Supply Chain Shocks, Fed Moves & America’s Economic Crossroads with Current's Stuart Sopp
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On the Tape.

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A warm welcome to the Risk Reversal Podcast. Guy Adami here with my dear friend Stuart Sopp, CEO of Current. How are you? I'm doing really well. Thank you, Guy, for having me. Last time we saw you was December. Well, we've seen you in the interim. But last time we talked was December 24th, Christmas Eve.

A lot has changed. So let's just try to look at the last... Well, I mean, specifically the last couple months. But over that period of time, a lot has definitely changed. Yeah. What's gone on? Has anything happened? Well, you tell me, Stu, because... Well, I'll tell you what's going on. For me, finally, some of the uneasiness that was sort of manifesting itself in the fall made its way into the market. And one thing that I sort of was noticing into last year was...

this sort of stealth pickup in volatility. And now since January, February, the prolonged heightened volatility, to me at least, is sort of interesting. Yeah, I think that's been played out with being long exchanges, right? Like you've seen those do really well.

Obviously, they're beneficiaries of the long vol. I think first term, first year, or the first 100 days, Trump administration, which is all we can really talk about, I think, because it just affects so many things.

was always kind of going to be like this. I mean, we've seen it in some of the numbers, right? So in Q1, especially towards the end, before Liberation Day or whatever you want to call that thing in April, you saw stockpiling, right? So we saw wholesalers stockpiling. We saw retail sales that we now know pipped up a little bit. It was also tax refund season. So

For us at Current, we sort of service maybe the poorest segment of America, the most in need of affordable banking services. And tax refund season is super important. So they get between $3,000 and $5,000, something like that on average. And they go and use that money to pay off friends, loans, car loans, all that stuff. And so we've had a really good data set. We're doing quite well as a company because it turns out

People need affordable banking more than ever before. And we've got the right products for everyone. So, you know, Main Street over Wall Street, that kind of thing. So that's been our mission. So we're here for everyone in America. It's trying to service them there. But we are seeing a little bit of stress in some of the discretionary data. So if you look at like the number of swipes and how much is spent on gas and fast food. So this would be like treats at the weekend, things like that, as far as we can tell from the data. And we saw...

the McDonald's earnings today came out lower. And I think that will continue. So I think crude's off a little bit as well. So I think people are driving less. If they don't have to drive, they ain't driving. And if they're trying to treat themselves, they're trying to pull back. So what you have seen is sort of manifesting itself in some of the granular earnings, as you said, with McDonald's, but some other things as well. And you said this environment that we find ourselves in, it's sort of your sweet spot. But

at a certain point, things start to get a little, I would imagine, get a little dicey. And I'm seeing it, you know, I look at 90-day delinquency rates, which have moved up in a pretty meaningful way. And again, these are all bit of tells. I don't necessarily know if you can trade the market on the back of it. I think at some point you can, but it's all sort of happening in real time. Yeah, that's a good point. So if you listen to Rich Fairbanks and

on the Cap One earnings call the other week. I want to say it was last week and maybe it was the week before. He sort of called it out as well. He said, you know, the number of people paying off a minimum balance is going up into, I think it's like 11, 12% for them. And then delinquencies are rising, like you said. So I think we're at the stage where the stresses are building. That's what's happening. People are like trying to find other ways to cover the costs, trying to cut back a little bit.

And I think the American consumer has sort of stockpiled and sort of preparing for like a pretty bad summer is where I'd put it. And the reason why I say that is it's pretty public knowledge now, I think, that trucking is falling in terms of, you know, even truck drivers are advising each other not to go to LA and San Diego. It's like there's no work or Seattle. So you're seeing that ports are down 40% on the containers from China. So.

So, what have we got? Three weeks of this? So, even if you were to get rid of all the tariffs and they started... That's assuming China wouldn't even embargo us as a retaliatory thing. So, best case scenario happens right now is what you're saying. Today, we just fix it. Yeah. You've still got like a month's worth of stuff. Now, maybe there's enough stock to cover that. But if you're going into like multi-months, like we're at three weeks now, maybe we go...

