TRUMP’S TARIFFS EXPLAINED: Impact on Your Wallet, Opportunities, Recession Warning & Market Crash

Summary

Earn Your Leisure Podcast: Episode Summary

Title: TRUMP’S TARIFFS EXPLAINED: Impact on Your Wallet, Opportunities, Recession Warning & Market Crash
Host/Author: EYL Network
Release Date: April 4, 2025

In this illuminating episode of Earn Your Leisure, hosts Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings delve deep into the complexities and ramifications of President Trump's latest tariff policies. Joined by esteemed guests Frank Holland from CNBC and Caleb Silver, the discussion offers a comprehensive examination of how these tariffs are reshaping the American economy, affecting consumers, businesses, and the broader financial markets.

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1. Introduction to Trump's Tariff Policies

The episode opens with the hosts setting the stage for a heated discussion on the newly implemented tariffs by the Trump administration. The tariffs, aimed at addressing trade imbalances and protecting American industries, have sparked significant debate among economists, business leaders, and the general populace.

Notable Quote:
Ian Dunlap (00:30): "It's been a hell of a day... we're gonna have some insightful conversations tonight because where else would you go to get insightful conversations?"

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2. Understanding the Tariffs: Intentions and Formulas

Frank Holland provides an in-depth analysis of the tariff structures, emphasizing the lack of consistency and rationale behind the imposed rates. He highlights that the tariffs vary widely across different countries without a transparent formula, leading to confusion and inefficiency.

Notable Quote:
Frank Holland (04:21): "There's really no rhyme or reason to this situation... They just made up random numbers and threw it at the board."

The hosts scrutinize the reciprocal nature of these tariffs, revealing discrepancies in how different countries are being taxed, further complicating international trade relations.

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3. Economic Impacts: Consumers and Businesses

A primary focus of the discussion centers on how these tariffs translate to higher costs for consumers. By imposing taxes on imported goods, companies like Walmart face increased expenses, which are inevitably passed on to the consumer through higher prices.

Notable Quote:
Frank Holland (07:31): "It's going to cost more money... everything is gonna go up because it's going to cost more money."

The conversation extends to the challenges businesses face in adjusting their supply chains, highlighting the increased labor costs in the U.S. compared to countries like Mexico and China.

Notable Quote:
Frank Holland (09:42): "The price that it costs to build a car per worker in America is $70... in Mexico, it's like $6 an hour."

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4. Potential Recession and Market Crash Warnings

The hosts express significant concern over the possibility of these tariffs triggering a recession. With the stock market already experiencing a downturn, the uncertainty breeds fear among investors and business leaders alike.

Notable Quote:
Caleb Silver (16:30): "I think May 7th is the date and we'll probably have a lot of volatility until then."

Frank Holland corroborates these fears, citing that major sectors and flagship companies are expected to bear the brunt, potentially leading to a market crash reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis.

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5. Investment Strategies Amidst Economic Turmoil

Despite the bleak outlook, the episode sheds light on investment opportunities that arise during such crises. The guests emphasize the importance of strategic investment, such as dollar-cost averaging and focusing on resilient sectors like healthcare and consumer staples.

Notable Quote:
Frank Holland (22:00): "There are opportunities in every crisis... dollar cost averaging is important but you're staying in these companies for the long term."

Caleb Silver advises listeners to remain disciplined, invest in education, and prepare personal business plans to navigate potential economic downturns effectively.

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6. Cryptocurrency’s Role in the Current Economy

The conversation also touches upon the role of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, in the context of the current economic climate. While traditionally seen as a hedge against inflation, Bitcoin's recent performance has shown a correlation with stock markets, reducing its appeal as a safe haven.

Notable Quote:
Caleb Silver (44:52): "Bitcoin is not going to be the answer for them. So it won't have that type of demand like we thought it would at some point in time."

The hosts debate whether cryptocurrencies can gain mass adoption during economic hardships, with Rashad Bilal expressing skepticism about Bitcoin’s utility for the average consumer.

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7. Political and Global Trade Implications

The episode explores the broader political ramifications of the tariffs, including strained relations with key trade partners and potential shifts in the global trade order. The discussion highlights how these measures could diminish America's cultural and economic influence worldwide.

Notable Quote:
Rashad Bilal (59:47): "Half the companies in the S&P 500 have 40% of the revenue coming from overseas. So that's going to hurt both on the sentiment front, on the brand front and also what is the cultural impact."

The hosts express concern over potential boycotts and the diminishing appeal of American brands and educational institutions abroad, which could have long-term negative effects on the U.S. economy.

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8. Workforce and Manufacturing Challenges

Addressing the impact on the labor market, the discussion underscores the difficulties in repatriating manufacturing jobs to the U.S. The high cost of labor, coupled with the inevitability of automation, poses significant hurdles to achieving the administration's goal of revitalizing American manufacturing.

Notable Quote:
Rashad Bilal (38:41): "We're asking companies to pay a lot more... the labor cost is gonna go down, but the unemployment."

The hosts debate the feasibility of creating sustainable, well-paying manufacturing jobs in the current economic landscape, emphasizing the structural challenges within American industries.

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9. Future Outlook: Federal Reserve’s Role and Policy Responses

The cohort anticipates critical decisions from the Federal Reserve, particularly regarding interest rate adjustments. The potential for the Fed to cut rates in response to the economic slowdown is discussed as a pivotal factor that could influence the market's trajectory.

Notable Quote:
Caleb Silver (73:02): "The Federal Reserve, our central bank, has two jobs... keep unemployment or keep the country fully employed, and also keep inflation in the 2 to 2.5 percent range."

Rashad Bilal questions whether the current administration will allow the Fed the autonomy to respond effectively to the economic challenges exacerbated by the tariffs.

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10. Conclusion: Navigating Uncertainty and Building Resilience

As the episode wraps up, the hosts reiterate the importance of education, strategic investment, and personal resilience in navigating the uncertain economic landscape. They encourage listeners to stay informed, invest wisely, and prepare for possible economic shifts.

Notable Quote:
Frank Holland (82:38): "Stay disciplined. Don't gamble. Dollar cost average. Good companies, index funds, state, of course."

The episode concludes on a note of cautious optimism, emphasizing that while the economic outlook is fraught with challenges, informed and strategic actions can mitigate adverse effects and uncover opportunities amid crisis.

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Key Takeaways:

• Tariffs Impact: President Trump's tariffs, lacking consistent rationale, are driving up consumer prices and disrupting supply chains, leading to increased costs for both businesses and consumers.

• Recession Risks: The current economic policies may trigger a recession, with significant potential for a market crash akin to past financial crises.

• Investment Strategies: Emphasis on dollar-cost averaging, focusing on resilient sectors, and long-term investments in stable companies can provide stability amidst market volatility.

• Cryptocurrency Scrutiny: Bitcoin's recent performance aligns more closely with traditional markets, questioning its role as a reliable hedge in economic downturns.

• Global Trade Relations: Strained international relationships and potential boycotts threaten America's economic and cultural influence globally.

• Manufacturing Challenges: Repatriating manufacturing jobs is hindered by high labor costs and automation, making the administration's goals difficult to achieve.

• Federal Reserve's Role: Future interest rate decisions by the Fed will be critical in shaping the economic outcome, with potential policy responses being a key area of focus.

By dissecting these multifaceted issues, Earn Your Leisure equips listeners with the knowledge to understand and navigate the evolving economic landscape shaped by Trump's tariff policies.

Transcript

[Ian Dunlap]

Location, the lab. Quentin only has 24 hours to sell his car. Is that even possible? He goes to Carvana.com.

[Rashad Bilal]

What is this, a movie trailer?

[Ian Dunlap]

He ignores the doubters, enters his license plate.

[Caleb Silver]

Wow, that's a great offer.

[Ian Dunlap]

The car is sold, but will Carvana pick it up in time for it?

[Caleb Silver]

They'll literally pick it up tomorrow morning.

[Rashad Bilal]

Done with the dramatics.

[Ian Dunlap]

Car selling in record time.

[Caleb Silver]

Save your time. Go to Carvana.com and sell your car today. Pick up. These may apply.

[Ian Dunlap]

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Happy Thursday. Thursday. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It's. It's been a hell of a day. It's been a hell of a day. Shout out to everybody here in the chat. Alicia, what's going on? You said you are a newbie. Welcome to the family. Welcome to the family. We're gonna have some. Some insightful conversations tonight because where else would you go to get insightful conversations?

[Frank Holland]

That's a fact.

[Ian Dunlap]

Thank you for trusting us. That's a fact. That's a fact. Gonna let everybody get in here. Let the family get in here. We're gonna have a. A spirited conversation because there's a lot going on and there's a lot to be explained. There's a lot of confusion, a lot of angst, a lot of uncertainty. And so hopefully we can offer some clarity, some concise information that you can take with you tomorrow and going forward. So that's what our job is here tonight. This is eyl, State of emergency special edition.

[Frank Holland]

For sure. For sure. So this is live. This is live. So we could definitely answer some questions in the chat here. This was. Yeah, we wasn't expecting to go live. We wasn't expecting to have an episode this week, but with everything that's going on, felt that it was very timely, very important because I'm sure a lot of people lost a lot of money today in their. In their portfolios, and there's a lot of people that's nervous about different things. So we are going to provide you with a bunch of information. But before we start, man, this is more timely than ever. Invest Fest. Yeah, this, this year is going to be an interesting year for sure. The information and the relationships, the only thing that's going to save you in this world. Get your tickets to invest fest. Invest.com. the Holy Grail when it comes to networking and business and entrepreneurship. August 22nd in Atlanta, Georgia. And don't forget the book. You deserve to be rich.

[Ian Dunlap]

This is exactly why you deserve it.

[Frank Holland]

Also very timely.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

So, okay, I have opinions about this. So we're gonna bring, we're gonna bring some very esteemed guests on in a minute.

[Ian Dunlap]

Friends of the show, for sure. Yep.

[Frank Holland]

But before we start, I want to just, you know, say that I told you so.

[Ian Dunlap]

That's what you're starting. All right, which part, which part did you tell them? Let's start there.

[Frank Holland]

Well, I said that mass deportation would lead to an increase in home prices. And the New York Times actually just published an article two days ago about the increase in home prices because of mass deportation.

[Ian Dunlap]

Okay.

[Frank Holland]

They said one guy, they had one guy in particular. His home was his home build. The new home build was going up $200,000 because of labor.

[Ian Dunlap]

Labor. That's an issue.

[Frank Holland]

That's one thing I told you about supply chain issues. The next thing that I, I said is that tariffs is not a good idea. Mass scale tariffs is not a good idea. So I think it's important to understand why I think that. But it's just my opinion, but I mean, we lost $1.6 trillion in the stock market today. So in a day, I guess a few other people feel that same way.

[Ian Dunlap]

But yeah, I think most economists felt that way. Right. Like, if you, if you watch and you studied economists, what they've been saying, even pre election, right when they were looking economic plans and they were seeing tariffs, like 29 out of 30, I think some, some percentage like that were like, mass tariffs are a bad idea. Even Dan Ives yesterday was saying, like, after the rollout, this is worse than the worst case scenario.

[Frank Holland]

Well, another thing I think is interesting is that there's really no rhyme or reason to, to this situation. Like even the explanation of how they decided the formula for the tariffs. No, we're still trying to figure that part out.

[Ian Dunlap]

I looked it up. I looked it up. It's like some math equation. The New York Times put it in, in, in the publication. I even. That doesn't, the equation doesn't make sense. I think the clearest way they're trying to say is that whatever they're, that the United States is being charged, they're gonna give a reciprocal, a tariff of half of that.

