Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
This week on the podcast what Can I Say? Tour de forced conversation about all things economic with Ellen Zettner. She's been at Morgan Stanley for just about a decade now better part of a decade.
She was chief Economist.
She has morphed into the Chief Economic Strategist and global head of thematic and macro investing for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. The firm runs something crazy number like seven trillion dollars. She's also a member of the firm's Global Investment Committee. She's won every accolade and economic award you can as a Wall Street economist, and her interest just rangers far and wide. We talk about everything from tariffs to fit
independence to data integrity at the BLS. She's just a very thoughtful, insightful economist who spends a lot of time thinking about how can I fashion this information in a way that will be useful for my clients, many of whom are investors, And now in her new role at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, she becomes the client she's helping
to run that big pile of money. I thought this conversation was absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also with no further ado my discussion with Morgan Stanley's Allen Zettner.
Hi, Barry, thanks for having me. I'm really glad that you got my title correct and without losing your breath because it's a long one.
Well, you know, AI helped me assemble that, and I know that's a theme of yours, so well, we'll get that to that a little later. It's been it's been a while since we had you on the last time you hear it was the first Trump administration. We're going to talk about a lot of policy issues, but before we get there, I just want to talk a little bit about your background because it's so interesting and not what we think of as the typical path to Wall Street.
You get a bachelor's and an MBA from the University of Colorado. What was the original career planning.
Yeah, bachelor's and masters from Denver, University of Colorado at Denver, which I think surprises people even more. Yeah, so I had gotten a late start, as I would put it, with the university. After high school, I was partying, having a great time gap year it was well, it turned out to be an unplanned gap year.
And you know, in.
The state of Texas, there's a lot of room. You don't need to live at home, and at least back then you didn't need to live at home in order to afford you know, you could afford to live.
On your own.
So I remember turning eighteen and my mother looked at her watch and basically said, why are you still here? And so I moved out with my friends. Was just having a great time. And so by the time I decided to get serious and said, hey, you know I want to I want to go somewhere else for university. I was starting university when my friends were graduating, and so I wanted a commuter campus, and University of Colorado Denver was just a phenomenal place to be with an amazing economics department.
So Texas girl up in Denver. How to be a climate shock to you?
It was?
It was a little strange.
So we had registered side unseen my parents and I we drove up the fifteen hour drive from Austin, Texas to Denver. The first twelve hours are in the state of Texas and then you finally get out of the state.
That's that's starting in the middle.
That wait, so New York to cut Texas to Colorado, Austin to Denver, Boston to Denver, fifteen hours, eighty percent of which are still in the stot are still in.
The state of Texas.
So you go through one tiny corner called Ratone Pass. That's where my Texas comes out. Rattone Pass right there where Colorado and New Mexico and Texas come together, and you just slip right through into Colorado. And so we registered side unseen. My mother woke me up. I was sleeping in the backseat of the car, and she said, Ellen, look and I woke up and I looked out of the window and I saw the mountains, and I was like, Mama, I'm home.
I had never seen mountains before.
Had you seen snow before?
I had seen snow in Austin once every six years on average, it snowed. And so we made a snowman with a lot of rocks and sticks in it and leaves, but it was a snowman. But my mother had spent summers in Boulder. So my grandfather taught. Both my grandparents taught at University of Texas. My grandmother got her PhD from Cornell in the early thirties. My grandfather got his PhD from Columbia here in New York. They were both
teaching at the University of Texas. He founded the physical education department at the University of Texas, and so here was a legacy. My mother grew up spending summers living in the dorm in Boulder because he would teach summers at University of Colorado and Boulder, and so she always talked about the mountains. And just when I decided to leave Texas for school, I said, that's where I want to go, is the mountains, even though I had no idea exactly what I was saying.
But you ended up not leaving Texas permanently. After you get your MBA Revenu Estimating Division at the Texas State Controller's Office, working with some guy named George W.
Bush, tell ye, tell us a little bit about this guy that used to be the governor of the state of Texas, you know.
But no, that was great.
So I got my master's degree in economic and said, well, what do I do now? And so made sense to go back home to Austin. Now, at that time, for economists, your option was to work for the state, or you could work for a u TEMCO, which is University of Texas Investment arm Like there's not a lot of areas for economists. Then now there's a thriving investment community, hedge funds, you name it. But then you worked for the state, and so it was a great way to start. Texas
legislature is a binding a legislature. It's only in session in odd years. So I think I worked really really hard for five months every other year, and it was a wonderful, wonderful way.
The rest of the time. Let's see, in the.
Late nineties, there was this thing called day trading with no restrictions in a firm. You just sort of like have fun and be like, oh, I made a few thousand dollars today day trading. No, it was it was sort of a let's let's put it this way. It was a wonderful way to start where I could really dive deep into topics such as studying the fairness of the tax system in the state of Texas, doing economic
development studies. We were a part of the study that helped attract the first Toyota tundra plant to the state of Texas in San Antonio and working for Tamra Ploute, who was just so important in steering my career.
She was the chief.
Economist for the State of Texas at the time PhD from University of Pennsylvania. You mentioned the Lawrence Arkline Award. It was such an honor to receive that twice because Tamar had studied under Lawrence Klin at University of Pennsylvania, and so it was just being thrown into a macro role was such a huge determinant of my entire career and studying things like household behavior in the state of Texas, which gave me my love for the consumer and household behavior,
which has lasted my whole career. So I lasted there for about five years and then started looking for something in New.
York, and consumer and household behavior lasted your whole career to good effect and good result, because as we've seen over the past fifty years, the US consumers what drives the entire economy. So being an expert in that space, I can't imagine that hurt your either your career hasn't hurt, or your economic forecast.
And I've propelled many an economist off of the back of bringing them onto my team and saying, here you go, here's a huge consumer platform, learn it and run it. And they have gone on to do amazing things. One of them still with me at Morgan Stanley. Paula Campbell Roberts. One of my shining, shining achievements in my career is seeing her career at KKR flourish.
That's really interesting. So how do you go from the Revenue Estimating Division in the Texas government to Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi on Wall Street. That seems like a big jump.
It is a big jump.
So part of it was that I felt State government was not where I wanted to be for the long run. There's something about uh something in my DNA, as it is with many people in finance, that attracts me to just a fast moving environment. I needed something that was much more.
Dynamic and not closed every other year.
Yeah, not closed every other year, although I do sometimes long for the boring days of working at the State.
