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cover of episode Macro Matters: Trade Wars, Labor Markets, and Economic Signals

Macro Matters: Trade Wars, Labor Markets, and Economic Signals

2025/2/3
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Guy: 我们正在对播客进行品牌重塑,精简内容,专注于每日市场洞察和专家对话,以适应市场变化和提升效率。 Dan: 本周我们将讨论关税、财报和重要的就业报告,关注市场对关税的反应,以及对科技公司和美国经济的影响。 Liz Thomas: 市场对关税的反应并非完全符合预期,国债收益率的反应并不像预期的那样剧烈。这可能是因为资金流向债券市场的一种避险行为,抵消了通货膨胀的影响。长期贸易战可能导致滞胀,即经济增长放缓但通货膨胀持续存在。我们需要关注关税是否为谈判策略,以及它们是否会长期存在。持续的贸易战将严重影响公司盈利,从而使市场估值过高。大型科技公司股价的走势表明,市场正在从与贸易相关的股票中撤资,转向那些受贸易影响较小的公司。美国消费者短期内可能不会感受到关税的影响,但长期来看,关税将影响食品和汽油等商品的价格,从而损害可选消费品股票。DeepSeek事件表明,即使采取了控制措施,技术创新仍然可能发生,这将迫使其他公司加快创新步伐并降低成本。金价持续上涨,这似乎与利率、美元走势无关,这可能预示着市场正在寻找某种信号。各国央行购买黄金,以及散户投资者的参与,是推动金价上涨的主要因素。尽管美联储现在更关注通货膨胀,但就业报告仍然非常重要,因为它可能对市场造成冲击。就业报告的预期相对稳定,这增加了市场出现意外冲击的可能性。如果小时工资增长强劲,这将表明劳动力市场紧张,并可能导致通货膨胀。旷日持久的贸易战可能会导致美国制造业裁员,从而影响就业情况。如果就业市场失去平衡,可能会导致失业人数和职位空缺同时增加,因为求职者和职位需求之间存在错配。公司现在难以将通货膨胀成本转嫁给消费者,因为消费者对价格更加敏感。沃尔玛和塔吉特股价的差异可能反映了消费者在通货膨胀时期改变消费行为的情况,消费者倾向于选择更便宜的商品。

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On the Tape.

iConnections is the world's largest capital introduction platform in the alternative investment industry. They bring the asset management community together through a membership platform that lets allocators and managers meet and connect both physically and virtually. Over 3,000 allocators and 600 managers are part of the iConnections community, overseeing nearly $48 trillion and $16 trillion in assets, respectively.

They are also the people behind the alternative investment industry's largest and most exciting in-person events. To find out more about iConnections events and members-only platform, visit iConnections.io. SoFi, the all-in-one super app for banking, borrowing, and investing. Earn industry-leading APY, get great loan rates, and trade stocks.

SoFi. Get your money right. Banking products and loans offered by SoFi Bank N.A., NMLS 696891. Brokerage and active investing products offered through SoFi Securities, LLC. Member FINRA SIPC.

All right, welcome to the Risk Reversal Pod. It is Monday morning. Guy and I are going to have a great conversation with Liz Young-Thomas of SoFi. We're going to hit earnings this week. We're going to hit tariff and trade reactions. And of course, the all-important jobs report on Friday. But Guy, I just said the Risk Reversal Pod podcast.

Talk to the people about what we're doing here as we rebrand the pod. Evolution is an important part of mankind. It's also a very important part of businesses. And we're trying to evolve and we're trying to get a little streamlined here. So everything is going to fall under the risk reversal brand. So nothing changes on your end, folks. Nothing needs to be done on your end. We are now just the risk reversal pod. Monday through Friday, market call will still be at one o'clock.

each day, but nothing changes, but we're trying to streamline and clean things up. Yeah. And I guess the idea is between on the tape and okay, computer, you know, the content we love, the contributors we love. We just thought that to your point, guy streamlining it five days a week, five

30 minutes Monday through Thursday, and then we're going to still have those great conversations with strategists, economists, market participants that are going to drop on Friday morning. Those will tend to be a bit longer, but example here, we're doing the look ahead. We're kind of breaking down the biggest themes that we think are going to be of the week. And then this afternoon, I'm taping a tech pod with Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management, a

frequent contributor to the pod here. And we're just going to go over all things AI, DeepSeek, and video. We're going to look at some big earnings of Amazon and Google, Uber, and AMD this week. So stick around for that. That drops in the podcast store. But Guy and I are going to be right back with Liz Thomas of SoFi.

