Transcript
A (0:00)
On this episode of Full Signal, I sit down with Bob Elliott. He is the CIO and co founder of Unlimited Funds and he used to work directly with Ray Dalio at Bridgewater. We get into his macro outlook, the Iran conflict, what the oil shock could do to asset prices, how he's thinking about the rest of the year for investors and much more. This is a fantastic conversation. It is full of insight.
B (0:21)
I think you're going to love it. Bob, it's great to see you.
A (0:27)
I would love to just get right
B (0:28)
into your big picture overview of markets. My understanding is that you're a bit more cautious than maybe some of our other colleagues in the industry right now.
C (0:37)
Yeah, well, I think when we were coming into this year, the beginning of this year, we were, we had sort of transitioned from what I called the income driven expansion, which is where, you know, households were making good income and they were spending it and that was powering the economy, to what I now what I called the savings driven economy, where, you know, the slowing of income growth for households had meant that they had to start to draw down their savings in order to maintain their spending. And in addition, the government, you know, the fiscal deficit was expanding and businesses were starting to borrow in order to invest. And that sort of put the economy a bit on the knife's edge. You know, if nothing, if there was no other issues, we probably would have had a fine year here in 26. But unfortunately, in the last couple of weeks, an issue has arisen. We're experiencing an oil shock and oil shocks, they don't come around very often and a lot of folks can easily sort of forget the dynamics. But in some ways it's very simple, which is when oil prices rise a lot, that means input costs rise, which really create a tough scenario because both inflation rises, which reduces the ability for a central bank to ease monetary policy, but also real spending falls because people are spending more on gas and less on other essentials in their book. And that's a big drag on the economy. And so right now, given oil prices where the curve is right now we're looking at something like a one to one and a half percent hit to real spending in the US Economy for consumers. And that would transition the US Economy from on a knife's edge, still barely getting to that 2% growth that we're all used to, to something that's going to look a lot closer to through the rest of the year.
B (2:22)
Is all of this contingent on the Iran conflict being a prolonged conflict? Or you see this, let's say an Oil shock and inflation fears, can those headwinds persist even if it's very short lived conflict?
