Don't Sell Your Stocks! The Bears Are Wrong | Ed Yardeni

**Ed Yardeni** (0:00)
I don't think it's going to be a bear market. I think we bottomed on April 8th. I think the economy is going to prove to be resilient, so we'll see some slowdown, but I don't think we'll see a recession. I think consumers are going to continue to spend, especially the retiring baby boomers. And I think capital spending, particularly in technology, will remain very strong. So that's my opinion, and therefore my opinion is, you know, I didn't recommend selling out of the market. I still wouldn't recommend that.

**Adam Taggart** (0:38)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. When today's guest expert was last on this channel, he predicted that the financial markets would have a sloppy start to 2025, but then find their footing and rise to new highs, possibly as high as 7,000 on the S&P by the end of the year. Now, of course, that was before the new administration took office and all that's happened since then. So is he still as bullish with his year-end outlook for stocks or have recent developments like the Trump tariffs required a downshifting of expectations? To find out, we're fortunate to be joined by Dr. Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research. Ed, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Ed Yardeni** (1:19)
Thank you, Adam.

**Adam Taggart** (1:21)
All right. Well, as I said there, Ed, you had an outlook coming into the year. Now, obviously, an awful lot has happened in a short period of time this year.
I'd like to get into sort of how that may have impacted your outlook. What have been the most meaningful macro developments since your last appearance here back in December? And how have they impacted your macro outlook, if at all?

**Ed Yardeni** (1:44)
Well, it's clearly Trump 2 and the policies that have been implemented on the tariff side. That's been the big macroeconomic shocker. Back in Trump 1.0, the administration back then started with the good stuff. They started with the tax cuts, got them accomplished in 2017 And then they moved on to tariffs. So whatever negative impact the tariff discussion and policies had back then were more than compensated for by the stimulus provided by the tax cuts. This time around, the administration decided to start out with the tariff issue. And certainly a much sweeping, much more sweeping approach to tariffs. And it took me a few weeks to recognize that this was not going to be a good situation. And so I did actually lower my expectations for the S&P 500 from 7,000 to 6,000. I did that in early March and basically concluded that it might be kind of a flat year after all, not a double digit year. But I moved my 7,000 target to next year and then 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 by 2029 I'm still a believer in what I think we've just discussed before, the idea that this decade may very well be justified. We may be justified in calling it the roaring 2020s. Now it doesn't feel like that right now, but at least I got the first half of the decade right. That's worked out quite well for a while. I think that the economy is going to demonstrate its resilience. I think productivity is going to continue to make a comeback. And so I do have an optimistic outlook still for where this market is going. But in the interim, yeah, I did feel back in December that the market could be choppy for a little while until we kind of got the lay of the land of Trump 2.0. And I think maybe it's wishful thinking, but I think kind of the worst of the negative consequences or impacts on the stock market might be behind us and that we might very well have made a low on April 8th. So I don't think it turned out to be a bear market. I think it's turning out to be a correction.
And I think we'll get some more choppiness, but by the second half of the year, I think we will be heading up to 6,000, which is not far away anymore.

**Adam Taggart** (4:32)
Right, right. Okay, so we'll get into this in more depth, but just really quickly to take it off the table. Sounds like you then you don't expect a recession this year. There's a lot of folks saying that the tariffs-

**Ed Yardeni** (4:43)
Yeah. I think I wasn't the only strategist, obviously, that reconsidered the outlook. There were a lot of us who were quite optimistic, and other strategists also cut their expectations for this year. Some may be a little bit more than I did, others maybe not as much.