Is This A Watershed Moment for the Fed? With Danielle DiMartino Booth

Summary

Brew Markets – "Is This A Watershed Moment for the Fed?"

Host: Ann Berry
Guest: Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO & Chief Strategist, QI Research
Date: October 13, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Ann Berry welcomes Danielle DiMartino Booth, a noted Federal Reserve insider, analyst, and CEO of QI Research, to discuss the current pivotal moment for the Fed. With missing government labor data (thanks to a shutdown), growing political pressure on the Fed, shifting approaches to monetary policy, and alarming developments in private credit and structured finance, this episode dives deep into what it all means for markets and the broader economy. The discussion ranges from Fed independence to asset bubbles, labor market risks, and practical advice for the next generation of workers and investors.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. The Latest Fed Minutes & The State of Fed Independence

Timestamps: [06:20] – [11:02]

• Danielle's Read: The September FOMC meeting minutes underscore both dissent and unity inside the Fed, even after new board additions.

• Some members favored not cutting rates due to inflation concerns, others called for bigger cuts—yet the Fed presented a united front.

  "They made a very, very strong stand for Fed independence."
  — Danielle DiMartino Booth [06:56]

• What Comes Next?
  With missing government employment data (shutdown), the Fed is relying on alternative labor indicators—with proprietary data sets like ADP in play.

  "It's pretty difficult to be flying as blind as they are... Markets have already fully priced in a quarter point additional rate cut on October 29th."
  — Danielle DiMartino Booth [07:26]

2. Labor Market Data, Revisions, and a Permanent Shift?

Timestamps: [10:16] – [14:14]

• Ann highlights Danielle’s long-standing advocacy for using alternative data in labor market analysis.

• A Watershed Moment:
  The shutdown and unreliable official stats may finally push the Fed to diversify data sources—a change Danielle champions.

  "This is a watershed moment for Fed policymakers... 89% of polled economists across the United States, we're saying whatever it is we're getting, it's not kosher. It's not even acceptable..."
  — Danielle DiMartino Booth [11:03]

• The problem: Stale official data, frequent and sizable revisions, and employers faking job postings to boost morale.

• Quiet layoffs (below reporting thresholds) and hiring freezes create headcount reductions hidden from official reports.

• Final accurate numbers come only quarterly, forcing eventual catch-up—and often abrupt revisions.

3. Structural Shifts: Inflation, Politics, and the Fed’s Dual Mandate

Timestamps: [15:36] – [18:07]

• The Fed’s focus has shifted over the decades from inflation to labor—the labor "obsession" led to the neglect of asset price bubbles.

  "They became obsessed with the labor mandate to the extent that they were able to completely blindly disregard asset price inflation..."
  — Danielle DiMartino Booth [17:18]

• Fed independence is increasingly under threat—politicization dates back decades, with figures like Greenspan loving public adoration and setting up the “Fed put.”

• Even as the Fed tries to strike an independent pose, external pressures (stock market, White House, Congress) are ever-present.

4. Are We in a Bubble? Tech, AI, Private Credit, & Enron Echoes

Timestamps: [18:44] – [23:00]

• Ann draws a parallel between Powell's recent comments and Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" speech.

• Danielle unequivocally says we're in a bubble—but as in 1999 or 2000, bubbles can run for years.

• Key Risk:
  The proliferation of opaque private credit, vendor financing, and circular financial relationships harks back to Enron:

  "When you start providing the people buying your products with the financing that they need to buy them... that's circular in nature. Isn't that a red flag?... Enron was just a massive financing company."
  — Danielle DiMartino Booth [19:13, 20:54]

• Recent collapses (First Brands) and the integration of AI company financing into these structures suggest risks are systemic and growing.

5. Gold, Bitcoin, and the Meme Asset Craze

Timestamps: [23:00] – [25:31]

• Gold is at record highs, but Danielle warns institutional buy-in is for momentum, not true hedging.

