Yardeni Research President Ed Yardeni Talks State of the Market | Bloomberg Talks

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[00:00:07]>> Joining us now, Edward Yardeni for a two-hour conversation. I got eight ways to go here. You have a young Turk in the green room with you this morning. What's your number one advice to a 20-year 22-year-old kid who's like, "My God, I'm sitting next to Edward Yardeni." What do [clears throat] you tell the young Turks?

[00:00:26]>> Read my books.

[00:00:27]>> And buy them before you read them, right?

[00:00:30]>> You have to buy them. They're They're open to the public. You know, I I I I share the the knowledge that I've I've gained over the years. So, in 2018, I wrote a book called Predicting the Markets. Turned out to be 600 pages long about the what I learned in the first 40 years of my career. Now, I'm working on the next 40 years.

[00:00:47]>> What's the maxim that's been most true across the emotion of this bull market that won't go down?

[00:00:54]>> Well, I think it's earnings. I mean, it won't go down cuz earnings won't go down. I think I think the reason [clears throat] earnings have been so resilient is because the economy's been so resilient.

[00:01:03]Uh you know, it's uh it's it's every time we we throw something at it, it just hangs in there.

[00:01:09]>> Are we getting a free lunch from a set of stimuli that have goosed revenues to generate that free cash flow and earnings?

[00:01:16]>> I I think there's certainly something to to be said for that. Uh I mean, one and a half to two trillion-dollar government deficits certainly are stimulative.

[00:01:25]Uh but uh we've also had uh a very strong consumer uh not you know, kind of inconsistent with the so-called K economy thesis. I call it the G economy thesis. It's really been the baby boomers that are keeping spending going because they're retiring and they've got 89 trillion dollars of uh retirement assets.

[00:01:44]>> of money Lawrence McDonald's talked about. It's It's I mean, it's just there. It's just a wall of money. And then, of course, there's the AI capital [clears throat] spending boom and there's a lot of controversy about whether that's going to pay off or whether it's not and it's going to it's one big bubble that's going to burst. I think it's going to pay off.

[00:02:01]>> So, that's kind of where I want to go, Ed. I mean, you've seen so many cycles, so many major themes in this marketplace, whether it's the internet or how do you think about AI here? I mean, it seems like a lot of folks are telling us this is as big as anything we've seen.

[00:02:16]>> Well, that that's that's my view and the way I put it in perspective is AI is not a revolution, it's an evolution in the digital revolution. The digital revolution started in the mid-1960s with the IBM mainframes and the digital revolution is all about processing as much information, data as we possibly can, as quickly as we can, as cheaply as we can and we've made a tremendous amount of progress going from the IBM mainframe to PCs, laptops, the cloud, and now AI's. I I kind of I think Tom will like this.

[00:02:49]I view us now as having four factors of production, land, labor, capital, and data.

[00:02:55]>> And data, okay.

[00:02:56]>> And we never really thought of data as a factor of production and this ties into my Buzz Lightyear theory of to infinity and beyond. There will never be a shortage of data.

[00:03:07]>> Right. And Bloomberg, we are at our heart a data >> Nice. Security that's >> creating more and more data in the world >> That was so good. You get to work tomorrow.

[00:03:15]>> I get to work tomorrow [laughter] on June 10th. And the analytics around all that data is is kind of what we do here at Bloomberg.

[00:03:21]>> So, what are we doing here, Ed? I mean, can we feel comfortable with this earnings environment out there to continue to support this market? Boy, we just came through the last couple quarters have just been extraordinary for earnings growth.

[00:03:33]>> Well, let let me give you some some lingo on that. I'm I'm a believer that we're better off with a bull market based on FEMO than FOMO. FOMO is fear of missing out and if if people are have fear of missing out, that that'll affect the PE.

[00:03:50]You'll get the valuation multiple too high, you'll get a bubble and and it's bound to burst. Female is fabulous earnings momentum. Earnings have been absolutely fabulous and I'd rather have a melt up based on earnings than one on valuation multiples and and that's what we have.

[00:04:06]>> Ed Yardeni with us folks and we continue. We welcome all of you across America. So if I line up my 10 most important dinners across the arc of this privilege of Bloomberg, one of them was with the Richard Berner years ago and it was in the vicinity of 2012 14 years ago. This is Berner of Morgan Stanley building out that franchise with Stephen Roach and then his public service to the nation.

[00:04:29]And Dick Berner and I sat there and he was on fire Ed Yardeni over the dots. The dots go back to January 2012.

[00:04:38]I would suggest we had a shift.

[00:04:41]Tectonic we'll know in time. Were the dots efficacious? Were they of value?

[00:04:48]>> Well, I'm kind of biased. I'm a Fed watcher so the more and the more noise they provide for me to try to interpret for people the the better. I I like the dot plot. I think it's it's a good insight into where the committee's headed.

[00:05:02]Yeah, the median is is is important but I think so is the the distribution.

[00:05:08]To me the the funniest thing about the dot plot is uh when you ask them for their long-term estimate for the Fed funds rate and this is often called the neutral rate and you would think there's some science to the neutral rate at the Fed but there's no science at all. They just 19 of them tell them tell us what they think it is and it and sometimes the spread is between 3 and 4%. It's like, you know, that well that's really helpful.

[00:05:36]>> I I look at where Mr. Warsh is taking us.

[00:05:39]He has that much power. I mean chairmen have that much power to shift the dialogue, don't they?

[00:05:45]>> Well, I I think the dialogue stays the same, but then how much of it gets communicated to the public is what he seems to be focusing on.

[00:05:53]>> Right.

[00:05:53]>> I mean, I think the the the dialogue at the Fed is going to actually turn out to be more independent than it had been.

[00:06:00]You know, but but he's actually come around to the to the to the old view that a Fed chair needs to have a consensus. I mean, he could have been the only dissenter >> Right.

[00:06:11]>> at that meeting, but he wasn't. He he joined the the the committee.

[00:06:15]>> Email comes in. Mike, he's on the parade route somewhere. Mike, thank you so much for emailing in today. Can you reaffirm your roaring 20s scenario and where is your SPX statistic right now?

[00:06:27]>> Well, I'm looking for the S&P 500 to get to 8,250 by the end of the year and still >> end of this year?

[00:06:34]>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we're 7,700. I mean, we're at 7,500, so we're we're moving in the right direction. And there's still several months left. And then for by the end of the decade, the end of 2029, I'm still using 10,000 and the roaring 2020s has worked out pretty well here for the first 7 >> Yeah, I think so. It's It's you know, it's it's getting to be more and more roaring.