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.

The condition of consumer and household financial conditions and the rapid rise of consumer borrowing delinquencies.

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

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

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.”

The probability of recession in 2024.

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.

Charles Payne discusses the state of the IPO pipeline heading into 2024 and how that pipeline has punished investors for 15, 20 years. He also shares his Word of the Year for stock investors: nimble.

Jim Bianco says the art of stock picking is very much alive, breaks down “a multi-year bear market in bonds,” talks the resilience of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, and discusses China’s slow recovery and its impact on commodities.

Jeffrey Gundlach looks at valuations and price-to-earnings since the November start of the Everything Rally then talks about how a secular shift from a long period of declining interest rates to a period of rising interest rates will impact participants’ and prognosticators’ understanding of the markets. He also discusses the potential economic backdrop that would have him looking at EM and lower tiers of credit, and he shares why he has put money in India and doesn’t even look at it. He closes with his thoughts on mortgage spreads, high yield bond defaults and TIPS.

David Rosenberg talks about how the CPI is a flawed statistic, the S&P 500’s flat two-year performance with no improvement in valuations, how there’s so much psychology involved in the stock market, the equity risk premium, and how the soft landing is real and how historically it has served as a precursor to contraction. He also shares his thoughts on positioning and the outlook for several countries, including Japan and Canada.

The markets section concludes with Danielle DiMartino Booth discussing private markets juxtaposed against public markets and the impact of public pension funds flowing into private equity a few years ago, and speculating on who will be living in Illinois if Indiana gets rid of its state income tax.

Bank Term Funding Program

What Upsets the Applecart?

Bank Excess Reserves

Corporate Debt

2023 could offer cyclical downturn in a landscape of secular change as the world appears on the threshold of global recession. Moreover, trends that for decades have driven economies, markets, monetary policy and governance might be staging reversals. In this first of three segments.DoubleLine CEO Jeffrey Gundlach and moderator DoubleLine Deputy Chief Investment Officer Jeffrey Sherman on Jan. 4, 2023, discuss the Macroeconomic State of Play with their guests James Bianco, President and Macro Strategist at Bianco Research; Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO of Quill Intelligence; author and Fox Business anchor Charles Payne; and David Rosenberg, President of economic consulting firm Rosenberg Research & Associates.

Mr. Sherman.begins the segment asking what is “the path setting forward” for inflation in 2023 and “how that dictates into the macroeconomy.” Among the answers, Ms. DiMartino Booth notes recent Federal Reserve paper would indicate monetary tightening filtering into the economy in 12 months, thus reaching the economy in March. She already sees “disinflationary pressures multiplying left and right.” Citing declines in ISM prices paid and quits in transportation and warehousing jobs, Mr. Payne expects () people’s predominant preoccupation will shift to recession “quicker than anyone’s anticipating,” a downturn which he expects to be “huge.” Mr. Gundlach () expects inflation to fall to “about 4% for the May (CPI) report.” He takes issues with “completely implausible” consensus forecasts of the CPI falling rapidly from 9.1% to make a dead stop at 2.5% for three years. In the event of a rapid decline to 2.5%, Mr. Gundlach thinks the CPI will continue to fall and might make a negative year-over-year print sometime during 2023.

Much of the discussion focuses on monetary policy at the Fed, which is being driven by more than inflation, the panelists observe, the killing of the “Fed put.” The unspoken aim of the Fed? Mr. Rosenberg.thinks “they want to do a reset of valuations in the markets, and, I mean, principally the stock market. Powell can’t come out and say, I want to destroy your 401K.” Powell, Mr. Bianco notes (), “wants the Fed put gone. He wants the markets to stop trading on liquidity. The problem is that’s exactly what they are trading on right now. Bad news is good news.”

The panel discussion turns.from the Fed to Congress and the White House. “I’m more worried about the politicians,” Mr. Gundlach says, “because once the economy rolls over what we’ve seen is massive relief, free-money spending…. We thought that $700 billion was a big stimulus back in ’08. Now we’re doing trillions and trillions. Maybe the next time it’s not $1,000 or $1,200 a month. Maybe it’s $50,000 a month.” Mr. Payne says politicians would see such transfer payments as “a good way to get re-elected.” Ms. DiMartino Booth, however, thinks the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, “is going to want their pound of flesh” and could resist cutting those checks.

