The transcript from this week’s MiB: Bob Michele, CIO and Head of Global Fixed Income, Currency & Commodities, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, is below.
You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.
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Masters in Business
Bob Michele, Chief Investment Officer and Head of Global Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities, J.P. Morgan Asset Management
Bloomberg Radio | Transcript | October 2026
00:00:02 Bloomberg Audio Studios: podcasts, radio, news.
00:00:07 BARRY RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast, another fantastic conversation. Bob Michele has had an amazing career. He could be one of the most informed, influential managers in the whole world of fixed income, in his perch as Chief Investment Officer and Head of Global Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. He oversees a lot of assets and a lot of people, not just for corporate America and for central banks, but for regular investors, for pretty much everybody around the world.
Few people know as much about what drives the fixed income markets as Bob does. I thought the conversation was fantastic, and I think you will also. With no further ado, my conversation with J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s Bob Michele.
Bob Michele, welcome to Bloomberg.
00:01:12 BOB MICHELE: I’m thrilled to be here.
00:01:13 BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m thrilled to have you. The timing couldn’t be better. Before we talk about what you’ve built at J.P. Morgan and the state of the fixed income markets, I want to dive into your background, which is so interesting. University of Pennsylvania, classical languages degree. That is not the traditional route to managing fixed income. What was the original career plan?
00:01:41 BOB MICHELE: Well, it’s a good point. I’m here by accident, so that’s how the career plan worked out. Actually, I was a dual major. I also majored in natural sciences. Both my parents were doctors. My father was a surgeon, my mother was an orthodontist. Every job I had over the summer was pretty much working in a hospital or a lab somewhere. I was doing pre-med studies at Penn, ready to go to medical school.
Unfortunately, my father died my junior year, and I decided maybe I should take a break before I do all of that. You’re at Penn, Wharton’s right there, everyone’s talking about business, going to work for a bank. And I said, why not me? I’ll do that for a year. Everyone laughed at me: You have absolutely no business courses. Give me one to take, I said, and they said, take accounting. So I took accounting second term my senior year, didn’t understand anything about it, interviewed with a load of banks, and someone was foolish enough to hire me: Bankers Trust. I’ll tell you, Barry, after one week in banking in New York City, I knew I was never going to medical school.
00:02:49 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really? That’s fascinating. So it was just dumb luck. You ended up at Bankers Trust right out of college?
00:02:55 BOB MICHELE: Pretty much. I wrote to a lot of firms. I laugh, and maybe this is a complaint for the University of Pennsylvania. I went to College Hall and pulled Lehman out of the folder and sent them a letter. But Lehman was spelled L-E-G-H-M-A-N for some reason. So there was a typo. I didn’t know, right? I wasn’t a business major. I was doing sciences. I was doing classics, Latin and Greek. So I sent it off. They must have had a good laugh. I never heard back from them.
00:03:28 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Well, they assumed you were too risky, right? So you start on the investment management side at Bankers Trust as an analyst, eventually a portfolio manager. Then you shift to managing taxable and total return portfolios at Brown Brothers Harriman. You were never an economist, you were never a market strategist. You went straight from the classics to an analyst to a PM. Tell us about that progression.
00:03:58 BOB MICHELE: Well, there are a couple of things along the way that I learned. The first is I took the CFA. I figured if I didn’t have the background and the CFA was becoming popular, I could learn it. Then I also had a lot of confidence in myself. I sat there and I figured, if going to a class a couple of times a week for one term, you can learn organic chemistry, what if you’re doing something eight to 12 hours a day, five days a week, for 30 days? Can you learn it as quickly as you could organic chemistry? And the reality is, yeah, you could pick up a lot. You could teach yourself a lot. What did appeal to me was the mathematical aspect behind investments. Doing the sciences, there’s a lot of math involved, and there it is, right in investments.
00:04:53 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So people always bring up that it’s not a science, it’s not quite an art. It’s a little bit of a mix of both. Is the same true for fixed income?
00:05:04 BOB MICHELE: I think it’s a little bit more of a science than an art. Perhaps equities is a bit more art than science. I did a lot of equity work until the early nineties, and I switched purely to fixed income. And the attraction for me is the valuation metric that goes along with fixed income. You could model it. There was a maturity. All the dynamics behind the cash flows could be calculated. There was a finality to it that, to somebody with a math background, with a sciences background, was appealing.
When I looked at the equity market, one of my early roommates in New York City, he and I would debate late in the evening about how do you value a stock. He was working in corporate finance at Bache at the time, and it would become very theoretical, and this would go on for a year, and we could never figure out what was the proper way to value a stock. There were dozens of ways, and every one of them seemed to be a different valuation. So I’m very happy with the choice I made.
00:06:09 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you lead me to a really interesting recognition. It’s pretty well settled, at least amongst the academics, that active stock selection is ultimately a very difficult game over the long haul. It’s very difficult to beat passive on the equity side. But on the fixed income side, more science than art, it seems that active managers in fixed income very much bring value, and there’s an advantage to active on the bond side over just a broad passive index. Do you credit the fact that it’s more science than art, or does it have something to do with the fact that, hey, equity folks are stuck picking from 3,500 stocks, and you have tens of millions of products to pick from?
00:07:05 BOB MICHELE: I think there’s a strong element of science. I think when you step back and look at the bond market, you can calculate yield. Most of the time you’re going to find investors gravitate to higher-yielding instruments. That gives you a bit of a cushion. You know that over time, if your portfolio yields more than a benchmark, you’re likely to outperform the benchmark. So my expectation of my team is that almost all the time they will outperform the benchmark. Now, the competitor universe, that’s a very different dynamic, because a lot of competitors outperform benchmarks. So we have to think of ourselves not only as outperforming a benchmark, but also outperforming a competitor universe.
00:07:52 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you run US fixed income at First Boston, better known as Credit Suisse today. You’re a managing director at BlackRock before ultimately leading fixed income in London for Schroders Investment Management. I’m curious, what was your experience like in the UK and in the eurozone? Did that have any impact on how you look at fixed income markets?
00:08:15 BOB MICHELE: It was a fantastic experience. It absolutely has a dynamic on how I look at the fixed income markets. I do think globally. But if you look at the period that I went to London, it was 2001 until 2010. It was really the creation and the buildup of the euro. So I wasn’t in London on my own. In fact, in 2000, when the thought about going to London to run the fixed income platform first came up, the thought was, well, maybe you’re going to wind up in Frankfurt, because that’s the home of the euro. The European Central Bank is in Frankfurt. But a funny thing happened on the way to Frankfurt. Thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans went to London in banking, and we rather liked London. So we all stayed there, and it was an incredible 10-year run.
