BlackRock ($BGT) podcast mentions
I mean, it's a practical matter. The numbers have just gotten too big. I mean, the Fed has enabled— I mean, let's take a step back. I mean, over the last 35 years since Greenspan was the boss, the Fed, slowly but surely the Fed has pursued policies that has enabled the reckless spending of the US government. And both parties have done it and the Fed's enabled it. And here we are now. We've got $40 trillion. There's no way the Fed could do anything super aggressive. Because of the consequences, especially when you've got so much of the retirement money all tied up in the Vanguard and BlackRock index funds, right? So now you're going to create— the bond market gets splattered in a big enough way that blows through the passive bid as it approaches the super danger zone that Mike's pointed out between 60% and 65%. So you got that creeping along. Now you've got this private credit garbage that may be about to cause a problem. Via the life insurance company. Maybe they can tamp that down for another little while. So you've got some big problems coming along at a moment in time where the passive bid might get kind of unstable, for lack of a better term. And so the Fed can't be very aggressive without potentially triggering some of these problems. So I don't know how worse is going to play this. I don't know how best is going to play this. I mean, the size of the debt is basically unmanageable. And then they've got to keep these balls in the air. They got to keep the stock market from tanking, which the passive bid helps on a regular basis. But in the next couple of years, a lot of these forces are going to come together at the same time. And there will be trouble. It's not going to be in the next 15 minutes, but you have to be aware of these things. So if you start to see something unravel, you have to know how it can play out, right?
Bill Fleckenstein — Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · It's Crunch Time For Bonds | Bill Fleckenstein · 2026-08-23Yeah. Um, let's see, let's use, um, iBit. So this is the, uh, BlackRock, uh, Bitcoin Trust.
Lance Roberts — Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · Risk Of A 10% Market Correction Now Uncomfortably High | Lance Roberts · 2026-08-22Because you've got 401s and all these other accounts, even a rollover IRA, you probably can't magically turn every dollar into an identical type of account, but you might be able to dramatically simplify the number of accounts that you're managing. As an example, some of those former employer accounts may be eligible to roll into your current employer's retirement plan, assuming that the plan accepts incoming rollovers. Another possibility is rolling certain accounts into your existing rollover IRA. Here's where I would just slow us down. Don't consolidate just for the satisfaction of having fewer logins. Before you do anything, before you move any money, do an audit and ask yourself, what are the fees on all of the various accounts? What are my investments? Do I have access to low-cost institutional funds in one employer account that I wouldn't necessarily be able to buy elsewhere? Are there any valuable guarantees or plan-specific features? And how easy is the plan to manage? If your current employer's retirement plan, you like it, it's got low fees, good investment choices, an easy UX interface, it could potentially become the hub for all these other accounts that you have dangling. Maybe several of those old accounts roll into your current plan. Now, I wanna talk about the part of your question that I think is totally normal too, which is the fear aspect of this. You mentioned Bernie Madoff. We also know that sometimes banks can go under because of their own poor mismanagement, and it's a psychological reaction, but it's rooted in a lot of truth, right? So if you log into one website and see $1 million sitting under one corporate logo, you might be like, okay, too many eggs in this basket. But here's the distinction I want everyone to understand. Diversifying your investments is not the same thing as diversifying your custodian. So let's say you have half a million at Fidelity. It doesn't necessarily mean you have $500,000 invested in Fidelity. You have, you know, a Vanguard ETF, you have a BlackRock ETF, you have treasury bonds, you have an S&P 500 index fund, bonds, cash. Those securities are the assets, and Fidelity is the institution holding or servicing the account. And reputable regulated brokerages and retirement plan custodians are not.
