The Pomp Podcast - #1397 Phil Rosen & Anthony Pompliano | Government Just Erased 1 Million Jobs!

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

Phil Rosen, the Co-Founder of Opening Bell Daily, and Anthony Pompliano, CEO of Professional Capital Management, discuss the government revision of 1 million jobs, Fed’s interest rate decision, asset prices, big tech stocks, economic data vs portfolio, and market outlook for the rest of the week. ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit ⁠https://www.xapobank.com/pomp⁠ to join. ======================= Gemini is the safe and secure way to trade crypto. Gemini is offering eligible new users the opportunity to earn $100 in BTC when they trade $1000 in crypto within their first 30 days of signing up. Head over to https://www.gemini.com/partners/pomp and start trading crypto to earn $100 in BTC. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up, guys? We're back with Phil Rosen, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Opening Bell Daily. In this conversation, Phil and I talk about a wild development.

The United States government is going to revise all of the job growth over the last year. They're going to erase a million jobs. We explain what's happening and why it's important. We then get into things around inflation, personal finance, stocks, bonds, and what we think is going to happen with the interest rate cut in September. This is a big week in financial markets. Phil is here to talk about all the intricacies and break down how you should be thinking about allocating capital. I enjoy talking to Phil. It seems like you guys love these episodes and so we'll keep doing them. Make sure that you subscribe on YouTube or you go ahead and you give us a review on the podcast. Here's my conversation with Phil Rosen. 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. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo Bank. Let this sink in for a moment. Over half a trillion dollars in Bitcoin has been lost or stolen. Whether that is misplaced hardware wallets or an exchange that went bust, the risks are very real. That's why I think where and how you store your Bitcoin is absolutely critical. Now meet Zappo Bank, the world's first fully

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and start trading with Gemini today to earn $100 in Bitcoin. That's right. Gemini will give you $100 in Bitcoin if you head over to Gemini.com slash partners slash pump and you trade $1,000 in crypto within the first 30 days. Analysts at Goldman Sachs are predicting that the government may have overstated

up to a million jobs in the last year. And that's had a lot of people saying that the government may have been misleading or just misinterpreting or just incompetent as far as their job counting. What do you make of this? So to be clear, there's a lot of incompetent people in the government.

There's also a lot of complexity in doing economic data. And so just because there are incompetent people or there are bureaucratic people, it does not always mean that they are being malicious or nefarious in some of the economic data. I think that the job revisions is a situation where it's just really hard to count how many jobs are getting created,

how many jobs are getting lost and keeping track of 330 million people and what are they all doing. So with that said, it is absurd, insane that Goldman Sachs believes 1 million jobs and to make this crystal clear for people, there was about a million jobs gained last year. Now, Goldman Sachs believes that there's going to be this revision.

It's kind of like if you took the test and you got a second chance to go back and change your answer, and they are going to revise that number down by a million, which means that for a year, the government was telling us job gains, job gains, job gains, look at all the jobs that we're creating. And now if this revision ends up being accurate, that means that they're going to say, oh, by the way, there was no job gained in the last year. And so the reason why that becomes a huge problem is because we probably thought based on the economic data that the economy was stronger than it actually is. Now, why is that important?

Well, the Federal Reserve is making monetary policy decisions based on this data. And so if they thought it was stronger, maybe they should have already been cutting interest rates. So there's the potential that they're behind the curve because they were getting bad data. And then on top of that, how many other people were making decisions in their investment portfolio or elsewhere in the economy based on the economic data. And so I always go back and I try to remind people, you have to assume that the economic data is a strong data point, but you cannot put 100% faith in these numbers because there are revisions. It's really complex. The government historically is under or over counted depending on the metric. And so what you really are looking for is much

more the direction of travel than the exact kind of specific number. And if you can look at direction of travel, really what you're looking for is the change. So if something is dropping and all of a starts gaining, that's a really important data point. Much, much more important than was it 800,000 jobs gained, a million jobs gained, 1.1 million jobs gained, or in this case, zero. If we do see this crazy million jobs erased, where do you stand on whether you think the Fed is on time or late with their rate cuts? The Fed can never be on time. It is a law of the universe because structurally the Fed is reactive. So the only way that the Fed can make a decision