00:09:14 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So was all 10 years at Schroders, or did you move over to J.P. Morgan in the middle of that run?
00:09:19 BOB MICHELE: Towards the end, in 2008, I moved over to J.P. Morgan. And actually it came through one of your earlier guests. Seth Bernstein was head of fixed income at J.P. Morgan. They were having some problems. At the end of 2007, early 2008, he pinged me. He was in London and said, here’s an opportunity to come be Chief Investment Officer. Are you interested or not? And I sat back and thought for a second, well, J.P. Morgan is the big deal, right? And they’ve got a huge platform. And I remember early on in my career understanding that they managed a lot of the central bank assets in fixed income, which were the flagship accounts back in the early nineties. So at some point I realized, we’re headed back to the New York area. I’m going with J.P. Morgan.
00:10:18 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Sounds like it was a long time coming. That seems like really one of the ultimate positions in your space.
00:10:28 BOB MICHELE: In all fairness, Schroders was a fantastic place, and I loved everything about Schroders. I was there for 10 years. They were fantastic to me and my family, and we helped build a real quality franchise there. We were winning business everywhere, not just in fixed income, in a lot of areas. But time moves on and opportunities come and go, and I didn’t feel that that opportunity would come around again if I didn’t take it.
00:11:00 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Absolutely. So you joined J.P. Morgan in ’08, just as the Great Financial Crisis is starting to ramp up. What was that like, trying to get your footing in a new firm when the credit world is falling apart?
00:11:15 BOB MICHELE: Well, when I was at Schroders, we had pretty clean, pristine portfolios, so we were performing exceptionally well. When I got to J.P. Morgan, it’s interesting, I was on a US contract back then. It was only two weeks. So in the two-week period from when I resigned from Schroders and then started at J.P. Morgan, Lehman came and went. It was gone. So you walk in…
00:11:47 BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s Lehman with a G, right?
00:11:50 BOB MICHELE: A G and an H, all of them were gone. So it was gone. And I walk into J.P. Morgan and I’m sitting down with Seth, and he’s giving me the lay of the land. And there were some problems there, but they weren’t things that were insurmountable. There were just over-allocations in some areas. But you saw there was an opportunity to go in and make a change, put in place a process that you had confidence in, something that was disciplined, and control the way the business looked going forward. So it was an exciting time to be in the markets.
00:12:30 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Yeah, to say the very least. And to give credit where credit is due, there was a subprime derivative issue that had flared up at JPM years earlier, and Jamie Dimon said, get all that crap off our balance sheet, we’re not in the speculative business, we’re a major money center bank, not a gambling house. I’m paraphrasing, but he famously kind of read people the riot act. So when a lot of other big banks ran into trouble, J.P. Morgan was in a beautiful position to pick up a lot of assets cheap: Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, go down the list. They really came out of that era really well. I’m curious, what did that era teach you as a bond investor? What should we all have learned about risk, about fixed income, and about leverage?
00:13:25 BOB MICHELE: It forced you to be a fiduciary. It forced you to put yourself in your client’s shoes and think about, are these the things that they want to own in their bond portfolio? Or are they looking for you to put investments in place that will give them some yield, but they’ll get their capital back? The whole thing won’t be at risk. They may not get the yield or return they were expecting. So that’s the first thing that we all understood, I’d say.
The second is, you learn that every bond is different. There are a lot of different dynamics. You have to roll up your sleeves, you have to do your own research. You can’t outsource your research. You have to understand everything about the bond. You have to understand the underlying collateral of the bond. You have to understand who’s obligated to pay you back. You have to understand the cash flow dynamics, any prioritization, covenants, all of that. So it really changed the way, I believe, the market looked at fixed income.
00:14:28 BARRY RITHOLTZ: And hopefully for the better. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Bob Michele, Chief Investment Officer and Head of Global Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities, discussing building out those departments at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Bob Michele. He is Chief Investment Officer and Head of Global Fixed Income at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. He joined the firm in ’08.
So let’s talk about the businesses you cover there. It’s fixed income, it’s currencies, and commodities. I’m curious, what’s the intermarket relationship between those three, what we think of as separate asset classes?
00:15:24 BOB MICHELE: Well, there’s a big macroeconomic driver to them. They’re all predicated on how the global business environment is doing. If it’s a healthy business environment, then probably there are going to be some growth and inflationary pressures. Bond yields will be a little higher. Commodities will price that in. There’s probably some demand for commodities; they’ll be a little bit higher in price. And when you look at currencies, you’ll have to figure out which sovereigns are doing better than others, and those currencies will tend to do better. So I’d say the first thing is to step back and think about the global macro environment, and then you start to figure out where the value is in each of those markets.
00:16:06 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I’ve always looked at currencies, especially the US dollar, as inverse to commodities. When the dollar does well, commodities sell off a little bit, and vice versa. Although lately the US dollar seems to be holding up pretty well, and commodities have enjoyed quite a bit of a run. How do you look at the current relationship today? Is that being driven by other factors, or is it just part of the cycle?
00:16:31 BOB MICHELE: Yeah, I had a similar view over my career, that gold was the anti-dollar, right? If you didn’t like the dollar, you held gold, and vice versa. And that generally held true for quite some period of time. I would say today, one of the advantages I have is that I meet with a lot of official institutions globally, and a lot of the conversation always is: we’re over-allocated to US dollar assets, US fixed income. Is there an alternate reserve currency we should be looking at? And it’s a real head-scratcher, because for the first time in my career, I can’t really think of one.
If you go back over history and think about alternate reserve currencies to the dollar, I think back to the late eighties, when the yen was considered the alternate reserve currency to the dollar. Remember the Japanese were buying Pebble Beach, they were buying Rockefeller Center.
00:17:32 BARRY RITHOLTZ: They’re going to bring it back to Tokyo with them, right?
00:17:35 BOB MICHELE: Pretty much.
00:17:36 BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s what people were concerned about.
00:17:38 BOB MICHELE: And then that came and went. We talked about my moving to London. That was the advent of the euro. And for the first time people said, finally, a United States of Europe. We have a euro that’s going to be a reserve currency. It’s going to match the size and scope of the US. There you go. And for a while it looked like it. And then ultimately we learned monetary union without fiscal union isn’t so good.
