Josh Brown (4:06)

Not really, but I love the, I love the piece. Yeah, I think, I think it's fascinating. We have people like submitting their creative writing projects like it's college and the market instantly like starts repricing MasterCard and Visa by 10%. I think it's fucking hilarious. I, I think it was very well written.

Ed Elson (4:30)

Yeah.

Josh Brown (4:30)

And I, and I appreciated that ability to like try to think two years ahead and all the knock on effects. The thing is, I've seen this before and I'm not going to finish that sentence by saying I know how it turns out. I just know it turns out differently than every single negative piling on top of each other without an offset in sight. That is very rarely how these things end up. And so I think it's important for us to think through the, the issues that Citrini raises. But I think it's highly unnecessary for us to all conclude, oh yeah, it'll probably, it'll probably shake out just like this. Every possible terrible externality will occur all at once and it'll be game over for the economy. Like obviously that's not the way these things play out.

Ed Elson (5:24)

Yeah, 100 I 100% agree. It so well written, it was so interesting. It carried through the whole narrative. It collected all of the details, all of the relevant details that we should be talking about. And then the part where it lost me was when the market decided to sell pretty much everything, or at least everything in software. Software was down 5%. You saw very big names falling. Doordash fell as much as 6% because, sure, why not? Because this guy wrote that AI would essentially replace it. What do you make of the actual argument of the piece, which is essentially that AI is going to be so incredible, so productive that actually it's going to destroy our economy in all of these Unexpected ways. GDP will grow, there will be a lot of output, but the economy itself will be in a, in a state of structural crisis.

Josh Brown (6:20)

This could only be written by someone who employs no people and has no customers and has never really been in business before. It's a, it's a, it's like a Gen Z slash millennial think piece written by very bright people, of course, who don't understand that the frictions in the economy are not just like these annoying things with a friendly face. The relationships in the real world, they're not just like, oh, here is a friction, but we put a salesperson in front of it, therefore it'll persist forever. Because the thing that business owners understand is that, and I don't mean business owners like I want a hedge fund, I sit in front of a Bloomberg all day. I mean like people that actually run businesses where there is like face to face interaction. The thing that we all implicitly know is that every business effectively is a solution to a problem.

Ed Elson (7:23)

Yes.

Josh Brown (7:24)

Even like, like, even like the most abstract example, because the, the, the examples that are right at my fingertips. A hospital is a business and it's solving the problem of people being sick and wanting to get better. Okay, that's easy. What is the Four Seasons? It's a solution to a problem. People want to be entertained, slash they want to travel to places, but they have the means and the standards that are high enough where a regular hotel won't do. So like, if you think of businesses as just solutions to problems, which is really all they are, then what this is, this piece is saying is that we're going to run out of problems.

Ed Elson (8:03)

Right?

Josh Brown (8:04)

Come on. In 10000 years of, of the evolution of human society, do we ever actually run out of problems to solve? So this idea that we're in a post laboratory economy and people aren't going to have to work anymore because there'll be nothing for them to do. Are we losing our collective minds? There will always be problems to solve. And every wave of technology solves old problems, introduces new ones. And this idea that we'll be able to just turn everything over to agents who will solve problems on our behalf. Okay, I'll buy that. A lot of what's going to happen is that great. And you think we're just going to sit in a room quietly and read a book, right? No, we'll be out creating new problems. Think about a, think about a lawyer. The fundamental constraint of a lawyer filing lawsuits is he doesn't have enough associates to do the paperwork. What if that constraint were removed and utilizing AgentIC AI, he could file paperwork till his heart's content. Is he filing more or less lawsuits in that scenario?

Ed Elson (9:09)

Right.

Josh Brown (9:10)

Filing more, obviously more and more lawsuits means more people defending themselves against lawsuits. And you see how this, I didn't come up with this, I didn't come up with this concept, but it's a very important one. Someone said in 1955, the work will expand to fit the, the time available. Like the more time we have, the more work we will create for ourselves. And until you process that, you're not going to understand just how misguided these types of sci fi writings really are.

Ed Elson (9:45)

Yeah, it seems to also say that this idea of friction, friction that we experience in our daily lives is going to be just totally eliminated as a concept because of AI. I, maybe we'll see it less in our daily lives, maybe a little bit. But even so, I mean the friction still being handled by someone, it's just being handled by an AI now. So that's still a business that's still going to create value, that's still going to create a whole ecosystem and an economy around it.

