Transcription
Folks, the flapjacks are absolutely burnt. Oh boy, do we have a lot to go through in this video? It was worse; it was way worse than anybody anticipated. Oh my gosh. Okay, at the front of this video, we're going to go through the damage that is going on out there in the market. We're going to talk about what do you do in this sort of situation? Right. We'll talk about the one glimmer of good news. We'll talk about one asset that is actually going up. Yes, you heard me; there is actually something going up in this whole scenario. We'll talk about the numbers; we're going to get into all that. And then I want to get into Professor Jeremy Seagull. He went on CNBC before the tariffs came out; I want to share his opinions. Additionally, they also had Tom Lee on; I want to play for you guys what Tom Lee said about this whole mess and kind of react to that here on the reaction video. I mean, jeez, there's just a lot going on here. Okay, we got a lot to get into. I appreciate y'all joining me. One thing, one thing only, I need from you guys, and it's for you to smash that like button on this video, and that's it, man. That's all I need from you. If you want to subscribe, you can certainly subscribe. We are at, uh, 85,000 subscribers or something, uh, pretty big on this channel, so I appreciate y'all for being here.
Okay, so right off the bat, um, Big Dog, Big Dog's getting slammed after hours right now; stock down over six percentage points here to, uh, just after-hours trading. Apple—keep in mind these are just early reactions; like it could be much more severe than what you were seeing right now tomorrow when, let's say, the masses, uh, get a hold of this news, cuz this is just the early people kind of in the know, you know, that are moving these stocks around right now. And so when this news gets out and everybody figures out, "Oh, this was actually much more severe than anybody anticipated," you could actually see a lot more panic selling; you could see the VIX spike in quite a substantial way. Check this out. Oh boy. Nvidia, Nvidia down five plus percent. Could Nvidia break $100 a share? It's possible, man. It it's it's possible. It's not guaranteed, but it is possible that Nvidia breaks $100, and that's kind of a, you know, that's a line in the sand in regards to Nvidia's $100 level. Nike getting slammed 6 and a half percent after hours; obviously, tariffs on a lot of foreign countries. I mean, that's it's a drama show, right? RH is getting absolutely obliterated after hours. I'm not sure if you guys have seen RH. Oh my gosh, that stock's down nearly 25 percent after hours right now; absolutely brutal. AMD has broken that $100 barrier; $100 another, you know, line in the sand in regards to AMD, and it just broke through that $99 there; not getting hit as hard as Nvidia, right? Um, but I think just people look at Nvidia and they say there's a lot more to lose than something like AMD that's already seen as kind of a beaten-down dog, right? The Q's now down about three and a half percent, right, and we haven't even seen panic selling yet; like this is just the early folks that are looking at everything Trump just announced here and they're saying, "Oh, this is worse than anybody anticipated; we're out, peace out." Okay, don't—you could get some some margin capitulation; you could get some actual panic selling, um, tomorrow, so do keep that in mind; this is just the early moves here.
Now, if you want one glimmer of good news in this whole situation, we do see the 10-year moving down. Um, this would be great if we could see this tenure get into the threes. This has been stubborn, and if you're talking about lower interest rates, lower loan rates, all those things, cuz remember, I think there's a couple goals, uh, with what Trump's doing here with the tariffs. Obviously, there's the goal he talks about; we're going to, you know, we're going to make so much money from these tariffs, and you know, we're going to bring back manufacturing in the US, all those sorts of things. But I do believe it is a big goal, uh, of Trump in this first, you know, 6 to 9 months he's in office; I do believe he wants to, you know—and I don't think he really talks about this publicly, but I think behind closed doors he wants to see all these treasuries a lot lower because if you can get all these treasuries a lot lower, right, and you can get the Fed to start lowering rates substantially, then ultimately you could get mortgage rates to get a lot lower, which could unfreeze the housing market. The housing market's been frozen now for several years, and you're not going to unfreeze the housing market until you get these Treasury yields lower, until you get the Fed lowering rates and you get a much lower interest rate environment, cuz people just are not very willing to sign up for 6 and 7 percent mortgages when they're at 2 and 3 percent mortgages right now, right? And so you got to get home prices down, you got to get interest rates down, right, and then you could talk about a little bit better backdrop for the economy over the next couple years here.
