ALO38: Why the Old Rules of Diversification Are Changing ft. Mike Pyle

**Mike Pyle** (0:01)
I mean, to me, that's been the most important touchdown across all of my career, and something I try to remind myself of every day, sitting in my new role of BlackRock. This is an extraordinary organization filled with people who know their corner of what we do better than anybody else. And if I'm open to that, I can bring things together, connect dots in ways that are going to deliver value for clients and deliver value for the firm.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged. In markets, success doesn't come from predicting what happens next. It comes from being prepared for what you can't predict.
In each episode, we go deep with some of the world's most thoughtful minds in investing, economics, and beyond, to understand how they think, how they prepare, and how they decide, and the experiences that shaped how they see the world. No noise, no shortcuts, just real conversations to help you think better and invest with confidence.

**Alan Dunne** (0:59)
Welcome back to Top Traders Unplugged. My name is Alan Dunne, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Mike Pyle. Mike is Deputy Head of BlackRock's Portfolio Management Group, which spans systematic and discretionary investment strategies across liquid asset classes.
Mike has been at BlackRock on and on for quite a while. He was previously the firm's Global Chief Investment Strategist.
Earlier in his career, he has spent an extensive amount of time in the US government from 2022 to 2024 He was the US Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics. Earlier in his career, he has been Chief Economic Advisor to Vice President Harris, and in the prior administration had been a Special Assistant for Economic Policy to President Obama. Mike, that's a great CV. We're delighted to have you with us. How are you doing? I'm good.

**Mike Pyle** (1:54)
It's so wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me and wanted to chat about markets and economics and all the things that so many of us care about.

**Alan Dunne** (2:03)
Great. Well, I gave a quick overview. You have a fascinating background in government and in markets. We always like to hear what got you interested in economics and markets in the first place.

**Mike Pyle** (2:14)
Yeah.
I majored in economics when I was in university. I did some graduate work in economics and I came into college thinking I would be an economics major and I left college an economics major, but I really was a bit of a journey along the way. I came to school thinking I was going to become an economics major because it was the closest thing that my university offered to a business administration degree, and that's what I thought that I wanted to study and to go do. Then I left it and thought it was going to be a philosophy major for a while, an English major for a while, and then came back to economics for a different reason, which is it provided a framework to really explain the world around me, why people behave the way they do, why firms and companies behaved the way they do, why governments can use policy to shape incentives and hopefully lead to more broadly shared prosperity, and of course also the role that capital markets can play in all of this, and the important role in helping all of us use capital markets to build for a better future to connect savers and investors. All of those things became clear as I got deeper into my education, and as a result of that, it was like this is what I want to go do, this is what I want to be a part of, whether it's in the private sector or as a policy maker.

**Alan Dunne** (3:52)
Good stuff. And obviously you've had that extensive experience in policy and government, which we might touch on briefly later on as well.
But I did mention that you were BlackRock's global chief investment strategist for I guess for much of the last decade, I think it was from 2014 to 2020 Now you're back in a different role. And I think it's fair to say we're in a very changed macro environment to the environment that you would have been navigating back then. I mean, from your perspective, how do you characterize that change in the macro regime?

**Mike Pyle** (4:30)
Yeah, I think that's a great way of getting into a whole range of interesting topics. And in some ways, for me, it was an especially jarring transition. You know, I, as you pointed out, was at BlackRock from 2014 to 2021, left work in Capital Marcus for three years, and then came back in 2024 really to, as you say, a kind of pretty dramatically changed macro and market environment. And to see the snapshot really between those two different worlds was a really striking one.