Odd Lots - Pimco CEO Manny Roman on Japanese Bonds and the Sell America Trade

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Earlier this week, we saw something unusual happen in markets. The S&P 500 fell 2%, US Treasury yields rose, and the dollar simultaneously declined. This trifecta of market moves has rekindled talk of the "Sell America" trade as investors worry about the Trump administrations threats to take over Greenland. At the same time, Japanese bonds sold off after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called a snap election. So, how concerned should investors be about these latest developments? Is the "Sell America" trade really back? Or are we seeing a global rise in long bond yields? In this episode, we talk with Pimco CEO Emmanuel Roman about how he’s reading the moves. We also discuss Pimco's investment in data center debt, how the company is using AI internally, and why he doesn't 'get' gold. Read more:Why Investors Are Worried About Japan’s Bond MarketHow Gold’s Safe-Haven Appeal Is Fueling Record Prices Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to OddLOTS. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast, OddLOTS on Amazon music. Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. Joe, it's back. What's back? It's back. What's back?

They're back. No, the Sell America Tray. Oh, the Cell America trade. Various flavors of what that Quebec could have been, but all seemed to be converging at once. Yeah, I should have been more clear. So we are recording this on January 21st, and this comes a day after we saw a pretty big sell-off in the market. What was interesting about that sell-off is it was a trifecta of U.S. assets. So you had the S&P 500 down, bond yields up, and the dollar index down as well.

And so obviously people are talking about, is this the start or the restart? of the sell America trade. All of this is coming in the context of Trump's threats against Greenland, lots of geopolitical risk. And I should also just mention we are recording this. Literally at the end of this discussion, Trump is due to speak at Davos. I don't know why we do this to ourselves. Yeah, right. So all of this could change on a dime within like 60 minutes, but there's a lot going on. Yeah, and it probably won't change on a dime. And the reason is because while you, Yes, it is true that probably the tensions in Europe over Greenland, NATO, et cetera, are very important. Mark Carney having given a pretty extraordinary speech yesterday.

There's also the Japan element and the rising bond yields in Japan, which is related to, you know, I don't know, abenomics 2.0, perhaps, with the new prime minister and so forth. And so then part of the story yesterday, and you mentioned the trifecta sell-off, but part of the story yesterday, fairly sharp increase lately. in long-end rates in the U.S. and Japan. The 40-year bond in JGB, which never exists up until 2007, apparently, hit 4% for the first time in history. We were looking at sub-4% 10-year rates as recently as October in the U.S. Actually, maybe even as recently as December, now are closer to 4.3 again. So, like, those people who keep thinking, like, mortgages are going to, like, come down, et cetera. It's not looking like it. So there is a lot of. lot going on in terms of potential theoretical drivers, et cetera. But the important thing is that

rates at the long end keep pushing up. Well, this is the debate, right? So Scott Besson in Davos, like a lot of people at the moment, was saying that he thinks the U.S. Treasury sell-off was just, you know, the Japan effect. Yeah. And others think it's a geopolitical risk premium. So, you know, we need to get into all of this. Yes. And we have the perfect guest. Really the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Manny Roman. He is, of course, the CEO of Pimco. So, Mani, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts. Thank you for having me.

Why don't we start with that last question? When you're looking at bond yields today, how much of that do you see as the geopolitical risk premium versus just a follow-through from the Japan sell-off? Well, I think the honest answer is a mix of both. But when I was listening to you and when you look at how much the market reacted, they didn't react that much. I mean, bond yield went up five or six bibs yesterday on a 10-year. and the stock market is down 2%.

I mean, it's not exactly an earthquake. And so I do think that the market is very rational and essentially discount a lot of the noise and look through it. The day where the market is really concerned about something, you're going to see a much bigger reaction. That's the first point. The second point, I think, is the currency barely move.

I mean, I was looking at euro and sterling this morning. I mean, we flat as a pancake. the move away from the dollar, yes, as a secular trend, the fact that you want to diversify away from the dollar makes sense and you want to have other currency than the dollar, but the dollar remains the real reserve currency of the world. And so I take all of this with a grain of salt and we animals in the best possible way and we look at the screen and we tend to overreact to what we hear and so on and so forth. I was thinking about this last night, looking at the S&P 500 falling. You were thinking about how you're an animal looking at the screen?

