US Stocks To Underperform For For Years Ahead | Kevin Muir

**Kevin Muir** (0:00)
If you think about it, it'll just be the whole situation that we've had in the past decade, where every money has just kind of continually moved into the US. It'll then just move out. And I don't think it'll move out in some sort of crash scenario, where all of a sudden everyone leaves, unless there's something really dramatic that Trump does. It'll just be at the margin, it'll be more and more money coming out and forcing this thing out. And so we're going to see years of underperformance of the US stock market.

**Adam Taggart** (0:38)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. There's a lot of urgency right now in America to reduce the fiscal deficit via the new Department of Government Efficiency, and to also reduce its trade deficit via the threat of tariffs. Both initiatives are creating a lot of disruption right now and have their fair share of vocal supporters and detractors. So are they likely to work? And at what cost? To discuss, we're fortunate to speak today with market veteran Kevin Muir, founder and editor of The Macro Tourist, the highly acclaimed newsletter that currently ranks as one of the top financial sub stacks in the entire world. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Kevin Muir** (1:19)
Adam, it's always a pleasure to be on your show. Thanks for having me.

**Adam Taggart** (1:22)
Thank you. And I appreciate you bringing such a great attitude when there's a little uncharacteristic tension between our countries right now, you being in Canada, us being here in America. But we love you guys and very much love you, Kevin.

**Kevin Muir** (1:36)
Listen, Americans are terrific people, and I'm sure we'll all work it out, and eventually we'll figure it all out. And I realize that's just one person talking, and the vast majority of people have much different attitude.

**Adam Taggart** (1:48)
Yeah, great. Well, and our president has been talking with some colorful language about maybe referring to Canada as the 51st state, and I've now seen Canadians starting to refer to the US as the 11th province. Well, that was a good turnaround.

**Kevin Muir** (2:08)
So Adam, I was going to say, I can forgive you as long as we beat you in hockey. And then that was the key. So I would have been a lot more upset if we had lost in hockey than anything else.

**Adam Taggart** (2:19)
All right. And let me say congratulations. You guys played a great game. So anyways, yes, I'm glad that we can all stay friends through all this. All right. Well, look, it mentioned the intro there, that is a lot of focus right now on reducing those twin tariffs. I know that you've been writing about this. We'll talk about that in a second. Real quick, let's just kick it off with the usual general starting point, Kevin. What's your current assessment of the global economy and financial markets?

**Kevin Muir** (2:47)
Well, I've been saying this for a bit ever since Trump was elected that the world is changing. It's changing in a big way. And one of the things that I've been highlighting is that we're returning to kind of the environment of the 1980s.
When those Macro gurus, the hedge fund pioneers like Soros and Steinhardt, were making their fortunes trading big-picture kind of asset classes. And I suspect that that's about what we're about to embark on. And I think we've already seen it in terms of the various moves that we've had. All you have to do is look at the kind of relative moves on the stock markets of the last month or two to see the fact that now all of a sudden, it's not just the US going up. We see things like European stock screaming. And then we see stuff like, you know, the dollar getting traded in a big way, or gold going to new all-time highs. These are all asset class moves that we're going to experience going forward that's going to continue. And I've been kind of harking and just drilling this into people's head that in the past, it was easy to kind of not worry about Macro. A lot of the economies were, you know, basically intertwined. There was not a lot of conflict. There was not a lot of worries about that.

**Adam Taggart** (4:08)
Well, you just said that you said to buy long and set on your hands and just hold.

**Kevin Muir** (4:12)
That's right. But more than that, the policy of the different countries were, you know, they were, there's a spirit of cooperation. There was no sorts of conflict between them in terms of economic policy. Sure, at the margin, you might have seen something where someone was slightly more easy or someone was a little more letting their currency go. But it wasn't these sorts of really distorted markets that we're seeing now in terms of people being very upset about the price of their currency or the level of rates. And I suspect that what we're going to see going forward is much more of this. And I really caution everyone, go out. If you haven't been spending any time on Macro in the last little while, get yourself up to speed because it's going to matter more and more.