Make America Gyrate Again

0:25This sounds different to how the usual Unhedged podcast sounds. I am still Katie Martin, and I'm joined as so often by Rob Armstrong, who's flown in all the way from New York City from the Unhedged newsletter to do this podcast today. Rob, say hola. Hola. So we've been let out of our office for good behavior. I've escaped from the gray audio studio in the basement of FT Towers and traveled to Madrid to record this podcast in front of students, lecturers, a whole bunch of people at the IE Business School in the capital of beautiful Spain. And we can see out the window, it's a beautiful place to be, and we're really, really happy to be here.

1:06So why are we in Madrid? It's really very simple. These people asked us nicely, and we said yes. There's really nothing more to it than that. But I will say, we thought to ourselves, Madrid, you say? In March? Yes. Blazing sunshine. I packed my gaffas, my sunglasses. I'm wearing canvas shoes. And listeners, I must tell you, it is pouring with rain. Like, not precisely now, but the weather is terrible. Yeah, terrible. It's British weather in Madrid. Yeah. I feel like we've been brought here on false pretenses. We blame you, Katie. Yeah. Yeah. So Barney Jopson from the FT's Man in Madrid, he wrote a big piece recently in the FT about how Madrid is a big destination for Americans who are fleeing the chaos of Trump's America.

2:00That was true yesterday. We had a real Trump day yesterday. But my question to you, Rob, is how big of a suitcase have you brought? Are you staying here now? uh i have my passport in my pocket and i'm ready to do a runner at any time uh i think monday's market was a good uh metaphor for how it feels to be an american right now yeah which is down violently but sometimes up violently sometimes sideways uh up in surprising places. Yeah. And so trying to figure out this is a it is a job. It is an employment plan for financial journalists. Yes. The first this last month or so. The chaos of the Trump administration is precisely what keeps financial journalism alive.

2:50So thank you, Donald Trump. Yes. But so let's that's what we're going to talk about today is like markets. U.S. markets are all over the place. And we were told a couple of things at the start of this year. One of them is the only investment theme that matters is American exceptionalism. Buy US, don't buy anything else. You'd be an idiot if you bought anything else. That is working out extremely badly at the start of this year. But also we were told, and in fact, we said it on this very podcast, that if markets go bad, Donald Trump will backtrack and not carry out some of the many threats that he's making.

3:28so everyone got this wrong yes well what we know is they say they won't backtrack so you want to understand why markets were so extraordinarily horrific yesterday you have to look at the comments from scott percent the treasury secretary and donald trump over the weekend donald trump says i'm not even watching markets scott percent says we care about main street not wall street and then they go on to say the equivalent of no pain no gain you know it's like when your doctor says to you you might feel a little bit of pressure here yeah which means something awful is about to happen to you and on Monday I think the market tried to digest the fact that they didn't have the so-called Trump put yeah that that no the the cavalry was not coming to the rescue.

4:21Yeah. Now, that may turn out to be wrong on Tuesday. One feature of this market is what is conventional wisdom on Monday is out with the trash on Tuesday. Yeah. So but for now, we do not believe in a Trump put. So this idea of a put is the idea that, you know, if bad stuff happens, don't worry, either the president or the central bank or someone else will come in on a white horse and solve it. And we got some indication that that would happen with Trump serially threatening and withdrawing tariffs. It gave us the pleasing sensation that it wasn't for real. It was all rhetoric. And suddenly it feels very much real.

5:00So let's just go through what markets have actually been doing recently. Monday, so if you're listening to this, we're recording it on Tuesday. It's going out on Thursday. God knows whether it will still hold. There's a great FT headline this morning, or a great FT moment that journalists will appreciate, which is there was a headline on the FT that instantly became obsolete. Like the first headline in the morning was markets stabilize after Monday's route or something like that. And that headline worked for about 15 minutes. And then you could hear the sound of the eraser being dragged across the paper and it turned markets resume fall.

5:37And who knows what the headline will be this afternoon. But those of us who work in newsrooms know what those days are like where you just write one story again and again and again in different forms. Yeah, it's like nailing jelly to a wall. But what is, for me, the most interesting thing about Monday, where the NASDAQ was down 4%, the S &P 500 was down 2.7%. What's interesting about both that day and some of the days that preceded it was that it was not a general sell-off. The biggest losers were big tech. It wasn't economically sensitive stocks that had the worst of it, which is very interesting.

