#812 The Fed Didn't Raise Rates - What Now? w/ Darius Dale

Darius Dale is the Founder & CEO of 42 Macro, the leading macro risk manager adviser. In this conversation, we discuss the macro economy, what's happening in the financial markets, how Darius is looking at various metrics, and what you should be considering as you're investing your capital. Darius joins us every Thursday on "The Best Business Show." To see the video with the corresponding charts that Darius references throughout the interview, go to "The Best Business Show: LIVE" YouTube Channel ======================= Today’s episode is sponsored by Abra. Based in California and backed by top VC firms, Abra is an all-in-one simple, secure app that allows you to trade over 110 cryptocurrencies, get 0% interest loans using your crypto as collateral and earn interest with up to 14% APY on stablecoins and 8.15% APY on Bitcoin. Join nearly 2 million users by downloading Abra from the Google Play or Apple App store. If you download the app today, you will get $15 in free crypto once you fund your account. You came, you invested — now conquer. ======================= Unstoppable Domains is THE #1 provider of NFT domains. These aren’t traditional domains, these are domains with superpowers. With your unique NFT domain such as pomp dot crypto or pomp dot nft, you can replace your long complex wallet addresses, verify ownership of your NFTs and join the 10’s of thousands of people who are now using their NFT domain as their Twitter and Discord usernames. Go to unstoppabledomains.com and get YourName dot crypto, dot x, dot nft or a range of other endings for as low as $5 and never worry about gas or renewal fees because with Unstoppable Domains you pay once and own forever! ======================= DeFi Technologies represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U. S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at defi.tech =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Darius Dale is the founder and CEO of 42 Macro, the leading macro risk management advisor. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on in the macro economy, what's happening in the financial markets, how Darius is looking at various metrics, and also what you at home should be thinking about as you invest your capital. I really enjoyed this conversation with Darius, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra. Based in California and backed by top VC firms, Abra is an all-in-one, simple, secure app that allows you to trade over 110 cryptocurrencies, get 0% interest loans

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  using your crypto as collateral, and earn interest with up to 14% APY on stablecoins and 8.15% APY on Bitcoin. You can join nearly 2 million users by downloading Abra from the Google Play or Apple App Store. If you download the app today, you will get $15 in free crypto once you fund your account. You can go to abra.com to learn more. You came, you invested, now conquer. Abra, conquer crypto. Abra.com. Go check it out today. Today's episode is brought to you by Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains is the number one provider of NFT domains. These aren't traditional domains, these are domains with superpowers. With your unique NFT domains such as pomp.crypto or pomp.nft, you can

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  replace your long, complex wallet addresses, verify ownership of your NFTs, enjoy the tens of thousands of people who are now using their NFT domain as their Twitter and Discord usernames. Go to unstoppabledomains.com and get your name.crypto.x.nft or a range of other endings for as low as $5. And never worry about gas or renewal fees because with Unstoppable Domains, you pay once and you own it forever. Head on over to unstoppabledomains.com today to check out more about what they've got. Again, go there and you can get any domain with any ending for as low as $5. UnstoppableDomains.com. This episode is brought to you by DeFi Technologies. DeFi Technologies represents what's next In the digital economy, they're providing simplified trusted access to crypto,

• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

  decentralized finance and web three investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. DeFi Technologies is currently listed on the US exchange at DEF T F Stock Ticker and the Canadian Neo Exchange at D E F I. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit their website at DeFi.Tech. I'm really excited about what these guys are doing. I've become an advisor to the business and I highly suggest you go check them out. Go to their website at DeFi.Tech today.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:19Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's start, let's start with interest rate decisions. Obviously, the Fed, was it last week? Everyone was geared up. We thought they were going to raise interest rates. Everyone was ready for, for war with cheaper capital and they didn't do anything. Well, what's your general take on, on the Fed's decision?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, I wouldn't necessarily say that they were expected to raise rates. There was an outside chance that they could raise rates, but the reality is the, the rate hiking party should start in March at the March 16th FOMC meeting and could potentially start and continue at every FOMC meeting through the end of the year, although that's not what's priced into the markets. What's priced in the markets are five hikes starting in March, spread, spread out sporadically throughout the, the year. So what Jay Powell did do last week was effectively tell the markets that, hey, look, we might actually do more than what's currently priced in. And in our opinion, that, that sort of opens up a Pandora's box of monetary policy risk

• 4:19Speaker 02

  that, you know, investors really haven't had to deal with since going back to Q4 18 and then probably the latter part of 15 is the, the most recent iterations prior to that.