[Frank Holland]

But that's not the case, though.

[Ian Dunlap]

I know.

[Frank Holland]

And so they just made up a random. They just made up random numbers and threw it at the board.

[Ian Dunlap]

I got the board right here. Let's see the board. Let's put it up. Let's put the board up. Let's put the board up.

[Frank Holland]

Yeah. So I mean, just look at Japan, right? I mean, 46. So 24 is not 50 of 46. Right? So it's just a bunch of random, like we're In Colombia is 10 for 10. So some countries they matched. Even some countries they did 50, some countries they did 30. Some countries there's really no set rhyme or reason behind how they actually got these tariffs.

[Ian Dunlap]

Vietnam, 90%.

[Frank Holland]

Okay, what, what I also said earlier on social media was that, you know, a lot of people, Trump's thing is that is retaliatory and they, they, they tax us, they have tariffs on us. So I think it's important to actually have some level of understanding. I said it's on social media. But lot of these terrorists was put in place after World War II when we were trying to actually help rebuild the world, really. But especially these Asian countries that was, I mean, they was damn near devastated tremendously from the war, right? So that was a way. But America has the largest spending economy in the history of the world, by far. Economy by far. And the amount of money that we actually spend on exports far exceeds the amount that we. The amount of money that we spend on imports far exceeds the amount that we spend on exports. So we spend $3.2 trillion on exports, but around 2 trillion on exports, 3.2 on imports, 2 trillion on exports. So that leaves a 1.1, 1.2 trillion dollar deficit deficit. So the idea of like an eye for eye is not really a relevant conversation because we spend so much more on export, on imports. And that's everything from cars to fabrics to furnitures to games, you name it. The biggest continent that we, that we import products from is Asia. China is the number one country and then after that is North America with Canada in Mexico. So what ends up happening is that when you have tariffs, let's say it's a board game that's coming from Vietnam and Walmart is carrying it. So Vietnam doesn't pay more money, but what happens is that Walmart's gonna have to pay more money.

[Ian Dunlap]

I think that is the confusion and because that's been the message throughout the campaign, is that it's attacks on the country. It's attacks on the country. It's an attacks on attacks on the country. People believe that a tariff is a tax on a country. What attack a tariff is, is kind of what you're explaining, right? Like it won't be up to the country, it'll be on the person that is receiving the import, the person that.

[Frank Holland]

Buys the products from the country. So then, okay, so if a board game goes from $10 to 12 that they have to buy it now, they're gonna have to sell it. It's not gonna be 18, it's gonna be 22 when they sell it.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

So every, that's why everything is gonna go up because it's going to cost more money. Now the another thing that, let me.

[Ian Dunlap]

Let me just touch on that. So to like even make it more clear for you, right, let's use the Walmart example. Let's use the board game, for example, that tariff that comes with the board game. Right. Walmart is going to have to do have a choice here. Right. They're either going to say we're going to pay this tariff, whatever the percentage is, or we're not going to pay this tariff. And you know who's going to pay it? Our customers. And so when they put that, that price inside of whatever the product is, you pay more.

[Frank Holland]

Yeah, but they, they still pay, even if they pay it, they still going.

[Ian Dunlap]

They'Re still gonna pay more.

[Frank Holland]

I'm saying they, they have, Walmart has to pay it, but the, the cost is going to be built into the product which now the product pays more. So, so then another theory is that, okay, well this is going to force jobs back to America. Now on theory, that's not a, that's not a bad theory. I want to be non biased about this conversation. It's not a bad theory because we have outsourced manufacturing for decades and we are dependent on other countries and that could lead to problems now. But the problem with this theory is that obviously it's going to take a long time. You just can't build 700 factories in one month. Right. So it's going to take a long time to actually build these factories.

[Ian Dunlap]

That's the first problem.

[Frank Holland]

That's the first problem.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yep.

[Frank Holland]

So there's going to be pain in that, in that process. The second problem is that the labor, so I put it on Instagram, the price that it costs to build a car per worker in America is $70.

[Ian Dunlap]

$70. Yep.

[Frank Holland]

The price that it cost in Mexico is like $6 an hour.

[Ian Dunlap]

Right.

[Frank Holland]

So if you have to pay work, that's why the prices of houses are going up.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

Because the, the amount of money that you can pay an undocumented immigrant is a lot lower than the amount of money that you would have to pay a union construction worker. I'm not saying what's right or wrong. Right. That's not, that's not the basis of this conversation. I'm just saying that's just the actual fact.

[Ian Dunlap]

Right.

[Frank Holland]

So if you have to pay somebody more money, once again, what do you think that that cost is going to go. That's going to go to the consumer because it's going to cost more money to get the job done. Another thing, like using the auto industry as an example, but this is true to any, any. Like, there's companies now that make products in America, auto companies. There's no auto company that makes products in, that does not ship and receive products from overseas to build the car. So when you build the car, you have to get an engine, you have to get variety of different parts. Those parts come from overseas. So now if you put tariffs on those parts, it's still going to raise the cost of the car and a variety of other different things. So it's like, okay, well, why can't we get cheap parts made in America? Well, that's a, it's, it's a pretty complicated problem, right? Because. Well, that goes back to the labor as well. That goes back to actually having the facilities to actually do it. There's a variety of different things that we've outsourced and we don't have, let's just be honest. We don't have a labor force that is built to build iPhones like nobody want. That's. Nobody wants to sit in a tech sweatshop for 12 hours a day.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. This is not right or wrong. This is just literally what's happening. And I saw this statistic and it was like, this makes perfect sense. Right. We let with, yes, we are the number one consumer nation. Right. Our GDP is 20%. Right. Of the world's income. 20% of the world's GDP belongs to the United States. Right. We have 5% of the world's population, which means that we're always going to fall short on labor. The other part is that when we have the labor, we can't afford to pay the labor. Right. So this is why you outsource jobs. Look at a company like Apple, for example, today, right. Had its worst day since the COVID pandemic started. Why? Well, a lot of the factories and a lot of the, the products that they manufacture come from China. If you're going to put that heavy of a tax on China, what do you think is going to happen to a company like Apple's products? Right. That $900 phone is now going to be 1500, 1600, 17, $100.

[Frank Holland]

And, and then, and then it's also a thing of, by the time they build the factories, AI's robots are going to be doing the jobs anyway. That's cost effective, but that's not Helpful. As far as getting American jobs, these jobs are not coming back to America because they're not, they're outdated anyway. Eventually these jobs are not even going to be done by human beings anyway. So to have a long term trajectory on a short term job is not sustainable. Like human beings are not going to be manufacturing car cars for too much longer. It doesn't make sense. Cars, retail products, when you can have a robot do it, why would you have a human do it?

[Ian Dunlap]

So there's this bright side. And while I'm watching all of this, knowing that it's like, well, if it's going to be robotics and it's going to be a gent. Well, we already been speaking about that, right? So the bright side is, yes, there's pain right now, but we can see where the future's at it. Right. We can kind of see like there's not going to be a human doing those jobs. Right. Whether you're talking about Apple, you're talking about Nike, you're talking about Walmart. From a retail or good side, those jobs are going to be done by robotics. We can agree on that.

[Frank Holland]

Yeah, for sure.

[Ian Dunlap]

Going forward. And it's more cost effective to do that. So if we think about who's going to pay for the labor. Well, if we have machines doing the labor, then that labor cost is gonna go down.

[Frank Holland]

The labor cost goes down, but the unemployment.

[Ian Dunlap]

So there we go.

[Frank Holland]

The number one thing is like, we're gonna bring jobs back to America. Well, that's not really bringing jobs back. If robots are assembling iPhones and if robots are assembling cars, where's the jobs? Okay, okay, well, let's. Since sometimes people need to hear it from other points of view. So we're going to bring our friend, CNBC correspondent and host Frank Holland.

[Caleb Silver]

What's up, y'all? What's going on?

[Frank Holland]

What's going on, Frank?

[Ian Dunlap]

What's up, man?

[Caleb Silver]

Man honor and a pleasure to be back with y'all. It's not market Mondays, market Thursdays, I guess, you know, tariff special. But it's really a pleasure always, like listening to these conversations you guys have, especially where you kick off the show because it kind of gives everybody an insight of what you guys are thinking about, what's on your mind.

[Frank Holland]

For sure.

[Ian Dunlap]

I appreciate that. And shout out to Ian. I know a lot of people in the chat. Ian is actually in the chat, y'all. So, like, you're asking for him. He's in the chat.

[Frank Holland]

Shout out to Ian.

[Ian Dunlap]

We just spoke to him.

[Frank Holland]

Salute to Ian. Okay, so yeah, definitely.

[Caleb Silver]

What's up to Ian, man. What's up, dog?

[Ian Dunlap]

Hit me up.

[Frank Holland]

So Frank, you work on, you work at cnbc, right? So, okay. Sometimes people might think that I'm a little biased, but I would like, I'm not sure anymore.

[Ian Dunlap]

I'm reading the comments, like for the first time I read comments and it was like, this is what you asked for. Or they're like, you were a damn. I'm like, what side do they think you on at this point is, is mixed signals out there.

[Frank Holland]

I'm on everybody. I'm on this.

[Caleb Silver]

I think we're all on the side of no recession though.

[Frank Holland]

I'm on this side. We were on the side of the Green Party.

[Ian Dunlap]

There it is.

[Frank Holland]

When I say Green Party, their presidents. Yes, for sure.

[Ian Dunlap]

So Frank, you kind of listening to some of the conversation, right?

[Caleb Silver]

Absolutely.

[Ian Dunlap]

You brought up the R word. I didn't want to bring it up, but based on the things we're saying, the tea leaves are kind of pointing toward that.

[Caleb Silver]

No, I mean it's definitely a kind of a tenuous situation. I mean, we also happened on the markets today. I think the dow dropped what, 1600 points. Huge drops for tech. Huge drops are just about every part of the market. But I want to go back to what you guys were talking about about the tariff formula. And I think that has a lot of people scratching their head. I would imagine some other countries scratching their head. The Trump administration did say that they're doing reciprocal terror. Well, first off, that 10 across the board tariff and reciprocal tariffs. But they said they have their own formula. So some of it's based on what other countries charge us and then some of it's based on what they say are non tariff barriers like bad taxes and stuff like that. Ian Bremmer, really smart guy when it comes to international things. President of Eurasia Group, I think he's the founder as well. He put out a tweet basically saying that the Trump administration, they took the trade surplus with each country and then divided it by the exports. And that's how they came with the numbers like for the EU, that's how they came with 39. So you know, he was very critical of it. But I think doesn't matter the formula right now, just the levels of it right now are making things, you know, I think making everybody nervous across the world. So one of the, the estimates that I've been really leaning on is from Ernst and Young. They see inflation going up 1%, GDP going down 1% in 2025. That's basically what a lot of people call stagflation. That's prices going up, but growth going down, more than likely wages staying flat. And we all know when prices go up, your wages stay flat. Well, you, you're losing money essentially. And that's what a lot of people talk about. When you talk about investing in gold or Bitcoin, you want to invest in an appreciating asset. A lot of people feel like a dollar is actually a depreciating asset. So there is a lot of danger going forward. Nobody wants to talk about recession, but it's certainly one of the dangers. I believe JP Morgan raised their estimate from 20 up to 35% when we're talking about a chance of recession. I've talked to a lot of CEOs about this and a lot of them say I, I just got to sit still until I have more clarity. And I don't think we have more clarity yet.

