E97: SPAC updates, public/private market overview, Putin's end game & more

At the end of the day, there are tens of utilities in America, but there are 100 million households. And the only path to energy independence is to get every single 100 million household to be resilient, which means they need their own solar panels. They need battery storage. They need their own potable water.

Technology is there. I mean, people are getting generators for natural gases backups. We're going to have to figure out how to take the load off the grid and build resiliency into it.

It looks to me like we're headed for, I mean, I call it a double-dip recession, I think a couple of months ago. That's exactly what it's looking like.

The bad news is I think that it's going to be a really tough, sticky time for the US consumer probably over the next 18 months.

There's an inevitability now that unemployment is going to rise. There is an inevitability now that the economy is going to contract.

It felt like at the end of last year, you guys remember, I thought like conflict was likely this year. I don't think that the conditions that I was referencing have really gotten better. I think they've gotten worse.

I think he's more right than wrong. I think that when things aren't easy, you need to find sort of distractions, essentially, to get people to focus on other things so that the core problem isn't as obvious.

But as Sacks says, there's like this weird like turning up the volume happening on, hey, maybe we're getting closer to a point where if Putin is having tactical failure in this conflict, there's more weaponry he can use that has greater impact.

I see no evidence that we have any intentions of seeking a diplomatic off ramp. I see no evidence that they're looking for to give him a golden bridge, like you said.

Jay Cal, I thought that you were right this whole time, which is we're going to build a golden bridge. We're going to find a way to egress this guy. I'm now in the David camp, which is I think that the stated strategy of the Western Alliance is essentially to cause him to make such a categorically catastrophic mistake, so as to become a pariah, so as to either get overthrown or something.

kudos to Chamath for basically calling that, you know, when the Fed just a couple of months ago was saying that so-called neutral would be 3 to 3.5%. Chamath was saying, no, it's going to be 4.5%, 5% plus.

It's this inflation, as I've said for a long time, is going to be sticky and persistent. I think you're going to see Fed funds at or breaching 5%.

we seem to have an administration that is enacting and embracing inflationary policies to support what they consider to be economic growth and improved employment conditions in this country. And the unfortunate effect of many of those policies is inflation.

Every SPAC sponsor friend of mine that I know is not seeking targets anymore. They're all expecting to wind up and return capital.

The overwhelming majority of the tech SPACs, I think probably will just wind up.

But the silver lining is I think that we are starting a bottoming process for the equity markets. And I think that by the end of this year or the early part of next year, most of that will be done.

And look, I've been pretty clear about this since November. The marginal trade should have been to be trimming risk.

Unemployment will go back up. Inflation will be sticky. Real earnings will shrink. Consumption will ebb. And earnings will not be that great.

I think when the tide goes out, we find out, right? And this is what's happening. The tide's out, and you're going to find all the weakness in the system. It's all going to get flushed.

But I would tend to think that this is an overly optimistic, overly rosy scenario.

we would come in, we would do the work, and we would say the company is worth X. And that number typically was 50 or 60 percent lower than their last private valuation.

I just think, I think like going public seems like a fantasy at this point. I think the whole public markets exit idea is frozen for two years.

The IRA passed an incredible set of incentives, both for the producers of these things and for the end companies that actually deploy them. And so we've solved that problem, you know.

I think there's some really interesting deals in energy. In fact, we spent a lot of time actually pivoting and spending time in energy, looking at, you know, everything from, you know, producers of Nat Gas and Oil to, you know, folks that were building terminals to LNG facilities.

These are the districts that need coal, coal fired plants, LNG, oil to keep going, to sort of minimize the impacts of inflation.