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- [00:00]
A
Sam foreign. Welcome to Real Vision. Welcome to Macro Mondays. My name is Miguel and this week, to be honest, I'm not sending live from Copenhagen. I'm sending live from Gran Canaria and the Canary Islands of Spain. So if we have any hiccups in the connection, that's that's probably to blame. I don't know whether the European Union has has been funding all the enough bandwidth for for our show here but but let's see how it goes. Anyway. I'm joined as usual by Andreas Dino. Welcome to the show, Andreas.
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B
Thanks Mik do we have Elon and Starlink involved in getting you online from.
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A
This is actually just the hotel life, so so far it's working quite well. It's looking even better than our office, to be honest. Andre so it's it's decent so far. Let's see how it goes. We we have so much to talk about address. It's it's been an incredible day simply let alone week to to to talk about. So we'll we'll we'll try and digest as much as as we can in this Macro Wrap, our weekly wrap up of of Macro News the Macro Outlook. We we present you with some insights into the the the full spectrum of analysis that we publish at Real Vision. So you'll have to go to Real Vision, either the alpha or pro tier for for increased access to all that and we'll make some reference to to that along the way. But this is our free show and we try to keep it that way. I'm not sure we'll have time for too many listener questions, but we'll try and pick out one or two of those. So so please do post them. Otherwise we are gathering all these for some of our other shows as well all the list of questions to to get them in there. So address let's get right into it. Instead of our usual disclaimer, I wanted to jump right into to last night's bombshell of a video which came on top of a bomb. The bombshell news that the Federal Reserve has been subpoenaed essentially grand jury has been served grand jury subpoenas and Jay Powell issued this video statement right afterwards. Let's just have a play a little bit here.
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C
The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public rather than following the preferences of the President. This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions or whether instead monetary policy will be Directed by political pressure or intimidation. I have served at the Federal Reserve under four administrations, Republicans and Democrats alike. In every case, I have carried out my duties without political fear or favor, focused solely on our mandate of price stability and maximum employment. Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do with integrity and a commitment to serving the American people. Thank you.
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A
Jay Powell really turning this up, creating an open state of war, you could almost say between the Trump administration and Jay Powell. And the market is reacting right now. What's your first take issue we just talked about before going on air that your phone was bombarded with this earlier today. What do you make of all this, Andreas?
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B
Yeah, so I mean this obviously happened late Sunday local time, meaning that my phone was bombarded with messages at around 2:00am Danish time. And I quickly figured out that this was something more impactful than just every other update from the Federal Reserve. Know, first of all, putting pressure on the Fed is not exactly new from the administration. Right. But using the Department of Justice is in my opinion a genuine newcomer also in a historical context. You know, I've used a lot of bandwidth today trying to figure out whether it's been seen before anywhere on earth. I'm not actually sure, you know, I wanted to triple check that but. But at least it's a newcomer during my professional era of covering central banks. And what makes it even crazier is that it is also a genuine newcomer that the Federal Reserve openly and publicly responds to this subpoena by the Department of Justice saying that it's basically a cover up, which makes it even crazier.
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A
Right.
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B
He basically tells us that this is not about the restoration case or whatever you want to call it, the fed buildings in D.C. and all of that. It is about our policy. Right. It's not about that case making it an open warfare. I have to agree. And to be honest Michael, I actually think the market reaction is quite small.
- [05:29]
A
I was feeling worse, to be honest.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And you know, obviously we have a steeper yield curve. The, you know, it's not like we're repricing in tens of basis points. We're talking three, four basis points out the curve. We're talking about an outlook where the Fed is basically priced not to move until Powell is out. At least he's out as a chairman come may.
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A
Right.
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B
Whether he'll stay on as a member of, of the committee after that is, you know, is anybody's guess right now. I have my doubts at least after having watched this and you know, the most clear reaction, we obviously have that in Gold and, and obviously also Silver. And I guess that was why my phone was smoking hot this, this early a.m. because I, you know, I've had my, my fights with the silver community over the past couple of weeks and obviously they won this one. You know, no one kind of expected this, but, but Silver is doing great today. Having said that, Michael, this, this is to some extent of return to what we saw basically during April where we had a lot of international discussions ongoing on whether can we trust the Fed, can we trust the dollar system and all of that. And I think we'll return to that discussion basically from now.
