(7-10-26) Ep. 250: Economists Say Prices Won’t Drop Anytime Soon as Iran War Tensions Continue to Escalate & Much More.

Today's Articles:

(Fox Business) - Consumers shouldn't expect prices to fall anytime soon, top economist warns. (ZeroHedge) - No Takers, Nor Tankers. (Quartz) - Manufacturing's collapse offers a grim playbook for AI's white-collar disruption. (CNBC) - June home sales disappoint as prices reach an all-time high. (Armstrong Economics) - The Reason Socialism Appeals to the Youth. (The Times of Israel) - US braces for prolonged Iran escalation; no current push for Israeli involvement. (Just the News) - U.S. strategy has left Iran’s infrastructure vulnerable, says military historian Victor David Hanson. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised. Hello everyone, and thank you for tuning into today's broadcast. It's the Friday, July 10th, 2026 episode of the Marco Gerae Show, the only show where the facts are facts and our truths thrive. It's Friday, folks, and before we head into our weekend, we've got to take a look and evaluate the economy's performance all across the board for this week, which is what matters most. Why do I say that? Because we have the November elections coming up. And among other issues, we have to look at things like affordability. Now I know most of you scuff at that, especially older people tend to scuff at the term now. We talk about the affordability crisis in this country. However, most Americans will vote on their wallets. We've heard the clever saying, it's the economy stupid. Well, that's true. This is the single most important issue that most Americans look at. How is their wallet doing? What's happening? That's what they want to see. They want to see a strong economy, no matter what who's in power, by the way. So we'll take a look at that. We'll also be taking a look at our stock market numbers and make sense of all that before we get into other top stories today that I know you will all enjoy, of course. But I want to begin today's show with an article from Fox Business that really highlights the severity of the state of our economy currently. And the headline reads, Consumers shouldn't expect prices to fall anytime soon. The top economist warns, well, isn't that nice? Now, folks, while we've seen some relief at the pumps as of late, the corporate supply chain strains and the lingering effects of the global trade itself, due to the geopolitical shocks we've been experiencing, are expected to keep prices elevated for the foreseeable future. So what does that mean? That means we don't even know when these prices will begin to come down. We're far away from the Federal Reserve's target of the 2% inflation. They're estimating that right now. Just the inflation alone will not reach 2% until possibly 2028. That is not going to look good for Republicans, not by a long shot, uh, especially when we find ourselves in this election year. We want to keep control of the midterms and win both back the House and the Senate. That's not going to happen if inflation continues to go up, which I expect it will. For the past couple months, it's just continued to rise and rise and rise. At a steady 0.2% since this war began. Not where we want it to go. Now, Dana Peterson, the economist here surveyed, said that I think that consumers are going to continue to complain about elevated prices going forward because CEOs really don't have much of a choice. Inflation, including the two big shocks of tariffs, thanks to Trump's tariff war that he installed last year in 2025, and now the war in 2026, probably peaked in the second quarter of this year. And we will see inflation slowly decelerate over the course of this year, but it's still going to be high. I tend to disagree. If there's any deceleration of inflation, it's going to come much, much later in the year and after this war ends. But it's going to be long after the war ends. Why do I say this to you? Why do I believe that? Because as long as this strait is shut down and the necessary traffic of 138 to 140 ships a day are leaving the Strait of Hormuz to continue shipping goods and petroleum and what have you, we're going to see the global economy in shock. And I just want to illustrate to you. If a ship leaves the Persian Gulf today and it's headed to the United States, it's going to take that ship roughly two months to get here. So while while Trump can go on and complain all he wants, or even boast about it, whatever he wants to do, when he's talking about the strait, that's going to take two months for that ship to dock in California. Two months. So if it left two weeks ago, it still has a month and a half to get to where it needs to go here. I told you before, this is not the flicker of a light switch. This is not the blink of an eye. This this healing from what we did. Invading Iran, taking out the Ayatollah, the closure of the Strait of Ramuse. Fixing this problem is going to take much, much longer than what started it. We're now seeing that CEOs themselves are losing confidence in the economy. They surveyed some 141 different CEOs and found that the overall score in terms of consumer confidence and confidence alone in the economy fell to 47 in quarter two. And that was down from 59 in quarter one. So that'd be the first three months of this year. It was at a 59. Now, anything over 50 means a positive outlook in the economy. Anything below 50 means it's a negative outlook. Now remember, this is just in April to June. That's quarter two. Now we're in quarter three right now. So you can only imagine the sentiments right now from these CEOs as we push forward in this war. Only 15% of the CEOs say that the economy is better than it was six months ago, down 39% from quarter one, while 47% say it's much worse. Up 8%. Now, additionally, 40% of the respondents expect economic conditions to worsen over the next six months. So again, the remainder of 2026. And if that does happen, if we don't turn things around, or at least start to turn things around, begin to lower prices, if we even can at this point, uh there is no way the Republicans will begin to hold the House or the U.S. Senate, folks. Senate maybe we hold on to, but the House for sure we will definitely lose if things do not start turning around. People do not want this war. Republicans and Democrats alike, independents alike, do not want this war. We elected Trump because we don't want these wars. And now we seem to find ourselves in this conflict continuing to go on and on with no end in sight. So I'm not shocked about this this report here. I believe this. Consumers are getting more fed up. We're seeing prices beginning to rise on top of the inflation, which is sitting at 4.2% right now. And again, we're being hammered on the gas prices, which is going to offset the entirety of the market. And the entirety of the commerce in America is offset by these rising gas prices at such a high level. Now, I do want to say one more thing before we move on to the oil issue. And that is if President Trump, if he cannot convince people that he is