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There's a different perspective on the debt side versus the equity side and it's just structural. So equity investors play for the upside, bond investors limit the downside. So at the end of the day, as a bond investor, your greatest hope is just to get paid back, right? So I think that requires a different calculus, a different analysis. So what do you bond investors look at more crucially critically than what equity investors I think is about free cash flow generation? That is the area that I do worry about. So if you look at debt sustainability, if you think about kind of the US kind of debt trajectory on a go forward basis, to me at least, all signs point to higher back end yield, steeper curves, not lower ones. I worry about the market happily lending money to these hyperscalers. To me that doesn't make a lot of sense as they'll continue to drain their free cash flow lever up. And so you look at Meta, it's running free cash flow negative this year. Alphabet's basically 90% lower, likely free cash flow negative the following year. So yeah, so these are fundamentally much more risky companies. And so that concerns me for sure.
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Welcome to the Master Investor Podcast with me, Wilfred Frost, where we celebrate and learn from the success of the greatest investors, business leaders and politicians in the
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world, giving you, our listeners, the edge.
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The Master Investor Podcast is sponsored by BNY Investments, LSEG and Interactive Brokers. Please do remember the views expressed in this podcast are for general information purposes only. Nothing in the podcast constitutes a financial promotion, investment advice or a personal recommendation. More on that in the show notes. My guest today, Greg Peters, oversees $1.2 trillion in assets in fixed income as
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the co chief investment officer of fixed income at Prudential Global Investment Management. Pgim. Whether people are buying or selling bonds, they will speak to Greg, including finance ministers, central bankers, investors and corporate leadership. Greg, welcome to the Master Investor Podcast.
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Great to have you with us.
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Thanks for having me.
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Will tell us what the origins of PGM are.
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PGM grew up as part of Prudential Financial, which is the large insurance company in in America. Not to be confused with the one here, which is why we're called pgim. We'll get to that in a moment. We've been investing for 150 years from credit to all parts of fixed income. About 10 years ago we rebranded because of the complexity of being a global world and only being able to use Prudential and part of it to pgm. It's a conglomerate of wholly owned investment
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firms and you obviously oversee all of the fixed income at PGM and the $1.2 trillion figure makes up actually the vast majority of assets at PGM more broadly. And that's what everything. Sovereign debt, corporate debt, all types of fixed income.
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Yes, it's across the globe. It's from sovereign debt to asset based finance. It's from public and private credit. And this runs the gamut.
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And just a sort of brief snapshot for now because we're going to get into maybe how your mindset's changing. But you were telling me in preparation for this, that of that 1.2 trillion currently, or at least recently, much more of that has been in the corporate side than the sovereign side.
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Yeah. So I think we're known very much as a credit institution, a credit shop as we say. And so a large part of those assets are in public credit as well as private credit. And then kind of layered on top of derivative, no pun intended, is the structured finance piece, which is credit with different kind of wrapper and packaging and details around it.
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Well, we're going to kind of get into your views on all those different subsectors as we go through it, but wanted to start with a bit of a bond investing 101 because I don't think we stopped to do this sort of thing enough. When you are looking at, if we talk about sovereign stuff first, a country's long term bonds, what are the key factors you look to assess?
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Yeah, so I think it's important to remember that it's an art, not a science. So there is no magical form. But I guess the preconditions and the starting point is just fiscal sustainability. So what is the debt to gdp? What is the growth relative to the spending or the revenue relative to spending? R minus G. Those factors are crucially important as a starting point, but it's not sufficient because if you look at a scatter plot of countries and where they trade from a yield perspective and wipe out the names, a lot of it doesn't have to do with that debt to GDP dynamic. So there's more to it. The second factor I would say is the structure of the debt. So is it local? So the emerging markets over the N number of years have always struggled with having a lot of their debt offshore. Right. So it's less controlled, kind of part and parcel. What's also important is the debt profile. Do you have too much of your sovereign debt or a lot of your sovereign debt that rolls over so you're more susceptible to that rollover risk? Then there's just good old classic fundamentals from inflation, economic growth, Demographics, productivity. The big piece that's really in play now though, putting it all together, is the institutional aspects of the country itself. The central bank independence is absolutely crucial. The US benefits from that greatly, as do a lot of other developed markets. And then the rule of law and the political system around it also provides investors a lot of confidence. And that all feeds into the last piece, which is liquidity, the ability to access to trade, to utilize that market in an efficient way.