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A
Yeah, essentially my first thought here, thinking politically was the gut reaction is, oh, this is something you see in a third world country and it is this sort of open warfare and the political influence over the central bank. However, my second thought was if this had been a third world country, the central bank director, if this has been a true dictatorship, the central bank director wouldn't have made this move, such a video and posted it. I mean, you would have either been exiled or shot or, you know, so, so there some elements of checks and balances still remain. It's clear that the Trump administration is taking the democratic system to the extremes of what you can do within the system, putting the absolute extreme amounts of pressure on the Fed. But, but we are somehow still within sort of a democratic system. The thing is, Andreas, this leaves complete distrust, open state of war between the Fed and the administration. I even saw Senator Thom Tillis, Republican Senator who's on the, what's it called, the.
- [07:56]
B
Banking Committee or whatever.
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A
Banking Committee. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. He has to, to confirm any nominee for the, for the Fed, including the upcoming Fed chair that he won't do so essentially nullifying the Republican majority in that committee. Which leaves an interesting political backdrop because it seems like the Republican party is not 100% behind Donald Trump on this and you could have a prolonged sort of power vacuum around the Fed and that's exactly what Donald Trump does not want to. So this leads my question when earth. Can't Trump just wait five, six months until a pair pounds out anyway?
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B
Yeah, to be honest, I don't really get that either because you're right that a power vacuum would lead to a lame doc committee and such a committee is probably not willing to take a whole lot of directional decisions. Right. They'll probably just stand pattern and wait and see. Right. I think this is once again a Trump classic where he wants to Put the, as you put it, the extreme amount of pressure on the committee and given the pricing of the Fed, we have I think live roughly 9 basis points priced, maybe 10 basis points priced for the next three meetings. Up until the end of Powell's chairmanship, he's not really got a lot to lose. Can he force this committee into cutting a few times until May? The vanilla take right now is that it will lead to fit rather in the opposite direction. I don't necessarily agree, especially not since we'll get benign inflation data and weak jobs data over the course of the next couple of months. You know, our now casting is as crystal clear as it can get on inflation and jobs right now. Speaking live here in January, we'll get a benign inflation report tomorrow. I'm really comfortable with that forecast compared to the economic consensus from central bank, sorry the big commercial banks. And given the very last sentence of his statement, Powell, he will treat this inflation report and the next jobs report as any other inflation report as any other jobs report. That's basically what he's telling us. And to be honest, having met quite a few of these members, I think they will do that. So in any case, I actually think it's much less big of a deal until Powell is replaced and then we'll obviously have to find out whether Trump can find a candidate that is willing to, you know, obey to these new guiding principles or whatever you want to call them.
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A
So I want to ask you about the, the investment play here or the, the positioning play. But before that I just want to throw the app of the week and you, you, you delivered that Andreas with a, a little bit of a contest here. Let's have it on the screen here. The first user out there to give you the full Tim Walls drive by treatment and shop, recharge from a passing car, gets a free one year subscription and that, that's, that's open and we're going to Miami. So it doesn't have to be in our home city. Plenty of, plenty of opportunities to go over there. It has to be drive by. It has to be in a car. Yes.
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B
And you need to document it.
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Yes, absolutely.
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B
We want the video.
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A
But and this is obviously knowing you Andres, this is probably directed at some of all this, the silver hacks out there. So address we, we're obviously seeing a bit of a movement into gold, silver, perhaps even bitcoin out of this. What's the play here? Is this back into silver? Do you believe more gold become. What do you think here?
