ATOMIQ LEVEL Live Featuring Michael Howell with Chris J Snook

Michael Howell, a veteran of the 1980s London finance scene, spent his formative years at Salomon Brothers, the world’s largest fixed‑income house before its absorption into Citigroup. There he learned that markets are not shaped by textbook equations but by the physical movement of money across trading desks. Observing desks light up on the floor gave him a visceral sense of capital flows, a lesson he later codified in his book *Capital Wars*. This focus on where dollars travel, rather than static price models, became the cornerstone of his analytical framework.

After Salomon’s early‑1990s treasury scandal, Howell pivoted to Barings, a bank that had built its reputation on emerging‑market exposure but lacked robust risk controls. The contrast between Salomon’s disciplined risk philosophy and Barings’ ad‑hoc approach highlighted the importance of systematic cross‑border flow monitoring. Howell championed a shift toward Latin America and Eastern Europe, recognizing that foreign capital waves could reshape entire economies. His experience underscored two enduring truths: central‑bank policy often lags behind real‑time money movements, and understanding credit and sovereign risk is essential for navigating today’s globalized markets.

Today, Howell argues that global liquidity—largely generated by private‑sector innovation and repo‑collateral markets—has become the primary driver of asset prices, dwarfing the real‑economy’s absorption capacity. In the United States, excess liquidity flows into equities; in the United Kingdom it inflates housing; elsewhere it fuels mixed asset bubbles. The Federal Reserve’s traditional grip on markets is eroding as fiscal policy and private capital creation take the lead. For investors, tracking these cross‑border flows offers a predictive edge, echoing Howell’s long‑standing belief that money‑movement, not policy pronouncements, dictates market direction.