The Julia La Roche Show

David Hunter (@DaveHcontrarian), Chief Macro Strategist at Contrarian Macro Advisors, joins Julia La Roche on episode 83 to discuss his forecast for the market and economy. Hunter, who’s been in markets for 50 years, is calling for the end of a 41-year bull market. He expects the market will continue to melt up, forecasting the S&P peak at 6,000 to 7,000 before a global bust.  He’s also bullish on gold, calling for $3,000 by the end of the year. He also made a case for why gold could soar to $20,000 in the decade's second half.  0:00 Intro  0:40 Becoming a contrarian  2:40 Macro view  5:18 Stock market is one of the best leading indicators  8:40 What is the market forecasting?  11:22 Another melt up in the market  16:39 Calling for the end of a 41-year bull market 18:24 Economic and market cycles  20:17 Global bust forecast for 2024 23:05 Forecasting S&P peaking at 6,000-7,000, before 80% drop 29:00 Deflation 34:30 Bullish gold, calling for gold $3,000 this year, $20,000 second half of the decade 41:00 Outlook for the U.S. Dollar  44:00 Treasuries  47:00 The debt is ‘a giant Ponzi scheme’ 49:20 Challenge to the thesis  52:30 Parting thoughts  

Steve H. Hanke (@Steve_Hanke), professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University and the founder and co-director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, joins Julia La Roche on episode 81 for a wide-ranging conversation on the economy. Two years ago, using the quantity theory of money — which links asset prices, economic activity and inflation to changes in the money supply—Professor Hanke accurately predicted that inflation would be persistent and rise to the highest levels in a generation between 6 to 9%. Inflation topped out at 9.1%. Hanke thinks the inflation story is over, and a recession is likely on the way.  Read “Did Lockdowns Work?” Here: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Perspectives-_1_Did-lockdowns-work__June_web.pdf The Hanke-Cofnas Gold Sentiment Score: https://thegoldsentimentreport.com/ 0:00 Open 0:47 Money supply drives the economy 3:00 Inflation story is basically over  4:49 Economic picture around the world  5:25 Inflation is a local problem 7:02 The Fed has been a complete disaster  12:13 One-to-one linkage in change in money supply and inflation  13:00 Path to becoming a Monetarist  15:00 Why doesn’t the Fed pay attention to the quantity theory of money  18:24 Recession  20:47 Preparing for a recession  22:18 Long-term bullish on gold  27:29 Covid lockdowns biggest policy mistake in modern times

Macro investor Nicholas Glinsman (@nglinsman), co-founder of Malmgren Glinsman Partners, joins Julia La Roche on episode 80 for a wide-ranging discussion on China. In this episode, Glinsman highlights the risks investors and corporate decision-makers face with their investments in China, including the inability to get money out of the country. Link to Malmgren-Glinsman Partners Daily Ahead of the Heard and Malmgren Institutional Research: https://d5d0c2-2.myshopify.com/ Read Harald Malmgren (@Halsrethink) and Nick Glinsman’s “China Will Be The Next Japan” paper here: http://www.international-economy.com/TIE_W23_Malmgren.pdf 0:00 Show open 1:08 Welcome Nick Glinsman 1:40 From Salomon Brothers to hedge funds 2:28 Harald Malmgren  5:08 Long Dollar against Chinese Yuan trade  6:25 Assessment of macro environment  7:24 The Fed  9:00 Regional banks, commercial real estate  15:00 Liquidity 18:00 Liquidity impact 23:30 China  25:50 Xi is decoupling China’s economic model  29:30 Investors need to be careful about putting money in China  34:14 Anecdote of a friend who couldn’t get capital out of the country  37:30 Getting money out of Hong Kong is difficult  43:22 A lot of corporate earnings are going to be kept in China  46:40 China Is The Next Japan  51:00 Chinese growth to disappoint headed for “Lost Decade”  55:30 EV cars 58:00 Parting thoughts