Farnoosh Torabi — So Money with Farnoosh Torabi · 2025: Ask Farnoosh: Are We in a Housing Bubble? Plus: BNPL Warning Signs, AI Shopping Scams & Should You Consolidate Your 401(k)s? · 2026-08-21I would assume that it has to do with Feynman and just the next generations because that is accretive to their guidance and that's what people want to see, like how are numbers stacking up. Yes, the financing is going to come, but those were the $500 billion amount that I mentioned. That's MOUs and it's not even definitive. We don't even know how much money those 6 financiers— BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs— have actually raised at this point. So I think that if anything, Jensen Huang is just going to change the narrative, make sure that we all don't think it's circular financing, that they're going to be at risk down the line, which was the point of this story right now. And more so focused on the actual chips that are going to be going out into the market over the next 3 to 6 months and how that changes their revenue and whether there'll be a more than $3 billion beat, which is the market has come to expect every single quarter now for NVIDIA.
Christina Partizanopoulos — Squawk on the Street · 11AM Hour: Anthropic Investor on Upcoming IPO, Owner of Rare Trading Card & Crypto's Rally 8/21/26 · 2026-08-21People like BlackRock, people like Apollo, they're going to buy the equity tranche and the mezzanine tranches, the high-grade, the high-yield tranches of these things. For their private credit investors. But what it does is it sort of softens it because this whole structure can have multiple data centers contributing collateral, multiple counterparties and all these things. Nvidia isn't facing the same counterparty with its credit guarantee, and so it's attractive to them. But in the end, it's the same thing, which is NVIDIA's building, and many, every company is promising future support without having to finance it off balance sheet. And so, you know, that's normal. Like, this isn't ringing the bell saying this is, you know, Enron about to happen, but you are seeing that it's All of this issuance is creating a little bit of concern, a little bit of indigestion, and these new structures are ways of tapping more demand. And so to me, the signal was pretty simple. NVIDIA is not— is out of capacity to do direct deals, direct circular deals, but still very, very in need of supporting its customer and just had to come up with another way to do it, which to me is a slight negative, but we'll see. You know, NVIDIA reports next week. I'm sure their earnings and their forecast will be through the roof.
Andy Constan — Excess Returns · We Asked Andy Constan What Happens If AI Funding Breaks Before the Thesis — And if Warsh Blinks · 2026-08-20I mean, to me, that's been, you know, the most important touchstone across all of my career and something I try to remind myself of every day sitting in my new role at BlackRock. This is an extraordinary organization filled with people who know their corner of what we do better than anybody else. And if I'm open to that, I can bring things together, connect dots in ways that are going to deliver value for clients and deliver value for the firm.
Mike Pyle — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19Welcome back to Trop Traders Unplugged. My name is Alan Dunn, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Mike Pyle. Mike is Deputy Head of BlackRock's Portfolio Management Group, which spans systematic and discretionary investment strategies across liquid asset classes. Mike has been at BlackRock on and off for quite a while. He was previously the firm's Global Chief Investment Strategist, and Earlier in his career, he has spent an extensive amount of time in the US government. From 2022 to 2024, he was the US Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics. And earlier in his career, he has been Chief Economic Advisor to Vice President Harris, and in the prior administration had been a Special Assistant for Economic Policy to President Obama. Mike, that's a great CV. We're delighted to have you with us. How are you doing?
Alan Dunn — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19Good stuff. And obviously you've had that extensive experience in policy and government, which we might touch on briefly later on as well. But I did mention that you were BlackRock's Global Chief Investment Strategist for, I guess, for much of the last decade. I think it was from kind of 2014 to 2020. Now you're back in a different role, and I think it's fair to say we're in a very changed macro environment to the environment that you would've been navigating back then. I mean, from your perspective, how do you characterize that change in the macro regime?
