Is a Recession Coming? (EP.402)
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Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Good morning, Ben. Good morning, Michael. You are in a lovely Marriott somewhere, it looks like. It's a Hyatt. Oh, sorry. Hyatt. Back in the central time zone. Back again. Good to be back. You were racking up those frequent flyer miles lately. Yeah. We had a lot of people hitting me up on social media with pictures of you from the Knicks game. And there was one in particular where, I don't know, I think it was a close game.

It was a very close game. So you were sitting essentially, it looked like at the scorer's table kind of deal. That's how it looks, right? That scorer's table. And it's you and your friends with your arms around each other, and you have your hands in the air and a huge scream coming out of your mouth. Is that when the Knicks won? What happened? That was when OG hit a three with four seconds left. Okay. So someone caught that. I couldn't find the game. It wasn't on wherever I was. It wasn't on my local settings. So what was your experience like with the very first courtside seats? It was incredible. Yeah.

Is it like first class, though? If you sit first class once, you can't go back? You feel like you can't go back with the plebs? Well, I have to go back. But, you know, it was great. The game was incredible. It was so much fun. But enough of that. Let's talk about this. Last week, we started the show saying that it feels like everybody just turned bearish, right? Yeah. And we're starting the show this week where it feels like everybody thinks we're going back into a recession. Oh, yeah. I mean...

I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that the risk of a recession and or stagflation or a bear market is much higher now than it was a month ago. That's not hyperbolic at all. If you're doing probabilities, the risks are much higher than they were. I don't think you can call yourself a serious analyst if you don't think that. Yeah. If we continue down the path of government austerity and 25% tariffs on all of our trading partners, then the risk of a recession is way higher now than it was before.

Period. End of sentence. Yeah. Last week I was saying, you know, the reintroduction of risk is actually a good thing for, for a reset of psychology, a lot of complacency, but the risk, the real risk of a recession is never a good thing. And as far as the stock market is concerned, if we do get a recession from elevated multiples, not crazy, but elevated multiples, then

Um, the, the, the 24 times forward earnings, 26 times, whatever it was, that was all well and good in the world that might not exist anymore. And if earnings are not going to deliver the growth that is being, that was being priced into that multiple, it can get ugly, uh, in a hurry. I mean, the, the best guess would be, we would, we would have a bear market well before a recession even hits our shores. Right. Yeah. I think the stock market would immediately sniff that out. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's what's happening. So the big chart of the week was GDP now, which is updated on a weekly basis. And last week, this thing crashed to show, well, the first quarter looks like it's going to be a negative GDP print. And then it went down even more this week. And now it's showing, I don't know, a negative 2.8% or something. This thing is not infallible. It's not totally predictive. But I think the trend is generally in the right direction. So the tariffs are about to go into effect? Yeah.

Well, they did go into effect yesterday. Today's tariff day, if we want to celebrate. So the idea is, okay, wow, it looks like the economy just fell off of a cliff. That's what it looks like from this chart. Now, a lot of people said, well, take a deep breath. Hang on. This is not as bad as it might seem. A lot of it is import stuff where the tariff is basically causing a lot of these companies to pull a lot of the stuff forward. So the tariffs are causing this.

But the point was like, well, this could be more of a calculation kind of thing with the way imports and exports are calculated, that it's not necessarily like all of a sudden economic activity is falling off a cliff. Darrell Fairweather, she is the chief economist at Redfin. This morning, she tweeted, unless we all wake up from this collective tariff nightmare, the reality is recession, recession with inflation, which is called stagflation. It's the worst kind of recession because people lose their jobs and prices stay high along with interest rates.

Yeah, no, it's not good. So I guess the so the Wall Street supporters of Trump's policies were basically thinking, hey, listen, if we get deregulation and tax cuts and not the tariff and austerity stuff like we're off to the races, I I put this out.

in November, there was all these headlines at the end of November. And I said, the wall of worry is over. And it was how animal spirits are impacting behaviors and animal spirits are coming back. And it was all these headlines from all the financial publications talking about animal spirits and who they are. And I feel like those have been extinguished almost immediately. Now,

The question is how long does this stuff last? Because a lot of people were betting on the fact that, well, these are just a negotiating play. He's not actually going to do it. And now it's like, no, he's going to do it. The tariffs are coming.

And so I guess now the only hope is, well, the tariffs are only going to be here for a short time. That would be the hope for people is that, okay, he's going to see some pain in the stock market. Everything is hurting and he's going to reverse these things. The tax is such a dominant piece of the conversation that NVIDIA felt 10% yesterday. And it seemed like nobody, it was like an afterthought. This morning, Target reported and pulled this from the transcripts.

In light of ongoing consumer uncertainty and a small decline in February net sales combined with tariff uncertainty, the company expects to see meaningful year-over-year profit pressure in its Q1 relative to the remainder of the year. So- You're going to hear a lot of this from CEOs in the coming quarters. So to Ben's earlier point, I think the market is in the process of pricing the standards. It's going to do it really quickly. So what does this mean for you as an investor if you're listening to us and you're like, uh-oh, the guys are getting nervous? Yeah.

this is not timable. I don't know what this is going to look like, what the stock market's going to look like, the recovery, who knows. But the market is going to react a lot quicker. And if you do get out because you're nervous, getting back in is always impossible. The stock market is never like, welcome back in. Now's a great time to come back in. Thanks for sitting in the sideline. We'd love to have you back. It doesn't work like that. I guess the thinking is that there's always the risk of a recession or a bear market or something. And again, we can't

You can't say that these things are happening with a certainty, just that there's a higher probability of it. So I guess if you're an investor, the reason for it doesn't matter as much as the fact that it could happen. Yeah. Right? I think that's the whole point is that it could happen. And to your point that a recession is bad, there are people that are trying to spin this in a positive way. So Chamath tweeted yesterday. Mm-hmm.

