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- [00:00]
Gillian Tett
This is an iHeart podcast, Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.
- [00:23]
Tracy Alloway
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
- [00:27]
Joe Wiesenthal
And I'm Joe Wiesenthal.
- [00:29]
Tracy Alloway
Joe, yes. In the recent episode with Kaiser Kuo, you dropped at the very end because you said you were hoping that no one was listening. You dropped that you are coming round to complex financial products.
- [00:43]
Joe Wiesenthal
You know, I did drop a little bomb there at the very end of the episode. Cause it's something I've been thinking about more and more. And I'll just lay it out very quickly what I think about, which is that one of the most influential episodes we've done in a long time in my mind was episode we did with Ricardo Houseman, who were either recently talked to or about to talk to, depending on when this episode comes out, et cetera. About complexity is a good thing. That's a sign of. When wealthy economies are capable of producing complex products, that's usually a sign they get wealthier. That's mostly discussed in the manufacturing sense. And then lately I've been thinking, you know what, There are some wealthy countries that produce really complex stuff that aren't manufacturing. The uk, the us, et cetera. Mostly. Much of it is sort of complex financial products. Maybe we need a rethink and maybe we need to sort of take a fresh light about why the market is willing to pay the creators of complex financial products so much. And maybe they're not as bad as sort of some of us thought. Or maybe we, maybe we should be more proud of our financial creations, lean into them a little bit more.
- [01:48]
Tracy Alloway
Lean in, you know, justice for complex financial products.
- [01:52]
Joe Wiesenthal
Yeah, because there was this other thing too, like in like early 2000s, where people are like, oh, all the great minds were working on, you know, building derivatives when they should have been doing something else. And then they went and built like social media and like products to like hack our attention to sell ads. Was that so much better anyway? I don't know. Like, maybe it's like time to rethink the positives of finance in the world. Great financial crisis. That was history. Let's remember the good at parts. Anyway, it's just been on my mind lately. All right. I didn't know you were gonna like turn, say, like, okay, now you have to do a whole episode defending this position.
- [02:24]
Tracy Alloway
Well, I'm being nice. I brought it. No, I. I brought you the perfect guest to discuss all of this. And I mean, really, the perfect guest. So this is actually someone I've wanted to get on the podcast for a very, very long time. I used to work with her at the Financial Times. I worked for her at the Financial Times for a while. We are going to be speaking with Gillian Tett. She is, of course, a columnist for the FT and head of King's College at Cambridge. Gillian, welcome to the show.
- [02:50]
Gillian Tett
Well, it's great to be on the show. And I think, Tracy, I often felt like I was working for you at the financial time. You were so much smarter than the rest us, and you really blazed a trail in many of these discussions.
- [03:02]
Tracy Alloway
Well, thank you so much for saying that. I hope my bosses at Bloomberg are listening.
- [03:06]
Gillian Tett
Yeah, give them bonus straight away.
- [03:09]
Tracy Alloway
You, of course, basically wrote the book on derivatives, Fool's Gold, which came out at a very fortuitous time, 2009. So right after the 2008 financial crisis. Talk to us about the genesis of that book because I think a couple years before when you started working on it, I don't think a lot of people were thinking, oh, we need to write an entire book on how we these things called credit default swaps.
- [03:33]
Gillian Tett
No. Well, most people aren't quite as weird as me, but the reality is I'm trained as a cultural anthropologist, which might sound like it's got nothing to do with Wall Street. And in fact, my PhD was based on fieldwork looking at marriage rituals in Tajikistan. So that's not your obvious starting point, but one thing that cultural anthropology teaches you is that as human beings, we all wrap ourselves up in assumptions and ideas we inherit from our cultural surroundings, and those often make us very blind to things that we ignore in our world. Social silence really matters. It's what we don't talk about that really matters. And starting back in about 2005, when I was running the Lex column at the Financial Times, I noticed that newspapers and politicians talked obsessively about equity markets and sometimes credit markets and bond markets. But actually, when you looked at what was driving revenues in the City of London, where I was based at the time, it was actually things like derivatives and credit derivatives, which no one talked about because they seem to be geeky and technical and incredibly dull. But the reality is that things that look dull and boring to a point we don't discuss them are often the most important things in the world. So I became kind of fascinated by this underbelly of the City of London and Wall Street. I used to say that they looked like icebergs in that you had a bit poking above the surface that people talked about, which was the equity markets and a shadowy chunk that everyone ignored. So I dived in, really, starting in 2005, into the world of credit derivatives initially to try and almost do a tourist guide to what was happening there for the wider Financial Times readership. This was a few years after the dot com boom. And in the same way that my colleagues had gone around explaining the Internet, I thought I could explain financial innovation and see what was really going on. But of course, it turned out to be considerably more deceptive and challenging and ultimately more dramatic than I ever imagined.
