The Pomp Podcast - #1506 Jordi Visser | Trump Throws Bitcoin & Stocks Into CHAOS

Episode Date: March 15, 2025

Jordi Visser is a macro investor with over 30 years of Wall Street experience. He also writes a Substack called “VisserLabs” and puts out investing YouTube videos. In this conversation we discuss Trump’s economic plan, tariffs, tax proposals, Trump vs Powell, inflation, gold, stocks, and the relationships and uncertainty from the Trump admin.=======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/=======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.=======================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 going on, guys? We are back with an amazing episode with Jordy Visser. Jordy spent over 30 years on Wall Street. He is one of the smartest hedge fund investors that I know. And

he's here to give you free information about what's going on in the world. We talk about the current administration, tariffs, tax situation, why the stock market is going down, whether you should worry about it or not, whether he thinks stocks will actually hit all time highs again before the end of the year. We then talk about gold, Bitcoin, what the relationship is, why it's breaking down, whether Bitcoin is in good shape or not, and why is gold going up at such a fast pace? We touched on all of this and much more in today's episode. So I hope you guys enjoy it. Once you get done listening, send it to a friend, help them get better educated as well. And we'll see you guys next week. Here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser.

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. clients worldwide we manage over 15 000 machines across our sites our facilities are staffed seven days a week and we fix most on-site issues in under 48 hours in fact we can repair more than 2 000 hash boards each month in our dedicated repair center ensuring your miners run smooth

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to help you get access to real crypto in your retirement account. And here's the best part. As a listener to this podcast, you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account. That's right. Search for Bitcoin IRA in the app store or visit bitcoinira.com slash pomp to join 200,000 Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. Bitcoinira.com to upgrade today and you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account. So Jordy, a great place to start this conversation is the Trump administration is obviously moving incredibly fast. It seems chaotic to a lot of people. There's uncertainty. Stock market is coming down and people want to understand what is their plan? What are they doing? And I

thought that a good place to kind of level set here is just what is your understanding of what they're trying to accomplish and why are they trying to do it? Yeah, I think this is, at least from the people I've talked to in the markets, this is the biggest confusion point is, is there a plan? What is the plan and how are they executing it? So everyone's kind of lost, like not knowing what the situation is going to be. So you see uncertainty levels and all surveys have gone through the roof. You're hearing that. Last week, FactSet put out earnings changes for the first quarter and they've moved earnings estimates down sharply based on consensus numbers and the number one reason is uncertainty over the tariff so when you ask the question what is the plan i think

people um who don't understand how severe the situation is need to kind of set the table in their mind for something has to be done quickly and if they want to go someplace to really learn more about what's happened. Listening to any recent one-hour podcast with Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio has been in the press a lot. He actually wrote a book specifically about the situation and he released it free on the internet so people can go read it. But I think this will start to calm people down. And it sounds funny to say there's a serious problem. But if you're looking for what's going on and should it be happening, I think if you read traditional media, you've got one side saying this is a disaster and so it's scaring the hell

of people on the other side you have people saying this is the way we should go and no one will get off of the we don't care about the stock market we're in a full-out war it's economic we have to get back what we want i think people have to go back and just see that number one we have too much debt number two this year i think there's nine trillion dollars that matures so we have to refinance that debt that's a big number but when you add in the fact that the deficit is another $1.8 to $2 trillion, that means that we have to also issue more debt to finance the hole that we have. So Ray Dalio's point was when you get in that situation of a spiral, it's a death spiral, meaning if you don't fix it fast, you're in trouble. And his point was you have to use all

different types of mechanisms. And I think if you sit back and look, we're trying to do tariffs, that's a tax hike, that's to transfer money from the private sector to the public sector to make hopefully the deficit better. You've got Doge trying to make deficit better through austerity. You are trying things, but at the same time, Dalio's point is you do deflationary actions, but then you also do stimulative actions. And that's where the tax cuts fit in. So I think there is a plan. You can debate whether it's being executed properly, but there is a plan. So one of the parts to me that people really don't quite get is you have this deficit. And the way that I think about this is the deficit is getting bigger every single year on an annual

basis. So it used to be a $1 trillion a year deficit. Then it was 1.5. Now it's like two. The latest numbers are suggesting it could be as big as 2.75 trillion. It's just continuing to expand. And then to your point, we already have a big debt number out there and that debt rolls over. We got to continue to refinance this. And in layman's terms, the way I always describe to people is we basically take out a second credit card with a higher limit to pay off the first credit card. And every time you do that, you got to go find someone who will give you a bigger and bigger credit limit to be able to pay off your previous credit card debt. And so as a government doing this, they're coming in and they're saying, hey, this is a big problem. We need to come and

address it. Now, it also feels like when you go and you have a company that is struggling and you're going to take over that business, you don't just show up and say, okay, we're going to make this one change. It is a complete overhaul of the business. So you got some good employees, you keep them. You got some bad employees, you fire them. You're spending too much money over here, you cut that. You got to go to your customer and say, I need you to pay me more money on the revenue side. You're pulling all these different levers to make the whole better. It sounds like that's what the government really is trying to do here. And so maybe we can kind of go through each one of these and unpack, is it working? Is it not? What are they trying to accomplish? And we can