Uh So, I knew that I needed.
To go to either a d C or Chicago or in New York. I wasn't quite sure where. And so while I was job searching, which back then involved looking in the newspapers or which is going to sound I mean, people are just being like.
Mailing them, so many of them.
But also, you know, I have a long, rich history now with the National Association for Business Economics and their jobs Board, which was extremely antiquated then. Well didn't seem antiquated back then. People would be appalled at that job's board now. But I actually found my job at.
Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi.
Through the NABE Jobs Board, which is still econjobs dot org. And so I think of Nabe as being my partner in my career since I joined Nabe in the late nineties. Long story short, I get this great job at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi. The as the senior economists there, I basically was a one man band, which was great because I had to wear every hat as economists for smaller
institutions or with smaller research arms have to do. And what's so interesting about my time there, and I was there for eight years, is that during that time the financial crisis hit and I felt so lucky to be at a Japanese firm at that time because we had not taken part in mortgage backed security investing. We had already gone through a financial crisis of our own that
had lasted a long time. Japanese firms were sitting on a pile of cash, and it was at that time that the ceremonial check was walked across Broadway to purchase twenty percent of Morgan Stanley to keep Morgan Stanley.
Afloat from banks from from MUFG, which the check is written from Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi.
So that happened.
And what was interesting was when I eventually ended up at Morgan Stanley to hear what it was like from my colleagues from the other side on a Friday, being told, you know, go home and we'll let you know on Sunday if you still have a job, if the doors are going to be open, and then being told on Sunday that you can go back to work, and the fear that they felt versus I didn't feel total job security because I for the first time I was seeing economics teams just on the whole, just being cut and
you had never seen that poor. The economists are sort of, you know, we're kind of we've got decent job security compared to the rest in finance.
But sorry.
This is when I could make a joke about certain news that came out after.
Free but no I didn't. But anyhow, what I.
Really so vividly remember, similar to you, I was in an institution that, through a combination of dumb luck and what have you, was on the right side of that. So while the street was freaking out, I didn't feel personally the same job in security of pressure that everybody
else did. But I had maintained an email list of ten or fifteen thousand readers, and most of the addresses were you know, MS dot com, mL dot com, whatever, the various institutional and you know, you would occasionally have somebody leave a position and you would have a bounce back rate each week of two three emails, but eight or nine I was seeing like three hundred, four hundred,
five hundred emails a week come back. This is no longer a valid email address at GS dot com or whatever it happened it was.
It was really alarming.
It very like that was nothing I've ever experienced. Even two thousand, which seemed like it was a disaster, didn't compare to this.
Yeah, yeah, so never experienced anything like it, And so, and you know, I really think that that's when LinkedIn took off because I had signed up for LinkedIn at the time but didn't use it. I'm still not a huge fan of social media. I know that's terrible to say. How can anybody be successful today with that?
Using social media?
I'm going to tell you I think that was a formally minority position, like an outlier position, And now I think the consensus has built that the algorithm is awful. It manipulates us towards outrage. You look at the rising levels of depression amongst teenagers. It's really tracks the rise of smartphones and social media. So I don't think it's as bad a thing to say in twenty twenty five more Yeah, But in twenty fifteen people would have looked at you like, what do you mean?
You don't like, what do you mean?
Yeah?
And now I think the verdict is in or yeah.
Well, I think for two thousand and eight. You know, in finance, oftentimes the jobs we have, when your time is up, you're ripped out of your seat and.
With the box and a security guard escorting you to the time.
Because you have access to sensitive information like that's how for most of us in finance, that's how you're is going to look one day, and so if you had joined LinkedIn, it was the way that you didn't lose all those contacts. And so I really think that's where and certainly that's where I was like, Okay, maybe I should keep up with people through LinkedIn, but I'll tell you that I have learned how to train those algorithms. So with Instagram, which I have since dropped all together.
But when I was on Instagram, I got so tired of being marketed to as a fifty plus year old woman. It was every single ad was the best mascarra for insert you know, or it was the best insert you know blank for women over fifty. So it's the best mass scare for women over fifty, the best shampoo for women over fifty, the best whatever. And it would always somehow show this beautiful woman that happened to be over fifty.
Wait till you're over sixty and just go through your spam folder and see you the sort of stuff that they marketing.
Yeah, it's a little insulting.
But what I did was I saw an ad one time for dog food. Now I don't have any pets, so I clicked on that ad and it started showing me dog food adds. So I stopped purchasing things because
this was the problem. I'm an impulse buyer, so I would purchase things on Instagram and so, but then Instagram started, It got my number, It knew what I was doing, and so that I thought, okay, I need to click on the dog food ad and now poke around in that site a little bit, and then okay, I need to poke around the side of it and then add something to my cart, and then just abandoned it. And
so for a while I was able to train. If I just did that a couple times, then for thirty days, I would get dog ads and I easily could continue to enjoy Instagram without buying a thing.
One of the things that has made Facebook so valuable is its ability to create not just targeted ads to you and your demographics. All right, you're a woman over fifty, that's two blunts. They can also track your browsing history. They can link it to your zip code. They know how your town and county voted in the last election. They know your credit score and your purchase history, so you could really find you know, the old joke in advertising is half of advertising dollars are wasted. We just
don't know which half. As you bring in more and more technology to this, we're starting to figure out exactly how to not waste any dollars, which is why some of the ads you get are kind of spooky and creepy, like, hey, is my phone listening to me? No, Well, whether it is or not, your browsing just is so revealing of THEIA.
And it's true.
But if you think about it, if we tie that back to the old days of just having to send out surveys for data and such, you know, as an economist, I want as much data as possible. I want it to measure everything you could possibly you know, look at sideways,
and I appreciate having that detailed data. My husband used to get irritated because, again, back in the old days, when someone might actually call to do a survey, I would be the one that would give them the time of day and answer the survey because I knew that as a practicing economist, I would really appreciate having that detail.
Instead.
Now, because it's being done by algorithms and machines and there's not a personal call behind it, we're sort of alarmed that someone is getting that much information, But it's also because a good deal of it's not used to make the government more data more accurate, right, It's used to make a company more profitable by selling to you.
So it is a bit different.
But you know, if the government could employ those techniques and give me that kind of detailed data on our population, I would use it all day long.
