New World Disorder Playing Out in 2025 (Uncut) 04-22-2025

GOLD: New World Disorder Playing Out in 2025, Stocks Bottomed | Ed Yardeni

People say that gold is a hedge against inflation. It’s a hedge against a lot of things, including geopolitical chaos, which is kind of what we have now. I mean, the situation between China and Taiwan looks like it could get worse.

What would you do about defending Taiwan? And he said, I wouldn’t do anything militarily. He said, I’m going to put 150% to 200% tariff on China. Well, that’s what he just did.

And for a guy who keeps counting up the cards and claiming he’s got more cards than the other people around the table. Hello and welcome to Soar Financially, a channel where we discuss the macro to understand the micro. My name is Kai Hoffman.

I’m the Ed Jay Armani guy over on X and of course, your host of this channel. And I’m looking forward to welcoming back Ed Giordani. He’s the president of Giordani Research and somebody I really like watching on mainstream TV because he’s invited as a contrarian indicator or contrarian guest.

And I’m really looking forward to his contrarian opinion because I know his answer to the first question will probably surprise you a little bit. But before we get to that, hit that like and subscribe button. It helps us out tremendously bringing guests like Ed onto the program and it’s a free way to support us.

So thank you so much for doing that. Ed, it is a pleasure to welcome you back on the program. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sure, my pleasure. Yeah, absolutely. And I promised a shocking question to begin the conversation, but we do have to discuss whether bull market or you said before, bull markets don’t die of old age.

They’re getting killed by policy mistakes. Are we still in the bull market, Ed? Well, we certainly have had the policy mistake. Eventually, this tariff turmoil that Trump started may sort itself out and we may actually wind up with lower tariffs, at least for the reciprocal ones.

The 10% steady one looks like it’s going to be with us for a while. So arguably, that’s the policy mistake. And so if you reverse engineer that statement, it would argue that we’re in a bear market.

We clearly got into bear market territory with the Nasdaq for a couple of days. And we also came close to a bear market with the S&P 500. And all that happened on April 8th.

On April 9th, Trump postponed the reciprocal tariffs, and we had this huge rally in the market. I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that we retest the lows, but I do think that we probably made the lows on April 8th. And that’s because it’s pretty hard to short this market and it’s pretty hard to get back in it if you’re out of it, as we saw on April 9th.

So you’re either in it for the long haul, or you’re a day trader, or you’re amazing at picking tops and getting back in at bottoms. But I’ve told people that I think it’s too late to panic. I think that the bull market will live again, and that this too shall pass.

Because I don’t think the Trump administration and all their Republican supporters in Congress want to lose the midterm elections. And if they don’t get their act together quickly and have Trump declare victory on the tariff side, they’re going to lose the midterms. And then their grand scheme for radically changing a lot of the way we do things in the economy and in our social system, our entire country won’t be changed the way they would like it to change.

Yeah, no very good insights there, Ed. And it seems like we’re at peak bearishness in the market sentiment, consumer sentiment, mostly driven by uncertainty, I’d suggest. But is it peak bearishness, actually? Are we seeing a turnaround already? I think we are seeing a peak bearishness.

The bull bear ratio that you can calculate with investors’ intelligence, you can do another bull bear ratio with the AAII survey. They’re all extremely bearish. And that usually works as a contrary indicator, as a buy signal.

When everybody is feeling sick to the pit of their stomach, that’s when the market usually bottoms. But that’s because it’s not just investors that feel sick. It’s also the Fed that gets really concerned.

And they come in with a Fed put and they lower interest rates and they save the day. This time around, the Fed put is, I don’t know that it’s kaput, but it’s definitely on hold because the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, has made it very clear that he and other Fed officials, as all of us were, were surprised by the magnitude of the reciprocal tariffs announced by Donald Trump. And Powell concluded that means that the inflation that will result from it will be higher and more persistent, and that the weakness in the economy will be worse.