And then coming out of the Great Financial Crisis, remember, it was China, it was the renminbi. China did what the world needed it to do. In 2009 it borrowed and it spent, and it created aggregate final demand in a world which didn’t have a lot of aggregate final demand. And yeah, I know there’s talk about the highways to nowhere and the ghost cities; those have eventually been populated. But people talked about the renminbi, and then that came and went, and then it became gold. And you talk to central banks, they’ve acquired some gold. It’s really hard for them to use gold to manage and deliver on their primary objective, which is price stability, inflation. Gold’s more a reflection of the outcome of their policies than allowing them to alter their policy. So today we sit here, and really the dollar is the only reserve currency out there. Nobody wants to fight it for now.
00:19:10 BARRY RITHOLTZ: I always wondered, why should economic growth be dependent on how much yellow metal we scrape out of the ground each year? But hold that aside. You didn’t mention Bitcoin or any of the cryptocurrencies. Is that a fantasy that some people hold, that we’re going to replace the US dollar with either central bank-issued currencies or cryptocurrencies, or perhaps Bitcoin?
00:19:38 BOB MICHELE: I know Bitcoin’s been controversial. I know a lot of the controversy has to do with what does it actually represent. I’m going to talk to that. And I know a lot of it is concern that if it’s untracked, unregulated, it gets used for criminal enterprise. And yes, of course that’s a concern.
Let me go back to store of value. From the time it was created, I stepped back and thought, I can see this as a store of value. I can see the millennial generation and surrounding cohorts coming along, and this is something they would like to have as a store of value. What does it represent? A mathematical formula. Okay, I have a math background. I kind of get that. I’m okay with that. When I get into debates with clients about “but you own nothing,” and it just goes on and on, I bring up fine art. I bring up the thought that, look at some of the fine art. A few months ago, a Jackson Pollock painting sold at Christie’s for close to $200 million. And I went to see it, because I wanted to see it. It was beautiful. It was, like, squiggly lines. Probably you can do it. You can take a Monet, and with AI today and with 3D printers, you can replicate a Monet perfectly: every color, every brush stroke. And yet the original, I don’t know, is probably worth a hundred million. Who are we to tell our collectors that that’s not what they want as their store of value? That it can be replicated today almost exactly. Why would you pay that much when you can have a copy where most people can’t tell the difference?
So I’ve always appreciated what Bitcoin represented and crypto represented. I think it’s an alternate asset class, and I think it is a store of value. And I’m not here to lecture people on what they want to put their money into.
00:21:44 BARRY RITHOLTZ: An alternative to fiat currency. Could that ever be an alternative to the dollar?
00:21:52 BOB MICHELE: I’m not sure. I think you would need central banks to come in, you would need treasuries to come in. I think there’s a big difference between, and a confusion between, crypto and a stablecoin, and what can be tracked and regulated, and what has the full faith and credit of the US behind it. And is it a digital currency? All of those things I agree with. I don’t know if crypto can become mainstream. I don’t know if it’s Bitcoin. But I do see a digital dollar in the stablecoin world, with the backing of the Treasury, the support of the Federal Reserve. To me that’s almost inevitable.
00:22:35 BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m glad you brought up stablecoins, and I don’t want to spend too much time talking about currencies. But I’ve always thought of the dollar more as a medium of exchange than a store of value, if only because we tend to have inflation at 2, 3 percent or higher over longer periods of time, and I could swap my dollars for true stores of value, whether it’s businesses, real estate, stocks, bonds, et cetera. Is that a fair description?
00:23:03 BOB MICHELE: I think it is, which is why we have our careers. Because if you just sit there with a load of dollars, as you say, they’re depreciating by at least the rate of inflation. If you get the dollars invested, then you hopefully are generating at least a return equal to inflation and something that’s a premium to that. And that helps you save, and that helps you buy a home down the road, and it protects your assets, your cash, from eroding in value.
00:23:35 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you’ve been doing this for quite a while. You were fairly vocal heading into ’08, warning people about the crisis, and then again in 2023 about regional bank stress. You are a reader of fixed income markets. How different are they today than, you know, 20-plus years ago heading into the GFC?
00:23:57 BOB MICHELE: I think, and don’t mistake this for “there’s another GFC brewing,” I think we are back to an environment that reminds me of the aughts. And I think it’s a healthy environment, where there’s a demand for capital because there’s a productive use of that capital. And because of that, there’s going to be a competition for capital and a cost of that capital, and it ain’t gonna be zero anymore. It’s going to have a real value to it.
And I go back to 2012 a lot, when the Fed started with its summary of economic projections and the nefarious dot plot. If you go back to the very first one and look at their estimate of the long-term neutral rate for the fed funds rate, it was four and a quarter percent. How did they get there? They looked, over that time period, at the 99-year history of the Fed: the real fed funds rate was two and a quarter. You’re targeting 2 percent inflation. There’s your four and a quarter percent fed funds rate. I think that’s a world we’re headed back to and we’re in. I like it. It reflects a dynamic economy. It reflects that we’re leaving the post-Great Financial Crisis behind, where frankly, US baby boomers kind of broke things. We took the one asset that never went down in value, which was housing, and figured a way to oversupply it so that it went down and created a crisis.
00:25:28 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk about that. You and I have both discussed normalization. In anticipation of talking to you, I pulled some data, and it’s really eye-opening over the last 25 years. From 2001 to 2026, the 10-year averaged about three and a quarter, a touch less; the 30-year fixed rate mortgage, a little over 5 percent. If you look at the 25 years prior to that, it’s double. You’re over 8 percent on the 10-year, and mortgages from ’76 to 2000 averaged about 10 percent. So how much of what we’ve been experiencing over the past five years is just, hey, the past quarter century has been aberrational, and now we’re getting back to normal?
00:26:16 BOB MICHELE: I think a lot of it. And by the way, when my wife and I bought our first house, our first mortgage was 10 and 5/8 percent. And being the smart bond guy that I am, at 10 and a quarter percent we refinanced. So there’s an entirely different thinking out there. When I look at mortgage rates today, I think the two periods you highlighted, the truth is somewhere in between. Certainly the early part of that, we were coming off of the Volcker shock, right, when he raised rates to 20 percent. I was in the…
00:26:48 BARRY RITHOLTZ: ’81, ’82, around there.