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So I guess the US and the
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UK are quite good countries to compare because they're sort of free from being in a trading block and otherwise similar factors. Why does the UK pay more for a 10 year borrowing than the US does?
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Well, so the first thing is that the treasury market is the deepest liquid, most liquid market in the world. So that is what investors use for collateral. It's just a key fabric of the Fed funding system globally. So the US just benefits from that alone and then the rest has to do with some of the growth dynamics. So let's go back to that. I think the US is perceived to have a much better growth trajectory than here in the uk. You think about productivity, which is the question on the table that everyone's asking about as it relates to AI. I think the US is perceived to have a much better story around that productivity potential, which takes you on a different growth plane. I do think the central bank independence question is very much the same. So I don't see a lot of daylight between the two. But I think it really has to do with the growth potential. And the debt dynamics are substantially similar. So I think it's more around the growth.
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Expand it to us for when you're weighing up credit viability of individual companies,
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is it just the same factors as
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an equity market investor would be looking at for those companies or similar factors but putting different weights I guess to them?
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Well, definitely different weights. There's a different perspective on the debt side versus the equity side and it's just structural. So equity investors play for the upside. Bond investors limit the downside. At the end of the day, as a bond investor, your greatest hope is just to get paid back. I think that requires a different calculus, a different analysis. What do bond investors look at more crucially critically than what equity investors I think is about free cash flow generation. So what is the company generating off their business in order to pay you back? Whereas on the equity side, oftentimes you can run free cash flow negative for a very, very long time if they're seeing the growth on the other end. But as a Bond investor, you don't really have that luxury. So I think that is a critical point. And then leverage is a very delicate balance as well as equity investors want some leverage because it's just a higher gearing makes earnings higher potentially. Whereas debt investors are a little more worried around different types of leverage levels.
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Just finally on this 101 and setup, when you're looking at credit at companies debt is the spread over their respective countries sovereign yield what matters or is the absolute yield what matters? Has that changed over time as we've had these more global powerforce companies?
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Well, it depends on how you think about it versus your liability. But I will tell you as a pure credit investor, I think it's all about the credit spread. You need to separate out the risk. You should think about sovereign risk separate from credit risk and separate from FX risk. I think the danger oftentimes is conflating the two. And you're seeing it today quite readily where many investors are looking at investment grade corporates, whether it's here in Europe or in the US and they're looking at it from a yield perspective. Even though credit spreads are really quite tight. What that really tells you, I think by extension is that the sovereign debt's the cheap part, not the credit piece. Yet investors are just looking at it on a yield basis. And I think that's not the right way to do it.
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Let's get into some of then your views on what is attractive right now. Long US sovereign debt. Was your last comment there to suggest that's cheap and attractive or is there quite a lot of risk attached to it?
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Well, there's definitely risk attached to it. You know you're going right at it, right? So I think that that is the area that I do worry about. If you look at debt sustainability, you look at the trajectory of debt in the US globally actually. So this is not just a US story. There is I think, a repricing of what we call a term premium. And I expect that to continue at the same time that trade has been foiled the past couple weeks as these sovereign bond markets, US Treasuries in particular, have provided that insulating factor of risk off protection. So as fears have arisen around geopolitical events, Iran in particular, investors have plowed once again back into safe haven. Assets such as Treasuries and that has flattened the curve. So it's a push pull over time. But if you think about the US debt trajectory on a go forward basis, to me at least, all signs point to higher back end yield, steeper curves, not lower ones.
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It's really interesting hearing that market risk off sentiment factor, which I totally agree clearly has played a part. But it's not just been the last couple of weeks. If we had this conversation a year ago, you'd probably make the same point about the outlook for the long end of the US yield curve. And yet it hasn't moved that much. Are there any other factors you point to? What has the US Treasury Secretary done to help achieve that? Or is it just almost not luck as you're saying, but factors outside of his control?
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No, you bring up an excellent point and that highlights almost a risk in and of itself. How comfortable are you as an investor around the efficacy of that being a risk off hedge? That's less so today than where we were just a few years ago. The fact that it's working now gives me comfort, but doesn't necessarily mean it will work going forward. But I do think the US has done things better than some other countries as far as debt management is concerned. If you look at just managing the debt profile, the US Treasury I think does much better than job of controlling that through this regular and predictable idea that they have where they're not just hitting too much in the back end and kind of moving it around. Other jurisdictions haven't done the same job. In my mind, that has disproportionately hurt those back end curves vis a vis the US And I also think there's a concern that the US treasury would do something unconventional, whether it's through a massive buyback program or change issuance in the back end where investors are a little leery to kind of go short to back end. So I think the combination of those two factors definitely driven by the US treasury keeps a cap on back end yields.
