Media Appearances

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses the impeachment inquiry and provides logistics on the China tariffs and the hype surrounding them.

As President Trump announces he will leave New York for Florida, TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses a ‘mass exodus’ from blue states, like California and New York.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses the strength of the U.S. economy, despite differing opinions.

Another model, assembled by Trend Macrolytics, accurately predicts every presidential victor back to 1952 by focusing on the effects of the economy and incumbency on the electoral college, according to Donald Luskin, the firm’s chief investment officer. It projects Trump will win reelection next year with 354 electoral votes — a margin that seems staggering on its face. “To get something that high, you have to go back to Ronald Reagan, and that may not be possible in the red-blue world we live in now,” Luskin tells me. 

The model stakes first-term incumbents with a heavy advantage. (That edge curdles into a disadvantage for candidates running to extend their party’s hold on the White House into a third or fourth term. See: George H.W. Bush in 1992 or Al Gore in 2000.) And then it factors in six economic indicators, including oil prices, personal income, inflation and tax burdens. 

One seemingly important measure the model doesn’t include: The president’s approval rating. Luskin says it actually doesn’t carry much predictive power. And besides, Trump’s remains in the middle of the pack for presidents around the 1,000-day mark in their first term.

Of his own model’s projection, Luskin says “it is directionally correct, and I’m willing to put real money that Trump is going to be reelected, assuming all the model inputs are the same as they are today.” But he adds that “you and I and Mark Zandi should take a humility pill here. We still live in a world of imponderables, and these are very rough navigation tools.”

Trendmacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses the record-low unemployment rate, the Federal Reserve and the 2020 election.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin reacts to the August jobs report and the U.S.-China trade dispute.

 TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses how China is hurting from President Trump’s tariffs.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses the ongoing U.S.-China tariff war and why he is critical of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

An economic model developed by investor Donald Luskin suggests that Trump would receive 340 electoral votes, significantly more than the 270 needed to win the presidency.

But he cautioned that the new tariffs presented an “unlikely but credible nightmare scenario” in which China spiraled into a recession. That could then lead to a downturn in the United States and erode the president’s relative strength on the economy.

“It’s not that we can’t take China down,” Luskin said. “It’s that we can’t take China down without taking ourselves down.”

An excerpt from Donald Donald and Andrew Greta’s I am John Galt: Today’s Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It (Wiley). Note the last two paragraphs refer to his death. When the book was written, that event was still in the future.

Trend Macro Chief Investment Officer Donald Luskin on the economic factors that lead to young people having a sense of entitlement and the state of the markets.

"Let's ask Trend Macrolytics CIO Donald Luskin," Payne continued, introducing the guest onto the show. "These kinds of polls are always around. Bank rate does some things, other folks. It is always alarming, 32 percent say they will retire before age 65, which might be unrealistic but 23 percent say never. Is that worrisome for you, Donald?"

"Doesn't worry me personally," Luskin responded. "I guess I'm one of those people who plans never to retire."

The 65-year-old Chief Investment Officer appear to then criticize the notion of retirement, before enthusiastically praising America for allowing its citizens to work until they die.

In a chat with Fox Business Network, Luskin went on to blow off the very idea of retiring and heap praise on the notion of endlessly working.

“What do people do when they retire? You know, how do you spend a day?” he said. “I mean, is bowling that interesting? Is fishing that interesting?”

Luskin says he loves his job. “Why do I want to stop it? It’s not like it hurts.” He’s lucky in that way. Not everybody, of course, wants to work until the grave, yet a growing number of Americans feel they’re left with not choice.

About one-third of older adults feel unprepared, while 56% of younger adults say they don’t feel prepared for retirement, according to the poll.

“It is part of your destiny to be productive and to work,” Luskin said, acknowledging that this concept means different things to different people.

Prior to Mr. Xi’s agreement this morning to meet with Mr. Trump next week, the always interesting Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics had predicted that Beijing would come back to the table because of a “game changer” in the negotiations. According to Mr. Luskin, a separate Trump negotiation recently put Mr. Xi on notice that China was not going to win a tariff battle with the United States. In a Friday video, Mr. Luskin observed:

"Mexico just agreed to expend its resources to stem the flow of migrants from Central America through Mexico into the United States. In essence, Trump just delivered on the biggest, craziest campaign promise in history. He just used tariffs to get Mexico to agree to pay for the wall."