Eight weeks. I think, I don't know if we're going to, you know, we could have like a COVID-like, you know, summer where you're like, hey, there's no this, that, and the other on the shelves. Which I don't think people are taking into consideration. I definitely don't think the market's taking that into consideration because I think there's this belief out there, maybe amongst pundits or maybe amongst even politicians or this administration or everybody else that...

If a deal was struck with this magic wand, everything goes back to normal. But to your point, it's not that easy. I don't think so. There's already something baked in the cake. At least you'll draw down stock, right, at this point. But like we're saying, there's a trigger point over the next couple of months. I think you've got until the end of June, something like that. And then I think things could be pretty bad. All the CEOs, all the sort of other portfolio companies that I speak to, or the VCs that have invested in us speak to,

They're saying CapEx hiring large decisions all on hold. Like they paused everything. You saw the IPO market for all the FinTech all on hold. Almost every company CEO now has gone from like pretty optimistic in February to perish. But we're paid to be sort of pessimistic and scared of our shadow a little bit. So maybe you can...

you know, take that with a grain of salt. But like there is a lot of people right now making decisions for the rest of the year saying, I'm not going to spend as much. I'm not going to do that incremental thing. I'm going to focus on my core. That's what they're doing right now. What is consumer sentiment tell you? And what do you think it's based on? Now, this is me and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth at all, but I've said

for a long time, and whether I'm right or not, I don't know if it's even the point, but the way I look at it, consumer sentiment, all it is is an overlay of the S&P 500. And I'm not suggesting everybody owns stocks because they don't, but...

When the stock market is the lead story for days or weeks at a time, and it's not the lead because it's going up, it's the lead because we're having these cascading moves lower. That's what scares people because they sort of look around and say, wait a second, what's going on? Should I go to McDonald's? Should I buy that coffee? Should I take that trip? So do you need the market to get back on sort of terra firma for people to start feeling better about things? Or is this something else going on? No, I'm with you. I've always taken that position that consumer confidence is just

highly correlated to the stock market. And it makes sense in many ways. And you're seeing that from...

sort of the baby boomer generation, late stage Gen X, you know, they probably have a lot of stocks, right? And there's a lot of discretionary income comes from their dividends and their strategies and portfolios and things like that. And they're probably feeling it, right? Like we're now, we're still down a little bit on the year, back a little bit. But, you know, I think that's where that confidence really comes from. Everyone else is just trying to make things work, right? If you look at the true flation gauge, if you were to take a more broader perspective,

view of what really matters is obviously shelters, rent. That means a big difference, which is primarily tied to interest rates. And so I guess the question here is, is inflation low enough and has the recent contraction in GDP that we saw, which could have been mainly affected by imports and all that. I'm sure you've gone over that.

Is that enough for the Fed to go, all right, let's get going, right? Then I think you see a more broad-based, assuming inflation with all these supply-side problems is kind of okay.

then I think you see broad-based sort of consumer confidence start to pick back up. So you do think that if this Fed were to, I'm going to use the word acquiesce because Jerome Powell seems pretty sort of dug in. But if he starts to look at things the way you're looking at him and says, okay, you know what? Maybe we need to get back on the rate-cutting cycle.

That's enough? I mean, do you think that's enough? I mean, is it just that... I'm not saying it's simplistic in any way, but do you think it's just that simple? It's not that simple because we would maybe still hit a recession, a technical recession. Remember that one in the Biden administration where they refused to admit it was a recession? They refused to acknowledge it. They changed the definition. They changed the definition. They changed the definition. So I think we had a recession and I think we're six weeks to eight weeks away from...

baking in a recession, a technical recession into this year. So will it be enough just knowing that things are contracting? Inflation will most likely come off. That's what that means. It means that we'll start cutting rates.

And so the reason why I'm sort of leading into this is because if consumer confidence is the ones that's measured by Chicago, whatever board. Michigan. Michigan, yeah, sorry, Michigan one board. And it's primarily related to the S&P or like stock markets in general. When you start cutting into recession, it's when the equity markets start going, right? They start going down, not up.