start with the tariffs, because I think a lot of people see tariffs as economic policy to drive more tax revenue. But then there's a whole lot of other people who say, wait a minute, this just seems like we're playing kind of like a pissing match with some of these world leaders. And the guy in Ontario says he's going to put 25% tariff on electricity. So we come over the top with 50% on steel and aluminum. You know, the people in Europe say they're going to put a 50% tax on American whiskey. We come over the top and say, we're going to 200% on wine and spirits, right? So how much of this is like negotiating and geopolitical kind of posturing versus do you think that they're actually trying to drive more revenue? I definitely think without any question,

you cannot doubt that the tariff negotiations are real and there's going to be tariff changes. I think you have to start with that because it's impossible to take what he did in the first administration, realize he did put tariffs. He's called himself the tariff man. Tariffs are real. I mean, there's no other way around it. They're going to happen. Now, when you say the stock market's falling because of the tariffs, I think what's ended up happening and what people have to realize, a lot of what we're trying to renegotiate is reciprocal. It's trying to get things that are more in line. If you're going to put tariffs on our cars, why shouldn't we have tariffs on your cars? So if we can come to an agreement that

balances things out, he's just trying to get some money through the tariffs back in the government's hands that normalize things. And when you combine it with your other question, anyone who has gone into, if you haven't read the book, just go into ChatGPT and say, what's the negotiating style of Donald Trump based on the art of the deal? And you will get literally what we're getting. So when someone posts 200% tariffs on wine, just posts it and the market responds to it, he's clearly doing negotiation in the way that he feels, which is to apply leverage. Now, I think there's a bigger plan here that probably has to do as well with what happened with getting the tax cut or getting the shutdown kind of averted. I think he's trying to apply

pressure to everyone and as ray dalio said you have to come out of the gates running on this every day that counts it counts in a big number and you highlighted that like so far five months in or over the last five months it's if you annualize that number and i and i will say remember the biggest tax receipts that we get come from income taxes which are going to be coming soon so that's that'll bring the number back down but your point is valid like we we have to do stuff so the tariffs are meant to get some money back in they are a tax hike there's no doubt about it but to be honest with you we've we've talked about consumption tax heights where the wealthy pay more money and i think people have to start realizing that tariffs on items yes they will make

the overall consumer pay more some of that money will go to the government but if it's on items where we've got a distribution of wealth problem you are bringing money hopefully back into the country that way so that's the first thing definitely on taxes in particular i think the knock against Trump or the critique from the left was always, you're just going to give tax breaks to the wealthy. You're going to help enrich your friends, kind of the normal political talking points. I don't think anyone saw that Howard Letnick and Donald Trump and Scott Besant and all these guys would be talking about, no, actually our goal is to get 0% tax rate at the federal income level for anyone making $150,000 or less. And I went and I looked at the data and

there's 130 million American households. They say that 85 to 90% of American households make less than 150K. So that means that like 110 million or so households, they want to get them to zero federal income tax, which would be one of the most transformative things you could do for households, let alone the American economy. But you are taking money away from the US government in that funding mechanism. So talk a little bit about these tax proposals at this point, they're not targeting just rich people. They're also saying that they want to have no federal income tax on people who make less than $150,000 a year. Yeah. This is, again, why if you read the papers, whatever paper you read every day,

you're going to be biased by what you've read because it's going to have either something that is more to the right or something more to the left. My own opinion from hopefully sitting somewhere in the middle is I don't see how anything he's doing is helping the wealthy people. I think he's trying to get a message out, whether it's, you know, taxes on tips, whatever it is, he's trying to help out people in the country. And the distribution of wealth problem is a major part of this thing. He just doesn't want to do it by raising taxes on the wealthy, which is a very difficult thing to do because it slows down businesses. So that's why if you do things like consumption wise, and it's on tariffs, and who spends, you know, the bulk of GDP in this

country is consumed by the top 20%. It's a huge portion of GDP at this point, and that's the distribution of wealth problem. So if you make tax sites on consumption through tariffs, you are, by definition, hurting people. You're getting more money from wealthy. So it's a way to increase taxes on the wealthy. And so I think this income tax thing, I don't know how they're going to be able to maneuver this through, but I do think they're genuine about trying to help out the distribution of wealth problem in the country and whether or not they can do that. I think a lot of it is going to be many moving pieces. And I think one point that has gotten a little bit too far out of control, there's short-term things that are negotiation today. The tariffs thing to me

is a negotiation today. And that's why I said, I believe that averting a shutdown and then getting his tax cuts through simultaneously around, this has been kind of the goal. Play the tariff debate, Get what you can out of that. At the same time, get your tax cuts through to kind of go through stimulative on one end and balanced on the other with increased revenues. I think that that's what he's trying to do. And I think this is to try and both help the stock market, give people some comfort because everything is negative right now in the press. What is interesting to me is everything that he's doing on tariffs, taxes, kind of economic policy, geopolitical negotiating, even I would say trying to get the ceasefire deal done for

