cover of episode Why the Dollar is Slipping and Navigating What’s Actually Moving Markets with Karen Finerman

Why the Dollar is Slipping and Navigating What’s Actually Moving Markets with Karen Finerman

2025/4/21
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Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin

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Karen Finerman
美国商业女性和电视人物,知名对冲基金经理和CNBC《Fast Money》评论员。
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Nicole Lappin
一位致力于财务教育和媒体的专家,通过多种平台帮助人们提高财务素养。
Topics
Nicole Lappin: 本周的经济新闻相对平静,重点在于适应新的经济常态,而非追逐瞬息万变的新闻头条。 Karen Finerman: 当前市场环境充满挑战,令人筋疲力尽,需要时刻保持警惕,随时应对潜在的重大市场波动。我的投资策略是长期持有,不试图预测市场时机,而是在市场恐慌时买入。我关注VIX指数,并在VIX指数很高,市场恐慌情绪严重时买入股票。我持有的Meta, Netflix, Amazon和一些银行股票近期表现不佳,但我仍然看好这些公司的长期前景。我对2025年股票选择(CARB)的展望,其中戴尔公司受关税影响最大。阿里巴巴股票表现出色,我对中国直接面向消费者(DTC)公司持乐观态度,并增持了阿里巴巴股票。中国商品的最低免税额即将到期,这将对一些中国公司(如TikTok广告商)产生负面影响,并可能波及Meta。中国公司试图规避关税的做法,可能会对高端奢侈品供应商造成问题。我对LVMH集团的股价下跌感到意外,并将其与开云集团进行比较,认为后者的问题在于管理层。开云集团的困境在于其首席执行官的收购行为分散了公司对核心业务的关注。我认为亚马逊的股票目前具有吸引力,因为其估值较低,并且其AWS业务在人工智能领域拥有巨大机遇。当前经济形势的不确定性使得判断经济是否会衰退变得困难。我的对冲策略类似于高免赔额的保险,只在市场大幅下跌时才会生效。现在不是初次尝试期权交易的好时机,但期权可以作为一种风险管理工具。美元贬值的原因是多方面的,包括对美国国债的需求下降、杠杆交易的清算以及对美元作为储备货币地位的担忧。传统上,当股市下跌时,债券收益率下降,美元升值;但目前的情况却相反,这打破了传统的相关性。美国巨额债务对债券收益率和美元汇率产生影响。美元贬值对美国消费者和跨国公司产生影响。美元贬值使美国商品对其他国家更具吸引力,并影响跨国公司的盈利报告。金融业的放松管制可能会降低抵押贷款利率,但应谨慎进行。尽管IPO和并购活动减少,但交易量却很高,这为投行带来了短期收益。金融股近期表现不佳,但花旗集团在首席执行官简·弗雷泽的领导下正在改善。我认为金融股、Meta和亚马逊是目前值得投资的优质资产。不要依赖直觉做投资决策,而应进行理性分析。

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This chapter explores the rising cost of everyday goods and offers a solution for managing personal finances by using the Chime Credit Builder Card to build credit without incurring expensive debt.
  • Rising cost of everyday goods
  • Chime Credit Builder Card: a secured credit card with no annual fees to build credit

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I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. You have

So I feel like the story this week is less about the moment to moment headlines like it was last week and instead looking ahead to settling down into this new normal. Nothing happened this week that was as crazy as what went down last week for sure. I mean, we don't have any tweets moving trillions of dollars to discuss today. So we can kind of take a deep breath and talk about how to adapt to the economic conditions that seem to be staying here for a while, whether it's six weeks or six months.

To help me do that, I'm joined by Karen Feinerman, one of my favorites. She is the co-founder and CEO of a New York-based hedge fund, Metropolitan Capital Advisors, and has been a panelist on CNBC's Fast Money since day one, literally. She's also the host of the podcast How She Does It, conversations with powerful women about how they're embracing challenges and managing success, both personally and professionally.

So today we talk about the value of the dollar, the opportunities and challenges with all the tariff chaos and Karen's best performing stock pick of 2025. Here's our conversation. Karen Feinerman, welcome to Money Rehab. Nicole, thank you for having me. So good to reconnect. Normally we kick off our interviews by getting straight into the headlines, but in this economy, it just feels important to ask how you're doing.