It stands to reason that a fall in asset prices will have very little impact on the core constituents of Trump's base. To that end, I wouldn't be surprised if he has little reaction to an equity or home price market correction. Separately, the upside of shrinking these asset prices is it gives folks a legitimate chance to buy at lower levels, making equity, homeownership more possible. So he's saying that there's 50% of the country or so, and we're going to get into this in a little bit, that doesn't own many assets. They don't have a lot of financial assets. They're held in the hands of the few, as we talked about last week.

He says, said differently, don't presume that the stock market going up is a useful barometer anymore. In fact, it going down may be a better signal for its popularity. This is the most galaxy brain take I've ever taken, I've ever heard. What the f*** is he talking about? So the idea is that people who don't own financial assets, if we get a recession and financial asset prices go down, they could benefit by buying them. Oh, dude.

This is the dumbest billionaire take I've ever heard because guess who has the ability to buy financial assets when they're down? People with money and who own financial assets. The people without the financial assets have no backstop. They're the ones who are hurt the most by a recession. So this idea that, well, if we get a recession, rates will be lower, maybe that's a good thing. Good luck with that. We spoke about this last week. Bloomberg created a chart about the amount of spending of the overall economy that's done by the top 10%.

And it used to be below 40%. We mentioned last week it's now 50%. The bottom is 60%. The bottom 60% of people that he's talking about buying these assets are responsible for less than 20% of spending. Guess what? Guess where their spending is going, especially in a recession. It's not to buy stocks on the cheap. Right. And especially if tariffs cause higher prices, it's going to be – their money is going to be going to more of the grocery store and the gas pump. So –

I do think like this is the kind of thing, this is a self-inflicted wound if it happens. And that's the craziest thing is that Trump and Musk were handed this, you know, not awesome economy, but low unemployment, decent growth, low inflation. And if they cause a recession through their policies, this is the biggest own economic goal ever. This is, it's the most unnecessary recession we've ever seen. And so you would hope that

Cooler heads prevail and realize like, wait, why are we doing this? What's the point here? And that's my hope here is that they realize that there's, why put us into recession if we don't need to? It's totally unnecessary. Does the stock market make another all-time high this year? That depends. Do the tariffs stay on all year? If the tariffs are on all year, then no. We've seen the last of the highs. If the tariffs come off, could we see the stock market come back, charging back? I don't know. Wouldn't shock me.

It really depends on... If they lift the tariffs, we'll go back to highs. Real personal spending fell by the most since 2021. That's not great. Americans saved 4.6% of their after-tax income in January, up from 3.5% in December. Also probably not great, right? Why? The fact that people are battening down the hatches, basically? Less spending, more saving is... At the personal finance level, it's good, I suppose. But the read on that is not positive. The reason people are spending less and saving more...

is because they're getting ready. Do you think that if we didn't have 25% tariffs, that the Fed would already be cutting rates again? Because I think the Fed would have already cut again if it wasn't for the threat of tariffs causing inflation to remain a little elevated. I don't know. Because back to the Neil Dutta point from before,

It's not like all this stuff just happened on a dime. A lot of it is happening very quickly now, but some of this stuff was already slowing to begin with. And I do think that the Fed probably would have continued cutting rates had we not had the threat of tariffs. Ben, why is Ray Dalio so obsessed with comparing this to the 1930s? He's been doing this since – when did he start doing this, 2015? Yeah.

2015 or so was the first time he did the 1937. So he was on Odd Lots this week and he said there's going to be a U.S. debt crisis, heart attack within three years. And I pulled, this took me five minutes. I just typed in Ray Dalio and recession predictions or debt super cycle stuff by years. And I feel like if you're a legendary investor, you want to kind of ride off into the sunset. And don't you think, so it's kind of like Jordan winning the championship in his last year and walking off.

Don't you think that you want to just call one more just because, like, that's the way to do it? But don't – you read the Rob Copeland book about Dalio, right? He's done this his whole career. He predicted a depression in the early 1980s right before we set off on, like, the biggest bull market in history in the United States. So I think –

I think the most interesting thing about Dalio is the fact that he is constantly predicting a financial crisis, but that doesn't really translate into his returns of his fund. Because I think so much of the fund that he invests in at Bridgewater is quantitatively based and model-driven. So I think it's actually- He's not in charge anymore. I think it's a really good lesson in the way of don't allow your opinions and predictions to infiltrate your portfolio. And it seems like he hasn't done that.

Right. Because otherwise Bridgewater never would have made as much money as it did if they would have been investing based on all of his recession and debt super cycle predictions. Yeah. Yeah. Because he's been on this for a while. But what does it even mean? Like, I mean, he said interest rates would spike. People would stop buying treasuries. I don't know. Maybe. I hope not. Obviously, that would be pretty catastrophic. But if you're an investor, I would pay this no mind. Ray Dalio is obviously an incredibly smart guy, but not helpful.

So rates are coming down. Absent a debt end of the debt super cycle, rates are coming down to 10 years back close to 4%, but two years below 4% now. So to your point about, I think last week you said, I don't think falling rates are a good thing if they're signaling a slowdown in the economy. And I think that's what we've been seeing though. Yeah, it's way too early and way too cute to say that actually this is going to be good for asset prices because lower interest rates, lower inflation, lower

Come on. No. Bad news is bad news. But are we finally seeing bonds act as the hedge of last resort now? Yeah. Bonds are back to a diversifier, right? So I did this yesterday. I think the numbers might be maybe a little worse now since things rolled over. But this was as of yesterday, and we're recording this Tuesday morning. So this is like Monday afternoon-ish.

The year-to-date returns for the Vanguard European Stock Index were 13% on a year-to-date basis, and the S&P was up 1% or so. Again, those are probably a little lower now. The point is there was a huge spread between European stocks and U.S. stocks. And is this finally the year where we see diversification work in a real way for the first time in a while? We'll find out. I don't know. I mean, it is right now. I think the setup is there for it if things continue to play out this way.

