YouSaid · the spoken record

Ash Williams

lines on the record: 107
first: 2025-08-11
most recent: 2025-08-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, what do we have to offer? Well, first of all, we have scale in our favor. Secondly, we have the ability to manage money ourselves. We've got a lot of investment professionals. Our team is over 200 people. Investment professionals, 50 plus. And a lot of people with deep experience, and we're running active and passive fixed income and in equity investing, we do passive investing and factor investing. We're not saying we can necessarily say what the factors are or what the mix of the factors ought to be in any given month, but we are really, really good at replicating indices dead accurately. And then through a combination of sec lending and playing the names that the index providers signal in advance are going to be added to or taken out of the”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opportunities that come and go, so we wouldn't have a permanent High yield debt would be an example. There are times when high yield is compelling. There are times when not so much. So let's go there when the spreads are attractive and leave when they're not and we'll get paid for renting our capital for that period of time. So that at the high level is the way we do things, and to the extent we can find ways to win on a relative basis by playing by a different set of rules, we'll take that opportunity every chance we can.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End up with a pretty heavy equity beta that we will always have. But as long as you are truly a long-term investor and one of the powers of defined benefit plans is risk pooling, which means you're always investing as a perpetuity over a very long horizon, you're not constrained by the mortality curve of risk that individuals can tolerate. That's important because over the long periods of time, equities by definition are going to be the higher returning asset class relative to fixed income. And then when you have what I would call equity-like risk assets, private equity, venture capital, et cetera, then those are complementary as well, and will tend to be a little more pro-cyclical in a lot of ways. And then we have another sleeve in which we put more opportunistic things that might be”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess our view is that what is practical and has been proven to work for us, I can't speak for others, over time, has been to have a thoughtful allocation process that you revisit annually at a sort of a high level just to validate your asset class return assumptions and make sure it's still reasonable. Then about every three to five years do a much deeper dive on how you're approaching it. But what we found is setting an allocation that's a rational allocation to begin with, given your liabilities and your liquidity needs and your governance environment and then sticking to it over time will work. What was tried in the 80s and to a degree in the 90s that failed miserably was the idea of making active judgments and jiggling around the tactical asset allocation as people now call it. Just a bad idea”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So go do it. And that was the beginning of a six-year effort that I undertook. Where we figured out how to completely change our compensation culture and design a comp scheme from the ground up that was legitimate, market driven, created great alignment, included an element of base and incentive compensation that was very specifically tied to achievement, bounded to avoid unnecessary incentivization of risk, et cetera. We spent six years in working through our advisory council, got an actual plan document written, had, I want to say, between 15 and 20 public meetings on this thing over all that time. It's been in place and operating now for going on five years, and it is the life changer.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I got back there was a lot of talk about dramatically increasing the compensation of the position for the executive director, and they added the term NCIO to give it a little more specificity. And at the end of the day, what was done was about half of what was said. But the direction was good. And I think the reasons that came out that way were very appropriate, which is to say the state had just been dealt the worst financial blow in its modern history and was completely broke. And the idea of making some massive pay move for somebody in a job like mine when all the beneficiaries are in a terrible position, believe me, I got it. I was fine with that. And I was interested in the service anyway. And it was still a significant shift from where it had been before. And the commitment was given, look, we understand this needs to be addressed and we want you to work on it.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Traveled to New York pretty regularly, have New York come to you and the rest of the world come to you pretty regularly. The parade of talent we get in and out of our building is absolutely amazing and very refreshing. People were there for non-economic reasons. The problem is that's sort of like the line from the old Maryland Monroe movie about relying on the kindness of strangers. It's just not a reliable way to run a railroad.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the way people are in jobs in New York or Los Angeles, where there are a million alternative employers right around the corner. And if you're unhappy at point A, you cross the street and go to point B and take another job. If you're a portfolio manager in Tallassee, Florida, there aren't a whole lot of other options than the SBA. So most people were there for some combination of having family there, enjoying the lifestyle, enjoying the reality that you could live in a very peaceful place.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first thing you do is you fix the compensation. The problem is in the public sector, that's sort of like saying, well, all you need to do is have peace in the Middle East. People have been trying that for a long time, and it's hard, which is why it doesn't exist. But in our situation, We had historically had less turnover than one would imagine because a lot of people were in their jobs and”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's start with the team. You touched on when you left after years of toiling away and making great progress. You at the top were getting paid $140,000 a year. How do you start with building a team or keeping the people that you have in place when compensation clearly isn't the driver?”