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The feedback on the @TruthGundlach episode has been incredible, so I'm posting the pod here on X too. 🙏
In his debut on The Julia La Roche Show, Jeffrey Gundlach, founder and CEO of DoubleLine Capital, breaks down why private credit is an unmitigated disaster, why the next recession will send rates up and the dollar down, and why most American investors are completely unprepared for what's coming.
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction & welcome Jeffrey Gundlach
1:33 Big picture macro: secular shift from falling to rising interest rates
16:00 The case for 100% non-US stocks
17:30 Gundlach's current asset allocation
22:00 Private credit and why it's a “total unmitigated disaster"
38:00 The Fed follows the 2-year Treasury - next move a rate hike?
42:30 Recession odds
47:00 Capital preservation mode: lowest risk positioning in DoubleLine's 17-year history
50:00 The gold call
53:00 The most dangerous force in investing
56:00 California headed for bankruptcy?
1:01:00 Non-consensus prediction: three parties on the ballot in the next presidential election
1:02:00 The Fourth Turning
Anyone can own Bitcoin
because (drumroll)... it doesn't exist!
You can't see it or touch it.
That's both a criticism
and a secret superpower.
👇540 beach-floating seconds
about the magical gift of UTXOs.
You know Ryan Gosling's character in The Big Short?
Well he didn't really have a quant called Jiang.
He had Pius Sprenger - who also happens to be an OG Bitcoiner too.
Never heard of him? Well, when I did, I just had to get him on the podcast!
I spoke to @PiusSprenger about:
- How he picked the housing bubble 4 years before everybody else.
- The early ridicule, and eventual vindication.
- Institutional blind resistance
And it was remarkably similar to the experience of being an early Bitcoiner.
Pius has a deep technical background, is an accomplished investor, and sits on the board of the Scientific Bitcoin Institute @ScientificBTC
It was a great pleasure to have this conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Private credit returns 11.5% on loans that yield 9.5%.
Nobody asks how.
I'll tell you how:
Leverage.
They take a portfolio of loans yielding 9.5%, lever it 2x, and the gross return doubles to 19%. Subtract financing costs and fees, hand the client 11.5%, and show them a chart with a line so smooth it would make Madoff jealous.
That's the product Wall Street has been selling to pensions, endowments, insurance companies, and now your 401(k).
They even gave it a nice name. "Private credit."
There's a better name for it: volatility laundering.
The returns aren't smooth because the risk is low. They're smooth because nobody is marking anything to market. The same people making the loans are the ones deciding what they're worth.
When everything's going up, that's a feature. When it turns? It's a trapdoor.
And we're watching the trapdoor open right now.
Funds are gating redemptions across the industry. Loans are going from 100 cents on the dollar to zero in a single quarter. The biggest asset managers on earth are telling investors: "Sorry, you can't have your money back."
And none of this should surprise anyone who's been paying attention. Every cycle produces the SAME SCHEME wearing a different outfit.
Junk bonds in the 80s. Mortgage-backed securities in 2007. Both sold the identical promise - equity-like returns with bond-like stability. Both ended the same way.
Private credit is the 2020s version. Bigger numbers. Fancier packaging. Same math.
The leverage is the tell. Any time someone shows you returns that look too good for the underlying asset, there's leverage hiding somewhere in the structure. And leverage doesn't create returns...
It amplifies outcomes - in both directions.
What pisses me off is that the people running this know exactly what they're doing.
The risk disclosures are 400 pages long. The gates are buried in footnotes. It's not technically illegal. But doing something because you can get away with it - not because it's right - is a special kind of rotten.
After 2008, NOBODY went to jail. Banks paid fines that amounted to rounding errors on their balance sheets. The message was clear: heads you win, tails the taxpayer covers it.
So of course they did it again. Why wouldn't they?
And here's where the realist in me takes over from the idealist:
They're not going to let this blow up cleanly. They NEVER do...
The playbook is extend, pretend, and print. Special vehicles. Special accommodations. More liquidity injected into a system that's already drowning in it.
Every time they paper over a crisis, they confirm the only trade that matters.
Gold pulled back hard this week - from $5,000 to around $4,575. Every shakeout over the past two years has been a buying opportunity.
The structural case (debasement, central bank accumulation, collapsing confidence in sovereign debt) hasn't weakened. It's accelerated.
The worse private credit gets, the more they'll have to print. And the more they print, the HIGHER gold goes.
It's not complicated. It's just math that most people don't want to accept.
For years they told you stock picking was dead.
"Just buy the index. Don't bother with research. The passive bid will carry you."
I'm here to tell you that era is OVER. And the people who don't adjust are going to pay for it.
The S&P 500 just broke below its 200 day moving average for the first time in 214 sessions. It's on pace for its fourth consecutive losing week.
The Mag 7 which carried the entire market for 3 years are getting dismantled.
Microsoft down 18% year to date. Amazon down 10%. The Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF down 6% while the equal-weight S&P is outperforming.
The rotation I've been calling for is here. R is for Rotation, not Recession.
But here's what most people don't understand about passive investing, and why this unwind could be SAVAGE:
The machine that drove prices up without caring about fundamentals is going to drive them down the same way. There's been no real price discovery in large-cap US equities for years.
Money flowed in because money was flowing in. That's NOT investing.
I saw the exact same dynamic in Japan in the 1980s. I ran the Fidelity Overseas Fund during that bubble.
The Japanese market got to two-thirds of the entire non US equity index. Banks traded at 100x earnings, 10x book.
The float was so tight you couldn't buy or sell ANYTHING in size without moving the market 20%.
Jeremy Grantham, John Templeton - all the greats were screaming about it.
They were early. But once the worm turned, it was fast. And the beautiful part was you didn't need to be a genius. You just had to avoid Japan and index everything else. Hit them where they ain't.
That's where we are with US mega-cap tech right now.
You don't need to make complicated bets. Just stop being concentrated in the same 7 stocks that everyone else owns.
Step 1: switch your cap-weighted S&P into the equal-weight RSP. Overnight you cut your Mag 7 exposure from 35% to 0.2% per name. The equal weight has been winning all year. I think that continues.
Step 2: look overseas. International markets have been outperforming the US in 2026. European equities, Japanese stocks, emerging markets - all cheaper, all under-owned, all benefiting from the capital rotation out of US tech.
Step 3: get into real assets. Gold. Energy. Commodities. These are the sectors that perform when inflation is the dominant risk, which it is. Oil at $96 with a war in the Persian Gulf isn't going back to $50 regardless of what any politician promises.
And step 4: if you have the stomach for it, there's a portfolio of overvalued garbage out there that's going to get cut in half. Companies with no earnings, no moat, and no reason to exist at current prices. The short side hasn't been this attractive since 2000.
After years of the index crushing active managers, the tables have TURNED.
Dispersion is widening. Fundamentals are starting to matter again.
Stock picking isn't dead.
IT WAS JUST SLEEPING