YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill McNabb

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145
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2015-05-15
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2015-05-15
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1
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  1. “No idea what night was. So a lot three was. So you're absolutely right. And 7374 is the closest. And you asked it an earlier question, who were some of the people who influenced me? Well, they all live through that. So I got to hear their stories. And so even though I was a teenager in 70, I remember sitting in gas lines for my dad was the trade-off. 74, absolutely. I got to use the car if I sat in the line. That's right. Even an odd, you know, was each day, one day was even. But so I was vaguely aware how bad it was out there. But we didn't live through it as professionals. But some of my early mentors did. And so you look at that and you say, okay, what can I learn from them? And so now I think going forward, I'm hoping we're going to do a much better job of this.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And do I have any regrets? And one of them is, you know, we didn't have the sophistication around our capital markets model. We weren't doing all these Monte Carlo simulations and predicting future returns and so forth. But you knew in 99 that the next decade couldn't be great. I mean, you just knew. I mean, when PEs were where they were, however you want to measure valuation And I wish we as an industry had done a better job telling people that. And there were people out there who were saying it, but it wasn't the strong voice. And to me, I certainly don't want to go through that again. I don't think we're in that territory, by the way. But on the other hand, we're farther along.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You just summarize the book perfectly. I'm only three chapters into it. You got the levers. I mean, that's the book. I had the Charlie. Charlie was kind enough to send me the book early and I had a chance to review it. And it's exactly his message. And look, it is what it is. And it's up to us, I think, to really make that case. Look, I'll say something that'll sound sacrilegious and it's not meant to. But if I go back to 98, 99”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Which is your first choice? And there are no other levers. And so what you have to, you know, I think it's very much incumbent on us as professionals to make that case to people. And it's hard. You know, it's not sexy. It's not necessarily a fun message. But the flip side is it's the responsible thing to do.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “There'll be some inflation. The real message is, especially for people who are in the bulk of their earning years and in their savings years, is don't expect the markets to bail out over the next decade. You need to be saving at a higher rate than you are. Well, that's”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Future returns So, yeah, you and I could both dream up a lot of worse ones, and we can certainly what could lead to them. And you can dream up a few better. You mentioned some things that could accelerate earnings and whatnot. But if you look at that, what it says is a 60-40 portfolio is probably going to be in the 550. So 350 real, let's say, just for estimates. That's on the low end of it's not crazy. And so what we've been doing is we've been pretty vocal about this. Because again, to me, it's an asymmetric risk for an investor. If we're wrong, if we're too high, then it's going to be a really rough ride. If we're too low, then great. Everybody will be happy at the end.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And when historically, when markets have been valued this way, the central tendency would be to be a couple hundred basis points below long-term average. And so that would typically, and again, it's a much flatter distribution with much longer tails, but the central tendency is in the six to eight range. And so we've actually been horrible. No, it's not. Considering what...”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “We look at, if you look at, let's say 10 years, if you look at yield to maturity on a bond, it's your best predictor of annual returns, you know, plus or minus 50 basis points typically. So yield to maturity on corporate bonds is less than three right now, or let's say three just around the numbers. So that's our best guess as to what bonds are going to return over the next decade. I can dream up a scenario where it's worse. I can dream up a scenario where it's better. Not many that it's better. But if you do sort of... In the square, the bulk of the distribution, if you will, is around that 3% number for a corporate bond. If you look at equities, we're at a pretty high valuation place, probably top decile historically. And again, so we run a capital markets model, which basically runs a Monte Carlo simulation.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I mean, if you think again, I'm going to oversimplify it, but if you think about it Short term money fund should be yielding about 2%. That's what inflation is. Historically, the money markets. Produce roughly inflation, no real return. And so we've gone through a distortion in the markets for this prolonged period of time where essentially the short end were producing negative real returns. We've never lived through that. And typically when you study history, the longer something's distorted The less predictable and the harsher the outcome is. So that's my big long winded caveat.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Expected return. So I'll give you all the appropriate caveats. So one, you know, we're living in a period like none we've ever lived. We've never seen the Fed do what it's done the last six years. And if you put the pre-crisis easy money period on top of that, you know, we've lived in a decade of a decade of very easy money. I don't know how to think about that. To be perfectly honest, I've killed myself thinking about it all the time and I don't know when it ends and how it ends. So let me make that.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I'll give you an example. So I just did this for somebody where we looked at sort of a high cost versus low cost sort of total cost of investing, if you will. So looking at a place where they were getting advice and whatnot. The difference in the ending balances translated into a 40% difference in income. That's amazing. So basically, imagine your standard of living up or down 40% based on this effect”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Right That's actually a great point, and what I hadn't even thought of, but you're absolutely right when I think about what the periods are. So again, our view is really be very long-term oriented in what you're doing. And that's actually what gives the ability for, and obviously this sounds like I'm talking, you know, Vanguard's book, if you will, but low cost. Low cost advantage, it's that compounding effect over a decade that really shows up. When you look at, say, active versus passive as the extreme examples of low cost investing, year to year can be half of your active funds, some years will beat your passive funds. But when you look over 10-year period, it's consistently less than 20%. And that's that compounding cost differential over a long period of time.