First of all, I want to say what an absolute honour it is to be invited here by Mark and the rest of the Fixed Income Analysts Society. I gather that this is the first time FIASI has had an external master of ceremonies for the hall of fame dinner, which makes it even more special.

But what clinched me dump three kids on my patient wife in Oslo and fly out here was our inductees this evening. I’ve known Bob and Barbara for a while now, and I’ve been a big fan of Steve’s work for ages. It is truly a privilege to be part of their induction tonight.

I also feel that despite being a journalist, that I am a little among friends here today. You see, fixed income is my first love as a financial journalist, and as Cat Stevens sang, the first cut is the deepest.

I know equities gets most of the mainstream love and attention, but everyone in this room knows that fixed income is where it’s at. Bonds are cool.

As a bond person once told me, we should pity equities people, who will never know the clean, pure joy of just getting repaid in full and on time.

In fact I’m writing an entire book on the awesome history of the bond market, which is why I suspect Mark invited me in the first place. I’m glad to say that we have a very special guest with us in the room because of research I’m doing for that book. Downstairs, you might have spotted something pretty special: the world’s oldest living bond. It’s almost as old as Bob.

Almost four hundred years ago, drifting ice on the river Lek outside Utrecht smashed up a dike on the river – obviously a pretty big problem in a country that is one thirds below sea level. Soon, the entire region is flooded, with even Amsterdam threatened by the water.

But as you’ll all know, the Dutch were brilliant, sophisticated pioneers of finance. The local water board - called Hoogheemraadschap Lekdijk Bovendams - quickly sold a 1200 guilder bond to a wealthy woman in Amsterdam called Elsken Jorisdochter.

In return for the money to repair the dyke in 1624, the water board promised Jorisdochter, her descendants or anyone who owned the bearer bond 2.5 per cent interest in perpetuity.

The dike is still there, in a bend of the Lek river, and even more remarkably, this bond is still alive.It first paid its interest in Carolus guilders; then Flemish pounds; then modern guilders and today it pays its current owner the New York Stock Exchange about €15 of interest a year.

Just think about what this bond has survived through. The borders of the country now called the Netherlands have changed enormously over the years. There have been multiple revolutions. Napoleon subsumed it. Two world wars, several pandemics and four currencies. And through it all, it has kept paying interest.

So why am I banging on about this? Well partly because I think this is amazing. It is a genuine financial wonder of the world. If you don’t like a four century old Dutch goatskin perpetual that still pays interest then I’m afraid we can’t be friends.

But mostly because this bond — this beautiful goatskin bond — is a physical reminder of how bonds built the modern world.

They have won wars and broken countries, funded hospitals and medicine and tobacco farms and sugar plantations, and paid for what we watch on Netflix. They’ve even helped bankroll Manchester United, but I’ll forgive that faux pas in the interest of amity this evening. And today, the bond market is bigger than the bank loan market, for the first time since they first emerged in their semi-modern form from Renaissance Italy almost a millennium ago.

One of the things I like about the bond market — which outsiders often don’t realise and even some of you insiders sometimes forget — is that it is also about people.

Sure, bond people are mathier than the equity market’s slack-jawed yokels. And if we’re being honest the bond industry has a bit of a reputation for being … brusque. I think even this audience would admit that fixed income people are not known for their outgoing optimism. But because it’s an over the counter market, I think it’s always been far more about relationships than the anonymous world of equities. And you can really tell that even today.

The bond market, of course, is changing. To steal a line from Barbara, this is no longer our grandmother’s bond market. I’ve been following the advent and increasing degree of electronification, indexation and systematisation of the bond market with a mix of fascination, apprehension and delight.

But at its heart, people helped build this bond market, with every generation laying a few more bricks on a now mighty wall. And that work has been valuable — enormously valuable.

Lloyd Blankfein once got a lot of stick for joking that he was just doing God’s work. Now, I happen to be a strict atheist, but I do believe that the people in this room are helping do God’s work. Well compensated God’s work, but God’s work nonetheless. So here is to all of you, and may you all be inducted one day.

STEVE BERKLEY INTRODUCTION

One of the things I really like about FIASI’s hall of fame is that it recognises that the market is made by a lot of different people with different roles, who all together have helped it become what it is today.

Naturally, investors and traders dominate. But there are also academics like Harry Markowitz and Bill Sharpe, data providers like Mike Bloomberg and legendary analysts like Marty Leibowitz, Joyce Chang and Marty Fridson. I note with interest that there is even one journalist on the roster, Jim Grant.

But as a huge fan of indexing, I’m very very happy that this first inductee tonight is Mr Agg himself, Steve Berkley.

Steve retired as CEO of Bloomberg’s index business earlier this year, after an incredible career there, at BlackRock and obviously Lehman Brothers, where he was global head of the index business and helped launch the Agg back in 1973.

Just think of how hard that was back then. There was no public pricing data, no turnover data. And unlike equities, bonds are constantly born and die. The early version only included Treasuries and a few corporate bonds, and it was only calculated once a month. As Steve put it to me, “it was trash, but it was better than nothing”.

From lowly trash, Steve helped nurture an incredible business. Trillions of dollars track the Agg today, and it is only the centrepiece of a huge and influential indexing family today housed lovingly inside Bloomberg.

So why was the Agg so successful? Some of it was embracing technology and transparency of course, in a market not exactly known for either. But also by giving away a lot of their tools and data to people, so that there was shared ownership that went far beyond the walls of Lehman. As I mentioned, the bond industry is a people business. That goes for its indices as well, and Steve’s career exemplifies that.

Steve is now retired, but that will only give him more time to complete his other great project: visiting every country in the world. He is now up to 167 of the 193 recognised by the UN, and both the south and the north pole. So if you want some travel tips with your indexing nerdery then hit him up after this.

BOB MICHELE INTRODUCTION

Market timing is a damn difficult thing, but our next inductee has shown plenty of good timing his entire career, not least by starting it the week the all-time high in Treasury yields was hit in 1981.

I hope Bob forgives the earlier joke about being older than the Dutch bond, but here is another example of how old he is: his first job at Bankers Trust was breaking time deposits.

Interest rates were so high and moving around so quickly it often made sense to pay the penalty for taking your money out and putting it in a new time account. Until recently, explaining the idea of high deposit rates to people would be a bit like trying to explain theoretical physics to a goldfish.

But over the years there is not a single corner of the fixed income markets that he hasn’t been involved in - whether rates, credit, ABS or emerging markets. I’ve certainly enjoyed tapping him up for insights many times over the years. But I’m sorry to say that early in his career at Bankers Trust he did briefly dabble in equities. Feel free to boo him.

Although he’s now overall chief investment officer for JPMorgan Asset Management – and by several accounts a fabulous boss – I think it really speaks to his creditable love of investing that he is also head of global fixed income and still manages money across several funds. And all this for someone who studied classics! Clearly, social sciences are the way to go.

But perhaps most importantly, he is a fellow Liverpool fan, and I gather that he had the good fortune to marry up, to someone who he met at CFA class. Honestly, i think the CFA should do a better job of marketing itself as a potential dating avenue.

BARBARA NOVICK INTRO

Our last inductee of the evening would like everyone to know that this is actually a BlackRock hattrick tonight, with all three of them having worked there at some point.

I’m not sure everyone will agree that this represents a true BlackRock sweep, given that Bob was only there for three years, two decades ago (though Steve was admittedly there for almost seven).

But I have learned from personal experience that disagreeing with Barbara is not something one does lightly, and I’m certainly not going to do so tonight.

But of course Barbara didn’t just work for BlackRock. She helped found it, and shape it into the formidable gigantic force it is today. Just think that when she, Larry Fink and a few other friends and colleagues founded BlackRock, they were initially warned by one industry expert that “the world does not need another bond fund”. I guess their response to that was to take over the entire investment industry.

Many of you will mostly have known Barbara for her public policy work, especially around the structure of the bond market, or spearheading BlackRock’s stewardship team at a very tempestuous time. But this was really just a culmination of a pretty incredible four-decade career, most of which was spent in fixed income. When I mentioned Barbara’s induction tonight to a contact, his one word response was “legend”.

Not a lot of people know this, but Barbara actually invented the senior/subordinated passthrough back when she was at First Boston with Larry Fink. Like a lot of financial innovations, senior/subordinated eventually got taken a tad too far of course, but it still must have been exhilarating to work on all this back in the 1980s - the decade I’d say the modern-day bond market was really forged. And it was largely forged by people like Barbara.

Today, she’s a senior advisor at BlackRock and a board member at companies like Intel and New York Life, and has so many awards that we don’t have time to list them all even if I had all evening. But for me, she will above all always mostly be a fixed income trailblazer. If this isn’t our grandmother’s bond market, it is largely thanks to people like her.