It’s worth noting that the Fair model is hardly alone in its forecast. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has looked at 12 models, and Mr. Trump wins in all of them. Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics has reached the same conclusion in his examination of the Electoral College.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin on the trade negotiations between the U.S. and China.

Meanwhile Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics generally sees the art of the deal:

"Just because we are seeing such things now does not mean the deal is falling apart. To be sure, it might mean that. Mistakes can happen. But more likely it signals the highly turbulent edge of chaos – the existential interface between “yes” and “no” – that all negotiations have to pass through before they end.

"...And at the end of the day, we can’t rule out that Trump never wanted a trade deal to begin with, but began his trade war to break China’s economy before it overtakes the world – indeed to break China itself, the way Ronald Reagan broke the Soviet Union... But remember the fundamental truth here. Trump wants you to worry about just that kind of possibility. He wants you to think he’s crazy. He wants to you to fear him. Because if you aren’t afraid of him, Xi Jinping won’t be either. And if Xi isn’t afraid, he has absolutely no reason to give a millimeter on trade."

If stoking alarm among the advocates of open markets is part of the plan here, Mr. Trump’s mission is accomplished.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin on President Trump’s Federal Reserve picks and whether earnings will continue to propel the stock market higher.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin on the Trump administration’s push to make a trade deal with China.

“The economy is just so damn strong right now and by all historic precedent the incumbent should run away with it,” Donald Luskin, the chief investment officer of TrendMacrolytics, a research firm that predicted Trump’s 2016 win, told Politico. “I just don’t see how the blue wall could resist all that.”

...Still, the economy is generally seen as the most important factor when it comes to how voters cast their ballot and Luskin says there would need to be a major decline in economic growth and uptick in unemployment for Trump to lose. Luskin’s current model – which tracks GDP growth, gas prices, inflation, disposable income, tax burden and payrolls – has Trump winning in a blowout with 294 electoral votes.

Economist Don Luskin discusses the U.S.-China trade negotiations and why President Trump is keeping tariffs on China in place.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses how the U.S. is allowing citizens to sue certain Cuban businesses amid the crisis in Venezuela.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin and Belpointe chief strategist David Nelson on the state of the U.S. stock market and whether people should invest in China.

TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin discusses how Russia is helping disputed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and whether the U.S. should block the country’s oil shipments.

TrendMacro CEO Donald Luskin on the U.S. economic outlook and Trump administration trade negotiations with China.

Investors remain on edge as earnings woes raise fears over global growth. Will the markets re-test December lows? Erin Gibbs of S&P Investment Advisory Services, TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin and Efficient Advisors CIO Larry Shover weigh in.

Economist Donald Luskin says that the Democrats are the economy’s worst enemy.

TrendMacro CEO Donald Luskin on the outlook for the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes and the Fed's impact on the markets and U.S. economy.

TrendMacro chief investment officer Donald Luskin discusses how a federal judge ruled that ObamaCare is unconstitutional, and market volatility.

The job market has been strong, and small business confidence remains high, but those tend to be lagging indicators. With the world economy showing strains, the chances of a significant U.S. growth slowdown can no longer be ruled out. We’d note that our contributor Donald Luskin, the financial adviser and long-time growth optimist, has put himself on recession watch.

Trend Macro Chief Investment Officer Donald Luskin discusses the recent market selloff and how the U.S. detained an alleged Chinese spy, who is facing charges of trying to steal trade secrets from companies including GE Aviation.

There is a reason Jason Furman didn’t cite any specifics to back up his claim that “financial markets reacted” to President Trump’s tweet about Friday’s jobs report “with unusual volatility for the early morning hours” (“The Economic Risks of Trump’s Premature Tweeting,” op-ed, June 4). The reason is that they didn’t. In the 69 minutes between the tweet and the actual release, futures contracts on the S&P 500 meandered randomly in a narrow range of about one-tenth of a percent of the index’s value. The yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond rose less than two one-hundredths of 1%, moving in the same direction and at the same pace as it had been all night.

The more notable aspect of Mr. Furman’s commentary is that it may mark the first time that a former Obama administration official has admitted that one of President Trump’s tweets was truthful.

Donald L. Luskin

CIO, Trend Macrolytics LLC

Chicago

Donald Luskin, chief investment officer at TrendMacro, offers a simpler reason why stocks eventually stop going down. “It halts once the algos and investors run out of stuff to sell,” he said, adding that a rebound gives investors “hope ... and that starts the healing.”

