Mouth Noises: 50y, ISS, HF - podcast episode cover

Mouth Noises: 50y, ISS, HF

Nov 14, 202532 min
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

Katie and Matt discuss ASMR, 50-year mortgages, Fannie and Freddie, housing as a positional good, indentured servitude, assumable and/or portable mortgages, Matt’s mortgage rate, optimal exercise of prepayment options, proxy adviser competition, shareholder proposals, good governance, index fund voting, hedge fund talent constraints, gardening leave, the Black Death and the AI Ph.D. pipeline.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. I'm gonna eat a bowl. I go the Mono soup.

Speaker 2

Wait, what is it?

Speaker 1

I've got the Mono soup Potato and lemon.

Speaker 2

Yea potato and lemon. That sounds lovely. This, of course from the Bloomberg Pantry.

Speaker 1

Get that on the mic.

Speaker 2

This is ASMR. If you've ever wanted to if you ever want to hear Malvine just inhaling soup.

Speaker 1

I want to be clear that I was exaggerating my slurping there for the mic.

Speaker 2

That's what ASMR is, to exaggerate your sounds. At least I don't know. I've never actually watched an a SMR video.

Speaker 1

I'm like aware of the SMR with us.

Speaker 2

I see parodies of it on TikTok, like people really clicking keyboards. But that's all I got.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I hope that some people get spine tingles out of this podcast.

Speaker 2

I just shuddered, got a spine shudder.

Speaker 1

Hello and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talked about stuff related to money. I'm Matt Levine and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.

Speaker 2

And I'm Katie greifeld a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television. You just took a sip of water off mic, and I.

Speaker 1

Feel like, yeah, I'm not, in general trying to make mouth poises throughout the podcast.

Speaker 2

That's what the podcast is, just mouth.

Speaker 1

That's the title.

Speaker 2

All right, one thing, We're done here. So I don't own a home. I would really like to and maybe.

Speaker 1

But you're not forty yet, which is like the median age of.

Speaker 2

I know, I know, I think it's thirty nine.

Speaker 1

But you know, anyway, what would make your home more affordable. It's probably not a fifty year mortgage. But that's like been in the news this week.

Speaker 2

It's been in the news.

Speaker 1

Trump tweeted about our about it or whatever he.

Speaker 2

Did he did. Did you see the Politico story on the TikTok of how it came to be?

Speaker 1

It's so good. It's because it's like a political story that's like the Trump administration is just a snake pit. And so it's like all the people who don't like Bill Poulty, who is the head of the Federal Housing Regulator and a real you know, publicity hound, Bill Bulting like apparently shut up to a golf game with Trump with like a giant poster board saying like Franklin Roosevelt invented the thirty year mortgage, Donald Trump invented the fifty

year mortgage. And Trump was like, great, I'll tweet about it.

Speaker 2

I have the details. It was a Saturday evening, it was not during a golf game, but it was at President Donald Trump's Palm Beach golf club. It was a three x five poster board. Sure, and you're right in that FDR appeared below thirty year mortgage and there was a photo of Trump below fifty year mortgage and the headline was great American President. Right.

Speaker 1

So that was enough for Trump to tweet about it and be like, oh, yeah, that's all the policy analysays I needed to back a fifty year mortgage. And then, like other people in Tromp administration, went to political and are like he sold potus a bill of goods that wasn't necessarily accurate, and I don't know, they said about your other nasty things about Pulty, like you know, yeah, recorded in Politico.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it's funny because it's showing up in the stock market. We're recording this on Thursday and at least right now, shares of Fanny May and Freddie Mack apparently they're falling in a big way because the word on the street is that Pulty is falling out of favor with the administration, which is probably I don't know nothing's real until it is. But it's funny to see shares actually.

Speaker 1

React, right, And it's such like a bank shot. It's not like would a fifty year mortgage be good for Fanny? Would it be bad for Fanny? It doesn't matter. Like I've written about this for literally a decade, one day Fanny and Freddie will be released from government conservatorship. But you could always make money by betting against the being in the next year. Like for the last ten years people said, oh, it can't last forever, they have to

be released. But so like there was like a thesis that Pulty would be the one to crack it open and actually.