And so then I would think it actually gets worse before it gets better. But for the broader based sort of population who are not really equity holders, their life gets a little easier. So there could be a scenario where you're in the midst of something, recession on the precipice of something, Fed starts to cut, people feel better, but the market backs off. I mean, that's...

that's an outcome that you could see. - 100%. - 'Cause we're gonna start to talk about the market in a second, but that might not be the worst thing in the world if you get people feeling a little bit better about things. You have to stomach however many months or weeks of a downturn in the market, but if it starts to sort of re-accelerate and get people back on board and feeling better about things, maybe that's what we have to endure.

I think it might be right. The caveat I would have is, you know, we're seizing the engine right now of America from a liquidity point of view, from a, you know, goods point of view. Like, things are not moving, basically. So assuming that could get going again, I mean, you're seeing...

Amazon cut jobs. You're seeing UPS. Yes, 20,000 jobs. Cutting jobs on the back of Amazon, right? And so we're seeing, I've always said, I've been on the show for a few years now and I'm like, look at trucking. It's the backbone of America. It is a leading indicator. It's a leading indicator. Trucking's not good.

So I'm here to say, you know, I've been sort of warning for potentially this moment and I'm like, it's not good. And so what we need is some resolution from this tariff with China. It doesn't really matter about anyone else. It's just China. And assuming we get some form of resolution that makes, that means that the goods are now flowing again.

All right, maybe we'll have a shallow recession. Maybe we could just about avoid it. But we're getting into this danger zone where we can't avoid it. As people are listening to this, the jobs number has come out. And I'm not asking you to handicap that, but we can talk about sort of the employment picture sort of at a higher level, 30,000 feet. And

It's hard for me to come to the conclusion that the job market is going to start to re-accelerate the right way, where things are going to start to get better again. It feels like once the job market is in motion, either way, it stays in motion. And you have this sort of escape velocity. And now I think the escape velocity is happening with the unemployment rate ticking higher. How important is that? I mean, I think it's extraordinarily important. But, you know, you sit in a different seat, a much different level now.

What is your sense about that? I think it's extremely important. So obviously it depends on who's losing their jobs. There's been a lot of

government employees that you could say were potentially low production for the country. And so like, okay, does it really affect you? But they're still spending the money, but it was on the back of debt and all that stuff. There's a GDP hit that we're going to go through. You see initial claims that they're above. They ticked up today, I think. And continuing claims as well went higher. So yeah, I think from a...

From all those angles, you're going to see just more stress in the economy. Now, the game has been apparently that we're going to reprivatize

reprivatize the country. Now, there's definitely a lag in this. Like I just told you. How long a lag do you think? I think it's next year. Yeah. I think it's 2026 might be great. We've got to get through 25. And we just started May. So when you say next year, you don't mean January. You know, we're probably talking May, June, July of next year. Yeah. And I actually do, if I was to put money on, this is such a highly volatile time.

environment for all the obvious reasons. But if I was to put money on it, I would say it gets worse before it gets better. I think China could have a couple of aces up their sleeve of like, hey, we'll embargo you for a couple of months even when we've agreed. Just because we can. We just show you that we own you, right? Which would be terrible for us.

And then I think, you know, the administration has like tax things they can do, which they're probably loading that bullet up right now. It's trying to work on a tax policy and like big tax breaks for people who are in the main street versus Wall Street. There's probably tax hikes.

For the coastal elites, it's probably how it's going to work. A little collateral damage over here. Well, that's sort of how it worked in the first administration, too, if you think about it. The SALCAP. Yeah. Yeah, he's doing... Basically, it'll be more of that. And so you'll see some stimulus from that. And ultimately, let's see where it goes with the Fed, because...

