YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Zandi

lines on the record: 98
first: 2025-08-29
most recent: 2025-08-29
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

“Sub stack where With Oh, it was an amazing scary, said I can remember a few scary moments in my mind when I got a call from a CEO of a major retailer saying that if we don't do something, he's going to not be able to make payroll. I'm thinking to myself, he's telling me this. We got a real problem. Well, he wants you to tell people that's exactly what it was. That was exactly what it was.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rest of the solar system is safe. And it was I might have been Abelson or Grant, but that sounds like a Jim Grant. It very much does. It sort of drove.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that, yeah, I've been there for 20 years. I love Moody's, but that really helped a lot, right? In every respect, it helped my credibility. Helped the company's credibility. Yeah, help the company's established a set of ground rules that I'm able to write about, think about, talk about anything that I think is important about the economy. All that was established. Now that's getting tested at different points in time as we move along here, and we're in a trying time now, but that was very, very important to my successful stay at Moody's for 20 years.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, the CEO was a later panel with Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett was a shareholder in Moody's. I think he still is a big shareholder. The lawmakers were questioning them. And the CEO could say, hey, look, here's the study. Can I tell you something?”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was chair, I think, at the time. He was definitely chair to the CEO's credit. He said, okay, you publish it. And it's the best thing that ever happened to, well, one of the things best things that happened to Moody's because when the Financial Inquiry Commission, you remember the Financial Inquiry.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subprime mortgage. And remember in that speech, and he said, don't worry, this is not a problem. But because he wrote that speech, he said, look, this is why I'm talking about it. Right.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Modi's Full moodies. Right. And this, of course, I just had sold my company to them. So, this is all brand new. Who is this guy? What's he doing? That's the back of the alphabet. We never get to his stuff. And he goes, why is he talking about subprime mortgage? What does that have to do about the economy? And at the time, that was a reasonable question. The best thing that ever happened, Bernanke gave a speech called”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I got pushback. You did? I did. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a paper on the subprime mortgage space and did everything but say these securities should be downgraded. House price declines, credit risk, defaults, foreclosure. These are the losses. But I didn't take it the next step and say, okay, what does this mean for ratings? But I wrote that paper and it went to the CEO, a great guy.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio, my extra special guest this week was. I bet you say that to all the economists.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We figured this out already. So I feel like I'm on pretty sound ground when I say I'm not a fan of these broad-based tariffs.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and economists think about the second, third, fourth, fifth order effects of these things and how they platter over time. So it's very, not at all unusual to have these knockout dragged down fights between economists over issues. But on tariffs, broad-based tariffs, it's not much of a debate. Right. There's a pretty big consensus.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally so interesting because on almost every issue economists debate and the debate is reasonable economists reasonable”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have always provided advice when asked from both sides of the aisle. So, you know, sometimes more from the times more from the R side, but I've done both. Clearly the political center of gravity has shifted here and even McCain, I'm not sure where that kind of lines up in the political spectrum. But yeah, I've always been non-partisan. I tried my very best to be nonpartisan. And even now it's tough to talk about the economy as an economist given all of the things that are going on with economic policy, tariffs and immigration and doge. Generally, when I address a group, I start saying, I know I'm going to sound political. I don't mean to be political. I'm doing my very best not to be political. So please forgive me. And that's generally people's take that in and forgive me if I overstep in some way in their mind.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is going to be a mess, and there was complete kind of no, there's not. It'll be everything will be okay. And so there was a little bit of tension at the end of that campaign.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is well before Obama came on the scene. I didn't know President Obama at all. And I knew McCain and I admired him mostly around foreign policy. That's obviously where his expertise was. But I also felt like they needed real help. The campaign needed real help on economics. And I was the guy who took all the incoming information about the economy and translating that into what does it mean for economic activity and how should we, the campaign respond to that. I wasn't paid. I wasn't officially part of the campaign, but that's the kind of support I provided. But obviously when the crisis hit, Senator McCain, that wasn't his strong suit, right? Again, he was foreign policy. He wasn't economics. He kind of struggled across the finish line and never really grabbed on. I can recall briefing the campaign saying we've got a real problem here. This is a...”