I was thinking about exact. I wasn't in a moment of being an animal looking at the screen last night. It did occur to me as like, okay, S&P had fallen 2% on Tuesday, the 20th. However, in the context of an incredible year and an incredible 15 years. And a market. It's not that much. Nonetheless, I guess it's the confluence of headlines coming together. It's like, oh, I'm going to like pay attention to this 2% down day.

But I certainly take your point. These are modest moves in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, this upward pressure that we continue to see on the long end of curves, setting aside one week or whatever, whether we're talking about Japan, the U.S., elsewhere. Like, what is the bigger story that we're, like, taking from that? Well, I think Japan is quite a peculiar situation. Okay, let's talk about Japan. Let me start with the U.S. because it's the easiest thing.

Look, rates have been essentially in a ranch for the past year and a half. I think the Treasury and the Fed would be very focused on the long end of the curve. And I think that fixed income offers a real good entry point in terms of investment. I mean, we talked about the SNP. The SNP is very expensive. Investors are going to look at, you know, long-term fixed income and say, I can make six or seven percent holding a basket of fixed income. That looks really attractive. And so I think every time yield back up, you see money coming back. I talk about PIMCO, the flows have been incredibly good over the past 12 months. You know, people have come and both U.S. asset. And the trend is very clear. Nothing is changing. And we have people basically saying I can get

equity like return using fixed income. And for as long as that remains the case, I think the rates have very bounded in terms of where they're going to go. Okay. Japan is a very specific situation. I just came back from Japan last week. Oh, great. I mean, you feel bullish. I think everyone you meet is bullish equity. You know, I started my career in 1987. It's the first time that I see the NICA above when I started. I mean, it's unbelievable. But yes, you know, there is for the first time inflation. And the longer another curve is probably going to go higher.

And that's probably overall a good thing. Now, the super secular trend is the democratic pressures are a real problem, a real problem. But I think one of the thing we try to do is look at the liquid instruments. So the 40-year JGB may not be the most liquid instrument. The 10-year JGB is a real. Sure, I agree. The 40-year are the probably hardly trading. And, you know, the same goes in the U.S., right?

I mean, we don't want to look at the tenure. The 30 is a bit of a different story. You mentioned U.S. Treasury's trading in a band, and this is something I wanted to talk about because, you know, before yesterday, the non-movement in the bond market was really remarkable. So the move index is at its lowest since, I think, like, 2021. That's the bond volatility index. And if you look at the 30-day trading range for 10-year treasuries, that was at the tide. since the 1970s, which is pretty remarkable. What has that lack of volatility been like for a big bond shop like PIMCO?

It's a funny thing. We do like volatility because with volatility comes alpha. Right. And so we do like the opportunity to provide liquidity and add interesting position to our portfolio, for sure. But we need to scale up and scale down the risk depending on what's happening in a market and depending on the opportunity. And so we just came back from a very strong period of performance.

This is going to be plenty to do. And it may be on name specific. It may be on macro trend. I do think that a competitive edge is not to be able to predict day to day what's going to happen to the market. Our competitive edge is to have structural position to think about where value is, to optimize our portfolio, to think about the downside risk. You know, that's what we know how to do.

And, you know, it's an interesting market. things are cheap, I would say rates are cheap, and some things are rather tight. You know, investment grade are probably rather tight. But in structure product and mortgages, there's a lot to do. So you have this environment where you can build portfolio and sort of feel reasonably comfortable that you will perform over the next 12 to 24 months. Let's talk about, go back to Japan, since you just got back from Japan. And actually, I don't think we've done an episode on Japan since the election of the new prime minister. But tell us a little bit more. I mean, I mean, why now?

What's going on? You see, everyone feels bullish, et cetera. Tell us a little more color of what you learned in your trip to Japan. Well, I mean, look, we have a big Japanese office, and there are people in Pimcoe who knows a lot about this. I mean, look, it's for 20 years, Japan has tried to restart inflation. And for 19 years, it really hasn't worked. And then all of a sudden, they managed to get somewhere in a labor market,

which is fairly tight, where immigration is a problem. And where when you go there, I think there's a clear desire to monitor immigration. And the new prime minister has been very vocal about making sure that there's a limit in terms of labor force moving into Japan. Now, over the medium term, that's a problem. But when you look at the inflationary pressure, it's pretty clear that there's more inflation in Japan that it has been for the longest possible time. Now, the second thing is, I think you see other factor in Japan that you haven't seen in a long time. I was surprised by the fact that you have much more activism in a stock market, people to try to take ownership in company, trying to turn them around, breaking down conglomerate. It's not the first time I hear that.

