It's not just, you know, buying stocks or buying corporate bonds.

Well, great.

So let me start in the most simple place.

Uh, and, and you mentioned this earlier, that, you know, governments have spent a lot of money, uh, in, uh, in, in recent years.

Uh, in the US, we're running big deficits.

Now you have these multi-trillion dollar, uh, investment needs, um, from all of these technological or technology firms, energy infrastructure-oriented firms, and this is all very well advertised.

So, you know, uh, these numbers are large, and they're numbers that the market's quite aware of.

So in a multi-asset portfolio context, like how do we need to think about bond allocations today differently, if at all, than it was five to ten years ago?

talk about it a lot

and perhaps we oversimplify things, but it felt like late last year, earlier this year, there was a lot of focus on AI as a technology that was becoming more and more efficient very, very quickly.

And this idea from a macro perspective that this could drive broad efficiency, lead to increased productivity and through more efficiency, lower costs.

It'd be really, really helpful from a top line economic sense.

Risk assets were doing quite well while bonds were rallying.

And in fact, we had a very well behaved market where we started with attractive yields, which again, we're going to talk about later.

But also we had a nice, well-behaved market where rates were trending lower.

Squash it down.

Yeah

... up still in the Ukraine, uh, with a risk of, of escalation.

Uh, actual war in the Middle East alongside the type of direct trade tensions, geopolitical tensions, extreme, uh, political uncertainty within this country.

Uh, you look over at the UK, similar dynamic.

You look at elections all around the world now, you tend to have, um, candidates from extreme perspectives, typically battling it out for control of countries.

Uh, there is very little true middle nowadays.

So, you know, our, our, our, our point with the piece is that, you know, you're starting with, uh, financial market valuations that are high.

And what is happening today has been a continued, um, remarkable push through all of these dangers.

(laughs)

... as well and having a bunch of rising stars, which I don't think a lot of people were necessarily expecting.

But talk a little bit more about the rating agencies.

What are the pressures that you think are perhaps driving them to rate some of these structures higher than they otherwise might be? Well, a- a- again, there, there are multiple rating agencies that have different philosophies to, to how they arrive at a rating.

And there's gonna be, you know, understandable disagreement, you know, within markets.

But issuers are quite shrewd.

You know, they're gonna go to where they get the most favorable, uh, ratings treatment.

Yeah.