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B
Let me put it like this. This is not a good story for the US Dollar and we've seen that in various expressions. You can obviously play it directly via the foreign exchange market. I think gold is a no brainer since the Global south is already on a trend basis buying a lot of gold. And this move from Jay Powell will likely also lead to some of the G10 central banks concluding the same thing, that maybe we should diversify the reserve portfolio a little bit into gold. And when these big institutions move, they also move the market in relation to silver. It's not a monetary metal at the moment. Very few if any central banks hold silver. They used to going many, many, many decades back. So I don't think silver is as crystal clear a case as gold is. We thankfully have a decent portion of metals exposure both via gold and copper in our portfolio. Also have other indirect debasement bets on the dollar. And then as you point to Miguel, I think the big surprise here would.
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A
Be.
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A move in bitcoin and move in crypto because that space has kind of been searching for a trigger to get renewed momentum. Maybe this could be it. I certainly wouldn't rule that out. We also have a decent exposure ourselves to that topic. I think it would be a much, you know, it holds a much larger potential of really rallying should it get some momentum behind it. Since silver is very subscribed to already. Gold is certainly also subscribed to as an investment play on this, while bitcoin certainly less so if you look at it live.
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A
I think this also plays into one of our main thematics for this year that everything Trump does right now is about the midterms. He himself stated that if he loses the midterms he'll get indicted essentially he'll go to jail potentially. So this is really do or die for both for him and the Republican Party obviously. So I think this fits into that. Trump can't just wait until May because if you get a new central bank or a new chair in May, that person won't really have time to do all that much before the, before the midterms to drive markets all that much. So he's really, really, really in a hurry. And I think we're seeing that on a number of front address. We're not going to talk too much about about Greenland today. We've covered that in past shows and in post and everywhere. But I saw this bit of news that I just wanted your reaction to because you see this from a, from a Republican business friendly administration. Really puzzled me, Andreas, that Donald Trump wants to institute a one year cap on credit card, interest rates of 10%, essentially price controls on credit cards. This looks to me like more of an AOC or Bernie is Bernie Sanders sort of proposal, comes on top of terrorism, number of other things. So what's your take on the economic policy of the Trump and the policy mix of the Trump administration right now? And how much can they drive before the midterms, you think?
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B
Yeah. And I mean, this comes on top of Trump instructing Fannie and Freddie to buy mortgage bonds last week as well. So essentially some sort of indirect QE from other official institutions.
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A
Right.
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B
By the way, Michael, I don't know whether you've seen it, but Bernie Sanders tweeted after this that he looks very much forward to cooperating with the Trump administration on getting this done because obviously it needs to pass Congress first. Again, the vanilla takeaway is that at least if you ask an economist, the issue with price control is that it limits supply. And I think there is some merit to that view. That is the textbook understanding of, you know, arbitrarily contrary price pressures. If you tell, you know, a berry farm that they cannot price strawberries at a certain price point, they'll also end up producing fewer strawberries. And it's kind of the same logic that you'll apply here from a credit perspective. You'll end up supplying credit cards to fewer customers due to the price cap. Right. If you're a subprime credit. Why would you get a credit card if you can only charge 10%?
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Right.
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The point is that. Sorry. The flip side is that this kind of leans on an assumption that the current price, the current interest rate is a fully flexible market interest rate of a credit card. And I don't think it is. I think it's very far from being that. And we've actually seen a rapid increase in the average interest rate on credit cards while interest rates have been cut by the central bank. So they're increasing their credit margins on average while spreads in all other shapes have narrowed. To me, that's a regulatory issue rather than a market price issue. I'm not sure you can solve it like this, but there's certainly something to this. And what I'll say is that my. And it's very hard to prove, but my gut feeling is that we're very far from the fair price in the current credit card space. It's probably not 10%, and you cannot implement it like this. But you'll have to look at the regulatory backdrop, and maybe that's something that will ultimately be part of this process because this will never be implemented. You have my words for that.
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A
Fair point addressed. And there is some impetus to Donald Trump signaling this to the credit card companies as well, that that could go some way. But, but, but that's not, not really a persistent effect most likely. So Andre, it seems to me that everything is pointing in the direction of full steam ahead on the economy and the Trump administration throwing everything they have essentially or trying to at least at, at generating returns in the stock market, generating growth, generating job creation perhaps. Also you posted last week about an emerging rebalancing an emerging rotation in the stock market that you're seeing. And I know that this chart may be hard to view on X or YouTube, you can get the full chart on real vision. But could you just put some word into what you're seeing there and how this fits into the midterm narrative?
