Bond king for the post-Gross world, exposer of WSJ conspiracies, and man who showed up at Sohn dressed in a Jack Nicholson Joker costume, Jeff Gundlach, is a guy who knows it all, ok?
Jeff is one of those annoying people who tries to couch everything – and I do mean everything – in terms of something he’s supposedly said at one time or another.
I could give you countless examples of that, but I’ll just cite a couple of random ones from 2018 to make the point. Back in March, ol’ Jeff was opining on stocks and bonds as he’s wont to do from time to time when he’s not too busy regaling his social media followers with tales of conspiracies and fake news.
Jeff — through careful introspection and consultation with his proprietary models — had come to a truly unique conclusion about 10Y yields and equities. This was his conclusion:
My idea that the S&P would go down on the year would become an extraordinarily strong conviction as the 10-year starts to make an accelerated move above 3 percent.
“My idea.” Because no one else had thought of that. It was his idea. Trademark, copyright, Gundlach.
Then, a couple of weeks later, he showed up on CNBC to remind you just how “right” he’s been about, well, about everything, whether it’s yields, equities, the VIX and even Bitcoin. In one particularly ridiculous soundbite, Gundlach claimed to have learned pretty much everything there is to know about the Great Depression when he was in elementary school.
He also knows that when it comes to technical analysis, it’s best to take a Brian Fantana approach –“60% of the time, it works every time.”
Fast forward to Tuesday and Gundlach – who is omniscient unless what you’re asking is whether that’s a $15 bottle of Shiraz or a fine Bordeaux, in which case you can dupe him out of a cool million – held another one of his DoubleLine webcasts and it was predictably chock-full of observations that exactly no one would describe as any semblance of profound.
Apparently, the media is going to zoom in on his analysis of the deteriorating U.S. fiscal position.
“It’s pretty much unprecedented that we’re seeing this level debt expansion so late in an economic cycle,” Jeff mused, adding that “increasing the size of the deficit while we’re raising interest rates almost seems like a suicide mission.”
Yes, what we’re doing “almost seems like a suicide mission.”
And Jeff is a guy who knows something about “suicide missions” because what would you call dressing like this in public?
Anyway, this is just another example of Gundlach reiterating what everyone else has been saying for months and managing to somehow grab headlines by repeating it. Invariably, he’ll show up on TV a couple of months from now and figure out a way to tacitly suggest that he was the first one to sound the alarm.
To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with reiterating things other people have said (hell, I do it all the time).
It’s just that every once in a while, it would be fantastic if he would maybe offer up something unique so that everyone else can capitalize off his “very good brain” on the way to becoming rich enough to accidentally spend $1 million on fake wine.
Hell, I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on the guy. After all, he’s just a non-combative “scorpion” in search of “good, truth-loving souls”…
