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Can Democrats stop the 'tax doom loop'? · The Financial Exchange Show

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  donation today. The DAV five K Boston is presented by
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  Veterans Development Corporation. Face is the Financial Exchange with Chuck
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  Zada and Mark van Betty.
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  Speaker 2: At the moment, we've got a modest bounce happening across
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  major US equity markets, with the Dow up two hundred
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  and nineteen points, the S and P F twenty two,
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  and the NASDAK up ninety three, so about a half
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  a percent bump on all three major US indices.
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  Speaker 3: All right, Well, we're gonna try and reconnect Chuck there.
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  I'm not sure what's going on with that connection there today,
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  but yeah, it is the second hour of the Financial Exchange.
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  Will effort Chuck here and try and get him reconnected here.
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  But just want to recap yesterday's tech selloff, if you will. Mark,
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  we saw the Nasdaq close down over three percent, S
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  and P five hundred down over two percent, and we
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  kind of saw something similar back in early August. So
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  I don't know, could you kind of recap what we
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  saw yesterday and maybe why it happened? Any insight on
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  that front?
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  Speaker 4: Now, journalists, financially journalists, as you know, always attribute a
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  big sell off to something because it's easy to think
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  about it that way. It's kind of comforting to think
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  we have a grasp of why things are moving the
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  way that they are. But in fact, movements, even large movements,
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  are often random. I'm not suggesting that they're not responding
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  to underlying economic and market events on average in some
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  kind of rational way, but big moves can be random.
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  Big moves, even big crashes, are just small crashes that
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  kind of got out of control, that snowballed, if you like.
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  And there are lots of examples of this throughout history.
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  So it's normal to want to attribute effect to cause. Again,
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  I think there's something comforting in knowing or thinking we
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  know about why something happened. But these big movements are
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  part and parcel of stock ownership.
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  Speaker 1: As we all know.
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  Speaker 4: Volatility is Chuck Sadup wherever he is right now, likes
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  to say, is a feature, not a symptom of market malfunctioning.
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  It's normal. It's the price we pay for high long
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  run returns. So today, Tuck, as you point out, where
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  seeing stocks rebound modestly, it's not obvious to me that
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  the economic news that we got this morning, which was
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  the so called jolts job opening and labor turnover surveys,
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  what that acronym stands for it suggested, not suggested, but
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  outright showed to the extent that these estimates are reliable,
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  that number of job opening shrank by a few hundred
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  thousand last month, and that they're at their lowest level
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  now in a few years. You may recall that the
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  so called Jolts report was something people followed very very
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  closely when inflation was very high, and naturally more job
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  openings indicates greater demand for workers, a hotter labor market.
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  We were struggling to explain it. Jolts largely did inflation's
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  come down. Jolts has come down, Other measures of labor
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  market titness have come down. So all of these measures
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  are sinking and pointing, I think, to or telling the
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  same story to the extent that inflation was attributable to
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  an excess of demand which manifested itself in an overly
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  tight and unnaturally type if you like labor market, those
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  conditions of east.
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  Speaker 3: All right, we have chuck now back Chuck. We were
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  just touching on yesterday's sell off and Jolts this morning.
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  Any other follow up thoughts there?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think that when we look at
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  the data here and try to make sense of it.
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  There's clearly a slowdown that's happening. The question is is
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  it the slowdown that you want to see to get
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  to the point where you know, you feel that there's
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  no risk of the labor market causing further inflation, or
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  is it the kind of slowdown that leads to recession.
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  And we're not going to know for a little bit
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  longer here, but the data is kind of pingponging between
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  those two possibilities on kind of a weekly, bi weekly
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  basis right now. So we'll see where this ends up going.
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  But there's a definite slowing in the data that we're seeing.
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  And the other thing is, as Mark has said before,
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  look you get to a point where, hey, if the
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  data continues to slow and interest rates come down further,
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  then you get to a point where people say, hey, gee,
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  I didn't realize that mortgage rates.
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  Speaker 5: You know, we are back in you know, the high fives.
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  Speaker 2: Now if we get there, you know, a couple months
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  from now, and maybe they start looking at buying homes
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  in the spring. So it's it's a dynamic system that's
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  never static, and ultimately it's one where we're going to
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  be sorting through what happens for a little bit here.
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  Speaker 5: I don't think that we have any.