00:26:49 BOB MICHELE: Yeah, I was in the market for that. I’ve seen both 20 percent fed funds and 0 percent fed funds. I don’t think 10 percent, you just take the median, that’s it. I do think, you know, somewhere in the 3 to 6 percent range strikes me as where the Fed should be. So is 4.5 percent a neutral point? I think that’s a good bogey to put out there right now as we kind of feel around for what is normal again. And again, I consider that healthy. I like the ability to give our client base, businesses and households, bond portfolios that have yields above 6 percent in the investment grade space. And if you take a little below investment grade, you get close to 7 percent. That’s very different than delivering a portfolio with a yield of 2 percent on it.
00:27:43 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So we’re going to talk a lot more about bonds and fixed income investing. I want to stay with these various regimes. The Federal Reserve has made a number of changes under the new chairman. What do you think their perspective is about higher for longer? Everybody uses that phrase. To me it feels more like normalization as opposed to higher for longer. Is this a brand new Federal Reserve regime, and we have to stop thinking about it the way we thought about either the Bernanke regime or the Yellen regime?
00:28:20 BOB MICHELE: Well, you started off by asking me what I did when I got to J.P. Morgan. So I appreciate: you’re put into a role, you have to be given the flexibility and the ability to organize things the way that you want. And when I look at Chair Warsh, and he stepped into the Fed, he’s doing that. There are things that he doesn’t like. There are things he’d like to get more information on. He probably has a plan. It’s fine. He’s not going to break anything, and we’ll just have to learn to adapt. We adapted from Volcker to Greenspan. We’re now adapting from Powell to Warsh. It will all be okay.
What do I think about some of the things he’s doing? I actually think we had gotten to a pretty good place, where when you looked at the transparency all the central banks had gotten to, they look at a lot of models. They have models that tell them about the economy, inflation, interest rates, yada, yada, yada, credit spreads. And they’re pretty transparent about them. So we got to see those models. They put out a lot of minutes, so there was a lot of commentary in the minutes about what they were doing. And then there were a lot of publications that they put out there. What they were doing is pretty much activating millions of people in the industry to focus on the issues they were concerned about and get all that feedback. And in an AI world, you could probably process it. I would’ve thought that was valuable. I don’t know why central banks would want to get away from that. So I’m hoping that there’s some in-between there.
What do I expect from this Fed? I expect this Fed to be more vigilant on inflation than growth. I think the central banks and the Fed that were more vigilant on growth had to be, after the Great Financial Crisis. Now you’ve got the next demographic coming along. The 1991 births are now the largest population cohort. They’ve replaced the 1959 births. So they’re going to want things. They’re going to be the dominant earner, spender, and saver. All of those things have a growth and inflation element to it. And again, it’s not around zero, it’s a much higher rate. And I think we’re going to have central banks that will have to be more focused on inflation vigilance, and they’re catching on to that.
00:30:49 BARRY RITHOLTZ: That makes a whole lot of sense to me. I always thought the transparency, here are the models, here are what we are thinking about, here are the important issues, was a way the Fed communicated to the market: Hey, here’s what we’re going to do. Why don’t you guys go do our heavy lifting for us? When we’ve heard about less guidance, less communication, it sounds like less transparency. Are they losing that mechanism of the Fed informing the market, hey, here’s what you guys need to go do?
00:31:24 BOB MICHELE: A little bit. And look, it hasn’t been perfect, right? They were forecasting rate cuts this year when you go back to the start of the year. That’s never materialized. But they pointed the industry at, here are the things we’re looking at. So they started to get an early feedback loop. I think those of us in the business, particularly working for large firms with a lot of resources, we’re always going to do our own research. We’re always going to talk to businesses, we’re always going to look at what households are doing. We’re always going to build our own models. We’ll put them out there. We’ll say, this is what we’re thinking, this is where the risks are, this is where the value is. And it’s not going to change that. And then we’ll wait to see how the Fed reacts to those things.
00:32:12 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Did the Fed send the markets a “hey, don’t worry about this” earlier this year, when we saw inflation and tariffs and then the war in Iran? Did they kind of underestimate the impact of all those elements?
00:32:28 BOB MICHELE: I don’t think so. I think they learned from 2022 that you can’t say that it’s transitory. You can’t always look through it. You can to some extent. So perhaps their initial inclination is, this could be wound up pretty quickly, let’s wait and see what happens. But the reality is, within six months’ time they shifted gears. They’ve started the hiking cycle. Like all of us, they’re just going to watch events in the Middle East and look at where oil is, see if there are second-, third-round effects to it in the broader inflation metrics. And if they have to respond with much higher rates, they will. I think that’s a good place for them to be.
00:33:10 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Makes a lot of sense. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Bob Michele, CIO and Head of Global Fixed Income at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, discussing the current rate and credit environment around the world. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Bob Michele. He’s Chief Investment Officer and Head of Global Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities at J.P. Morgan Asset Management.
So let’s talk about some of the things that are driving the markets, driving the economy. It’s been pretty clear artificial intelligence and the hyperscalers are just a house afire, a big part of GDP. AI data center build-outs are using everything from euros to yen to hybrid structures for the credit on this. I’m curious, what are your thoughts about this? Is the market pricing it correctly? Have we over-allocated to the space? What’s going on over there in credit?
00:34:20 BOB MICHELE: Well, I’m fortunate to have worked in a franchise that saw and believed in AI early. And I go back three or so years ago, before really the buildup, and I think of Jamie Dimon and Mary Erdoes pretty much pushing us, dragging us kicking and screaming into AI. “You don’t understand. It’s greater than anything that happened in the dot-com era. You have to go back to the Industrial Revolution.” I love that. It may even be greater than that. And initially we looked at it, we weren’t sure. We had people come in, talk to us about it. Is it like an amped-up Google on steroids or something like that? And you begin to then use it very quickly. Like any technology, once you’re introduced to it, you can’t put it away. You start to use it.
So we’ve been on this journey within JPMorgan Chase for over three years now. It’s everywhere. It’s all-consuming. And the differentiation in how we do things today versus what we did two or three years ago is extraordinary. Even from the start of the year. It’s everywhere in fixed income. We actually just did a Shark Tank. We had the analysts and associates submit proposals to us. There were 11 of them, three were finalists, and we’ve decided we’re going to fund two of them. And this was just in the last week or so. So within the bank, I see it, I understand it, it’s real. When I talk to our client base, I am a little bit surprised, perhaps I shouldn’t be, how many businesses are just starting that journey.
