Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend: July 24th 2026

**Carol Massar** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead, with insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy, plus global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Businessweek Daily podcast with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:31)
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend Podcast. This past week, it was largely about the news flow from Washington to Wall Street that included an escalation in Middle East hostilities. As the US and Iran signaled, a renewal of peace talks is unlikely in the near term, as military attacks continued from both sides. Also, volatility in the equity markets around semiconductors and AI-related names as the start of the mega cap earning season got underway thanks to results from Tesla and Alphabet. Many other companies came out with results this past week. We were pretty busy pouring over them, but we are really getting ready for this coming week's biggest drop of quarterly results, including four of the bag 7, Tim. So we're going to be busy.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:14)
Oh, we're going to be busy because we also have a Fed decision.

**Carol Massar** (1:16)
Oh, yeah, there is that.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:17)
Yeah, it's the second meeting under Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. Inflation concerns being fueled by the ongoing war in the Middle East. That has continued to push up oil prices. As always, you can find the latest updates and coverage on the Bloomberg terminal and at bloomberg.com.

**Carol Massar** (1:30)
When it comes to earnings this past week, though, we did get a read on investors thanks to Charles Schwab, which benefited from last quarter's market volatility and the SpaceX IPO. We talked about it all, plus the push into prediction markets with Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:45)
Plus, Bloomberg auto reporter Keith Notton reflects on four decades on the global auto beat, all the twists and turns and bumps in the road, everything from bailouts and buyouts, Elon and EVs and to China's coming of age.

**Carol Massar** (1:58)
All of that to come, we begin with the state of crypto. Robinhood is continuing its push into the world of digital assets by expanding its services into the UK and Canada.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:07)
This is analyst at Bernstein and Piper Sandler said this past week that Robinhood's revenue from prediction markets is set to overshadow that from cryptocurrency trading. We were curious what the company thought about that. For more, we caught up with Johan Kerbrot, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Crypto and International at Robinhood. We've got this decline in crypto trading and I think many people would argue it's related to the price action that we've seen since October. But at the same time, a catalyst in prediction markets with the World Cup.
I'm just wondering how you're thinking about this universe of these two different elements of trading and how that affects your users. Like are they doing less on crypto and more with prediction markets?

**Johan Kerbrot** (2:48)
We haven't seen that in our data when we look at our customer engagement on the platform.
We do have contracts on the prediction market platform that are related to crypto index price and crypto actions. But overall, I think it's just one of the cycle where we see a bit the sentiment in crypto a little down.
Overall, we are just focusing on building new tools and new features that people can utilize when the sentiment goes up.

**Tim Stenovec** (3:12)
So when the sentiment goes up, not if the sentiment goes up, like you're confident it will go up.

**Johan Kerbrot** (3:17)
We've seen all of these different cycles a lot, and I think this is not our first time, not our first radio, and I think the sentiment will come back. We saw it with the launch of our Robinhood chain July 1st. We've seen very good metrics, already 105 million transaction on the platform.

**Tim Stenovec** (3:34)
So explain what the impetus behind that was, and why you guys launched that now.

**Johan Kerbrot** (3:40)
Yeah, we really wanted to create an infrastructure and a backbone for creating new products that brings the value of DeFi and blockchain technology to our traditional finance systems. And so one of the first products that we launched with this chain is called Robinhood Earn that gives you approximately 7% on the dollar that you're lending to the protocol. And I think it's really giving you the best of two worlds, the high yield that you can get from DeFi and also the simple UX and UI that you can get from a platform like Robinhood.