YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Bessant

lines on the record: 46
first: 2025-03-21
most recent: 2025-03-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Bitcoin is a global asset that is affected by liquidity, yes, mostly US liquidity, but the fact is that when you have what's happening in Europe on the fiscal, when you have what's happening in China on unleashing, they've been doing the monetary thing, but now they're really coming in size on the fiscal thing. I have a feeling that as there's outflows out of Nasdaq out of MAG 7 going back home, that Bitcoin, well, you know, this is always the debate, right? Is Bitcoin just highly correlated to Nasdaq? And I might see this opportunity for a decoupling there where just the liquidity impulse from the rest of the world starts to uplift it. So, you know, obviously you want to match the volatility or the delta there, but I think Short NASDAQ, long Bitcoin is interesting. for that reason.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believer in the tech, that's for sure. Long term time horizon. Okay, my trade for this is something that I've been shopping around and still thinking about, but I'm Bearish Mag7, generally speaking. I think there's too much capital in it versus what's happening in the rest of the world.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not a trader, so you should not listen to me. But I actually kind of like Robin Hood here as an individual stock. There's an enormous amount of attention that gets paid towards Coinbase as an index bet on crypto. Robinhood's a very similar business. They have more monthly active users. They have an even more retail user base and more valuable order flow. They have a really competent team in crypto. You can see Vlad kind of posting on Twitter every other day about all the stuff that they want to do. They want to tokenize a bunch of assets. There's a huge amount there from launching an L2 to doing a stablecoin basically just running the playbook that Coinbase has run. So something to watch. Not investment advice.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I kind of think for the remainder of the year it's like you can imagine the administration is like selling calls on the equity indices and risk assets. They don't want it to collapse, but they don't really want it to be ripping face like Yellen and Biden into the election. So yeah, I think selling upside when unallies and being long bonds until they're forced to pivot.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The equity markets, and why I maintain a bit more caution than maybe the average person here. And again, I just really, until the Treasury starts to do, until their words and actions don't line up, then I'll start to maybe question it. But it's very clear to me at this stage that, and we're so early, right? I mean, the correction with SWIFT, but it's like one month. 2022 is 12 or whatever 10. So these things can last and there's just really no reason for them to, if they reignite the economy here, yields go up. And this is very counterproductive. And they have plenty of time. Midterms is the next stop, you know, the stop gap. And you work back a little bit. We know how short people's memories are.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason why the dip has worked so well for stocks and risk over the last two years is because it never affected the economy and earnings. So going back to late summer issues last year with the yen, that was more kind of nuanced technical deleveraging. It wasn't an economic issue. The April real yield scare of 24 with kind of Middle East issues, again sort of an inflation scare, but not an earnings thing. October 23, similar deal march banking crisis backstopped immediately, but there was concerns. But this is the first time where it's like, oh, actually, no, there's actually downside earnings potential with everything that's happening from the fiscal side and no liquidity support from the Fed. And that is what I think drove such a steep deleveraging in”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for me, it's longing duration bonds, TLTV, type of 10 to 30 year until the Fed blinks and cuts, which is at least a couple months off. Or we further enough correction in risk assets to elicit a change in tone from the administration and Treasury and Fed. Other than that,”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Built out. And so I see a lot of optimism because I think a lot of this stuff is going to finally start to work at scale, but it's going to actively upset the group of people that are currently here is my bet.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I mean, I think the thing that's working right now, right, is, I mean, keep in mind, Bitcoin's been around for 17 years. It was the opposite of a smooth run. And now it looks so good. There's a strategic Bitcoin reserve that the US has laid out. Everyone knows what the narrative is, but man, I mean, there were so many times when it looked like it wasn't going to make it. It took a long time to get here. Everything else in crypto is much, much newer than that. I mean, even like the second most battle-tested ground here would be sort of DeFi built on Ethereum. That's been around for six years. If you're being pretty generous, it just takes a long time for these things ultimately to get built out. And I think underneath these undeniably positive headlines, there are still big ideological and almost technical and frankly like political challenges to deal with. Like one of the big unanswered questions is how has law”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, Mike, I want to get with you about what I felt like is the big theme of this conference so far, which is, you know, it's a lot of an institution. But then you go on crypto Twitter, you go and check out what retail is feeling like right now, and it's just, it's abysmal. It feels like a bear market. There's just been the meme coin market implosion. What is going on? Which side is right right now? Is institutional just exit liquidity and that's a smart money or is it the opposite?”