About this episode
FS Chiron Funds CIO Ryan Caldwell, FS Investments Chief Economist Lara Rhame and special guests sit down in Kansas City to talk about the unique backdrop leading us into 2022. They reflect on the dominant feature of 2021 (you guessed it: inflation), fed policy, potential domino effects in Europe and elsewhere internationally, and the balancing of multiple cycle-clocks. A year ahead that feels this different requires a different, vigilant approach, and this conversation kicks off what the team intends to be a research-forward quarter with many updates to come.
Transcript excerpt:
Ryan Caldwell (00:00:57):
… We thought maybe what we would do today in early year tradition is maybe do a recap look back quickly of what 2021 was, and maybe set the table for what we are thinking about in 2022. And off the top, one of the things that I wanted to lay down for our listeners, we are going to be a little bit more active on the research side this year. We do think we’re at some incredibly important paradigm shifts that are happening in global capital markets. And we actually think there’s much more to write about. Lara sort of kicked this off last year in her economic series. First talking about the great moderation, and then lastly, very recently talking about inflation and its impacts.
Ryan Caldwell (00:01:51):
But we want to get more robust with this. So one of the things that you will see from us this year is a pretty consistent cadence of what is happening, why we think it’s happening and ultimately what we think you ought to be doing about it when you think about portfolio construction. So much more to come this year, but again, this podcast is really set up to do a little bit of backward look. A little bit of kind of forward foreshadowing and dig into maybe some of the topical issues.
Ryan Caldwell (00:02:20):
So maybe let me start with ’21. And look. ’21, guys, as we all know was a really weird year. And one of the things, as I was thinking about prepping for this, I hearken back to, Lara, on our December of 2020 podcast had made this outrageous statement that, “One of the left field ideas could be that people are starting to think about the U.S. being in a recess by the end of 2021.” And we all kind of looked at her cockeyed and said, “Yeah well, we’ll see.” And interestingly, we never got close to a recession, but the market sure thinks we did.