is what the data tells them to make. And that data is backwards looking data. The data tells them what already happened. And so as you've seen, let's take the current monetary policy decisions around interest rates. The Fed refuses to cut interest rates until they have confirmation

that inflation is under control. So they are not going to make an interest rate decision because we think we're close to having it under control, or we expect in the next 90 days to have it under control. They are only going to make the interest rate cut once they can confirm we have inflation under control. They only know that on a lagging basis. And so there's no ability for them to front run, for them to predict, or for them to kind of make the decision in the same day or week.

And so when you understand that the Fed's decision-making process will always be behind the curve because of the structural disadvantage and the kind of data pipeline, then what you begin to understand is why investors move their capital in advance of the Fed decision is because the investors don't want to wait for the Fed to move. They're trying to actually time in the market and be more of a real-time response. And so it's this fascinating dynamic where the Fed is naturally operating on a lagging basis. Market participants believe that there is alpha or returns that can be generated by

operating in a more real-time basis. But both parties are looking at data that is likely to be inaccurate at best. And so it is really hard. And that is what makes, I think, economics so intellectually stimulating for people. It's what causes all of the debate. And ultimately, it's what makes markets because the same cohort of people can look at one data point and come away with very different conclusions. You may go long an asset and I go short that asset, but we looked at the same data because it's not just about the data. It's also how we interpret it. What does it mean? And so it's this amazing game. I like to say investing is the professional sport for thinkers. And so the Fed is actually playing the same game.

The difference is they have no skin in the game. When the Fed is wrong, the Fed doesn't lose money. The Fed doesn't get punished. They don't get fired or lose their job. And so it's this crazy thing where they are responsible for interest rates and monetary policy decisions, but there's no accountability. So my reaction to this and to what you're saying is that I wonder if the market is going to react to this downward revision, because pretty much all year, the markets have been going up because they're betting on the Fed to cut rates. But if the Fed is maybe super behind now, or even just a little behind more than anticipated, is that going to push asset prices even higher because that just guarantees maybe more aggressive rate cuts?

Let it rip. I mean, it's this weird thing where if we were sitting here and interest rates were at zero and the Fed didn't have a lot of wiggle room, I think there's a lot of people that would say, hey, maybe we are at the top. One of the financial instruments that I find really interesting that's become quite popular is this kind of like no loss index or these buffer bonds, some people are calling them. And so really what these assets are doing is they allow you to get exposure to an index and you can't lose money on the downside. That's how they're designed. So if you think you're at or near an all-time high, that is likely to be the all-time high, and there's going to be a market correction, you can buy these things. You can stay somewhat

exposed to you know upside but you have that downside uh significant protection and so this buffer bond obviously becomes really interesting right there's 50 billion dollars that have flowed into these uh different assets i think on wall street but what also becomes true is if we believe that the fed which has five and a half percent interest rates and can cut it's like they reloaded their gun and so now we're sitting here we're saying hey the fed's not out of the fight the fed took a water break right they went they got a sandwich they took a nap they are fresh ready to fight and so if there is a market downturn or if they decide it's time they're gonna fire everything they got which means the playbook of the second half of 2020 is coming back and asset

prices will absolutely rip because now the fed's gonna stimulate the economy the fed has not been stimulating the economy and we're still at or near all-time highs imagine what happens when they start the stimulation process. Is your anticipation for an upswing in asset prices for stocks to mirror what's going on in crypto? Do you expect both to sort of correlate up? Correlations right now have kind of equaled out a little bit. During moments of crisis, correlations are very, very high. During kind of very boring times, you get somewhat of a non-correlated type relationship. I actually think stocks are much more important to watch based on the Fed. I think stocks are more sensitive to monetary policy. Crypto and maybe

