When I decided to set myself the task of recording one phone call I have each week I never realised how much fun it would turn out to be. Often, I figured if others were ok with it I’d hit record when on the phone to a friend, an advisor, a colleague, or even a client. Easy.

Also, because I’m selfish, I realised that it was also an opportunity to follow through on conversations that I should have been having but for any number of reasons never took place. Oftentimes a friend will say something along the lines of “you should chat to so and so, I think you guys will get along great” and then just as often I’d get busy and it wouldn’t happen. Well, setting a weekly “must do” is proving a formidable means of correcting that.

Speaking of fun: I was introduced to Worth Wray by a friend and have been reading and listening to his thoughts on the markets for the last couple of months.

As such, I really shouldn’t have been at all surprised to have so much fun as I did when I rang him up and we began chatting and getting into some really fascinating stuff. We blew through the 2-hour mark like a drunk through a red light before other duties called and we weren’t even done yet. I felt cheated.

Worth has a really great grasp on the global macro landscape. But not only that – he has at least two of the most valuable attributes any investor could ask for: humility and curiosity.

He is presently the chief economist and global macro strategist at STA Wealth Management, who are clearly damn lucky to have him. I decided to split the conversation into two parts. The first part you can listen to below where Worth and I discuss:

• Worth’s thoughts on where to place capital for the next ten years
• What many global macro economists are missing right now
• The elements which are threatening globalisation and what this means
• The impact of rising protectionism vs technological advancements
• Worth brought up a really interesting and contrary view to demographic decline in the West – something I’d not thought about before
• What most economists don’t get about socialism
• And much more

Direct download link (right-click and choose “Save As”)

And in part deux… well, you’ll have to wait till I publish that one next Monday.

But I hope you enjoy the first part as much as I did.

– Chris

PS: In the process of trying to get better at these I used a new piece of software so I do hope that the sound quality is great.

“In some ways, history can be extremely informative. In other ways, we’re working through a global shift that has never happened before.” — Worth Wray