6:12If we were just having a growth scare, right, if the economists were just downgrading GDP growth for America, downgrading consumption expectations for America, but Apple was down 5 % on Monday. NVIDIA was down. Amazon was down. Microsoft right down the list. And so what's that all about? Those aren't the first companies you'd expect to fall. They're not economically sensitive companies in relative terms. What's going on? and my best guess is this is an example of selling what you can sell right you know we've talked about this a bit on the podcast before you've made a zillion dollars on nvidia yeah you're now overweight in your portfolio it's time to sell something why not nvidia in other words what's the easiest way to take risk off the table right and it's where this where you've made the most money already.

7:01So is your view then that actually the U.S. economy itself is fine? Okay, that's a hard question to answer, but I'll screw it up as follows. There's two kinds of economic data. There's hard data and there's soft data. Hard data is when you observe something happening, someone getting fired, someone buying something, a company reports its results, it made money or didn't. These are just hard facts. Then there's soft data, which you ask one of these good people, how are you feeling? And they say, I feel great. I feel lousy, whatever. We're in an interesting situation in America where the soft data is terrible and the hard data is fine.

7:40So not that many people have been fired. The reporting season we just had, companies had great profits. Things are kind of ticking along okay. But you ask people how they're feeling, they say, I feel like crap. So eventually feeling like crap turns into not spending money. But you don't know kind of when that happens or how do you really feel is now special. So which do you believe, the hard data or the soft data? Because they disagree. One thing, though, is precisely because of tariffs, we are seeing downgrades to U.S. growth forecasts from some pretty serious people. So Goldman Sachs, Jan Hatzius, chief economist, I believe is his title at Goldman Sachs.

8:23He's a pretty serious guy. Goldman Sachs is a pretty influential investment bank. They're doing two interesting things. They are cutting their U.S. growth forecast. I think they are below consensus on U.S. growth. Dude, they were at 2.7. Yeah. And they've been bullish for a long time, which is interesting. And they're going to 1.5. That's a huge cut. That's 1.2 percentage points of GDP growth. Yeah. Right? And what's interesting is they agree the hard data is good. It's all because of tariffs. Yeah. Their justification for that huge cut in their forecast is all because they think tariffs are going to be such a big drag.

8:57So they're cutting U.S. growth forecasts and they're also simultaneously, which is quite interesting, raising European growth forecasts. Not by a lot, like not by the same sort of degree, but nonetheless, you don't see this very often. I thought European growth forecasts only went one direction. So it's nice to see they can go up too. They can go up as well as down. Yeah, yeah. Look, you're surrounded by Europeans here, Rob. I know, it's true. I mean, they know better than I do. You've got to watch yourself. They're on the poisty end of the European economy. Yeah. But I guess one thing that I think is going to get really interesting in markets and in the real economy pretty soon is that, so one thing that people say about markets when they don't know what to say is markets hate uncertainty.

9:40Yes. Right? I've heard a lot of people saying that over the years, and most of them don't know what they're talking about. However, markets hate uncertainty. Yes, it is true. And one thing, so as you say, we've just had the reporting season, but pretty soon we're going to get round to the next corporate reporting season in the US. How on earth are you supposed to give guidance to investors about what's going to happen to your income, your revenue over the next quarter if you literally do not know if you're getting tariffed or not? Yeah. And I think you've already seen that. In the fourth quarter reports, when the big American companies came in, said we had a great quarter.

10:17And then the analysts say, what about next year? And the company said... It's a podcast, Rob. You can't just shrug. Okay, that was me shrugging. And this was kind of... So Walmart had a wonderful quarter. They've been doing great. And they said, we don't know. Next year is weird. And look, you can use the term market state uncertainty, but what a company is nothing else but a big planning mechanism that's the reason companies exist is to plan otherwise we'd all work for ourselves and there would be nothing but freelancers a company is a planning machine right and if you take away their ability to plan they can't company anymore right and so even at the margin a downgrade in certainty means less investment so that is the risk to not you know trump's tariffs are one form of risk but there's an independent form of risk which is you diminish the planning horizon companies spend less money and that's when the soft data becomes the hard data yeah right and will that happen you know i feel like we're manic in america moods are up and down yeah it's really it's really difficult to say so broadly speaking, though, the hard data is kind of okay.