• 4:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then when you start to think about what happens when they go to raise those rates, how much of this is priced into the market versus you're expecting there's still to be pretty significant impact on prices?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Well, see, that's the problem right now with asset markets is because I've been saying this in our research, Jay Powell has effectively solidified, or at the bare minimum, removed the right tail of the monetary tightening distribution from that distribution. So he's effectively saying, look, yeah, the market's priced here, you know, it's got five hikes or thereabouts, and terminal Fed funds rate somewhere around 1752, pick your market, but we could do more. And if the data causes us to do more, we will do more. And he was very fervent about that. And that, in our opinion, is a big signal to markets because markets are now at the risk of the data. They're no longer at the risk of the Fed's forecast and, you know, their ability to call things like transitory inflation, or

• 5:21Speaker 02

  not call, obviously, things like transitory inflation. They're now at the risk of however the data might evolve over the next few months and quarters. And if the data evolves in a way that is adverse from an inflation perspective, we're going to get more policy tightening than what's currently priced in the markets. And in our opinion, if that happens, starting around the springtime and through this throughout the summertime, we're going to have some real big problems in asset markets because that's when our model suggests growth is likely to start to slow at a faster pace.

• 5:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to think about the way that investors are kind of moving capital, et cetera, it seems like, obviously, there was a rotation from growth and risk assets into more value-type investments. What else are you seeing investors think about in preparation for a potential rate hike in March?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, unfortunately, it's not going to be a ton of places to hide, right? I mean, so many assets have been beneficiaries of the Fed's effectively doubling its balance sheet since going back to the onset of the pandemic. You know, you pick your stock markets, current commodity markets, digital assets, NFTs, you know, pick your asset market, and they've all been, again, a beneficiary of a record quantitative easing, and more importantly, perhaps, record fiscal easing as well. And both of those spigots are being slammed shut to varying degrees throughout this year. And we think the fiscal spigot is effectively just completely turned off. I mean, if anything, we're going to see a fairly large, if not the largest fiscal contraction, second largest, I think the fiscal contraction in World War

• 6:45Speaker 02

  II ultimately wind up being bigger. But this would be like the second largest Fiscal contraction we've seen in US history. And so that's going to be issued, then obviously the Fed potentially shrinking its balance sheet starting at the earliest April now is going to be an issue as well. And so if you think about where to hide, I mean, cash is the most obvious solution. We do believe there'll be an opportunity to buy treasury bonds, not the short end of the curve, but rather the long end of the curve as some of the market volatility picks up. And then lastly, you know, you know, clearly volatility, volatility products are going to be a way for investors to sort of manage risk or express some of these more bearish bets.

• 7:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to think about what like guaranteed losers are and guaranteed maybe is an aggressive terminology, but like, what are the things that people should be most cognizant of in terms of unlikely to be good places, right? There's one aspect of like, people are running to places that are of safety or will benefit from this environment. What are the things that they should run from most aggressively?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I mean, let's, let's be, let's, I'll start by saying, because I think you, you made up a good point about guarantees, right? Let's start by saying, hey, look, let's always be making investment decisions based on the context of your strategic investment objectives. If you're someone who can take a lot of risk, then you shouldn't necessarily be running from assets. If anything, you should use big drawdowns and assets as an opportunity to be accumulating, you know, some of your favorite exposures. But if you're someone who's probably closer to retirement, who, you know, really can't afford to suffer a big drawdown in your capital base, then obviously you're going to be looking towards and looking for more safer assets. And so going back to the question, you know, the things that are poised to do worse,

• 8:29Speaker 02

  at least according to our forecasts, our models and in our market signaling process, you know, the higher beta risk assets is something we talked about on the program over the last few weeks. You know, high beta risk assets are kind of front and center as it relates to, you know, what, what types of assets should do poorly in this regime. You know, clearly digital currencies, you know, Bitcoin, you know, Ethereum, all those types of assets. Although I would argue within the digital currency space, Bitcoin is certainly poised to outperform. You typically, the higher beta, the higher the volatility, the asset, the Better it performed on the upside is is typically, you know, the kinds of things that are underperform on the downside or or do worse on the downside. So that's, you know, within the digital asset space.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  It's that kind of stuff. It's the the poop coins, I like to call them. And then within the equity market, it's higher beta equities. You know, it's anything that has a a beta higher than the stock market or volatility higher than the stock market. It's it's companies that have, you know, sort of longer term fundamental fundamentals that are further out in the future as opposed to companies that are currently generating cash, things of that nature.