Yeah, yeah. But I think this time it's certainly more real than it has been. And then when you think of the AI robotic trend, you know, the one thing Japan knows how to do. is to make things and to make sophisticated product. And I think that all of a sudden, there is a competitive edge that Japan has in terms of a number of stock which looks attractive. Forget about whether they're price right or wrong. But in terms of business model, they're quite attractive.

Just on the bond sell-off, how much of that is the return or expected return of inflation versus debt sustainability concerns? Because this is the other thing that's been very long running in Japan. You always hear it's a heavily indebted country. Is this maybe the bond vigilantes finally turning their attention to Japan? So I was talking with Rich Clarita, who is our chief economist. Friend of the pod as well. Friend of the pod.

And I said to him, I said, you know, we tend to look at debt to GDP. What if we look at debt to household savings? And then you realize for both the US and Japan, that there's just a lot of money. in the U.S. with the baby boomer, in Japan, with savers who tend to not to spend enough. And if you believe in fiscal policy and the fact that eventually taxes will go higher, then I think that the dynamic becomes quite different, and you can have higher sustainability in terms of debt, because the ability to collect money is there.

You look at the U.S., for example, you could have at some point in time higher inheritance taxes, this $80 trillion of wealth in the baby boomers, eventually that will go to the next generation, but it will also go to the state. And it's a question of how much goes to the state versus the next generation, but there is the ability to tax more. It also comes down, I suppose, to the political capacity of the state to tax. Because on math, you say, look, there's tons of private household assets.

We've far more wealth than we do have done. debt as a society and therefore it's just a matter of channeling in the right place, but you also need the politics to rebuild, which actually gets me to a question that you might have putting on the sort of like CEO of a big asset manager hat. You know, in California, there's talk about a wealth tax, et cetera. There's talk in Europe about wealth taxes. There's people talking about, oh, I want to like set up my family office or whatever somewhere in the Gulf and avoid all this. What do you see on that front? Do you see money moving in a significant degree high net worth or ultra high net worth clients really thinking about where their money is domiciled in a different way? So you knew there was something good about me is that I'm French. And so I've seen firsthand the experience of a wealth tax.

Yeah, tell us more about that. Well, it turned out to be a disaster because the realities people can move. They decided to vote with their feet. and they didn't believe that the government would keep the taxes at historically 2 to 3% of wealth, and they decided to go to Belgium or to Switzerland and to other places and so on. So I think the evidence in terms of how well wealth tax work is quite mixed. In California, you can cross to Nevada and decide you want to live in Nevada, God forbid. But then you have to live in Nevada. But you're going to live in Nevada.

But there are many other places, and there's anecdotal evidence of people moving to Austin and domiciting themselves in Austin and so on so forth. And so I think one of the thing about the U.S. tax code is you have competition among states in terms of where people can reside and so on so forth. Now, you know, there's many great things about California. We're based in Newport Beach. We're happy to be in Newport Beach. We pay high taxes. It's all good. But do you see into California or even on like right now, are you hearing about high net worth clients making these decisions right now or thinking about that? All secondhand and all from the tech industry. And I read the same news than you do. I'll be honest with you. I never met Larry Page,

but I understand he moved to Texas. By the way, one of the thing we've done really, really well is we set up an Austin office and it's been a great success. So we have 500 people in Austin. It's a big business for us. There's a great university there, which produce a lot of grad in STEM. I've heard. In STEM. Joe's aware of it. That's my alma mater. Is it? Yeah. So here we go. Thank you for saying that. Here we go. 90% of the graduate from UT stay in Austin. So you're one of the exception. Chris, that was one of the pitch. I deserted my soul.

He got out. But it's been a real good thing for us. Yeah. On April 4th, 2023, around two in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco.

Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering.

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executives making an impact on the eye-heartening, Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I want to go back to the Sell America Trade and Dollar diversification because one of the things that I think contributed to the atmosphere yesterday was we saw a headline about a Danish pension fund selling its treasury holdings. I think they have a hundred million or something like that. Not mega. Right. So a drop in the bucket of the U.S. Treasury market. But the fact that a pension fund is saying we're going to get rid of all our exposure because things are just too unpredictable, obviously feeds into concerns about, again, that geopolitical risk premium. When you see a headline like that, what goes through your mind?

