Réflexions de Katie Martin, chroniqueuse des marchés au Financial Times

Jo Taylor: Welcome to today's podcast. My name is Jo Taylor. I'm the CEO of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. We're really pleased today to have with us as our guest, Katie Martin. Now, a lot of you will know Katie from her time at the Financial Times. Katie's a career journalist who spent a lot of her life covering financial markets and probably best known for her column, The Long View. It's great to have Katie with us today. And as well as joining our podcast, she's an expert in this field, having been a long-standing co-presenter of the F.T.'s podcast, Unhedged. Katie, probably a good way to break the ice is to probably say, 20 years as a financial journalist, how did you get to that career and what keeps you there?

Katie Martin: You're making me feel quite old here, Jo. I'll be honest. but, yes, I've been in this game a fair old while. I always wanted to be a journalist. I don't think anyone wakes up as a child and wants to be a financial journalist as such, because why would kids know what bonds and stocks are? But I always wanted to be a journalist, in no small part because, Lois Lane was really cool and she had a typewriter in the Superman movies, and that was enough for me. I always wanted to do this. And so I started off at the trade press. Lots of us do that. I was at Euromoney, which you're probably familiar with, started off there and then went into wires. Dow Jones Newswires, that became the Wall Street Journal. I was with that group for 11 years. Then I hopped over to the F.T. I've also been there for 11 years. I don't move about much and I don't know how to do anything else is the short answer.

Jo Taylor: I want to delve a bit more into the financial world that you cover. But just going back a step, I think you studied Russian, before becoming a journalist. Now I've got some overlap with you because I studied Russian history. What got you into Russian as a career choice? Did you want to be a spy or something? What's the story?

Katie Martin: It is a bit random. when I was at school when I was 13, it was presented to us. There was a choice. You could either do ancient Greek.

Jo Taylor: A dead language.

Katie Martin: Didn't really see the point of that. Or you could do Russian, or you could learn to cook. It was a girls' school and I thought, hmm. I went and studied Russian and I don't know, it just stuck. I've got no family from out there or anything like that. I was good at languages. it was just my thing. I picked it up at school and then I went and studied Russian at Cambridge. I promise I'm not a spy. I did consider becoming a spy for a little while. but, yes, not for me. I think I'm better at telling secrets than I am at keeping secrets. so. Yeah, I mean from studying the history, it's just a fascinating place with a fascinating culture. The language is it's not the easiest, but, as an introduction into the grand sweep of 20th century European history. It's pretty difficult to beat spending a bit of time in Russia.

Jo Taylor: My perception of your current activities is that you talk to lots of people and you're trying to sense which people are actually saying something that resonates and makes sense to you, and which people are talking their own marketing or a bit of BS, as you might call it, in terms of how they are trying to persuade you of something. How do you use your antenna to decide that one is something I can build into and share with readers versus something I discount because it doesn't make too much sense to me?

Katie Martin: Part of it is spidey senses? And the other thing is, I actually think there is value in speaking to and listening to the BS merchants? It's really important to understand how other people think because like financial markets, as you know very well, they don't care what you think. They don't care what your preferences are. They don't care what your worldview is. They are an amalgamation of what everyone else in the world thinks, and you're just a tiny little speck in it. And so you might think a particular asset class makes no sense or a particular investment makes no sense, but it might work out regardless. Or you might think markets are too optimistic, they're too pessimistic. And I just think it's really worth speaking to as broad a range of people as you possibly can to, understand that full spread. What I've always said to, colleagues of mine, Junior colleagues of mine coming up through the ranks in financial journalism is be fussy who you speak to. People can be controversial. They can have wild out there ideas, but try and avoid actual idiots. Try and avoid people who are just tap dancing along and pretending they understand things, and particularly try and speak to people who are actually managing money. If you've got skin in the game, it is a completely different conversation. You're not just spitballing and you're not just saying, this is what I think is going to happen when you're actually managing money, and particularly when you're managing other people's money you have that sense of responsibility. I think it makes for more informed commentary and opinion and news analysis.