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sort of like eating an elephant. You do it a little bit at a time. And I think the way to do it is like any super complex task, you divide it into units that are manageable and divisible, and then you assemble them so that each has its own infrastructure and its own intellectual feeds for ideas and oversight and everything else. And if you build a team right, You just go from there, and it's simpler than it sound”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had the ability to look at opportunities and be a solution provider to others who were in a jam. So there were lots of very prestigious institutions, endowments and what have you who were longer illiquid investments and particularly those subject to capital calls than they realized they were. And they got in a liquidity pinch in late 2008, early 2009, and were quietly doing secondary offerings to raise cash. So we picked off a number of those at very advantageous prices and a number of things like that.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the other advantage I had was by the last week in October, the financial markets were way closer to a bottom than they were anything else. So my view was this is an ideal time to come in because the buildings burned to the foundation. It's going to be essentially up from here. I always steal this quote from Brith Harris, but I always give him credit for it. Major advantage we had was being long-term oriented. Liquid”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was way better than anybody thought, and I had a huge head start for several reasons. First of all, many of the people who were in positions of responsibility at a senior level were people I had hired at a junior level years before, so I knew these people. It's not like I'd never seen them before, and I didn't have any judgment on who they were or what their competence or trustworthiness was. Quite the opposite. The problem that was the blow-up was not a failed pension portfolio. It wasn't even in the pension. It was a cash pool. It was completely independent. It had nothing to do with the pension.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have anywhere near the level of What would you say sharp elbows and perhaps situational ethics that you have in big cities? So we thought, you know, it might be time to go back and we could do some good things and fix what used to have our fingerprints all over it.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in reality, the proportion of the illiquid assets was tiny. It was less than 3%. It was not life-threatening. It was not really even material to the size of that pool given a normal liquidity environment. But when you get a panic like that, no theater has exits big enough to handle a stampede like that. So it created a huge problem. It was front page of the journal and the Times at the time it led to major political issues. I had been working in Manhattan and living in Connecticut for 12 years. My wife and I had a third child while we were in Connecticut. She was at about age seven or eight when this was going on. And we thought, you know, the first two girls came out beautifully. We think part of it was because they grew up in a humble place called Tell Asse Florida that's very family oriented.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that news hit Bloomberg. These securities were downgraded and became illiquid. There was a lead Bloomberg story on it that with the luck of no one lucky hit the Bloomberg wire during coincidentally the day that the Florida finance officers association was meeting, I think in Orlando. So I'm picturing all of these local government types who all have their money and the SBA's local government pool standing around at a reception saying, do you believe that? What are you going to do, Ted? Well, I think I'm just going to redeem. Well, Ted, if you're redeeming, we're redeeming too. And guess what? In about 48 hours, the cash pool of the SBA, which is, like I said, about a $34 billion pool, received redemptions for something on the order of 80% of its assets. I don't think there's a financial institution in the world that could survive.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Supervisory chain had been winnowed down to being non existent. There was no money being spent on training. There was very little participation in industry thought leadership getting out and building the brand, like the conversation we're having today.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something's not right with that. Somebody's not putting on the right number of coats of paint to make the car look good and be durable. And sure enough, a young portfolio manager who had more or less sole responsibility for about a $30 plus billion dollar cash pool that the state board ran for local governments bought some securities that were asset-backed paper that were legally not suitable.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what happened then was. When I left the state board in'96 it was in very good shape and in the ensuing dozen or so years there were a couple of changes in leadership and there were some changes in attitudes. And what happened that led to my coming back to Florida was in the fourth quarter of 2007 the ranks of the SBA over the years that I had been gone the headcount had stayed was actually down a little bit. The assets under management had grown very substantially. The number of investment mandates they were managing had quadrupled. The budget had remained flat.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't like that idea. So Jeff got my name from somewhere and called me. And I said, you know, that actually could work. It might be very interesting. This was a real shift, but so here I had the shock of going from a place that literally at tea time every day we had people who served tea and cakes at fir tree if you need a legal pad i think there's an office supply store down the street go get one you want some coffee go make it a pencil fine i think i might have one you can go sharpen it and use it but give it back you know that kind of thing so it's a completely different environment in that regard but it was a scrappy creative place we built an unbelievable business we had a great team our clients were the best of the best in the family offices university endowments and all kinds of folks”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walk into a room with a PM carrying a bunch of books, introduce the PM, and then sit there and take notes, and then do follow up. That's not what you need. You need somebody that's capable of knowing this book inside and out, presenting it, answering questions, understanding the client's needs, and having the credibility that they're perfectly happy talking to that individual. So you need somebody who's been around. And of course, Jeff was no fool. He was a value guy, and his immediate reaction was, do you know what somebody like that's going to cost?”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founding investors, he was looking for somebody to be between him and potential clients and existing clients so that he could focus on the portfolio and somebody else could do the other. And he got some advice from a fellow named Steve Berger. Steve years ago ran hedge funds for Cambridge Associates. I think he was the first hedge fund guy there. And Steve told Jeff, Jeff, you're a young man. Let me give you some advice. Whoever you want to be your ambassador to your investors and potential investors needs to be an older person relative to you. Doesn't mean they're an old person. Just means they're older and have enough gray hair and they have some independent reputation on the street because most IR people”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to London and assume some role in the headquarters down in the city. Three, if you want to continue being a country head for asset management, the immediate option was koala lumpur. And so while that decision process was going on, I was sort of thinking, well, obviously there are other options in the world. And a gentleman named Jeff Tannenbaum cold called me. Jeff founded Furtree Partners and is a very gifted guy. He had worked for Jerry Kohlberg as Jerry's analyst when Jerry left KKR, and he had started a fund about five years prior, which had earned net returns of around 25% annualized over that time. Very unique business model, combining sort of private equity and public markets and activism in a constructive way. He had gotten just big enough. He had around $400 million in assets, including some very silk stock.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Global investment management out of London. So the good news was I had fulfilled my mission. The bad news was there was no longer a need for a CEO of asset management in the US. So the options were really three. A, stay in New York at a lesser rank, which if you've been the sheriff who cleaned out the saloon, that could be a dangerous role without a gun.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People need to be intellectually repotted from time to time, and serving in a university presidency for someone like me, this was him talking, who's sort of naturally curious and a scholar by nature, this to me is a real intellectual refreshment. And he did that later in life. In retrospect, that's what Furtree was for me, because I'd always been a big organizations. I'd work for state government in Florida. I'd work for the SBA. At least that I could access. And Schroeder's big global company, resources all over everywhere. And when we completed the cleanup of their acquisition here in the US, which was the old Worthime Investment Partnership, and got that on a completely clean control footing and rebuilt the professional staff, et cetera, it was integrated into Schroder.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another shock. Well, that was a great thing. One of the people I've always admired is a fellow named Sandy D'Alembert. Sandy was president of Florida State University at one time. He's a noted lawyer from Northwest Florida. was Dean of Flora State Law School presley American Bar Association, etc. And Sandy used a phrase once before he became president of Florida State University.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's really, that's where working in a legislative body and a government was great training because it's the same thing. You've got all kinds of people with agendas that have nothing to do with the signals that are being Messaged publicly or the framing that's being messaged publicly, and the faster you get used to the idea of, look, life is sort of like one big card game. And unless you're incredibly good at reading tales in human behavior, there's a very good chance that you have no idea what cards are involved here or where your hand stacks up. So play accordingly.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is knowing what you don't know. And you might think you know an issue based on the inferences you've drawn from talking to your colleagues here in New York. But if the headquarters is 3,000 miles away and there are a lot of other players there that you're not talking to on a day-to-day basis, some of whom may be from families that have owned equity stakes in the firm for hundreds of years, there's a pretty good chance what you know is of thimbleful of what there is to know and your idea that you understand a situation is just wrong.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good as a global company and one of the lessons there was that cultures matter and cultures are different in the UK and Europe workwise than they are in the US, particularly New York, just different work norms, different expectations. And you have, particularly in a company that at the time was, I think it was 120 years old, there were things that they had to deal with that we didn't, particularly in the tech area. They had a lot of legacy mainframe computer systems. So when the whole Y2K thing was around, that was a hair on fire issue in London, and they were asking us to do all kinds of things here, keep people in the office overnight, and have supplies for a nuclear war. And it was really something. It was over the top. So you'll learn things like that. And you also learn that there are layers in organizations. And one of the great lessons in life always...”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty intense, pretty darn intense. I was living in Connecticut, commuting into Manhattan, our offices in those days were seven hundred eighty seven seventh Avenue, which from Grand Central, where we sit now, that's a hike, even double timing it, about the best I could do was around 17 minutes. So if you've got a 17-minute walk from the train, you're catching your normal morning train would be 650 in the morning, 651, and best case you're going to catch a 540 train home, more likely you're going to catch something later, in which your base day was about a 12 or 13 hour day, base day. And three hours of that is tied up with a combination of walking and riding on the train, which means you're extremely well read. But wow, it takes a lot out of your life.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of tobacco divestiture on public funds, I think Florida's piece of that cost about $500 million. I think in California it was a couple of billion.