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sector is attempting to do. Yeah, and then on the other side, I think that doesn't get enough talk is at least the possibility that the U.S.'s strong state sponsorship of Bitcoin makes it at least relatively less attractive to countries like Russia who just got hundreds of millions of their reserves confiscated essentially and sanctions and all these sorts of things that Like you said are the ideological foundation of it being an outside the system asset versus something that has state sponsorship and embrace.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's an underlying, I agree with that, it's more government. There's things that make sense for governments to help incubate. And I think they do that already quite a bit with all these other agencies and things. But the underlying thing that maybe people don't talk about is if you have a balanced budget, responsible monetary policy and people respecting the value of fiat, you sort of don't need Bitcoin. So that's, I mean, I'm a long run believer because I don't think those things are going to be achieved by government globally in perpetuity, but that is the truth. If Bitcoin was born and exists as a flight of safety store value and protection of purchasing power, so if you don't have those, which is what a smart treasure”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is the issue with so much of crypto sometimes it leads people to lose these ideological beliefs that they have. It's like, okay, well, if we're all free market believers and we're also excited about this idea that we create a tax-funded hedge fund, I'm not on board with that idea.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It and letting them take the taxpaying money and letting that fund the sovereign wealth fund. So I don't like, you know, the idea of it is great because yes, they're going to infinite TWAP our bags and that's all awesome and good. But I think that's why.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also have spicy takes on the Sovereign Wealth Fund too. To your point, the US is a debtor nation. I almost said my country, but I'm Canadian. Maybe for now. Yeah, I know. Yeah Look, if you're a debtor nation and you want to run a sovereign wealth fund, setting aside all the fancy tricks that they're talking about, like taking the gold reserves and marking it the market and put in there, or the digital assets that they've already seized, putting that in, that's all great. But if you get to the point where you're like, okay, we want to actually structurally run a sovereign wealth fund, but we're a debtor country. You have to start asking where does that capital come from? And it comes from the private sector. It comes from taxpayers. So if it's coming from taxpayers, if you're in agreement with that, you're making the admission that you are willing to allow the government to work as a pension fund, basically, on your behalf. You know, I myself, I definitely lean more libertarian. I'm not really interested in that premise. I'm much more interested in deciding myself what pension fund, which head fund. I want to provide my capital towards. I'm not really interested in taking...”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different institutions or even individuals to bank directly with the Federal Reserve. So the advantage of this would be there's zero risk. You have no counterparty risk. The disadvantage of this would be in why the Fed is always pushed back against it is one, they don't want a direct banking relationship with everyone, but they also don't want to do is undermine their own commercial banking system because who would bank with JP Morgan if you could bank directly with the Fed and take absolutely no risk, right? So it's undermining to them. And so you kind of have on the one hand over here banking directly with the Fed. On the other hand over here you're banking with a commercial bank which is backed up by a pretty diverse set of loans, right? Like different duration treasuries, private credit, whatever it is. And then there's this kind of middle ground here, which is stable coins, which are global bank deposits, which are just backed by very short-dated government debt. And sort of a low overhead global from day one sort of bank deposit actually that looks maybe”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to ask you, I would get your opinion on this Sovereign Wealth Fund, U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund as well. I'm torn between being excited about it and thinking it's interesting and not 100% understanding it. My understanding of Sovereign Wealth Funds is if you're a country and you're generating surplus revenue that you can't reinvest back into your own domestic economy, then you move it mostly into the United States. But we're a debtor nation, so that makes less sense for us. If you had done that, if you had put one of these together 50 years ago, you'd have done extremely well. And Social Security might not be underfunded. But on the stablecoin front, I also wonder if they are looking at this as potential disruption to the commercial banking system. Folks in this room, has anyone heard the term narrow banking before? My man. So narrow banking was something that has been tried a couple times over the course of the past decade, but there have been pushes to allow”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sell gold, like, no, it's all fungible, like debt deficit, like if we spend somewhere here, we have to cut here. If