going to turn things around and they actually believe him, which right now is a long shot, right? We're short on fertilizer, we're short on oil coming in the country, uh, chemicals like ammonia, sulfur, urea to produce obviously the fertilizer that is used to create crops, right? We we have to plant crops, don't we? So we're we're in for a big deal of trouble coming forward. Whatever we do not plant today, we don't have six months from now. So that again, I laugh, but it's because we're in such a dire situation at this point. And nobody seems to give a damn. I hear barely anybody talking about just this one issue. How are we gonna feed ourselves? You know, the Green Revolution that began after World War II that is able to allow this mass production of food, uh, that that took place and allowed cities to grow, suburbs to grow. People weren't the obviously the agrarian culture in this country began to drop, but it was able to produce more and sustain the existing population. If you went to a grocery store, you had everything you wanted. You could have bananas, strawberries, blueberries, any type of beef, chickens, you know, fish, dairy, anything you wanted, you would be able to find. If you don't plant crops at all, well, your fruits and vegetables are gone, but what else are you gonna feed the livestock with if you can't produce corn or soy? What are you gonna do? You're gonna be in lots of trouble. And so you'll see those prices beginning to rise as well. We're also talking about aluminum, we're also talking about helium for semiconductors, all of these things which keep our economy going have been completely shut out. That's a very, very, a very, very big problem. Which brings me to the next point: the oil itself. This comes from Zero Hedge says the daily crossings through the Strait of Hormuz increased substantially after the U.S. and Iran announced a peace agreement in mid-June. Well, that would be the memorandum of understanding. However, those numbers have started to dwindle after the ceasefire. Now, they never reached back the 140, 138, 142, whatever the number may be. On average, it's about 140 ships crossing through day through the Strait of Hormuz daily. We never got back to those numbers. We never resume that. Largely, that has a lot to do with the insurance companies, which I've mentioned to you time and time again. But the problem is, we're only about 24% of the pre-war transit. That means we have a significant reduction in the level of all of these different goods or which the world needs. Europe needs them, Asia needs them, the Western Hemisphere, we need them. This is because this is the area in which the world of where this is produced in a great significant sum. Now, Reuters also reported that some war insurers have advised the shipowners to pause Hormuz voyages after the attacks. Well, no kidding. No kidding. No insurance company is going to let a ship go through the strait now that has been mined by the Iranians, that risk being struck. Should they not follow the Iranians' coordination and listen to the United States, for instance, like we saw with the Qatari liquefied natural gas vessel that got struck the other day, which turned all this into complete chaos. So you have the insurers now saying, stay still. Don't move, just keep sitting there. We don't want you to move anywhere. This is also part of the problem. If the insurers don't believe that their ships can cross safely, they're not going to have them move. So that's why you're seeing mostly Iranian vessels, Indian vessels, Chinese ships coming in. You're not seeing the European vessels coming and going. That's why this is happening. And now with President Trump saying the ceasefire is over, what do you think insurers are going to do now? Do you believe they're going to be confident that the ships can travel through without any issue? Of course not. And by the way, a lot of these vessels that have been sitting there for months now, doing nothing, sitting by idly, they need to do lots of maintenance on the vessels. Obviously, the crew is probably well expended right now. So there's so much that has to be done on that front as well. But a lot of the oil you're seeing leave the strait right now is not coming to the U.S. That's my point. It is not coming here. It's going to Asia. It's going to Japan or South Korea or China or India. It's not coming here. And so our markets are going to be struggling as a result of this, especially because we're dropping our strategic petroleum reserves down to the bare minimum. That's why President Trump said a couple weeks ago. He said we have about four weeks until we have reached our limit as to what we can utilize in the reserves. So we're we're there, folks. Next week we're in mid-July. We've reached that point. So the question upon us is what do we do next? Do we continue to lower that past the military level of which we need necessary to defend our nation? Which is a massive national security risk? Or do we continue just to dwindle that down? Use about 1.4 to 2 million barrels per day. Continue to refine that way. What do we do then? Do we try to up what we get from Venezuela? This extremely heavy sour crude, which takes even longer to refine and it even costs more? Do we try to import more from Mexico or from Canada? What do we do next? What is the next step here? Because we don't seem to have a plan at all. And that's why we're seeing the price of oil continue to go up now. And I believe it will continue to go up significantly as time goes on. We'll talk about the oil futures in just a little bit, folks, but that's just a precursor as to why we're seeing the prices go up. That's why inflation's up. That's why the consumer confidence is in the toilet. Don't expect it to go anywhere anytime soon. This next article out of courts again illustrates where we are in our economy and why we've been really in the decline for quite some time. This comes discussing the issue of manufacturing in this country. And what they say here is that the manufacturing decline didn't just start as a single event. This was a process over a long period of time that has been neglected by president after president. And we've never really fully recovered at all when we started to see a lot of this shift take place about 25 or so years ago. You know, this comes in waves, in the sense that this recovery would just be temporary, we'd come back, we'd rebound. It never really happened. And a lot of these communities that were hit the hardest never even came back themselves. And now we're talking about AI-driven displacement beginning with the white-collar knowledge workers, and the manufacturing collapse in itself is really the closest comparison to what's taking place now with this risk of AI taking a lot of these really good-paying jobs. So what took place though? US manufacturing employment peaked at 19.6 million jobs in June of 1979, some 47 years ago. This is according again to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jumpstart to December 2009, that figure had fallen by 11.5 million