  "Now it's a meme stock... when people who've never mentioned the word gold start talking about how much of it you should own, it's great to be recognized, but they're not recognizing it for its purpose..."
  — Danielle DiMartino Booth [24:12, 24:45]

• Big banks recommending 20% gold positions underline the speculative fervor.

• Ann asks about Bitcoin; Danielle admits its “higher beta” but prefers the fundamental utility of gold.

6. Investing in the Current Climate

Timestamps: [25:35] – [26:55]

• Equities are overvalued, but some dividend-paying, old-economy companies still have appeal.
• Many top investors and Berkshire Hathaway are sitting on enormous cash piles.
• It's a very difficult environment to find value.

7. The Next Generation: Jobs, Skills, and Surviving the Labor Market

Timestamps: [26:55] – [31:56]

• New graduates face the toughest job market since 1988—but unlike then, today’s problem is demand collapse, not just supply surge.

• Danielle, as a mother, sees first-hand the disillusionment among students (“What have I just done for the last four years?”).

• Political paralysis keeps companies from investing or hiring; AI adoption accelerates the replacement of entry-level workers.

• Key takeaways for young people:

  • Go into trades or healthcare—professions machines can’t fully replace.
  • Even overqualified grads should consider non-traditional career entries (like owning an HVAC company).
  • In high-status fields (law, accounting, forensics), aim to be irreplaceable, not just credentialed.

  "If you, as a human being, can outthink [machines]... in the interim, take any job you can get and nothing is beneath you. Remember that."
  — Danielle DiMartino Booth [31:56]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "This is a watershed moment for Fed policymakers." [11:03] – Danielle DiMartino Booth
• "They made a very, very strong stand for Fed independence." [06:56] – Danielle DiMartino Booth
• "It's pretty difficult to be flying as blind as they are..." [07:26] – Danielle DiMartino Booth
• "A blind person can see valuations being where they are... we've surpassed anything that we saw in 2000." [19:13] – Danielle DiMartino Booth
• "When people who've never mentioned the word gold start talking about how much of it you should own, it's great to be recognized, but they're not recognizing it for its purpose." [24:45] – Danielle DiMartino Booth
• "Nothing is beneath you. Remember that." [31:56] – Danielle DiMartino Booth

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Segment Timestamps (Key Discussion Points)

• Fed Minutes & Independence: [06:20]–[11:02]
• Labor Data & The Rise of Alternative Indicators: [10:16]–[14:14]
• Labor vs. Inflation Mandate + Politics: [15:36]–[18:07]
• Bubble Risks, Private Credit, & Enron Echoes: [18:44]–[23:00]
• Gold & Meme Assets: [23:00]–[25:31]
• Dividend Investing & Cash Hoards: [25:35]–[26:55]
• Youth Labor Market & Advice for New Workers: [26:55]–[31:56]

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Tone & Style

Ann Berry’s questions are incisive but personable; Danielle is candid, analytical, and sometimes wry—often providing data-driven critique with a pragmatic, at times urgent, sense of the stakes.

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Takeaways

• The Fed is under greater stress than most realize, with data vacuums and political pressures threatening real independence.
• Asset valuations are stretched, bubbles are growing, and systemic risks are building—especially with private credit and financial engineering.
• Young people must rethink career-building: prioritize un-automatable trades and skills, be flexible, and accept any foothold in the market.
• In uncertain times, being irreplaceable matters more than prestige or credentialing.

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For listeners, this episode delivers context, perspective, and actionable wisdom at a moment of profound economic uncertainty.