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Allen Zenner, chief economic strategist and global head of Madick and Macro Investing at Morgan Stanley, discussing the Mattic Investing and her macro work at Morgan Stanley. I'm Barry Dults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Allan Zantner is my extra special guest. She's chief economic strategist and global head of Thematic and macro Investing from Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. Overall,
the firm manages over seven trillion dollars. Let's talk a little bit about your role at Morgan Stanley. What brought you there from? Previously you were at Nomura and Banka Tokyo Mitsubishi. What brought you to Morgan Stanley?
Vincent Reinhardt, Oh really, yeah.
Of.
Rein Hart and Rogoff fame well, rhin Hart rein Harten Roguoff. So the rhin Harten rogue offf mostly is Carmen Reinhardt. And but yeah, Vincent called me up one day and said, would you like to come work for me? And I us of course I knew him previously. I was an economist, you know.
I mean I knew of him. But did you know I knew of him?
I did not know him on a personal basis, right, And it was an absolute surprise to get that call. And I couldn't go there fast enough.
Huh.
So it wasn't just the Morgan Stanley name, which is wonderful to go to a place where just the name alone gives you a certain amount of gravitas. I was the same economist I was previously doing the same work and the same methodologies, employing the same tools. But suddenly it was like, oh, she's at Morgan Stanley. So just changing the name to such a well respected firm meant all the difference in my career.
But to specifically be able to.
Go and learn from an economist who sat at the at the right hand of Alan Greenspan for so many years, you know, being a fed watcher and being able to then work for the quintessential fed watcher and sort of plug the holes. In my knowledge, it was just an opportunity I couldn't pass up.
What was the role? You obviously didn't start as chief economy.
I started as his senior economist.
Oh really? And then how much longer was it before you were elevated as a chief economist?
Oh gosh, about a year and a half. So Vincent and I were able to overlap for about a year and a half before I took the chief economist role. You may or may not know that that he and Carmen reside in Boston, and so being able to work full time from Boston continue to support Carmen in her role at Harvard, and also a role that fits him so perfectly well as the chief economist, the financial chief economist at Bnymellon is just the perfect place to be.
So I am very thankful for the time that we were able to spend together overlapping there at Morgan Stanley, And so in twenty fifteen I then became the chief US economist.
So on the Morgan Stanley website is a little bio of you, and in it you described twenty sixteen as a very significant and for you personally career defining year. Why is that.
I like to think back of periods in my career when my limits were tested, and it might be the financial crisis, it might be some other recession, it might have been COVID, But certainly twenty sixteen we had a presidential election year and my limits were absolutely tested, both physically and mentally. So I had gone to DC the morning of the election. I had already voted in early voting. I had left on a sixth flight, which means I had to get up at four in the morning, and
went to DC for meetings. Then I flew on to New Orleans to prep for a conference and decided that I would go to the gym, as I love to do when I'm at the hotel, and then you know, buckle down and get ready to watch the fun electional results come in, and watching the election results come in, and then answering client questions at the same time, and then seeing all of that unfold in a way that was surprising to many people.
Where this cycle kicked off. Where okay, wait, I thought I was going to go to the gym.
Okay, not going to the gym, Wait, I need to order some sort of dinner to the room.
Okay, I can't beat.
Then it was then it was oh gosh, Asia is awake. Got to get on calls with Asia. Then it was oh boy, Europe's waking up. Got to get on calls with Europe. Calls with my coll calls with these clients, calls, calls, calls, calls, calls. At eleven am in the morning, which was now more than twenty four hours later, after I had gotten up, I decided that maybe I should at least try to close my eyes for a little bit. I closed my eyes,
couldn't fall asleep. I had to go down stairs at the hotel to deliver an economic outlook to what had then become a standing room only event, because look what's just happened. Let's hear from the economist. And we had just putten out put out. We had just put out our year ahead outlooks because those come.
Out in November.
And so I was there standing at the front of the room and I just left my PowerPoint presentation on the front page the holding screen as a holding screen, and said, let's go ask me whatever questions you have. I'm not going to have all the answers, but let's talk, and I don't even remember what I said. The time flew by. I then went back to the airport, tried to get on an earlier flight to go back, was still delayed. Finally got back at eleven pm at night
to New York. I could not fall asleep still either on the flight or when I got home, and ultimately, finally I just gave up sleeping, went into the office, and forty two hours I went without sleeping.
At a certain point, your cognitive functioning just starts to fall off a cliff. But that was real. I similarly have a vivid recollection of just shock from so many people questions that had to be really exciting.
Yeah, so was it? And see you say exciting.
Now I live off of that stuff because oh you're adrenaline. Jumpee, adrenaline. You're tested, your limits are tested. And what a great story to tell. I was also on the trading floor at one am when Brexit happened. I had gone to sleep at eleven and set the alarm for midnight. The alarm went off, I know that my husband immediately checked the phone. I heard him say, oh, sh and I was like, what what? And I was like, oh my god, I had to get in the shower and get to the trading floor by one am.
I just read this morning. Nobody talks about Brexit anymore. I just read a data point that shocked me, which was the GDP of Italy just pasted the GDP of the UK. Mind blown. And there are a lot of reasons, but clearly Brexit has to be a significant part of that. Yeah, yeah, giant part of that.
It's like, thank you UK for bringing some business back to us, because here's a country that is dying. Their birth rates are non existent, their population has been shrinking, So how can GDP be growing. There's no fundamental basis for it, so it must be some sort of tectonic shift like Brexit.
Pretty pretty fascinating. There's so much stuff. I don't want to just get stuck in twenty sixteen. Let's go forward. Let's look forward. One of the things you wrote about was the coming youth boom economy. And when we look at gen z born between ninety seven and twenty twelve, they and gen y are going to dominate the US economy really in the next ten years or so. They'll yield higher consumption. You wrote wages and housing demand, stimulating GDP growth. This was a few years ago, do you.
Still hold to that was in twenty nineteen.
Yeah, So the youth boom is this still coming?
Yeah? So we're here, we're in it, and we were at the cusp of it. Then Millennials were already starting to outnumber baby boomers, and then you've got Gen Z coming up behind them at that time that were just as large. So when you combine the two, and that's what we mean by the youth boom, you've got a demographic that is larger than any in our country's past and sets us apart on the globe stage. Because our
major trading partners are across G ten, nobody has those demographics. Now, our birth rates have been falling, and that is a problem, and that's a problem that by the way, lights of Fire under the need for AI as well. But our birth rates are higher than our major trading partners, and so comparatively speaking, that is something that's very important that
drives the back drop. Now, economists love demographics. Demographics make the world go round, and demographics, you know, it's when you look at any point in time, how well did the Census Bureau get demographic projections pretty well because it turns out we sort of all age kind of along the same track. And what we know from detailed government data is we know how we tend to move through the world and spend and behave at certain age ranges.