[Frank Holland]

Well, that's what I wanted to ask you because we're gonna make this a group discussion. We got another surprise. But you talk to a lot of CEOs, right? You talk to a lot of intelligent people and you talk to a lot of wealthy people. What is the sentiment of those people that you're talking to?

[Caleb Silver]

Confusion, man. And by the way, you guys are too wealthy and smart guys I talked.

[Frank Holland]

To, but confused, allegedly.

[Caleb Silver]

Nah, I'm not.

[Ian Dunlap]

Saying.

[Caleb Silver]

Just a lot of confusion. A lot of people aren't quite sure how this is all going to play out. Some of them are confused. Why, why are we putting tariffs on Canada? You know what I mean? Our neighbor to the north that we depend on. Why are we putting these tariffs on Mexico when remember President Trump during his first term? He's the one that negotiated the usmca. So the reason why some of these, these goods are moving back and forth is because he signed on to a deal that incentivized companies to look at Canada, the United States and Mexico is one block now it's the usmca. And to build in Mexico and to build in Canada. So that agreement incentivized a lot of them. One of the prevalent things I'm hearing from a lot of CEOs is that we build our supply chain, we build our factories, we built whatever we're building for decades. We're not building for this administration, we're not building for the next four years. So how do you make decade long decisions when you know this person is going to be in the office for four years and you don't know what the next person May think they may have a totally different view on trade altogether.

[Ian Dunlap]

This is an interesting time. Right? So we talked about stagflation, right? Inflationary environments. That keeps coming up. This. Does this feel like a negotiating tactic? Because we've been hearing that a lot over the past couple of days. Is this negotiated tactic to say, all right, let's get everybody to the table so now we can finally figure out a tariff system that works for us. I mean, it feels like a waiting game in a sense where it's like we're going to feel some pain. And he's campaigned on that. There's going to be short term pain. We don't know how long short term is. It could be relative. But eventually these countries will come asking for a negotiation so that this can get settled because uncertainty doesn't help anyone. Does it feel that way to you?

[Caleb Silver]

That's not the tone that I felt like the President was striking. He didn't seem like he was looking for deals or diplomacy. At least that's what I took away from when he was talking at the Rose Garden the other day. It didn't sound like he wanted to make a deal. It didn't sound like he wanted to be diplomatic. Diplomatic. It didn't sound like this was a ploy. It sounded like this is what he really believed his administration should do, especially when it came to those 10 tariffs. Now, some of the other tariffs, I imagine there would be some room for negotiation. Earlier today I was talking to Carlos Gutierrez, former Commerce Secretary under George W. Bush. He said he was in China. And according to the people he spoke to, he's speaking to a lot of high level people. He didn't tell me exactly who, but talking to a lot of high level people the that they say they're nervous. There hasn't been any back channeling as far as they know. They haven't heard about a lot of back channeling going on. They're really kind of confused about some of these tactics. You often hear President Trump say he has a good relationship with Xi. And then you see essentially 54% tariffs on China, which is obviously going to shake up a lot of supply chains, a lot of businesses. Apples won, Lululemon's $1 trees and other stock hit hard. All those expensive things come from China. So I didn't get the impression there was a lot of deals on the table, at least now. Now maybe the President's administration have a trick up their sleeve. But you keep hearing these conflicting reports. Some people say their sources are telling them the President wants to make A deal he wants to negotiate. Other people are saying a deal isn't really what he's looking for unless people make very substantial, substantial commitments to move their manufacturing to the US so we.

[Frank Holland]

Have 5,000 people on this live. Hit the like button and share. So with that, and this is. This is just a random live that we did that lets me know that people have a lot of anxiety, but this is the golden question that they want to have before we bring our other guests in to kind of make it a group conversation. Stocks. And we're going to talk about our opinions. But you work in cnbc, so talk stocks all day. You talk stocks all day, right?

[Caleb Silver]

All day.

[Frank Holland]

Stocks. Where are we at with the stock market? Oh, is this. Is this going to be like a 2008 thing where this, this is just the beginning and we headed for 30, 35. Stock market crash.

[Ian Dunlap]

Why are you saying things like that, man? We can't have that out there.

[Caleb Silver]

I know, man. Yo, Shoddy's putting the bad juju out.

[Rashad Bilal]

There.

[Caleb Silver]

But on a serious note, I mean, isn't that the fear? I think that's the fear that a lot of people have. That's why today you see stocks like Progressive insurance up 1 1/2 percent. All stayed up like 2%. People are going putting their money in companies that you know are going to make money no matter what. No matter what happens. You got to have your car insured. You know what I mean? No matter what happens. Cure Dr. Pepper, I think was up 2%, you're still going to drink a soda, you know what I mean? Like, you're not going to stop drinking soda because you're making less money or your business isn't doing as well. Some things people are going to continue to spend on. So is the setup for something like that to happen? I mean, I think all the smart people I'm talking to say yes. I'm going to start with my man Jim Kramer from Mad Money. He's saying put some money on the sidelines. Put some cash on the sidelines. When generally he's saying be invested in the market. Even he's saying it's a little bit too shaky. I'm talking to a lot of other traders. They're saying right now it's just not a great environment to trade. A couple weeks ago, a lot of people thought we had hit a tradable bottom. The fact that we were hitting the bottom until we got this tariff announcement. Then when we get some clarity and maybe some more volatility, but it feels like there might be More volatility ahead. When you're seeing mega cap tech just sell off the way it did today, I think the Mag 7 lost about $1 trillion worth of market value. When you see that happen, it's hard for the market to really gain its footing. Remember, Those stocks are about 55 of the SPY, about 55 of the Triple Q. So I mean with that kind of concentration, those stocks under pressure, it's really hard for the market just to really find its footing. And you got to remember those stocks, they're not necessarily tariff sensitive and not necessarily influence inflation sensitive, but they are growth sensitive. Companies need to feel confident in their ability to grow, to spend money on cloud computing, to spend money on AI agents and take these different steps. And if, if you're unsure about the economy and what the administration is doing, you're not going to make those kind of investments. If you're a CEO, it's hard to go to the board and say I want to spend X amount of money to move my stuff to the cloud or to put these AI agents in when you don't even know what's coming up.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, it's interesting when you talk about the Max 7, that one company that would probably be right on the outside of that Netflix was almost positive today. It might have closed positive png like stocks like that makes sense because no matter what, you're gonna need your household supplies. You said the tradable bottom, which is interesting because we all knew that April 2nd was coming and we circled that date and obviously we saw what happened. But now it feels like maybe April 9th is one of those dates that we now have to circle with the retaliatory tariffs coming back our way from all these countries that, that we are now putting taxes on. What's been the sediment around the 9th now is the day that we all have to watch because we thought that was a tradable bottom a few weeks ago. Yesterday happened next Wednesday. Who knows, man?

[Caleb Silver]

I mean you gotta watch the 4th, the 10th. I mean there's still the potential for pharmaceutical tariffs, for semiconductor chip tariffs, you know, lumber, copper. I mean just there's so many different areas that could face tariffs. So I don't know if there's one date you, you can point to. I think the next date. I think a lot of people have circled on their calendar, specifically when I'm talking to people who manage money or who try to trade is actually May 7th. That's the Fed decision. So a lot of people are starting to think the Fed might have to get active. Previously it was thought very low chance of the Fed cutting in May. I think it was JP Morgan that came out and said they believe the, the next cut will come up in July. I'm talking to a lot of people, a lot of rumblings who think that the Fed, the Fed officials, Jay Powell, everybody else, they may feel like they need to get ahead of this whole tariff situation and cut as soon as maybe, which would certainly give the boost to the market. I don't know if you guys ever know this guy, Mark Smith from Wells Fargo Advisors, great guy. He's a guest on my show. He came on and he was talking about two areas of the market that he thinks not recession proof, not tariff proof, but generally resistant to it. And one of them was financials. Another rate cut would significantly help the financials. I'm talking to big banks like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo City and stuff like that. So to me, I think May 7th is the date and we'll probably have a lot of volatility until then. I think the only certainty that we may get is from the Fed if they're going to cut.

[Frank Holland]

Let's, let's bring, let's bring our other guest on friend of the show, friend of the show, Caleb.

[Rashad Bilal]

Still, I didn't know Frank Holland was going to be here. This is a full party.

[Caleb Silver]

Thanks for having, man. We're just hanging out down in Miami, actually, with Chef Kwame.

[Frank Holland]

Oh, yeah, nice. Your monks did a great panel, man.

[Caleb Silver]

Chef Kwame's a good dude.

[Ian Dunlap]

Solid, solid guy.

[Frank Holland]

So, yeah, Caleb, good friend of the show, chief editor of Investopedia. So I'm sure a lot of people have been hitting your site trying to find out what tariffs are and what when the recession is coming and stuff like that. So from a historical standpoint. Right. Can you give us some historical insight on tariffs and why America for the last 70 years has been more free trade? We haven't pushed this button of tariffs, but because people a lot, you know, a lot of that's, that's a common theme. People like, well, we've been getting ripped off for a long time. They can't understand why we haven't done this a lot earlier. Right. But there's a, there's a, there's a reason why we haven't done this.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, well, we actually have. And it was the Smoot Hawley tariff that kicked this whole thing off about 100 years ago. So we've been a tariff nation. And in the early days of America, Alexander Hamilton, they all favored tariffs in order to raise some money for the government, but never to this extent where we're being, we're actually putting a consumptive tax on our own citizens to pay for this, to raise money because they want to cut taxes. This is a very, very weird way of doing it. We have never had tariffs to this degree, but you got to remember Trump 1.0, there was over $300 billion worth of tariffs. The Biden administration came in and added more tariffs on top of that. But when you look around the world, it's just never been at this level. And the fact that we're coming out with this 10% across the board tariffs, which really, as I said, is a consumption tax for consumers here in the United States, that's a very big precedent right there. And I think it changes the entire global world order, and it changes the way capital markets are going to work. And I'll say it for this reason when you can't. And Frank was alluding to it a little bit, the Fed meeting is super important. But you got to wonder if this, this level of tariffs and this intensity is intentional by the Trump administration that wants lower interest rates. He has said that back on the campaign trail and all along. So by forcing the economy to slow down, it forces the Fed's hand to lower interest rates so that our debt payments, which we make every quarter as a country, get reduced a little bit. We spend the second most amount of money we spend as a, as a government is on servicing our debt, which is over a trillion dollars just servicing the debt. So if we can lower that, then there's going to free up more money to do forced deportations, to build walls, to do whatever else is on the agenda of this administration?

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, it feels like. Is there a goal. I know there's been a lot of talk. What is the goal number? Or is there a goal number that they're trying to receive from the terrorists? Right. We obviously know that government spending and Doge was created to reduce that. But it feels like the uncertainty around the number, it kind of has no rhyme or reason. So from your perspective, like, is there, from the, the deficit, which is what 37 trillion now do, is this the best method forward? Right. Like we, I know Shoddy alluded to it earlier. Right. Sometimes you, you can't pull the band, band aid off too fast.

[Caleb Silver]

Yeah.

[Ian Dunlap]

Does it feel like this has happened? And obviously is this the best method going forward?