Are we really QTing? For the rest of the year, are we going to do some QE at some point? I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see if they start to go on to a bond buying program. Because now I'm going to ask you to sort of switch hats for a second. We'll put the other hat back on. But let's put your old hat on, the old Stuart Soff. A couple of weeks ago, particularly...

between about 7 p.m. Eastern time and about 10 p.m., the bond market was seizing up. I mean, there were some really bad things happening. And I was watching it in real time saying, this is not good. And 10-year yields probably went from about 420 up to about four and a half or so in almost a straight line, which is something... Listen, this is what I've said

I'm again, this is just my opinion, but the stock market for this administration is a nuisance. The bond market is something that scares them. And that night they got scared because on the next day,

President Trump talked about, I watched the interview Maria Bartiromo did with Jamie Dimon, had people talk to me about the bond market, and he definitely backed off. Yeah. How scary was that? And was that a tremor? Or was that sort of the main event? Yeah, it was basically Scott Besant got involved. Oh, yeah. Like you saw that, right? Yeah.

So I agree with everything you're saying. This is not an equity market for them. Eventually it is. No, eventually it is. If you hit like minus 40 on the percent. I agree. Of course they're going to do something and the Fed will do something and all the rest of it. But ultimately we're in the issuance season, right? We're trying to issue and roll this debt. We've got a ton of bills. We've got trillions of dollars to roll. We've got to work out like it's still Powell. So...

You know, how much influence, you know, between the Treasury Secretary and him. I don't know how that's, you know, they have to have a good relationship, right? The dynamic is odd. Yeah, it's definitely off. Yeah. So you have to imagine that, you know, the next few months. And we got all this issuance into June, right? And so you're like, okay, you know, you've got to keep this market. Well, I mean, but you know this as well.

The confidence necessary, it's a confidence game. And people buy our debt because they feel good about what's going on. When people start feeling a little squealy, they start selling the US dollar, which we're going to talk about in a second. And they'll buy our debt, but they'll do it at a higher rate of interest. And around the edges-

you're seeing that. And I'm not saying I'm going to have failed auctions. That's not my point. But I think the market's going to demand a higher rate of interest to buy said debt. And oh, by the way, if these rating agencies ever get involved, that gets interesting too. Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know any policy...

decisions out there, so it's just me riffing. But you could only imagine what Trump's been doing with everything else with the tariffs. He may try and replicate that with the incremental Treasury bias. So if you're South Korea and Japan, they're friendly nations, but there's a lot of US troops over there.

and they're keeping the enemy away. Now, if I was him and like thinking in my sort of Trumpian hat, which I don't have, I'm just saying if I had one, I'd be like calling Japan and South Korea and saying, hey, you know, you should probably buy some treasuries over the next couple of months. Otherwise, maybe we're pulling our troops out. And maybe you have to, then your defense spend has to go up. I'm sure that there's some of that going on. Yeah. Yeah. So I suspect that's, you know, some, but it's shakedowns, right? It's just like,

you know, maybe the reality and the perception are pretty close here, which is America has subsidized safety and security at the expense of the American taxpayer, but like they used to have the incremental bond buyer. Now everyone's pulling back. They're like, well, now that trade's done, right? Like you're not buying our bonds, but we're still paying for all this security, right? It's the same for Europe. It's the same everywhere else. So it's like,

This is real seismic stuff. It is seismic stuff. It's big. And you mentioned seismic stuff. Let's talk about the US dollar because that was a big part of your career for a long time. And you're seeing moves in the US dollar against...

You know, I had some, we had Danielle DiMartino Booth on, and I think you know Danielle. She worked for Richard Fisher, Dallas Fed. She wrote the book Fed Up. She's locked in with all this stuff. Love it. And she said the people that she's talking to, they're looking for any way to sort of have a short dollar position on against pretty much anything. Yeah.

And that's been playing out. Now, the dollar has bounced a little bit, but that's just trading. My question to you, is there some fundamental shift going on away from the U.S. dollar? Yeah, there is. I mean, I would say it's more broader than that. It's a shift away from America. Okay. So...