Right now, if you want to know one asset, there is one asset that is actually going up right now, and it just hit a new all-time high right now, believe it or not, and it is good old gold. Gold hitting new all-time highs right now, and as I put here on X—I'm not sure if you guys follow me on X, by the way; if you ever want to follow me on X or if you ever want to follow me on Instagram, I always have those linked in the description area of my my channel, so you can literally go down to the description area and you can click on my X and follow me on there if you want to follow me on there or Instagram as well. I post a lot more on X and Instagram; Instagram is a little bit more just like personal life type stuff; X is a lot more like business, stock, uh, economy-related stuff. Okay, so I said there's two reasons why everybody's flocking at gold right now: one is fear around the dollar, right? With all these tariffs, there's a lot of fear about, you know, the dollar being the reserve currency of the world. Listen, I've heard that a lot over the past 16 years I've been in the financial markets; at the end of the day, it doesn't end up meaning much, right? But it is a fear in the short term. Secondly, people love to run to gold in time periods of uncertainty, and right now, could you think of a more uncertain time than right now, um, at least in recent years? Right, all this tariff stuff there's—because you got to understand because the tariff numbers are so high, right? Let me show you kind of the numbers here; I mean, it's very self-explanatory; the numbers are extremely high. Now there's going to be a lot of fear about a major recession, major recession right now that you're seeing these sorts of tariff numbers because we're we could be talking about a situation where companies are in a really bad position, right? They have to lay off workers; that creates a whole bad domino effect; creates high unemployment, right; creates a weaker economy, weaker numbers for companies; you know, you just get in a very bad dynamic, right? So that's a fear out there. Now, whether that comes to fruition or not, we'll see; we'll see, like maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, right? But this certainly causes a lot of uncertainty, cuz now everybody's looking like, "Oh wait, that country is going to have 25 percent tariffs, and that one's going to have 34 percent, and they're going to have 45 percent, blah blah blah." And everybody says, "Wait a minute, we just went through a massive batch of inflation, so you're going to put another new massive batch of inflation on the consumer now at this point in time, right? Because who's going to pay the tariff? Some somebody's paying the tariff; somebody's paying the tariff on that; if there's tariff on this and tariff on that, right? The importer is the one who pays the price on that; it's not China, right? It's whoever's actually importing that good. Now, is everybody just going to take the hits on that, or are they going to pass that along to the consumer? Well, you're going to have to assume they're going to pass at least some of it on to the consumer, right? Or if the companies have to all take a hit on that, guess what's going to happen to those companies? Right, their earnings are going to sink. What happens when the earnings sink for companies? What do they do? They cut employees; that's just what that always happens; it's the way it always plays out. Earnings of a company tanks; bye-bye employees. You get a bunch of companies all cutting employees left and right, right? You end up with much higher unemployment; you end up in a recession, right? And so this is something the Fed looks at. Now, the Fed's in a pickle right now. This gets to the next batch of uncertainty, and this is severe because now if you're if you're in president of the Federal Reserve, what do you do right now? Because you're looking at all these crazy tariff numbers; you're saying, "Oh my gosh, that looks like it's going to be a lot of inflation coming over this next year, right? And then you're also looking out there and you're saying, 'I don't think this is going to bode well for the economy over the next year.'" So then you start trying to balance like, okay, do we care more about the economy or do we care more about inflation getting out of control again, right? The the recency bias is more fear around inflation getting out of control because that's what we dealt with recently, but at the same time, you can't just let the economy completely tank because then you got a big mess to clean up. And then we want to talk about deficits; we want to talk about federal debt. Do you know what's going to happen if the economy really tanks? Do you know what's going to happen if unemployment goes sky-high? Money printer go—you know exactly what they're going to do; Fed's going to start having to backstop everything; they're going to have to do whatever it takes to make sure people keep jobs; it's going to be a whole mess, right? So the Fed's in a tough pickle, and that adds to the uncertainty, and once again, when people feel uncertain, they like to flock to gold. Now, if you actually get into a major recession, gold price doesn't always hold up, and a lot of people learn that in the great financial crisis, and coming out of the great financial crisis, gold wasn't bad going into it, but a lot of people thought gold was going to do tremendous those years coming out; it didn't actually, you know, I I I had a great accounting, uh, instructor, uh, professor in college, right? I took three levels of accounting with him; he was tremendous, but he was a gold bug. A gold bug is a person that believes, you know, you got to stick the majority of your money into gold essentially, and they're such huge believers of gold, and my accounting instructor, he was one of those individuals, right? And you know, I think he looked like a genius for a while there while gold was holding decent in and the stock market was doing horrible, but ultimately as those years came out, 2009, 2010, 2011, as you came out, look at what gold did, and then look what, let's say, the NASDAQ did for instance, right? I mean, they were in a whole different league. So we got a whole mess.