Josh Brown (10:13)

And there were people who used to sit on an elevator all day and they would wear a uniform and a special cap. It was literally only the elevator guy could wear this cap. Yeah, and he stood there when he pressed people's floors for them, he operated the elevator. Or maybe this is before buttons and he used a leverage. Is anyone like what happened to all the good elevator operator jobs? There were trucks that drove around Brooklyn. They were knife sharpening trucks. They had the same bells as like an ice cream truck. And they would roll slowly through a neighborhood and all, all the women would come running out of their kitchens, aprons on, with an armful of knives that needed sharpening. And then the technology improved to the point where, hey, we don't actually need to sharpen knives, we throw them out and buy new ones. Yeah, it's like, of course we're going to have disruption and entire categories of jobs being lost. The thing that people are worried about is that they all happen at once.

Ed Elson (11:10)

Yes.

Josh Brown (11:10)

The more realistic scenario is that this rolls industry through industry. And as each industry sees lots of jobs be disrupted, it creates new ones in their wake. And look, I think what most people end up realizing is that AI is a better complement to experienced workers than it is a replacement doesn't mean no one gets replaced. It means the people that don't get replaced utilize AI and do bigger business and that leads to more job creation. In other areas of the economy. It happens every time. It'll happen this time. It'll be uncomfortable in certain pockets. Nobody is, is nobody's delusional about that.

Ed Elson (11:54)

Exactly. And the time frame, the time frame is the question. It's like how many jobs will be replaced, displaced within a certain timeframe? How many of them in that timeframe? That's going to be the disruption. But the idea that this has structurally changed the entire fabric of the universe, that's where it's. I start to get lost. I do need to wrap us up here. I think a big piece of this, or at least something that is very interesting to me is again the market's reaction to a blog that was posted on Substack by as you call it. It was a think piece by a very smart person who wrote a very, very interesting and creative article and it inspired incredible selling pressure, incredible value destruction, which to me says something about how investors are feeling right now.

Josh Brown (12:42)

Yeah.

Ed Elson (12:42)

And something that you have described. You came up with this term halo, which stands for heavy assets, low obsolescence, which is the new type of company that investors seem to like right now, which is companies that have nothing to do with AI. AI won't even touch it. So before we go, could you just describe this halo term that's gotten pretty popular? Wall Street Journal wrote an article about it. It's your term. Just describe what that means and how investors feel right now.

Josh Brown (13:10)

So in early February, I was talking about the types of stocks that were on the 52 week high list and what they all had in common was they have heavy assets on their balance sheets and they have low obsolescence risk. And it occurred to me that this was a reversal of the entire post financial crisis period where we fetishized the opposite asset, light businesses. We wanted companies with subscription revenue, arrangement, very little cost of doing business, and almost no assets on their balance sheet. And now it's flipped. It's the reverse. You look at stocks like Anheuser Busch, Coca Cola, Pepsi, you cannot type I want a Diet Coke into a prompt and have somebody else create that product. It is not disruptible. Natural gas transmission lines, utilities, Caterpillar, Deere, most stocks that are related to heavy industry, in fact completely halo. And there are some really fascinating examples inside of one industry. You could say Expedia is highly disruptible by AI. You can plan trips, you can book flights, you can have an agent that scours these airline websites and find the optimal trip for you putting Expedia out of business. But within the same sector, there's Delta. Can you prompt yourself? A fucking airplane? Obviously not. So this is a really interesting market. What this does, Ed, just to sum up, it throws out all these old paradigms that people think about in the stock market. It crushes the growth versus value thing. That's now irrelevant. It gets rid of cyclical versus defensive. That's irrelevant too. It even breaks the tech versus non tech idea because certain tech stocks like Apple are extremely halo. You cannot get around the physical iPhone device and ChatGPT is probably just going to become a plugin to the iOS ecosystem. So Apple is Halo while Adobe is not. So I think that that's a really important prism through which to view the stock market and I think that dynamic will remain important throughout the rest of the year.

Ed Elson (15:21)

Absolutely. Lots more that we could discuss. I mean, again, my takeaway, people are very confused and very anxious right now. All of the paradigms that they've been following are just being thrown out the window and it's very confusing to see which ones actually work.