Bitcoin specifically, it definitely is sensitive to a degree. Bitcoin led the down, both the up and the down, the up of 2020, 2021, and then the down of end of 2022 when the Fed started to talk about kind of raising interest rates. So it definitely replies to monetary policy, but there are a lot more factors that play into why would Bitcoin go up or down than just monetary policy, whereas stocks I think are kind of more singularly focused on cost of capital and some of those economic conditions. And so when I see the Fed beginning to think about making moves or changing stuff. To me, stocks will actually tell us a really compelling story. And then also, most people on Wall Street are not long-term investors. Whereas in the Bitcoin world,

60 plus percent of Bitcoin hasn't moved in a long time. So it's very long-term oriented, very illiquid type asset. Stocks tend to kind of have people who are looking to buy and sell and hedge and time markets. You can see a lot of capital flows changing based on these monetary policy decisions where with Bitcoin, you might not. I think that makes sense. Something I actually wrote about this morning, there's been fewer investors shorting big tech stocks as big tech has dominated the market more and more. I think right now, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, and Amazon, those five stocks make up 29% of the S&P 500, which is insane. And the biggest five stocks in the early 2000s before the dotcom crash only made up 18%. And that so that stat with the

fewer investors shorting those names, that seems very bubbly to me. Like what else could it be other than stocks going up and people are getting more and more bullish the bigger they get. What is your read on that set of data? To a degree, you can make that argument. I think the counter argument would be, these are some of the best businesses

ever created in history. And if you look at just how big they are, how much cash they generate, if you look at the competitive moats that they have, if you look at the efficiency of capital in terms of what they're able to do from an R&D perspective. If you look at the growth rates, given the size that they have,

these are like really, really impressive businesses. And so if you think about it from the perspective of like, these five companies are probably much more dominant than the best five companies in the dot-com bubble. They deserve a bigger percentage. Now, the question is, if it was 18%, 25 years ago, should it be 22%, 25, 29, should it be 40%? Like what is it, right? And so I think that there is no right answer, but it feels like these businesses are amazing businesses and that's why

people are putting capital. The other thing that I think has happened is the reason why that percentage is going up is because there's a lot of stocks in the S&P 500 that are not performing. And so what you get is you're getting a bifurcation. You're getting fantastic performance, from, you know, the mag seven, but you're actually not getting good performance from a lot of other stocks, maybe the bottom, you know, 400 450. And so what is occurring, obviously, is the density or the kind of ownership of the S&P 500 from those seven stocks is, you know, going up significantly. And people are saying, why do I only own 29% of those stocks in the S&P 500? If that's where all the return is coming from, why don't I just put 100% of my money in those seven stocks?

And so it is this idea that people are just trying to chase returns. Now, every stock doesn't go up forever. And so the question is, how much more runway do these companies have? What I found really interesting is there's this podcast, BG2. It's two guys, one's a venture capitalist, one's on Wall Street, and they talk about a lot of data. And one of the things they looked at was the PE multiples of these businesses. And what they found was actually many of these kind of top five, top seven businesses, their PE multiples are not necessarily higher than they were in 2021. So the euphoria, the kind of chaos of 2021 actually carried the valuations higher on whether it's revenue multiples, PEs, et cetera, compared to now. So it doesn't mean that it's not frothy. it just means that within the last five years it was frothier than it is right now which is kind

of an interesting data point because it it begs the question like maybe uh investors have been exposed to such frothy environments that we don't even think there's froth right now because we're kind of like well this is nothing compared to you know three four years ago and so could we be headed back to like we have to hit those extremes again um i'm not sure but but uh it's possible What do you think? Yeah. I mean, what I, uh, the chart that makes me like, it always stops me when I see it, the mag seven alone. If you bet on those in the last year, you would have doubled your returns than if you just bought S and P 500. And to me, it's like, it's obviously an amazing return on investment, but I can't help but hesitate because I, you know, how long can that go?

