Macro Voices · Hedge Fund Manager Erik Townsend

MacroVoices #508 Laskhman Achuthan: Inflation Cycles Amid Regime Change

November 26, 2025·1 hr 5 min·5 clips

Achuthan says an AI bust is 'virtually certain' but admits the dot-com parallel means timing the exit is nearly impossible.

The scoreboard opens with some relief. Patrick Ceresna has the S&P 500 up 187 basis points at 6766 after its first real correction since Liberation Day. Then Eric Townsend brings ECRI co-founder Lakshmana Chuthan into the harder question: how useful are business cycles when politics and geopolitics are crowding the tape? Growth, inflation, and market direction get treated as connected problems, not separate boxes. Townsend reaches for the dot-com bust, the stock market bust of the 1970s, and the late-1960s runup to the Nixon shock. The guest does not swat those comparisons away, but he is careful about them. Structural shifts can matter a lot. The trouble is spotting them while they are happening. That is the useful tension in the episode. Five years later, a turning point can look obvious. In the moment, investors are stuck with mood, memory, and too much information coming in at once. The guest argues that cycles still help because they give a firmer read than a grand historical analogy. Even with government data temporarily on hold, his forward look is that growth is not collapsing and inflation, in broad terms, is not running away over the next couple of quarters. The tone is restrained, which is the point. This is not a headline-trading episode or a call to name the next regime change before everyone else. It is a reminder to use history carefully and let cyclical evidence do the quieter work when the big narratives get loud.

As heard by us

A grounded Macro Voices episode on growth, inflation, and how hard it is to spot a real regime shift in real time.

Macro Voices spends the week on business cycles, growth, and inflation, with ECRI co-founder Lakshmana Chuthan as the guest. Eric Townsend keeps the focus on a simple question: does the current backdrop point to a real structural turn, or is it just market noise?

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Why you'd press play

You want a calm macro read while stocks rebound and the growth-and-inflation picture is still being sorted out.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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