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In this limited series, Odd Lots explains some of the thorniest issues facing the US economy through the medium of … chicken. Chicken occupies a unique position in the US diet, but issues facing the poultry industry illustrate wider points about the development of the US economy and the decisions being made about how it's structured and who benefits from it. So why has the chicken industry evolved in the way that it has? What’s been driving the price increases in eggs and meat? And what does it all say about things like inflation, the labor market and the nature of American capitalism?

Check out Beak Capitalism on Odd Lots wherever you get your podcasts.

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From our friends over at the Elon, Inc. podcast from Businessweek, hosted by David Papadopoulos, is this special episode we're sharing to our What Goes Up listeners. Please enjoy this episode, subscribe to their feed, and leave a review!
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For years, Tesla fans and critics alike have produced mock bingo cards ahead of Tesla earnings calls. And so, in honor of Tesla’s next call, which will be held Jan. 24 after markets close, the Elon Inc. crew produced our own bingo game. This week we preview Tesla’s Q4 2023 earnings and introduce our picks for which Muskisms will carry the day. You can download a PDF of this quarter’s bingo card here.

In this episode we also recap the other major events from the week: A visit to Auschwitz, a farewell to a former political ally and a paltry attempt at feud of the week.

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Bloomberg News Now is a comprehensive audio report on today's top stories. Listen for the latest news, whenever you want it, covering global business stories around the world.

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At Bloomberg, we’re always talking about the biggest business stories, and no one is bigger than Elon Musk.

In this new chat weekly show, host David Papadopoulos and a panel of guests including Businessweek’s Max Chafkin, Tesla reporter Dana Hull, Big Tech editor Sarah Frier, and more, will break down the most important stories on Musk and his empire. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hey 'What Goes Up' listeners, here's another Bloomberg podcast you might enjoy: Merryn Talks Money. It's hosted by senior columnist Merryn Somerset Webb and every week aims to explain how markets work – and how you can make them work for you. Every episode features a relaxed but in-depth conversation with a fund manager, a strategist, a Bloomberg expert or just someone Merryn finds particularly interesting in any given week. Listen in for the kind of insights and explanations everyone can use to help them make better saving and investing choices. This week Merryn speaks to GMO's Jeremy Grantham. Listen to part of the conversation here and the whole thing on the Merryn Talks Money feed.

Enjoy Merryn Talks Money on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/merryn-talks-money/id1654809850

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The troubles facing highly indebted property developers in China have dominated conversations about the Asian nation’s economy and markets this year. Yet according to Rayliant Global Advisors’ Jason Hsu, there’s an important distinction between this housing crisis and previous ones elsewhere: The developers are the ones who are over-leveraged—not households. And that difference is guiding policymakers’ response.

Hsu, chief investment officer of Rayliant and a co-founder of Research Affiliates, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss China and other emerging markets. 

“Chinese households are not levered when it comes to real estate,” he says. “They’re not levered because they can buy their first home with money down—and they pay quite a bit money down—and they generally have to sort of have enough income to cover the payment. That bankruptcy you’re seeing in the developer sector is very engineered. On the household side, there’s not a balance-sheet crisis, because they’re not buying real estate on leverage. So they really don’t think there’s a meaningful problem there.”

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When it comes to the US Federal Reserve’s campaign to crush inflation by raising interest rates, Morgan Stanley Chief US Economist Ellen Zentner says this: “I have a strong view that they’re done here—but they have left the door open.”

Zentner joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the Fed’s decision this week to pause rate hikes, and what she expects of monetary policy and the US economy going forward. Cooling inflation should keep the central bank on hold until it’s ready to cut rates next year, she says. In the near term, a potential government shutdown by Republicans would bolster the case for maintaining the status quo at the Fed’s November meeting. A shutdown, she explains, would leave policymakers without all of the economic data they need to make a decision.

“In monetary-policy making, uncertainty tends to lead to policy paralysis,” Zentner says. “If we’re lacking data that the Fed can officially sink its teeth into, then that’s going to lead to an inability to make a decision about the path for rates.”

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A few years ago, an editor asked Bloomberg investigative reporter Zeke Faux to take a look at the cryptocurrency Tether, a so-called stablecoin meant to precisely track the US dollar by backing it with real-world reserves. What followed was a tour through some of the most-colorful corners of the crypto world, from Mighty Ducks actor Brock Pierce’s yacht to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s digs in the Bahamas and, finally, a hotbed for human trafficking in Cambodia.