russia ukraine etc is having an impact on the stock market stock market is down 10 in about three weeks uh i believe it is the fifth fastest decline since 1950 you told me um but then i see stats like uh peter maluk over at creative planning posts and he says hey the intra-year average drawdown is like 14 15 over the last 75 years and so i guess my first question is just like, should we be worried about a 10% drop or is this somewhat normal in the stock market in general? Yeah. I mean, this is the point where in the last two weeks, the sentiment on surveys that the market participants look at has gone down sharply. It doesn't matter. First, it was the trading one, but now you've got into the Investor's Intelligence Newsletter, which is one of the more

reliable ones, and that's gone into, I would say, bearish territory. So sentiment's been negative, but there hasn't been a bounce yet. And I think part of it is because, A, a 10% correction, although it's happened super fast, and it is, I mean, it's the fastest 10% correction since COVID. And it's been very disruptive to hedge funds. It's been very disruptive to the parts of the market where, like we've seen in crypto, take the altcoins and convert that into the stock market and things like Apple and Palantir, which, I mean, some of these companies are making real dollars, but they're multiples that exploded. So we've seen multiple compression, but the reality is the breadth of the market is near all-time high stuff. And that's because there's been a lot of

stocks that have gone higher. In fact, as of last, I guess it was Tuesday, we still had about 200 companies in the S&P 500 out of the 500. So about 40% were still up for the year. So a 10% correction is not a big deal. The question I always say as someone who tries to be rational about this and who does think we are nearing a point where there's going to be some kind of a bounce is are we going to have a recession? Because where the question becomes important to actually have a 20, 30% correction, which is less common, those generally happen when you're either at or going into a recession. And that's where sentiment is starting to go. But the reality is all we're seeing right now is a pause in businesses and investors. And they've kind of said,

we don't know what's going to go on. There are no signs as of now that there's going to be a recession. And I don't think there'll be one because I think very quickly, if we reduce the rhetoric and the trade war, the market will start to bounce and all of a sudden people start planning those vacations again. But right now everything's on hold. One of the parts I always go back to is it seems like the more people talk about a recession, the less likely a recession is to happen. Is the same thing true? You think in the more fear in those sentiment surveys, the less likely it is that we're going much, much lower. Like if people are already worried,

if people are already kind of projecting what they think is going to happen in the future, it feels like usually the market is telling you, hey, maybe we're bottoming now because the fear is the worst that it's been. How do you think about that? Well, first of all, let's go through because you and I have gotten to know each other

about technology and about crypto. When we actually had recessions, true recessions that, and I hate to say this to people, if you throw out COVID, we had a recession in the great financial crisis, which was a real one. And it was driven by a credit contagion, a debt. It was, in my opinion, the last of the industrial revolution where we had built up all this debt in the private sector and it started to unravel and the government had to absorb that debt and put it on its balance sheets. Now, if you go back to 1980, when recessions were more relevant, manufacturing jobs were about a third of the economy. Now they're

less than 10%. So where are the jobs are created? And the reason I bring up jobs to actually have a recession, there needs to be a credit situation, which I just, the private credit market is not big relative to the equity market. So the equity market needs to fall a lot. But the problem is most of the jobs being created during healthcare, they've been government too. So we're reducing that. And as you pointed out in one of your videos this week, a lot of the jobs have been government and this goes to contractors and stuff there. 25%, I think over the last two years. Yeah. It's a big number. Healthcare is not a cyclical job. We need more nurses. We've got an aging population that until we have humanoids that can actually work in the hospitals, which isn't coming

soon, we will continue to hire people on that. I've mentioned here, I have four kids, three of are in the healthcare field. So it's a reality. So we don't have recessions the way we did in the past because of credit, but also because the nature of the job situation has gone. But when I say the private sector, and this is something that I want to make sure people watching this, this is a great time to be looking for what is going to work coming out of this. So if you're going to invest and you've done this, I think everyone in crypto gets used to these. I think the equity market, it's not as normal. So people start worrying about this whole, well, it's going to be a recession. A recession to me is defined as you lose about one and a half

percent of jobs, which would mean job losses of about two and a half million people right now. And you can't find work for about a year or two. So when we had the great financial crisis, we went up to 10% unemployment and it took us a long time to get back down to four. That was the last time because the demographic shift in the first baby boomer retired in 2011. So we have a labor shortage now. So we have a bigger problem that we don't have enough jobs. we're obviously not, the immigration policies change. We're not going to have an excess of people. So it's going to be harder. And so I don't see recession as a possibility. And I think AI is going to create tons of productivity that'll keep going, which will bring profit margins up.