It's a very fluid situation, bud. It is, yes. And we've seen a million of these head fakes along the way. But could we see some, you know, see these insular trade policies actually strengthen the European Union in some ways and that be the catalyst for them to finally outperform? I think that story makes a lot of sense to me. This seems to me like the first catalyst you could see for international stocks doing well. And there's a lot, you talked about a lot of the

The higher valuations and all the tech stuff with the US market, the European market has none of that. Did you read the Stripe annual report? No. It's very Berkshire-esque. So Stripe is – what is their mission? To increase the GDP of the internet, I believe. Stripe is a payment processing platform. Yeah.

It's very Berkshire-esque. This is what they wrote, one of the things that they wrote in their letter. The US corporate sector is both a cradle of invention and a densely populated graveyard of companies that had fabulous futures in their pasts. Of the 500 companies in the S&P at its inception in 1957, only 53 remain in the index today. More than half of that remaining 53 use Stripe.

Back in 1957, companies could expect to remain in the index for 61 years. In 1980, the average tenure was 36 years. Today, it's just under 20 years. Enduring businesses are increasingly rare. This is why the historical bet is on the MAG-7 not continuing to stay at the top of the heap, at least not all of them. So the best quote in the post was, the revenue that businesses process on Stripe

is growing seven times faster than that of all companies in the S&P 500. And I threw this into ChatGPT, Ben, the entire thing, and I said, pick out the best quote, and that was the quote I picked out. Same quote that I picked out. Okay. So you're using it for editing purposes as well now, huh? No. Oh. Well, kind of. Sorry, summarizing purposes. Yeah, no, editing and summarizing are different things. I do think that's a really good...

way to use these large language models is just taking a really long text and say, pull out the four or five best things. But the reason why I jumped to this is because you mentioned like the catalyst for Europe. So they say that 45% of European founders say that the European business climate is getting worse compared with only 15% of US founders.

Even more strikingly, founders in Europe are twice as likely to see North America as an opportunity for growth than Europe itself. Why? They go on to say that the evidence suggests that Europe needs a broader, deeper, and more diverse array of financing solutions. In the US, almost 80% of corporate lending is now from non-bank sources.

Compared to a much smaller number in the EU. I don't know why the number's not in there. But they say that this raises the cost of capital for European firms, which in turn lowers investment rates. So anyway, yes. A lot of structural advantages to the US is what you're saying. Right, right. So can we see cyclical outperformance out of Europe and the rest of the world? Can we see cyclical outperformance that lasts a couple of years? Yeah, why not? Yeah.

But we do have a considerable structural advantage, which again, might already be reflected, might, is reflected in valuations. Right. To your point on the tech side of it, especially. Right. That makes sense. All right. I think the easiest bull markets to continue in the years ahead. Here's my, here's my take. Gambling inequality and then laziness slash convenience. Okay. So someone posted this. I think people will get unlazy in a bear market.

I don't know, man. I think this is so that someone posted this Finchat posted this door dash has turned the corner to profitability and still continues to grow its order volume. Total orders are now up 735% over the past five years. So this shows total orders on a quarterly basis. And you can see this is just up into the right. I think this gets killed in a recession. You think Dory gets killed in a recession? Yeah, dude, I'm not paying $24 in service fees. I'm going to go out and get my food.

I just think once people have a taste of this kind of thing and a convenience and they say, well, I don't know, it's $7 more or $12 more. If we go into a recession and people lose their jobs and they start to get scared and their neighbors lose their jobs and they start to get a little bit more cautious, this is the first thing to go. Why didn't this go in the inflationary spike then? Prices went way higher. Why didn't people get rid of DoorDash? Because unemployment was 4%.

All right, I'm just saying the inertia piece. You could be right. In the next recession, whenever it comes, DoorDash could fall 60% or something. You could be right, too. I could be overestimating. I think it'll be a good test of this. This was an interesting one, too, from the Wall Street Journal. Following almost a tenfold increase in the stock price since its IPO almost a decade ago, Ferrari is now worth $90 billion.

making it the most valuable car company in Europe despite delivering 13,752 vehicles last year. Volkswagen sold 9 million cars last year and has a market cap $40 billion lower. This is interesting. So the CEO of Ferrari said, we are not an automotive company. We are a luxury company that is also doing cars. I never would have expected to look at the Ferrari chart like this. I mean, it looks like the DoorDash piece. They're up, I don't know, 750% since going public.

They sold fewer than 14,000 cars last year. Wow. I got a lot of emails, by the way, from Toyota drivers. What do people want you to drive for a Toyota? Yeah. You know what? Toyota's in the lead. Okay. If I was to get a new car today, I think I'm going to do it. What kind? Sequoia? What's the big one? No, not the giant one. Okay. Just like the Highlander maybe? Highlander? I like the 4Runners. Isn't that a Toyota? Yeah. Yeah.

I have to do some homework, but I don't want any problems out of my vehicle. No nonsense. You get the highest trim for one of these Toyotas or Hondas or whatever, and it still feels like you're driving a luxury vehicle, right? That's your best bet. All right. Torsten Slagg chart of the week from Apollo.

Roughly half of U.S. households do not have any retirement assets. He breaks this out by age as well. And pretty much across the board, it's anywhere from 50 to 60 percent of people hold retirement assets, meaning 40 to 50 percent on these different age groups do not hold any zero retirement assets. So we talk a lot about wealth inequality and income inequality. This chart is the reason we need Social Security in this country, because without Social Security,

half the, I mean, I guess you could say a lot of that 50%, they still own a home, right? They just don't have a 401k so that their home is probably their financial asset for many of them. But for most people, if social security didn't exist, they would be so screwed for retirement, right? And guess what? If we get a bear market or recession, these people are not going to be picking up stocks on the cheap. I still can't believe that that was an actual opinion by someone who

has a lot of money and maybe some intelligence anyway. Um, but I gotta be honest. I gotta be honest with you. I didn't hear a word you said for the last two minutes, but there was a noise coming from my computer and I was scrambling to find what the tab was coming from. Um, I heard the last part and I trust that the other, the rest of it was, was, uh, was great.

All right. Just not as many people hold retirement assets as you think. I think we've improved over the years, but it's a lower number than it feels like it should be. All right. So the market's open. The S&P is in a 5.69% correction. Nice, but also not nice. Okay. All right. That's still nothing, basically, though.

