The bond market is headed for a crisis

Yahoo

15-04-2025

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While a lot of attention has been focused on the volatile stock market, investing pros say it's time to shift more focus to the bond market. Indeed the market is undergoing its own major convulsions amid Trump tariff concerns, which is rattling many investors around the world. Of note is that as stock prices have sold off, bond prices have sold off too. That despite Treasurys often being viewed as a place of safety during stock market turbulence. The moves in the bond market are sending signals that the US may have trouble paying its future debts and could fall into a recession soon. Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi sits down with bond market expert and founder of The Bear Traps Report Lawrence McDonald to get his thoughts on the high-stakes situation. McDonald says a Lehman Brothers-like moment may be coming to markets. He adds there are other ways to invest in Nvidia (NVDA) besides investing in Nvidia, suggesting metals stocks or the hard assets themselves.
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Welcome to a new episode of Opening bid. I'm Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sai. Like I always say, this is the podcast that will make you a smarter investor, period. Let's put up one minute on the clock, our shot clock, uh, stock of the day going Best Buy on this news that President Trump or the Trump administration will exempt smartphones, computers, and certain electronics from those China Towers.And there was just this massive relief. Suddenly companies like Apple are going to do amazingly in terms of financials, but when you dig beneath the results, the 20% tariff is still in place here. So I want to lock in on Best Buy because when I originally heard this news, I'm like, right, Best Buy is years gonna be saved. This is great, rah rah. Best Buy, no, that's not the case. And here are some numbers here from the folks at Citi.So the 20% China tariff is still in place. That means a lot of products that Best Buy sells smartphones, electronics, computers will still be hit by that tariff. City estimating Best Buy could see a 15% product cost inflation hit, almost 1000 basis point hit to gross profit margins this year because of that 20% tariff, assuming there's no mitigating factors. To me that spells not a good financial.Holiday season for a company like Best Buy and I'm out of time. That's all I got on Best Buy. All right, let's, uh, continue to drill, drill into markets here. Special guest Larry McDonald, author, the bear traps report founder, good to see you in person. I know you're you're traveling the world, so good to see you in Times Square at the NASDAQ.
Yeah, it's been a good run. I mean, the book, our book came out and the main thesis of the book How to Listen to Market Speak. Great book this, um.Multi-polar world that drives a colossal migration of capital and that's what kind of played out last week.
You were the, you were thebond guy and holy cow, we have seen some major moves in the bond market. The 10 year up to 4.5%. I thought when stocks sold off you go into treasuries, but that's not working. Why?
OK, for the last 40 years, you're right, whenever we go risk off, so down in stocks, bonds have gone up.And it has a lot to do with the flight equality, United States of America and trust, and there's two elements of trust that are broken. Let's Congress broke the back of the trust around the debt, so $37 trillion of debt, but that's up 11 trillion in the last 4 years, right? So and global investors were already a little sick to their stomach of, you know, with the United States and that amount of debt, but then Trump came along with a sledgehammer and said we're gonna change the world order on trade, right?So if you're a European investor for the last like 30 years you've just loved the United States, love the United States most of the time. Now when I spoke last week to European investors, they're losing money on their stocks, they're losing money on their bonds and the foreign exchange. So if you own US stocks in.In, uh, in any kind of euro or any kind of currency in Europe, uh, you're losing money on the currency as well, so they're not happy clients now, and so what that's doing is it takes imagine a whitewater river of incoming cash coming into the United States just violently reversing and going the other way. That's what's happening.
What'sthe, what's the signal that the bond market is sending you?
Uh, just signaling, uh, a lack of trust in the sense that that world order that we've had is, is changing first of all, and what we make the point in the book how to listen to market speak is this great migration of capital. If there's that much uncertainty in bonds, which for the bedrock, then we should see capital move from financial assets which are financial assets all it means is paper certificates, bonds and stocks. It's paper.Uh, we should move over toward hard assets which we just kind of see over the last year. Silver is outperforming the NASDAQ. Gold's outperforming the Nasdaq by like 30, 30%, and
that's not the normhere. I mean, investors have been trained the past 10 years. Stocks like Nvidia and Apple go up in a straight line and maybe on like 2% of your portfolio ingold or maybe 1%.
Newmont Mining up $15 last week, and this is the stock that Buffett bought years ago, Buffett's team.So, uh, yeah, it's not like we're, that's all that's not the only place to be, but companies that own assets in the ground, whether it be natural gas, whether it be, uh, platinum palladium, I mean there's so many, there's so many metals that are strategic for just this whole AI revolution.I mean, I think we're gonna have a copper crisis in 2026-2027 where the amount of copper needed for the Ukraine rebuild, right, for the Gaza rebuild for artificial intelligence, for robotics, supposedly all these robots are gonna replace human beings.They all need metal. They all need copper and and strategic metals, and that's where the real moneys can be made. The old portfolio was your 60/40 stock bonds belong a lot of growth stocks. That was like 2010 to 2020 portfolio. That's history.The new portfolio that we line up in the book is a portfolio of kind of harder harder harder hard asset companies.