...We’ve been hosting an op-ed debate on stock prices, and last week financial consultant Donald Luskin made his case for the running of the bulls as expected corporate earnings are adjusted upward due to tax reform. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein makes the case for caution nearby, arguing that equity prices are fated to fall as the Federal Reserve reverses its long period of asset purchases and low interest rates, and inflation makes a comeback. Both men could be right, depending on your investment time frame.

The bullish case is based on expectations of capitalized profits, which have risen smartly with the cut in corporate tax rates. The higher after-tax returns flow into higher asset values, all else being equal. The surprise is that stocks have kept rising this year, with the S&P 500 up some 4%. This suggests that many investors underestimated the possibility of pro-growth tax reform passing last year, and now they are catching up to the implications...

Donald Luskin, chief investment officer for Trend Macrolytics, said that Republican Roy Moore’s loss in Alabama will be a big incentive for Republican leaders to “drive the negotiations to a conclusion.”

“It makes more urgent the need for the GOP to exploit its 2018 electoral map advantage in the Senate — tax cuts are the perfect trophy to bring the voters, now without the stench of Moore’s sexual misconduct scandals," he wrote in an analysis for investors Tuesday night.

Don Luskin of Trend Macrolytics wrote to clients this morning about the aftermath of Charlottesville: "We think it’s a clinical case of mass hysteria – and one of the strangest we’ve ever seen. It’s not about the event itself. It’s about President Donald Trump’s reaction to the event, because he is the most famous and fascinating man who has ever lived, and what we’ve called the Trump Infamy Ecosystem profits from exploiting that strange fact. And it’s not even about whether Trump is a racist. It is self-evident that he is not, because there is no evidence that he is (just as it is self-evident that his campaign didn’t conspire with Russia to hack the election). His sin is that he has failed to express his outrage at the event in a particular way – or, more precisely, that he has expressed it in a way that doesn’t kowtow to the identity politics lobby."

Mr. Luskin points to a number of polls suggesting that the hysterical reaction to Mr. Trump is occurring within the media profession, not among the public at large. For example, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll finds that even a survey sample that gives Mr. Trump his standard lousy approval rating overwhelmingly agrees with the President that statues of Confederate leaders should not be torn down. Even a plurality of African-Americans agrees that the statues should remain in place as symbols of our history.

...Regardless, it is striking that after much of the media labored so hard this week to try to tie Mr. Trump to white supremacists, the public doesn’t seem to be buying it. In what was portrayed as perhaps his worst week in office, the RealClearPolitics average shows a slight improvement in his weak approval ratings. According to Mr. Luskin, this could be a buying opportunity for investors: "...we think Trump’s defiance of prevailing norms of identity politics has profound pro-growth implications. Whatever else it may bring along with it, its embrace by the electorate points to a generational 'turning' away from anti-business and risk aversion trends that have choked off growth in the Not So Great Expansion following the Great Recession. If this moment becomes a referendum on Trump, then it may also be referendum on that 'turning.' Our optimism that we are entering a new secular period of better growth and risk-tolerance has never come from Trump as a person, but rather from the cultural forces – the “animal spirits,” to use an almost pejorative term for them – that have welled up from the grass roots, choosing Trump as their best available representative."

...Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics thinks Mr. Trump has every right to take credit for rising markets. In a note to clients this week he acknowledges the view of many investors that “all of the pro-growth hopes and dreams that flourished right after Trump’s surprise election have now been crushed by the swamp, and Trump’s own seeming self-destructiveness.”

Mr. Luskin has a different view and writes that booming U.S. stock markets probably represent a “rational recognition that, since Trump took office, many pro-growth hopes and dreams have already become reality.” Mr. Luskin continues, “We’re not trying to be either cheerleaders or partisans here. But it’s a reality that a great deal of pro-growth progress has been made.” He ticks off a list that includes pipeline approvals, the rollback of various Obama-era rules, and the hiring of deregulators to run the EPA, the FCC and other federal agencies.

As for disturbing news out of Washington, Mr. Luskin sees Mr. Trump at the center of “an ecosystem self-perpetuated by the lust for power by politicians on both sides of the aisle, and the lust for audience by the media both liberal and conservative. The apex predator in this ecosystem is Trump, who controls it all by following Roger Stone’s rule that ‘it is better to be infamous than not to be famous at all.’ That’s not a recipe for clarity.”