The panelists are generally bearish on the U.S. economy’s ability to avoid entering recession in 2023. Mr. Rosenberg.for example, finds no significant sources of “vitality for the economy,” ticking off a corporate profits recession, no capital spending; little excess savings, with “what’s left in the wrong hands... the fat cats who aren’t going to spend it.” Meanwhile, the lagged effects of Fed tightening, he notes, are going to kick in, with consumers facing rising unemployment and housing “in a tailspin.”

Some people are putting their hopes in the reopening of China’s economy after the most recent lockdown regime. Mr. Bianco.pours cold water on that idea. While China is going to reopen, he says, “they’re not going back to 2019. They’re not going to get 40 million people riding the subway, which is what they used to have in the major cities a day, going to 12-hour shifts, manufacturing stuff to ship to the West.”

Most Anticipated Recession Ever

Growth Expectations Revised Higher in 2023

2023 the Mirror Image of 2022

Cross-Asset Volatility Divergence

Prolonged Contraction in Global Manufacturing

Normalizing Labor Supply-Demand Imbalance

Households Awash in Liquidity

Weakness in Cyclical Employment

Longer Lags From Tighter Monetary Policy

Fed Gets Real

Inflation Continues to Decelerate

Wage Growth to Moderate

Inflation Subsiding but Prices High

Rate Cuts Expected in 2024

10-Year U.S. Treasury Yield Correlated to Policy Rate Expectations

Where Will the Money Go?

Starting Yield Matters

Maturity Wall in Focus

Are We in a New Real Rate Regime?

Seasonality of Municipal Closed-End Funds

U.S. Treasury Supply a Risk in the New Year

Protracted Yield Curve Inversion

Equal-Weighted Set to Outperform Cap-Weighted?

Elevated Geopolitical Risk

DoubleLine Capital CEO-CIO Jeffery Gundlach joins Jennifer Ablan, editor-in-chief and CCO of P&I, for an interview and audience Q&A on Twitter Spaces, recorded Sept. 20, 2022. Topics covered by Mr. Gundlach include deflationary forces in the economy.if the Fed’s tightening has resulted in a financial accident and should it ease off (), and where the S&P 500 could settle (). The two also get into Mr. Gundlach’s take on risk tolerance (); how he got his start in the financial industry (); and his involvement with the resurgent Buffalo AKG Art Museum (), which Mr. Gundlach promises will be better than the Whitney and Guggenheim when it opens in May 2023.

The event concludes with questions from audience members, who ask for Mr. Gundlach’s book recommendations.and his thoughts on investors’ reaction to the two- and 10-year U.S. Treasury yields (), Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell (), geopolitical impacts (), and the outlook for the U.S. midterms and 2024 ().

The outlook on inflation, including the roll-off of positive base effects that had contributed to lower year-over-year inflation readings, potentially resulting in more stubborn inflation levels in the future, contributing to higher interest rates for longer.

A rollover in housing rents, on the back of a “ton of new multi-family supply hitting the market,” a factor that should help ease pressure on headline and core inflation.

Signs of lower wage and labor pressures, including a falling quits rate and reduced small-business hiring, perhaps presaging lower price pressures in the services sector of the economy. Mr. Shinoda also warns that these signs of weakness should give a moment of pause to people who are pricing in a “no landing” scenario for the economy.

Recovering consumer sentiment.

Among downside risks, the prospect of “higher-for-longer” borrowing rates. Higher rates already are putting the squeeze on commercial real estate; higher-for-longer could do the same to corporate borrowers, many of whom, due to the lack of bank lending, have turned to private lenders of floating-rate loans.

Interest rates across the Treasury curve, the market pricing (as of the time of the episode recording) of future levels of the federal funds interest rate, and Mr. Shinoda’s sanguine view on the actual timing of rate cuts in 2024.

Fixed income in March (positive across all major sectors), followed by a back-up in yields in the first part of April.

What’s Cheap: DoubleLine’s report on which parts of the fixed income universe are attractive relative to others. Spread tightening, Ken Shinoda notes, which has driven big rallies in investment grade and high yield corporate bonds, and in emerging markets corporates, has been coming to securitization markets, with the exception of Agency mortgage-backed securities.

Equity performance in March (broad gains, led by the Nikkei).

Commodity performance (broad gains across energy, industrial metals, precious metals and agriculture). In particular, Mr. Shinoda calls out an Asia-driven surge in gold prices.