On this special, bonus episode of Masters in Business, I speak with Filippo Gori, co-head of Global Banking at J.P. Morgan. Gori shares insights from his climb through the firm’s ranks across London and Hong Kong, plus discuss the current state of banking, capital markets and more.

A transcript of our conversation is available below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

 

 

 

 

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MASTERS IN BUSINESS
A Conversation with Filippo Gori Co-Head of Global Banking, JP Morgan
Bloomberg Radio  •  Transcript

 

ANNOUNCER (00:00:02):  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:00:17):  This week on the podcast — what a fascinating conversation. Filippo Gori is co-head of global banking at JP Morgan. He started in London and eventually moved over to Hong Kong, where he worked for 13 years before coming recently to New York. He’s seen just about every aspect there is when it comes to commercial, corporate and investment banking around the world. I thought this conversation was quite fascinating, and I think you will also. With no further ado, JP Morgan’s Filippo Gori.

FILIPPO GORI (00:00:51):  Thank you for having me.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:00:52):  I’m fascinated by the mispronunciation of your name — “Philip O’Gorey.” Did the people in Hong Kong really think you were Scottish or Irish?

FILIPPO GORI (00:01:03):  At the beginning, when I just moved to Hong Kong, people were surprised when I arrived there, because the way they pronounce my name and surname, it sounds more like “Philip O’Gorey.” So they were expecting an Irish or a Scottish person — then they had an Italian, so they had to adjust to that.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:01:20):  That’s very funny. So let’s roll back a little. Before Hong Kong, you get your master’s of science in economics, summa cum laude, from Bocconi University in Milan. Was markets and investment banking always the career plan?

FILIPPO GORI (00:01:37):  No, absolutely not the plan — well, not that I really had any plans back then, but my passion was, and still is, history. I grew up in rural Tuscany, and I’m a byproduct of the Italian state education. You take your high school exam at the age of 19, and then you apply to university. So in the three months between finishing high school and deciding where you go to university, I thought I was going to go and study history in Florence. But my dad, who has been a central figure in my life, suggested to me, why don’t you apply to Bocconi University? I didn’t really have an idea what it was — I only knew it was in Milan — and maybe more to please him, I took the tests, and I went on with the rest of my summer holidays. And then I got accepted to Bocconi, and I decided to go there, but with no real plans back then.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:02:51):  Well, you mentioned you were thinking about going into history. You taught classical civilization in the UK. Tell us, was an academic career ever in the cards?

FILIPPO GORI (00:03:05):  Yeah. When I finished with Bocconi — I graduated in economic history — I thought I was going to do a PhD in that topic. Back then, there was a rule whereby you’re not allowed to move from a master’s directly to a PhD. You need to work for a couple of years, and then you apply for the PhD. And therefore it made sense to think, okay, you know what, I’m going to remain in academia as I start thinking about the dissertation that I will work on for my PhD. And therefore, for a variety of totally strange reasons, I ended up as a teacher in North Yorkshire, in an English college, teaching Italian as a foreign language and classical civilization too. And then, by pure chance, I stepped into the opportunity to apply to JP Morgan. And I applied to JP Morgan, and I’ve never left since then.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:04:11):  That was London in 1999. So first — did you start in markets, or asset management, or banking?

FILIPPO GORI (00:04:22):  That’s a very good question. I started in a graduate program back then. I joined JP Morgan pre-merger with Chase. It was a tiny — back then — global institution of around 15,000 people globally. Think about now: we have 330,000. We had lost the coveted AAA rating back in the middle of the nineties, and it was a bank that was trying to find its roots back. We were not one of the five broker-dealers that were the shining objects of the era; we were probably a tier-two, if not tier-three, institution back then. And I joined in a graduate program called Internal Consulting Services. The idea was they were hiring the most diverse people, with the most diverse of backgrounds, and somebody like me would work on a variety of different things, including the internet, which was something that was coming to be back then.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:05:26):  1999 — the internet was big back then.

FILIPPO GORI (00:05:28):  So they hired me, and the idea was you would rotate in this graduate program every three months in a different part of the firm, so you learn how the firm operates and you can decide how you can help interject the internet into all of this. My first rotation was in asset management. My second rotation was in CRM — client relationship management, believe it or not. And then — back then, literally, the world was so small — suddenly they need an analyst in the Milan office to do FX sales. They look around and say, who is the last Italian who has joined us? And somebody says, there is this guy — I’ve seen him around. So they call me up and say, okay, do you know one plus one? That was the interview. Okay, you move to Milan to do FX sales. So that’s how I moved to markets, to do FX sales. And then the merger happened, they brought me back to London, I moved to derivatives, and I grew up on the markets side of the business.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:06:34):  So London to Milan. And then what brought you to Hong Kong in 2013?

FILIPPO GORI (00:06:39):  2013 — that’s another interesting story. So we need to wind the clock back. It’s 2012. I’ve been running Southern Europe for quite some time with a friend who was my co-head back then, and the opportunity to move to New York started to develop. So I discussed with my wife, who back then was working at the Bank of England, whether she could be seconded to the Fed, and so on and so forth. So the conversation started happening as, okay, you know what, after 12 or 13 years at the firm in London, we’re going to move to New York.

And then suddenly, May 2012, the London Whale happened, and the decision was, forget about it — you stay put. Back then my wife said to me, please, I know that Asia is not on your cards, you want to move to New York, but if there is ever the opportunity to move to Asia, please promise me that you will consider it. And as every Italian man does — of course, darling, absolutely.

So roughly a year later, I get a call from my boss, who says, okay, Daniel Pinto — who was the CEO of the CIB back then — wants to see you tomorrow to discuss an opportunity to move to Hong Kong. Don’t sit on it thinking about it too much; they’re considering somebody external, so make up your mind pretty quickly. So, as you do in those circumstances as an Italian man, what I did was send a text to my wife. And the text was something along the lines of: darling, maybe tonight after dinner we should have a conversation, because there is an option to move to Asia — but it’s unlikely, I’m not so sure. She replied five minutes later: tell them that we are going. So the following morning, when I went to interview with the boss, it was kind of — that’s fine, whatever, we’re going.

So literally, I moved to Hong Kong having never been to Hong Kong in my life — and I had never been to Asia in my life. But the family was happy, so it was a family adventure, and we took it like that. Literally, the furthest east I had been was India; I had never been to Asia when I moved there.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:09:12):  Why was your wife so enthusiastic about Hong Kong and Asia? Had she been before?

FILIPPO GORI (00:09:16):  She had traveled around Asia already, definitely. She had been to Japan and other parts of the region.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:09:23):  Japan and Hong Kong — very different.

FILIPPO GORI (00:09:25):  Very different. And she said, it’s the right time — we were both late thirties, the girls were still young. Life is about the journey, and therefore it was the right thing to do. Interestingly enough, from a career standpoint, it was a totally non-traditional choice. And everyone was saying to me, you’re going to come back in a body bag. Or there was this acronym, FILTH — Failed In London, Try Hong Kong — because there was a little bit of an idea back then that if you were not good enough to operate in Europe, they used to ship you to Asia, back from the colonial days.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:10:12):  I was going to say, that might have been true 50 years ago — but in the nineties and two thousands?

FILIPPO GORI (00:10:18):  Well, still, there was that view. But we went there and we loved it. We absolutely loved Hong Kong, to the point that we spent 12 years there.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:10:28):  Wow. So obviously there’s a bit of culture shock, but I’m really interested in what it was like being an Italian who worked in London, now going to an entirely different culture, a different way they do business. How challenging was that transition?

FILIPPO GORI (00:10:49):  It was interesting in the sense that I thought I knew diversity, because back then I was running Southern Europe — Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal — where, although there are commonalities from a culture standpoint, there are different ways of doing business. And I know that for us, Italians and Spaniards are not the same thing. But largely, the reality is that we have a lot in common culturally. So you move to Hong Kong and you run a region of 16, 17 countries that is truly, truly diverse. And the best definition that I got of Asia was: it is a conglomerate of countries that happens to share the same time zone.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:11:36):  But that’s it.

FILIPPO GORI (00:11:37):  And even that definition is wrong, because if you think about Wellington in New Zealand and Mumbai, there’s seven and a half hours, right? So it’s wider than the US. So they have really nothing in common. So you spend a lot of time trying to understand how the business operates around you. And there is no way that you manage to do it unless you put in the experience, you put in the years. So after 12 years, I feel I am comfortable in understanding how Asia operates — but it took me truly, truly a long time.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:12:14):  So I was going to ask — you say how Asia operates, but that’s 16 different countries, different regulations, different ways of doing business, different cultures, different languages.

FILIPPO GORI (00:12:26):  Absolutely. So let me give you an example. You go to Japan — it’s not so important what is said in the meeting, but what is not said in the meeting, and the concept of face, and how things operate. You go to Australia, at the opposite end of the region, and it’s very much in your face — they tell you very clearly what they think of you, and so on and so forth. And then between these two extremes, you have every shape of things. So it takes time. But it’s fascinating, and I loved getting to know the culture, getting to know the history, getting to know, quote-unquote, the biases, getting to know the opportunities. And if you think about it — and this is probably not well known — most likely by the end of this decade, 50 percent of global GDP will be housed in Asia Pacific, and the second, third and fourth largest countries from a GDP standpoint will be Asian.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:13:31):  China, Japan, Korea — is that it?

FILIPPO GORI (00:13:33):  No — China, India, Japan, most likely.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:13:36):  South Korea doesn’t make the top four?

FILIPPO GORI (00:13:38):  South Korea doesn’t make the top four.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:13:40):  Hmm, really, really interesting — to say nothing of Taiwan. And then obviously Vietnam and other countries are much smaller.

FILIPPO GORI (00:13:47):  Yeah — or Australia, which is a continent in itself, with all the peculiarities. So it is a remarkable, interesting region that is not well understood, both from an opportunity standpoint and a challenges standpoint. And it’s interesting — in Chinese, the sign for opportunity and challenge is the same.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:14:12):  Really, really interesting. Is English the universal language over there? Obviously Australia and New Zealand are going to be easy — two people separated by a common language is the old joke about America and the UK — but what was it like trying to communicate in places like Thailand, or Vietnam, or the Philippines, or Malaysia?

FILIPPO GORI (00:14:41):  In Southeast Asia, English is more widely used, for historical reasons. Think about Singapore, Thailand and some of the others —

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:14:56):  Colonialism, sure.

