What's Bill Gross Up To?

When the subject of interest rates and inflation creeps up - as it has with today's higher-than-expected consumer price index numbers - Bill Gross can't be too far behind. Gross, chief investment officer of Newport Beach-based Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco to most everybody in the financial world), figures that the Federal Reserve might find it hard to keep cutting interest rates in the face of inflation, a weak dollar and the fact that the recent cuts haven't done much to revive the economy. Gross appeared on Bloomberg Radio - he's often called the most prominent bond investor and Pimco is such a mammoth investment company - $747 billion in bond assets - that it's sometimes accused of throwing its weight around. "It's a double-edged sword, having huge size in the markets," Don Phillips, a managing director at Chicago-based research firm Morningstar Inc., tells Bloomberg's Seth Lubove and Elizabeth Stanton. "The negatives would tend to outweigh the positives - unless you're very smart about using the positives to your advantage and to your clients' advantage."

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