Brent Johnson (@SantiagoAuFund), the CEO of Puerto Rico-based wealth management firm Santiago Capital and the creator of the Dollar Milkshake Theory, returns to the podcast for episode 79. Brent, who believes we’re heading for a currency crisis, is the creator of The Dollar Milkshake Theory, a framework he developed to explain how a sovereign debt and currency crisis might play out. He explained how the world was flooded with liquidity thanks to extraordinary monetary policies following the Global Financial Crisis. The Dollar Milkshake is a simplified way to demonstrate how capital — all of the liquidity that makes up the “milkshake” — would flee the rest of the world and get sucked up by the U.S. Dollar (the straw) and U.S.-based markets creating a myriad of problems globally.   During this conversation, Brent explains his Dollar Milkshake Theory and what’s changed since publicly sharing his thesis five years ago. Brent weighed in on the de-dollarization narrative and why he expects the U.S. dollar to go higher. He also made a case for investing in gold.  0:00 Show Open  1:22 Welcome Brent Johnson  2:04 Macro framework  2:57 Heading toward a sovereign debt and currency crisis  4:04 Rate hikes will likely pinch economy in back half of the year 4:50 The Dollar Milkshake Theory, explained  6:52 Why we’ll likely see easy money again 7:45 “This is not a story that ends well”   10:00 Has the Dollar Milkshake Theory changed in 5 years? 13:42 Last year solidified our thesis  17:37 Catalysts for a higher dollar 19:19 Credit crunch  21:43 Geopolitical concerns  22:40 De-dollarization  29:49 A blowback from rate hikes?  35:00 Headlines don’t match reality  37:33 Debt ceiling short-term and long-term implications  44:14 Why is the Fed continuing to hike?  48:20 Why the Fed will pivot  50:05 Regional banks  52:52 Owning physical gold as an insurance policy  55:05 Cash for optionality  56:56 Camino de Santiago  1:01:01 Parting thoughts 

Zurich-based author and investor Guy Spier (@GSpier), the founder and CEO of Aquamarine Capital, joins Julia La Roche one episode 78. In 2008, Guy and his friend Monish Pabrai bid just over $650,000 for a charity lunch with Warren Buffett. That meal with the Oracle of Omaha was a transformative experience for Guy, which he wrote about in his book, “The Education of a Value Investor,” which has sold more than 40,000 copies and has also been translated into Hebrew, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Mandarin and Spanish. Guy completed his MBA at the Harvard Business School, class of 1993, and holds a First Class degree in PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) from Oxford University, where he studied at Brasenose College with British Prime Minister David Cameron. After completing his MBA, Guy started the Aquamarine Fund, an investment vehicle inspired by the original 1950s Buffett partnerships and run with a close replication of the original Buffett partnership rules. The focus is on investing for long-term capital appreciation and capital preservation by running a portfolio of equity investments with the goal of acquiring companies with outstanding long-term economics at a reasonable price and where there is a sufficient margin of safety between the company’s market price and its intrinsic value. Typical investors include high net-worth individuals, family offices, and private banks. 0:00 Show open 1:50 Welcome, Guy Spier 3:00 Started as a Gordon Gekko wannabe, found a ‘lifeline’ through Buffett 6:13 Reading about Warren Buffett 9:47 The pilgrimage to Omaha 11:00 Power of sending thank-you notes 17:00 Handwritten notes from Buffett 18:09 Bidding on lunch with Buffett 22:30 Lunch with Buffett was “transformational.” 27:44 The inner scorecard 30:00 Deep fear ahead of meeting Buffett 34:06 How much does the macro matter? 37:28 Siren songs of the hyped stocks 40:25 Writing with William Green 44:26 Why he changed his mind about not talking to company management 49:20 New investment process checklist items 54:15 Debt 57:10 Buffett spends time thinking about the downside 1:01:20 Content diet for investing 1:08:40 Surrounding yourself with a mastermind group

