#410 Chris Whalen: Age of Uncertainty - Falling Home Prices, Cracks in Private Credit, & Sidelined Fed

Chris Whalen returns after the FOMC's 25-basis-point hike and calls it what he wrote in his notes: lame. His argument is that the Fed has become the tail and the Treasury the dog — with a $2 trillion deficit running above 6% of GDP, monetary policy is close to irrelevant, and Kevin Warsh will eventually be forced back into QE and debt monetization whether he wants it or not. That leaves Congress, which Whalen says has stopped doing the one job only it can do, prompting a provocative exchange with Julia about whether a fiscal crisis ends with a manager running the purse the way FDR ran 1933. From there the conversation turns to where the damage shows up: housing, where more than half of American homes fell in price over the past year and Whalen expects a real correction into 2028; private credit and insurance, where he agrees with Jeffrey Gundlach that private credit is the fuse and the insurers are the bomb, and warns annuity holders at the wrong carriers may not be made whole; and energy, where the Houthis' grip on the Red Sea may force the refining industry to redeploy away from the Persian Gulf entirely. He also walks through his own portfolio — Schwab, Flagstar, Annaly, AGNC, and steady additions to gold and silver — explains why he holds no T-bills, and gives his take on the SEC's innovation exemption, calling crypto tokens a polite form of fraud better regulated by state gaming commissions.

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Timestamps:

0:00 – Welcome back

1:03 – "The Fed had to do something or be irrelevant"

5:38 – Is the FOMC even relevant anymore?

5:57 – Treasury is the dog, the Fed is the tail

6:20 – The Fed will be forced to monetize the debt

6:48 – A dysfunctional Congress

9:39 – The age of uncertainty

10:00 – Half of American homes fell in price this year

11:12 – Misery on the Eights: the correction into 2028

11:24 – Gundlach: private credit is the fuse, insurance is the bomb

11:50 – How PE used insurers to compound too fast

13:28 – Why annuity holders are calling

14:02 – Duration matching and the part of the industry that works

15:28 – Energy

16:03 – Trump, the war he started, and no leadership

17:15 – Echoes of the 1970s — and Europe's winter

18:41 – Bank stocks are dead; deposit costs are rising again

20:34 – The AI trade

21:28 – Where do you put money with no clear narrative?

21:48 – Gold doesn't trade like a stock

22:20 – Chris on his own portfolio

23:06 – Schwab, Bank of America, and the low-hanging fruit nobody picks

24:52 – Crypto: the SEC's innovation exemption after Clarity failed

27:03 – Can Congress legislate at all after the midterms?

28:18 – Viewer Q: Does flattening change the Annaly call?

29:33 – Why Chris owns no T-bills

30:26 – What he's watching the rest of the year

31:37 – Close

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