← Masters in Business
Masters in Business
Assessing Asset Volatility and Iran War Threats With BlackRock's Mike Pyle
01:04:19
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- [00:00]
Barry Ritholtz
Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive and murky. Lots of firms throw a couple of flashy funds your way and call it a day. Vanguard takes a different approach. The Vanguard Lineup includes over 80 bond funds actively managed by a 200 person global squad of sector specialists, analysts and traders. Lots of firms love to highlight their star portfolio managers like it's all about that one brilliant mind that makes the magic happen. Vanguard's philosophy is different. They believe the best active strategy shouldn't be one person, it should be shared across the team. So if you're looking to offer your clients funds that are built to deliver consistent results, go see the record for yourself@vanguard.com audio that's vanguard.com audio all investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor Being a small
- [01:01]
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- [02:18]
Commercial Narrator 1
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News this is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Bloomberg Radio.
- [02:33]
Barry Ritholtz
This week on the podcast wow, this is another banger. Strap yourself in. Mike Pyle, deputy head of BlackRock's portfolio management group. They oversee about $5 trillion in client assets. Not only is it systematic and discretionary investment strategies, but he also oversees the BlackRock Investment Institute as well as their hedge funds. You may not know BlackRock globally is one of the top 10 hedge fund over portfolio managers about 90 billion. One little note, we are recording this on Tuesday, April 7th. Supposedly something is happening tonight at 8 o'. Clock. You'll know what happened by the time you hear this. We won't. We don't know if something terrible is happening or if it's another Taco Tuesday, but we'll find out soon enough. In the meantime, with no further ado, my conversation with Mike Pyle, deputy head of BlackRock's portfolio management group. Before we get into both your market and government experience, let's take a look at your background. You graduate summa cum laude in economics from Dartmouth. You get a JD from Yale and then a master's, an LLM from Cambridge. What was the original career plan?
- [03:50]
Mike Pyle
So I maybe go back before higher education. You know, I'm from a little town in the Midwest, 600 people in the middle of Olympic, Illinois, no stoplights in the little town where I grew up. And I had a sense from a pretty early age that I wanted to do something out beyond the horizon, out past the fields. And I was lucky enough when I was in high school there was this competition sponsored by the local community college called Running the US Economy where you could set monetary policy, you'd set government spending levels, you'd set taxation rates, basically the big tools of monetary and fiscal policy. And over a 10 year period you'd set those variables and you'd see what came out the other side in terms of GDP growth, in terms of unemployment, in terms of the stock market. And for me, I had never really grappled with a more interesting set of problems than that when I was 14, 15, 16 years old and I didn't really have the words to express what it is that would take me to. But I knew that problems at the heart of economic policy, what that meant for ordinary people, what that meant for markets, were the most fascinating things I'd ever encountered and how I wanted to spend my career.
- [05:09]
Barry Ritholtz
And how you spent your career is moving back and forth between government and the private sector. You have two long stints at BlackRock, including the current one. You were in the Obama administration, you were in the Biden administration. How do you shift back and forth between these two worlds? And how does working in government affect how you perceive investing risk policy from the private side?
- [05:37]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, so I'd say I try to view my time in government and my time as an investor in a blackrock as really two sides of the same coin. The job in government, at least as I understood it was to whether through economic policy or national security policy, had the pleasure to work on both of those through the years. You know, provide a predictable, stable foundation for prosperity for the US and hopefully the world beyond. And recognize that the job in government is to provide that stable foundation so businesses, so families, so individuals can, you know, live their lives, make their choices economically, can take risks in the economy to build businesses, expand businesses, invest and grow, knowing that there's some basic stability and predictability that they get from government. And so for me, like I said, that time in government was one side of that coin. That time as an investor is the other side of that coin. How do you try to take that output from policymakers and make sense of the world, make sense of the economy, make sense of markets, and then make sound choices for clients?
- [06:53]
Barry Ritholtz
We're going to talk a little later about the state of government policy. I want to just stick with your background before we get into the nitty gritty. So you were at the treasury and the White House from 2009 to 2013, really the midst of the great financial crisis recovery. Tell us about that experience. What was that like?
- [07:18]
Mike Pyle
So it was a pretty extraordinary thing to be a part of, had a chance to learn from, be seasoned by, you know, a set of extraordinary, in my judgment, policymakers, whether that was Secretary Geithner, Lael Brainard, Peter Orszag, Jason Furman, others, folks that early in my career, you know, I just learned a lot about what it meant to make sound policy choices, consider policy choices in the midst of crisis. You know, I think one of the things I also took away from that experience is this recognition that, you know, there's. There's kind of, there's no other room that, you know, these are very accomplished policymakers making choices with imperfect information, with not enough time, with incredibly high stakes. And there's no other room where the hyper competent people who know everything and have the luxury of time are. There's just the human being sitting in front of you and you've got to do your role to support them in the way you can. And you know, for me, that was a very, you know, empowering experience. A recognition that from an early stage in my career, I needed to take responsibility. I needed to offer my best day in and day out, because like I said, there's no other room with the hyper competent people. There's just the role you get to play with people acting with not enough time and not enough information to make high consequence judgments.
- [08:50]
Barry Ritholtz
So, so let's talk about those judgments. What do you think policymakers got right and what was the biggest mistake? What did we get wrong as a nation?
- [09:01]
Mike Pyle
So, I mean, I think that the, I think one of the principal lessons coming out of the global financial crisis is that in the face of a large economic shock, a shock that impacts the balance sheets of households and businesses, the government needs to act speedily and with size to prevent the labor market damage, the economic damage, from being an overhang that lasts for a long time. And I think one of the things that a lot of policymakers concluded coming out of the GFC is we just didn't do enough, quickly enough. And as a result, we had a very slow recovery that didn't last just a couple of years, but 10, 12 years and had labor market damage that lasted for longer than it needed to because we didn't ask with the force and speed that we needed to.