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asking if I would consider coming to work for them. They were making their first U.S. acquisition, and the proposition was come to New York, work for us. You know the firm we've worked for you, your family's half English, it's a good fit, you're an Anglophile. Come on, you'll love this. And I thought, wow, what a contrast. On the one hand, I have the chief executive of Schroeder's calling me ever so politely and deferentially from London, offering me a path to a different life versus here at home where I've worked and done the best I can for years and years and years, I'm getting no recognition for what I've done. I'm getting beaten on for something I won't do that I don't think's in the fund's best interest. So I left. And the wrap-up on that is that there was, after a number of years, the legislature decided they did do divestiture. They then came back years later and reversed the decision. One of the consulting firms did an analysis of the impact”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came up, each of us would say we're going to separate the fiduciary duty from the health policy, but the fight got so ugly between the governor and the tobacco people, he wanted to stop it and wanted to use the equivalent of the nuclear weapon, which in his mind was divestiture. So he became equally emphatic to me. I want those blanking stocks sold. And my view was, well, The other two trustees don't think so. And about that time, I got a call from Schroeder's based here in New York, the British Association.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're heavy in tobacco. And I raised the question and said, listen, we really need to separate the fiduciary duty and the political policy as it relates to health and dangerous products like cigarettes because I can't really hold a manager accountable for beating the S&P 500 and then tell him he can't own one of the fastest growing, most lucrative sectors of the S&P 500 with no legal authority to do that. I just pulled it out of the air because you thought it was a good idea, Mr. Chairman. And the other problem I had was two of the three trustees agreed with my point of view and didn't think we should get into tobacco divestiture. The governor was emphatic on that. And that's all he wanted to talk about. And there got to be a point of stress over that subject. And we had had an accord for the first couple of years that this battle was brewing.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and to the extent they sold it, and as a result, serious if not fatal diseases affected thousands of people, many of whom were on Medicare, Medicaid, and those on Medicaid, the states ended up paying the bill for a lot of that healthcare. So the ideal was there's a course of action for states who provide Medicaid expenditure that the tobacco companies should make the states whole for that Medicaid cost. That was the genesis of the tobacco litigation that became a national, if not international phenomenon and resulted in settlements way into the billions of dollars that the tobacco companies. And so our governor was very focused on that. And we were in the odd spot that we had a tobacco portfolio of $740 million or so, as I remember. And our top performing outside managers”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six years we double the size of the fund. We had terrific investment results. We had a completely clean control environment. No issues there and did a lot of pretty creative things and we moved the fund in some new directions. One of the things I did was globalize the fund and go into emerging markets for the first time, which we did during the Mexican peso crisis. That was entertaining. A lot of interesting things like that. So during that six-year period, I think I had one change in my comp. And at the end of six years, and doubling one of what was then one of the biggest pension funds in the country and still is, I think I was making $140,000. And the direction that our governor was going, and he was well intended from a health policy standpoint, but Florida was the place where the tobacco litigation originated. The idea that tobacco companies knew they were selling a lethal product.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was a great reason, and it is emblematic of the problem that plagues public pension funds everywhere, which is there was a misalignment between the decision authority stakeholders, in this case trustees and legislature, and the beneficiaries and the staff of the state board. As reflected by the fact that I think I was there six years on the first tour of duty.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, one of my favorite examples is if you think about uniqueness of location, location, location, what do you want? You want to be in a wealthy area, say you have pricing power. You want an asset that's absolutely needed and is not subject to becoming an eight-track tape as an asset. You also want to have natural barriers to entry for competition. So the example I give is a place that we bought back in that period called Corte Madeira Town Center. If you left San Francisco on your way to a weekend in the Napa Valley and you went on the 101 over the Golden Gate Bridge, on your left is a very nice residential area called Corte Madera. And the little mixed office building in the town center is called Corte Madeira Town Center. We own all of it and have ever since way back then.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why wouldn't you want to keep it forever? But if you're on a traditional partnership structure, partnerships have lives, which means there's a capital raising cycle, there's an investment period, there's a holding period, and there's a contemplated liquidation date that might have a year or two of extensions, but it's not infinite. And all the while you're paying carried interest in management fees.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had fixed income and we had a real estate program. And the most advanced thing we had, I would say, was our real estate program. To this day, it's a unique model in that we manage about 60% of that book, or a little over half, in what we call our principal portfolio, which means we own the properties directly and we manage them ourselves, and we often have them with not a great deal of leverage on them. So we have a terrific valuation cushion. And, you know, if you think about Warren Buffett's stories about the best possible businesses, what's example number one? Owning the only toll bridge. Across a body of water that everybody needs to cross because the places on either side are important and you get to set the price. So if you own a fabulous piece of real estate,”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I became executive director for the first time in December of 1991, and back then we had U.S. equities. We had a brand new infant-sized private equity program. It wasn't even really a private equity program yet because we hadn't clarified the law about partnerships and whatnot.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought, you know, I could actually do that. And it was up to three elected officials to decide. So the treasurer and the controller were immediately there and their offices were next door to each other. So that took all of about 10 minutes to cover those votes. So I went to see Governor Chiles with two votes. And he gave me great advice. He said, you know, I'm going to give you the same advice I give my airplane pilots, which is they're going to be plenty of times where I'm going to push you to do something because I want to go somewhere and I'm going to hurry to get there. And he said, the first time you listen to me and override your own judgment and get us both in trouble, I'll fire your ass. That's exactly what he said. I thought, that's great advice. And that's how the world works. Because it's your job as a fiduciary to know when to say when and just say no if you have to. And there are plenty of times in life where that's the best thing you can do.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1991, I believe it was, the fellow who was then the executive director of the board, Cliff Hinkel, came to me and he said, you know, I've decided I'm going private again. And it's really important that the board be led competently, and we don't want to have this thing fall into a political environment. That will not be helpful. You need to come run it. You've been engineering it behind the scenes for years. You know as much as anybody more than most.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the SL crisis, and saw all kinds of businesses fail, saw all kinds of chicanery where boards had shirked their responsibility, they'd covered up self-dealing, there were fraudulent real estate deals. Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California, known as the Sand states, were the epicenter of the S&L crisis. It was an incredible crucible of learning because you saw the consequences of poor underwriting, ignoring the risks, insider dealing, lack of transparency, and just plain out and out greed. So that was a great learning experience. And all the while I'm still working for one of the trustees of the SBA, I'm involved in working with the SBA day-to-day. And finally, in about”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the governor's office, he decided to run for the U.S. Senate. And at the time, my oldest daughter was a little girl, and it didn't make any sense for me to relocate to Washington. And one of the other trustees of the SBA, the state controller, asked me if I would come be his chief of staff. Well, he also happened to be the banking and securities regulator in the state. And this was right before what is now known as the Savings and Loan Crisis, which nobody knew was coming. So I wind up being chief of staff of the state financial regulator”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New governor named Bob Graham, who later became a U.S. Senator, was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Governor Graham was having a terrible time with the legislature. One of his staff people called me up and said, would you consider coming to work for the governor? We conducted a little poll of House members and Senate members, and we asked each of them, if we were in a higher staff person to cover you, who you pick. And apparently the House members liked me. I think I was 23 years old or something, and he persuaded me to join his staff, which I did, and that was a wonderful learning experience for me. And then just rolling the clock forward, one of the things I covered for him was the pension fund. The governor is one of the three trustees of the state board. So I continued deepening my knowledge of the state board and its activities. And then after a number of years,”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I looked at that question and we changed the law to allow up to twenty five percent of the portfolio to go into U.S. equities. And as part of that process, I got to know the various people who were involved with the pension plan and the way Florida's constitution works and Florida's laws work. The State Board of Administration has responsibility for investing pension assets. And so I became acquainted with the state board way back in about, oh gosh, this must have been 1976, something like that. And then after working in the House for a couple years, Hyatt finished his speakership. The next speaker came to me and said, by the way, I'm forming a staff and I've been elected speaker, but the difference between you and me is you know what the speaker does. So I think it'd be a good idea if you'd come to work for me. So I did. And about a year into that, we had a”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not Florida. So I was asked to take a look at that. This was a period of very high inflation, if you think back, and the allowable investments were U.S. Treasury bonds and investment-grade corporate bonds. Well, very hard to close an underfunding situation in a high inflation environment with fixed income instruments.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An opportunity to come into contact with until they were in their 40s at least. So it's a major head start. I know, by the way, the other thing is, if you go to grad school here, the legislature will pay for it. You have no debt. And I was thinking those are all good points. And then there's the matter of my girlfriend, now my wife of 37 years, all of which said, Matthew work can wait. I'll get up there later. So I stayed put. And one of the first things I was asked to do was look at the legal investment authority for the state pension fund, which had been newly created in 1974 and was created by bundling together a large number of state and local government pension plans that shared the characteristics of being either chronically or acutely underfunded or both. So the funded ratio for this overall statewide plan that had just been created was something like 45% in most places you'd say just dig a hole and bury it. Don't even think about it.”
2025-08-11 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Public Pensions – Ash Williams (Florida SBA) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source