• 9:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when we start to think about Bitcoin, let's talk there for a second. There's been a massive adoption on Wall Street, large financial institutions, banks, etc. I think that you and I both recognize that they treat Bitcoin as a risk asset. And so it kind of gets lumped in with other types of risk assets. But there's still this base of folks who will call them the Bitcoiners. They continue to accumulate Bitcoin, they dollar cost average, they're usually more retail focused individuals. And they treat this as their reserve asset. How do you see that playing out in these types of environments where you almost have like two different bases of holders? And they're actually optimizing and treating an asset differently in an environment like this?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a phenomenal question, bro.

• 10:12Anthony Pompliano?

  It's all I ask.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  There's a third, yeah. Every day, man. I think there's a third community of investors that we should interject into this conversation as well. And there's this sort of retail kind of Fed fiscal policy driven speculator, right? Like this, let's be clear, like, there's a lot of investors that have come into the digital asset space in the past few years that aren't your traditional dollar cost average, you know, this is our long term play. This is a, you know, source of value over the long term. There's a lot of folks who've come into this asset class, looking at charts, you know, double, triple, quadruple, you know, etc. And have actually speculated and are intending to speculate. And I'm concerned about that particular cohort sort of heading for the exits

• 10:57Speaker 02

  while the, you know, the kind of the institutional investors and the traditional retail investors are continuing to, you know, either dollar cost average or, you know, just build longer term strategic positions, right? You know, I think when you think about sort of markets in particular. Markets that are crashing, sometimes it's less about the fundamentals. The fundamentals are usually the catalyst. But then eventually the positioning and technical dynamics within the market take over. And I'm concerned that, you know, there's still a lot of froth and still a lot of participation in the asset class. And as I say, I don't think it's Bitcoin. I think stocks, you could name stocks, markets of the credit market as well. There's still a lot of participation in these asset class that is a function of a lot of the free money that's been created by the government in the past 12 to 18 months that is not only going away, that is starting, but not only stopping, but it's actually moving and going away.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  It's going in the opposite direction now and actually taking money out of the system.

• 11:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And one of the things that we talked about recently is that the US debt is now, the national debt's over 30 trillion. And as I was looking more and more at the numbers, GDP has been growing in and around 3% annualized for the last like 15 years or so. But the debt's been growing at, you know, 7 to 9% on an annual basis. What's your read into the debt growing so much faster? We're now about 125% debt to GDP. Like, how does that overlay into their ability to raise rates and kind of do some of the things that they might otherwise try to do?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Great question. So, yeah, I think I'll put the other term for you guys next week. You know, so what you tend to see is, this is true for most advanced economies, least economies we can get the data for, right? That the sort of real, long-term real interest rates are inverse, almost perfectly inversely correlated to the amount of debt stock in the economy. And so as the debt stock grows, you typically find is that it becomes harder and harder for the economy to sustain higher debt servicing costs without actually slowing. And so this is typically why that at every Fed hiking cycle, for instance, at least the one since the early part of the 80s, late 70s, early 80s, we've made lower highs. We've, you know, we've peaked in terms of the terminal Fed funds rate for every hiking cycle at a lower high relative to the prior tightening cycle.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  And part of that, and at least in our opinion, a big driving force behind that is the amount of indebtedness in the economy. I mean, you know, I think I've seen estimates, you know, I think there's several ways to sort of go about calculating this, but when you, you know, balance it all in, you're talking about private sector debt, household balance, or households and corporates. Public sector debt, you know, unfunded liabilities, things of that nature. I mean, we're well over 400% of GDP um here in the US economy, and that's pretty typical for your most advanced economy, somewhere between 250 to 450 or something like that. So that means, you know, interest rates, every time they go up, you know, they're going to go up to a lower high before they start to threaten um economic activity, and we may have already hit those levels.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  If you look at sort of the the real 10-year Treasury yield or the 30-year Treasury yield on an inflation-adjusted basis, maybe we've already gotten to that point, just given all the excess debt we've layered on in the past 12 to 18 months. Nobody really knows. And this is why I sent you a couple of charts today, if you don't mind putting them up. There's the the first chart shows the US road GDP. There's this expectation in among investor consensus that uh that the US economy, or the next one, the other one, the US economy is is is is going to grow, you know, 3.8% in 2022. That number, that 3.8% is 160 basis points north of what our trend growth rate has been over the last five years. Right? So like, there's clearly something in consensus expectations