Transcript

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[Ann Berry]

Is the Fed flying blind without government employment data? What's the Fed's pulse on political pressure? And are we about to experience Enron 2.0? I'm joined by insider Danielle DiMartino Booth to break it all down. And we put a human face to the swirl of AI chip talk with our CEO of the Week for Monday, October 13th. It's Brew Markets Daily and I'm Ann Berry. Today the bond markets are closed, the equity market, though, is open, and a lot of you are off work for the day. So whatever it is you're doing, we have a special conversation to come. But first, the news has been all chips, all the time these past few weeks, with intel gathering investments from SoftBank, the US government and the giant amongst all the chip players, Nvidia. And with that giant CEO dominating the latest news in AI money with investments in OpenAI and Elon Musk's XAI. So with all the focus on artificial intelligence, we thought we'd bring it back to human intelligence in profiling our CEO of the Week. And that's Lisa sue in the top job at amd. Born in Taiwan, Sue's family moved to the US when she was just two years old, raising her in New York. And she was fascinated by electronics early, taking apart her brother's remote controlled cars just to see how they worked. Now that curiosity ultimately took sue to MIT, where she earned not one, but not two, but three degrees in electrical engineering, culminating in her PhD research on semiconductors in the early 1990s. Now, after a stint at Texas Instruments, then 13 years at IBM, followed by the chief technology officer role at Free Scale Semiconductor, sue joined AMD in 2012 as a senior vice president. Now her rockets shot up very quickly. She was named president and CEO in 2014. Now, at the time that Su took the top job, AMD had lost its luster in the microprocessor world. Its rival intel dominated the PC market, and AMD stock was languishing at around 2ish dollars a share. Many analysts thought the company might not survive, but sue made a bet on engineering excellence. And this is what's so interesting Given her own engineering pedigree, she was highly credible in deciding to make those decisions. She doubled down on research and focused the company's efforts on a new chip architecture called Z, and used aggressive pricing to push for faster user adoption. Now the results were extraordinary. By the late 2000 and tens, AMD chips were powering everything from gaming consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox to high performance data centers. And in 2022, AMD's market cap surpassed Intel's for the first time. But even there, sue could not rest on her laurels, in part because AMD's expansion came from integrating its 49 billion dollar acquisition of Z links, a huge undertaking after the deal closed in February that year. It is massive work to do to absorb an acquisition of that scale, but it was necessary to push AMD into high performance computing solutions for the likes of data centers and automotive markets. This was also the time that Nvidia had emerged as the next gen chip rival to watch. Now, while intel has floundered with lack of innovation and poor capex choices. We've talked about that on the show. And AMD's gains in the PC market have been outshone by Nvidia's leaps in AI. So last week AMD struck a deal for OpenAI to get up to a 10% stake in the company in return for a massive five year run of purchases by the ChatGPT innovator, a move that the market thinks gives AMD a shot, though by no means a silver bullet at closing the gap with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence arena. Folks have been saying that this could be transformational to for amd. So what's it like to work for the person behind all this? Well, Sue's leadership style is known to be low key but decisive. She's famous for meticulous preparation and for making tough technical calls even when they're unpopular. Colleagues describe her as a, quote, CEO who speaks fluent engineer, while two fun facts about that CEO who speaks fluent engineer. On her watch, AMD stock price has gone from under $3 a share to over three $230 today. And her admittedly distant cousin, well, it's the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Coming up, Fed insider Danielle DiMartino Booth with some insights that made my blood pressure go up. Stay with us. But first, a word from our sponsor capital client group. Now our producer John and I were talking about some other podcasts that we listened to.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

That's right.

[John Couteau]

Who are the people shaping Capital Group's investment thinking on the Capital Ideas podcast? They go behind the headlines to hear from portfolio managers, analysts and leaders about the experiences and IDE ideas that helped guide their work.

[Ann Berry]