- [05:38]
Joe Wiesenthal
It really is extraordinary vindication on your part because the book came out in May 2009. So at that point, like, people were just getting up to speed and this was all anyone's talking about. And here you were years ahead and you already are, like, here's the book that you all have to read now, which is just, I mean, extraordinary vindication of your choice to, like, begin down this path of looking into them. Tracy and I were both in London in April, and I loved it. It wasn't my first time there. I loved it. Extraordinary wealthy society. I know there's all this anxiety in the uk. It's like, oh, you can't, like, build steel anymore economically, all this, I get it, there are some issues, et cetera, but people are willing to pay a lot of money for the services that the city provides all around the world and make it one of the richest, richest societies ever to exist on earth.
- [06:29]
Gillian Tett
Well, I have to be honest and say that I did not originally expect to be writing a disaster book. What actually happened was I spent the summer of 2007 writing the book and finished it in September 2007, went back to work, thought the whole thing was done and dusted. And at that point, it was simply an account of how this tribal group at J.P. morgan had dreamt up the idea of credit derivatives and taken it to extremes. And literally the day after I came back to work, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the book had to be dramatically rewritten very fast, because by then, of course, it was clear that credit derivatives had the potential to destabilize very wide swathes of. Of the financial markets. And they weren't the source of the crisis. That was the subprime mortgage lending. But they amplified the crisis dramatically. And of course, for the City of London, a lot of its growth in the preceding years had been due to its activities in the financial sector, and particularly the fact that London was a home of much of this creativity. And once the crisis hit, London not only became an epicenter of the things that were going wrong and. But of course, ultimately saw some of its own financial fortune suffer as a result.
- [07:46]
Joe Wiesenthal
First of all, the fact that you didn't go into the book expecting to write a disaster book. Still to my mind, vindicates the choice because there was obviously so much interest.
- [07:54]
Gillian Tett
In the debt, I should say, by the way, actually I was predicting back in 2005 that core derivatives were a house of cards going to tumble at some point.
- [08:04]
Tracy Alloway
You wrote a lot about it in the ft, repeatedly.
- [08:07]
Joe Wiesenthal
But I want to press further on this point that people are clearly willing to pay a lot of money for these financial services for the service of creating these derivatives. There are not many places, they're not, you know, there's Shenzhen for manufacturing electronics, there's a few places I don't know for manufacturing whatever else. And then there's like London and New York for manufacturing complex derivatives. And they're worth a lot of money and people are willing to pay a lot of money for them. Like you mentioned that they're house of cards, et cetera. Yet around the world clearly don't customers think there's value in all these services?
- [08:44]
Gillian Tett
Well, credit derivatives and other derivatives and complex financial products exist for a reason, which is that people want to use them and buy them. And they want to use them and buy them because essentially they offer a way of expressing ideas in finance, taking bets, making investments that are dramatically more flexible, more subtle, more multifaceted, and sometimes cheaper than using other financial instruments. And the image I sometimes use to explain what they do is a bit like Photoshopping a picture. You can have a picture of something, you can have the actual something, or you can take a photograph and then Photoshop it according to your own desires. And that in a sense is a bit like what a derivative does. Or to use another analogy, if you want to invest in the equity market, you can either go and buy an etf, which is like a box of chocolates, it's pre selected, or you can go to an expensive equivalent of a chocolatier where you pick and mix whatever chocolates you want, but that takes more money and time. Or you can just take a photograph of all the chocolates you like in the world and just Photoshop it to whichever ones you want. And that essentially is derivative.
- [10:02]
Tracy Alloway
I'm not sure how much I personally would value a photo of a bunch of chocolates, but point taken. Okay, so maybe just as an example, let's use CDS and the invention of credit default swaps and then how, I guess they transformed during the financial crisis or running up until the financial crisis. Because as you pointed out, you made the point that CDS is not necessarily the proximate cause of the crisis, but definitely amplified it. So talk us through what CDS were originally intended to do and what they ended up doing.