That is an upset Danish pension plan for a reason that I think we can understand, but that in the large scale of thing represents absolutely nothing. And, you know, one of the thing when you work for PIMCO that you see is country with high savings rate and low population, Canada, Australia, need the US to put capital to work because the local market is too small. So imagine, for example, that you are one of the superannuation in Australia. The reality is you need the US to put money to work. Your local market is too small. You're not going to put 50% of your asset. You're not going to put 50% of your assets in Asia. And Europe, I don't know. I mean, I'm European. There's many things that I love about Europe, but the investment opportunity may not be as exciting as it should be.

We haven't seen growth over the past six years. It's a problem. So the other trend, which is happening exactly at the same time that we've been very involved with is the AI build up. And the fact that at the same time, you have the sell America. At the same time, you have an enormous amount of money coming into AI and data center and building up a whole new ecosystem. And that, I think, will provide exciting investment opportunity for plenty of people. So you have to wait the two and the micro versus the politics. And if I was a guessing man, I think the macro wins. Nonetheless, I'm going to still try to goad you into the politics-ish question because

we're very flattered that you came to visit us here at our offices in New York City. But it's hard not to note that you're not in Davos right now. I was there in 2015. I got a flu, so I vowed to never go again. What's your excuse? My excuse is, I think, I mean, look, I always say my partner, Dinaviston, who was on your pod a month ago. And I, look, our life belongs to a client.

We here to manage the firm. We're here to sort of. Aren't they all in Davos? Yeah, this is what they, this is why a lot of them are saying, oh, I go to Davos because this is where my clients are. Networking. Yeah, networking. Why is Jamie Diamond's there?

He would say, my clients are here. I got to meet with them. See, what's your excuse? We're simple people. We mind the shop. We mind the shop. And look, people make different decisions and so on so forth. And given what's happening in the market, given everything else, I think we're glad.

We're glad we're in the office. I love making the office. That being said, Tracy wrote about this yesterday in our newsletter. The conversations that are happening in Davos, they're pretty serious. I mean, Mark Carney talking about this sort of, it's time for us to not be a rough, sir. It's time to not, we can't be nostalgic about how the world was five or ten or 30 years ago, et cetera. But it's hard. Markets don't easily price in geopolitical turning points or when they do it tends to be in an L shape, et cetera.

Surely you're like thinking about these things. All the time. And look, Mark Carney is a friend. He used to be on a global advisory board. I think he's a fantastic human being and a great prime minister for Canada. But I will read the transcript of his speech at the same time, you will. And I understand the predicament that the question is, how much Canadian bonds do I want to own and how much Canadian dollar do I want to own? And, you know, information is very, very efficient. And the reality is Marx says to everyone at the same time what he thinks. And that's the way it should work. How do you actually factor in geopolitical risk into the way you manage your portfolios? Because this seems to be something that investors understandably struggle with, especially since a lot of the outcomes are so binary, right? It's like, well, either the U.S. takes over,

Canada or the U.S. doesn't take over Canada? I think we try to be incredibly humble and say, why do we have an edge? And the reality is if the three of us sees the exact same thing at the same time, we don't have an edge. I think we really, really try to understand politics. We have one of my partner, Lib Cantrell, is solely focused on U.S. politics. She does a great job. We care, but we care about macro issues that may not make it to a pod.

We care about mortgage reform. We care about, you know, actually what can the president do in terms of Greenland. The reality is he needs two-thirds of the Senate and Congress approval. That seems like a lot. So we care about smaller things. And often we said, look, we don't know anything that the market doesn't know. And so we shouldn't build a position based on politics because the reality is we all see the same thing at the same time.

In some markets, you know, I come back to currency. Yeah. I mean, you look at the big currency. it's the most efficient market in the world. I mean, if you look statistically, they're incredibly hard to predict. I mean, you look at time series of, you know, dollar yen or dollar sterling or dollar euro and so on. I mean, it is as close to white noise as anything can be. So you build a portfolio.

Yes, there is a theme that the dollar may get weaker in which case you want to have other currency. You know, we like the Australian dollars. We like the British pound. Why? Because the economy is slowing down and you have high rates. And so there's plenty of room to cut. And you say to yourself, that's something you want to own. But, you know, how much of your portfolio?

portfolio it is, 20, 25%, something like this. It cannot be 100. What do you make of the relentless bid in gold? Honestly, there's things where I just give up and I say, and I say, I don't understand. That's one of them. Really? Yes, totally. Say more. Well, I believe that assets are being moved by two factors, valuation and momentum.

