Transcription

• Seth Bernstein

  I come from New York City, capital of the world, and I've lived here most of my life. And so, I grew up here in Manhattan. I went to University outside Philadelphia, here in the United States. I also went to London School of Economics. And I spent the first 33 years of my career at J.P. Morgan. I wanted to be an architect. And I went for a term to Columbia University to do that. And I realized that I didn't have enough money to be an architect because almost no one makes any money as an architect here in the United States. So, it's really a passion and you must do it as a passion. It can't be a vocation, can't be a job. And so, I had to sort of rethink my career plans in college and I decided for a host of perfectly superficial reasons that I wanted to be a banker. I went to a training program at J.P. Morgan, which was a prominent, as it is today, bank here in New York. And I spent most of my career, my first 18 years there, as a capital markets banker in fixed income, dealing with bonds and loans and stuff like that. And I think the big change in my life and my career occurred when my firm was bought by another firm. My firm was bought by Chase, which is another large bank here in New York. And it became JPMorgan Chase. And I moved at that time from being a banker to becoming a money manager. And that was in 2002. And for the last 22 years, I have been responsible for managing investors and managing money on behalf of people, I think it's a much more satisfying and engaging role. And it's a role which I think is almost unique in business in that your clients are really entrusting you with something very precious, which is their future. whether it's their retirement or children's education here in the United States, whether it's a wealthy family or intergenerational wealth or a university or a hospital who needed to have their endowments managed. And that's an enormous obligation. I don't know another role where people entrust so much to certainly anyone in finance. And finance doesn't have the reputation, at least here in the United States, of being the most honorable of roles. I think it's probably worse in France. And I think that's a very high bar and an obligation I take very seriously. I think it's inspired me. As an American, I grew up and was educated here with limited exposure, which is quite common for Americans to the world outside. I found my career exposed me to a diverse set of people from different cultures, different perspectives, different backgrounds, from the Gulf to Southeast Asia to the South here in the United States to Central America. And I found it incredibly enriching because I've learned so much through that and those perspectives inform how I view the world today. I also benefited from being in an era where the world was increasingly globalizing. So from1994 until just before COVID, global trade was expanding very quickly. Markets were opening, places like China which very few westerners had any real exposure to suddenly became what is now the second largest economy in the world. Unfortunately, in the last eight or ten years, we begun to move in reverse globally where we're becoming more fractured, less unified and it's made everything more complicated, more expensive and it will result in slower growth and frankly slower degree improvement in people's lives. That's not to say globalization was all good. There were lots of things that needed to be corrected about it. But I think as the world becomes more isolated from one another, whether it's the West is isolated from Russia or China, or we are less connected to Africa or South America. I think we lose something as societies. If we look in the U.S., but perhaps even more so in Europe, Western societies are aging very rapidly. And immigration, which everyone is so fearful of today, seems to be a common theme across Europe and the United States. It's a dominant theme in the elections across the globe today. Frankly, if we don't open ourselves up to more immigration, we're going to get increasingly more elderly as populations. And that means slower growth and a lower quality of life for people. I know we, as a group, we were paralyzed by fear, but we are so far better off as a society today than we were 30 or 50 years ago. But the world's changing very rapidly and I think that scares people. Whether it's global trade, whether it's the advent of technology and artificial intelligence, I think people are fearful as to what those changes portend personally and for society. And I think as a collective we were more embracing of change before than we are today. I have a very talented team of people, some of whom I've been with for many, many years, who understand my foibles, understand how to get me focused on the key priorities, and keep us moving forward. And it's a group that changes over time. But we have a very small leadership team here at Alliance Bernstein. There are five or six of us who run this firm day to day. And we have a broader group of roughly 30 or 35 people who we deal with regularly to run the broader business. And I think it's built on a high level of mutual trust and extreme levels of competence and experience. We function effectively in what is a very challenging marketplace. But I think you need to balance that with a life outside of work and interests and family and all these other attributes of life because we don't work for the sake of working, we work for this to live. And I think understanding those priorities is important. Trust is central to what we do because our clients are entrusting their wealth to us, their savings. Most of our clients don't have much in the way of savings, and in fact, they'll outlive their savings. So, we're trying to help them bridge that. And so, I think it's central to what we do, and you can never lose that trust because that's all you have, is the credibility with your clients.