we add here, and he gets that. So I just, I don't, I think it's a fulfilled campaign promise this far, and I don't really see a lot of legs to it. But on the stablecoin front, two goals, right? Get yields down, so increased demand for your debt. He's the largest bond salesman US Treasury bond salesman. Like I just mentioned, a weaker dollar is a headwind because it's inflationary. And so he wants a higher demand for US dollars. So both of those things, when you see stablecoins go from non-existent to a top 20 holder of your national debt is pretty inspiring and something I would be doing everything possible to increase around the globe. So stablecoins continue to be the most obvious thing for”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is if the Assets that they could use to mine Bitcoin with X. It's a not great business though, hash price and revenue profitability for miners is back to extreme lows, sort of bear market lows, just given the growth and hash rate and difficulty. But when you zoom out and just take off the tinted goggles of being a crypto fanatic, you see the four countries that have Bitcoin reserves is North Korea, El Salvador, Bhutan, and the US. I don't know, is that super exciting if you're another country, like it doesn't feel like there's this global race to acquire Bitcoin to me. And we're a debtor nation. We're running massive deficits. It's fungible, right? Since we're talking about how intelligent and logical and rational he is. And he's not going to just say, oh, well, we could.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's certainly a large buyer and already a very large owner of. U.S. Treasuries. So I think Scott Besson is a guy who knows monetary plumbing very deeply. Mentioned before, he's already talking about messing with. to allow them to More deregulated and buy more U.S. bonds. I think he sees this as an incremental buyer of bonds. So I think it's extremely, part of the reason why it's one of these massive tailwinds, I think. That exists for stable coins in the US in general.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the reason I've never really loved it on corporate balance sheets either, which I know people love. But yes, I'm not a huge fan of the strategic Bitcoin reserver, honestly, the stockpile in general. But that's just my personal perspective. On the stablecoin front, I think that's massive for the United States. And I think it's not an accident When you hear about cabinet members. Or Scott Besson talking about anything related to crypto, he's talking about stablecoins. And actually, Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America, when he was talking about Bank of America potentially launching a stablecoin, I thought he phrased it very interestingly. He's like, I don't see the difference between this and bank deposits. And I think if you squint at it, it's kind of hard to see what the difference is between that and bank deposits.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the strategic Bitcoin reserve, Not sure if I get it. I don't really like it, actually. I think that the US still is in this position of enormous privilege of being the issuer of the global reserve currency. The only thing better than having to back your currency with high quality collateral is not having to back it and being the collateral itself. And so I just sort of wonder if you have a strategic Bitcoin reserve. You're saying this is strategic to my country for some reason. Bitcoin doesn't exist in the real world. We don't have liabilities denominated in Bitcoin like we do with petroleum. And so what is the message that you're sending? The only thing that you could be backstopping is your currency. To be honest, I just don't love it.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so another piece of the puzzle here, which is related to the reason that we're actually here today, which is a digital asset summit. But there's a lot of cross currents between what can the administration do with stablecoins as a marginal buyer of debt? What can the administration do with a Bitcoin strategic reserve? And how does that sit within the interplay of everything we're talking about? I want to maybe start with you, Mike. I'm not actually sure where you stand right now on the Bitcoin strategic reserve and all of that and how you think about that from the super high level macro goals here of this administration and achieving the goals that they're talking about, like where does that sit within it and then also stable coins in terms of being the fastest growing marginal buyer of that debt.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I think that you can look at some of the actions of this administration does tell you exactly how they think and what they want, right? I mean, Trump has been super consistent on this. You can find interviews going back to the 80s where he thinks that the rest of the world, especially Europe, does not pay their fair share for defense. And he said repeatedly, this is what I want. And then he sent JD Vance to Munich and he makes a fiery 15-minute speech. Two weeks later, they're proposing a $500 billion fiscal investment into rearmament, right? I'm unclear if that's a good thing for the rest of the world. Or for Alta, but I think that's kind of the trend, and they made it very clear that that's what they want.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For no reason of his, where you could even see a situation where for him to achieve his goals, he'd have to say, hey guys, you got to tighten up the belt like we are. This is inflationary. I don't know if that's going to happen yet, but so it's a very tight loop to thread. I have to at this moment be in the skeptic camp if it can actually fully get done without more pain first for risk assets.