As far as corrections go. Well, Ben, my friend, it's not the current drawdown that gets people scared, right? It's the impending. How bad can it get? Yeah. If it stops here, I don't think anybody's going to care too much. But NVIDIA, yeah. All right. There's some pain out there. Where are we going next? Oh, crypto. Let's do it. You know, I think, listen, I'm going to zag on this one a little bit. Anytime you can pick up Cardano on the cheap, I think you have to do it.

Okay. Because Cardano, with Cardano and Ripple, you can see what with Cardano...

It really is. I don't know what a Cardano is. I don't know what Ripple does. I don't know. Joe Long. All right. So for people that missed the headline because it came in pretty quickly, at least with the price pump. What did Trump – Trump tweeted that he's going to create a crypto reserve and it's going to be Bitcoin and Cardano and Ripple and –

I don't know if he mentioned Solana in the first one, but then I guess somebody talked to him. Somebody gave him an elbow. It was like, Hey, also mentioned ETH, mentioned ETH and Sol. So then he quoted him. It was like, of course there's going to be ETH and Sol there too. So all the coins pumped and this is just, they pumped for, they pumped for a day and then they fell right back down. It's a, it's a face palm. It's lots of face palms. Joe Lonsdale, um, uh,

Joe is the co-founder of Palantir, founder of Adapar. He's very much on the West Coast tech scene. Joe tweeted,

Credit to him because these are his people. So David Sachs, the crypto czar, quote tweeted him and said, nobody announced a tax or spending program. Maybe you should wait to find out what's actually being proposed. So, I mean, the grift, the corruption, it's all so bad. Why the fuck do we need a crypto reserve? Why not an Apple reserve? Why not a...

I don't know. Why don't I just, it's nonsense. I think we need an egg reserve in this country. One thing that made me feel a little bit better, and maybe I'm naive in taking this at face value, is that the FT reported that David Sachs, prior to coming to the administration, sold all of his crypto. He quote tweeted and said, correct, I sold all my cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Ethan sold prior to the start of the administration. I don't know if he was able to sell it for tax-free. I don't know if that was part of the deal. I don't know. That makes me feel kind of worse because if he was just trying to pump his own bags, I would actually understand it. If he's not trying to pump his bags, then I understand it even less. Okay.

Hunter Horsley at Bitwise said, I saw this Trump statement today, same as everyone else. I imagine a strategic reserve would just be Bitcoin. That makes the most sense to me. Now, I understand this probably, Bitcoin reserve doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people, myself included. I don't think that we need a Bitcoin reserve. But just back to Hunter's point, he said, many crypto assets have merits, but what we're talking about here isn't a US investment portfolio. We're talking about a reserve. And Bitcoin is the undisputed store of value for the digital age.

Of course, I'm grateful the new administration is so constructive on the space. Look forward to learning more about the thinking here. But what are we doing? What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Because, yeah, essentially we would be using borrowed funds to go into more debt to buy these assets. It doesn't

Make any sense to me. So yeah, the the reaction from the crypto crowd is mixed as I just mentioned There's obviously some people that are cheering it on and some people that are taking a little bit more of a sober view Oh really? Cuz I haven't seen one person who made a good case for why this should be why this should happen No, no, no, I didn't I didn't say good case I just said I said you're cheering it on many people many people encrypt are rejecting this and many people are cheering on I don't know what the people who are cheering it on just want to see the number go up Yeah, I get that. Um

I think the worst thing for these crypto people is who are banking on all this stuff is the government does all this stuff. They say we're going to do a strategic reserve. They say we're going to deregulate and crypto still doesn't go to the moon. Then what? Then you actually then you're forced to, hey, we have to actually do something. We have to create something.

And then also, what if another administration comes in and dumps everything? It says, no, we're undoing this. Well, that's the thing. When you have a reserve, listen, the government is never in the same personal finance headspace as a household. People who make that, who conflate those two, that's dumb. But if a reserve- We're going broke. Wait, hold on. We're going broke. Let's buy Bitcoin. Yes, but a reserve is- So let's say the government had billions and billions of dollars of crypto. And they decided, okay, yeah, we're going to use this to pay off the debt.

If they owned all that crypto and then they went to sell it to pay off the debt, guess what happens to the price of crypto? It crashes. So it's like a catch-22 thing where you can't say we're going to own all this crypto to pay off the debt because once you try to pay it off, it's like the value of all these meme coins and shit coins. If the largest holders ever went to sell them all, the price would effectively go to zero. So you're kind of holding yourself up

with these values where it doesn't make any sense. I don't understand the logic behind the Bitcoin reserve. I think he's doing it because he said he was going to do it. But I don't like him one bit. Even as somebody that would benefit from higher prices, I do not like it. I don't know. I think the US government holding Cardano, because Cardano, again, you can do stuff with it, and it's Cardano. I still don't know what that is. Someone tell me what it is. I have no idea.

Do you know what Cardano is? Come on. I don't know what Cardano is. It's a layer one. I don't know. It's a clown show. Not Cardano. I don't know anything about it, but I don't like what's happening one bit. All right. How is this? This is why I bought Bitcoin in the first place, because I fucking hate this shit so much. And because I'm a very petty person, if it was going up and I didn't own it, I'd be very spiteful. So does that make me a bad person or a bad investor or just an idiot or an asshole? I don't know, but I don't like it. All right. How's this? I think we've been a little negative today.

I think if we have a recession, the offset to a recession is going to be the housing market. I'm pretty sure I believe this. So the housing market has been in a recession for the past, I don't know, 18, 24 months. Kevin Gordon tweeting, U.S. pending home sales have fallen to a new all-time low. I'm coming around to the idea that the best hedge in the next recession will be housing. If interest rates continue to come down and mortgage rates get 6% and 5%. No, hard-boiled eggs.