So we're actually in a really good spot that could we shrink down to maybe 1% growth over a couple of quarters? Yeah. Could it be negative for a quarter? Sure. But people shouldn't be looking at some massive unwind like 2008. And there is this like hedge fund unwind that you've been talking about um which more is from like an investment thought process explain how this works and like why is it happening yeah it started to make the press and if things don't change soon uh it it could become a bigger story there's two places so i grew up in emerging markets that's where my background is in the 90s everything that i traded i when i was at morgan stanley my first job i was handed the mexico book two months before the

tequila crisis started and they devalued their currency and it was a derivative book and thankfully the guy who had it before me did a really good job of making sure that it was hedged but i learned very quickly two things number one uh when you have a lot of debt things can unwind very quickly and number two all the bad things that tend to happen in these situations tend to happen from an unwind of of leverage ltcm happened while i was in brazil during the emerging market crisis and this is a version of that so i mentioned last week that i'm concerned about ai optimized risk management structures so machine learning and ai has been around a lot longer than people realize chat gpt was not the beginning of it that's where we got llms uh democratized but

machine learning has been huge for a long time and some of the bigger hedge funds have had a huge advantage and spend 100 plus million dollars a year on quant models to make sure that they are hedged once we had democratized ai a couple things happened one is momentum strategy started to really work well and part of the reason they work well my son can go in and back test any strategy and say hey tell me what's worked really well create a portfolio and let me put it on and we saw a really big rise in people doing this at the same time you can go optimize portfolio much easier you can just put it in hey i want to strip out all the factor risk main point is uh it's been kind of this grace period where a lot of big strategies that run paired portfolios that are

risk optimized they've been losing money at a fairly fast clip and it's been let's say out of the ordinary relative to the past six seven years and in some cases the last 13 years and that's because in my opinion what we are trying to do when you say nato might break up when you start going into a trade war and saying tariffs are going to go back to where they were in the 1800s risk optimization is based on historical correlations and volatility we don't know the world we're going into and so i think and i don't want to get wonky on this one but a lot of risk models don't know what to do right now and so everyone is risk reducing and that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of creating losses so internally it's been a lot worse and that's why

i said there's been about 200 stocks up in the s p 300 down and that's because the ones that are down have been the ones that people were long very sensitive to artificial intelligence the ones that have gone higher like even europe like china are ones that people didn't own and so you've had this kind of uh unwind that happens every now and then right now it's it's losses it could get worse if things continue. But as of right now, I think if that happens, credit will start to widen out. I did want to mention the other place where there's been a growth in leverage that people should watch is the private debt markets. And so the private equity funds have fallen significantly over the court. Their stocks have fallen significantly over the last

five weeks. And historically, they have a fairly high correlation in their stock price to the private credit markets, because obviously they're private equity and private credit. and we're starting to see some weakness there. So that's another place that people should watch. Watch the private equity stocks. When you see this unwind happening, it means that they are de-risking as a individual participant in the market.

What are the risks to the market when everyone starts to de-risk together, right? Because now you're like creating this like correlation in a weird way where each individual actor is becoming safer in their opinion, but actually if they all do it at the same time, there's gotta be risk. that and that's the problem and i think that's why you know the administration we may have talked

about it last week i know you've you've made it you've talked about it on your videos but if the goal of the administration was to get tenure rates lower everyone was kind of applauding well rates have gone down from 480 to 425 as of yesterday that's great but the stock market is back to where it was september and i think you also said stock market's unchanged over the last six months which is true tenure rates at that same time six months ago when stocks were down there they were three $367. They're $425 right now. So they're actually higher. So this is the problem that comes. And I think your point is the one that worries me. And this is the point where I think if I had to grade the administration, I think they're trying to solve a problem which needs to be solved and

they're doing it quickly. So I completely agree with doing it that way. I think the messaging they're bringing to the market is we don't care about the stock market. Okay. I don't think that messaging is a great idea. I don't think getting into trade wars as opposed to negotiating the terrorists, but this is the way he likes to negotiate. So at some point here, the reason I think there's going to be a bounce is because I do think the pressure is starting to show up in approval ratings. And I do think it's showing up from his own administration around the country, just from the stuff you kind of see in Twitter and the little talking points. That is why this self-fulfilling prophecy of de-risking, it's starting to hurt his situation. And so I think

we're at a point where if he continues with this and we have April 2nd coming up and everyone in the hedge fund world is waiting for that, which means the opposite of de-risking is are people going to take risks? No one's taking risks ahead of April 2nd at this point because we have no clarity on what it's going to mean. And that puts us in a very precarious position if something starts to happen. And we do have vulnerabilities on economic data, earnings, things along those lines, because the earnings period will start just after April 2nd. And we'll start to see how much of an impact that the pausing has had from the consumer. One of the parts that I've noticed already is there's been a couple of companies that have

reported. And I think I saw BMW, a couple of others. They're all already pointing to tariffs as like a boogeyman. And you got to say, look, the guy got in office on January 20th or whatever it was. He hadn't even been there for 60 days yet. And companies are already blaming these activities. um what's hilarious to me is it feels like now if you had a bad performance you're going to have a window of time where you can just blame the government and it doesn't actually have anything to do with what your q4 results were yeah right um he wasn't he wasn't even in office yet but you're already talking about tariffs um how do hedge funds kind of evaluate you know what what's being said in terms of the words versus what the data is in the calendar of when the results are

actually being reported from. Well, that's why I mentioned. So there's two things about this. And last week I said something and I've said it, I've done some webinars this week with strictly for asset managers. The stock market is 200% of GDP. Their sentiment is that no matter which one you use, consumer confidence, University of Michigan, I don't care where, it's not just low. It's been lower than you would expect with unemployment rate where it is and the stock market where it was. And the reason is because of the distribution of wealth problem. And I've called this, and I think AI is impacting this, where we've lost the ability for people to upwardly move up the corporate ladder.