Ifis the bond market suggesting that the bond market losing trust in the US credit worthiness and how big a deal isthat?
It's enormous now it's, it can be won back um through deficit reduction and through taxation.And it's people, people forget all tariffs are is taxes, so a tariff is just a tax on global investors.
I just got hit with145%tax.
Yeah. Now Americans do pay if you wanna if you wanna buy, buy an iPhone, you're gonna pay a higher tax, right? But a lot.Uh, the, the thing about tariffs is global companies and global countries are also sharing that tax so we can to get out of this debt hole we can raise taxes on global companies, global investors, US, US citizens, or we can default. I mean, interest on the debt is $1 trillion a year, right? That's 25% of tax receipts, 20% of tax receipts, and the rest, the rest of the developed world is only like.So the rest of the developed world in terms of interest, annual interest cost versus their tax receipts, the rest of the developed worlds like in the 234 to 6% group.
I caught a post from you on X. I don't know where you were, but you were breaking down the stress we're seeing in the bond market and you dropped Lehman and you lived and managed. That's the first time I came in contact with your work, uh, during the, the great financial crisis. Are we headed towards another, another, are we headed towards a crisis in the bond market?
Yes, uh, they, they're gonna put some fire hoses into this, right? Um, but in terms of the bond markets, real sustainability as a safe haven.Those days are are starting to just slowly go away and that means that you're gonna own different types of bonds. You're gonna own bonds of other countries, not just the not, it's just everybody was overdosing on the US, right? And all it means is that your global investors are gonna have more diversified portfolio that they they've been burnt by this lack of trust. It's like there's certain things that we've all been through these horrible experiences when you can't unsee something, right? The global investors have just been.Hit over the head with this huge amount of debt that the United States has, uh, this kind of lack of trust and spending in Congress and then Trump with the sledgehammer on tariffs trying to raise taxes and they're just like, OK.I'm gonna have a basket of bonds and that's what's gonna break that's what's breaking down the bond market. They're just gonna try to own other things besides just being overdosed on growth stocks and and US
Treasury. Right, let me see if I can make this through lines. So China, what the second largest holder of treasuries, uh, and they're getting hit with these large tar.From the Trump administration, do you envision them dumping treasuries? If so, do they do so aggressively and what are the ramifications of China doing that to theUS economy?
See that that's part of the, the, the scare out there is that China doesn't even have to dump, but if they, if they leak that they might dump, uh, then other people try to get in front of that. um, there's also a lot of banks that.That are in this this whole basis trade that's a big problem that's unwinding a lot of hedge funds really that are in this trade and that that's unwinding so it's like a combination of China and people worrying about China and Japan, um, you know what we're in a trade war with them maybe they're not gonna be there to buy our bonds and so there's that worry and then we have this very complicated basis trade that's blowing up and so those those things are happening the exact same time.So at the end of the day what I talked about on on my video is the last 30 years when whenever there was a crash in the stock market when Lehman went down you made $8 trillion investors made they lost $8 trillion of stock value but they made $3.5 trillion back on bonds and when COVID hit, investors lost $9 trillion but they made $4 trillion back on their bonds. Imagine that.Now we've lost $9 trillion the last since February 19th $9 trillion and you basically haven't made anything back on the bond side.
If you were sitting with the Treasury secretary instead of Brian Sai this morning, what would you want to know from him?
Well, first I would want, I would want to have someone like a Scott Pascent that's running the show instead of like.Navarro one day Lutnick the other day Hawks, these real and they're, they're, they're really, uh, they mean well, but they are crushing global.Sentiment on world order they're they're basically what we talked about in the book we're in a multi-polar world versus a unipolar world a unipolar world with the United States is like the strong empire and it's kind of leadership and globalization is very stable. A multipolar world is something like where we have Navarro and Lutnick out there really threatening our our allies and our trading partners and that kind of hostility.Is driving money out of the United States. So if I was the, I'd want to have him. I'd, I'd want to be taking that wheel away from Navarro and Lutnick,
yeah, especially, yeah, they, they really say some, uh, shocking things. Hang with us, uh, Larry. We're gonna go off for a quick break. We're gonna be right back on opening bid talking more on bonds, stock market, and of course the economic outlook. We'll be right back.All right, welcome back to Opening bid here. We're having a great chat here with Larry McDonald, the bear traps, uh, the bear traps report founder, also, uh, author of How to Listen when Markets Speak, encourage everyone to give this one a read, really, really good book. So we were talking about the Treasury Secretary, uh, Scott Besson. He's.I feel like his focus on tariffs is distracting him from some of the bigger things he wants to do, cut the deficit. Is that just not gonna get done in this?
