Here’s how to tell if impeachment is working

This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a callalloo of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here.  Today's Agenda Impeachment hearings will work if they sink Trump's approval ratings. After the great cable unbundling comes the great re-bundling. Markets may temporarily overlook a little trade disappointment. Jamie Dimon is wrong about negative interest rates. What to Watch When You're Impeaching the President If there's one thing we can't get enough of here at Bloomberg Opinion, it's unnecessary business jargon. We're all about whiteboarding synergies offline and whatnot. So let's learn a new one: KPI, short for Key Performance Indicator, which you should definitely toss into your next business meeting, job interview or parole hearing to look smart.  Here's an example: The KPI for the Democratic impeachment process is movement in President Donald Trump's approval rating. Jonathan Bernstein writes that the goal of public impeachment hearings, which began today, is not really to introduce new evidence (though we got some of that). It's to make the case that what we already know — Trump extorted Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden — is really, really bad. If this succeeds, then Trump's stubbornly static (though low) approval rating will fall, which is what it will probably take to make Republicans finally consider abandoning him. So Trump's approval rating is the KPI to watch. Now for some blue-sky thinking: Impeachment still seems unlikely to result in Trump's removal from office, but Thomas Geoghegan has a radical idea that might do the trick: a settlement deal giving Trump immunity from prosecution in exchange for his taking one last ride on Marine One. This could be passed like a simple bill and would be far less divisive than impeachment. Let's whiteboard it offline. Synergies. Bundling Is the New Unbundling Ever get the feeling we were better off churning butter and reading books by firelight? Technological progress is great and all, but it also brings new headaches. Take our glorious new era of streaming television. The latest entry, Disney+, launched yesterday, and 10 million people signed up despite technical problems. As Tara Lachapelle wrote yesterday, these people can get even more content with a Disney super bundle that includes Hulu and ESPN+. But that's still a tiny corner of the observable content universe. For the rest, you'll need Netflix, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max and a gazillion more. This will create much expense, confusion and annoyance for consumers, Tara notes in a new column. That could make people fondly recall the good old days when terrible  cable companies bundled all this stuff together for one exorbitant fee. Those same cable companies could be among the first to benefit from streaming Luddism. Then there are the dramatic advances by Amazon.com Inc. and others in making it easy to return online purchases. This makes e-commerce far less stressful for shoppers, but it is absolutely disastrous for the environment, notes Adam Minter. Companies and consumers need to figure out how to cut down on all the extra cardboard, shipping and product waste that returns create. And by now we know that slick ride-hailing services encourage people to get into cars with sometimes sketchy strangers, sometimes with sadly predictable results. To make these services safer, they must be much more restrictive about hiring drivers, writes Rachel Rosenthal, even if it raises costs. Progress doesn't come for free.  Fed, FOMO May Help Markets Forget Trade Fears The stock market was momentarily less than chuffed today after news broke that the "phase one" China trade deal markets have been slavering about for weeks may founder over China agricultural purchases. This fits with the less-than-ebullient noises Trump made about trade in a speech yesterday, disappointing optimists, notes Robert Burgess. But John Authers argues the market's relentless recent rally is driven mainly by the Fed expanding its balance sheet again in response to trouble in the repo market. This is driving year-end fear of missing out (FOMO) among money managers. It may not be sustainable (see China Trade War), but the optimists have momentum on their side for now, John writes in a second column, making the risk of missing out real.  Further Second-Cold-War Reading: China has advantages in the AI race, but the most important ones are still American. — Hal Brands  Negative Rates Aren't So Bad There's something creepy about negative interest rates, like those uncanny valley video-game people or me trying to dance. Rates below zero may help struggling economies, but that doesn't stop people from complaining and worrying about them. Recent worriers have included bankers such as Jamie Dimon, who warn they're actually hurting economies by slowing down lending. Ferdinando Giugliano calls Dimon's complaints bogus; negative rates hurt bank profits, yes, but there's no evidence yet of any other problems. That doesn't mean rates should stay negative forever.  But in the meantime, we probably haven't fully explored all that we can do with this flood of easy money, writes Noah Smith. For one thing, abundant capital has huge fiscal policy implications: It means governments can safely borrow and spend more and makes taxing capital gains less harmful to the economy.  Telltale Charts In a lot of ways, Berlin is the perfect site for Tesla Inc.'s new European plant, writes Leonid Bershidsky. It's not a car city, but it is a tech city. The dilemma for Democratic presidential candidates is that early primary states are in far better shape economically than general-election swing states, writes Karl Smith. That calls for very different campaign messages.  Further Reading The trillion-dollar Labour spending figure Tories throw around is beside the point; the issue is quality, not quantity. — Therese Raphael  The IEA's latest global energy outlook should worry both environmentalists and oil giants. — Liam Denning  There's rarely been a better time to hope for peace in Yemen. — Bobby Ghosh  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have found a fellow traveler in Trump, but the rest of the U.S. government still wants him to pay for his misdeeds. — Eli Lake  ICYMI Elon Musk's SolarCity deal is Tesla's biggest problem. Deval Patrick is running for president now, maybe. Venice is flooded. Kickers Han and Greedo shot at the same time, it turns out. (h/t Scott Kominers) Scientists get 2-million-year-old DNA from Bigfoot's ancestor? (h/t Mike Smedley)  Journalists are disclosing how much they get paid. Rod Stewart has a bonkers model-train set. Note: Please send model trains and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. FOLLOW US SEND TO A FRIEND You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter. Unsubscribe | Bloomberg.com | Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022