Mr. Luskin observes that neither Mr. Trump nor the journalists who hate him seem to have much interest in presenting a “false image of calm and control,” as might have prevailed in some earlier administrations. Mr. Luskin writes:

"What is happening here is that the swamp hasn’t gotten drained yet, but we are seeing it more clearly than ever before. You can tell yourself that things are actually worse now, but we think the truth is that you are just seeing for the first time distasteful realities that have been there all along."

What does it mean for investors? Mr. Luskin concludes:

"Despite seeming chaos in Washington, US stocks are on track for a 2017 total return of 20.9%, twice the historical average, and risk premia are lower. Technically, a correction is overdue. But risk-tolerant markets can handle the chaos of the Trump infamy ecosystem. It is informationally efficient to reveal distasteful processes that were there all along, but concealed."

Today’s jobs report might seem perfect in the context of recent years. But Mr. Trump wants Reagan-style growth, not Obama- or Bush-style job creation. Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics writes in a note to clients today that while this morning’s report was better than expected, it’s actually a “middle of the pack jobs report.”

I’m surprised by the naiveté of Mr. Luskin in assuming that Republicans welcome a (truly) more objective rule in setting interest rates. Consider that in December 2016 the newly appointed (January 2017) Vice Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade Roger Williams whined about only the second one quarter-point interest rate rise in a decade to a level which is still well below what most rules-based advocates would calculate. Does conservative dogma include perpetual, unwarranted interest-cost subsidization for all borrowers and debtors?

The S&P 500 — and not the Dow — is also the performance benchmark that money managers are compared against, adds Don Luskin, chief investment officer at TrendMacro. “A pro is only interested in what benchmark he is trying to beat,” Luskin says.

Adds Luskin: “Retail investors who still think about the Dow do so out of nostalgic habit. But investors who make up the vast majority of trading nowadays look at more sophisticated indexes that are better constructed and more diversified.”

“When there is a quantum shift in growth expectations, the arithmetic of P-E multiples fails to capture the value in stocks,” argues Don Luskin, chief investment officer at TrendMacro. “Why look at this quarter’s earnings, or for that matter why just look one year ahead, to appraise what a company might earn? If America is really going to be great again, stock prices should look to above-trend earnings growth that could last for several years. That will make stocks appear expensive, but they’re really not.”

...don’t rule out a bear market if Clinton loses, warns Don Luskin, chief investment officer at financial research firm TrendMacro. “If Trump wins … stocks will drop at least 20% just like that,” Luskin told USA TODAY. “Because markets hate to be surprised and hate it when the conventional wisdom is dead wrong. Just look at the reaction to Brexit.”

...Violence in the aftermath of the election, if it occurs, is viewed as a short-term hiccup... Adds Luskin: “Markets are not typically rattled by violence in the streets. Remember 1968 — riots, assassinations, shootings all over the world — stocks just went higher and higher, through it all.”

...Donald Luskin, chief investment officer at TrendMacro, a financial research firm, zapped out a recent report to clients titled, Let’s Talk About Something Other than the Election.

"Whatever happens with Deutsche Bank, this is not — I repeat, not — a Lehman moment," says Don Luskin, chief investment officer at investment firm TrendMacro. "We are not looking at globally interconnected fragility like we were in 2008. And if anything goes wrong at all, after the 2008 experience, the central banks of the world know precisely what to do to put the fire out."

"When push comes to shove, Merkel will bail out Deutsche Bank," says Luskin of TrendMacro.

...the Trump haters say we must throw Mr. Trump over the bus in order to save the Senate and House majorities.This is a foolhardy strategy because one can’t win without the other. As economist Donald Luskin puts it in his historical analysis of presidential races and Senate gains: “It is clear from history that the House and the Senate always move in the same party direction as the White House, and with the same magnitude. That means the presidential candidate is like a boat that congressional candidates are riding on. It’s really stupid to torpedo that boat."

"The key lesson is that when bond yields are so persistently low, there is really no sensible place for money to go except for stocks," says Don Luskin, chief investment officer at TrendMacro. "That puts a safety net under stocks, and events that would normally be bear markets turn out to be mere corrections and buying opportunities."

Donald Luskin, TrendMacro, discusses Trump's stance on trade and what it will take to make America grow again.