Jo Taylor: It's a really interesting point. I can remember I was in a room the other day where there's probably 100 investors, probably a third were investing their own money, and a third were people who raise money to invest, and it was quite a stark difference between the view and conservatism, actually, of people who are putting their own money to work, from us, like either an evergreen fund or off the balance sheet like we do, so I guess the other question is I think in the UK, we're well known for being quite sometimes quite critical of the world. How do you walk that tightrope between being curious, critical, but not getting to be too cynical about some of the things you hear and you see, because I guess that must be sometimes a temptation.

Katie Martin: this is something that we grapple with at the F.T. And I imagine people at other news organisations do the same, which is are we always too miserable? Are we always looking for things that can go wrong? You have like a crash in the markets a crash, say you're down like 5% in a day. That's a pretty bad day in the office for the stock market. We're all over it. Do we give the same amount of attention to days when the market is up by 5%? Maybe, maybe not. There's an ecosystem here, right, where people don't want to read stories that say everything's probably going to be fine. People want to read stories that, say to them, this is where we think the potential pitfalls are. This is where things are going wrong. These are the things to watch out for. does that make us too miserable? It's an open question and we try and fight against it. And actually, I think we do. the F.T. deals with markets pretty even-handedly. There are good days, there are bad days. There are forces that pull stock markets higher even and there are forces that pull stock markets lower. And we try to deal with them evenly. It is tricky though, and, I think we're all, we don't want to be doom mongers. We don't want to encourage our readers to miss out on opportunities and to be too cautious because that is that's the easier path.

Katie Martin: And also pessimists make more noise than the optimists? They do that they can be very noisy, sometimes pretty empty vessels and they get a lot of time, much more air time than they should. And I think when, journalists write about financial markets again, it can be very easy. And it's a temptation that we must avoid to impose our personal politics on it or our publications politics on it, because you see instances where in the UK, for example, you can look through any number of newspapers that are convinced that we're in the teeth of a horrendous crisis in UK government bonds and a horrendous crisis in sterling. And I look at the charts and I think, I just don't know what you're talking about. But again, it's a reflection of your priors, and it's a reflection of your politics. And the worrying thing about that is that it actually does affect investor behaviour, particularly among self-directed retail investors. I think, I guess the moral of the story for, consumers of financial news is think about the politics behind the publication and think about what they're trying to achieve. And, just question, is this objective? Is this fair? Does this express the possibility that that markets could move the other way? And is it even handed. so yeah, be careful what you read.

Jo Taylor: Yeah, that's a great tip. But let's be honest, there's some issues I think around at the moment where you might say there are definitely risks around in the world. well covered in terms of some of the geopolitical risk, the Iran conflict and what that's probably going to mean going forward. I guess at Teachers’ we try to have what we call an all-weather portfolio. Hopefully it can deal with most things that come along and challenge us. How do you see things? I guess I would be more in a world where we expect lower growth, higher inflation type of oversimplification. Is that something that would resonate for you?

Katie Martin: Yeah, definitely. There's a real tension in markets at the moment. And again, I try and speak to as broad a range of people as I can. When I talk to people in stock markets, they're like, this is great. Corporate earnings are doing fine. My portfolio is working out fine. We've recovered from the shock of the war in Iran. I don't know what you people are worrying about. You talk to people in the energy market and they say hell is coming.

Jo Taylor: It's already come, I think.

Katie Martin: In certain parts of the world it has already come. I don't understand why you people are so chilled out. A lot of these energy traders are pretty much running on vapours at this point. They're worried about what's going to happen. And they're very conscious that you can end the war pretty much with a click of the fingers. But you cannot restart the flow of energy supplies around the world just instantaneously. And then in the middle, you've got the bond market. And like typically bond investors are a more miserable bunch than, equity investors like stock market investors are always thinking about what can go right. Bond investors are always thinking about what can go wrong. They're very different types of people individually. It's quite interesting. They're different tribes, but they're caught in the middle where the bond market is saying, yes, we think slower growth, but we think higher inflation and we think more borrowing is coming from governments around the world who suddenly have realised they've got to spend more on energy, they've got to spend more on green energy, and they've got to spend more on defence. And so you have this weird thing going on in the market at the moment where they really don't match up. I find that tension quite, interesting. I don't know how are you dealing with it? It's like you're getting these such mixed signals?