jobs. That is a massive drop, folks, in a 30-year span. Now, the drop wasn't just gradual. It happened in five distinct collapses, each tied to a recession. And after each one of them, employment never climbed back to where it stood before. So again, I say this to you. We talk about the the building bust right now. We we have 20% of downtowns in every single part of this country that are empty buildings, that are not being utilized for any purpose, which means the banks eventually will go defunct because nobody's paying for this. It's gonna lead to major problems on that arena. We've talked about the building bust and the banking bust, but we also talked about the AI bust as well. Right now we're being very bullish on AI in this country. Trump is very bullish on AI. But I've told you before, what creates a middle class? It's the manufacturing. Now I'm not saying everybody in this country should have a manufacturing job. I'm not saying that, but we do need to make our own products here. And we used to lead the world in doing that. Now, this problem again began roughly in the 1950s in the Rust Belt. That's when the erosion first began. And slowly but surely, facing little competition, they had no incentive to innovate, therefore, by the 1980s, this visible crisis was much more noticeable. Even at that point in the 1980s, the manufacturing employment fell some 7% from the start of that decade to the end. 7%. That'd be during the Reagan and Bush years in the 1980s, of course. And again, what did what were we told? We were said that the losses would be temporary. Manufacturing would bounce back, right, a little bit after every recession. Since World War II, uh policymakers, business leaders, economists alike all said that the pattern would hold. Well, what was the reality of it? They believe we're in a transitioning economy, right? And the displaced workers would then just simply find new roles. So don't worry about it. You'll find another job doing something else. But that assumption was wrong, folks. And what the Bureau of Labor Statistics information actually showed us was that the employment fell in all five recessions after 1979, in each case, it never fully recovered to pre-recession levels. So the manufacturing share of the total non-farm employment dropped from 22% at its peak to 9% by June of 2019. And again, the worst came after 2000. And you know this because you listen to my show every week. What happened after 2000, ladies and gentlemen? What did good old Billy Clinton do to us? Good old Bill, right? Yeah, the sleaze bag that he is. Worth what is he worth now? What are they worth the Clintons now? Some 40, 50, 60 million dollars? It's amazing to me, isn't it? Is it amazing to you too? They get this rich after they leave office? Well, I digress. Bill Clinton let China into the World Trade Organization. Starting in 2001, that took place. That was when it began. Then you saw the manufacturing employment plunging from 17.3 million in January of 2000 all the way down to 11.5 million by December 2009. So in that short span of time, in nine years, you're you're looking at a 33% drop in just a single decade. And a large share of those losses went to China. Those jobs outsourced went to China. They found cheaper rates, lower tax brackets, so they sent their companies there. Again, to make a bigger profit for themselves. So while it's headquartered here in the United States, everything being made is somewhere else. And of course, you have to bring the products in. That costs money, of course, to do that. But there are products people want, so people pay for it. And so these companies make a lot of money, and now it's on a global market. That's what it all comes down to. So they estimated in this landmark research, just referring to what they call the China shock, is that the rising Chinese imports between 1999 and 2011 cost the economy some 2.4 million jobs. That's what we did in that time frame. So from Clinton to Bush to the start of the Obama administration, we lost some 2.4 million jobs just in that sector alone. So just through this whole industry, just with what we did with China, lost us 2.4 million jobs. By the way, the total manufacturing employment fell by 5.8 million workers over that same time period. That's a lot of people. So the direct Chinese import competition explains roughly why 10% of the losses that we continue to see, with the broader supply chain effects pushing the real numbers much, much higher. So, what have I told you before? What do we need to do here in the US? We need to start incentivizing manufacturing here in the U.S. I know it's going to take a lot. I understand this. But this is how you start building back up a middle class. This is how you start building back some of these communities. I think Detroit, Michigan, think Youngst, Youngstown, Ohio, all over this rust belt. Where Trump has been popular as of late. This is what you need to do. This is how you build things back. We have to start incentivizing, bring your company back here, bring this back here. Let's invest in this, in this community. This is how you build the people back up. But we're not doing that. We're focused more on war than we are building up the U.S. economy itself and our own GDP for that matter. Now, we've again related this to AI in this country. Is it similar? Is the manufacturing trend that we saw from beginning in the 1950s to right now similar to what AI is going to be doing to us, but at a much faster pace? I seem to think so. AI is going to be targeting the cognitive, the computer-based work, not just the manual labor. We're seeing some of it in the manufacturing automation, certainly, but a lot of the AI that comes in is going to be taking a lot of these white-collar jobs. And what they're fighting, this is what the Brookings Institute figured out. What they found was that the generative AI could reshape half of the workload for nearly a third of the workforce. With law, with finance, with these STEM jobs, really kind of taking the brunt of all this because of how the how cognitive heavy a lot of these jobs really come down to. So think about that for a second. If you're looking at what's going on, what they found was about 80% of the US workforce could have at least 10% of their work task affected by large language models and higher. Income jobs facing the greatest exposure. That's what we have to look forward to, ladies and gentlemen, with AI that we've been investing heavily on. And I said to you before, who's going to lead us in AI? It's going to be China. China, then India, then maybe the United States, if we get our act together. But we're not producing the rare earths like we once were. We used to lead the world in refining rare earth minerals. We don't do that anymore. Now China's got it. We're not leading the world in AI. China's got it. They're the ones investing in it. That's what they're planning. And whoever leads AI is going to be the next world superpower. There you go, folks. So while we focus on war, war, war ever since 2000, right? That's another