On Monday, stater of all things obvious, 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, appeared on CNBC and delivered exactly what this market didn’t need.
In what is becoming a daily tradition, relative overnight stability was shattered when dawn broke on a new day in the U.S., with the first two blows coming from more lackluster U.S. economic data and a tweet from the President, who literally screamed “fire” in a crowded theatre, taking to Twitter to not-at-all-calmly explain that “the outside world is blowing up around us, Paris is burning and China is way down.”
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Stocks attempted to recover from that even as healthcare, one of the few bright spots in 2018, crumbled under the weight of the Obamacare ruling.
Enter Jeff Gundlach.
Jeff is one of our favorite punching bags and to explain why, we’ll just quote ourselves from a post published last week. To wit, from our recap of his latest webcast:
I guess I wouldn’t be so hard on Jeff were it not for how incorrigible he is and were it not for the fact that he has an extremely pernicious habit of showing up on TV and basically just rehashing what’s been going on, only in an overtly condescending tone.
Every, single time he’s on CNBC it feels like you’re watching the news only with an anchor who is talking down to you and otherwise berating you for no discernible reason.
Well by God, Jeff did all of that again today on CNBC.
Instead of letting Jeff effectively co-host the network’s “Halftime Report”, Scott Wapner instead sat opposite Gundlach and conducted what amounted to an interview, although it would have been infinitely more fun had Jeff sent R2-D2 over to the CNBC studios to project his hologram self onto the set to deliver his bearish prognostications like Princess Leia sending out a distress call. Here’s what transpired:
Again, exactly none of that is what the market needed today. Here’s a Cliff’s Notes guide:
(Bloomberg)
That checks all the boxes. Jeff called for a worsening of the trade war, said the Fed shouldn’t raise rates, said we’re in a long-term bear market, told you to go to cash (“short-term, high quality bonds”), told you that 2019 will be all about “preservation” and then, in the final insult, told you that your SPY is a piece of sh*t.
You can thank Jeff for this:
(Bloomberg)
Hopefully, Gundlach is done for the day, but given his penchant for self-promotion, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he hopped on the phone to Reuters to tell them how the BBB apocalypse is coming.
Bring back Bill Gross!
Not to defend Gundlach on this but a a certain point a simplified explanation is really in order.. The Biorhythm of this market points to down any way you massage it and excessively complicating events does not make one correct in the Analysis(re. Kocic post over the weekend);
Neither the Fed nor the Whitehouse need help in attempts to muddy the waters as they appear expert enough to suit us all.
Kocic didn’t say anything like you’re suggesting. If you think he did, you didn’t understand the post. In fact, what he said was that what you’re seeing in markets is the natural result of the Fed’s convexity management efforts prizing stability in the long end over the equity market. Look at 10Y yields today. Any questions?
Also: the reason you get a “simplified explanation” from Gundlach, is because that’s all he’s willing/capable of providing, apparently.
Don’t get fascinated with these people just because they’re on TV. I can sit in a chair and tell you that Bitcoin crashed and that the S&P is probably going to go lower before it hits new highs.
It also helps that simply by saying that, Gundlach can ensure that his call comes true. “I think the S&P is going lower” —-> S&P goes lower on Gundlach comments —-> Gundlach was right.
Same as: “I predict I’m going to eat turkey tonight —> gets in car, goes to store, buys turkey, makes sandwich —-> I was right.