Druckenmiller, Rowan, Pick & Gray

It’s rare to have a quadruple header like I had this week. In a three-day span I spoke to billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, Apollo Chief Marc Rowan, Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray and Ted Pick, who leads Morgan Stanley.

We are less than 18 days away from a presidential election, the stock market is hovering close to all-time highs and the bond markets are behaving as though there’s very little risk to the economy. Each executive offered their view on the markets, how they’re thinking about the future of the US and how they’re navigating their businesses.

Stanley Druckenmiller

Druck, as he’s known, runs his own Duquesne Family Office and spoke in a more than 20-minute interview in what was first a warning about the Federal Reserve. He thought the central bank’s 50 basis-point interest-rate cut was a mistake, and that he hopes the Fed isn’t trapping itself through forward guidance.

“It’s a big risk,” he said. “If in fact they’re wrong and inflation takes off because monetary policy is in fact not restrictive and we have fiscal expansion going on, and they have to tighten again, could be a nightmare for markets and maybe even for the independence of the Fed.”

His former colleague at Soros Fund Management, Scott Bessent, has been an informal adviser to Donald Trump through this election cycle. Bessent has been floating the idea of a shadow Fed chair — in essence, someone who could come in to serve as a challenge to Fed Chair Powell and essentially render him useless. Druckenmiller said that notion “is a horrible idea and irresponsible.”

He also spoke to the presidential election, where he said he’s not voting for either candidate. He said the market has spoken, that investors are very convinced Donald Trump will win. “I certainly would never support either one of them,” he said.

Apollo CEO Marc Rowan

Rowan has been making a point that public and private markets are set to converge. He’s given a timeline — the next 18 months. “All of us in this room we believe private is risky and public is safe, we know that in our bones,” he said.

“When something’s risky, you want it in a small bucket, and you want very high rates of return,” Rowan said to me Tuesday at the CAIS Alternative Investment Summit. “But what if we’re wrong? What if private is risky and safe — and public is risky and safe? Then everything we know about how money is managed and how we structured our portfolio is wrong.”

He made the point that both publicly traded debt and privately held debt can be standing at the same credit rating. He also went on to describe the efforts that Apollo is making in order to make the same privately held debt, such as that tied to Intel or other large corporations, able to change hands more easily through trades.

Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick

Morgan Stanley soared past estimates for its third quarter and cemented itself as the most valuable large US bank by price-to-book ratio — even more so than JPMorgan, traditionally the king.

When I asked Ted Pick why he thinks the stock is commanding such a multiple, he said, “I think it’s a consistency story more than anything.”

I also asked Pick what he would do in order to be No. 1 in trading and investment-banking businesses. (It's a goal he vocalized in an interview with me a year ago). He gave me a nuanced view on risk-taking and a metric called “VaR,” or value at risk. The $3 billion of equities-trading revenue brought in was done at a lower VaR despite all the choppy trading tied to Tokyo and China, he said, and argued that even in fixed income, which is traditionally a business that can whipsaw, Morgan Stanley has been stable.

Blackstone President Jonathan Gray

Blackstone this week surpassed $200 billion in market value for the first time. It became more valuable than Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and BlackRock — an $11.5 trillion money manager. (Blackstone’s assets are less than a 10th of that sum.)

I asked Gray what this says about the future of Blackstone.

“The business started originally in private equity, real estate private equity — now it’s broadened to many broader strategies in terms of infrastructure, core plus real estate, performing credit both investment-grade and non-investment-grade,” he said. He explained that insurance companies, institutional investors and individual investors are increasingly coming to Blackstone. “It really does say that alternatives are really coming of age.”

For Blackstone, a new era is seen as private credit becomes its top business by assets under management, surpassing even real estate. Here is Gray’s full interview, where he also talks about his expectations of the return of the IPO market, something Pick also expects to happen at a significant scale.

More on Wall Street

• A $10 billion capital raise from Izzy Englander's Millennium attracted $20 billion worth of interest, Bloomberg's Kathy Burton reports. A stunning amount of interest for a firm that has already been expanding ahead of the pack.
• At Ken Griffin's Citadel, stakes by employees in the flagship hedge fund surged during the past several years. Here are the details by Bloomberg's Miles Weiss and Hema Parmar. Citadel has also hired the top recruiting executive at Apple to be chief people officer to start at the hedge fund next month, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
• We spoke to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev from the firm's HOOD Summit in Miami, where about 2 million viewers tuned in virtually and hundreds more joined in person. The retail trading boom lives on, and he explained who his customers are becoming, increasingly.
• Carlyle's Steve Wise, co-head of Americas corporate private equity at the firm, joined me in his first television interview since taking the latest role this year. He speaks to the IPO market and corporate spin-offs as the next opportunity.
• The CEO of Cboe joined us on the outlook for volatility and his inclination for future mergers and acquisitions.

More to come. Next week, of course, we'll have full coverage of the IMF and World Bank meetings. We also get deeper into earnings season. Catch me, Katie Greifeld and Matt Miller every morning from 9:00 am to 11:00 am Eastern for Bloomberg Open Interest. And send all tips, opinions and ideas over to sbasak7@bloomberg.net.