Faux joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss his reporting, which is laid out in his new book Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. 

“There's actually these whole office towers, floor after floor of people who've been lured from, say, like Vietnam, with the offer of a good job,” Faux says. “Then when they get there, they're trapped. They're told they can't leave. They're beaten. They get electric shocks, other forms of torture, and they're just given like 10 phones each and made to try to lure people into scams from around the world.”

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From artificial intelligence to electric vehicles and travel stocks, some of the previously hot equity-market themes have borne the brunt of the selling during the market’s dip in August and September. Sylvia Jablonski, chief executive of Defiance ETFs LLC, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss why that is. She also makes the case for buying the dip. 

“Everyone kind of panics, sells off tech, sells off growth and goes back into cash, cash equivalents, staples and kind of the defensive types of plays,” Jablonski explains. But “these are actually great opportunities, especially if you’re a young person investing for the long term. These are amazing opportunities to dollar-cost average. That’s how I would characterize this market this year.”

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There’s a lot of excitement around AI-focused stocks right now, but market veteran Art Hogan urges caution when it comes to companies that are just trying to take advantage of the hype without having true ties to the industry. 

The chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how he views the artificial intelligence investment landscape, as well as other market trends.

“If we start to see the capital markets open, and we start to have a flood of newly minted companies that are AI-specific or adjacent, I would avoid that at all costs because they likely don’t have models,” he says.

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Matt Levine, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion who writes the Bloomberg newsletter Money Stuff, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss some of the hot finance topics he’s been covering and what he means when he says “everything is securities fraud.”

“I have a genre of stories called ‘everything is securities fraud,’ which is where public companies do random bad things and people sue them for securities fraud,” Levine says. “It’s indicative of this really big, interesting trend in American securities laws where everything gets sort of reflected—all conduct gets reflected—through the notion of securities fraud because it’s easy to bring cases and the damages can be really large. And so you can like litigate, you can fight over, all sorts of political and social issues by calling them securities fraud.”

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Crypto fanatics have been pining for a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund for a decade now. But as the applications piled up, US regulators repeatedly declined to approve one, citing the risk of fraud and market manipulation in cryptocurrency markets.

But with the entrance of BlackRock Inc. into the race, many market watchers are hopeful that one or more spot-Bitcoin ETFs will finally get the go-ahead. After all, the world’s largest asset manager has a strong track record of getting funds past regulatory roadblocks. On this week’s episode of the What Goes Up podcast, Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart from Bloomberg Intelligence join to discuss how BlackRock’s application dramatically changes the outlook for Bitcoin ETFs.

“When they filed, it was a whole different ballgame in my opinion,” says Balchunas. “The fact is they generally like to bring a gun to a knife fight. This is a firm who doesn’t like to lose, who knows what they're doing, and they must see something.”

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From the renewed and growing power of American organized labor to the case for minting a $1 trillion coin to end debt-ceiling brinkmanship once and for all, Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast has tried to tackle some of the most important topics related to the economy and financial markets. From Modern Monetary Theory to Bidenomics, the show hasn’t found a topic it can’t chew on.

Now, the podcast’s hosts get the chance to answer some questions instead of asking them. Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal joined the What Goes Up podcast to give their takes on some of the hot-button issues of the day.   

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The price of gold tends to do well in times of elevated uncertainty about economies and financial systems—something the world has seen a lot of in the past few years. Yet each time the precious metal rallies above $2,000 an ounce, it quickly falls back below that threshold.

Why is that? Joe Cavatoni, strategist at the World Gold Council, joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain what drives the price of gold, what buyers need to know and why that magic number has served as a ceiling. One main reason, he says, is that when prices go that high, they tend to reduce the real-world demand for gold—including from buyers of jewelry in China and India.

“These are price-sensitive businesses and price-sensitive consumers,” Cavatoni says. “So when you start seeing those types of price levels develop, that’s when you see those types of consumers back away from buying—and investors aren’t ready to step back in in the long-term.”

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A rallying stock market and better-than-expected second-quarter economic growth are just the latest developments pointing Wall Street skeptics to the possibility of a US “soft landing.” That’s where the Federal Reserve gets inflation back down to around 2% without triggering a downturn.