And he said the Fed’s kind of boxed in because they don’t really know whether to lower interest rates or raise interest rates given the perverse impact of tariffs on their dual mandate to keep inflation down and to keep the unemployment rate down. So that leaves us with the Trump put, or let’s call it the Trump pivot. And so far, so good.

Trump changes his mind on a regular basis. He postpones things that get everybody all excited. I think even the 25% tariff on autos was postponed because that really got me concerned about higher inflation, not just for auto prices, but everything auto-related like auto insurance.

We’ve been there before. It’s not a pretty picture when it contributes to inflation. But I’ve been saying of late that I reserve the right to change my forecast as often as the president changes his mind.

And I think we’re kind of in that kind of bizarre environment. Now, it’s an interesting topic of debate here. Of course, we need to talk inflation expectations because the Fed has been getting a lot of flack for their recent statements about stagflation.

Without saying stagflation, but they’ve been mentioning slower economic growth, higher inflation, 4% inflation target given out. Would you agree 4%? Is that realistic? Is it too low? Is it too high? Well, I do have a contrarian bent in me and my initial reaction to these tariffs were they’ll certainly be inflationary. And we actually got inflation kind of dead right since 2022.

We said that’s the peak. And we thought it would get down to 2% to 3% last year, which it did. And we thought it would stay there.

But then with these tariffs, we changed our view that at least for the rest of the year, inflation on a year-over-year basis could pop up to 3% to 4%. And instead of getting 2.5% to 3% real GDP growth, we figured that they’d probably be down to 1.5%. And as you know, a lot of us are struggling with whether there should be a negative sign in front of that 1.5%. It could be a recession. It could be a growth recession with no growth.

So there’s a lot of talk about stagflation. And it seems like a very plausible scenario. I doubt it’s going to be anything like the 1970s stagflation, but we could have a few quarters where inflation is above 3%, close to 4% or in that range.

And where real GDP growth is very lackluster. But my contrary instincts are that maybe the inflation rate will surprise us and it won’t really pick up. And I’m not talking on behalf of the administration.

I try to be as non-political as possible. But I’m seeing that the oil prices have come down and energy prices are very important for the inflation outlook. And it’s hard to get a lot of inflation when energy prices are actually weak.

And there’s plenty of oil around. And with Trump’s tariffs, the outlook for global economic growth is weaker and that’s keeping oil prices down as it is keeping other commodity prices down. And then we may find that retailers and other importers just loaded up on whatever they could get before tariffs and that they get cleaned out by consumers buying in advance of price increases.

We could run out of autos pretty quickly. And then things could slow down and inflationary pressures could actually stay fairly low. So I’m thinking about that scenario.

I can argue it both ways, but I think right now the stock market is actually holding up surprisingly well in the face of the potential for stagflation because stagflation is not a pretty picture for earnings. You get, sure you get higher prices, but you also get margin squeezes and then you get less unit growth for sales. Yeah, very difficult to follow up what you just said because I could take it any direction right now.

Because you covered a lot of topics in your last answer here, Ed. But I want to stay on the Fed for just a second. It feels like they’re caught between a rock and a hard place.

Inflation expectations higher. What should they do with the Fed funds rate here, Ed? Yeah, I don’t think we have to be ambiguous and call it a hard place. You’re stuck between a rock and a rock.

They’ve really been kind of cornered in by Trump. And I suspect some of them in the middle of the night are kind of chuckling because I’m sure most of them are not big fans of Donald Trump. Certainly not the Fed chair after Trump attacked him during Trump 1.0 and now he’s attacking him again under Trump 2.0. And the Fed chair is just trying to do his job in a nonpartisan, nonpolitical way.

He really does want to do right by the economy. But they can just throw their hands up and said, it’s nice that the president wants us to lower interest rates, but he’s just imposed tariffs that make the outlook for inflation worse. And maybe instead of transitory, it’ll be more persistent.

So we can act. They lost some of their credibility. In 2022 and 2023, when they didn’t see that inflation coming and it took them a while to raise interest rates.