Learn how long term perspective can help drive results and other exclusive insights you'll only find on the Capital Ideas podcast from Capital Group, published by Capital Client Group, Inc. September finally delivered the Fed rate cut the market's been waiting for. But with questions over the future independence of the Fed, labor data missing during the government shutdown, and structured financing failures coming to the fore, where do we go from here? To unpack all of this, I'm thrilled to be joined by Danielle DiMartino Booth. She's the CEO and Chief Strategist for QI Research. Now, Danielle previously spent nine years as an advisor to Richard Fisher at the Federal Reserve bank of Dallas. And today, hot on the heels of the release of minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee's latest meeting, we get her insights into the state of the Fed, the state of the markets, and where young people entering the workforce need to get strategic. Let's get into it. I have in front of me the Fed minutes from the September 6th to 17th meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. Tell me what you took away from seeing these when they came out yesterday.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Well, I was gratified to see that the disparity that had existed prior to Stephen Myron joining the Federal Reserve Board was very much still in evidence afterwards because there were a few members who were in favor of not having cut rates at all in September. They would have otherwise, had they had their druthers, sat on the sidelines and said, no, no, no, inflation's important. There were a few who mentioned in the minutes they were not by name, but there were a few who were concerned about those benchmark revisions to the labor market. And, you know, had they had their druthers, it was obvious they would have gone for a larger rate cut. And yet they all came together on September 17th and they presented a unified front. They voted together. They made a very, very strong stand for Fed independence. And it was, it wasn't until we got to see the minutes that we knew we all came together for a higher purpose.

[Ann Berry]

That's so interesting. That's so interesting. What do you think they do next time?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

It's pretty difficult to be flying as blind as they are. You know, I think the best, the best signal that we, that we got not knowing we were going to veer into a shutdown was before FOMC blackout started. There was a speech given by Christopher Waller, and it's pretty obvious that any rift that existed because Waller has dissented now twice against Powell. I think that rift has been mended after him standing tall with Powell and voting with Powell this September meeting. In any event, Waller gave a speech and he said, look, we're looking at alternative measures of employment. Heck, ADP tells us in the middle of the month how the data is looking. So we actually get a look into a proprietary data set that's not available to anybody in the public. And we already know that the labor market is weakening through that prism. It wasn't just that he was talking about ADP specifically. He was saying in broadcasting in advance we're going to find alternatives in the event that the government does shut down. This being said, what do they do on October 29th? It really depends on how long the government has shut down. Markets have already fully priced in a quarter point additional rate cut on October 29th. If we get too close to the government reopening and that meeting, I think they go for the rate cut regardless. You do because there's been, there's been so much evidence and so many. Carlyle Group, bank of America, everybody's coming up with their own proprietary internal labor market indicator to replace kind of this vacuum that's been left with no non farm payrolls, with no initial jobless claims, with no continuing jobless claims. So most of the shops are coming up with alternatives. None of them are suggesting any improvement. And you know what we looked at this morning in our Daily Feather was we looked at the past few post pandemic years because we tend to follow not seasonally adjusted claims, especially in a post pandemic world when all seasonality was thrown completely disrupted. So we look at the number of Americans searching on Google for file unemployment and it's been a very, very consistent guide until recently. And we've seen the percentage of Americans searching for file unemployment come way off trend of the past few years and the trend was very steady and it shot way up again. Yet another indicator that something else is amiss in the labor market. Regardless of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics should report with now a tremendous lag.

[Ann Berry]

Here's a question for you because Danielle, I've followed you for years actually. And when I follow you on X and everyone should take a look at your social media presence, you post very regularly. Whenever you read about a big layoff coming actually for a large employer, you're out there and you're saying look, there's another one coming. Here it is. And you've been saying that for years. Do you think that one consequence of this government shutdown there's one instance, there have been others, but this one's just very visible at the moment of the Fed being forced to look for other sources of labor data. Do you think that this actually is the catalyst that gets the Fed to do what you've been advocating for for a while, which is indeed make it common practice for you guys to look at other sources of data?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Yay. Absolutely. That would be.

[Ann Berry]

Danielle's nodding her hands.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

This is like a best case scenario. Yes, it absolutely. This is a watershed moment for Fed policymakers. Even prior to President Trump dismissing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replacing him and then now removing the replacement. So we have no head of the BLS right now. But even for that, 89% of polled economists across the United States, we're saying whatever it is we're getting, it's not kosher. It's not even acceptable. We're not relying on it because we.