So you, as an economist, you can just let your demographic cohorts age through those buckets and know kind of how the spending shifts are going to take place. When are participation rates in the labor force going to peak, When do we hit peak earning years, in peak working years, and therefore first time home buying years, et cetera, et cetera. So you mentioned housing as being one of our key calls in twenty nineteen, Well, that was only accelerated during COVID,
for sure, it wasn't. There were many themes that were accelerated during COVID, and housing is one of those. In terms of of the incredible demand. I mean, we are going to be underbuilding housing for a decade.
We have been under building housing really since the we estimate we.
Will have an eighteen million unit shortfall that.
We need to make up. That's a giant number. Chrise, It's a giant of course, we've been talking about four to five million currently and that comes from the National Association Realtors and the Association home Builders. So there's a little asterisk. Is this same and think.
About that that's currently and then you grow that over time. You pair it with affordability, You pair it with the fact that our surveys do show that millennials and Gen Z by far still want to live in single family homes. They may not all be able to afford single family and so single family renting will be in high demand. We're going to need to build those units. Home builders are going to have to respond by building smaller, less expensive homes. We think modular housing will have a big
role to play as well. And then you start to think about all the different ways we need to build homes as well that shortfall. In order to ensure all those homes, we're going to have to think about climate friendly building materials, more resist climate resistance building materials, all the different ways that we can appease the insurance companies so that we can actually build in the in the
areas and make up for those shortfalls. So I think housing is certainly from a thematic perspective, something that can It's a great example to me because it's something where this is a longer run structural theme, but it can fall out of favorite time cyclically because it is very interstrate sensitive. Right now, housing is not in a great place in the US. Affordability is terrible, and it's not
just an interest rate problem. More of the home price is made up from regulatory impacts than anything else.
How much of this is a lack of supply I know, I've Jonathan Miller and folks like that have been writing supply is running twenty to thirty percent of what it normally is. And how much of it is a little bit of nimby. Once people buy a home, they don't want to see all the pretty scenery get knocked over and new houses put up over there. What's the solution to this?
Well, I think the nimby really is a symptom of, or.
A side of effect of the regulation or sorry that the nimbi not in my backyard leads to is part of what leads to the heavy handed regulation right and heavy handed regulation by far is a key contributor to
the cost of overall housing. Then you add the cost of labor in a sector which has had a shortage of labor since two thousand and eight, and we only started to make up for that shortfall during the what I call the immigration period where we were bringing in millions of immigrants a year in twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three and part of twenty twenty four, only to see that reversal now put labor pressures on that sector again and then tear us on materials that go
into construction. So it's just it's cost upon cost upon cost that home builders are having to deal with that help drive the affordability issues for the home buyers as well.
Huh. Really intriguing. So obviously thematic investing is a big part of your job. Is there any other theme bigger than artificial intelligence today?
I'm going to say a probably not, But artificial intelligence it's a very broad it's very broad, and so I would gear it more towards AI tech and diffusion, which has been a key pillar, thematic pillar for Morgan Stanley. But here's why. It seems like my answer is just so easy and almost like not well thought out, almost flippant in a way. AI is a generalized technology, so it flows through everything. So whether you're thinking about a
multipolar world, theme, which importantly includes defense. We had gone long global defense back in January, and it was based on the fact that you've got your pallenteers of the world and open aiyes of the world of you know, working with the US government to modernize defense for tech and AI. And so if you think about you know, four themes, say longevity, AI, tech and diffusion, multipolar world, and the energy of everything. AI threads through all of that. It threads through.
All of it.
So when I think about, say conviction weighting those themes, your highest conviction weight is going to be on the AI, tech and diffusion.
Because it does thread through everything.
So what's more important the Magnificent seven or the magnificent four ninety three that are going to benefit from AI.
Well, I think there it's very difficult to not have those big, big tech names, let's say, in a multi thematic portfolio, or if you're trying to take advantage of an AI theme, because they are big players in the space. I mean, as soon as someone in this country moves into contracts with the US government, you've got an incredible amount of funding. Look at someone like an Elon Musk, who is a creature of the government. Sure I mean, how much of his wealth comes from government contracts exactly.
And so when these other players are wrapped up in government contracts and the government has put its priority in winning this seeming two horse race on AI against China, you would probably be ill advised to bet against that. It doesn't mean that AI tech infusion is just the mag seven. So of course, in my role, I can't talk about specific companies, and you don't want to ever take specific company advice from an economist.
I'll just say, but.
You've got very interesting players all the way down to mid cap and small cap all the way down to rustle three thousand that are important in an AI tech and diffusion space.
Meaning they become more efficient, productive, profitable by deployment, sort of like what we saw post Internet end.
Boss they and they become part of the fabric of that generalized technology that all companies end up using as AI diffuses across the economy.
It makes plenty of sense to me, what other big themes are you paying close attention to.
Some big themes?
And again it's hard for me to get away of some sort of flavor of AI. So as an economist, I'm going to go back to demographics every time. What are the incentives for adopting AI? Right incentives or adopting are You've got to replace labor shortfalls. That's a huge incentive. And so if you are a country with falling birth rates and you can make up for that in several different ways. One is your existing population. You can put in policies to boost labor force participation so have a
more full participation from your current population. You can be sure that you are not just have an open immigration system, and I don't mean just opening your borders to indiscriminate flows, but an open immigration system, a traditional open immigration system where you have a sound process for integrating immigrants into the labor market, something in the US has been very good at, something Europe is not very good at. Or you can replace that labor with AI and robotics. There's
your incentive. There's your incentive for countries like China, like Japan. Maybe not like India right now, but India's demographics are not good. Really when you look further out a decade from now, fifteen twenty years from now.
You know, it's funny you keep talking about demographics. Isn't the trend throughout history that as a country becomes first less poor and then wealthier, the birth rates just drop.
