Money Life with Chuck Jaffe

Everett Millman, precious metals specialist at Gainesville Coins , says that while gold took a big stumble last week, he doesn't believe the strong rally to start the year is over. Further, with gold trading near record highs but oil trading in the range of $70 a barrel, he believes investors will find greater opportunity in gold-mining stocks than in physical gold itself. Coupled with demand behi...

Victoria Fernandez, chief market strategist at Crossmark Global Investments , says investors looking at current market turmoil and the potential for stagflation and an economic recession should remember that "Doing nothing is something," making an active decision to continue with current allocations, which she says is appropriate for anyone who felt balanced when they entered 2025. Fernandez expec...

Francisco Bido, senior portfolio manager at F/m Acceleration , brings his quant-active approach to the Market Call, but notes that mixing the numbers — the quantitative approach — with the art of active management leads him to want a well-diversified portfolio filled with well-known names that stay true to his core investment believes, the kind of thing he would be happy to ride with until there i...

Dominic Ceci, chief investment officer at Johnson Financial Group , says that he believes the potential recession that the United States economy could be facing is likely to be "a run-of-the-mill, early '90s type of recession" that stays shallow and lasts a few quarters, but he acknowledges that the signs are murky and that the longer uncertainty around trade and other policies last, the deeper an...

Andrew Slimmon, senior portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Management , says that with so much investor optimism wiped away by the rough start to 2025, the opportunity for growth now looks better than it did at the start of the year. "Six months from now, I would say there's a good chance the market will be higher," Slimmon says in summing up a conversation that compares current conditi...

Mike Green , chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management , says that we're living through "a period of genuine uncertainty, and a period in which forecasts that would have been made even three or four months ago no longer seem to have any real validity." He says that the current set up for a trade/tariff war is setting the economy up for a repeat of real troubles, and made comparisons as varied...

Joe Ferrara, investment strategist at Gateway Investment Advisers , says that heightened volatility is likely here to stay as the market sorts out rapidly changing current conditions -- and says current market shocks are reminiscent in some ways of the Covid crisis or the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. He says that the current dichotomy between quantifiable potential outcomes from policies that ha...

Rebecca Rockey, deputy chief economist and global head of forecasting at Cushman & Wakefield — an analyst on the outlook survey committee for the National Association for Business Economics — discusses the group's recent "flash survey" of economists which found that since tariff policies were announced on "Liberation Day," more than one-third of economists now believe the next recession is likely...

George Bory, chief investment strategist for fixed income at Allspring Global Investments , says "We are in the midst of a stagflationary environment that's likely to last three to six months," with the question remaining whether a recession will follow. He does now think that recession is likely, though changes to trade and monetary policy could stave it off. Bory also discusses how and why the b...

Jeff Weniger , head of equity strategy at WisdomTree Asset Management , seems to only be half joking when he says investors might want to be bullish right now just because they would be the last bull standing, but he also notes that long-term investors, in conditions like these, must bite their lip and keep buying equities. That said, he thinks some of those equities should be international, and h...

Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union , says that investors should allow the market to settle down and they regain solid footing with their investments, but should use current nervousness and anxiety as a guide on how to remake their portfolio to be more stable regardless of conditions. Frick says he felt that the market was getting scary at the beginning of the year, so h...

Megan Horneman, chief investment officer at Verdence Capital Advisors , says that despite the painful volatility and the rising potential for recession, investors should be looking for opportunities, particularly in the areas that have been most hurt by the market decline after recent tariff announcements. She notes that global small and mid-cap stocks are in bear-market territory, pricing in a re...

Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM , says that unless an off-ramp to current government policies can be found, he expects a recession that is starting now and likely to last nine months. He has raised his likelihood of recession to 55 percent, but said you can see already a pullback in orders, which in turn will lead to a price shock, and then pullbacks in spending and ultimately labor that...

JoAnne Bianco, partner and portfolio manager at BondBloxx , says that investors should be re-assessing risk and deciding if the market's current moves are an over-reaction that could rebound or something more sticky, and she notes that some fixed-income assets have been the best performers this year. She notes that long-duration Treasuries and U.S. corporate bonds have been stellar and seem to hav...

Terri Spath, chief investment officer at Zuma Wealth , talks about actionable steps investors can take now — and that she has taken for her clients — to mitigate anxiety amid the uncertainty of the current US stock market. Specifically, Spath is diversifying into investments that have a negative or no correlation to the U.S. market, buying gold, long-duration Treasury bonds and stepping up exposur...

Duane McAllister, senior portfolio manager at Baird , says investors are right to be leaning into the fixed-income market as a safe haven amid current market turmoil, noting that the relationship between stocks and bonds has normalized, unlike 2022 when bonds moved in sync with stocks and investors lost money in both. With yields relatively high and holding steady, McAllister said bonds are provin...

Tom Samuelson, chief investment officer at Vineyard Global Advisors , says the market's long-running bull market is "on thin ice right now," from a technical standpoint, having fallen below its 200-day moving average, leaving the market "at a really interesting juncture," and making him defensive, building more cash, loading up on utilities and safe sectors and waiting to see how it plays out. Sam...

Jim Masturzo, chief investment officer for multi-asset strategies at Research Affiliates , says that despite the uncertainty surrounding tariff policies and geo-politics, international markets remain attractive and with a better valuation than domestic markets. But those global markets may also get a boost from the Trump Administration's plans to weaken the dollar — a dollar that Masturzo says his...

Lawrence McMillan, president of McMillan Analysis , says the market has been in an oversold rally and is currently correcting as it comes out of that. He sees deteriorating breadth but still thinks this could be what he called "a healthy correction." McMillan says if the Standard & Poor's 500 can't hold the 5400 level, he would expect it to drop to 5000, a move big enough to put the stock market i...

Harvard University economist Jason Furman — the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers — says that the tricky thing in forecasting now is high levels of uncertainty, particularly in terms of how much business and consumers pull back based on current conditions; if there's a recession, he says it will be spending cutbacks that trigger it. Furman notes that the average tariff rate is no...

Julius de Kempenaer, senior technical analyst at StockCharts says that the stock market at current levels is unattractive, because "the upside potential is now way more limited than the downside risk," and he expects that risk to be realized in a decline that could drop the market by another 5 percent or more. De Kempenaer says this dip won't feel much like a buying opportunity, because the market...

Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at BankRate.com , discusses how the site's latest survey shows that Americans are tapping into emergency savings increasingly to pay ordinary expenses . He talks about the dangerous spiral that a growing number of consumers are on, as they begin to exhaust emergency funds and have to rely increasingly on credit cards, currently carrying record-high interest ra...

Danielle DiMartino Booth, chief strategist at QI Research , says that she remains concerned about the economy in the short run because Congress isn't being "brisk and efficient" in delivering on the promise of de-regulation and lower taxes. Since those potential policy benefits haven't shown up — but the uncertainty of tariff policies has — she is expecting a bumpy economic road ahead. She does sa...

Scott Brown of Brown Technical Insights says that the market traditionally is weak during the first quarter of a new presidential cycle, but he notes that the third week of March is also when that tends to change and the market reaches the bottom of that cycle. He says we're still in a secular bull market, with April and May historically providing some runway. As a result, Brown expects a bounce a...

Dhruv Nagrath, director of fixed-income strategy at BlackRock , says that it's "easy to make a healthy return in your fixed income without taking too much risk," so while there are opportunities out the risk scale all the way out to high-yield and junk bonds, he notes that investors can stay safe and come away happy with their gains. Nagrath discusses what he expects to happen to bond yields when...