Elizabeth, how are you? Good morning. I am wide awake, wide eyed and bushy tailed today. Lots going on. There is lots going on today. We're going to talk about three things, Dan. We're going to look at these tariffs, which obviously have the market going a bit haywire. We're going to look at some earnings this week. And obviously there's some economic data as well, not least of which the all important. I can't believe I just said that Dan Jobs report.

Yeah, well, Liz is going to break that down for us. You know, it seems like a lot going on on Mondays this year. You know, last week we had the deep seek freak out. And then today, obviously, the reaction to the tariff announcement and trade. And, you know, I guess the surprising thing, Liz, there was that, you know, this was obviously hinted at. This is something that Trump ran on. Right. So they're saying promises made, promises kept.

but I'm surprised that the market is reacting this way. You know, we talked a little bit last week that maybe it was a constructive thing that you had mega cap tech specifically, those names, you know, associated with the AI trade sell off and you saw money go into other parts of the stock market. We talked about that on Monday. Here we are shortly after the open a week on week here in

And it seems like the weakness is across the board. Yeah. And I'm just sorry for looking down here, but I'm just checking because the market's just opened. We actually have recovered a little bit since the overnight session. So looking at last night futures at some point right before I went to bed, the futures were down much more than this. And so we've gained a little bit back. What I think is actually the most interesting about this is if you look across the Treasury complex.

Number one, the few maturities that are up are only up by about a basis point, basis point and a half. And then you've got longer duration treasuries, 10 year and 30 year down, actually. So I think the expectation here was that this was going to be just kind of blatantly inflationary and that yields would spike. And that's not what's happening right now. We've got the dollar up a little bit. We've got energy prices up.

But the yields, treasury yields are not responding. Number one, they're not responding exactly the same across maturities, but they're also not up. So I find that interesting today. Yeah. You know, it's interesting you say that because I look at the same thing and, you know, I'm trying to explain it away, I think.

Most people correctly would think what we just learned over the weekend or on late Friday would be inflationary. Therefore, we'd see rates go higher. But I think in the midst of what appears to be a pretty mild market sell-off, Dan, in my opinion, that money coming out of equities might be sort of this perceived flight to quality in the form of the bond market. So maybe one offsets the other. I don't know. But

I'll say this. I think when the market does come to the realization that, you know, it starts to connect some dots here, I do think yields get back on their horse higher. We'll see, though. I think that's what's happening this morning. Yeah. So David Rosenberg, Rosenberg Research, we just call him Rosie, you know, in his morning note. I think this is really important. You know, I'm not an economist. David is. He basically said that Trump overstepped

his bounds or maybe misstepped getting into the tariffs specifically with Canada. David's up there in Toronto. He is a Canadian. And, you know, Mexico, when you think about, you know, how much energy comes from those two places, how much the auto industry is reliant on not just parts, but obviously manufacturing there. And he thinks that it runs the risk, OK, of basically being a massive headwind to Trump's pro-growth agenda.

Right. And so let's just say this is inflationary. Let's say the trade war and tariffs go longer than some expect. Then you have a situation where if inflation does rise, which guy you think is the case, you think ultimately, I know what you just said about the flight to quality into treasuries and what that means right now for yields. But if inflation goes up, then you have a lot of resistance to inflation.

the administration, right? The poll numbers start to go lower and then you have less buy-in on your economic agenda. And then the last piece of this, and just reading through this over the weekend, is that you have these deficit hawks in the Republican Party in the House.

which also becomes a bit of a headwind, again, to that pro-growth agenda. So you could see things going pear-shaped, Liz, pretty quickly. And why am I focused so much on the administration? It's a big reason why he won, right? The dissatisfaction with the economy and inflation in general. So how do you think about that? Because I think Rosie makes a lot of good points there. Yeah, well, actually, I don't know if you guys saw Paul Tudor Jones on Squawk Box this morning, but he made some good points as well, sort of along the same vein,

The idea that the reason he was elected, the reason that Trump was reelected was because of the American worker and people believing that they weren't getting good wages and that American companies were not in the right position. So a lot of these actions, they were pretty well telegraphed, frankly, but a lot of these actions are still consistent and congruent with the end goal, so to speak, of that election.