Now, the moral of the story is none of this is good news in the short term; like this isn't good news; this was this was worse than the worst-case scenario. Let me be very clear about that; this was worse than the worst-case scenario. Now, the only good news out of that is it can't get any worse than this in regards to the whole tariff situation. When you got worse in the worst-case scenario, it's as bad as it gets, and so maybe it only gets better from here; like I, you know, I'm just trying to look for any sort of good news in regards to this whole situation, but it's ugly for the short term right now. What does it mean for you as a long-term investor? It means absolutely nothing; it means you step out there and you buy the dip and all these great companies that you love for the next 5, 10 years because at the end of the day, what do we know? Great companies get through hard times, right? You know, Apple—if we just think about Apple, imagine all the things Apple's had to go through over the past 30 years. I mean, if we go back, you know, if we go back 30 years ago, Apple was nearly bankrupt; let's not forget that, right? And so they got through almost going bankrupt, and Microsoft helped them stay alive, and Steve Jobs got them through that mess, right? Then they had to go through 9/11 in 2001, right? Uh, they had to go through the tech bubble popping; that was a whole situation to go through; they had to go through the uh, all the wars we had, right? Afghanistan, Iraq, uh, they had to go through, you know, tariffs on different countries coming through and going off and all those sorts of things; they had to deal with the great financial crisis, right? Uh, they had to go through Rona; they had to go through the out-of-control inflation we had with the consumer; they had to deal with really strong economies, really bad economies throughout the years, and this is just another thing they got to deal with, right? And so at the end of the day—and you could go through all these companies that have been around last past 30 years—you know how much Nike's gone through over the last, you know, 40 plus years; at the end of the day, these companies find a way to make it through; that's why they're phenomenal companies with great board of directors, and they got the, you know, among the most intelligent business leaders in the world that lead these companies, and they get them out to the other side, and then a few years pass, and then the stock prices are at new all-time highs, and people say, "Wow, remember when everybody's freaked out over XYZ problem, right?" And so at the end of the day, you step in, you buy these stocks, you hold for the long term, and if you get any lower prices, if AMD goes to 85, you just say thank you and you grab more shares. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it's just another thing to go through; it's short-term drama; none of it's good news for the short term for the stock market; none of it's good news in the short term for AMD or Nike or Nvidia or any of these stocks, but the end of the day, they will make it through the other side, and a few years from now, we'll look at these stocks and they'll be much higher than they are today, and they say, "Gosh, how did that happen, right?" And and there'll be a million people to tell you this time's different; you know, these stocks are never coming back; they're all going to zero; it's all doomsday, and um, you know, those people will be wrong again, but they'll do it again and again and again and again, right? And they'll sound smart in the short term, and in the long term, the only people that sound smart are the longs, right? So do keep that in mind.
All right, let's listen to Professor Jeremy Seagull.
And then we'll get into Tom Lee of the Wharton School; also a senior economist at Wisdom Tree.
"It's great to have you on a day like this. Welcome back."
"Thank you, Scott. Happy to be here."
"Will this be the so-called clearing event that people want it to be?"
"I think we all hope so, but um, honestly, I think maybe a better outcome, uh, first of all, we have to find out the average level, and and we we certainly know, uh, I, you know, when I remember when Goldman raised it from 10, which what they thought, to 15, that really kind of shocked the market. Now we're talking about 20 or or maybe even 25, but I think the most important factor will be how he positions renegotiation; in other words, a willingness: 'I will enter a negotiation; this is my starting point; if you lower on our exports, I will consider lowering on uh your exports.' I I think that would be received very favorably. See, and that was the issue; it it came across in in Trump's uh press conference or whatever you want to call it, you know, his liberation day speech that I watched the whole thing; it came across like he wasn't that open to um, you know, changing much. And at the end of the day, that's the right approach to take though if you're in his shoes, right? You you want to play hardball; you know, if you just sound like a little baby out there, h—I mean, countries aren't going to take that that this serious, right? If you're like, 'That's fine, you know, this is what we're doing; we're sticking to it,' okay? Now countries actually will, you know, wake up a little bit and say, 'Okay, man, he's serious.' Of course, that that is a process, but I think if we can tell by his language or his body language or how the other officials are going to be talking about potential reductions in response to a mutual lowering of tariffs, I think it will be taken uh well by the market. If he seems very rigid, um, and at levels over 15 percent, uh, I don't think it'll be taken well by the market."