People absolutely more affluent countries. It is a natural way of things. Countries that are able to, let me just say, roll with that right and boost productivity by making fuller use of your existing labor pool are those that still continue along that path of affluency. The US has not just higher birth rates than our major trading partners, we've
got higher rates of productivity. It's part of what US exceptionalism is built upon, is that not only have we kept birth rates higher, which population growth and specifically growth in your labor force goes into the potential growth in your economy those calculations, but we're also making those more productive, and it's part of our secret sauce of success. You know, when I talk about US exceptionalism, I'm not even referring
to markets financial markets. I'm talking about the US having more flexible labor market where we have higher rates of productivity. Very important that we continue to hang on to independent monetary policy, that we have stable currency, but that comparative advantage lies in your labor force and how far you can push it, and the US is just really good at that.
So let me ask you a thematic question, only it's going to be a negative. What's the one economic myth you hear more than others? What question bubbles up from clients, from brokers and advisors, from people within that you wish would just go away?
Maybe this gets too nuanced, because economists love nothing more than getting nuanced. But it's like you got the chicken and the egg backwards, right, right. So it's that the markets are pricing in that the FED is going to do something at its next meeting, and therefore the Fed has to do that.
The markets have been so wrong about that for so long.
I think the market's over time it had a very difficult So there's another one. Don't fight the Fed? Right, how many times do we say don't fight the Fed? And markets fight the Fed and they lose. But that the markets lead the Fed. Now, the FED makes low frequency decisions in a high frequency world. The market is very high frequency.
That's a great way to describe that.
Yeah, And so the fact of the matter is the market can respond on a dime when the data comes out when financial conditions change. The Fed can't. The Fed has to look at it, it has to deliberate it. It has to gain a consensus and then it moves. Much of the time, the market doesn't have it wrong. The market read the labor report of the most recent labor report and said that's not good. And guess what, the FED also thinks that's not good. Great, you're on
the same page. But the market was able to price it in well ahead of the FED actually delivering in September. So I do believe that the FED is going to cut twenty five bases points in September. Now this is with my hat on as the chief economic strategist Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. There are others in the firm that also have FEWS views on the FED, but you've asked me, and the beauty of this podcast that I get to give my views and you're only talking to me here.
So I do think though that our focus on September it can probably be best spent elsewhere in that the first cut is going to be the easiest, because, as Chairpell said, modestly restrictive. Do you need to be monstly restrictive when job growth has slowed? This sharply If you don't need to be mondstly restrictive, just make an adjustment they're not making any decisions about what happens after that.
So the fact that you know, do they or don't they cut in September and by the way, fifty basis points. That's a hard no from me because I knew I could tell, I could tell the question was on your lips it was about.
One hundred points. Someone now that's definitely.
Even harder no.
But I do believe that once you have made that cut, it's a little harder to justify if the data don't keep coming in in the same fashion to say why that one adjustment was perfect but not another. So I think where I would rather debate is how far do they need to go? And this is where I do disagree with some powers that be that the FED is going to need to cut a lot. I think we're going to have a good economy next year. I think
productivity is going to be picking up even more. I think there are parts of the One Big Beautiful Bill with the investment incentives that are in it, which are going to help put a floor into the economy. And we're not going to have an environment where the Fed's going to need to cut one hundred and fifty tw hundred paces.
To be fair. Stocks are at all time highs, real estates at all time highs, revenue and profits are at or near all time highs. It doesn't seem to be an economy begging for rate cuts, even as we're starting to see a slow down in some consumer spending and some hiring. But how much of that.
That justifies lower rates?
Doesn't tell you need to cut drastically, right, So do you want to good economy or do you want the Fed to cut drastically?
Well, we know what the president wants, Yeah, what the economy needs and what the market wants. They may be something slightly different.
Yeah, And if the Fed is watching it and objectively doing its job, then we will end up in the right place.
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Allen Zenner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley, discussing the state of today's economy in light of tariffs and trade policy. I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry Redults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest is Alan Zenner. She is chief economic strategist and global head of thematic and macroinvesting for
Morgan Stanley. The firm runs over seven trillion dollars. So you've written about tariff and trade policy. My question for you is how disruptive or destabilizing is this to either the US or global economy.
So we've certainly seen disruption in confidence. Markets don't like opaqueness, they like certainty, and we could see that early on in the volatility of Wow. January hit and it was tariff's tarifs, tariffs, and the market clearly was caught off sides. Policymakers were caught off sides, economists were caught off sides. And so then you kick off the flory of activity. What does this mean when the world order is being reset?
And it can mean a whole host of things. It's one reason why all economists, all forecasters have to take a very big slice of humble pie and take a big bite out of that because the uncertainty bands of any kind of forecast you put out are going to be highly uncertain. There's no way to know the impacts of tariffs truly until well after the fact. And that's because tariffs fall here, there, and everywhere. You're going to have some degree of manufacturers and the countries that we
import from eating the cost. You're going to have importers along the way eating the cost, wholesalers eating the cost, businesses that sell final goods eating the cost, and consumers having to eat some of that as well. The forecasting comes in where okay, how much of each? What percentage of each? I think one thing that I've observed is businesses have been sitting on a good deal more cushion in terms of cash and free cash flow than I think anybody had suspected that they would.
Be, Meaning they have the ability to eat.
Some of the ability to eat some of it.
I do think that even after Chinese manufacturers surprised us in twenty nineteen to the degree that they were willing to eat the costs, I think they've been able to continue to absorb it. I think ultimately for economists, because economists by and large are wearing a lot of egg on our face for getting it wrong, for sounding the alarm.
The companies were sounding the alarm too. We're taking our cues from what the surveys are saying, what we're hearing directly from companies that I'm going to pass on these prices to consumers. I am not going to eat this, But then how much of that are companies talking their own book as well?
To be fair, it's the middle of August. Liberation Day was early April, we had a ninety day pause. We really haven't felt the full impact on tariffs, and we probably won't until the fourth quarter or first quarter next year. So is it a little early to say, hey, no harm, no foul. No.
I think it's definitely to early say no harm, no foul. And I don't think anyone, even the administration, is saying there won't be some bit of bearing the brunt of that among consumers, among businesses.
In the US.
I think it's just that you've got one faction saying that it's going to be a lot less of an impact than some other factions. And no one really knows, so let's all.
Be humble about it.
No one knows. But there seems to be a bit of a consensus that tariffs are a consumption tax. It's like a vat tax on US households and businesses. Is that overstating the threat or is that is that accurty?