You know, clearly there's a lot of gold buying and a lot of gold movement. I'm sure you have covered that. Oh, yeah. At length. At length, right? So, yeah. So there's that. You know, you've seen – take the position of the UK and Europe because it's really easy to understand from their position. They're like, okay, all our pension funds, all these investment companies of our domestic system, we have sort of terrible stock markets that never go up. Yeah.

and maybe terrible innovation because of over-regulation. And so they enable sort of growth of those pension funds and growth of investments by investing in Mag7 and America. And so you can only imagine the discussions of sovereign wealth funds that are happening and also mandates saying, hey,

Maybe you're pulling back from America for a little bit. I know that we're not going to make as much money, but it's American. We don't need the dollars anymore. We're going to trade bilaterally. We don't need that anymore. Lots of energy, lots of commodities now priced in local currencies. And we have our own payment systems for like bricks and all this other stuff. And so there's just this intention. I would say it's also intentional from this administration pullback from America being the center sort of homogeny of the world. And so-

I agree with Danielle. I think longer term, the dollar is probably being re-rated a lot lower. 60, 70 on the Dixie would be my kind of area where it eventually goes. Which is, I think that has huge ramifications for a lot of different things. Now, you mentioned gold, so let's bring that into this equation as well. I mean...

I think that last move higher in gold, the one that took us up to all-time highs, was probably on the back of all the talk from the administration about firing Jerome Powell. I think the one tweet that went out talking about how his termination— I'm paraphrasing, but his termination can't come fast enough. That scared people, and it should have. Now, he walked that back.

in a meaningful way. And that's why I think the gold market is sort of backed off a little bit. But there's something going on here, because you said it, that repatriation of gold that's going on, where countries, and President Trump put this out in a tweet or a Truth Social where, again, I'm paraphrasing, but if you own the gold, if you have the gold, you control the cards or something like that. Yeah, he who wins controls the gold or something. And that was like, wait a second, where's that coming from?

So when countries, you know, possessions nine-tenths the law. And if it's your gold, but it's here in the United States at the Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan, is it your gold? And I think that's what people are starting to come to grips with. And the Bundesbank started this about 15 years ago when they said, you know what, we want our stuff back. Yeah.

What does that mean to you when you hear that? Well, I think the most obvious, there's probably two parts. One is the most obvious, which is the Ukraine war. I think it scared everyone that with the Russian sanctions, especially in Europe, and the UK was a big proponent of doing this. You know, we can argue whether they should have or not, but they seized assets. They seized assets. They seized gold. They seized all this stuff.

And apparently part of the peace deal is like giving it back, which is like, yo, we want this stuff back. And so I think, you know, I know obviously it was Biden led, right? Let's just be honest. It was a Biden administration policy. And I think it was a big wake up call for China and India and everyone else was like, I've got like gold in these places so that I can lend it and earn a carry on it.

But actually, to your point, do I really own it? That's right. Do I own it? And this is a deglobalized world, a multipolar world. I don't know who my friends are yet. I'm going to work it out. But that stuff, if we're re-rating fiat currencies, because maybe we're going back to pre-1980s, right? The old days, pegs and trade and all that. You remember those days? It's not...

I think that's part of the game. It's part of the game. I'm not going to say whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing, but what I will say is getting there is not a good thing. Getting there is going to be painful. It's like...

If you smoke your – not that I've ever smoked, but if you smoke your whole life and you want to stop, that's great. And the other side is going to be – Terrible, yeah. But getting there is going to be terrible. Yeah, that's right. The other side is great, getting there. Yeah, it's like any drug analogy. You got the cold turkey situation. We – like there's – I guess at a high level, there's this argument of like this administration is saying –

We're coming to an end of whatever America is, and we need to reinvent America, basically. And there's two thoughts. You could have either... Because I don't think anyone disagrees with that, like deep down. They may disagree with it on the surface. Well, what they want... All the jobs that have been lost, they want those jobs back, right? They want things to be manufactured. Like, I get the... But is that genie out of the bottle? I mean, can you get back? But okay, let's say we can get back there.

Yeah, I just – if we have a debt crisis, we will just – we will not default. We will just print money and the dollar will devalue even more than what it will devalue on a managed – that's what I'm kind of saying. There's two ways. You either accept the fate that we have too much, we can't do it. We're not productive enough to cover the debt.