Jo Taylor: I think so. I think the interesting question is because probably for the last two years, the equity markets around the world have generally trundled along, as you rightly pointed out, with quite a lot of resilience. You almost come back to what's going to be the catalyst to make that change. And I thought potentially the Iran conflict could be that seemed to be still tiptoeing away from that. Honestly, I would probably say above and beyond our focus on trying to deal with inflation because it's a big issue for a pension plan, particularly with inflation-linked liabilities to our members. It might be food if I was picking one thing out. You could see a scenario where not as much planted because of the cost of fertilizer or even the availability of fertilizer. If it's not actively planted and there's a bad harvest, you could easily see shortage of food as much as high prices. And that starts to become a very clear downward pressure, I would say. That would be the one I would be, not knowing it's going to be the issue, but it could easily be the catalyst that would tip us into a different frame of mind. I don't know whether you agree with that.

Katie Martin: When I speak to investors, that's broadly the path that they're picking through this? That there will be higher inflation through food prices, there will be higher inflation through energy prices. There's likely to be slower growth than you than you might previously have seen. This is just such an interesting moment. We're seeing like multilateral organisations that we've all grown up with and taken almost to be like a an element of nature? you look at NATO, you look at the UN, you look at OPEC okay, these are all flawed organisations, but they're organisations that bring people together and force them to thrash out arguments and ideas. And all of those organisations are under enormous pressure. Now, I would have thought a few years ago if you'd said to me that NATO would be in the position that it is now where its membership is unstable, let's say, and some of the alliances are crumbling. I would have said that's worth 10% off the stock market any day of the week? But actually.

Jo Taylor: But it didn't happen.

Katie Martin: What is NATO worth to investors? It’s a really open question. And I, and I really don't know. I don't know the answer. And I think it comes back to that point that you raised, which is resilience. We had Covid the entire global economy shut down pretty much overnight and markets recovered. You had Liberation Day last year, this threat of massive trade tariffs from the US across the whole of the rest of the planet. Some of that got rolled back, but still big market shock. But it recovered. And I think certainly in stock markets, we're so accustomed to this idea that don't worry, they will bounce back either. They will bounce back naturally through corporate earnings, which are doing very well in the states in particular at the moment. Or they will bounce back from some safety net, whether that's fiscal. taxes or whether tax and spending or whether it's through monetary policy. Through interest rates, people are just conditioned to thinking someone will turn up and fix this. And look, that's fine. That's great. And I'm absolutely a fan of stock market resilience. I think it's a net positive for the world. But there is a little part of me in the back of my head that just says, will the music stop one day? Is, this really sustainable? you can trot out a list of reasons why this would go wrong. I'm very happy that they haven't crystallized at this point, but it remains something that I think we should take seriously.

Jo Taylor: Maybe we could go to a parallel area. And this is our attempt to move out of bond territory into more equity optimism territory and you might look at, say, climate. so for me climate suddenly became subordinated to fourth or fifth on the list of things to talk about rather than 1 or 2. And particularly when you see all the challenges that may be coming our way through oil and gas availability and pricing maybe it will be a bit of a shot in the arm for alternative ways of generating energy. We know some parts of the world aren't too keen on wind power as versus solar and battery storage. But from our point of view, Teachers’ have been a very strong proponent that we want to be involved in the energy transition. We believe in trying to find other ways of producing energy as well as transmitting it to the right destination. And maybe this is a chance for some of those stalled projects, particularly around things like wind to get back on the, on the agenda. I don't know what you think.

Katie Martin: I mean it blows my mind that the world did not get this memo in 2022 with Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, violent moves in gas prices, natural gas prices and in oil prices, and a real clamping down on the availability of energy, particularly in Europe and still large parts of the world just carried on regardless and thought, well, we're just going to have to pay the higher the higher prices and bring in some subsidies to try and lessen the impact on households. Some countries have been quite innovative here. You look at the example of Spain, which went all in on solar. They have plenty of sunshine in Spain. And the result of that is that the impact of the energy shock that we've seen over the past couple of months has been quite subdued actually in Spain, they're much more in control of their own energy network. And I think this is a definitely a wake up call. As you say, there was this sustainable investing and investing through this ESG lens where you have very green tinted glasses on. You're always looking for green solutions to energy that encountered a real PR problem. If nothing else around the second Trump administration in particular, and lots of asset managers that we speak to who could not stop talking about ESG at one point. Suddenly...