I think housing is going to be the hedge. I think you're going to see more activity in housing that has been pent up. Listen, if there is a recession and people lose jobs, that's bad. But if the unemployment rate went from 4% to 8%, that's still a large set of the population with a job. And that

that have been waiting for lower rates and waiting for activity and waiting for people to get off the sidelines. And some people will because it's a recession. I feel like that pivot will make people want to sell. And then you have the home equity line of credit stuff come in where it's like, oh, my HELOC's at 5% now. Now I'm going to tap this thing because I need the money. I think housing is going to be one of the automatic stabilizers during the next recession. Thoughts? As long as banks don't pull back, yeah. Yeah.

I like it. Listen, you said we're being very negative. I don't feel too negative. I like this. I like the idea that people have an opportunity to buy stocks at lower prices. Me and Chamath, same thing. I feel the same way. But again, no, this is good. I don't like the tariffs. I don't like that. I don't like it. I think it's dumb. Let's see. How about this? What if the tariffs just offer people a really good buying opportunity, and when they're taken off, then…

I think the big worry is that we go too far down this road and then things can't be completely prepared and back to where they were. You can't just go back and hit a reset button. I think that's the worry. But I agree. Sometimes markets need to be shaken up a little bit. I'm not a super bear. I'm also not an idiot who doesn't recognize that there's risk out there, right? Like,

Can we go into a recession? Can we have a bear market? Yeah, obviously. But I'll say that I don't think that this is going to be a bear market. Could be wrong. This might age very poorly. But I think I don't see this going. And why am I even giving an opinion here? Because I'm making this up. But I don't think that this is going to be more than a 12 percenter. Okay. So then that means that we're not having a recession. Because if you think we're going to have a recession, we're definitely going to have a bear market. Mark it down.

Right. So I think that those two predictions have to go with one another. And I think it's way too early to say like, we are definitely having a recession. I think that people have to probably pump the brakes. Yeah. Again, the probability is risen, but you can't say like, we're definitely going into recession. I think that is a little too quick. Yeah. But again, I said this last week, I'll say it again. If you, cause we've spoken to a lot of these people over the years who were seduced by the 5% overnight rates and you had a lot of money in cash and

Now is the time. I'm not saying now is the optimal time. I don't know. But if you were looking for an opportunity, at least start to plan your entrance, okay? At least start to plan getting some money out of cash and back into the market. When all these high-flying stocks that people go, oh, these stocks ran away from me. A lot of these growth stocks are already down 30%, 40%, 50%. We could see another 2021 type of growth scare where a lot of these big stocks that were up a lot

our Palantir and Nvidia and whatever, and Bitcoin is falling again. Like all these things that you wish you would have bought now that they're falling,

Okay, now's your time to buy them at lower prices. Yeah. All right, where are we going next? All right, from Bloomberg. Headline, Austin rents tumbled 22% from peak on massive home buying spree. And they say basically they built a ton of apartments in Austin. Guess what? Rents fell. They talked about these people who are getting two months free rent and $600 credit for signing their lease. So...

This says nowhere in the country have rents declined as much as they have in Austin. Now, 22% off the peak reached in August 2023, according to Redfin. The median asking rent is $1,399 per month, down $400 in less than three years. Wow.

We have a lot of problems in this country that don't have readily made solutions. Like, how do we actually fix this big thing that's a problem? A lot of them don't have easy answers. The housing market is the only one that has an easy answer. Now you could say, well, do we have enough labor and construction capacity to actually build more? Do we have enough financing available? But if...

government officials really wanted to fix the housing market, I think they could incentivize this to be done. They could incentivize builders with guaranteed mortgages or low rates or whatever it is. If this was really something people wanted to fix, we could fix it. And it seems like there's no political will to do so for whatever reason. I don't understand it. But that is the one thing that there is a solution. It's very easy. Fix it. All right.

Don't look at this, unless you did already. I did not. The Federal Reserve released household income for the census data through 2023. What is the mean—that's average for you non-stat folks out there—the mean personal family income for a household level? So anywhere that there's a household with more than one person bringing in an income, what is the average income for families in the United States?

I'm always afraid to take a guess here at the risk of sounding out of touch or like an idiot. The average household income? Yes. $120,000. You're pretty close. $136,000 or so. Higher than I would have thought, actually. But why? I just... I don't know. Two incomes, right? Is that what that's saying or not necessarily? Yeah. No, yeah. You're right. Yeah. I don't know. It just...

High to mid-six figures is now the – I don't know. It sounds high to me. I think it's a good thing. That's why I do think getting back to the recession talk, if we do have a recession, it would probably be a mild one because people have higher incomes and they have assets and they have a margin of safety in their house and all this stuff. If there is a slowdown, it's not – I don't see it being a calamity. I don't see it being –

No, I agree. Could they slow the economy? Yes. Could earnings fall and that hurts the stock market? Absolutely. Is it going to cause a financial crisis? No, I don't think so. I don't think it gets to that point either. So there's this guy that I follow on Twitter and his handle is, and I'll just link to it. It's not a great handle. It's his name and it's a bit, a lot of letters, but posts great stuff. His name is Karush and he has a chart, where is this from? A company called eMarketer.

It's showing that Amazon Prime's video ad tier launch in the first quarter of 2024 has suppressed US streaming ad prices into 2025.

So it's showing Netflix, Disney, Max, Peacock, and Hulu, the average US ad-supported video-on-demand CPM by platform. Oh, so when Amazon came in, they set a lower bar and everyone else fell to it? Yeah. You know, like the Your March is My Opportunity, there's a pretty good illustration of that. That's surprising. I would have not assumed Prime Video would have that much pull. I would have thought everyone would be to whatever Netflix sets. That's interesting.

But I guess all these other also-rans, they had to match Prime if they're not as big as Netflix so they don't have as much power. So, Ben, Chris Ryan from The Ringer, he tweeted about a movie. And so I clicked the link to the trailer. But you know what I did? Not watching the trailer. Reading the description. So here's the description.

