Adam Taggart | Thoughtful Money, Released on 3/25/24

After embracing the “no landing narrative” last year and later unleashing animal spirits after the Presidential election that drove stocks to record levels of euphoria, the national mood has turned substantially more dour. Suddenly, the headlines are filled with fears of recession. The post-COVID higher cost of living and the uncertainty caused by the new Administration’s policies has many fearing for their household budgets, their portfolios, and their jobs. Are things really this bad? After all, the economy is still growing, inflation has moderated (mostly), and unemployment remains low. When there are so many crosscurrents as there are today, it’s prudent to seek the counsel of those who take. cold and calculated look at the data, to see what “is” vs what our biases may want us to see. Which is why we’re fortunate to speak with macro analyst Wolf Richter of WolfStreet.com, who will share with us what the charts he regularly compiles are telling him about the true state of today’s economy & markets.

0:00 – Introduction
2:30 – Uncertainty from Trump Administration Policies
9:21 – Stock Market Overvaluation Risks
15:46 – Economic Growth and Recession Outlook
20:30 – Tariffs and Manufacturing Revival
28:09 – Consumer Sentiment and Inflation Perceptions
40:15 – Consumer Spending Resilience
45:42 – High-End Consumer Confidence
55:56 – Stock Market Sell-Off as a Recession Trigger
1:00:06 – Investment Strategies in a Risky Environment
1:02:11 – Optimism for U.S. Manufacturing

Wolf Richter is the founder of Wolf Street Corp and the publisher of WolfStreet.com. Wolf has over twenty years of C-level operations experience, including turnarounds and a VC-funded startup. He has a BA, MA, and MBA (UT at Austin). In his prior life, he worked in Texas and Oklahoma, including a decade as General Manager and COO of a large Ford dealership and its subsidiaries.

Adam Taggart is the Founder of  Thoughtful Money. He is also Co-Founder and former President of Peak Prosperity. Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA. Prior to partnering with Chris Martenson (Adam was General Manager of our earlier site, ChrisMartenson.com), he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the ‘startup thing’ (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch. Most importantly, he’s a devoted husband and dad.

  economy, investing, market crash, recession, Wolf Richter