Speaker 2

Make it happen over the line.

Speaker 1

And now if both out of favor, then I don't know, I still think one day they're going to be released.

Speaker 2

Well, it's funny because you saw such a big run up and shares on this idea, and to your point that you can always make money betting against that idea. Apparently, shares of both have lost about fifty percent since their September peak, so just in the last two months or so. It's pretty amazing, though, that the pushback to the idea of a fifty year mortgage has been pretty bipartisan. Oh yeah, it's a terribly tell me why.

Speaker 1

Well, Okay, the idea of fifty year mortgage is that if you spread out your payments over fifty years instead of thirty years, your payments will be lower.

Speaker 2

This sounds good and.

Speaker 1

Like, you know, a normal assumption to like you'd save like ten or fifteen percent on your monthly mortgage payment. And so if people think about affordability of homes as being mainly a matter of the monthly payment they could make, then cutting fifteen percent off your monthly payment makes homes more affordable. Yeah, and if people are worried about home affordability,

the is a good policy. There are various problems with that, one of which is that you have to have your mortgage for fifty years, and so, like you don't build up equity, you're spending a lot more on interest. You know, people are like it doubles the cost of interest you pay over the life of the one and so it feels even less like home ownership and more like just renting forever. But to me, that's not the big problem.

To me, the big problem is like, and this is biased by my experience living in and around New York, but like where I live, housing is a positional good, and there are only so many houses, and people compete to buy them. And so if you just waved a magic wand and said houses will be ten percent more affordable, that people would still compete to buy them, and they would just bid them up more until they stopped being

ten percent more affordable. Right, Like, the price of a house where I live is not determined by how much it costs to build a house. It's determined by, like you know, there's only so many houses, there's only so much land in desirable areas, and so people bid up the price of that. And so if you did something to make housing more affordable, you would just raise the price of houses till fully eliminate that affordability advantage, and

so houses would be no more affordable. People like mey who own homes would make money because there'd be like a windfall one time gain, although then you'd have to go buy it. You know, if you moved, you'd have to buy a more expensive house, but like all of the affordability goals would be eliminated and you'd end up just having the same monthly payment but for fifty years

instead of thirty years, which seems terrible. I think it's true everywhere, but like a lot of us housing is supply constrained, and you do like see this effect, right, Like people talk about student loans, right, Like, if you have government subsidies of student loans, what happens is not that it gets cheaper to attend college. It's that colleges raise their tuition to fully capture that subsidy, and it gets to be, you know, the same price to attend college,

but the government is subsidizing it. And I think you'd see that here where if the default mortgage was fifty years, you would still kind of be paying the same amount per month, but nomeral house prizes will be higher.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Well, I mean make it about myself. I would like to buy a home. Rates are really high.

Speaker 1

I don't need they'd be higher for to your markets.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I don't need to buy a home, So we're kind of just timing the market waiting for rates to go down, but there has to be a bunch of people like me and do you think about Okay, rates go down, but then the people on the sidelines come in and they push up the price of the house, and I don't know, it probably ends up in the wash in terms of yeah, and how much of saving.

Speaker 1

It's not fully true that like house prices go up as rates go down, but it is like kind of true that, like, you know, you'd think lower rates would lead to more housing affordability, but like the summits that that gets washed out by raising the prices of houses. Yeah, it's the same basic mechanism.

Speaker 2

To your point that it probably feels like renting forever. There's a note from Compass point that was pretty crazy. The view of this analyst was that a fifty year mortgage offers quote home ownership via an indentured servitude contract, calling the concept a bad idea.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I agree with that, but I also like the difference in thirty ars and fifty years and that great like.

Speaker 2

Most that's what President Trump said, Yeah, just.