11:32So what we're seeing in markets with some really, so as you say, 4 % on the Nasdaq on Monday, 2.7 % came off the S &P. Another percent today. Another percent today, which is Tuesday. These are big numbers. This is a substantial pullback in US markets. But it's more of a kind of vibe session than it is a recession at the moment. I would frame the question even slightly differently. The U.S., as you alluded to at the beginning of the show, was an immensely overcrowded trade. Yeah. Everybody knew two months ago that all you had to do was have exposure to the U.S. and in particular to U.S. big equities.

12:13Yeah. This was 100 percent consensus or, as we say, everybody on one side of the boat. And what we might be seeing is not a true bear market, but really just everyone shifting to the other side of the boat. This doesn't have to be the beginning of the end of the world. It could just be everyone realizing we had too much over here and we need to correct. And at some point that process works itself out, the boat rights itself, and you keep sailing. We don't know yet whether we have a disaster on our hands, but it's an open possibility. But so one stock that's having a particularly bad time at the moment is...

12:50You can't keep the smile off your face when you say this. Is everyone's favorite electric vehicle maker, Tesla. Yes. Tell us what's going on there, Rob. You think I understand Tesla? So it's lost half, is it lost half its value? Since December, yeah. Since December. What is Tesla? It's a very good car company attached to Elon Musk. So you have Starlink, which has been in the news. You have a robot venture. You have an artificial intelligence venture. You have whatever Elon Musk is going to think up one day in the future. So one question we might ask is, of those things, what is the thing in Tesla that's changing its value?

13:32Is it the car company? Well, there are buying less Teslas. Or is it the future value of the robots company? Or is it the future value of Elon Musk? that is going down, like is literally the net present value of Elon Musk's life, is he putting that at risk right now? Because it was a bet on him. That stock was a bet on his brilliance. And he's, I would say he's playing a dangerous game. He's become a major political figure in America. And maybe that will work out brilliantly for Starlink, for Tesla, for artificial intelligence venture, or maybe it all explodes. The wheels come flying off and it goes off the side of the road.

14:13So there's a risk premium on the future value of Elon Musk is what I think is happening. Because what you can definitely see is that the more involved he gets in US politics, the more people don't want to buy his cars, like sales are falling off a cliff in Europe. Maybe this will turn out to be a blip. But, you know, it's clear that consumers don't like this stuff, right? So he's making himself the story, which is the problem, which is the problem. And that's even bigger problem for investors, right? Investors don't like political risk. You're all at a business school and you are learning how to assess business risk or financial risk or funding risk.

14:55And you have a spreadsheet and there's little numbers in the spreadsheet. Everybody's very happy. There's no spreadsheet for politics. So the people who tend to be in charge of our investments don't have a machine they can plug this kind of thing into. And so unquantifiable risk is very often simply not taken, right? You just leave it alone. And I think Elon Musk is, to the upside and the downside maybe, increasing the unquantifiable risk in Tesla with his political activities. Yeah. Now, one thing that you mentioned in your newsletter today that caught my eye is that stocks were getting fried on Monday.

15:34Yes. But treasuries, U.S. government bonds, were not particularly obviously picking up in price. Now, that could tell us two things. One is, this is not... I just want to interrupt here for a second. This is Katie setting herself up to say something mean about America. I've heard this before, and it's going to happen here. So go ahead. I'm right here. So it could mean one of two things or maybe both. One thing it could mean is that treasuries are not picking up particularly quickly in price because this is not a proper recession. So traditionally, what you would see is as stocks go down, the price of bonds, bonds are safe.

16:13The money goes running out of stocks, screaming across the road and leaps into bonds. And that isn't happening quite to the degree one would have expected. So is that saying to you, huh, this is not a proper recession? Or is it saying to you, people don't want to buy treasuries as much as they previously did. Maybe treasuries, which are supposed to be this shining beacon on the hill, they're like your safe room. They're where you go whenever the brown stuff hits the fan. Anything bad happens, you go and run into the warm, comforting arms of treasuries. Maybe the market is saying, actually, we think that treasuries are more political than they should be.

