This week, we speak with Ashish Shah, Chief Investment Officer, Public Investing, Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Previously, he was co-head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management LP’s global fixed income and liquidity solutions business, and serves as global head of GSAM’s cross-sector strategy and as a member of the fixed income strategy group. Prior to joining the firm, Shah was chief investment officer for global credit and head of fixed income for AllianceBernstein LP, where he oversaw all credit-related strategies. Shah was previously managing director and head of global credit strategy at Barclays Capital Inc., responsible for the high-grade, high-yield, structured credit and municipal strategy groups and the special situations research team, and head of credit strategy at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
He describes the days of the Lehman Brothers collapse during the Great Financial Crisis in 2008-09 — he did not cover mortgage-backed securities, but watched what happened from within LEH. Shah explains how on the day of the bankruptcy filing, he and his team showed up for work to do their weekly call for clients, reviewing positions and discussing the state of the credit markets. No one knew if they had a job or what might happen next, but his sense of obligation to the firm’s clients compelled him to work through the crisis. After the dust settled, Barclays recognized his leadership and ultimately put him in charge of their Global Credit Strategy (Barclays Capital had purchased Leman out of bankruptcy).
A list of his favorite books is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.
You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Dr. Ed Yardeni, President of Yardeni Research and former Chief Investment Strategist at Deutsche Bank, Cheif Economist at Prudential, and researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His most recent book is “Predicting the Markets: A Professional Autobiography.”
Ashish Shah Favorite Books
Dead Man’s Hand: A Pike Logan Novel by Brad Taylor
Term Limits by Vince Flynn
Dead Fall: A Thriller by Brad Thor
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
