GUNDLACH: If oil goes to $40 a barrel something is 'very, very wrong with the world'
And back in December 2014, "Bond King" Jeff Gundlach had a serious warning for the world if oil prices got to $40 a barrel.
"I hope it does not go to $40," Gundlach said in a presentation, "because then something is very, very wrong with the world, not just the economy. The geopolitical consequences could be - to put it bluntly - terrifying."
Gundlach added that, "If oil falls to around $40 a barrel then I think the yield on ten year Treasury note is going to 1%."
The 10-year note was trading at 2.14% on Tuesday.
On December 9, 2014, WTI was trading near $65 a barrel and Gundlach said oil looked like it was going lower, quipping that oil would find a bottom when it starts going up.
WTI eventually bottomed at $43 in mid-March and spend most all of the spring and early summer trading near $60.
On Tuesday, WTI hit a fresh 6-year low, plunging more than 4% and trading below $43 a barrel.
And all this as the Federal Reserve makes noise about raising interest rates, having some in the market asking if these external factors - what the Fed would call "exogenous" factors - will stop the Fed from changing its interest rate policy for the first time in over almost 7 years.
In an afternoon email, Russ Certo, a rate strategist at Brean Capital, highlighted Gundlach's comments and said that the linkages between the run-up, and now collapse, in commodity prices since the financial crisis have made, quite simply, for an extremely complex market environment right now.
"There is a global de-leveraging occurring in front of our eyes," Certo wrote. "And, I suppose, the smart folks will determine the exact causes and translate what that means for FUTURE investment thesis. Today it may not matter other than accurately anticipating a myriad of global price movements in relation to each other."
