Jeffrey Gundlach, star investor and CEO of DoubleLine Capital, predicts that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump will win the White House as voters embrace his campaign’s idea of “Make America Great Again.”
“Trump is going to win. I think Clinton and Sanders are both very poor candidates. I know the polls are signaling the opposite. But the polls said the opposite four years ago, too,”
he said in an interview with Swiss business magazine Finanz und Wirtschaft. “In the short term, Trump winning would be probably very positive for the economy.”
He compares the U.S. electorate’s feelings toward Trump with investor sentiment toward unconstrained bond funds, which became popular as people disdained traditional investment ideas.
“If everything you think you know looks unattractive, you go for something that you have no idea about. And that’s an unconstrained bond fund,” he says “The thinking was: ‘Don’t even tell me what you are doing, I do not want to know. Because if I know, I won’t like it.’ The same is true with respect to the elections: ‘Don’t give me a traditional candidate. Give me someone who I have no idea what he is going to do' – and that’s basically Donald Trump.”
Gundlach says Trump's economic policies may resemble those from the 1960s with a heavy emphasis on military and infrastructure spending.
“He might spend a lot of money on airports, roads and weapons. I think Trump would run up a huge deficit. Trump is very comfortable with debt. He’s a debt guy,” Gundlach says. “His whole business has had a lot of debt over time and he has gone bankrupt with several enterprises. So I think you could have a debt-fueled boom.”
Fed Got Slapped
He says the Federal Reserve has given up on trying to raise interest rates, which is good for gold and bond investments.
“Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen
basically capitulated on March 29. Janet Yellen took control with her speech at the Economic Club of New York,” Gundlach says. “She is not going to raise rates at the next Fed meeting in April despite all these other Fed officials saying that April is a possibility. But it’s not going to happen. We’re not going there. So you’ve gotten about as much capitulation as you can get.”
He expects the Fed will keep pushing back rate hikes and make them as gradual as possible after being chastened for raising rates in December for the first time in 10 years.
“That didn’t work very well. The stock market crashed and the credit markets were a disaster,” Gundlach says. “The markets have humiliated the Fed into abandoning their pretty idiotic forecast.”
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