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “You probably remember the article, but I think it was maybe a decade or more ago, the New York Times ran a piece where they looked at 20-year returns and they compared Treasury bonds to equities. And I think if I have the stat right, if you took the 10 best days out of a 20-year period, your equity return dropped from roughly 10% down to the level of a treasury bond And so that whole risk premium, if you will, that you were being paid was earned in 10 days. Now, you and I know it's not quite that simple, but I think the message was, are you that good You're going to be in those 10 days. And my view is nobody's that good.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And unfortunately, people do pay attention to them, and they actually occasionally invest, at least on the margin based on them. And I think they're making a huge mistake. And so we really want people thinking out, you know, I say five to ten, but 10, people should be thinking in tenure increments around their portfolios because it's really difficult to have any sense in the short run what's going to happen.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, look, I really believe that. Actually, one of the things I enjoy reading the most of yours is your commentary around short-term predictions. And I think you and I are aligned on this. You read these predictions for the year, and you might as well just throw darts.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think the fear, especially in some of the smaller planned market and which are sold through, many of which are sold through advisors and for smaller investors, that this will move away from any kind of transaction-based and fee-based for real little investors can be more expensive sometimes than transaction-based. I think there's a way, you know, people need to think about their costs anyway. But that's the argument that you hear some people make.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It's really solid, very difficult actually for any active managers to beat. And it's one of those things you will always be happy that you put an investor there.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And so the idea was could you put together a professionally managed balanced fund that would rebalance periodically, that was age-appropriate given somebody's traditional lifespan? And what we've done is we've got pretty sophisticated global asset allocation portfolio for people, very low cost, periodically rebalances. and wants to get into more subtleties we've got a million different options that we can give them and we can we can help them with that but for the person who's like i don't know what to do tell me your tell me when you want to retire put your money in that fund and you're and and i'll tell you barry if you look at the performance of these things over a long period of time”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It's a perfectly good default. In the early days of Target date funds, what was really fascinating is people said, gee, it's too simplistic. You're only looking at age and you and I'm younger than I am, but we're in the same band. So you may have a much different risk tolerance than I do. And does that mean we should be in different portfolios? And the short answer that is, of course, it does. But when you think about target date funds were designed for people who did not want to make a decision, nor often they weren't making a decision, so their money was going into a money market fund where they were earning almost nothing, certainly no real return.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah. So a couple things. Target day funds really came about when the Pension Protection Act was passed in 2007. One of the things that made very clear that you could have a default option that was a more balanced approach. So it sort of gave regulatory permission for something a lot of forward-thinking companies had already been doing.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Exactly. So it was actually counter to what the original intent. So they stepped back. The new rule is out. The proposal is out and people are studying. It's 400 pages. So we're sort of working our way through it as we speak, actually, right now. So I can't give you a definitive, do they have it right? I'm pretty sure they've thought about the prohibited transaction elements in the rules as we go forward. Hopefully they've got that right because that's going to be an important, for us that's really important at the highest level, higher fiduciary standards for people handling money makes a lot of sense.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I don't think that was the intent. And so, what would you do? You'd have to bring in a third party to be independent. That's great. More costs.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So at the highest level, we're actually comfortable with raising the fiduciary standard. I think as with all new regulation, the devil's going to be in the details. When the DOL actually tried to do this a couple years ago, as you may recall and ran into sort of a hornet's nest because under Arissa, there's some really technical in the weeds issues around prohibited transactions. And basically, if you were a 401k provider, you would have been prohibited from doing certain really basic things for your investors.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think they need to, there's still some opportunity for harmonization with the other agencies. I mean, it's pretty complicated to figure out who's in charge of what, you know, between the CFTC, the SEC, now the DOL and on certain issues.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And she's a long time. She's very tough, but I think she's very fair. She's an incredibly open to getting feedback. She really processes it very quickly. I think what the SEC is trying to do in terms of gathering, doing a better job gathering data so that they really have a better view into what's happening into markets is a really good thing. And a lot of it, you know, the fund industry, we're the most transparent. There's all this money outside the fund industry that they need to get their hand what's actually happening. And I think they're actually trying to move in that direction. So to me, that's a top priority.