Sunny California

Mnuchin is bullish at SoCal confab

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Don’t be fooled by recent market turmoil: The broader economy shows no signs of slowing down any time soon, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told an audience of financial pros here Monday.

In fact, Mnuchin said there is no prospect of there being a recession in the next two years.

“I don’t buy that at all,” Mnuchin said of a possible economic downturn before 2020.

“We see very strong economic growth for the next several years.”

Even though the stock market has largely soared since the depths of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, the real economy has not yet felt those benefits, suggesting that there may still be more room to run, he added.

“The financial markets have recovered. Corporate earnings have done very well,” Mnuchin told an audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

“For the average worker, their wages have not gone up.”

Also weighing on the crowd’s mind was how to navigate the stock markets now that volatility — long in hiding — has returned.

“I think that volatility is going to pick up,” Scott Minerd, chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners, said.

“It will really affect the people who are still psychologically damaged from 2008,” Mary Callahan Erdoes, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, said, noting that until recent years, moves of greater than 1 percent happened at least once a week — compared with eight for all of 2017.

Meanwhile, on the regulatory front, Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department’s antitrust boss, cautiously opined on the outcome of the AT&T-Time Warner trial, which had closing arguments on Monday.

“A lot of these things got settled in the past and we’re litigating this not to block,” he said. “There might be some pro-competitive aspects of this merger.”