key factor in all this. We've been investing in war, not inside the United States. With the so-called war on terror, folks, which we have not yet won. Has it led to a safer America? Has it led to a more prosperous America? No, we've been bankrolling all these countries and what have you, all these wars. Some $8 trillion spent? What have we got to show for it? Hallowed out American cities? Lack of jobs? Upping the drug use, alcohol use in a lot of these communities that have just been dwindling out? Go look at some of these rest belt states. You tell me, are they booming or are they busting? I'll let you figure that out for yourself. It's absolutely disgusting. Everything changed after 9-11. And much, much for the worse, unfortunately. Yeah, folks, that this is where we find ourselves. And it's, you know, it's not positive, but this is the reality. This is what we need to focus on. This is what Trump should have done on day one. Sit down, figure out how do we get manufacturing back in every single state. And then we know we lost tons of manufacturing jobs under the Biden administration that again never came back. Trump did bring in some during his first term. But this has to go up. This has to be a Reagan-like revolution with the economy. We have to start bringing millions of jobs back, good paying jobs. That's how you build a middle class, that's how you save a country. And we could start by the refining of the rare earths right here in this country. It's going to take a lot, but if we start doing that, and Trump is starting this, I gotta give him credit on this. Trump has started this process, but we're not hyper-focused on it. We're focused on war. We're focused on issues like immigration. Again, we don't secure your border, you open up your country to all these problems. Well, we should be focusing on fixing the infrastructure, fixing the job market, the opportunities, which again, we need in this country. Not bringing more H1B visa holders, which Trump for some reason would love to do. And by the way, we're seeing this in various states as well. These blue state governors are creating programs, bringing more H1B visa holders. Then you wonder why you apply for a job after college, and you don't even get a callback. This is the new America, folks. We have completely, completely diverted from our main mission here in the United States. That is to, yes, you trade, but stop interfering with foreign entanglements. Why would you bring in all these H1B visaholders from China, from India, from the third world to replace American jobs? You are being replaced, folks, if you haven't figured that out yet. Anyways, let's go on. Now that I'm all riled up. Okay, let's go on. Let's go on. And by the way, what we were talking earlier in the show about affordability, as I've said to you time and time again, this comes from CNBC. June sales for homes have dropped by 2.4% from May to 4.09 million units on the seasonally adjusted annualized basis. This is according to the National Association of Realtors. June sales, though. June sales, however, were 2.8% higher than they were the same month just a year ago. So these homes are getting more and more expensive. They're the highest they've ever been. All right. Again, thanks to inflation, a lot of it. We have a straight on the housing market. When you have roughly, oh, I don't know, 100 million people that don't belong in this country. Now I've debunked this to the people that say, no, no, no, it's really 18 million gerace. You don't know what you're talking about. I say, really? Yale did a study, said we have roughly between 22 and 25 million illegal aliens. This was in 2020, if I'm not mistaken. 2019, 2020. They redid the entire study. For years we kept hearing it was 11, 11, 11. Really? 11? And never changed in 20 years? Really? Well, they did the study again. They figured out it was probably roughly around 22 to 25 million people that are here living illegally. Okay. What happened when Joe Biden took over? That number obviously increased from at least 12 to 20 million. Let's take the higher number, though. We know it was at least 12 million. Some in Congress say it's probably 20 million with the gataways of which we don't know that came to this country. And we know that people were coming here in these large caravans. Joe Biden opened up the southern border in many places. We know that the illegals were coming in and fist bumping the border patrol agents that were told to let everybody in. They were cutting down the barbed wire, which Governor Greg Abbott put up in Texas to prevent people from coming into his states and flooding the border cities. Anyways, that number is likely 20 million. Okay, so alright, let's say it is that. So that means you have, ladies and gentlemen, 25 plus 20. Well, that would be 45 million illegal aliens in this country right now that we know of. Okay, that's the number. But on top of that, you have 55 million expired visa holders. These are people that come here maybe to work, go to school, and they stay in the country after their visa expires. So again, they're not supposed to be here. So, ladies and gentlemen, if I'm not mistaken, I'm not the best at math, but 45 plus 55, huh? You got about 100 million people that aren't supposed to be here. What the hell do you think that does to the housing market? That puts a massive strain on the housing market. So if you have a third of the population that isn't supposed to be here that's taking up housing, healthcare, food, water, electricity, hmm. That's going to put a strain on every single thing. So you have about a third of the housing market just inflated just because of that reason alone, is part of the problem. Then you have the inflation itself coming in. Uh, yeah, folks, that's why you have this problem with the housing market in this country. And nobody seems to want to address that. We're certainly not getting the mass deportation premises that Trump got. You can forget all about that. Now, Greg Bovino, by the way, I gotta give Greg Bovino credit. He was one of the people that was high up on DHS. I believe he's since resigned. I'm not sure completely. I know he was reassigned at one point. He either may have a lower position now or he's just positioned somewhere else. But he's not one of the faces that we we had seen earlier in this year. And he even said he had a plan for removing 100 million illegal aliens from this country. So obviously he's privy to this information, just like I am. That's why I share it with you. But he had a plan in order to execute this plan. And now all of a sudden we're we're just not doing it. Now we're allowing TPS holders to stay in the country from from Haiti, from Syria? Why? When you have an unemployment rate, you should not be bringing in any other new immigrants to this country, or anybody for that matter. Legal or illegal, doesn't matter. But this puts a straight on the entire market. That's why we're seeing a lot of these issues now. And young people want to start buying homes. They want to start planning their future. They just