Billionaire 'Bond King' Jeff Gundlach warned of stubborn inflation, shades of the dot-com bubble, and a potential recession this week. Here are the 9 best quotes.
- Jeff Gundlach compared the surge in tech stocks last year to the late stages of the dot-com bubble.
- The DoubleLine Capital boss predicted lingering inflation and a weaker dollar in the medium term.
Billionaire investor Jeff Gundlach warned of persistent inflation, and compared last year's tech-stock boom to the late stages of the dot-com bubble, in a CNBC interview on Tuesday.
The DoubleLine Capital CEO — whose nickname is the "Bond King" — also spoke at the Exchange conference in Miami on Tuesday. He slammed the Federal Reserve for overheating the economy and moving too slowly to curb inflation. He also predicted the US dollar would weaken over the next few years, and raised the prospect of a devastating recession in 2023.
Here are Gundlach's 9 best quotes, lightly edited for length and clarity:
1. "What's happening is the Fed is behind the curve, and the bond market is grossly mispriced thanks to the government's manipulation, so everything's being repriced." (Gundlach was attributing the recent market volatility to the Federal Reserve's sluggishness in raising interest rates, and the flood of monetary and fiscal stimulus during the pandemic).
2. "We are near peak inflation unless you have another surge in the price of energy. But inflation is going to be sticky, it's going to be frustratingly elevated."
3. "The Fed should be replaced with the 2-year Treasury. You can get rid of 800 PhD economists, which are not cheap, and replace them with the 2-year Treasury, and you'd probably be better off." (Gundlach was arguing that Fed policy is overwhelmingly driven by movements in government bond yields.)
4. "The only thing that was transitory was the use of the word 'transitory.'" (Gundlach was criticizing the Fed for downplaying rising inflation last year.)
5. "It's almost laughable that the Fed still talks about 2%, and people talk about how some magic wand is gonna come out and get the inflation rate down to 2%. The wage inflation is real. Everybody knows it."
6. "The Nasdaq is very, very volatile. It had the same type of run into September of last year as it had into the latter part of 1999. (Gundlach noted a shrinking number of stocks fueled the tech-heavy index's gains in the fourth quarter of last year, and called that narrowing a "warning sign that the market was running out of steam.")
7. "My highest conviction is 'short the dollar' — but not this week, over an investment horizon of say four, five years." (Gundlach said he was long the dollar in the near term, as he expects a flattening yield curve to support it.)
8. "I'm not looking for a recession this year because it takes time. There's potentially a calamity coming in 2023."
9. "I don't like the phrase 'bond king.' I didn't ask for that. Who wants to be bond king these days?"