TrendMacro Chief Investment Officer Don Luskin provides insight on the Federal Reserve's moves on 'Making Money.'
Media Appearances
"We’re going to have outright deflation." Luskin sees now as an opportunity to lay out some shorts in anticipation of weakness to come.
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin says a growing economy is 'like a growing boy' on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro Chief Investment Officer Donald Luskin joins ‘Mornings with Maria’ to discuss the Fed’s potential to continue to raise rates and its impact on bank stocks.
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin details how investors can tread an unpredictable market on 'Making Money.'
FOX Business host Charles Payne and TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin weigh in on the Sam Bankman-Fried saga and term limits for officials on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin unpacks disinflation and investing in stocks on 'Making Money.'
Fox News contributor Liz Peek and Trend Macrolytics CIO Donald Luskin discuss former President Donald Trump and President Biden’s South Carolina visits on ‘The Evening Edit.’
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin gives his take on the Federal Reserve's response to rising consumer prices on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald L. Luskin weighs in on House Speaker McCarthy's debt deal with President Biden on 'The Evening Edit.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald Luskin provides insight on the Fed's response to inflation on 'Mornings with Maria.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin gives his take on the debt bill on 'Making Money.'
The money supply doesn’t tell the whole story.
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin provides insight on inflation on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro Chief Investment Officer Don Luskin provides insight on the debt ceiling debate and the Fed's policies on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin gives his take on businesses throwing in the towel on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin reacts to the arraignment of President Trump and provides investing advice on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin calls out Fed Chair Powell's leadership on 'Making Money.'
Inflation has everyone’s attention. In this podcast, economist and financial analyst Don Luskin explains to IPI’s Merrill Matthews why the rapid increase in the money supply caused the inflation. And the declining money supply means inflation is on its way down.
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin reacts to inaccurate data surveys that erode public trust in the market on 'Making Money.'
...the sharp decline in the money supply that began last year will lead to rapid disinflation in the coming months and perhaps a recession. Wall Street forecaster Ed Hyman of Evercore ISI and Don Luskin of Trend Macro are anticipating similar inflation declines and are warning about the risk of recession. They note that Milton Friedman said monetary policy works with “long and variable lags” of a year or two.
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin reacts to President Biden's response to the Chinese spy balloon on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer gives his take on the Federal Reserve's response to record-high inflation on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer reacts to the FTX scandal and reveals the recipe for a good life on 'Making Money.'
Regarding Donald Luskin’s op-ed “The Feds Don’t Want You Betting on Elections” (Nov. 2): Listed futures contracts must serve some commercial purpose, such as hedging grain or currencies. A futures contract for $2 on Backfire in the third race at Pimlico, however, would be gambling. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is saying that electoral futures are gambling, not commercial.
TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald Luskin argues the impact of shutting down election betting silences 'free speech about politics.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Don Luskin provides insight on the United States' GDP on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald Luskin reacts to PayPal fining users $2,500 for sharing misinformation on 'Making Money.'
Mr. Luskin founded a company, Trend Macrolytics, after a long and distinguished career in the investment sector of the economy... Three years ago, Mr. Luskin relocated his business to Dallas from Chicago... As Luskin says you can see it in their eyes. He told me "When there is opportunity, upward mobility, the way people act accelerates that opportunity into a virtuous cycle. When there is upward mobility, everyone you meet might be someone who can help you move up, so you are always nice, always positive, always helpful, always respectful, always putting your best foot forward. That attitude creates bonds of commitment and trust that are essential to the environment of opportunity. It is therefore a self-fulfilling prophecy. The opposite is true too. When people think there is no opportunity, they act rude, bitter, resentful, untrusting. Even if there were opportunity, that would destroy it."
TrendMacro chief investment officer shreds President Joe Biden's comments on record-high inflation and weighs in on government programs on 'Making Money with Charles Payne.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald Luskin provides insight on energy production on 'Making Money.'
Is inflation rolling over? What caused it? How long will it take to get back to normal?
Don Luskin, Chief Investment Officer of TrendMacro, explains why inflation is already in decline and is going to recede faster than most have expected. With IPI Resident Scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews and IPI President Tom Giovanetti.