How am I doing? I mean, it's exhausting. I have to say it's exhausting. And, you know, you just never know what you're going to find. And this idea of there could be monumental news at any moment is it's tiring. Are you monitoring Twitter for a monumental potential tweet? Well, I'm on, you know, I'm on the computer all day long and just

At any moment, it could be something really market moving. So you have to sort of be in this high level of, you know...

high alert exactly yeah so has your investing strategy changed since liberation day liberation day no it hasn't it hasn't worked i can tell you that you know i'm always long i have various hedges on but always always net long very net long and that's been the strategy for years and years and

You know, it's painful when you are long going into the pandemic or going into the great financial crisis or whatever it might be. But the idea of sort of being able to market time, so know when to sell, know when to get back in, and then have that gap be wider than whatever taxes you might pay, to me is just a strategy that is too difficult. So I don't try to do it.

But what I do try to do, one of my favorite quotes, which I always come to, is buy when there's blood on the streets, even if it is your own. And I can tell you recently there's been a lot of my own. So I look at the VIX. I don't know how closely you follow the VIX, but it's sort of in no man's land now. It was up in the 50s.

So I'd be a buyer when it's terrifying. It's not low enough now. It's in limbo at, I don't know, 30 where it is right now. So I'm not really doing much, just being exhausted. So can you give us a sense of the VIX? We've been hearing a lot in the news lately. So when you say that the VIX is high around 50, what is it normally? And then you say that you look to cover some hedges.

What do you mean by that? So the VIX is really, it is a measurement of how likely the volatility is in the market at more than 1% on any given day. But it's really become known to be the sort of fear-greed index. So when the VIX is really low, and the kind of lowest I've ever seen it drag along for a long time is low double digits. So, you know, 11 or 12.

And then in periods of high uncertainty. So the highest I've ever seen it is during the pandemic, during the really, really dark, dark days of the pandemic, as high as about 80 intraday, maybe. So now the VIX has gone from mid-teens to as high as 56. I guess it was Tuesday morning. Was that when the bottom was sort of the...

I can't even remember all the days, but so it hit somewhere in the mid fifties. And I like when the VIX is super high. I like when things start trading down integers at a time, because that just tells me someone just wants to get out regardless of price.

And if I own that, that's not fun. But if I can buy more at a price where I'm buying from someone who says, I don't care what price I'm selling it, I just need to get out. That's ultimately been a good thing to do. It's been in the past, historically been a good thing to do. Exactly. You know, we shop, we love to get things on sale. We do not want our stocks on sale. That feels bad. Well, unless you're a long investor, like,

betting on the future, holding onto your investments for a long period of time, not trying to bet against the market. So when you say you see blood on the streets, including yours, what kind of blood have you been shedding? I hate saying that. I don't want you to shed blood. So, well, you know, I have a lot of meta, very big position. So that, you know, that that's been a

a very difficult one. I have Netflix as well, sort of hanging in the best. Amazon, which I have, I like a lot. I like how they're positioned, particularly in tough times like this. But the stock's down, I don't know where it is today, 172 or 173, I don't know the moment, but it's down considerably. And I still believe in the AI story. I still believe in AWS. I

And then they have this remarkable retailing business, gigantic retailing business. So that hasn't been fun. The banks, JP Morgan, my biggest bank position, went to 280, probably shouldn't have been at 280, and then went down to about 210. So that's a fair amount of pain. Citigroup. I don't know how long this podcast is, but I could go on and on for a while of things that haven't worked.

Yes. You had right at the beginning of the year, you shared the stocks that you were looking at for 2025. Yep. The acronym was CARB, which is making me hungry, but it was, right? Citi, Alibaba, United Rentals, Boeing, Energy, and Dell. Right. How do you feel about those picks moving into the second half of the year with everything we've seen in January?

Well, Dell certainly is most in the crosshairs of all of them. The tariff wars, you know, it was somewhat of a reprieve. I don't know that it's a permanent reprieve of China. We'll see. But the combination of the concern about AI and data center growth, that's obviously right in Dell's wheelhouse. And then

Aside from that business, there's also the PC business, and that has sort of slowed, but also the PC business really is affected a lot by tariffs. So that's been the most painful one. Mm-hmm.