"How much damage do you think's already been done from the uncertainty?"
"There are some who think that, you know, you you can get past this; there are others, like Tony Pascarello, Goldman Sachs, who say the game's changed in the market, and now it's all about the preservation of capital because of this uncertainty and what's going to happen even with more certainty of tariffs that are going to be punitive."
"Yes, because even if you know we know, for instance, if there's 20 percent, we really don't know what kind of a reduction in GDP that that will entail, um, I mean, and the ramifications are are very strong; I mean, we already see a big decline in in travel, uh, uh, by foreigners into the United States; I mean, that that hits the service sector; there may be some boycotts of US goods; and of course, the big wild card, Scott, as we all know, is the potential retaliation, and um, uh, you know, if if he sounds rigid and we hear tomorrow from the EU, Canada, and/or Mexico, okay? Now this these are our tariffs, um, that That is definitely going to be a negative shock for the market, so yeah."
"But here's another problem, right? Um, because uh, what do you say, Tony Pasco Balor or whatever, saying hide out in in in dollars right now, just hold cash, right? Here's the issue with that. All right, so we got Treasury yields going down, so high probability CD accounts are going to start yielding lower, probably within the next few weeks, honestly, uh, savings accounts as well, right? Also, what do we know about holding dollars in an inflationary environment? Because let's be very clear, all these tariffs, it feels like it's going to be inflationary, right? Look what it—back to the inflationary period we just went through; where where did holding dollars get you? Uh, your dollar got devalued massively; meanwhile, the stock market, as of just a couple of months ago, was at new all-time highs; real estate prices in many of the biggest cities in the, you know, out there are all-time highs, right? Bitcoin, as of a couple of months ago, was 100,000 plus, right? Even after this kind of recent crash, it's had still 80,000 plus, which is still severely higher than it was prior to all the big batch of inflation, right? So at the end of the day, your dollars got devalued; you could you had much less purchasing power, whether it be for stocks, real estate, uh, gold, Bitcoin, right? A carton of eggs; it doesn't matter what you look at, and meanwhile, everything got else got more expensive. So ultimately, you thought like, oh, it would be really intelligent to, you know, just stay in dollars; you're looking and you're saying, 'No, that wasn't a play.' And so do you think this time is going to be different? I don't know, maybe, but probably not, right? At the end of the day, when you're in an inflationary environment, everything gets much more expensive, and your dollar gets devalued less and less and less, and you can buy less and less and less and less. Okay? And so that's, you know, something I think very important to kind of keep in mind."
"Uh, yeah, there is definitely potential downside; flexibility; negotiate. Listen, if we could all negotiate to a zero tariff level, uh, at one point I remember Trump saying, 'Well, maybe if everyone had zero, I could take that.' Um, you know, that that that would be ideal, but it seems to be—"
"Yeah, I agree; I think I think 0 percent tariffs, all country 0 percent tariffs, I think that would be really cool."
"No, by the way, in regards to hold cash, that doesn't mean don't hold any cash; you should always hold some cash; you should always have emergency funds, you know, in a savings account or a CD account or something like that, right? In case you got any sort of emergency expenses or you lost your job, you know, you want to have at least a few months just chilling there that you feel comfortable and you're able to sleep well at night, right? Um, if your business got hurt, anything like that, you know, should always hold some level of cash, but to go super heavy cash, I mean, gosh, then you're then you get back to trying to play the timing game, and that's a really really tough game to play; you're far away at this point."
"The other point to make I think is that stocks have already, as you know, priced in a lot, right? We're down substantially already."
"What doesn't the market know at this point, Scott?"
