Michael Ashton, CFA, The Inflation Guy
One of a small number of practitioners who did not join the inflation markets so much as help build them.
Founder & Managing Principal
Michael Ashton founded Enduring Investments in 2008 after a career spent at the center of inflation markets. He traded the first interbank U.S. inflation swaps and served as the sole market maker for the CPI futures contract, making him one of the few practitioners alive who built these markets rather than inherited them.
He is the author of What’s Wrong with Money? and Maestro, My Ass!, a frequent presence on television and radio, and the host of the Inflation Guy podcast. His research and commentary are followed by institutional allocators, central bank economists and individual investors worldwide. He is a CFA charterholder.
Why this pedigree is the firm’s most under-appreciated asset
There is a meaningful difference between having a view on inflation and having had to quote a price on it. A market maker is obliged to be liquid in both directions, to hedge the residual book, and to be wrong in public. That experience is what makes it possible to decompose an unusual liability (Dutch wage inflation, a Québécois retiree basket, a synthetic CPI option payoff) into instruments that actually trade.
It is also why Enduring is comfortable being questioned directly by an investment committee rather than sending a deck. See how we work and the strategies that come out of it.
Published research
Eight papers on inflation measurement, liability-driven investing, pension de-risking and the mechanics of inflation-linked instruments: three in journals, including The Journal of Investing and Business Economics, and five working papers. Listed in full on the Insights page.
Books
- What’s Wrong with Money?: why the money most people carry in their heads behaves nothing like the money in the economy.
- Maestro, My Ass!: a re-examination of the Greenspan era and the inflation consequences that followed it.
Where his work appears
Michael is a regular contributor and interviewee across financial media, including Bloomberg television and radio, Barron’s, Business Insider, Investing.com, USA Today, Fortune and RealVision. He has appeared in each of them more than once; rather than single out one piece per outlet, the full body of his commentary is collected on the blog and the podcast below.
And his own work:
Common questions
What does “traded the first interbank U.S. inflation swaps” mean?
When the U.S. inflation swap market began, someone had to make the first two-way prices between banks. Michael Ashton was on one side of those early trades. The instruments most inflation strategies now depend on were, in part, priced into existence by the person running this firm.
What is a CPI futures market maker?
The CPI futures contract needed a firm willing to quote continuous two-sided prices. Michael Ashton was the sole market maker for it. Market making is a different discipline from macro research: you are obliged to have a price, and to be right often enough to survive.
Why does market-making pedigree matter to an allocator?
Because inflation is one of the few asset classes where the gap between commentary and execution is enormous. Plenty of firms have a view on CPI. Very few have had to quote a price on it, hedge the resulting book, and answer for the basis risk afterwards.
Where can I read his current work?
The Inflation Guy blog carries commentary on every CPI print and Fed meeting, and the Inflation Guy podcast covers the same ground in plain language. Both are free and neither is gated.
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