YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Bernstein

lines on the record
108
first
2025-07-11
most recent
2025-07-11
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Hutton, American Express or something like that. Yeah, it became Sheerson Lehman Hutton, the irony of which I once worked at Sheerson when they merged with Lehman Brothers and I lost my job there. And now Shearson Lehman was merging with Hutton and I lost my job again. So I was on the losing end of many, many mergers in the 1980s. But it was getting to Merrill was, you know, I was out of work for a while after Hudden went out of business. I met with a headhunter and the headhunter had set me up with an interview with Merrill. And Merrill kind of passed on me but then called me back about four months later. So their first choice.”

    2025-07-11 · Masters in Business · Richard Bernstein on the State of Markets Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “People listen They're seminal. So, what happened was that at the time, a lot of people at Chase IDC were in very high demand. We were the beginning of the Quant movement on Wall Street, right? And so there were a lot of people were getting hired away. One of my friends who was more an economist as opposed to a Quant guy got hired by the chief economist at EF Hutton at the time. And there was an opening in the investment strategy group. And he said, similar, like, why don't you come and interview? Come double your salary again. Well, it didn't do that, but it was an opportunity. So I grabbed it the opportunity. I worked at the time with a wonderful guy named Jeff Applegate, who unfortunately passed away recently. But Jeff was a great role model in terms of how to make Wall Street understandable to non-Wall Street people.”

    2025-07-11 · Masters in Business · Richard Bernstein on the State of Markets Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's been amazing. In fact, in one of the books I wrote many, many moons ago, I specifically thanked one of my philosophy professors for I took symbolic logic with him. I think I took a course in relativism with him, you know, all these different things, which have definitely been influential in my career, without a doubt.”

    2025-07-11 · Masters in Business · Richard Bernstein on the State of Markets Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So, I am the poster child for the liberal arts education. So I almost double majored in philosophy. I didn't. I was too lazy, to be perfectly frank, and didn't want to take one of the intro courses, but I took like, I don't know, five, six, seven philosophy courses, something like that. And for all the philosophy majors out there, I'm sure they know that a good part of philosophy is symbolic logic. And symbolic logic, what does computer programming? What is computer languages? It's just symbolic logic. So when I got introduced to Fortran the first day, I realized I could actually read a lot of the code because it was just symbolic logic.”

    2025-07-11 · Masters in Business · Richard Bernstein on the State of Markets Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And that's how I got involved in Wall Street, and I found through time that I really liked it, went back and got my MBA. And after a while, without sounding stupid about this, realized I knew more about this stuff than many of my clients did. And so I just worked my way through Wall Street and eventually, you know. But if you had said to me when I graduated Hamilton that I was going to end up being the chief investment strategist at Merrill Lynch, I would have said, you're crazy. You would have laughed.”

    2025-07-11 · Masters in Business · Richard Bernstein on the State of Markets Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Reagan took over. Everybody called up and said, Stop billing. We want to see what's going to happen under the Reagan administration. Wow. Now, I wasn't the smartest guy in the room. But it was pretty clear to me that this was no longer a growth industry. I had taught myself Fortran dating myself here quite a bit. I taught myself Fortran and was a pretty good computer programmer. And a friend of mine who had gotten fired from this economic consulting firm got a job at Chase Econometrics IDC and said, you have to come over here. You're a great programmer. You're going to love this stuff. They had the largest set of economic and financial databases in the world at the time because you have to come here. I said, what do I want to go to Wall Street for? I mean, like, I have no interest in Wall Street. Why would I go to Wall Street? And he said, well, let's be honest here. The salary is twice what you're making. I said, well, I'll go for the interview. I'll see what happens. Well, I went for the interview. I got the job. My biggest client turned out to be the Merrill Lynch Investment Strategy Group.”

    2025-07-11 · Masters in Business · Richard Bernstein on the State of Markets Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “One point. Was a big deal. And so it was, you got to remember labor unions were very powerful in the late 70s, early 80s. There was rampant inflation, and every company had a labor relations department. It was a growth industry. And so I decided I wanted to be a labor economist and got myself a job with a prestigious economic consulting firm in their labor economics department doing all kinds of government-related work, private sector, but government related work. And we were consultants, which is very critical because consultants bill by the hour. And literally the day after, so election day is Tuesday. In nineteen eighty, November 1980, Wednesday, 50% of our business basically went away.”

    2025-07-11 · Masters in Business · Richard Bernstein on the State of Markets Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So the career plan was kind of foiled, I would say, six months after graduation. So oddly enough, when I graduated Hamilton, I wanted to be a labor economist. And people say, like, today they go. Labor economy is like, what's that all about? That”

    2025-07-11 · Masters in Business · Richard Bernstein on the State of Markets Today · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source