[Rashad Bilal]

No, but it is a method and it is sort of taking a sledgehammer to a, you know, to a small nail, because this is actually hurting lower to Middle income families more than anybody out there. It's the. Peter Navarro was a Trump advisor, says it's going to raise $6 trillion. Not anytime soon. Right. These companies are going to pull back on their shipments. Our companies here in the United States aren't going to order more. So you're not going to feel the impacts of that. Who's going to feel it? Consumers who have to go to the grocery store, load up like they do every single week, feed their families. Right. Buy supplies to fix up their small business, order in inventory so they have enough inventory in their small business to be able to make it going forward. So this is more of a punishment against consumers and households in the United States with the intended impact of making people and other countries pay their fair share. The fact is we've had a pretty strong economy up until about two or three months ago that was in pretty good shape. 4% unemployment, GDP at 2.8%. Right. Inflation was coming down. It wasn't to where it wanted to be, to where the Fed would like it to be, but it was on its way, moving a little bit lower. So this is kind of a, like a complete change of the global world order. And it calls into question things like the sacredness of the ten year Treasury. Right. The most widely held, most saved asset in the world. Right. People own our debt because they believe that our country will grow and that we'll pay it back. Well, this is a big shot at that right now and it's also a big shot at the dollar. So if the dollar becomes, you know, less desired and doesn't become the reserve currency anymore, which we're a long way from that. But if you lose the yield, the 10 year treasury yield and you lose the dollar, you lose the structure of our capital markets. And that's very concerning.

[Frank Holland]

Well, this is some, anybody can chime in, but. So this is, this is what is a little confusing because Trump has been, he's been obsessed with tariffs since the 1980s. So I don't know if this is like just a personal crusade of his, like, you know, kind of like a bucket list thing that he just was just obsessed with his whole entire life and now he's just like, I just want to do this because like you said, I mean, if this continues, then we're most likely head to a recession. Right. So presidents don't like to be presidents during recession. So why would you personally tank the economy for no reason? Like we weren't in a bad spot like you said, we were actually in a good spot as far as the market, the unemployment, a variety of different things was actually, he's actually inherited a pretty good situation. Now the national, the debt is an issue for sure, but it wasn't needed, it wasn't needed to do it in this fashion. And a lot of people is going to cause a lot of pain. And like you said, lower to middle income people are going to feel that pain the most. Right. Because it's like, okay, if you got to pay extra 500 for something that's, that's inconvenient, if somebody is making $40,000, has to 500 for something that's life changing, that could potentially be life changing. Right. So yeah, I'm trying to figure this out. So you guys, you know, what is your thought process? You brought up the interest rates. That's interesting. But outside of that, why would some, why would he do this? Like, why would he have this much pain so early in his presidency for no apparent reason?

[Rashad Bilal]

Frank, you want to take it first?

[Caleb Silver]

No, go ahead, Caleb, you already start.

[Rashad Bilal]

Okay, here's what I think, and this is my opinion, not Investopedia's opinion, but I think that they want to burn it down, you know, or at least slow the economy, take it into a recession, bring the market way down and then through whatever mechanisms, either through privatization, which is where a lot of this is going. When you look at a lot of the government job cuts, privatization, so that those that are in close can line their pockets and get rich as they rebuild it back up, but through private means. Right. And then redistribute that wealth among the people that are going to help them get re elected in the future. So I think that's part of it. I think there's also a let's burn it down so we can build it back up and say what a great job we did rebuilding this economy which was in tatters. It is so rare. You mentioned it, Rashad. It is so rare for, for a president to come into office over the last four decades that's not in a recession. This president inherited actually a pretty strong economy. Biden inherited an economy that was coming out of the COVID pandemic. And even the last two presidents, they entered, they entered the White House in very difficult times for the economy, not this time around. So burning it down and then rebuilding and say we fixed this whole thing and look how we did it. Meanwhile, a lot of it's been privatized and very few people are getting very rich off of this.

[Caleb Silver]

When I look at it, it seems to me, again, this is my opinion on cnbc, it seems like to me a president is trying to establish a legacy he felt like he was supposed to have back to back terms. He's come back into office now. One way to establish a legacy is to reshape global trade and put your mark on that. He's someone who has done business all around the world, whether it be casinos or golf courses. His first administration, he did hire a lot of business leaders. This time it's even a bigger concentration of business leaders and people with very specific thoughts about the global economy. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant's a great example of that. Somebody who's just seen as a global thought leader when it comes to finance. So I think for him it's really his chance to put his stamp not only on the presidency the second time around, but the entire world. And I think you often hear him say when he's talking to business leaders about things that he sees as accomplishments, he goes, Trump got it done. Nobody else could get it done. People are saying that Trump got it done. So a lot of it seems like his legacy, at least in his mind, is at play. And you have to remember this is somebody based on what we saw in reports and ourselves on TV that faced, you know, a near death experience, possibly being assassinated. He's an older gentleman, he's close to about 80 years old himself. So when you get to that stage, as we all get older, we start to think more about what am I leaving behind, how are people going to see me? What accomplishments do I have to say?

[Frank Holland]

That's a very good point. That's, that's actually both of you, that's very insightful what you just said, because he puts his name on everything, right? He's the guy that puts his name on stuff that he doesn't even own. So like Trump Tower and Trump, like he's very big on branding and he's very big on legacy. So he said this before as far as like, if he can be the person that literally reshapes world trade from like how it's been for the last hundred years in a free trade market. And if he can, if, if he can. And now it can be like the Trump trade plan for, for the world, branding wise. I never, I haven't really thought about it like that, but that makes a lot of sense. That actually makes a lot of sense.

[Ian Dunlap]

It's kind of like what he alluded to, like what you were saying. He's had this ideology since the 80s. It was that Johnny Carson interview where he's sitting there talking about trade. But even watching them today, it feels like there's a certain level of delusion, right. I think Josh Brown said it today, like he's either incredibly right or he's going to be incredibly wrong about this as the market is tanking. Right. The Dow's down 1500 points. You know, reporters are asking him about it and he said, yo, the market's looking great. There's going to be a boom in the market. And it's, it just feels like a level of delusion, even to the point where we're talking about making jobs come back to America. And, and Caleb, before you on, we were kind of alluding to, like, does that even feel fathomable at this point? Right. The amount of time that it would take to, to build some of these jobs. I know Nike took a crazy hit. Apple, does this feel like something that is even feasible over the next five years? Because, yeah, 10, 15 years, you can build factory, you can build industry, but by that time it won't. These companies are going to take such a financial hit. People, the customers, obviously, if the companies are taking a hit, they're going to raise prices. People are going to feel the impact. Is it even feasible to do bring these jobs back?

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, we, we've only got like 13 million manufacturing jobs in this country right now. That's down from like 20 million. Even the president alluded to it himself. But there's a reason a lot of people don't want those jobs. They don't pay that well. They're really hard jobs, right? They're very difficult. They're physically difficult. They require a lot of hours. They don't pay that great. There's no more pensions anymore. So who is doing those jobs? A lot of the people that immigrated into the United States, the same people he wants to send out of the United States, were actually taking those jobs. Right? So getting, building the factories is one thing. Creating factories where you can pay a really livable, a real livable wage where somebody can raise a family on it and maybe, God forbid, own a home at some point in time, that's asking a lot of companies who are measured on a quarterly basis based on their bottom line, Right. They are responsible to shareholders. So when you have a shareholder mentality, right, and you have to answer to them every single quarter and increase your, you know, your projections and your, your forecast going forward and keep beating the street. And Frank knows as well, well, you're not going to pay the best wages. You're going to, you're going to find the cheapest Source of labor that you can. And that cheap, cheap source of labor has been Mexico, that has been Vietnam, that has been China, that has been anywhere but here. So you're asking companies to pay a lot more for that. And by putting tariffs on products coming into this country and now the retaliatory tariffs, you're not solving that part of the problem. The part of the problem that we have to solve is are they responsible to their shareholders? Are they responsible to their communities? Are they responsible to the United States to provide living wages for people so they can raise families? That is a real big disconnect.

[Frank Holland]

You can't have it both ways. You can't. I mean, you can't have a capitalist society and then say, well, we want everything to work fairly. That's not how capitalism works. This isn't, this isn't. You can't be anti socialism and anti communism and say, we want everybody equal. We want. No, the capitalist society is to make the most money as possible by spending as least money as possible. They're not doing anything illegal. It's not good business to spend billions of dollars more than you need to. It's more efficient to get the job done in those other countries because you can pay the people less. This is. I mean, we don't have to sugarcoat it, right? It's more efficient to get the job done in other countries because you can pay the people less and you can produce the products quicker. Less red tape. You don't have to go through regulation. They don't. It's a variety of different factors. Just like if you're building a home, it's more effective to have illegal immigrants build a home because they don't have health benefits, they're not part of a union, and you can pay the people less. Now, is that morally right or wrong? You can make an argument on both sides, because on one side you can say it's morally wrong. On the other side, you can say it's better than what they were getting in the other country. That's why they came to this country. So it's not. It may not be what you're looking for, but you're not them. So this is not. I don't understand this, but this is easy for people. If you haven't employed somebody, you don't have a full appreciation of this. If you are an employer, then you look at, you look at things differently. So none of these companies are going to be happy about spending more money.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, it, it. Frank, I'm going to come to you because you've been, you've spoken to CEOs, right? We looked at the first quarter, it was a negative quarter. Now you know, we're starting quarter two. How are CEOs even looking at their P Ls at this point? Right. With the tariffs to every day it's changing Q2, how people going to even be reporting their earnings. Obviously you're going to have to, you're losing, you're going to lose employees. Right. You're going to make less money. What does this look like in the CEO world when Q2 ends in June and this number comes in?

[Caleb Silver]

Well, we've already seen CEOs just respond to some of this before the tariffs were announced. Their guidance is pretty weak, which often leads to their stock not doing well after earnings. Even if the numbers for the earnings they're reporting are fine for the quarter they're reporting are fine, the guidance is weak. That leads to a sell off in some of the stocks. So that's one of the reasons we've seen a lot of volatility. But very quickly, I want to go back to Rashad's point for just a minute. Yeah, we're a capitalist country, but we're not pure. It's not pure play capitalist in situation. Remember back during the great financial crisis, we bailed out the banks. So if we were a capitalist country, the banks, they made a lot of risky bets. They lost. They bet on housing in mortgage backed securities and they put them together in a way that just wasn't solvent. They lost. So why don't, why don't we just let the banks go bankrupt? Because that's not, that's not going to work in the United States because people have their money in the banks. Why don't we let the auto industry go bankrupt? Well, the auto industry has tentacles and so many other industries like we're seeing right now with the tariffs being impacted. If all the automakers went out of business, it would lead to restaurants going out of business, the trucking companies that ship the parts going out of business. So we're not a pure play capitalist country. And I think that's what a lot of CEOs are trying to figure out, at least the ones I'm talking to. They're trying to balance understanding the President's objective as much as they can. A lot of them admit they're pretty confused about the terrorists, specifically with Mexico and Canada when he's the one that did USMCA and doing what's right for the company and try not to lay off workers and trying to keep products on the shelves and things like that. So it's multi. Tiered. I feel like they're, they're almost as confused as we are. Except as you mentioned, Rashad, they have the responsibility of a workforce, of a board of shareholders that they have to try to balance. So I think this earnings season that's starting up in about a week and a half is going to be pretty interesting. The banks come up first. So the banks are going to give us a lot of insight into loan demand, the willingness of companies to go public, the credit situation. I mean, a whole lot of things. We're going to get a great read on the economy. I think it's the first day. I think it's Citi and JP Morgan, that report. Don't might want you to correct me. I might be wrong about that. But two big banks will give us a lot of insight.