Josh Brown (15:35)

It's not supposed to be easy. If it were easy, everybody could do it. Get used to it.

Ed Elson (15:41)

That's exactly right. Josh Brown, thanks very much for your time.

Josh Brown (15:45)

Cheers, Ed.

Ed Elson (15:48)

After the break, warning signs from Blue Owl. And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe subscribe to my weekly newsletter, simply put@edwardelson.substack.com.

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Ed Elson (17:40)

We're back with Profty markets. Blue Owl Capital is at the center of a new panic over private credit. In recent weeks, investors have attempted to pull their money from the asset manager. Those requests are driven in part by concerns over the company's exposure to software borrowers. Now, following the increased demand for withdrawals, Blue Owl is shutting the gates on one of its private credit funds. Investors will no longer be able to ask to withdraw their money every quarter. Instead, the firm will sell assets and offer limited liquidity on a quarterly basis. Shares of Blue Owl plunged 10% on the news, and the sell off rippled across other alternative asset managers as well. Aries, Apollo and Blackstone fell more than 5%. So what exactly is Blue Owl and why is it preventing its investors from withdrawing cash? Here to help us answer these questions, we're speaking with Robert Armstrong, US Financial commentator for the Financial Times. Rob, welcome back to Profit markets. I want to get into Blue Owl with you. I keep on seeing this name in the news. I kind of know what they do, but not really. Can you just start off for us? What is Blue Owl? Why should we even care about them?

Rob Armstrong (19:02)

Blue Owl is a large, what would I call them, fixed income investor. So they run assorted funds that manage credit investments on behalf of investors in various different ways. And they're a big player in the space. They've been around for a long time and they've made a lot of money. So they're a meaningful player, especially in private credit, which is, of course, kind of the asset du jour of the last couple of years.

Ed Elson (19:37)

So talk a little bit about how it is the asset du jour, because I think that's a big piece of this story here. The reason why it probably matters to people is because private credit is suddenly a big deal. And it used to not be.

Rob Armstrong (19:50)

It used to not be. And it's not so often that a new asset class kind of appears right. The last, you know, private credit is now something that an institution, say a respectable institution will have a private credit allocation in their portfolio. And that might not have been true three or four or five years ago. And you have to go back 30 years before that, when junk bonds became this new asset class that people were getting into. I think the magic of the asset class has two parts. One is that it is reputed to have fixed income, like returns, like the returns you might get from high yield bonds, but with a little bump because you are lending to a special class of borrowers. These funds are lending to borrowers who for one reason or another would like to avoid public markets. Either they don't want, you know, they want a bilateral relationship with their lender, or their business is such that it's hard for larger markets to understand, or their cash flows are uneven, or for whatever reason, they don't want to be buffeted by the, the daily grind of, of the high yield bond market. So they do a bilateral deal with a lender who charges them a little bit more. So let say you were getting 8% on your high yield bond, part of your portfolio and institution. Maybe the private credit guy offers you 10. Let's say I'm just kind of picking those up. But you get a little edge there and that is called reaping an illiquidity premium. Right. You're not in the bond market. You can trade in and out all the time. You go to private credit, in theory, you get a couple more percentage points of yield. But you're like locked into this fund for five years. And everybody likes this extra yield. Everybody loves it.

Ed Elson (22:04)

So what we have here is this massively growing asset class that is interesting to a lot of people for various reasons. One of them being they might not want to go to the public markets.

Rob Armstrong (22:18)

That's for the borrowers. For the borrowers like it because they don't want to.

Ed Elson (22:22)

For the borrowers, for the people who are lending the money, they're making a lot of money.

Rob Armstrong (22:26)

Yeah. There's been an important point which is going to come up in this conversation which I think I should mention, please, which is that the value of the funds that have these private loans in them are not mark to market every day.

Ed Elson (22:44)

Yes.

Rob Armstrong (22:44)

Right. They're marked every quarter or so or however, very infrequently. And one of the things institutional investors love about this is that just because of the way the math works, this means that the returns from private credit look uncorrelated to public markets. And without boring you with the mathematics of portfolio construction, it's better to have an uncorrelated portfolio. The returns from different things in your portfolio moving in different directions makes the whole thing, the return for the level of risk superior in an uncorrelated portfolio. Now it may not really be uncorrelated. The appearance of uncorrelation is created by the fact that the thing isn't mark to market every day, like your junk bond portfolio, your equity portfolio, or whatever else. But that's a very important feature of why people like this product so much.