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, so I think the SEC has been moving in a very constructive direction. I think Mary Joe White has put some real clear markers in the sand around what her priorities are. And I think she's done a pretty good job. You know, she's tough. I mean, she's her reputation. She was a prosecutor in the Southern”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I think it was really, you know, it's one of those we'll never really know. I'm a markets-based person. I like to let the market shake out. Look, the short-term markets were in turmoil. And certainly the breaking of the buck by the reserve fund contributed to that. But you remember AAA companies were having a hard time rolling over their commercial paper. There was so much uncertainty as to what was going to be allowed and what was not going to be allowed. It's really tough to go back and say, well, this would have happened if only these things had been done or this would have happened if only these things had been done. I'm not sure we'll ever really know. I think the regulators did the best they could with the information that they had at the time.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “For us, I kind of always knew this would circle back though because our prime fund at that point was 65% government and treasury. So unless the US government defaulted, that prime fund could have withstood anything.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So, yeah. For better or worse. Yeah, if it was a fan of it. But everybody kind of unclenched a little bit. Look, I went out and talked to hundreds of clients afterwards, and they did.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Right. So, when you wrote a check, you didn't have a taxable event from a convenience standpoint, that's what it was all about. Now during the crisis, the reserve fund, which broke the buck, had a pretty big concentration of institutional investors, and the other funds that were under duress were all institutionally oriented. Now, you mentioned the taxpayer element, when the Treasury came in and put the guarantee on. To be fair, nobody asked for that. And actually it was just sort of imposed, and you didn't really have a lot of choice.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “spirit of the product. So the way the SEC reforms ended up, we actually thought it was a pretty balanced approach. First of all, lots of tightening of potential what can be in a portfolio and so forth and durations and whatnot. But very importantly”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So look, the way I look at money funds is money funds were essentially a convenience. If you look at a very short duration portfolio, the price fluctuates 0.999 to 1.001. under lots of different circumstances. And so the idea of keeping a constant NAV was a convenience that allowed people to use it for transactional purposes. Now, what happened over time, and this is a very fair criticism of the fund industry, is that simple product evolved into something different, especially on the institutional side. It became much more of a cash management vehicle. And what you saw were multiple NAVs being structuring the day and so forth and lots of interesting things being done where it really was away from the original.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Well, we want effective regulation, and where the concentration should be what activities, what practices are in play that actually could lead to a systemic issue. And so those are the sorts of things that we'd like to see FSOC focused on. So you mentioned earlier companies, funds that are buying a lot of illiquid securities. All right, I think it's a perfectly legitimate for FSOC to look at that and say, is that activity going to create systemic risk? Now we could have a debate about that, but it's a very fair question. And if the answer is yes, then, okay, then you either give them the opportunity to de-risk or designate them. But if the answer is no, then you move on. But it's certainly a good line of question. But just because a fund's big, right?”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Let's look at the history of cities. If city fails under this under Dodd-Frank, all CIFIs will be required to help out. So if you're in the, forget it's Vanguard, any large fund that's been designated systemically important, you're potentially on the hook for that. That does not seem right to us. Certainly not going to get a capital injection from the banking system to make it up because that's the risk you're bearing in the fund. So it seems completely irrational to us. So what we think, and again, I think as you know, at Vanguard, I did get a couple of, I've got a lot of fan mail on this. I've gotten a few people saying, this is not Vanguard. You guys are never anti-regulation. And I'm like, we're not anti-regulation. Actually, we dumb.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Let's make it even simpler. We already have Citigroup. I don't want to pick on Citi, but Citi's a systemically important institution. If Citigroup, for whatever reason, failed,”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “It's not like subprime. And it's not again, there's idiosyncratic risks there, which you shouldn't be trying to prevent because without risk, there's no return, but it's not systemic. The reason I wrote the op-ed and the timing of it was the FSB in Europe and the UK has issued its second consultation and there was a huge emphasis that big is bad and if funds are big or fund families are big then they should be deemed systemically important. And the consequences of being systemically important, as I pointed out in the editorial, are very asymmetric. If you're a shareholder of a fund that's designated as a SIFI, you're not going to get any benefit from that. But you potentially could be charged higher fees. You could be providing capital to bail out too big-to-fail firms.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “So the short answer is you would not think it would be logical because funds are, first of all, it's an agency-based business model, not a proprietary-based business model. Second, because of the Prohibitions against leverage. There's no leverage in funds.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “So we have a really deep team who've grown up doing this and they have a very rigorous process and they actually today travel the world looking for talent. And so we've got firms all around the world. I think 30 plus firms now managing about 75 mandates for us.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “and then bring them to the masses. So indexing certainly fit that bill. But even the way we run active, you know, we use sub-advisors from all around the world. That was very much the way pension funds and foundations and endowments worked. Early on in the mutual fund business, everybody's active teams were all in house. So we were really the only guys doing this. And again, the Charlies and the Berts were very influential in helping us think that through.