recent pivot economically, the relationship thawing with the U.S., the meeting this morning with the vice premier I think it’s this morning and Secretary Yellen. This is, this is a big deal.
GORMAN ON PRESIDENT XI
GORMAN: Under President Xi’s mantra of common prosperity, there are 2 ways to achieve that. One is by redistribution of existing prosperity, so everyone gets a piece of the pie. The other is by growing the pie so everybody gets a piece of the pie. They have pivoted, I think, from the former to the latter. That is good news for global growth.
GORMAN ON BASIS POINTS
GORMAN: We were on a 75-basis point track. We then quickly moved to 50. The talk for I think it’s next week, right, February 1 or something, is 25. I could see them doing 25, followed by 25, followed by a pause. I mean, that’s not implausible.
GORMAN ON LETTING RATES SETTLE
GORMAN: What I don’t see is them cutting. Right? Because that’s really playing with fire, to have done what we’ve done with rates, taken them up to where, and then turn that quickly to a cut. I think you’ve got to let this thing settle.
Interview with World Central Kitchen Chef & Founder Jose Andres
Video:
ANDRES ON UKRAINE HUMANITARIAN WORK
JOSE ANDRES: In Ukraine, we arrived 12 hours after the invasion from Russia began. We began in the border with 1000 meals the first day. Within weeks, we reached over 500,000 hot meals produced by 550 restaurants run by Ukrainians for Ukranians. We reach 1.7 million meals a day in the form of the hot meals and then bags of food covering the lack of infrastructure supermarkets grows remember 50 million Ukrainians displaced refugees, there to make sure that we were able to close the gaps on those places where food was an issue and covering in the short term the food needs.
ANDRES ON THE GRAIN CORRIDOR
ANDRES: Many countries in Africa and around the world will go hungry if the grain corridor keeps not running on Ukraine cannot keep supporting the grain. The war will be hungry if we don’t all together support Ukraine.
ANDRES ON INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT
ANDRES: I keep opening restaurants. We need to keep moving the economy but I think it’s okay to feed the few but in the process put you same know how in feeding the many. You mentioned Haiti. We’re in Davos, the place of promises the place where the deal make yourself they will happen. What happened in Haiti, the international community, governments, UN, we let Haiti go down. What I mean with that is we cannot let Ukraine go the way Haiti has gone. When the big leaders of the world combined moments like Davos, it’s okay to make promises, but promises made must be kept. Haiti is an example. We should do, we must do better.
ANDRES ON INVESTING IN UKRAINE
ANDRES: We’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars. We can only do what we do when people support us, but we are not that organization that we go from racing. What we do is boots on the ground, and start cooking and start feeding. People through social media sees what we do. And in the process, they support us because in real time, they see where their dollars go. The great thing is that much of the money we put to help Ukraine, we invested in Ukraine, leaving the money inside Ukraine, helping the economy.
ANDRES ON SOLVING FOOD REFUGEE ISSUES
ANDRES: When the rich countries give food to the poor countries, when actually we should be giving knowledge, know how so they can feed themselves. Those countries forever will be poor forever, we will have food refugees. That’s why I’ve been asking for a long time that every country in the world when I spoke to the NATO leaders in Madrid, I asked all of them presidents of every country must have a national security food advisor so we started making smart food decisions that then food stops being the problem, but actually food is the solution.
Interview with Breyer Capital Founder & CEO Jim Breyer
Video:
BREYER ON META BEING UNDER PRESSURE
JIM BREYER: My view is over the next 24 months, there will be a big rebound, but they’re going to be under a lot of pressure for the next 12 months and they’re not cutting costs fast enough in my humble opinion.
BREYER ON TIKTOK LONG-TERM OPTIMISM
BREYER: Bytedance is brilliant in terms of their investments in artificial intelligence. They are clearly taking an enormous amount of share Instagram being the other worldwide horizontal platform. I’m very optimistic long-term on TikTok
BREYER ON CHINA INVESTMENTS
BREYER: The second half of this year will be a boom period, particularly for the pent-up technology companies and healthcare companies. We are aggressively investing in building out hospitals, nursing homes.
SARA EISEN: In China?
BREYER: That is the single biggest Chinese investment theme for us.
BREYER ON TECH LAYOFFS
BREYER: We have another 12 months when I see truly extraordinary CEOs like Satya here appeared they’re laying off 10,000 people, these are the best companies so there’s a lot more pain to come in terms of employment.
BREYER ON PRIVATE MARKETS VALUATION CORRECTION
BREYER: The values are still in the private markets far too high. I’m involved with a couple of major endowments they have not marked down, nor the managers of many private equity and venture capital firms the way public stocks have been written down and carried by endowments. I think public stocks have been written down and carried by endowments I think we have a 12 months valuation correction in the private markets for later stage companies.