For more than a year, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has waged war on inflation while a chorus of adamant recession predictions has fallen flat. But even now, with inflation cooling and the economy looking to be on the glidepath, some big names remain uncertain that he can pull it off. Vanguard Group is one of them.

Joseph Davis, the firm’s global chief economist and head of its Investment Strategy Group, joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain why that is, as well as offer his reaction to the latest interest-rate increase and give his outlook for the bond market. 

“To get inflation down that last yard to 2%, you have to see a modest weakening in the labor market, which means the unemployment rate’s going to rise—although hopefully not drastically, let’s say four-and-a-half percent over the next year,” he says. “Well, that’s a hundred basis-point rise. So by definition, that is a recession. Now, anyone who thinks that that’s a soft landing is spitting in the face of 150 years of history.”

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A slow-motion crisis is unfolding in the global commercial real-estate market, thanks to the double-whammy of higher interest rates and lower demand for office space following the Covid-19 pandemic.

John Fish, who is head of the construction firm Suffolk, chair of the Real Estate Roundtable think tank and former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the problems facing the sector and what’s being done to help.  

“The biggest problem right now is the capital markets nationally have frozen,” he says of the US. “And the reason why they’ve frozen is because nobody understands value. We can’t evaluate price discovery because very few assets have traded during this period of time. Nobody understands where bottom is.”

One step in the right direction, he says, is recent guidance from federal regulators that allows lenders more flexibility when it comes to borrowers who need to refinance properties.

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US Federal Reserve officials have been adamant that they’re looking to get inflation levels back down to 2%. But the path to that goal could bring pain to millions of workers, a possible trade-off that “doesn’t make sense,” according to Rick Rieder, BlackRock Inc.’s chief investment officer of global fixed income.

“This whole idea of there’s a magic to 2% doesn’t make any sense to me. You just had immense stimulus—let it play out,” he says on this week’s episode of the What Goes Up podcast. “Interest rates—how much would you have to move them to get the unemployment rate to a level to slow wages? It’s not worth it. Why would you take millions of people out of work because you need to go from 2.7% to 2%?” He called the Fed goal a search for “mystical perfection.” BlackRock manages about $2.7 trillion in fixed-income assets for its clients.

Rieder adds that the segment of the population that gets hurt by higher inflation is the one that would bear the brunt of any potential layoffs. Meanwhile, raising rates creates an income benefit to wealthier people who tend to be savers, he says. “It’s illogical to me.”

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Global shifts in incomes and populations, geopolitics and the climate crisis are combining to drastically alter the outlook for the world’s food supply. Taimur Hyat, chief operating officer for asset manager PGIM, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss his research into the changing world of food and what opportunities and risks it all presents to investors.  

“We think food is where the energy sector and this whole talk about energy transition was about 10 years ago,” Hyat says. “We are like 10 years behind in the thinking. And it’s going to catch up with us, because the current food system is simply not fit for purpose. It is not going to work for our planet, it’s not going to work for our consumption needs for a variety of reasons.”

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The disconnect between a roaring stock market and stubborn recession predictions has left many investors scratching their heads. The equity strategists at Bloomberg Intelligence however have an intriguing explanation: Maybe the part of the economic downdraft most likely to impact stocks started last year, and the worst could already be over.

That’s what an economic-regime model suggests, according to BI Chief Equity Strategist Gina Martin Adams and her team. She joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain how the model works, and offer her mid-year update on the market.

The model uses month-over-month changes in capacity utilization, continuing jobless claims, ISM Manufacturing data and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment level to define the economy’s health. “This indicator started suggesting there were economic risks emerging for the equity market as early as June of last year,” Martin Adams says. “And then it hit just an outright low level, like a low that you never see outside of recession. We effectively had this big loss of momentum in the economy that impacted the equity market—extremely negatively—between June and December.”

She says that, by the model’s measure, the economy still isn’t out of the woods. “It’s still terrible. The reading is awful. It suggests we may actually still be in some form of an economic correction or recession, but it’s off of the low,” Martin Adams says. “So this is what’s really meaningful for price direction: As we know, equity prices are driven by shifts in momentum.”

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While in some places life has mostly gotten back to normal following the Covid-19 pandemic, there are aspects of economies and markets that may have been altered permanently. Jared Gross, the head of institutional portfolio strategy at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss his team’s research into the post-pandemic landscape.  