can't do it. The jobs aren't there. The jobs aren't providing anything for them. They're stuck in all this debt from going to school. Again, I can relate to all that. But this is putting a big strain again. This is how kids think today, too. They say, well, I've invested all this time and going to school, I've gotten this degree, I've gotten that degree, I'm ready to go, I'm applying to these jobs, I'm applying all over the country, I'm not hearing anything back. Now I'm taking this random job that I could have gotten without going to school. I didn't need to get a ma a bachelor's or a master's or a doctorate for that matter. Didn't have to do it. So why did I do this? So there's lots of this going back and forth. But the housing crisis, as we as we see again in this country, we're seeing people starting to buy homes much, much later than what we had seen in previous decades in this country. You know, if you go back to the 1950s and 60s, even the 70s, you had your first home roughly by the time you were between 23, 28 years old. You were starting a family. That's not the case anymore. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that we brought in so many people into this country in such a short period of time. People that we necessarily didn't need to have come into this country. We didn't secure our border. You have a welfare system, so that incentivize people to come in and utilize that. You have all these government programs now where people can come in and start taking advantage of those programs. Look no further than the legal aliens in Minnesota, California, all over the country too, by the way. Getting these grants from these congressional programs to get this money for, you know, daycare, for for for hospice, all these programs, and none of these services are being utilized. These people are making out with all this money. The system is so, so wrought with fraud, folks. It's unbelievable. But the problem is, folks, housing. Housing. And we we talk about the new housing bill Trump was getting ready to sign. He said he's not gonna sign it now because the Save Act has not been passed. So maybe that's some leverage he can utilize, which, by the way, I believe the SAVE Act should be passed, and that's a very good position Trump could take. But the issue is, folks, you have people here that don't belong here. I'm not saying every one of them are evil or bad people, or don't even love being here, by the way. I'm not gonna say that. But the truth remains, you have people that are here that are not supposed to be here, and they are utilizing our services in our country. Housing being one of them. This is what's putting a massive strain on the cost of housing and the access to it. Now, while the market still lean prices continue to rise here in this country, the median price of an existing home sold in June was $440,600. That's an increase of 1.8% from just a year before. And that's the highest on record for the median price of a house. And June is usually the strongest month for both sales and pricing. So we're seeing prices go up, but less people are getting beginning to buy. And where do we go from here, folks? What happens next? Do people continue to buy? Are houses going to continue to rise? Yes, they will. Of course they will. Why wouldn't they? Again, supply doesn't go up and you have a very high demand, or the demand continues to rise with that same existing amount of housing, you have higher prices. You have more people bidding for housing. This is why we are in this situation right, folks. So don't forget I told you that. The answer, of course, is very simple. You get rid of the people that don't belong here. That's the way you do it. You get rid of people that don't belong here. You end up trying to fix the market. That's one way to do it. And of course, you build what you can. You get rid of these ridiculous permits, which they do in places like my beloved California, where they have some stupid laws like the sequel laws, that would be the California Environmental Quality Act that passed under Reagan in 1970, allowing people to go in and sue the building contractors and preventing them from building houses, taking them to court. And what that did in California, thanks to organizations like the Sierra Club up in San Francismo, you take them to court and then they end up winning the case. Well, who do you think's paying up the legal fees? It's it's the person buying the house now. So the price of housing went up, up, up. You know, you come in and get a reappraisal on your house, your house that you paid, you know, $70,000 for in 1970, uh, you know, soon was about $700,000. And probably the price of so much more. Every single house, by the way, in San Francisco is now well over a million dollars. Anything in San Francisco is over a million dollars. Are any of these kids coming out of college with not getting the jobs of which they went to school for? Are they gonna start getting access to those houses? Probably not. Probably not. When you have six-digit um figures for your student loans, you're not you're not buying anything any type soon, folks. Unless you have a really, really good paying job. That may be true. But other than that, you're not getting, and that's causing a lot of Gen Zers, millennials alike to be disgruntled with the way the market's working today. Okay, so we've covered that. There we go. Don't expect that to get better anytime soon. Let me tell you though, this is comes from Armstrong Economics. We talk about the outlook of young Americans in this country, and the establishment continues to dismiss the growing support for socialism. We're seeing all these democratic socialists of America beginning to win these seats from Colorado to New York to Seattle, all over the country. And a lot of people are asking why? Why is this happening? Now we can look to college indoctrination, that's that's one thing we can look at, but that's not really the only part of the story. You've got to understand why an entire generation is losing faith in capitalism, largely for the reasons I've just told you. They're not able to make it, they don't see a future utilizing this market. And they blame capitalism. They blame free market capitalism. Well, we're very far away from free market capitalism. We're still in a capitalist society. But if kids cannot see that they can make it, what they will do, what they will go for, they'll go for anything. So if you offer them like a Zoran Mum Dummy did, free buses, free grocery store, rent-free, uh, rent freezes, excuse me, uh, you know, what I say, free bus rides, free daycare, free this, free that, free oxygen, free trash on the side of the road. You can get well, you could say free, free, free. Again, what has he really accomplished with all? He hasn't delivered on any of those situations. Uh, his seven months of being the schmuck that runs New York City now. But they'll take something if it means they get something from it. So if it means, hey, my rent's not gonna go up for a year or two, I'll take it. It's better than nothing. I'm already paying a ginormous amount of money just to live in the sewer that is known as New York City. I kid, folks, it's not a sewer. I do call it the big orange, though, instead of the big apple. Anyways, I kid. Anyways, let's move on. Why are young Americans entering adulthood in this distorted time period for the economy right now? They're ready to take on the world, yet housing has become unattainable for millions of people. That's a problem. What did I just tell you? I just told you the housing market is going up, up, up, and people are buying less, especially younger people. Now, according to some polling, 74% of young voters believe America is facing a housing crisis. No kidding. 