저자: Kevin · 외국인
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연준 의사록상 관세발 근원 상품 인플레이션이 지속돼 금리 인하가 지연될 수 있고, 워시 신임 연준의장 지명은 주식에 불리하고 채권에 유리하다고 주장. 이란 전쟁 가능성과 미군 전력 증강을 근거로 지정학 리스크를 강조하며, 단기 금·은·원유·채권 강세와 주식 조정 가능성을 제시. 다만 지정학 급락은 저가매수 기회라는 입장이며, 향후 6개월은 주식에 이상적이지 않다고 봄.
다듬은 글
Time to buckle up and prepare. There are two things happening in markets that frankly markets may not be ready for. First, rate hikes. Yeah, right now markets with overwhelming certainty believe that we are going to get at least two interest rate cuts by the end of this year. In fact, by December 9th of this year, markets anticipate an over 75% chance that we are going to have had two rate cuts and potentially even three or four rate cuts.
Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve just gave us hints in the minutes that they just released that that may not happen and they're starting to recalibrate market expectations. This is coming at exactly the same time that Donald Trump is potentially moving closer to frankly an allout war with Iran. Both of these are understandably going to have effects in the market.
And in this video, I want to break down what we should be watching for and of course how to potentially prepare for these issues. Are they buy the dips and where are they by the dips? Let's talk about it here. Hey everyone, me Kevin here. First thing that I want to do before I bring up the Federal Reserve minutes is no, not pitch an expiring coupon code, but instead talk about this.
This is a white board. See, it's white. It has a board. Okay, look. This is what you really need to understand. This is going to make a whole lot more sense when we actually go through the Fed minutes. If people believe that inflation is falling, right, coming down, then people will wait. by virtue of waiting with spending or delaying certain spending because they believe inflation is coming down or we're facing disinflation.
Typically, we end up seeing even more disinflation. So, for example, if you were going to go buy a home in Austin, Texas, as people look and then they go and see prices are falling, well, in that case, why don't I just wait? The very nature of people saying, "Well, I'll just wait for prices to come down more," leads prices to come down even more.
Now, this is really relevant to the Federal Reserve, not because of this problem, but rather because of this problem. If people believe that inflation is going to continue to rise, which a lot of us do, whether it's food expenses, oil and gas prices are going up again because of fear regarding Iran and some kind of incursion into Iran or the shortages we're seeing in Cuba.
These are very geopolitical issues. But people think that food costs, oil, energy, gas, artificial intelligence spending is just going to keep driving prices up. I mean, there was a front page story this morning on the Wall Street Journal about how data centers are now buying land away from residential housing developers, leading to even more of a shortage for residential housing.
Well, then people believe that the cost of their livelihoods is going to go up. I would guess that most of you believe that things have gotten a whole lot more expensive and unfortunately seem to continue to get more expensive. Well, as we continue to believe that, we tend to spend more now so that we can spend less in the longer term.
The idea is that if prices are rising, if we buy now, we won't have to buy the same thing later at an inflated price. We'll still get some of that benefit of, let's say, inventory prices on washing machines or cars or whatever because prices won't have fully risen yet. In fact, a hack I talked about this morning, by the way, on the public live stream that we did is I talked about how, you know, buying refurbished items, ironically, right now happens to be a sort of what I call a wedge deal in consumer goods.
Like, I bought a go-kart and a Dyson vacuum refurbished. Good as new, but a fraction of the cost. I would say almost 40% lower than new when usually they're within like 10 to 15%. I think it's because we don't have to pay the tariffs on the refurb stuff that's already here. The New York Fed just had a very large study that indicated that we paid for the first nine months of 2025, we paid 94% of all of the tariffs that Donald Trump implemented.
And for the last 3 months of the year, we paid about 86% of all of the tariffs, which essentially means on average, we paid somewhere around 90% of the tariffs that Donald Trump imposed. So really, we've seen taxes therefore go up on us, which actually then reiterates spend now because prices are going up, not down, or at least expenses are going up.
I think that's why we've seen such a boost to GDP and retail sales because people believe we're in an inflationary environment. The problem with that is the Federal Reserve, we'll talk about war in just a moment, just indicated in the Federal Open Market Committee minutes. remember my birthday was Jan 28th when we last covered it.
