welcome to off the run
Hello and welcome. Thank you for coming.
I’m a host/reporter for NPR’s economics podcast, Planet Money. I’ve covered finance at Bloomberg News, the Financial Times, and Barron’s magazine, and I’ve written a book about Bill Gross and the bond market.
What does it mean?
In the wild world of bonds, a contract can be either “on the run” or “off the run.” Usually these terms are used in reference to, say, Treasuries, or credit-default swaps. “On the run” things are the ones everyone is trading, the most-recently issued, the benchmark ones. An “off the run” contract is older, a little weird, hairier or more weathered, leftover in some way.
That’s this newsletter: it’s my normal work, but also the weird treasures I find, things that aren’t quite stories but aren’t totally not.
My Newsletter Origin Story
One day in the dark ages, I turned around in my swivel chair at Bloomberg News and saw our commercial mortgage-backed securities reporter composing an email to “CMBS professionals:.” She was sending her work out! Whoa! She’d collected such a following that every email she sent yielded an instant wave of clicks, making her stories immediately among the day’s most-read. And people *replied,* which yielded further scoops and stories. It was brilliant.
I then learned that our intrepid R(esidential)MBS correspondent had a similar list. These were two of the most ferocious and well-sourced reporters I knew. So I copied them at once, and it proved valuable as a way to connect with readers who are also often story subjects. The feedback feeds my work; I get smarter and you get smarter content, like I’m a Spotify recommendation algorithm but I eat more and make irrational choices.
At every job since, I lugged with me a cumbersome and disorganized clump of hundreds of email addresses. Those addresses change with everyone’s job changes, so each email I send generates ~200 bounce-backs, and I have to remove the broken addresses manually, and also gmail threads it weird and I lose the replies and it sucks. Which brings us here.
which is where
This is newsletter 2.0, the runoff from my regular day jobs. Here I will tell you about my work — about people with money and what they do with it. About what went into a story, or why it matters. Or the English translation of something that was published in German. I’ll also highlight great work by other people. Or whatever!
Subscribing gives you access to my newsletter, website, and brain. I want to hear from you — what interests you, what you want to read, what I should be thinking about, stuff I don’t know yet. I want you to feel empowered to reply with your thoughts*.
I also am a Sunday painter, and my partner is a musician, so sometimes you might get some artistic leakage.
Love,
Mary
*please dont be an asshole, tho; if u choose to do this i will not engage other than maybe to recommend a therapist in ur area. if u creep, i will break ur fingers. thank u.