So the momentum in gold is incredibly strong. I see it goes up every single day. Someone is buying it. Maybe it's CTA, maybe it's individual, maybe it's central bank. one, I don't understand, I stay on the sideline. But at the same token, I don't really understand crypto, and that's okay. I think when you're in asset management, the one thing you need to know is sort of stick to uniting and do what you know how to do. And when you don't understand, sort of said, okay, that's not my gig. I shouldn't be doing this.

Other people understand it better than I do. I think you gave us a very polite prompt earlier to talk about mortgages and mortgage reform, and we should do that because I know that PIMCO has been very bullish on mortgages recently. I see a Bloomberg headline just from last week saying Pimcoe sees mortgage rates easing on Fannie Freddie purchases. Those are part of the Trump administration's efforts to bring down mortgage rates. But of course, at the same time, you know, we started out this conversation talking about the 30-year yield, which is ticking up. How are you thinking of, I guess, those two tensions in the market? So the efforts on the political side to bring rates down versus bond yields,

longer-term bond yields that seem to, you know, be pretty stuck at high levels. That's right. Look, it's a complicated tension. And if you put yourself into the shoes of the U.S. administration, what looks clear to me is you want mortgage rate to be lower rather than higher. And for that, part of it you control and part of it you don't. And it's inflation expectation. It's the shape of the curve and it's discipline. And whether they get there or not, I don't know, is the short answer. The 30-year mortgages and the whole mortgage ecosystem looks cheap, and there's plenty to buy and it looks attractive.

Yes, we do think that the purchase will help in terms of valuation, but I don't know what I don't know. You have midterm coming in November. You know, it's too early to have any intelligent thing to say, but a lot of things can happen. Speaking of mortgages, one of the things that we've heard over the past several weeks, The administration wants to make it harder for big asset managers to buy single family homes to actually do anything like that. Might have to go through Congress, but we did get an order last night or a statement last night from the White House.

Talk about Fannie and Freddie, putting bigger constraints on large institutional investors. What do you make of some of these, I don't know, populist inspired impulses to sort of change the distribution of who could buy what assets? Not much. Okay. Why? Well, I mean, look, you know, we don't do that. There is, you know, some people do built rent. Yeah.

And they said build to rents exactly. So I think that's already a pretty big chunk of like what this whole phenomenon is. Yeah. And look, it's hard work. Yeah. The U.S., if you look at it from a macro standpoint, has a shortage of house, right? So we need more homes. And the reality is when you look over the 30-year period, the only places where cost haven't

gone down is building. And the reality is we need more cheap houses, especially in affordable housing. And that's a policy that I think would be quite good, but it's not because institution shouldn't own single house. You need more houses. You need people to be able to afford proper houses. And that's true, I think, in a lot of states. And there are states like, you know, Texas, for example, where you have plenty of space and you look at the cost of housing and it's going down. And you have states like California where it's really complicated.

You need the robots to build houses, right? So, okay, speaking of robots, AI has come up a couple times. this conversation. One of the interesting things that's happening in the credit market right now is that AI is becoming a much bigger force when it comes to investment grade debt. So lots of big companies issuing even more into that particular market. How does that change the credit market, if at all, for you? How are you thinking about the increased, I guess, exposure or presence of AI in something like IG? Well, I think you reported, we try not to talk about single positions, but you reported that we got involved into a very large 20-plus billion dollar transaction to build data center.

And some of these deals are going to be incredibly attractive and some won't be. And so I think what's really interesting is the big data center user may actually be the double-a or better rated company. And so Oracle or meta or any of this company actually have a capital structure where they may need a lot of money. but the money is backed by market cap if you use a Merton model which is above a trillion dollars and so they're pretty safe investment

that's pretty unique and so size is a competitive edge that plays well to our strength we're positioning ourselves to have plenty of capacity to do it if and when it comes and then some people like Microsoft and Google probably can do it with their cash

and build up their cash and don't need to issue debt to be able to do it so different people will go with different strategy. My understanding is you made a pretty chunky return already on that data center deal. And I've heard in the market that since you did that, everyone wants to come in and finance data centers. Are you seeing a lot of copycats or competition in the space to get on these new deals?

Well, not everyone can take $25 billion of a deal. True. And so I always say, you know, one of the things with Dan that we constantly think about is what's a competitive edge. and we big, and we do one thing. We do fixed income in old shapes and form. And so we always say we're going to make money where our strength are, and that's clearly one of a strength.