Uh yeah, these are the minutes from that day and we get a little bit of insight and we're going to go through this. I've highlighted we're going to go through the core pieces of this. I do want to mention that uh we did some buy the dipping over the last uh you know days and trading sessions and I've gone ahead and posted not only a short-term trade but also a bunch of long-term trades in that course member group.
You can join that at meetke.com. We do have a coupon code expiring called baby comeback. We haven't had one of these in about three and a half weeks. So, check that out. We'll have another price increase, but if you get in before February 20th at 11:59 p.m., you'll get every trade alert, every course, every private live stream and alpha report.
Uh, and you'll even get that brand new reinvest course. So, check that out over at mekevin.com. For now, though, let's get into those Fed minutes. So, the Federal Reserve argues that there's still this deceleration going on in housing prices, which is fine. That's what we've been seeing since after that COVID bubble where rents skyrocket.
We've really been seeing housing prices and housing services, I shouldn't say housing prices, rent prices slowly coming down, disinflating. In other words, uh going up at a slower rate. Not everywhere, but in a lot of parts of the country, rents have started to stabilize even though they're a lot higher than what they used to be.
And true flation really likes to weigh in that housing services. And that's where we're finding that true inflation is actually being reported at this record low. I mean, you could look at the last 12 month history of true inflation here. And we can see that true inflation estimate is actually plummeting.
So why are we really worried about inflation? Well, the Federal Reserve is worried about inflation because of the signal that they send or that the signal of the Federal Reserve's action sends to people and their spending. This is why I started with psychology. Even though, and I want to make this clear, even though Kevin sees nationwide rents are slowing their appreciation, we're getting disinflation there.
Even though Kevin thinks that artificial intelligence is going to create a deflation boom, which is really bad if you hold debt, right? But it's really good if you hold cash. So I think AI is deflationary. I think that over time we're going to see these tariff effects deflate away. All that's going to go away.
Between now and that opinion of mine, we still have to get through goods inflation. And that's what the Fed is worried about. If the Fed is seeing tariff inflation that is lasting longer and people are under the impression that the Federal Reserve has lost the plot and despite tariff inflation coming in hot, the Federal Reserve is going to go it's just transitory.
It'll go away and people will believe the Federal Reserve less. They'll spend more now and you'll actually cause something called entrenchment where what you do is you drive people to spend more now. GDP looks good in the short term. Retail sales look good in the short term, but you just make that inflation more permanent and persistent.
And the Federal Reserve in these minutes makes that concern very clear. Let me show you. Core goods price inflation has picked up over the same period that housing services have declined. A development the staff largely attributed to the effects of tariffs. So in other words, they're like, "Hey, you know, if it weren't for Trump's tariffs, we could probably have lower rates, but we have tariffs, so we have to deal with it.
And now we have to make sure that this inflation doesn't become persistent. Okay, fine. So, what else do they tell us? Well, they say the the effects of higher inflation on uh uh or higher tariffs on inflation are expected to Wayne starting around the middle of the year. So, hopefully we'll see tariff uh related inflation come down and then we could return to that disinflationary trend we were on before Donald Trump decided to go for tariffs.
The problem though with that in the meantime is the following. We have seen now risk to inflation projection as potentially being higher than what we've believed further or in the past which means that there is a risk just like in 20121 that inflation lasts longer and stays higher than we previously thought and people in recent memory have a lot of concern that the Federal Reserve is always too late.
Could be one of the reasons why we've seen gold rise the way it has. As a result, several participants remarked that the ongoing moderation in inflation for housing services was likely to exert downward pressure on overall inflation, as would higher productivity growth from things like artificial intelligence.
Those are deflationary, right? That's good. However, what's the problem with well, if that doesn't stabilize? What's right here? Take a look at this. The downside risks to employment have moderated in recent months, which is good. We don't want a big layoff session. But the risk of more persistent inflation remained.
