<p>Our first-ever podcast guest, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/johngtaft/"><u>John Taft</u></a>, returns nearly 100 episodes later. John is a Vice Chair of Baird. He was previously the CEO of RBC&#39;s U.S. wealth management business through the Great Financial Crisis, overseeing nearly 7,000 employees and almost $300 billion in assets. He chaired SIFMA, the leading securities industry trade association, and testified before Congress during the post-crisis reforms.</p><p><br></p><p>John has spent more than 40 years in finance, but he didn&#39;t start there. He set out to be a newspaper journalist. Then, on a reporting assignment in Lowell, Massachusetts, he watched community leaders use the tools of finance to rebuild a burnt-out industrial city — and realized he didn&#39;t just want to write about that work; he wanted to do it.</p><p><br></p><p>John wrote <em>Stewardship: Lessons Learned from the Lost Culture of Wall Street</em>, followed by <em>A Force for Good: How Enlightened Finance Can Restore Faith in Capitalism</em>. Today he’s helping oversee $560B in assets, writes the blog Finance for the Greater Good, and is one of three founding members of the Scholars of Finance Advisory Board.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode, John returns to discuss what he&#39;s seen happen to the industry — and where it needs to go next. He and Ross dig into the financialization of the economy, the &quot;disease of grandiosity&quot; infecting leaders across sectors, and why financial services have grown larger than necessary to serve the real economy. </p><p><br></p><p>They get to the productive heart of finance — what John calls &quot;helping real people in the real world solve real problems and achieve real goals&quot; — and the speculative noise crowding it out, from prediction markets and zero-day options to leveraged inverse ETFs and much of the digital asset ecosystem. They also explore AI&#39;s coming impact on capital allocation, the widening gap between rich and poor, and why John believes the next ten years will demand more stewardship from finance, not less.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Meet John </strong></p><p>John Taft is a Vice Chair of Baird and a member of the firm&#39;s Executive Committee. Earlier in his career, he was a managing director at Piper, Jaffray &amp; Hopwood; president and CEO of Voyageur Asset Management; president and CEO of Dougherty Summit Securities; and a consultant at Deloitte &amp; Touche. He currently serves on the boards of Riverfront Investment Group, Octavus Group, Baird Trust, and Sagard.</p><p><br></p><p>John holds a B.A. magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale University, and a master&#39;s degree in public and private management from the Yale School of Organization and Management. </p><p><br></p><p>He serves as Vice Chair of the Minneapolis Foundation, is an active member of the Itasca Project, and is an Executive in Residence at the Wake Forest University Center for the Study of Capitalism.</p><p><br></p><p>He credits his family — including his great-grandfather, 27th U.S. President William Howard Taft — for instilling the core values that shape his definition of business success and his belief in the importance of treating every person with dignity.</p>