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B
Yeah. So at least what we saw up until Powell released this video early this morning, our time in Europe was, you know, a classic rotational style mix. Back during last week we had small caps outperforming large caps. That's typically what you see when the economic cycle is, is improving. You had early signs of, of the energy space starting to recover from abysmal levels basically. And you also had some signs of banks doing well relative to technology and stuff like that. You know, the stuff you see when there's a very self fulfilling improving impulse in the economy. And I still think that it is a very likely theme for this year, especially given the very, I'd say lukewarm expectations for the US economy currently penciled in to various parts of the equity market. It's not like small caps have priced in a great recovery of the US Economy into the midterms. They're up, but more or less nothing since exactly a year ago. And the major moves that we've seen in US equities have been multiple expansions from you know, the layer just below max 7s in technology space over the past year or so. So I think there is clearly a scope for sort of a broader repricing of the outlook into the latter part of this year, especially given that the administration seems willing to, you know. Yeah. Use every single instrument in the armory to, to, to get us there in one piece or maybe even in a smoking hot piece, if you know what I mean.
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A
Okay, before I get to to a list of question or two, we have a few coming in on the situation in Iran that I just wanted to cover. I just wanted you to, to put a few words on the development in arm in our model portfolio that we run on real vision. I'm just going to show the, the allocation based on our thematics. We talked about them in some, some shows earlier. We're doing very, very well. We're. I didn't check today, but I think we're up close to 10%.
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B
Yes.
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Already. So, so, so still a very, very good prediction. If you annualize that, as I mentioned last week. I know we're not doing that, but can you just put some word into what, what's the thinking about what's the thinking behind this, this allocation? What, what's been working well so far?
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B
Yeah. So as you can see, we do have an allocation to themes that will typically tend to do well if the dollar weakens. Right. Both in the crypto utility space. The bucket called decoupling is a bucket that is designed to do well. If China and the US they sort of diverge on various political topics, I think that is amplified by what we saw from Powell as well, both due to the relationship to metals, but also obviously due to the impact it has on international flows into bond markets and so on and so forth. We've also seen how topics that are clearly linked to the budget have done very well. Not least the drones topic. Trump, I think during a time span of three or four hours last week said that military companies cannot pay out dividends. But I'm going to put another 500 billion into the budget of buying stuff from them anyway. So where are they going? Where are those dollars going by the.
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A
End of the day?
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Well, they can just keep them on their balance sheet. Right. But it's still positive for investors. Yeah, but it's essentially if you're an emerging technology company within the drone space, not yet capable of paying out dividends. Right, so exactly.
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That's essentially my only point from that. This is very innovation friendly. Should at least be the point about adding another 50% on top of the military budget. It's not going to happen. That's the prerogative of Congress to do that. And I don't think they can find that amount of money. But the intention is there. And the procurement part is actually something that the administration can do a little bit more about. So I think that is interesting. Of course, some of the big companies might choose to, okay, we'll just postpone or delay dividends for a few years. But it's still a very interesting development here. Andreas.
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B
Final thing I'd say, Mikal, on this allocation is that I think we got three major electricity deals announced just last week. I cannot Recall, I've been investing in themes related to AI for quite a while, but also themes related to the grid, etc. I cannot recall such an eventful first week of the year ever. And I think it goes to show that there's a lot of activity ongoing and probably this year will be about sort of the crossroads between the AI demand and almost the infinite AI demand, paired with the impossible schism of actually being able to deliver when there is an infinite demand. Right. If you know what I mean. The real economy will struggle to keep pace with all of that. Think grid investments, think data center investments, so on and so forth. So it will still be a very interesting year coming up. And what I'd like to conclude with just around sort of wrap up this discussion on Powell's video, Trump's pressure on the Fed and investments into the US. If you had told me 12 months ago, Michael, that we posted a record inflow into US assets from foreigners in 2025, I would probably have said, ah, that's a, that's, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But here we are, despite, you know, picking battles right, left and center with allies, foes, internal allies, internal foes, etc. Over the course of 12 months, we've seen record inflows to the US and as long as inflation doesn't spike, no one cares about Fed independence. Let me put it like that.