It's good to be PIMCO when it comes to new issuance, for sure. It is good to be PIMCO when it comes to new issue where we were part of the structuring working with, in this case, Morgan Stanley, and we understood the credit quite well, and it was something which fit into a portfolio. It may very well be that the next one doesn't fit into what we do in which case we'll pass. Returns to scale are such a common theme in our discussions last night, size per se, as a competitive advantage, which is not always the case because sometimes you like to hear, oh, we're small and nimble. But it seems like in many of these things we're talking about these days, size is huge.

You know, just like from the perspective of CEO and, you know, this conversation sort of blends the line of like what I would think of as a CEO discussion. CIO discussion, right? When we're talking about rates, it's a CIO discussion. When we're talking about where you have offices in Austin, this kind of a CEO discussion. But from the perspective of CEO, like, where else are you putting your chips besides you mentioned Texas and there's okay, there's some migration? I think Asia.

I think all the high growth market from a CEO standpoint is quite interesting. So we have a great Asian business. And when you look at the population, the savings rate, and where it will be 10 years from now, I think it is incredibly important that we do extremely well in Asia. And so we have offices in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, and they're doing great.

The buildup of wealth is really, really important, and that's before we start talking about China. And so if you look at the super secular horizon, Asia will become significantly bigger than Europe in terms of the amount of money for asset manager and where the opportunity set is. And I think that's pretty clear to me. Join Bloomberg in New York or via live stream on May 19th

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Do you anticipate mainland China ever being a real, a bigger opportunity? I hope so. I hope the market, the market of a level playing field at some part in time and something that all of us feel comfortable investing in. What would make you feel comfortable? Is it just the easing of capital controls or something else? control the rules in terms of setting a proper trading operation, all of these things. And I always say you can break the world differently. So you look at our business. I can break it and say you have high gross region, Middle East, Australia, Canada, Asia, where they all have the same characteristics.

They have high growth and high savings rate. And those are usually pretty good for asset manager. And then you have mature market like US and the UK where you'd be happy to grow at 5%. Because, you know, there's nothing really new happening and the market is the market. You may take market share and you may lose market share, but the secular growth in the markets is sort of well known. And what about in the Gulf? I think the Gulf is very exciting. I mean, I always make this joke.

If you close your eyes and you take a direct plane from L.A. to Abu Dhabi. So, as you know, we're in Newport Beach. Yeah. Honestly, you think you went around the world and kind of came back. Abu Dhabi is the L.A. of the world? It's very similar to Newport Beach, actually. People are super friendly. They've done a really, really good job.

Super friendly, great weather, and the most interesting culture and intellectual hubs that you can think of when I associate Abu Dhabi at Newport Beach. I mean, Abu Dhabi is, once again, over the super secular trend, I think the Middle East has come a long way. And I think you also had, you have a new generation of investment professional locally trained and locally raised, which is pretty good. And so once again, I think that's quite good. You know, and then there's what we don't know, you know, everything happening with Iran and whether Iran is something will happen or not.

And, you know, I think the understanding, too, is no one knows. I lived in Abu Dhabi for two years. And I always likened it to Texas in that it's hot all the time and you spend a lot of time, a lot of your time at the pool and at the shopping. all, and that's pretty much it. Oh, that could be California. Exactly. Exactly. Since we're on sort of CEO executive level topics, just on AI, this is a question we've

been asking a lot of our guests, but how are you incorporating AI, if at all, into your own workflow and organization? Oh, I think for us, the sort of defensive and offensive opportunity. So the defensive one, it should increase significantly productivity in terms of everything we do from the way we manipulate document, the way we create marketing, the way we optimize our trade function. But remember, every time we buy a bond, it goes into many different account. And every single account has different parameters, different restriction, it all goes to a custodian, it gets split, it has best X. All of these things is a complicated factory.

anything which makes the factory simpler, more efficient, and safer is a really, really good thing. AI will help to do this. We spend a lot of time discussing NDA and things like this where honestly, it's probably fair to say that we have better things to do. And so if AI gets us to a more efficient and less costly solution, that's good. I always say if AI allows us to reallocate resource more in R&D than in repetitive, menial function that we don't need to do, that's good. I think compliance will also benefit quite a bit from AI and the ability to do deep learning and sort of figure out whether they trend, whether we miss something, whether you look at every

possible situation. I think that's also quite good. And then there's the offensive part where you sort of said, okay, can I use a large language model to try to extract from data inside an opportunity that I may have missed? And I think on this, some of it will say, okay, that doesn't work. Yes, you know, we've analyzed every single sentence from the Fed and every single transcript and, you know, we found nothing that we didn't know. And then sometimes we may find things that are new and allows us to have an additional alpha. And I do think that large language model have a competitive edge when you have a lot of data which don't necessarily match perfectly.

