The Investor's Dilemma: Ride The Bubble Or Seek Safety? | Peter St Onge

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**Peter St Onge** (1:00)
Zooming out, so you go to war with the army you have, and, you know, do we live in a Ponzi financial system where everything is, you know, gamed and juked and full of predators preying on the guys who don't have insider information? Yes, all of that is absolutely true. However, this is the world we live in, and so you make the best of it. So, you know, I would without a doubt prefer that we just get rid of the Fed tomorrow. Markets would crash, the financial system would completely implode because it's, you know, 10 to 121 leverage. Good riddance should have happened in 2008 But having said, the odds of that happening the next year are very low. And so in the meantime, I play the AI bubble and I edge with gold and Bitcoin.

**Adam Taggart** (1:47)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Suddenly, signs of systemic stress are cropping up all around us. In the public debt markets, credit spreads are on the rise after years of dormancy. In the private credit markets, defaults and counterparty risk concerns have moved to the forefront. Volatility has returned to the stock market as doubts of AI spending sustainability mount. And worldwide, suspicions of fiat currency debasement are going mainstream. So, where is all this headed? To discuss, we're fortunate to welcome macro, market, and monetary analyst Peter St Onge to the program. Peter, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Peter St Onge** (2:27)
Thank you for having me on, Adam.

**Adam Taggart** (2:30)
Hey, Peter. So, we got to meet in person the other week at the New Orleans Investment Conference, and you were on, I think, a number of panels there, but I definitely got to sit and watch you on one. I was very impressed with how you handled yourself, and we got to talking in the green room and said, hey, let's get you on Thoughtful Money. So, thank you for making this happen so quickly.

**Peter St Onge** (2:51)
Yeah. Thank you for getting me on. I've been interested in coming on for a long time. I've been following the show for a long time and love the way you approach things and break them down. So, yeah, excited.

**Adam Taggart** (3:00)
Oh, all right. Well, thanks. All right. Well, look, then why don't we just roll up our sleeves and get into it? So, we'd like to talk to you kind of about all the themes that I just mentioned there in the intro. But before we get specific, since it's your first time on the channel, let me hit you with my general starter question, which is, what's your current assessment of the economy and financial markets?

**Peter St Onge** (3:20)
So, it's always scary to give a big picture because you are implicitly valuing things, right? You're implicitly predicting, let's say, the stocks will go up or something like that. So, I think this is why a lot of commentators sort of try to dodge the point, and they try to stick with the small things so that they never have to describe the entire elephant. But having said, I am broadly optimistic about the economy. I think we're in mid-cycle. I do not think we're in late cycle. The liquidity indicators, the M2 GDP is on fire. Just when you look at the macro, it's popular, I think, for a lot of commenters to sort of say that the sky is always falling. But if you look at the big numbers, I think right now, we're actually in a pretty good spot near term. So, talking the next two or four years. Now, of course, long-term, we're a complete disaster. We're a train going off a cliff because of the fiscal collapse. But I think near term, we're doing pretty well. And I think the biggest stories on that are really three things. So, one of them is that the Fed is no longer afraid of inflation the way they were after the Biden inflation they created. So, they're cutting, they just ended QT, or rather that's going to end in 12 days from now. So, that's going to be a burst of relative liquidity coming to the market.