So then I step back. Clearly we invest in all the hyperscalers. We do so across the capital structure, both in asset management and then on the banking side. So we’re seeing all facets of it. We’re all seeing the same thing. Demand is super high. The ability to deliver capacity to meet that demand is super low. So you have a couple of choices. You can either borrow today on your very pristine balance sheet and start delivering the capacity quickly, so you can monetize the demand, or you can build it out of excess cash flow, which a lot of these hyperscalers have. Not all of them, but most of them. If you do that, don’t you risk becoming the next BlackBerry or Nokia? Somebody else is going to get there faster than you are. You’re going to be content harvesting the revenue and profits you have, and you’re going to miss the next dynamic.
So we get it from all aspects. We get it from the use case, we get it from the demand for capital case. We see an end game. We don’t actually know what AI will do five, 10 years from now, but I feel we lived that in the internet. I only say, pull out your iPhone today, or whatever your smartphone is, and imagine if you had that in 2000. It didn’t come along till seven years later. How big would the dot-com bubble have been? We didn’t know what could exist. We’re open to that journey with AI. But today it’s making radical changes in how we operate the business. I’m excited about what it could do five years from now, and I’m happy to finance a lot of these borrowers in this space.
00:37:55 BARRY RITHOLTZ: You know, as a consumer of JPMorgan Chase, I have noticed the fraud alerts I get are very different currently than years ago. If it’s a hotel I’ve booked before, or travel, even overseas, it used to be a red flag. Now it’s not. And yet somebody bought $25 worth of something at a Walmart in Nebraska on my credit card, and obviously that got flagged right away. So I suspect this is being integrated throughout not only your shop, but everywhere. It’s going to be really fascinating to see what happens.
I’m really intrigued about the thought of allocating across all sorts of ways and across every various hyperscaler. Is that just the nature of being one of four giant money center banks? You are going to have a finger in every pie. Is that just how that goes?
00:38:53 BOB MICHELE: Okay. I wouldn’t phrase it like that. I would phrase it that you have these very large companies out there that have financing needs, and this is a seismic financing need. And they know they can come to JPMorgan Chase and we can offer them a lot of ways to finance it. Just on the debt side: Do you want to tap a bank line of credit? Do you want us to arrange some sort of direct loan and club it out? Maybe asset management is a part of that. Or do you want us to raise capital in the public markets for you, in the debt markets? For example, if you want to do that, do you want it all in dollars, or do you want some in euro, some in yen, some in Canadian dollars? That opportunity is also available. Or if you’re concerned that everyone may be crowding out the debt markets all at once, had you thought about equity? Look at where your equity is trading, look at the multiple, look at the stock level. At JPMorgan Chase you can offer all of those. So when I meet with some of the hyperscalers who are looking to borrow, I’m just a tiny sliver of the solution. I know they’re having other conversations across JPMorgan Chase.
00:40:08 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you mentioned the public bond market. We’ve seen tremendous growth in the private credit market alongside public markets. What are your thoughts on that? This has become a giant addition to public equities and public fixed income.
00:40:25 BOB MICHELE: I love it. I love the fact that a legitimate non-bank lending channel has been opened up. And yes, because I work within a bank that might otherwise like to have all those loans on its balance sheet, to have originated them, there is an acceptance that markets evolve. If I go back early in my career and I think about the mortgage market, I’ve seen this before. If you took out a mortgage in the eighties, it was from a bank, and then of course the bank sold it on to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac or Ginnie Mae, who then gave them capital to continue extending loans into the mortgage market. Today it’s not banks that are the largest mortgage lender; Rocket Mortgage is the largest mortgage lender. Yet banks and non-bank lenders have learned to coexist in that space.
I think the same thing is happening in private credit and direct lending. There’s also a convergence now. We were meeting with a lot of the borrowers in our space, and they wanted to understand, was it better for them to access the public debt markets, or should they access a direct loan? A lot of the larger, bigger borrowers were going through that dynamic. So we’ve created a partnership between my group in asset management and the commercial bank, where the commercial bank, which is the largest lender to corporate America, the largest banker to corporate America, will source and originate loans. We’ll have a look at them and do a fiduciary look. If they make sense for some of our client base, then we’ll put it into our portfolios. The convergence between public and private is happening everywhere. I think it’s healthy for the bond markets.
00:42:17 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk about a few other things besides inflation that are driving yields higher. How do you look at the current set of deficits? How significant has that been to what’s going on in bond markets? And is that a key factor with yield, or is that just one of many factors?
00:42:38 BOB MICHELE: I think it’s one of many factors. I think you have to go back to, are bonds giving you some sort of premium to inflation? If I think about debt and deficits, for sure there’s a level of righteous indignation we should all have. We’re all going to go home and balance our checkbooks. We all say, we’d like to have that, can’t afford it, don’t want to borrow, let’s do something else. We’d like to go there, they’re too expensive, let’s go here instead. Do we need to go out for dinner? No, probably not. We can eat at home. Everyone is doing that. Yet we look at governments, and they don’t seem to have that discipline anymore. And it’s not just the US. We’re learning it’s happening in France. We’re learning that it’s about to happen in Germany. Has it gone on in Japan and China for a while? It has.
I’m over it. I’m over it. You look at debt to GDP in Japan, it’s closing in on 300 percent. You look at China, it’s closing in on 200 percent. We’re just over 100 percent, right? I don’t know what the structural speed limit is, but it’s not here. Perhaps a more interesting measure is to look at debt service to GDP. Where does that become a problem? Where does it look stretched? Maybe the total amount of debt service payments to GDP at close to 5 percent is a historic high level for the US, but we’re in the mid-threes right now. To me that’s still pretty reasonable. There was a lot of low-coupon financing that’s gone on at the government level.
00:44:25 BARRY RITHOLTZ: And if memory serves, I’m doing this off the top of my head, 10 percent is where countries really run into trouble. If their debt service is 10 percent of their GDP, that’s really problematic.
00:44:36 BOB MICHELE: Yeah. And then you run the math on how much debt the US would have to issue to get there. I don’t even know if we could spend it all. You’re not giving $5,000 checks to everyone. I don’t know, maybe you’re giving $5 million checks to everyone.