"Okay, yeah, I wouldn't say substantially. Come on, man. The S&P 500 barely is down 10 percent; that's not substantially; that's a That's a, you know, little little correction; that's not substantially. Nasdaq, uh, as of what 2 days ago in the morning was down about 15 percent; that's still not substantially. When we're talking about substantial falls, we're talking 25 percent plus; we had a 10 percent, you know, bump because of Trump, and most of that's been eliminated, uh, now with a much tougher tariff stance than I think anyone certainly expected, uh, you know, in November and and December, uh, we're still, you know, I haven't settled on what this tax bill is going to be and how it's going to be passed, um, there's still a lot of negotiations there, so you know, the other favorable part of the Trump agenda is yet to be passed, uh, and now what we've basically done is wiped out the the Trump bump back to that pre-level. If he goes tough on tariffs and um, on that, I I certainly see further downside."
"Wow. You know, on on the idea of what happens to earnings and what we should be willing to pay for the earnings we may get in the future, if you look ahead to 2026, for example, Goldman Sachs is around $280."
"By the way, I'll say this; this is very important; I say this right now: if we don't see any level of panic selling tomorrow, if we don't, then that means we're still in a bull market, actually. This is just a little correction, and actually a much bigger bull market. In order to really, you know, say we got problems, we got real problems in the stock market, in the economy, things like that, you need to see panic selling tomorrow. You—the moves I'm showing you right now, and Apple, Nvidia, Nike, all these stocks, you need to see it even more severe than this; you need to see people say, 'Nah, this is bad.' Like, screw this, right? If you see that, then you can say, 'Okay, maybe this is something more.' Right? Maybe we could see an S&P 500 go down 20 or 25 percent, something like that, right? If you don't see that, then ultimately that's the market saying this is what this is; this is just a short-term, you know, pony show, and at the end of the day, we're still in a much bigger bull market, right? So that's something to keep an eye on."
"20 on that, a 20 multiples, only 5600; I don't think that's what people were were expecting, and that's even if you believe the 280."
"That is the biggest wild card in all of this."
"Yeah, I mean, I mean, I thought even before Trump was elected that the 2025 and 2026 were way too high just because we had, you know, 15, 18 percent growth rates in 23, 24; people started extrapolating long-term growth with no negative factors such as tariffs is 7, 8, 9, uh, so I I was saying, you know, how, you know, people are saying 2 percent, 2 and a half percent GDP, 'Gee, that's great,' uh, how do you get a 15 percent earnings boost out of that? And we all know right now the street is between zero and 1 percent for this first quarter, which of course, uh, just ended a couple days ago, so uh, you know, there's there's just no way I can see double-digit earnings growth, uh, coming out this year; I mean, next year obviously depends on how, you know, how far it goes down this year. I would say that really no one, no one can accurately predict that."
"I mean, you've you've spent your life there, certainly the better part of your adult life thinking about these issues and teaching future investors how to value stocks, and if you're talking about tariffs which cause price increases which hit corporate margins which then bleed into earnings which then decrease the value of stock prices—"
"Yeah, but one should also say that that nothing is forever."
"Exactly. Stocks are long-term assets, and that's that's their greatest quality, um, you know, even a couple of year bad earnings, if you put it into a pricing formula such uh, you know, as as we academics often do, really doesn't reduce the price that much as long as it bounces back, um, and I think that if you you know if you take the long view, are are these super high tariffs going to be forever, um, you know, there could be a change in administration; there could be all sorts of changes; I mean, the long-term pattern of the last 100 years has been downward, now broken by Trump, but certainly I'm not convinced that that would be the the long-term from this position. And stocks again that, you know, they they are they're assets that are the longest lived of all of them, and a couple years of declined earnings, certainly it's going to affect the stock market; people overreact in the short run; we always do, know, but in terms of their ultimate value, you know, I I still think they're they're certainly the best investments."