And some commented that those risks have now come into better balance, suggesting or cautioning that easing policy further while we still have these elevated inflation readings could be misinterpreted by markets as implying diminished policymaker commitment to 2%. Perhaps making higher inflation more entrenched.
in English, we are now less worried about the labor market because the labor market is, you know, balancing out a little bit more. So, we don't have to cut rates as much anymore for the labor market. Had a nice little rebound in the January report as well. So, hey, you know, maybe things are getting better here.
We have less to be worried about regarding jobs. However, if we keep cutting, people aren't going to believe us that we're saying tariff inflation is transitory. As a result, we need to prove that we are going to fight inflation. And that unfortunately is a bearish signal for Kevin Walsh. Remember, Kevin Walsh is the new Fed chair.
Uh well, the appointed Fed chair. He still has to get approved by the Senate. Kevin Walsh, in my opinion, uh says he wants rate cuts. Okay, that's what he says. That's to get the job. But realistically, Walsh increases risks for stocks. Uh he uh decreases the risk for bonds. If you've been watching the 102 yield spread, it's actually down to a spread of just 62 potentially because the bond market sees lower risk for long-term bonds or people are starting to flee to bonds because of the Iran war risk, which seems to be becoming more of an issue.
Uh, more on that in just a moment. Uh, and I personally see Worsh as a risk to gold and silver because you might rely on gold and silver less if you have somebody like WSH in in uh the Fed share position who is less likely to run that money printer, which again increases risks for stocks, right? So, all of these things have been pretty clear since the end of January.
And if you've noticed since the end of January, gold and silver topped stocks, a lot of them have gone down. It's been very hard to hit new highs on technology stocks with certainty, many of them down 30 to 60%. Uh, and we've actually seen bonds rise. So, all of this has come true since January, which we warned about back in January.
Now, Gold and Silver could see a bid because of Iran. We'll talk about Iran in just a moment, but understand what this now entire committee potentially leaning towards lower risks for jobs and higher risks for inflation means. It means that Kevin Walsh might go into this Fed committee and go, "All right, I told Trump we're cutting rates.
Let's have a vote and cut rates." And all of them might look at him and say, "You're a clown. We're keeping rates. In fact, we might even need to raise rates to show the world that we are serious about getting inflation down. See, as Dr. Powell has regularly taught us, inflation is mostly a psychological phenomenon.
That's why they say it's a like a ghost of monetary policy. That's because the Federal Reserve works by talking and setting expectations and markets react relatively quickly to that. At least we believe. Now, what we find is that as the Federal Reserve is telling us, labor the labor market conditions had shown some sign of stabilization and the downside risk to the labor market have diminished.
We now instead of focusing on labor want to focus on inflation more. Now, of course, there are some issues that are still lingering. We're still in a low hire environment. We're still in an area with job gains in significantly fewer sectors of the market. We're really only growing jobs in very specific portions of the market like healthcare or education.
And this has been really a slow bleed in the labor market for a while. But this duality creates a really nasty potential problem. You have this Kevin Walsh who's going to come in not be able to reduce rates. Donald Trump will be really pissed that Walsh isn't able to convince his cronies to get rates down.
That will be probably unfortunately worse for stocks. On top of that, the bond market could benefit because the bond market will believe, okay, cool. The Fed is actually like going to be serious about inflation here. But on top of that risk, the longer the stock market suffers because of uh risk premium going up due to Kevin Walsh and rates staying higher, the more likely it is we end up having a stock market correction, which often leads to layoffs at a time our economy really can't absorb more layoffs.
Now, to compound all of this, we now have reports from Axios that Trump is actually secretly moving closer to a major war with Iran. While in the public face, we keep hearing that the United States is closing on a deal or closing in on a deal with Iran. At the same time as we're supposedly closing in on a deal with Iran, we are actually getting a massive military buildup.
People believe that the delay of talks and Trump creating red lines is really just a way to buy Donald Trump time to get more weapons into position. As Axios reports, while both sides say that they've made progress, the gaps are wide and US officials are not optimistic about closing those gaps. In other ways, it was very clear that the president has set some red lines and Iranians are not willing to actually acknowledge and work through those.
And so, at the same time, we're finding more than 150 US military cargo flights have moved weapons, systems, and ammunitions in and ammunition into the Middle East. In just the last 24 hours, another 50 fighter jets, a combination of F-35s, 22s, and 16s, have headed to the region. Now, this isn't expected to be some 12-day war.
