Every weekday morning from 8:00 to 10:00 E.T., people turn to Betty Liu, anchor of Bloomberg Television’s, “In the Loop with Betty Liu,” for breaking business news and interviews with industry leaders.
Available to more than 270 million homes around the globe, Bloomberg Television recently launched its first advertising campaign aimed at increasing the profile of the channel, Betty Liu and other Bloomberg TV talent in the tri-state area.
Tara Williams spoke to the veteran financial journalist by phone about her move to Millburn, her family and career and her insights on the economy.
Q: What attracted you to Millburn?
When I was living in Metuchen, we were renting and thought at the time now is a really good time to buy a home; prices are dropping; New Jersey has a lot of great neighborhoods; and my kids were just getting to the age that they were going from preschool to elementary school. So I really wanted to find an area that had a great public school system and was also very family-friendly—those two things go hand-in-hand.
A couple of people told me about some different towns, like Westfield and Montclair. I came upon Millburn because there was a house there that I just loved—it was big; it was modern; it had everything I wanted and it was a really good price. Being the business person in me, I thought, “This is a really great deal.” So I checked out Millburn some more. I love the town—good restaurants, cute places for kids, and I love the fact that I’m near Maplewood and Short Hills and I’m near all of these other great towns and I realized a lot of people there commute into New York very quickly, so it just had everything I wanted.
Q: Your day begins pretty early.
I wake up at 3:45 every morning, so I’m usually in bed by the time the kids go to bed, as well. I get into work around 4:30 and at this point, I’m pretty used to the hours.
I’ve been doing morning television for about six years now, so I’m pretty used to these hours and they’ve always worked really well as a parent because the kids go to bed really early so when they go to bed, I go to bed.
Q: You have twin boys.
Yes, they are six years old—just about to turn seven in July.
Q: When you’re not working what do you like to do during your downtime?
I like to sleep. Usually, I’m home by the time the kids are out of school, so we’ll go to Taekwondo or I’ll take the kids to their music lessons. We also just spend time around the neighborhood. There are various places to eat out in Millburn and Maplewood.
I have a sister who lives in Edison and a father who lives in Philadelphia, so on the weekend we sometimes go down to Philadelphia to hang out there for a little bit. Pretty much, it’s what anyone does with their kids on the weekend.
Q: You graduated from University of Pennsylvania as an English major.
I was an English major with a minor focus on Asian-American literature.
Q: What drew you to financial reporting?
It was kind of a happy accident. I had all of these visions when I graduated college that I was one day going to be a foreign correspondent working for The New York Times or writing for the features section of The Times or The New Yorker magazine—those were my dreams as I was graduating UPenn.
As luck would have it after I left university, I found this posting at Dow Jones Newswires, which I had no idea it was a business newswire. I just saw that it was AP Dow Jones and I thought, “Great. It has the words AP in it.” This is part of the dream I had working overseas with the Associated Press. So I applied for the job and I became one of the copy editors for it.
But the reason why I loved it was because they told me right away that if I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, I could do so in the next couple of years, so I snatched that opportunity and knew I wanted to work overseas—I didn’t care if it was business or not—I just wanted to do it. The rest is history.
Q: You cover investing in your book, “Age Smart: Discovering the Fountain of Youth at Midlife and Beyond.” What’s the best financial advice you’ve ever received and from whom did it come?
I’ve gotten a lot of really good career and financial advice, and I get a lot of that just by the reporting I’ve done and the guests that I talk to.
One of them I can think of is a long, long time ago I was interviewing a CEO and I asked him not exactly financial advice but career advice about how he stays competitive even as he’s getting ready to retire from a major company—he’s a CEO of a major Fortune 50 company and he used to be a professional tennis player. And he said to me, “Look Betty, one of the things I remember from days on the court is that you never stop keeping score.” It just struck me as a very balanced way of staying competitive and continuing on your career path.
Another piece of advice I got one time was from Cathie Black, who was the former head of Hearst Magazines. I was interviewing her for the book, and this was before I had children. I was pregnant at the time I interviewed her and she was just talking about balancing motherhood and balancing career and children. She said to me, “One of the things about how I’m able to do my job and how I’m able to be successful is I’ve learned that when you’re with your kids you focus on them, even if it’s 15 minutes and that 15 minutes of time can last you throughout the whole day with them.” Those are little pieces of advice that I’ve taken to heart and they still work for me.
Q: Have you kept in touch with Ms. Black since she resigned as the New York City schools chancellor?
I sent her a note through her assistant after that. But I’ve been careful not to obviously contact her too much on this. I do hope one of these days we can get together for lunch again.
Q: What made you make the move from print to broadcast journalism?
When I was in Atlanta for the Financial Times I was doing guest segments on CNN and MSNBC and some of the other local stations, and I guess you can say I got bitten by the TV bug. I just thought it was really—the whole television experience, the real-time; the adrenaline rush—just got to me. I thought this was great.
So I thought why not use my background in business and background in print and try my hand in television. I took some classes in broadcast journalism and made that jump by essentially using my background in business and my background in Asia. I had my kids, went on maternity leave. While I was on maternity leave, CNBC Asia called me and said, “Look you’ve got the perfect background—you’ve got the business news, the Asia experience because you’ve been in Hong Kong before—you just don’t have the TV experience, but we’re willing to take the risk. So, if you’re willing to come out here for two and a half months, bring your kids with you, then we’ll do it.” I said, “Fantastic.”