And so maybe with AI, maybe that's the third option. If we had AI, maybe we could do it, but it's not really here yet. And so what Trump's doing and his administration is saying, hey, we don't want to hit the wall. We're hitting the wall, but we're going to try and change it a little bit. We're still going to clip the wall. But we want to sort of skid off it. We're going to skid off the wall. And so America will be American and be great. Yeah.

The other option, which I think everyone else has kind of taken is don't worry about it. We're going to hit the wall. When we hit the wall, we'll just work it out. And I heard the same kind of conversation

in the early 2000s all around like tying up credit lines when I was working in banks and all these option guys were like, "Oh yeah, I'm tying up a 30-year credit line and I get paid $2 million today." Guess what? 2008 rolls around, those guys are bounced. They've got $20 million in their pocket. Everyone else is picking up the bill. And that's the problem when you, if you know there's an issue and there's a structural issue,

I believe I'm in the former camp. Let's try and skid off the wall because I've seen what happens when you hit the wall. When you hit the wall, everyone out. We are going to pick up the pillow.

We're picking up the bill. So this is as painful as this is and as uncertain and horrible as it is, we're in a transition phase between demographics, boomers versus X and millennials. This is what's happening. And like, it's ugly and it's hard and it's going to, you know, and I don't know if he's doing the right things either, by the way. Neither do I. And I'm not going to comment one way or another, but I'm trying to figure out what, you know, what the ramifications are.

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But when you have $37 trillion of debt sitting on top of a GDP that's maybe 28, I mean, you can start doing the math, you know, 122% debt to GDP, something like that. Yes, sir. You want your currency to be weaker. So maybe that's the game all along. Like if the...

You're not going to grow your way out of it, probably. So if you say, you know what, I can't grow my way out of this, so I'm just going to devalue my currency. Because, you know what, when you have that, you want a weaker currency if you owe people dollars. I mean, it's just that simple. I think Scott Bassam... He gets it. He told us. He actually said these words. It's like, we want a weaker dollar. Why does he want a weaker dollar for these exact words? That's right. And he wants a weaker dollar this year. But, okay.

is it be careful what you wish for then because who you know maybe a weakened a weakened dollar is a hidden tax on the u.s consumer you're buying power goes down that's right now you don't see it necessarily but you start to say wait a second you know what's going on here so what if in fact you get what you want there there are other things that come along with that i agree so we import everything

That's right. Right? For obvious reasons. And so a weaker dollar will basically be a tax, an inflation kind of tax. It's not quite inflation, but it would feel like it. Well, it's going to feel like it. It'll feel like inflation. If you believe this administration, they'll say, well, we're going to have manufacturing here and we're going to have CapEx. And like a weaker dollar means we can now sell abroad. Now, I don't know about you, Guy, but like...

I'm deeply distrusting of this CapEx cycle that's going to be magically here in like six months. Stop. So stop right there because I'm with you on that as well. And it's a great thing to be able to promise CapEx and investment because you get them off your back. That's right. It's like, I got you. Don't worry. I'm going to... And for however many period of time... Okay. Okay.

You don't have to worry about that. But is that going to come to fruition? Like, talk to me about the sanctity of CapEx that we've heard, because that's what you're discussing right now. That's right. I mean, I haven't done the work here, and I probably now have had this conversation with you. I'd love to do it, which is in his first term, he got promised a lot of CapEx. How much came through? Well, that's it. I'm willing to bet like zero. Well, because you get the headlines. It's like that old thing, you know, you get...

Indicted on the first page of the Wall Street Journal. But then when the market realizes you didn't do it, it's page eight below the fold. And it's the same thing here. The headlines are all this money investing in the United States and people get excited about that. But the back of the, again, page eight below the fold, that's when it comes, well, it never really happened. But nobody really cares at that point. That's it. Now you mention it, it's definitely true. And if you look at the people promising...