Jo Taylor: All gone.

Katie Martin: Gone. The phrase has been expunged from their websites. They never speak about it like it never happened. And I'm thinking, am I going mad? I definitely remember this was a big thing for you a couple of years ago.

Katie Martin: The reality is, especially in Europe, we never turned our back on it. It's always been there. We just haven't shouted about it in quite the same way as we did before. And I think it is time to have a much more honest conversation about that. And I think so Green bonds, for example, have just motored ahead. There's plenty of investor demand for them. I gather from asset managers that if you want to get any mandate for any public pension scheme in Europe and you don't have some ESG lens, you are wasting your time. You just you just do not get through the door. We've carried on, the US can do what it's going to do. but, yes, I feel like the green energy revolution, which is still playing out, is just going to be so interesting politically and geopolitically and financially and all the rest of it. You look at the strides that China has made in this space. I think it already accounts for like a third of spending on green energy globally. They can they can knock out solar panels like double quick. They know what they're doing and they're very good at making electric vehicles. And so ultimately the winner, if you like, of this conflict that we're that we're seeing in Iran is likely to be China. It sets a lot more geopolitical weight on China, a lot more innovation onto China, a lot more focus on what it can do in terms of unlocking that green energy transition. So yeah, I think one of the lasting impacts of what we've seen over the past few months in the Middle East is going to be this, reset into more defence spending, more green energy spending. I think it would be I can't see a scenario in which Europe, for example, passes up that opportunity.

Jo Taylor: We’ve talked a bit about climate, talked a bit about some of the vulnerabilities around, I guess we may look back on 2026 as the year of the big IPO. There’s still quite a few questions and what felt like a very bullish part of the market opportunity set.

Katie Martin: Right.

Jo Taylor: What about AI? Is it going to get regulated? There's still quite a few questions in what felt like a very bullish part of the market opportunity set.

Katie Martin: It's a bit hard to know which way is up with the AI trade sometimes, right. we spent a large part of last year of 2025 saying is this thing a bubble. Does AI actually work? Does anyone want this stuff? There seems to be large sums of money being thrown at things that don't make a lot of instinctive sense. Is, this just we're chasing our shadow here? And then pretty much for no reason at all. In the opening weeks of 2026, that narrative turned absolutely on its head to, oh, actually, AI is too good. We don't need humans anymore. We don't so then it became a conversation about...

Jo Taylor: We all do podcasts now.

Katie Martin: Then it became a conversation about what are the, what are the social and political ramifications of getting rid of a lot of human jobs and putting them through machines instead. And it's like, how did we go from one thing to another? Now, the thoughtful asset managers that I speak to say, look, this is this is what markets do when they don't know. And I think they really don't know at the moment. They don't know is this technology monetizable? Is there a real revenue stream that comes from this? And if there is, what does that revenue stream look like and where is it distributed? Which companies are going to do well and which companies are going to do badly? And other companies that aren't focused on AI, are they going to use it? Are they going to become much better versions of their current selves as a result of using it? Or are they going to be wasting their money? The only the only answer is there's going to be disruption. But I don't I don't really know what that looks like. And I think a lot of these questions are going to really bubble up to the surface as a result of the proposed IPOs of some AI names, it's like, okay, we get it. We see the technology, some of us use it we like it. Claude is very good at writing at building charts for me and all that stuff but who's going to pay for it? And are they going to pay for it loyally? And are they going to pay for it every week or every month? Or what's that going to look like? And that remains a really open question. And so whether the technology works or not is almost not the question anymore. It's who's going to pay for this stuff.

Jo Taylor: Right. And also I think there's a big split at the moment between people who use AI all the time in their private life, as well as in work. And people who are, as you say, probably a bit more standing on the touchline wondering how that's going to play out. I do think that the data centre model feeding into AI is quite difficult still to establish who makes the money, and it's probably been further distorted by a lot of firms in and around the component parts of data centres, investing in each other to make those growth scenarios happen at the speed that investors are expecting.

