Ep. 312 – 2025 1st Quarter Economic Update
CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE
In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the “2025 1st Quarter Economic Update” with special guest Tom Siomades, Chief Market Economist. Together, they break down the real story behind the numbers and headlines from the first quarter of 2025, offering valuable insights into the 2025 market outlook, economic trends 2025, and the complexities around tariffs and the economy. As volatility and uncertainty persist, understanding the true state of the economy becomes crucial for anyone involved in Retirement Planning.
Listen in to learn about the potential impact of the 2025 recession talk, the Inflation outlook 2025, consumer behavior trends like Consumer spending 2025, and how the Federal Reserve is navigating these turbulent times. Whether you’re planning for retirement or adjusting your financial strategy, this economic update offers clear-eyed guidance for financial planning for 2025 and beyond.
In this episode, find out:
- How the “January effect” influenced the 2025 market outlook.
- The role tariffs and the economy are playing in increased market volatility.
- The importance of consumer sentiment and Consumer spending 2025.
- How the Federal Reserve‘s decisions are being pressured by current economic conditions.
- Insights into the economic forecast 2025 and how it impacts Retirement Planning.
Tweetable Quotes:
“Economic uncertainty is a given, but having a well-structured retirement plan prepares you for whatever comes next.” – Radon Stancil
“Even in volatile times, sticking to a flexible, diversified strategy is the key to retiring comfortably.” – Murs Tariq
Resources:
If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!
To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.
Here’s the full transcript:
Welcome to Secure Your Retirement podcast. We are very happy to be able to have a
special guest with us. We’ve had him once before, but he did such a good job in
helping us think through the economy. We have with us the chief market economist,
Tom Siomades. So, Tom, thank you very much for coming on and chatting with us again
on another episode. Hey, thanks for having me on. I’m happy to be here to see you
guys again. It seems just like yesterday, but we’re in January, North Carolina. I
guess the weather here is what January was like in North Carolina. We’re moving you
guys here in Kansas. Yeah, Kansas City. Well, hey, Tom, you know, what we like to
do on these, you know, have somebody like you that kind of gives us a, a well
rounded picture of what’s going on and everything. We hear all these different
topics. You could get on one station and they’re telling you one thing, get on
another station, they’re telling you something else. And so, what we like to do is
to try to give our audience, I guess the big picture as to where things are.
So, I think because we try to do these quarterly, let’s just give an overview of
kind of the first quarter of 2025 and maybe give us a little bit of the highlights
of how you saw that first quarter playing out. – Sure, so if folks recall, right?
We had the inauguration in January. So, there was a ton of optimism after the
election about all new things that are going to come down the
you know, all this potential stuff, right? But all of it was sort of in retrospect
was more enthusiasm than it was reality, right? You know,
things were kind of where they were before the election, during the election, right
after the election. And you still have; you still had like the same old sort of
mundane, you know, everyday talking points of, you know, are we going to be in a in a
recession, things look pretty solid. There’s a consumer hanging in there. We were
talking about stubborn inflation and how many times the Fed would sort of run of
the mill stuff. And as a new administration took hold and started doing stuff,
some of the activities that they were engaging in began kind of to take shape,
right? So, some of the things that, you know, I think made some sense and like
people were saying, hey, you know, this is what I signed up for, this is what I
wanted to see was, you know, they wanted to look at government efficiency, and they
wanted to see some of the stuff that was happening in the prior administration, you
know, reverse, right? Mostly like social type issues, so the economic,
but, you know, like the border and crime and things like that. And those kind of
all started, started, you know, kind of taking root. I mean, people, again,
without taking sides here, and I know it’s hard because a lot of people tend to
view these things to their sort of personal lenses, but, you know, at the end of
the day, it’s like, you know, you may disagree with what a lot of the things,
the how they’re being done. But I don’t think anybody would disagree like, you know,
we should look into the government and how efficient it is. You may not like what’s
being done or the way it’s being done, but you can’t tell me that we’re all 100 %
sure, that the government is running like a Swiss clock. Things like that.