[Frank Holland]

So. Okay, so let's go to this part because this is. There's opportunities in every crisis. So I do want to. Because, you know, when I came, when I, I used to be a financial advisor and I started during the, I literally started my career during the Great Recession. It was actually a good time to start because I had nowhere to go but up. And I was putting clients in mutual funds and 529 plans and a variety of different things. And a lot of these people had never invested in the stock market before. So there was their first time investing in the stock market. They was investing when the stock market was down 30, 35% and it worked out for them. So there is opportunities in every crisis and this is definitely a crisis. So let's, let's, let's go to, let's go through these different ones. Larry Flank. Frank flank think BlackRock CEO. He made interesting commentary about bitcoin. And this is interesting. Bitcoin is interesting because usually bitcoin, traditionally, when previously it wasn't directly tied to world economies and the US dollar, but now we see it's like a direct correlation. When the stock market goes down, bitcoin goes down. They don't move opposite. Gold has been going opposite. But bitcoin is pretty much like a tech company at this point. It moves as the stock market moves. And today it was down. But do you see a world where this is actually beneficial for bitcoin with the dollar because the dollar went down also? That's another thing. Tariffs are actually supposed to make the dollar stronger from my understanding, but in this case, the dollar is actually decreasing. Right. And I guess a lot of that is just world sentiment. That's kind of turning negative across America, but then a variety of other things that you talked about. So okay, in this world of this is hurtful to America for sure. But could this be beneficial for bitcoin?

[Caleb Silver]

Caleb, you want to take it first?

[Rashad Bilal]

I'll take it first. I mean we know that 50 odd million people own crypto in some way, shape or form, but we also know that the top 1% own the most of it. Right. And a lot of bitcoin is owned by publicly traded companies like the microstrategy of the world that are basically bitcoin treasuries. Even Tesla is like a bitcoin Treasury. So could be good just because of the scarcity aspect of it all. And we used to live in this world called Tina. Right. There is no alternative to stocks because interest rates were so low. There was just stock stocks. Right. You'd be a fool to invest in anything else until bitcoin came along after the great financial crisis. Well, now you have this alternative asset. But for most people, they don't know how to turn bitcoin, whatever bitcoin holdings they have, into usable fiat to pay their utility bill. Right. We still aren't at that level where it's just something I can just, oh, I'll just Apple pay with my bitcoin right now. Now you can in a very few cases. But when we're talking about the people that are going to get hurt the most by rising prices, stagflation, a potential recession, higher tariffs, Bitcoin is not going to be the answer for them. So it won't have that type of demand, that mass demand like we thought it would at some point in time. At the same time, this is a deregulatory administration that has been promising to stockpile bitcoin, add it to the reserves, mine its own bitcoin and I bet you will eventually let it into our 401ks. Fidelity announced that today or yesterday you can now have bitcoin in Your, in your 401k if you want. So it is going to become a little bit more ubiquitous, but it's not going to become more useful. And I think right now we need a really useful currency and a dependable currency to get through any type of crisis that we're going to go through. It's not going to be the answer for the masses. It's going to be the answer for the very rich. And that's another thing that makes me wonder like usually the stock market falling, you know, into a correction was. It was a stoplight for President Trump and Trump 1.0. It's not anymore, right? The 10 year treasury yield spiking used to be, oh, you know, maybe you've gone too far here. It's not anymore. Why is that? They're deep into cryptocurrencies in that administration in person. The Trump coin, the Melania coin, the family, all the different ETFs that they have associated with their coins and their meme coins, maybe they don't really care about what has been traditional ways of growing wealth in this country because they're into it digitally and again, they're just here for now. I don't know.

[Ian Dunlap]

It definitely feel and this is why I feel like there's something that that savior complex is coming into play at some point. It's just a matter of time, right? There was a time in Trump 1.0, like you said, if the market was going down, it was a concerning issue, right? To hear him say that the market is looking great as a dow is down 1500 points and the Nasdaq is down a thousand points. It's concerning, right? And the people that you that it's going to affect, and I'll let both of you guys can answer, are the middle class, right? So when we're talking about the jobs coming back and we're talking about living wages, we're talking about government funding being cut, we're talking about government programming being cut, that directly affects the middle class. And so obviously a lot of people who are watching here tonight are part of that class. What, what is the solace that they can take in this at this point.

[Frank Holland]

Man?

[Caleb Silver]

I mean, is there any solace right now? I think it's hard to find any solace right now. I'm not sure about that one, man. I'm gonna jump off of Caleb's point really quick. To your point. Trump family is deep into crypto. I mean, Eric Trump, I think a couple, maybe it was yesterday, came up with the headline saying that he was thinking about turning the family business pivoting it fully into crypto. He's launching a bitcoin mining company, just doing a lot with cryptocurrencies. Overall, I think when it comes to bitcoin, at least for right now, I don't think it's the moment for bitcoin. This is again my personal opinion, Caleb, again, to your point, a lot of those bitcoin buyers, they were institutional buyers, they were companies and things like that. Right now people are trying to de risk their, their balance sheets and de risk their portfolios. Whether you're A tech company like a Tesla or you're an institutional big bank doing it right now. And also they found their new thing, private credit. You saw a private credit ETF come out. So I think a lot of the interest when it comes to institutional buyers is, is private credit, which is basically private debt loaning people money at high rates with basically higher levels of like collateral or you know, like you buy a house, you might put down 10%. Well a private credit deal might be you have to put down 50 or give collateral up to 50. So that's becoming a lot more of a lucrative part of the market and also an area where they're trying to get, they're hoping to get retail investors through ETFs but institutional investors, a lot of money managers are pushing them towards private credit. So it seems like Wall street, you know, they just find new things. Whether back in the day it was mortgage backed securities, now it's private credit. For a while it was a bitcoin etf. So I just don't know if right now is the time for bitcoin. I'm going to be honest, I'm not a big cryptocurrency person. I hold some just to diversify my portfolio, but I'm not really sure which one's going to win. I don't think any of us know which one's going to win long term or Bitcoin will even be a thing ten years from now. Maybe it'll be all about Ethereum or Solana. I'm not really sure.

[Rashad Bilal]

Right, so what, what is the asset besides your home that working families can hold on to to try to continue to build wealth and, and pass it on to their generations? We been teaching people for 50, 60, 70 years about the stock market. First it was mutual funds, right? Then it was index funds, then it was ETFs, then it, right? And now there's half as many stocks on the publicly traded markets than there used to be. Why is that, Frank? Because it's a pain in the ass to be a publicly traded company managing quarter to quarter, right? Shareholders up your butt, increasing your forecast going forward. What's wrong with your profit margins? You know, how come you don't have enough DEI or whatever? It's a really hard thing to be a publicly traded company in this country. There's a ton of regulation now. They're going to remove some of that. And at the same time, you know, if there's not going to be, if there's going to be less publicly traded companies and Wall street keeps inventing new things to sell us in the form of private credit or private equity in an ETF wrapper which is like, you know, my friend Tyrone says it's like putting a Ferrari engine in like a Buick, right? It's like you're not going to get the most out of it. What are they doing that for? They're finding different ways to securitize things because the things that we have grown up investing in that were the building blocks of our wealth are becoming scarcer. And now the public markets, I'm afraid, are becoming less trustworthy.

[Caleb Silver]

Yeah, I don't, I don't have an answer. Obviously your, your personal residence is a great investment because you can live in it and ideally it also appreciates the other areas. I'm not sure. I think it just really depends. I mean, education is always a great investment, but the question is, what is that education? College doesn't seem to make the same sense in one state. Did I know a lot of people that graduate in debt and aren't really on a trajectory to ever get out of debt with the money that they're going to make if they plan to live even just a middle class lifestyle. You know, it's one thing if you go to college, you're going to live in a shack somewhere and save every penny, but who really wants to do that after spending four years in college?

[Rashad Bilal]

I do believe that stocks are still, I still believe the stock market is going to eventually return to some sort of a mean return. I don't know if it'll be the 12, 13.

[Caleb Silver]

I thought you meant outside of stocks though.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, outside of stock.

[Caleb Silver]

I still do think stocks are a great investment, especially over the long term. If you're willing to hold. Like on my show, I often question people, they go, I'm a long term investor. I'm like, okay, but this is a show for people looking to make some short term to intermediate moves. But in general, holding stocks over the long term is the safest investment by far.

[Rashad Bilal]

Has been.

[Frank Holland]

Yeah, for sure. Okay. I'm glad you guys said that because they call me a doomsday alarmist a lot of times.

[Ian Dunlap]

But thanks, Frank, for being honest. No, it's true.

[Frank Holland]

Pretty consistent. So, so what, what, how do you feel about investing right now as far as companies? Are you deploying money into the market right now or are you? Because I'm always putting money into the market. My theory is that you have to force yourself to put money into the stock market every single month. That's my theory. So I'm a big believer in dollar cost averaging. Now, sometimes you put money in some things, you might not put money in other things. Right. Like I might see an opportunity where it's like, okay, well, I think that it's time to be a little bit more conservative. I'm just going to put money in S P500 this month. Not gonna put money in the stocks or I'm not fully confident in Apple. I'm not putting money in Apple. I might put money in qqq, which Apple is a part of. But I feel more confident because it's diversified amongst a variety of other different companies. Besides, one particular company or SMH is down a lot right now. So maybe smh, I feel confident in putting some money in smh, riding it out. That doesn't mean that it's not going to. Because I also firmly believe that we're headed to a recession if we don't. If this doesn't change. Let me preference this by saying this. If this tariff policy does not change, if it, if it does not change, we are, we are going to be in a recession. And if we go into a recession, we're going to a bear market. And if we go into a bear market, stocks are going to fall lower than what they are now.

[Ian Dunlap]

I think that's safe to say.

[Frank Holland]

That's my, that's my thesis. But what, what are you doing?

[Ian Dunlap]

I think that's safe to say right now. The, like I said, the, the number one catalyst is uncertainty. And that's what we're seeing consistently over the past couple of weeks. And so you always have to have your targets. Right. And so like we talk about Nvidia, I know Ian said 105 is a number. Well, it hit 103 today.

[Frank Holland]

It's headed to 90 at this rate.

[Ian Dunlap]

Well, even, even. That's fine, right? If I see it at 90, it's even more attractive to me. Is it a company that I believe in? Is it a company I'm going to hold long term? It's a company that I have 3,000 shares in. I'm not going anywhere, right? And so I buy. I'll buy more. I told you. Attractive company for the past two months has been Netflix. We saw how they reported after that their last quarter. Obviously what they're doing with live sports and the wwe. We actually witnessed it in firsthand. I like that company. How will tariffs affect that? I'm not sure how it will affect it long term, but I see that a discount. I like it. The other one is meta.

[Frank Holland]

Right.

[Ian Dunlap]

Obviously what they're doing and the role that they're going to play in connectivity throughout the world, not just here in America and the global landscape that they have. I like them too. And so when they get down to attractive prices, I know Nvidia just dropped 32%. Apple dropped 20 today. The companies that you liked and you were waiting for them to be 2025 down from their all time highs. Well, they're here. Will they go lower? They could, but they still attractive companies. Those are the companies that will lead this economy. You already allude to it Caleb, when you're talking about 55% of the S P is in the Max 7. Right. So these companies are going to lead our economy. They're at discounted prices. Dollar cost averaging is important but you're staying in these companies for the long term. Those, those are, those are great companies. So you stay on. Now are we doing options on some of them? Nvidia, it gets down to 90. I like it because I can see out to 2027. Right. So when I start seeing 2027 calls where it's deep like December 2027, I like that I'm always using time as a barrier to, to help me fight off volatility.

