Ken Fisher Discusses Inflation, Sell America, US National Debt and More

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Well, first off, let me just say that if you're waiting for clarity, the stock market's a very expensive place to get it because the stock market always moves before you get clarity.

[00:00:14]So, every month I get questions sent in to me and I try to answer them, quickly, which every month I fail at because I'm not very good at saying things quickly.

[00:00:25]I can talk very, very fast if I have to speak really fast and make mumble jumble out of everything.

[00:00:29]But in reality, I'm a kind of a plotter when it comes to explaining things.

[00:00:35]So, this month's first question, "Isn't high inflation and a worsening job market an indicator for a recession?"

[00:00:41]No.

[00:00:43]The fact is, both of them, at the point in time that you see them when you say "A worsening," what we're really talking about when you say worsening is looking at recent months and projecting that into the future.

[00:00:54]And the fact of the matter is, whether it's inflation, looking backward, or job numbers, looking backward, they aren't necessarily at all consistent with the future.

[00:01:04]Therefore, they're not predictive.

[00:01:06]This is not something that's useful.

[00:01:07]Now, let me just go further really quickly.

[00:01:10]Isn't high inflation.

[00:01:11]Well, if you're asking me a hypothetical question, that might be a little different.

[00:01:16]But if you put a number on what high inflation means, it's really not high inflation that is predictor of recession. It's if you had much worsening in inflation, and then the central banks of the world were to tighten hard to try to fight that that might cause recession.

[00:01:36]But if you think high inflation is the inflation that's going on around the world, now you're smoking the funny stuff.

[00:01:43]Because if you look at the inflation now compared to most of the inflation in the last 50 years, we're actually at levels that are below those levels.

[00:01:52]You're still reacting to the inflation that occurred in the immediate aftermath of Covid, when central banks did a bunch of stupid stuff, increased the quantity of money drastically on a global basis, and ushered in, depending on where you are in the world, 25 to 35% cumulative inflation in just a few years.

[00:02:11]But that's the past. That's not where we are now.

[00:02:14]Where, like in the United States, we're looking at 3% inflation.

[00:02:17]We went for a long, long, long time with 5% a year inflation, world did just fine.

[00:02:23]I'm not suggesting where inflation is going, I'm answering the question. And the answer to the question is no.

[00:02:28]It's not a reflection of recession.

[00:02:31]"If investors start to lose confidence in the US being "investable" due to unpredictable policy making—tariffs, Iran, etc... does that not at some point lead to it actually being different this time?"

[00:02:42]No, not necessarily, but maybe. Let me point out what I just said before about that stuff about inflation, in global, in global being what's important more than a single country.

[00:02:58]Fact of the matter is, if you think about US, US is just part of the world when it comes to stock market, just part of the world when it comes to GDP. It's about 25% of GDP globally.

[00:03:11]We got plenty of crazy in he rest of the world and always have.

[00:03:15]In some ways, the world has countries becoming more crazy, countries becoming less crazy.

[00:03:20]The point in time, what happens with the United States and its unpredictability is in the eyes of the beholder to some extent.

[00:03:29]It is unclear to me that the that the United States is inherently, in aggregate, less predictable than it used to be.

[00:03:36]Politicians say a lot of crazy stuff.

[00:03:40]Politicians may say and do things that are a little different than they've done before.

[00:03:46]I'm not sure that's really, when it comes to the economy, the United States, as a whole, being so unpredictable, that it really is.

[00:03:54]The United States is an economy has been pretty darn steady rolling.

[00:03:58]"Sell in May. Why not sell and buy back in after the midterm elections bring clarity?" Well, first off, let me just say that if you're waiting for clarity, the stock market's a very expensive place to get it because the stock market always moves before you get clarity.

[00:04:12]Secondarily, there's this age old mumbo jumbo nonsense says, "Sell in May, go away" because there have been a few very extreme periods of May to October that have caused that period to not be very pleasant.

[00:04:29]But if you actually take the history of May through that September, October time period, that the "Sell in May, go away" folk talk about, actually, if you look at correctly calculated indexes like the S&P 500 or the Morgan Stanley World.

[00:04:44]More importantly, the World than the S&P 500.

[00:04:46]But true of both, their net-positive throughout that time period in history, including those bad months.

[00:04:52]Those bad few times where they got extreme outcomes.

[00:04:56]Never let a few extreme outcomes, in a longer history, skew your sense of what's normal.

[00:05:02]And don't ever bet that because a period has below average returns that are positive, that it'll have necessarily below average returns in the time period that's ahead.

[00:05:16]"Sell in May, go away," "Buy back later on," whether it's midterms or not, is wrong.

[00:05:24]But stocks start rising when the Midterm Miracle, that I've written about many times over decades, occurs before the midterms actually hit.

[00:05:34]And finally, can you speak to the rising national debt and the risks involved for the country and the investment community?

[00:05:41]I've written about this for a long, long time.

[00:05:44]I've spoken about this for a long, long time.

[00:05:47]The US debt, which is seeming to be gargantuan numbers, if you think of the $38 trillion of debt, is actually in ways that are measurable, not problematic.

[00:06:00]If it was problematic, I am going to guarantee you, a dollar to a doughnut, that US long-term interest rates would be much higher than they are, because borrowers would demand to be paid mightily for taking the risk of the debt that they would be funding, not being paid back.

[00:06:22]The fact is, you can read in my books and in columns that I've written, all kind of detail.

[00:06:28]I'm supposed to answer this stuff quickly on these questions, so I can't take you through all that for ten minutes.

[00:06:34]But the fact of the matter is, we are not at levels that cause developed nations to have problems.

[00:06:41]Might we at some point in the future?

[00:06:42]Of course we might, but that's down the road to be considered, and that doesn't have anything to do with what would happen to the stock market, to the bond market, or to GDP in the period of the next few years.

[00:06:56]Thank you for all of these questions.

[00:06:58]Send in more next month.

[00:07:00]I'll answer more next month.

[00:07:01]I always enjoy doing this, even if sometimes my responses and my answers to some of these questions are a little bit bombastic.

[00:07:08]Keep sending them in. I enjoy doing them.

[00:07:10]Thank you.

[00:07:23]Hi, this is Ken Fisher.

[00:07:25]Subscribe to the Fisher Investments' YouTube channel if you like what you've seen.

[00:07:29]Click the bell to be notified as soon as we publish new videos.