- [25:54]
A
As long as inflation does and no one cares about the debt, we'll take care of that down the road. Perhaps the AI productivity spike. Productivity growth is close to 5% now. We'll solve that. Who knows? I think it was a great Danish economist, Costin Jakobsen, formerly of Saxo bank, who coined the term, or use the term state capitalism for what we're seeing right now. And I think that's very fitting. A lot of history related to that term, but it is essentially what we're seeing. Even though you may say that the US is acting like a Third world country, they're still investing so much money into strategic sectors that it's so hard not to be there from an investment perspective. And then we'll have to deal with the ethics, the politics, the politics and the debt at a later date. Essentially, you have to get on this train. That's the way I'm feeling about this. Yeah. And we are in this portfolio. Yeah.
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B
And just to disclaim, I'm obviously biased when I say this, but the only region that is not running state capitalism is probably Northern Europe by now. And I'd still argue that we do.
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A
To some extent, by the way, Germany is beginning to.
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B
Exactly. And on top of that, I mean, no real innovation is going on there. So you cannot just, I mean, is it even feasible to consider, you know, all funds running in that direction?
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Not at all.
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Right. So you just have to accept the playing field now that state capitalism, capitalism is a thing in the US It's a thing in Brazil, it's a thing in China. It's a part of the chessboard that you have to navigate.
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A
Exactly. Okay.
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B
Okay.
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A
Just a very, very quick note on Iran. I received a couple of questions on what's the outlook there, Andreas? I'm going to be covering that in all the drill article tomorrow or most likely on Wednesday actually. So we're obviously monitoring this. The situation is almost reaching a tragic level. I'm not convinced that we are in the middle of a revolution. We are in sort of a pre revolutionary state. But the Iranian government is sadly doing everything right. First of all, they started shooting at the demonstrators. That's what you need to do when you're this desperate. The big gamble is that the soldiers actually carry out the orders. So far, seems like they are sadly, tragically carrying out those orders. That means that as long as you can get soldiers to fire their guns, you stay in power. The other thing they need to do is to try and get Trump to walk into a trap of issuing military threats towards Iran. He's done that. That means they can say, oh, but all these demonstrations, that's just CIA, that's just US Supported rebels. And I kind of fear that the US is walking into this trap set up by the Islamic Republic. I do hope we see a regime change down there. I do hope such a regime change does not devolve into civil war. I'll talk more on that in the drill on Wednesday. As for an investment perspective, my take on this is very similar to Venezuela a few months ago. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if the US Is going to intervene or if the regime is going to fall. But we are moving towards a reopening of the Iranian economy one way or the other at some point. So if you have the patience for it, there are a couple of very, very good thematics to run there. We have some of them covered already in our portfolio. And I'll expand on this Wednesday. Which companies, which, which sectors can come in and work with the reopened Iran, what needs to be rebuilt. A couple of interesting thematics there that we'll expand on and obviously cover over the coming days and weeks and press.
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B
I have a final feedback question from someone in the audience stating the question here, actually, to you, Miguel. Miguel, I have an important question. Can you please ask Andreas whether he's used that running machine yet? And I'm pointing to it now. And. And the honest answer is no. It's only there for the show, so. You know, I haven't read any of those books either, so. Yeah, I. I just asked someone smart to. To set up this as a, you know, as the right background.
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A
Have you even been sitting in that lounge chair?
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B
I'm not. I'm not even using glasses, you know, so it's just to look smart. So everything is here to look smart.
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A
It works very well. My daughter slept in that very office for New Year's. Andreas, we can. That wasn't a big success either, but that's probably more to her sleeping patterns and everything else. Okay. Andreas. So much more. We could have come around. We'll be covering that on Real Vision and the show next week. Until then, thank you very much. Thanks very much to you for joining. Thanks to everyone for watching. We'll be back next week. Sam.