Stephanie Pomboy: Iran War Creating A Global Scramble For Hard Assets?

**Adam Taggart** (0:00)
And we should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you here for another monthly macro maven melangerie with my great friend, the macro maven herself, Steph Pomboy. Steph, how are you doing?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:17)
I'm great. How are you doing?

**Adam Taggart** (0:19)
Good. I'm not even sure melangerie is a word, but it's just what came out.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:23)
It came out, so we're going to run with it.

**Adam Taggart** (0:26)
All right. Well, look, thank you so much for coming into the studio today. Nice to record this with us.
We're Sans Wilhelmina, because you're in the studio. So sorry, everybody. Big womp-womp for that, but I'm sure we'll get her again at some point in the future. Happy Tax Day, Steph.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:43)
Oh, gee, thank you so much. I actually have a story about that, but we can talk about it later in the conversation.

**Adam Taggart** (0:50)
Okay, we'll get there. I was kind of crying tears on X yesterday about it, and certainly seems like a lot of other people aren't having a lot of fun this time around.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:59)
Yeah.

**Adam Taggart** (1:00)
But, and maybe we can talk a little bit about, the country is supposed to be getting record tax refunds now from the one big, beautiful bill and all that, but maybe they're getting offset by higher oil prices. So we'll talk about that in a moment. But there are two things I want to talk with you about here at the start, Steph, and they're both related to the war. I'll mention both and then we'll maybe hit them in order.
So one is, I saw you on Maria Bartiromo's show the other day, and talking about how you were beating the hard asset drum as you normally do, and Maria was actually much more interested in that than I think they normally are. So it seems that the war has been potentially creating this scramble for hard assets. It certainly is with things like oil and helium and whatnot, but this war seems to be a really good reminder, one might say wake up call to the rest of the world, that hard assets are finite and you can't always count on current supply chains. And that possession is nine tenths of the law, as they say, and it is better to secure your nation's supply of hard assets, and I think investors are getting into that space too. So I want to talk on that theme with you, but I'll mention the second thing I want to talk about with you, which is if you look at the S&P right now, the S&P is essentially saying, war is over.
The entire war discount that was weighing on the market is gone at this point in time. And I guess that's a sense, a vote from the market that it thinks this war is going to end relatively quickly and relatively well. So we can tackle those in any order you'd like, but maybe let's start with the first one about the hard assets. You have been a champion of them, obviously, for as long as I've known you, and certainly over the past year plus. How in your eyes, if at all, has the war changed the game for hard assets?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (3:04)
Well, honestly, I think those two questions kind of dovetail nicely because the hard asset story for me was always about current and accelerating currency debasement.

**Adam Taggart** (3:19)
Currency debasement, yeah.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (3:20)
Basically. So not just here in the US., but globally, especially in the major industrial countries that are the world's reserve currencies. So that has always been sort of my main interest in hard assets, was as a way to preserve capital at a time when I thought that the dollar, not only was being debased, but that was just barely getting started, that the need to print money would just expand geometrically. And I think the war actually underscores that point by, you know, we are hardly five minutes into it before the president came out and said, I want another one and a half trillion dollars for deficits, for defense spending. So any idea that we were going to somehow restrain spending and, you know, try to bring our runaway debt and deficits into some kind of, you know, universe where we could slowly start to grow into them, just went right out the window.
I think you'll recall when we had the conference in St. Pete, Tom Hunnig was talking about the idea that we'd have this fed treasury accord and that the objective would be to get Congress to slow the rate of spending so that the fed would have the ability to, you know, slowly shrink the balance sheet without creating some untoward situation in the bond market. And I think we all kind of laughed thinking, yeah, so we're relying on Congress to slow spending. That seemed like a crazy push. But now this war obviously just kind of increases the likelihood that the deficit is absolutely never, ever, ever going to go lower. Quite the contrary, it's probably going to go higher, irrespective of how quickly the US economy is growing. So that's sort of, I would answer both of those questions in that way.