And they’re in exactly the same position now. If they ease in the face of a rebound in inflation, their credibility will truly be shot. And bond yields will actually go up, which is kind of perverse and ironic because Secretary of Treasury, Scott Besant, a few weeks ago said that he and the president agreed that what really matters is the 10-year bond yield.

Implicit in that statement was that they were not going to beat up on the Fed, that they really were going to have policies that would bring the bond yield down. Because it does matter more to the economy. It matters to what it costs the government to fund itself on a long-term basis.

It depends. Corporate finance depends on it. Mortgages depend on it.

And here, if they lower interest rates, as they did, by the way, last year, and they were shocked to see the bond yield go up, we weren’t shocked because we argued that it made no sense what the Fed did last year in lowering rates. Because at that time, the economy looked absolutely fine and there was no reason to lower interest rates. So I coined the phrase bond vigilantes back in the early 80s.

And the bond vigilantes sure gave thumbs down to what the Fed did last year in terms of lowering rates. I can only imagine what the Fed lowered interest rates again. The bond vigilantes would probably react very badly again and you’d probably get the bond yield going up instead of down, maybe even retesting 5%.

Yeah. Again, Ed, you threw a lot of topics into one answer again. I talk too much.

It’s fantastic though, but it makes my head spin because I really want to keep a good conversation going, which is fantastic. I love it. That’s why I talk so much, because my head is spinning from everything that’s going on.

I mentioned it earlier, but I started subscribing to a physical newspaper again, so I at least have a lot of topics in one place so I can have an overview. It doesn’t mean I believe in everything that’s being written down, but just to get my head into one place, right? But just real quick on the Fed, I don’t want to leave it just yet. You said the Fed put is on hold and I think Jerome Powell in Chicago the other day, I think two days ago or so, poured some cold water on that as well.

Does that mean that QE is being ruled out right now? Because it feels like there’s indirect QE happening by easing off the QT part. Yeah, well, as a matter of fact, what Powell said a few days ago was just reiterating what he said on April 4th. Back then he said that the Fed was in no rush to lower interest rates, especially because tariffs were coming and they weren’t certain about what the tariffs were even going to look like.

And then when they got a handle on what the tariffs looked like, the reciprocal tariffs came in on April 2nd and already on April 4th, Powell was shooting down the idea that they were going to accommodate those tariffs by lowering interest rates. And of course, Trump in the past couple of days has demanded that the Fed help them out and accommodate the tariffs with lower rates. And Powell basically said, forget about it.

So that’s kind of where we are with that. Now, clearly, we all know that the dual mandate of the Fed is to keep inflation down and keep unemployment down. And sometimes that’s easy to do.

It’s turned out to be remarkably easy over the past few years. Sometimes there’s a lot of inconsistencies in that. But the Fed also has another kind of stealth mandate, which is to avert a financial crisis.

Financial crises are kind of the worst outcome, if you will, of what can happen because they cause recessions, they cause credit crunches and recessions. So it’s conceivable that the tariffs and the turmoil created by the tariffs will cause a financial crisis. And we kind of saw that a week ago or so when the bond market kind of seemed to be blowing up with a bond yield going from 4% to 4.5%, basically on the announcement of Trump’s tariffs.

Yeah, I think you coined the phrase Trump turmoil 2.0. The mainstream media called it the his list trust moment. Are they spot on? Is it that severe yet? Because you hinted at the turmoil in the bond market here, 4% to 4.5%. Doesn’t sound too dramatic, but the timeframe I think is key here. I think we are on notice.

I think the administration is on notice. And as a matter of fact, when Trump pivoted on April 9th and postponed the tariffs, the reciprocal tariffs on everybody, every country except China when he did that, he said specifically that he did that to a large extent because of the turmoil in the bond market. So Trump tariff turmoil is certainly having an impact in the credit markets.