Speaker 1

Like back to use. It's a little thing I don't Most people don't live in their homes for thirty years, right, Like a thirty year MORTGAGEES is a way to sort of adjust the payments and ultimately, like you saw your house after seven years and you you know, cash out whatever the increase in the equity is. With a fifty year mortgage, you'd build the in round numbers zero equity in your first you know, seven years, and so you'd basically be cashing out the increase in the house price

rather than you know, actually having a savings device. But it's not literal, and you know you don't you don't have to stay.

Speaker 2

There for fifty years. I'm sure a lot of people opened this analyst's research note though.

Speaker 1

So because it's said indentured it's hurt in the headline.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I would click on that.

Speaker 1

It's pretty good. I Do you want to talk about the other Bill Pulty ideas?

Speaker 2

Yeah, tell me about them.

Speaker 1

Well, so they're assumable and portable mortgages. Yes, you didn't about these ideas. People have been talking about this forever and like they exist in various pockets of the world, but they're not like the norm in US mortgages. But so in an assumable mortgage is like I move out of my house, you buy my house, I give you my mortgage and a portal mortrorgage. I move out of my house, I buy a different house, and I take

my mortgage with me. Right, So, like if I have a three and a quarter percent mortgage, which.

Speaker 2

Katie, I do, okay less.

Speaker 1

With three and a quarter percent mortgage, and I want to move now, like whatever mortgage rates are, you know, six and change percent.

Speaker 2

Something like that.

Speaker 1

If I wanted to move, if I could keep my three and a quarter percent mortgage, that would be nice for me, right, And so in normal US mortgages now you can't, but like you know, there are places where you can't, and both He has talked about having some version of that in the kind of like Fanny and Freddie standardized US mortgage market.

Speaker 2

That makes sense, Yeah, sort of.

Speaker 1

It would be nice if you do it. The problem is.

Speaker 2

There might be more inventory because people wouldn't just sit on their houses for.

Speaker 1

Ye, that's true. It would like loosen up the market a little bit.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

Problem is that, like the US has a thirty year mortgage, yes, which has fast terms. It is a thirty year mortgage with a fixed rate. Normal you know people's mortgage thirty your mortgage with a fixed rate that is prepayable at any time without penalty, and that is a like in theory,

a very valuable option. Right, if you borrow money for thirty years and at any point you can prepay it without penalty, then if like market insru's rates go up, you keep your mortgage and you're paying a low market rate. And if market rates go down, you prepay your mortgage and get a new mortgage and you get the lower rate. So if you're a mortgage investor, you're always on the wrong side of that. If rates go up, you hold a low market paper and if rates go down, you

get you know, prepaid. And that's not really true because almost nobody optimally exercises their prepayment option because almost everybody who is a thirty year mortgage moves after like seven years, and so when they move, they have to prepay their mortgage.

And so it's not the case that people only prepay when rates go down, right, It's like people prepay kind of randomly, And sometimes people who have three and a quarter percent mortgages move and prepay their mortgage and go get another six percent mortgage and grumble about it, but

they have to do it. Let the move for work, or whatever, right, and if you got rid of that, then the prepayment option would be a really valuable option, and that would make it would be really bad for mortgage investors and make mortgages much more expensive, I think, because you'd have to price that option right, because people would never prepay except when rates went down, and so you'd always have kind of the wrong way interest rate risk on your mortgage.

Speaker 2

And how do you feel about assumable mortgages.

Speaker 1

It's the same story, but either way, the point is that if you have a below market mortgage, someone can keep it right. Yeah, And like you know, assumable mortgage is like you take my blow market mortgage, but like presumably you pay me for that, right, So it's the same basic idea.

Speaker 2

I would like to take it without paying you.

Speaker 1

I understand.

Speaker 2

Okay, that could have I mean, something could have happened to here anyway. I don't want to move to your house, though, I'm sure it's great. It's not dead possums.

Speaker 1

And that's right, we've talked. Its only bad things about my house.

Speaker 2

No, I see it on Instagram sometimes.

Speaker 1

You know what, I have a have a really good mortgage rate.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, that's probably Yeah, I want to die in New Jersey. Though, what do you want to talk about now?