"Well, because—so a very important point he brings up there—I have a great book that is on the side of my bed; if I recall, it is called Mastering the Market Cycle by Howard Marx, and in that book, the the biggest overarching thing you learn is none of this is permanent; none of this is permanent. Whenever you're going through a time period, whatever it is, it's not permanent; it's just a short-term blip, and the market moves up and down and all around, right? The economy moves up and down; it doesn't matter what time period I take you back to; it was just a little blip on a long wave, right? You just, you know, think about the ocean, and there's a little wave that, you know, comes to shore; it's like wa—that wave was huge; it was a 10-ft wave; it's just a little little thing in the water in this massive ocean over time. So if you take it back to the great financial crisis, I mean, people—I I remember shortly after I got started in the stock market, like people thought like the great financial crisis was going to keep forever, and we're just going to have a bad economy forever, and like, you know, that was going to be what that is, right? You know, um, people prior to the tech bubble blowing up, like they thought tech stocks just going to go up forever, and that was just, you know, valuations didn't matter; like people think whatever is going on short term is just lasting, and like it's it's no—it's not. At the end of the day, the economy gets bigger, right? Great corporations, earnings go up, revenue goes up; they become more dominant; they become bigger than ever; this"
Is just the way the game goes. On short-term is what short-term is. Right, Rona, when we were, you know, I take you back to March 2020, you know, there was a lot of people that thought we were going to have the economy shut down for three years. That was a real thought, right? I mean, a short couple months later, many of the economies, at least in the United States, started to open up again. You know what I mean? Like people thought 3 years we're going to be shut down, right? And so it doesn't matter, like everybody thinks like all this short-term stuff is lasting. None of it lasts; it gets over. And that's why you have to buy great long-term assets such as stocks and you take advantage of the deals you get at that particular time. And then a few years later, people, you know, are like, "Geez, I wish I was buying at that time, man." But there was blah blah blah thing going on, and I thought that was going to wreck us forever, and now it did.
The challenge in all of this is looking through the forest to the trees; yeah, seeing the forest through the trees and get through this nastiness of tariffs and get to the other side to where the grass is really supposed to be greenest for this market, a better environment for dealmaking and deregulation and the extension of the tax cuts and maybe addition additions to the tax cuts that are already in existence that are are set to expire. That that's what you're talking about. Um, it's difficult to do that now because there's so much uncertainty from business and consumer levels that it is really difficult to think about the things that are on the come. Yeah, I mean, you know, throughout history, investors have always overreacted to the to the short run. It it's actually in our human nature to do that, uh, and and and make it difficult to say, "Oh my goodness, there is grass greener out there." In history has shown us that that that is really always the case. It has always been the case in the 220-year history of the stock market. Um, and yet, you know, our human nature says, "Oh my goodness, you know, one year of bad earnings, one and a half year of bad earnings, sell stocks, get out of the market." Um, and that's why so many people fail to get the returns they really should get by sticking through these tough times.
Professor, we'll leave it there. I appreciate your time as always. Jeremy Seagull, we'll see you soon. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. All right. Um, let's now bring in Tom Lee of Funstrat, Dan Greenhouse of Solus Alternative Asset Management. Tom's a CNBC contributor. It's so good to have you both with us. Um, Tom, I know you agree with a large part of what the professor said. That's what you're trying to do and impart on our investing audience. Those are the headlines from the notes that you continue to put out: tough now, better later; invest for the longer term this year. That's right. Um, you know, we don't want investors to be panicking now or rage selling. We've had a very painful draw down, and I know we're facing this huge uncertainty that may not end tomorrow, might last months. But like the other declines in stocks, like the one last year or the ones in 2022, the ones who could endure that short-term pain and and took advantage of those declines are going to have good opportunities.
Yeah, what if things are different though this time, that these tariffs are going to be a favored measure by this president, whether they're permanent, temporary, months, years—no one really knows. They're not going to be a day, no, that... Yeah, listen, I, across the street, every big bank, every medium-sized bank, I'm sure Fundstrat have hosted calls with their clients to discuss what they expect for tariff, and I've been on a couple of those calls, and there's universal complete uncertainty as to what's going to be announced in even 45 minutes' time, let alone 45 days' time. So I think it's fair to Tom's point and to the professor's point for everybody to have a little bit of fog in their investing outlook right now. However, I want to take a step back here and just note to the professor's point that that stocks are long-lived assets, risk assets are long-lived assets, and unless you think a recession is forthcoming and a meaningful decline in earnings is forthcoming, then probably your best bet is to ride this out. And to your point about EPS 280 right now for the next four quarters is basically unchanged over the last couple of weeks. Now you could say that's the ignorance of the market thinking that this isn't going to matter, and someone thinks it does, but it also could be telling you that maybe the tariff headlines which populate all the newspapers aren't quite as bad as the reality on the ground. What about that, Tom?