TrendMacro CIO weighs in on states sending out checks to combat rising inflation on 'Making Money with Charles Payne.'
The government wants you to think its policies are reducing inflation. This isn’t the truth. Inflation is going away because government money infusion is over. Inflation is always a monetary problem of too much money chasing too few goods. The COVID lockdown saw the greatest infusion of money in the shortest time in the history of the world at a time when the economy that was shut down. That spending is over and the economy is turning out goods and services again, so the cause of the inflation has ended. Neither the inflation reduction act nor the Federal Reserve raising interest rates is responsible for the waning inflation, but they could bring it back.
TrendMacro Chief Investment Officer Don Luskin gives his take on the Federal Reserve's response to record-high inflation on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin calls the push to hire more IRS agents an 'invasive' 'state apparatus.'
"Since the onset of the pandemic, lawmakers have spent about $6 trillion on various income-support programs for households and businesses," wrote Donald Luskin, chief investment officer of TrendMacro, in a piece in The Wall Street Journal. "That all dropped straight into the bank accounts that are part of M2, which also grew about $6 trillion over precisely the same period." 2 is cash in circulation along with liquid bank and money-market fund balances.
Luskin quoted famed economist Milton Friedman who said that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon". Growth in M2 peaked at an astronomical 27 percent in February 2021, but has been falling since, Luskin said.
TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald Luskin gives his take on the consequences of rate hikes from the Federal Reserve on 'Making Money.'
Paul Gigot interviews TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin on jobs day -- why the drop in labor force participation, and why is all the job growth in red states?
Trendmacro CIO Donald Luskin reacts to Jay Powell's handling of record-high inflation and flight cancellations on 'Making Money with Charles Payne.'
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin reacts to the Biden administration allegedly downplaying recession possibilities while Americans struggle with record-high inflation on 'Making Money.'
Don Luskin and Rep. Lee Zeldin provide insight on record-high inflation on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro CIO weighs in on the controversy over the Tesla CEO's bid to control Twitter on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald Luskin weighs in on rising crime after the Brooklyn train shooting suspect was arrested and gives his take on inflation on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro chief investment officer provides economic strategies to lower inflation and interest rates on 'Making Money.'
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin says the Biden administration has a 'knowledge problem' about the trucking industry.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin argues the Federal Reserve can't really do anything about inflation.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses California's green energy goals on 'Making Money.'
IRF’s JP Smith is joined by Donald Luskin of TrendMacro in this riveting podcast where Donald iterates his view that the post-pandemic bull market is not over. Recalling past crises, Donald remarks that such events promote rapid innovation. In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, technological innovations have partly facilitated vast growth. Thus, despite the challenge of reliably measuring productivity and a workforce reduced by 5 million, US GDP on a real inflation adjusted basis is far higher than pre-pandemic levels. Addressing the elephant in the room, the looming impact of the Omicron variant, Donald draws on TrendMacro's COVID-19 pandemic and impact of lockdowns model which provides insights on the supposed benefits, or lack of benefits, from implementing lockdowns. Additionally, he expresses his view that inflation is transitory and that the bond market does not reflect the views of many prominent economic thinkers. Donald further shares his thoughts on commodities and in particular, oil – which is experiencing a demand shortfall due to reduced global mobility.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin argues Democrats 'just want to put on a show' by slamming Sen. Joe Manchin given House representatives are up for reelection next year.
Don Luskin of TrendMacrolytics writes in a note to clients today: "Global real rates and yields are now the lowest in the history of the data." His data goes back decades and he notes that 10-year government bonds in the U.S., Europe and much of the rest of the world are yielding less than inflation. Lately in the United States, inflation has been outrunning the yield on the 10-year Treasury by more than five full percentage points. This brutal negative real return is worse than anything investors have received since an inflation event that really did prove to be transitory.