FILIPPO GORI (00:14:57):  Yeah, sure — Malaysia and so on and so forth. In North Asia, it is not as widely used, and therefore you need to learn how to communicate through translations, or the whole ritual that there is at times related to the translation. And at times, especially on the mainland in China, even in meetings where your audience will speak English, the meeting will be held in Chinese with a translation. So there is a whole understanding of how you operate in those countries that is complicated.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:15:39):  So you’ve said that the corporate outlook has remained very resilient despite what seems like an endless run of geopolitical uncertainty. We’ve had tariffs, we’ve had wars, we’ve had inflation. What are people in various regions doing to cope with this, and what underlines this ongoing resiliency?

FILIPPO GORI (00:16:04):  The resilience is probably one of the most surprising factors of 2026. If you think about what has been put through the global economy in the last couple of years, the global economy has been exceptionally, exceptionally resilient. This is true of the world. Then, depending on where you are around the world, clients are focused — or regulators or governments are focused — on different topics.

If you start, for instance, with the US: clearly the economy is doing fantastically well, and there is a sense of, how can we continue to dream about outcomes that were not even possible a few years back, and how can we participate in this incredible engine of growth, this super-resilient economy? There are some concerns around inflation — every now and then you hear people talking about it — but generically, and this tells you a lot about the cultural attitudes of different places in the world, here there is a sense of optimism that is clearly palpable.

You move to Europe, and the environment is resilient. Europe is doing, to a certain extent, better than we at times give it credit for, but it is preparing for a heavy electoral cycle that will come next year. Italy will go to election — the parliament will come to an end next year — so will France, and the UK most likely will have a new prime minister after the summer. So there is already, as you go around Europe, a sense of, we are beginning the electoral cycle. There are concerns around inflation in Europe, spillover from the Iran crisis, and how that would prompt the ECB, which already has high rates, and how that would shape the European economy. There is a war on the eastern border, between Ukraine and Russia, that is impacting the rest of the region, and it’s shaping the way leaders and business leaders are thinking about the future. And there is, to a certain extent, a sense of admiration looking towards the US, and a sense of, is there more that can be done to make Europe like the US?

Then you go to the Middle East. Clearly the Middle East is still recovering from what’s going on, but that part of the world is for sure the winner in a global South narrative, for a variety of different reasons. It will remain a winner of the global South narrative. And notwithstanding the geopolitical headwinds, you can see the investments that are still going there — and they will keep on going there. There is an infrastructural shift in the way the Middle East thinks, and also in building infrastructure, that is fundamental.

Then you go to Africa, which is a supremely important continent for a variety of different reasons — probably the most extreme in terms of dealing with countries which we are not really used to. We have a large presence in South Africa and Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya. And there you see the importance of critical minerals, the importance of urbanization, the demographics that are exceptionally in favor of that part of the world. So while for the past decade and this decade Asia has been a fundamental part of the global economic landscape, we need to start thinking that after the Middle East, Africa will become the next big thing.

And then you move to Asia. Asia, to a certain extent, is not up-and-coming — it has really arrived. I already mentioned the second, third and fourth largest economies in the world. And there, it will be a matter of dealing, to a certain extent, with the geopolitical winds — sometimes they blow in one direction, sometimes they blow in a different direction — and the strategic angle of that part of the world. There is a narrative out there that globalization is finished. I beg to disagree — a little exaggerated — because the economies are so intertwined. And if you see how much manufacturing happens in Asia, it is very difficult to reverse. It doesn’t mean that you should not try, but shifting supply chains takes years, if not decades. So that part of the world will remain fundamental. And there you have Japan, which is performing exceptionally well and is super, super interesting. You have China, which remains supremely interesting from an opportunity standpoint, and the way they’re changing their own economy. You mentioned Korea — think about the importance of Korea from a memory standpoint for the AI ecosystem. Then you have India, you have Southeast Asia, you have critical minerals in Australia. So different parts of the world are dealing with the current setup in different ways. And you have probably the two extremes, if I think about it, with Europe in the middle: the US and Asia really gunning for growth, while Europe is still trying to figure out a way to grow more in this current environment.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:22:03):  So we’re going to talk a whole lot more about Asia in a bit, but I want to circle back to the Middle East and to Africa. I think a lot of us think of the Middle East as just a collection of petro-states, with Israel in the middle, and then whatever geopolitical turmoil surrounds that structure. It sounds like you are looking at the Middle East as not only a changing set of infrastructure, but becoming a financial center. What else is happening in the Middle East? That’s a huge change.

FILIPPO GORI (00:22:41):  You mentioned part of it already. So it is becoming a more relevant financial center — for sure, the UAE is becoming much more important from that standpoint, and you can perceive, when you go there, the degree of investment that is taking place from global players positioning themselves over there. Then there is the whole set of investments and reforms to the economy of the Kingdom, and how that is shaping the changes of Saudi into the future — and again, it is remarkable, the changes that you see happening day to day over there. Then you have Qatar. And there is an enormous infrastructure play taking place in that part of the world — typical solid infrastructure, but there is also digital infrastructure taking place over there. Think about energy, and how fundamental energy is for data centers. That part of the world becomes super fundamental from that point of view too.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:23:55):  We used to think of finance centers as New York, London, Hong Kong. Do we add Dubai to it? Is Dubai in that group?

FILIPPO GORI (00:24:05):  I think you need to add Dubai, and for sure Singapore too — you cannot forget Singapore. And to a certain extent, I think Tokyo is still a fundamental player, especially in the equity markets globally. Those are the ones that in my mind I would consider fundamental. And then, if you allow me, there is also continental Europe — there are a few centers there.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:24:32):  So we’re going to circle back to Europe also. But one last question about this area — I have to ask about Africa. We all know about rare earths and other minerals. Africa stands out as one of the few regions that isn’t going through the same sort of fertility crisis that we’re seeing in the rest of the world. Is that a driver, or is it something more fundamental than that?

FILIPPO GORI (00:24:57):  I think you have what you said — demographics and urbanization are super fundamental. Then you have the richness in critical minerals. And I would add that Africa, to a certain extent, has probably been — not ignored, but not on the radar screen of the Western world for too long. To the point that the influence in Africa is heavy from Russia and China. So I think it’s in our interest to make sure that the Western world understands Africa and operates over there, for a variety of different reasons. Africa is the southern border of the European Union, and it is fundamental, and it is not well understood. For instance, at times Russia does not only create problems for Europe from an eastern border standpoint; it creates problems for Europe from a southern border standpoint, by operating in some of the sub-Saharan African countries and pushing immigrants towards the shores of Europe.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:26:08):  Which has been a problem in Europe — it led to Brexit. It’s a problem here in the United States — or I should say it’s an issue, not so much a problem.

FILIPPO GORI (00:26:18):  Starting from the assumption, though, that Europe has a demographic issue, and therefore we need to figure out a way to —

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:26:31):  Increase population, or —

FILIPPO GORI (00:26:32):  — or accept that Europe needs a certain degree of immigration. How to do that is not well understood.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:26:42):  It seems to be a function of wealth — that when a country hits a certain per capita income, people have options, and they tend to have fewer children. Is anything going to change that, or is that just the way it is?

FILIPPO GORI (00:26:57):  I think there are some components of it — I don’t think it’s only wealth; it’s also cultural. If I look at Italy, which is a wealthy country in itself, although relatively small — if you think about it, fewer than 60 million people live in Italy — Italy has been in a demographic crisis now for 40 years. And at the current pace, there will be no more Italians in just over a century. And Italy is also losing a lot of talent — every year, between 100,000 and 115,000 young Italians leave the country to go and work somewhere else. So there is a lot of it that is cultural too.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:27:47):  Hmm, really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Filippo Gori, co-head of global banking at JP Morgan, talking about the growth of JP Morgan into a powerhouse. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:28:18):  I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Filippo Gori. He’s co-head of global banking at JP Morgan. Having joined the firm in London in 1999, he has since relocated through Hong Kong to New York. So you’ve had really such a unique perspective — you’ve led businesses in Asia Pacific, in emerging markets, in London, and now in New York. Do you have to adapt your leadership style or your strategy when you move from one region to another?

FILIPPO GORI (00:28:57):  Absolutely. It is part of the exercise of growing into the job. One of the things I learned early on in my career: you cannot have the same leadership style with every colleague. That was particularly true in Asia, where if you use the same tone of approach with a Japanese colleague and an Australian colleague, for sure you get it wrong in one of the two cases. So you need to adjust how you react to your colleagues and your clients, and you adjust your communication, your delivery, how you deliver the importance of certain things, and so on and so forth. I’m still trying to figure out the US — full disclaimer.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:29:42):  Well, I’m curious — I’m going to assume New York is more like Australia than Japan. But I would also imagine a lot of differences from London.

FILIPPO GORI (00:29:52):  Absolutely. London is very much understated, and there is a way in which you say something, but without really saying it outright.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:30:04):  And New York is pretty much the opposite, huh? No mincing words.

FILIPPO GORI (00:30:09):  So it’s been interesting so far.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:30:11):  I can imagine. So your charge is global banking. And when I think of that department, that’s everything from investment banking to corporate services to commercial banking. How do you get all those lines of business to collaborate, as opposed to compete? It seems like all the horses are pulling in different directions.

FILIPPO GORI (00:30:36):  It is actually the other way around. Global banking is three lines of business — commercial banking, corporate banking and investment banking — that have been put together under this global banking umbrella that spans 46 countries, around 200 major locations around the world, and, let’s call it, around 70,000 clients, give or take. And the idea is you cover all the wholesale banking businesses under one umbrella. So, every corporate that makes at least $20 million of revenues and above — less than $20 million is called business banking, and it belongs to Chase, so you’re still using the branches. The moment you qualify, let’s say from a revenue standpoint or a size-of-business standpoint, for the wholesale part of the firm, you become part of JP Morgan. Then the whole client continuum is covered by the same management team, the same group of leaders, with the same rules, the same capital allocation, and so on and so forth.

It is becoming particularly important, especially in this day and age — think about the innovation economy, whereby a corporate or a startup graduates to become a multi-billion-dollar corporation supremely fast nowadays. In the past, it could take 20 years, 30 years for a corporate to grow through the various stages of life. Here it’s from cradle to infinity at the speed of light. So it is important that the transition and the support happen within a homogeneous management, and the same way of looking at the clients.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:32:29):  So JP Morgan emphasizes technology investment and the importance of artificial intelligence. What parts of banking is AI changing? What is very much ahead of the curve, and what do you think are the areas that are most ripe for disruption?