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  Speaker 2: Clear answers right now, and we're still trying to figure
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  out exactly where this economy and these markets are are
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  going to be going. So that's that's where we stand
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  at the moment here, Mark, I want to talk a
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  little bit about this piece from CNBC forty four two
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  percent of workers are cautiously optimistic about meeting retirement goals,
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  and I'm curious to get your thoughts on. I know that,
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  you know, pulls about feelings about retirement are kind of
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  hard to you know, draw a ton from. But I
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  would make the case that if if one in two
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  people are saying, hey, I'm pretty optimistic about retirement, I
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  don't know that that's a horrible result.
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  Speaker 4: Actually, no, that just from memory, this could be off.
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  But I think that's relatively good compared to respondents historically,
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  say over the last couple of decades. And part of
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  that may be attributable to an increasing number of tools
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  either three or four to one K provider or through
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  your financial advisor if you work with one, that allow
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  you to get a quick and reasonably accurate assessment of
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  how likely you are to meet your goals. You tell
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  your advisor or even your four to one K provider,
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  through the tools they make available on their website, what
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  your annual income goal is and when you want to
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  hit that. By say I want to retire on fifty
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  thousand dollars a year in today's dollars at age sixty five,
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  it'll tell you the likelihood that you can convert your
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  four oh one K into a so called immediate annuity
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  at that age. This is a tool we didn't have
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  in the mid nineties. It became available starting in the
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  late nineties, and now it's very widely available to not
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  only anybody with a four h one K, but anybody
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  with an IRA with one of the major providers, and
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  certainly to clients with a reputable advisory firm. So people
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  now have tools at their disposal and relatively easily accessible
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  tools that'll tell them whether or not they're on target.
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  There's no reason unless you're not eligible for a four
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  h one K and have no access to financial education
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  tools at all, no reason why most Americans shouldn't have
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  ready access to a number like that.
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  Speaker 2: When you look at the data here, one piece that
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  is interesting is even though about half of workers say
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  they're callsly optimistic about reaching, you know, their retirement goals.
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  Eighty two percent of workers say that achieving a comfortable
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  retirement is going to be much harder or somewhat harder
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  to achieve than it was for their parents. And I'm
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  trying to make sense of this, and there are two
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  things that come to mind. The first is, look, the
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  generation that is retiring now, in generations that we'll be
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  retiring in the future, largely using defined contribution plans, not
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  to find benefit plans. So I think that there is
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  no pension that's necessarily taking care of people the way
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  that you know, you saw for really the kind of
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  the generation that was working from in that post war
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  period through you know, the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties.
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  But other than that, you know, I wonder if we
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  end up looking at that as something where we view
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  kind of period as the norm, because we all know
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  people that you know, worked from you know, nineteen fifty
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  to nineteen ninety, and you know, they were working for
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  forty years and we knew them for that time, and
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  then we saw them retire and have a twenty thirty
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  year retirement and so on and so forth, and so
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  that seems normal to us. But if you look at
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  pretty much the rest of American history, that looks like
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  the outlier. And I wonder if we're just interpreting that
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  period as, hey, what should be normal to retire into
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  as opposed to Hey, the US was just abnormally wealthy
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  in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, and so
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  as a result, it was easier for companies to pay
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  for their workers' retirement. And that's not the norm going
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  forward or going right now.
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  Speaker 4: I think you nailed it. Those were heady years. Economic
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  growth was very high in the fifties and sixties. It
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  was even high in the seventies that we tend to
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  view that decade now as one of disappointment, politicalomic, geopolitical,
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  you name it. But in terms of economic growth, a
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  real rate was very close to the nineteen eighties. So
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  it was only in relative to and of course the
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  uncertainty associated with high inflation sours our perceptions of that period,
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  but only relative to the extraordinary growth of the fifties
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  and sixties, which resulted from US being the only major
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  power without damage to our industrial base after World War Two.
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  We were like seventy eighty percent of the world's manufacturing,
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  or maybe we're closer to fifty, but seventy eighty percent
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  of the world's oil output after World War Two, anything
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  that could be made on a factory line was made
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  in America because everybody else's industrial base was bombed to
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  oblivion after World War Two. So we came out of
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  that much like we did World War One as not
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  only the world's creditor but the hub of the world's manufacturing.
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  Next two decades were relatively relatively high growth. So yeah, Chuck,
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  I think we're comparing it to that Golden era of growth.