No, that's exactly how it works, to the extent that they that companies eat it on the margin or pass it onto households, and households eat it and paying higher prices. That is exactly how it works. I mean, that is the economic theory of it. That is sound. It's the degree to which the costs are absorbed and by what players along the import channel. That is the That is
the unknown factor. And I can tell you that you know, what the President is doing or has been doing, is changing global trade in a way that typically would play out over a decade or so in a very short period of time, and so that's led to a tremendous amount of uncertainty. And like you said, this may be something where the full tariff impacts aren't felt until the
fourth quarter or first quarter of next year. And if that is the case, we'll deal with it when it comes and Chair Pal and the Fed will be there to act very nimbly around that. I am confident of. But has there been unfair trade practices? Absolutely? Do we need to renegotiate trade contracts? Absolutely. I was at the State of Texas during NAFTA. NAFTA was not renegotiated until it became the USMCA under Trump's first term. Why the
global economy is so dynamic. How could a trade agreement put together in the nineties still be relevant in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.
It makes no sense.
So absolutely we need to be revisiting, like alongside a dynamic global.
Economy on a more regular basis, on.
A more regular basis.
We're just doing this over a short period of time, and that's created a good deal of disruption and uncertainty and volatility and guesswork, if you will, among the economics community.
So let's talk about that guess work. There's going to be some of these tariffs showing up as on the household level. Is that a head wind for consumption? Same question about businesses If they have to eat some of the tariffs, that's going to affect profitability. There's no free lunch.
Is there.
No, There's never a free lunch. So we are seeing consumer spending slow now. It's slowing for several reasons. One, we've had a reversal of immigration in the US. That is, no small number of people bodies consume and so if you've got fewer bodies, they're consuming less.
And I want to say we have had a negative net new population this year for the first time I think in US history. Is that is that accurate?
Yeah, it's I mean we've slowed to a trickle in population growth at times, but it is highly unusual, highly unusual. You've got less bodies in the US, so you're consuming less. Now those bodies contributed to low income consumption. You've also got low income consumers in general in the US that when prices for goods go up from tariffs or for whatever reason, they're going to consume less. So consumer spending
has been slowing. Now why hasn't it slowed even more so than it has when population growth has been negative from a reversal in immigration, Because the top end consumers are still spending. So the top income quintile in the US represents forty five percent of all consumer spending. If you take just the top two income quintels, that's more than sixty percent of all consumer spending. And so we
want what we want. And whether you say maybe that's still an artifact of COVID, we were all taught we're going to die tomorrow, So spending it's God or it's just this tremendous, tremendous increase in real estate wealth and tremendous increase in financial wealth. And even though our marginal propensity to consume out of that wealth is smaller for upper income households, the growth in wealth is just enormous, and so when they're spending, it tends to mask weakness
at the low end. But there are some risks along the horizon. Student borrows have to.
Start paying that back.
I don't think that we're out of the woods and that because the economy is growing at half the pace it was last year, we're just fine. I think we can grow even more slowly before it gets better.
So let's talk about two issues that are policy concerns that you've raised. One is economic data integrity. Durding this a few days after Trump fired the head of the BLS. What sort of concerns does this raise in terms of protection of data integrity?
So data integrity cuts both ways. So prior to that very high profile firing of the BLS commissioner, the concern among the economics community for quite some time has been that data integrity has been slipping. And the way we look measure that is we look at survey response rates, and especially because the Labor Market report is the end all be all number one data.
Point in the US that we follow.
The response rates had been slipping and now why is that, Well, they're myriad reasons. One is that we have frequent government shutdowns, and so when the lights aren't on and no one's there to police the survey and call you the business and say hey, it's really important that you respond, and you don't get that call as of business, it starts to instill in you the sense of maybe this survey isn't so important, maybe I don't need to answer that.
And so what we've seen is after those episodes, you tend to have a slippage and response rates that you never quite get back. Another issue is we talked about the youth boom. I don't see a lot of youthful people jumping up and down to work for the government.
Maybe that's because the systems are antiquated. I wonder, because you've got older generations at the government that are having to teach an antiquated programming language to younger generations coming in programming languages that don't exist anywhere else, And so how does that instill excitement among young people to come in and work for the government. We have also had a systematic underfunding of data agencies for quite some time
as well. How can you you overhaul your systems without the proper funding, and so it's something that the NAY of the National Associate for Business Economics has really followed this closely. We have a Statistics Committee that meets with all the heads of the statistical agencies, and the statistical agencies have a very strong outreach program to economists in academia, in government, and in the private sector to say, here are methodologies, how.
Can we do it better?
And so we're constantly searching for ways to improve and honestly, to their credit, half the time, the private sector economists are like crickets, how can we do it better? Oh, you don't like the way we measure housing, tell us how we can do it better. Cricket, cricket. No, I just like to say I don't like the way you do it. I mean, but we're not really offering a lot of sound solutions. We're a massive economy. It's not
easy to measure the data. But one thing that we do well historically is we measure data well, and we have the best most robust data sets out of any other country. We compare ourselves to, but it has been slipping so very fun. What I will advocate for is funding the data agencies and encouraging them to overhaul their systems.
So let's talk a little bit about the Federal Reserve independence. How much risk is there that the FED could get politicized.
So we have to take the risk seriously.
And I understand why folks might be concerned that we could be headed for a time when there's collusion between the White House and the FED, because we've been there before, so you could understand the concern. And that was a very different time between Arthur Burns and the Nixon White House.
But it was a very real time.
And then it led to the hyperinflation, and those of us of a certain age, we don't want to live through.
Nineteen seventies inflation. That was an ugly decade.
Economics, that was an ugly decade.
And I tell those harrowing tales to my team of waiting in line for gasoline with my mother, you know, because it was rationed or we couldn't get gasoline on a Sunday.
I remember I had a lawn mowing business and I would show up with my little red gas can and they would say do you have an odd number license plate or an even number license plate? And my answer was always, I'm twelve. I don't have a license plate. I just need a gallon of gas so I can mow missus McCarthy's lawn down the street.
Yeah.
Always.
I can't believe they had the nerve to ask a twelve year old, Oh, no, you show up, But it shows you why should you a twelve year old get priority or someone that needs.
To commute to work.
But apparently, but.
My parents bought a house at eighteen percent mortgage interest in nineteen.
Eighty eighteen percent.