After a drug deal gone wrong, Tom Hardy's the star. After a drug deal gone wrong, a bruised detective must fight his way through a criminal underworld to rescue a politician's estranged son while unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city. I'm in. Tom Hardy? All right. Why would I watch a trailer and spoil it? I'm in. Yeah, I don't know. I'd personally just rather watch the trailer. Really? You can get a sense of the tone of the movie through a trailer.

Like, oh, this is going to be a really over-the-top action movie that's not – like, I don't think the description always matches the trailer. What percent of movies – of trailers do you see and say this movie is going to suck? These days, a lot of them. I love watching movie trailers, though. It's one of my favorite pastimes. I watched a movie on the flight called Undercover. It's a foreign film. Ooh, look at you. No big deal. And it's a woman who goes undercover.

spy, espionage, are we going to get caught? Answer the phone. Who is it? Love it. I love movies like that where it's really tense. Somebody's cover is going to get blown. Did you watch Zero Day? Is it Zero Day? What was it, De Niro, a Netflix thing? I made it like 15 minutes in and I just thought, eh. Really? Yeah. How pretentious of you.

15 minutes and you discarded Bobby D? You said, I get it. This is garbage. When he was working out and jogging, I don't know. I'm sorry. He mailed this performance in. Is he mailing in everything these days? Does he really try anymore? He does so many things. I don't know. I like it. All right. You're the only one. All right. I have a dumb question. So I was watching the combine, the NFL combine, where college athletes –

compete. They do the 40 yard dash. They do the vertical jump. When these athletes do a vertical jump and it says like, Oh, he has a 39 inch vertical. Tell me if this is what it means. Does this mean that his toes are 39 inches off the ground? Because I Googled it. And the way that they do it is they put like this bar on top of you with like horizontal tags and you jump and you smack them. Right. So, so what they do is they measure the distance between your standing arm up

And however, whatever you hit, does that also by definition mean that their toes are 39 inches off the ground? Because it doesn't look like it. Like in the replay, it doesn't look like they're jumping three and a half feet. Yes. That's what it means. That's what it means, right? Yes. I don't believe it. Okay. If you think about it, if you put your hand up and then your hand touches the top thing, it's just your body's moving up by the same amount. It's the same thing. Maybe, maybe, you know, it might be throwing me off is like when you jump, your feet go down.

Yeah, true. The toes are pointed. The toes are pointing. So maybe that adds that if you're, if these are big people, so if they're, if they're, if they've got 14 inch toes, that's why the 39 inches only looks like 26 inches or whatever. I'm looking at, I'm looking at things like for frame of reference and like, it just doesn't look like they're three and a half feet off the ground. Measuring from the heels instead of the, well, I have one of those box jumps. I don't do it as much anymore, but I have one of those box jumping things.

Uh, have you seen these before you do box jumps for an exercise for exercise? You should do it. It'll help your back. And so you turn it on different sides and it says the, the height and the tallest one I have is 30 inches, right? It's that's the tallest. And I put it up and my kids always try to do it. They like, they have fun with it, but I can do, I can do 30 inches pretty. And that's not a, it's, I have to pull my legs up, you know, but do the, do the, I can do 30 inches.

You might be able to keep them close. You possibly would blow out your Achilles. I just, I have to point out, you sent us a picture of your old man basketball league. My back hurts so bad all week. I couldn't, so on Tuesday, I couldn't get out of bed. I felt like getting out of bed. Like I thought I wasn't gonna be able to play, but. So you play how about once a week you play?

Yeah, but I couldn't bail because it's like the teams are decided. And I can't be like, hey, guys, sorry, my back hurts. It's such a lame excuse. But see, I didn't realize how serious this was because I picture open gym. You show up. There's 15 guys and you shoot free throws to see who's on which team and then you just play. That is how it is. That is how it is for every week except for one week we do an official thing. Okay, because the picture you sent me, you had like a team uniform on. Yeah, yeah.

Like a full-out uniform that you guys had printed up somewhere. So this is serious stuff. And of course, you were number 69. Which… All right. Dude, I was a statue out there. I couldn't move. It was awful. Let my team down. By the way, you know what? If this podcast is feeling a little extra dark, this is the darkest hotel room I've ever been in. There's no light. There's a lamp. I'm using a lamp. I feel like hotels should all have the same…

light switches in the same places because that really always throws me off. Sometimes the switch is on the light. Sometimes it's on like a switch on the wall in a weird place. It's always really hard to find the switches for the lamps in a hotel. - There's legitimately, I'm looking about this. There's, there's honest to goodness, there's no lights in here. - It does look very dark. All right, let's go to the Ben's feelings section of the show now. So you said a couple weeks ago, we were talking about my brother, that with your mother, you, the small stuff doesn't impact you anymore or like the- - Nope, never.

Yeah, so this Keanu Reeves meme that I've seen before, it's like I'm at that stage of my life where I keep myself out of arguments. Even if you tell me one plus one equals five, you're absolutely correct. Enjoy. And I see people post this all the time. I don't think anyone actually has this line of thinking in their life. I feel like Keanu must be a one of one. But I can certainly see after going through a situation like this, there's like immediately I feel like there was –

take all this stuff on the table that people think about and worry about on a daily basis and shove 60% of it off the table for me. Just a lot of stuff that people seem to care about, I just cannot make myself care about anymore. And I don't know if that's going to last. It might last. But I also can see the situation where someone who goes through a tragedy like this and a really bad situation, like as someone who's tried to study like the

the emotions of investors in psychology for the past, I don't know, 20 years or so and try to understand them better. I feel like I'm like internally dissecting myself to have the feelings that I'm having. And I can easily see how someone would tip over the scale and fall into like the land of,

Nihilism or I don't care about anything and I'm just depressed. I can see how easily you could fall into that trap Yeah, I can't do that because I have a family and but I can see how easily that can go from like a superpower of I don't care about this other this menial stuff that no one should care about I don't care about that anymore, too I don't care about anything and that's it. That's like the the balance you have to walk up You can't get to the other place of not caring about anything because then what's the point of anything right anyway, I

But so my, my, my goal is that I'm going to be Keanu and we'll see if that lasts or not. But, um, love it. Yes. I'm trying. Um, I made a phone call last week to the, to a dog trainer. We have a boxer puppy and she needs some training, uh, cause boxer puppies are wild. So anyway, uh, I left a voicemail and I gave them my number. Uh, you could reach me at dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I repeated it because that's, I guess that's what I do. I don't know if that's what you do, but, and I thought to myself, Hey, wait a minute.

