I started writing The Eye on the Market 20 years ago, in 2005. Before that, our clients wanted to hear from us. And I had this prior publication called On My Mind, but it only went out every six months. And it became really clear after the dot com collapse things are changing around the world so rapidly now that we have to have a rapid-fire approach to understanding what's going on, reflecting it in our investment portfolios, and reflecting it in the communications that we make to clients.
Think about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. That whole drama played out over just a handful of days. So we have to be pretty nimble and quick to be able to understand the implications of those kind of things.
[SOARING MUSIC]
When I was trying to figure out which Eye on the Market pieces to include in this retrospective, I wanted to pick ones that were interesting historically but also relevant for the future. And the ones that stood out the most were the pieces that we wrote about bottom feeding, which is what do you do after there's a crash on the market. You can't always anticipate them, but then you have to be able to act pretty nimbly. And we've done a lot of really interesting research on how equities bottom first in every correction. In other words, equities bottom first, then you start seeing an improvement in industrial production, payrolls, manufacturing surveys, and eventually housing, unemployment, credit delinquencies, and things like that. So it's really important for us as investors to understand that that dynamic tends to play itself out almost every time you have a major correction.
When you're going to take on something, you can't go in half-baked. You have to really do all of your research, and it takes a lot of time. Sometimes we'll work on something for a period of months before we publish on it because it takes that long to get it right. But it's pretty clear what topics matter the most to investors, because they're the things that have to be driving markets. A good example is what's going on right now with tariffs. Instead of having to rely on other third-party estimates-- and there are some people out there that do a good job-- I wasn't comfortable with that. So the team and I, we built a tariff model that goes through all 12,000 codes in the census database across 200 or so trade counterparties and factored in all of the exclusions and stuff like that. We wanted to have our own hands-on model so that we could estimate the real-world increase in effective tariff rates as a function of these different policies.
A lot of times, there's no substitute for doing that kind of work. And similarly, we manage, let's say, $80 or $100 billion worth of municipals as safe harbor investments on behalf of our clients. There's no substitute for doing the hard work to understand the credit risk of those entities, because you can't just look at their general obligation debt. You also have to look at their unfunded pension and retiree health care obligations. And that's not done by any external entity that I've ever seen. So every couple of years, we'll pore through hundreds of those single and multi-employer reports to put together an understanding for key state, cities, and counties of what their real obligations are.
In terms of creating an Eye on the Market, they're all different. Sometimes we're diving into topics that we don't an enormous amount about before we start to look at them. One of the benefits of working at a place like JP Morgan is the halo effect that Jamie has created for the firm. And I've mentioned this to him and to other people. I can call just about anybody and say, hi, I'm the chief strategist at JP Morgan. I'd like to learn a little bit more about this. Can you help me? And with a couple of rare exceptions, people usually say yes.
So at this point, I have a pretty broad network, whether it's across health care, energy, consumer discretionary, financials. I also read about 2,000 pages of research every week and then do follow-up calls with the people that write them. And that tends to be an important part of our investment process too. And then the last thing is I always have three really hardworking, besieged, hand-picked analysts who help me out with the production process and the research process, too.
I would say the one effort that I'm most proud of is the annual energy paper that we do.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
People don't always agree with it, but people generally respect the degree of research and fact-finding that goes into the piece itself, which is now a very widely read and anticipated a publication that we do each year, even within the most sophisticated participants in the energy industry. The energy world is interesting. There are advocates and there are analysts. Advocates have a lot of good data, but they'll only tell you the data that supports their point of view. I'm an energy analyst. Good, bad, or ugly about the energy transition, we're going to analyze what's actually going on.
It's about three to four months of work every year. And for a little over a decade, Vaclav Smil, who many of our clients know, was our technical advisor. I developed a close relationship with him. That's been, for me, the most rewarding project that I've worked on, and I look forward to continuing to work on that every spring.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
So it was a lot of work by a lot of people to pull this retrospective together. I want to thank Jamie for what he's done. I joined JP Morgan in 1987. JP Morgan wasn't always JP Morgan. And the reputation that it has today, Jamie is largely responsible for that. And I also want to thank Mary, who's been a constant supporter. Both of them have been big supporters of the Eye on the Market, which at times goes against the grain. It names names. And as you'll see in the retrospective, sometimes it does so with heavy doses of sarcasm.