And so if you're a person who just started, and I'll use my daughters, and they just come out of college and they're working really long hours trying to help people get better. And I asked them, well do you know approximately how much money you'll be making in five years they go yeah and they tell me that's not enough to live in new york city and they want to live in new york city they want to live in l.a they want to live in these places one of my daughters lives in little rock arkansas and she went there because how much he could make relative to what it would cost was more in line with what she wanted in her life the reason i bring that up as part of your question is the stock market and crypto they're both hope things for people and so when the stock market

goes down what does happen and what has happened in surveys vacation plans in the us have collapsed in surveys um we've seen new orders from the pmi sharply lower we've seen consume real consumer spending in in the first month down sharply the economic data the atlanta fed gdp now it's going to move back up, but it's somewhere between zero and 1%. We are having a slowdown and it's not because we're going into a recession. It's because people are like, I don't want to take those extra spendings because my stock market's going down. My mother's retired. She sees her stock market go down 10%. That's meaningful. And it doesn't matter that same price of September. They keep marking that up in their heads. They're like,

you know what? I'm going to be prudent. I'm not going to spend anything because they're reading the papers and the papers are scaring him so i i think that isn't an overreaction to the tariffs i think what we're seeing around the globe is people that are spending are just holding back until they get more clarity and that's what i said if his goal was to create softer economic conditions which might be uh he's getting that the rate fall is not happening at the same pace as the stock market but there's a lot of people that speculate that what he really needs to do because most of the debt and this is the other problem that i mentioned we have nine trillion dollars of of debt maturing this year but most of that's short-term debt so if tenure rates go down

that doesn't actually help the debt situation uh if the fed doesn't cut rates so i think there's a lot of belief that if we can get this stuff down gas at the pump is coming down egg prices are finally coming down like you're seeing things finally come down maybe they can cut rates but i think the stock market has paused people one of the heuristics that i've used is uh trump truth posted or you know tweeted at whatever uh platform he's using now uh at jerome powell basically said get the rates down get the rates down cut rates powell very defiantly said no i'm not gonna cut rates uh i'm independent that led reporters to ask him you know if he tells you to quit will you quit or will he fire you or whatever the language was um he said no so it's very kind

of i'm going to be independent i'm going almost to the degree of being defiant um is it as simple as just like trump and besson are saying okay you're not going to cut rates we're going to make you cut rates we're going to literally break your will by slowing down this economy so much that you're going to cut these rates down or is that too um maybe uh uh that's a hopeful dream that there's some you know chess going on between the fed and uh in the executive branch bill dudley wrote an op-ed this week in uh in bloomberg i believe it was in bloomberg regardless he wrote an op-ed this week um the problem is and this is the issue that that they have uh the fed is responding yes to what will be slower growth but their mandate is

around jobs which right now are still fine and unfortunately inflation is not only above their target but you know based on we we saw two good what appeared to be good inflation numbers this week but the problem is the pce which is the one that they follow the estimates are above 0.3 so you go through an annualized you take 12 times we're still above three percent in pc core and and at this point this is a very difficult thing for them to navigate in terms of okay we want to they want to lower rates too they understand this they're americans they realize that paying money on debt's not real but they need to have inflation in check and the issue is inflation expectations for the next two years via the swap market they're up above three percent um

and they have gone up since trump took over 10-year rates are up below that i guess it's more two years or about 270 the the the actual tips are up at three but regardless there's a 30 basis point spread right now where two-year swap expectations of inflation are above 10-year. The problem with that is that means inflation expectations in the near term are elevated in terms of what people expect. And you've seen that in most surveys. Now, it's been skewed a lot by the divide between Democrats and Republicans. All Democrats think it's going higher, Republicans say it's going lower. And I think all of that just makes it confusing for the Fed. So unless we see something on the job situation that gives them the ammo,

I think it's really, really hard with how fast he's going to, at the same time, say we're going to do tax cuts and we're going to do tariffs because both of those arguably, you could make a case, could be inflationary and they don't know the answer. So I think they're on pause to wait and see. The inflation number, and I wrote about it this week, 3%, now 2.8, trueflation, which i always caveat say it's alternative inflation metric tries to be more real time there's some people who really you know put a lot of weight into it there's other people who will tell me all the reasons why it's stupid whatever but it is showing 1.35 percent so if the government number was 2.8 and true inflation zone 2.6 it's kind of a wash in my mind right but when you are 50 percent

lower. And you actually were higher than the government number three months ago. It tells me that you're not structurally undercounting forever or whatever. It seems more sensitive to the real-time nature of this. And so when the government was at 2.93%, they were at 3.1%. Now, all of a sudden, true inflation is down at 1.35%, which is such a significant drop. Do you read into two, three, four months from now, we should expect the inflation number to be under 2%. And it's just that they have backwards looking kind of lagging data. And that probably is more likely where we are with the inflation number. The government data just hasn't caught up yet. I am actually finally in the camp that what Truflation is