But Alibaba having an amazing year. That's been having an amazing year. Yeah. I feel like there was sort of not regime change because the regime is exactly the same, but a change in policy. And that doesn't have tariff issues, right? They do very little business in the United States. And they have a huge business. They have a huge cloud business. They have, I mean, they're in so many different things, logistics, and they really are a conglomerate. They have an extraordinary amount of cash.

And it's not expensive. But it's subject to who knows what. Who knows. With the success of your Alibaba pick, are you looking to double down more on Chinese DTC companies? I did buy some more Alibaba Friday, I think Thursday, Friday. I think that even in the situation that we're in, that China really feels that they need to support their economy.

And that will benefit Alibaba. So I have added. Have you looked at anything else or does anything else DTC? I own some FXI. I own KWeb. So some ETFs, but that's the only individual stock that I own.

Does it worry you what's going on with the de minimis exemption? I'm assuming you've been following this being sunset for Chinese products next month. Right. So that doesn't affect Alibaba as much. So Timu and Xi'an, that's really affecting them. And I think we're also going to see Meta is sort of a collateral damage there as well. Not this Super Bowl, but the one before that.

it seemed like every other ad was Timu, Xi'an. So we're going to see a meaningful contraction there. And those are big advertisers.

So I think that's part of what's weighing down meta. I mean, you've got a lot of things, but that you've got the lawsuit. Because there's this big push, especially on TikTok right now. And we did an episode about how Chinese companies are now trying to market to individual Americans to buy directly and skirt around the tariff stuff. I mean, I'm my, I don't know if you know, but my house.

It was burned down in the alley fires. And so now I did not know that. Where do you live in the Palisades? Where do you live? I did. Yeah. Oh, I'm so sorry. Thank you. Thank you. You're the best. It's only recently that we found a new place to move into and I need to buy everything. And so I was looking at Alibaba and I was like, oh, my gosh, is this something that I can do directly? You can. And not pay the tariffs? Well, the de minimis is eight hundred dollars.

That's what a shipment, anything below $800. So I actually don't know if you aggregate for more than $800. Maybe there's a way around it. I actually, I don't know.

I think it's really interesting to see what's happening with the Chinese companies that are trying to take the tariff news and, you know, spin it or sell their knockoffs or God knows what. Do you have any thought about what's going to happen? Well, it's interesting to the extent that any of that is about luxury high end goods. If I were Louis Vuitton and that were one of my suppliers,

I would be very, very unhappy. So unhappy that I might look for another supplier. So if that is part of their game plan, I think that part is going to end up being very problematic. But for other things, I know these manufacturers are just carpet-bombing TikTok.

Every 40 seconds. Yeah. Are you seeing, well, so let me go back. I'm assuming you're not surprised by LVMH then tanking or the luxury sector. No, I actually was a little surprised that American Express was good because I would have thought the correlation between the LVMH consumer and American Express was high and that Louis Vuitton in the U.S. was a miss, right?

In Asia, it was a disaster, but it was a miss. And so, meaning, well, they were expecting for, it was about four percentage points low on same store sales or comps, rather. And so that's a, you know, that's a miss. And I would have thought AXP would, that customer would overlap directly. And that wasn't the case.

That's interesting. I mean, what's tricky to understand is when a company is on sale or it's just not good. So if you're looking at some high quality investments, maybe on sale, we love a sale, but what about the LVMHs of the world? That's not been a good one for me, but I look at LVMH versus Caring, for example. So you have two conglomerates, each has extraordinary brands.

Kering has really struggled with Gucci.

And that is the main driver of their business. And it's just been a disaster for a couple of years. So, I mean, we're talking about like revenues down 20, revenues. That's enormous. And so to me, that would fall in the, oh, we might have a material change here in that a couple of things. Something happened about two years ago that I really didn't like and made me sell my stock in Caring, which was the CEO who's married to Salma Hayek, the actress,

bought CAA, took control of Creative Artists Agency. And I hate acquisitions like that, that are a huge distraction. And it sort of really shows sort of taking your eye off the ball. And coincidentally, that was when this sort of all the pent-up demand and spend from the pandemic was starting to wane.

And so for all of the luxury houses, that was sort of weighing on them. But Caring is, you know, pretty levered. And so that distraction, I thought, was really not a good sign. So one thing about Bernard Arnault, he is all in. He is engaged all the time.

Yeah, it seems like one of these things is not like the other because they're the parent company of YSL, Gucci, Balenciaga, Bottega, Alexander McQueen, CAA? Yeah. Yeah. And so I don't know why you bought it. I don't know. I assume she's represented that, I guess. So I really didn't like that. And I thought, all right, if I'm going to have exposure in that area, I'd rather have LVMH.

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Are there other opportunities right now in this market that you're seeing of things that are legitimately on sale? So when we talk about on sale, we talk about high quality investments being down, not the things that are probably not going to come back up. I think Amazon is really attractive now. It hasn't traded here at this level. So I like to look at PE, assuming a balance sheet's fine, which their balance sheet is, it's fine.

Very good. It's not as good as Alphabet, but it's very, very, very good. That's not an issue in any way at all. It's a positive. So I think we haven't had a chance to buy a business like this, AWS, which I don't know if you saw on CNBC, Andrew Sorkin's interview with Andrew Jassy last week.

And he talked about AI as the most transformative thing. They are not slowing down their AI business. And like what they saw as the opportunity in cloud maybe a decade ago, this is what they think the opportunity is now. The margins in that business are gigantic. And then they have this extraordinary retail business.

And so together, it's trading at about 28 times earnings. It hasn't been here probably ever in its entire history. So that's one that I've been adding to that I like. Yeah, if you just look at our packages outside. Right. Well, for you guys, that must be all the time, every day. Yeah. Packages. Packages.

I'm trying to glean, though, from your strategy whether or not you think we're recession bound or not. I don't know. I think it's 50-50. The thing that's so unusual about this particular time is that it seems to be a self-inflicted wound, right? That I think we could get out of this

fairly quickly if we had some clarity. The market hates uncertainty. So even bad news with certainty is better than vague uncertainty with no news. So it's hard to know. Could the president just switch strategy and say, all right, we've got, you know, 15% across the board. That's it. That's the deal around the world. I think the market would rally tremendously.

But I'm also not optimistic that that will happen in the short term. Is it harder to hedge because of that? Because, you know, as you said, when the VIX gets cuckoo high crazy, you want to cover some of your hedges. Right. What is covering? So if I'm short Q's against a portfolio that has exposure to the MAC 7, I'll

I'll buy some back. So I bought some back. Often I own puts that are, I'm not looking to buy puts that start to make money right if the market goes down right from the point that I buy them. I'm looking at it as protection if the market goes down 5% or more, that kind of move. So what I think of is sort of insurance with a high deductible. I'm going to take some pain the first 5% down before that hedge really starts to

kick in. It'll start to move, but it won't. It'll really kick in the lower it goes. So and when you own those and the market's going down, you're like, oh, thank God I own these puts. That's the time to sell them. It's hard to do.

But yeah, almost always it's the right thing. Can you talk to a new options investor who might be exploring puts and calls and all the fun right now? I wouldn't be exploring them now for the first time. I can tell you it is a wild, wild market out there. And with, you know, zero day options, I wouldn't touch those. And those are options that expire.

The same day. Right. Although we did see that crazy trade of somebody with zero day SPY. Yeah. With probably very, very good information. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that going on. That's not luck. No. Would you want to step into that? I mean, would you follow it? Maybe that might not be so dumb, right? That could be like, look, I don't know what's going on, but I know that that guy does.

That that's not a playing field right now. It is not. And so this isn't the time if you don't if you don't use options, this isn't the time to start trying them out. But I do I think it's a good tool to have sort of in your, you know, your toolbox to be able to express you can a long bet. Right. You want to know the name. But let's say there's a lot of risk. You feel like other business could be terribly damaged in a tariff.

war that's protracted, then you can buy calls instead of the stock and know, all right, here's the most I could lose. You know, with certainty, you know what they call, how much you can lose. You don't know how much you can make on the upside. And, you know, really is a lot. That's great. But you know what you can lose. So certainty again is a good thing to have.