• 14:23Speaker 02

  that suggest, hey, look, this economy is about to boom still, or it's like, the boom is going to continue, you know, off the pandemic lows. And part of the, you know, kind of the risk to that is everything we're talking about. Maybe a lot of this debt that we piled on to the economy in the context of monetary tightening, fiscal tightening, and obviously higher real interest rates, maybe that actually does, you know, prevent the boom from occurring and materializing into us. That's a lot of downside risk as it relates to the market, as it relates to risk appetite, and and higher beta risk assets in general.

• 14:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you start to think about uh the Federal Reserve, what would you do? Like, come March and through the rest of this year, what what would kind of your uh uh decisions be? Uh to try to uh uh kind of, I don't know, account for the the situation we find ourselves in?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Well, so that's a loaded question. So I'll start. There's two different ways to answer that. There's a what would I do if I were Jay Powell, which is, you know, I wouldn't wait to March. You'd probably get a hike out of me today just so I can spook the market and let them know I'm in business because this inflation dynamic is a real serious thing. Not only is it a problem for, you know, people like, you know, how a lot of us used to be in terms of, you know, not being able to go to the store, the gas pump and actually, um, you know, sort of see your dollar stretch. But more importantly, I think it's actually becoming an issue for the economy. Um, you look at real consumer spending, it contracted at a 12% annualized pace last month. And this and it had very little to do with Omicron. In fact, most of the slowing 32% contraction came in goods, um, goods contraction. So we're now starting to see that hangover from all the excess consumption in goods. And

• 15:55Speaker 02

  part of the reason we're seeing a hangover, in our opinion, is that real incomes are actually contracting as well. You look at not a real disposable personal income, that's income after taxes and adjusted for inflation and per cap on a per capita basis, it's contracting at a down 3% annualized pace. Like that would be recessionary if we saw if this was outside of the pandemic where some of these numbers have gotten much larger than they have historically been. Um, that would be a very scary data point that everybody be talking about. But obviously we've seen such volatility and a lot of economic statistics throughout the pandemic. It's a sort of on the back burner for now, you know, obviously behind the Fed's normalization drive. Um, so in, you know, in terms of what I'd be doing, I'd recognize that inflation is actually really starting to hurt the lower to median consumer and

• 16:38Speaker 02

  eventually it's going to come come home to roost in terms of hurting the overall economy. I mean, the Atlanta Fed's GDP now tracker has a Q1 GDP coming in at 0.1% for Q1. Now that's going to bounce in Q2, but what if it doesn't bounce to the same degree that consensus expectations are calling for it to bounce? What if throughout the back half of the year, that bounce fizzles out and actually we start to slow again? And I think those are very legitimate probabilities as opposed to sort of remote possibilities, which is what the market is currently expecting. Answering the question a second way. What would I do if Darius Dell was running the Fed, irrespective of Jay Powell? The number thing, one thing I'd do is, is get rid of, of, of some committee full of people, you know, people with disparate backgrounds and various, you know, levels of expertise,

• 17:22Speaker 02

  coming together to decide the price of money and the quantity of money for the global economy. I think that's a preposterous artifact. And it's really just a relic of the past and the, and the reason it still exists is because it's too hard to replace. But the reality is, you need to find a way to replace it if you're going to have the global economy maximize its efficiency and productivity. And so the best way to do that would be able to, you know, create some sort of blockchain sourced open in architecture, you know, way that, you know, allows the, for the more smooth and, and thoughtful intermediation of capital. I'm certainly not an expert in any of what I just said, so, you know, don't, don't, don't hold me, don't hold my feet to the fire on that. But I do believe there's probably a better solution than having, I don't know, 12 to 15 people, usually old white guys, you know, sit around a room and tell us all what the quantity and price of money should be.

• 18:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, John, what questions you guys got?

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Darius, what's up, man? Mine would just be around like how this plane lands safely, right? Between kind of lowering inflation a little bit, but also keeping the stock market in check and avoiding a recession. So like in your mind, one, I guess, how much of kind of consumer thoughts and the total market reaction in general, does the Fed take into account when they're doing some of these things? And then two, like, how do they actually do this? How do they make sure that the stock market doesn't drop 20, 30, 40% while they get inflation under control?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, you, that's a phenomenal, this is a phenomenal question session, boys. You guys are in your game today, man. Sorry, Joe, so I'll start by saying, how does the plan land safely, right? Like, you know, imagine like, I think of this as like trying to kick a field goal. Like, it's, it's bigger than threading the needle because we're talking about, you know, all of global economy and all of global capital markets. So let's call it a kicking a game winning field goal. But I think the issue with investor consensus is that they think the Fed is kicking like a 35 to 40 yard field goal, when in reality, they're kicking like a 60 yard field goal, right? Like, and this is just going to be a really difficult field goal to make. If you think about, you know, just taking just enough air out of the economy to slow inflation, but not enough air out of the economy to actually slow the economy in an adverse way for

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Risk assets and capital market activity broadly. I think that's a really tough thing to do and part of the, you know, there's two reasons. That's a really tough thing to do. One, you know, monetary policy works on quote unquote long and variable lags. I've heard that said, you know, every time, every single month throughout my entire career. I've not seen anybody sort of quantify it, but I'll take it. We'll take it for what it's worth. Cause I'm sure they're accurate, you know, I don't feel like, you know, getting into a wonky academic debate today. So if it works on long and variable lags, that means you won't really know the impact of what you're doing today. Until that long and variable lag has occurred. And so that means, you know, in terms of getting feedback from their, from their monetary normalization drive. They're not going to get any relevant feedback until we get into the back half of the year.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  For things, decisions that they're going to make, you know, here in Q1 and Q2. So that's a, that's an issue in terms of, you know, kind of threading the needle or really kicking that game winning field goal. And then number two, I just don't trust these guys and their forecasting ability. I mean, you go back to what, what were they talking about this time last year? Well, inflation is transitory, you know, they're not going to raise interest rates for a while. We're going to be committed to, you know, expanding the balance sheet and making sure we achieve our maximum employment mandate. And then like fast forward a year today, oh, well, we were actually at maximum employment six months ago. We didn't tell you inflation is double what we thought it was going to be. And, uh, uh, yeah, we're about to hike interest rates, right?

• 20:42Speaker 02

  This is that institution and there you're saying you're going to trust that institution and their forecasting ability? To land this plane safety or kick this game winning field goal? I just think it's a preposterous exercise. They're going to struggle with it in my, in my opinion.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Gotcha. John, what you got for us? Darius, how do you think about all the stuff that's happening internationally? With the Ukraine, Russia, everything that goes along internationally? How is that going to affect us here in the States?

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Another great question. So my answer is I have no clue. You know, I think more, more people who do what I do for a living need to start saying that phrase more frequently. Because it's okay. We don't have to have answers for everything. You need to have a process for absorbing information and changing market dynamics. But you don't need to know what Vladimir Putin is going to do or eat for breakfast or, or, or, you know, drink for lunch, you know, lunch today. I have no idea. He's probably gonna drink pocket lunch if I had to guess.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  But, you know, but besides that, you know, so the key takeaway is that, look, that's an open the envelope risk. That's the kind of risk that's hard to quantify. It's hard to sort of, you know, build a process or a model for. So you have to accept it as a, you have to sort of assess, you know, the probability of occurring and actually account for that somehow in your portfolio. You know, for anything geopolitical, obviously, that tends to perpetuate higher levels of market volatility. And so maybe you want to have some sort of, you know, volatility hedges on just to account for the fact that you could have some geopolitical risk. Maybe you want to be long crude oil. We're currently long crude oil. Um, you know, partially as a function of understanding that this geopolitical risk um, is in, is out there in existence. So, you know, there's ways to take advantage of it

• 22:16Speaker 02

  without actually knowing the outcome. You know, because the reality is, is investors, we never really know the outcome ever. You know, I don't know where, we don't know, and I mean the word no specifically, literally. You don't know anything about the future. My mom is a UPS, uh, the plant, uh, security guard. I know exactly about the, as much about the future as she does, which is nothing. I have better models to predict what I think is going to happen in the future than she does, because I don't think she has any, but the reality is none of us knows. And so all we're trying to do as investors is take a very wide distribution of, of possible outcomes. A lot of stuff is possible in the future and use, you know, thoughtful models, use our ability, our ability to derive intel from different people, different sources,

• 23:01Speaker 02

  and shrink that distribution of possible outcomes into a narrower subset of probable outcomes. And then you start to allocate capital from, from that perspective. There's really nothing else you can do as an investor that's going to consistently work across cycles.

• 23:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Darius, when you start to think about the everyday person, uh, people who don't know anything about inflation, they don't understand what the Federal Reserve is, they just go to work, they try to do their job to the best of their ability, they get paid a paycheck, and then they go home and want to enjoy life. Like, what, what's going to be the impact on them, you know, over the next, let's call it 10, 12 months, uh, as we get some of this, uh, kind of more intervention, right? I think a lot about like, we had intervention in 2020, uh, that definitely. Created a change in asset prices, markets, inflation, etc. We kind of watched that play out over 18 months or so. And now we're basically getting another intervention. So although we felt the impacts of the first intervention of this kind of pandemic-related economic crisis

• 23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  through 2021, really, it was, we set out on a course, you know, starting kind of March, April, May of 2020, and then let that play out for just under two years. Now it feels like we're switching regimes into this new kind of intervention mode and going in the other direction. Like, what do you think is the next, you know, months or even two years or so for the average person?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a phenomenal question. I will start by saying, if you agree with us and our forecast, which is inflation should come down, albeit at a gradual pace over the course of the year and over the next course, most likely two years, then by definition, the average person should wind up better, certainly on a real, on an inflation-adjusted basis, than they were at the starting point. That doesn't necessarily mean it's all roses, you know, roses and rainbows and puppy dogs. The reality is what the Fed, the intervention the Fed is taking now and a lot of other global central banks today, we got the Bank of England hiking rates. We're going to see a lot more of that throughout this year. It's going to be a lot of monetary tightening and liquidity sucked out of the system throughout this year

• 25:01Speaker 02

  and potentially throughout next year as well, to the extent we don't have a real big economic hiccup over the next 12 months or so. You know, that kind of intervention is adverse to rich people. You know, it's the holders of the capital, it's their turn to pay the piper. It was the poor person's, you know, turn to pay the piper throughout 2021 and into the early part of 2022, when inflation was growing demonstrably faster than wages, than nominal wages. And so you had persistently and deepening negative wage growth. And so, you know, I think, use my mom as an example. I think she, you know, she works at a UPS, you know, Amazon plant. So like she signs people in to go unload the trucks and all that stuff. I think she got a, you know, a one or two dollar raise a year ago or something like that.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  But, you know, the frequency with which I send money home and the quantity with which I send money home. Is actually accelerated and increase. And part of the reason for that is that the prices of everything she consumes, you know, from transportation to her rent to everything, has gone up significantly. So that's, I, I think I, my mom is a very, you know, sort of average person in that regard. And so there's a lot of people out there that have sort of been sort of, you know, had to really feel the pinch of inflation. And again, I, going back to the consumer spending data I highlighted, I think that's really starting to, you know, come home to roost. Now, you know, a year from now, it should be a little bit better at the margins. But, you know, in terms of what that ultimately means for the economy and asset markets, it could actually be worse because as we know, uh, rich people, you know, people in the upper income cohorts and the upper, uh, uh, cohorts of the wealth distribution

• 26:29Speaker 02

  tend to spend more money. They don't, they have a lower marginal propensity to spend, but they have a higher and an outside share of overall aggregate spending. For example, the top two cohorts of consumer spending or of, of income in a country that count for 20% of consumer spending, of the top two deciles. So they're out, outkicking their coverage by a double. And so like, to the extent you start to see risk assets suffer, um, you know, and things of that nature, you're going to start to see that, that consumption, that, that upper quintile, that upper, uh, upper income, um, and wealth distribution cohort really start to pull back on their consumption. And that is not something anybody's talking about right now.

