DoubleLine Capital Round Table Prime 2024: Part 1 - Macro

Jim's Comments:
27:28 Jim's view on Inflation.
1:06:26 The solution to Federal Government Spending.

During the macroeconomic segment of its 2024 edition, participants in DoubleLine Round Table Prime among other issues debate the seeming failure of the most telegraphed recession in history to materialize in 2023, the intersection of Federal Reserve policy with a presidential election year and deep changes in the economy post-2020. Coming together for Round Table Prime are DoubleLine CEO Jeffrey Gundlach and moderator DoubleLine Deputy Chief Investment Officer Jeffrey Sherman with their guests James Bianco, President and Macro Strategist at Bianco Research; Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO of Quill Intelligence; Charles Payne, author and Fox Business Anchor; and David Rosenberg, President of economic consulting firm Rosenberg Research & Associates. Round Table Prime was held Jan. 11, 2024.

Topics include:

(1:08) How the U.S. avoided recession despite numerous recessionary indicators and evidence the U.S. economy is far more downbeat than some widely followed economic statistics would indicate.

(10:57) The condition of consumer and household financial conditions and the rapid rise of consumer borrowing delinquencies.

(15:50) Possible factors behind the protracted length of the current cycle, including money supply as measured by M2, and as Charles Payne points out (27:58), the velocity of money.

(30:45) Post-2020 transformations of the economy, the biggest, Jim Bianco notes, being remote work and acceleration of deglobalization, with important implications for inflation.

(35:52) Federal Reserve monetary policy, including Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell’s dovish pivot Dec. 13, which Danielle DiMartino Booth thinks was timed “to get in front of the Iowa caucuses.”

(45:50) The probability of recession in 2024.

(50:11) Jeffrey Gundlach’s warning about the combination of the federal government running large deficits (even amid low unemployment), funded by debt, amid rising interest rates, and his outlook on the inevitability of a restructuring of the federal debt and the unfunded liabilities of American entitlement programs.