Katie Martin: Yeah, that whole thing I struggle to get my head around. They've got stakes in each other, and they've got offtake agreements with each other. And it is quite a weird ecosystem. But I think one thing that gets lost in all that is that it's often assumed that the AI boom is, a stock market question, and it begins and ends in the stock market. That's not true at all. The hyperscalers have issued a lot of money in corporate bonds to fund part of this data centre buildout. This idea that you can avoid AI and that it's a theme that you can exclude from your portfolio is rubbish. You can be in emerging markets. And guess what the big EM stocks are. They're related to the to the AI trade. You can be in corporate bonds. Well guess what. A large chunk of that is baked into the AI trade. It doesn't matter where you are. It doesn't matter where your portfolio is, it has to touch AI at multiple points. And so, does that make us more resilient or less? I don't honestly know the answer to that question, but there is no way to avoid it.

Jo Taylor: Let me take you somewhere else because obviously, teaches us from Canada and I guess for our Canadian viewers, a couple of quick questions if I could. How do you see Canada in the world at the moment? Obviously, there's been a bit more coverage with Mark Carney and his Davos speech, as well as trying to knit together an alternative to the US trade options that we currently have, is Canada’s standing in the world still good?

Katie Martin: I think so. I think the Carney speech at Davos was a big moment. And it was, it was a galvanizing moment for smaller economies to band together and to think about a world that doesn't necessarily revolve around the same great powers as we've been used to over the past in the post war period. For me, that's very healthy, like criticisms that I sometimes hear about Canada from a distance is, well, they seem to have plenty of internal trade barriers over there that I wasn't previously aware of. And the economy is also very oil heavy. And so is Canada in the right position to be talking about multilateralism and, breaking down barriers and thinking about a world beyond fossil fuels. Fair. But I do think Canada stands out as a obviously a friend to the UK, as a friend to, Europe. And I think the world does have to think a little bit differently about reliance on the US, whether that's in defence or whether that's in finance or whether that's in tech. It seems like a healthier place to be to, spread that around a little bit. And I think Canada is in a good position to grab some of that.

Jo Taylor: The other thing Canada is doing at the moment is you've probably seen is launching a new sovereign wealth fund. Do you think the UK should have something that more of a look alike to that?

Katie Martin: Should the UK have a sovereign wealth fund? Good question. Look, there's a large part of our pension system that is unfunded that could be done differently. There are pros and cons that come with that. A large part of our pensions are funded through taxes rather than through a big pot of money. Would a sovereign wealth fund be the way to do that? I think being Brits, we would obsess about the potential downsides there and obsess about what investments are being made. What are the political motivations behind that, what are the special interests? And if we were to be as a country, effectively sending lots of money abroad to invest in opportunities overseas, then I think, again, it would get tricky and political quite early on. Why are you funding housing in this country and not funding housing in this country? Please. And why are you investing in infrastructure over there when you should be investing in infrastructure over here? I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I am saying I can see how Brits are just too miserable to make this work too quick to see the downsides A because we are often very downbeat about the UK.

Katie Martin: And it was really funny. I was talking to someone the other day who's a chief executive of a German company and they do construction and infrastructure and all these sorts of things. And he was saying, we love doing business in the UK, you're very clear, and you have very clear legal frameworks and, you have a very robust rule of law, and you're very consultative and you have a very skilled workforce and, and, and, I was saying to him like, this is mad, it doesn't resonate. It's like, don't know what you're talking about. I think we're very good at beating up on ourselves and, in a way that obviously Americans are very good at beating their chests and seeing all of the positives. I guess Canadians are somewhere in between.

Jo Taylor: I think Canadians are generally glass half full people. Canada has a wonderful backdrop of lots of natural resources and space and you know, there's not SpaceX space but space to live. And they've done very well with immigration, which I think is to credit to all of the governments that have preceded and the current one, the current Liberal government.

Now one bit of the world we haven't talked to maybe just sort of try and have a brief comment about this is Asia. In our case, we paused investing in China because we were finding it quite difficult to not only make the returns, but sometimes we'd be investing in sectors which would become strategic and therefore more difficult to find an exit or an end point for that.