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So how is it possible for gold to have soared as much as it has over that same time period, a year or so, and yields to remain calm and equity markets to have risen? Why is gold moving almost on its own to that scale of move?
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There's been a fundamental shift in the gold market. It started in 2022. It's basically a byproduct, at least in my opinion, when with Russia invading Ukraine, the US weaponizing the dollar to a degree. And so what you've seen subsequently is this massive buying of foreigners, namely China, India, Poland, and the Gulf states. So it's been a demand story. Right. So that's been a big driver. And then relatedly what you're seeing is this move away from or hedging out the US dollar. This is a reserve currency hedge, so to speak. Given that the US dollar was weaponized in 2022, at least in some people's mind, there's just a broader need to diversify away from dollars and where are you going to go? And investors, global investors are going into gold. That is the predominant driving force. And then it just kind of feeds on itself. But it's really about that demand driven around trying to diversify dollar exposure.
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Then I guess just rounding off the US quickly. I mean on the Fed, it sounds like what you said earlier is you're not concerned about independence being threatened.
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Well, I didn't say that exactly. I am concerned. I mean I am concerned about it. I do think there is a proper guardrails in place. I am hopeful, but that is a central issue. There was much made of the Fed chair. I think that might be missing the bigger issue, which is there's other items that come to fore in the course of this year and into next year potentially around Fed independence. So I think it's still very much an open debate, but I'm confident that it'll continue to assert itself. Going back to why bond yields have been so stable in the US relative even with the inflation spike at all, is because the confidence in the central bank. So I think it's incumbent upon the US to keep that in place. And if that changes then that just unhinges the back end of the curve.
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Let's touch on a couple of other countries before we go onto the corporate side. Japan, what's your outlook there for long bonds? There's a lot of moving parts there obviously, but they've been hitting 30 year highs on the 10 and 30 year and 40 year recently. Is it only one way traffic there or not?
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I mean, 30 years high off of being on the floor forever. Japan just been out of step out of sync with the rest of the world in this aspect for quite some time. They've had this massive monetization program going on where they would issue debt and the central bank would just basically buy it all. Their debt to GDP is extraordinarily high, 250%. They've gotten away with it because of this monetization. Now they decided that they need to normalize. I would submit it's long overdue, but nonetheless here we are. I think this normalization process is stolen process. What the Japanese found out is that through this monetization process, the buyer base disappeared. They crowded out any buyers. Their domestic buyers basically aged out. Their demographics moved against them. So there was no longer a need for long duration JGBs and they're left with a non existent buyer base. Effectively, it's a much more fragile situation. Just by virtue of that alone, I think we're in this adjustment cycle. As they continue to lean on the fiscal, they're starting to see a little inflation. I think the hope is that investment that's been abroad all these years outside of Japan comes back and that helps stabilize the JGB market. But I think that's still an open question. I think it's still early days. My belief is that you'll see steeper curves, higher yields and lower yen and lower yen.
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Even if there's a kind of onshoring of yen that's currently abroad, it would
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really have to be a large move for that to subside, I think. But that would help on the margin. Absolutely. But we're a ways away from that.
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If you snapshot closer to home in Europe, a lot of people talk about France and Ukraine having similar, though not as pronounced challenges as Japan has. Obviously debt to GDP is not up in the 200%. Are there nations here, big developed nations that you look at with similar dynamics where you think there's only one way to go on the yield curve dynamics?
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Yeah. So if you go back to where we started, just some of the preconditions, France decidedly jumps off the page. Full disclosure, I've been saying this for the past decade or so, so these things take time to play out. But the critical piece there is once again around the political piece and the ability to govern. And so what happened over the summer with France was the markets woke up and the inability to form parliament and these sorts of items really spooked the bond market. So when you're operating with a high debt to gdp, with fragile finances, that stability matters a lot. We saw it here in the UK with the Liz Truss moment. We're getting these signs and bouts. I still think it's there. The most important piece of it is that the preconditions exist. What should scare you is that when with those preconditions, you know it's lurking, something's going to happen sometime, somewhere, you're just not sure when. And I think as a bond investor, not knowing when piece means that risk premium, term premium should be higher, all else equal. And that's what we're starting to See.
