A $60 Billion Manager Mulls Selling All U.S. Assets on Trade War

(Bloomberg) -- Nader Naeimi, a money manager at the $145 billion AMP Capital Investors Ltd., is so frustrated by the tariff fight with China that he's considering dumping all his American holdings.

“At some point, you just bite the bullet and say, I'm just going to get out of all my assets, all my exposures out of the U.S.,” Naeimi, the Sydney-based head of dynamic markets at the money manager, said in a phone interview. “That's the No. 1 thing we're thinking.”

Naeimi says the risk due to the tit-for-tat levies between the two countries is starting to overshadow all the positives in the global economy, after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered his administration to consider tariffs on an additional $100 billion of Chinese goods on Thursday. In response, China said it would counter U.S. protectionism “to the end, and at any cost.”

“We're torn here,” said Naeimi, who directly manages about $1.4 billion and helps oversee more than $60 billion for AMP. “On the one hand, there's great fundamentals, global growth is synchronized, but the political risk is just becoming too much to handle.”

Naeimi, who says his fund is light on U.S. equities, suggested shorting Boeing Co. of the U.S. and buying shares in France's Airbus SE. “China's got a pretty massive agreement, deal with Boeing, so they could easily reverse that,” he said.

The AMP manager says he's spending time looking for hedges against possible retaliation from China. He bought gold today, he said.

“We've got to find ways” to protect the portfolio, he said.

The most radical one? Selling everything in sight.

To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Burgess in Sydney at mburgess46@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Divya Balji at dbalji1@bloomberg.net, Tom Redmond, Sarah McDonald

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