- [10:01]
Barry Ritholtz
So when you say we didn't do enough, the Fed was at zero. Every type of credit Alphabet soup of organizational government entities came into effect. Are you referring to the fiscal side? Because it felt like the fiscal stimulus was very, very modest. About a third was temporary tax cuts, a third was temporary extension of unemployment. Shovel ready stuff was 100, $180 billion. It almost seems like we overcompensated in the start of the pandemic and went huge to make up for that. But I'm assuming you're talking about a very underfunded fiscal stimulus.
- [10:44]
Mike Pyle
I think that's principally. Yes, you know what I mean. I mean, I think one thing I would, you know, highlight here is in some ways the United States only got out of the doldrums post the GFC during the first Trump administration and President Trump and that Republican Congress passed the 2017 tax bills. Now, coming from where I come from, I wouldn't necessarily have signed off on every particular of that bill, but I think what you saw was fiscal stimulus at size going through the economy as a result of those, as a result of that tax bill and as a result an economy that at long last began to see full employment, began to see that higher velocity, began to see really the US get out of those post GFC doldrums. Again, not how I would have necessarily designed the fiscal stimulus myself, but I think the fact that that's really perhaps the moment when we came out of the doldrums highlights that that fiscal lever was one that perhaps we should have pulled sooner and at greater earlier post the crisis.
- [11:55]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting. So let's talk about some of your other roles within government. You were a law clerk for Merrick Garland. That's fascinating. Tell us about that experience.
- [12:08]
Mike Pyle
Yes. Judge Garland was my very first boss in Washington. In some ways the perfect way to begin a career. Somebody that I continue to regard as the model public servant. I say listen. And I learned three things from the judge. I learned what it meant to love the law. I learned that I didn't love the law the way the judge did. And that three, I needed to find something that. That I loved as much as Judge Garland, loved being a lawyer, being a judge. And so that brought me back to what I'd done. I was talking about a moment ago in high school when I really fell in love with economics, economic policy, the impact on people and markets, what I'd studied as an undergrad and in graduate school. And so what I really took away from that experience is I wanted there to be a strong public service component to what I did, and also that I needed to put myself to work in a space that I really loved and felt passion for. And that was the space of economics, domestic economic policy, international economic policy, and working to make the US and the world a more prosperous place.
- [13:18]
Barry Ritholtz
So you were the President's personal envoy to groups like the G7, the G20, APEC summits. When you look around the world and see US China relations, Russia's war in Ukraine, Israel, and America's war with Iran, AI and just energy security, trade and investment tariffs, all these things, it seems like it's just an old overwhelming amount of things taking place. How effective are these global organizations? What do they actually accomplish? It just seems like the fire hose is so overwhelming, it's impossible to know where to even begin.
- [14:04]
Mike Pyle
So, you know, I worked for two years as President Biden's deputy National Security adviser. I think President Biden started from the place of believing that the United States acts with greatest impact in the world when it acts alongside our closest allies and partners. And I think that's part of the reason why the G7, during the years I was serving, was perhaps at the height of its impact and influence across time. I mean, I think of two things that really highlight this. One was, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, really acting with force, with one voice, not just as the United States, but as a set of allies to put a historic set of sanctions on Russia, to put historic economic pressure on Russia, and to do that in a way that made sure that it wasn't just the United States acting, but all of our allies and partners together around the world acting in concert, delivering a stronger force, a policy than the United States for all of its Power and might could have delivered by itself. Similarly, I think with respect to a kind of different type of problem, thinking about the United States competition with China, like in domains such as technology and artificial intelligence, the type of thing that's very front of mind today, a lot of our European allies came to that with, with more skepticism. They have a different perspective on their relations with China than, you know, we had, than the United States had both across, frankly, the Trump administration and the Biden administration. And it was, you know, the hard diplomatic work day in, day out, week in, week out, you know, persuading skeptical allies to join us in some of the policy steps that we thought were important to protect our technologies, to protect the national security applications that they offer, to protect our economic well being against that competitive threat, and bringing those allies along through, like I said, the hard work of diplomacy, through the hard work of persuasion, day in, day out, week in, week out, I think was ultimately quite fruitful and something that was an important part of how I spent those years.
- [16:27]
Barry Ritholtz
So given all that at policy experience and being in the room where it happens, how does that affect how you look at markets and investing? Did your government experience affect how you think about risk, uncertainty and various opportunities?
- [16:47]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, so, I mean, I would say a couple things there, you know, one, you know, I do think that, that investing and policymaking are different exercises and need to be kept separate. Policymaking is an exercise of attempting to make a world as you want it to be, or at least as the people's elected representatives want it to be. Investing as an exercise of taking the world as it is and making sound judgments about how to invest client capital, that is their capital, that is their savings on their behalf, so as to help them achieve what they've set out to achieve. And so to me, the framework I've used to think about investing kind of comes back to some of the blocking and tackling of active management. I think about my mentor at BlackRock, Ron Kahn, one of the authors of the literally the Bible of Quantitative Investing and the Fundamental Law of Active Management. It's really all about making forecasts that are right about the world, having a wide set of those forecasts so you can build a diversified portfolio and then translating those insights efficiently into portfolios through the assets you own. So again, for me, these exercises overlap to some degree, but I really try to keep them distinct because one's about the world as you might hope it to be, and the other is about the world as it is. And being sure that you don't confuse those two things is really part and parcel of what it means, I think, to do, you know, the job you're meant to do at each.
- [18:29]
Barry Ritholtz
I like that. I like that framework between the two. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Mike Pyle, deputy head at BlackRock's PMG, discussing the portfolio Management Group. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive and murky. Lots of firms throw a couple of flashy funds your way and call it a day. Vanguard takes a different approach. The Vanguard Lineup includes over 80 bond funds actively managed by a 200 person global squad of sector specialists, analysts and traders. Lots of firms love to highlight their star portfolio managers like it's all about that one brilliant mind that makes the magic happen. Vanguard's philosophy is different. They believe the best active strategy shouldn't be one person, it should be shared across the team. So if you're looking to offer your clients funds that are built to deliver consistent results, go see the record for yourself@vanguard.com audio. That's vanguard.com audio all investing is subject to risk Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor Support
- [19:56]
Commercial Narrator 2
for the show comes from Public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios. One of these tools is called Generated Assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific like biotech companies with high R and D spend, small cap stocks with improving operating margins or the S&P 500 minus high debt companies. Chances are there isn't an ETF that fits your exact criteria. But on Public, you just type in a prompt and their AI screens thousands of stocks and builds a one of a kind index. You can even backtest it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks, go to public.com market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market ad paid for by
- [20:49]
Barry Ritholtz
Public Holdings Brokerage Services by public investing member FINRA, SIPC advisory services by public advisors SEC registered advisor crypto services by ZeroHash sample prompts are for illustrative purposes only, not investment advice. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures@public.com Disclosures travel smarter, not
- [21:09]
Commercial Narrator 3
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- [21:45]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Mike Pyle. He is the deputy head of BlackRock's portfolio management group. The group oversees $94 billion in hedge fund assets and another 394 billion in systematic investments. So let's talk a little bit about the Portfolio Management Group. So let's talk a little bit about the Portfolio Management Group. Tell us about the various strategies you oversee. What does the deputy head of PMG actually do?
- [22:25]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, so the Portfolio Management Group as you you talked about is really the organization within BlackRock that oversees our active investing strategies in public markets. You know, been entrusted with over just about $5 trillion in client assets to manage through those strategies, but really spans asset classes, fixed income equities, multi assets, span styles, as you say, both discretionary and systematic spans, both long only as well as long short hedge fund and liquid alternative strategies. So really it's that full umbrella of active strategies in public markets. In terms of what do I,
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Commercial Narrator 3
I
- [23:08]
Mike Pyle
directly oversee what we do on the hedge funds and liquid alternative side, directly oversee our efforts in fundamental equities and directly oversee our internal think tank, the BlackRock Investment Institute. But what does that mean day to day? I'd say it's a mix with some share of my time. I am working with our portfolio managers, working with our lead researchers to try to offer what I can to help them frame what's happening in the world, to help them, as we talked about, understand the world as it is and what that might mean for markets and help them think about the choices they're making in portfolios on behalf of clients. But you know, really the lion's share of my time is about making sure, you know, we've got the right portfolio managers and teams, the right strategies, the right investment process and research process sitting beneath those teams so that we can, you know, deliver for clients in a lot of respects, it's, you know, about a lot more about being the GM or the coach than being, being the player. And I think that's a, it's a, it's a pretty exciting mix of things that I get to do as a result.
- [24:15]
Barry Ritholtz
So I think everybody understands what hedge funds are, what are liquid alternatives. Explain that a little bit.
- [24:21]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, sure. So maybe to take a, take a step back, you know, if I think about the challenge that investors face today, and this is true, whether we're talking about the most sophisticated large asset owners on the planet or mom and pop investors saving for their retirement, it's where can they find diversification? Obviously, one of the core precepts of investing is the free lunch of diversification, the value of diversification. And yet it is increasingly hard to find out there. And I think that's true in a couple of ways. One, traditionally we think about government bonds being an important hedge against stocks in a portfolio. When stocks go down, bonds go up in value. That's not what we saw in 2022. That's not what we saw in March of this year. And so finding tools that can help diversify portfolios in a world where bonds aren't perhaps serving that role as well as they have at different points in history. And secondly, on the equity side, facing market that are increasingly concentrated, we see what a large share of indices, those big mega cap tech names are today. That means that when you own the index, you're owning a less diversified equity portfolio than has historically been the case. So what does that mean about where liquid alternatives step in? I think one of the ways in which investors can find diversification is by having exposures that are neutral to broad markets, neutral to those betas and stocks and bonds that drive the lion's share of portfolios. And being neutral to the markets means having strategies that can be long and short in an asset class that can be long. Individual stocks can be short, individual stocks the same on the bond side in order to generate alpha and investment return that is independent of the movements in the broad markets. Liquid alternatives are vehicles that have exactly those types of strategies. They're very similar in this respect to the types of strategies that we deploy in our direct hedge funds and offer similar types of uncorrelated return. Now, an important difference between something like a direct hedge fund and a liquid alternative, these are different types of vehicles meant for different types of investors. They offer daily liquidity as opposed to hedge funds which have different liquidity terms. That means running strategies that at their core are the same across Liquid alts and hedge funds, but are designed to be in daily liquid vehicles that are designed to be run with much less leverage to recognize the types of clients and the types of needs that those clients have, which are for greater diversification but also liquidity, transparency, availability. That is different from an institutional hedge fund clientele.
- [27:32]
Barry Ritholtz
So from your seat, what sort of trends are you observing either in hedge funds or liquid alts? What kind of strategies are resonating with investors?
- [27:42]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, so I think that exactly as we were talking about, what's resonating is the availability of diversification, of diversifying the
- [27:53]
Barry Ritholtz
diversifiers, meaning beyond just 60, 40, just beyond just stocks and bonds.
- [27:58]
Mike Pyle
Exactly. And I think some work that my colleagues, the BlackRock Investment Institute, did, highlighted the type of world that we're investing in now. And they basically made the point, which goes to why we don't see the diversification across stocks and bonds we have historically, that, that some of the macroeconomic and the macro underpinnings of markets have become unmoored in recent years. It is a less predictable framework, whether it's around trends on growth of inflation, trends around monetary and fiscal policy frameworks, the geopolitical environment and the like. And as a result, hedge funds and liquid alternative strategies provide tools that allow managers to navigate that environment either, like with my colleagues on the systematic side, you know, running strategies that are not just market neutral, but neutral to broad market factors like momentum, like low volatility, like some of these other kind of well known factor exposures, and really focusing on true uncorrelated alpha. And also macroeconomic strategies, macro strategies where skilled managers are navigating a much more complicated macroeconomic environment to deliver alpha through that skillful navigation. Those from our research are the two types of strategies that are perhaps best poised to offer that different type of return, that different type of diversification. And that's what we're seeing not just within the firm, but across the industry. The places that are attracting client interest are systematic strategies, are macro strategies. And we think precisely because they best correspond to the opportunity set that markets are offering us.
- [29:40]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's talk a little bit about that systematic approach. That team began in 1985 with a grand total of three investment signals used more than a thousand investment signals. I'm kind of fascinated. This came along with the BGI acquisition in 09, which everybody remembers for iShares, but this is still almost $400 billion. This is a substantial chunk of capital. Tell us a little bit about how the systematic team thinks about adding a signal, how they integrate all These various signals. And I'm legally obligated to ask how is AI contributing to these signals?
- [30:23]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, I mean, so I'd say a couple things. I mean, one, you know, this is a team that really is at the forefront of pulling in a bunch, taking advantage of the fact that the availability of data in the world, structured data, unstructured data, is stepwise different than it has been ever before in history. And the techniques available to analyze, process, identify consistent, valuable investment signals from that data is also given expanded compute, given the changes in techniques, including around generative and agentic AI, to make sense of that data and bring order to it. This is really at the heart of what our systematic researchers do in building signals and portfolios. I'd add a couple of additional points. One, building on what you said, they've been at this for now 41 years. You know, they are not new to using data, using tools of AI, machine learning to generate alpha for clients. This is something they've been at really defining the frontier for four decades. They were doing natural language processing more than 10 years ago. They were doing portfolio optimization with machine learning more than 10 years ago. This is not a Johnny come lately story of the moment. This is a story of accrued excellence and expertise built over decades thing, I'd say. And maybe it's funny to talk about it with respect to a quant team, to a kind of hardcore systematic team, but I think one of the things that really sets it apart within BlackRock, within the industry, is the culture that they've built. This is a core set of investors and researchers that as you say, have been together for decades, that have been together in many cases since before BGI became a part of BlackRock, became BlackRock systematic. And so there's that kind of continuity, that legacy across time. And at the same time, they're also every year adding young professionals, young researchers fresh off their PhD with new perspectives, new innovative techniques, new ways of looking at the data, new ways of looking at AI. And I think that really special balance between experience, continuity, depth of knowledge built over decades with new voices, new perspectives, new ways of solving hard computational and hard data problems. That's what's pretty special about the culture they built as well.
- [33:05]
Barry Ritholtz
So you guys sit very much at an intersection between quantitative and fundamental data, between quantitative and fundamental investors. When you're thinking about systematic signals, how do you manage when what comes out of out of the data conflicts with the fundamental narrative that seems to be driving most of the conversations? How do you contextualize that? Who wins that debate?
- [33:38]
Mike Pyle
I think it's a great question. I'd say a few observations. 1 BlackRock we believe in individual PMs and teams that are empowered to make judgments that they are accountable for. And so it may be that our systematic investors are coming to a different view on markets on a range of stocks than our fundamental teams are. That's okay. We believe in empowered, like I said, portfolio managers who are making the best decisions they can for our clients, but are armed with a common set of tools to come to judgments. But I think to abstract away from that further, I'd say I really do think that in some pretty important ways what systematic investors do is just a different kind of thing altogether from what fundamental investors do. If I think about the work that our fundamental investors do, it's really harnessing all potential sources of insight to go as deep as humanly possible, as technologically possible with respect to understanding an individual company, an individual asset, and its likelihood of outbreak, performing or underperforming the market in the years ahead. That's different than the type of, I think, insight that our systematic investors tend to kind of think about. They think about sort of what they call high breadth insights. So insights that, you know, basically apply to a wide range of stocks, 300, 400, 500 stocks. You know, we found an insight that we think, on balance over time, across the universe of many hundreds of stocks is going to outperform. That's not about deep research in one company and coming to a highly convicted view on one company that's coming to a view about what is statistically likely to be the case across the full universe of stocks, on balance across time. Now, where do I think these things can be complementary to one another one I would say is these are just kind of pretty different sources of insight. And again, we've talked about diversification. Putting yourself in a place to put different types of insights into a single portfolio can be additive, can be diversifying, can mean that the alpha that you're generating is more diversified and resilient. I'd say another thing, and this is something we're spending a lot of time on with our fundamental teams just by virtue of what systematic investors do. Insights that apply across many hundreds of stocks, products, packaging, as you talked about many hundreds, if not a thousand types of signals into one portfolio. They think a lot about portfolio construction, they think a lot about how do I take those different insights and size them versus one another to come up with a portfolio that is optimized to achieve client results. I think that taking some of those lessons of portfolio construction into the fundamental realm with a set of investors that at the end of the day, I think on balance view themselves as having conviction about companies more than portfolios and having them kind of take some of those portfolio optimization frames of mind and apply it to how they build portfolios. On the fundamental side there, I think is also a real source of complementarity and something we're spending a lot of time on in PMG.
- [36:53]
Barry Ritholtz
And the BlackRock Investment Institute also sits under your umbrella. Tell us about what sort of research they produce, who consumes the output of this. Is it internal, is it external, is it both? Give us a little color on the BlackRock Investment Institute.
- [37:10]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, I mean it's a really powerful tool at blackrock. I mean, I think one of the. Maybe to take a step back, as I've been doing a couple times in this conversation, I think one of our observations about the asset management industry, the hedge fund industry over the last 10 or 15 years is that 10 or 15 years ago, people viewed hedge fund Alpha, Alpha more broadly perhaps as the province of small niche players who understood some corner of the market deeper and better than anybody else. I think 10 or 15 years on, I think we've come to see that alpha is more the province of scale. This is the story of the rise of the multi strategy hedge funds of the citadels and millenniums. But we think it's also true of the asset management industry writ large that there are a lot of benefits of scale that come from insight, that come from risk management, that come from trading and liquidity, that come from operational backbone. And a big piece of that is something like the BlackRock Investment Institute that's able to really dedicate itself to the question of how do we research and source valuable insight across a full platform and deliver that to our portfolio managers. And so the purpose of the BlackRock Investment Institute is one, to inform those alpha research discussions to really inform and drive the investment debate within the firm, but then also to open up the curtain and let our clients see and consume a lot of the research that our portfolio managers are using day in and day out to inform their own thinking, their own investment decision making. So to answer your question, it's a little both and it's about driving the investment debate, driving the alpha discussion within the firm, but then saying we've benefited from this, we want our clients to benefit from it too, and let's produce work that based on what we use internally allows our clients to enjoy the fruits of that research as well.
- [39:13]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Mike Pyle, deputy head of BlackRock's portfolio management group, discussing the state of the world economy and markets in an era of geopolitical uncertainty. I'm Barry Britholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
- [39:44]
Commercial Narrator 2
Support for the show comes from Public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds and crypto, and they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios. One of these tools is called Generated Assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific like biotech companies with high R and D spend, small cap stocks with improving operating margins, or the S&P 500 minus high debt companies. Chances are there isn't an ETF that fits your exact criteria. But on Public you just type in a prompt and their AI screens thousands of stocks and builds a one of a kind index. You can even backtest it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks, go to public.com market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market ad paid for by
- [40:38]
Barry Ritholtz
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- [42:34]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Mike Pyle, deputy head of BlackRock's portfolio management group, responsible for, I don't know, about $5 trillion in investor assets. So we are living through an era, especially under this administration, of seemingly challenging geopolitical turmoil and unexpected policy shifts. I want to start with something positive, which was a quote from you. U.S. resilience is underestimated. So tell us what that means. What does the market MISPRICE about the U.S. economy or the U.S. markets? And we're recording this in the first week in April, despite everything that's happened, tariffs and war in Iran, markets are barely 5% off their recent highs. Tell us a little bit about U.S. resilience.
- [43:38]
Mike Pyle
Sure. Well, you know, first I would say, yeah, we're taping this on Tuesday, midday,
- [43:44]
Barry Ritholtz
8 o' clock tonight. Who knows what will happen? And for all we know, that's a misdirection and it's going to start as soon as it gets dark.
- [43:50]
Mike Pyle
Who knows, we will, we will all find out together. But I, but I do think that this point about US Resilience is an important one. You know, you know, we've seen it on display in many moments over the past number of years, including the last 12 months. You know, the, you know, diversity, the breadth, the innovative potential of the US Economy, the quality of our corporate sector, you know, these are all things that are pretty extraordinary. I think one of the things that I would highlight in the here now with respect to, you know, what I think is, is fairly described as a historic energy shock. A energy shock the dimensions of which I think are going to only become even more clear in the weeks and months ahead. And we're seeing physical supply disruptions in a way that, for example, we didn't see in 2022 post Russia's invasion. And this is a global shock. This is a global supply chain shock. It is going to have impacts on the United States. But I do think it's fair to say that in a real economic sense, the US Is relatively more insulated from this shock than other economies around the world, whether that's in Europe, whether that's in east and Southeast Asia, whether that's in the emerging markets broadly. And you can look at one number which I spend a fair amount of time looking at and marveling at in some respects, which is, you know, the price of natural gas in the U.S. and if you look at a chart of the last three, four months of the natural gas contract in the US Basically hasn't budged, you would be hard pressed to identify where on that chart the military intervention in Iran began. And I think that highlights, you know, the extent to which this critical input to electricity production in the United States, this critical input to industrial production in the United States, this critical input to the way houses kind of heat themselves and cook. You know, all of this is, you know, basically untouched by what we've seen in the war over the last five weeks. Again, I think that's in some ways the most dramatic data point, but it highlights the extent to which even in the face of this global shock, there are very important dimensions of the US that look different than other economies around the world and makes us, on balance, more resilient than those other economies.
- [46:14]
Barry Ritholtz
Nat gas tends to be moved around by pipeline and it's more local.
- [46:20]
Mike Pyle
Yeah. Unlike oil, it is not a globally integrated market.
- [46:23]
Barry Ritholtz
And right before we stepped in here, I checked the price of crude was 1 13. So by the time this comes out, it's either much higher or much lower or maybe the same. But you mentioned supply. Let's delve into that. We saw a giant supply chain shock during the pandemic. The war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is creating a new energy supply shock. This seems to be an ongoing issue. You would have thought by now we would have solved this problem, but it continues to be significant to the global economy. Tell us your views on this.
- [47:00]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, I mean, you asked about the role that the BlackRock Investment Institute plays. I mean, I think one of the things that they have done and built on over the last four years is a piece of work they did back in 2022 called a world shaped by supply, which basically talked about the ways in which in the 2000 and tens in particular, it was a world defined by aggregate demand. This goes back to the very start of our conversation when we talked about the struggles that the US and global economy had after the GFC because perhaps of the lack of a forceful fiscal policy lever being pulled. That's a story about aggregate demand. That's a story about there being insufficient demand in the macroeconomy to achieve full employment and inflation at target. The story post Covid is not that it's a world, as they said, you know, shaped by supply. And you know, I think that wasn't true. That was true not just in 2021, 2022, after Covid, after Russia's invasion, you know, it's, it's true today as well. And I would sort of draw attention to, you know, really two episodes that we've seen already in 2026 that highlight this point. One, and most obviously, you know, is what we've seen in markets since the beginning of the military intervention in Iran and the world pricing to a greater or lesser extent, you know, a pretty traditional negative energy supply shock, higher inflation expectations, lower growth expectations, a pullback in risk really across different types of asset classes. But if you roll the clock back just a couple of weeks before the beginning of hostilities in Iran, you saw a market priced for a different type of supply shock, a positive technology supply shock from AI. We saw that disinflationary, even deflationary trend in the way government bonds were getting priced. We saw big cross sectional moves in the equity market reflecting the potential disruption from AI around a range of business models. And so really 2026 I think highlights both on the positive side and on the negative side in terms of supply shocks, what it means to be living in a world shaped by supply.
- [49:15]
Barry Ritholtz
So abundance on the one hand, scarcity on the other, and logistical interruptions determining which way we go.
- [49:24]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, and the thing I need to put on my sort of policy observer hat, at a minimum, these, however hard financial problems are to solve and they are hard to solve as the gfc, as the Eurozone crisis made clear, they are fundamentally not engineering problems. They are problems of political and policy will supply chain problems. Those are a different beast entirely. This is about rewiring the way physical things, atoms can get produced, get transported, get consumed. And that is a much harder, much slower, much more difficult economic and market problem. Much different and harder policy problem. I think again I would highlight this is one of the ways in which I think the US has proven itself more resilient. Again, the kind of quality, the innovative capacity, the flexibility of the US corporate sector to solve through the supply chain problems that we've seen since the advent of COVID That's a genuine source of resilience for our economy. But also I think highlights that these are hard problems and a different set of problems in kind than what we saw post the gfc.
- [50:39]
Barry Ritholtz
So let me have you put on your policy wonk cap and look out three years, five years. What is the result of this war going to mean for things like alternative energy supplies? It turns out now China is fairly insulated for different reasons than the United States. We have fracking and nat gas. They seem to have a ton of solar and wind and geothermal, which we've sort of neglected the past couple of years. What's the end result of this war going to be? I don't mean in terms of military or political alignment. I mean in terms of global economy. In terms of global economy, energy consumption, things like that.
- [51:26]
Mike Pyle
Well, I'd say you talk about three or five years out, to quote the potentially apocryphal story about Joe and Lai. I think it's too soon to tell. We're going to find out again together in the years, maybe even the hours and days ahead. But I will say I think we're spending a fair amount of time trying to think about some of these questions in blackrock. What are the more durable economic themes going to be coming out of the shock? I mean, I guess I might, you know, highlight three, you know, one, you know, I think energy security, which I think post Covid. Post Russia's invasion was already front of mind for countries, companies, economies around the world is only going to become more so. This is, I think, one of the important trends of our moment. Secondly, I think what we're going to see both from countries and from companies is increased focus on strategic stockpiling. Obviously, we're seeing economies make use of things like strategic petroleum reserves. I suspect that in spaces like energy, but much more broadly across a much wider set of critical inputs of raw materials, you're going to see companies and countries really turn to using resources to build stockpiles of those critical inputs. Again, we've talked for a long time about the ways in which there's been a turn in the world from just in time supply chains to resilient supply chains. That type of stockpiling behavior is what it means in important ways to be spending more resources than you otherwise would today for an efficient outcome today in service of greater resilience over the long term. And then I think the third is, I do think that countries and companies around the world are going to be looking at their energy mix. And I think one of the points we've made about investing diversification is a really important precept in investing. It is perhaps the only free lunch that's out there. And I would expect a lot of different players to be thinking as they think about their energy securities they think about how to build strategic stockpiles. What's the right diversification to ensure that I'm not subject to choke points, to supply shortages, to disruptions.
- [53:58]
Barry Ritholtz
Looking ahead, I like the concept of the framework of this shift shift that's taken place in the 2000 and twenties in a lot of ways, where the regime today is so much different than the 2000 and tens. More fiscal stimulus, higher rates that seem to be structural and built in, higher inflation rates, more geopolitical actions, more volatility. Does this decade require us to fundamentally rethink how we build portfolios, how we manage risk? How different are the 2020s from the 2010s?
- [54:38]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, I mean, I think this gets to some of the themes we were talking about earlier, that, you know, diversification is an extraordinarily important tool as an investor, and diversification is harder to come by today than it was in the 2010s and has been historically. Again, that's true around the role that government bonds can be relied upon to play in portfolios, like in months such as March 2026, like in 2022. It's also true as we were talking about in terms of equity markets and how concentrated equity markets, especially in the United States, have become. And so building portfolios means building portfolios that achieve diversification in a world where diversification is less available than it has been in the past through straightforward means like balanced 60, 40 portfolios. What does that mean? You know, my boss, Larry Fink, has talked about the role that private assets can play in building more resilient, more diversified portfolios. And I think as part of that, talking about the role that hedge funds and liquid alternative strategies can play in public markets, as we've done here, that role, that uncorrelated alpha, alpha that's not exposed to broad market directionality can play in portfolios. These are the types of solutions that I think investors of all types are going to need to reach for to build those portfolios that are designed for a world shaped by supply, designed for a world of geopolitical shocks, designed for a world where diversification is harder to come by. And the answer isn't as straightforward as the traditional 60, 40. The world is going to have to be thought of in terms of that broader set of tools.
- [56:26]
Barry Ritholtz
So we've spent a lot of time talking about the Middle East. Let's look around the rest of the world, starting with this attempt to sort of decouple from China. Is that achievable or are these just political aspirations that don't reflect economic reality.
- [56:47]
Mike Pyle
So I think that's a very good question. I will say, you know, it is clear that President Trump and the administration have been working to achieve a stable economic footing between the US And China. I think that that if it were to be achieved, would be positive. Again, from the perspective of the type of stability, the type of predictability that allows businesses, households, individuals to plan and make choices, I think that plays into one of the things that we've been talking about. What I've been talking about last week, even with some of your colleagues, is the summit between President Trump and President Xi is scheduled for May 14 and May 15. I think that as we look about events in the Middle east, that's a date that I have in my own eye. As I think about when hostilities in the Middle east would likely need to be winding down, I think hard pressed to see how a summit happens. They've already rescheduled it once. Hard pressed see how a summit happens in the event of ongoing active hostilities in the Middle East. And I do wonder hard whether that's a backstop around the Middle east because I do think that there's a strong priority from this president, I think from the Chinese side as well, to find that stability between the US And China. And I think the summit is meant to be the culmination of a lot of that work.
- [58:19]
Barry Ritholtz
So have to talk about AI a little bit. What's the potential there for a possible supply shock and impact on the labor markets, the ability to accelerate productivity and corporate earnings growth? How does BlackRock think about what AI is really doing across everything?
- [58:42]
Mike Pyle
Sure. I mean, I would say the uncertainty bands here are extraordinarily high. And so I think in some ways it's hard to venture a forecast around what this means for productivity, what this means for the labor market, what this means for geopolitics one year from now, much less five, eight, ten years from now? I think what I might helpfully do is zero in a little bit within a domain that I know better, namely BlackRock. And I think about what are we doing. And I make maybe a couple of observations. One, we've already talked about the work ongoing in the systematic platform and really they continue day in and day out to define that frontier of what technology, what AI means in terms of how to manage portfolios and generate investment insight. You know, I look across our active investment platform more broadly. We are very busily deploying tools that empower individual researchers to access more of the collective intelligence of blackrock, to go deeper, to go broader, more rapidly. Around researching individual securities, researching individual companies, researching macroeconomic trends, and come to more judgments, better judgments, more rapidly in ways that we think can help drive investment performance. Third, I think one of the ways in which BlackRock continues to seek to provide solutions that make sense for our clients is to do what we call customization at scale, to be able to look at an individual investor, listen to their concerns, listen to their needs, and design a solution that's customized for their particular circumstances. Again, whether that's an institution or an individual technology, AI is opening up the prospect of being able to do that with more granularity at greater speed and allow us to get in front of our clients with solutions that are really oriented to their goals, their dreams, their ambitions, their concerns in a way that's different than before. Last point I'd make is one of the cool things about being at blackrock is, is, you know, it's a big place filled with a lot of smart people and a lot of the excitement is just giving tools to our researchers, to our professionals, and seeing organically, you know, what they come up with. And I think a lot of the excitement of the moment is seeing so much innovation, seeing so much experimentation, seeing so many cool applications of this technology and our data to solve problems for clients. Now we're at the stage where we're kind of saying, as a firm, okay, what are the handful of things that have bubbled up organically that we think can really move the needle for our clients, really move the needle for the firm and think about what it means to put our shoulder behind those as an organization.
- [61:40]
Barry Ritholtz
So, last question. Before I get to my favorites, I ask all our guests, given all this geopolitical turmoil and market volatility and uncertainty, what do you think investors are not thinking about or talking about, but perhaps should be? What? What topics? Assets, geography, policy, data point? What's getting overlooked but shouldn't.
- [62:03]
Mike Pyle
So there. I mean, I'll offer an answer that kind of puts on both of my hats and say, we've obviously been talking about AI. We were just talking about it as applied to BlackRock. I think that the investment implications of AI, as I said, have huge kind of uncertainty bands around them. Where value is going to accrue at what pace, what transformations to the macro economy, to the labor market, to geopolitics. These are all extraordinarily first order questions for investors. I'd say one piece that I think is being underappreciated is the degree to which I think AI is going to become a first order political and policy issue in the quarters couple of years ahead, we're seeing the beginnings of that talk about data center moratoriums, talk about things like chip access for China, something I worked on. But I think if you talk to pollsters, they would say AI is rocketing up the list of issues that voters are focused on in the United States more broadly. And I think an important dimension of what it's going to mean to invest in AI is understanding that this is going to become a risingly important political and policy issue and an additional dimension of uncertainty that investors are going to have to confront as we make choices around where impact is going to be felt and value is going to accrue.
- [63:32]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting answer. All right, let's jump to my favorite questions. I ask all of my guests, starting with and I really have to split this question into two who were the mentors who helped shape your career, both from an investing standpoint as well as a government and policy perspective?