Harold Bradley, a long-time investment manager and chief investment officer, joins Julia La Roche on episode 77 to discuss why Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have distorted the role of equities markets in capital formation while posing systemic risks. Bradley has broad and deep experience in mutual funds, foundations and endowments, exchanges, and private equity partnerships, including venture capital and hedge funds. His experience also encompasses investments in farmland, metals and mining, futures and options, and a track record of successful engagement with venture-backed technology and FinTech companies, including W.R. Hambrecht's OpenIPO, Euronet Worldwide, StarMine Corp (sold to Reuters) and Archipelago, LLC (IPO). In 1982, Bradley introduced first of a kind cash-settled stock index futures contract in the Value Line Composite Index while at the Kansas City Board Trade before purchasing a membership and trading for five years on the floor. In 1988, he was hired at Twentieth Century, now American Century, as the first equity trader, and built a globally recognized trading operation over the next ten years. He was the lead portfolio manager of small-cap growth funds from 2003 to 2007. He was later appointed Chief Investment Officer of aggressive growth strategies before being named President of American Century Ventures in 1999, which invested $63 million in businesses likely to disrupt the mutual fund industry. From 2003 to 2007, he managed American Century Tomorrow and a team of software engineers and developers who used artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, inference engines, and pattern recognition to develop manager compliance systems and quantitative investment strategies for American Century growth mutual funds managing $10B. The American Century trading desk received global recognition as an innovator of electronic trading techniques and protocols, including the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) Protocol steering committee that created open source standards for order, trade and settlement instructions between investment firms, brokers and exchanges in global equities and foreign exchange trading. Throughout his career, Bradley delivered Congressional testimony on stock market regulation, electronic trading, soft dollars, decimalization of stock prices, and ETFs. As Chief Investment Officer of the Kauffman Foundation from 2007 to 2012, he co-authored a vital research paper with Robert Litan highlighting risks to market stability from lax regulation of ETFs. He also co-authored widely-cited papers on subpar venture capital fund returns, with recommended best practices. He's been interviewed by CNBC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and others. Read Harold Bradley's October 2011 testimony on ETFs here: https://www.etf.com/docs/Bradley_Testimony_10-19-11_SII.pdf 0:00 Open 1:21 Harold Bradley 2:15 Accidental investor 3:00 Agricultural commodities reporter 5:43 A major structural shift 6:45 Pace of change 7:50 Wheat pit to stocks 10:29 1987 crash 13:04 Black Monday blamed on portfolio insurance. ETFs 'a form of portfolio insurance' 13:45 20 Building trading operation 16:30 Electronic trading 21:15 Fees 22:40 Flawed system was a bug, not a feature 23:01 Soft dollars 28:59 Testified before Congress six times 30:10 Risk in ETFs 32:00 Drawback to mutual funds 35:12 Why did ETFs start 38:22 Decimalization 40:30 How D.C. works 43:00 ETFs are presented as a passive investment, but they're not 48:30 KRE 53:29 ETFs have instant liquidity, but the component securities within an ETF aren't immediately liquid 57:00 Gold/silver ETFs 1:00:45 Margin lending 1:03:18 How are ETFs distorting markets and the systemic risk they pose 1:06:00 Undermining price discovery 1:10:38 Bubbles 1:11:50 AI next ETF craze 1:13:00 Punishing good management 1:17:00 Investing today 1:20:00 Investing challenges 1:22:54 Why market won't go down? 1:27:00 Fragile markets 1:28:00 ETF risk likely won't go away 1:34:00 Markets today

