31 August 2026
17 new episodes (16 hours listening) published by the 38 podcasts on the list. 10 highlight clips below (25 mins total).
Investment 31 August 2026 · 10 clips
Monetary Matters
Jeff Keller
Jeff Keller founded and runs Capelight Partners, a technology sector hedge fund he has managed since 2021. He came to investing from an operating background at Salesforce and MongoDB and says he has been doing this for twenty years.
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1 of 4 framework
Jeff Keller says the hyperscalers keep spending even at a 4 or 5% return, because capex buys an option on staying in business rather than clearing a hurdle rate.
Powered shells without the chips are the cheap version of that option: the site and the power are secured and capacity can be filled quickly if demand arrives. He concedes the maths is poor for shareholders, calling a mid-single-digit return a waste of capital rather than a destruction of it, and doubts the share price is a strong enough lever to change anyone's course.
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2 of 4 current issue
The AI labs, SpaceX and Google will have raised about $500 billion between them this year once the Anthropic IPO lands, and the debt markets absorbed it without visible strain.
A 150 basis point move in borrowing costs adds perhaps $10 to $20 billion a year against that, which he does not think changes a decision the buyers treat as existential. He notes the shift from buybacks to debt issuance has made the build-out more fragile, and that a window closing, rather than a price rising, is what would stop it.
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3 of 4 framework
Capelight Partners watches three things that would break the AI trade, lab ARR, hyperscaler capex and the forward price of compute, and none of the three has cracked yet.
Compute pricing does the most work of the three, because an overbuild shows up there before it reaches anyone's revenue line. He puts late 2021 as the last time the full set of ingredients lined up, government support, retail crowding and cyclicality dressed as secular growth, and reads all three as present now but not yet aligned.
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4 of 4 contrarian
Jeff Keller expects AI tools to make markets less efficient rather than more, because a model will tell a manager his thesis is smart and narrative cycles get faster and more crowded.
Someone had put it to him that models remove fear and greed by being rational. His counter is that the same tools raise confidence in consensus work, and that phones and an always-on investor base shorten the time a narrative takes to form and to crowd, with quantitative models the possible exception.
Monetary Matters
Andrew Granato and Pranjal Drall
Granato is an assistant professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin and Drall is a JD/PhD candidate at Yale. They co-wrote the paper the episode covers, "Private Credit's State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers", and say they have two follow-up papers in progress, one on insurer leverage and one on policyholder surrender behaviour.
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explainer
Granato and Drall set out how a US life insurer escapes its own disclosure rules: shift assets into a reinsurer it owns outright in Bermuda, where capital requirements are lighter and, on news reports, leverage runs 30 to 50 times.
Iowa and Vermont host the same structure, which the guests call captive or shadow reinsurance, and once the assets sit formally with the subsidiary the rules binding the parent stop applying to them while the same owner sits on both sides. Insurers owned by private equity use it more than others on the evidence they cite.
Animal Spirits
Dan Skelly
Dan Skelly runs the equity model portfolio team at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and is lead portfolio manager for the US model and dividend equity strategies, part of a suite of eight long-only SMAs. He has been at Morgan Stanley since 2005, sits on the firm's global investment committee, and runs 40 to 50 stock portfolios at a 2 to 3% tracking error with 30 to 40% annual turnover.
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1 of 2 framework
Dan Skelly treats a government or regulatory hit to a holding as almost always overdone, and a loss of brand or market share as the thing that kills a business.
Visa and Mastercard fell 30% in six months on the 2010 Durbin amendment and then ten-bagged, which is the case he leans on. Underneath sits one question asked at every drawdown, whether earnings power and the moat are impaired temporarily or permanently, and he rejects a hard stop-loss as too rigid for a taxable book turning over 30 to 40% a year.
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2 of 2 prediction
Dan Skelly expects 2027 to look like 2023, with Mag 7 leadership back and a poor year for small caps and the median stock.
This year's margin gain came from a one-off price pass-through, so an average company that cannot repeat it stops outgrowing the index. He hangs the call on whether the productivity boost at AI adopters offsets any deceleration in infrastructure spending, and expects sideways trade into the midterms before October earnings set the direction.
Alpha Exchange
Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi, CIO for the Americas and Global Head of Equities at UBS Global Wealth Management
CIO for the Americas and Global Head of Equities at UBS Global Wealth Management, which she puts at 7.3 trillion dollars under management across public and private assets. She spent almost 25 years at Tudor Investment Corporation, starting in quantitative macro and global tactical asset allocation and running the fundamental global equity portfolio and flagship fund for the last 14 of them.
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1 of 2 prediction
UBS's Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi puts the rate sensitivity of AI capital expenditure near zero, and says it would take well beyond 50 basis points on the long end to dent the data centre build.
Hyperscalers are already paying three times an electrician's going rate and twice the base rate for electricity, so financing cost sits well down the list against being first to AGI. US housing starts hit a three and a half year low under those same rates, which is what sharpens the comparison: one borrower is visibly constrained and the other is not.
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2 of 2 framework
Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi argues that neither stretched valuations nor the circular financing deals between AI companies can start a correction, and that a demand miss is the only thing that can.
She separates the trigger from the amplifier: valuations set how far a market falls once fundamentals disappoint, and the circular deals set how many balance sheets get dragged in, while neither begins the move. Against that she puts roughly 25 trillion dollars of AI-attributed appreciation across public and private markets and under a trillion of revenue at the application layer.
Odd Lots
Darrell Duffie, professor of finance at Stanford University
Duffie presented a paper at the 2023 Jackson Hole symposium on how to fix the US Treasury market, and is working now with two New York Fed economists and a Stanford doctoral student on what the buyback programme actually achieves. After March 2020 he said dealer balance sheets would clog again, and he says here that they have not yet, with dealers holding more space than he expected.
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explainer
Darrell Duffie takes the Fed's liabilities one at a time and finds reserves are the only item that can be reduced, so whether the balance sheet shrinks depends on banks agreeing to hold fewer of them.
The Fed cannot ask the Treasury to run down its account or the public to hand back notes, so an asset sale has to be matched on the reserve side. Acharya and Rajan described the ratchet at Jackson Hole in 2017: every expansion leaves banks holding more of an asset that satisfies liquidity requirements while paying a market rate, so forcing it out makes markets volatile and the central bank retreats.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
Worth listening to in full 31 August 2026
Most clips above stand alone. These are the episodes that justify the whole hour.
Worse Than A Bank Failure: What Actually Happens When a Life Insurer Goes Bust | Drall & Granato
The full 78 minutes is one argument built in order, from why private equity wants a life insurer through to what the authors would change, and the parts that are not clipped here carry the connective tissue between the asset side and the liability side. Anyone with private credit in a portfolio or an insurance counterparty on a term sheet will get more from the whole than from the pieces.
What's Behind the Big Surge in US Government Bond Yields
Thirty-six minutes with no padding, and the parts left unclipped carry their weight: what the buyback programme was originally for, how the Bank of England kept a gilt intervention separate from its tightening with a Treasury indemnity, and where the term premium decomposition actually comes from.