FILIPPO GORI (00:32:48):  It is very difficult to assess whether you are ahead of the curve, or ahead of the pack, or whether you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, because things are changing so rapidly. So I would not dare to say, oh, we are ahead of the curve. We are investing — it is a giant leap of mankind, in terms of the revolution that is happening under our eyes. There is clearly efficiency that can be achieved through the use of AI processes and procedures and tools, so that you can provide better client service, or better customer service, while being more efficient — which means that you can probably cover more clients. And our ambition is to cover more clients — let’s say to reach a hundred thousand clients by 2030 — in a more efficient way. So technology and, quote-unquote, AI are helping us scale the business much faster than before, and ideally without having to increase the costs.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:33:55):  Hmm, really, really interesting. I think we’re all aware that AI is changing everything so rapidly. Where do you think human judgment is irreplaceable? What part of the business is, hey, we could become more efficient with AI, but the ultimate decision-maker has to be a person?

FILIPPO GORI (00:34:17):  It’s fundamental that a human is in the loop, for a variety of different reasons. Ultimately, I would simplify it this way: you are dealing with clients, clients are human beings, and at the end of the day, I think a client wants to be dealt with by a person. So the human in the loop remains fundamental. AI can help speed up some processes, it can help achieve better scale, but the individual remains fundamental in our business.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:34:54):  So when you joined JP Morgan back in 1999, you mentioned it was not at the top of the league tables. What was the reason it managed to break into the top tier? Was it this emphasis on technology investment? Was it a strategy? What led the firm to becoming a global top-tier bank?

FILIPPO GORI (00:35:20):  Okay, so I think there is an obvious answer, and then there is a less obvious one. I would say the obvious answer is JP Morgan Chase went through a series of mergers, including acquiring Bank One in 2004, which brought to the firm a certain Jamie Dimon, who changed the way in which the firm operated. Think back then — the JP Morgan Chase–Bank One merger was still a conglomerate of institutions that had merged together over the previous 20 years, and many of those mergers had not actually been fully executed. You had Manufacturers Hanover merging into Chemical, merging into Chase. You had First Chicago merging into Bank One. You had JP Morgan and a variety of different things — there was Cazenove in the middle too. So the integration of all of this was a fundamental piece that made us who we are today. And Jamie was the leader, and the individual that could have the vision of how to do this and create the fortress balance sheet and everything else that came with that, that made us who we are today.

I think the less obvious answer is we went through 2007 — and I hope I’m not being controversial here, but probably we were still busy with the merger and everything else, so we didn’t have time to focus on some of the other stuff that then caused the problems. And Jamie’s view was very clear: we do things that make sense for the customers, we do things that make sense for the firm, fortress balance sheet, and so on and so forth.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:37:17):  If I recall correctly — I want to say it was around ’05 — there was a minor little subprime issue with JP Morgan, long before it was a problem everywhere else. And if I remember correctly, Dimon said, get all that crap off our balance sheet; we don’t play in those sorts of speculative waters. So when the real trouble hit in ’08–’09, they had a very clean balance sheet. So that’s a factor.

FILIPPO GORI (00:37:49):  And then, since then: investing, investing, investing, and investing again — through the cycle. You invest, you keep growing — you’re growing not because you like it per se, but because you can provide better customer service, you work towards the betterment of the communities where you operate, and you keep investing, absolutely, through the cycle. When I arrived in Asia in 2013, the firmwide revenues that we made in that year are less than what we made in the first quarter of this year. What has happened there has definitely been the growth of Asia in the meantime, but it has also been us investing in the region across products, countries and jurisdictions — so that if you build the infrastructure, and you are there to serve the clients, the business will come.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:38:44):  Hmm, interesting. What does “one firm” mean in practice — this big motion towards JP Morgan as one firm? Whether you’re in the middle market, or a global enterprise, or the public markets — explain the thinking behind this.

FILIPPO GORI (00:39:02):  So the thinking is: the organization is huge — it’s 330,000 people. So the idea is to make the company feel small to our clients, and to a certain extent to our employees.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:39:17):  In other words, you don’t want scale to be a disadvantage.

FILIPPO GORI (00:39:20):  Absolutely. Because when you have 330,000 people, maybe the adjective that you associate with us is not “nimble” — but we try to be. We make the firm feel small to our clients, to our employees, to the communities and everything else. So we try to maintain a personal, human angle in everything that we do.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:39:43):  And you’ve now been at JP Morgan 26, almost 27 years — kind of unusual these days, people staying with one firm.

FILIPPO GORI (00:39:51):  I’m one of the new kids on the block at the firm. There are people that have been there really — yeah, absolutely. Doug Petno, I think, is going on 37, and many of the other seniors — my co-head, John Simmons, I think is just crossing 34. And many of the other folks around me are in the same zip code, if not having spent more time than me.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:40:14):  So what keeps you and these folks at the firm for so long?

FILIPPO GORI (00:40:19):  I think the people and the culture. For me, JP Morgan became part of me and my family. And you stay because you like the people, you like the environment, you like what you do on your day-to-day — but fundamentally, I think, the people.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:40:37):  And you mentioned 330,000 people. How big can JP Morgan Chase get? Is this going to be a half-a-million-person employer sometime soon?

FILIPPO GORI (00:40:49):  I think from a scale standpoint, we are where we need to be in terms of people. The idea is, can we use AI to grow the business without having to grow the footprint much more?

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:41:02):  So this is probably it for the next decade.

FILIPPO GORI (00:41:05):  I would — I mean, I’m not Jamie, so you should ask the question to Jamie. But from a global banking standpoint, yes — I think the headcount we have now, we are trying to keep stable for the next few years.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:41:17):  Huh, really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Filippo Gori, co-head of global banking at JP Morgan, discussing the state of capital markets today. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

*     *     *

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:41:52):  I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Filippo Gori. He’s co-head of global banking at JP Morgan, where he’s been working since 1999 — in London, Hong Kong, and now New York. So we touched on this earlier, about resiliency in the face of all this macro volatility. But it’s not just the economy — it’s been a ton of M&A and dealmaking, and this year we’ve seen a lot of IPOs, and giant IPOs at that. Why is all this holding up so well despite all of the geopolitical turmoil we see?

FILIPPO GORI (00:42:35):  I think there is a variety of different things. To a certain extent, there was a little bit of pipeline that had been built over the years that needed to find its way —

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:42:46):  It had slowed down post-pandemic for a while.

FILIPPO GORI (00:42:48):  Exactly. So IPOs — we thought in 2024 they were going to come back; then in 2025, finally, we see the return of the IPOs, which is good as a component of cyclicality — it’s the right time for this to happen. M&A — I think there is probably an extent of what we discussed earlier on. Boards are observing the resiliency of the economy, of the global economy. They think it’s the right time to make strategic decisions. They’re probably getting comfortable that the cost of capital will not go much lower than where it is now — probably there’s a sense of higher-for-longer, to a certain extent. And therefore people are getting their hands dirty in terms of dealing. And we are just witnessing what could be, from a wallet standpoint in pure investment banking, if not the best-ever year — which was 2021 — very close to the best-ever year in terms of volumes.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:43:56):  Probably the biggest change over the past decade has been the rise of private capital — whether it’s private debt, private credit, private equity. How is that changing a global bank? Do you guys look at this as competition, or is it expanding the range of solutions you can offer to clients?

FILIPPO GORI (00:44:15):  It’s a little bit of both. Private capital definitely plays a role in the everyday economy, in the sense that after the GFC, for traditional banks, certain sectors in certain cases became harder to deploy capital to. And therefore, to a certain extent, there is a group of clients that arrived to be the beneficiaries of private credit — because of the simplicity of the solution, the unitranche, and so on and so forth. So that has caused the growth of that sector. And we have been operating — we have been doing loans, and a private loan is just another form of loan — for 225 years. So we launched our own initiative, our own private credit business, a few years back, but we increased it last year — officially around February last year — to $50 billion of our own capital allocated to it. And the idea is, when you go to a client, you try to offer an agnostic set of solutions: we can do anything you want, from the traditional private lending solutions, to more innovative solutions, to the traditional syndicated financing facilities, and so on and so forth. So the idea is to offer the clients all the potential tools in the JP Morgan armory.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:45:51):  So these private transactions have been rising really since after the financial crisis. What does this tell us about public market M&A? How do you look at the difference between these few public companies and this rising number of private companies?

FILIPPO GORI (00:46:14):  Look, it’s a trend that has been going on since the 1980s. The number of public companies in the US, and around the world, has reduced substantially since then. There are various reasons for that. Part of it could be the cost associated with being a public company. Part of it could be the fact that some of the companies have grown in size and have acquired some of the smaller companies, and so on and so forth. I am absolutely in favor of a healthy public market, because it’s one of the greatest strengths of the United States — the fact that there is a market out there where you can raise capital, you can finance yourself, there is a price discovery mechanism, which I enormously love. If I look at other countries where I’ve operated, where the size of those public markets is smaller, you see that those economies struggle to gain scale, struggle to gain opportunity. So for me, the public market in the US is a treasure that must be cherished.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:47:25):  Fair enough. We’ve seen a number of mega-deals happen over the past couple of quarters, including the giant SpaceX IPO. We have Anthropic coming up; there are a bunch of other AI IPOs coming up. But there’s also been a lot of merger activity in that space. What’s driving these big transformative deals?

FILIPPO GORI (00:47:51):  As I mentioned, to a certain extent it is the perception of stability of the cost of financing, the opportunity from regulation that will make some transactions possible, and, I think, the backlog that had been created over the years. But in general, boards are very sanguine that this is the right moment — let’s take the opportunity, let’s transform. Many boards are also looking at what’s happening with AI and thinking, okay, it’s a Copernican revolution that is happening, therefore I’d better be ahead of it and take the opportunity, and so on and so forth.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:48:37):  Otherwise you’re behind. So your charge is global — you get to look around the world at opportunities. I’m curious, how do you measure where opportunities are greatest? Are there specific data points you’re looking at, like volume of IPOs or mergers? How do you look at the world region by region and figure out, hey, we need to spend more time and capital in region X?

FILIPPO GORI (00:49:06):  So what we do — this is a constant process whereby we challenge ourselves consistently as the CIB, the commercial and investment bank, management team. And we say, okay, we operate in 46 countries — should we operate in five more? And if so, which ones do we look at? What is the opportunity? Why does it strategically make sense to invest more in that country versus another? Or why don’t we invest more in an existing country? And so on and so forth. Bearing in mind that one of the fundamental ways in which we look at the world is the following: we have never left a single country since we entered it. So being in a country is not the same thing as owning a share or a stock — you don’t like it anymore, you sell it. Once you make the decision to enter a country, you are there forever, because you’re there for the employees, for the clients, for the communities, the regulators, and so on and so forth. So we think about that very carefully.