00:44:50 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Right? That wouldn’t be inflationary at all. So we wouldn’t have to worry about that.
So there has been some hesitancy when we look at these Treasury auctions from foreign buyers. I know you’ve pushed back on the Sell America narrative. What are your thoughts on how attractive US Treasuries are today around the world?
00:45:13 BOB MICHELE: The US doesn’t own the best bonds in the global bond market. It has some of them, but not all of them. There are other good borrowers out there. And when we step back and look at the repricing that’s gone on, particularly over the last year, yields have gone up to extreme levels in several places. And recently we talked about Australia and Japan. And for us, it’s the discipline of the central bank and the willingness to lean into that, maybe create a little bit of pain for the longer-term good, to try and rein in some of the inflation, rather than leave monetary policy so accommodative that you effectively finance the higher price level of energy in the pass-through, and that becomes an inflation problem. So markets like that.
We tend to like emerging market debt. We look at the local emerging market debt that’s been issued over the last decade, and it looks terrific to us. Historically, early in my career, I looked at Brady bonds. I recall I was taught that emerging markets borrowed your money, then confiscated it, and then you have to go after them to get it back, right? That’s the wrong way to think about it. And happily, early in my career, back in the early nineties, whether it was at Brown Brothers or First Boston Asset Management, we would bring in junior central bankers from around the world, and they would do an internship with you, and you got to meet people from other central banks. Well, guess what? Those guys are back running the central banks. So the local emerging markets are now financing themselves in local currency debt. They have full yield curves. The domestic bonds aren’t dependent on cross-border flows. They don’t need us. They have pension funds and insurance companies that support the long end. They have wealth management platforms that support the front end and the intermediate part of the curve. When we look at the ownership of local emerging market debt, close to 90 percent of it is owned by locals. The other 10 percent are crossover buyers like us, coming in with portfolios that aren’t dedicated there. The central banks are doing a fantastic job. They’re every bit as good as the developed market central banks. You could argue, if you go back to 2021, when they started hiking rates a year before the developed market central banks, they’re actually a little bit sharper. So that’s the hidden gem in our portfolios today: local emerging market debt. The authorities are doing a great job in those countries.
00:48:03 BARRY RITHOLTZ: What regions of EM debt do you like? What specific countries?
00:48:06 BOB MICHELE: It’s a combination. There are a lot that we like in Latin America. We own Mexico, we own Colombia, we own Brazil. Then you mix in a little Eastern Europe: Czech and Poland. There was a new issue that just came for South Africa, close to a 10 percent yield. We bought some of that.
00:48:31 BARRY RITHOLTZ: 10 percent. Yeah, that’s real. That’s real yield.
00:48:33 BOB MICHELE: It’s a lot of real yield. And when I look at that basket that we put together, you’re looking at a real yield that’s close to 5 percent and a nominal yield that’s close to 9 percent. So that’s pretty attractive for sovereigns that I think have pretty diligent central banks. I also heard the president of Paraguay at a conference last week. And then you just start thinking and wondering, well, maybe the hard currency debt makes sense for that. So every time I listen to an emerging market, I don’t think, is it good debt or bad debt? I think, what debt is there? What’s the price of that debt? Does it make sense? Where would I be interested? A lot of good stuff going on there as well.
00:49:23 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk TIPS here in the US. What are your thoughts on inflation-indexed bonds?
00:49:32 BOB MICHELE: Well, TIPS are a great way to tell you what’s priced into the market. And if I look at TIPS today, it’s telling us that despite the concern over oil and the second- and third-round effects, actually TIPS are embedding inflation expectations of 2.35 percent. That’s really well anchored. What’s become a little bit unanchored is the real yield embedded within TIPS. That’s at 2.9 percent. You have to go back to the dot-com era to find real yields that high. So what’s actually become priced into bond markets is less about inflation concern and the ability of central banks to handle that, and more concern about the mix of policies out there. You’ve got monetary policy; we talked about, we don’t know the reaction functions anymore. You’ve got fiscal policy; there’s a lot of borrowing going on, we don’t really understand that. Of course we have the geopolitics of what’s going on in the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, and then just politics in general. You’re going to have an election in France, and you have midterms coming up in the US. I think all of that uncertainty is pushing bond investors to demand compensation for that, and that’s being reflected in higher real yields.
00:50:53 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really, really interesting observation. We haven’t talked about muni bonds. If you’re a New York resident and you’re in a national/New York combination muni portfolio today, we’re recording this right before October starts, you’re getting, I’m sorry, close to 5 percent yield. That’s a taxable equivalent of over 8 percent. If I would’ve told somebody you could get 8 percent five years ago, they would, you know, throw me a parade. What are your thoughts on munis, especially if you are in a high-tax state like New York, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts?
00:51:35 BOB MICHELE: Love them. Love them. Absolutely love them. Exactly for what you say: the yield is there, it’s high. The market’s come under a little bit of pressure there. Of course the backup in yields makes everyone a little bit apprehensive about putting money into the bond market, particularly munis. You don’t want to try and catch a falling knife. We think it’s gone too far. There’s been a lot of supply. Munis typically like to fund themselves before we get into year-end. And of course, if you’ve had a backup in yields over the course of the year, bond prices are going to be down. As you know, we’re entering the tax harvesting season, tax loss harvesting. So we’re seeing a lot of that. We’re seeing a lot of munis being sold to harvest losses, to offset gains somewhere else in somebody’s portfolio. That’s created a pretty good buying opportunity for us. One of the things we look at to try to measure the overall health in the municipal bond market are the rainy day funds that they have. And if you go back 10 years or so, they didn’t really have any rainy day funds. They had blown through a lot of their budgets, and fiscal discipline was a problem for them. Then COVID, or the payouts that they received, and suddenly those rainy day funds are flush again.
00:52:59 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you really like munis. I’m thrilled to hear that. I’m a fan as well. So let’s talk a little bit about the state of the economy. Your fourth quarter 2026 outlook puts the probability of economic expansion at 85 percent. That’s as close to certainty that we’re not getting a recession as I think any one of us that are in the public eye would be wanting to go. What are the drivers of this? We’ve seen a whole lot of concerns about inflation and food and energy. You’ve mentioned geopolitics. There’s all this concern about various elections. And yet the economy is so resilient. What are the big drivers there?
