Stephanie Pomboy: We're Not Out Of The Woods Yet

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:00)
The NBA playoffs are here, and I'm getting my best in on FanDuel. Talk to me, Chuck GPT, what do you know?

**Adam Taggart** (0:06)
All sorts of interest and stuff. Even Charles Barkley's Greatest Fear.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:09)
Hey, nobody needs to know that.

**Adam Taggart** (0:11)
New customers bet $5 to get 200 in bonus bets if you win FanDuel, America's number one sports book.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:17)
21 plus and president select states.

**Adam Taggart** (0:18)
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**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:28)
Gambling problem.

**Adam Taggart** (0:28)
Call 1-800-GAMBLER. All right. We should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host. Very happy to be back here for our bi-weekly Wednesday fun sessions with the wonderful Stephanie Pomboy, who is now in her new place. Stephanie, how are you?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:47)
Yeah, I'm great. Always fun to be with you. And it seems like it just gets more crazy every time we convene here. We're thinking, well, what will we have to talk about? And it's just like you used that expression of drinking from a fire hose. And I feel like that, especially today.

**Adam Taggart** (1:04)
So, yeah, it's crazy. I mean, you know, there's an old saying, what there are years where nothing happens, and then, sorry, decades where nothing happens, and then there are moments where activity happens. It totally feels like that. It feels like it's already a different world, even though we just saw you, what, three weeks ago? Yeah. Okay. So look, lots to get into here. I think when we were talking yesterday about what to focus on today, I heard you say, Steph, hey, we should really just tackle the question. All of a sudden, we've had so many kind of positive headlines around trade and deals announced and China's at the table. The world seems to be breathing a collective sigh of relief around the whole terafors. And I think the big question is, is that justified? Can we unclench and is the worst behind us, or do we still need to be vigilant here? Real quick before we dive into that, I just want to make a quick shameless personal plea here to folks.
My ex account, Twitter account, is sitting here at 99,000 followers. So I'm this close to getting to 100,000 followers. So folks, if you don't already follow me on X, I'll put up my X handle, it's at MenloBear. Give it a follow, help push us into the six digits. And the reason why you want to follow me on Twitter and Stephanie on Twitter as well, we'll put up Stephanie's handle in a second.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (2:36)
Yeah, I need a lot more support to get to any milestone than you do.

**Adam Taggart** (2:40)
You're not that far behind me, Steph.
But if you enjoy these videos and the discussions that we have, like Steph and I have bi-weekly, it's great. But if you want to just listen to our stream of consciousness during a week, or I tweet a little bit more than Stephanie. So for me during the day, if you want to hear about the headlines that get my attention or observations I have about breaking developments and things like that, that's what X is really good for. All right. So, oh, and let me see, do I actually even have a little banner here for my X account? I don't. So let me just create it and put it up here. It's one of the benefits of this cool little feature that we have here. Okay. So there it's at Menlo Bear and that's on X. And I've got Stephanie's here too. Hers is at S Pomboy.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (3:33)
Thank you for saving me the trouble of trying to figure that out.

**Adam Taggart** (3:36)
No worries. Yeah. All right. Well, look, like I said, Steph, lots to talk about. So why don't we just dive right in? So in terms of the trade war here and the world's, you know, all of a sudden growing excitement, the markets suddenly bearish again, S&P actually up now for the year. Is the worst behind us? Are we out of the woods or are there key risks that we still need to keep in mind here?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (4:00)
Yeah, well, I mean, I think we can't dismiss the fact that this is a very positive development, the weekend's news with, you know, China and the US arranging sort of a cease fire, especially given what seemed to be this kind of attitude on the Chinese part that they didn't want to suggest that they had any real urgency to come to the negotiating table. So I think in that regard, the fact that they did agree to this 90-day ceasefire and everyone's kind of stood down suggests that China really isn't in quite the strong position that they imagined that they were in. So it would seem to be an admission on their part that they need to come up with a deal. But even that being said, for the very moment that Trump started talking about tariffs and this whole tariff diplomacy and resetting trade, I wrote a piece called scapegoating. And the topic was this whole tariff trade war is going to steal attention from what is really the most important issue for the US economy. And that to be the broken record that I am, I think is the stubbornly high level of interest rates.