Tull therefore invited Dunn, Grossman and Luskin over to lunch at Morgan Stanley's opulent dining room to explain how they wanted to launch a series of exchange-traded index funds that tracked international stockmarkets. SPDR was hardly a roaring success, but Luskin seemed particularly keen on the idea. Luskin, a college dropout turned options trader, was unusually abrasive for BGI, a company that was dominated mostly by clean-cut soft-spoken former academics like Grossman, who would debate and analyze everything to death. But even Luskin's detractors admit that he was brilliant, that he brought a lot of drive and trading expertise to the organization, and that his bluntness could be useful at a place in love with never-ending Socratic debate. Luskin handed the practical task of building to suite of ETFs to Amy Schioldager, a fund manager responsible for BGI's international index funds. "Make it happen," he tersely instructed her, with little instruction on how to do it.
One purported difference is that Mr. Powell will be more independent than Ms. Brainard, who is close to Treasury and a partisan Democrat. As Donald Luskin of TrendMacro notes, she struck a dovish tone in September before the 2016 election, but on the eve of the Trump Presidency in January 2017 she suddenly discovered that the Fed was close to its inflation and unemployment targets. Two months later she was calling for tighter money. As she has auditioned for the top job, her recent speeches have embraced the Democratic Party’s progressive passions—climate change, racial and gender equity, “financial inclusion.”
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin joins 'Making Money' to discuss who's responsible for flooding the market with money.
A Wall Street Journal article by Donald L. Luskin of TrendMacro, a global investment strategy consulting firm, was titled "The Failed Lockdown Experiment." ...In other words, lockdowns may have worsened the Covid-19 problem. Was the enormous damage inflicted by the lockdowns another case of scare politics terrorizing America and the world? A case can be made that it was.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin, Kingsview Wealth Management CIO Scott Martin and CenterSquare Investment Management strategist Uma Pattarkine discuss vaccine rates in America, government spending, productivity, the Federal Reserve and today’s markets.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses vaccine mandates, labor shortage, states' job growth after opting out of unemployment benefits and Florida start-up funding.
Donald Luskin, Trendmacro CIO, and Ed Yardeni, Yardeni Research President, discuss Elizabeth Warren’s recent comments about Biden’s decision to renominate Jerome Powell as the Federal Chair on ‘Making Money’
Maria discusses Democrats pushing for a $3.5 trillion spending plan with TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin reacts to watchdog groups questioning lawmakers' late disclosure of stock transactions, stagflation and the Democrats' spending bill.
Trendmacro CIO reflects on how Dick's Sporting Goods was founded and reveals why capitalism allows businesses to succeed on 'Making Money'
Why we're in a once-in-a-lifetime productivity revolution -- and why the Fed isn't really using reverse repos to secretly tighten policy.
As for the risk of another shock from Democrats’ partisan tax-and-spend plan to be enacted on top of any infrastructure deal, Don Luskin at TrendMacrolytics sees an encouraging message in the markets. What has seemed puzzling is that rip-roaring stocks suggest a vibrant economic future, while very low bond yields often signal slow growth ahead. Mr. Luskin first addresses these seemingly mixed signals.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin on China Stocks, FOMC Minutes and taxes.
Nancy Tengler & Don Luskin on WABC with Larry Kudlow.
Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot interviews TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin about the May jobs report and the Biden budget.
Mr. Biden has also promised better long-term growth with his economic slogan, “Build Back Better.” But, as our contributor Donald Luskin asks, then where’s the “better” in the Biden economic forecasts?
Tracking data show the COVID-19 pandemic taught us many things, including: masks work, lockdowns don't, and the American people and economy are amazingly resilient. Prepare for a savings and technology induced boom period.
Believe it or not, $400 billion to unionize health-care workers.
Our contributor Donald Luskin’s TrendMacro firm reports that the share of the population unable to work due to businesses affected by the pandemic fell to 4.4% in March. Last July it was still 12%. The TrendMacro social distancing index based on cell-phone mobility is also down close to pre-pandemic levels.
Donald Luskin, one of my favorite analysts going back to the days when he regularly debunked Paul Krugman, has studied the effectiveness of wearing masks (as opposed to mask mandates) in preventing infections. He employed the same basic methodology he uses to dispute the effectiveness of lockdowns.
Luskin found strong evidence that, unlike lockdowns, masks are effective. You can listen to his nuanced explanation (about 7 minutes) here.
