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 the bond market and Bill Gross (NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER!).

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 found, 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! Insane! She had collected such a following that her email would yield an instant wave of clicks, making her stories immediately among the day’s most-read. Furthermore, people *replied,* which yielded further scoops and stories. It was brilliant.

I was curious — did everyone do this? It turned out that our intrepid R(esidential)MBS correspondent, had a similar list. I only had two samples, but they were two of the most ferocious and well-sourced reporters I knew. I copied them at once, and it proved valuable as a great 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. I’ll also highlight rad work by other reporters.

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

@mdc

Photo by Joel Arbaje

*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.

Subscribe to off the run by mary childs

a collection of the highest-quality runoff from my dayjob -- the lil anecdotes, the interesting behind-the-scenes, the good rage.