16:50And treasuries are more risky than they should be. And we don't want to go there for safety. We want to go somewhere else. How do you plead? I plead not guilty. I think treasuries are still in a certain way, the only game in town. There's no global substitute for a safe asset. They are, however, inflation sensitive. And if the economic problem is tariffs, the obvious economic problem risk is inflation, and you're not going to buy a 10-year treasury, or you're not going to buy as many 10-year treasuries if you're worried they're going to lose their value when inflation goes up. So this is why the combination of low growth and inflation is so terrible.

17:31It's because it leaves you nowhere to hide, right? The place to hide in investing is the fact that bonds and stocks, under most conditions, go different directions. In inflationary times, they go the same direction. So there really is nowhere to hide. That's the horror of stagflation. There's nowhere. Gold, maybe, can you go? Yep, sure. I'm not going to say Bitcoin. Or I should say just to see your eyes pop out of your head. But there's nowhere to go. And so I think that the stagflation risk is not here, but it's at the corner of the room scaring everyone. Yeah. OK, that makes sense. So I want to go back to something that I mentioned right at the top of this show, which was we were all told, and in fact, we said on this very podcast, that don't worry if bad stuff happens, Donald Trump will back away.

18:20The stock's vigilantes will act as a controlling mechanism on Donald Trump. Why is that not happening? And do you think at some point he will blink? I have the following deeply insightful thing to say about Trump. I think he does like to be popular. I think he likes to be liked, more so even than the average person. I think it is easy to say, I don't care what markets are doing when they're down. 10 from the top now i think we're at about 10 as of today it's a lot harder to say when they're down 25 yeah when they're down 25 everybody in america who has a pension is noticeably poor yeah and that is it's one thing to say we have to do the brave thing we have to take the pain now let's be brave uh that's easy relatively easy to do now if current trends continue it's going to be very hard to do.

19:18And people are going to get fired in the White House. There's going to be blame. There's going to be a general freak out. And we'll see what will happen. You know, all I will say, my prediction is, if it gets bad enough, he will blink because he likes to be popular. But it's not bad enough yet. Because as you were saying, like Scott percent from Treasury is saying, we don't we don't care what markets do, which is an extremely weird thing for a Treasury Secretary to say. Yeah, that's a very strange thing to say. But I will resist the idea that this is all Trump's fault. He's an easy guy. He draws our attention.

19:49But remember the bad setup he came in with. He came in with every risk asset in America nailed to the ceiling expensive. Yeah. And when that is the situation, there's only one way to go, and that is down. And so that's a terrible setup. He also came in and he says when he talks about, oh, it's the Biden economy. This is his big excuse. Oh, the Biden economy is turning bad on us. Basent said that over the weekend. We inherited this. There is an element of truth to that in that the United States was growing above a sustainable trend growth grade. And it was doing that because it borrowed a lot of money.

20:27And that can't go on forever. That is true. And at some point when you have very, very expensive assets and an economy that is growing faster than it can grow forever, things that can't go up any further tend to go down. You know, and that's the situation that the Trump people inherited. So I think what they might be thinking is, this has to happen sometime. Let's get it out of the way before midterms. Yes. And if it must be done, let it be done quickly. That's a very bad quotation of Shakespeare. I can't remember exactly. I don't you know what play that is. I want to sound a little bit literary.

21:07So things go up and then they go down again. That's the kind of insight you get from the Unhedged podcast. So on that note, we are going to go to a very short break and then we're going to be back with questions from the audience.

21:29Listeners, welcome back to Unhedged here at IE Business School in Madrid. We're taking questions from our lovely audience. So, lovely audience, who's the next question from? Lee Newman, Dean of IE Business School. Oh, hi. Thank you for being here. There is economic thinking that being the predominant currency reserves of the world confer certain economic advantages on the country that controls that currency. So the US is, I think, roughly about 60 % of the currency reserves globally. So that's largely based on trust. And you mentioned the word safety. So my question is, how do you see the current situation in the world with the Trump administration affecting trust in the U.S.