We’ve seen some of the credit quality spreads start to widen. We’ve just seen a lot of kind of cracks starting to form in the credit markets. And the thing about the credit markets is nobody really knows where the vulnerabilities are until the system is stressed.

I mean, in 2007, even the credit derivatives people didn’t know what kind of Frankenstein that they had created. And here the latest cracks were in some, what’s called basis trades where hedge funds and others were buying bonds on huge amount of leverage and offsetting that with some shorts. In interest rate swaps, it’s too complicated for me to explain it.

And that’s not because I don’t respect the audience or you, it’s just, I don’t understand it. But anyways, there’s a lot of things that none of us understand, even the people that are playing the game that suddenly blow up when their assumptions blow up. There are things that are just way over my head.

Swap lines is another topic here, for example. It’s just, I have to admit is way over my head. But we need to drill in a little bit into the barter market behavior and perhaps the anti-US sentiment that has been generated here over the last, let’s say, month in general.

A lot of capital seemingly fleeing the US. Do you see that capital A return or do you think that pace will actually pick up in the future? Well, at the end of the day, it’s all about money. Right now, that’s at the end of the day.

Meanwhile, during the day, we can have panic reactions. Trump certainly seems as though, acts as though he wants to end the old world order that occurred after World War II and the United States became basically this superpower, not just militarily, but also in the financial realm. The dollar was and continues to be a very important reserve currency.

But I think the price of gold says it all. People are kind of saying, well, if I don’t really trust the Americans to keep the old world order going on. And by the way, in line with turmoil, right now we have the new world disorder.

I mean, it doesn’t look very orderly. Not even clear where it’s going to land because there’s no master plan coming out of the administration of how they want to see this all play out. So there’s a lot of nervousness.

And all of a sudden, at least for a few days, a few weeks, people ran to the Euro as a safe haven for global investors. I don’t know what’s so exciting about Europe. Their economy is not doing so well, but I guess the Europeans are politically more predictable right now than the Trump administration.

But I think, again, gold says it all. A lot of people kind of concluding, based on history, when things kind of get this kind of weird, it’s time to own gold. And people say that gold is a hedge against inflation.

It’s a hedge against a lot of things, including geopolitical chaos, kind of what we have now. I mean, the situation between China and Taiwan looks like it could get worse as a result of what’s going on right now. I mean, Trump was asked before the elections during the campaign by The Wall Street Journal in an interview, what would you do about defending Taiwan? And he said, I wouldn’t do anything militarily.

I kind of acknowledged the pragmatic reality that Taiwan’s 100 miles away from China. It’s going to be hard to defend them against Taiwan, against an attack by China. But then he said, if they do that, I’m going to slap them with a huge tax, he called it.

He said, I’m going to put 150% to 200% tariff on China. Well, that’s what he just did. And for a guy who keeps counting up the cards and claiming he’s got more cards than the other people around the table.

It means he’s cheating, right? He just gave away the China card. That means if he has more cards than everybody else at the table, he’s cheating. Yeah, there’s something wrong, yeah.

It reminds me of a scene from the movie Maverick where people just keep pulling aces out of their sleeves. Right? But interesting segue to geopolitics to a degree as well, because I think that’s where the tariffs fit in as well. Would you agree or would you say that the tariff war is ultimately aimed at China and everything else is just noise? You said 10% doesn’t really make a difference.

145% on China does. Is China the real enemy here? I think China is the real enemy. And perhaps this is all about sitting together with every country that does business with China and forcing them to do less business with China.

I think one of the peeves and rightly so about dealing with China is they don’t play by the rules. And as a result of that, during Trump 1.0, we tried to come up with some agreement to reduce their flooding of our markets and global markets with Chinese goods. The Chinese went through Vietnam.

They went through Mexico. They went through Canada. And so Trump’s had a dance with them before.

And there was an agreement. And Trump feels, the administration feels, that they violated that as well. So they don’t trust China.

And then there’s the whole national security issues. I mean, I have to say, I kind of agree that the United States shouldn’t depend on China for critical goods, materials, commodities that are necessary for national security. So I kind of get the steel and aluminum and the copper.

I don’t get the auto tariffs. But I don’t get why. I hope that we anticipated that China would respond to these exorbitant tariffs by cutting off their exports of rare earth minerals.

I hope we’ve got a stockpile of this stuff and that we’ve got a plan B. Otherwise, it would be kind of suggest that this thing wasn’t very carefully or prudently thought out and orchestrated, which would be very disappointing and dangerous. It’s an interesting topic because I think both sides have a lot to lose in that tariff war, really. Like US is sort of financing China indirectly, but then China supplies the US with much needed goods, as you exactly pointed out.

I’m trying to figure out what the ace in China’s sleeve is here. And you touched on gold earlier. I keep coming back to the secret gold holdings and maybe a potential currency war.

I’m using hyperbole here maybe a little bit, but how do you see that playing out? Does that factor a role at all? Do you keep that in the back of your mind? Well, I’m totally humbled by all the events that are going on. I mean, it is head spinning. And I’ve got a long record of not changing my forecast too much and more often than not getting it right.

So maybe it’s just kind of, I’m lazy. I don’t like to do the homework of having to change my forecast on a regular basis. But now again, I have to, as a hedge, tell everybody I reserve the right to change my forecast as often as the president changes his mind.

It’s a tough environment to predict. I would predict it’s not going to last for very long because it’s just too crazy. There’s too much at stake here.

And so it’s conceivable that, and I hope that we’re going to see some discussions between China and the United States. But again, I think this administration is kind of carrying on what the first term of the administration was focusing on, which is to view China as an adversary and figure out to the extent to which our trade relationships are not consistent with that kind of view. So Trump has certainly unleashed a very unpredictable situation.

Not only is he unpredictable, but when you take an old world order and now suddenly have a new world disorder, it’s hard to see how everything plays out. And there’s a lot of ways it could go right. There’s a lot of ways it could go wrong.

China owns about $760 billion worth of US treasuries, of course. And if they really wanted to upset the market or upset the US in particular, they could just dump that. The question is who would have to buy it and what kind of effect would that have on the market in general? Well, I think if we did get a financial crisis out of all this, if we saw the bond yield zooming up above 5% and nobody had an explanation for it, the only explanation was that China was dumping its bonds.

By the way, they would be shooting themselves in both feet in that situation because maybe the initial sales would be done at the current yields. Let’s say they started selling 100 billion here, 100 billion there, and the upward pressure started to show up in the bond yield. Along the way, they’d be selling at 5%, 6%.

In other words, they’d be getting hosed, killed on the capital losses in their bond portfolio. But then again, in a situation where geopolitics is what rules and not geoeconomics, it’s a conceivable scenario. I think in that scenario, the Fed would do something.

I think there would be a Fed put. As I said, I think the Fed put is on standby. It’s not as though they couldn’t do something.

And I think the Treasury and the Fed could kind of continue what Janet Yellen did when she was Treasury Secretary back in 2023 when the bond yield went from 4% in August to 5% in October. The Treasury under Janet Yellen said what basically told the bond vigilantes, you know, if that’s the way you feel about my bonds and notes, I’ll just issue, you know, I won’t give you as many and I’ll raise more of the funding for the government in the Treasury bill market. So the Treasury could issue more short-term Treasury’s bills and fewer bonds.

And that would actually force the Fed to buy those Treasuries because the Fed is targeting, it’s stabilizing short-term rates and upward pressure on the Treasury bill market would force it to basically monetize the Treasury bills. And that’s one way they could calm things down. But we don’t wanna see that happen, but it’s a possibility.

Now, it’s an interesting topic of discussion because have we really identified the bond vigilantes? Like I keep coming back to movie and maybe cartoon quotes because I grew up with them, but Scooby-Doo, if we lift the mask at the end of the 20-minute cartoon here, who’s underneath the mask? Everybody who’s either in the bond market or thinking about going into the bond market, anybody who’s thinking about buying more bonds or thinking about selling them. So that’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of individuals.