[Frank Holland]

What about puts? Puts is another.

[Ian Dunlap]

I see everybody in chat. I feel like everybody's doing that right now. Right. Everybody kept circling April 2nd. They're looking at April 2nd as a date. They know that tariffs are going to get into, into effect. They start buying puts on indexes. Right. So they bought it, put on the, on the S P. They bought puts on qqq. Why? Well, exactly what happened today. Now we don't know what certainty looks like or uncertainty looks like for the next couple of weeks. Like you said, if this doesn't change. Yeah, I mean it's pretty safe to say that recession is added and that's just by definition two negative quarters. I can't see how these tariffs go into effect this month. And this is a positive quarter for most of these companies.

[Frank Holland]

We're on the verge of a global meltdown, a global recession. I don't think XRP is going to be the answer. I don't know why people are so obsessed with xrp. It's confusing to me. But out of every, out of every vehicle that you can think about, XRP is the one golden child. It hasn't done anything in seven years. It goes up, it comes down and I'm just, it's just this. But this goes back to the lack of education. This also goes back to the gambit's mentality and it's also go, how much education can we give you guys? We've been giving you education every single day for seven years. So for you to champion xrp, it's disappointing because it's like, I'm not saying that it has no future at all, but out of everything in the world, XRP is the one thing that you're going die on it.

[Ian Dunlap]

It doesn't cost much, right. People can load their money inside of it. There's uncertainty around it. We heard that the SEC has now settled. It's the hope, right? As Frank did.

[Frank Holland]

A lot of people in Vegas will hope.

[Ian Dunlap]

Exactly. That's why we never put hope into the equation. Right. You want to make sure you do enough research and you're investing long term in some things that we know are proven to increase the GDP of our economy for sure.

[Frank Holland]

Well, let me ask you guys this. From a global perspective, right? How do you think the perception, how does this affect. Because everybody's mad at America right now. That's another part of this equation from world leaders. But then citizens, like people, I've seen Canadian citizens, that's like they're not going to America because they're boycotting America. Like there's a global settlement that is setting in of people that's mad at America. How, how, how do you think that is playing in and what, what is the, the long term effects of that? Because America was always known as like the place you want to go to. It's like the, the cool place to be. But we were cool.

[Rashad Bilal]

We got the fs, we got blue jeans over here. We're a lot of fun. But right now nobody wants to come, right? So it's going to hurt on the tourism front, it's going to hurt on the trade front, we know that. But also just on the cultural. It's hard to put a number on this. But you know, cultural influence has a wealth impact as well. And you can see it in entertainment, obviously when movies go from here over to there, you know, over to Europe or Asia where certainly Marvel and those other franchises are massive. But they also have parks over there. Disney operates around the world, right? Coca Cola sells its product around the world. I think half the companies in the S&P 540% of the revenue comes from overseas. So that's going to hurt both on the sentiment front, on the brand front and also again, what is the cultural impact from a dollar perspective that these companies are going to feel because they come from the United States or they're associated with the United States like Mickey Mouse, like Coca Cola. Right. There's nothing more American than, than these companies. And I think they're going to suffer abroad as well.

[Caleb Silver]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great point, but you got to remember we're a service economy. Like the things that we export are services. And one of those things is education. So as long as we have Harvard, Stanford, you know, Georgia Tech, people will come to the United States.

[Frank Holland]

Well, that, well, that, that's on the fire now. People with the administration doing what they're doing with Columbia and Harvard and they then, now people saying like that the education thing, which we want. You were right. But now education is under attack. All of these Ivy League schools are shuffling because what they're doing is the administration's putting so much pressure on these schools that they're forcing them to change policy. Now they're upsetting students and they're upsetting faculty. But then on one hand they got to satisfy administration and they got to satisfy people that's giving them money. On the other hand, they're sacrificing their credibility with the students and faculty and real academia. Right. Because that's not how the academic really works. So, yeah, you're right. But at what point do people say, well, yeah, I'm not going to school in America anymore because I might get arrested from a plain clothes police officer and sent to Houston and held in a detention center for six months.

[Caleb Silver]

I mean, that, that seems to be something that's emerging as an issue because we've seen some people, you know, according to reports, essentially get taken off the street. But can I tell you from my personal experience, this is anecdotal. When I went to business school, about three quarters of my class was from Asia and a lot of them were very wealthy. Like the parking lot. I got my MBA from Bentley University up in Boston. The parking lot had BMWs, Bentleys, things I'd never seen before. And I would ask my classmates, like, you're, you know, why'd you come over from. Whether it be China or Taiwan, wherever. They're just like, you know, my parents wanted me to get an education in The United, the U.S. they thought it was, you know, they saw a lot of prestige in me going to school in Boston. So at least in the near term, I don't think that really changes, you know, I mean, the prestige of American schools, the experience of going to an American school, from what I hear, I didn't go to college anywhere else is very different than going to college overseas. Also just the networking ability. You get to meet people in The United States potentially make business contacts. But that paradigm, to your point, could be changing because a lot of the people that I worked, that I went to school with, their parents sent them over here. There was the prestige of going to school in the US and also you meet people here in the US and then hopefully you make business contacts that work for their businesses overseas.

[Ian Dunlap]

Is it sustainable though? Right? We, I had a, a very insightful conversation in terms of just college. Yes, the prestige, but the, the battle for the future won't be from an institution, right? Like if we're talking about the advancement in artificial intell intelligence, it won't be a battle for like who's more intelligent because they went to said Ivy League school. It'll be like who has more of a purpose and who has a skill. Because if an agent can learn a four year degree in 10 minutes, then I could just work with the agent and save myself the time and the money that it's going to cost me to actually go to school. So how, how sustainable is that mindset of hey, hey, we, we have the best schools?

[Caleb Silver]

That's a tough question. At least in the near term I think it's pretty sustainable. But I think that goes full circle to what we were talking about. Like, you know, is going to college the best decision for a lot of people? And I know that, you know, this show obviously focuses on, on the black and brown community. Is that, does that always make sense? Why not a trade school? I mean when you talk to people, a lot of the millionaires that are at golf clubs and doing things, they're plumbers, they're contractors, they do H Vac. You're seeing a lot of people build their wealth that way. And then the jobs of the future really going full circle. We were talking about what are those going to be? Are those going to be jobs where you need a four year degree or you need the ability to learn and adapt and can you learn those skills that you need to, to use physically better at a trade school or some type of other technical school. I have mixed like really mixed feelings about the tariffs. You know, in theory it kind of makes sense that it would bring jobs back here. I also hear what you're saying is that a lot of these jobs are going to be taken by robots and things like that. But I do think you have to try to bring some jobs back here so people can start with those jobs and get upskilled to the jobs they're going to exist, exist in the future. I've seen various estimates, but I've seen one estimate was that 60 of the jobs that exist today didn't exist before World War II. So you have to start somewhere, especially for lower income people. And whether it's assembly, nobody dreams of assembling an iPhone in some factory in Idaho or Iowa. But that's a start. And then hypothetically, you can be upskilled to the higher tech jobs of the future where you work side by side with the robot or you do augmented reality, whatever you're doing. But you do have to start somewhere.

[Frank Holland]

Well, you also brought up a good point where you said 70% of your classmates was from Asia. That's another thing that we talked about. That's another problem. Right. Like we as a society are actually getting dumber. This is not my personal opinion. This has just been proven. We're not even in the top 20 when it comes to education in the world. We might not even be in the top 40. So even a lot of these high, the high paying jobs are not going to Americans anyway. We came back from Silicon Valley, we was in Meta and we was in Nvidia and all of the people there were either from China or from India. So yeah, I mean, we're bringing jobs if we're going to try to bring jobs back to America. But like you said, those are low paying jobs for the most part. Even if it's a high paying, low paying job, it's still a low paying job when you factor in inflation and variety of these really high paying jobs Americans aren't getting anyway because of education. We're not educated enough to actually do these jobs anyway.

[Caleb Silver]

But you got to start somewhere. Like, I used to work in Detroit. I spent a lot of time in Detroit. So I mean, I, I think there's a lot of potential for someone to start on the assembly line at a Ford plant and get an idea like, man, I can do this better than you create a stamping plan or you create some other part plan or you create some innovation. But you have to be in that room to get the insight.

[Frank Holland]

But we know, but we never moved up from that though, Frank. We've been doing that job for 150 years. Yeah, like nobody said, like I hear what you're saying, but it's 2025. We don't need to start at the ground level anymore. We got to start at the highest level because we've been at the ground level forever. And that promise of moving up the ladder has never. We've never moved up the ladder.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, it's like preparing for a race forever. Like the races. It's, it's already being ran. Like, we, we can't get to the starting line and say, all right, we're ready. No, they already are running the marathon, right? Like, we, it's not even playing catch up, but we got to participate in the space where it's like, all right, well, we can't start at the ground and we can see where this is headed. We have to be in this race for the long run or else we're going to stay at the finish start line. Like, all right, I think we're ready to go. I think we're ready to go.

[Caleb Silver]

Like, no, I get what you guys are saying, but you got to also.

[Frank Holland]

Understand when he said they taking black jobs, right? I mean, that's essentially what he's referring to, right? Like, but it's like low skill jobs are not low paying and low skilled jobs are not a pathway to. It's not a sustainable future, right? So it's like even, why are we really even fighting for these jobs? They're not sustainable. They're not sustainable. Like, putting together an iPhone is not aspirational and it's not sustainable. That's not something that I don't think our focus should be on.

[Caleb Silver]

I understand everything you're saying, but you got to start somewhere. And while Caleb is pointing out that U.S. unemployment said about 4% black unemployment is higher than that and a lot of us are skewed more towards as you're talking about lower paying jobs, I'm not saying that manufacturing jobs are the cure all and it's going to fix everything, but oftentimes manufacturing jobs are steady. They pay better than service jobs, even pay better than some of the warehousing jobs they've got really popular during the pandemic. They come with benefits. They provide a ladder for people that want to use it. Similar to the military. The military doesn't pay great. But if you get into the military and you, you learn how to use some of those resources, it can be a ladder up. Some people get out the military and you're right, they don't have any more skills than when they got in there.

[Frank Holland]

Let me ask you this, both of you guys, before we wrap, I want to get your opinion because the political aspect plays a part too. So Elon Musk, you see, he's been under a lot of pressure and it's starting to backfire. They lost the judicial race in Wisconsin, which he put a lot of money into.25 million. So that to me is a sign that there's some level of There's a revolt. Politically, this usually always happens. One party gets in, then the other party has a favor because they could just say the other party's messing up. But Trump, he's pretty hell bent on what he wants to do and everybody around him is, is, is gonna agree with it. I wonder, at what point if the stock market doesn't cause enough pain, like if we go into recession, we lose 30% of the stock market and that's not enough pain. At what point do the Republic. Does the Republican establishment put pressure on Trump because they're saying that this is starting to backfire on us. Right? Because a downward economy is not beneficial for a political party that's in power. So they're going to start getting blamed for it eventually. Right. So he might not care because he only has one term left. But if.

[Ian Dunlap]

Allegedly.

[Frank Holland]

Allegedly. But if, but if the Republican establishment, which I don't even know if there's a Republican establishment at this point, it's just maga. Can political pressure get put on him to reverse course if things get too bad?