And they've been very supportive of me. And as I mentioned in the introduction, only two pieces ever got squashed because of their content out of 4,500 pages that we actually published. And I'd like to also thank all the analysts that have worked for me over the last 20 years that are mentioned in the end. If anybody wants any insights into me as a person, read the last section, which is an autobiography about how I ended up in the asset management business in the first place.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
I started writing The Eye on the Market 20 years ago, in 2005. Before that, our clients wanted to hear from us. And I had this prior publication called On My Mind, but it only went out every six months. And it became really clear after the dot com collapse things are changing around the world so rapidly now that we have to have a rapid-fire approach to understanding what's going on, reflecting it in our investment portfolios, and reflecting it in the communications that we make to clients.
Think about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. That whole drama played out over just a handful of days. So we have to be pretty nimble and quick to be able to understand the implications of those kind of things.
[SOARING MUSIC]
When I was trying to figure out which Eye on the Market pieces to include in this retrospective, I wanted to pick ones that were interesting historically but also relevant for the future. And the ones that stood out the most were the pieces that we wrote about bottom feeding, which is what do you do after there's a crash on the market. You can't always anticipate them, but then you have to be able to act pretty nimbly. And we've done a lot of really interesting research on how equities bottom first in every correction. In other words, equities bottom first, then you start seeing an improvement in industrial production, payrolls, manufacturing surveys, and eventually housing, unemployment, credit delinquencies, and things like that. So it's really important for us as investors to understand that that dynamic tends to play itself out almost every time you have a major correction.
When you're going to take on something, you can't go in half-baked. You have to really do all of your research, and it takes a lot of time. Sometimes we'll work on something for a period of months before we publish on it because it takes that long to get it right. But it's pretty clear what topics matter the most to investors, because they're the things that have to be driving markets. A good example is what's going on right now with tariffs. Instead of having to rely on other third-party estimates-- and there are some people out there that do a good job-- I wasn't comfortable with that. So the team and I, we built a tariff model that goes through all 12,000 codes in the census database across 200 or so trade counterparties and factored in all of the exclusions and stuff like that. We wanted to have our own hands-on model so that we could estimate the real-world increase in effective tariff rates as a function of these different policies.
A lot of times, there's no substitute for doing that kind of work. And similarly, we manage, let's say, $80 or $100 billion worth of municipals as safe harbor investments on behalf of our clients. There's no substitute for doing the hard work to understand the credit risk of those entities, because you can't just look at their general obligation debt. You also have to look at their unfunded pension and retiree health care obligations. And that's not done by any external entity that I've ever seen. So every couple of years, we'll pore through hundreds of those single and multi-employer reports to put together an understanding for key state, cities, and counties of what their real obligations are.
In terms of creating an Eye on the Market, they're all different. Sometimes we're diving into topics that we don't an enormous amount about before we start to look at them. One of the benefits of working at a place like JP Morgan is the halo effect that Jamie has created for the firm. And I've mentioned this to him and to other people. I can call just about anybody and say, hi, I'm the chief strategist at JP Morgan. I'd like to learn a little bit more about this. Can you help me? And with a couple of rare exceptions, people usually say yes.
So at this point, I have a pretty broad network, whether it's across health care, energy, consumer discretionary, financials. I also read about 2,000 pages of research every week and then do follow-up calls with the people that write them. And that tends to be an important part of our investment process too. And then the last thing is I always have three really hardworking, besieged, hand-picked analysts who help me out with the production process and the research process, too.
I would say the one effort that I'm most proud of is the annual energy paper that we do.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
People don't always agree with it, but people generally respect the degree of research and fact-finding that goes into the piece itself, which is now a very widely read and anticipated a publication that we do each year, even within the most sophisticated participants in the energy industry. The energy world is interesting. There are advocates and there are analysts. Advocates have a lot of good data, but they'll only tell you the data that supports their point of view. I'm an energy analyst. Good, bad, or ugly about the energy transition, we're going to analyze what's actually going on.
It's about three to four months of work every year. And for a little over a decade, Vaclav Smil, who many of our clients know, was our technical advisor. I developed a close relationship with him. That's been, for me, the most rewarding project that I've worked on, and I look forward to continuing to work on that every spring.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
So it was a lot of work by a lot of people to pull this retrospective together. I want to thank Jamie for what he's done. I joined JP Morgan in 1987. JP Morgan wasn't always JP Morgan. And the reputation that it has today, Jamie is largely responsible for that. And I also want to thank Mary, who's been a constant supporter. Both of them have been big supporters of the Eye on the Market, which at times goes against the grain. It names names. And as you'll see in the retrospective, sometimes it does so with heavy doses of sarcasm.
And they've been very supportive of me. And as I mentioned in the introduction, only two pieces ever got squashed because of their content out of 4,500 pages that we actually published. And I'd like to also thank all the analysts that have worked for me over the last 20 years that are mentioned in the end. If anybody wants any insights into me as a person, read the last section, which is an autobiography about how I ended up in the asset management business in the first place.
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
