Jeff Gundlach Delivers Surprisingly Cogent CNBC Interview, Calls Out Fed, Trump Administration

On Monday, Jeff Gundlach showed up at Sohn and regaled the audience with a series of intentionally inflammatory remarks about the crowded Democratic primary field.

“Now, Joe [Biden] is grabbing the spotlight … but no, Joe, I don’t want your hands on my shoulders”, Jeff said, on the way to calling Beto O’Rourke a “snowflake” and branding Elizabeth Warren “the mother-in-law from hell”.

“I say short them all”, Gundlach (who left his Jack Nicholson Joker costume in the closet this year) concluded.

But Jeff didn’t just want to cast aspersions at Democrats. He also took the opportunity to suggest that investors should bet on a surge in rates vol. with a straddle on the pedestrian iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF.

“I think this is an extremely compelling time to do this trade and an extremely important environment where outcomes are so binary”, Gundlach remarked.

“I can just see the CBOE guys cranking the vol on the series he mentioned”, one trader quipped Tuesday. “I should probably go offer it”.

Fast forward 24 hours and Jeff showed up on CNBC wearing somebody’s couch for an “exclusive” interview with the network’s Scott Wapner. The two men chatted on a roof made out of grass.

Weighing in on the latest trade escalation, Gundlach called it an example of “an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.” Surprisingly, Jeff didn’t claim to have coined that phrase.

As you can see, Gundlach also put the odds of the US ratcheting up the tariff rate on $200 billion in Chinese goods this Friday at around “50%”. You’d be forgiven for suggesting that’s not exactly a bold call, considering the USTR literally said the US will in fact implement the higher tariffs at 12:01 AM on May 10.

If you’re wondering whether Jeff still thinks we’re “in a bear market” (as he famously proclaimed in December during another interview with Wapner that arguably caused a grievous swoon in stocks), the answer is “of course”.

Incredibly – and we’ll give credit where it’s due – Jeff’s subsequent comments were generally spot-on. Here’s a bit about the economy which, again, is pretty cogent if you can get past the part where he implicitly suggests that the 5s30s is something that only he pays attention to:

After that, Gundlach delivered an almost flawless critique of Trumpian economic balderdash and the inherent absurdity of talking up the economy while simultaneously demanding rate cuts. Do note in the clip below how Jeff explicitly calls Trump and his surrogates out for effectively pushing modern monetary theory:

Of course, the best part of the entire interview is when Gundlach accuses Trump of lying about the jobs market and blames social media for the rampant dissemination of misinformation (that starts at the 1:30 mark in the last clip above).

Now if only Jeff’s own Twitter feed hadn’t descended into abject farce in 2017, we wouldn’t be compelled to note the irony.

All in all, though, Gundlach gets a solid “B+” for Tuesday’s musings. One imagines he would give it an “A” without equivocation.