Larry Summers and Bob Rubin Join Our CIOs to Discuss the Surprising Economic Cycle

Editor’s Note: A portion of this podcast contains charts, which are shown in the video player when referenced by the speaker.

We are living through a cycle that is playing out very differently than previous cycles over the last few decades. In particular, we’ve seen a situation where inflation rose to multidecade highs, the Fed hiked rates at one of the fastest paces in history, and yet the result has been a relatively moderate outcome—with growth staying resilient and inflation coming back down toward 2%.

We reached out to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to explore these dynamics—and any other big topics on his mind—with our CIOs and senior investors. And Larry had the good idea of including his friend Bob Rubin in our discussion as well.

Both Larry and Bob have had illustrious careers in government and the private sector. Larry was the 71st Secretary of the Treasury, president of Harvard University, chief economist at the World Bank, and now serves as an OpenAI board member. Bob had a long career at Goldman Sachs, where he served as co-senior partner and co-chair. He was the 70th Secretary of the Treasury, preceding Larry, and before that was the director of the newly created National Economic Council.

The full conversation was over two hours long, so we’re sharing some of the highlights from that discussion with a focus on the biggest questions facing investors today. For example, why has growth remained so resilient despite such a rapid hiking cycle? Why has inflation fallen so quickly without a recession? And you’ll hear both Larry and co-CIO Greg Jensen discuss their perspectives on these issues and how they’re thinking about the outlook going forward.

You’ll also hear Larry and Bob discuss questions like: is the US budget deficit now approaching dangerous levels? What do we make of the dollar’s exceptional strength and its outlook from here? And how will breakthroughs in artificial intelligence flow through to the economy? We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Note: The views of external guests do not necessarily reflect the views of Bridgewater.