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This episode is sponsored by BNY Investments. BMY Investments is part of bmy, a global financial services company supporting investors and institutions around the world. This sponsorship does not constitute investment advice. Hi guys, it's Wilf. I hope you're enjoying this episode. Just a quick reminder to please hit, follow or subscribe on your podcast or
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And if you've got time, please do give us a five star rating and leave us a comment. It really helps other people find the podcast too. Now back to the episode.
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I want to move on now to credit and to corporate trends. And I guess as a snapshot maybe we've just sort of moved out of this period in time. But I think I'm right in saying for a large part of the last few years big mega cap tech companies have been able to issue debt at yields lower than the sovereign market. At times almost negative spreads. Has that ever occurred before in history? How striking has it been those low rates that Apple and other companies have been able to issue debt at in the last five years or so?
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Well, so go back in time. They had no debt at the time. On a net debt basis, they were sitting on tremendous amount of cash. They used the debt markets really quite sparingly. And so the thought was these types of institutions are safer than the sovereign. I personally don't bite down on that argument. I think there should be a spread, a corporate spread positive to the sovereign and that's what you mostly see. So I think that was highly anomalous. And I think as you kind of fast forward to today, the reason why it should be anomalous is because look what happened to those debt profiles. These companies have moved from using debt in a sparingly way to issue a tremendous amount of debt, eye popping amount of debt to finance this AI boom, this data center bill.
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When you look at that, it's funny you mentioned free cash flows as a metric earlier in your 101. Some pointing now for some of those mega cap tech companies it's either turning negative the free cash flow or at least fallen dramatically. Are you very worried about what's happened in terms of that debt issuance? Slightly worried. Do you own any of it?
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All the above. So here, let me start with I think the unsecured investment grade corporate unsecured bond market financing. This is not a good relative value. I worry about the market happily lending money to these hyperscalers. To me that doesn't make a lot of sense as they'll continue to drain their free cash flow Lever up. And so what you own today is going to look very different down the road. Then you overlay the high level of uncertainty. We're just not sure how it's going to play out. I think that's bad risk, but that gets to your free cash flow. You look at Meta, it's running free cash flow negative this year. Google alphabets basically 90% lower likely free cash flow negative the following year. These are fundamentally much more risky companies. That concerns me for sure. I think there's better ways to play it, which is what we're doing. But the unsecured market I think is something that worries me.
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So how are you playing it?
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We're playing through the structured product market. What we're doing is we're effectively providing construction loans to these data center builds with collateral with guarantees, with guaranteed power hookups with guaranteed leases. And so you're in a much more senior position than the unsecureds. Yet they're trading because they're through SPV vehicles. So these specially financed vehicles, they're trading anywhere from 100 to 200 basis points cheaper than the unsecured. To me, that's where the value is in the food chain.
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If you put yourself in the room for a Meta or Alphabet or an Apple or whoever it might be, can you blame them for funding things via this debt when they've got it away at relatively nominal yields? Or I mean, you shrug suggests it's okay. I mean, will they regret it because they still at least have to pay the cash flows going forward? Could they not have issued a huge amount of equity? It's not like they're doing it at a cheap valuation.
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Well, so that's the head scratching part. So there's 5.3 trillion that has to be financed over the next five years. About 1.5 trillion comes from free cash flow. That's why it's being drained, of course. And then only a small bit is slated through equity. It's all happening on the debt side and I think that's because they want the gearing aspect of it. Why was this SBV concept so popular? Because it was off balance sheet and equity investors didn't really have to know about it. You think about there was a particular deal in the marketplace that they did off balance sheet, meta, that is. And they did that because they didn't want another Metaverse on their hand and have $100 billion write down that equity investors would see. I think there's some of it hiding some of the leverage and some of the financing to the equity side, but. But it's so public now that it's almost like a backfiring strategy. But I agree with you. I would have anticipated a little more equity and that doesn't make me feel good from a debt perspective.
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Yeah, it's really interesting. I think people do talk about it a lot, yet it hasn't pressured the equity prices much yet. One area that has seen equity prices pressured is software. This is something you saw coming middle of last year.
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Yeah, so did everybody else. This has been a well forecasted story, but everyone thought they had a little more time. This is one of these events where a trigger just all of a sudden became relevant. The latest Claude release just opened up people's eyes to wow, you can actually vibe code any software that you want. So yeah, I think that is the story in the credit markets right now and equity market. I think it's an incredibly challenging one. I'm sure lots of companies are getting beaten up too much that don't deserve it. However, just think about it, right? You have a situation. This is the classic melting ice cube and you're not sure at what rate and pace that ice cube is going to melt. But you're looking at the fundamentals of these companies oftentimes that are really quite good with a terminal value that's potentially zero. So how do you invest in that complex? It's really challenging. And then the debt markets really was a large provider of financing over the past five years. You're really seeing that show its weakness over the past couple weeks.
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What's your take on the scale of nerves we see out there in private credit at the moment? The last couple of days it's been super relevant. Once again, overdone or legitimate?
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Some aspects are likely overdone, as it always is, but I think most of it is quite legitimate. If you look at the growth in the credit system over the past 10 years, particularly over the past five years it's been in private credit. Use. The high yield bond market, the junk bond market as a proxy. The high yield bond market is the best shape we've seen it in ever probably. And it hasn't grown at all in the past 10 years. That risk had to be transferred somewhere and it was transferred there. It's just simple math. That's where the leverage in the system is. What makes it more concerning, of course, is the opacity. Investors aren't really sure what's in there. Which brings me to the BDCs where that is a gateway into the fundamentals of private credit. What you're Seeing through the headlines here is a lot of weakness. You're seeing a lot of software exposure up to 20% or more and that's tip of the spear. I think a lot of those concerns are quite legitimate.
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I mean one of the kind of big talking points at the moment is it's not contagious like in 2008 because the leverage, the risk is carried on private capital, not in banks. Do you buy that and or either way, do you feel exposed as a credit investor?
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Every contagion is different, every crisis is different. I think investors take too much comfort and they use simple analogies to the last crisis. And so if I heard it's not 2008, once I've heard it 100, of course it's not going to be like 2008, it's going to be different. But there's elements of contagion risk and elements of worry. There is leverage in the system. I Talked about the BDCs, I talk about on CLOS, the lower parts of the Clos structures. So there is leverage, there's subscription line leverage and nav leverage on top of these funds. So there's leverage upon leverage that a lot of investors don't see. Do I think it's cataclysmic? No. Do I think it's a healthy credit adjustment? Yes. But things never move in a swimmingly straight line and so that's where the overreaction. But I just think we're in a very early stages of this as this creative destruction nature of AI. We were very focused on the creative piece and now we're focus on the destructive piece. And I think there's a lot more to happen there and I think private credit is part and parcel to it.
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So are you now kind of coming back to something that we started on near the top? Are you seeing, are you more attracted to the sovereign debt than the corporate debt?
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At the moment I am. I see a lot more value on the sovereign bond side than the corporate side. That being said, I love taking risk and shots in credit, but I don't think it's a beta play. I think too many investors have been thinking about credit as just a beta overlay and I don't think that's the right way to Think about it, particularly as we're in a credit cycle here. Gosh, I've even heard investors talk about getting beta exposure to private credit, which is quintessentially like an alpha driven investment, not a beta investment. So I think this whole beta idea around credit is what is no longer. And I see a lot more value in sovereign. And you can see that in a couple ways. You can see that in just the tightness of the credit spreads themselves. They're at the richest deciles that we've seen in history. So very, very tight. So how much tighter can they go the second you see it in swap spreads? How does Treasuries cash, let's say cash, sovereign bonds trade relative to swaps, kind of funded versus unfunded globally? Now what you see is that sovereign bonds trade cheap to that. That says to me that that's kind of additional premium. So the cheapness in the market in my mind is on the sovereign side, less so on the credit side.
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Obviously on the sovereign side. At the short end, where central banks keep their rates is going to be heavily influenced by inflation outlook. It's kind of the crux of the outlook for the next decade. But do you think the AI will unleash a deflationary productivity force that means inflation will stay very low or, or is there a risk that it's sticky? The inflation we've had the last couple
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years, I think it's a two step process. The first step go back to just the unleashing of the spending. That is classic putting pressure and inflationary pressure in the system. So I think if anything this is inflationary over the near term, over the long term, if you do get the productivity, which I do think you'll get productivity out of it, then it'll be disinflationary. But I think the first step in this process and the first step of the trade is inflationary, not disinflationary.
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And that lasts for how many years?
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Well, I don't know. I mean the adoption rates are happening at record speed, but the investment is continuing en masse. Right. And I think the investment piece is not fully understood either. So there's this massive spend on data centers. You build a data center, it's up and running. The 70% of that data center expense is chips and racks. So if you want to stay on the frontier, you have to reinvest. Let's pick a number. Anywhere from four to seven years, five years in new chip technology. So it's a constant spend. So this maintenance capex cycle is probably the largest I've ever seen. It's not like laying underground sea cables where you do it once and then you kind of get leverage, operating leverage off that investment. You have to spend time and time and time again and it's just really hard to get a return on that invested capital. So it's open question, I think in
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terms of the short end, do you think it's attractive then at the moment or do you think rate cuts are going to follow suit this year and next year as they have in the last year?