22:12dollar as the reserve currency? And how might that affect Katie and I disagree on this, so I'll let her talk first, because I'm the bigger person. I wrote a column recently about exactly this, about the idea that big long-term investors could start to lose trust in the US dollar as a major reserve currency. And I thought when I put that story out that I was going to get a barrage of emails from big Americans telling me I was a huge idiot and I got it all wrong. And not at all. I got a lot of correspondence from people who I consider to be serious academics, serious investors saying, no, I think this is genuinely happening.

22:52I think the dollar, I think the U.S. administration is undermining the full faith and credit in the U.S. And this could snowball very easily. I know you disagree because you're an American. I just don't think there's anything else. There's no replacement asset that has the liquidity of the dollar. There's no replacement asset that has the liquidity of the and the relative stability of the U.S. Treasury. What I will say to your excellent question is that the Trump administration is completely all over the place on this issue. So on the one hand, they have this view that it's actually an economic disadvantage to be the kind of default reserve currency, because that means people buy your currency for financial reasons.

23:36So your currency can't fall as it normally would because of supply and demand. And as a result of that, your exports are too expensive and you develop a deficit and they fire everyone in Ohio and you know the rest of the story. Right. Whether that's true or not, that's one branch of Trump administration thinking. The other branch of Trump administration thinking is anybody who doesn't use the dollar is a traitor to America, is a threat to our security. He's threatened any company that any country that dares replace their reserve assets. So you tell me which is the real Trump administration, and I'll be better able to answer your question about what is going to happen.

24:15But I have no idea which of those two views will prevail. So best of luck to us all. Next question. Thank you very much. My name is Luis Miguel. I'm in the international MBA. You were mentioning about the sentiment of the U.S. companies about not knowing what's coming in the future. And also, Katie, you mentioned about the bond market, about, you know, how the equities are falling and it's not, you know, the same movement of what's happening, what should happen in the bond market. So my question comes, how would a movement in the Fed's rate, can this, like, revert the situation of more spending and a movement in the bonds?

24:58Or what do you think about this? It all depends on inflation. Does inflation trap the Fed? The next few inflation reports are everything. Because if inflation stays above 3%, which a lot of those same analysts who are cutting their growth forecasts are putting up their inflation forecasts, if the number is above 3%, I don't think the Fed can cut. They're trapped. And they have a dual mandate. They have employment on the one hand and inflation on the other. But when those two mandates are in conflict, inflation wins. Historically, especially after a major inflationary incident like we've had. So will the Fed be able to do anything at all?

25:42Depends on inflation. Because the policy rate is restrictive right now. Bonds are expensive right now. That is restraining growth right now. I don't know how restrictive they are, but the policy rate is restrictive. But maybe the Fed can't do anything. Okay, we're going to have to wrap it up there. But just really, really quickly, it would not be an unhedged podcast without Long Short, a part of the show where we go longer thing we love or shorter thing we hate. Rob, what do you love or hate today? I'm along the city of Madrid. I haven't been here in like 25 years. There's a good feeling here.

26:17The vibes in the city, just walking around, the talking to the people here. You don't get a feeling of old Europe here. There's some electricity in the air in this city. and so that vibe check has gone quite well. I don't know if things might be different in Barcelona or Berlin or some other European city starting with B, but here it seems good. Yeah. Similarly, I'm going to be long eels. We just had a very nice lunch of scrambled eggs and eels. Yeah, not a dish I have. Delicious. Which is not something I would eat if it was in the FT canteen. But that's the difference. Yeah, here you would eat the eels.

26:57Yeah, very happily eat it. It was very nice. Okay, we're going to have to wrap it up there. Listeners, we will be back in your ears on Tuesday. So, muchas gracias. And listen in again then.

27:12Unhedged is produced by Jake Harper and edited by Brian Erstad. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. We had additional help from Topher Forges. Cheryl Brumley is the FT's global head of audio. Special thanks to Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Greta Cohn and Natalie Sadler. FT Premium subscribers can get the Unhedged newsletter for free A 30-day free trial is available to everyone else Just go to ft.com slash unhedged offer I'm Katie Martin, thanks for listening

27:59Thank you.