[Ann Berry]

Keep seeing, we kept on seeing big revisions, didn't we? So dates would come out and then the next month we would see them being revised.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

And then even the, you know, it wasn't even waiting 18 months anymore to get these huge oh my gosh. And the year ended March 31, there were 911,000 fewer jobs than what we were starting to get them much closer. Oh, gee. Two months later, June was revised into the red. The pandemic notwithstanding, that was the first month that we found out within two months that we had lost jobs on a net basis since September 2010. And that's got to wake up policymakers. But yes, I hope that this is the mother of all morning brew wake up call to say it is time to find some alternatives and rely on them. And you know, the beauty of X, except for those bots. But the beauty of X is that I learn. I learned so much when I posted a year ago on ghost postings, on postings that employers were putting out there to boost morale. But they weren't actually real job openings. They had never had an intention of filling them. They were just putting them out on LinkedIn or on indeed, to make current employees feel a little bit more secure in their job. Even though the employees were like, we don't see any new people.

[Ann Berry]

Interesting.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Our workload's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. They haven't brought on people in so long, it feels like we're in a hiring freeze. And now that's become endemic. Now we have to deal with what Chair Powell describes as a low hiring, low firing environment. Once you start to break into the corpus, once it's hiring freezes and canceling job openings and buyouts and attrition. Your headcount starts to shrink and companies do not want to announce layoffs. They do not. It is just toxic. But they found a way around it. They found a workaround or they lay off 10, 20, 30 at a time so that they don't have to file a warn notice in the state because they haven't hit that hundred threshold of employees that they're going to lay off at one time. So they just, they just drip out the reduction in their headcount. And that's why we're also seeing such massive revisions. Because once a quarter you have to tell the census if you're if your ABC employer once a quarter, you are legally obligated to report to the census what your head count is.

[Ann Berry]

So it catches up. The information does. At some point the light gets shine shone on it. Brew Markets Daily is sponsored by Public, the platform for those who take investing seriously. John, if you were to create a portfolio from scratch right here and now, what would you want to know?

[John Couteau]

I mean, okay, at the very least, stocks, options, bonds and crypto.

[Ann Berry]

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[John Couteau]

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[Ann Berry]

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[Ann Berry]

It and we're going to come back to it in more structural changes. Danielle but let's talk about the inflation side of the equate of the equation. Now you've got a ton of experience, not only observing the Fed and commentating on the Fed. In your current role, you've been inside at the Dallas Fed in your time there, just paint the picture for us. How much conversation was there focusing on the labor side instead of the inflation side of the dual mandate? So just for the audience, just to recap, the Fed is supposed to look at both trying to optimize employment, but also keeping inflation at this 2% target. Two sides, two pieces of the balancing act. So how much are you seeing the shift today towards labor versus inflation at versus your time there? And how much when you were at the Dallas Fed, were people worried about Fed independence?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

So there wasn't enough worry about Fed independence when I was there. There wasn't near enough worry. Sebastian Mallady was is Alan Greenspan's biographer. And he basically shadowed the man for two years. He was kind of an embedded reporter, if you will, a war reporter. And his main takeaway was, you know, Alan liked to be popular. He really enjoyed the maestro cnbc filming him walking into a Fed meeting and trying to gauge the weight of the briefcase he was carrying. And he really loved the public's adoration and malady's conclusion was that's why he became so beholden to the stock market.

[Ann Berry]

Interesting.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

And that's why the Fed put was kind of born in 1987. As we went further down from Bernanke to Yellen, they became obsessed, obsessed with the labor mandate to the extent that they were able to completely blindly disregard asset price inflation, which is a real thing now. We call it easy financial conditions, but it's asset price inflation that was being disregarded because they were leaning so hard in trying to get an all inclusive unemployment rate that was so low that they were missing what was happening in housing inflation. They were missing what was happening in stock market inflation. And of course we had the crisis.

[Ann Berry]

Right?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

So the Fed's been politicized for a very long time.

[Ann Berry]

That's a really interesting perspective. And you've just said Alan Greenspan wanted adulation, but he did at one point call out, quote, irrational exuberance.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

He did okay, and he was laughed at.

[Ann Berry]

And he was right.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

And he was right.

