Andrew Ross Sorkin: belief

Transcript context

…I think I agree with that, and it will be necessary. Even with high debt and deficits, there’s only so many T-bills to go around, and we want to use them for everything So, does the rest of the world. You don’t want to get into T-bills paying a rate of zero. The real economy is intrinsically risky for obvious reasons, and financial engineering can only make it so much safer. That’s the ultimate dilemma. It seems to me New Deal banking regulation is finally truly obsolete, and we just don’t know what to replace it with. Okay, I got one for you. Talking about the GENIUS Act, what do you think of the idea that we’re going to have private credit and venture capital and private equity funds effectively in either retirement accounts or available to retail investors without the commensurate or similar disclosures that we’ve typically had for publicly traded companies, so these are going to be funds that are going to have private assets in them. They’ll have a NAV, a valuation ostensibly — at least in my mind, unfortunately — being measured by the manager of these funds, so I would like to see more disclosure personally and auditing and the like. But there are also going to be these interesting semi-liquid funds, which is to say, it’s going to look like a stock. You could buy it on any day, but it’s not clear you could sell it on any day. I think it’s inevitable, and if I invest, which I do only at very modest, diversified, non-stock picking levels, I don’t consider the disclosures to be worth very much at all. I have some faith in diversifying, and I think markets are not entirely efficient, but to throw darts and diversify, you’ll do almost as well as you can do any other way. We let people bet on football games, right? A lot of people now are going broke with sports gambling. So, to tell people, well, you can bet on football games or you can buy Bitcoin, which at least used to be super volatile, but you can’t own shares in these funds because they don’t meet some — what is obscure to the voter — SEC requirement about disclosure and liquidity. People think you’re crazy, right? Over time, I think that distinction goes away.…

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