Yeah, it's insurance, you know, buy insurance after the fire. Right. How much is fire insurance now? It's not even available probably. Right. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So same thing with hedging. Lock in your protection before the chaos. Right. Chaos, it's very expensive and usually doesn't work out well when you buy protection in chaos.

Let's talk about the value of the dollar. I think this is not getting as much attention. It's fallen by about 8% this year, recently trading near three-year lows. Can you help us understand why this is happening? I can sort of, but honestly, I'm not sure. I can tell you sort of what's happening. So we're seeing normally when there is a crisis such as this, there is this, it's called a flight to quality and money around the world

goes to the United States because it is the safest, the biggest, the rule of law, all of the things that make the U.S. market great. And so people buy U.S. dollars and they buy treasuries. They might buy short term, they might buy the 10 year, for example. And that's usually what happens in a crisis.

That did not happen in this crisis. In fact, the reverse happened. So there was selling in treasuries. We saw the 10-year yield. When people sell the bonds, yields go up. They need to, you know, if you want to entice more people to buy those bonds, you have to pay more interest. So that worked the opposite way that we would have seen. And so when you have people from around the world, let's just use the example of Chinese sellers.

I don't know how much of the selling was Chinese sellers, but they own hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds, 750 billion dollars of bonds. So they sell their 10-year bond, you get dollars back for the bond, they sell those dollars. So you have this effect of the bonds going down and the dollar going down,

which is the opposite of what you thought would happen. In addition, there was this giant levered basis trade on that had people buying the 10-year, selling the 30, and they have to get out. That was sort of on top of it in a chaotic market. And then you had one more thing, the Japanese yen trade, which has been on for years, which is people... Yes, the yen carry trade. So people, short yen,

They take that money by dollars, by treasuries. Well, that started to unwind when China, when Japan started to raise interest rates and the yen appreciated. And then there's this question mark of, is the U.S. going to remain the reserve? Is the U.S. dollar going to remain the reserve currency of the world? I think so. But the idea that that's even a question right now is scary. So,

A lot of things going on. Plus one other thing, which is in the last year or so, there's been a move out of some U.S. equities into other countries, mostly Europe, because the valuation differential has gotten so huge that we talk about U.S. exceptionalism and how great this country is to do business and rule of law and all of that, great capital markets, all of that. But

the EU had underperformed for so many years and the US markets had done well, the value proposition changed. So money started to leave the US having nothing to do with tariffs. This predates Trump's election. So let's recap because I think this is really important. Typically in the textbook world, stocks go down.

Mm-hmm. Bonds go down. Yields go down. Prices go up. Right. That's sometimes confusing if you're new to it. It's like a seesaw. Right. And then the dollar goes up.

And then the dollar goes up. But now we saw stocks down, bond yields up, dollar down. I mean, the stocks down is sort of the constant, but the way that bonds reacted and the way the dollar reacted was really weird. Was really weird. And one more thing to think about was that

The Trump administration's plan was, okay, if we slow the economy, then bond yields in the 10-year in particular will trade down, meaning the interest rate will be lower.

So we know we have this enormous deficit that we need to fund. And one of the ways to fund that you sell 10 years. You can sell much nearer in, but then you got to keep rolling and you don't know where interest rates will be. So it wouldn't have been a terrible thing if the 10 year traded down because there were concerns about a recession and that we were able to issue 10 year, you know, tens of billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars

of 10 years at a low rate. And so our interest rate costs would have gone down. But that's not what happened. And I think that correlation breaking down is what ultimately made Trump put on the 90-day pause to cool down the things that seem to be almost breaking. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, right? If you're issuing that much debt. And when we talk about the US being in debt, it comes from

our treasuries selling the U.S. debt in the form of treasuries. Other countries buy that. And so when you're issuing that debt, every basis point, so fraction of a percent, Matt, are billions of dollars. Right. Yeah. And what we have to pay back for somebody to lend us money, essentially. Exactly.

So the system was broken. The seesaw was broken. And then really just underlying why the falling dollar matters right now. It's kind of a silent tax, right? Your money. Yes. If you're in the U.S., buy less. Yes.

So one of the things that originally the Trump administration had talked about was, well, other currencies are going to go down against the dollar because we're, you know, king of the world. And so that even if we are tariffed, that will lessen some of the blow.