This is 2025. They're going to get a missed call from me, and they see the voicemails I transcribed. They could just hit the play button and call me back. I don't need to leave them my phone number. I think you do as a courtesy still, just in case. Okay. Right? But wait, listen to this. So I had that thought, and then a day later, Robin forwarded me a voicemail.

And I'm glad the person left their phone number because if you get forwarded a voicemail, it's not a missed call, right? So you can't just like press play or press callback. So I needed the phone number in this case. That's true, especially with a business. Sometimes the call comes in from like a central number and it's not the number you need to get the person. Ben, can I share a nitpick that is going to reveal a – maybe – I don't have this bad flaw in my personality. And I'm not even bothered by it. It's not even a nitpick. It's more of like an observation, okay? I'm not mad. Just like –

When you get picked up by an Uber driver from your home and they say your name with a question mark. Oh. Michael? Yeah. Yes, you're at my house. Of course it's Michael. They should just say, good morning, Michael. Now, if you're at a city, obviously they say it's appropriate to ask with a question mark because there's thousands of people around. Creatures of habit. What if they just have gone to the wrong house before? You know, I got... Speaking of convenience...

I'd say once a week, I will get DoorDash. If I'm busy in the office and I'm doing something and I don't want to go out to get lunch somewhere, I will just DoorDash it. And I did it the other day, and the DoorDash guy walks into my office, and he's got this huge two bags from a sub shop, Fire something subs or whatever. He's like, here you go. And it's all these chips, and it's probably like 16 sub sandwiches.

And I was like, I was waiting for him to pull my bag out of these bags. So that's what he was doing. He's like, here you go. And I said, that's not my order. I didn't order from that place or I don't have 16 people in here. And the guy's like, are you sure? I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure. And guess what? He realized the computer messed him up. He went all the way back to the restaurant, got my order.

Brought it back, and then he realized that it was messed up and was a nice guy about the whole thing. He said, here, I'll leave these 16 sandwiches with you anyway. All right. Let's do recommendations. I watched Onora this weekend, I think the night before the Oscars. I heard good things about it, wanted to see it. And so here's my review. I watched it in two sittings. So I watched the first half Friday night, the second half Saturday night.

And my review is this movie was the horse meme, the horse draw meme. I love this movie. I disagree. But go ahead. What's your review? You don't like the ending or the second half? I thought the first half of the movie was amazing. I was ready to proclaim like, okay, this should have won Best Oscar. It was very good. And I thought the second half of the movie was way too long. It was tedious. It was annoying. And I didn't – it just totally fell off of a cliff for me. And I just – it was like, eh, it was an okay movie. I thought it just kind of really –

it like limped to the finish line. Okay. I was on a major high from seeing this in the theater.

So I think that I was better able to tolerate a maybe not so great second half. I mean, it was a 220-minute movie, and they could have easily cut 45 minutes off of anything from the second half of the movie. Excuse me. What do you mean they easily cut? Sir, this is the Oscar winner. How dare you? You saw it from your couch. You don't get to have the first instance. I think the Oscar movies this year stunk. I think this is one of the worst best picture lineups in 20 years. I think that's my takeaway.

The performance was amazing. The performance I thought of the two, the Russian kid I thought was hilarious. And then the goods were so funny. I thought they were just okay. I thought the main girl, I thought she was great and she, she probably deserved the Oscar, but I just thought the movie was kind of, eh, I love the movie, but I agree. This was a really, really, here's my question for you. Was she doing a Staten Island or a Long Island accent in the movie? Staten Island. No Brooklyn, I think, or Staten Island, not Long Island.

Okay, I thought Staten Island. So that was my review of Venora. Here's my other thing. TV is so good right now. So my wife and I were talking the other day. Every week we get new episodes of The Pit.

which is just a fantastic show. I've mentioned this before. You have to watch it. The Pit, White Lotus, and Severance. New episodes every week. These are three amazing shows. I've never watched a medical... I never watched DR, so I've never watched Grey's Anatomy. I know it's different. Okay. Watch The Pit. It is a fantastic show. It is so good. Such high quality. Can I say one thing on... So I'm late to Severance. I'm just... I don't know why. I missed the start to season two, and I've just been dragging my feet.

The last episode was fantastic. Okay. I'm having trouble breaking back into it. I had trouble with the first. The first couple episodes of this season I thought were a little weird, but it's grown in the last couple I've been. I think it's well on its way to being a prestige TV show. It's great. Okay. Yeah, I'll break through the battery. I just need to. Okay.

Two weeks ago, I forgot to mention this. They did Wayne's World on the rewatchables. Oh, I saw Rocky drop this morning, by the way. They did Rocky. I'm psyched to listen to that. So Kyle Brandt was on Wayne's World with Bill Simmons, and those guys, especially Kyle Brandt, just destroyed. Yeah, I rewatched it because I listened to that.

It is funny how much of a – it's more of like a skit-based movie than it is – I forgot how skit-based it is. But yeah, Mike Myers is kind of a genius. I never saw – so they also did Blues Brothers. I never saw that movie. I don't think I'm ever going to. I feel like it's one of those movies that was either in your time and you loved it or it was past your time and you kind of go, wait a minute, what? Yeah. It's kind of a weird pop culture thing. Oh, I – we'll do the top ten shows. But before we do –

I flagged one thing that I want to get a chuckle with you out of. I saw this on Instagram from Barstool. They made a bracket. What is the best old guy phrase? Did you see this by any chance? Okay. We're going to go through this. This is hysterical. Newsflash, buddy.

versus yellow. All right. Next, next one is look who the cat dragged in versus hate to burst your bubble. And look, it's all, it's all just old guys. Max is, I don't know why this tickles my funny bone. Let me sneak past you versus don't mind if I do.