- [63:50]
Mike Pyle
Yeah. So I'd offer a couple of thoughts here. Parapeters in my life, a guy named Peter Fisher, who's responsible for bringing me into BlackRock as an investor. To me, he had been a senior official in George W. Bush's Treasury Department, a legendary Federal Reserve official, had led the fixed income platform at BlackRock, had really that type of career, bringing together public and private, and is the person kind of most responsible for bringing me into blackrock, and somebody who's been an important counselor to me through the years, spent some time yesterday with my very first economic policy boss in Washington, Peter Orszag. I was part of President Obama's cabinet as the director of the White House Budget Office, now the CEO of Lazard. Similarly, somebody to me who's brought together public service with financial and commercial service as well, and somebody who's again, been an important source of council advice. But I would say beyond that, I mean, my mentors both in government and blackrock, I'd really look into those organizations writ large. When I was in government, the career civil servants at the Office of Management Budget, the career civil servants at the Treasury Department, they knew more about their corner of the federal government, their corner of the world, than anybody else in the world. And if you just sat down and listened, they had so much to share and offer. Similarly, at BlackRock, my attitude when I walked in as a kind of new investor in my mid-30s, having never been in financial markets before, was I've got as much to learn from the analysts associates as I do from those Peters as I do from the senior leadership of the firm. And being Open to this idea that there is knowledge to be gleaned in all places in these organizations is I think, how I think about how I've been mentored by these places as much as individual people.
- [65:46]
Barry Ritholtz
Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading currently?
- [65:50]
Mike Pyle
So I've been revisiting a favorite of mine called the Wise Men by Walter Isaacson. I was listening to a podcast that Tyler Cowen did a couple of of weeks ago where he talked about AI the geopolitical changes that we're seeing means that the world is going to have to be reinvented anew. Not unlike, perhaps was the case after the Second World War. That's a book about the group of Americans that really constructed the post war world, constructed the security architecture, constructed a world built on American leadership and integrated global markets, and helped to build that 80 years of peace, of prosperity that we as Americans have enjoyed. And I think that revisiting that is a reminder of what it takes to rebuild a world, what it takes to invent a world anew. And I do think that Tyler's right, that this is a moment that because of technological transformation, because of changes in the world writ large, is going to require that type of thinking again. And so revisiting that book and revisiting some of its lessons is something that's been important to me in the past couple of weeks.
- [67:03]
Barry Ritholtz
You mentioned Tyler Cowen's podcast. What else is you streaming these days? Other podcasts or Netflix or Amazon type stuff?
- [67:12]
Mike Pyle
Yeah. So I would put in a pitch for my friends Jake Sullivan and John Finer, their new podcast called the long game about U.S. national security and foreign policy. I'd say I like it for three reasons. I mean, one, you know, I think they really try to offer a pretty just the facts perspective on the choices confronting policymakers here in the United States and more broadly. Two, it's a real window into the craft of foreign policy. I mean, I think there's a lot to be learned from the craft of how professionals, whether they're policymakers or investors or business leaders kind of think about doing what they do. And this is a window in that. And third is a personal one. You know, I spent two years of my life, spent many years on top of that, being in dialogue with both of those guys. And for me once a week to kind of tune in for an hour and hear two familiar voices talking about stuff that I care about is a pretty comforting thing to get to do as well.
- [68:09]
Barry Ritholtz
So our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interested in a career in either investing or government policy.
- [68:22]
Mike Pyle
Yeah. So I'd say a mix of the timeless and the timely. I think on the timely side, it is clearly the case that working to be at the frontier of how the tools of technology, the tools of AI are getting used to expand and augment the productivity of workers in finance and government is kind of table stakes. But I'd also emphasize the timeless. In investing, it is still going to be the case that the net amount of alpha in the market, net of fees is zero or gross of fees is zero. It is still going to be the case that the fundamental law of active management, that that mix of, of forecasting skill, breadth, and the ability to translate in a portfolio is what's going to define active management. You know, being steeped in those timeless truths, I think is valuable. Last point I'd make is, you know, you can never emphasize enough what is always going to be human. You know, trust is hard to build. It is built on the back of relationships and relationships across time. You know, spending time building your relationships, building trust, being seen as somebody who acts with trust and integrity, you know, it's not just a way to live a good life, is also a pretty good piece of, I think, career advice as well.
- [69:48]
Barry Ritholtz
I like that advice. And our final question. What do you know about the world of investing today? Might have been useful to know 30 years or so ago.
- [69:58]
Mike Pyle
Yeah, I mean, you know, I would say, you know, we've talked a lot about diversification and portfolio construction across this conversation. And that, to me, I think, is the piece that I most climbed up a curve around, that I've been kind of most struck by learning about during my time at blackrock across the stint in the prior one. What I expected to learn when I left government the first time was, okay. How do I do deep macroeconomic research? What I expected when I left government the first time around is how do I take deep macroeconomic research and turn that into an insight that I can put on as an individual position or individual trade? What I hadn't appreciated and came to really love learning about was, okay, how do you actually take five or six or seven of those insights, put them in a portfolio, understand how much return each can generate, understand how they're correlated, how they move with one another, and then build a portfolio of those insights that is going to deliver the right risk, the right return for clients? And that's the art and science of portfolio construction, which to me is, at the end of the day, the art and science of what it means to be a good investor and to serve your clients well.
- [71:13]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you Mike for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Mike Pyle, Deputy head head of BlackRock's portfolio management group, helping to oversee about $5 trillion in client assets. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the 600 we've done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn't thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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Commercial Narrator 2
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