And that's not what happened, right? So the euro has appreciated a lot. The pound has appreciated. The Mexican peso is about flat from when he was elected. The Canadian dollar's down a little bit, but these big moves are not happening. So that's interesting. I don't know what exactly to make of it, but...

Yeah, the dollar isn't currency. It's this confidence idea, right? When it falls, the world starts looking for a new safe haven. Yes, right. Sterling or the pound or the euro. Right, whatever it might be. The one thing it does help is that our goods are comparatively cheaper, right? So if you're European and wanted to buy an American made whatever, take away the tariffs for a moment. It got a lot cheaper. It got 8% cheaper than

in the last, I don't know how long, from when you said it was around $1.08 or so. So things got cheaper. That makes us a little bit more attractive. Also, it does help multinational companies when they report earnings. So let's say you're Procter & Gamble, you sell $10 billion in Europe and you convert your euros

back into dollars, you get more dollars, your earnings will go up. But I always dismiss that because it works the other way sometimes. I don't really count FX when I think about a

companies earnings power others do i don't fx just being in foreign foreign exchange right currency stuff i know i just have to decode all this no it's good i assume people know but what how you know it's boring knowing what fx no so it's a weird language it's great to learn this world obviously been dominating all the financial news cycle of course there's a lot

of other stories happening and unfolding and evolving as well what's something that you think has been overshadowed by all the tariff news that we should keep our eye on oh that is a good question because i feel like it's like a shiny object thing right yeah right people can get away with some weird stuff because nobody's really paying attention i think deregulation

I feel like that is something in their control, and that would be a benefit to many companies. So even Jamie Dimon said it on his call. Jamie Dimon, I think, is one of the greatest financial executives of the last century. Brian Moynihan also said it. He's the CEO of Bank America. He said on his call, the amount of paperwork and legal issues and rules that change and

and are so arcane in some ways and also just, I don't know, whimsical, but that they have to comply with cost banks so much money. So if deregulation happens in many businesses, but let's choose banking because they are particularly regulated, then that will free up

more money for making additional loans. It will make the banks more profitable, which makes them healthier. And Jamie Dimon gave the example of if we could get rid of some of that regulation, we could make mortgages cheaper up to about 70 basis points cheaper, which matters a lot if you're a homeowner and you can get a mortgage 70 basis points. So lower than what you have now. That would be a very good thing.

And that's something that's in their control. So we may see that. Not too much deregulation, though. Right. We don't want to go through 2008. Right. So things, you know, it's a pendulum, right? We always go from one excess past what probably is the right amount to the other that is the wrong amount is too much. So there's a lot of room to come back and still have guardrails that we need. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Hold on to your wallets. Money Rehab will be right back. And now for some more Money Rehab. We thought that this would be like the go-go days again of fundraising and IPOs.

But we've seen a big dry up there. Right. And we thought there would be a lot of mergers and investment banking activity not happening. One thing that is happening is the amount of trading revenue. So if you're the Goldman Sachs desk or JP Morgan's desk, the amount of volume you're doing trading is extraordinary, right? We've had several of the highest volume days ever just in the last two weeks.

So they'll make money on that. They'll make sort of extra money. But I don't want to pay a big multiple of earnings on what I think is extra short-term money that isn't going to be a long-term trend of giant trading day commissions. But in the very short term, it helps.

In your picks in your carved city was for the, it stood, the C stood for city. That's been down 10% though. Yeah. I mean, how are the financials? The financials started off really well. Uh,

And then really got hurt in this, in this tariff, whatever you want to call it. I don't know. Do you have a word for it? We can bleep it out. I don't know. Okay. That is the proper word for it, I think. Yeah. So... Hullabaloo? Hullabaloo. Kerfuffle. Kerfuffle. I love a kerfuffle. Okay. Who doesn't love a kerfuffle? Perfect. Just because Jamie Dimon used the word kerfuffle. He's kind of a folksy man. Yeah. But he...