Herb Greenberg (@HerbGreenberg) is the editor of the Empire Financial Daily e-letter, Herb Greenberg's QUANT-X System, and Empire Real Wealth. Previously, he was the co-founder of Pacific Square Research and Greenberg Meritz Research & Analytics – both independent, short-biased investment research firms. Greenberg spent more than 40 years as a financial journalist at some of the country's leading newspapers, websites, and broadcast media, where he covered almost every industry. He served as senior stocks commentator at CNBC and was a financial correspondent at the Chicago Tribune. He also spent 10 years as the daily business columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, during which time he started his five-year run as Fortune's monthly Against the Grain columnist and was the morning business reporter for San Francisco's KRON-TV. When the Internet and online media were still emerging, Greenberg was one of the first mainstream journalists to make the shift online, when he became senior columnist at TheStreet. He later shifted to the same role at MarketWatch. When Dow Jones bought out MarketWatch, he added a weekend investor column for the Wall Street Journal to the mix. Earlier in his career, Greenberg was a reporter at Crain's Chicago Business and a business reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He also spent a year as an analyst at a risk arbitrage firm. Greenberg holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Miami and completed the Herbert J. Davenport Fellowship at the University of Missouri. 0:00 Show Open 1:54 Welcome Herb Greenberg 2:40 Wanted to be a radio disc jockey, turned out to be a business journalist 4:06 Getting hooked on reporting  5:40 Path to the University of Miami  6:00 Late bloomer in journalism career  9:00 From Miami to St. Paul 10:25 Herb’s big break at Crain’s (the “bootcamp” of his career) 14:00 ‘Golden era’ of business journalism  15:08 Herb wrote the ‘original Business Insider’ column 18:08 The story Herb never talks about  22:00 State of business journalism today  24:44 Stories  27:14 Assessment of the markets and the economy  28:44 Paying the price for ridiculously low rates  30:00 Discrepancy between what’s real and the data  31:16 Markets are messy  32:55 Wish I had been more aggressive in funding 401k and IRA 34:55 Best question anyone has ever asked me  37:57 Family office analysts are happier than hedge fund analysts  42:00 Red flags  46:00 Silicon Valley Bank, regional bank failures 49:00 The ETF Monster https://www.cnbc.com/2010/09/13/man-vs-machine-the-etf-monster.html 51:30 Blaming the short-seller narrative  53:10 Concept of avoiding loss 53:50 ChatGPT is the ‘new weather’ on earnings calls 58:00 Longevity 

Mike Maloney (@mike_maloney), author of Guide To Investing In Gold And Silver and founder and CEO of GoldSilver.com, joins Julia La Roche on episode 75 to discuss his newest book and latest warning that an economic storm is coming that will dwarf the 2008 global financial crisis and why we could see the unleashing of a massive bull market in gold and silver. You can buy Mike’s newest book, The Great Gold And Silver Rush Of The 21st Century here: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Gold-Silver-Rush-Century/dp/B0BP3HW5HJ You can read Chapters 3 and 4 of The Great Gold and Silver Rush of the 21st here: ⁠https://ggsr21.com/online-chapters/⁠ You can buy Mike's first book Guide To Investing In Gold And Silver here: https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Investing-Gold-Silver-Financial/dp/1937832740/ 0:00 Show open 1:30 Welcome Mike Maloney 2:56 Mike says the new book is not easy to find on Amazon 4:00 Macro picture today — the world is drowning in debt 5:59 ‘An evil monetary system’ 7:20 ‘You have been monetized’ 13:00 When we used gold  14:29 Modern monetary system based on ‘fraud, theft, and enslavement,’ says Mike Maloney  17:00 ‘Unless it stores value, it’s not money. Period.’  17:15 Money v. Currency  22:12 A monetary system that’s ‘an illusion'  24:00 ‘On a path toward an implosion’  26:00 CBDCs  27:58 Central Banks buying gold  28:47 China and gold  33:00 A bigger financial crisis than 2008?  35:00 ‘The Almost Everything Bubble’ and ‘The Bernanke Bust’  39:00 Open Market explained  48:33 Warping the economy  50:35 Interest in gold and silver  53:00 US dollar  54:00 Trapped in an ultra-complex system  56:26 Taxpayer takes a loss  59:00 Benefits of owning precious metals during a meltdown  1:02:50 Gold and silver could soar 

Bob Elliott (@BobEUnlimited), cofounder and CEO of Unlimited, which uses machine learning to create index replication ETFs of 2&20 style alternative investments like hedge funds, venture capital, and private equity, joins Julia La Roche on episode 74 for a deep dive into macro, the regional banking crisis, inflation dynamics, and more. Prior to founding Unlimited, Bob was a Senior Investment Executive at Bridgewater Associates, where he served on the Investment Committee (G7) and created investment strategies across equities, fixed income, credit, exchange rates, and commodities, including many used in the flagship Pure Alpha fund. He also built and led Ray Dalio’s personal investment research team for nearly a decade. He’s the author of hundreds of Bridgewater’s widely read Daily Observations and directly counseled some of the world’s foremost policymakers and institutional investors on economic and investing issues. Bob has also served as an advisor and executive at several startups, including CircleUp, an investment company focused on early-stage consumer brands. He revamped the investment strategy for the company’s $150mln venture funds leveraging big data approaches to improve decision-making. He was also the co-founder of GiveWell, a startup charity evaluator which now directs more than $500mln in annual contributions. Bob holds a BA in History and Science from Harvard. 0:00 Intro 1:43 Welcome Bob Elliott  2:27 Macro picture  3:30 Many people haven’t experienced a typical macro cycle in their careers 4:48 Income-led cycle, not a credit-led cycle  6:33 Areas that aren’t sensitive to rise in rates 9:33 Banking crisis  9:54 Not like 2008 13:30 Not a credit problem. It’s a policy problem.  16:00 The bank run issue  19:00 We’ve entered a point in the crisis where the ineffective policy framework is creating the instability  20:10 Bank runs are self-reinforcing  21:00 Speculators creating sizable moves in banking stocks  23:00 Best way to deal with banking crisis  25:35 Impact from the Fed’s policies  29:18 Commercial real estate risk  32:55 Globalization  36:16 Disconnect between the market and the Fed  38:42 Higher for longer most probable  40:20 Paths that align with the bond market pricing  42:30 Likelihood of getting back to the 2% inflation target  44:32 Inflation entrenchment  46:20 Risk Fed faces with inflation  47:46 Wage inflation  48:50 Raising prices and not seeing demand destruction  51:33 Teaching macro 

Banker and author Chris Whalen (@rcwhalen), chairman of Whalen Global Advisors, who is also the author of The Institutional Risk Analyst, joins Julia La Roche on episode 73 to discuss the failure of First Republic Bank, the Federal Reserve’s role in the spate of bank failures, and why we should expect more failures ahead.  In this episode, Whalen outlines why thee will be a repricing across the banking industries as banks have to raise deposit rates to get closer to T-bills, but many banks can’t do that. As a result, he expects that the Fed will have to drop rates before the end of the year or risk more bank failures.  0:00 Intro  1:41 Welcoming Chris Whalen  2:22 The false narrative around First Republic’s failure  3:14 The Fed panicked and started excessive open market intervention in 2019 4:09 Outliers in banking are the ones going down  5:02 It’s just like the 1980s  5:48 If banks don’t reprice, they’re not going to make it 6:20 The Fed likely didn’t recognize this existential risk  7:00 Fed buying MBS was a terrible mistake  7:47 Monetary policy is implemented in the bond market  8:11 Why was the Fed buying MBS? It’s dangerous. 10:19 Not surprised by bank failures 11:45 Most banks are insolvent  12:45 Weaker banks will get picked on, but larger banks could go down 13:36 Bank of the Ozarks successfully raised more deposits  14:00 Powell will have to drop rates before end of the year or we’ll have more bank failures  16:38 Not a failure of supervision  17:24 Where is the blame placed?  18:50 All banks are going to be vulnerable  19:50 Net Interest Margin is going to get squeezed  20:45 How many more bank failures can Powell and Yellen survive?  22:41 Different from 2008?  24:00 Impact or rate hikes  25:11 Fed raised too far, too fast, and left the banks with big losses 26:40 Commercial real estate risk  29:33 Powell could lose control of the situation if he doesn’t talk to Congress and the public about the situation