Speaker 1

I don't know, you talk about proxy advisors?

Speaker 2

Yeah, why not? This is a fun conversation on the heels of, of course, the Tesla vote Elon Musk's compensation package.

Speaker 1

Yeah, there's two praxy advisors. I mean there's more than two, but there's two for practical purposes, and they're called ISS IS in Distitutional Shareholders Service and Glass Lewis, and they're in the business of telling investors how they should vote on proxy vote and you almost never hear about it because it doesn't matter. It's like all these like advisory

practice votes at companies you don't care about. And then every once in a while, not that infrequently, Tesla's like, we'd like to give Elon Musk at trillion dollars, what do you think shareholders? And then Glass Lewis and ISS say no. Of course they say no because, like they are professionals in the business of corporate governance, and they have certain professional norms and expectations, Like they go to conferences, they talk to like minded people who are interested in

corporate governance. And if you ask anyone interested in corporate governance should we pay the CEO at trillion dollars. They'll say, no, that's not a good thing. And then Tesla is like a different kettle of fish. Right, Like, Tesla has investors who like Elon Musk, and he's like, I want a trillion dollars. I'm like, great, here, I have a trillion dollars.

But Class Lewis and I as us don't want that, and so they say no, and then nobody cares because Tesla's investors some of them follow Glass Lewis and Is as recommendations, but most of them are And so Tesla voted in favor of giving Elms bags of money, but el Ms got mad.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

I think there's a widespread you know, kind of like right wing coded being mad at Glass Lewis and Iss because they tell people how to vote on corporate shareholder votes. And corporate shareholder votes, a lot of them are about shareholder proposals, like you should write a report about how much carbon you produce. Right, It's very like environmental and social coded, and so these firms sometimes tell shareholders you should vote in favor of writing a report on carbonations.

So there's this perception that they're like kind of esg ish that they care more about environmental, social, and governance issues than like, you know, the Trump administration or the Republican Congress people do. And so there's the sense that like they have too much power and they push companies to be more left wing than they otherwise would be.

So there's like an effort to rain them in, and you've seen that this week with like the Wall Street Journal reporting that the Trump White House is contemplating some sort of executive order too in some way rein in the proxy advisors, right, and then also there's a report that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating them for anti trust problems.

Speaker 2

Yeah, basically whether they're breaking anti trust laws related to how they advise on proxy issues such as climate and social related policy.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's not clear what the anti trust problem is. Yeah, there was a House hearing on you know, anti trust in the proxy advisors a few months ago. And the kind of thrust there is that there are only two of them, and they somehow stifle competition or have bought up competitors so that there's only two proxy advisors. And the world would be a better place if there was a lot of proxy advisors. I don't think that's really

the problem. I think the problem that people worry about is that, however many you know, two or three or ten proxy advisors, the proxy advisors have theoretically outside impact because they tell shareholders of every company how to vote. Like, the market is not for proxy advisory services, the market is for every public company. I also think that, like, there are only two proxy advisory services that are big, but how many should there be?

Speaker 2

Kind of reminds me of ratings agencies, because there's three of them.

Speaker 1

It's very similar.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, there's more than three, but there.

Speaker 1

Is more competition in ratings agency. People worry that it's an olocopoly, but it's more competitive than in proxy advisory And I think one reason for that is, like.

Speaker 2

Ratings keep it in.

Speaker 1

I don't even know what that was. Ratings is ratings are intuitively important. People care about the credit worthiness of their loans and whatnot. I've written this week one reason that every investor a sources it's proxy voting decisions to to proxy advisory services. The stuff doesn't matter. Like, you know you own like zero point one percent of the shares of some public company, you know you own five

hundred companies. They each have like ten share advisory shareholder proposals each year, your vote like one, you're not going to change the outcome of the vote, and to the outcome of the vote doesn't have any practical effect, and so it's kind of crazy to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and so you outsource it to people who can think about it on behalf of everyone, and the number of people that you need to do that is the high.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Well, when you said it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1

This is like my thesis, like people care about this a lot.

