Wall Street's 'Most Exciting Era'? The Investment Committee Weighs In 8/20/26

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**Scott Wapner** (1:00)
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Carl, thanks. Welcome to the Halftime Report. I'm Scott Wapner, front and center this hour of the state of the markets with one of the biggest investors on Wall Street declaring the environment one of the most exciting, most fun ever. We'll discuss and debate whether, in fact, it is with the Investment Committee. We'll document a new move from Josh Brown as well, so you don't want to miss that. Joining me for the hour today, along with Josh, Jim Labenthal, Rob Sechin, we'll go to the markets here. We do have an issue today. We are red and it's largely because yields are back up, oil's back up, threats are back up from the White House and the president regarding Iran, markets obviously don't love that.
Still, as I said in the open, many big investors say the environment's bullish. BlackRock's Rick Rieder, he told me on Closing Bell, we could get another five to 10% out of this market this year and that there's so much going on, it is almost overwhelming.

**Rick Rieder** (2:13)
I will say, Scott, this is the best, most exciting, most fun investment environment. Then I go home at night and I fall asleep immediately. It is exhausting. It is. There's so many. Today alone, like you said at the open, the cross currents, we spent a bunch of time today on health care. This Moderna News is significant. So we started to look at the tools businesses, we looked at different parts of health care. Like boy, every day there's a new menu to look at. I will say one thing, I've never in my career felt like every day, I come in and I feel like I'm prepared, and I go home and I feel like I'm behind.
And it's incredibly exciting time, but it's stressful because we're learning so much every day.

**Scott Wapner** (2:57)
Well, we thought that was a great jumping off point for us today to have a really robust discussion. We'll start it off with you, Josh, when you hear that from the gentleman at the world's largest asset manager, who is the CIO of not only global fixed income, but heads their global allocation team.
He says, plugged into the bond market and the stock market, as you'll find anywhere on Wall Street. And that's what he had to say. Rick Rieder, what do you think?

**Josh Brown** (3:27)
Exciting is not always great, I guess, would be...
I totally agree with everything you said, especially in fixed income. I don't think most people are allocating the fixed income portion of their portfolio, hoping for excitement. I think you guys are probably great. I think we get enough excitement from the equity side. But to his point, longer yields are back up today.
So we did a little bit of jawboning exercise, a little messaging, let's call it, from the Treasury. Yesterday, now, we're back up six basis points, which is the biggest mover of all durations. The big picture here is, this is not Trump-specific or Besant-specific or US Fed-specific. What we're seeing at the long end of the bond market is happening literally all over the world, everywhere except for Switzerland. Why not Switzerland? Very disciplined with their debt. Everybody else, it's been a free-for-all, especially since COVID accelerated what's been going on for 15 years. No political party in any developed country around the world wants to make any tough decisions. And so in the absence of any kind of fiscal discipline, what we essentially have is deficits growing.
Now you couple that with political dysfunction, and you see this happening in the Japanese bond market, you see it happening here, it's happening in France, the UK. This is a global phenomenon. And I don't mean to scare people, because the good news is, yes, we are now approaching one-to-one on debt to the size of the economy. It's a little bit scary. However, who owns the debt? The case in the United States, we're paying interest to ourselves. Investors own most of the debt. And so long as that equilibrium is in place, we can keep kicking the can, we can do this into another administration, and then maybe even another one after that. So the stock market has been able to hold in. The excitement that Rieder is talking about, absolutely that's going on on the bond side of people's portfolios. But I don't think it...