- [10:37]
Gillian Tett
Well, at the most basic credit default swaps were a way of taking out a bet on whether or not you thought a loan or a bond would go into default. And they were originally created for corporate bonds. And essentially, people who thought that a company looked a bit dodgy could take out a credit default swap as a form of insurance or as a way to bet the company would actually default, depending on which side of the trade they were on. And that was a much more flexible way of trading that risk than actually buying the bond. Because, of course, corporate bonds are often pretty illiquid. They may not exist in the size you want. And if you think a company's going to default, historically, the only way to express that belief in an investment trade was simply not to buy the bond with the credit default swap, that you can actually be much more active in betting that it will default. Now, these were initially single instruments, usually attached to single companies, and they were created partly as a way of running rules around regulations and in particular, banking regulations. And it was also created as a way for banks to lessen the risk on their own books of having exposure to any particular corporate name. However, the initial group that created these instruments, which in many ways were very, very clever, a really clever innovation, saw the business grow, and they began to bundle different credit default swaps together. And then the idea got transplanted into the mortgage market. And then what happened was that masses of mortgages from different parts of America were bundled together, and then credit defaults were written onto the actual bundles of mortgages. And on top of that, the original credit default swaps linked to those mortgages were sometimes pulled together, chopped up into new pieces, and sometimes used to reissue entirely brand new instruments all over again. And the problem that happened at that point was that, although when the original idea popped up, people could look at a company like IBM and say, yeah, you know what? I think it's got quite a high default risk, or not a high default risk, and they kind of knew what they were betting on by the time you're dealing with mortgages from gazillions of different homeowners all over the country, and by the time they've been chopped up and then repackaged and then repackaged again, it's very hard indeed to actually look through to what the underlying risks are, except by taking on trust either from the issuer or from a credit rating agency. And at the core of what happened in 2008 was that all of that complexity and opacity meant that you had the equivalent of a world where people were buying these instruments on trust, and yet that trust wasn't justified because some of them were turning bad. And when some of the underlying mortgages started to turn bad, what happened was the equivalent of a food poisoning scare. And I promise you, Tracey, I'm not going to just talk about food, but the best analogy I know is a food poisoning scare where essentially you had some of the bits of underlying loans and debts and the mortgage bundles went badly wrong. They basically defaulted. The problem was that, as with, say, sausages in a supermarket, if you hear that one or two cows in the food chain have got toxic problems and they're creating food poisoning problems, if you don't know which sausages that meat's gone into, you're probably going to refuse to buy any sausages. And if your parents at a school where kids are being fed sausage, Stewart, you're probably going to tell your kids to stop eating school lunches, period. And what happened in 2007, 2008, was the financial equivalent of that, because it became clear that some of the mortgages had gone bad, nobody knew which bundles of default swaps and derivatives they'd gone into. And so essentially, consumers, AKA investors, fled the market completely and it froze up.
- [15:07]
Joe Wiesenthal
I love the analogy of a food poisoning scare. I had never really thought of it in that particular terms before, but I think it sounds very apt. But it also seems like when something like a food poisoning scare happens in financial markets, you know, we just call it a bank run. Right. And bank runs happen every, you know, several decades, or, you know, big one, maybe happen once a century, and they usually take a different form, et cetera. But going back to the metaphor of the food poisoning scare in retrospect, and I'm curious your take on this now, in 2025 or maybe 2015 or 2009, when the book came out, like, how much food was actually gone bad and how much was it, that a little bit had gone bad, and yet people were afraid that everything had gone bad.
- [15:57]
Gillian Tett
Well, even to this day, the actual numbers are still contested.
