Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest today for a flash update is Chris Bloomstran, the founder and CIO of Semper Augustus and a popular past guest on the show. We talk about his view on the state of the public equity market, why it will be hard for the market to deliver great returns for the next decade relative to the last decade, and where opportunities may lie. Please enjoy our conversation.
Portfolio Adjustments during the COVID Crisis
Talk to me a little bit about how you are thinking about or actually making adjustments to your portfolio in light of what has to be the most bizarre and challenging macro backdrop that we've ever faced as investors in our sort of collective careers.
Chris
Well, there's no doubt. Nobody's seen anything like this. I mean you can draw parallels to periods like the Great Depression or the World War II period, but I don't think you've ever seen the enormity of entire broad swaths of the global economy just stopping on a dime, going into this. And one of the themes of my letters in the last few years has been that we've really built up inordinate levels of debt in society, at all levels, household debt, corporate debt, government debt. And for that, we think that the debt stock relative to the size of the economy is unsustainable.