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's some mean reversion to be had making higher global bond yields, putting pressure on the U.S. bond yields. But the other thing is the downward pressure on the dollar also is importing of inflation, where in the last three-ish plus years, we've been actually importing deflation relatively or disinflation relative to the rest of the world because we've had a strong dollar. And so what that does is puts sort of a floor bid under commodities structurally. That doesn't mean commodities have to go up. They're doing other supply things. They're hurting demand. So they're trying other methods, but there's structural headwinds that come in that make it more difficult. You could even see a situation where China, Europe, Japan start running so hot relative to what Bess it needs to do to get our yields down that he just the global cost of capital is rising inflation starts rising for”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mechanically, there are things you can't control, and that is the flows, which in this case, lower growth, lower U.S. bond yields weakens the dollar, and by definition strengthens rest of world currencies. It makes, you know, there's a reason we've had extreme concentration in our large cap indices in the MEG-7, because it's been the safety trade when the rest of the world wasn't growing, when China was in recession, when Europe's in recession, in the US is propped up on fiscal largesse. But that's reversing. And so we've seen the first shot across the bow here, but there's two effects. One, you mentioned is the relative attractiveness of non-U.S. assets, so the U.S. has 4% of the world's population, but 60% of the global equity market cap.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love Vessen. I want to be Bessant when I grow up. He definitely knows this. But the trade after the trade here that I don't think most are speaking about is how you point out big of a headwind that is for his objectives to bring inflation down and bring yields down. Because it's all thus far, it's been two months. For all the progress or some people view lack of progress that's been made, things have gone quite smoothly, right? We've cut the deal with the Saudis to pump more oil. Russian Ukraine have largely fallen in line. All our other trading partners have largely fallen in line on tariffs. There hasn't been a big breakout of global conflict or trade war noise.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That all leads to marginally also, you know, just from the correlation of if capital goes back to Europe and chases those higher yields, they're going to be selling MAG 7, they're going to be selling U.S. bonds. That leads to higher bond yields. Do you think they expected that? Because that, to me, is a headwind against their goal of getting the 10-year lower. If we got every other, you know, we got China fiscal coming online too. Those are negative headwinds for bond yields. Do you think Besson anticipated that?”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think that's, I want to pull into this discussion here, and I'll ask you, Quinn, in a second here. But, okay, so their goal is to get the 10-year down. You know, they've achieved, I think, 50 bip so far at the cost of a 12% equity correction. That's a pretty large trade-off, I would say. And then in the same vein, I don't think they anticipated such a fiscal reaction, especially from Europe. I wonder, and I'm curious on your guys' takes, but...”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that they're going to change that moving forward with they can mess with things like the SLR for banks. And actually Besson's quote was he thinks that they can reduce BIS 70 basis points alone with just that lever.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two years, we had a spending problem, and most of the job growth is being driven by government, and I think there's an attempt to shift growth onto the private sector through deregulation and tax cuts. And I think it's a good plan. I don't really see a path here where we everyone tightens their belts and we take huge cuts and I just don't see without a massive crisis. So I think this administration's perspective is we're going to move the impetus of growth from the public sector and government and giving away a bunch of jobs like that into the private sector and we're going to try to incentivize job growth. And I think alongside that they're very sensitive about honestly terming out our debt. So there have been some, I think, critical. There was a lot of question marks around Janet Yellen's shift in terms of how she ran bond auctions for a little while, moving much more toward shorter dated bills as opposed to longer dated treasuries. And I think that”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that the perspective from this administration that I agree with is that you need to grow your way out of this, actually. I think that there's sort of an incorrect view that you can actual verbatim phrase from Secretary Scott Bessant was we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. And so I think his perspective, you often hear that you can't look at a government like household financing or a startup. And I think in a lot of ways you can't, but I think in this one way you can. There are definite revenues and there are definite costs. And if you were looking at a company or a startup here, there's not a massive problem. We've gotten out ahead of our skis, but we still have the most robust economy on earth. It's growing in a very organic and steady way. And so I think you can largely look at Doge as a way of just reining our costs in or running at a more break-even rate. And I think a pretty decent framework for looking at the economy right now is over the course of the last”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But okay, look, so they're playing with fire here. If you're trying to do what they're trying to do, which is to get Grow Slow and pull things back and actually pull it off without diving into recession, because I'm still not in that camp. But when you look at history of these moments where you go through these cycles of decreasing liquidity, decrease in growth, and then swooping underneath and trying to catch it, basically a soft landing, but from a fiscal side and not letting go to a hard landing. When you look at previous crises during history, what's your perspective on how likely this is for them to pull off without it going too far? And then, oh shit, now we have to run up even greater fiscal deficits because we went too far, too low, and now we got to revitalize the economy because we messed up and we're in a recession.