DoubleLine Relationship Manager Stephen Dopp welcomes Tim Paulson, author of The Paulson Perspective and a 25-year Wall Street veteran, for the inaugural episode of The Glide Path. The conversation centers on Mr. Paulson’s recent essay arguing that the Federal Reserve’s obsession with the overnight rate is outdated. His core point is that the economy has fundamentally changed since the framework was built. Corporations now fund capex through cash flow and equity rather than bank debt, and most homeowners locked in low fixed mortgage rates years ago, making both groups far less sensitive to small moves in the federal funds rate. Mr. Paulson draws a sharp distinction between the fed funds rate, which he calls a broad thermostat for the economy, and the Fed’s separate systemic stabilization tools. He argues that conflating the two, as markets did during the 2023 regional bank failures, creates unnecessary panic and confused policy expectations.
The conversation then turns to housing affordability, which Mr. Paulson calls a supply problem being incorrectly treated as a rate problem. On private credit, he traces today’s growth back to post-2008 bank regulation that pushed lending risk outside the banking system entirely. He’s direct about a mismatch emerging between long-duration private-credit assets and increasingly retail-oriented, liquidity-seeking capital. He also pushes back firmly on the idea that the absence of daily mark-to-market pricing is a genuine feature rather than a source of hidden risk. Transparency, not the illusion of stability, is what protects investors during periods of stress.
The episode closes on the fiscal deficit, which Mr. Paulson frames as a real but unpredictable risk, one that markets will tolerate right up until they don’t. He expects inflation to stay uncomfortably elevated as debt servicing costs increasingly compete with the disinflationary gains many are hoping AI productivity will deliver.
Speaker Bio:Tim Paulson is a fixed income and macro strategist who spent fifteen years at Goldman Sachs — first as a risk-taker in the mortgage department, then in institutional sales working with some of the world’s largest investors — followed by a decade at Lord Abbett as the firm’s primary investment voice, speaking at major conferences and building market frameworks that moved billions in assets.
After thousands of conversations with professional investors across his career, Tim has made debunking bad market narratives something of a personal mission. He writes about it at The Paulson Perspective, an independent macro publication built around a simple conviction: most of what gets written about markets is either an oversimplification or a distortion. He hosts Crosswinds, a monthly conversation about the economic and market ideas the consensus gets wrong.
Mr. Dopp joined DoubleLine in 2026 as a Relationship Manager on the Global Relationship Management team. Prior to DoubleLine, he was with Lord Abbett & Co. as National Director, Retirement. Mr. Dopp holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Columbia Southern University and an MBA from Rutgers Business School. He also holds the FINRA Series 7, 24 and 63 licenses.