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  And of course life expectancy was shorter than two so
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  it was it was easier, if you like, in an
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  actuarial since to offer a pension, and easier to provide
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  benefits like social security and eventually medicare.
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  Speaker 2: Take a quick break here when we return the tax
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  doom loop.
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  Speaker 5: After this.
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  Speaker 2: Mark there's a piece of The New York Times. It's
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  titled can Democrats stop the tax doom loop. The doom
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  loop here is what this is talking about. Actually, it
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  is that next year is the last year of the
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  Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts provision provisions staying in place,
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  Meaning if Congress does not extend your change those provisions
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  for twenty twenty six, then the tax cuts that were
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  put into place by President Trump back in twenty seventeen expire.
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  And it's a familiar place the Democrats have found themselves in.
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  Back in the I forget exactly what the year was,
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  I think was twenty twelve, the Bush tax cuts were
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  set to expire, and Democrats are Republicans negotiated basically to
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  keep most of them around for individuals and families earning
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  less than four hundred and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, respectively,
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  but most of the other tax cuts went by the
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  wayside at that point. And so what this piece is
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  talking about is that Democrats are looking at polling on
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  the issue of taxes and kind of saying, hey, there's
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  not necessarily a justification for extending these, Maybe we should
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  just let them expire. And that's something that they are
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  discussing as a possibility in terms of how they try
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  to set tax policy in twenty twenty six and onward
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  if they were to have control of the presidency and
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  or either branch of Congress.
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  Speaker 5: Your thoughts, mark.
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  Speaker 4: Well outlays as a percentage of GDP continues to go up,
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  governments spending more. It doesn't appear to be any end
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  insight to that trend. It's mostly been the case since
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  the War on Terror started. So government's getting bigger in
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  terms of spending again as a proportion of the economy.
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  At the same time people were getting older. We require
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  more benefits, so part of that is social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
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  Primarily social Security and Medicare, I guess. And then at
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  the same moreover where you know, as you pointed out,
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  we cut taxes in one again and now then there
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  was a recession argument for doing it. We did it
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  again after they won the mid terms in two and
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  Dick Cheney famously said deficits don't matter. And really from
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  that point on and it's been off to the races.
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  There hasn't been a party at the national There hasn't
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  been a candidate, i should say, at the national level,
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  of candidate for president that ran on a platform of
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  cutting the deficit of fiscal austerity. Then again, few do
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  Clinton's known as a Clinton SAMs now as being a
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  deficit cutter, and deservedly so. But he ran on spending more,
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  not less. So I don't know, Chuck. There appears to
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  be no appetite for it. It's not even discussed in
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  the current campaign, which is both sad but at the
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  same time not surprising. Now, the question is when do
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  interest rates start to reflect that. Maybe they already do.
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  Maybe the ten year would be two point eight instead
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  of three point eight today. We really don't know. You
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  can't test that possible alternative history. But at what point
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  do big, big deficits and resulting debt really start to
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  pinch and do we as consumers really start to feel
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  it in the form of higher interest rates? I don't know.
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  Speaker 2: And when we look at the history on there are
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  two numbers that matter from a deficit perspective. It's look,
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  what are your outlays each year as a percentage of
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  GDP and what are your revenues and outlays. The interesting
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  thing and Mark kind of got into this a little
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  bit post war. You go get nineteen forty eight and
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  outlays were about eleven percent of GDP. That's what the
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  federal government was spending by the mid nineteen sixties, that
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  it bumped up into kind of the fifteen to seventeen
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  percent range, and it stayed there through the early nineteen seventies.
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  It then bumped up into the twenties in the mid eighties,
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  and so you saw, you know, kind of again this
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  additional expansion of federal governments spending throughout the mid eighties,
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  before in the late two thousands getting back down into
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  the seventeen percent range. Today it's sitting at about twenty
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  two percent. Again, for much of the twenty tens, it
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  was right around twenty percent. So it's kind of been this,
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  if you will get the long term trend, it's this
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  gradual creep up of you know, a couple percentage points
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  a decade over.
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  Speaker 5: The last five or six decades.