However, the repercussions that are happening in the meantime, we've got, obviously, there have been a bunch of estimates over the weekend. How much is this going to shave off of U.S. GDP? How much is this going to shave off of Canada and Mexico? And it's going to disrupt a lot of consumer products, including what we buy at the grocery store, including a lot of retail goods, autos, all of this, right? And what you would expect is that it's going to start to drive a stagflationary fear.

We've been talking about stagflation for a long time. And as we know, part of the stagflation equation is that growth does slow down, but inflation does not. So I think that's the logical place to land. But again, the reaction in the market today so far is not in

entirely clearly stagflation yet. And I think part of what we have to wait on today, I mean, obviously, this is really the first trading day that we get to react to this. What we have to wait on today and maybe this week and maybe even for a few weeks is to find out, is this intended to be a negotiation tactic? And are these really intended to stay on for the long term? I've heard people talk about this isn't even sustainable for the long term.

If these are not intended to stay on for the long term, we're just going to see a lot of volatility in markets while we price them in and then price them out. And we go through this retaliation phase, which Canada has already threatened quite a bit of. I imagine Mexico will come back with its own retaliatory efforts. There's going to be a lot more information that we're going to get over the coming days and weeks on this front. And I expect that this does not stay the way that it was announced today. I agree with that. You know, one of the things that I've thought incorrectly, but

the market at these valuations, and when I say the market, I am talking about the market as a monolith. It has less and less room for error if something were to come up. And this is obviously one thing that potentially could come up. And as Elizabeth mentioned, we're going to see iterations of this. But if this were to last for a period of time, Dan, what it's going to mean is almost by definition, earnings are not going to come in as robust as the market thinks. And we're going to have butters at one point this week. We'll obviously probably have that type of

conversation, but it's going to be a huge drag, in my opinion, to earnings. So the expected earnings growth is just not going to be there. So that makes an expensive market, I think, that much more expensive. I mean, if you really want to do back of the envelope things, you know, and if you're

sort of play it out. The market, to Liz's point, I mean, today's move, at least what we've seen over the last 15 or so, 20 minutes since the open, is muted for sure. Yeah, so down about 1.5% for both the S&P and the NASDAQ. The S&P is only down 3% from the all-time highs, I think, made last year.

last week. The NASDAQ's down 4.5%. Interestingly, never made a new high, never confirmed the new high in the S&P 500. And to your point about expected earnings growth this year, about 13.5%. I think the three of us were all surprised that that number didn't creep lower as we got into the back half of last year. But that puts the S&P at 22 times forward, which again, people will use the example of

valuation when it's suitable, you know, probably too far after we've kind of corrected at some point, they're going to look back and say, hey, listen, at 22 times, that was whatever. You know, we have over a thousand companies to report this week, probably more than a hundred in the S&P 500, a couple big ones. I mean, actually, there's a few that I think are important.

Some have to do with trade. Some have to do with the AI situation that we had last week. And then some just are probably a pretty decent read on the consumer. And let's just start with mega cap tech. Tuesday after the close, it's Google. And Thursday after the close, it's Amazon. Both implied moves about 5.5% in either direction. It's interesting, though, as we're looking at these names right now, Amazon is unchanged on the day, which is

I think is pretty fascinating. Google's down 1%. Amazon's one of those ones you would have thought that tariffs, trade war, would not be good for them when you consider how much of the goods that they sell here in the U.S. come from China. And then Google, you consider yourself, well, they're not in China. They don't sell goods that are going to be subject to this sort of thing. Both stocks.

Trading very near all-time highs, Guy. Thoughts on these? And then also the meta that we took a look at last week. Again, they are not in China. They have a growing e-commerce business not affected by this. That stock is up on the day. Those three names, what are they telling you? Is it just a rotation out of some of the semi-names and the ones that are probably closer tied to what might be a trade situation where it's going to be really hard to get goods and services into the states that are not going to be taxed?

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it without question. I mean, what we didn't talk about yet, but we will, is the move in NVIDIA since basically the day after they reported earnings. I think the stock traded up to 153. As we're sitting here now, it's in the one teens. And if you're asking me, I think it's still headed lower. The reversal in Apple on Friday on the back

of an earnings report Thursday night, which by the way, that move hard didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I think that's part of it. So money coming out of those names, clearly, I think they're finding their way into names like Google, which you can still obviously make a case for in valuation. Amazon, I think is sort of Teflon in most environments, tariffs, no tariffs, they seem to win. Obviously, there's a cloud business there as well. And then Facebook is just a beneficiary. I

think, again, my opinion, the fact that they've been able to use AI to improve their margins and just look at that last release. I mean, if you just looked at it in terms of earnings and revenue growth, you'd be like, eh. But then you look at it, the margin expansion they've seen over the last year or so, it's pretty significant. And that to me is they're one of a few companies, at least the ones that we talk about, that have been able to leverage AI in a way that obviously is a

Yeah, Liz, when you think about just the reaction last week to the deep seek, winners and losers were picked. There's an argument that could be made that it was a shot across the bow. It's going to reinforce the fact that as a country, you know, for a whole host of reasons, and one of the big ones is kind of national security, that we got to get our act together. If we were caught sleeping at the wheel while China was doing this, whether they were using NVIDIA chips that were, you know, in servers that were in Singapore and the like, it

It doesn't really matter. They've made some innovations that I think we have basically underappreciated. And they're also using technology that was forced to become better with the chip restrictions, you know, the chip bans and the like here. So again, that's something that's going to continue to play out. To Guy's point, NVIDIA closed horribly on the week. Here it is.

Followed through, it's down 5%. From a technical perspective, it's broken almost every moving average. For the first time, it's below the 150 and 200, and I want to say a year and a half percent, but it was done on fundamentals. Away from that, though, what are you focused on when you think about Disney, when you think about Uber? These are very tied to U.S. discretionary spending. Are there any takeaways that you're kind of looking to make as we head into Friday's jobs report?

Well, look, so first of all, big picture, if we think back to China was supposed to be one of the drivers for our discretionary companies for even luxury retail around the globe. And then it didn't come through because the Chinese consumer is in a world of hurt. But I think the U.S. consumer made up for a lot of that. So those companies didn't get as hurt as everybody expected. And now here we are, you know, last week, discretionary took it on the chin from some of that. And then today it's the second worst sector aside from I.T.,

because of these tariff announcements. So the U.S. consumer, I don't think, is going to feel the pain of some of these tariffs immediately. But in a week or two's time, if they stay on, you start to see it at the grocery store, you start to see it at the pump, all the things that the consumer is going to be more sensitive to. So I think discretionary stocks will continue to suffer as long as this trade war carries on. The idea of deep seek and what happened last week

First of all, to your point, Dan, it's not necessarily about whether or not DeepSeek is going to take over the world or whether or not it's going to be the next winner and it's going to render a bunch of things obsolete. It's the fact that regardless of the controls we tried to put on,

they still did it. It still happened. And the competitive landscape changed. So now you're going to see companies trying to scramble to figure out, okay, how do we make the next faster, cheaper option? What does this look like for the next two to three years for our demand? And it did force everybody to sort of speed up

hone in and try to find cost-cutting options. And that's what competition does. Now, we're going to continue to hear headlines about whether or not they did it legally and all these different things that got around in the back end of it. Again, I come back to, I don't know that it matters as much as it does that it happened, right? And it's possible to continue to innovate, which then has to make everybody else sharper and cheaper at what they're doing.

interesting one of the other things that's been happening very quietly dan and i know elizabeth has views on this because she's been sort of in this camp for quite some time is the move in gold which if you look at what's happened to bitcoin i think bitcoin topped out about 108 000 or so i think it traded down to 92 000 over the weekend but obviously it's been under some pressure and i don't want to make a big deal out of it because it's obviously had a huge run over the last couple weeks in the wake of that gold just continues to do sort of the grind higher

And Liz, as I've said, gold's worked with rates going higher, rates going lower, dollar higher, dollar lower. Seemingly in every environment, it continues to sort of do its thing. And I think that's a story that more and more people are going to start to talk about. Some of the miners have been okay. Some have traded poorly, but-

Gold, to me, has been a harbinger of something that I think I know, but the market is trying to sniff out right now. Yeah. So first of all, full disclosure, I've been talking about owning gold for a long time. Last week, I did sell out of the miners, not because I'm suddenly bearish on the miners, but just because it's not worth the volatility right now, especially in this environment. So it recovered a little bit of the loss. I got out of that position, but I'm still long behind.

gold ETFs in the form of IAU and PHYS. So I'm looking at my screen right now, the ETFs that I track, the list of ETFs that I track, there are only a handful that are positive right now. Gold is up there as in the top three. The only thing outperforming gold today is the TLT.

on the list that i track okay so this is clearly a defensive move guy to your point the reaction and the so-called relationship problem between gold and some of the other assets in the market what you would expect is if the dollar is going up gold is not necessarily going up gold is also a zero yielding asset so if yields are attractive elsewhere you would expect that gold is not usually going up now we've got pretty attractive yields compared to history or at least compared to recent history so

So it's interesting that gold has risen, which has perplexed a lot of investors. And Mario and I tweeted about this last week. Actually, you can see the dislocation happen right around when Russia invaded Ukraine. Now we're going back to 2022 at this point, but that's when the dollar got weaponized.

And you had countries start to realize, oh, wait, they can weaponize the dollar in the sense that now I can't even access my own reserves. I thought that that was my reserve. I can't access my own reserves. So I need to have something else that I can access that's global. And then central banks started buying gold, China being chief among them. So you have this demand that's occurred for gold from central banks around the globe that's propped it up. And now I think what's happening is you're starting to see the retail investor perk up.

and get involved. So yes, we've hit all-time highs in gold. I think it's probably hit on all the technical indicators as overbought and frothy and all of these different things, but it continues to rise because of forces that we're not usually used to talking about driving gold.

So, you know, on that front, you guys know that I'm not a gold bug. I don't know much about it. And to what, Guy, you just said about Bitcoin trading as low as $92,000. Here it is at $96,000. I'm really interested to see, and we saw this over the last couple of years a little bit, the correlation of Bitcoin to the NASDAQ, right? So risk on, sort of risk off a little bit. Gold, though, like you just mentioned, is going the opposite way, right? For the reasons that you would probably not sort of expect. And, you know, Guy, I saw something that

MicroStrategy for the first time in 12 weeks last week did not buy Bitcoin, which I thought was interesting. They keep issuing equity and debt to buy it. They did some funky deal last week. So this one, 90,000 in Bitcoin, to me, is a really interesting level. The breakout was 73,000 after being in a long consolidation for most of last year. And then as soon as the election was done, it kind of ripped and

continue to make new highs. It got, you know, well over 100,000. So it'll be interesting to see if it can hold 90,000. And what are the knock-on effects? Not just in the kind of crypto universe, but because of the correlations to NASDAQ, because of the sort of leverage, because of the risk-taking that's been going on. I think you can draw a

a through line to zero days to expiration options. You know, all this sort of risk-taking that folks have been rewarded for over the last couple of years. So to me, I think when gold goes up and you see this sort of stuff go down, you better get your antennas up, Guy. Well, my antenna are certainly up and it's starting to manifest in ways that I've thought for a while incorrectly, but we'll see. But after a very short break, a little economic data, including Dan, the all-important jobs report. So stick around.

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Learn more at cmegroup.com slash eventcontracts. iConnections is the world's largest capital introduction platform in the alternative investment industry. They bring the asset management community together through a membership platform that lets allocators and managers meet and connect both physically and virtually. Over 3,000 allocators and 600 managers are part of the iConnections community, overseeing nearly $48 trillion and $16 trillion in assets, respectively.

They are also the people behind the alternative investment industry's largest and most exciting in-person events. To find out more about iConnections events and members-only platform, visit iConnections.io.

SoFi, the all-in-one super app for banking, borrowing, and investing. Earn industry-leading APY, get great loan rates, and trade stocks. SoFi, get your money right. Banking products and loans offered by SoFi Bank N.A., NMLS 696891. Brokerage and active investing products offered through SoFi Securities, LLC, member FINRA, SIPC. ♪

We teased it and you got it this week, Elizabeth. You have your Super Bowl. This is, I would imagine, one of the playoff games for you. The all-important jobs report at the end of the week. And the market, given what we've seen over the last week or so, is going to take a lot of their cues from what they see, read and hear.

So as we've been talking about for a while, 2024 was the story of the labor market. Everybody had watched that very, very closely because we thought that that's the only thing that the Fed would react to. Now we're starting to pay more attention to inflation as well. But that doesn't mean that the jobs reports are less important. And I still think that they have the power to shock the market if something comes in outside of expectations. Before that jobs report, though, we get another type of labor report, which is the jolt.

reports, job openings, that happens tomorrow. So that's also something to watch. The expectations are pretty flat, meaning that job openings are expected to stay about the same as they were last month. But one of the things that we watch in this report is what we call labor churn. So you want to watch basically the activity that's happening in the labor market. And that's as far as the quits rate.

the layoff rate, the hiring rate. And you get those reads here too. Labor churn staying low has helped wage growth stay low and it's helped productivity increase. So you want labor churn to stay low, but not too low in the sense of layoffs going up. So that's something else to watch.