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, well, money talks, right? And as soon as, you know, some of those donors start losing some of their money, some of the big donors or, or some of the big governors start losing donors in their states and losing those statewide races, which doesn't allow them to do the redistricting, which doesn't allow them to do the remapping to then stay in power for the next 12 years. That's what I think you see. Start to see a little bit of a pullback because it's clearly not the stock market. We've already seen that. It's not the bond market. We've definitely seen that. I think people are going to get angry, they're going to get hungry and they're going to get mad. This summer we'll see what that does. Or whether this government's just going to clap down with martial law. That remains to be seen, too. Like what happens when people hit the streets because they are just so mad they can't take it anymore. That's what we're going to end up seeing, how this government responds to that and how the rest of the nation observes that and says, oh, is that how we're handling our people now? I mean, you already talked about people being taken off the street and being deported to Houston and stuff like that. What happens when people get really mad and start taking to the streets? Right. And what happens when the big money stops flowing into the people that have put this administration in power? That's probably when you're going to see some movement.

[Caleb Silver]

That's a great question. I think the midterms, longer horizon, the midterms for the Congress, for congressional races is going to be a key test. If the Trump backed candidates win the midterms, I think that extends his influence. Even though he's a lame duck president. If they don't, I think that's going to be a clear dividing line in his influence. Before then, I'm not really sure because, I mean, look at Tesla, Elon Musk, I mean, I can't, I don't remember how much he's lost. I think he's lost about $600 billion.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. Stock down 36.

[Caleb Silver]

Yeah. He's certainly been impacted. And also, I think some of his plans for the future are potentially impacted. Like, you know how we, when you ride hail a car, you call it an Uber and there's only Uber and Lyft, but you still call it an Uber. Like, I'm gonna get an Uber. Even when you're doing a Lyft, a lot of times he's gonna put out robots and also a robo taxi. The question is, do people want to take them if they're associated with Elon Musk, To Caleb's point, like, are you so disgusted by what happened with Doge and some of the other things? Do you, do you basically boycott the Tesla robo taxi? Do you not buy the Tesla robot? Do you buy the hypothetical Microsoft robot instead? Does that hurt the stock? Are other people in this Trump orbit, are they potentially going to face that kind of same consumer reaction? We just don't know yet. You know what I mean? It's not clear.

[Ian Dunlap]

We.

[Caleb Silver]

One other test we might get, and I don't even know how this is going to work out, but if one of the companies or that where the CEO is a Trump backer gets to actually buy Tick Tock, do people leave Tick Tock and protest? I don't, I don't know. I don't think so. I think people just kind of really like TikTok.

[Ian Dunlap]

As you were saying. Exactly. Exactly what I was thinking. Yeah.

[Caleb Silver]

And also, I mean, look at Mark Zuckerberg. He's very closely in line with the Trump administration right now. I, I mean, I'll be honest, you know, I don't know anybody that's left Instagram because they're against what Mark Zuckerberg's done. I haven't heard, I've heard people say a lot of other things about boycotting this retailer. Boycott this retailer. I haven't heard one person say I'm jumping off Instagram. Frank's right.

[Rashad Bilal]

We say one thing, but do the. But do the other all the time.

[Ian Dunlap]

Frank, you, you nailed it, man. I was actually thinking that, right, like Robotech, that that announcement is going to be coming in June. I know they have a rollout, but you think about Those, all those CEOs, right, that came to the inauguration or pre inauguration and came and spoke to Trump and what that perspective is now, right, that they've lost, I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars from their personal wealth. Obviously, they're, they're going to be fine. But it's interesting to look at. May 7th is the date you brought up the Fed chair. Caleb, I think you're, you're one of the most educated people in this space of breaking down the correlation between inflation between the CPI between mortgage, not mortgage maze, the interest rates going up. Can you just explain that to people so they can get a clear glimpse of how all those things play a part and why the decision of how many rate cuts we get this year is going to be super important?

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah. The Federal Reserve, our central bank, has two jobs, two mandates, right? Keep unemployment or keep the country fully employed, which is somewhere between 3 and a half and 4% unemployment, and also keep inflation in the 2 to 2 and a half percent range. That's where they've traditionally wanted these things to happen. How do they do that? They do that by either raising or lowering interest rates or buying more government securities. But by raising interest rates, making money more expensive, people are going to spend less. That's a way for, that's a way to keep inflation from rising or to, or to actually help bring it down. We saw that when inflation hit 8.8% after the pandemic, they raised rates to multigenerational highs to do that. And we're still on our way back down. Now, if the economy starts to sputter because we're doing less consumer spending, and just remember that GDP, gross domestic product, is 70% consumer spending. That's us going to the mall, taking a vacation, buying a new pair of Air Force Nikes. Frank. That is us spending money and businesses spending money. When we slow down our spending, the Fed lowers interest rates to juice the economy, makes money cheaper, cheaper to borrow, so we'll spend more, consume more. That usually kickstarts the economy. Now, what we've seen over the past several recessions, going back to the great financial crisis, is when the economy got into really bad shape. Whether it was the fault of the banks making bad loans or, or whether it's just a Covid all of a sudden knocking everything offline and all of a sudden everybody's at home and the economy comes to a standstill. Well, what does the Fed do? It slam it lowers interest rates to the floor, takes interest rates to zero to stimulate the economy to get people spending again. That's what we did. That's what produced inflation and that's what got the economy back in gear and the stock market back in gear again. The concern to me now is that there was no moral hazard when you knew the Fed was just going to come in and take care of everything or the government was just going to put helicopter rain helicopter money all over the economy to get us spending again, whether that was through stimulus payments or what have you or through tarp Back in the great financial crisis. Is this the type of administration that will do that? Are they going to come to the rescue of the economy that they're kind of burning down right now, or are they going to let it burn and in the process destroy tens of millions of households and their wealth going forward? And that's a huge question right now. And how much control does the Fed really have? The Fed has always said it remains independent. I'm in Washington D.C. right now, guys. Tomorrow morning I'm going to an interview with Fed Chair Powell. I'm not interviewing him, but I'm going to be in the room when it's happening because I want to hear what he has to say about this. But he's not going to say anything because he knows he doesn't have the power right now.

[Frank Holland]

Extremely insightful, extremely insightful conversation.

[Caleb Silver]

Can I hit you guys with two things really quick? Tomorrow on cnbc, we're at the Microsoft CEO, I believe, my colleague John Ford. He's going to be doing the interview for anybody doesn't know, follow John Ford, man. He's, he's the preeminent voice when it comes to tech. He's the Walter Cronkite attack. He's Brian Gunn attack. Right. Any other thing you want to throw in there to your other point about robotics and everything, personally, and this is just me, this is not, you know, I'm not instructing my do this. It's just insight into what I do. I'm a big believer in investing in the triple Q's and the Mag seven. I think at least a couple of those companies are going to win when it comes to AI agents, automation. @ least a couple of them. And probably when you look at the triple cues, a bunch of them, a bunch of them are Going to either do the software, do the agents. I mean, just various companies in there. Then the other thing, mutual friend of all of us, John Hope, Brian, he's doing an event tomorrow, Business plan for America. I think all of us have to come up with our personal business plan. We got to think about what happens if we face a recession. It's not just about saving money. It's just what do you pivot to right now? If you're just doing a job just for a check and it may go away, how do you pivot to doing what you actually want to do and you're passionate about? As you guys mentioned, this is a crisis. But out of all crisis or crises come opportunity. New businesses will be created, new industries will be created, even just new nonsense will be created. People come up with new things that they're just interested in to waste time. And I'm not dissing anybody. But the Ashton hall thing, people are now buying Saratoga water and squeezing lemons and dipping their face in bowls. There's going to be some other craze like that during the pandemic. I mean, during the recession, if we have one, there's going to be so many opportunities. So I, you know, me like, and I think everybody else out there, you should be throwing with your own business plan. Make sure you're doing the things that you want to do and not just things you have to do.

[Rashad Bilal]

Right. Be the CEO of your own life. Never more important than right now.

[Ian Dunlap]

That's right.

[Frank Holland]

Well, thank you, gentlemen. First of all, everybody, Frank Holland has a Show on C CNBC at 5:00 in the morning every day. And Investopedia is a website that I've been using for years and is a great resource, probably the top resource on the net when it comes to learning about different. Like it's all stuff that you can actually type in and it gives you detailed information. So up to date. Yeah, for sure. So. And they both have come to Invest Fest. Invest alumni. They've done a variety of different things with us.

[Ian Dunlap]

Market Mondays. Yeah, yeah, we got, we gotta, we gotta get, we gotta get John, man. We gotta get him on the show.

[Caleb Silver]

Let's do it. I mean, every day. You guys need to connect.

[Frank Holland]

Absolutely.

[Ian Dunlap]

Sure.

[Frank Holland]

And thank you guys because, yeah, we talked about it before, but I said, I said, in my opinion, I think Invest Fest this year, this is going to be the most important year because it's always important to get information, but it's even more important in times of crisis. The information and the relationships, those are the two most important Things that's really going to propel you during times of crisis. So what's your guys experience with Invest Fest before we leave? Like what's your. Because you, you've both experienced it. So I'm just always interested to see how other people view it because it's kind of hard for me to view it because I'm on the outs. I'm in like, you know, on the perimeter. So you guys inside of it, how is it?

[Caleb Silver]

Well, I'll start. Excellent vibe. The energy is amazing. Everybody's there to learn. People are taking notes, they're listening. They're also engaging with each other. You know, it's just, it's almost like a collegial environment. It's like you're on a college campus. Almost everybody feels comfortable to speak to each other, ask questions. I think the panels have been amazing. I really enjoyed them. Not only the ones I moderated, but I just got to watch some of the other ones. I found it highly educational and I really would tell other people, you got to come at least for one day. Just got to come and experience it for one day. Spend the day there, Walk through the other area where you have people with booths and things like that. The marketplace. Exactly. It's just a great experience. A lot of like minded people. If you're someone that wants to learn, grow, just grow yourself and also grow your wealth.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, I'd say it's, you know, the greatest show in investing right now. And I mean that. And I go to a lot of these where you get high level speakers, really good conversation, you get into it. There's the educational part and there's the showtime part and you do great at both of those things. But the best part for me is actually sitting in that booth area in the marketplace area, just talking to people and having people come up and ask me questions about money and their own personal finances. Make sure they're on the right track. Somebody will hear our conversation, they'll chime in. And all of a sudden you got six, seven people I've never met in my life, I'm not even from Atlanta, who want to talk and engage and help each other out. That spirit of generosity and reciprocity there is unbelievable and it seems like it's totally organic. You guys just, you created this amazing event and people brought that with that energy with them when they came to it because you engendered that and that's what you get out of that. And it's not like it's a thousand people, it's like, you know, thousands and thousands of people all feeling the same vibe.

[Frank Holland]

Appreciate it.

[Ian Dunlap]

We appreciate you, Caleb. We must have the skateboard there with you this year, please.

[Rashad Bilal]

The board will be back now.

[Frank Holland]

We appreciate you guys so much. Always. Always adding so much value. Extremely knowledgeable and thank you. Thank you so much.

[Rashad Bilal]

Thank you.

[Caleb Silver]

It's going to be on the emergency tariff episode, man.

[Rashad Bilal]

Good to be on with Frank Holland, too, man.

[Frank Holland]

It's. It's a. It's. It's a crucial time in America right now.

[Caleb Silver]

Appreciate y'all, man. Earn your leisure. You guys keep doing what you do, man. People need it.

[Rashad Bilal]

Keep doing what you're doing.