I guess the topic that we've seen discussed quite a lot is the what if you know, what if you had to disengage from China, remove China from the supply chains of all of the companies you're working with. I would say for us anyway, unlike say Russia when it came along, that wasn't too difficult. We didn't have too much exposure or exposure within supply chains, but China would be a completely different challenge. Any thoughts on the probability that ever happening through to how people might go about it?

Katie Martin: Oh, that's a big question, Jo. That’s the nightmare scenario. And I think we've spoken a lot about how resilient markets are. But if for any reason the world felt a need to disconnect from China, that would be a completely different matter. It's not just green energy and electric vehicles where China is making huge strides. It's absolutely enmeshed in the supply chains for everything, whether that's like low value goods or high value goods. That really would be difficult. I would say Investors over the years. They really swing around on China? And one minute everyone is all in. The next minute you get this raft of like regulatory announcements that just come out of nowhere, affecting the education sector, which was a couple of years ago. Right. And, people just get wiped out on certain investments and just think, well, what is going on here? Why didn't I see this coming? And the policy uncertainty is really difficult for investors to deal with. And so I think a lot of asset managers, I know a lot of asset managers said, I'm out, okay. This is just not a game that we really need to be in. US stock markets are doing so well. Why? do we have to bother taking China risk. People are warming to China now. People are spotting signs that maybe this long running nightmare in the real estate sector in China is at least closer to the end than the beginning.

Katie Martin: It's been very difficult to figure out what's going on there, but it seems to be easing up and coming to a natural end, she says. Touch wood. you can see the leadership that China is carving out in certain high tech industries. And so people are again sniffing around and thinking, well, maybe it makes sense to have a little bit of an allocation there. It diversifies me away from, other parts of the world. There are some potential high growth areas. It makes a lot of sense. But, yes, people have the Taiwan question has fallen out of public conscience, I think a little bit recently. And we've all been obsessed with Ukraine and we've been obsessed with Iran, but it's still there.

Jo Taylor: Sure.

Katie Martin: And, it remains an open question. And yet that's the big shock that everybody hopes won't happen because it's not in a lot of ways, it's not in China's interest either. You look at the wealth accumulation and the, industrial base that it's built up by being somewhat integrated with the West. Would it want to pull the plug on that? I doubt it, but we live in interesting times, I suppose.

Jo Taylor: I thought, for a bit of fun, I'm going to rapid-fire a few questions at you which will help everybody watching this podcast understand Katie better.

Katie Martin: Okay.

Jo Taylor: And if it doesn't, it be a bit of a laugh anyway, so. Cat or dog?

Katie Martin: Dog.

Jo Taylor: Beach or city.

Katie Martin: It depends what for, like to live? City.

Jo Taylor: You just have to say which you prefer.

Katie Martin: It’s a bit hard.

Jo Taylor: Beer or wine?

Katie Martin: Wine.

Jo Taylor: Theatre or cinema.

Katie Martin: Cinema.

Jo Taylor: Pounds or dollars.

Katie Martin: Sterling all the way.

Jo Taylor: Pub or karaoke?

Katie Martin: Oh, I like a bit of karaoke. You can have both, karaoke in pubs.

Jo Taylor: Good answer.

Katie Martin: What's your go-to karaoke song?

Jo Taylor: I normally do a Beatles number, Get Back or something, because it's in a range where I can actually sing it, and there aren't that many tunes where I can sing it within the range. That’s normally where I try and go. It'll also depend on when I'm up, if I'm up later in the event, and I've had a few sherbets, as they say, I might be a bit more broad-minded, but it also helps if the song and some of the words, because that way you can really get into it.

Katie Martin: Yeah, I didn't realise you were a karaoke fan. Okay, everyday’s a school day.

Jo Taylor: I’m not really, but I can be.

Jo Taylor: Let me just say, Katie, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. You've been a wonderful guest. Really enjoyed the discussion so far. And I hope we can talk again on other things. And so I say so far, and let me just say, I am sure you will be, giving people food for thought through your column and your thoughts. I certainly do for me, I always go to yours first at the back of the, F.T. and I think in an uncertain world, having somebody who can give a range of views and share other people's views in terms of how that feeds into that is really helpful. Thank you again. And, thank you all to the listeners who joined our podcast today. It’s great to have you with us and I hope we'll be able to see you again at our on our next podcast.