62% say the economy is unfair to young people. Well, they deem it as unfair because, again, they're not making it yet. That's part of the problem. Now, we could say, for instance, when a lot of these baby boomers officially retire and move on, it'll open up some things in the market. That's true. And you have 36% describe themselves as struggling financially or in an outright crisis. That's a lot of people. This is the group of 18 to 39. But I think the most startling part about all this: 53% of Americans in that same age group, I just told you, 18 to 39, said that they would support a democratic socialist, this would be a communist, for president of the United States. Now, this would be Bernie Sanders on steroids, if this were to take place. So, you know, when we say AOC has no chance to be president, that might not actually be true. God forbid that it were ever to happen. Can you imagine her dealing with Putin or she? Or talking with the Ayatollah of Iran, or just anybody for that. But can you imagine her speaking to anybody outside the press and actually determining policy and signing things into power? I mean, it would just be it would be the end of this country. If a if a low IQ like her were ever, ever to take control of this country, everything would be up-ended, everything, I mean, it would just be chaos. Absolute chaos. The border would be wide open, there would be zero job growth. She doesn't know how to create a job. And don't give me this crap she went to study economics at Boston University or Boston College, wherever she claimed to have gone. I don't buy it for a second. I don't buy it for a second. There's no way you can study economics and be this completely stupid or void of reality of what needs to be done. Just doesn't work out that way. And I know we're taught Keynesian economics today, we're we're we've gone astray from how the economy really should work. We're not reading Thomas Sowell's or the Walter Williams or the Milton Friedman's of the world. We're not reading the real way of which we solve these economical problems. I understand that. But for her to be this stupid and somehow graduate with honors, either goes to show my point that says that the standards have fallen significantly, or, or this is the other situation, or she didn't get the degree that she claims to have gotten. One or the other, it has to be true, folks. And I don't know which one it is, but can you imagine that? 53% of Americans, 18 to 39, would say they would support a democratic socialist for president. This is a problem. And Trump isn't doing any favors to these young people by showing that this system is not working for them. 76% favor nationalizing industries. Again, this is complete communism, healthcare, energy, and big tech. Nationalizing it. That means the government comes in and says, this is what you're going to do. You have no more autonomy in your own company. We're going to take it over. I would point to them the example of look at what happened in the Soviet Union. Just take a look at that. See how that goes. Look how China was doing before Billy Clinton brought them into the World Trade Organization in 2001. What was their GDP like for three decades straight? In the toilet. It's a flat line. It's dead, dead on arrival. Was not anywhere to be found. Even after we opened up trade with them under the Nixon administration, their GDP sucked. There was nothing there. So we allowed China to grow. And a lot of times it comes because we they've stolen our patents to create a lot of these products themselves. But China is investing in China now. So while it's still a communist country, it's communist run for sure. They're investing in business. We are not investing in business. We are investing in war. We are spending trillions of dollars on war and we're getting nothing in return. Certainly not any sort of freedom. How do you have freedom too, by the way, when you have a wide open southern border where anybody can cross? Does anyone want to explain that issue to me? Yeah, that's the real issue. We have an open southern border and an open open northern border as well. So I thought this was interesting. I wanted to share that with you because this is now the new mindset of the young Americans. Now, I can't really fault a young person, 18, 19, 20, you know, you're just getting started in life and getting your first job and you're saying, geez, this is unfair. I'm working 40 hours a week and I can't do anything but live in my parents' house. Well, why do you think that is? Again, we have things like inflation that are a major problem. These menial jobs that are there, absolutely, and they're good starting jobs, but if graduates can't find careers that match their education while others remain kind of trapped in this temporary workforce of which they find themselves, again, living with parents well into adulthood, you're gonna have disgruntled people that say, Hey, this sounds good, let's give it a try. Unfortunately, it's been tried and it doesn't work out. It usually leads to millions of people dying or starving to death. Again, look at the Soviet Union, folks. Take a good look at that. Alright, let's move on, folks. We've expounded quite a bit on the economy today. Let's take a good long look at the stock market before we move on to some other news articles before we go into our weekend. Let's take a look at the Dow Jones. Let's take a look at our top marginal stocks today, trading at $52,669.47 in the green, up 0.35% today. Not doing too bad. The SP 500 trading at $7,572.80 today, up 0.39%, and the NASDAQ trading at $26,281.92 up. Some 75 points today, also in the green. Yep, that's why we're seeing some positivity with the market today. We're seeing the technology stocks, the semiconductor. We have certain industrials benefiting from the geopolitical stability that Trump is. I suppose he's trying to offer to us. So we're seeing some positivity in that. But of course, the AI-driven sector growths are what's leading the top marginal stocks. That's why you're seeing that. You're seeing some federate expectations with Kevin Warsh holding off on raising the interest rates right now. We're seeing also some corporate earnings in both the tech and industrial sectors as well. That's causing some optimism as of right now. That's why people, again, are bullish on this. Alright, so good. We're seeing that. How's the crypto stock looking? We got Bitcoin trading right now at $63,774.10, up almost a percentage point today at 0.91%. And we've got Ether trading at $1,784.15 a share, up 2.04% as of right now. Not a shock there. Let's go look at some of our tech stocks as well. We've got NVIDIA trading at $210.17 a share, up 3.64% today, doing very, very well. We've also got Apple trading at $315.37 down almost a percentage point. I'm sorry, down almost a point today on the market. Looking over at Amazon, trading at $245.38 a share, down 0.67% today. And advanced micro devices, trading at $555.53 a share, up 1.161% today. All right. Microsoft. How are we doing in Microsoft? Good old, good old Billy Gates of Hell's old company. Trading at $385.18 a share up 0.21%. And when we look at Meta, good old Mark Zuckerberg, how are we doing over there? Trading at $669.33 a share up almost 6% at 5.99% today. Looking at Alphabet or Google. It's in the red today, trading at $355.75 a share. Down almost a percentage point at 0.88% today. So not much change has really taken place there. And we look at Dell Technologies. $442.70 a share today, down 1.67%. So looking at the red there, Broadcom also in the red today, unfortunately, trending at $400.31 a share, down 0.20%. And finally, Elon Musk Tesla, how are we doing there? Trading at $408.94 a share, up 0.59%, folks. So what's the overall with the tech stocks today? We're seeing again the AI infrastructure super cycle is really propping up a lot of these stocks. And again, when you have the government bullish on it, it helps out as well. So NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon leading in a lot of this growth. You're seeing the Alphabet, the Metas, the Apples are kind of balancing out innovation and profitability right now. Broadcom and advanced microtech uh, excuse me, advanced devices. Advanced micro devices are benefiting from the chip demand surge, and Dell seems to be gaining in data centers services as well. Uh, the macro risks and the potential AI winter sentiment remain on the horizon, though. Remember, I told you there's an AI buzz coming. You can only be bullish for so long. Unless you start turning that investment into profit, people are going to start pulling out. Just that's what I've been told. That's why I'm sharing that with you. All right, and let's take a look at our precious metals today. Let's have the precious metals market is working. We've got gold trading at $4,110.20 a share, down 30 points. Silver is trading at just under $60 an ounce today at $59.59 a share, down 1.25%. We've got platinum trading at $1,628.80 a share, just down 0.08%, so barely moved. And palladium, the only one in the green today, trading at $1,277.50 a share, up 1.87%. So we're seeing a lot of the pullback from gold just slightly today, you know, barely, kind of from the oil-driven inflation fears that have lifted the rate expectations. That's why we're seeing that. They don't know if we're going to be raising interest rates very soon. President Trump has deferred to Kevin Warsh to make that decision, probably by the next upcoming meeting on inflation. And if the interest rates go up, you're gonna see the dollar strengthen. That's why we're seeing that. Um, the inflation concerns, the geopolitical tensions are a lot of why this is going on. Same thing goes with silver. Down for the week. We're seeing the industrial sentiment still soft. Palladium stabilizing near the oversold levels. Again, the dollar easing helps as well. And of course, you have palladium, strongest performer today recovering from the multi-months low. That's why we're seeing a lot of that. Again, I've told you I'm always bullish on that goal, folks, and I'm still told if we get into economic turmoil. So, in other words, if we enter a major recession, or God forbid we enter a depression, you'll see the gold and the silver and the platinum and the palladium will begin to rise. That will be the end result. Because no matter even if Kevin Warsh does begin to slowly raise interest rates, if we have global turmoil or the economy falls out, lots of people will be looking to the precious metals. They'll start investing more heavily in the gold and the silver, and they'll pull out from the AI stocks. That's what will happen as a result of that. All right, and finally, folks, let's go take a nice look at our oil prices today. We've got West Texas Intermediate trading at $71.59 today, down 0.68%. Brent crude trading at $76.11 today, down 0.25%, up a little bit this week from where it was at the start of this week because of the resuming of the conflict with Iran, which I estimate will probably continue to rise again. We'll see the oil prices beginning to go up. That's my guess here, folks. Burbane crude trading today. Their closure was $70.80 per barrel, down almost 50 cents today. Looking at Dubai crude, they were last trading at $69.24 in US dollars. And let's take a good long look at Western Canadian Select today, trading at $57.99 per barrel. Uh it was a slight decrease of 0.36% from the previous close. And finally, Eural's crude coming out of Russia, trading at $55.14 per barrel in US dollars. The 24-hour change was 3.42%, is what they're claiming, of course. And why is this happening? Well, of course, you know, because I tell you all the time, a lot of it's because of the geopolitical risk. They don't know what's going to be happening yet. They don't know if Iran's going to make a deal, US makes a deal, the strait opens, the strait closes. It's just this constant volatility with the back and forth. You know, Trump bombs one day, then the next day he says the Iranians are on the phone with him begging for a deal. Well, that only happens, that it can only work for so long. Once the supply chain really bottlenecks and really hits at home when they say, hey, we've got no more oil to refine. We have no more oil at the pumps. We have no more gasoline now. That's gonna cause things to upend and we'll have lots of problems. So the regional supply demands are balancing right now, the quality-based pricing spreads, but you're not gonna see those oil prices beginning to drop anytime soon, folks. I believe they're gonna continue to go up because Trump really has no way out anymore. And if Iran just comes out and flatly says that we're not gonna negotiate anymore, you'll see that straight begin to lock down, and you'll continue to see the price of oil go up. That's my guess. If I had to make a guess. Alright, let's move on to other very important topics, ladies and gentlemen, especially with the war itself. Again, I don't want to drag on this too long. We've got about 10 minutes remaining, but let me just say to you, even the times of Israel right now are saying that the U.S. braces for a prolonged Iranian escalation. No current push for the Israeli government to get involved. Well, they're too involved in Lebanon, which again is a violation of the memorandum. So therefore, that goes on, that means there are no further negotiations. Everyone was happy about this. They thought