This is expected to be regime change in coordination with the Israelis and a complete obliteration of uh the Iranian government. I want to make that clear. Coordination with the Israelis against the Iranians. Now, take a look at what I wrote. I wrote this in the Meet Kevin app. You could get this totally for free, by the way.
I wrote this data down on February 8th in the Meet Kevin app. And I wrote down that uh negotiations were still ongoing, but there's a Twitter account called armchair admiral and on February 8th he noted that 112 USC17s have either arrived or were in route to the Middle East. 17 to 18 more in progress.
Axios is now reporting 150. Right? We're seeing the base build up in the Middle East. And here are some of those logs in terms of where they're going based on, you know, flight tracking. And what I thought was really interesting about the C17 is by studying the C17 a little bit compared to the C130.
I've actually been at the back of one of these C130s before at about 1,500 ft with the back door open. Coolest experience ever. Like shout out to our military. It's really really cool. But uh these Globe Masters are way way bigger than the C130s. The C130 is about 97 feet long. It has a 43,000 lb payload.
And typically on a fully loaded paratrooper mission, you'd have about 64 paratroopers in there. You can fit more gear and people depending on how you arrange it. But on a typical C17 mission, you'd have about 50% more paratroopers, about 102. And instead of a 43,000lb payload, you have about a 4x payload of about 170,000 lb, which is remarkable.
Uh, it's designed to carry A1 Abrams battle tanks and tactical vehicles, which almost implies like a, you know, more air superiority domination followed by ground invasion and occupation, right? Like I'm not I'm not saying that's definitely going to happen, but it's it's something to be concerned about.
It can operate on 3,500 foot runways. I mean, for pilots, this is pretty cool. The, you know, my aircraft that I was trained in had a 19,000 total weight, not payload. Our payload was like 3,000, you know, after fuel or whatever. You could put like 3,000 2,000 to 3,000 lbs of people, uh, you know, baggage or whatever in there, uh, depending on obviously other factors.
But the point is this is these these aircraft have a massive massive payload. It's hard to put into uh perspective. Uh so I'll just put a picture here. Uh here you go. You can see this looks like they're carrying lighting infrastructure here as well as some military equipment. And you can see a lot of the jump seats on the sides.
So these are really big components. And so I think now it's useful to sort of consolidate and try to put all of this together because we really have multiple risks going on in markets right now. So, first things first, geopolitical historically, we know this. If you watch this channel, you already know this, okay?
Geopolitically, historically is a buy the dip. Okay? We have the Supreme Court maybe Friday. Uh this will uh increase uncertainty, but long-term this is a buy the dip. Buy the dip. Okay. So on those two things alone like an invasion into Iran whether or not it happens it's usually a buy the dip. Uh however we would anticipate uh that with geopolitical I would expect uh gold, silver and oil up uh but also bonds so treasury bonds gold silver oil up right uh supreme court maybe Friday uh long-term buy the dip if I are killed.
Okay, if I are dead, I think bonds go up and long-term stocks up as costs down, right? It's disinflationary, which means bonds can rally. The uh Fed uh like I'll call it mediumterm, so call it, you know, 6 to 12 months, not our friend. Uh they'll probably be on hold. That is going to be, in my opinion, bearish stocks.
uh and you know probably a little bit more neutral bonds. Uh Kevin Walsh is bullish bonds. So you can kind of see a theme here like bonds in all of these actually seem to do quite well. Um bullish bonds, bearish gold, silver stocks. Uh the Federal Reserve is not really going to be our friend until this tariff inflation fades.
And since they're probably going to be on hold until we have confirmation of that and we get through some of these other uncertainties, honestly, the next 6 months probably aren't the most ideal for stocks. Uh next 6 months probably not heavily ideal for stocks. I do think that'll generate buying opportunities.
Uh I've been buying the dip. I also just uh put a short-term trade in. Uh it's an options trade. You could see that at, you know, if you're part of the membership at me.com. You can also join now and see it. Uh but we also deployed uh together somewhere around over $300,000 into dip buying on stocks.