[Ann Berry]

And he was right. So here's a question to sort of draw the comparison with today. Fed Chair Jay Powell said he believes that equities are fairly highly valued. People immediately leapt on that and said, this is the moment that's the equivalent of Alan Greenspan saying, we've seen irrational exuberance.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Well, great. We've got three years of Runway ahead of us. Well, let's all go long.

[Ann Berry]

Are you. Are we in a bubble, Danielle? Are we in a stock bubble? Are we in a Stock market.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Oh, gosh, I don't. I don't think anybody disputes that.

[Ann Berry]

Well, some people do. I mean, if you talk to Dan Ives, who's been a guest here, and he's such an advocate of. Of tech and saying, no, this isn't a bull market, that's deservedly a bull market. This isn't a bubble. Because the AI Industrial revolution is real. People are saying, there are folks, they know we're not in a bubble. So what do you think?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Well, with deference to Dan Ives, the majority of kind of the former Super Bowls are now saying we're in a bubble. But bubbles inflate for a very long time, just like they did in 1997, 98 and 99. After the irrational exuberance, those two words were uttered. That is the main line that I'm hearing right now. It's not that we're not in a bubble because a blind person can see valuations being where they are. And a blind person knows that if you aggregate all measures of valuation, that we've surpassed anything that we saw in 2000, but yet in 2000, we surpassed anything that we had seen in 1929 and kept on going. So if it's the nature of the bubble to continue inflating, then, yeah, we could go for years from here. That's the theory, at least. My source of pushback. I'm actually writing about this as we speak, and I'm deep in the weeds right now. My source of anxiety here is financing and funding. Vendor financing. Vendor financing is typically a red flag. It's probably also a term your listeners may have never heard of. But when you start providing the people buying your products with the financing that they need to buy them, and you can draw a nice cute little circle around that and you say, oh, that's circular in nature. Isn't that a red flag? Well, yes, it is. But then when you start to look at the growth in the background.

[Ann Berry]

Yeah.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Of some of these financing mechanisms, private credit. Jim Chanos did. If anybody did not see the Financial Times interview that Jim Chanos did last week, it was. It was so simple and elegant. And what he said was, by the time that we learned that Enron was in fact a bank, was in fact a financing company dressed in drag as some utility electricity trader, whatever it was, in the end we found out that Enron was just a massive financing company.

[Ann Berry]

So let's give this a name. Danielle. The circular reference, you know, it's Nvidia investing in OpenAI.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Right?

[Ann Berry]

Right. Is the big one. That's out there now we've got OpenAI and AMD with this sort of swap, let's call it, of a revenue contract for equity.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

But they're not my point.

[Ann Berry]

They're not your point. Who are you thinking?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

So I'll finish by saying if First Brands, which is just some. Who cares about air filters. If First Brands is our Enron and we are finding out every single day that it is a massive financing company. Yes, there are auto parts involved, but the last night before I fell asleep, you know, one of the financing arms of this company said that $2.3 billion had up and vanished, Vanished. And I'm like, oh, this is so, so, so, so Enron or Tyco or WorldCom.

[Ann Berry]

Interesting.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Jim's point was once you cross over into deploying the financing means into the boring economy type of companies, then you're pretty far gone down the road of the bubble.

[Ann Berry]

Thank you for bringing this up, Danielle. Because we are all so focused on AI and we are so wrapped up in this narrative.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

AI is tucked into the same non depository financial institution, private credit lenders that are at the absolute epicenter of what happened with Tricolor, of what happened with first brands. As boring as they are, they tie right to AI.

[Ann Berry]

Right. You're broadening out our perspective on this, which is incredibly helpful. Let's talk about something else that ties into this idea of asset inflation which you've touched on. Let's talk about gold. Right. Record highs. Oh, wow. Danielle's face literally just fell at the mention of gold.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Because it's a basic holding in all portfolios. I mean, I say that in my.

[Ann Berry]

Sleep, but you've called it a meme stock.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

It's a meme stock.