showing. And again, when I was doing my YouTube videos at the end of last year and in the beginning, I was more in the camp that there was going to be inflation. And it wasn't around the tariffs. It was around some other things. But you take oil down to the mid-60s, and it is the bottom of kind of the range that it's been bouncing around it. Gas at the pumps come down. That's kind of the, let's say, the flexible ones or the part that moves and bounces around. But a lot of things like auto insurance, housing insurance, all of those things have gone up significantly. And I'm not saying they're going to come down, but I think we've reached a point where the economy is weak enough and i do mean i think the economy is going to weaken i think

the policies that have come in place are going to shave off a good hundred basis points of nominal gdp nominal gdp has been about five percent it doesn't get talked about that much but i think if you can get nominal gdp back down to around four uh china's cpi just went negative again and that has an influence on our stuff even and we're going to raise tariffs so it's not going to be a pure one for one but i happen to believe that the inflation stuff is not going to be bad and if it is related to the tariffs it is a one-off that is true i mean you raise prices once the next year they're not getting another tariff raise so it raises for one year it has a little impact and then it comes back down so i think the market's going to look through it that's why i i really

i don't think we're going into a recession i i think actually the policies that we're doing are going to find a way to help inflation uh i just think as i'm a bitcoin person one of my you know big things is the conversation about the mar-a-lago accords if you ask me how this is going to end i find it hard to believe that we're going to find the money necessary for the fiscal deficit to get in check based on the way we're going up about this i also think the fight back from the other countries on the tariffs is a meaningful thing and that leaves the how do we solve this thing and i think there's a lot of truth in the mar-a-lago accords as to how this thing may end it's very good for gold it's very good for bitcoin and that's one of

the reasons why i think you've seen gold go higher is i think people are starting to build in that this is going to end up with some kind of an agreement between the countries because i don't think it's going to end with us backing down yeah i definitely don't think that he's going to back down um he strikes me as uh what's the scene in the titanic where they go and the captain's there and he's like the captain goes down with the ship i think that is exactly we got a captain who's gonna go down with the ship or he will succeed with the ship right either way um gold and bitcoin uh you brought up and usually the drivers of gold are the drivers of bitcoin uh we have seen both of them do well last year i think gold was up 50 bitcoin was up 100 percent um i have said you know

bitcoin is gold with wings it actually you know goes up or whatever um but gold has been going up and bitcoin has been going down in recent weeks what do you make of uh kind of the divergence of performance between those two assets okay so you have described bitcoin as analog gold which is what it is so i if i look at digital gold and i go okay so let's take the other side there has to be two parts to this so gold itself to me is it's about in it's about money supply it's about growing liquidity but it's also about the framework of the world possibility of wars i'm going to hide my money what donald trump is doing is knocking down technology stocks so bitcoin has a correlation to technology because it is a technology at the end of the day

I'm bullish on it, not because of printing. I think if productivity is really good, even if money supply grew very, very little, as long as we're productive, then Bitcoin is still going to be going higher. So I've not been one of those ones that likes to follow this M2 thing in there. That being said, it is pointing straight up now. So everyone who's happy about Bitcoin will be there. I think gold is actually moving this way because of what I said, which is we got off of the gold standard.

And so this whole thing of whether you go to Bretton Woods, whether you go back, we're talking about reestablishing kind of the the order of the world. It's very pro gold. You don't know whether it's deflationary or inflationary at this point. I think at the end of the day, it's bad for all currencies because I think, you know, we talk about our debt. Japan's is far bigger deficits all across the globe. Ours is just worse than most places. So I think we're still in a world where at the end of this, even if it ends up being something for gold now, once the NASDAQ starts to move higher, and I hate to say that because then everyone goes, well, it's just tech stocks. The NASDAQ is amorphous. I don't know anyone

that owns the NASDAQ. I know people that own the S&P and Bitcoin outperforms the S&P. I know people that did own the MAG-7, but now the MAG-7 has gone down. And the fact that they've had a 20% correction and Bitcoin's had a 30% correction, here's what I will say. I think when Bitcoin does go high or when the market turns a little bit i think bitcoin is going to dramatically outperform stocks so gold has gone higher bitcoin hasn't but i think the catch-up will happen once we get a bounce in the market and i think bitcoin will be back up towards 90. the real move higher though at this point i think has to come from clarity on the tariffs and at that point that's when we'll have a big move and then the bigger move will come from the admission that we're going

to have to print money to get out of this and i will remind people that part of ray dalio's thing is the stimulator part also includes debasing i mean it's you have to get the deficit back to three percent that's what scott benson has said that's what ray dolly said i don't think the fact that they both said that is is go read ray dalio's stuff it'll it'll give you some insight and what does he say to own gold and bitcoin so gold is at all-time highs um is there a psychological barrier at three thousand dollars an ounce you know bitcoiners were looking at a hundred thousand it's a big round number uh it was kind of a dream at one point then it became reality crossed over and said oh now everyone's gonna be paying attention it feels safe now because it's at

a hundred thousand whatever is there any kind of psychological impact of gold hitting three thousand or is that just another number like two thousand was yeah it's it's just another number i mean we've seen central banks buying for a while but to be fair when stephen muren wrote the paper if you're a central bank and you you've kind of gone through this yourself and you're like the only solution is for them to come to us and say how about we issue bonds for a hundred years and we pay you zero interest on it i mean basically defaulting on the debt you would be accumulating as much gold as you possibly can um they're gonna let the dollar go down you'd be accumulating as much gold as you can and so i think the gold thing has

