Founder of MacroMavens (macromavens.com) — the "Macro Maven": an institutional macro strategist known for consumer/credit-cycle work; a self-described commodity bull / paper-asset bear. Running synthesis of her video/podcast appearances, with per-transcript breakdowns and a stock index.
The mark-to-market vehicle behind hyperscaler earnings ($8B → $75B+ on Amazon's books); no view on the business, but the same accounting lever that inflated profits produces the write-downs if AI valuations cool.
Named only as the archetype of the legacy corporate pension — private plans are also loaded with alternative assets and "will feel some of that pain," though less underfunded than public plans.
Her worked example of fake earnings quality: the Anthropic stake marked from $8B to $75B+, ~$16B of a ~$30B quarter booked as mark-to-market "other income" — paper gains that can't pay salaries or interest, while free cash flow has gone negative and debt is issued into widening spreads.
Same distortion — a big chunk of latest earnings from booking Anthropic gains, one-time and overvalued-by-default if Anthropic is; constructive only on the credit, where an investor can lend to Google instead of the Treasury at a higher yield.
In one line: The AI capex boom is a bond-market story — corporate borrowers are now crowding out a Treasury that must roll $10 trillion a year, so higher-for-longer is structural; the profits offsetting those rates are half bookkeeping; and a system that levered up as rates fell now breaks at ever-lower yields, held together only by a Fed put that Warsh says he will retire and that investors won't unlearn until it has been tested, repeatedly. As an inflationary economy siphons the marginal dollar away from financial assets, hard assets beat paper. A commodity bull / paper-asset bear — gold bull, near-term energy bull, bearish on long bonds — positioned early and waiting.
Crowding out, inverted. The government must roll $10T this year ($6.7T of bills that auto-roll every 12 months + $2.3–3.3T of notes/bonds); corporates must refinance $1.2T, and the hyperscalers — free cash flow gone — are now new borrowers on top. SIFMA data show private-sector issuance year-to-date matching the federal government's. The long end pays for it, and Treasuries are the benchmark everyone else is priced off: higher for longer for everybody. The more bullish you are on AI capex, the more committed to higher rates you should be.
Earnings quality is the bulls' weak point.AMZN's Anthropic stake went from $8B to north of $75B, and ~$16B of a ~$30B reported quarter was that mark-to-market gain; GOOGL booked Anthropic gains the same way. Roughly 12 of ~20 points of Q1 S&P earnings growth was mark-to-market accounting. The ~12 companies that made the index look cash-rich are all now free-cash-flow negative and issuing debt into widening spreads — credit markets already show the discernment equities lack.
The market's biggest bid has flipped. Companies have stopped buying back shares and are now net issuers of stock — a decade-long structural tailwind "silently going away and no one's really paying attention."
Secular, not just cyclical. Deglobalization begets the reverse of 1980–2020: a multipolar world less reliant on the dollar and Treasuries (China and Japan already buying less or selling), plus inflationary reshoring — rates grinding higher each year for decades. The BoJ defending the yen by selling Treasuries is the live version of it.
The tub. When inflation and rates fall, the economy needs less of each day's liquidity and the overflow inflates financial assets; run it in reverse and the economy siphons the marginal dollar, so hard assets and commodities outperform paper — and hard assets "can't be manufactured out of thin air" while paper issuance is at hyper-scale. Dart-throwing stops working; fundamental analysis returns.
Crises at ever-lower yields — and the put is why this one hasn't come. Her one chart: every financial crisis has struck at a lower level of Treasury yields than the last, because leverage rose as rates fell (federal debt past $40T, record margin debt). She expected a crisis by now; what bought time is the Fed put — investors "extend and pretend" to the next expected cut. Underneath: the biggest wave of corporate bankruptcies since the GFC, private credit trading at huge haircuts to its marks, junk borrowing at 7.4% (vs 4% at the trough) into a $1.2T roll, hyperscaler CDS widening like 2007 ABCP, the top 10 balance sheets nothing like the other 490, and even Mag 7 names turning FCF-negative (2026-SEP-02).
Warsh vs Bessent: the Greenspan 1986–87 script. Warsh wants to retire the Fed put — right long-term, a "comeuppance" near term — but four decades of conditioning only unlearns through repeated 5–10% drops with no dovish response; a hawkish new chair with the long end rising and equities ignoring it is exactly how Greenspan began before capitulating and founding the put. Meanwhile Bessent "couldn't be more interventionist": the yen intervention was "a spectacular failure" (Soros vs the BoE), the $2B→$4B buyback "flubbed," and the TGA's "$1T of firepower" is a checking account against a $2T deficit — in her view a scare tactic to squeeze a record spec short in the long end and cut mortgage rates before the Nov-3 midterms. The real $1T lever would be revaluing the gold reserve from $42/oz.
Policy is constrained, not hawkish. Warsh's balance sheet is already up $200B since December's "non-QE QE"; Bessent found no way around T-bill issuance. Pensions are ~$4T underfunded at record highs, with alternatives marking at 50c — so the next recession brings a pension bailout, a deficit far above today's ~$2T, and a Fed balance sheet "well over 15 trillion," possibly 20. "Run it hot" ends in print. Nothing sustainable changes before November 3: every intervention is aimed at the midterms, and 2028 is a binary for the whole energy-and-intervention regime.
How she's positioned. Long gold, waiting for it to recover its footing (a self-described gold bull); energy exposure increased (own the AI boom through its inputs — "if you're an AI bull, you kind of have to be a bull for energy and copper"), and in September a near-term energy bull: oil won't "drop like a stone" after Iran as the world rebuilds reserves and AI demand holds, with Venezuela's 100-year lease only a cushion on expectations (and really a China deal). Bearish on rates, minding the long-end short squeeze; a little dry powder in T-bills; no material bets in Treasuries until there's "more agita." Rather early than late.
The product
What it is:MacroMavens — the independent macro research firm Stephanie Pomboy founded and writes; readers "can go to macromavens, plural, dot com and find out about my research there and you can sign up" (and, per September, "read sample research"). She writes a weekly client report with a cover note — the 2026-SEP-02 one set Bessent's interventionism against Warsh's free-market treatise. She also posts on X/Twitter (@spomboy). Beyond that, the free monthly Thoughtful Money conversation is the public-facing channel, and she is on the faculty of Thoughtful Money's fall online conference alongside Grant Williams. Grounded only in what she said on these appearances (2026-AUG-05, 2026-SEP-02) — to be expanded as later appearances reveal more.
Offering
What it is
How she runs it
Seen in this appearance
MacroMavens research
Subscription macro research at macromavens.com
Institutional-style macro work built off primary data (she pulls SIFMA's quarterly bond-issuance series herself rather than quoting headlines)
"They can go to macromavens… find out about my research there and you can sign up"
Monthly Thoughtful Money update
A free recurring conversation with Adam Taggart
Adam asks her every time whether her personal portfolio changed, so the audience hears any material shift in what she likes or dislikes
"Have you made any major changes to your own personal portfolio since the last time we talked?" — "I have not."
How it serves retail investors:
Translates the plumbing — issuance calendars, mark-to-market accounting, the buyback-to-issuance flip — into a single plain conclusion a retail investor can act on: higher for longer, hard assets over paper.
Explicit about time horizon: she is talking "over the course of years, decade plus," not the next quarter, and says outright she would rather be early than late.
Discloses her own positioning each month (gold, energy, T-bill dry powder) so the audience can see whether the thesis is actually being traded — while both she and the host state plainly that it is not personal financial advice.
Transcripts
One dated page per appearance — each has its talking points and the saved transcript. Newest first.
Stephanie Pomboy appearances discovered via search (Stephanie Pomboy MacroMavens interview), not yet processed — verify publish dates & channels, newest first. Limited to the last ~2 years. None queued yet.