I guess these aren't a lot of phrases that are probably going to die at some point, aren't they? Next is, it's not the heat, it's the humidity. Of course, a classic. Versus, working hard or hardly working? Is beer o'clock on there? All right, so that's one side of the bracket. The other side is, what's the damage, right, when you're going to pay the bill? Versus, see you later, alligator. Next is, you and what army? Versus, talking about food, these are dangerous. Okay.

Next is no more. Mr. Nice guy versus nice blinker. Oh, when people don't put on their blinker. Yeah. All right. And lastly, ready to rock and roll versus cool your jets. See, I feel like these are more funny to you because you're a middle-aged guy. Now, I don't know why these are all very, very funny to me. All right. Shows me to do it. I got a big list. I got a huge list here. Um, me too. Okay. I'm going to go first.

These are the ones that are unimpeachable for me. So this is— Hold on. Let me grab my list. This is the best shows of this century, basically, since we have prestige. And I'm going to include The Sopranos since that basically kicked this off. No network shows. Well, there's one network show. One. On Friday Night Lights? Yes. No, it's not allowed. Because I don't make the rules. The emailer made the rules, and he said no network shows. But fine. Go. All right. So my unimpeachable ones are Breaking Bad, The Wire, Sopranos, Mad Men. Wait. Hold on. Dude. You got to—

Sorry. I got a lot. Okay. So Breaking Bad, The Wire, Sopranos. Those are on everyone's list. Mad Men, which I was an early adopter of. I was in Mad Men from the start. Six Feet Under is my one that not a lot of people have. I think that's one of the best shows ever and it has the greatest finale of all time. Succession is made down to the list. Then Friday Night Lights. Those are my unimpeachable ones. I think that's seven. Okay.

So my ones that could have made it that are probably pretty close, I have Game of Thrones, Warlock Empire. Hold on. You still have three more spots. I know. And I'm going to tell you, there's a lot of them that are jockeying for those positions. I think Severance could get there. Hey, cool your jets.

I think Severance could get there. I think White Lotus will probably be there. I rewatched... I tried to watch your De Niro show, and I decided, you know what? I'm just going to watch the first season of White Lotus again. And I forgot how good of a character Armand is. I think he's the best White Lotus character ever. Oh, so good. And that was only six episodes. I could have gone another four episodes of that crew. I think Veep could potentially be on the list. The Leftovers, I think, is a really underrated one. And then The Bear and Fleabag. So those are ones that are very close for me that could...

The positioning could be Jocelyn. Then the ones that could have been there but trailed off, House of Cards. I think people forget how good those first few seasons were. The Americans, it kind of died down in the middle and then the ending was great. Dexter started off great, like the first four seasons and trailed off. Arrested Development was one of the original comedies, I think, and then Justified in the Office. So I got a whole list of stuff here. I'm the guy with the strings on the wall. So which three are you plucking?

So I'd probably say Veep, I think is the funniest comedy show maybe ever written. Or not funniest, smartest. So I'd say like Veep, White Lotus, and probably The Bear. Oh, wow. Or Fleabag. You love The Bear. Yes, I love The Bear. Okay. Flea guy, you said? Fleabag. Fleabag. Really? Yeah. All right. So I have three separate lists. One is my list and one is this is off my list.

because I didn't see these shows. So I didn't see a lot of these shows. I never saw The Wire, The Americans, Deadwood, Atlanta, Veep, and I only saw Three Sons of Sopranos. Okay, that's good to know. These are, okay, so they're not on my list. I never saw them. I know they're on everyone else's. These are not on my list, but these are like my next 10. True Detective, I know two and three were terrible, but one was so epic. Game of Thrones, Girls, True Blood, Ray Donovan, The Boys, True Detective, Entourage, Yellowstone, Sons of Anarchy.

All good shows, not top 10. All right, my top 10 in no order. I think the only one that's like really out there, I don't have this great list actually. I have two that probably don't belong. All right, the two that don't belong, Bloodline was a show on Netflix where the first two seasons were two of my favorite seasons ever.

It was very good. The first season especially was very good. The third season stunk, but hey, it's on my list, so what can I tell you? And then the other one that probably shouldn't be here but is Boardwalk Empire. Is that a big stretch? That's a stretch. No, I love that show. Okay. All right, so a succession of— It's a very high-quality show. What else do I have here that's different from yours? I have succession on Bloodline. I put House of Cards here because I love that show. I have White Lotus. Oh, Curb. Did you not put Curb on yours?

No, probably could have. Homeland, Breaking Bad, two others that you don't have. Silicon Valley and Ali G, Borat, Bruno. All right. I think we covered them all on our list. You picked up a few that I missed and I picked up a few that missed. I did love Ali G back in the day. I listened to him recently on SmartList. Yeah, he's very good. Genius. All right. What else is going on, Ben? I got nothing. All right. What's the market doing? Let's see.

Down. Okay. Next week at this time, are we in a correction? 10% down from the highs? Or does he blink this weekend? See, this is the hard part. If you're trying to predict this stuff and you're saying, this is definitely going to happen, he could wake up

Sunday and say tariffs are gone and that changes the entire landscape of any prediction you can make. Yeah, I mean the the news flow like I said, but it's a very fluid situation The news flow is happening so quickly that who knows a lot of things that we said today might look very foolish even tomorrow I feel like I feel like everything that the Wall Street people predicted is completely wrong anything Wall Street firms have been saying is

This is a negotiating tactic. He's not going to actually do it. All that stuff. Full steam ahead. Yeah. And those, the Wall Street firms have been completely offsides on this, on this the whole time. They were wrong. Yeah. So anything they say, I don't, I don't trust it. I don't, I don't think you can trust anyone in this that tries to handicap this right now because we don't know. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Who knows where we'll be next week? We'll be here. We'll be recording. We'll be reacting. AnimalSpirits at TheCompoundNews.com. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.

Go, go.