He's extraordinarily good at his business. But normally when you see turmoil in the financial markets, banks, because they are levered, don't generally trade well. So Citibank didn't trade well. I mean, JP Morgan, I'd say it was a 280, went to 210. That's an enormous move. Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs. I mean, all of them. So they all kind of moved together. There wasn't really a huge standout of one that

Morgan Stanley is a little bit of a different business model. They were down 30% too. So, you know, they all kind of got hit. Citi, I think Citi is a really interesting situation because it's super cheap and you're in the, hopefully near the last third or so of a multi-year effort by Jane Fraser. And I love that a woman is the CEO there. I love that. And she has really remade that bank, clarified the lines of business and

and really gone after expenses. So some of the city's earnings and improvement is in her control, and she's doing it. And that's been a really good thing to see. Just on this last earnings call, we started to really see it. And she feels it'll continue to happen in 2025 and 2026. So I love that earnings call. And all of them also say, though, we don't know what the economy is going to bring. We don't know how people's

You know, are we going to have more credit issues? Likely, right? Credit card non-performing, you know, people who are unable to pay back their credit card, that ratio will go up and that's going to cost the banks money. But they're not seeing it yet. I believe they will. They believe they will.

Delinquencies, yeah. Yes, delinquencies. But Citigroup has this other thing, which is within their own control, which is what I like a lot about it. And J.P. Morgan has the most extraordinary leadership. But, you know, Jamie B. Dinah will leave one day. Yes, but not any day soon. Let's hope not. He has a lot of life left in him. Yeah, so when we talk about

Things being on sale, would you say things being on sale that are high quality investments, would you say that the financials would be one? And if you're sort of new to this space, there are a lot of ETFs. Right.

Yeah. That combine a bunch of these banks together. But I kind of feel like if Bank of America goes away, like just because it's called Bank of America, zombie apocalypse problems. Yes, but I don't think that'll happen. So a number of these big banks and I forget who are I think there's eight of them. There's a JP Morgan, the Citibank, Wells Fargo, names like that.

The government will not let them fail. They are called SIFI banks, strategically important financial institutions, which basically means we cannot let them fail. Otherwise, the apocalypse is the financial apocalypse is here. So as a result of getting that sort of protection that they also have a lot of this regulation that we talked about.

But I really do believe the regulation has gone too far and they're way, way, way less levered than they were going into the financial crisis. The business, as I said, the guardrails are there and they're working. Yeah, we need a Goldilocks situation. Right, exactly. We need a Goldilocks situation. But when I try to think about, okay, buy if I'm sort of, what would I buy? I always think, okay, if I owned none of anything, what would I go out and start buying today?

So I would buy Citigroup. I would buy some JP Morgan. I would buy some Meta. I think the earnings power there is extraordinary. The stock now is about at a market multiple. And if you back out the cash, it's at a lower than market multiple. So meaning the stock market trades at some multiple of the collective earnings of all the companies in, let's say, the S&P 500 market.

So you have X amount of earnings times 20. That's the multiple that's currently on the market. And that moves with interest rates. So that's where it is right now, 20 times earnings. So Meta to me is an extraordinary business that is not a run-of-the-mill S&P company.

It is an extraordinary money machine, has some headwinds for sure, but the underlying business is extraordinary. It's not really subject to tariffs. If I own none of that, I'd be buying that. I'd be buying Amazon if I own none of that. So it's scary. It feels better sort of to buy it at Amazon at $220, but it isn't. It's better at $170, whatever, $2, $3, if I check up right now, $170, $222. Okay.

So those kind of names I would start with. Also, just in a time of turmoil, you want to be in a company that doesn't have a debt problem. And none of these kind of companies have debt problems. So that's important.

It is. We end our episodes, Karen, by asking all of our guests for a tip that listeners can take straight to the bank today. You gave us so many already about how to navigate this market and just try to not get too scared. Right. Don't get too tired either. You need a nap, sister. I do. I do. I do need a nap. So here's really the tip that I would have is for almost everyone, right?

Your gut is not your friend. Your gut tells you to do the wrong thing almost all the time. So if you're terrified and you don't want to buy anything, it's probably not a bad time to buy. And if you feel great and you want to own more and you want to borrow money to buy more, your gut's telling you the wrong thing. Don't listen to her. Sometimes she takes bad direction. It could be about personal relationships. It could be about stocks. Just always check your gut. So true. Yeah.

Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. Our researcher is Emily Holmes.

Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, [email protected] to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me. And follow us on Instagram @moneynews and TikTok @moneynewsnetwork for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. No, seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.