According to Gross, some of the most-important legacies of the global health crisis will be disruptions to trade practices and the reaction of central banks to volatility in markets. Some highlights of the conversation:

“It’s a rewiring of trade. The big pipe between China and the developed markets is being split apart. There’s a lot of reshoring, onshoring, friendshoring, nearshoring—all of that stuff is going on, and it’s a real thing, and it’s going to change the way trade happens,” Gross said.  

Another big change is that investors can’t expect the US Federal Reserve to come to the rescue when markets wobble, he says. “The central bank put, which everyone used to talk about, has probably been replaced with a fiscal put. If you’re looking for a backstop for market volatility, you probably can’t depend on the monetary authorities as much as you used to, because they now have to be very careful given the amount of fiscal stimulus in the economy. They can’t just cut rates because stocks go down. They can’t just cut rates because a bank is wobbling.”

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Enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has powered a breakneck rally in US equities this year, far overshadowing the US Federal Reserve’s campaign to raise interest rates. So how should investors sort out the fundamentals from the hype?

Mark Baribeau, the head of global equity at PGIM’s Jennison Associates, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how he’s viewing the opportunity. He’s the lead manager of the PGIM Jennison Global Opportunities Fund, which is beating 99% of its peers with a more-than 30% gain so far in 2023. 

“The infrastructure layer that allows for this accelerated computing to go on is the way to play AI right now. Because we’re in the R&D phase, the applications are just getting developed,” Baribeau says. “Nvidia is an easy example. We kind of refer to their earnings release on May 24 as the ‘Big Bang’ because, in my history of doing growth equities since the ‘90s, I’ve never seen a company raise guidance for a quarter by $4 billion. That’s unprecedented.”

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According to Seema Shah, the chief global strategist for Principal Asset Management, the US economy will enter a recession, likely at the end of this year. Though she says it could be mild and short-lived.

Shah joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss why she thinks there will be a downturn, and why it could last just two quarters.

Earnings have come down and could continue to do so, she says, which may “weigh on asset prices.” And while the labor market looks strong right now, she warns that it’s a lagging indicator and could weaken fairly quickly. 

“I know a lot of people out there who are expecting recession—they expect it to come in Q3. I look at the labor market, the strength of it, and I say that that's almost impossible,” Shah says. “By Q4, we would expect fairly mild negative growth, and then in Q1, a deeper downturn. But then by Q2, this is back to recovery. So this is historically a very short recession and historically a very, very mild recession.”

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Artificial intelligence is all the rage on Wall Street. Some strategists see AI trends driving further gains for stocks as others point to how big banks are beginning to use it to automate some jobs. MarketReader, founded by Jens Nordvig, is leveraging AI to analyze US equity market trends and help predict why a stock might be moving a certain way. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how he sees AI helping investors digest information at a faster pace.

“What’s happened this year is that actually applying AI has become so much easier than it was six months ago.” Nordvig says. “Our original plan was more focused on structural modeling, traditional fundamental modeling. But we’ve really seen how this actually allows us to do stuff that we just can’t do with traditional models.”

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Investing in farmland has historically offered an attractive and stable source of returns, yet it’s not an easy asset class for most investors to access. Carter Malloy founded a platform called AcreTrader in an effort to make it easier to purchase fractional ownership of a farm. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss some of the benefits and risks of this type of farmland investing. 

“You don’t have big, huge up years and huge down years that you do across so many other mainstream asset classes,” Malloy says. “So the consistency of the returns and that relative lack of volatility—in investor speak, the Sharpe ratio—of farmland can be very, very attractive.”

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A lot of investors are sitting on piles of cash. In fact, J.P. Morgan Wealth Management estimates its clients are more overweight with cash now than they’ve been in a decade. 

But attractive buying opportunities could be lurking, including in fixed income, US mid-cap stocks and European equities, according to Chief Investment Strategist Tom Kennedy. 

He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss corners of the market—in the US and abroad—that look enticing. He also talks about how Europe managed to avoid a recession, and why the US Federal Reserve is likely done with its hiking campaign, among other things. 

“Cash very rarely outperforms, and it takes a long time for rates to go up, but they can come down really fast,” he said. “The last seven business cycles, when you have the last rate hike from the Fed, in the two years after that, cash tends to underperform duration assets.”

