Thoughts from Katie Martin, Markets Columnist, Financial Times​ | School of Thought Podcast | OTPP

You're making me feel quite old here, Joe. I'll be honest. But, yeah, 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 Spider in the Superman movies and that was enough for me. So I always wanted to do this and I started off at the trade press. Lots of us do that. So I was at Euromoney, which you're probably familiar with. Started off there and then went into wires. So Dow Jones Newswires that kind of became the Wall Street Journal. So I was with that group for like 11 years.

Then I hopped over to the FT. I've also been there for 11 years. So I don't move about much and I don't know how to do anything else is the short answer.

It is a bit random. So when I was at school and I was 13, it was presented to us there was a choice. You could either do ancient Greek, a dead language. Didn't really see the point of that. Or you could do Russian or you could learn to cook. It was a girl school. And I thought, so I went and studied Russian. And I don't know, it just sort of stuck. I've got no family from out there or anything like that. I was good at languages, so it was just kind of my thing. So 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 yeah, 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, a fascinating culture. The language isn't 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.

Part of it is sort of spidey senses, right? 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 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're a sort of 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 or 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 coming up through the ranks in financial journalism, is be fussy who you speak to. So people can be controversial. They can have wild out there ideas, but try and avoid actual idiots. Try and avoid people who are just sort of 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 saying this is what I think's 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.

So, this is something that we grapple with at the FT and I imagine people other news organizations do the same, which is, are we always too miserable? Are we always looking for things that can go wrong? So, you have a crash in the markets, 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. So there's an ecosystem here where people don't want to read stories that say everything's probably going to be fine. Actually people want to read stories that say this is where we think the potential pitfalls are. This is where things are going wrong. These are the things to watch out for. So does that make us too miserable? It's an open question and we try and fight against it. Actually I think we at the FT deal with markets pretty evenhandedly. There are good days, there are bad days. There are forces that pull stock markets higher and there are forces that pull stock markets lower. We try to deal with them evenly. It is tricky though and we don't want to be doomongers. We don't want to encourage our readers to miss out on opportunities and to be too cautious, because that's the easier path. Also, pessimists make more noise than the optimists, right?

Definitely. There's a real tension in markets at the moment. 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 from 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.

You know 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 vapors at this point. They're worried about what's going to happen and they're very conscious that you can end the war with a click of the fingers, but you cannot restart the flow of energy supplies around the world instantaneously. And then in the middle, you've got the bond market. Typically bond investors are a more miserable bunch than equity investors. Stock market investors are always thinking about what can go right.

Yes. 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 mean, I don't know how are you dealing with it? It's like you're getting these such mixed signals, right?

When I speak to investors, that's broadly the kind of path that they're picking through this, right? 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 might previously have seen. This is just such an interesting moment. We're seeing multilateral organizations that we've all grown up with and taken almost to be like an element of nature. You look at NATO, you look at the UN, you look at OPEC. These are all flawed organizations, but they're organizations that bring people together and force them to thrash out arguments and ideas. And all of those organizations 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 sort of position that it is now, where its membership is unstable and some of the alliances are crumbling, I would have said that's worth 10% off the stock market any day of the week, right?

Yeah. Like, what is NATO worth to investors? It's a really open question and I really don't know the answer. And I think it comes back to that point that you raised, which is resilience. 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 sort of safety net, whether that's fiscal, taxes and spending, or monetary policy through interest rates. People are just conditioned to thinking someone will turn up and fix this. And that's fine. That's great. 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.

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. Still large parts of the world just sort of carried on regardless and thought, well, we're just going to have to pay 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. 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 definitely a wakeup call. As you say, there was this sustainable investing and investing through this sort of ESG lens where you have very kind of green tinted glasses on, always looking for green solutions to energy. That encountered a real kind of PR problem, if nothing else, around the second Trump administration in particular. Lots of asset managers that we speak to who could not stop talking about ESG at one point suddenly 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. 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. Green bonds, for example, have just sort of motored ahead. There's plenty of investor demand for them. I gather from asset managers that if you want to get any kind of mandate for any kind of public pension scheme in Europe and you don't have some sort of ESG lens, you are wasting your time. You just don't get through the door. So we've kind of carried on. The US can do what it's going to do. The green energy revolution, which is still playing out, is just going to be so interesting politically and geopolitically and financially. 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.

Yeah, 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 kind of us 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. So then it became a conversation about podcast now. Then it became a conversation about what are the social and political ramifications of getting rid of a lot of human jobs and putting them through machines instead. It's like, how did we go from one thing to another? The thoughtful asset managers that I speak to say, look, 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 the 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? So the only answer is there's going to be disruption, but I don't really know what that looks like. 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 building charts for me and all that sort of stuff. But who's going to pay for it? And are they going to pay for it loyally? Are they going to pay for it every week or every month? What's that going to look like? That remains a really open question. Whether the technology works or not is almost not the question anymore. It's who's going to pay for this stuff.

That whole thing I struggle to get my head around. They've got stakes in each other and they've got sort of offtake agreements with each other. 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 center buildout. So 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 AI trade. You can be in corporate bonds. Well, guess what? A large chunk of that is baked into the AI trade. So it doesn't matter where you are. Doesn't matter where your portfolio is. It has to touch AI at multiple points. 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.

I think so. Carney's speech at Davos was a big moment and it was a kind of 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 postwar period. For me, that's very healthy. 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. The economy is also very oil heavy. 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 obviously a friend to the UK, a friend to Europe. The world does have to think a little bit differently about reliance on the US, whether that's in defense, finance, or tech. It seems like a healthier place to be to spread that around a little bit. I think Canada's in a good position to grab some of that.

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 pension is just 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. If we were to be effectively sending lots of money abroad to invest in opportunities overseas, then I think 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? 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, because we are often very downbeat about the UK. 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. He was saying we love doing business in the UK. You have very clear legal frameworks, you have a very robust rule of law, you're very consultative, you have a very skilled workforce. I was saying to him, this is mad. People never...

I don't know what you're talking about. I think we're very good at beating up on ourselves in a way that Americans are very good at beating their chests and seeing all of the positives. I guess Canadians are somewhere in between.

That's a big question, Joe. That's the nightmare scenario. 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 enshrined in the supply chains for everything, whether that's low value goods or high value goods. That really would be difficult. I would say investors over the years really sort of swing around on China, right? One minute everyone is all in, the next minute you get this raft of regulatory announcements that just come out of nowhere affecting the education sector, which was you a couple of years ago, right? People just get wiped out on certain investments and think, what is going on here? Why didn't I see this coming? The policy uncertainty is really difficult for investors to deal with. So I think a lot of asset managers just said, I'm out. This is 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. 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. People are again sniffing around and thinking, 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 people have the Taiwan question has kind of fallen out of public conscience, I think, a little bit recently, and we've all been obsessed with Ukraine and Iran, but it's still there.

It remains an open question. That's the big shock that everybody hopes won't happen because 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.

Dog.

Well, it depends what for. To live, city.

Wine.

Cinema.

Sterling all the way.

Oh, we like a bit of karaoke. You can have both. Karaoke in pubs.

I normally do a sort of 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. So that's normally where I try and go. It also depends 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 you know the song and you know some of the words, because that way you can really get into it.

I'm not really, but I'm just, you know, see, I can BS for Canada's rest.