As far as the jobs report coming up this Friday, this is a little bit later than usual. But as far as the jobs report, we're looking at an unemployment rate that's expected to stay steady at 4.1 percent. Labor force participation expected to stay steady. So as far as expectations go, nothing seems to be able to change here. That also opens us up to a

an opportunity for a little bit of a shock. So I do think that depending on how this week goes, depending on how inflation expectations look for this week and how the market looks for this week, people will be looking at the jobs report, maybe even as a little savior of tell me something good, right? Tell me something good about the economy and hopefully they get it. If they don't, it could actually pile on to a rough week.

hourly wages year over year, how important if it were to come in hot in your opinion? Yeah. So hourly wages are expected to come in at 3.8% growth year over year. That's down a little bit from 3.9% last month. If it comes in hot, as I mentioned before, this is one of the reasons we watch labor churn because in a really tight labor market, you've got wages that continue to rise because that's what

companies have to do in order to hang on to their workers. If we are in a position, and I don't think it's going to be happening quite yet, but if we're in a position where immigration laws are really tightening up and we've got fewer workers in the system, you are likely to see average hourly wages go up because companies, again, are going to struggle to find workers to fill those jobs. So that is something to watch, I think, probably a little bit later in the first quarter and into the second quarter. But good call out.

And that's exactly why I asked, Dan, because although it's not going to manifest itself, I think in this number, that's something I think you have to watch going forward. If in fact, a lot of these immigration policies take place, you know, not political, just sort of back to the envelope math, you're going to have to find people to work these jobs. And almost by definition, you're going to have to pay them more to do it, which I think is somewhat inflationary, which is another reason why I think rates can go higher. But it's absolutely something to watch moving forward.

Yeah, I guess on the flip side, I don't know if you caught Robert Lighthouser. He was the former Trump advisor on trade and tariffs in the first administration, a huge hawk on tariffs. And he was on 60 Minutes. He didn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense, in my opinion. I think a lot of folks didn't think he made a lot of sense in the first time around. But

When you think about the potential for an extended trade war, if you're just looking at the market right now and you're looking at the areas that got hit pretty hard, if you're looking at industrials, you're looking at autos, there's a whole host of other sectors that seem to be bearing the brunt of this. What happens in a protracted trade war is that manufacturing here in the U.S., they end up laying people off, you know, and there was a

A bit of that in that 60 Minutes hit last night. They were talking about a plant in Ohio, a Stellantis plant that had shut down during the first administration and they moved a bunch of jobs, you know, to Mexico and the like. So, you know, it's not so clear about how this plays out for the employment picture. And I just wonder, Liz, so close to that Fed meeting, you know, last week, whether there's going to be like anything important takeaways, especially, hey, listen, the other point is if the Doge is shutting Stellantis

down the way that they apparently have started out, you're going to lose a lot of government workers. And that has been a huge part of the employment picture over the last few years or so. So I don't think this one is that clear. And I think as soon as we get out of earnings season, if this week we don't hear a lot of CEOs kind of doing a hand wringing about the uncertainty, it's quickly going to be a macro environment, you know what I mean? Where we can talk S&P earnings a

all we want. And that will be a byproduct of all this macro sort of stuff. But it's going to be, Liz, a very macro market. Yeah. And we've heard Jerome Powell meeting after meeting for at least the last handful of meetings talk about the labor market coming back into better balance. And it is as of right now. But

if some of this changes, it will again go out of balance. And then you've got sometimes what we end up seeing is a mismatch between basically the people who are unemployed and their skill sets and the jobs that are actually open. So you might end up with higher unemployed persons, meaning the unemployment rate rises or the number of people out of work and looking for a job rises as do job openings.

because there isn't a match between the people who are looking for those jobs and the jobs that they can actually get. So that could be one of those kind of stuck in the mud labor markets that is not a good position to be in. Again, we won't really know that. I think for at least a couple of months still, this labor report is going to be about January. Obviously, we know inauguration didn't happen until the 21st, and it takes a while for people to file for unemployment. So some of those numbers are just not going to make it into this data yet. But it is certainly something to watch as we move through the first half of this year.

And before we get out of here, I mean, I look at General Motors, you know, if you want to sort of drill down a little bit, the move we've seen today, but the move we've seen over the last week or so, I mean, this was a stock that, you know, until prior to about a week and a half or two weeks ago, had been doing extraordinarily well. Now I look at GM back below $50, you know, down four and a half, 5%. And, you know, that obviously is sort of ground zero, I would think for

everything that's going on around this. They're at the focal point of a lot of these different inputs that we just spent the last half hour talking about, Dan. Yeah, it's pretty shocking, though, that Tesla is down six and a half percent when you think about Musk's proximity to the president and to policy, right? Like you would think that this company would be somewhat

insulated. You know, Guy, you and I have been talking about this for a while. Elon has gone back and forth about EV credits, right? And whether it's good for them, bad for them, what it means relative to their competition. But when you think about a heightened trade war with China, you know, Tesla is just low-hanging fruit, especially in the context of what's going on the back and forth with things like TikTok now with DeepSeek. The other one, Apple

had kind of carved out a pretty nice exclusion from a bunch of the tariffs, you know, going back to the first administration. So it's always interesting to kind of see what's up and what's down on days like this. Here's another example. Walmart is unchanged and Target is down three and a half percent. So help me figure that one out. Both companies rely on imports, right, from China. And this gets back to a question that we had

about inflation for two years. What companies are able to absorb a bunch of these higher prices and which companies are able to pass through a big part of that? And we saw margin expansion during all that inflationary period for a lot of different sectors, Liz. So help me make some sense of that because I think on days like this, if a day like this turns into a week and then it turns into a month or two, there's going to be winner's

and losers that are picked, not just by investors, but also by the administration and what they are willing to exclude from this. So that sort of uncertainty is the thing that jams up our supply chains. It causes companies to kind of grow inventories. And on the

backside of this, there could be lots of disruption. So it's not just that this is a shot across the bow to our allies and our adversaries, but this could do a lot of damage domestically for companies that had been doing pretty well on the margin front, which was also powering a lot

of that earnings gain, right, period over period, which is also causing margins to look great. Yeah, well, I think gone are the days where companies can just blindly pass through inflationary costs and raise prices because consumers are hot on the trail. They know that inflation has come down, so you can't just take things up anymore. They will make other substitutions and the price elasticity has changed where people will make different choices. And I think that's what's

playing out in some of these names that you mentioned today, I think this doesn't make either of them a buy or a sell, but Walmart versus Target, if you just look at the typical reaction of consumers when they're trying to save money, they're trying to avoid inflationary costs, you do see that trade down. The story was most of last year, the trade down into Walmart, even for higher income earners.

I think Target is looked at sometimes as more of a discretionary staple, if that makes sense. Even though they both fall into staples, some of the discretionary spending that goes to Target. And then as you mentioned, Dan, inventory control. We know that there have been stories from Target about inventory problems that have persisted. So as consumers change their behavior, and now we know that that ends up being the story, consumers change their behavior very quick.

if they're worried about inflation, if they're worried about prices rising. That's, I think, what the reaction today is. I don't think it's necessarily idiosyncratic to those particular companies. I think it's more of a fear where Target is getting wrapped up into the sell-off happening in discretionary stocks.

Product mix, obviously a big part of that without question. Walmart wins in many environments. And I think that's what we're seeing here today. Dan, you have about to have a great conversation with Gene Munster that will drop on the Risk Reversal podcast tomorrow. Talk about that real quick.

Yeah, Gene of Deepwater Asset Management. He's been a great contributor to the pod over the last few years, a really brilliant tech investor, former analyst guy. You and I have known Gene for, it feels like, as long as we've been doing CNBC. We're going to do a week-on-week just recap of what we learned about the reaction to the DeepSeek data and that product that is whipping around the world. It's the top download here in the U.S. And the other thing I noticed late last week is that Perplexity, which is used...

A lot of different models that you can choose from, whether it be, you know, Llama by Meta, Gemini is not there yet from Google, but ChatGPT is in there, Anthropix Cloud. They're already using this R1 model from DeepSeek. So we're going to break it down. We're going to give our, you know, 411 on just the winners and the losers and the likes. So check that out. It'll be in the podcast store tomorrow morning.