Speaker 2

Yeah, but like there's very rarely a.

Speaker 1

Practical implication like mergers. Right, Like mergers, there's a shareholder vote and every so often it's contested and like class lewists or iss will have a view, but often in those cases, like the shares are kind of held by arbitration. As anyway, who have there view? You know the Elin Muss compensation. Every couple of years, there's a meaningful we'll be here, got there, But it's a lot of routine stuff. Yeah, it's not like never impactful, but it's almost never impactful.

Speaker 2

Well that made me think of, you know, whether or not it even matters whether their recommendations matter or not because you think about the experience with Tesla, and Tesla is a unique beast. But I've seen stats that like thirty percent of their shareholder base is retail. Both of these proxy advisors recommended passing this package. It obviously passed regardless, So like how much do their recommendations even matter in this day and age.

Speaker 1

Well, so a couple of things. One is that their recommendations used to matter more, and now like more big asset managers because of sort of a pressure campaign about this over the last few years. Now more big asset managers like no, no, no, we make our own decisions. We don't look at ISS our Glass list. Also, ISS and Glass Lewis have kind of backed away from having

a house view and to get ahead of this. And yeah, like there's you know, places like Tesla where it's a lot of retail shaholders who don't care abouts and classes. For the most part, it's really like it's not the biggest asset managers, it's not retail. It's kind of smaller asset managers in the middle who tend to defer to class Lewis and as more. But the other thing is like they tend not to defer to them as much on huge economically meaningful decisions that affect big companies that

make up big portions of their portfolios. Right, if you believe, like Elon Musk is gonna leave Tesla, if you vote against the package, then you will make your own decision about that. Yeah, not just do whatever iss is. But you have four hundred other companies where they're like, oh, we have like a shareholder proposal on our greenhouse gas emissions,

and you just like check a box. Right, So, like I think their recommendations have more impact on like lower profile votes, and there are just so many lower profile votes and those boots are lower profile. But they also like they annoy corporate CEOs when like fifty or thirty or ten percent of their shareholders vote in favor of

like having a report on greenhouse gas emissions. Like that's annoying to a CEO, and so they complain to like their Congress per Center, to the FTC or whatever, like, ah, these guys are, you know, interfering in our business, but it's not that impactful.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's funny. Something I wondered in all of this, and I didn't take the time to look it up. Are Glass Lewis and Iss ever in conflict, Like do they ever split or do they always sort of recommend as a block.

Speaker 1

I haven't looked at up you there. I'm certain that they have split. Yeah, it would be crazy if they never split.

Speaker 2

It would be crazy, wouldn't it.

Speaker 1

But as I said, like these people come from a professional interest in corporate governance, and there are sort of like standard views on what's good governance. Right, I think those standard views are not like not everyone agrees with them, right,

Like it's classically good governance too. For instance, have a board chair who is not the CEO, right, so the board has more like effective oversight over the CEO, and so ISAs in Glass Lives, pretty not always, but pretty regularly recommend voting in favor of splitting the board chair. And see, yeah, but you know, you look at like there are a lot of like various six us whole CEOs.

We're like, no, I want to be the chair of my company because I want to I'm the right person to run this company, and I want to supervise the board too, And like that's not like a crazy view, it's not like quote unquote good governance, but it's a thing that like some shareholders and you know, agree makes

sense with some CEOs. So a lot of stuff like that where it's like there's a classic view on good governance that is not always applicable and like you know, Iss and glass Lewis or a little more on the side of you know, classic good governance rather than what shareholders want for a particular company. I want to say one other thing about so, like this story is like a lot of it is about Iss and glass Lewis,

but not all of it. Like there's also the very closely related issue of index fund managers like black Rock and Vanguard, who used to defer more to Iss and Glass Lewis now kind of have their own house views but are kind of similar in that they like affect the votes of huge portions of every public company. Yeah reluctantly, Yeah, I sas and Glass Lewis too, reluctantly know it collect views for like managing voting. No, it's not, it's not like they do it.

Speaker 2

They do.

Speaker 1

It's a lot of like administrative work. It's a lot of like they help companies like actually do the process of voting. Right, So like if they could just like flip a coin and be like you should vote, you know, for this, or they don't care that much about the substantive recommendations. They care about like getting paid to do the sort of administrative work, and so they are backing away from doing some of the substantive recommendations and having a house sept.

Speaker 2

I didn't mean to smirch them. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1

It's so like black Rock and Vanguard and State Street, you know, control huge blocks of every public company famously and vote, and people get mad at them for how they vote, and like there's this view that they're too left wing and blah blah blah. And so the reports about a potential executive order on this, it's not just about the proxy advisors, it's also about index line voting. Yeah, and I've never heard like a great solution for what

they should do. But the report that I saw, like the Wall Street Journal, like there's talk of having them mirror their voting so that they can ask their you know, so if you're a black Rock, you have you know, thousands of clients and your index funds, and you ask

your clients how would you vote? And you know, ninety nine point nine percent of them don't return the questionnaire, and like zero point one percent say I would vote in favorite management or whatever, and then I think the idea would be that the Index one managers would have to mirror the votes of their clients who responded, which is kind of a crazy outcome if you think about it, because the people who respond are going to be passionate, passionate.

I was going to say cranks, passionate and nicer. So right now people complain about Black Rock, but black like the big index ones, mostly vote with management. Yeah, but if they had to ask their investors how would you vote and then get weird answers back, they would vote a lot more against management, and it would be kind of bad for corporate managers and kind of good for like activists shareholders.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Well, I wrote this at the end of October. Vanguard has this called Investor Choice, and I'm sure that Black Crock and State Street have similar initiatives as well. But this is recency biased because I wrote this story anyway. So basically it asks it's people who own shares of the index funds that are in this program, basically how they would like management to vote or how they would like the fun company to vote. They don't ask them

about every thing. I believe it's like a range of choices as to you know, I want to maximize profits or I care about social issues, and then Vanguard votes. I think there's some subjectivity to that, but they vote based on what that shareholder selected.

Speaker 1

Yeah, but don't they vote that shareholder shares like in other words, like if they ask every shareholder and ninety nine percent of them don't answer, then the one percent get voted the way they want to. But the ninety nine percent Vanguard is not just mirroring the one percent, right, Like they're making their own decisions.

Speaker 2

I think it's somewhere between them. I don't remember the exact details.

Speaker 1

If you do full mirroring, then like the cranks get a lot.

Speaker 2

Of Yeah, I do like that. Yeah, but maybe that's how it should be. I don't know if you're.

Speaker 1

Argument right, like if you the people who care who pay attention to share I just like I come back to like, it is kind of irrational to pay attention to shareholder voting, so it's not really how it should be. To get the worst results if you let the people who pay attention to shareolder voting be the ones, this lad in the outcome. But there's not another way to do it. You need someone to pay attention to do it.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's true, and maybe you should be rewarded for you taking the time to Karen answer the thing. Speaking of rewards, competition for talent reaches on.

Speaker 1

Yeah, this is a great story about Bradley Sacks that Business Insider about the talent wars at the hedge funds.

Speaker 2

It's like an evergreen story.

Speaker 1

It's an evergreen story. He quotes someone saying, you set up something to attract mercenaries, but now you want loyal soldiers. It doesn't work because, like, if you went to work at a hedgehund because they promised you fifty million dollars, you're probably a person who would go work at a different hedge fund if they promised you sixty million dollars, right, Like, probably you're there for the money, Like.

Speaker 2

Probably, yeah, yeah, that's really safe. That's fine.