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “That's exactly right. So those two people had huge influence early in my career. In terms of running the business, Charlie Ellis and Burt Malkiel, who were both on our board, certainly were very influential and more at a philosophical level. And again, it was all about the client coming first. And it was also around taking a very rigorous academic approach, if you will. One of the things we've tried to do at Vanguard is take really complicated ideas.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And the original team, again, they were just so talented. And they were very different than the Windsor team. They weren't nearly, they weren't deep value. They were kind of growthy, but growth at a reasonable price. But it was more just, we're going to find really good companies invest in them and watch. And what was interesting is. So from NAF, I learned being a contrarian is never a bad thing. And from PrimeCap, I learned about patients. They have very low portfolio turnover, one of the lowest turnovers of any active manager. And they would make very concentrated bets as well, which if you're going to invest in active, if you can get low cost and some concentration, I think it gives you your best chance of outperforming.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So outside Vanguard, because I've had a ton of influences inside the company, from just a pure investment perspective, two of my, I actually run a risk here because I have a lot of people I really enjoy talking to, but the original Windsor team, John Neff, who was a legendary value investor, watching him. Talk about stocks and the way he thought about the markets is a young person in Vanguard. You know, it was like a free education. It was unbelievable. It was like getting your master's PhD and advanced PhD all at once because he just was so insightful. He knew more about the companies he was investing in than their own management state. I also had the great privilege of watching PrimeCap evolve as a firm. We hired PrimeCap very early, and PrimeCap was a group that spun out of capital research. And the founder was a guy named Howie Scow.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “And so he said, You're going to need somebody who's a great leader of people and developer of talent. And you're going to need somebody who can really sort of think about the intersection of technology and investing going forward. And Tim met both those criteria really well. And he's just done a fabulous job.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “So fortunately for us, one of the things Gus did was he developed an And we then moved one of our key leaders, Tim Buckley, who had run our retail business over. And some people saw it as a nontraditional move because Tim hadn't grown up in the investment portion of the business. But he had spent his whole career getting deep on the investment side. And Gus told me something really interesting right before he retired. He said, look, when you're looking for my replacement, you're not going to get somebody who came up the way I did. He started out, he traded stocks. He wrote the original code for optimizing our index funds. He was very hands-on. The group had gotten to be very large. Our investment team now, several hundred people. We run two plus trillion in Malvern.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Yeah, I love Gus, and I was very blessed. I joined Vanguard in 1986. Gus joined in 1987 and moved in two doors down, if you will, from my office, and we became really good friends right from the get-go. And one of the things that really was remarkable about Gus is the investment guys would all talk about how great he was with computer science and he could sort of translate investment ideas into code. And the computer guys would all talk about how great he was on the investment side and math and how he could explain all that to them. And he just had this ability to get stuff done. He also was a great spokesman for us because he got out there and he could take really complicated ideas and boil them down to sort of their real basic most simple concepts.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Did Yeah, we did a lot more media than usual, either our own private webcasts or our chief investment officer at the time, Gus Sauter and I probably did half a dozen television shows within a month, which would be typically more than we would do in a couple years.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “I think it is. And I think it's three yards in a cloud of dust. And if you can just repeat that over and over, you'll be successful. During the crisis, though, we tried to be more front and center. We felt that there was a real need to. Stress to people we did not think the world was going to end. And as a result, despite all the emotional trauma that was going on due to the market, they needed to be able to see through that. And if we could help that in any way, we really felt it was our responsibility to do that”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Well, I think it's interesting. Our media coverage sort of waxes and wanes. We get a lot of nice things written about us and said about us. But in terms of doing the in-person stuff, we find we're in demand when there's a crisis, when things are really a bullion, people think we're boring because we're not going to give them the hot stock tip or whatever.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Well, I'd like to think that we're hopefully influencing the marketplace so that people are focusing more on it. But look, I think in most organizations, to be very fair, there's a natural conflict. We're owned by our funds and therefore our investors. So for us, when we say we're putting shareholders first, we're putting both the shareholders of the company, if you will, as well as our clients first. They're the same. They're either privately held or they're publicly traded, and so they have their public shareholders that they have to earn a return for, and then they have their clients. By definition, that's a conflict and how you balance that. Fortunately, I'm not that smart. So I need the simplicity.”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “You don't have to book coach. I fortunately have enough miles on a couple airlines that it's almost automatic. But we do. Look, it's the shareholders' money at the end of the day. And we're not trying to. Be holier than thou, but you have to always put yourself in the shareholders' shoes. And, you know, basically, is this a good investment or is this time well spent for the shareholder?”

    2015-05-15 · Masters in Business · Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source