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, equally as interesting my friend Kevin Hassett. Asked me to come help out the McCain campaign. Now Kevin is the head of the National Economic Council Donald Trump. He was at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute at the time.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And big spending. Other than that, everybody. That's a great point. And So transparently. Where we are on the deficit and debt for”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I hadn't thought of it that way, Barry, but that's a really good way of putting it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the Fed had to work really hard back in the 2010s because they weren't getting any support from fiscal policy. That was government shutdowns. That's right. Treasury debt limit battles. Fiscal policy was contractionary. And so the Fed had to step in and provide a lot of support.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first two CARES Acts were under President Trump. Right. Biden gets into office March of 2021, 2021. He passes the American Recovery Act, $2 trillion. Obviously, it was very large, a lot of criticism, even Larry Summers was all over it, saying it's too large. But I think the Biden administration was looking back at the Obama administration and saying, hey, look, the Obama administration was we will come up with this package and if we need more, we'll get it. They never got it. So the economy struggled for 10 years after the financial crisis. And so the Biden administration saw that and they said, hey, we probably should go for a bigger bite of the apple because we may not get another bite and therefore let's go for a bigger package. Right.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, and I think that's the lesson that the Biden administration took coming out of the pandemic, right? Even the Trump.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was the time when the administration was trying to figure out how do I respond, Obama administration, the crisis that occurred September 08. He was in office by january of 2009. They used that period to try to figure out how do I respond to this mess? What do I do both from a fiscal policy perspective, from a regulatory perspective from all angles? And I had done a lot of work on”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. That's right. But even he didn't say anything. So I walk out of that meeting and I'm going, ah, maybe I have this all wrong. So points in time I had my doubt, but it became clear.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was confusing them into silence. I was totally confused by the whole thing. There was a guy, Ed Gramlich, who was, you remember him? Sure. He was kind of a naysayer.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did have one. I had a number of periods of doubt in that lead up to the crisis. One was the Fed under Greenspan asked me to come in and brief them on housing because I was a housing guy and I give this talk and it was pretty dark. And at the end of it saying that we're going to have a problem. I didn't think we were going to have a problem to the degree we had the problem, but I knew there was a problem coming. That was the message of the talk. And when I finished, I didn't get a single question from one Fed member.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The private label securities market, the market. And the regulators were my client. So the FDIC. For many, many years was my largest client by far and away. Wow. Yeah. So I was looking at this space from the prism of housing, housing finance, and also from a regulatory perspective. And I could see this was a problem.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's so interesting. And so regional financial associates, banks, regions, obviously it's real estate and housing are kind of top of mind. Totally, right? They write a lot.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I remember that piece. I'm a macro guy, but my area of expertise is housing and housing finance. I was watching the housing and mortgage finance markets very carefully at the time.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, they're everywhere In a sales force all over the world, right? And Moody's a respected institution, but overseas it's highly respected if you go into many emerging markets, right? Rating debt, sovereign debt is really, really critical. And so when a Moody's or an S&P says something, it really does move markets. And so it helped us raise, we had no credibility overseas, and this allowed us to gain some credibility.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Sales, and that's the key reason why we sold was because we were mostly US and we were trying to go global and that's hard. It's very expensive. We set up an office in London and Sydney and it was difficult.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to tell you it was great because we were allowed to remain independent in every respect, except for some of the back office kind of things that legal, which no one wants to do.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I have no idea how accurate that is With it. Yeah, there's Moody's, the rating agency, and then Moody's Analytics. More recently, we've been moving together, but I'm still in the entity Moody's Analytics.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we had no idea what it was worth. Just serendipity Fitch knocked on the door at roughly the same time within a week or two. I can't connect the dots. No, it's nothing like a bidding one, right? Exactly. So we were able to get a price, right? And I do remember him saying to me, hey, Mark, what price would it take for us to end this negotiation? To this day, I gave him a price and he took it right away. And I go, too little. Too low.