So when it's, you know, in the mortgage market, you have your house, your mortgage, your credit score, a picture of your house, your insurance, your employment history, your communication with your mortgage provider. All of these things, I think, should give us a finer assessment in terms of what's happening. And then the more data that you have, the more of an edge, presumably, you get. But I think you embark into this journey being humble and sort of hope that, you know, you have a few in. Just on the, I suppose, defensive. Because we just recorded an episode talking about some of the coding models. And there's a huge theme in the stock market, specifically, lots of sort of mid-level enterprise software companies getting very hurt because their clients are like,

maybe we could buy this or maybe the AI. We don't need to put in a sales ticket into a system because they can have an AI that just knows that tell the salesperson to make a call, etc. On this sort of basic blocking and tackling, at an asset manager, you must have tons of third-party enterprise software, contracts and seat negotiations, et cetera. At that level, see AI tilting the playing field and such, you know what, maybe we could build this feature trivially and we don't need to pay this per seat license or anything like that. Are you seeing this in action? I think you're totally right. I think that all of us have apps that we use and software that we use that we don't love and that costs too much money and we'll try to replace

them. And some of them you'll be able to replace quickly and some of them want. That's an effort. That's a real thing. In-house development. Is that something you're doing already? Sure. Interesting. And I think to link that back to the market, there's been quite a high level of activity in private equity in software because the cash flow were deemed to be predictable with high leverage. It would be interesting to see what happened to the returns of this software company

for the years to come. There'll be winners and loser. but the top line of some of the software company will be interesting. And I know that Dan is worried about the software industry in terms of risk and every single credit we own, we look at it with an air length and say, if AI is as game changing as we think it is,

what would it do to this business model? And I think that's a perfectly reasonable question in terms of what it may do. You mentioned the Fed a little earlier, And I realize we've gone this entire conversation without actually talking that much about the U.S. Central Bank. But let's rectify that now. So one of the remarkable things about the bond market recently is even though there have been

concerns and headlines around central bank credibility and possibly Powell, you know, coming under criminal indictment and all of that, the bond market hasn't really reacted that much. Again, it's been trading in a very narrow range. We've also seen tips and other inflation related bonds, basically not in quite. incorporating any of what you would think would be these political risks. Do you worry at all about credibility of the central bank as a big bond buyer? I think we believe in Fed independence. And as we often say, I haven't met many politicians who want higher rate. And so there's two lever in economic policy. There's monetary and fiscal. You want the Fed to be in charge of monetary policy.

And I think the good news is whoever gets the job as head of the Fed enters into the history book. I think the weight of the function is such that people tend to make very rational decision. It doesn't mean that they're always the correct one, but you're not going to see a situation where with the reading of inflation, they make totally suboptimal decision for political reason. I think it's very hard. You think we're far from that? I think it's very hard to do. Okay.

And you have a voting process. I think when your chief economist tells you you're crazy, it's just really difficult to kind of go against this. Now, you know, maybe once you can kind of look through the data and say, I do think the data are going to become better. Here's why. But it's a really, really dangerous game. Also, once you lose credibility, you really lose credibility.

you really lose credibility. And I often say, I think everyone has looked at the list of situation in the UK. When you do something borderline crazy, in literally five days, you can destroy your credibility on the bond market. And you have to move at the speed of light and with the Bank of England to be able to correct when rates go up literally 100 bibs. And so I do think the market punishes you and punishes you. really hard if you try to do something which she doesn't want. Why is it that Liz Truss is like, okay, this was like a dangerous thing, it was like reckless, et cetera, whereas new prime minister of Japan comes in, talks about

reflationary policies, and you describe it's like everyone's excited about Japan right now. What is the difference between the inflationary impulse that Liz Truss was expected to have accelerated with the mini budget versus maybe the more benign reflation, that you're mostly describing as a sort of positive development in Japan? Well, I think what happened is she gave this whole tax package at the same time. So there was like this liberalization

at the same time a tax package where clearly someone hadn't kind of figure out the very basic math in terms of what it did to government spending. And then all of a sudden, you had a huge deficit that the market saw and say, oh my God, there's no way you can do this. This is not realistic.

