Stephanie Pomboy: It's Just Dumb To Dismiss Recession Risks At This Point

**Adam Taggart** (0:00)
All right, and we should be live here. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Welcoming you back to Macro Morning Mondays with the Macro Maven herself, Stephanie Pomboy. Hi Steph, how are you?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:12)
I'm good, how are you? Actually, I'll apologize ahead of time for your audience. I'm battling something, I don't know what, so apologies for the worse voice and the periodic coughing, but we will get through this. And the good thing is no one can catch what I got remotely.

**Adam Taggart** (0:31)
Well, I'm very sorry to hear that, Steph, but folks, Steph Pomboy, one more reason to love her. She plays hurt, she doesn't back down. Well, Stephanie, look, it's St. Patrick's Day, which I just realized basically as I was logging in to this video, neither you nor I are wearing green, but I wish you the best St. Patrick's Day and same to all the viewers.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:51)
Well, thank you. I hope that there's a lot of green in it for everybody on the screen today.

**Adam Taggart** (0:57)
Hopefully, yeah. People have seen a lot of red over the past several weeks, and I think a little green would be good for everybody. Obviously, that's one of the questions we'll talk about, Steph, is your thoughts on what's been happening in the markets. But a couple bit of housekeeping news first, and then we'll get to the big theme, which is recession risk.
First off, folks, I got a little bit of bad news, a little bit of good news. The bad news is, you all remember a few months ago, we started this new trial period of these Macro Morning Mondays with Stephanie, and this is going to be the final Macro Monday morning with Stephanie. And I'm sure that's shocking to a lot of you. But the good news is, it's because it's moving to Wednesdays. So it's going to be Macro Wednesdays with Stephanie Pomboy moving forward from here. So Steph's got a lot of change going on in her life, and this new day helped her, it helps me. So I hope everybody's thrilled this is going to continue. It's just going to have a new day. So the next time we do this will be what I think a week and a half from now. I'm not remembering the exact date, but I'll pull it up in a second when Stephanie's talking and lock it into folks' minds. But anyways, I just expect this to be going on Wednesdays going forward, not Mondays. Secondly, just quick housekeeping. We had a fantastic conference this past weekend. Steph, it was really one of the best ever. I can't really say it was the best ever because you weren't part of it this time around. You will be next week. But it really was fantastic. And don't take my word for it, folks. If you're watching and attended, please comment in the comment section below to share your own personal assessment. But what I just want to let folks know is if you didn't register for the conference and are now thinking, darn it, I really wish I had. And I can tell you folks, it could not have been more timely given all that's going on here. You still can buy a replay of the entire event. Just go to thoughtfulmoney.com/conference and you can buy the replay there. It's got all the presentations, all the live Q&A, all the resources we mentioned, an archive of the live chat from the day. So you'll get the entire experience. All right, Steph, well now look to our main event here. So I'll basically just concede the floor to you, but just to tee it up, we've had a lot of discussion of late in the media about recession risk, which has finally really fell out of the headlines last summer. Everybody was confident we had achieved the no landing. But all of a sudden, starting about three, four weeks ago, people started getting nervous again. Now there's a huge debate. And I think one of the things you want to comment on is, well, I think both you and I should believe that economics is factual, data-driven and should never be politicized or made a partisan topic. There does seem to be some partisan element coming in here that I think you think distracts, detracts is the wrong thing to be doing when you're facing a real problem like this, correct?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (3:52)
Yeah, and I mean, to be fair, I sort of contributed to that back at the end of last year when we were getting all these crazy economic reports that seemed far too strong given what we were seeing beneath the surface of the economy and what consumers were expressing in the sentiment surveys, etc. And I think I facetiously commented many times that once Biden's out of office, we'll get all the revisions that show that we were actually in recession back then, but it'll be laid at the next administration's feet. So I can understand some of that to some degree, but the reality is that the economic data is really very poor. And again, I was arguing last year that we were actually in recession, and pretty much the only indicator that didn't reflect that was the real GDP report. And to believe that, you have to buy into the government's counting of inflation, which I don't. I don't know if any of your viewers out there do. But basically every other economic statistic out there was in recession territory, whether it was housing activity or consumer sentiment numbers or real retail sales, or the share of broad consumer spending that was going to housing and health care, blah, blah, blah. I mean, you go on to have the line, leading indicators, inverted yield curve. So now we flash forward to 2025 and we have a new administration. And when data comes out that suggests that we are actually slowing dramatically from wherever we were in 2024 and people start worrying about a recession. A lot of the talking heads out there in the partisan world are dismissing that as just sort of liberal whiny talking points. And I think we saw this really on Friday when the University of Michigan sentiment survey came out and it surprisingly showed another deterioration.