[Ian Dunlap]

You're my guy, Frank. I'll give you a call, my brother. Appreciate you.

[Caleb Silver]

I'll talk to y'all soon, man. Thank you.

[Ian Dunlap]

All right.

[Frank Holland]

Yes, sir. Okay.

[Ian Dunlap]

All right, man.

[Frank Holland]

What did we learn today?

[Ian Dunlap]

That was a lot, man. That was a lot. But it's important, right, People, like I said, a lot of angst, a lot of uncertainty. I'm glad that the open conversation people in the chat are even having their own conversations, but giving some type of education around what's happening because most people just hear the news and news happens to them. They don't really know what's going on. Hopefully we got to debunk some things, give some clarity some things. And people make investment decisions and make personal decisions about the information that they received tonight, man.

[Frank Holland]

That's the power of relationships. We wasn't planning on doing an episode, two phone calls, man, but within a couple of hours, we. We got episode. We promoted on social media. We have good friends, so they came and we had 8,000 people on. So the relationship thing. I'm always going to talk about relationships because that's the key. That's. That's. That's the major key in life is relationships.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

So, yeah, it will probably get rockier. I'm not gonna lie to you. I think that we in. We. We in for this. This is gonna be. This is gonna be a rocky road, but it's opportunities in every crisis. Stay disciplined. Don't gamble. Dollar cost average. Good companies, index funds, state, of course. Put your plan together. Don't spend money unnecessarily. Invest in your education. This. This is it, man.

[Ian Dunlap]

This is.

[Frank Holland]

This is it. This is it.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. Somebody asked when my class is. My class will be shooting for the 17th of April. So Eylu all earners. Our class is going to be April 17th for our options class. It's gonna be a good one. I got. I got some special, special guests joining me. So it's gonna be dope. Make sure y'all tune in real quick before you go.

[Frank Holland]

Oh yeah, there is a host hotel. Somebody asked that in the chat.

[Ian Dunlap]

Okay.

[Frank Holland]

If you go to investfest.com I believe the hotel information is on there.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, yeah, I know it's the first. The signature is. The signature is our host hotel.

[Frank Holland]

And you get it, but you get a rate. Yeah, you get the Invest fest.

[Ian Dunlap]

Go to investfest.com. all the information is there. Make sure y'all get. Get the percentage off on our website to the Signia which is actually attached to the venue. You can't. It doesn't get any better than that.

[Frank Holland]

But this is important.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

Don't just book the signia on your own because you won't get the discounted rate.

[Ian Dunlap]

Go to Invest.

[Frank Holland]

Go to investfest.com and you get the discounted rate. But please, the hotel is literally attached to the convention center.

[Ian Dunlap]

Absolutely.

[Frank Holland]

That. That's the best place to stay.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. That was one of the. The best improvements over the years of investors having that hotel attached to the actual venue. People wake up, they walk downstairs, they on their lunch, they go back to their rooms, get a quick nap, come back downstairs, get ready for the evening, wake up, do the same thing in the morning. Shout out to everybody, all. Everybody putting that together.

[Frank Holland]

August 22nd to August 24th.

[Ian Dunlap]

That's a fact.

[Frank Holland]

And it's the Signia by Hilton.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yes. I was gonna ask you before we go. There's supposed to be a decision here. Maybe there'll be a delay on the tick tock. Amazon put their bid in. Larry Ellison is the front runner. What's your thoughts?

[Frank Holland]

I heard the Amazon plays not getting taken seriously from the administration.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

Larry Ellison somebody that is very good with Trump. So you know, I think that's gonna have. Caleb brought a good point as far as that they might be burning this down on purpose to make. To privatize everything and to help the people strategic people around them that's extremely rich and get very more. Get more richer.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

So that would be one of those people. Right. That would be a person who directly benefit from this situation is somebody like Larry.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yes. He said more richer, more wealthy. Same thing.

[Frank Holland]

Look, I don't think grammar's important. I'll be honest with you.

[Caleb Silver]

Yes.

[Frank Holland]

I think man, we on the. We on the verge of a global depression.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yes.

[Frank Holland]

I don't think how you spell there it's gonna matter. I don't think. I don't think it's gonna matter.

[Ian Dunlap]

I'll be honest with you there them.

[Frank Holland]

Those Yeah, I don't think if you spell 2 with 2 O's or 1 O, you can spell it with the letter, the number two at this point.

[Ian Dunlap]

Just the number.

[Frank Holland]

Yo, you better. This is getting serious out here. Some love songs, grammar, you. The, the punctuation is not gonna matter.

[Ian Dunlap]

Blame it on Chad. Gbt.

[Frank Holland]

When, when a robot is doing everybody's job.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, I, I predicted, I asked that because in our class I was talking about Larry Ellison's relationship with Trump, but the fact that they already had a partnership with Tik Tok to run their, their data in 2020 during the pandemic. They already have relationships there with, with optimizing their information for their platform. The fact that Stargate and that announcement happened in early January, right around the inauguration, Larry Ellison has been popping up. There's some signs that, that Oracle is gonna be a heavy, heavy player in that Tick Tock situation. So that should happen, I think, on the 5th. So we'll see by Malcolm Mondays we'll know what happens. Either it gets delayed or it gets, it gets bought out.

[Frank Holland]

But for one thing for sure, yeah, I knew that Tick Tock wasn't going away, and it didn't go away. So Oracle, like he said, people love Tick Tock. People love Instagram.

[Ian Dunlap]

They'll keep using it.

[Frank Holland]

Yeah, certain things. You, you could boycott. You could boycott Target, but Instagram's off limits.

[Ian Dunlap]

Hey, Ian, if you're still in the chat, man, we're gonna have a conversation about Nike on, on Monday.

[Frank Holland]

Nike screwed.

[Ian Dunlap]

They in big trouble.

[Frank Holland]

Nike is really screwed.

[Ian Dunlap]

They're in big trouble.

[Frank Holland]

But Market Mondays will be very interesting.

[Ian Dunlap]

Oh, my gosh.

[Frank Holland]

Yeah, that'll be an interesting one for sure.

[Ian Dunlap]

We're gonna have a conversation about that. Yeah. Full locker. You on the clock. You next. You next, you next.

[Frank Holland]

Keep your composure. Keep your composure. Trump.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

Hell of a guy. It's Trump. You know, there's, there's a thing on Tick Tock now. It's like, you know, the running thing was that he's a good businessman, so he'd be good for the economy. Is he really a good businessman, though? He's had like over 10 bankruptcies. He's a great marketer. We can never take that away.

[Ian Dunlap]

That he is.

[Frank Holland]

He's a great marketer.

[Ian Dunlap]

You know what?

[Frank Holland]

But the businessman thing is up, up for question at this point because we really got to consider that because of the bankruptcies. I mean, just in general, he's run a lot of companies into the ground. This. He lost the, he lost the election last time because of the economy. He. I've never. They said they've never seen a president manufacture a recession in 80 days. That's. This is pretty historic.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. We haven't done this on per.

[Frank Holland]

Like, he's manufactured.

[Ian Dunlap]

That's why I feel like there's. It's going to be all right. Here it is. Here's how I saved the day.

[Frank Holland]

The.

[Ian Dunlap]

Here's how I saved the day moment is coming. It's just about when it happens.

[Frank Holland]

Until. Until he's not able to do it.

[Ian Dunlap]

Until you can't say the day.

[Frank Holland]

Until you can't save the day.

[Ian Dunlap]

No, he's propping this thing up.

[Frank Holland]

You go too far. He's going really far.

[Ian Dunlap]

Not far enough. Yeah.

[Frank Holland]

China said, I don't know what you're doing.

[Ian Dunlap]

I want to see what they say.

[Frank Holland]

China literally says, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what you're doing.

[Ian Dunlap]

There was the. The one of the premieres from Canada said, yo, if they drop Tarot, we'll drop them today. They're like, but you've had to. He's like, we'll drop everything today. Let's. Let's do this. It's. It's a. To say it's an interesting time is an understatement. This is an unprecedented time. Like I said, like, we can't predict. We can look at historical analytics. Right? Like, I got this almanac here that. That traces the history of the market for the past 90 years. Ain't nothing like this guy. Ain't nothing like this town. We've never seen it. This is. This is going to be in the history books. We're living in it.

[Frank Holland]

Dei. This is the real dei. A bunch of people that have no idea what they're doing. That's the real dei. That's the rest of crazy thing about it. This is the real DEI plan. You got a bunch of people that have no idea what they're doing that's just running am.

[Ian Dunlap]

We should have had Cory Booker on here.

[Frank Holland]

Cory Booker spoke for 27. I'm not sure what that accomplished. He literally spoke for 27 people cheering.

[Ian Dunlap]

Them on, like, yeah, this is the person we need to stand up for us. 27.

[Frank Holland]

I don't know what speaking for 27 hours accomplishes.

[Ian Dunlap]

I don't know. I. I don't know. I. Maybe they can help me chat. Y'all can help. I'm not sure. Do you remember any of it? Like, how do you retain. How do you prepare for that? Number one. They. He didn't even sit down, he said.

[Frank Holland]

Utter foolishness. That's what that was. That was utter foolishness.

[Ian Dunlap]

Oh, man. 27 hours. That's gonna be a new song. Longest filibuster in history. Yeah, you're right. I'm just not sure what. What it. What it does.

[Frank Holland]

Did he. He. Did he not have to go to the bathroom?

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. How does that happen, Pete?

[Frank Holland]

Like he had a diaper on.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, probably. Probably.

[Frank Holland]

At least he got. At least he got in the history books.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. You can't stop at 24.

[Frank Holland]

He broke Strom Thurman's record.

[Ian Dunlap]

That. What did that accomplish when he did it?

[Frank Holland]

I'm not sure.

[Ian Dunlap]

Gained attention. You're right. It did gain attention. We're talking about it, so I guess.

[Frank Holland]

A lot of attention it is. For sure.

[Ian Dunlap]

He said he had the fenty in his system.

[Frank Holland]

Coca Cola Stat.

[Ian Dunlap]

That Coca Cola chat y'all wild. Is the only way somebody could be awake for 24 hours.

[Frank Holland]

Those Addy pills, man.

[Ian Dunlap]

Allegedly. He is allegedly Adderall. We gotta say alleged. Now we've seen Allegedly. A couple things have happened.

[Frank Holland]

Allegedly.

[Ian Dunlap]

Throwing our name out there. Allegedly. Everything's alleged.

[Frank Holland]

This is entertainment purposes only.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yo. Be good to each other. Keep your seat belt on out here. We will get through this. We will get through this. Love is love, man. We love y'all. Thank y'all for tuning in. Thank y'all for rocking with us. We'll see y'all Monday. See y'all Monday.

[Frank Holland]

Peace, love. Check out the audio. This is gonna be audio also.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. Run it back.

[Caleb Silver]

Location the lab.

[Ian Dunlap]

Quinton only has 24 hours to sell his car. Is that even possible? He goes to Carvana.com.

[Rashad Bilal]

What is this, a movie trailer?

[Ian Dunlap]

He ignores the doubters, enters his license plate.

[Caleb Silver]

Wow.

[Ian Dunlap]

That's a great offer. The car is sold, but will Carvana pick it up in time for it?

[Caleb Silver]

They'll literally pick it up tomorrow morning.

[Ian Dunlap]

Done with the dramatics. Car selling in record time.

[Caleb Silver]

Save your time. Go to Carvana.com and sell your car today. Pickup fees may apply.