- [16:02]
Joe Wiesenthal
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
- [16:03]
Gillian Tett
Yes. Whether it was 25 billion, whether it was 250 billion, we still don't know exactly how many mortgages defaulted. And of course, one of the difficulties about trying to measure that in America, like any other financial crisis, is that when you have an initial property market bust, prices collapse dramatically, and for a period of time, it looks like everything's gone bad. And then subsequently, some of those loans actually recover because property prices go back up again. So it's very hard indeed to measure what the actual losses were. But what we do know was that in the run up to 2008, not only had vast amounts of derivatives been written linked to the mortgage market that was going bad, but a lot of those products had been built with a huge amount of leverage, which meant that even a small loss made them extremely problematic. You had a problem of tranching, which was very, very complicated. In many of these products, the credit rating agencies were, for a long time, the only way of actually judging whether or not a product was good or bad. And it turned out their ratings were completely wrong. And you also had a lot of these products held by investors who had no tolerance for these kind of risks. So you put that all together, and frankly, you had the makings of a perfect storm. And it was very, very painful indeed. And what made it doubly painful was that in the course of slicing and dicing all of these different mortgages and using derivatives, many of the products had been labeled aaa. And so people thought they were ultra safe, and it paid them no attention. They sat on their balance sheet. And the other problem was that people, ironically, had bought these products because they said they wanted to diversify and hedge their risks. And the theory was that in the old days, a bank had a bunch of loans to, say, a mortgage company or a bunch of properties, and that was very concentrated on their books. So that if they then repackaged them as derivatives and sold them to everyone else, then you basically had a problem shared and a problem shared, the problem halved. So people thought, right, this stuff has been scattered across the markets. If something defaults, it might hit a lot of people to a tiny amount, but it won't wipe anybody out because it's diversified. The critical misunderstanding that people made was that because the system was so opaque and complex, no one saw that all the risks were actually reconcentrating themselves back on a couple of big institutions books, because the same institution was writing credit default swaps to everybody, and in particular, AIG Financial Products was at the center of most of these trades. So instead of diversifying and spreading risk, credit default swaps were doing the very opposite and reconcentrating it.
- [18:56]
Joe Wiesenthal
Tracy the idea that it's really even still impossible to know, like, how much of these assets had properly gone bad, this has always been my frustration. With Bagehot's dictum of lending against good collateral. Yeah, but I've never. I've always hated that because like what's good collateral? It's like it's good collateral contingent upon reflation of the economy anyway. But that's always bothered me, this impossibility of knowing what's good or bad collateral even years after. Anyway, keep going.
- [19:21]
Tracy Alloway
I enjoy your Baget rants for sure. Okay, well, actually this feeds into what I was going to ask. So the solution to the crisis proposed eventually by regulators was more transparency of derivatives and complex fight financial instruments so people would have to report their positions to the DTCC and also central clearing for derivatives. Do you get any sense, Gillian, of how big a difference that's made? Because when I look at the CDS market, parts of it still seem very, very opaque to me. I mean, things like CDX index options, swaptions, I don't think those get reported.
- [20:01]
Gillian Tett
Well, I think it's basically as so often been a case of two steps forward, one back. So the progress is that when I started covering this in 2008, I couldn't get the price for a CDS on anything without calling up the brokers individually one by one and getting a quote. I couldn't work out how big the market was. And it was so opaque that at one stage officials at the bis, a Bank for International Settlements that was one of the few institutions that was trying to monitor this and raise the alarm. They called me up and said, do I have any data? And I went, well, hang on, you're supposed to have the data. This is the wrong way around. And they said, yeah, the problem was we just don't know. Now the good news is today, one, you can get CDS prices for most instruments that are traded even slightly in the markets. You can get CDS prices relatively easily. Two, we do have macro figures about what's going on. And three, the very fact that you can get those prices in the chartform changes how people look at the financial sector. I mean, I remember very clearly the first time that I actually pushed for the FT to publish something called the ABX index, which was showing mortgage defaults. It was transformational because suddenly people could actually see it and imagine it. And that changed how people imagined finance. Same thing happened when Axel Weber, not Axel Weber, one of the other analysts, coined the phrase shadow banking for the first time. And suddenly everyone realized that what they thought was the financial system dominated by banks was dead wrong. In fact, the shadow banking world was huge and swelling. So in some ways there's a lot more transparency than there was 15 years ago. And that's a very good thing. What is troubling is that firstly, the transparency doesn't extend to all instruments. Secondly, the level of leverage and above all embedded leverage isn't apparent. And that really matters, particularly right now. And thirdly, I'm the strong believer that to have effective financial markets you need to have markets where assets can actually be traded properly and people can have easy access to that quickly. That wasn't the case before 2008 because people who were creating CDOs were doing so ironically in the name of creating perfectly liquid markets. And the great buzzword back then was liquefication. We're going to use financial innovation to liquefy everything and then we'll have the perfect nirvana where all risks are priced properly and risks end up in the hands of people who are best suited to hold them. That was a justification for this innovation. And what people failed to notice was that the instruments they were creating were so darn complicated. In fact, they were barely being traded at all. I mean, the bundles of so called CDOs, collateral default obligations, which were essentially created often through synthetic derivatives, were so difficult to trade that most institutions just bought them and stuck them on the balance sheet and ended up valuing them not with market prices because they didn't really exist, there wasn't enough trading. But they ended up valuing them in the so called mark to market system, using implied prices from often rating agency models. And if you have that situation, all the red lights on the dashboard should be flashing because that shows that even if you have a so called mark to market accounting system, you don't have enough markets to get proper market prices and you don't really know what the value is of things.