So let's go really quick. When Lehman failed, right, the fiscal and monetary response, the fiscal and monetary was $4 trillion when COVID went down in 2020 and then you had the regional bank crisis after that and then the elections or fiscal spending in Washington was crazy into the election.That response was not $4 trillion it was $16 trillion. So think of Lehman 4 versus 16. Now Becent is Treasury secretary. He's gonna sell bonds to the world to finance this huge building bond salesman, chief bond salesman, exactly, and um it's harder to sell bonds and um fortunately what they've tried to do.Is they tried to Yellen in the last year and a half, 2 years, former Treasury, yeah, former, former Tre she she issued tons and tons of T- bills so mentioned like borrowing money for like 6 months, 1 year, and she brilliantly placed bond volatility.Not in the election year. She'd actually by doing all because T- Bills mature in 3 months, right? 6 months, so those bonds can't move in price, right? So she pushed all that that bond issuance out into 2025, 2026. So she placed bond volatility brilliantly in the hands of the Republicans.
So what happens though? What, what, what's the response? What does he, what's going to happen to the bond market laterthis year?
He has to go sell these bonds and, and to a more with Navarro and Lutnick trying to like, you know, they, he's in the worst possible spot. And so, yeah, so he's gonna try to calm things down. And you know, at the end of the day, they're trying to repair 40 years of dysfunction in Washington.In a very, very short period of time in 4 years, and they're trying to take as much pain away from the mid they wanna take the pain as far away from the midterms as possible, right?
I, you have a real global view. I mean, you're constantly on the road and and traveling. What is the, how did your international clients view what is happening in the US, but then by extension how they view what's happening to them.
So, so we run a, uh, we run a Bloomberg chat and a private discord room with institutional investors in 30 countries. The bear trap support is the company, but most of our revenue is from a lot, at least 50% is from hedge funds, mutual funds, and pension funds around the world. And yeah, the, the trust that's been broken the last, you know, imagine you're a bond investor and you just watch the US jack up the deficit.Uh, borrow a lot of money in the front part of the curve which is makes us look a little bit like an emerging market country and then come out with a way to fund it through pounding taxation around the world to other countries. It's, it just creates this like lack of trust. I talked to a guy in Zurich yesterday and he's like runs billions of dollars and he's like Larry, all we had to do the last 30 years is just sit back and.Really over allocate to the United States. So you mentioned all these allocators, that's all they've done is over allocate, over allocate into US stocks and bonds and so they're up to here in terms of the allocation and now they just have to take it down back to where we were maybe 10 years ago, but that's.It's at least 1 trillion bucks. What
arethey waiting for to put money back into into the US stock market? What do they need to see? And do they have trust? Anything that they want to see might actually happen with this administration.
Like he said, he said to me, you know, there's certain things you can't unsee and with these trends around currencies and bonds and stocks, especially currencies and bonds, when those trends go this way, they, they would need to see Congress take total control.Over taxation away from the White House and have that guaranteed for at least a year and so the White House means well they're trying to undo 40 years of dysfunction where we've lost we've lost 5 million jobs. Let's not kid ourselves. The reason why Trump was elected twice pretty much is the manufacturing base of the United States has been absolutely hollowed out and.He's trying to fix that, but the way they're going about it and the rate of change that they're trying to go about it is very fast and very shocking. And so to your point is what's gonna, what's where's the fire hose that's gonna put this out? I guess if Congress were to take taxation and tariff authority away from the White House and stabilize it and give, give the global investment community a 1 or 2 year certainty of where we would be on tariffs.That would, that would do that would go a long way, but that's just not gonna happen
and you mentioned manufacturing and a lot of CEOs that I talked to, they tell me a couple of things. First, I can't build a plant overnight, right? And then two, if I do build that plant opens 5 years from now, it's gonna cost me more to make stuff in the US. And then I look back at.Things that Apple CEO Tim Cook has said, he says in 2015, I think he did an interview on CBS calling out uh a lack of skills in the US to do this. Are we just, do we want a $33,500 iPhone? Is that what we're lookingfor
here? That's the problem. It's when you, when you, when you decimate the United States working class for 30, 40 years, you're Republicans, Democrats trying to fix that, it's gonna take a long time, and Trump, they wanna sell us that it's that they can fix this. But yeah, if you're Apple or any company that makes.One thing that one thing that makes the most sense is just giving golden visas to the most talented technicians and semiconductors because that's the one area where I think the Trump team is 100% right, national security, artificial intelligence, right?