They tend to be obviously heavily invested in the consumer of America, obviously, and very good, normally very good diplomats, if you know what I mean. Playing the game. It's always the same people who play the game well. So I wonder, but if you think about the market rally, getting back to the market, a lot of it has been built on this CapEx spend. So you hear from Google, you hear from Amazon, you hear from Facebook, all these companies, the spend is still there, we need to invest, AI...

The question is, if things slow down in a meaningful way, you know, we had that discussion earlier. The first thing that's going to get cut is CapEx, I think, unless they're so hell-bent on the belief that regardless, they have to make these investments. So I don't know if that's the case.

CapEx is first, and then the inevitable is next, you're going to start to lay people off. Yeah. The way I would look at that is the AI CapEx, the data centers, and the energy are almost national security items now. Well, so you think that's going to stay regardless. I do. And I think the administration, if it saw a slowdown, would probably find creative ways to make sure it kept going, in my view. I don't know anything again, but like...

And even if they didn't, if you were to squint, you could take a look at AI development as like in a recessionary or depressionary market as a cost-saving because you're displacing white-collar workers. So you'd be like, okay, let's just – you know, you look at Microsoft, Google, and Meta. They've all come out, all of those CEOs come out the last two weeks and said 35% to 45% of all new code is written by AI. AI.

That sounds like you're saving a lot of money on engineers to me, right? Engineers are expensive. So to me, I don't know if that gets cut. Now, every other capex I think probably gets cut. The pharma guy is promising building drugs here. The car guy is promising. I think it's not going to happen. It's a pipe dream. Yeah. When you see the stock market, because you watch that as well, we made an all-time high, I think, in February in the S&P 500.

We made a 52-week low in early April. The move we've seen since, as we're sitting here on Thursday, is basically a 50% retracement of the all-time high and the recent low, which all makes sense. You've also been in this business, and you hear all the different terminology, golden cross. In this case, we've had a death cross in the S&P where the 50-day moving average is

It's crossed through the 200-day on the way down. Individual stocks, that's happened as well. Do you put any stock in that whatsoever? Yeah. Normally, when you see those crosses and they rally, it means a delay or a resumption of the bull trend, right? And so if you saw a continuation and it didn't rally once they crossed, you'd be like, let's get the shorts out. Let's get short here. So I think...

My view right now is between 5.6, say the S&P, 5.6, 5.7, 5.5, somewhere there. We're here now, by the way.

Probably toppy. I wouldn't want to be going long or short here. Not yet. Well, maybe take a short, but maybe not go long. I think gold at 3.5 was an obvious one. It was like a psychological level, all that stuff. So it's taken a breather. It's taken a breather. And I think below 3,000, you saw it dip below 3 a couple of times in everyone's buy. I think it'll test it again. You're meant to buy that. But the equity market, as we've said here...

is second place to the bond market. And so I wouldn't be surprised if we see another shot at low. In the bond market. Yeah. Or another shot in equities on the downside. Shot in equities because once we, if there is supply chain problems and there's no recourse with China, all this stuff with the Ukraine peace deal and all, like this is all the tailwinds now, but we're pricing out most of the, this is it. This is the resumption, the sort of pullback is on good news. We're pricing in good news.

Right now, as you said earlier, no one's pricing in like, hey, there might not be stuff this summer, right? You know, there's a lot to be encouraged by. I mean, the resilience of the stock market is one thing. You know, the fact that the bond market move, it was sort of a, not even a one-day event. It was a few-hour event. And cooler had seemingly prevailed, like,

I'll take some solace in that, but what I keep coming back to is this, you know, were those just tremors and is there a main event coming or did we dodge a bullet? And I think, you know, that's what the market is struggling with here. And you hear a lot of, you know, now seemingly recession is, I think, a lot of people, a lot smarter than I am, which as I've said is not a high bar, but a lot of people saying 65, 70% chance. A lot of people said we might be in one now. I have no idea. I'm not an economist, but, you know, historically, you know,

when we're in one or about to go into one, the multiple that market's willing to pay for a dollar worth of earnings is not 20. You know, it's something closer to 14 or 15. So that, we're not there yet. And there's a reason why Warren Buffett is still sitting around with $335 billion of cash waiting. And the question is, what is he waiting for? Yeah, blood on the streets. And apparently there's no blood for him. I actually said this to a hedge fund buddy the other day. I was like-