00:53:45 BOB MICHELE: I think there are a couple of things. One is the capex cycle. When we talk to businesses, they are investing. And to us, you can look across industries and say, okay, it may all be around AI currently. But the interesting thing is, when we talk to sovereign borrowers and ask them about their spending plans, technology is one of them, of course, but they also talk about investing in their military, defense of their borders. You’re going to see more of that capex come through. Of course they’re talking about energy independence and security. You’re going to see more investment there. And of course, in the aftermath of tariffs, everyone’s concerned about manufacturing and their supply lines, and they’re interested in investing in that. So we see capex as being more broadly based than simply AI. When you look at corporate earnings and corporate profitability, they look pretty good, and they actually look pretty good globally.
00:54:49 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you’ve watched both professionals and individuals invest in the fixed income space for decades. What do you think the biggest mistake people make in this area is, and what sort of errors are you concerned about the potential of people making in this environment?
00:55:08 BOB MICHELE: That’s a really interesting question. I’m going to give you a kind of different answer. I tell people, particularly new to the industry, those that we’re hiring out of colleges and universities, to understand managing money is a two-edged sword. It’s a privilege to manage somebody else’s money. You need to understand that. But it comes with an enormous responsibility. It’s not a game, it’s serious. You have individual clients who have dreams, who have aspirations. They’re saving for a home. They’re going to send their kids to college. They’re saving for retirement. They want to go on a holiday, something like that. It’s important. We deal with big businesses, we deal with pension funds. They have retirees who are dependent on the retirement plan paying out and giving them a healthy stream of income to live off of. We deal with insurance companies, we deal with monetary authorities, central banks, official institutions. There is an individual at the end of all of that, it’s important to understand, who is dependent on the returns you generate. It’s not a game, it’s real. Accept that with the privilege, the responsibility.
I think when you step back and look at the markets today, you have to approach it that way. Am I making rational investments? Am I stretching too much? Am I taking too much risk? What am I actually here to do? For us in fixed income, it’s to ensure that you get your capital back, plus you get a reasonable income stream, coupon payments, and the total package is some premium to inflation. So I don’t want to reach too far for the marginal borrower that has a problematic business model and roll the dice. Maybe I’ll get my money back, maybe I’ll make another percent on income that I might have by lending to another borrower. I want to do the smart, prudent thing, because I know it’s not a game. I know there’s a real expectation at the end of this.
00:57:26 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Serious answer. Last question before I jump to my favorites that I ask all of my guests. What do you think fixed income investors, or just investors generally, are not really thinking about but perhaps should? It could be a topic, it could be a region, it could be a data point. What’s getting overlooked in this environment that shouldn’t?
00:57:48 BOB MICHELE: There’s the near term, which is what happens in the last 18 months of the Trump presidency. It looks unlikely that he’s going to retain Congress. Will he lose the House? The House and the Senate? One or the other? What happens if you have a split Congress and an administration? What do they do, and what does he do? Everything’s cruising along pretty well right now. Does that dynamic change? So I think we need to start looking at that more closely and wondering what happens when there’s no more fiscal stimulus. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has sort of come and gone. If we’re left with higher energy prices and with tariffs, and there’s nothing that will provide the stimulus, and Congress is unable to deliver it, do we have a soft landing, or is it something that’s a little bit harder? So that’s one thing that we’re focused on.
From the longer term, we talked a little bit about the demographics. The 1991 births are around. I think we have to understand what that looks like. I talked about how they replaced the 1959 births. I am one. I saw that in my career, how we dominated earning, spending, and saving. The 1991 births and surrounding cohorts, they’re 35 this year. So they are on that journey for the next 20 years. The interesting thing is, as baby boomers, near as I can tell, looking at me and you, we’re living longer. So we’re not going to de-asset. We’re probably going to retain our assets. We’re going to hold them longer than historical metrics would tell you. What does that world look like? Where will the demand be? What will inflation and growth look like? How will policymakers have to respond? So that’s something we constantly wrestle with.
00:59:45 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So if I’m hearing you correctly, historically divided government has always been good for the equity market. If we don’t get more stimulus, it sounds like that’s potentially disinflationary. Maybe we see yields come down, not back to zero, but maybe down to under 4 percent on the 10-year. Is this a Goldilocks scenario you’re laying out, plus the Gen Z and Gen Alpha spending run over the next 20 years? This sounds like this is really good for everybody.
01:00:23 BOB MICHELE: Well, it’s sort of like 1980, or ’81, to 2000. When you look at it on, you know, a line, it looks pretty good from the equity market. There was that stock market crash in ’87, and…
01:00:40 BARRY RITHOLTZ: That one-off won’t happen again.
01:00:41 BOB MICHELE: Well, and then there was ’89, right, which was the mini crash. Then you had Long-Term Capital and the whole dot-com. So, I mean, plus…
01:00:51 BARRY RITHOLTZ: The Asian contagion, right in the middle of that.
01:00:53 BOB MICHELE: Yeah. And then you go back to, remember that random county in California, Orange County? Orange County, yes. Defaulted.
01:01:01 BARRY RITHOLTZ: ’90, ’91, something like that.
01:01:02 BOB MICHELE: I think it was ’94, ’95. Yeah, the tequila crisis. So I think you’re right. I think the next decade-plus looks pretty good, but it’s not going to be a perfect straight line. And I wonder if, in the second half of the Trump term, the last 18 months, without the fiscal impulse, yet you’ll have a gridlocked Congress. But we’re used to the adrenaline rush from capital flowing in. If you don’t get that, do we get a soft landing or a hard landing? We really haven’t had a recession in seven years.
01:01:37 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Seven, yeah. I mean, other than the brief COVID, it’s been closer to 17 since the GFC. I mean, COVID I kind of think of as not the normal business cycle contraction. It was a pandemic. So somewhere out there, one will probably come due. And it always looks better in retrospect. You don’t remember. I was on the trading desk in the nineties. I don’t remember how painful ’96, ’97, ’98 were. And those were big double-digit gains those years.
01:02:08 BOB MICHELE: Really? They were?
01:02:09 BARRY RITHOLTZ: They were. So let me, I only have you for a few more minutes. Let me jump to my favorite questions I ask all my guests, starting with: Who are your mentors who helped shape your career? You mentioned Seth Bernstein. Tell us about the folks that really put you on the career path you’ve been on.
