Transcript
A (0:00)
What you can see right now is that we're transitioning, unfortunately, out of a period that I've labeled the everything bubble. And that everything bubble is basically illustrating the fact that liquidity has been abundant relative to debt. Now, what has gone on? Well, the first thing that's happened is that every crisis that we've seen pretty much since the GFC has been addressed by policymakers throwing liquidity back into markets. The celebrated QE trade, okay, that has been going on, and maybe we're about to restart that.
B (0:36)
Michael Howell, welcome to Bankless. It's an honor to have you, sir.
A (0:39)
Well, it's great to be here. A lot of things going on in markets right now. I think we need to keep abreast of them.
B (0:45)
We do. And I think that I want to keep abreast of global liquidity and looking at that through this lens. So your life's work has really been mapping money to flows, global liquidity flows, and you help investors track global liquidity liquidity. I feel like I'm an investor and many Bankless listeners might be in a similar position as myself that kind of understands global liquidity, but doesn't fully understand it. And I see a lot of noise out there, people talking about, well, you know, Fed said this and therefore this, or they'll look at charts of M2 and say, this is bullish or this is bearish. And I'm really looking for signal, you know, in this episode and in our conversation, because I think you can provide it on global liquidity because you position global liquidity as a master variable that really drives cycles and crises and asset prices and certainly a lot that's happening in crypto. So can you talk about this? Maybe we can get into the 101 conversation. Is your basic position that global liquidity acts as almost a theory of everything?
A (1:54)
Well, I mean, maybe it wouldn't go that far, but I'd go fairly close to that. I think the interesting point to ponder is why did we get to this position? Why is looking at global equality so important? Why money flows and watching where the money is really a key factor in understanding asset prices today. And I think the beginning of my insight was that I used to work for the American investment bank Salomon Brothers. And Salomon Brothers was a big trading firm. It pretty much was for many, many years, the bond markets internationally. And Salomon used to pride itself on not just research, but actually having a big trading engine and a trading floor that was physically enormous. And part of the idea of that trading floor was that you could basically see money moving from desk to desk. And you know, I used to sit in my, my office in, in the research department. You could actually look out over the trading floor in London, which was, you know, a vast space. This was back in the late 1980s, early 1990s. And you could actually see the money moving from desk to desk. And one of the things that Salomon Brothers always used to school us in was the whole idea that in financial markets there are no unrelated events. And the fact is that if you got one desk that was screaming, you know, buy, buy, buy, there was another desk on another part of the floor which was basically saying, sell. And you saw this money shifting around the world. And because Salomon was an international broker in fixed income, you could actually see these shifts pretty much taking place. So that was really the insight. And Henry Kaufman, who was then head of research at Salamander Brothers, basically used to do an analysis of US Flow of funds analysis called Prospects in Financial Markets every year, which was a very detailed tone that went into the flows of money that were coming in or prospectively going out of U.S. financial institutions and U.S. securities. And that was really a very insightful document for actually understanding how asset prices were moved. But this was a very different view than sort of the textbook view that said, you know, you've got to do this little math equation and you've got to look at, compare yields and whatever else may be. I mean, that really wasn't how asset prices performed. Asset prices are formed in the market. They're formed by supply and demand. And money flows are really a very, very important factor. So that's really the genesis of everything. And what we do now to cross border and now GL index is, is we basically track these money flows worldwide. We've been doing it for, you know, near on three decades now. So we're pretty familiar with the data. And we cover 90 countries and we, you know, hopefully are the definitive source of information on liquidity flow globally.