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As the US government debt-ceiling standoff heats up and markets grow more volatile, veteran Loomis Sayles & Co. portfolio manager Elaine Stokes has some advice for investors in the corporate-bond market: Get ready to buy.

Stokes joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the opportunities the drama in Washington may create, the potential for a credit crunch stemming from regional-bank turmoil, and how high-yield bonds may not be as risky as they seem, given recession concerns.  

“The volatility that I think we’re going to have over the next couple weeks is going to be the opportunity. So take advantage of that opportunity to buy a little further out the curve, to buy low dollar-price bonds, to build in real return for a long time,” she said on the podcast. With regard to high-yield bonds, she added: “I don’t believe that this time around it’s going to be the traditional high-yield market that’s going to see the big wave of defaults. That is going to happen in either the bank-loan market or the private market. That’s where the weaker issuance has come, the lower-quality issuance. So the traditional high-yield market is actually setting up to look pretty attractive.”

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Brace for a US recession to start next quarter and worsen at the end of the year, and don’t bet on the Federal Reserve to react immediately to prop up growth. That’s according to Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo & Co. She joined the What Goes Up podcast to give her appraisal of the economy, and discuss what to expect for the rest of 2023.

“It’s likely to be kind of more of a slow drag in terms of economic activity, just given that we also don’t think the Fed’s going to be riding to the rescue as soon as you do see that weakness,” she said on the podcast. “The nature of the inflation that we’re seeing right now, we think that the Fed’s actually going to be pretty reluctant to ease policy even as the economy is entering a recession.”

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While the drama surrounding regional US banks has largely subsided following the failure of three lenders in March, that doesn’t mean the ripple effects of Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes are over. This is according to Que Nguyen, chief investment officer of equities at Research Affiliates, who joined the What Goes Up podcast to give her outlook on markets and talk about why she doesn’t foresee a soft landing for the economy.

“When the Fed raises rates and it breaks something, it rarely happens that it’s a very small break,” she says. “Usually it’s a very big break. And so while I’d never thought that we would get to a great-financial-crisis level of breakdown, I do believe—and I did believe, and I still believe—that there would be more things that break. Whether that continued to be in the small regional banks or whether that bled over to something else such as real estate lending, private credit—definitely those dangers still remain out there.”

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Runaway inflation. Surging interest rates. Bank failures. For a while it seemed like all of these issues would combine to trigger a US recession. Not so fast, says Morgan Stanley’s Seth Carpenter, the bank’s global chief economist. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain why there are signs the US could experience a “soft landing” that averts a major economic downturn. 

“It seems hard to avoid the fact that the US economy is going to slow down, and part of the reason why that’s hard to avoid is because that is absolutely, categorically, by design the Fed’s objective,” he said. “We think they’re looking carefully at the data and asking, ‘Do we have enough evidence that things are slowing down a lot, but not yet crashing?’ Because that’s what they’re looking for in order to stop the hiking cycle. So we think the last hike is in May, when there’ll be more evidence of a slowdown, but not yet evidence that things have actually fallen off of a cliff.” 

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Troy Gayeski, chief market strategist at FS Investments, says don’t wait until May to flee the stock market rally—get out now. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain why he’s expecting the S&P 500 to bottom out at around 3,200, a roughly 22% drop from current levels.

“First of all, the strongest rallies have always been in bear markets,” he says. “Usually they’re driven by technical factors. And then there’s a narrative that’s put together to justify it: the more recent one was that inflation’s going to slow enough that the Fed won’t have to hike anymore, and then we’re going to have a recession and somehow that’s going to cause the Fed to cut rapidly. But recessions aren’t bad for revenue or earnings? It really makes very little sense.”

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It’s not just the prospect of deteriorating fundamentals that has Man Group’s Mark Jones skeptical about stocks these days. It’s also the risk of money flowing into fixed-income investments now that they’re sporting attractive yields. Jones, who is the deputy chief executive of the world’s largest publicly traded hedge-fund manager, joined the What Goes Up podcast to give his outlook on markets and explain what strategies have been working well at his firm.

“I think the risk-reward in equities is very, very tough at the moment,” he says. The first reason is a potential further cut in earnings expectations. Second is the flow of money into alternatives to stocks such as government bonds and corporate credit. “Whether that’s the consumer or whether that’s big institutional clients starting to come back to an asset class that, frankly, had fallen relatively out of favor, some of that flow of funds is also an issue for equities as just people move money around.”