- [23:29]
Joe Wiesenthal
You mentioned that suddenly someone coins the term shadow banking and then you sort of rethink all these different elements of how you see the financial system. We talk a lot on the podcast these days about non bank financial institutions in two forms. Primarily we talk a lot about private credit. So the post Dodd Frank emergence of these non bank entities that do a lot of lending and the emergence of multi strategy hedge funds that the post Dodd Frank emergence of a lot of these funds that do a lot of what used to be called prop trading. And of course banks still have their role in the ecosystem. And so then the question of, well, do these risks ultimately redound back to the banks who as these outside entities pursue leverage. But I'm curious, putting back on the hat of the sort of anthropologist perspective, how would you Go about like, you know, try to see if there are real risks here in the new model. Because I don't know, like I've said on the podcast before, the some of the post Dodd Frank changes of separating this risk taking from deposit taking seems like it maybe was a good idea. But where might you explore in terms of trying to figure out where these new risks emerge?
- [24:37]
Gillian Tett
Well, I think one of the constant themes from financial history is that new risks never emerge where the last risks were. So I think the chance of another crisis with mortgage derivatives right now is about zero. However, crises tend to emerge as a result of three things. One is an overreaction last time round by a bunch of regulators that end up introducing changes to try and contain the last crisis that distort the financial system so much that they create the next crisis. Because one of the reasons why credit derivatives popped up was partly because in reaction to what had happened during the savings and loans crisis in America in the 1980s when there was too much concentration of lending exposures on banks books. So one justification for credit derivatives was well, let's create a tool that spreads that exposure around and the problem will be solved. Which it did. But then it created new problems. So first point is look for where excessively ham fisted regulation last time around has created new distortions. Second key thing is look for what people aren't talking about. So social silence is always critical in any field. Third point is look for activity that's occurring outside silos or between silos. And by that I mean that one of the constant problems in finance is that institutions and regulators create structures set up to monitor and handle the world that existed a couple of years ago. And then the outside world moves on and the institutions are left with structures which have hardened into bureaucratic organizations. So to give you an example of what I mean, ubs, which I wrote about in my second to last book called the Silo Effect, had a massive risk management department and it spent a huge amount of time back in 2005, 6, 7, looking at the risks that had blown up finance in the past which were basically hedge funds and, and leveraged loans. And its massive risk management department spent a huge amount of time examining every single possible danger to UBS that might come from that. What they did not do was look at this new class of activity, credit derivatives and mortgage backed securities because they were labeled as AAA ultra safe inside the bank's accounting system. So they were ignored. But also they cut across different areas of activities inside the bank. So a mortgage backed default swap was basically Both a tradable security and something linked to credit, and also something linked to the operational risk inside the bank as well. And UBS risk management department was split into three separate silos, Credit trading and liquidity or logistical risk. And they didn't talk to each other. And so on top of the fact you had geographical splits in UBS between the New York desk and the Zurich desk and the London desk, you had this completely fragmented system and the new products felt in the cracks. And UBS ended up running enormous risks that almost blew it up, even though it had a massive risk management department. So I would say look for silos, look for what's happening between the silos, and then also look for new hidden concentrations of risk. And if I extrapolate that to the current world today, one area where you have a lot of activity falling between regulatory silos and institutional silos is in fintech and in additional finance. Because the skills you need to understand cyberspace are very different from the skills you've historically needed to understand the world of money. And you've also got all kinds of activity happening on the edge of regulatory perimeters, which are often not properly policed or understood at all. So a classic example of this is the fact that the big banks all use cloud computing a lot. They all use the same 2, 3, 4 cloud computing providers. There's massive reconcentration of risks there. But groups like the bank for International Settlements and other banking regulators can't really track that because it's outside their regulatory perimeter. The tech regulators don't track it either. And so you have a classic example of a potential risk for the future falling between the cracks.