And the back end of the curve just went crazy. I mean, at some point in time, fiscal policy, really, really matters. And, you know, look, I, you know, one of the thing about being European is you look at fiscal policy quite a bit because that's, that's been one of the core level of economic policy. And somehow, I think the left hand and the right hand forgot to talk to each other and they came up with a package, which made no sense and clearly hadn't been blessed by the UK Treasury and the market reacted incredibly strongly to that. You know, I think when it comes to PIMCO, I think

it's often underappreciated how much of PIMCO is about those sort of overlays on top of the fixed income positions. And so I have to channel my inner Bill Gross here and ask, are you selling volatility into this particular environment? Well, I think we look at volatility all the time. And I think when we find an opportunity to sell volatility, we do. And it's a source of a lot of fun. I think we've done it for a very long time. And sometimes we think it's attractive, and sometimes we think it's less attractive, and I'm not going to talk about opposition, but it is a source of risk premiere,

and I think we focus on it. I think to kind of come back to this, we hit single, right? And I think what makes our performance is really the work of 300 people under Dynavisen, but we hit a lot of single well, and when you put all this single together, the result is pretty good.

the great man coming down from the mountain and thinking that all this great macro trend are going to happen, that doesn't quite work. It's really about being incredibly disciplined and essentially making a bit of money every single day with various different level. And maybe I demystify what we do, but I think it's actually a lot of work. And that's why it works. And it's repeatable. You know, I always say to a fund manager, why do you think you can make money? question number one. Question number two, why is it repeatable?

Why do you think you can do it again? And the great idea and a great man coming from the mountain, I was the table of the lows. I'm not entirely sure it's that repeatable. Because sometimes you get lost in the burning bush and, you know, other things and so on. These are very evocative images. You know, I'm an evocative guy.

And I do think repeatability is really, really important. You want to make the process as industrial as possible and sort of said, okay, those are older level I have. And on average, this is going to be pretty good. All right, Manny Roman. Thank you so much for coming on. It was really fun. That was fantastic.

Thank you so much. Joe, that was a really enjoyable conversation. And I like straddling the CEO and CIO worlds. It was interesting to get that perspective. You know, one thing I saw right before we recorded this episode, people were talking about the Bank of America Global Fund Manager Survey. Oh, is that out today? I don't think it's out, but in the last one, relatively recently, I think, geopolitical conflict, top the list, which, you know, kind of expected.

But then the second concern, the second biggest concern, was a disorderly rise in bond yields. Interesting. So, like, 19% of respondents had that down as their, like, top tail risk in January. That's pretty interesting to me. And that's, the atmosphere feels a little bit different because people are so primed for the, particular event. Totally. You know, the thing that I keep thinking about is we just have this combination right now of like, all right, so like we didn't ask many of this directly, but it's like this fundamental question, why does the neutral rate appear to be higher than it used to be, right?

And there's two big things going on, which is there's a lot of public spending because of remilitarization and that's related to geopolitics, this desire for national self-sufficiency across a range of technological and commodities and so forth. So there's like tons of spending. And we're throwing sand to the gears of trade. So that spending is less efficient than an otherwise would have been. Right. So for a dollar of spending, maybe only 75% does actually contribute to the economy and 25% is waste, et cetera. So these are two things going on at once. And so like I certainly take Mannie's point. And I think it's totally right. There's like, you can't one day you get a blip. And it's like, it's not the end of the world. And you have to like

train yourself to like not overthink a single day. On the other hand, rates around the world remain despite rate cuts, et cetera, and despite arguably slow down, significantly above where they were pre-crisis. Right. There's a direction of travel that seems to be clear. There's a broader direction of travel that strikes me is very intuitive given the simultaneous phenomenon of like less efficient trading systems and more spending. All right. I see Trump is giving his address at Davos. So Shall we leave it there? The other man from the man. Wait, can I just say, I loved man.

He's like man of the mountain. I feel in finance we're always talking about men of the mountain coming down with their wisdom. Yeah. So I love that. But yes, we should go listen to a man literally in the mountain right now. Lots of mountain men in Davos. And hear what he has to say. All right.

Anyway, we can leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Kermin-Armond, Dashel Bennett, Dashbot and kale Brooks at kale Brooks.

For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash oddlots. We have a daily newsletter in all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord.g. slash Odlots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we talk to the CEO of the world's biggest bond fund, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes,

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