Is the Economy Great or Terrible? |
Torsten Slok may be the only economist whose work is routinely described as a banger — as in “another banger of a chart from Torsten Slok!” — and on the frigid December afternoon we meet, he’s done it again. It’s the day after the Fed meeting, when stocks rose after Jerome Powell pushed through the third interest-rate cut of the year. At 6:58 a.m., Slok, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, sent out his daily newsletter containing a single chart plotting stock valuations; the caption read, in part, “Investors should expect to get zero in return in the S&P 500 over the coming decade.” Sitting in his office, Slok gleefully confirms his purposely provocative prediction. “Zero,” he says, holding up the “okay” symbol with his hand to form a big fat O between his thumb and forefinger. This would seem to be terrible news for anyone planning to retire, buy a home, or send their kids to college anytime soon, and Slok agrees that it’s “not good at all.”
Downstairs, four enormous green-and-red candy canes hang from the slanted façade of the Solow Building, and inside the private-equity giant’s headquarters, employees mill around a “barista bar” laden with fruit and dark-chocolate truffles. The floor is embossed with the words CONTRARIAN CAF É. Here in midtown, some 80 blocks north of Wall Street, where the focus on the private markets — especially the trendy niche known as private credit — has brought Apollo’s assets under management to nearly $1 trillion, they proudly go against the grain. “I want the reader to say, What did he come up with today? Is it something crazy? ” says Slok, who explains his newsletter is titled The Daily Spark because he hopes it will spark discussion. “If I can get some blood boiling,” he adds, “then I think I have served my purpose.”
Most of the time, Slok doesn’t try to predict what will happen with the economy. His job with the newsletter is to identify trends and risks, but because he does so in bite-size daily installments, untethered to a political ideology — and because he is known........