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  Speaker 2: On the other hand, when you look at federal receipts,
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  the thing that's fascinating here is for as much debate
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  as there is about tax policy and oh like, we're
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  gonna do this, and we're gonna change taxes this way
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  and that way, and we're gonna do this and that
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  and YadA YadA, for the last seventy years, federal receipts
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  have been between fifteen percent and eighteen percent, with a
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  couple outliers, you know, on each side. The late nineties
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  saw a ton of tax revenue come in because of
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  the dot com bubble, and you know a bunch of
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  capital gains taxes that were being raised. But otherwise you've
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  basically been in this narrow like two to three percent
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  range for federal receipts. So for all the handwringing about, hey,
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  you know, here's how much taxes changed, and here's how
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  much this administration's gonna do this and that, basically no
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  one really makes any significant moves on taxes. They're around
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  the edges and they have these, you know, little tweaks
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  that end up happening, Whereas on the revenue side, it's
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  a I'm sorry. On the spending side, it's just this
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  steady march up over the last seventy years or so
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  in terms of federal spending as a percentage of GDP,
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  And that's kind of how we ended up where we
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  are is we've spent more as we've gone through the
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  last seventy years, and revenue has remained remarkably consistent regardless
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  of administration or party or anything else. And that's why
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  we are where we are today. Taking a look at
• 17:38
  markets as we head towards the bottom of the hour,
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  the Dow is up about a quarter percent, s and
• 17:43
  P about a tenth of a percent. The Nasdak is
• 17:45
  now flat at this point in time.
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  Speaker 1: Here bringing the latest financial news straight to your radio
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• 18:02
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• 18:05
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  Speaker 5: Mark. You are a Volkswagen driver, correct.
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  Speaker 4: I am?
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  Speaker 2: So this piece today again kind of a big one. Well,
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  not really a big one for you, because you're a
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  Volkswagen driver. You don't work at a plant in Germany,
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  so it's not.
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  Speaker 5: Quite the same.
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  Speaker 4: I read it's it's concerning.
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  Speaker 2: It's a really interesting story. So Volkswagen is considering the
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  closure of a manufacturing plant in Germany, uh for the
• 18:40
  first time ever. And the big thing on this is
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  Volkswagen Corporate is saying, look, we're facing, you know, a
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  bunch of new entrants into the market, you know, most
• 18:52
  notably these these Chinese EV's that are entering the European market.
• 18:57
  Speaker 5: We have a tough economic environment that.
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  Speaker 2: We're dealing with, and we need to be able to
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  do more cost cutting than what we normally do. The
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  union for Volkswagen employees is fighting back and saying, hey, this.
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  Speaker 5: Is not you know, the result of you know what
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  you say. It is.
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  Speaker 2: Instead, you decided to build you know, products that aren't
• 19:20
  popular enough, and you're not doing enough work to you know,
• 19:24
  keep us competitive blah blah blah, and so, you know,
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  most notably they said, look, why didn't you invest anything
• 19:31
  in trying to develop hybrid technology that's very popular? And
• 19:34
  so this is a battle that is shaping up between
• 19:37
  Volkswagen management and their union. And ultimately, while while this
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  is a you know something that you know does relate
• 19:46
  to the high cost of manufacturing in in Germany, ultimately,
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  in my opinion, the real issue is the one that
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  I noted at the beginning, which is, look, you've got
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  China providing huge subsidies to electric vehicle makers and they
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  are now exporting those evs into the EU, and it
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  is you know, causing some real damage to the German
• 20:11
  manufacturing bases, as we can see here and Europe. Despite
• 20:16
  this very direct threat to what is the economic engine
• 20:21
  of the region, Europe does not seem to want to
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  take this seriously enough by raising tariffs on Chinese evs
• 20:28
  to the level that's needed in order to maintain adequate
• 20:33
  competition for domestic manufacturers. And I know people will say, well,
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  you know you need to have free trade in this now,
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  Well that also means that, hey, China's got to abide
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  by those rules of free trade, and they simply don't
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  when it comes to how they are subsidizing their manufacturers
• 20:49
  in this industry in particular.
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  Speaker 4: So are tariffs even on the table here is a solution?
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  I don't they are, So let me have the context.
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  Speaker 5: So it's not from this piece.
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  Speaker 2: It's so back in the spring, Europe said that they
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  were going to I'm just pulling it up now, just
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  so I can have the rates correct.
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  Speaker 5: Europe said that they were going to. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: On June twelfth, they said that they were putting into
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  effect higher tariffs of seventeen point four percent on cars
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  from BYD, nineteen point nine percent on cars from Geely,
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  and thirty seven point six from Sai C. And then
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  a couple of weeks ago they backtracked. And this is
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  from August twenty first, so just two months later I'm
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  quoting here.
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  Speaker 5: This is from CNN.
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  Speaker 2: The European Union might have just given Tesla's future sales
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  in the region a boost by setting tariffs on its
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  China made vehicles considerab below those imposed unrival electric automakers.
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  On Tuesday, the European Commission, the EU's executive arms, set
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  their rate for taxes on Tesla EV's at nine percent,
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  but then they ended up, you know, coming in at
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  these lower levels, you know, kind of in the ten
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  to twelve percent range that they set on Chinese EV's,
• 22:13
  So basically they you know, pruned what they were going
• 22:17
  to be doing, and it's I don't know, I find
• 22:22
  it kind of disappointing in terms of, you know, how
• 22:25
  they're approaching this, because in my mind, if you have
• 22:28
  a country that is, you know, subsidizing to the extent
• 22:32
  that China is their EV production, you want to do
• 22:37
  something to offset that. And this is a place where
• 22:39
  I think that tactical tariffs make a ton of sense.
• 22:44
  Speaker 4: I guess it depends on your the consensus reached by
• 22:47
  your political system. I mean, you the economic argument is, well,
• 22:51
  then you focus on where your comparative advantage lies. You
• 22:54
  make something else. Germans have decided, and this has a
• 22:59
  long history, They've decided that they will accept slightly lower
• 23:04
  not much. They're a very wealthy country, not as wealthy
• 23:06
  as we are, but very wealthy in a per capita sense.
• 23:09
  They'll accept slightly lower growth and living standards. I shouldn't
• 23:12
  overstate that. You know, their economic growth is stalled there
• 23:15
  and part of it is part of the part of
• 23:17
  the it is undoubtedly attributable to the power that their
• 23:21
  social contract, even if it's an implicit one, this sort
• 23:24
  of agreement that business and labor and government are equal,
• 23:27
  co equal partners in setting economic policy. They've consciously made
• 23:32
  that made that decision to trade off higher growth the
• 23:38
  rough and tumble capitalism that we practice here. They've made
• 23:42
  a decision not to adopt that. Many social democracies have,
• 23:46
  including our neighbors to the north, Canada, Scandinavian countries are
• 23:49
  other examples. That's the way they want to live. Good luck.
• 23:52
  I would take the subsidized Chinese crap and focus on
• 23:56
  where we have a comparative advantage, which is largely what
• 23:59
  we've what we've done until the past several years.
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: Summer is coming to an end, so it's time to
• 24:05
  take your planner and book a spectacular vacation in the
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  anywhere in the Caribbean, and their popularity is at an
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  check out the American Caribbean, where you'll find all the
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  information you'll need to book a trip that you'll never forget.
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• 25:11
  Speaker 5: Mark.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: I want to talk a little bit about traffic, if
• 25:14
  that's okay with you.
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: Sure.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: So, there is a company by the name of Inrix
• 25:22
  who they are a traffic data analysis company, and what
• 25:27
  they are seeing is that as opposed to the typical
• 25:32
  kind of pre pandemic rush hours that you would see
• 25:36
  at nine am and five pm, instead, what you're seeing
• 25:41
  is a little bit more of a midday rush hour
• 25:44
  that picks up and then that activity continues throughout much
• 25:48
  of the afternoon. And this is largely attributed to two factors,
• 25:52
  one of which is the availability of remote work and
• 25:54
  workers who might come in just for a portion of
• 25:57
  the day, and the other one is is that as
• 26:00
  a result of that, people may have moved further away
• 26:03
  than they used to live from their offices, and so
• 26:06
  you end up with much more traffic throughout much of
• 26:09
  the day, but the peaks are not quite as trafficky
• 26:13
  as they used to be.
• 26:14
  Speaker 5: Your thoughts makes sense.
• 26:16
  Speaker 4: I've experienced it myself, thanks to the generous work schedule
• 26:20
  allowed to me by my employer. I appreciate the flexibility.
• 26:26
  And I've myself witnessed unpredictable changing in traffic path and
• 26:33
  now that you used to be able to count and
• 26:34
  I think many you could probably relate to this. Tuesdays
• 26:36
  and Thursdays used to be harrowing. Friday morning or afternoon.
• 26:40
  Friday morning was great, always a cake walk. Friday afternoon.
• 26:43
  I don't know whether people spent the night on Thursday
• 26:44
  and they had to go home on Friday but not
• 26:46
  go in. I've never been able to figure that one out.
• 26:48
  Friday afternoons had been terrible. Now things are far less predictable.
• 26:52
  And Chuck, that explanation is consistent with my own experience,
• 26:55
  what I'm hearing in the experience of others, and what
• 26:58
  we're reading in accounts like this, and I think it's
• 27:01
  a good thing.
• 27:03
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I do as well.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: It's something where ultimately I think we're still sorting through,
• 27:10
  you know, what the longer term implications of this are.
• 27:13
  But certainly it's you know, the one thing that you
• 27:17
  see is again and I'll see it, you know, if
• 27:19
  I'm you know, commuting to a different office or you know,
• 27:22
  commuting again to and from the office, depending on you
• 27:26
  know what my schedule looks like but yeah, it's the
• 27:31
  afternoon busyness does seem to start around one thirty now
• 27:36
  as opposed to you know, the three thirty or four
• 27:39
  that it used to start at. So there's some definite
• 27:42
  changes that have happened in this report saying hey, it's
• 27:46
  not just what you're seeing locally, this is something that
• 27:48
  you're seeing nationally as a trend in traffic patterns.
• 27:54
  Speaker 5: Quick break here.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: When we return, we'll do a little bit of stack roulette.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: The Financial Exchange Show podcast drops every day on Apple, Spotify,
• 28:04
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• 28:08
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• 28:13
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• 28:18
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• 28:22
  Exchange Radio Network.
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: The Financial Exchange has built an incredible partnership with the
• 28:32
  Disabled American Veterans Department of Massachusetts. We can't wait to
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• 29:02
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• 29:07
  Speaker 5: Mark what do you have for me? For stack Roulette? Today?
• 29:09
  Speaker 4: Chuck Good article in the Wall Street Journal. Everyone should
• 29:12
  check it out. Trump is the title wants to drill,
• 29:14
  Baby Drill. We all know that she stole that phrase
• 29:16
  from Larry Cudlow. But can he cut energy prices? They ask?
• 29:21
  And the upshot you don't have to read the twenty
• 29:24
  odd paragraphs that comprise this article. The upshot is no,
• 29:27
  no policymaker can. The price of oil is globally determined.
• 29:32
  It's influenced by factors mostly, if not entirely, outside of
• 29:36
  anyone president's control any countries control, really private or public sector.
• 29:42
  In the short term, the issue right now is not
• 29:45
  that the federal government is restricting drilling. We're drilling more
• 29:49
  than we ever had. We've never been fully energy independent.
• 29:53
  We've always imported a little bit even during the golden
• 29:55
  era of Trump's term, as some of you like to
• 29:58
  think about it in terms of oil price, but there's
• 30:01
  very little a president can do. Oil companies have said
• 30:03
  they're not going to drill more. They like high profits.
• 30:05
  If anything, his deregulatory agenda for the oil sector, which
• 30:10
  is probably mostly a good idea, we'll do nothing but
• 30:12
  increase profits, not the supply of oil. Again, good article,
• 30:17
  worth worth worth checking out.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if you look at gas prices in the last
• 30:25
  twenty five years or so, the only times that we've
• 30:29
  been really twenty years since you know, kind of the
• 30:31
  middle of five the only times that we've seen gas prices,
• 30:36
  you know, down around two dollars a gallon. There are
• 30:41
  three key instances. The first is early two thousand and nine,
• 30:46
  the economy was awful. The second is early twenty sixteen,
• 30:52
  the economy wasn't terrible. But basically what happened is Russia decided, hey,
• 30:56
  we want to put all of the US frackers out
• 30:59
  of businesses quickly as possible, and so they just pumped
• 31:02
  as much oil as they could and it devastated the
• 31:05
  US energy industry, which, if you want to ask, hey,
• 31:08
  why is you know, why are US energy firms a
• 31:10
  little bit hesitant to pump more with you know, how
• 31:14
  much they could still make on each marginal barrel of oil.
• 31:17
  Speaker 5: The answer is late.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: Twenty fifteen early twenty sixteen, when Russia put the screws
• 31:21
  to them. And the third time when you see all
• 31:23
  gas prices down in that range was May of twenty twenty,
• 31:26
  when most of the economy was still kind of emerging
• 31:30
  from the initial shutdowns after the COVID nineteen pandemic kicked off.
• 31:36
  So none of those are situations where you look at
• 31:38
  it and say, hey, that was you know, the result
• 31:41
  of policy in the United States that caused this. No,
• 31:44
  they were either bad economies or someone else saying we
• 31:47
  don't care about profit, We're just gonna pump no matter what.
• 31:51
  In basically any other period during that time, gas is
• 31:55
  covered between two dollars and fifty cents and three dollars
• 31:58
  and fifty cents a barrel, and there's no correlation between
• 32:03
  what policy was at that time and where gas prices
• 32:07
  ended up. You can make a case, hey, is it
• 32:10
  better for us to try to produce domestically so that
• 32:14
  we're not as beholden, you know, to other countries that
• 32:18
  might not share how we want the geopolitics of the
• 32:21
  world to you know, unfold, sure, of course, but that's
• 32:24
  different from saying that you're going to be able to
• 32:27
  change gas prices simply by shifting the policy that you are,
• 32:33
  you know, conducting domestically as we've seen. Look, if the
• 32:37
  United States says, hey, we're going to pump more in
• 32:39
  order to get prices down, OPEC might simply say, fine,
• 32:43
  we want to continue to be profitable and we're not
• 32:45
  going to pump as much then.
• 32:47
  Speaker 4: So there'd still be a global price for oil. Though,
• 32:49
  are we going to determine you can't cut off international
• 32:52
  correct demand? How are we going to determine the price
• 32:55
  of a gallant even if we said we're not gonna
• 32:57
  let in any foreign oil, we're going to refine it
• 32:59
  here from sou to nuts, from when we take it
• 33:01
  out of the ground until it goes into your car,
• 33:03
  how will you determine the price for that supply and demand? Okay,
• 33:06
  does that mean you're not gonna let any international buyers
• 33:08
  into this market? It's that's not workable. The magic bullets
• 33:13
  like this are always fanciful, and this is an example
• 33:18
  of a great example of one again check out the article.
• 33:21
  They spell out the pros and cons.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: Mark, I want to talk a little bit about space here,
• 33:26
  if that's okay, of course. Okay, So the Boeing star Liner,
• 33:33
  which is uh, well, it's supposed to be undocking from
• 33:37
  the International Space Station later this week, but over the weekend,
• 33:42
  there was this mysterious sound that started permeating through the
• 33:48
  star Liner. It sounded like a sonar ping. Unfortunately, it
• 33:54
  was not aliens coming to you know, destroy Earth with
• 33:58
  you know, greater technology. What in fact it turned out
• 34:02
  to be was that there was an echo from some
• 34:07
  kind of hot mic that was you know, echoing over
• 34:10
  the speaker and generating that feedback that you get, and
• 34:13
  they were able to identify that as the problem rather
• 34:18
  than anything more exciting, like you know, the aliens from
• 34:22
  Independence Day coming down and you know, trying to devastate
• 34:26
  humanity or anything like that.
• 34:29
  Speaker 5: So this was a big relief. Yes it was I
• 34:33
  missed the alert.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: It was a microphone that was turned on by mistake,
• 34:39
  and not aliens coming to destroy us.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: I mean, if I started hearing eerie sounds after being
• 34:46
  in that space shuttle, what I thought was going to
• 34:49
  be eight days or whatever. It was, and it's now
• 34:52
  been months. Oh boy, your mind's gonna start playing tricks
• 34:56
  with you at that point.
• 34:57
  Speaker 4: Any action would be welcome that too.
• 34:59
  Speaker 5: Yeah, Moon's haunted.
• 35:01
  Speaker 4: You'd be famous.
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: The moon's haunted.
• 35:04
  Speaker 5: Moon's haunted. Get out of here.
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: Taking a look at markets at the top of the hour,
• 35:10
  we got the Dow up sixty three points, the S
• 35:12
  and P's up one, Nasdaq up four, So not a
• 35:14
  whole lot of movement today in either direction after a
• 35:17
  big downward slide yesterday. We'll see what ends up holding
• 35:21
  up in the afternoon, and we're back tomorrow. We got
• 35:25
  more jobs dated with the weekly jobless claims. All that
• 35:28
  and more coming up on tomorrow's show on the Financial
• 35:32
  Exchange