It’s one of those moments where you either do it and you move onto another path or you don’t do it and you stay where you are.
Q: The Financial Times nominated you for a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for articles you wrote on immigrant labor. Can you talk about this?
It was actually about Mexicans working in the South. The assignment I had for the FT was really interesting because it was such a mixture—it almost fell into the dream job I had originally when I left UPenn, which was, “Oh I’m going to write features for The New Yorker…”
What I got a chance to do was to escape the straight corporate business news beat and move into more human interest stories. So when I was at the FT in Atlanta, people didn’t even know the FT there—they’re like, “What kind of paper is this?”; “Why is it pink?” There was a lot of me getting to know people and them getting to know me.
One of the things I did a lot when I was there—I was just a one-woman band—I would hop into my Honda, drive around the South and just find stories that I thought would be interesting to business readers. One of those was about immigrant labor in the South and the Mexicans working across the border and working Alabama and Mississippi in the cotton fields, picking soybeans—all of that.
I was trying to find the human story to this—their conditions, but at the same time, the farmers that needed to hire them. The costs; what that meant on U.S. trade policy; what that meant in China; what that meant to other agriculturally-producing countries, so it wove in everything from politics to economics to business to immigration and society and culture…
Q: Applying some of the topics you just mentioned above, what are your thoughts about the Chinese economy and the levels of regulation there?
I’ve covered quite a bit about the companies and the government itself and how they’re managing the economy. I think as they’re trying to manage through a really fast-growing country, there’s going to be various issues that come about—labor issues, currency issues, issues about their companies and privatizing them…I get this sense that the government is trying to find a balance between encouraging growth and trying to make sure that growth doesn’t get out of hand and you can just see that in every aspect of the life in China.
Q: In early June, you spoke with Simon Johnson, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and Bloomberg View columnist, about financial regulation in relation to the Dodd-Frank Act. What are your thoughts about higher levels of bank regulation and Johnson’s characterization of big banks as GSEs (government sponsored entities) like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?
It’s a great question because this is at the heart of what we’ve seen come out of the financial crisis is this debate of, “What do we do; how do we take care of “Too Big to Fail?” That’s what Simon Johnson was talking about is that his belief is that regulation is not hard enough and that the banks have only gotten bigger and that they actually need to be broken up or made smaller.
I think what’s going on now is so interesting and I hope it doesn’t get lost on the public too much because it can get lost in a quagmire of technical language and financial concepts.
Basically what you’ve got is on one hand you’ve got regulators that say we want to make sure we don’t have another financial crisis and then you’ve got banks on the other hand that say, “If you regulate us too much, we’re not going to make any money and if we’re not going to make any money, then nobody else is going to make any money because we lend money out.”
So, there’s a brewing war going on right now between the regulators and the banks on Wall Street and for everybody who’s watching and isn’t involved on Wall Street, they should know what is going on because it can affect them and will affect them.
It’s all about, ultimately, what are the banks going to do—are they going to lend more money; are they going to be able to stimulate the economy by putting more money into the system…that’s what Simon is talking about.
Q: Any thoughts on where you think the U.S. economy is headed?
I usually don’t give my opinion on where the U.S. economy is headed—I just listen and ask the questions.
What I’m hearing is a great debate about where we’re headed. Some are saying we are moving along sideways right now for a while. Others like David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said he believes 99% were going into a recession by next year.
Then there are others like Warren Buffett who think this country is going to make it through and the economy is going to continue to grow. I think there’s an overall consensus that we’re not going to see a big growth rate like prior to the (financial) crisis; we’re not going to see that for quite some time because the jobless rate is close to 10%.
Q: What was it like interviewing Warren Buffett?
He really was a fascinating person. I’m going to have him live on my program in a few weeks at the Sun Valley meeting, so he’ll be on almost as a guest host or co-host for an hour with me.
He’s somebody who really brought the idea of investing and investing well and for the long-term into the American psyche, and it can’t be underestimated the impact he’s had on retail investing in the United States…
I’ve gone to his Berkshire meeting over the last three years and it is just amazing to see the number of shareholders and the fans and the followers he has. He’s very much the down-home folksy kind of guy that his persona is. He’s very open, very direct—I’ve always considered him to be one of the best interviews I’ve ever had because there’s never a question he won’t answer directly.
Q: Are there some people you would like to interview that you haven’t yet interviewed?
I could tell you there’s a few people I would love to have on. One of them is Carlos Slim. I would like to bring him back on my program—we interviewed him a couple of times, but I would like to spend more time with him.
There are people in Asia that I would like to do an interview with—Li Ka-Shing—the “Superman of Asia”—he would be a fantastic interview. Warren Buffett I could say was one of my dream interviews.
Why move to Milburn? Because that’s where ABC’s go. Duh.
Ms. Liu is quoted as saying she loves “the fact” that, as a Millburn resident, she’s near Short Hills. One then has to wonder about her sense of geography, since Short Hills is part of Millburn.
And while it may be true that Bloomberg TV is “available” to some 270 million households, its actual American audience is far, far, far smaller than that. At any time, let alone weekday mornings.
Both of these points could of course have been resolved easily enough via copy and line editing. But it always seems as if Baristanet has no such thing on its crack staff as actual editors.
In the Loop with Betty Liu”
She should really change her last name to Boop.