That was normal because if you didn't buy it that day, it was more expensive the next day. That's what strikes fear in the hearts of monetary policy makers because that is inflation expectations. The price was going to be more expensive tomorrow, so you better buy it today.
Inflation expectations lead to consumer and behavior that helps the drive.
Prices, yes, and it starts off that sort of vicious cycle. And so this is at the heart of why you need independent monetary policy making, because if the market believes that the FED might keep rates easier than the economy would otherwise dictate, then is that going to again lead to something like runaway inflation is going to lead to stagnation. And that's why every time there's some headline where the FEDS and dependence may be threatened, you see term premium
increase at the long end of the yield curve. You see the stagnation playbook go go into effect among investors, and you know, going back to US exceptionalism. Independent monetary policy making is a pillar of US exceptionalism.
Really interesting in a bunch of names floated for FED chair other than Scott Besson, who has said he's not interested and I think is probably the most thoughtful person that I've heard names I've heard thrown out. Any of those names make you remotely comfortable? Or what do you think about some of these trial balloons that keep getting tossed around?
Yeah, so I think I agree with you.
I like the steady hand and careful thinking that comes from Treasury Secretary Besson. It would actually, in policy circles, be a demotion to send the Treasury secretary to become a chair.
Of the FMC. That's the emotion we think of it.
So in markets, I often hear this from investors is wait, but the chair of the FED is the most powerful person in the world, but from in policy circles, it is a lesser position than Treasury secretary.
Very interesting, it's a longer tenure, especially if we look at recent administrations. It's not like someone becomes treasure secretary and they're there for all four years. They seem to turn over pretty rapidly.
It can be the case, right, but we've had not always.
We've had back to back six year terms for pal. That's a pretty yeah, yeah for.
Your terms, but yeah, and there tends to be a lot of longevity with FED chairs because they also don't change typically with administrations. Uh, and so in political parties, they tend to span political parties.
So, look, there are a lot.
Of you know, I obviously am going to have some personal favorites of mine that have been thrown out there. But unfortunately I'm not going to give you those names.
But they will just tell me who you really don't like.
There is yes, yes, I'll do the opposite. No, but there there there are plenty of names in there that have been tossed around as possibilities that would make fine FMC chairs. I think what you're going to see is with each of those names of a float to the top. The markets will have their say on whether that is a candidate that would be believed to be a mouthpiece of President Trump or not.
When I look at various cabinet members Defense, Intelligence, Health and Welfare and most recently now BLS, can't say these are the best and the brightest. It's not camelot under Kennedy, and you could kind of under John F. Kennedy in nineteen sixty you could kind of get away with that in certain cabinet positions. Am I wrong in saying markets won't tolerate someone like an RFK junior and all of his anti vaccination attitudes at a place like NIH or
CDC with a FED chair. Is the bar higher for the chairman of the Federal Reserve than other specific cabinet positions.
Well, I think piggybacking on, you know, sort of your exact examples there, Who directly has a hand in influencing financial markets. That is the FED chair, That is the FOMC collectively, not just the FED chair, but the FOMC is a collective body, and that's why the markets will always be most sensitive to who is the chair of the FED.
So I want to ask a question about policy, not politics. But very often when we talk about you know, anytime something comes up, like taco whatever, it seems to get overly politicized. But the one descriptor I heard that's kind of fascinating is that there isn't a Trump put, there's
a Trump collar. And what that means is when markets are near all time highs, he's someone in bolden and can be very aggressive in doing things like firing the BLS commissioner when the market sells off and suddenly we're ten, fifteen, almost twenty percent off the highs. Hey, we're going to put a pause on taris for ninety days. There's a little bit of a floor there, and hence the phrase Trump collar. I know, we only have six or eight
months worth of recent data. How important do you believe market prices are to this president and this administration?
So in the first administration, you know, we we were like, okay, we've got his number. We've got his number. He takes the stock market as the single best indicator of his approval rating, right, and so if the stock market pukes, if it's a huge sell off, he's going to listen. And so we went into this second Trump term with the markets assuming Aha, Yes, all we have to do is speak and will speak volumes with a sell off and he will change his tune. Well, that is not
what happened. That's not what happened, because the markets did puke when it became apparent that he was going to be very aggressive on a trade policy in his second term. The market puked and the President stayed the course.
So someone asked me my opinion as to what I think trade policy is going to look like going forward, given how frequently we've seen flip flops and back and forth and extensions, and what I answered, And I'm curious as to your perspective on this. Tell me the last person who whispers and President Trump's year before a decision is made, and that'll tell me where the market will go. If it's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen is the last person
to speak to him. I think the markets would be pretty steady and on a gradual move higher if it had happens to be someone like Pena Navara will buckle up wearing for a bumpy ride. Fair way to describe the policy making in DC, I think.
So, I mean basically what you're getting at in a roundabout way is just who do the markets trust? Who do the markets trust? And I think you've had Treasure Secretary Bessant that had an active role in that hair raising time between April second and April ninth, meeting with Chair Pal, helping to persuade the President to sort of back off at that time, adding to that hair raising moment by threatening to fire Pal like the markets have come to know Bessn't as a calm and steady voice.
And steady is the word that always seems to pop into my head.
Any equals certainty, equals your tea equals the opposite of volatility, and so you know the markets will speak volumes as to who they believe they can trust.
Coming up, we continue our comversation with Ellen Zenner, chief economic strategist from Morgan Stanley. I'm Barry Riddults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. All right, so I only have you for a limited amount of time. Let's jump to our favorite questions, starting with who are your mentors who helped shape your career? Well?
Tamer Plout, so I have mentioned I worked for her at the State of Texas. She was a very influential chief economist at the State of Texas, and that was my She was my first.
Barry.
You always remember your first, So she was the first chief economist that I worked for, and he has followed my career for the next twenty five years. She's followed my career. I think my first foura fora into investment banking, my chief economist was David Wrestler at Numerous Security. He was a twenty six year veteran chief economist at twenty six year veteran of Numerous Securities and he's now playing
golf twenty four to seven in the South. But he because it was my first foray into investment banking, into the high frequency world trading as a trading desk economist. He was very influential there and I still hear from him all the time when he sees me in the media or he hears of some forecasting award or something like that, like he's still the proud Papa today. And so those were two big early mentors of mine that helped shape my career.
That's great. Before we get to books, and you actually brought a few books, I want to ask you about streaming. What are you listening to or watching What's What's keeping you entertained?
I really developed a love for streaming.
I've watched TV before very similar cod the TV was.
Never on in our apartment, and so with COVID, I really my eyes were open. And so I really love documentaries. The one that I'm watching right now is on Billy Joel.
I'm literally just wrapping up the first we stopped just before the Stranger.
Yeah.
So they must have made it for fifty somethings in this world, right, So well, if.
You grew up in the sixties, seventies, eighties Bill, especially in New York or Long Island, Billy Joel was everywhere.
Yeah, which I'm of an age that I know him in real time. But I'm from the South, so I didn't know all of these things. So my streaming habits are extremely polarized and polarizing probably so it's anywhere from documentary so I can expand my knowledge and expand my mind to the most streaming reality shows like Love Island and I Am not kidding you if anyone wants to say, wow, she really is a real person.
It's the fact that I can.
Enjoy Love Island and then in the next hour, I can enjoy a documentary on Billy Joel.
So you have a couple of books here, let's talk about books are what are you reading now? What are some of your favorites?
Yeah, I have a couple of books.
So when I first as you mentioned, I was on almost exactly eight years ago, and I talked about Jonah Sarah's book A Piece of the Action, How the Middle Class Became the Money Class, still one of my favorite books on the rise of consumer credit in the US and our love hate relationship with it.
But it's been that analysis of how the middle class suddenly gained entry to homes, mortgages, cars, and lots of consumer discretionary goods. Huge boom for middle class America, right.
Incredible.
It really is still an incredible book. And every economist of mine that I have covered the consumer and study household behavior, they have to read it. So I brought in today Kurt Vonnegutz player piano.
Can't go wrong with Vonni and so I.
Have not read this book, but I'll tell you that what I'm showing you, if the listeners could see, is a handwritten note from a colleague after watching a webcast of my how many people get handwritten notes.
Still not many, right, but they catch your attention.
And the webcast was me and Adam Jonas and Adam Jonas is he was always referred to as the Tesla guy. He's probably the quintessential thought leader at Morgan Stanley. He's just got a celebrity following, and he is leading the
charge on robotics and humanoids. And so after that webcast, I was sent this because this book, written in the nineteen fifty covered rise of the corporation and replacement of the state, the ruthless efficiency of capitalism in dealing with labor, the overpowering of the worker.
By AI and automation.
That's all in this book from the nineteen seventy five years ago.
Maybe five years ago.
The other book I brought in so again, just like my streaming habits a cleft, is called The Bluegrass Conspiracy, An inside story of power, greed, drugs and murder. This is the backstory to Cocaine Bear, the movie Oh, which is one of my favorite movies.
I haven't seen it because it sounds so bare crazy.
Come on, yeah, I mean, it just sounds like a wildly fictionalized account of a highly unlikely event.
Yeah, how's the book?
The book, I am just starting and I cannot wait to get through it because the movie, the only thing that the movie that really happened that was in the movie was that there was a dead bear found in a national park with a belly full of cocaine.
That is the.
Only thing in the movie that was accurate. It was accurate. That actually is in the book. But there's a whole backstory here and I cannot wait to read it. It comes highly recommended, So you can see that my taste in books runs the gambit as well, just like my streaming.
So if you haven't.
Read Player Piano yet, have you read other Vonnugut? Have you read Kat's Cradle or Swaterhouse Vonnagut? All right, so everybody should read Slaughterhouse five, And if you're at all remotely interested in science and technology, run a mock Cat's Cradle is his version of that. What makes him so fascinating is he finds these incredible concepts and just so simply explains them in such an compelling and entertaining fashion.
But isn't it also scary how books can be written that long ago? And then here we are talking about humanoids and robotics because another I have to say piggybacking off of this idea of robotics and humanoids. Twenty thirteen. Have you seen the movie Robot and Frank. No, Robot and Frank, Frank Langella was in it. Susan Sarandon, Peter sars Guard, James Marsden, Live Tyler Grow.
That's some cavy.
It is so.
Talk about when we think about thematics, longevity is a thematic AI tech and diffusion is a thematic in terms of thematic investing. Robot and Frank is about a senior gentleman that he wants to age in place, and to help him do that, his family buys him a home companion robot.
To which him, which is really not decades away.
No, we're not that far off from that. In Japan, they're already testing it. So this was in twenty thirteen. The kicker, though, is that it just so happens that Frank was a petty thief in his prior life. He's now going through early dementia. He was a petty thief and he co opts the robot to help him. That's the fun part of the movie. But Robot and Frank twenty three.
I'm check absolutely check that out. Our last two questions, what sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interest in the career in economics, finance, investing. What would your advice you to that.
I would say for them to find any and everyone they can think of that works in that field already.
The best is to if you.
Can, not to cold call, but to try to find some sort of connection, whether it's your wealth advisor, and see who your wealth advice. I get contacted by our wealth advisors that say, hey, my client has a son who this Do you mind if I put you in
touch with him? Find some way, And when you start to have conversations with people that are already working in areas where you think you want to work, never leave that converse without getting two more names from them of people they think you should contact, and can they make that opening for you so that you always have another conversation to be had.
Each call always asks for two more names. That's great advice for someone right out of college. And our final question, what do you know about the world of economics, investing, thematic investing, macro economy today that might have been helpful twenty five or so years ago, really, when you were first starting out.
I think if I were to know that.
Models are not the end all be all, I would have started using anecdotal evidence a lot earlier. I am a very big believer in anecdotal evidence, and I've been criticized for that in my career. It's not statistically sound. I like to use my one man data sample, which is my husband when I studied behavior, and and I just it's a great way to connect to people, connect
to your audience, get a message across. And I'm a big believer in using anecdotal evidence when thinking about how to adjust your forecast subjectively, and so I wish I had started using that my career even earlier.
Ellen, this has been absolutely a pleasure. It's been way too long since we had you in here. We have been speaking with Alan Zenner. She's chief economic strategist and global head of thematic and macro investing for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. They manage over seven trillion dollars in total assets. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the five hundred and forty seven we've
done over the past twelve years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcast, and be sure and check out my new book, How Not to Invest The ideas, numbers and behaviors that they're joy wealth and how to avoid them, How Not to Invest at your favorite bookstore.
I would be remiss.
If I didn't thank the Crack team that helps with these conversations together each week. Peter Nicolino is my audio engineer. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Sage Bauman is the Heavy podcast at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Rutolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio