Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
What are you seeing right now? Are you seeing those changes that people are talking about, that diversification away from US assets?
Do you see that at all now?
We really don't see that in the data at this point. I remember where we've come from, which is the US has been really an incredibly strongly performing market, strong economy. People who've been predicting the US to be some type of decline from an economic point of view, recessions, we've talked about that in the past two or three years.
None of that's actually happened.
And in fact, now I think you find and you've heard this on your show, more optimism associated with what the next year holds from an economic point of view, GDP pretty solid, looking to potentially even expand in twenty twenty six. You've got the stimulus checks coming the way that they actually didn't adjust their withholding in order to be able to encourage those stimulus checks. That all is a pretty good setup. And you've got to be in
the preparedness business. We're all risk managers, and at the end of the day, you've got to be resilient because things can go wrong. Things can happen but I think that's the setup, and so reallocating away from the US in the face of that probably not the smartest choice to make.
But you've got to be diversified.
So you cannot have the concentration you has been a pretty concentrated bet over the past few years.
Although what's the consequence of that. I mean, there's a difference between reallocating away from and diversifying. There is some knock on effect, which is maybe some people are calling cell America, other people are just saying diversifying and hedging your bets. I mean, how much will that affect the funding conditions of the United States.
Well, if diversification makes sense, one needs to have a balanced portfolio. It's just good risk management. It's good investment management to make sure that you've got exposure to the various different opportunities that are out there.
But we certainly have seen and you know, look around. We're a global firm.
We provide platforms and serve clients all across the world. But when you look at the US and you just look at the facts of the performance over the course of the past decade, you look at all the innovation that's been in the US, all of the value that's created. AI is one example technology. More generally, it would have been a mistake to not have participated in the US market, and so a little bit of rebalancing, a little bit of sort of thinking about how to make sure you've
got the right portfolio where there's equities, fixed income. We talk about sixty forty. Oh gosh, it was dead. Now it's back bonds. Okay, where do you want to be exposed to in the bond market? You know, the US bond market is still the most liquid market in the world, and it is still the closest thing to a risk free asset that there actually is.
How important is it that Senator Tom Tillis stays and senate at least for the next three hundred and sixty four days. He was on just a moment ago with us and he was talking about how he's not going to hold confirmation hearings until the DOJ suitor inquiry into
a FEDOJ Powell is lifted. I'm just wondering, from your perspective, how important it is to see that type of noise died down around the Federal Reserve for you to feel confident that this truly is going to remain the status quo going forward, right, Well.
The sentence is a great public servant, and I appreciate all of his time serving in the US Senate. But I think you hit the key point, which is, at the end of the day, is not super helpful for the long term objectives of the US, which are keep interest rates on the low side, to be able to make it easier for people to be able to borrow, to be able to buy a home, to be able to fund a car payment, for companies to be able to borrow in order to be able to fund and invest their businesses.
For all of that, we want low rates, so.
Creating and sort of shaking at the foundation of the independence of monetary policy, that's not really in the interests of keeping long term rates slow.
So I think it is helpful if that.
Dies down and we can get back to the business of releasing the economy perform.
Counterproductive, which is the words you use in the past when it comes to it.
Have you any engagement with the White House about this issue given the concerns.
We're always talking to the administration making sure that we're giving our point of view, and so that's of course that's one of our jobs and one of my jobs as a CEO is to be talking all across the administration and in Congress and giving them our perspective. And I do think it is in the interests and the administration has been very clear they would like to see long term interest rates lower because it benefits companies and individuals.
And so if that's the objective, then making sure that we're keeping the Federal Reserve sort of a little bit out of the news and not super controversial, I would personally say, would be would be would be in further into that objective.
It's certainly very much in the news at the moment. Robin, Can we talk about your business? It has to be a much changing in what direction are you leaning into? Well, we've been reimagining the company, to be quite honest. You know, we've got a fun history. We're two hundred and forty years old. We were born right around the time of the United States seventeen eighty four, oldest bank in the nation, one of the oldest companies in New York.
It's that's a fun history. Now we've got to be old because we've been innovating all along the way. We've stayed very focused on customers and our culture is important.
That's how you get to be a long lived company. So what have we been doing.
We've been taking stock of what we've actually got, our real assets, our great businesses, and we've really been focused on delivering them better for the client. Used to be a bunch of pieces, kind of siloed, fragmented, and so we set out three years ago to say, we're just going to reimagine the company and we're going to pull ourselves together. We're going to focus on our clients. We've got these market leading businesses, what kind of a financial
services platforms company these days? And we're going to rally round as a team. Very important that culture team to be able to deliver for customers.
And you can see the results. So this was past quarter for us.
Which comes to the sort of the end of that first three year chapter. It was a quarter of records. It was actually a year of records for us in twenty twenty five. Record revenue, record pre tax income, huge EPs growth, and the market's rewarded us for that. But what they're really looking through and seeing is the fact that we're delivering for our customers, and that's what it's all about.