Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - September 18th, 2026

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1:29Carol Massar:Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. This is Bloomberg Business Week Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead. With insight on the people, companies and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus, global business, finance and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Bloomberg Business Week Weekend Podcast. Our backdrop this week, it was a beach on the West Coast. And so over the next 60 minutes, we've got highlights from the annual Future Proof Festival in Huntington Beach, California.

2:12Carol Massar:It's a gathering of the wealth management ecosystem, including over 150 C-suite executives, 3 ,000 financial analysts, wealth management execs, and limited partners, more than 5 ,000 attendees in all, representing an anticipated$20 trillion in assets under management. It's kind of like, Tim, a who's who of the financial world. This year does, though, mark the fifth year of the event, condensing industry insights, networking and technology trends into four outdoor days. All of this happening against the backdrop of an industry-wide push to adopt AI, a high-stakes Fed meeting, ongoing global conflict, and a volatile macroeconomic climate.

2:52Carol Massar:Yeah, safe to say there was a lot to talk about. Well, this hour will include our conversations from Future Proof with Rick Pitcairn, Chairman and Chief Global Strategist at the more than 100-year-old family office that bears his family name. We talked about the drama when it comes to family money. We're also joined by Joe Magazine, partner at Fortuna Investments. He talks about why he thinks Miami can become the new Wall Street South. First up, we start with the event itself. And the themes Future Proof was focusing on this year, Matt Middleton is the creator and CEO. It's remarkable to see in five years what the community has kind of done, right?

3:28Carol Massar:I always laugh and say, yeah, you have this great idea, but, you know, idea is just an idea. and when you think about this business, right, more broadly, like we are a full mile long and it feels like every single asset manager is building here. So I want to talk the economics of the event, but I think what's equally interesting to me is the economic impact of this event. And I'm wondering if you've quantified this at all because 16 hotels, people flying in from all over the country for this. I go to buy a coffee in the morning. They know I'm with the festival. Everybody here is wearing a badge.

4:00Carol Massar:They're spending money at night. What is the economic impact? Oh, it's tens of millions of dollars now. We usually, come in October, we'll have the debrief with the city. But last year, it eclipsed$20 million. And I think it's going to be way more than that this year, just in the grand size of it. It's funny when you go, because I'm here early, right, and building, and you hear from all of the staff at the hotels. And they're like, future proof. It's like they look at it as like their week. It's almost like the holiday weekends, right? And so it represents, obviously, the financial impact. But more importantly, the quality of people that show up here.

4:32Carol Massar:And I think they always embrace it and love it the same. I have to say, everybody in the hotel is incredible. The thing that is noticeable, I think, to some people who come here in the summer just for vacation, is now that school's back in session around the country, it's a pretty typically dead time of year for this area. For sure. I mean, even on the beach, not many people out there right now because everybody's here. But you come here in the middle of summer, everything is packed. Yeah. Well, I mean, also think about it. This is Huntington Beach, right? This is in LA, right? So the fact that we have 5 ,700 people here from the financial professional industry is remarkable.

5:07Carol Massar:And then, yeah, people walk by. They're doing their walks on the weekend, and they're like, is this part of the FIFA programming? Because the infrastructure is massive, right? And they're so used to these. Like, what is this activation? I'm like, oh, it's the wealth management industry. They're like, what? It doesn't look like that at all. And, I mean, you guys have expanded onto the beach big time this year. Matt, part of I think we've had a conversation in the past that part of it, though, is you maybe don't want it to get too large. Is that still still the case? So I have a different view to I think what most people think about.

5:38Carol Massar:Right. Large. What happens with events that get large, they lose that intimacy. And I actually don't think intimacy is defined by a number. I think it's defined by an experience. Right. And so when you start to think about what are the types of event experiences that make you feel connected? Right. You could do that through an outdoor setting. You could do that through the use of technology, which we do to make sure that people have all of these either one-to-one meetings or all of these group meetings. But if you look at each of these pavilions, you'll see content running. You'll see community.

6:06Carol Massar:You'll see ice cream pop-ups, right? People are embracing it in so many ways. So to answer your question, yes, we don't want to get it to the point where it is truly 10 ,000, 15 ,000 people, where it's unwieldy. But the truth is, I don't think we're anywhere close to losing that feeling of intimacy. What are the economics of this event in terms of putting it on and the profitability of it? Well, look, it's a year-round venture for my team. My team, we're now 30 people. There's 250 people that come here temporarily to work and build this, right? We start at the end of Labor Day. And for five days, they resurrect what is now a little city in the industry.

6:46Carol Massar:And it's built. So the economic impact is obviously massive to the city. The impact to the industry is massive. But you're profitable and you weren't always, right? I will just say last year was the first year we turned to profit. So this is a multi-year journey and an investment. Nothing like this exists in the industry. And you could imagine when I went post-COVID when no events existed. And I was like, hey, guys, I have a great idea. Let's create a wealth festival. Most people laughed me off those calls. So here we are now where most of them are activating here. Main topics when you thought about this year versus maybe last year.

7:19Carol Massar:Yeah. So, look, I think the reoccurring theme, unsurprising to anyone, is AI. Everyone's trying to figure out how to profit or invest in AI. Also thinking about what it means for industries, specifically our industry. So that hasn't changed. I feel like we brought that up last year when we talked about it. We then created Future Proof Citywide, which is an entire event focused on how AI is transforming the industry. And that had 4 ,400 people in Miami earlier this year. And so it's just a continued theme. I would say that is the, no matter what the topic we have on the stages, somehow somebody brings up AI.

7:53Carol Massar:Our thanks to Matt Middleton, founder and CEO of Future Proof. Also joining us at Future Proof in Huntington Beach, Jan Van Eck. He is the CEO of Van Eck Funds. We talked about how investors are navigating the AI infrastructure boom and hedging against ongoing global risks with assets like gold. I think our economy is actually concentrated in two areas. and one relates to this conference. One is obviously AI, where the tech industry is providing so much of the earnings of the overall market and the earnings growth, right? Even despite the size, which has all of us shaking our heads. So tech, that's kind of obvious and well discussed.

8:34Our economy, people talk about K-shape and they usually care about the leg that's going down. We are such a rich country. I think there's a reflexology a little bit that if we have a big downturn in the market, that will pull the economy down. I mean, because the wealthy consumers are the ones that drive a lot of economic spending. And so that's the second risk, Tim, that I would see in the market.

9:00Carol Massar:Given the challenges that we're seeing right now, higher yields, higher energy prices, concerns about a slowing economy, yet equity markets are through only 3 % off their highs. Are we seeing that because of the people who do have the money in this country continuing to spend with gas prices higher, with energy prices higher? Is that why we're seeing the resilience? Yeah. Well, you know I like to focus on the big 10-year macro trends, right? And post-COVID, we had, if you look at monetary policy and fiscal policy, I call it two feet on the gas, both on monetary, right? Zero interest rates, throwing money at everything, and two feet on the gas for fiscal policy.

9:40government spending. I think we're neutralish. I mean, everyone has an opinion on the Fed, but I think we're neutralish on monetary policy. I think we still have a foot on the gas when it comes to government spending, right? And that relates to debt and deficits. So I think that's why the economy is at full employment. We're kind of in good shape.

9:59Carol Massar:But you've been worried about the budget deficit for a long, long time. And I remember earlier in my career, every conversation, We brought it up, and then it just went away, and we were okay not talking about it. Now it's kind of front and center, and I feel like increasingly more and more people are talking about this is a major risk. How do you see it? I'm going to disappoint you, Carol. I'm one of the biggest bond bears. I know. I talk about it all the time. Yeah. But we know that timing in the markets is super hard, and so what I've been asking people at this conference is, when do you buy the 10-year?

10:31At 5%, 5.5%, 6 %? At some point, and when people are so negative about bonds, the conturing in me makes me want to go buy bonds. So, you know, that's, I'm a little bit more neutral. And I think, listen, at these yields, people were talking about, you know, muni yields on the long end of duration of high single digits. That's going to compete against equities and other parts of the portfolio. So, you know, probably long term. Listen, long term bearish, long term bull on gold. Right. Ten years out. It's the new global currency. But short term, I kind of react against all the bearishness.

11:09Carol Massar:Where do you think gold's then headed? We saw a couple of good strong years last two years. I think it was up more than 50 percent last year. This year, it's a little bit not as, you know, investors seem so eager to go to move into gold. But where do you see it going? Well, Bitcoin and gold hit all time highs last year. and I think they have effectively bottomed and are heading towards all-time highs again. Now, it may be a slow move because there's a lot of consolidation. If you look at a five-year chart of gold, it looks like it just went up the Himalayan mountains. So it's got to reset, even though I think it's got that long-term bid.

11:41So even if it takes another year of going sideways. The other thing is I tell people gold is not driven by U.S. inflation. We're not a U.S. – it doesn't dominate the world anymore. We're a global world. And global growth in Asia drives a lot of demand for gold. And this war is really bad for Asian growth, right? India in particular. So that's why it's not surprising that it's sort of struggling a little bit here.

12:07Carol Massar:I want to go back to something that you said earlier. And we'll get back to more Bitcoin and gold in a minute. But you mentioned the deficit. And earlier today, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant was on Capitol Hill. He said that$5 ,000 checks will not affect the deficit. There are ways to do this without affecting the deficit. Is he right? You know, President Trump and Scott Besson are risk takers. And I think they're taking a lot of risks here. They're toying with the market. I mean, that's a flat-out silly statement. And he was there when Trump made the comment in Texas. And that really kind of, it's really undermining confidence and risking confidence.

12:45Because confidence is everything. That's what prices long-term interest rates. So, you know, I think that's not to be taken at face value. It's going to add to the deficit. Of course it is. Of course it is. And, look, I think at the end of the day, Americans know this when I speak to people at conferences. Welcome to high – in the next five years, we're getting higher taxes and lower government spending.

13:08Carol Massar:We just can't. We can't. It's not sustainable any other way is what you're saying. I mean, a Social Security loan, right, is going to run out of money in 32. That was Jan Van Eck, CEO of Van Eck Funds, joining us from Future Proof. Coming up, it's a more than 100-year-old investment firm built to handle a single family's fortune, that of the industrialist John Pitcairn Jr. And now it's evolved to serve other high-net-worth families. Britt Pitcairn joins us as Future Proof 2026 in Huntington Beach, California continues. This is Bloomberg.

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15:00Carol Massar:This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at 2 p.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station. Just say, Alexa, play Bloomberg 1130. I'm Carol Masser along with Tim Stenevec with a special weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week as we bring you the highlights from our coverage this past week of the Future Proof Festival held in Huntington Beach, California. Rick Pitcairn is chairman and chief global strategist at Pitcairn. It's a more than 100-year-old family office, and they, among other things, help wealthy families plan for the next generations.

15:42Carol Massar:I want to talk to you about markets and about what you see as a strategy moving forward. But you come at this at a unique angle, given your family history, the industrialist side of things, and the way that for five generations, you and the family have nurtured that fortune and also sort of built it into this family office that has more than$12 billion in assets under management. Give us a little bit of the history here. Well, everything you said was correct except for it's seven generations, but who's counting? Oh, my gosh. But who's counting? So we had really, my great-grandfather was the equivalent of a private equity investor and built a lot of businesses.

16:18One of them, a publicly traded business called PPG Industries, which was glass and chemicals. Now publicly traded. Right. And the private equity of the day was Carnegie and steel and my great-grandfather in glass and paint and Rockefeller and oil. And they were the ones that were 31 years old and making those fortunes. And he came over and moved to Philadelphia, passed away, left three brothers. My grandfather was 21 at the time. So think like the Waltons. They were each independently wealthy but quite young. The oldest was 29, I think. So they decided under the leadership of my great uncle that we'd keep all the money together and have the same advisors, the same tax advisors, investment advisors, so that they wouldn't sort of separate and get picked off, I think is what they were thinking.

17:07They keep their financial power together, and that was the start of our business 103 years ago. And later on, like in the 80s, we started to serve other families, and now the majority of our business is serving other families, though the Pitcairn family wealth is still a big part of what we do.

17:24Carol Massar:What do families do today? Are they so inclined to kind of all stay together, or does everybody kind of want to separate and go their own ways? It's a mix. You know, we're lucky enough to have some clients that have had structures in place a long, long time. And many of those structures sort of incentivize the family to stay together. So you might have a trust structure that was built in the 40s or the 50s, and the family needs a lot of help to navigate that structure, and that's sort of incentivization to stay together. My experience, my professional experience, is it's really healthy for families to figure out ways to give families a fair door and way out if they don't want to play.

18:01So whether that's in terms of the valuation of illiquid stock or how you would separate a trust, but to do that fairly rather than say, you know, sort of if you go, you get book value, which is unfair, you know, and then because if the family members stay in and they don't want to be in, they're actually quite detrimental to what the core of the family is trying to achieve.

18:22Carol Massar:You know, there's that old adage about shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, which obviously did not apply to your family. And I'm curious if you have seen that happen, how you avoid that and sort of where that comes from. this is your world. I really think families come to us so that doesn't happen to them. We try to build in structures to where you don't run into that cycle, to where you have this perpetuity to the wealth. And I think that's why they come. And in fact, one of the coolest things I've seen in my career is when that really gets broken. Like you have a second gen or a third gen who comes along to what the first gen built and like puts an exponent on it.

18:59It was worth $400 million when the first gen was retiring and get done. And they take that thing and they're just as entrepreneurial and they make it worth$4 billion. And I think that's so cool because it goes against the idea that it's just this slow drain of the wealth from a big pile to a little pile. I really try to help families not do that.

19:17Carol Massar:What do you help families do in terms of how to allocate some of their investments or their wealth in particular? You've got$12 billion in assets under management among these families and your own. But I'm just curious what's interesting. There's basic things like the AI trade. We're looking at higher yields. What is it that's interesting, private markets versus public? I continue to be astounded at the demand for private investments by the wealthiest segments. I think sometimes that even comes at the detriment to their own investments. They think that they adjudicate the entire investment offering through the private investment spectrum rather than realizing.

19:57Carol Massar:Private equity, private credit, all of it. All of it, but primarily private. They all want SpaceX. They all want to be in Peter Thiel's latest fund. They all want access that is hard to get. And they actually buy some intermediary stuff a lot of the time. It doesn't perform near as well as the shiny star that they're looking at. And I think our job is really, it's to be, I mean, it's I guess a bad word, but a disciplinarian. In that, yeah, there's a role for private equity. There's a role for private credit. But let's do it inside a diverse portfolio where we aren't chasing the hot trade. and we're built for any kind of downturn that might come.

20:31Carol Massar:You want to get in their way, so then, to create some friction to keep them out of trouble. Correct. I mean, I always say, you know, my families are in the end zone. My job is to help them spike the ball, not drag them out on the field where they can get hit. And so if they want, you know, 100 % hedge funds in 2006, I say that's maybe not such a good idea. So I want to build on what Carol was asking, because you are now a global strategist. You used to be chief investment officer of the firm. You're watching this stuff closely. Your job now is to look at opportunities that are out there and really scour the globe for these opportunities.

21:08Carol Massar:You mentioned private markets. Where else are the opportunities? I think what we're seeing a lot of right now, and you see it all over this conference, is a lot of focus on the tax impact to U.S. clients. What's that after-tax dollar versus the pre-tax dollar, which you didn't see a lot. So we started thinking about this in one of the – You know he's in a family office when he talks about taxes. Death, divorce, and taxes. But I do feel like there's been a shift in the narrative of people talking a lot more about tax implications. Walk up and down. Walk up and down right here. And we started working on this in 2007.

21:44It was one of the better things I did in my career was seeing how some of this could work for families. You're seeing a lot of people work on these levered strategies right now where you're putting like$145 ,000,$145 ,000 around a portfolio just to have a lot of gains and losses so that you get a massive tax impact. And there's problems with the custodians. I was watching. I mean, it's a buzz right now. And it's a little gratifying to me because we were working on this pretty hard a long time ago.