Markets Happy Hour Podcast - November 11, 2025 - with Special Guest Rich Nuzum

In today's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we are delighted to host Rich Nuzum, Head of OCIO at Franklin Templeton, for our usual canter through the macro drivers of investor portfolios - inflation, interest rates, equity markets, geopolitics and other asset classes.

We look at inflation firstly - and ask about expectations, which, remarkably, are diverging along political lines in the US. It seems that inflation is very much in the eye of the beholder - an aspect noted by Rich who suggests that averages "often lie" and are not an accurate depiction of client by client inflation.

We move then to central banks and their challenging task of navigating in the fog without even less data than usual, and we move then to geopolitics where Rich discusses the oil price and demand and supply issues as well as the importance that investors think through the ramifications that current geopolitical forces have on their portfolios.

We move to US equity markets and the AI underpinning, the effect of the shutdown and why non-US markets seem to be signalling something else today.

We end with a detailed discussion of credit markets and Rich gives an alternative take on some of the weakness that seems to have recently been noticed in credit markets.