The Fed's Folly: From Moral Hazard to Business as Usual, Feat. Jesse Felder

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2020

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today on The Brief: An unexpectedly good retail sales report drives market confidence Are we in for a second wave of white-collar layoffs? The latest rumblings in central bank digital currencies Our main conversation: Jesse Felder is an independent financial analyst and one of the best financial curators on Twitter. In this wide ranging conversation, he and NLW discuss: The Robinhood rally and what makes it both alike and different from previous manias The illusion of American recovery and the disconnect between markets and fundamentals The Federal Reserve’s role in increasing economic inequality Why the dollar is significantly overvalued relative to other currencies Why financial assets could be poised for a rough decade Find our guest online: Twitter: @jessefelder Website: The Felder Report

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond.
0:13.0	This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Cipher Trace. The breakdown is produced and distributed by Coindesk.
0:22.6	And now, here's your host, NLW.
0:28.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown.
0:30.1	It is Tuesday, June 16th, and today's main topic is a conversation with Jesse Felder.
0:36.1	Jesse is the founder of the Felder Report and a just brilliant
0:39.3	market analysts. That is going to be a great conversation, but first, let's go to the brief.
0:45.1	First up on the brief today is the return of retail sales. So what happened? The Commerce Department
0:50.5	released a report that said that retail sales, which includes both online and offline purchases, increased 17.7% between April and May of this year, and that
1:00.2	is seasonally adjusted. This is much bigger than the predicted 7.7% increase that economists
1:06.5	were expecting. Now, it's still lower in total, obviously, than February. February saw 527.3 billion
1:14.1	in sales as compared to 485.5 billion for May. But still, the fact that the growth was 10% higher
1:22.1	even than predicted by economists suggests that there is more confidence perhaps in the markets than some leading experts
1:29.1	thought. Why does this matter? Well, it's exactly that. It has to do with this question of confidence.
1:34.0	Stocks are up on the news, and one of the key questions coming out of the COVID-19 shutdowns is,
1:39.1	what demand will be gone forever? How much can the economy bounce back? Will there be major structural barriers
1:46.1	or just shifts in consumer behavior that make it impossible to get that V-shaped recovery that
1:50.9	people are hoping for? This suggests that some economists may have over-predicted a shift in demand,
1:56.3	at least in the short term. Still, I do think that it's worth being cautious and breaking down a layer to
2:01.4	focus on the specifics. For example, while restaurants are back 30% from April, they're
2:07.1	still down 40% year over year, and I don't think anyone believes that we're going to see necessarily
2:12.6	a quick return to the same demand that they were predicting before. The key question going
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Blockworks, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Blockworks and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.