We look at some macro trends, we try to understand where the world is going, where the opportunities are coming. We ask our clients — some of our clients are some of the largest companies in the world — and you try to see how they think, how they operate: can we support them everywhere around the world where they operate, or not? Or similarly, there are companies that are developing in some of these countries and want to go global — can we support them in that case? So that’s the exercise that we do, and we look at it collectively as a CIB management team across the various products — whether it’s banking, whether it’s payments, whether it’s markets, whether it’s security services — and we collectively make a decision on where to invest. And we do it on a quasi-regular basis; we discuss this.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:50:57):  So I want to talk about the EU and Asia, but before we dive into those areas — any other areas of the world that are presenting a great number of opportunities?

FILIPPO GORI (00:51:10):  Well, Latin America, for sure. We have not discussed it, but if you think about Brazil and Mexico — for sure, super interesting markets, super important for us. And they are at the doorstep of the United States. So it is fundamental that we have a critical presence over there, and that we keep on growing it.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:51:33):  And you mentioned earlier you think the European area is almost overlooked — that they’re on the verge of the next phase of growth. What’s going on in Europe?

FILIPPO GORI (00:51:46):  So what I meant is, there is generically a degree of pessimism around Europe. The pessimism comes from the fact that the growth of the European Union, in terms of GDP growth, has been anemic for now — call it 25 years. It grows 0.5, 0.7, maybe 1 percent, and we consider ourselves lucky. And that has been one of the challenges, because growth brings jobs, growth brings wealth, growth brings all the things that I see here in the United States. At the same time, as a European, I always want to remind folks that Europe at times is not widely understood. The European Union concept was not born out of the idea of an economic union. It was born out of the dream of the founding fathers of the European Union not to have war on European soil ever again.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:52:49):  From a security perspective, not an economic perspective.

FILIPPO GORI (00:52:51):  They were visionaries, actually. If you think about De Gasperi in Italy, and Adenauer in Germany, and some of the others — the Second World War had just finished, the coal and steel treaties of the beginning of the 1950s. The idea was, if we are intertwined from an economic standpoint, it is less likely we will go to war together.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:53:17):  It’s mostly worked.

FILIPPO GORI (00:53:18):  And this worked. And the next thing was the Treaty of Rome, and that was the beginning of the European Union as we know it, and Maastricht and everything else. So I just want to remind people that Europe does exist — the European Union exists first and foremost not to have war on European soil. And we need to grow, don’t get me wrong — less bureaucracy, more growth — but we should not lose sight of what the founding fathers gave us.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:53:45):  So let’s talk about the perspective from the United States about Europe: a lovely place to visit, but a challenging place to do business. A great place to live — because in much of Europe there’s guaranteed healthcare, guaranteed paid education, paid retirement — but it makes it expensive to do business there. It’s very hard to fire anybody. Is that American bias accurate, or no?

FILIPPO GORI (00:54:21):  The criticism that is laid at the steps of the European Union is perfectly valid — all of the things you just mentioned, and more; the list is forever long. What I’m trying to say, though, is something different. This year we’re celebrating 250 years of the United States of America. Europe has over 3,000 years of history. So you can’t expect that 3,000 years of history get wiped out and they all row in the same direction. We have come from having had war every 10 years to not having had war since 1945. We have strengthened that. We have culturally enormous social nets. And my concern is, if the economies don’t grow, and we have a problem of demography, then in the future we will not be able to afford those social nets. So things have to happen in Europe — and I’m perfectly fine with that. Former President Draghi, in his white paper, told us what we have to do. We don’t need to reinvent the world; we just need to go and implement what he told us. Will we do it? Yes. Will it take us a long time? Absolutely, yes — because it’s Europe. But Europe exists for a variety of different reasons, and we should never forget that.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:55:55):  Really, really interesting. So we’ve talked about regions; let’s talk about sectors. AI and technology, obviously a big sector. Manufacturing and industrial reshoring is going on. Infrastructure changes, financial services, energy and renewable energy, healthcare, defense — so many different areas seem to be going through massive transitions. What do you do with a target-rich environment like that? How do you decide where to focus? Or do the companies reveal themselves, and it becomes self-evident?

FILIPPO GORI (00:56:37):  So we have an account planning process — year by year, sector by sector, region by region — where we look at the various sectors. And while you mentioned all of them in one go, not every sector is hot at the same time. So the focus is, within all the sectors in every country, and by subsector — we have 28 subsectors — do we have enough bankers? Do we have enough resources allocated? Can we do more? Should we do more? If we have to prioritize, how do we prioritize those asks? And that’s what we do. So there is an enormous amount of account planning — which, if you do it well, then the results will come.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:57:25):  And you know, the Draghi white paper sort of veers into government-driven industrial policy. Obviously that’s big in China; it was big in the United States up until about 40 years ago. It seems like it’s coming back. How do you think about government involvement in these private-company decisions and growth?

FILIPPO GORI (00:57:50):  So Europe already has a larger component of the economy that is state-owned or partially state-owned companies. So from a European standpoint, in itself, it is not so rare to have concepts like that. The idea, to me, is more: can we have pan-European champions? We have done that in the automotive sector; we have done that in the airline industry. We have not really done that in other sectors. Europe has freedom of movement for people, for capital — but there is no real freedom of movement for services yet. So that’s one of the things that we should try to implement, and therefore facilitate the growth of European champions in the various sectors, some of which you mentioned, so that we will be able to compete better with the US on one side, or with Asia on the other side. Europe still has a little bit of a bias that small is good, because small protects the consumer, from an economic standpoint — thinking about oligopolies and everything else. I think we’re at a stage where right now size matters, and therefore we should facilitate the creation of larger European companies — pan-European, not country-specific.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:59:38):  Like Airbus — that’s the model.

FILIPPO GORI (00:59:41):  Airbus could be one. There are plenty of other examples — in consumer there are a few; in cars, Stellantis is an example. We should do that in financial services, for instance. I think it’s fundamental that Europe has larger financial services players, and so on and so forth.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:00:06):  What’s fascinating to me about Europe — and I appreciate what you’re saying about smaller companies needing to get big — in the US, where we used to enforce antitrust rules but kind of stopped in the 1980s, not only have these companies gotten big, but they’ve become mega-companies that dominate their space. To be clear, that’s very unlikely to happen in Europe, right? You want them large and global and competitive, but not necessarily dominant — at least if I’m going by what you’re describing.

FILIPPO GORI (01:00:38):  Yes — that would be a step too far from a European Union standpoint, given the fundamental way in which Europeans look at business. But larger companies, absolutely.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:00:50):  Right. I was curious, because they seem to be very — I don’t want to say hostile, but very specific — about regulating the Facebooks and Apples and Googles of the world, versus smaller companies that are trying to get a toehold in the global marketplace. All right, so before I get to my favorite questions, one last question. What do you think most people in investment banking, and/or commercial or corporate banking, aren’t thinking about, but really should be? What’s the important topic that’s not getting enough focus?

FILIPPO GORI (01:01:32):  That’s a good question. I think there is a ton of focus on AI, geopolitics, inflation and other things. And I think we don’t spend enough time focusing on the people, and how we prepare the people for the future that is coming.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:01:55):  So is that education? Is that corporate training?

FILIPPO GORI (01:01:58):  It’s a little bit of everything. How do we explain to folks how we see the future? We should do more from that point of view, and prepare them for a future that is coming. But that starts with academia, and how we recruit people, and so on and so forth.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:02:17):  So let’s jump to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests — starting with, tell us about your early mentors who helped shape your career.

FILIPPO GORI (01:02:26):  Man, I’ve been lucky to have had many people looking after me over the years. I’ve been lucky to have worked for the same individual for 19 years — I joined as his analyst, he was the associate on the desk, and 19 years later we were two senior managing directors, but I was still working for him. But there are three that I would like to mention. One is Matteo Del Fante. When I joined in London, he was the most senior Italian at the firm, and he is now the CEO of Poste Italiane — as a friend, as somebody who has looked after me and helped me, guided me. He’s from Tuscany too. And then probably Marc Badrichani, who retired in 2024, and he was running the markets business. And Carlos Hernandez, who was running banking before me. And I still remember, when I was in Hong Kong during COVID, he used to call me twice a week, religiously, every week, without booking a meeting — just call and say, how is everything going? All good? Tell me what’s happening. So the human element was really, really, really important for me.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:03:39):  Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites, and what are you reading currently?

FILIPPO GORI (01:03:43):  So I’m an avid reader — I read lots of stuff, nothing finance-driven. Right now I’m reading three Italian books at the same time, which is a little bit complicated. I like novels, I like fiction. But the one book that I read quite recently that impressed me was a book called The Wealth of Shadows.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:04:14):  The Wealth of Shadows.

FILIPPO GORI (01:04:15):  By Graham Moore. And it explains, in a fictionalized way, how the US during the Second World War used its economy to cripple the German economy. And you have individuals like Keynes playing into this, and how ultimately this became Bretton Woods, and the role of how the dollar overtook the pound, and so on and so forth. That was fascinating. And I read another book called A Girl Called Samson, which is about the Revolutionary War here in the United States, and a woman — it’s a real history — a woman that fought in the Continental Army under Washington, dressed as a boy.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:05:07):  Oh really? Very, very interesting.

FILIPPO GORI (01:05:09):  Those are two. But I also use Audible a lot. So audiobooks have lately been my saving grace, because I can listen to them while I’m traveling on planes, so I don’t need to carry the physical books with me. I’m a heavy user of Audible.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:05:31):  Besides Audible, what else are you streaming? What are you either watching or listening to?

FILIPPO GORI (01:05:37):  Watching — apart from your program, obviously — my wife and I loved Outlander, which just streamed its last season, on Starz I think it is, here in the US. And then Drops of God, about wine — it’s a fascinating series — and a few others.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:06:02):  Huh, really, really interesting. We watched Outlander until the previous season, and kind of said, all right, we’re good right here — when they were stuck in the United States. But it was a really fascinating show. Final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interested in a career in either corporate, commercial or investment banking?

FILIPPO GORI (01:06:28):  It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. So take your time; understand the environment in which you operate. Try to focus on the bigger, important things — don’t be too focused just on the product, but understand the environment in which you operate. Remember, it’s a people business, both internally and externally. So make sure that you invest in creating human relationships.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:06:53):  And our final question: what do you know about the world of investing and investment banking today that might have been useful back in 1999, when you were first getting started?

FILIPPO GORI (01:07:05):  It’s a marathon, not a sprint. So never take things for granted. And above all, don’t make personal sacrifices that you’re going to regret later. At times, I’ve not been as present as I would have liked with my family.

BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:07:28):  Hmm, interesting enough. Filippo, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Filippo Gori. He is co-head of global banking at JP Morgan. If you enjoyed this conversation, well, check out any of the 650 we’ve done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps us put these conversations together each week: Alexis Noriega is my video producer; Sean Russo is my researcher; Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

 

~~~

 

 

 

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My morning reads:

• Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI: Companies big and small are mixing models and it’s changing the economics and power players of the industry. Model costs have collapsed and the spending discipline has arrived all at once. (Wall Street Journal)

• Women are making more money. Why are they still doing everything else? What happens when women’s economic role changes faster than anyone’s expectations do? Your Brain on Money on the second-shift persistence — earnings equality is advancing faster than domestic equality, and the mental load math hasn’t moved. (Your Brain on Money) see also Taylor Swift Bought Her Way Out of Biometric Surveillance. Kylie Jenner Wants to Sell It. In the age of facial recognition, privacy is a status symbol. Steffi Cao on facial recognition as ambient infrastructure — your phone, the TSA gate, the grocery store — and the one thing money can still buy its way out of. (Slate)

• For Family Offices, AI Is Both an Investment Theme and an Operational Test: Adoption of artificial intelligence tools and investments are rising across family offices. Chief Investment Officer on the double exposure — family offices allocating to AI while struggling to deploy it internally. (Chief Investment Officer)

• The Rolex Report 2026: The same leader, a different market: A Chrono24’s annual state of the secondary market — Rolex still dominates, but the price dynamics underneath have shifted meaningfully from the 2022 peak era. The analysis of completed transactions from 2018 to Q2 2026 shows Rolex’s pandemic premium has fully unwound. The brand stays in front, but its lead has narrowed across every segment and younger buyers are spreading their money more widely.  (Chrono24)

• Paramount Has Spent 100 Years in Hollywood. David Ellison Loved That. Until He Didn’t: The Hollywood Reporter on Ellison’s pivot from studio romantic to cost-cutter — the century-old lot, the layoffs, and the streaming math that changed his mind. The mogul says he’s considering moving his studio out of California. Not long ago, he was talking a big game about how a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery would boost the state. (Hollywood Reporter)

• Waymo Is Growing Faster Than Ever. So Are Its Glitches: The New York Times on the scaling paradox — the expansion is working, the safety record holds, and the edge cases multiply anyway. As Waymo deploys more driverless cars to 15 U.S. cities and counting, its vehicles keep encountering new and unexpected situations that they have no script to handle. (New York Times)

• The Rise of the Unstoppable American Tourist: A strong dollar, accumulated savings and no apparent price sensitivity. Europe has noticed. A supercharged U.S. economy has helped transform a nation of homebodies into zealous international travelers; ‘Travel isn’t optional’ (Wall Street Journal)

• Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse: The Walrus on the post-search internet — AI answers replacing links, the traffic collapse downstream, and the information ecosystem nobody chose. As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing (The Walrus)

• Dogs Can Tell When You’re Happy, Sad or Frustrated, Study Shows: Kathleen Felton on researchers scanning awake, unrestrained dogs to test how deep the emotional read actually goes. Anyone with a dog suspected as much; the brain imaging is the new part. (Washington Post) see also Can Florida’s ‘coastal corridor’ project safeguard wildlife and boost economy? Conservationists have created a ‘coastal corridor’ of ocean-based projects designed to preserve and nourish vulnerable marine life. Richard Luscombe on disappearing manatees, bleached reefs, gender-changing turtles and hurricane-wrecked oyster beds — and an attempt to borrow a conservation playbook that already worked on land.  (The Guardian).

• The 2026 song of the summer: The Washington Post’s interactive on the summer-song race — the data, the contenders, and how the category itself has fragmented — a dreamy, data-driven quest to find the summer soundtrack of 2026. (Washington Post)

Video of the day: This Is The Most Effective Home Wind Turbine In The World. Why Don’t We Use It?

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dr. Ankur Crawford, EVP and Portfolio Manager at Alger. She heads the firm’s flagship Alger Capital Appreciation strategies. She was an Engineer at Intel, won the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, and was awarded fellowship Natl Academy of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, and holds several U.S. patents.  She was recognized as a “Top Women in Asset Management” in 2020 and serves on the board of The Knowledge House, a Bronx-based charity teaching technology skills to underserved communities.

 

Artificial intelligence has never been more important to the US economy than it is right now

Source: Derek Thompson

 

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An interesting article about investors carrying too much cash was in today’s Wall Street Journal. There’s nothing in the piece that is inaccurate or misleading; it’s just a little narrow and could use better framing.1

I want to address five elements that put the issue of how much cash you should be carrying into a broader perspective:

1. House Money: Everybody wants to compare the current market boom to the late 90s – I disagree on valuations and bubbliciousness, but allow me to share my experience from the 90s; people who were not managing money then might not be aware of the history.

I have vivid mid-1990s recollections of clients calling to sell stocks. It was the 14th or 15th year of a 19-year bull market. They wanted to roll out of some highly appreciated equities into real estate – a vacation property or an upgrade to their primary residence. They willingly gave up a few years of future equity returns in exchange for an immediate improvement to their lifestyle.

A reminder for individual investors: you are not hedge fund managers competing in league tables for bragging rights; you are individuals trying to live and enjoy your life, giving your family the best opportunities and experiences you can.

Today, we are 17 years post-GFC bottom; many people are sitting on huge gains. I never have a problem when clients want to take something off the table to make a major purchase that a) they can afford and b) brings them joy.

2. Why Not Bonds? If you’re in your 20s, 30s, or 40s, you’re probably better off in an all-equity portfolio (assuming you have the self-discipline to not panic every drawdown). The anecdote the WSJ starts with is a 75-year-old retiree with 85% equity and 15% money market. It asks, “Why not own some bonds instead of the money market?”

The short answer is certainty. If you are mapping out your annual spend, you know exactly what you have and what it will be when any of those bills come due.

The longer answer is the tradeoff: Are you getting paid enough yield to compensate for any additional risk you assume? SNAXX is a favorite Money Market yielding 3.65%. (0.19% expense ratio). In an era of 3% inflation, you are only slightly ahead.

Investment-grade (IG) bond funds yield ~4.4%; go out 5–10 years and, in exchange for more duration risk, yield ~4.9%. At 10+ years, you are at ~5.4%. The longer the duration, the more sensitive bonds are to changes in interest rates. If you look at Munis, you are getting ~4% – a 6.4% taxable equivalent yield for investors who are high-income and live in a high-tax state.

The trade-off? Most of these funds experienced a lot of volatility in 2024-25. The concern is the timing of when cash is needed into a bond drawdown.2

3. Good Planning: For a 65-year-old+ investor, keeping a modest pile of cash is not the worst thing they can do. Mapping out your liabilities for the year, whether it’s quarterly tax filings, philanthropy, mortgage payments, wedding gifts, or the like, is simply a comfortable form of planning.

If knowing these cash uses are not at risk of a bond fund drawdown; if it makes it easier to budget your annual spending; if all of the above allows you to sleep well at night, then you have your answer to the MM or Bond fund question.

4. My priors: I do not believe individual investors need to wring out every last basis point of yield at the cost of their own comfort levels. Sometimes, we give up rounding errors or returns in exchange for less stress.

Everything in investing (and life) is a series of tradeoffs; we want to make the best decisions we can with limited information about an uncertain future. This includes yields, inflation, and the direction of future interest rates.

5. Embrace Joy: The time to defer gratification is when you are young, with decades of compounding ahead of you.

My favorite stories from advisors and clients are about families who are reluctant to spend because they are nervous, having lived through the Dotcom implosion, the GFC, Flash Crash, COVID, and 2022. But if the numbers say they can easily afford to take the entire extended family to visit the old country, or to buy that vacation property, or to pay for their kids’ first-home down payments or their grandkids’ college, then why the hell not?

What else is the purpose of money if not to live and be joyful in our limited time on this planet?

~~~

If you are the kind of person who wants to squeeze every last basis point of yield out of your cash, then – depending upon your income and tax situation – an intermediate IG Corp or Muni fund makes a lot of sense.

If a few thousand dollars in additional yield over the course of spending down a pile of cash each year isn’t as important as your peace of mind, if it makes you more comfortable, then perhaps a money market fund is the right answer for you. It depends on the specifics of your circumstances, preferences, and individual psychology.

Like so much in this space, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

The key to making a good cash management decision is understanding the trade-offs and the dollars involved. An informed, thoughtful process that considers all of these factors will lead you to the best decision for you and your individual circumstances.

 

 

See also:
Wealth Management Has a $3 Trillion Problem: Investors Are Keeping Too Much Cash
By Miriam Gottfried
WSJ, Aug. 12, 2026

 

Previously:
Overvalued, Bubble, or Revolution? (July 17, 2026)

 

 

 

__________

1. The best news about this article? At least we are not talking about people sitting with 100s of 1000s of dollars in 0.25% checking accounts…

2. There may be some PTSD following the 16% drawdown in the Bloomberg US Aggregate Bond Index (AGG) in 2022.

 

The post Let’s Talk About Cash… appeared first on The Big Picture.

My mid-week morning reads:

• I Vibe Coded a Security Risk: The app worked. Nobody, including me, had checked whether it was safe. “The feature is live lol” — a sentence written with a genuinely nervous laugh, immediately after the code-review agent explained what had just shipped. (Every)

• America’s Mortgage King Lost $600 Million and Needed a Rescue: Billionaire Mat Ishbia was in trouble after a failed takeover and mistimed bets on interest rates. The rescue came from Oaktree Capital Management, which tells you most of what you need to know about the terms. (Wall Street Journal) see also MiB: Mat Ishbia, United Wholesale Mortgage’s CEO: The chief executive officer of United Wholesale Mortgage (UWC), the top wholesale lender and No. 2 overall mortgage lender in the United States. The 9,000-person firm went public in the biggest SPAC ever. (The Big Picture)

• The Best Way to Sell a Concentrated Position: Most of the time, this exercise will tell you to sell more than you’d like. You won’t get filthy rich by doing so, but you’ll never be poor either. Nick Maggiulli works the actual math on the problem every advisor eventually inherits — one giant low-basis holding and no painless exit. (Of Dollars And Data)

• How animation studios are killing their future with AI: Studios are firing skilled animators, then rehiring them to fix what the models get wrong. Sadev Parikh on the full cycle — studios fire skilled animators, then rehire them to clean up what the models got wrong. (Washington Post)

• War Is Helping Chinese EVs Upend the Global Car Market: High gasoline prices are giving a boost to China’s electric-vehicle exports, Thailand cut excise taxes on imported electric cars and its prime minister swapped his Rolls-Royce for a BYD as part of a national energy push. Laos banned gasoline car imports outright for the rest of the year. (Wall Street Journal)

• Twenty-Seven Years with Victor Niederhoffer (By a longtime collaborator)  Laurel Kenner’s remembrance of Niederhoffer, who died August 4. She was halfway through a Louis l’Amour novel about a man who repeatedly started over from zero, and recognized him in it. (Laurel Kenner)

• Greenland Issues ‘Strong Warning’ as Trump-Linked Oil Firm Prepares to Drill: The island’s government says it granted no approval after Greenland Energy landed equipment ashore for exploratory drilling. (The Guardian)

• Leg evolution made most humans right-handed: ‘Rightie’ preference isn’t seen in any of our primate relatives. (Popular Science)

• How a Drone ‘Hellscape’ Might Stop a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan: Inspired by Ukraine’s battlefield gains, Taiwan is betting on drones to deter a potential Chinese invasion. The Pentagon’s plan to fill the Taiwan Strait with thousands of cheap autonomous systems, and whether it would actually buy enough time. (New York Times)

• A Spectacular Solar Eclipse Is Coming. Here’s How to See It.: The August 2026 totality path, where to stand, and what the viewing conditions look like. Here’s where the August 12 eclipse will be visible, what viewers can expect—and why even a partial eclipse requires proper eye protection. (National Geographic)

Video of the day: NASA Is Flying to an Asteroid Worth More Than Earth — Here’s the Catch

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Jack Raines, a writer and venture capitalist. We discuss his new book, Young Money.