like like what you're saying and the thing to me that stands out is whether this uh you know a lot of the enthusiasm seems to be on ai and how long can that last because if we're watching these companies put billions and billions of dollars of investment into ai there has to be some payoff as far as application or demand for these ai products um so i just don't know i i don't know how much more runway we'll see for this. Is there anything that gives you pause as far as what are the biggest risks that you would be looking out for in that batch of stocks? I think the fact we constantly hear everyone talking about, is it a bubble? Are we in a recession? Are these companies overvalued? Means that they're not overvalued, we're not in a bubble, and we're not in a

recession. You know, those things tend to happen when no one's paying attention. It's kind of the surprise factor is actually the thing that you should worry about. And if you go back to 2021, you know, September, October, November, a lot of people who were like, it's going up forever, right? Like there was true euphoria. And so right now it feels a lot different than that. The other thing that I think is really important is inflation is much higher than it's been in the past, right? Even at 3%, it's 50% higher than the 2% target, but we just lived through 9% in the official numbers. And so when people look at historical valuation data, they are looking at it when people were buying stocks to buy stocks. There is some subset of buyers of equities today

who are buying stocks because they want to actually benefit from inflation. They're trying to protect themselves from the inflation. So there is now a monetary premium that is being assigned to stocks. Now, is that a 1% monetary premium? Is that a 5%? I don't know. It's really hard to quantify. But the reason why that's important is you would expect that valuations should be higher with the monetary premium than without it 10, 20, 30 years ago. And so when you compare these kind of valuation data and people say like, oh, stocks right now are 7% higher than they have been on average over the last 50 years. You're like, well, that actually may be equal because it's just the monetary premium. There's 7% more capital going into the market, trying to hide

from higher inflation. And so it's just as if it was 30 years ago, valuation wise, very hard analysis to make. And so what I think ends up being something that people need to kind of pay attention to is not externally looking at stocks and valuation data, et cetera. What is your time horizon? I constantly talk to people and I just say to them, if you are under the age of 50 and you have at least a 10-year time horizon, I don't want to hear you talking about a recession

because every data point, every study, everything tells us that it is much more likely and the probability is on your side that stocks are going to be higher 10 years from now than they are today. So if you have a 10 plus year time horizon, you should be trying to optimize your income, spend less than you make take your excess cash and buy financial assets and hold them for long

term and so when you think about it from that perspective it takes the fun out of it because you don't get the intellectual stimulation of like oh am i going to time the market but if you are the type of person who is just going to keep buying and you're just dollar cost averaging into these assets then spending your time trying to time when is the next recession coming actually has zero impact on your financial portfolio you're much better off buying every top every bottom and everything in between for the next 10 years because it's only going to keep compounding over time and time in the market is more important than timing the market it's just that that's not fun to talk about right nobody wants to hear it doesn't matter everyone wants

to hear oh my god tomorrow i think that the market's going to crash and like you know here's all the data as to why, but it really just comes down to what is your time horizon? If you've got a long time horizon, you're a young person. It literally doesn't matter what happens between here and 10, 15 years from now. I think something else to your point, no one wants to talk about is how a recession is a buying opportunity. Like no one wants to talk about stocks going on sale and capitalizing on that sale when the economy is going down. Something I wanted to ask you about was, so we already went over asset prices are going very high in the last year, but economic data is weakening, if not already weaker than we

think it is. How do you think either an economist or even policymakers, how should they balance decision making or how they talk about the economy and assets when you sort of have these two diverging narratives? Your portfolio could be very strong, but maybe your personal finances are suffering, or you feel like things are too expensive for you, and maybe you can't get a job. Those two things are very hard to square, I think. So what would you say there? I think those trends are only going to continue. You're going to continue to see the average American family suffer financially, unfortunately, because you're going to see home affordability not get solved. You're going to see inflation be higher than they normally used to.

