Ep 222: Anurag Agarwal - The Asset Class That Moves the World: Inside Global Transportation Investing
Inside the Rope with David ClarkShow Notes
Eighty percent of everything you consume travels on a ship. Your iron ore, your energy, your Amazon delivery - all of it. So why do so few sophisticated investors have any exposure to the asset class that makes it happen? This week David sits down with Anurag Agarwal, Head of Portfolio Management at J.P. Morgan Asset Management and co-head of their Global Transportation Group. Anurag spent years on the investment banking side of Wall Street before a decade teaching entrepreneurship and corporate finance at Boston University. A career arc that gives him an unusually rigorous lens on how capital really moves through the physical world. Transportation as an asset class sits in a compelling middle ground: it carries the contractual dependability of core infrastructure, but its underlying assets move - and that mobility, it turns out, is one of its most powerful risk management features. When Russia was sanctioned, you couldn't do much with an airport in Moscow. But you could fly a plane out, repaint it, and re-lease it to someone else within weeks. The conversation also challenges a widely held assumption: that geopolitical disruption is bad for these assets. Anurag walks through why every major shock of the last six years - COVID, Russia-Ukraine, the Houthi attacks on the Suez Canal, Liberation Day tariffs - has actually driven lease rates and asset valuations higher, not lower. When supply chains break down, ships become scarcer. When they become scarcer, rates climb. When it takes four years and $200 million to build a new vessel, you can't solve that overnight. If you hold an infrastructure allocation, or are building one, this episode will sharpen your thinking considerably.
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