been about defensive posturing or posturing for central banks of what the world will look like my obsession and belief in gold is that it is still it's still an old person's thing it's it's not a young person's it's not it's not the kid in nigeria or the kid in brazil or the kid in argentina they're going to own bitcoin and the problem is most of the money is with these bigger powers and so the older people control the power at this point but they're just figuring out the nature of what this the world's going to look like when you talk about nato not existing i mean i don't think people have put into context what that actually means i mean it's a big statement and And rather than sit there and freak out about it, my grandmother taught me a lot growing

up in the Depression and then in World War II. When you talk to people like that, they had a bad life. My grandmother was born in 1920. I mean, her first 25 years, she saw horror. She was one of the nicest, happiest people I ever met. She never took debt out again, but that was the scar she had. But the rest of the stuff, she enjoyed life. So, we survive through these things and we go through it.

So when you hear NATO's bringing down, the question is, has the world changed since 1945? Of course it has. So I think the system is changing. And I think people are buying gold as a, I don't know what the new system is going to look like. I don't trust I have any idea what Donald Trump's going to do. I'm going to have gold for the time being. But at some point, Bitcoin is going to go up and gold is not going to go up.

It's going to happen at some point soon. Do you think stocks will hit a new all-time high before the end of the year? Yes, they do. so 10 correction now means you don't just go with 10 back up right obviously i had to go up more uh to recover is it as simple as we get clarity on the tariffs maybe we get past you know april 2nd everyone kind of understands what's going on and that's the driver or do you think that there has to be uh some true return to what i'll call you know qe where they're cutting rates and printing money. And that's really the driver. Honestly, I think it's a combination of both of that.

I don't think anything's going to happen on April 2nd that's going to bring clarity. From what I know about the reciprocal tax situation, it's going to take months and it's still going to be negotiations. The thing that has hurt the stock market the most, and this is why i believe it's intentional he's waffled on tariffs when they have an impact but what he hasn't waffled on is there is i mean when besant says there's no trump put um yesterday donald trump said i won't bend like they're they're sending a message that they don't care about the stock market when he said the chinese think in hundreds of years we think in quarters there is a truth to that but i mean he's literally i mean that was such a fire line right like like

again there's plenty of people who don't like on whatever but that is one of the hard truths that americans do not want to hear yeah right is uh their long-term thinking we're short-term thinking and i would argue that uh with him in office we don't even think in quarters like pretty much the media is thinking in hours i know multiple people who work at these publications and they wake up and they're like i have to wake up earlier because this guy's already doing stuff at six o'clock in in the morning and i want to be first to cover it it's crazy it is crazy and and the person saying we think in quarters he's tweeting or posting all day long yeah and i literally was getting a coffee yesterday and i look on them and i'm like 200 percent tariff on all alcohol coming

from europe minutes minutes after they announced the 50 percent right yeah the um have you ever seen the clip uh oh i'm gonna um there's a documentary that was created uh it is called i think the art of the surge if i remember correctly um and it follows his campaign and it's fascinating to watch because you essentially get behind the scenes look it has how he and his team operates so there's some political elements to it to kind of ignore that stuff right but if you watch it it's an episodic thing and you get to see him interacting with his team and there's this famous clip that went very viral online because he's sitting at a at a table and uh he's watching i think it was a debate or a speech and as he hears what's going on the tv he turns to a

woman who uh she's known as the human printer because she walks around with a mobile printer and she prints out physical paper so that he can read it because he doesn't like to use his phone yep and he is dictating to her what to tweet and the camera shows him and it cuts to her computer and so you can see like what he's saying and what she's typing the like randomly capitalized letters the all caps you know the multiple x that's not actually him writing it it is somebody on the team who understands how he does tweet when he tweets yeah but they're the ones who are typing it And so what always surprises me when I see tweets like the 200%, you know, and the way it's written and all this stuff is that passed a filter. Did I get posted without like going through a filter and everyone was still like, you know, publish, which tells me that this is maybe more strategic than if it was just somebody, you know, sometimes I tweet things and it doesn't go through a filter and you're like, ah, I maybe should have thought that went through a little bit more.

or you know of course they're gonna critique this one word I should have phrased that better or whatever right he's still president United States he's still like like they're not gonna just give him his phone and be like you know knock yourself out right so it it then begs the question of when you hear besant and let Nick and all these guys talk I think I'm just uh impressed maybe by how cohesive they are in a situation where it would be very easy for them to break from the president because their friends are calling them they're like the pressures of this essentially everyone you care about you're hurting which is a very weird dynamic but they all are we're doing this we don't care we're steadfast in it you know whatever do you read it all into the fact that

If one of them dissents or one of them breaks, does it kind of fall apart? Now, all of a sudden, you've got the president standing by himself and he doesn't have the support of the treasury secretary or commerce or whatever. So this is a great question. And this is one of the things I want to say for people to calm down a little bit. I think that point there is it's both good in one sense, meaning when he was president the first time, he was clearly learning on the job. He brought in a lot of people and it's been reported.

