From The Wall Street Journal, May 8:
Zoltan Pozsar’s Writing Is Dense, Esoteric— And a Hit. Now He’s Left Credit Suisse.
Mr. Pozsar’s work at Credit Suisse pulled back the curtain on the arcane but critical multitrillion-dollar global funding market
Zoltan Pozsar, a widely followed Credit Suisse markets guru, has left the bank, part of an exodus of staff that started in the months before the lender’s shotgun takeover by rival UBS.
The Hungarian-born economist became a financial-world rock star for his analysis of mysterious market dynamics and behind-the-scenes accounts of how money flows through the plumbing of the global financial system.
The reason for his departure couldn’t be learned. Mr. Pozsar declined requests for comment.
Mr. Pozsar wore a nametag that gave his professional affiliation as “TBD,” when he spoke at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Salomon Center of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business on Friday. He argued that global interest rates will rise more than many traders expect.
A person familiar with the matter said he left Credit Suisse in recent months. One of his last reports for the bank, in January, was on the future of the monetary system.
Mr. Pozsar’s work at Credit Suisse pulled back the curtain on the arcane but critical multitrillion-dollar global funding market. That is where Wall Street, companies and governments swap cash in exchange for ultrasafe collateral to shore up the funds required for operations or trading. He worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S. Treasury before joining Credit Suisse in 2015, where he was Credit Suisse’s global head of short-term interest-rate strategy.
His reputation grew after his accurate prediction of turmoil in those markets in 2019, volatile episodes in which problems in short-term lending threatened to spread to other areas. Mr. Pozsar became a must read for traders and portfolio managers, and his first name a hashtag for finance nerds on Twitter.
“Zoltan knows that market, and he can probe it to find elements of risk and inefficiency,” said David Kotok, chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors. “There are very few places you can find such good explanations of it.” Mr. Pozsar’s prose can be dense, esoteric and forbidding. His notes bore titles such as “From Exorbitant Privilege to Existential Trilemma” or “Sterilization and the Fracking of Reserves.” The latter piece, from 2017, used oil exploration as a metaphor for sources of liquidity in the financial system.
Wall Street insiders and Reddit amateurs alike zealously dissected his writing, trading digital copies like music fans swapping bootlegs....
....MUCH MORE
