The Contrarian Investor Podcast Posts

Moderator 0:02
Welcome to the Contrarian Investor Podcast. We give voice to those who challenge a prevailing sentiment in global financial markets. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Nothing on this podcast should be taken as investment advice. Guests were not compensated for their appearance, nor do they supply payment in order to appear. Individuals on this podcast may hold positions in the securities that are discussed. Listeners are urged to educate themselves and make their own decisions. Now, here’s your host, Mr. Nathaniel E Baker,

Nathaniel E. Baker 0:35
Marc Chandler, you are an economist, and you have a website marctomarket.com, mark with a “c.” And I want to talk about your background later. But the first the thing that is kind of vexing everybody, obviously, these days is this Corona virus. And of course we hope everybody stays healthy. But beyond that, what people are trying to figure out now is the economic and earnings impact that is coronavirus is going to have in the US and across and across the globe. And so I’m very pleased to have you on the podcast to hopefully put into context a little bit, what types of things we’re seeing economically. how bad the damage you expect to be, how quickly we should rebound or could rebound. And yeah, just your general take on things from an economic perspective.

Marc Chandler 1:33
Sure, thanks. Yeah, what a shocker. Hmm, you know, all the things that we thought about, like what could hurt us. Many people, I mean, pandemics, Sandys, viruses. Of course, this is like, they make great Netflix series. But at the end of the day, I think that I’m hesitant to call it a black swan event. Because it’s like the third or fourth kind of virus we’ve gotten in recent years, I think about SARS. I think about MERS, even, you know, so. So on one hand, I think we’re ill prepared for this kind of shock. And ill prepared socially, institutionally and psychologically, I think that this is this is the real thing. I mean, if we’ve been saving money for a rainy day, this is a rainy day. This is the emergency that we’ve that we probably haven’t seen so much in our lifetimes. I know people talk about some man, some very clearly man made and specifically man made disasters like World War One, World War Two. in our lifetimes, you think about these other big events, maybe 9/11 here in the US, but this and maybe even some of us still have a scar tissue from the global from the great financial crisis. Well, we don’t know nine, but this is bigger and bigger than bigger than these bigger than these kind of events that we’re familiar with. I think the closest thing can be the Spanish flu, early part of the century. So so the First thing I’d make is that a lot of people I think are confused, because we kind of talk ourselves into this into these like myths. And one of these myths is that the Fed kills economic recoveries. And that that’s the cause of the last few sessions we’ve had. And I look at those other recessions, great financial crisis, the tech bubble, and it seems that loan crisis earlier in my career, these are financial crises that lead over to an economic crisis and have a business cycle. But this what we’re dealing with now, this is an economic crisis, it’s going to spill over and hitting the financial sector. So what we’ve seen around the world but also in the US, central bank’s ease monetary policy, so they cut interest rates, buying assets, like the QE versions that we saw before, but other countries are doing their own versions of it. And we’ve got the federal the federal government, slowly responding. I think at first the US was very far behind the curve still in denial. I think we were in denial up to about two days ago. So until like March 13 or so. And I think that I think that sort of now I think we’re getting more serious. And, you know, a couple weeks ago when Congress was proposing about an $8 billion spending package, it was criticized for having a lot of ideological goodies in it. And now, as of this morning, the White House to Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is talking about an 850 billion dollar package. So this is like we’re going on to war footing.