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If there’s one thing that keeps professional investors up at night, it’s being involved in a “crowded trade.” In other words, a position that’s become so popular that there are few investors left to get involved with it, so there’s risk of painful losses for all if the crowd heads for the exits.

That’s part of the appeal of microcap stocks for Patrick McDonough, a portfolio manager at PGIM Quantitative Solutions. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain his approach to analyzing these smaller, younger companies whose values are often measured in millions, rather than billions, of dollars. Since many investors are more comfortable with bigger, more-established companies, microcaps offer a unique and overlooked source of growth.

“It’s something that people have historically avoided,” McDonough says. “Which means it’s not crowded. So it’s an area we can go in and get a lot of upside.”

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When Steve Sosnick recalls 2008 and tries to make parallels to the current turmoil in the banking sector, one memory sticks out: riding the elevator with Thomas Peterffy, founder of Interactive Brokers, who offhandedly asked him “what’s new?”

“And I said, ‘what’s really interesting to me is the story that I’m reading this morning about how Bear Stearns may have as much as $20 billion in losses at some of their hedge funds,” recalled Sosnick, who’s currently chief strategist at Interactive. “And he said, ‘what’s their market cap?’ And I said, ‘I think about $20 billion.’”

“‘Are you telling me Bear Stearns is broke?’” Peterffy asked. Sosnick recalls saying, “‘I guess I am, aren’t I?’”

Sosnick joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss what lessons from the 2008 financial crisis can be applied today. Though the current predicament isn’t similar to that period—banks are in much stronger positions and the economic backdrop is vastly different—it’s important to keep lessons learned in mind, he says. 

“They say history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes,” Sosnick says. “And I think there’s a certain rhyme to it, but we’re not there yet. And I certainly hope we don’t get there.”

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Torsten Slok had been firmly in the “no landing” camp of economists. More positive than a “soft landing,” its adherents say the Federal Reserve will tame inflation without triggering a recession at all. But for Slok, chief economist of Apollo Global Management, that all changed with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Now he’s bracing for a “hard landing.”

Slok joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the sizeable role regional banks play in the US economy, and the reasons why SVB’s collapse changed his outlook. A big reason is how regional banks may now change their behavior.

“Regional banks make up 30% of assets and roughly 40% of all lending,” he explains. That big chunk of the US banking sector is now looking at what happened to SVB and worrying what comes next. With a slowdown potentially underway thanks to the central bank’s rate hikes, Slok warns a reluctance to lend by SVB’s mid-size brethren might mean it comes “faster simply because of this banking situation.”

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Jeremy Grantham blames the US Federal Reserve for creating a bubble in asset prices—one he says has a long way to go before it’s fully deflated. As a result, stock prices may not reach bottom until late next year, he warns.

The 84-year-old co-founder of investment firm GMO joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain what he calls the current, “meat grinder” phase of the market, and why he believes the central bank has “hardly gotten anything right.”  

“Since Alan Greenspan first arrived—Paul Volcker knew what he was doing—but since then it’s been a long, continuous horror show,” Grantham says of US monetary policy. “They’ve engaged in policies that drive up the prices of assets, other things being even, and create spectacular overpriced bubbles. They then break because that’s what bubbles have to do. They simply break of their own extreme overpricing, and we pay a very tough price.”

Grantham also discusses broader market risks, including shortages of labor and natural resources, the climate crisis, de-globalization and a new version of the Cold War. “All of these long-term factors are beginning to bite,” he says. “This will make this particular down-leg more dangerous, and perhaps worse than we anticipated.”

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Princeton University’s Alan Blinder is one of the most prominent economists to have expressed optimism that the Federal Reserve can engineer a so-called “soft landing” for the US economy—taming inflation without triggering a recession.

But Blinder, who served in the 1990s as a vice chair of the Fed and a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, explains on this episode of What Goes Up why he’s toned down his assessment. A big reason is the change in the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusts inflation data for seasonal factors, he says. The result is that, while inflation moderated in the second half of 2022, it didn’t cool off as quickly as previous data indicated.

Blinder says that means there’s reason to expect more rate hikes from the Fed. “I think they still have a chance” at a soft landing, he concludes, “but it's a tougher chance than it was.”

