- May 23, 2025
Inflation Standoff
The Strategic Investment Conference is over. I’m now in my annual recovery period, during which I try to absorb the informational firehose I (with thousands of others) just experienced.
Read moreThoughts from the Frontline: Tag = "mauldin"
- May 16, 2025
How We Got Here
We are in the middle of the Strategic Investment Conference, a fabulous gathering of some of the best economic, political, and geopolitical minds anywhere. I’m really proud of what we’re doing. And at the last minute, we’ve added Dr. Mehmet Oz, nationally regarded cardiovascular surgeon, author of numerous best-selling books with my friend Dr. Mike Roizen, and now head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He will be joined by Dr. Robert Redfield, former CDC director, virologist,...
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- May 9, 2025
Tension in the Sandpile
I’ve been writing about tariffs for a couple of months now, focusing mostly on the macroeconomic harm and the costs they impose on small businesses. Today I want to consider something else: the new risks they are adding to the financial system alongside the old risks. We had a small taste of it when markets convulsed in early April. That episode passed, but I don’t think the risk is gone. Different and potentially worse may be coming, as the disruptions compound.
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- May 2, 2025
Soft Data Gets Softer
Economic data can be soft or hard. “Soft” data reflects attitudes, expectations, opinions, and feelings. It’s a step removed from the “hard” data reflecting actual events. Soft data is still valuable because future expectations shape the hard data that follows.
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- April 25, 2025
Tariff-Induced Paralysis
In some kinds of surgery, it is necessary to keep the patient extremely still because even small, involuntary movements can cause damage. Anesthesiologists administer “paralytic” drugs so the surgeons can do their work safely. Thus, a condition we would normally dread actually helps restore us to health.
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- April 18, 2025
The Uncertainty World
Markets don’t like uncertainty. It is a cliché, but for a very good reason. It is more than a truism. In fact, businesses don’t like uncertainty. You and I don’t like uncertainty in our personal lives. When we go to the store, we want to be certain that what we are looking for is there, and at a reasonable price. We want our food orders to be certain. We want our relationships to be certain. In fact, the relationships we value most are the ones in which we feel certain whether it’s personal,...
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- April 11, 2025
The Uncertainty Recession
You probably noticed we are having one of those “weeks when decades happen.” Notice also, however, that we are still here. Your investments and businesses may be bruised but you’re still in the game.
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- March 28, 2025
Do Trade Deficits Matter?
Financial market news has seemingly become all tariffs, all the time. The president’s plan, whatever it is, seems to spring from his belief that trade deficits are bad and must be eliminated. Tariffs are just a means to that end.
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- March 21, 2025
The Inflationista Illuminati, Part 2
The theme among so many writers seems to be “vibe shift.” And indeed, there is a concern the economy is slowing and may even be in a recession. That is certainly what today’s writer and my friend, Danielle DiMartino Booth, points to in this second part of her data-driven inflation analysis, which I share below. She believes the mainstream media, both financial and otherwise, is missing the fact that inflation is going to come down faster than most analysts expect—including those at the Federal...
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- March 14, 2025
The Inflationista Illuminati
Last week we published a chart of the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model, which had just dropped sharply to a -2.4% real GDP growth forecast for the first quarter of 2025. This model can be volatile. Its latest big swing was mostly an artifact of spiking gold imports. Economic growth prospects do seem to have dimmed considerably, though.
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