- [29:22]
Tracy Alloway
So I want to bring us up to speed even more, I guess, and talk about current events. You've been writing a lot about geonomics, which I guess is this idea that I guess economic policy is becoming more intermingled with statecraft and the idea that you're going to have more activist measures from governments when it comes to solving particular choke points in the economy. So obviously we have Trump and the tariffs as one example, but we also had industrial policy on the rise in the US under the Biden administration, even before that. And I guess I'm curious what the rise of geonomics or maybe the progress of protectionism or the slow retreat from globalization, that's a big assumption that it's all happening. But I'm curious what it means for a financial industry which, as we've discussed on previous episodes, has very much grown in concert with globalization and, you know, liberalized financial flows and things like that.
- [30:24]
Gillian Tett
Well, in some ways, geonomics is just a posh word for political science or political economy, or if you like, life beyond the balance sheet. And by that I mean that most of your listeners grew up in the late 20th century in the west, in an era, or if they didn't grow up in the west, they might have grown up if they're listening to Bloomberg podcast in parts of the world which were subject to the missionary zeal of the CFA exams. And that essentially implied a certain mindset. And the mindset arose from a combination of three factors. One was the growth of neoliberal free market ideas of the 1970s and 80s. The second was the explosion in computing power. And the third was the explosion in the financial industry. And those three things came together to create a voracious demand to use the new digital tools in computing to model finance and free markets, supposedly free markets to create a set of instruments that the fast expanding ranks of financial professionals could use to price securities, predict the future, place trading bets, et cetera, et cetera, around the world, backed by groups like the cfa, which were a bit like the American financial equivalent of the Catholic Church in that they went around the world evangelizing and spreading the creed right around the world. Now, that mindset, which we all grew up with, and as an anthropologist would say, we're all creatures of our own cultural environment, seems to us to be normal, natural, and inevitable. And it doesn't just use computing power to predict the future. It's also marked by a certain amount of tunnel vision, because it assumes that if you put the right inputs into an economic model or put the information that matters onto a balance sheet of a company, you've basically got the key to model and forecast what's going to happen next. And in some ways, that worked really well. But the problem is that there are always things that you leave out of your economic model. There are always things that you leave out of your balance sheet or just footnotes. And those things tend to be things like politics, social conflict, tech change, environmental risk, medical risk, or what groups like the World Economic Forum coyly call interstate conflict, better known as war. And the story of the last two decades is that everything that wasn't on the balance sheet or in the model is what's really blown up everyone's forecasts and become increasingly important. So what we're seeing now, in my view, is really the fifth big swing in the intellectual zeitgeist since 1900. And by that I mean that up until 1914, you really had imperialist, free market capitalism in the world. Then between the wars, you had protectionist, populist, nationalist visions of the economy. Then after World War II, you essentially had Keynesianism took root, the idea the state could jump in and direct things for the good of all. And that was really sort of international Keynesianism. Then you had the neoliberal age, really, starting the 1980s. And now you've got a swing of the pendulum back towards, effectively, geo economics, where the world's woken up and discovered what they always knew back in the 1920s, and they also sort of knew back in the Keynesian period, which is that power matters, politics matters, it's not all about free markets. And free markets are often something of a canard or a falsehood. And that actually, when you want to make sense of the world, you have to combine economics and political analysis, social analysis, tech analysis, look at a much wider range of things, get lateral vision, not tunnel vision. And I'm not saying in any way, shape or form that that means economics doesn't work anymore. But what I say is you have to look at your economic models and all the lovely tools that the financial industry has developed as being a bit like a compass. And if you're stuck in a dark wood at night, you don't want to throw away your compass because it's incredibly useful. But if you only stare down at the face of that compass and walk through that wood at night, you're probably going to walk into a tree or trip over a tree route, because you have to look up and around beyond your compass to see what's actually happening. And that's really what geoeconomics is trying to do.
- [34:57]
Joe Wiesenthal
I love the compass forest analogy. You know, it's easy, and I've engaged in it myself, but it's easy to like, look back at the 90s and the sort of the end of history, optimism and some of the predictions of the mid-90s, which is kind of where their story, much of it starts in your book Fool's Gold, with some of the early iterations on this stuff. And it's easy to look back and talk about the naivete, but I get it. I mean, the west had just won the Cold War in really decisive fashion. And this is something you talk about in your book and you just mention it now. It's like we really did suddenly also have this emergence of really powerful tools to price risk and price various events in the future. So at the same time that everyone sort of said, okay, liberalism and capitalism, democracy are vindicated and Suddenly we have these incredible calculators or computers that can do a reasonably good job pricing risk outside of the emergence of some of these trees that you run into. Like, I have a lot of sympathy for the characters of that time thinking like, oh, this is. Things are going to be really good.
- [36:03]
Gillian Tett
I completely have sympathy. And the reality is that humans basically move in pendulum swings, and whenever there's a new innovation, we're all dazzled by it until we see the downside. And just as we learned about the upside of derivatives and then learned about the downside, we've all learned about the upside of economic models. And there are huge economic advantages to using them. And now we see the downsides. And I should say, the other thing that makes it dangerous to use this kind of neoliberal mindset is that you've got governments in the world moving away from a neoliberal mindset themselves. And Donald Trump epitomizes that. But he's as much a symptom as a cause of this, in that for the Trump administration, economics doesn't sit in a separate box, which is distinct from tech, trade policy, military stuff anymore, as far as the Donald Trump administration is concerned. And you can see this in the way they approach negotiations. Other countries, tech issues, military issues, cultural issues, finance issues, trade issues are all jumbled up together as part of a whole. And it's horrifying to most governments reared in that neoliberal mindset, but I suspect it's probably going to be the trend for quite a while.
- [37:21]
Joe Wiesenthal
Yeah. I joked on Twitter the other day that in every foreign election, I was just like, just tell me which one is the Trump and which one is the liberal? Then I figured there's. I don't really see the world that flatly, but kind of. But, you know, going back to anthropology and back to the 90s and back to these new tools and the Internet and computers, et cetera, you say in your book that the incoming cohort of bankers who are really, like, native to this new technology, did they sneer? Did they look down to some extent at the older generation that might have been more inclined towards conservatism about banking because they didn't have the sort of skills or the natural inclination to sort of use the wonders of technology?
- [38:04]
Gillian Tett
Well, almost every big innovation that we've seen in the last 150 years has been driven by a bunch of kids. And since I'm sitting in King's College in Cambridge, anyone under the age of, you know, 30 looks like a kid to me. But a bunch of, you Know, young kids coming in, having mastery of knowledge of a new technology that often the older generation doesn't understand, full of excitement about how they can innovate and break all the rules. And they essentially usually get together and do exactly that very rapidly and bring about great benefits, but often end up bringing about great harm too. And they often have a messianic zeal and belief, although they tell themselves that they are somehow saving the world or bringing good for humanity. We've seen that happen in life science, we've seen that happen in computing, in AI, in social media when that was first created. The same thing happened with finance and a generation of kids who I profiled in my book JP Morgan, but not just JP Morgan, who stumbled on the idea of creating credit derivatives, did so very fast, did so in a way that their bosses often didn't understand and let rip. And that's a pattern we've seen over and over again. And the reality is that every single innovation in history has a good side and a bad side. And the older generation can often see the bad side. The younger generation can see the good side. Without the enthusiasm of the younger generation, nothing will change. But they still need the older generation oldies like me now to basically point out the previous risks.
- [39:44]
Tracy Alloway
So since we're on the topic of financial products and very big changes in the financial system and the way people are thinking of trade and things like that, there was something that caught my eye and certainly caught your eye recently, and that is something called section 8, 9, 9. That basically opens the door to the US taxing foreign holders of Treasuries, which would be an enormous, enormous change to how they previously been treated. How big a deal is that?
- [40:14]
Gillian Tett
Well, one of the other hallmarks of the neoliberal economic mindset that we all grew up with and assumed was normal and inevitable and unchanging is this idea that capital should move freely. And that was seen in the prescriptions of the imf. It was seen in the way that Wall street worked and operated and in pronouncements of politicians. And so section 899 refers to the idea that there might be taxes, new taxes imposed on non American holders of American assets. Now, some people might say, well, that's kind of fair enough, because guess what? Americans pay taxes on capital gains. Why should non Americans be any different? But the reality is there's been quite a few tax breaks in the past for non Americans to encourage them to bring their money to America. And there's been such a desire to unleash that flood of money, foreign Capital that back in 1984 the American government actually removed a pre existing tax on Chinese investors, say, that bought Treasuries securities. And so one of the reasons why you've seen China pile in such big time into the American Treasuries market is because of those kind of incentives. Now we've all got used to this idea that there should be encouragement for foreigners to come and invest in countries. We take it for granted as normal. The reality is though, the Trump administration has a very different perspective on this. And so not only are they thinking of reversing the 1984 ruling, which means that in fact Chinese and others would face taxes if they bought Treasuries, but they're also thinking of using this so called Section 899 to impose taxes on non American holders of American assets. And they're doing that partly because they want to get lots of revenue. There's a think tank allied with JD Vance that suggests you could get $2 trillion worth of revenue from this. But there's also a desire to slow the amount of money flooding into America to weaken the dollar and to ensure that American industry can, can become more competitive. So it's quite a different mindset again that I think most people are not prepared for.