It’s a lot of institutional investors. It’s a lot of central banks. So it’s not a small group.

It’s lots of people, lots of institutions. And the bond vigilantes from that perspective become more powerful than ever simply because there’s more debt than ever. Over $35 trillion in government debt, which means that even if the treasury said, okay, we’re going to issue even fewer bonds and notes and we’re going to do even more in bills, there would still be an enormous amount of bonds and notes out there that the bond vigilantes could say, that’s not good enough.

We really think that this is going to be too inflationary and we’re selling our bonds. So the bond vigilantes, as I said, have really never been more powerful. And they suddenly became a force in 2023 when the bond yield in a heartbeat went from 4% to 5%.

So we got a hint of what they might do a couple of weeks ago when Trump’s liberation day created a turmoil, not only in the realm of tariffs, but also in the credit markets. Do you see any worry that the U.S. will be able or won’t be able to refinance this year? About $7 trillion, if the number is correct, will need to be refinanced? No, no, no. I mean, the only question is what yield? I mean, there’s always going to be, you know, that was a concern back in 2023 when the bond yield went from 4% to 5%.

Bill Ackman of Pershing announced a brilliant trade. I think he basically shorted the bonds close to 4% and then announced that 5% that he had made enough money and wasn’t going to play the game. It was a brilliant trade.

And we saw that the treasury certainly had an impact on bringing the bond yield down by issuing more treasury bills. But I think we also saw that there is a yield at which there’ll be buyers. The reason the bond yield went from 4% to 5% in 2023 is because we had some really sloppy auctions.

So I think the auctions will tell the story. And if the auctions are sloppy, it doesn’t look like we got enough. I mean, it doesn’t look like there’s enough people that want to buy the bonds.

The yield will go up and people will want it. There’ll be some people out there who say, you know what? If the bond yields go up any higher, we’re going to have a recession. Inflation is going to come down.

It’s going to get the message to our politicians that we’ve run out of room to just keep willy-nilly borrowing like this. You know, Ray Dalio’s been going around for a couple of years predicting a debt crisis where the government, implying that the US government might not be able to refinance his debt. I mean, that’s just nonsense.

It’s going to be able to… The question is, will it have to refinance a debt at an interest rate that clobbers the rest of us and puts us into a recession with unemployment and lots of people upset? And then will we rise and demand that our politicians do something about this damn deficit? – No, you’re right. The question is, and maybe that leads also to the pressure on Powell to lower interest rates because the US does not want to refinance at 5%. It wants to refinance at 2%, 3%, or 3.5%. – Yeah, but Powell’s got a perfectly good cover here.

It’s like, not my department. Go to the Treasury. You know, they’re the one.

It’s not my job to finance the deficit, the fiscal excesses. And he said several times that we need to… that we’re an unsustainable fiscal path. So he doesn’t want to make it sustainable with monetary policy.

He wants to see the politicians reduce the growth rate and outlays and increase the growth rate and receipts. I mean, you know, narrowing the deficit is really easy. All we got to do is cut back on outlays and increase receipts.

The political problem is it’s not easy. – No, it’s true. Try cutting anything and you hear everybody kicking and screaming, right? I have a couple more topics I want to cover with you, Ed, here.

And one of them is the role of the US dollar itself. And how do you see the US dollar currently and how do you see it moving forward in its, you know, globally from a global perspective as well? Sorry. – The US is still the world’s largest economy, certainly the largest consumer economy.

Nobody does consumption better than Americans. If there was an Olympics in consumption, I think we’d win gold, bronze and silver. I’m not bragging here.

I’m just being descriptive of American consumers. And the Chinese don’t even come close. And that’s been one of the problems.

It’s one of the reasons we have a trade deficit. Americans spend a lot of money and they don’t care where the product is made. They don’t turn it upside down and see if it’s made in China and say, no, I’m not going to buy that.