Speaker 1

If you're working at a hedgehund for fifty million dollars, a lot of reasons to assume that you're there for the money, and so you could be lured away by a higher bidder. And that makes it frustrating. If you are the head of a hedge fund and you want to stop having constant bidding wars. I also, I hadn't really thought about it, but like he makes the point that, like there's an artificial constraint on hedge fund talent caused by the fact that everyone has these like super long

gardening leaves. Yeah, and so basically like half of all hedge fund portfolio managers are on the beach at any given time, and so the price of hedgemen managers gets bid up because you can only get so many of them because the rest are on long term gardening leaves.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it's great, creates value, yes, artificial scarcity, and it's great because like like a stylized the fact of economic history is that after the Black Death in Europe, you know, labor or like farm hand wages went up because farmhands were so scarce that they could command a much higher wage.

Speaker 1

That's a very bad way to create scarcity in the labor market. The hedgemund manager way of half of you are on vacation at any time so the other half get paid more is like really nice. It's like you have a career where you get paid a lot because you're scarce, like artificially scarce, and also you get to take long vacations every couple of years.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I is. The Englander called it a talent bubble that's created by you know, you restrict supply.

Speaker 1

The other thing is like, I don't really understand why hedge fund talent is so exogenous and and elastic, like the article talks about it. Like some of these big multi strategy funds have set up you know, training academies they hire out of college. They like try to take unmolded clay and turn it into you know, hedge fund managers, like that should be possible. Why can't you teach someone

how to manage a hedge fund? They can understand it's like hard, but you know, if you're paying the twenty million dollars, you get someone to do it.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I agree with you. You sounded a little bit like Elwood's there. So it kind of threw me for a loop. Okay, like it's hard, Like it's hard. Yeah, Yeah, I'm.

Speaker 1

Paying me twenty million dollars to manage a hedge fund. I'll do it for six months and then take two years.

Speaker 2

Regardingly, Yeah, but I feel like this story, I don't know. We talk about talent wars all the time. We talk about it when it comes to banking, we talk about it. When it comes to hedge funds, talk about it when it comes to AI. AI. We've talked about this before. It feels like a little bit more pure to your point that if a hedge fund pays you fifty million dollars to do hedge fund things, that probably you'll take

an offer for sixty million dollars. But maybe with AI there is a little bit more of a mission statement and I want to save the world. Yeah, I don't know one thing that destroy it.

Speaker 1

One thing about AI is like hedge funds have been around and some before them for a long time, and like in the modern form for you know, years, maybe decades. AI is very new, and so it's very understandable that there is a hugely constrained to supply. Right, Like the number of people who went and got aiphds is not that high because that was kind of a specialized thing until it became you know.

Speaker 2

Also, if you got that PhD, how long before it's stale.

Speaker 1

I don't think it gets stale because I think you then work in AI and you would like work at the cutting edge of the field. But yeah, I mean, like, right, if you if you get that PhD and then spend twenty years, you know, doing something else. I'll get stuff.

But I think that like the market did not produce that many aiphds because it wasn't a thing that got you paid hundred million dollars five years ago, and now that it is, I'm sure that one there will be you know, in the next ten years, there'll be more AI paches, and two they will perhaps have less pure motives, right because if you're you know, if you're a sixteen year old who's good at math, instead of thinking maybe one day or at a hedgehot now you're likeeah, maybe

one day or at an AI start up and one hundred million dollars a year, So you'll get more supply and less purity. But like hedgehunts, they've been around for a while, Like you should it should equilibrate. I don't know.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Okay, that's foe all I have to say. Apparently there's a rocket launch that I forgot was happening. I forgot.

Speaker 1

Okay, I'm gonna just have some delicious And that was the Money Stuff podcast.

Speaker 2

I'm Matt Levine and I'm Katie Greifeld.

Speaker 1

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff.

Speaker 2

Newsletter Bloomberg, and you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on the Clothes between three and five pm Eastern.

Speaker 1

To hear from you, you can send an email to Moneypod at Bloomberg dot net. Ask us a question and we might answer it on the air.

Speaker 2

You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.

Speaker 1

The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by annam Aserakis and rosas Onda.

Speaker 2

Our theme music was composed by Blake.

Speaker 1

Maples Amy keen as our executive producer.

Speaker 2

And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.

Speaker 1

Thanks for listening to The Money Stuff Podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android