Trump maybe, maybe could get Netanyahu to stop what he's doing, to remove their troops from southern Lebanon. That's not gonna happen. That that pipe dream has long gone. That sun has set. It's not happening. And while Trump has, again, begun to bomb inside of Iran during the ceremony for the slain Ayatollah Khamani, this is gonna cause the government to be very upset, of course. Certainly Moj Taba, and certainly the Iranian people. If any of you have been blessed to have seen what was going on, you're seeing about 40 to 45 million people in total over the last week paying homage to the slain Ayatollah. Not just in Iran, Iraq too, has got people on the streets in support. There are lots of calls against President Trump calling for his life. It's uh it's it's a crazy time, folks. We're we're living through chaotic times. I don't know of anything more I could say to you on that. Uh the Western press has downplayed this. Again, there's no support. There is lots of support, folks. There are millions of people in the streets, and the Iranians are not obviously happy that they've bombed civilian infrastructure. We've talked about that in yesterday's show. And I imagine they will continue to go back and forth with this. I again, I don't believe this is anywhere close to being over with. I just don't believe it. Not by a long shot. So I think Trump's saying that the Iranians are wanting to make you a deal. What I have figured out, again, through my context yesterday, I was able to figure out that it's actually President Trump now going back to the Pakistanis and asking for them to try to get the Iranians back to the other. How many times are we gonna go back and forth with this? How many times are the Iranians going to say, okay, we'll come and meet with you. Only to have this happen yet again. Because of our actions in the region. This is going to end one way or another, folks, and I I do believe at some point the Iranians say, enough is enough, we're done dealing with you. No more negotiations. The Miranda of Understanding is dead. It's no more. You yourself, Mr. Trump, caused this to happen. You've said it's over with, you think it's dead, you're calling us scum? We're not gonna meet each other anymore. In fact, by the way, we're actually going to put forth the documentation to get out of the non-proliferation treaty, and that could only lead to one thing: possibly the possibility of Iran acquiring, procuring, or developing on their own a nuclear weapon with the help of some of their allied friends. Again, BRICS has Pakistan, as India, as China, Russia, all have nuclear technology. And it wouldn't be very difficult or even far-fetched to believe that if these countries come together as as one, as a as a BRICS party, and say, we don't want this to happen to Iran. We want Iran to utilize the strike now, as they see, but we need the cooperation of the Gulf Arab states to get the oil, get the helium, get the aluminum, the sulfur, the urea. You name it, we need that to continue to flow. So we gotta stop this. What will deter the United States and Israel? That would be strength. That would be the next step. Which brings up our next point, though. This comes from just the news. And by the way, I respect Victor Davis Hansen, of whom is interviewed in this article right now. I completely disagree with him on this point, though. I really don't understand why he's suggesting a lot of the things that he's saying in this article. Let's break it down really quickly. Now, rejecting claims on the U.S. is trapped in this quagmire with Iran, historian Victor Davis Hansen predicted on Thursday that President Trump will systematically cripple Tehran's infrastructure before shifting the burden of securing the Strait of Wormuz to the oil-dependent European and Asian allies. He told John Solomon's reports podcast, he's going to respond disproportionately. Well, I mean, again, we're doing the same old. If we're bombing, again, a railway, or if we're bombing a bridge, or if we're bombing a port, that's not going to cause the government to stop what they're doing. It's just not going to do that. The Iranis will have other means of transportation for all of their products. That's just the truth of the matter. They control the Strait of Rebooz. We have no way to militarily go and open it. There's no way we would bring our vessels to try to do that because that would risk them getting hit. Now, as I told you the other day, again, I listen to people that are geopolitical analysts, that have CIA connections, that have connections with other people in intelligence and other countries dealing with this matter. I'll leave it to you at that, folks. I hate to tell you to take my word, but this is what I've been told. By the way, what I was told, what I what I heard yesterday, was after the bombing that the United States did with the railway from Tehran to Mashad, this bombardment, within hours of it, right? We dropped bombs, we destroyed part of the railway, we destroyed part of the track. Within hours of this bombardment, the Iranian engineers laid a brand new track on one side of this new this railway that goes from Tehran to Moshad. The other side was completed within hours afterwards. That's the resil resiliency of the engineers inside of Iran. Now I know we like to call them primitive or backwards or you know, they're they're nothing. Again, folks, there are very smart people inside of Iran. That's just how it is. That's the truth of the matter. And they were able to repair part of this railway of which we decided to attack. The US also bombed a bridge connecting the railway to the Belt and Road Initiative that I've talked to you about. This is to the northeast of the country. This is in the um this is part of the Belt and Road Initiative. And this is by the Turkmenistan border, this ends in Singjiang in Western China. Again, paid for by China. The US also bombed one of the Chabahar ports that helps connect Iran to to India. Uh so this is part of this north-south transportation corridor among these BRICS countries. Now, while some of it's already been rebuilt and coming back, a lot of it is still a bit damaged. Again, I don't know if Trump would continue to, for instance, uh go back and decide that he wants to continue to bomb. And what he would do with that, again, I don't know. But I disagree with this totally. I think that if Trump continues to bomb, bomb, bomb, I think you'll see the retaliation on US vessels, again, the Gulf Arab States, in which they're facilitating these attacks, and even back in Israel, which again, I don't think Trump or Netanyahu would like to see. I just don't believe in it. Folks, thank you again for being here today. The weekend is now here. We end today's show. Thank you as always for being here. Make sure you're staying prepped with food, water, medicine, fuel, money, tools, anything to be self-sufficient in this time of uncertainty. Enjoy the rest of your day. Have a blessed weekend, I'll see you back here Monday for more roundbreaking news. Until then, be good, stay busy. God bless.