Larry Kudlow leads the discussion with Chief Investment Strategist, Stephanie Link and Trend Macro CIO, Don Luskin.
The hiring pace should escalate in March as the great national reopening continues. Investment adviser Donald Luskin notes that his social-distancing index, which tracks cellphone data, improved sharply after the week in February when the Bureau of Labor Statistics takes its jobs sample.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses COVID lockdowns, stimulus payments and inflation concerns.
“Do We Need More Stimulus?,” asks Donald Luskin of TrendMacrolytics in an investment research note today. Mr. Luskin writes:
"In client calls this week, we’re hearing a strong consensus that the economy is in a sustainable V-shaped recovery, and that 2021 will be a very good year. We’re not going to say this consensus is wrong. Indeed, it’s what we were nearly alone in predicting all the way back in March and April... Will there be short-term setbacks? Of course, and the formation of a consensus is what usually provokes one... If anything, our biggest difference from the optimistic consensus is that we’re now thinking past recovery to expansion, and we don’t see it as a stretch that 2021 could be a downright boom."
A downright boom? Mr. Luskin continues making his case:
"US households have accumulated $2.5 trillion in personal savings this year, unable or too cautious to spend the prior stimulus money. That’s a moneybomb of pent-up demand equal to 11.8% of GDP, and it will detonate next year when the “third wave” of Covid-19 tops out and 50 million inoculations with the new vaccine are administered through January."
How might strategic election litigation impact #stockmarketinvesting? @DonLuskin joins me to discuss.
Donald Luskin, Chief Investment Officer at TrendMacro, recited stats that he said showed that states that did shut downs didn't have outcomes any better than those that stayed open.
"My contribution to helping with policies is to try to show you some evidence of the policies that we, and everyone else in the world, have tried so far have been an utter failure. And we had I'm sure the best of intentions going in but you know what they say about the path to hell," he said.
"Now I know this is gonna be very, very hard for you to believe because from first principles if you have an infectious disease, I admit it makes all the sense in the world to try to isolate people from each other in order to prevent them from spreading it. But it turns out to not be that way. And, by the way, we all have a big investment in having done this and it would be very embarrassing if we caused the depression for nothing but that is what the backward looking empirical evidence tells you," he said.
A series of studies – a July 21, 2020 research paper in The Lancet and in August 2020, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 27719 and a TrendMacro statistical analysis – have made the case that the lockdowns have been ineffective against the coronavirus.
In a discussion on the national economy pre-and post-COVID-19, Kudlow was interviewed by Donald Luskin, chief investment officer for Dallas-based TrendMacro.
Even as a volatile political environment contributes to uncertainty, Kudlow said the nation is seeing solid recovery signs – positive numbers in housing, retail, automobile sales, manufacturing and unemployment. The V-shaped recovery, Kudlow said, is “self-sustaining and will carry us to better than 20% growth in the third and fourth quarters.”
Kudlow said the Texas economy is in far better shape than other states. “Texas will come out of this pandemic as strong as ever – maybe even stronger – thanks to its pro-business and pro-entrepreneurial attitude,” that he added is “attracting people from all over the country.”
Trump fans are hoping for a replay of the 2016 shocker, with the president running up an Electoral College win in spite of worrisome polls. They could prove correct for this reason: the enormous power of incumbency, a force that today’s pundits tend to minimize. A power that, according to Don Luskin of Trend Macrolytics, grants an incumbent president 81 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win reelection...
Luskin’s TrendMacrolytics election model predicted Trump’s victory in 2016, and, applied retroactively, has correctly called every election since 1952. The purely quantitative model uses no polling data but instead relies on political and economic variables.
Commenting on the 1.4 million jobs gained in August, Luskin wrote, “This datapoint gives Trump 53 additional electoral college votes in our quantitative election model, which now forecasts he will win by a margin of 355.”
Scoot on over to Trend Macrolytics which has correctly predicted the victor in the Electoral College in the past 17 presidential election cycles (1952-2016). An updated analysis has flipped over the last six weeks to show Trump now winning definitively in the Electoral College, 410 electoral votes to 128 electoral votes. Do I think Trump will break 400 electoral votes? Probably not. But the only thing that Trend has gotten wrong since 1952 is the margin of victory. It has always correctly predicted the ultimate winner.