They buy. And meanwhile, the Chinese, thanks to horrible policies by the Chinese Communist Party, particularly the one-child policy, they have a geriatric population and older people just don’t spend as much as younger aspirational people. And we do have immigration, both legal and illegal, now maybe less illegal.

But we have that kind of open door policy. The Chinese don’t have that policy. So the dollar naturally is a key international reserve currency because everybody wants to do business with the United States.

We’ll soon find out how much they do. They want to do business with the United States. I think that’s the card that Trump is playing is that we are the world’s biggest consumers.

And if you want access to our market, then you got to play by our rules, or at least play by fairer trade rules. So that’s what’s going on here. Now I’m seeing a lot of chatter about, oh, you know, we’ve seen previous empires go into decline.

And when they go into decline, their currency no longer is desired. And it depreciates the values and something else rises to the fore. And so there’s a lot of predictions right now that we’re in that kind of environment where the United States is in decline.

If it wasn’t serious, it’d be hilarious. I mean, the front cover of The Economist in October had a cover story that just talked about basically American exceptionalism and how amazing the US economy was. And the dollar was like a rocket ship going straight up.

And now I think it’s this week that they’ve got a very bearish scenario, very bearish cover of the United States. And if you look at the past three, we’ve had three Economist covers in a row that basically say, you know, America’s, you know, the end of the Roman Empire situation. So from a contrarian perspective, I’m saying not so fast.

Maybe that’s not the way it’s going to play out. It could play out in any happier way. America’s still, you know, a superpower militarily, superpower economically, a superpower as a consumer market.

So I think some of this dollar decline is, it could go further to the downside if other countries decide they want to own more gold. But at the end of the day, it really depends on what happens to the American economy. And I’m not giving up on the US economy.

And again, I don’t say this from a political standpoint. As a matter of fact, over the years, I’ve maintained my credibility by saying, you know, what I’ve observed mostly over the years is that it’s amazing how well the US economy and our stock market do despite Washington. I don’t care who’s in the White House, one way or the other, the rest of us working stiffs make this thing work.

And we just have to work around what the cockamamie policies that continuously come out of Washington. And we do that. America still is a very entrepreneurial economy.

We have an exceptional capital market, lots of money available for a venture, for innovation. We have an exceptional banking system. I think it really improved dramatically after the great financial crisis.

We have lots of farmland. We have lots of minerals. We have lots of oil, lots of gas.

There’s a lot that’s exceptional about the United States. As a matter of fact, until Trump spoiled my forecast, I was saying that this decade could be the roaring 2020s. And I got half the decade right now, hoping that this is just an interruption and things will look better again within the next six to 12 months.

But I’m trying to stay optimistic, but I have to also stay realistic at the same time. So I wouldn’t give up on the dollar. On the other hand, I’m telling people, you may want to have some gold in your portfolio as an offset to all the craziness.

Gold is a very good hedge against chaos. And gold really started to this latest… And it tends to have long bull markets. We’ve only had two really since Nixon went off the gold standard and closed the gold window in August of 1971.

But the bull markets last a while and the bear markets last a while too. I think we’re in a bull market now. And it really got started when Russia invaded Ukraine and the United States froze the assets of the Russians and central banks of countries that don’t like us, don’t agree with us, are threatened by us, like China, like Russia, like Venezuela, like Iran, and now maybe some others have been loading up on gold.

Now you took my very last question away here with gold. So I’m going to drill a little deeper on that topic. I had one beforehand, but… We think alike.

No, but before I get to gold, really quick, somebody actually sent me the two economists title covers just this morning. Like one was the US dollar, royal of dollars, like a rocket. And the other one was Edward Munch, the scream, how a dollar crisis would unfold.

So it’s kind of funny that you mentioned that. That’s why I needed to bring that up. The country indicators are like screaming that the stock market has to be bought here and the dollar should be bought here.

But as I said, if you do that, you also want to have some significant amount of gold, just in case you’re wrong about that. Yeah. No, let’s stay on gold.

Do you have any price targets? Like the move has been really violent, for lack of better term. Like, is there anything in… Do you have a target in mind? Is it overbought? Is it overhyped perhaps even? You definitely do not want to take my advice on gold because I’ve never been a gold bug. It’s never been in my toolkit.

It’s never been something that I’ve presented targets on. I’m kind of an old-fashioned strategist. I’ll tell you what I think the S&P 500 is going to do.

I think I’ll tell you what the bond deal is going to do. And I’ve had some good successes at that. By the way, I’m really, really good at calling bottoms on the S&P 500.

And I’ve been asked occasionally, why do bottoms better than tops? And I’ve got a relative who I don’t speak to very often. I guess we don’t like each other that much. But every now and then, he calls me up and he says, Eddie, I know we haven’t talked in a while, but should I get out of the market here? And that’s always at the bottom of bear markets.

And I’m waiting for his call. So maybe we aren’t quite there. Again, maybe we have to double test the April 8th low.

And maybe he’ll call me. I hope he calls me. But with regards to gold, yes, I’ve gone where Eddie Ardeni has never gone before, to quote Star Trek.

And so I started putting some charts together. We have charts that are open to the public on ardeni.com. And there’s a book of just charts on gold. And I look at them and I use them as material to write.

And I’m also an amateur technician. So again, you don’t really wanna listen to me on any of this. So I combined my amateur technical approach with my amazing insight, fundamentally, that China and other bad actors relative to Americans’ interests are buying gold.

And that’s my fundamentals. And so, yeah, it looks to me like it could get to 4,000. When it broke above 2,000 last year, we said, you know, technically, it looks like an important breakout.

And then we kind of reversed engineer and said, okay, that probably has to do with central banks buying more gold. And again, this was not an amazing insight on my part. Everybody was recognizing that.

And based on just a channel that the gold’s been traveling on, I figured we could get to 3,000. And here we are above that. And then I figure 4,000 by the end of the year and 5,000 by the end of next year.

I call these targets. They’re not forecasts. They’re not, they don’t come with a money back guarantee.

This is just kind of based on putting together the puzzle pieces together. And, you know, we’re already at 3,300 and the price of gold has just kind of gone up. Usually when something goes up like that, again, my amateur technical experience suggests that it’s gonna go down.

So there could be certainly some correction. And I saw a chart that says seasonally, gold tends to be weak during the spring and summer starts picking up again. But, you know, all I think I know on a fundamental basis is the world is pretty chaotic.

I think there was a Broadway show once called, it’s called Stop the World I Want to Get Off. And every now and then, maybe on a daily basis, I kind of reading the headlines because, you know, in our business, we have to stay informed. You know, you kind of say, this can’t end well.

And by the way, a lot of my career has been arguing against that, that it can’t end well, that the world’s not gonna come to an end. And some of my best calls have been that the pessimists are wrong. And I’m still betting that the pessimists will be wrong.

Ed, what a wonderful conversation. I really, really enjoy speaking with you. It was really insightful, a lot of information packed in a very short timeframe here.

Where can we send our audience to follow you? You mentioned your domain earlier, but any other good touch points? Yeah, well, for many years, I’ve been on Wall Street. When I went off Wall Street in 2007, we just focused on institutional research. And so to see that, you can go to yardeni.com and there’s a trial there.

You can also get a link to our research for individual investors, which is more affordable for individuals. And that would be yardeniquicktakes.com. It’s a daily that it tries to be more actionable because it is daily and it tries to focus on the relationships of the economic variables, the political variables, the Fed variables to the markets. Ed, what a wonderful conversation.

Really appreciate you coming on. Live long and prosper, right? Really appreciate your time. And we’ll have to catch up soon.

Once maybe gold reaches one of your targets. I’m happy with 4,000. Either way, you could also ask me what went wrong.

Exactly. Thank you so much for your time. Everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in here to Soar Financially.

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