At the end of the day, this entire conversation comes down to what earnings are going to be, and then we have to decide what we're willing to pay for the earnings in in stock prices. Do you have any level of confidence now that you can see through whatever fog exists? Um, well, I think people are making what I would call like linear adjustments to earnings because they're making a tariff assumption, not assuming that there's companies that can find ways to either get efficiency or they're going to get a currency benefit. I think earnings are going to change a lot less than people expect, and the the easiest way to see that is the bond market is a very good economist. High-yield spreads have not widened dramatically even this week as stocks took it on the gut. And if you look at one-year, one-year inflation break even, so the estimated inflation from one year from now, one year ahead, that's actually fallen 30 basis points. So the the bond market is not expecting more inflation. I actually think earnings are going to hold up a lot better than people expect.
Don't you think though that it to some level it's almost undeniable that margins are going to take a hit, that the companies by and large don't have the level of pricing power that they once did because they know that consumers are sick and tired of inflation and they're tired of seeing prices go up? There's no appetite to raise prices, at least initially. You're going to eat it, and you're going to see a lower margin, which is the story. Yeah, and I I I don't want to get a little dark here, but we know companies were hoarding labor for the last few years, and there was a stigma for downsizing or retirements, but we know AI is actually producing enough PhD level type workers that you could see companies re-engineer. I I think labor costs will be one of the solves for why earnings might surprise in the next year. And let me add, well, clearly tariffs are not a boost to to margin companies. Here's what you got to understand. Okay, listen, companies always have a lot of cards up their sleeves, okay, that they can pull out at any moment. And so, um, you know, never worry about the big companies too much, 'cause they have a lot of power, and they have a lot of ways to to to get around things. You got to usually worry about the average man. There's little doubt about that. There are there's a shared pain here amongst companies, and I it's not so easy. I was watching a news report on one of the the political news shows before they were interviewing someone who said, "Well, the car is coming in; it was 100,000; now it's going to be 125,000." And that's not how it works at all, obviously. It's on value added; it's a little more complicated than that. And in the case of margins, Walmart, let's say, is not going to eat all of this; some of the suppliers are going to eat some of this; consumers are going to eat some of it; Walmart itself is going to eat some of it. So ascertaining the exact hit to margins across sectors, particularly consumer discretionary, is much more complicated than simply saying, "Well, you're you're you're..." You're also um addressing the the so-called the power position, the bully position of the companies like Walmart who can have that leverage over their suppliers. Not all companies certainly have that.
No, that's fair enough. And to that degree, and maybe I might want to add one more thing, you know, there's going to be a lot of onshoring in the US, you know, maybe as much as 6 trillion of capital assets that's additive to S&P earnings. Okay, let me, I'll come back to you guys in a second. I do have some news regarding Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, uh, CEO. So, uh, yeah, you know what else is interesting? Look at how heavy the uh Russell's getting hammered, almost 5%. I'll be honest with you guys, man, I I never thought I would buy a Russell uh 2000 ETF, but I have been looking at like a 2x, 3x leverage on the Russell 2000. I don't know, maybe maybe I buy some of that, maybe, you know, if this really if we if the market really gets hammered, I don't know, man, it would be tempting, but we'll we'll see uh what happens with that. But man, there's a lot of uh great stock opportunities out there, and uh, you know, fun times, entertaining times, drama's back, you know, drama's back. You know, keep an eye on the VIX tomorrow. The VIX should spike up. The biggest question in regards to VIX is how severe is the spike, right? That's the only thing in regards to VIX that's going to be very interesting, um, is how crazy does a VIX go tomorrow? Are we talking a VIX 25 tomorrow? Are we talking to VIX 30? Are we talking to VIX 35? You know, anytime you get over 30 in the VIX, you know, you have to be buying, like, just bottom line. If the VIX ever goes over 30, which who knows, maybe it happens tomorrow, you have to be buying stocks. It's just as simple as that. Like, I I can show you every time period throughout the years, and uh, every time the VIX ever goes over 30, and the further it goes over 30, great buying opportunity, literally. You always look back a few years later, and you're like, "Thank thank goodness I was thank goodness I was buying when that VIX was 30 plus." It's usually a telltale sign of like, "Hey, a lot of dramas out there, everybody's real freaked out, bye bye bye." Okay, all righty guys, appreciate you joining me as always. Pin comment down there today if you want to follow me on X or if you want to follow me on Instagram. I'll put those as pinned comment down there today. Much love, and have a great...