What do you think? Like I said, exactly the same thing I just said to you. I'm like, in this zone here, you maybe want to just hold off for a little bit. Let's see. I just don't see it being a bull market, right? These are not normal conditions or volatility for a bull market resumption. So in my mind, it's probably down. And then the Warren Buffett thing, I'm like, that guy didn't buy yet. Well, that's the thing. He didn't buy anything. And as much as it felt scary, the duration was so short.

short that I don't think people had time to really feel scared. It was Sunday night for the equity market. Good luck logging into your Charles Schwab and interactive brokers trying to lift futures and all that. That's what I was doing. So it was pretty tricky. What do you make of the... Before we get out of here, because this is like the energy patch, the energy sector, the move in crude oil. There are a lot of... I mean...

There's a lot of things that, you know, you discussed Crude Oil in the beginning of the show in terms of, you know, what it means for your consumer. But what do you think it means just in terms of what's going on? Is it a supply thing? OPEC clearly is basically, I think they're putting a middle finger out and saying, you want to play this game? We're going to flood the market because at a certain price, on the downside, it's not good for us either. Texas has like a pretty high, you know, fracking is a,

It's not a low-dollar, low-cost infrastructure crude oil break-even, right? Nor is the oil sands of Canada. So, yeah, I mean, they could do it and probably are doing it. There's some really confusing things around the China deal as well, like how much ethanol they're importing and natural gas. It's just a very...

complex situation and so I put my old macro hat on and go I don't know all the variables I will look at price I will look at to be your guide my price is the guide and then I'll talk to a bunch of people which I'm doing and work out whether they're like really fearful of this or really greedy on that and like try and work out positioning basically and in energy I

I do think it goes a bit lower, but like I'm a little bearish right now. You can hear it. Like maybe it still goes up. Maybe we go back to 6,000 S&P and then it comes off. But I just, I don't see how else we keep going up unless there is new news, which is,

hey, we solved everything and they start shipping stuff. Yeah, well, we solved everything. I mean, I know there's a lot of hope around that and the potential for that tweet or headline or news conference or whatever is always out there because I think this is an administration that likes the platitudes. Yeah. But I don't, to your earlier point, like it's just not that easy, I don't think. There's a real economy here. You know, I speak to some small business owners, not through the role I have at Current, but...

they're all just in a lot of pain. A lot of them are going to close. And you're not seeing that data yet. Q2 data should be pretty bad. It's going to be lumpy. It's going to be messy. It's going to be confusing. Like, as you said earlier, the GDP print, there were a lot of components of it to say, you know, maybe it wasn't as bad as it looked. But then you look at the inflation component of it, and that was sort of scary. I mean...

There's so many... There's something for everybody, I guess, is what I'm saying. If you're bullish, you can find reasons to be. And if you're bearish, you can find reasons to be. And the battle lines should begin fought right now in the S&P and in the bond market and in some of these currency moves, which have been historic. Yeah. I totally agree with that. And then whilst we look at Warren Buffett on one side trying to... He's not buying yet. You look at Donald Trump and he's not owning the stock market. It's Biden's market, according to him. Right. Remember that? Yeah. And it's like, come on, dude. Yeah.

Well, that went out. So this is, again, we're doing this on Thursday. Yesterday, when the market opened on the lows, that tweet went out. This is not my stock market. This is Biden. It should go down. What was interesting about that, and again, politics bore the shit out of me, but in the run-up to the election, when the stock market was doing well every day, he talked about how the stock market was pricing him winning the election. So I guess you can have it both ways, I guess, is the point.

You know, when you start to hedge that way, it makes you wonder, you know, what are they seeing that we're not talking about? Yeah, exactly. Well, probably the bond market, which will trigger the equity market. Stuart Sopp, it is great to have you. The CEO of Current, December 24th, May 1st. We'll have you back sooner than that. Thanks, Stu. Thank you, Guy. Thank you for your time.