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Exchange-traded fund managers have seen massive inflows into fixed-income ETFs in recent months. As the dust settles from the bond market’s worst year on record, ETFs focused on safe and simple Treasuries have attracted the bulk of the money. Stephen Laipply, the US head of fixed income ETFs at BlackRock, explains this state of affairs on the latest episode of the What Goes Up podcast.

Many investors who follow a standard strategy of investing 60% of their portfolio in stocks and 40% in bonds have found it to be the right time to “fix” that 40% segment, Laipply says. “Investors are looking at this market, the public fixed-income markets, and realizing that they can ‘fix’ their 40 by de-risking it to varying degrees,” he says. “You don’t have to have the majority in high yield to get a certain yield target. You can allocate to the front end of the Treasury curve and get yields that you were seeing at some point in the high-yield market. So it really is an opportunity to get back to what that 40 was supposed to do, which is diversify your risk assets.”

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The stock market may be off to a great start in 2023, but investors should be “mindful about not being bullied” by the rally, says Wealth Enhancement Group’s Nicole Webb.

She warns that it won’t last.

The S&P 500 is up 7% so far this year, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 has surged roughly 15%. Webb, a senior vice president and financial adviser at the firm, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss her views on the market and the speediness of the recovery.

“To us fundamentally, does technology make sense from a valuation standpoint?” she said. “Much of this rally in mega-technology—or if you even want to just call it a Nasdaq rally year to date—it’s a little bit of an unwinding of the selloff of last year, probably closely followed by a bit of a FOMO rally.”

“We’re not bullish on the stickiness of this as we don’t see any type of Fed pivot” from rate hikes in the near term.

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ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm, spurring all manner of experiments and examination as to what extent the artificial-intelligence model can supplant humans and daily tasks. But it’s also being used on Wall Street, where a number of exchange-traded fund issuers, including State Street, have grasped onto the concept to help put together innovative products. 

Matt Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas Research at State Street Global Advisors, joined the What Goes Up podcast to talk about using AI in portfolio construction. His firm’s SPDR S&P Kensho New Economies Composite ETF is up roughly 20% this year. 

“The reason why we went down this path of using AI is that we wanted something forward looking—something dynamic—because back in 2018, we understood that, in the ETF world, there weren’t a lot of strategies that were this forward-looking, innovative-type paradigm,” Bartolini said. “The AI process was able to deliver that for us.” 

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Morgan Stanley’s Jim Caron joined the What Goes Up podcast to dissect this week’s US Federal Reserve meeting and analyze how markets may have misinterpreted the message being sent by Chair Jerome Powell.

“This is a guy who’s worried about inflation; this is somebody who’s not done tightening by any stretch of the imagination,” said Caron, the co-chief investment officer of Global Balanced Funds at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. But Powell’s comments triggered rallies in stocks and bonds amid speculation that the central bank was getting more dovish. “This is one of the risks that I think that we have coming up over the next few weeks,” Caron said. “That if the intended market reaction doesn’t match what the intended statement was supposed to convey, then, as is typical, there’s going to be some walking back of this.”

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The rare bright spots for investing last year were those strategies that follow trends in markets rather than fundamentals. This successful approach included the AlphaSimplex Managed Futures Strategy Fund, which returned more than 32% for the year. Kathryn Kaminski, chief research strategist and portfolio manager at AlphaSimplex Group, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss her firm’s strategies, and what she’s expecting in 2023. 

“We do really well when there’s massive trends, when there’s dislocation, when things are uncomfortable,” she says. “And last year was definitely uncomfortable, particularly fixed income.”

One development she expects may make investors uncomfortable this year is the likelihood that inflation bottoms out at around 4%, rather than the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. At that point, Kaminski says, “the Fed either has to say, ‘well, we’re no longer going to try’ or ‘we’re going to have to keep trying.’ And people are not going to like that either. So I think that that’s the challenge.”

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The stock market got off to a roaring start this year with the S&P 500 at one point clocking a year-to-date gain of more than 4%. Truist Wealth Co-Chief Investment Officer Keith Lerner, however, is skeptical of the New Year bounce. He says the possibility of a recession and dwindling liquidity make the rally unsustainable. 

Lerner joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain why he’s advising clients to take a defensive posture with investments, and what he believes is the best way to execute that strategy. “Being defensive from a stock, bonds and cash perspective is being overweight fixed income relative to equities. And then—in the fixed-income component—keeping it simple: keeping it with high-quality fixed income and not really taking a lot of credit risk at this point.”