01:02:27 BOB MICHELE: Do you know, it’s another thing I tell people joining the industry: look at senior leaders. You learn a lot from what made them successful. You also learn what’s holding some of them back. And along the way, I’ve tried to do that. I go back to when I was at Brown Brothers Harriman. The partner in charge of fixed income, Gene Raines, loved the guy. He did all his own research. The Fed handbook at the time, I think it’s now the Beige Book, would come out. He would get a copy, and he would comb through it and read everything. So from him, I learned, do your own research. And I do that. I go online, I get all the publications from the IMF, from central banks, and read them.
When I was at BlackRock, from Larry and Rob I learned winning is fun. You outperform benchmarks, you win new mandates. It’s a lot more fun than losing. And I’ve tried to build that into J.P. Morgan, where we position ourselves as being a winner, that we’ll outperform benchmarks, we’ll win client mandates, everyone participates in the upside.
When I got to J.P. Morgan, and I watch Jamie Dimon and Mary Erdoes, what you learn is there is an obligation and an expectation that if you work at JPMorgan Chase, you do first-class business in a first-class way. The clients expect it, and they expect it. So deliver on that. So there is a very high standard, which I like, and I think people have to wear that badge at JPMorgan Chase. They do expect to deliver higher than they have previously, but they see that they’re winning. And that’s all good.
01:04:22 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really interesting answer. Let’s talk about books. What are you reading? What are some of your favorites?
01:04:27 BOB MICHELE: I do read a lot. It’s funny, once you leave college and university and you don’t have to do the required reading, you wander off into things that are interesting. I’ve read a trio of good books over the summer. I read 1929, which was terrific, Andrew Ross Sorkin. I also read Empire of Pain. Very good. Read it. It’s about the Sackler empire.
01:04:55 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Oh, that’s right.
01:04:56 BOB MICHELE: So that’s pretty…
01:04:58 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Also won a few awards, if I recall.
01:05:00 BOB MICHELE: I think so. And then also, because I’m a Philadelphian, I’ve always wanted to read Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin, and I just finished that up, and that was a great read. Next on my list is A Fabulous Debt.
01:05:14 BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m halfway through it. It’s spectacular. First of all, when you tell someone you’re reading a history of bonds, the first reaction is, oh, that must be boring as hell. I’m like, no, it’s absolutely fascinating. You go back to Venice, and then you go to the Dutch, and then London. And you know, we think of all the big crashes as equity, but through history it’s mostly been bonds. And you, of all people, you’re going to love this book. Deeply researched, really well written.
01:05:45 BOB MICHELE: Do you know, last week I had lunch with Robin. He told me he has a signed copy of the book for me. It’s in Oslo. What am I supposed to do with that? You’re right. I don’t think bonds are boring. If you step back and think about it, what I love is we can finance anything: businesses, households, governments. Who else can do that?
01:06:06 BARRY RITHOLTZ: And not only did they finance making the Netherlands, which is below sea level, habitable, but it’s why the British were able to beat Napoleon, the greatest general in Europe, because his finance and costs were so much higher than theirs. I don’t want to spoil anything. You’re going to enjoy this book. I knew a lot of stuff in it, but it was just presented in such a fascinating way. Who would’ve guessed?
What else are you doing for entertainment these days? What are you listening to, or streaming, or watching?
01:06:43 BOB MICHELE: What am I streaming? I like sort of the spy, espionage stuff.
01:06:48 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Same.
01:06:49 BOB MICHELE: Lioness is really good this year. Fauda is shockingly good. You know, it’s a tough watch, but it’s really good.
01:06:59 BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s so stressful. You can’t go to sleep after Fauda. Yeah. Lioness, that was some cliffhanger at the end. Have you finished the season?
01:07:06 BOB MICHELE: Yeah, I have. Yeah. It would keep you coming back. Yep. You know, Reacher is kind of in that covert ops. That’s interesting. And then of course, because I spent time in England, I like some of the British stuff. Slow Horses. To me, how does Gary Oldman do it? He’s great. Like, how is he that character? That’s great. And then Ted Lasso, of course.
01:07:28 BARRY RITHOLTZ: So my wife doesn’t watch Slow Horses, but I like it. And she just sucked me into the new Reacher spinoff. That’s also Neagley.
01:07:40 BOB MICHELE: Yeah. Very good. Of course we’re watching that.
01:07:42 BARRY RITHOLTZ: We watched the first one. We just watched the first Ted Lasso, because we always wait for the whole season to drop.
01:07:49 BOB MICHELE: Ah, you gotta binge it, huh?
01:07:51 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Well, one a night. I don’t want to wait 10 weeks. That was the problem with Reacher.
Last two questions. Normally here I would ask what sort of advice you would give to a college grad interested in your space. Instead, I’m going to give your own quote back to you. This is something you say to interns, and I want you to comment on it: “The way to differentiate yourself now is mastering AI tools the way a previous generation mastered spreadsheets.” Explain that.
01:08:23 BOB MICHELE: You have a technology advantage coming out of university, because it’s a way of life. And those of us who have been in business for a while are generally still on legacy systems, eyeing what will be coming along. When I started at Bankers Trust in 1981, we did everything on yellow ledger paper and HP 12Cs. And then the first sort of electronic spreadsheet came along, VisiCalc. And I had done some BASIC programming back in high school and at Penn, so I had some sort of background, and immediately started crunching numbers with VisiCalc and looking at dozens of companies at once, instead of spending the whole day trying to look at one company. And it created a step change in my career. It differentiated what I was doing relative to what everyone else was doing.
Those that we’re interviewing for our platform now, who are in college or university, we’re seeing how AI-enabled they are. We can teach them the finance. I taught myself that, going to CFA class and being in the business. We’re all there. But we want them to come in and give us the aha moment. Like, why aren’t you doing it this way, using this GPT or this tool? Why are you doing it that way? So to me that’s the most critical thing.
01:09:51 BARRY RITHOLTZ: And our final question: What do you know about the world of fixed income investing today that might’ve been useful back in the nineties when you were really first getting started?
01:10:01 BOB MICHELE: I think it’s okay to take risks. I think the bond market presents loads of different risks to you. There are new instruments that come along. There are new vehicles. There are new tools to use. Take some risk.
01:10:19 BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really, really good advice. We have been speaking with Bob Michele. He is the Head of Global Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities, as well as Chief Investment Officer, at J.P. Morgan Asset Management.
If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the previous 664 we’ve done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts from. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Elizabeth Srin is my video producer, Anna Luke is my podcast producer.
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