So, there was a lot of the typical type of stuff. And then we started having these
rumblings about, you know, the tariffs and unfair trade practices.
And again, you know, that hit just as the quarter ended, right?
I think, you know, it became official on April 2nd when Trump came out with the
big, you know, menu board of who the naughty children were and who was going to
get punished. So, we had pretty much a first,
January is really good, right? I mean, at the end of the day, and what people need
to take away from that is, typically, again, this is not a typical, we’re not in a
typical spot right now, but typically when you have a very strong January, you have
generally, a strong year in the market. So, we had a rip roaring,
really nice January, and that kind of permeated into, you know, spilled over to
February, and then we started all of this sort of terror of getting stirred and the
lawsuits, the back and forth, which is to be expected, because politics are politics,
right? But it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary until we kind of hit that
independence liberation day, whatever we want to call it, and then it became real
for the markets that there was going to be tariff turmoil. And that’s kind of
what we’ve been dealing with here the past three weeks. And I’ll just, I’ll stay
there unless you guys want to get into anything specific in the quarter, but it was
kind of like started off great, started off promising a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of
potential. And then we started getting bogged down
You know, finger pointing, he said, she said, it’s, it’s, it’s,
like I said, it’s expected. But we, when we talk about tariffs, I can kind of give
you my take on it and hopefully it’ll make some sense to folks. Yeah.
So, you know, the, I think a lot, a lot of people walking into the year would all
agree, right? Regardless of what side you’re on that this year is going to be a
bit crazy. There’s a lot of uncertainty, how aggressive are some of these policies
administered and all that stuff. And so now I think we’re seeing that it’s actually
happening. We walked into the year knowing that it’s going to happen at some point.
Now we’re seeing it happen. And I think that’s kind of leading to some of the
volatility that we’re seeing in the market. But yeah, let’s stick on tariffs because
that is what everyone is talking about. And what has happened over the last, I
don’t know, month and a half or so is you got government efficiency causing turmoil.
And then that slows down for a little bit. And then you got tariffs, tariff
conversations. And then you got the Fed saying, oh, we can’t make moves until we
see how the tariffs play out and everything. So, with the tariff aspect of things,
you know, recently, we’ve had a pretty aggressive stance. And now we’re in a 90
day, or it was announced as a 90 day pause. So, what’s, first,
I guess give people some background, if they haven’t been paying fully attention as
to this tariff conversation, some background, as far as how it started, where it’s
- And then give us your thoughts on where, where is this going? What’s your
opinion on it? Is it the right way? Is it too aggressive? What’s your feeling on
it? Okay. So, um, you all, you reminded me when you’re telling me, I had a
professor when we were taking a military history course, whose final question was,
please explain and illustrate the development of warfare from Plato to NATO, right?
So, you’ve got four hours to write it. So, let’s back up a little bit about why we
have these “unfair tariffs,” if you want to call it that, right? If
you guys recall, after World War II, there were basically two spheres of influence
in the world, right, and it was the–
sides of the corner. You can go to either one you want, either street corner. Well,
on one bar, you’ve got happy hour, ladies’ night, you know, drink specials that are
the other one you got one brand of beer and it’s open from 10 o ‘clock in the
morning till 2 o ‘clock in the afternoon, not on weekends. That was kind of us with
the Soviet Union. We wanted people to come to our bar. So, we created a trading
environment that favored selling to the United States, us buying our goods, you know,
until we basically made the bar across the street go away. Okay? For the past
probably since the Soviet Union went away, there really has been no benefit to this,
you know, us being the absorber of the world’s goods, right? So, what happened was
countries, you know, got used to tariffing us more, and basically tipping the playing
field to where it wasn’t really fair to us. So, what happened was no president,
no administration, Republican, Democrat, whatever, had really just didn’t want to mess
with that, right? They didn’t want to upset that Apple card. So, in Trump, you know,
and he’s been talking about this, if you watch interviews, he’s been talking about
this stuff back in the ’80s. Now it’s funny because he was talking about it in the
’80s and he was actually referring to Japan, but in today’s world. It could be
China, right? You basically have countries that sell into our consumer-based economy,
and we absorb it, and they charge us to sell to them more than we do to buy
their stuff. And as a result, there’s a discrepancy there. So, when Trump finally
decided to fix that and apply a reciprocal tariff, which nobody thought he would
do, that freaked the market out. So, I have a little graph, because it’s ironic, an
independence or a liberation day, I was actually in Canada visiting with Sterling,
and I didn’t know if they were going to let us back out because we were in a trade
war. We were going to be held as human shields up in Canada. So, there’s,
I saw a chart that I thought was really super interesting. So, this is a chart that
I saw that made all the sense in the world. I mean, look at what’s happened
through the years, right? You didn’t really have a whole lot of trade uncertainty
until about COVID. And then this time around, this is where we are when it comes
to trade. So that’s what that tariff rose garden ceremony in.
It shot up the uncertainty of the entire world order when it comes to trade,
right? And we hadn’t seen any kind of disruption close to that until we saw that
during the COVID supply line chain, supply chain kind of thing, uncertainties that
occurred. So literally has not happened in 30 years. So that’s what the markets,
you know, that’s what the markets, you know, reacting to, reacting to. They’re seeing
this policy that we’ve never seen before. As long as we can remember, we were
always paying whatever tariffs the Europeans or the Chinese or whoever wanted us to
pay, and we were never tariffing their stock. So that’s the attempt that the reset,
I guess that Trump was trying to do. And actually, you know, so what you said,
you know, earlier, you know, there’s talk of it. And there was like some saber
rattling back and forth, but it kind of didn’t happen until there
actually happened, until there was actual date set in stone that this thing was
going to happen a couple of days after this liberation then. So that’s the part that I
thought was, you know, unprecedented, if you will. So that’s kind of what happened
with the tariffs. And I mean, we can get into more specifics if you guys want, but
that’s really what it was. It was just an upending of the world order as, you
know, probably easily the last 30 years, if not probably for the last, you know,
70 or 80 years. Well, and what I, the way I see it is I see that,
you know, there’s obviously Opinions about whether the way it’s being done is good
or bad or what it might be I think the administration itself has actually said,
you know This because this is going to call some pain before it gets good if we
continue on this path So the question is
Where we are at right now with this battle in particular what appears to be a
continued battle in particular right now with China. Will this lead us into a
recession? Uh, will it be, you know, obviously we had a significant sell off in the
market. Um,
we’ve seen that, that already play out that seems to have at least calm down just
a little bit. There’s not really a good direction right now in the market.
Obviously, uh, things could go either way, but from an economic standpoint to the
country, if this holds and there’s not a settlement that comes out of this,
I mean, what do you see? – There’s a lot of, in my opinion, this one is not
really clear cut because I would almost argue that we’re in a recession right now
from an emotional standpoint. I don’t know a lot of people that feel great about
what’s going on out there. The issue has been, and we can get into it when we
talk about the Fed a little bit, the issue has been, the hard data on
employment, GDP, those type of things has not really been supportive of us sliding
into a recession, okay? All the other stuff, the consumer spending,
defaults and stuff like that, late payments on loans are all pointing to the fact
that the people are hurt. I mean, it was kind of,
you know, fringy, but yet emblematic about the whole thing that we had with the
eggs, right? That whole egg thing was crazy. I mean, it’s not, it wasn’t because of
economic problems because we had a bird flu and had to destroy a bunch of birds
and it takes some time for it to come back. But the fact of it is, how many
people complained or were complaining about the price of eggs, right? And that was
sort of like a canary in the coal mine. So, if this thing persists and goes on
longer than what people perceive right now.
Yeah, we could push ourselves into a recession, all given the fact that we’re
already kind of in a sour move, right? That’s one. The other aspect of it is, we
don’t know what’s going to happen when the 90 day period comes up. I mean, they keep
telling us there’s all these people lining up. I mean, I think their fists are
bloody from banging and I go, let us in, let us in. We want to do a trade deal. I
don’t know. I mean, until we see the first, until we see India and Japan and South
Korea comes with meaningful deals. And again, we’re also talking about someone who in
an office is very bombastic and very skewed in how they’re going to report this,
right? So, there’s the PR overlay of like, we may not get anything paper in a trade
deal, but it’s going to be heralded as the greatest deal ever, right? So, there’s
that aspect of it. So how much of it can you believe? But at the end of the day,
having trade uncertainty with your allies and adversaries is not a good thing.
Hopefully, we can get resolved. A lot of this stuff resolved in this 90 -day period,
so, we don’t have to threaten more tariffs, and then we’ll go through this whole
cycle again. But I think ultimately, at the end of the day, what this comes down
to is, it comes down to a eye to eye tooth to tooth with China.
And if you notice China was the only one that didn’t signal a willingness to talk.
So that tells me they’re pretty entrenched and they’re not going to want to give anything
- There’s part of it is a cultural thing because they’ve got this whole like
saving face thing and they don’t want to admit they were wrong or whatever. I don’t
know. I don’t know how that works. But at the end of the day, they’re not in a
good position. They export way more to us than we import from them.
You know, there’s a few things that are critical, that may be hard for us to
acquire from somewhere else. But I think that’s really getting the Chinese to blink
is what’s going to hold this market up. And I think at the end of the day,
I think we can avoid recession, but we’ve got to get positive, right? I mean, I
don’t know how much more stuff we can take. We’ve been hammered with, you know,
the election was very divisive. Then after that, you had, you know, high inflation
that’s persisting, that’s wearing people down. You know, look, you’d have a crappy
attitude too if I spent the past month telling you that these tariffs are going to
make prices go up again. And you’re like sitting there smacking your head saying, oh
God, not again. We just had this thing a couple of years ago and we’re telling me
you’re going to make things better. And then you’ve got a media for good or bad or
skewed or not is telling you that the prices are going to go up on everything. And
that’s exhausting to be in that place. So, I think as much as I discount soft data,
I think I’ve been through a few cycles where we’ve had us basically be– we talked
to ourselves. We self fulfilling prophesied ourselves into a recession because we
stopped spending. And think about it. 70 % of the economy is driven by the consumer,
right? If the consumer feels bad, if you guys feel bad, you don’t go out and buy
that car, you know, you think, “Well, I could remodel my kitchen, but I’m not
really…” It adds up. And eventually, you know, we get to a place where, you know,
people don’t spend money, businesses report bad earnings, people have to get laid
off. So, you know, there’s a lot there, right? I mean, that could possibly happen,
but I think chances of a recession are way more elevated, we’ll probably get a
negative print of GDP. That’s what I’m hearing from the Atlanta Fed is that they’re
going to probably print one negative quarter because there’s been all of this
upheaval in the past quarter. And I don’t buy that whole thing like when you get
the Goldman Sachs like 45%. You guys know your personal economy,
you’re either like 100 % personal economy or zero because you don’t have a
job. So, this whole thing about 40 % chance of recession, I don’t know what that
means because I was looking at some other charts and every single time before a
recession, the odds of a recession were always like 35%. Let me just say,
oh, well, you know, a third of the time we might get a recession. Well, how about
calling it actually say, yeah, and then they’re obviously 100 % of the time when
we’re, you know, ankle deep in it, but at that point it’s too late, right? So
yeah, yeah, team, you know, we walked into the year with a better outlook on the
Fed’s ability to start doing some rate cuts. They did a couple last year in 24 and
then it looked pretty promising for this year, but now with, with some of the
actions that have been taken on the, on really the trade wars aspect of it, there’s
a lot of threats to what the Fed can do. And I guess, and if you think about,
you know, a lot of business owners and everything like that, they’re thinking, well,
we got to bring stuff inside the United States, because we can’t afford to operate
outside the United States anymore, which is going to drive their cost up, but they
also have to invest and rates are high right now. So, in a way,
you probably heard, I’ve heard that this is all a strategic move in a way to kind
of force the Fed’s hand in some manner. So, what are your thoughts on the pressure
that’s on the Fed right now? And, you know, where do they go? Do they stick to
their guns? Or at what point do they have to fold? – I think you look at, you
look at what the Fed started the year off, right? We were calling for about two.
And then miraculous, after all this terror stuff started popping off, we were
wearing the five cam. And now they’re, you know, they were talking about something
in the second half of the year. Now they’re talking about doing something and
potentially in June. They got some good ammo with the most recent CPI numbers.
We have two months of inflation decline and actually last month was the first time
I think since 21 where you actually had a negative print on inflation.
So, prices went down. So, I think that gives them if they get another month of data
like that, because I think they’re like 2 .4 on CPI. It’s not that far. If they
can get closer to, you know, demonstrate that there’s been, you know, three months
of, you know, downward sliding, I think that gives them an out to low rates.
The challenge is that the market, the bond market’s not buying it, right? The bond
market, I think the thing that gets lost in the whole bed inflation,
you inflation, tariff thing is that we have $36 trillion in debt that needs to be
financed. And the market’s like, “Are you guys going to fix this?” Because it’s not
getting better. We didn’t fix Social Security; we didn’t fix Medicare. I don’t know
how we got to $36 trillion, but we don’t have anything to show for it. We still
have all those systemic problems out there, underfunded stuff that we keep kicking
down the road. So, the bond people are saying, “Wait a minute, I don’t care what
the Fed does on the short end, who cares?” I care about the fact that this $36
trillion needs to be refinanced and I don’t want to get paid 4 % for it. I want
to get paid 5%. And that’s the bigger challenge is how do you win the confidence
back? The Fed will do what the Fed’s going to do. And I think, you know, a
quarter basis point or 50 basis points here is not going to make a big difference
in the trading of the economy, of the stock market, but not the economy for the
most part, right? I mean, what’s 50 basis points, right? It may jazz the market,
but I think at the end of the day, the challenge here is we need to see movement
from a government that, you know, spends a lot of I mean, think about this, this
is really interesting to me. It’s like our budget was about four and a half
trillion dollars in 2019 for the government. It’s like over seven now. And the
question I ask is, what do we got for that extra 60%, 70 % of the spend there?
I don’t know. I can’t point to anything. My life’s not better. So, you know, and
yet when you go to the government and say, we need to bring us back to 2019
levels, they’re like, no, no, we can’t. The whole system will collapse on itself.
We’re going to have Armageddon and, you know, crazy, you know, revolution in the
streets, blood in the streets. You know, that’s the challenge, right? The challenge
is that you have to convince the markets that rates need to come down. And when you’re,
when you’re slogging out 36 trillion dollars, that means to maybe finance, you know,
Kind of makes you wonder why we didn’t sell bonds, 100 -year bonds at 0 % interest
rates or effective rates or 2 % long -term rates, and now we’re here. Because now,
this stuff’s going to start coming due, and the bonds are going to want to
refinance. I’m not going to have to pay for it. And the Fed lowering rates, that
might help in businesses or short -term financing and things like that.
But it isn’t going to convince people that we’re healthy when it comes to $36 ,000
in that. Yeah. All good things for us to at least think about and understand a
little bit. So, I appreciate you breaking some of this down just to have the
conversation. So, I’m going to ask you probably a ridiculous question. And I say
ridiculous because there’s no real good way that you could give us an answer that
you know is going to happen. But if you had to sit here today looking forward,
how do you see things playing out over the next few months and how the year plays
out? – Okay, so I started the year pretty upbeat, right?
I thought we were going to have an up year and usually the first year as a new
administration takes over and we did have pretty strong support coming in,
you generally have a lot of, you know, tailwind and stuff is talked about and,
you know, there’s enthusiasm and honey. I don’t think that that’s all entirely gone
away because a lot of it, you know, to me right now anyway, there’s a lot of good
that can still happen. Okay, there’s a lot more hurdles at this point, I And you
have to get through this tariff stuff and has to go away as an input of
uncertainty to put it down. It just needs to be settled. We need to come down and
say, OK, these are all the people we made deals with. These are what the things
are, and they will stay in place, right? Then you have to get the tax,
the big, beautiful bill as it’s called these to get through, right? You need to get
those taxes and the resolution process done, and you need to hammer, you need to
continue to hammer on regulations and government spending,
right? If those things can kind of get on a positive tilt instead of where they
are right now, which tariffs create uncertainty, people are scared it’s going to
cause a recession, people are afraid of inflation. That’s not a positive for the
rest of the year but if we can say we resolve the tariff stuff prices are going
to get steady we’re going to get inflation down also we’re going to streamline some
government and we’re also going to lower you know the cost of doing business and
you know encourage that stuff energy prices you know we need to come or have come
down I mean I think I was like $60 in barrel I’m seeing sub $3 gas in a lot of
places, right? So that’s a good thing. If those things get on a positive tilt,
I can see us making back everything we’ve lost and probably getting to hit another
10 to 15 % in the second half of the year. But if the terror stuff drags out,
if the bill blows up and somehow doesn’t move through Congress because, you know,
you’ve got the people that are and much larger cuts to go than anybody’s prepared
to agree to, right? And they just gum it up because the margins are so thin, right?
And then, you know, if we continue to, you know, have Tesla’s get burned and,
you know, all that kind of stuff. I mean, you see what I mean, right? We’re like
on a knife set, right? The guy will go really well, really quickly or we can slide
into it. So, I think it’s going to be the next 90 days will be huge. You know, we
got to get some resolution to the tariff stuff. I don’t think the China thing is
going to solve itself anytime soon. I think we’re in a collision course and this is
another sort of, you know, this is just another instance of that,
right? They want to dominate the world trade, and they want to be the dominant
power. They see us is being weak and you know acquiescing and they feel like
they’re on the ascendancy and I think they’re going to be sorely they’re going to
be very sorry if they if they test us outwardly, they already do it in various ways
right, they cheat they steal they steal our IP they you know they manipulate them
currency I mean, the fentanyl stuff that they ship over the border,
you know, all of that stuff. There’s a lot going on, right? And so, you know,
I don’t think that that’s ever going to go away, but at least if we can get rid
of the 15 things, the 15 fires burning at once and focus on one,
while everything else is humming along, I think that’ll go a long way to, you know,
turning the, turning the corner on this yeah well those are some really
good thoughts and definitely gives our listeners something to think about as we you
know every day is a different headline and everything like that but we’ll be sure
to check back in with you in a few months at the end of the second quarter but
Tom thanks a lot for you know spending some time with us and walking through some
concepts that are not fun to talk about right now, but we need to be talking about
and we need to stay educated. So, thanks a lot for your time. – Yeah, hopefully next
time we chat, you know, it’ll be a little bit more uplifting, right? I mean, this
is just, this is what’s to be expected. Markets, you know, move up and down.
And, you know, I think we got lulled into this sense of calmness,
you know? And I think volatility is a thing and it’s always something different,
right? I mean, you can go back decades and find something that, you know, popped
off here or there. I think this is one of those. I don’t think this is the
beginning of some sort of the end. I think this is just something that we’re going
to have to get through and, you know, hopefully we’re in a better place three
months from now, six months from now. All right. Well, we’re looking forward to
having you back and seeing how that’s going to play out. Thanks for your time, Take
care and have a wonderful day. We hope you have enjoyed this episode of Secure Your
Retirement.