Alan Dunn — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19Yeah, I think that's a great way of getting into a whole range of interesting topics. And in some ways for me, it was an especially jarring transition. You know, I, as you pointed out, was at BlackRock from 2014 to 2021, left work in capital markets for 3 years and then came back in 2024, really to a, as you say, a kind of pretty dramatically changed macro and market environment. And to see the snapshot really between those two different worlds was a really striking one. And I think it gets at, you know, some really important dynamics for thinking about the economy, markets, and investing today by distinguishing where we are from where we were. So, you know, I'd say the key point I would start with is to say, Today, this current market environment is really a world shaped by supply, as we say. And this began during the pandemic, but we've really seen it only accelerate since then, whether it's the Russia-Ukraine war, whether it's the energy shock coming out of the war in Iran, whether it in some ways most importantly is the transformation underway with respect to artificial intelligence and the CapEx impulse powering that all of these are phenomena happening on the supply side of the economy. And that's a very different world in ways that I would love to explore from what we saw during the 2010s, which was really a world more driven by a lack of demand, a lack of aggregate demand. And that led to a whole range of things. It led to a very particular set of policies and policy interventions, particularly from central bankers. It led to a very particular market and volatility regime. And I think as a result, each of those distinct environments had different takeaways or upshots in terms of how you would construct portfolios to generate the right risk-return profile for your needs.
Mike Pyle — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19Yeah, I mean, I think the way I see some of the private markets exposures that we think about, particularly here at BlackRock in spaces like infrastructure and credit, is that, you know, So, you know, take credit for example. Income plays a really important role in portfolios as I just described. Yeah. Getting exposure to a diversified basket of income-generating assets means, you know, looking across the full span of capital markets. If you're going to build, you know, a sound diversified income-generating set of exposures in your portfolio, It can't just be in the public market space anymore. That wouldn't be a kind of full representation of, you know, of attractive income-generating assets in today's capital markets. And so bringing public and private exposures together, bringing different types of exposures from the credit universe, you know, corporate, securitized, emerging market, and the like is, I think from our perspective, the way that you should be building thoughtful, balanced, diversified exposures at your portfolio in order to generate that type of stable income that's an important building block for the total book. I think on the flip side, hedge fund strategies in particular, like I said, kind of more market-neutral, low-net strategies, I think those are best thought of as important diversifiers. To the overall portfolio that running at kind of lower zero beta is, you know, a really important thing to add to the mix of a total portfolio to give, you know, a different kind of risk-return profile than your equity exposures, than your income exposures, which are by their nature going to be, you know, more sensitive to, you know, to, you know, the kind of swings in growth that, you know, you see at the total economy level. And I think those more market-neutral exposures should be less sensitive to that and as a result, more diversifying. Is that as straightforward a diversifier as, you know, buying a 10-year Treasury was a decade ago? You know, no, like that was about as good an environment as one could hope for, for having a very straightforward hedge in a portfolio.
Mike Pyle — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19Yeah, so I mean, I guess a few thoughts. I mean, I think one, we spend a lot of time on our systematic effort here at BlackRock. And, you know, I think one of the things that's really shaped and, you know, kind of really been, you know, seared into the experiences of the senior investors there was exactly that, was that kind of pre-GFC 2006, 2007 quant crisis. You know, BlackRock, we've been systematically investing for 40 years. So a really, you know, long history of both innovation but also experience in a bunch of different types of market conditions. And, you know, have learning the lessons of both that episode as well as other episodes that we've seen along the way in the hedge fund ecosystem as well as the quant ecosystem, I think has really motivated a lot of how both they do research into alpha signals, but also how they construct portfolios. And I think, you know, in this exact way that the second point I'd highlight is I think one of the things that's really powerful in particular about more systematic approaches is the ability not just to dial overall market beta, but to dial some of those individual factor exposures as well, you know, down to zero or something close to it. So you're really isolating that, that pure uncorrelated alpha component of the return. If you kind of dial the, or the turn the clock back to pre the quant crisis in 2006, 2007, a lot of quant strategies were about harnessing factor exposures to deliver return. And I think what was discovered is, you know, those factor exposures are actually subject to really unattractive drawdown features in stressed markets. And I think kind of rolling the clock forward, what we've tried to do is, you know, not just, as I said, kind of dial dial the beta down to zero, but dial some of those well-known factor exposures like momentum, like others, as close to zero as possible and really isolate that pure alpha piece. So I do think that, you know, that experience has motivated the way research is conducted, the way portfolios are constructed precisely to be, you know, responsive to some of those previous experiences. And I will say, you know, I think obviously we've seen nothing of the magnitude of the 2006-2007 quant quake, you know, since then.