- [42:22]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah, a very big change. Jillian, we're going to have to leave it there. Honestly. We could talk to you for hours about many, many different things, but that was so much fun to catch up on derivatives and talk about maybe where risks are lurking in the financial system now. Really appreciate you coming on. Odd thoughts for the first time. We have to have you back.
- [42:42]
Gillian Tett
Well, thank you. I really enjoy chatting to you. And the last thought I'll leave you with is that the period of time that we all grew up with, when free market ideals were taken for granted, is actually a historical aberration. And if you look across most societies and most points of history, it's not the case that the world we're moving into now is weird. We were the weird ones for the last 40 years.
- [43:04]
Tracy Alloway
I love that. Okay, Gillian, thank you so much.
- [43:06]
Gillian Tett
Thank you. Thanks.
- [43:08]
Tracy Alloway
Bye. Joe. We were the weird ones.
- [43:23]
Joe Wiesenthal
Yeah. I think about this all the time, actually. So many, so many things in that conversation I think about all the time, actually. But one thing I think about, like, we are the weird ones, which is probably true, but the idea that we would have any conception of what normal is or like, you know, things are getting weird. Like it's so weird in its premise because like, in some sense I think that the modern economy or the modern world has roughly existed since the end of World War II. And so basically 80 years or a little more. And so like literally like the entire like one person's lifetime, like that's nothing. Yeah, that's literally nothing. Like we're barely getting it's day one around here in terms of what the modern. So when we think about all these changes, AI et cetera, like we have no normal to index against really because we're just getting started.
- [44:08]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah, timelines are very, very long. The other thing I was thinking is just on the sort of geonomics revival of industrial policy point, I wonder if we will get financial products that are like tailored at targeting those particular risks. So for instance, could you come up with like a tariff hedge of some sort just in case Trump is going to announce something one day and then may maybe take it back the next day. I wonder if that's a risk that companies could offload in some way.
- [44:38]
Joe Wiesenthal
It would be really interesting to think about like very specific measurable risks and what you could build on them in this new society. But I'm glad you asked that question also about the sort of geonomics and what that means for financial institutions because I really started thinking about this after a recent episode with Scott Bach and I've thought about this in the derivative sense. So much of the growth of finance is very specifically about solving not just modern problems of complexity but problems of cross border complexity.
- [45:08]
Tracy Alloway
Absolutely.
- [45:09]
Joe Wiesenthal
And you know even the fact, Gillian talks about this in her book the Fact London emerging as a source of this in part due to US regulations and pre Glass Steagall repeal, stuff like that. Lots of interesting themes right there.
- [45:25]
Tracy Alloway
Right. And if you have something like section 8, 99 that is calculated to disincentivize investors from holding US treasuries then that would decrease demand for a bunch of financial products such as treasury futures and things like that.
- [45:38]
Joe Wiesenthal
I still want to push forward on my project to vindicate the existence of high finance and I suspect that there's a reason that. And you know, like as Julian said, like, you know, there's still derivatives but the next crisis is probably not going to be in the derivatives that were sort of vilified or people were anxious about 15 years ago. Right. It's gonna be something, it always changes. But you know, people still get paid a lot of money to create and trade these instruments. And I still have this intuition it's because they're providing a valuable service. And so I wanna you know, do more episodes on vindicating the status of.
- [46:13]
Tracy Alloway
Finance and society we gotta get Dalio back on to do a deep dive into hedging the chicken McNugget.
- [46:19]
Joe Wiesenthal
Totally. There's gonna be all kinds of these things that we'll discover.
- [46:22]
Tracy Alloway
All right, shall we leave it there for now?
- [46:24]
Joe Wiesenthal
Let's leave it there.
- [46:25]
Tracy Alloway
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
- [46:30]
Joe Wiesenthal
And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow Gillian Tett. She's at gilliantett. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at carmenarman, Dashiell Bennett at dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kellbrooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.com oddlots where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all of these topics 24. 7 in our Discord Discord, GG Odds.
- [46:55]
Tracy Alloway
And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about the value of complex financial products, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening SA.
- [47:47]
Gillian Tett
This is an I Heart podcast.