[Ann Berry]

Okay. Why is it a meme stock right now?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Well, okay, so in my defense, I did work on the sell side when I started out my career here in New York. So sometimes you recognize things for what they are. And typically when the sell side gets in, you're like, sell it. So when big sell side firms that for generations have been told from on high, never mention gold, that is something that. That's what those gold bug weird people. They're up in the middle of the night with tinfoil hats on. That's their world. We are an investment bank and our asset allocation is with reputable asset classes.

[Ann Berry]

And gold's not a reputable asset?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Well, it wasn't until five hot minutes ago.

[Ann Berry]

And why not? Why was it not?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

It was considered to be an outlier. It doesn't produce any income. There's no dividend Payment. It's an old relic, and now it's a meme stock. And so because Goldman Sachs has got a price target on a precious metal that's supposed to hedge your portfolio in the event that something goes really wrong, not move in tandem with the S.

[Ann Berry]

And P. So Ray Dalio has reportedly said folks should be thinking about increasing their allocation to gold.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

They're all saying it.

[Ann Berry]

They're all saying it. You think everyone's just.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Morgan Stanley just said 20% of your portfolio should be in gold. Again, when people who've never mentioned the word gold start talking about how much of it you should own, it's great to be recognized, but they're not recognizing it for its purpose, and that's protection. They're saying you need to own it for the same reason you need it to own bitcoin, because it's going to the moon.

[Ann Berry]

And what do you think of bitcoin?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Well, it's gone to the moon.

[Ann Berry]

Do you think that, like gold, it doesn't yield any dividends? Do you think it's something that folks should consider?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Yes, but at least you can make it into something really pretty. Gold.

[Ann Berry]

Gold. Okay. So you think less of bitcoin than you do of gold.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

I think that as an asset class, it's certainly got a higher beta.

[Ann Berry]

Got it. Got it. So when you think about where you're personally investing at the moment, Danielle, equities, you've said overvalued gold.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

That doesn't mean that. That doesn't mean that something like, I don't know, an oil company that's been around for 100 years and has never cut their dividend wouldn't have some appeal in this environment. I do like cash flow. I like really safe dividends. So there are places to be. They're just the places where nobody else is at.

[Ann Berry]

Got it. But it feels like everything's sort of up there, inexpensive and picked over right now. Do you think there's still spots to find value in? And I hear you on energy, but even there, we're seeing M and A activity picking up. It feels like people have said, oh, let's take a look at energy stocks.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Well, that's what I'm saying. Saying dividend. Because, you know, even people who bought GE and wrote it all the way down in 2009, at least they got some cash flow from that, from that dividend. It's a very difficult investing environment. When you speak to a lot of veteran investors, they're sitting on 30, 33, 40% cash. When you look at Berkshire Hathaway, it's sitting on this massive pile of cash. So I think we're in a very, very difficult investing environment right now.

[Ann Berry]

Let's switch gears and wrap up together. Danielle Talking about something a bit more personal. And that is what is going to happen for the next generation of young people who want to become investors. But also frankly, even before that to get the money to investor trying to find their way through the labor market right now. And I'm bringing it back to labor because again, you've, you've really been trying to track what is the impact of technology on the labor market, frankly. But even before the AI discussion was up, you've been tracking this for a long time. When you look at the rates of employment for young people just graduating from school or young people thinking about going to school and asking is it even worth it? Because I don't know what's going to be sitting there in the job market on the other side. What are you seeing? And you're a mom, right? You've got, and I've got, you know.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

