Jeffrey Gundlach, DoubleLine Capital CEO and chief investment officer, likes the idea that DOGE, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, will cut waste and corruption. The White House’s fast-changing tariff policy? Not as much.
Gundlach, on his firm’s webcast Tuesday, noted that he was asked recently whether he still supports everything the Trump administration does.
“Well, I never supported everything the Trump administration did. I didn't like the state and local tax deduction cap. I didn't like the tax cuts that Trump put in place. I don't like a lot of things that every administration does. So, we’ll see what happens,” he said.
“I do support the DOGE thing. I would like to find at least one and a half trillion dollars of cuts. We'll see if we can find that,” he said, adding that it seemed like a heavy lift. The billionaire investor also noted what he called a “not in my backyard” aspect to the cuts DOGE is executing.
“A lot of people don't like the waste and corruption in the federal government, but once someone starts to actually cut things, they don't want their aspects to get cut,” Gundlach said.
“You can't cut without cutting. So you have to find the fraud and the waste and the corruption, and you actually have to cut it. And I'm quite in favor of that happening because it's the only way that we could try to get our fiscal house in order.”
As for tariff policy, Gundlach said it “changes seemingly by the hour, on-again off-again. And it doesn't seem to have a strong logic to it at this point. I know that Trump likes to negotiate in public and says things he doesn't really mean like Canada's going to be the 51st state. I don't really think he believes that, but he likes to troll people, I guess.”
Gundlach also noted that the Magnificent 7 megacap momentum stocks had been viewed as invulnerable and “immortal in terms of nonstop outperformance. But that never works out that way. Every sector is always vulnerable, and we’re starting to, obviously, see that.”
In addition, the DoubleLine leader said the U.S. no longer enjoys the secularly declining interest rate environment that it had since the early 1980s, which has significance for the stock market.
Here are 10 predictions that Gundlach offered on the webcast.
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