Head of Bloomberg Beta speaks at Colby event

“Roy Banat on Bloomberg Beta”

This past Thursday, April 7, Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage venture capital firm, spoke at an event sponsored by the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Bloomberg Beta focuses on companies that hope to profoundly alter the ways in which the wheels of business turn, specifically within the fields of machine learning. For his own part, Bahat focuses on the future of work itself — he has prior experience in consulting, public policy, and technology. 

His talk, titled “Your Work in the Age of Automation,” was held in the Parker Reed Room in the Schair-Swenson-Watson Alumni Center Thursday evening. The format of the event was a long-form conversation with guided question topics asked by a panel of three.

The panel included yours truly, Director of the Davis Institute for AI and Professor of Computer Science Amanda Stent, and Assistant Professor of Economics Ekaterina Seregina. 

The conversation bounced between topics such as artificial intelligence and automation of labour to Bahat’s investment process.

One question focused on Bloomberg Beta’s open-source nature of investing, as the firm interestingly elects to put its operating manual on Github, a popular software development platform.

Bahat noted that this decision was based on his desire to create a value-driven investing process that seeks to forge a better future for labourers from an AI lens.

Another question asked Bahat to speak about the current dynamics of the labour market that soon-to-be graduates will enter. Bahat highlighted the significant differences between the labour market of today and the one he entered upon his own college graduation, stating that it may be near-impossible for him to give good advice. Despite that, he remarked, “one’s first job is rarely the decider of success for an individual.” 

The conversation highlighted the future of work and artificial intelligence in Maine, as well as how to speak about artificial intelligence with those who do not have a firm understanding of the field, which leads them to irrationally fear the term “AI.”

Overall, Bahat presented interesting sentiments about not only AI, but forecasting, public policy, finance, and even a little bit of philosophy. A recording of the livestream can be viewed on the Davis Institute website. 

“Inflation, yield curve inversions strike fear in investors”

As markets continue to grapple with the seemingly everlasting supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 fallout, another major signal occurred over the last week of trading days that has caused alarm for many. The yield curve, which displays the spread between the yields of US Government treasuries at various maturities, inverted at a few key spreads in the waning trading sessions of March.

Most notably, the spread between the two-year and ten-year yield became negative in early April, sounding the alarm for many investors, pundits, and researchers alike.

Yield curve inversions are generally viewed as an event that prices in both future economic conditions, inflation expectations, and monetary policy expectations. In a recent study, BCA Research observed that the two-year and ten-year yield has inverted before seven of the last eight recessions. 

Despite the inversion (which has since reverted to a positive spread of 19 basis points at the time of writing), Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell implored onlookers to remain calm. Instead, he noted that the Fed’s preferred yield curve measure, the implied yield in 18 months on three-month T Bills minus the yield presently on three-month T Bills was strongly positive and had trended upward towards a spread of nearly two per cent throughout 2022.

Already, the Federal Open Market Committee hiked their key policy variable by 25 basis points last month but persistent inflation has led those to believe that there will be a least a half-percentage point hike at this month’s meeting and more to follow.

Critics of Powell’s Fed have noted the influence of large-scale asset purchases such as quantitative easing on the US Treasury market, which has blurred the true predictive power signalled by the yield curve. 

~ Cameron Dyer `22