I've got a senior in college. I've got two seniors in high school and their friends, my senior in college. Their friends are really struggling. They're really struggling, but they're struggling on a personal level. They're like, what have I just done for the last four years that I'm now not marketable? What's changed so much in such a short span of time? And what have I been doing? Losing sleep, staying up for projects, studying my just preparing for tests. And what have I just done? Have I really just wasted all this time? I mean, the unemployment rate for new entrants to the job market is the highest that it was since 1988. Well, 1988 we had the biggest surge of individuals into the workforce in US History because that's when the baby boomers peaked in terms of their age entering the economy and that supply was slowly absorbed into the market. But that was a supply driven surge which caused the unemployment rate to rise. Right now it's lack of demand, right? And it is a frightening world out there for these kids. It's, I fear, given the political backdrop because right now companies are paralyzed and we hope one big beautiful bill is just going to unleash the gates of investment on January 1, 2026. That is the hope I want to get there. But at the moment it seems like even if companies don't know how to deploy AI, it seems like they're deploying it anyways and replacing human beings with that. And you have to worry for these people in their 20s, they'll never get the beginnings of their careers back. This is when they, this is when they pay their dues. This is when they have the energy to pay their dues and work all crazy hours and learn and be sponges and prepare for, I can see my 30s and this is going to be the goal and I'll be like this person and I'll be this successful if they can't even break into the job market and they're voters.

[Ann Berry]

So, and just a final thought or pearl of wisdom from you, then, Danielle, in the spirit of hope, is not a strategy. And you're a young person today thinking about where should I go and deploy my talent, Right? That's what you've got. That's your resource at that age. As you have spent all this time passing through the data by sector, you just see so much, you've been in the weeds, but you come up and take a macro view. Is it healthcare? Is it trade schools? Is it, you know, if you were to say to a young person, like, take this sector seriously as you think about where to maybe think about going to look for a job right now, which one would it be?

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Well, trades is a given and so many Americans don't want to go there. But you know what? If you just graduated at the top of your class in finance, well, maybe think about owning an H Vac company. Learn the skills first though, or your workers will take you out to lunch. But do look at health care, study demographics, look at professions that cannot be replaced entirely by a machine. If you seem to think that you have the potential future as a litigator, as law school applications are just through the roof, don't just say, I can study for three years and get a piece of paper. Understand, you have got to become the best litigator out there, something a machine cannot replicate. If you're staying over and getting an extra master's in accounting because you want to get that extra skill set, fine. But watch Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Understand, you need to be the forensics auditor of tomorrow. Think about what machines can accomplish and think about what machines cannot accomplish if you as a human being can outthink them. And by the way, in the interim, take any job you can get and nothing is below, nothing is beneath you. Remember that.

[Ann Berry]

Just get on the train. Danielle, thank you so much. Come back. This is just, as you say, a watershed moment, it feels like, for the Fed and we're going to see a lot happening towards, you know, this government shut down what happens the rest of this year. So please do come back, share some more happy thank you.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Thank you.

[Ann Berry]

Big thanks to Danielle DiMartino Booth for joining. We definitely want her to come back. Well, John, we're in the heart of earnings season. So before we go, which companies do you have your eye on this week?

[John Couteau]

Well, we recently talked about regional banks that want to scale up and big banks that are looking to go local. So I've got my eye on bank earnings this week, expecting to hear from J.P. morgan, Wells Fargo, Citi bank of America and many others. I'm also curious to see what's going on at Domino's and Johnson and Johnson also reporting this week.

[Ann Berry]

There is a lot going on. And I will just refer you back to an episode we had last week on the regional bank mergers including Uniting of Comerica and 5th 3rd. It turned out to be a bit of a sleeper hit with folks coming back to us and saying really curious to know what what's going on with the rise of experiential and more branches in other parts of the country than the ones we tend to hear about. Well, go check it out and also come back. That's it folks for today's Brew Markets Daily.

[John Couteau]

Brew Markets Daily is hosted by Ann Berry and produced by John Couteau, Tariq Aptel, Latif and Emily Milian. Our technical director is Utena Wagu. Guest booking by A.B. silver. The President of Morning Brew Inc. Is Devin Emery.

[Ann Berry]

Wake up tomorrow with the Morning Brew newsletter and tune in to Neil and Toby on Morning Brew Daily. We'll see you back here tomorrow, same time, same place.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

And Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the Emu music. Limu, Save yourself money today.

[Ann Berry]

Increase your wealth. Customize and save.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

We see that may have been too much feeling.

[John Couteau]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Very underwritten by.

[John Couteau]

Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth]

Excludes Massachusetts.