Welcome to our exchanges at Goldman Sachs markets update for February 21.

Every week we sit down with leaders across the firm to get their quick take on five numbers

they're watching in the markets.

I'm Jake Seawatt and today's guest is Michael Castle of our Global Markets Division.

Michael, welcome to the program.

Great to be here.

So before we dive into the numbers, just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do here at

Goldman. Sure. I run the macro pod within the multi asset

platform sales team within the securities division. I've been at

Goldman a little over 11 years and I moved from the Sydney Desk to New York

just over a year ago.

All right. You did not sound like a native New Yorker.

So what big number in markets have you been looking at?

Sure.

112 billion.

That's the total amount of inflows into global bond funds year to date and that's an acceleration from the record flows that we saw in 2019.

There's a few drivers behind this but I think some of the key ones of the global savings dynamics and the flight to quality

into fixed income that we've seen over the past year.

And then there's some important implications from this as well.

The first being the majority of these bond flows are into US dollar product so that means there's been a large

demand for US dollars recently and that's helped the US dollar off to its

stronger start since 2015. The second big market implication is that a lot of these

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