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Get ready for some bad earnings-season news. That’s the call from Savita Subramanian, the head of equity and quantitative strategy at Bank of America, who is expecting a 10% drop in earnings that will likely keep a lid on the S&P 500 in 2023.

She joined the What Goes Up podcast to give her outlook for the market and explain why she thinks analysts’ earnings estimates are too high: “We are going to see those estimates come down, and it's likely to happen after companies guide more aggressively lower around 2023 earnings. I think where we're going to see pressures are in companies with more labor intensity, like services companies, companies where you're really seeing cost pressure remain high. Those are the areas where we think that we're going to see some downward guidance on margins.” 

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The US Federal Reserve’s commitment to higher interest rates and the potential for a recession in 2023 will combine to damage corporate earnings—damage that likely will cause the stock market to revisit its bear-market lows, warns Jurrien Timmer, director of global macro at Fidelity Investments.  

Timmer joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss his outlook for the year, and explain why he thinks bonds will resume their role as a source of protection for investors in balanced portfolios. His take on stocks? This year “is going be kind of a choppy, sideways market where we’re going to revisit the lows maybe once or twice as the fear grows that there’s an earnings wave coming.”

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Before his FTX cryptocurrency empire collapsed, many of Sam Bankman-Fried’s public statements indicated that he made decisions “as though he had no risk aversion,” according to Victor Haghani, the founder and chief investment officer of Elm Partners Management and a co-founder of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund. 

Haghani joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how Bankman-Fried’s tolerance for risk made him highly unusual under the “theory of choice under uncertainty,” and how the causes of FTX’s implosion differ from what triggered the failure of LTCM. Haghani also discusses his own approach to assessing risk when investing client assets at Elm Partners. (Note: This episode was recorded in early December, before Bankman-Fried was indicted for his alleged role in FTX’s failure.)

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The decades-long trend of globalization has come to an end and the fracturing of geopolitics will have huge implications for capital markets and investing in 2023, according to strategists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Jared Gross, head of institutional portfolio strategy at JPMorgan Asset Management, joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss how everything from supply chains to industrial policy, energy and defense will feel the impact.

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Don’t expect volatile equity-market swings to go away when the calendar flips to 2023, says Edward Jones senior investment strategist Mona Mahajan, who advises focusing on defensive and value stocks in the new year. But there is hope for later in the year, she says, when the market will be looking forward to lower inflation and a stabilizing US economy.

Mahajan joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss her outlook for next year and assess the market’s reaction to the latest message from the Federal Reserve to expect higher interest rates for longer. 

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Bonds are back—and they appear to be the preferred asset class as we head into the uncertain economic environment in 2023, according to Gargi Chaudhuri, head of investment strategy for the Americas at BlackRock’s iShares unit. She joined this week’s What Goes Up podcast to talk about her 2023 outlook, next week’s policy decision by the Federal Reserve and the appeal of not only safe Treasuries but some riskier mortgage securities.

“It is so exciting, I think, to be in a world where there are some incredible opportunities staying very high in quality, short in duration, in the fixed-income markets,” she said. 

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Expectations that inflation will normalize to near 2% in the near term will “end in tears,” according to Vincent Deluard, the director of global macro strategy at brokerage StoneX Financial. He contends growth in consumer prices will remain closer to 5% for about a decade. Deluard joined the latest episode of the What Goes Up podcast to explain why he believes inflation will remain stubbornly high and what that would mean for markets. He also reveals what he calls “Silicon Valley’s Seven Deadly Sins.”

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The implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire dealt a harsh blow to the Bahamas’ ambitions to be a hub for the crypto industry, and it’s causing massive pain for locals who treated the now-bankrupt exchange like a bank.

Stephane Ouellette, chief executive of Toronto-based crypto firm FRNT Financial, traveled to the Bahamas to assess the fallout from the collapse. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the bankruptcy’s effect on the island nation it called home, as well as the impact the scandal is having on his business and the entire market.

“FTX was positioning [itself] as a banking alternative, particularly in regions where they operated—like the Bahamas,” Ouellette said. “So there’s even more horror stories of people treating FTX like bank-like infrastructure, and therefore leaving a significant amount of their assets just latent on FTX. Now they can’t get access to them, just like everybody else.”

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