You can't have all theseships made by Taiwan
it's absolute insanity. It's literally a recipe for.A massive shock. I mean, bigger than Lehman, right, if, if Taiwan were to be invaded, so what we should be doing is giving golden vis visas immediate access for, you know, thousands of the best technicians in the semiconductor space. Get them over to the United States. But like you said, cost of living here is higher. That's all part of our book. What we talk about is when you reshore.Uh, you're just gonna raise the cost of everything and we're gonna go into a higher interest rate, um, higher bond yield, higher inflation regime that's gonna last very similar we went from like 1968 to 1981 after the Vietnam War and all of a sudden if, if you're in that higher interest rate, higher inflation regime because of reshoring and because of wars and global conflicts, then you need a whole new portfolio construction.And that's why I reach out to us at the bear trap support because that's what we're all about. It's like, OK, we're looking like what is the portfolio for, you know, the next 10 years, not the last 10 years. I think if you look at American investors, there's still, there's still like table max, the 2010, 2020 portfolio.
Maybe you seeit, but I, I'm listening to everything you're saying. Uh, I stack it up against the things that I see and hear. I don't see the catalyst to get into markets here. I'm not picking stocks. It's not what I, I do.Where's the appetite to jump in here and buy Nvidia offize?
OK, so within the last week, Nvidia, both Exxon and Chevron were combined. Exxon and Chevron were only 29% of Nvidia's market cap.Uh, the entire copper industry, copper, like your free ports and all these just look at the CLPX ETF. If you add up the value of all those companies, it's a fraction of Nvidia. But if you really, really, really listen to Jensen and the Nvidia gods, um, the only way they get to their growth trajectory that's needed to justify that close to a $3 trillion dollar evaluation, the only way you get there is with a lot more copper, so.If you look at the copper names or the oil names, they're down 30%, sometimes 25-30% off the highs and the future looks great for them because the valuation set up is so skewed just Nvidia is up here and the entire copper industry here. Nvidia is here, the entire uranium industry for all the nuclear power they're gonna need to fund to fund.To find enough finance to power all this, all these new AI data centers, right? So it's so skewed so you can make a lot of money by investing in the power infrastructure plays, uh, your SMRs, your, there's a lot of ETFs that that are in the space you are and M right where you're investing in a basket of companies.They are going to power AI for the next 30years.
Uh, I wanna get your hot take. It's what we do, uh, towards the end of the podcast. You mentioned, uh, the portfolio for the next 10 years. What is that portfolio because I imagine the next 210 years are gonna look a lot different because of these tariffs and how unsettling things have been.
OK, so let's go back to basics. Last 30 years was 60/40 stocks bonds, and out of that 60, there was a lot of growth stocks in there, right? Your fangs and just big, big growth stocks. We're probably moving to a 30, 30, 40 world, so 30% commodities, 30% bonds, uh, it depends on the age of the investor and say 40% stocks, um, in that world, on the, you wanna have less growth and more value.That's why the COW, uh, I think it's COWZ ETF, those types of stocks are outperforming global value, the EWU ETF. Just look at, just look at the holdings of the EWU. It's a group of global companies, your Glencores, you know, your, your BHPs, I'm sorry.Like your Rios, your Rio Tintos, and so your companies that own assets in the ground, your companies that own lots of copper reserves, right? FCX's of the world, you wanna look at the, the COPX, that's the portfolio. So it's you're going from 6040 stocks bonds to 30, 30, 40 and out of that stock port portion.You should have more more value and more companies that own hard assets like the COPX like the GDX like the SIL like the URNM, these are all ETFs that own baskets of companies that are in the AI infrastructure space.Uh, that are also in the robotic space in in terms of, um, supporting the, the robotics industry through copper and then the United States rebuild of Los Angeles, the rebuild of the Ukraine, the rebuild of our of our power grid in the United States, that's all copper, right? How much copper are we gonna need to rebuild Los Angeles, the Ukraine, and the US grid.To support all that artificial intelligence, it's a ton of copper, and so you wanna belong those copper names and that's where you're gonna get, you're gonna get far better portfolio construction and returns by owning the copper names than owning Nvidia lookingforward.
Great insights as always. That's why we always have you on here, Larry McDonald, the bear traps report founder and of course the author of How to Listen when Mark at Speed, give this, uh, book a read. Really good stuff. Larry puts all his passion.As you see on camera here right into this book. Good to see you. Thanks, Brian. All right, good to see you, man. Good to see you. All right, that's it for the latest episode of Opening Bid. Continue to hit us with all those stars on all the podcast platforms and thumbs up on YouTube. Love your feedback. Always try to answer your questions. Keep it coming. We'll talk to you soon.