Ed Elson (23:45)

And I think this gets to the core of why this is important and perhaps could be a real problem. And people are beginning to talk about this, and I think it all comes down to the name, which is private credit, which is, you don't know what is really going on. You don't see it's not mark to market. You don't see what's really happening. You don't see really the redemptions. You don't really see the performance of these investments. And this is now becoming a real issue, especially in the AI world, where Blue Owl has been a huge player.

Rob Armstrong (24:24)

Yeah.

Ed Elson (24:25)

Loaning out tons and tons of money to build all of these data centers. And then we're posed with the question. It's like, well, we don't really know what all of that debt is. And the big question that investors have been worried about is how much debt is being used to build out this infrastructure. And this brings us to the conversation that we have. We're speaking with Josh Brown on this. There was obviously the Citrini blog post that went absolutely haywire this week that brings up this issue of what AI and private credit's association with AI could do to the private credit ecosystem and how much default we might see in this ecosystem. So, I mean, a lot of.

Rob Armstrong (25:13)

There's a lot there.

Ed Elson (25:14)

If you could speak to all of this.

Rob Armstrong (25:16)

Let me, let me give. Given us a lot to think about. Let me complicate it even further. The, the, the point. There is two issues there. One of them is that with private credit that you need to try to keep separate. One of the issues is lack of transparency. How much do we know about the performance of the underlying loans and how much do we know about what they are worth when they are not Mark to market every day. And, you know, you might have greater or lesser transparency depending on the product. Liquidity is a separate issue. Right. But the two kind of converge. Right. Because when people get nervous, rightly or wrongly, you know, maybe this AI thing is really worth worrying about and maybe it's not. But as long as people are nervous, then the liquidity thing becomes an issue, right? Yes. Because if, you know, a couple people head for the exit and the fund says, and something like this happened to one of Blue Owl's funds. And the fund has a limit on how many people can come or leave. As we said at the beginning of the discussion, these are long term loans, bilateral agreements. You can't just liquidate when investors want to leave. So there's gates on a lot of these private credit funds. And, and only so many people can leave in a given quarter or so forth. But anyway, the instant anybody gets told, actually we're up to our limit, nobody else can leave. That is the moment where everybody wants to leave.

Ed Elson (26:49)

Which is exactly what has just happened this week, right?

Rob Armstrong (26:51)

Yes, exactly.

Ed Elson (26:53)

And it's exactly what happened to Silicon Valley Bank. It's the bank, Silicon Valley bank.

Rob Armstrong (26:57)

But you know, it's. But Silicon Valley bank they don't have. You can take a deposit out of a bank anytime. Right. The, the point about a private credit fund is it says right on the wrapper you're only going to have an access, access to your money back. In the case of an institution, it might be years. And you kind of know that going in. And so you have to ride it out with them. But where the story gets interesting is when you try to sell this institutional product with the kind of low liquidity that institutions are designed to handle. They have an infinite life, they have a diversified portfolio. And you say, wouldn't it be great to sell this wonderful product to retail investors? Because after all, where the real money is is selling a product to retirees. That's the biggest pile of money there is. And so you take this product with low liquidity and you sell it to retail investors. They actually have higher demands for liquidity. And now you're trying to kind of square the circle. You've got investors who are retail investors, not institutional investors who want and need liquidity. And you have a product whose very identity is in not providing liquidity. And then you mix in the AI stuff you're talking about and it can be quite a combustible mixture. I know that was a lot, but I think the liquidity issue becomes live as soon as there's even questions about the, the credit quality issue.

Ed Elson (28:25)

Yes, 100%. And, and that is. We're seeing shares of blue owl plunging 10% on this news. I think this is a story that many of us are not fully tackling because there are so many complicated moving parts. Yes, but it is getting to that point. It seems that we do need to be talking about Blue Howe.

Rob Armstrong (28:49)

Yeah, I think we do. And, but, and the important point I'd like to make to you and to your listeners is that you can get in Trouble. A product, you know, a fund can get in trouble at times like this, even if the underlying loan quality is good. And I think there's good reason to think maybe the loans in this Blue Owl product that, you know, they were going to merge and they didn't and they stopped redemption, so forth. Maybe the loans are fine. Yeah, right. But because you are taking this product that is designed for institutional investors and selling it to retail investors and trying to give them a little bit of liquidity, you're setting yourself up for trouble. Right. Nobody waits around to see how bad the trouble really is.