He hired a bunch of people that had their own opinions. They're very strong and things kind of broke down. Right now, the fact that you have everyone coming out with the same message is very unique. Now, I will say last night there was a post annexed by Charlie Gasparino saying someone in the White House has said effectively that we've reached a point in the market that it's starting to have an impact. the white house is now having conversations that maybe this has kind of gone a little too far i think within an hour it came out that it was from outside the white house and that they have not changed anything inside and so you can take that two ways i and i again i this is one of the reasons why i like to listen to other congressmen and senators speak because they're not in the

the White House, but they're getting pressure from their constituents. And the pressure is growing because when the stock market goes down, it becomes an issue. And for everyone out there, that's a good thing to know that, okay, we're a democracy. If stocks are going down, my big fear is you open up Pandora's box, it starts to spiral out of control. I don't mind a 10% correction. When you asked me, do I think stocks will go back to highs? Whether it happens in November or in May of next year is relevant to me. I think our earnings will be good. I think there won't be a recession. I think the goals of the administration are incredibly important. And regardless of what you feel about the president, we can't sit here and let debt to GDP be at this level and let the

fiscal deficit be at these levels because we have no room. God forbid there was a recession. We have no room to do anything and we will have failed auctions. So I think the messaging out of the White House at this point, it's been impressive that it's cohesive. I think it needs to stay that way. I just think we got to start making sure the stock market doesn't keep moving at a pace that is this fast. Yeah. One of the things I was talking with a friend at dinner the other night is with Biden, there was not a lot of action. Like there wasn't the frenetic pace of things getting done, but also there wasn't a lot of information. And, you know, he is being hidden and nobody wants to, you know, his cognitive decline, whatever other people would say like, Hey, he's busy.

He's being the president, right? He's not talking to the media, whatever, but like lack of action, lack of access actually created in a weird way, uh, very calm markets. Trump is the exact opposite. Not only do you have a frenetic pace of action, but also he's posting, they're interviewing there. I mean, it, I don't know how let Nick and Besson are getting anything to other doing like 10 interviews a day each.

Right. I mean, it's incredible to see not only do you have a president who is obviously high energy and, you know, kind of very fast paced, but he surrounded himself with people like this. And so to me, that's also contributing a lot to the like uncertainty and the chaos a little bit is not just the actions, but the fact that every single hour you're getting new information. And then that makes people feel like, hey, things are moving faster than they really are. And so to me, that, again, is part of the design. Yep. Right. It is keep doing the interviews, keep talking to the press, keep getting the word out there.

And if we change our mind, if we change tactics, if there's an update, like we immediately have the information out there versus the past administration, which was almost the exact opposite. It was like, we're not saying anything. I mean, even to the point where the southern border was basically wide open and people were like, hey, what's going on? And they're like, we don't know what you're talking about. I'm going to give you some props here. for for those of you who don't watch anthony's daily stuff from the desk what he just said there as someone who's followed markets for a long time that's a nuance in terms of paying attention to what is actually happening scott besson has been on tv almost every single day it's it's amazing

and you go back and say how often was janet yellen on tv never never and so you're in a point where they are bringing messages you may not like what the message is right now but to your point if they want to quickly pivot and move this is all part of what they're trying to do there is no doubt in my mind that there is a plan again you can disagree and i do with the execution on the okay we're putting tariffs 200 like random number i i it impacts markets but i also believe that whether the stock market falls 10 or 20 percent in a period of six weeks if five weeks from now it takes back half of that it doesn't matter like i don't think at the end of the day that disrupts and creates a recession what will create a recession is if the stock market goes down 30

it stays there for two years and then this whole thing is a disaster but the only way for that to truly happen is if companies are going to start firing people and that's not going to happen so everyone just needs to tap their brakes they should watch you on on the daily shows because what you just said is a very nuanced way that should bring people you're not going to read that that in the paper. They are out there. They are trying to get the message across. And it's very important when you're trying to do something as troubling as this is, it very seldom gets talked about. So you guys hear this. With our debt situation and the amount of debt we have rolling off and the deficit we have, if we don't do this, we will have a failed auction at some point.

And when you have a failed auction, the market's going to fall that way. And when it falls that way, you're not in control of it because there's nothing you can do other than print more money get back into the same hole so they're trying to do something which trust me is very very important just type in ray dalio beautiful the leveraging into chat gpt and it will bring up exactly what they're trying to do which is find money from all different places just like you would if you were in a house and you had a mortgage and all of a sudden you realize okay i lost my job i got a new job but my expenses are above my income that's where we are as a country we have a huge amount of debt that we have to roll over every year and our expenses are above our income

by almost two trillion dollars we have to get that in line just like you were a homeowner and this doesn't get put out in the media in the last administration but that's the reality coming out of covid we spent too much i completely agree where can we send people to find you on the internet you can find me on youtube you can find me on substack you can find me on x um viscer labs viscer labs and some form of it for all different handles on those but you can find me there but viscer labs has all my stuff on it your sub stack is excellent youtube highly suggest we'll link to both in the description thank you so much for doing this we'll do it again next week love it thanks anthony