• 27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you had to say before we wrap up, uh, you had to pick one thing that you're like, look, I really think this is going to happen, but no one is, uh, anticipating it. You know, this is like the biggest external, uh, surprise. Is there one thing you could point to where you're like, yep, from an economic standpoint, uh, more people either need to talk about it or more people need to be, uh, prepared for?

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they will be in, in my, in our opinion, um, talking about a recession, uh, either, you know, very late 2022 or early part of 2023.

• 27:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, what is the probability you think a recession happens this year?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Oh, this year, uh, very low still. Cause I mean, you know, I, I think in terms of I, when I outlined, I was saying, when they start talking about it, I think they'll start talking about it in, in late Q4 or in Q4 or Q1 of next year. Uh, the probability that it occurs this year is probably fairly low. Uh, you know, obviously you need back to back quarters of, of, of negative growth for a technical recession to occur. It's unlikely we see that in 2022, but it's very likely that by the time we start to accumulate a lot of this policy tightening, by the time we start to see what, you know, a lot of these projected drawdowns that we expect in and across risk assets really start to bite in terms of consumer spending for upper income and upper wealth cohorts, you know, by the

• 28:18Speaker 02

  time all that stuff occurs, that's when I think the growth outlook will really start to come under question as the medium term growth outlook, the growth outlook from, let's say, today over the next two, three years. And I think that those, those expectations might have to get ratcheted down and really start to sort of kind of spook people, right? Like, you know, I bring the chart next week, you know, one, one chart I created the other day was looking at, you know, kind of the start of the Fed funds rate hiking cycle relative to the unemployment rate. And, you know, this is data going back to the early seventies. And the Fed has never been this behind the curve or sort of this late into the labor market cycle before it started hiking policy. And so, you know, in terms of like an economy

• 28:59Speaker 02

  that has a lot of organic potential to continue growing, we've never had such a small amount of that at the beginning of, of the, of the, the, the policy tightening cycle. So to me, I think we're much closer to recession than the average person realizes. You know, again, I think a recession could very easily take place in the first half of next year. And that's very outside of consensus in terms of people talking about that. But I do believe by the end of the year, they will be.

• 29:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Darius, I love you, man. You can't come on here talking about bear case scenarios and recessions. This is a, this is a family show. We need to have positive energy only. Talking about recession should be outlawed on this show.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Well, by the way, by the way, this is not a, this won't be a bad recession. We don't have the kind of leverage built up in the private sector. No, no, I mean, look, there's two types of recession, right? There's a recession where there's a, you know, kind of an inventory goods recession, where you just have to get, you know, kind of supply chains back in order with a lower level of demand. And that's, you know, those are kind of be the quick, you know, kind of shallow ones. And then there's the sort of more financially oriented recessions where you have, you know, sort of excess credit creation in the economy that ultimately, you know, perpetuates adverse selection and the unwind of that, you know, tends to take longer. You tend to have deleveraging that persists for longer. It's a bigger deal for asset markets. It's a much nastier recession. This is the what I'm talking about now is much more akin to the former type of recession than

• 30:22Speaker 02

  the latter. So if you take any solace in that, then let's, you know, hey, look, if we go to recession, you know, first half of next year or something like that, it won't be that bad. It should be, it should be something that is very easily digested by markets and understood by market participants.

• 30:35Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the optimism I'm talking about is it'll be a recession.

• 30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the positive energy back. All right, we got to get you in the studio next week, my friend. But I appreciate you appreciate coming on. Where can we send people to to subscribe or follow you on the internet?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I'll send it for detail 42 macro detail at Twitter. I'm at come check us out at 42macro.com. If you have more than $50 invested, you certainly can afford our research.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Helping people not blow up in this past few months. So, you know, we got some chops in helping people with risk management.

• 31:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What a sales pitch. You're you're an absolute professional. All right, man. Listen, thank you so much for for coming on.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Appreciate you guys. I'll see you next week.

• 31:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we'll talk soon. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.