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Well, who knows, right? There's so many open questions. It's not like central banks have much keener insight than I think the investment community writ large. But I think the bias is for rates remain stickier, higher. I do think there's some scope to cut globally, a few cuts in the us, maybe three here in uk, a couple in Europe. So I think there's some scope for that. But the reason why I like being closer to the front end is because that has more predictive power. The more you can understand or the closer you are to central bank policy, the more certainty around your performance is. As you go out to curve once again, go out to those 30 years, you're tied to a lot more exogenous factors, a repricing of term premium at all and it just makes it a
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more dangerous game as we get towards the end. Greg, I'm interested on a stepping back question which is the pace. I guess we all started thinking about this suddenly again with Blue Owl and with Private Credit the last couple of days. But how quickly things can turn when they do turn, as we touched on earlier, maybe apart from what gold might be saying, all other parts of the markets do seem quite calm at the moment. Do you agree with that? Is it going to stick around?
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Yeah, markets have been unbelievably calm. I said the same thing last year with all the geopolitical and the tariffs at all, the market really took it in stride. It is a little surprising to me. So I'll be honest about that. But oftentimes what you see from a historical perspective, things are really quite common and they break you short the tails always as an investor, there's a lot of a lot that can go on within that tails. As soon as you get outside that distribution, that's when things really start to roll. We've been staying within that distribution, the media distribution. If you get a move outside then I think things really start to unwind. I don't know, I'm coming across a little doom and gloom more than I want to be because I think fundamentally we're in a good place. There's lots of positive things going on. There are some excesses, there are some fragilities, but by and large I think there's a lot of positives going on. I think maybe that undercurrent is keeping investors much more calm.
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And then just finally, Greg, we ask everyone this, which is your overriding investment advice for our listeners. And you can make it broad, you can even make it career advice rather than investment or specific to your sector and to fixed income. But what is your advice?
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Yeah, so I'm not going to give any specific advice, but I would say broadly it's about being incredibly humble, particularly in this environment. God, there's so much we don't know. We talked about software a little. How do you model that? You have to really examine things in a multidimensional way. My advice is to build a model of a scenario based approach. Don't look at point estimates. I think point estimates are the things that get investors into trouble. I blame CNBC for that too. I can tell you the story later, but. But I think it's incumbent upon investors to look at the full possibility of what could happen instead of just narrowing in on what you think might happen.
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I struggle to blame CNBC for anything because I had such a great time there, but I totally accept your concluding remarks. Greg, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the Master Investor Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.
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Thank you.
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That was, of course, Greg Peters from PGYM joining us here in London. Coming up next week on the Master Investor Podcast, we'll be joined by Rusher Sharma of Rockefeller Capital.
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Please do hit follow or subscribe if
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you haven't done already to tune in for that particular episode. But for now, our thanks again to Greg Peters.
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The Master Investor Podcast is sponsored by BNY Investments, LSEG and Interactive Brokers. Please do remember the views expressed in this podcast are for general information purposes only. Nothing in the podcast constitutes a financial promotion, investment advice, or a personal recommendation. More on that in the show Notes. This podcast is produced by Paradine Productions and Master Investor limited In association with Birdline Media. If you've enjoyed the show, please do subscribe on YouTube or click follow on your podcast platform and you'll be automatically notified each time a new episode drops.
Episode: Greg Peters: Why Sovereign Bonds Now Beat Corporate Credit
Date: March 2, 2026
Guest: Greg Peters, Co-Chief Investment Officer of Fixed Income, PGIM
Host: Wilfred Frost
This episode features Greg Peters of PGIM, who manages $1.2 trillion in fixed income assets. Together with Wilfred Frost, Peters explores why sovereign bonds have become more attractive relative to corporate credit, delving into the macroeconomic environment, risks in both government and corporate debt, the unique dynamics shaping today’s credit markets, and the impact of AI-driven investment.
Key Considerations:
US vs. UK Comparison:
The conversation is practical and nuanced, balancing caution with realism. Peters is candid about both opportunities and risks, often leaning towards conservatism on credit, but with a clear appreciation for market cycles and scenario-based thinking.
For listeners seeking insight into today's fixed income markets, this episode offers a timely, deeply informed perspective on why sovereign bonds currently outshine corporate credit, and how to navigate a rapidly evolving investment landscape.