How Bill Gross Built a Bond Empire And Then Lost It All
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For a long time, bond investing was considered a sleepy backwater. You bought a bond and just clipped coupons as you waited for it mature. Boring! Then Bill Gross discovered that bonds could be traded. He founded Pimco and proceeded to make lots of money from bond investing in sometimes questionable ways. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Matt Levine co-hosts in this special Odd Lots episode with Mary Childs, who's just published a book on Gross called "The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire and Lost It All." We discuss some of Pimco's most famous trades, whether Gross was a good investor, and his legacy to the world of bonds.
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| 0:43.4 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. My co-host, |
| 0:58.9 | Joe Weisenthal, is away. However, I have a replacement co-host for this very special episode. |
| 1:05.3 | We're going to be joined by Matt Levine. He is, of course, a columnist over at Bloomberg |
| 1:10.8 | Opinion. Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. |
| 1:16.3 | I have been covering bond markets for many, many years now. When you're covering bond markets, |
| 1:22.3 | it feels like, at one point in time, there was no escape from a certain bond investor. That was |
| 1:31.2 | a guy called Bill Gross. If you were covering bond markets, at one point or another, your path |
| 1:39.1 | would cross with Bill Gross in some way. It was either something he was doing or something that |
| 1:44.7 | he had said that you would inevitably have to write up. I don't know if you feel the same way, Matt. |
| 1:50.8 | Oh, yeah. In particular, he would write these monthly investment outlooks that were always |
| 1:55.8 | both widely covered because they were the outlook of an important bond investor about the bond |
| 2:00.2 | market, but also because he began them with embarrassing personal anecdotes. You'd read them and |
| 2:06.0 | be like, did this professional investor really just say that? Every month, you would top himself. |
| 2:12.7 | This guy in charge of billions of dollars worth of people's money, did he actually just write |
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