You're going to see things like food prices, et cetera, remain elevated. You're going to see all sorts of psychological scars from living through that nine plus percent inflation. And so business owners are going to be very sensitive and quick to raise prices. Consumers are going to always be nervous whenever they see price movements. There's a lot of ramifications of all that stuff. And so from a personal finance standpoint, it's only going to feel more and more like you can't get ahead. At the same time, those who hold financial assets are going to continue to get rich because

all of the things that are driving that personal finance kind of pain are driving asset prices higher as well. Inflation being kind of the biggest example. And so inflation is ravaging your purchasing power. And if your wages aren't growing faster than the inflation, you are literally falling behind. You're making less and less money and goods are rising at such a fast pace. You can't keep up. But what benefits from the inflation is the financial assets. And so that's where you get this massive wealth inequality gap and widening in that gap is that there is literally two different experiences in kind of the American society. There are people who have assets who are getting rich. Interest rates are at over 5%, but the stock market is at or near all-time highs. Bitcoin is at or near all-time highs, right? Real estate has continued to go up in many markets. Well, that is because the things that are driving these asset prices, mainly inflation, are the same reasons why they've jacked up interest rates. They're watching people kind of suffer on a day-to-day basis from a personal finance standpoint. And so if you look at that trend, literally the intelligence test of financial markets for the next 20 years, do you own financial assets or do you own cash? And if you own cash or cash equivalents, you are going to lose.

And people, you know, one of the things I constantly go back and point to is bonds historically have made up a massive portion, a double digit percentage of a 60-40 portfolio. Yet bonds are a guaranteed way to lose money. If you look at TLT and many other bond funds, they're down. At one point, TLT, I don't know what it is recently, but maybe in the last couple of weeks, TLT was down like 25% over the last five years. you got smoked holding these bonds. And so if you follow the cash and cash equivalent style of investing, you are holding a melting ice cube. If you buy financial assets,

investment assets, you benefit from the melting ice cube. And so it's like, you know, kind of this crazy complex economic and financial market analysis literally boils down to one question. Do you have financial assets that are investments or do you hold cash and cash equivalents? And the craziest part to me is that really, really, really smart people are just looking through their old lens and they're holding bonds. And they're like, look, I'm getting 5% right now. If you're getting 5% right now, you're probably not getting ahead. Yes, inflation is officially 3%, I see a lot of things going up more than 3%. And so when you look at that, you say to yourself, maybe actually that 60-40 portfolio should be more like 90-10.

And that is a conversation that I think self-directed investors have started to have. But financial advisors, academia, kind of the theoretical white paper world, they're not yet ready to kind of breach that because uh it suggests that a lot of the analysis they've done historically is no longer relevant which you know uh isn't necessarily their fault right the world changed um but it definitely begs you know for a different strategy so it's kind of it's tough but i don't know what what are you seeing or what are you hearing from people as you talk to them stocks are you know the best wealth generator wealth generating mechanism that we have. And, uh, you know, that's the same thing I've been hearing for the last

several years, interviewing strategists and bankers and all that. Um, and I, I would agree too. I mean, there's no, you know, you could say crypto maybe, but if you're not in crypto, the stock market is the best way to probably grow your wealth. And if you're, if you have a multi-decade time horizon, you, you won't out earn the stock market most likely like with a salary or a job. Yeah, I think everything you're saying is pretty spot on. Is there anything else that you're paying attention to right now in the market or data points or things that you've heard that you're like, oh, I didn't think about that being something to kind of pay attention to? Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing that I'll be reporting on this week

and that I've been sort of preparing for will be Jerome Powell's speech in Jackson Hole. that's definitely uh you know everyone will be watching whether he gives any signal on 25 basis points or 50 basis points for a september cut um and that's really dominating the market this week i think and uh i think friday will be a pretty big day do you think that he will confirm 25 basis points historically powell tends to say a lot of nothing every time he speaks i feel like he just says the same thing he said last time. And then he'll always say, I don't want to give any signals about the next whatever it is. So we'll probably see more of that. And yet you will see everyone in the financial press predicting that he will say something about the size of the rate cut.

I don't think he will. I don't think he will either. I think the best people have to kind to wish for is that he just, uh, insinuates there will be a rate cut. Um, but, uh, let's see what he says. Yep. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely.