| Bill Gross |
Fixed-income investing isn't an area normally associated with soul searching. can still wrongfoot us all, though. The Pimco managing director's March Investment Outlook takes a moment out from analysis of the bond markets to conduct a pensive and very personal meditation on religion, war and the author's mortality, with the help of a few carefully chosen quotations.
Gross seems to have plunged into the dark night of the soul. He writes: "In the absence of personal resolution, I fall back on the thinking of Tennyson: 'There lives more faith in honest doubt,' he wrote, 'than in half the creeds.' Perhaps. My life seems sprinkled with such self-consolations as the conclusion to my multi-act play comes rushing towards me faster than I care to acknowledge."
Gross, a Vietnam veteran, goes on to provide a sombre and critical assessment of the justification for war on Iraq. "By invading 'evil doer' nations, we may lessen our vulnerability but lose a piece of our soul in the process," he says. "I speak now, and risk client, public, and press censure because I was silent 35 years ago."