 

Chipmakers and health care sectors have converged to identical forward P/E ratios for the first time in years

Source: Apollo

 

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Guest post by Josh Frankel

 

In April 2025, my NYS municipality rushed to sign a contract for Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), live view cameras, and drone-as-first-responder technology with Flock Safety. The Flock contract was hastily put on the agenda for a vote that same evening, bypassing the customary public notice, as required by law. The subject was misleadingly referred to as “Public Safety Equipment” and gave no further detail as to what was under consideration or why.

Curious about where the cameras would be placed, I filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for the exact locations of the new Flock cameras. My request was denied three times, despite an extremely favorable opinion from the NYS Committee on Open Government (COOG).

So I sued. I filed an Article 78 litigation against the Village of Scarsdale (Index # 57090/2026 – February, 2026, Westchester County Supreme Court¹); last submissions to the judge were April 27. There is similar litigation, brought by the same New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) attorneys representing me, pending against Westchester County.2

~~~

A veil of secrecy is an essential component of Flock’s playbook, and what happened in my village is the playbook in municipalities nationwide. Flock makes inroads, secures support — and, I believe, personally coaches local law enforcement and trustees on how to keep it all on the down-low. Before you know it, Flock cameras are popping up everywhere.

Worse, some communities vote them through “consent agendas” — bulk votes on what are supposed to be routine matters. One community, Lucas County Ohio, rammed through on a consent agenda and tried to cancel once local officials realized exactly what they’d done.

The story of what happened in my community was perfectly chronicled by independent journalist Jessica Burbank. She wrote a killer piece for DropSite News and produced an outstanding one-hour documentary. Jessica’s work was a catalyst in bringing mass surveillance front and center nationwide. Her work, along with that of 404Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been indispensable in the effort to rein in this out-of-control technology.

Ultimately, intense public outcry and the failure to secure grant funding led to the cancellation of the contract in my community.

My involvement in opposing mass surveillance continues through my ongoing litigation with the NYCLU and volunteer work with the Institute for Justice (IJ). I am slated to join an IJ webinar in the coming days to discuss my experience. To that end, I have put together the following “toolkit,” which I hope other like-minded folks will use as a roadmap in their local communities.

Each and every tool in the kit was useful in its own way, and taken together, they are very powerful.

Good luck!

NOTE: FOIA/FOIL laws vary greatly from state to state. What works in NYS might not work elsewhere (and vice versa). Familiarize yourself with your state’s law so you can extract everything to which you are legally entitled.

 

~~~

 

LOCAL ALPR ADVOCACY: A CITIZEN’S TOOLKIT
Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Ask Questions.

Local surveillance programs can move from proposal to approval quickly—and sometimes with relatively little public attention. Residents do not need to be lawyers, technologists, or privacy experts to have an impact. They do need to pay attention, ask questions, obtain the records, and persist.

1. KNOW WHAT YOUR GOVERNMENT IS DOING

-Watch local government agendas. Search Board, Council, Police Commission and committee agendas for terms such as ALPR, license plate reader, camera, public safety technology, surveillance, and vendor names such as Flock Safety.

-Attend or watch public meetings. Important details often emerge during discussion that never appear in the agenda or resolution.

-Read the actual documents. Don’t rely solely on how a proposal is characterized publicly. Obtain the proposed contract, staff memoranda, policies, presentations and supporting materials.

-Ask questions early. Who will have access? How long will data be retained? Who can search it? Can other agencies access it? Is data shared across jurisdictions? What audit controls exist? Where will cameras be located? What happens when the contract ends?

2. USE PUBLIC-RECORDS LAWS

-NYS FOIL is a powerful investigative tool (with a strong presumption of access). Request contracts, proposals, vendor correspondence, policies, data-retention rules, audit logs, camera locations, internal memoranda and communications with neighboring agencies. AI can be very helpful in crafting comprehensive requests that are impossible to dodge.

-Ask for records—not answers. A well-crafted request identifies existing records rather than asking the government to explain itself.

-Request native electronic records when useful. Spreadsheets and databases can reveal considerably more than PDFs.

-Appeal denials. An agency’s initial “no” is not necessarily the final word.

-Know the exemptions being asserted. Ask the government to identify specifically why records are being withheld rather than accepting generalized claims about “security” or “law enforcement.”

-Use New York’s Committee on Open Government. COOG advisory opinions and guidance can be valuable when challenging an agency’s interpretation of FOIL. The Advisory Opinion I got — F19882 — could be very useful in other NYS municipalities.

3. FOLLOW THE PAPER TRAIL

-Build a chronology.

-Save agendas, meeting videos, resolutions and contracts.

-Preserve emails and correspondence.

-Compare what officials say publicly with what the underlying documents show.

-Follow the money: grants, purchase orders, contracts, renewals and amendments can reveal where a program is headed.

-Set up a Google Alert for “Flock Safety” — stay current on what is going on nationwide.

–Look beyond your municipality. Counties, neighboring police departments and other agencies may possess records involving the same system or vendor.

4. USE THE PUBLIC PROCESS

-Speak during public comment.

-Write to elected officials both collectively and individually.

-Ask specific questions that require specific answers.

-Draft and circulate a petition (one targeted petition is better than several that are fragmented).

-Encourage officials to adopt written policies before deployment rather than after cameras are operating.

-Ask for meaningful legislative oversight—not simply administrative approval by a police department.

–Bring other interested residents into the discussion. One inquiry is easy to dismiss; sustained public interest is much harder to ignore.

5. LEVERAGE LOCAL MEDIA

-Local reporters are often looking for well-documented stories about government, policing, technology and privacy.

-Give journalists documents and facts, not merely conclusions.

-Explain why the issue affects ordinary residents—not just people concerned about surveillance.

-Simplify: A complicated technology story becomes much more understandable when framed around these simple questions: Who is watching? What are they collecting? Who can see it? How long do they keep it?

6. DON’T ACCEPT FALSE CHOICES

Supporting effective law enforcement and questioning government surveillance are not mutually exclusive.

False question:

“Are ALPRs good or bad?”

Better questions:

What problem are we trying to solve?

Does this technology materially solve it?

What information will be collected about innocent people in the process?

What safeguards, oversight and transparency should accompany it?

7. DO RESEARCH

Access the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to get actual crime and clearance data for your municipality. Doing so can go a long way toward determining if you even have a problem that needs to be solved. I believe “Motor Vehicle Theft” should be the most relevant crime to explore. What is, or has been, the trajectory of clearance rates, i.e. are they rising dramatically, as they should be? This data is readily available and should match up to what you would receive from a FOIL request, without the wait.

8. BE PERSISTENT

Government processes move slowly. Records requests get delayed. Answers may generate more questions. Policies change. Vendors return with revised proposals.

Persistence matters.

9. THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON

Local government works differently when people are watching.

You don’t need special access. You need curiosity, public records, patience—and a willingness to keep asking reasonable questions until you get reasonable answers.

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES

1. JOSHUA FRANKEL v. VILLAGE OF SCARSDALE
Special Proceedings – CPLR Article 78

2. I am not a named party in the new case against the County, though that COOG opinion and my FOIL work were foundational. (Index # 57090/2026 – Westchester County Supreme Court)

 

The post Flock Around and Find Out: A Citizen’s Guide to Local ALPR Oversight appeared first on The Big Picture.

My Two-for-Tuesday morning reads:

• The Housing Recession is Over: The vibes remain bad, the recovery is uneven, but recession is now behind us. Conor Sen thought 2026 was the year housing cracked — Florida, Texas and Arizona were carrying 20% to 30% more listings than the same point pre-pandemic, and the number was still climbing. He is calling it the other way now. (Conor Sen)

• Private Credit Is Under Growing Strain, Despite Industry’s Upbeat Tone: Default rates are hitting recent highs, and internal reviews of loan health point to tougher times ahead, a WSJ analysis shows. Default rates are hitting recent highs, and internal reviews of loan health point to tougher times ahead. (Wall Street Journal) see also Private Equity Is Stuck With 33,575 Unsold Businesses: Even amid a booming deal-making environment, private equity firms are unable to exit a growing number of investments at values their investors require. The exit math is not working. A number that size is not a backlog, it is a structural problem for the entire asset class. (New York Times)

• Making it to New All-Time Highs: The world is awash in negativity, and every week brings a fresh reason to get scared out of stocks. The record highs keep arriving anyway. To reach new highs again and again in the 2020s investors have had to ignore: A global pandemic. The fastest 30%+ drawdown in history. A supply chain crisis. Meme stock mania. A 40-year high inflation rate of 9%. Russia invading Ukraine. 73 crash predictions from Robert Kiyosaki. 19 Michael Burry top calls… (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Everyday Guide to Supersizing Your Retirement Account: There are a number of tricks to grow a tax-advantaged 401(k) or IRA into a fortune. The mechanical tricks for turning a tax-advantaged 401(k) or IRA into something considerably larger than the contribution limits suggest. (Wall Street Journal)

• Record Profits, Terrible Service: Something’s Got to Give for US Consumers: An interactive on the widening gap between what American companies are earning and what customers are actually getting. Experts say consolidation and market power have left consumers paying more for less (The Guardian)

• America’s Capital of Homebuying Regret: Austin, spring 2022: Ryan McPherson and his wife bid $20,000 over ask to reach $615,000 on a four-bedroom, and wrote the sellers a heartfelt letter to close the deal. Prices have gone the other way since. Meet the Texas homeowners who are deep in the red thanks to Austin’s long, painful real estate hangover (Business Insider)

• Kill the Ticks: America needs a bigger plan to control its tick problem. “The ticks are winning,” a CDC scientist wrote in a recent paper. To put it even more bluntly, humans are losing and are on the retreat. (The Atlantic)

• It’s the Summer of Purse Guys: Ashley Fetters Maloy on the handbag as punctuation mark, and what happens when men — sidelined by a few centuries of pockets in menswear — start carrying one. For years, men have talked themselves out of one of fashion’s greatest inventions. This summer, cool guys are embracing bags, from the huge to the itty bitty. (Washington Post)

• July was the hottest month in the US since records began in 1895: The month featured long, intense heat domes that led to record hot temperatures from the East Coast to the Plains and Southwestern states. NOAA’s temperature records date back to 1895. Andrew Freedman on long, intense heat domes that set records from the East Coast through the Plains and Southwest. Large wildfires were burning across the Pacific Northwest and Canada by month’s end, mirroring Europe’s hottest summer on record. (CNN)

• Loss is a Bitch: No matter how much I try, I’m sad more than I realize: A burned-out writer takes a few days off the keyboard, and his wife suggests he write something personal instead. What comes back are memories he had stopped questioning.  (The Omission)

Video of the day: India’s Youth Are Angry. Here’s Why

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Jack Raines, a writer and venture capitalist. We discuss his new book, Young Money.

 

War Is Helping Chinese EVs Upend the Global Car Market

Source: Wall Street Journal

 

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Part II of my discussion with Vanguard’s Joe Davis and Rebecca Choo Quan about why we all make so many investing mistakes:

Breaking the Biggest Wealth-Destroying Habits
Knowing what not to do is only half the battle—the other half is actually avoiding those missteps. In part two of our conversation, Barry Ritholtz of Ritholtz Wealth Management gets practical: how to safeguard your portfolio against panic, minimize regret when making high-stakes decisions and think about wealth in terms of decades, not days.

Here is part I of our conversation.

 

 

See also:
Wall Street Journal

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

YouTube

 

Previously:
Vanguard: The Costliest Mistakes Even Experienced Investors Make (July 23, 2026)

How Not to Invest (full archive)

Vanguard Group (full archive)

 

The post Vanguard: Breaking the Biggest Wealth-Destroying Habits appeared first on The Big Picture.

My back-to-work morning reads:

• Mind the Gap 2026: Morningstar’s annual investor return gap study — the difference between fund returns and investor returns, driven by badly timed buying and selling. The behavior gap persists, and it’s still costing investors more than a percentage point a year. (Morningstar)

• Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate: The merchants are becoming princes, writes Tim O’Reilly (Economist) (archive mirror) see also Trump quietly clears the road for Musk’s Cybercab: “It’d be wonderful for the United States to have a national set of rules for autonomous driving.” It’d be wonderful for the United States to have a national set of rules for autonomous driving. (Popular Information)

• The Mystery of Online Prices: How Personal Data and Privacy Change What You Pay for Groceries: Mozilla Foundation’s investigation into surveillance pricing — the same cart costs different amounts for different people, and the data brokers deciding who pays more. (Mozilla Foundation)

• The Service A post-mortem on New York City’s weed underground. Ariel Delgado Dixon is the author of the new novel, Sourland. Here, she remembers a kingpin whose dog she used to walk. (Dirt)

• These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes: A new generation of philanthropists made rich by artificial intelligence are preparing to give away their vast wealth. What should we make of a multi-billion-dollar pinky promise? Wired on the AI wealth pledge wave — the billionaires promising to give it all away, and the question of whether philanthropy at this scale is generosity or governance. (Wired)

• Danny Meyer Finally Tells Us What Went Wrong: Matt Rodbard’s interview with the hospitality legend — the no-tipping retreat, the Union Square Cafe moves, and an unusually candid accounting of the bets that didn’t work. The new book What Could Possibly Go Right? is honest about wrong decisions. The industry needs to hear this. (Food Time with Matt Rodbard)

• How Data Centers Broke American Politics: What the Unabomber, Steve Bannon’s tech guy, and Bernie Sanders taught me about the great data center backlash of 2026. Wired on the data center backlash as a political realignment — power bills, water rights, and land use are scrambling party coalitions in every state with a buildout. (Wired)

• How the U.S. Squandered Its Strategic Advantage: The Atlantic on the weapons shortage shaping the Iran conflict — decades of industrial-base neglect meeting the reality of sustained munitions expenditure. (The Atlantic)

• The Prettiest Town in Every US State: From Stonington, Maine, to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, these picturesque locales prove that living large isn’t a requirement for living beautifully (Architectural Digest)

• How Jordan Harper Reinvented Noir for the Epstein Era: The New Yorker on the crime novelist whose fiction maps the actual power structures of exploitation — noir updated for a world where the conspiracies are real and documented. This year’s buzzy “A Violent Masterpiece” inverts the genre’s traditional contrast between optimism and despair. Is a hopeful crime novel still a noir? (New Yorker)

Video of the day: Erasing Taxes For the Rich Is the Hottest Business on Wall Street

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Jack Raines, a writer and venture capitalist. We discuss his new book, Young Money.

100 Years of US Stock Market Wealth Creation Breakdown – Bessembinder Findings

Source: Morningstar

 

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Transcript:

The transcript from this week’s, MiB: NAME, TITLE, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

 

~~~

 

XXXXX insert transcript here XXXXX

 

~~~

 

 

 

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Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:

• Criminal Deception in Silicon Valley: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, our findings reveal that entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception through a process of façading: Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance. An Organization Science paper extending the cultural-entrepreneurship literature — how founders craft compelling narratives to acquire resources, and where dramatized discourse crosses into fraud. (Organization Science)

• How rogue officers turned a nationwide camera network into a tool for stalking: Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems. Drew Harwell on Flock’s license-plate cameras, built to fight crime — and the at least 50 law enforcement officers charged with or accused of misusing them, including to spy on their exes. (Washington Post)

• A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?: Jeff Wise on a medevac flight out of Roswell and how drone warfare is making the skies more dangerous, even for airplanes far from any battlefield. Drone warfare is making the skies more dangerous, even for airplanes far from the battlefield. (Wired)

• How the Reflecting Pool Came to Mirror Trump’s Washington: The New York Times on the canoe incident’s afterlife — how a shallow pool on the National Mall became the perfect metaphor for a capital where every symbol is contested and every stunt is a federal case. (New York Times)

• REVEALED: The Scope of ICE’s Surveillance of Its Online Critics: Talking Points Memo on the documents showing ICE monitoring journalists, activists, and ordinary critics. (Talking Points Memo) see also How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics: The Wall Street Journal’s parallel investigation — the agency is building cases from posts, likes, and follower lists. Agency says its surveillance program searches for threats to agents, but critics see free-speech infringements (Wall Street Journal)

• How predatory trade schools drained $300 million from the GI Bill and cheated veterans: The institutions defrauded Veterans Affairs while cheating thousands out of career training, with some offering training on how to grow grass and make fake rocks, a Post investigation found. The Washington Post’s investigation into the schools charging veterans huge sums to learn how to grow grass and make fake rocks — the GI Bill grift at industrial scale. (Washington Post)

• Blanche Privately Vows to Take Down Abortion Rights Next: The New Republic reports on the AG nominee’s private assurances to conservative groups — the public confirmation-hearing moderation is not the private agenda. (New Republic)

• The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs: Michael Powell walks a mile from downtown Seattle into Little Saigon and finds an open-air market of roughly 250 people at 12th and Jackson. A long look at what harm reduction has and hasn’t delivered. Policies that gave addicts clean needles and places to use drugs were intended to reduce harm. They created a “zombie apocalypse.” (The Atlantic)

• What Happened to Talenti?: Wirecutter investigates the gelato decline — the recipe changes, the shrinking jars, and the private-equity playbook applied to premium ice cream. The comment-section outrage was right. (Wirecutter)

• One Night Only: An Honest Attempt to Understand the Ridiculous World of Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro’s New Rom-Com: Why are single people only allowed to have sex once each year? How on earth is that rule enforced? Is third base permitted? Pull up a chair—and get ready for a deep dive. (Vanity Fair)

Video of the day: The Watches We Were Wrong About

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Jack Raines, a writer and venture capitalist. We discuss his new book, Young Money.

 

AI Has Doubled Computing’s Share of U.S. GDP

Source: Paul Kedrosky

 

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~~~

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This week, I speak with Jack Raines, a writer and venture capitalist. We discuss his new book, “Young Money.” Jack dives into his unlikely journey into finance and venture capital. We discuss how his travels impacted the way he sees money and purpose for young people. He also reviews how to incorporate passion into your career and the impact it will have on your long-term finances.

A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Dr. Ankur Crawford, EVP and Portfolio Manager at Alger. She heads the firm’s flagship Alger Capital Appreciation strategies. She was an Engineer at Intel, won the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, and was awarded fellowship Natl Academy of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, and holds several U.S. patents.  She was recognized as a “Top Women in Asset Management” in 2020 and serves on the board of The Knowledge House, a Bronx-based charity teaching technology skills to underserved communities.

 

 

SPOTIFY EMBED

 

 

Current Reading/Favorite Books

 

 

 

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The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• The Future, Made in China: Beijing is competing with the U.S. for tech supremacy. Who wins will have huge political implications. Beijing is competing with the U.S. for tech supremacy. Who wins will have huge political implications. (New Yorker)

• The Wisdom of Crowds: Michael Mauboussin’s Consilient Observer paper on when crowds are smart and when they’re dangerous — the diversity, independence, and aggregation conditions that make collective judgment work, and what happens when they break down. (Morgan Stanley / Consilient Observer)

• Bernard Arnault: Inside the court of France’s richest man: Investigation’Bernard Arnault’s Empire’ (1/6). The billionaire at the head of LVMH is as secretive as he is powerful. He relies on a devoted entourage in which a mix of fear and admiration prevails. Raphaëlle Bacqué’s six-part series on the LVMH founder — the free-marketeer who whispers in the ear of every president, keeps his media outlets in line, and patronizes the arts. (Le Monde)

• How Hulk Hogan’s Heel Turn Changed Everything: An excerpt from David Shoemaker’s new book. When Hogan joined the nWo he didn’t just rewrite his own legacy — he recalibrated what fans expect from storytelling generally. As this excerpt from David Shoemaker’s new book, ‘Why Hulk Hogan Matters,’ explains, Hulk’s shift to villainy recalibrated how fans watch wrestling—and what they expect out of storytelling on a much deeper level. (The Ringer)

• Can Robots Save an Aging Japan?: The New York Times on Japan’s demographic bet — with a shrinking workforce and resistance to immigration, the country is wagering its future on automation, from elder care to cherry blossom maintenance. (New York Times)

• Nobody Said Stop: Inside 1.8 Million Chatbot Conversations: Digital Digging’s analysis of a massive conversation dataset — what people actually use chatbots for, and how rarely anyone pushes back on anything the AI says. How ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot keep the conversation going (Digital Digging)

• Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers. NOEMA’s essay on the industry’s emotional recession — the layoffs, the AI anxiety, the collapse of the mission-driven self-image, and the malaise settling over the people who were supposed to be building the future. (NOEMA)

• The end of the age of heroes AI will soon be better at math than any human. What does that mean? Noah Smith on the cultural shift away from great-man narratives — the founders, the geniuses, the visionaries — and toward institutions, systems, and collective competence. (Noahpinion)

• The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything. When President Donald Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from a federal investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, in 2017, the President was angry. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he yelled. But Roy Cohn—an American scoundrel and the lawyer who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, aided Senator Joseph McCarthy in implementing the Red Scare, and showed Trump the ropes in the real-estate business—was long gone.  (New Yorker)

• Inside the Long, AI-Powered Quest to Perfect Pringle-Making: The Wall Street Journal on Kellanova’s chip optimization program — machine vision, predictive maintenance, and the surprisingly hard physics of the saddle-shaped crisp. (Wall Street Journal)

Video of the day: How George Lucas Outsmarted Every Studio In Hollywood

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Jack Raines, a writer and venture capitalist. We discuss his new book, Young Money.

 

America’s biggest companies report ‘rock solid’ profits as consumers face higher costs

Source: Financial Times

 

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~~~

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3 Mistakes You’re Probably Making With Your Investments
The book “How Not to Invest” highlights the big things investors get wrong.
Kathleen Coxwell
Money Talk, July 3, 2025

 

 

When it comes to investing, sometimes the best moves are the ones you don’t make.

In “How Not to Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behavior That Destroy Wealth — and How to Avoid Them,” financial strategist Barry Ritholtz flips the script on traditional investment advice, focusing on avoiding common pitfalls rather than chasing flashy strategies.

His core message? Successful investing is often about discipline, patience, and steering clear of your own worst instincts. The premise of this book is that investing isn’t so much about what you do right; it is more about avoiding mistakes.

Barry Ritholtz, a Highly Respected Voice

Barry Ritholtz is one of the most respected voices in the world of finance, known for his no-nonsense approach to investing and his ability to cut through market hype. He is the co-founder and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, a firm that emphasizes evidence-based investing and long-term financial planning.

In addition to managing billions in client assets, Ritholtz is a prolific writer and commentator. He has published thousands of columns on investing for the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and The Street, plus more than 43,000 posts on his excellent blog, The Big Picture.

Additionally, he hosts the popular Bloomberg podcast “Masters in Business,” where he interviews top minds in finance, economics, and business.

What sets Ritholtz apart is his deep understanding of behavioral finance — how our emotions and cognitive biases influence investment decisions. “How Not to Invest” distills decades of research and experience into a simple, powerful message: the best investors are the ones who learn what not to do.

Bad Ideas, Bad Numbers, Bad Behavior, and Good Advice

Ritholtz organizes “How Not to Invest” into four clear and compelling sections: Bad Ideas, Bad Numbers, Bad Behavior, and Good Advice.

Each part tackles a different set of investing missteps that can quietly derail your financial success.

In Bad Ideas, Ritholtz explores the seductive but flawed strategies that often lead investors astray. Bad Numbers dives into the misuse of data, showing how misleading stats and poor assumptions can distort decision-making. Bad Behavior highlights the psychological traps — like fear, greed, and overconfidence — that sabotage even the smartest investors. Finally, in Good Advice, he shares time-tested principles and habits that actually work.

Together, these sections offer a roadmap not just for avoiding mistakes but for becoming a more grounded, thoughtful investor.

Here are three takeaways from “How Not to Invest.”

Bad Idea: Following the Emotional Ups and Downs of the Financial Media

One of the most dangerous habits for investors? Taking cues from the financial media. In “How Not to Invest,” Ritholtz warns that the media isn’t designed to help you build wealth. It’s designed to grab your attention. Headlines are crafted to stir emotion, amplify fear, or promise quick riches, not to offer thoughtful, long-term investment guidance.

Ritholtz argues that reacting to news cycles — whether it’s market crashes, political shifts, or hot stock picks — is a fast track to bad decisions. The media thrives on urgency, but good investing thrives on patience. When you chase breaking news or follow talking heads with bold predictions, you’re more likely to trade impulsively, time the market poorly, or fall for trends that fizzle out.

What to do instead: Ritholtz advises tuning out the noise and tuning into your own financial plan — one grounded in evidence, tailored to your goals, and resilient to the hype machine. After all, the best investment advice is rarely delivered in real-time on cable news.

This is an excellent argument for the Boldin Retirement Planner, arguably the most complete financial planning tool available online, where you are in complete control of your own financial future.

Bad Numbers: Economic Innumeracy

Economic innumeracy refers to the widespread inability to understand, interpret, or critically evaluate economic and financial numbers. It’s not just about poor math skills; it’s about misunderstanding how numbers apply to real-world economic decisions.

People who are economically innumerate might: Confuse nominal and real returns, ignoring inflation Misjudge the impact of compound interest (both how powerful it is and how slow it starts) Be swayed by cherry-picked statistics or misleading graphs Take precise predictions as fact, rather than estimates with uncertainty Misinterpret economic indicators like GDP, unemployment rates, or CPI React emotionally to big-sounding numbers without context (e.g., “$1 trillion in debt!” vs. “debt as a % of GDP”)

Ritholtz highlights economic innumeracy as a core problem in “How Not to Invest” because it leads people to make poor financial decisions based on bad or misunderstood data.

His advice? Learn the basics of how numbers work in an investing context and be skeptical of anyone presenting data without explanation or context.

Bad Behavior: Giving in to Your Own Cognitive Biases

One of the most underestimated risks in investing isn’t market volatility; it’s how your brain reacts to it.

In “How Not to Invest,” Ritholtz shines a light on the subtle yet powerful role that cognitive biases play in derailing good financial decisions. These are mental shortcuts — built for survival, not investing — that often lead us astray.

Ritholtz explains that biases like confirmation bias, overconfidence, hindsight bias, and loss aversion can cloud our judgment and fuel impulsive decisions.

For example, you might cling to a losing stock because selling feels like admitting failure (loss aversion), or you might ignore warning signs because you’re only seeking opinions that support your existing belief (confirmation bias). Worse, in times of stress, these biases compound, just when clarity matters most.

The danger isn’t just that we have biases. It’s that we rarely notice them. That’s why Ritholtz argues for creating systems that protect us from ourselves: automatic contributions, diversified portfolios, and written investment rules that reduce the space for emotional decision-making.

Recognizing your biases doesn’t make you weak. It makes you a smarter investor. The more aware you are of these mental traps, the better equipped you are to avoid avoidable mistakes.

 

 

 

 

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My end-of-week morning fishing reads:

• Some 64% of Young Men Day Trading Stocks Feel Like Failures. One-quarter of men aged 18-29 said they trade stocks daily, and almost two-thirds of them (64%) report feeling like failures, according to a study of 2,000 men published Wednesday by the Institute for Family Studies, a pro-marriage think tank. The survey data on the day-trading generation shows a correlation between trading frequency and misery at exactly what the behavioral literature predicts. (Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance)

• The Winning Formula for Fund Investors, and Why Others Left Money on the Table: US stock fund investors got the bag. Crypto fans fumbled it. (Morningstar)

• NYC’s Pied-à-Terre Owners Hunt for Creative Ways to Dodge New Tax: Owners of second homes are ‘apoplectic’ over the levy; some are highlighting flaws to reduce their home’s value or moving in family members. The Wall Street Journal on the avoidance strategies already in motion — LLC restructurings, residency claims, and creative occupancy arrangements. The tax passed; the lawyers are billing. (Wall Street Journal)

• The messy politics behind Google’s big AI shakeup: Google’s AI leadership changes may have come down to pressure to speed up products — and internal ethical conflicts. The Verge on the Jeff Dean–Demis Hassabis power struggle — the org chart battle that reveals how Google is really thinking about the DeepMind integration and the AI race. (The Verge)

• Can Reddit fend off a new wave of AI SEO spam? The era of AI-powered search has made Reddit mentions highly valuable. Subreddit moderators are catching brands trying to take advantage. The Verge on the marketers flooding Reddit with AI-generated posts designed to game AI search results — the last authentic corner of the internet is under siege precisely because it’s the last authentic corner. (The Verge)

• These Drivers Are Taking Extreme Measures to Avoid New Car Technology: Curmudgeonly roadblocks or the last beacons of sanity? These car owners disable alarms and reconfigure dashboards in search of low-tech bliss. (Wall Street Journal)

• Americans Are Turning on Trump: The president’s big gains with Black, Hispanic, and young voters in 2024 suggested a major shift. Less than two years later, he has lost those new supporters. The Atlantic on the polling shift — Black, Hispanic, and young voters who moved toward Trump in 2024 are moving away faster than any cohort in modern midterm history. (The Atlantic)

• How to Exist: Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil. Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules: 1. Don’t do anything; 2.Be content. By “don’t do anything,” I mean don’t move, don’t fidget, don’t indulge any thoughts or daydreams. You’re allowed to breathe, and blink. Raptitude’s meditation on the baseline skill nobody teaches — being present in your own life without optimizing, producing, or performing it. (Raptitude)

• No, You Don’t Want to Time Travel: A physicist’s spoilsport tour of why every time travel scenario is worse than advertised — the physics, the paradoxes, and the practical horrors. (D. Giles)

• What happens when an NFL ball goes into the stands? In this case, a lawsuit. Hamilton’s lawsuit says he was approached by stadium employees after Hurts handed him the ball, and “they misrepresented and lied to Mr. Hamilton claiming the football was not his property, and that he was violating law if he kept it and demanded that the football be returned.” The Athletic on the fan fight over a Jalen Hurts game ball that ended up in litigation — property law, stadium policy, and the absurd economics of sports memorabilia. (The Athletic)

Video of the day: The Economics Of Billy Joel

Be sure to check out a special bonus episode of Masters in Business interview with Mike Kelly, chief investment officer of Future Standard, a $90 billion multi-strategy platform for wealth management clients. Previously, he was at Omega Advisors and Tiger Management.

 

This indicator is giving the bull market another lease on life

Source: Marketwatch

 

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