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does. The CEO of Moody's Analytics was this fellow Mark Almeida, great guy. He is a Philly guy, and he and I worked together at Wharton Econometrics, which was Philly based because of Klein. And he was a data guy. He was in a cube next to me. I was a young economist working on models and data and forecasting. He was a data person. And so we knew each other quite well. And he went on to Moody's at that time was the rating agency, and he did extraordinarily well, became the CEO of Moody's Analytics when they formed Moody's Analytics. And he just knocked on the door and said, hey, are you interested in selling? And the answer was no.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the world. We were an economic forecasting for masquerading as a dot com. Right. Because at that time, your valuations were a lot higher. Sure. Of course, practically speaking, we set up economy.com, right? That was our, when you came to our site, you came to economy.com. So it was a way to advertise where you go to get our information.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Footprint outside of their state. So they needed the data and information that we were providing. So if I were a bank in Connecticut and I was thinking about moving in”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it was so much fun. I mean, I've been a startup. I've been a small business guy and I've been part now of obviously part of Moody's the large multinational. So I've seen business from a lot of different angles. And I'll have to tell you, maybe because I was just young, I mean, I loved being a startup. It was just a lot of fun. Especially if it's working. I can imagine, and we got lucky, the interstate banking happened, so all these banks needed to think about their...”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were a bunch of guys, right? Right. Yeah. We got the economy.com. I'm making this up, but we might have had. Forty fifty employees, something like that. Oh, really?”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I thought that he was older at that point. And Actually, we were competitor now, right? To Wharton. Oh, Wharton Econometrics. Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, we weren't really.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hickor and Denver, I believe. Yeah, Colorado, right? Because Colorado, right? And he squatted on all these names. In fact, when we were negotiating the price for that, buying economy.com, he was on a yacht somewhere in the South Pacific. He had made so much money on squatting the arms.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, we bought the URL economy.com. This guy from Quest, he was an executive at Quest. Remember Quest? Sure, of course. Yeah, one of the baby bells went out of AT&T.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow. Yeah, with my brother and my best friend. My best friend was also working, he was in the graduate program at Penn, and we were working at Wharton together. We could see there was a lot of problems with the way it was being run. It was mainframe oriented, and the PC was just coming out. So we were able to use the PC to do the things that we needed to do.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was regional economics. It was examining fancy word factor flow, so labor, capital, and the movement between regions and the country. And that was the basis for the firm I started in 1990 called Regional Financial Associates, because at that time...”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Punch cards. I recall those. Yeah. Yeah. You wanted to change the federal funds rate by 25 BIPS, you'd punch a card, you have a stack of cards, you would take it down to some guy who would put it into the main 12 hours. Oh, take 12 hours. And if you messed up, if you hit the wrong button, then you had to wait another 12 hours to get the answer. Well, how much was a quarter point increase in the funds rate going to do damage to the economy, that kind of thing?”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unless you played a really big royalty. But anyway, so that was a firm, a business, economic forecasting business. And so I learned the business as a graduate student working there to earn money. And I also use their main, at that time as a mainframe. There was no PC.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apart from the school, that's what I'm asking. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure there was some kind of financial arrangement that he must have paid some kind of royalty or something, but I'm not sure, you know. I don't think so.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my work was very empirical. My thesis advisor was the guy named Larry Klein. He was a Nobel laureate. Yes. He got it as a result of all the work he did building macro models, U.S. macro models. I needed to make money when I was in school, so I worked part-time. His firm is called Wharton Econometrics, you know, after the Wharton school.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was free, tax free. Wow. Tax free. I have four siblings. Wow. In fact, he actually, he was a pretty smart guy. bought a redstone at 42nd in Spruce, just off campus. And we all lived in that redstone. Amazing. Yeah.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely knew not academia. My father was a professor at Penn. And that's where we all went to Penn because Discounted tuition. At that time, which is a long time ago. You're going to tell me it was free.”
2025-08-29 · Masters in Business · Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi on the US Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source