Ed Elson (29:39)

Exactly. I want to end here with a quote from this guy, Orlando Geem's chief investment officer for asset management. He said, quote, the red flags we are seeing in private credit today are strikingly familiar to those of 2007. This is a comparison we are seeing more and more. What do you think of this statement?

Rob Armstrong (30:01)

It seems pretty strong. I mean, the weird thing, you started us out with concerns about AI investment, and the thing about those concerns have companies overinvested. Will the loans come good? Is AI going to undermine the software business as we know it, et cetera, et cetera. All those are concerns in kind of the medium to long term. So it's this weird situation where the companies you're dealing with or the, the data centers you're financing or whatever, like they're making their monthly payments, earnings is coming in as expected. There's just this thing on the horizon that, you know, it's a thing and you're worried about it, but it's not today. It's not showing up in earnings or cash flows or interest payments today. Yeah, but what about tomorrow? And that makes the situation really hard to judge. In 2007, the wheels were coming off and there was no cash flow today. Right. That, that problem happened very much in the present, whereas we're having anxieties about the future. And I think that's an important debt difference.

Ed Elson (31:10)

All right, Rob Armstrong, US Financial commentator for the Financial Times. Rob, we appreciate you taking us through a complicated topic, but I think this simplified. Thanks.

Rob Armstrong (31:19)

Cheers.

Ed Elson (31:25)

All right, before we end here, let's return to this Citrini Research blog that took the Internet by storm and took the markets down with it. This is the second viral blog post in three weeks that has erased hundreds of billions of dollars in market value overnight, which tells you more about how investors are feeling than about the blogs themselves. Because what you have to remember here is that these blogs aren't actually telling us anything new. They are simply synthesizing existing information in a creative and interesting way. And it's the feeling they are arousing within us, not the information that is causing these massive corporations to lose as much as 5, 6, 7% of their value within just a few hours. So let me give you my perspective on this viral blog that sent the markets into meltdown yet again. So, first off, it's a really good blog. It's way better than that other blog we discussed a few weeks ago. And the reason it's so good is because it ties together all of the relevant issues that could materialize because of AI. Not just how it might disrupt software, but also how it might disrupt the job market and the consumer economy and the debt markets and the insurance industry and so on and so forth. It illustrates how AI is calling into question all of the little pieces in our system that we tend to take for granted. Another way to put it is that it describes the catastrophic risks that Aswath de Modorin was warning us about in our episode on Friday. And so in that sense, it is a really good read, and I encourage you to read it. But does it warrant the cataclysmic reaction that we saw from the markets? No, it doesn't, because again, it doesn't tell us anything new. In fact, it simply describes a hypothetical situation which sounds like an absolute because of the way it was written. And that is, it's written in the past tense as if all this stuff actually happened, which makes it feel scarier. But let's be very clear, the entire post, top to bottom, is conjecture. It's informed conjecture, but it is conjecture nonetheless. In addition, it also misses several key points. For example, the premise of this blog is that all the companies that handle friction, so law firms and software companies and payments processors, they will all die a slow because AI will eliminate the business of handling friction, agents will be doing everything for us. Now, that might be kind of true, but if that is the case, then the friction handling business won't actually be eliminated. It will simply be transferred to a new set of players, namely the companies that own the agents. Now that might be a new set of companies, could be OpenAI could be anthropic, that would cause some disruption. Or it might just be the existing set of companies. It could be big tech, in which case those companies that embrace AI are going to get very, very rich. Put another way, yes, this technology is unique to this era, but the general rules of disruption remain the same. Just as Visa eliminated the friction of paying by check, it ultimately created a whole business around that. And credit cards, which did employ people and did generate value and ultimately created an ecosystem just like any other market. This blog seems to conven ignore that reality. It's very descriptive about the value destruction that AI could inspire, but it's almost silent on the value creation that it could also inspire. There are some more blind spots in the blog that we can maybe discuss another time, but the net net is this. It was an excellent, creative, interesting blog that also shouldn't have erased $300 billion in value, but it did. Which tells you how investors are really feeling right now. Anxious, apprehensive, and very, very confused. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen o' Donoghue and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thanks for listening to Profg Markets from Profgy Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.