Mike Pyle — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19I think that's a great question. I think we are seeing a lot of interest in portable alpha strategies from allocators today. And I think one of the things that we, you know, take, you know, some pride in at BlackRock is a really, you know, relentless focus on our kind of clients' needs as well as what we can deliver in terms of customization. Around client needs. And so, you know, we spent a lot of time on portable alpha strategies with a range of sophisticated clients, you know, both in terms of, you know, selection of underlying beta vehicle, selection of overlying alpha vehicle, and how you bring those two things together to give investors both that beta exposure that they want coupled with a, you know, really strong long-short, alpha engine, you know, sitting atop it. And I think, you know, we, it's been, it's been really interesting to see the types of solutions, that we've been able to, to work on with clients to really customize, you know, both of those things and, and generate kind of really unique solutions bringing the two together in a, in a complete, portable alpha solution.
Mike Pyle — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19So obviously this is something we're thinking about every day here at BlackRock. It's highly likely to be the most important question we think about over the next decade in terms of how we do what we do. I'd make, you know, two observations. I think one, you know, we're benefited, I think here from having a systematic investing team and platform that's, you know, been at the forefront of technology and investing for its 40-year history. And if you kind of just look over the last decade, you know, they were, you know, they were doing natural language processing more than a decade ago. They've been deploying machine learning in portfolio optimization and construction for almost as long. And so really that, that, you know, long tradition of being at the cutting edge of how to deploy technology and the work of investing in alpha signal generation in portfolio construction around all of these, you know, new and emerging techniques, you know, an important capability both in terms of delivering results to clients, but also in terms of shaping how we think more broadly across the firm around the, the business of what we do of, of, of investing client capital. I'd say on the fundamental and discretionary side, you know, I think in some ways a very different type of investment process, but, you know, I think important lessons to be learned from the systematic side. And so I'd say there it's been a focus on, you know, building research engines that can draw across the full set of proprietary data, uh, that we have, uh, here at BlackRock to really super empower our analysts, both to enhance the quality of the mosaic, uh, that they're, uh, considering with respect to any specific company or name, uh, enhance the decision-making process around, uh, arriving at a judgment on that name. But I think in some ways, just as or more importantly, increasing the ability of analysts to cover more names, to reach with high quality into a broader segment of the equity or fixed income market.
Mike Pyle — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19My advice is to look humbly around you 360 degrees in any organization you're a part of and to really run towards where, you know, the best people are and to learn from them. You know, I had this experience when I was in government. You know, I was fortunate enough to come into the White House on day one of President Obama's term as a very young policy professional and the ability to turn to, you know, the career civil servants at the Office of Management and Budget at the Treasury Department to learn all that they had to offer about their corner of the federal budget, their corner of the global economy. And to be really, you know, open to that was an incredible accelerant for what I learned and what I was able to do as a policymaker. Similarly, I showed up at BlackRock in my kind of early mid-30s, having never been an investor before. And what I realized was, okay, there's some things that I, you know, know that are relevant to this process of investing that I can offer. But, you know, I'm a total newbie. And whether it's the most senior MD or the most junior analyst or associate, there are things that they're going to know and know much more deeply about what we do here that, you know, I'm, I'm at square one on. And so to be open to being taught by people who know more about their thing than you do, wherever in your organization they sit, I mean, to me that's been, you know, the most important touchstone across all of my career and something I try to remind myself of every day sitting in my new role at BlackRock. This is an extraordinary organization filled with people who know their corner of what we do better than anybody else. And if I'm open to that, I can bring things together, connect dots in ways that are going to deliver value for clients and deliver value for the firm.
Mike Pyle — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19Very good. Well, thank you very much for coming on, Mike. It's been fascinating to hear your perspectives given your background and your seat at the moment. And I guess people can follow you and BlackRock's insights on the BlackRock website and on the various social media channels. But from all of us here at Top Traders Unplugged, Thanks for tuning in and we'll be back soon with more content.
Alan Dunn — Top Traders Unplugged · ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle · 2026-08-19