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The deal with the Saudis that I don't think got enough attention, but that was monumental in terms of trying to add more supply. But on the other hand, they do have things like bringing Iran from 1.5 million barrels to zero maximum pressure, the potential that the Russian conflict doesn't end so soon. So it's a tight needle to thread. The main point for me is that the Trump admin is willing to go through pain. We have not seen administration in a long time willing to do that. And they seem very willing. So I'll take them at their word as long as their actions corroborate, which they have.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the most clear trait to me here is longing bonds because you have the Fed attempting to respect the value of the dollar by not adding liquidity in the regime and being very patient on potential future cuts. And my view is that they're in a fairly hawkish stance. And then you have the same thing on Bessant. Bessant knows there's a big treasury supply issuance problem on the horizon if they don't fix the deficit and you know how do you fix if you're the largest bond salesman in the world and you want to tell a good story about why your bonds should be at lower yield either can get growth down get inflation down or both and you know there's another pillar to this which is energy you've noticed how they have been dead set on solving russia and ukraine very very obvious strategy to to lower oil prices”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Highs all the time, that's leading to this further consumption of higher income classes of society. So I think those are the two big reasons why we haven't seen inflation return to 2%. And now you have this administration come up and go to Powell and say, hey, look, you know, we're trying to get the 10-year yield down. We're trying to get a handle on things. We're trying to pull back fiscal retrenchment. I think Powell's over the moon.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's such a good way of framing things because I think a lot of people are getting it wrong right now in that interplay between Scott Bescent and Cherry Powell. I've seen a lot of takes where they say, oh, look, Bessant and Trump are trying to tank the economy to force the Fed to cut rates. And I don't think that's the way to think about it. I think you're correct in the way to think about it, which is, okay, let's think about what Powell has been thinking about and dealing with for the past five years now since COVID, basically, which is a couple things. He's trying to get a handle on inflation. And with the tools that the Fed has, they're limited for a number of reasons. We've talked about them before. But overall, he's been going, you know, you always have to think about the economy through the lens of fiscal and monetary and the interplay between those two. And on the fiscal side of things, we've been running some of the loosest fiscal regimes doing an expansion, right? So we have huge deficits. We have stock prices at all time.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Growth gets hit and we tip into a recession later in the year, and they have to start stimulating pre midterms 2026, and inflation is not down yet, there might be tensions. But in this point in time, I view very aligned interests and incentives between the two camps. And I can kind of feel that from Powell, where they're very comfortable waiting. And I think they're being assured of that from Besson and team. So that's a bit different dynamic than prior, at least last year where it's like, hey, we got an election to win. You got to juice these markets.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know what that's actually going to do in terms of generating growth in the real economy. So I think that's what's, it's, yeah, it's very choppy in the midterm, but I think later on towards the end of this year, you have things to look forward to. Yeah, I think that's the good point to bring up is the direction and sort of who's moving the pieces on monetary and fiscal policy. I firmly believe it really starts with the treasury and people probably don't account for how closely intertwined Fed and Treasury actually is. It's been very obvious the last number of years and I don't think it's changed in the new administration. In fact, I think Powell, much probably against what consensus view is of this tension between the Trump White House and Powell is actually much more aligned interests this go around, at least now. If we go through a big deep cut of Doge and”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I don't think that's a great option. Scott Besnant was very against austerity or severe austerity because that negatively impacts your ability to grow your way out of it. And so growth seems like the priority. And so when you look at kind of the three big components that they've thrown out so far, there's tariffs, which is negative growth. But then there are tax cuts. And there's also deregulation. And so what he outlined in his speech was They started with tariffs first, which is obviously not good for growth and you've seen markets throw a little bit of a hissy fit for the course of the last month. But what they have in their back pockets and what they're counting on is deregulation to drive growth and tax cuts to drive growth. And obviously spending is going to be a lever that they can pull how much they really end up cutting on the Doge side of things. And so I think markets are pricing in tariffs because that's what's happened so far. But ultimately, you do have the promise of tax cuts and deregulation later this year, but it's kind of a known unknown.