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Bill Gross: The Vigilante

Bill Gross: The Vigilante

2011-05-17
Source: The Atlantic

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This year, the Congressional Budget Office expects us to borrow another $1.5 trillion. In just two years, we will have borrowed almost 20 percent of gross domestic product, or more than $9,000 for every person in the United States. But we won’t be borrowing it from Bill Gross. For some time, he’d been selling his Treasury holdings, and by early March, he had reportedly dumped all of them. Then in mid-April, Gross upped the ante by placing bets against U.S. bonds in the market, a move that pushed the Total Return Fund’s holdings of U.S. debt to the equivalent of minus 3 percent. If the bond vigilantes really are getting the gang back together, then the size of Gross’s funds—and his recent divestment—would seem to make him their leader. With economists and politicians warning about the dire consequences of out-of-control deficits, it seemed like a good time to sit down and ask Gross how dire the situation was. Is the United States really heading for an epic showdown with the debt markets? And if it comes, how badly will we be hurt?

A trim, gentle-seeming 67-year-old, Bill Gross doesn’t look much like a vigilante. He speaks so quietly that my voice recorder gave up and turned itself off. PIMCO’s Newport Beach, California, office has the understated elegance of one of those five-star western resorts where executives go to de-stress. The tranquility extends even to the trading floor, where Gross still sits for most of the day. I spent the latter half of the 1990s installing networks on New York trading floors, and even the smallest of them operated at a low roar. But PIMCO’s 100-seat floor is so eerily silent that I half-expected to see the traders communicating in sign language. Showdowns with PIMCO come, not with a bang, but with the almost imperceptible clicks of traders calmly keying in their sell orders.

I started by asking Gross the questions on the mind of every economic pundit in Washington these days: Why did he sell? Does he think the U.S. will default on its debt?





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