Economy slowly recovers as businesses navigate complicated reopening process; TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald Luskin weighs in.
Friday’s blowout jobs report for August reveals a labor market and economy that continue to recover in encouraging fashion... The recovery after the 2008-2009 recession took three years to make this much progress, and the jobless rate was still 8.1% in August 2012...
Our contributor Donald Luskin notes that the number of Americans receiving Social Security disability payments is 9.8 million, one million fewer than in August 2012.
Trendmacro CEO Donald Luskin says his research has shown there is no correlation between the degree states locked down to the controlling coronavirus or deaths from coronavirus.
SAN DIEGO (KUSI) – Economic lockdowns were the government’s answer to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were told it would be short period of time to get through it.
Chief Investment Officer of the analytics firm “TrendMacro,” Donald Luskin, wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Failed Experiment of COVID Lockdowns” to detail why he believes they did not work.
Luskin started the piece writing, “the results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.”
Luskin explained that the period of time with the strictest lockdowns didn’t result in a reduction of spread whatsoever. Luskin wrote, “Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.”
Luskin joined KUSI’s Paul Rudy on Good Morning San Diego to discuss his article in depth.
TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin adds his perspective on how a Biden administration could impact the economy and markets, the difference between being rich and being wealthy and a proposed California wealth tax.
What Happened to Non-Covid Care? Don Luskin of TrendMacrolytics writes today in a note to clients:
"The single worst contributor to the worst quarter in the history of US GDP was health care services. It contracted less than some other sectors, but it is such a large share of overall GDP it has an outsized impact. Hospitals and clinics were shut to everyone but Covid-2019 patients, so standard treatments, tests and screenings could not take place. The capacity needed for Covid patients was wildly overestimated, which itself is good news. But there is both an economic and public health cost to denying health care to other patients."
Consumer spending fell 34.6% and accounted for some 25 percentage points of the GDP decline. ...the biggest surprise was the plunge in health-care spending during a health-care crisis. Health care represents about 12% of the U.S. economy and its collapse subtracted 9.5 percentage points from GDP.
How does that happen in a pandemic? The answer, as our friend Don Luskin points out, is that politicians panicked in March and waited for a surge of Covid-19 patients that the pandemic modelers told them would arrive. Blessedly, the modelers were wrong, and far fewer hospital and intensive-care beds were needed. But the economic harm from stopping all elective surgeries and barring visits to doctors was severe and unnecessary.
It was also a terrible public-health blunder. That harm will play out for years as Americans discover cancer, heart-disease and other diagnoses that were missed or delayed.
On their business network, FOX brought on Donald Luskin to provide a take on this new information, and he certainly delivered, stating that:
“…I guess I’m one of those people who plans never to retire. I mean, is bowling that interesting? Is fishing that interesting? I happen to love my work. Why do I want to stop it? It’s not like it hurts. Why would I stop it? This is great. What a great country where we have the opportunity to keep working. What a miracle where our lives are long enough and we’re healthy enough and mentally alert enough so we don’t have to retire like generations before us. This is a great blessing. You should embrace it.”
Donald Luskin, if I’m being honest, deserves some credit. It’s actually incredible how someone could encompass every single thing people hate about capitalism, and fit it in to such a small number of sentences.
Writing from Dallas this week, Don Luskin of Trend Macrolytics reports: “Joy and renewal are palpably in the air. We wish all our clients and friends the patience and good health to endure what we hope are the final throes of the Covid-19 crisis, and the resiliency to enjoy a speedy re-opening.”
He adds that as economies reopen, “The early adopters will be the healthy young, who have probably chafed the most under the boring and repressive rigors of lockdown, and who – it is now becoming known – are largely invulnerable to Covid-2019 anyway.” Mr. Luskin predicts: "FOCI (fear of Covid infection) will be replaced by FOMO (fear of missing out)."
Readers have by now learned to be skeptical of predictions about the virus, but are no doubt hoping Mr. Luskin is right on target.