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think... I think that it wasn't particularly good or particularly bad. There was another interview that went live today with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant where he outlined in quite a bit of detail how Treasury and honestly this administration is thinking about growth, inflation, et cetera, over the course of the next couple of years. And I think if you just look at this, I think this administration and politics is in the driver's seat at the moment, much more so than inflation or the Fed. And so if you look at this administration, they are very, very focused on balancing the budget. We know that debt is something that they care about for the first time in a long time. And during this interview, Scott Besson sort of went through how they think about alleviating the situation. And there are a couple of things that you can do. You can do austerity. You can try to grow your way out of the situation. You can do financial oppression. Politically, financial oppression is not going to work, I think, with this president in particular. He's very sensitive to the common man.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Introduced potential for hikes or something worse for risk assets. However, it's not good news. There's nothing here for me to really celebrate, particularly in a backdrop of the first time in. Since COVID, even pre probably, that fiscal has been a negative impulse on asset markets with Doge efforts and immigration being effectively halted from a percent plus growth of population every year since Biden became president to zero overnight from the southern border. So I just think that the overarching backdrop for the economy, growth, and what I expect to eventually show up in corporate earnings for the first time since we've had all these market pullbacks is kind of deterioration with no positive impulse on the liquidity side. Yes, okay, they're not hiking. The QT reduction is positive, but it doesn't give an impetus. So we can chop around here, but it doesn't make me excited.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I like to look at the meeting over meeting change and obviously the statement and rhetoric and press conference, but also the dot plots, which only come out quarterly. And when you compare the two, obviously we had growth expectations down with GDP, lower unemployment rate higher, and inflation expectations higher, which is very stagflationary, with the median or mean interest rate projection cuts the same. However, under the surface, you had the distribution move to a much more hawkish stance. You had the number of participants expecting one or fewer cuts go from four to eight and expecting three or more go from five to two. So it was a very meaningful shift in kind of the mean of the group. And I think I understand. The Dovish interpretation as, well, they marked up inflation expectations, but they didn't”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overall, in terms of the rate cuts that they expect, it's actually quite similar to the December meeting, which is the last time we had the SEP data. And that's two cuts, which is pretty close to where the market's at. So there's a lot of different mixed points in there. And then we also got some updates on the balance sheet and liquidity and what's going on there. So we got quantitative tightening updates heading into it. We saw from the FOMC meeting minutes that there was going to be some talk of pausing it, having to do with the debt ceiling dynamics. So we'll get into that. But interestingly enough, they only tapered the treasury component of QT. So they brought that down from $25 to $5 billion a month. So still doing a little bit, but pretty negligible. But then they're holding NBS constant. So the mortgage-backed securities, and I think this is key we can get into this, but they want to get those NBS off their book. And they are not interested in slowing that down by any means. So there's a lot to unpack there. Quinn, you've been pretty quick to the trigger here in calling it hawkish, despite markets rallying.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With that, we got the SCP data today, the dot plot, and that provided an interesting line of sight into gauging how are they thinking about inflation risks, how are they thinking about growth risks, and how does that all come together into what is their perspective for implementing monetary policy? So I'm going to keep it simple here and just go through a couple data points to understand how are they thinking about it. So for the growth forecast, for 2025, they're expecting it to come down from 2.1 to 1.7. From there, they see that level setting out and seeing it as so much like a short-term growth risk. Now, what's interesting is it's the complete opposite in terms of inflation risks. From there, they're looking at core PCE for 2025 to go from 2.5 to 2.8, and then eventually trickling them back down to 2.”
2025-03-21 · Forward Guidance · The Fed & Treasury Aren’t Backing Down | Weekly Roundup LIVE @ DAS · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT