Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 22nd of January 2019 to The Sounding Line.

Jeffrey Gundlach, founder of DoubleLine Capital, recently spoke with Barron’s to share his outlook on how to read the increasingly mixed economic data coming out of the US, with continued employment gains seemingly at odds with weakening industrial figures.

 

Jeffrey Gundlach:

“What’s interesting is that the things that have weakened have weakened just recently, other than housing and things like the banking sector. So, in the most recent couple of months you’ve seen things like the ISM manufacturing index took a bog drop, you’ve seen some layoffs in the construction sector which are remarkably high. They’re actually the highest in 18 years, or something like that. Mortgage applications are down to a level not seen since before the global financial crisis. So, I think it’s really important to watch the data as it comes out in the first quarter of this year, because it is mixed right now…”

“The jobs numbers that came out… for (the) first report in 2019 were surprisingly strong. but there was something underneath the surface that was a little disconcerting… All the jobs were for people over the age of 55. If you take the cohort for people age 20 to 54, there were actually job losses. There was a lot made out of the fact that the… work force participation rate went up. That was also older people, which kind of suggests that maybe the low interest rate and low investment environment that we saw in 2018 might be motivating people that want to be retired to come out of retirement and go back to work, which may not necessarily be correlated with what we think of as a strong economy.”

There is more to the interview, so enjoy it above.

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