More on that in the Meet Kevin membership. You can see that there. Uh but with all of this said, I think this is a good bottom line. And remember, coupon code expires Friday, so the price will go up again. You can get in there. If you're a course member, you could email us at staffme.com. We could get you bundled up as well.
But understand this geopolitically uh this can create uh can create a short-term dip in markets like you'll see bitcoin fall right so I usually expect uh you know bitcoin sudden fall uh there's going to be some liquidation risk that increases if there's some kind of invasion or collapse of negotiations supreme court uncertainty it's it's a plus and minus right here obviously anyone who's a beneficiary of a tariff tariff tariffs going away.
So any kind of US manufacturer or importer should benefit. Apple chip companies uh service companies are going to win less here. It's going to be more like hardware like a restoration hardware, Caterpillar, John Deere, right? Anything physical is really going to win on killing AIPA. Uh which is fantastic.
I I can't wait. I know that there's going to be uncertainty when and if this happens because people are going to say, "Oh, but you know what? If Donald Trump uh just comes out with new plans, we've gone through this in depth. It's going to take a lot longer for Donald Trump to utilize other weapons more efficiently for tariffs.
APA can be done through executive order. The others have to go through the Commerce Department. And if I were advising the Trump administration, which I'm not. I'm not a politician. Uh, if I were advis, because I respect you enough to recognize that you're going to have your own political opinions, and I'm not going to tell you how to live your life.
But if I was advising the Trump administration, I would say, here's the best thing you could do, Donald Trump. This is what you're going to say to the American people. Just read this verbatim. Okay? I don't even know what I'm going to say, so we're just going to yolo this one. Okay? I, Donald Trump, am quite disappointed in the Supreme Court for ruining what has made America so great again.
But alas, we are going to pause tariffs in accordance with the Supreme Court for the next year. We will utilize the revenue that we have collected for stimulus dividend checks to make America great again after midterms. vote for us in midterms and you'll get your stimulus dividend check in between now and then.
No tariffs, but we'll bring him back, baby, in the future. I'd go for something like that. You know, I I I think Donald Trump should take a clean exit on the tariffs. I'm not a fan of tariffs. I think they're attacks on us. Uh and they're stupid. That's I'm I'm just giving you my opinion there, obviously.
Uh and I actually think that would be bullish for markets if Donald Trump did that. Uh it'd be pretty smart. Uh, I think it'd be a win-winwin for everyone. It'd be a win for you. It'd be a win for the stock market. It'd be a win for inflation. It' be a win for the Fed. It'd be a win for jobs. It'd be a win for Trump.
Uh, because he'll brand it as as a tool to to get his votes during midterms because otherwise, I think they're going to lose certainly at least one of the chambers if if they don't come up with something creative. Federal Reserve medium-term, we know, not our friends. I mean, we just saw the the the minutes.
Uh unfortunately, this is also a risk factor because markets do anticipate that we are fully pricing in two rate cuts with a 75% likelihood. Uh that's probably going to flip to like a 75% chance that we don't get two rate cuts and the market has to digest that. So, you know, this is where we've been very cautious in our alpha report.
Uh we we actually just opened up a particular uh well I'm not going to give details on on what we just opened up but anyway uh you know it's not a surprise to me that we keep having these U-turn days. People wonder like Kevin why why does the market just U-turn like this and we keep going back to retesting 595.
It's trading right this trading trading and exit. You get this over and over again. These intraday moves really don't matter. What matters more broadly is sort of your longerterm trend, right? And the longer term trend over the last days has been well actually you could almost say weeks since October we've really topped out.
And the concern is that you know we've lost the 100 day moving average. Are we going to lose the 200 day moving average? That's obviously uh the next concern. So we'll see. But anyway, stay safe out there. Consider joining the programs over at mekevin.com. Maybe come back is the coupon code. You could also use that for our house hack artificial intelligence over at househack.com if you're looking to find the best real estate deals or valuation AI comes out soon, the second quarter on that.
Uh which we're really excited for. And um we think we're going to be moving to a monthly model somewhere around 190 to probably 299 bucks a month for that. Uh and so uh if you get in with lifetime access, you'll be in early and you won't have to pay another dime. .
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