September 13th, 2025 - A Wall of Worry

Steve Van Wie, Adam Van Wie, and Joey Loss discussed economic trends, including depopulation concerns and market performance. The trio delved into the impact of recent economic events, such as inflation, consumer behavior, and job losses, on market trends, highlighting notable stock performances, changes in unemployment claims, and recent developments with Oracle and Tesla. Additionally, the discussion touched on the potential implications of global depopulation trends and the complexities of personal finance management, particularly in light of sudden wealth from events like lottery winnings.

Transcript

STEVEN H VAN WIE 0:00

It's Saturday morning, it's 10 o'. Clock. This is the Van We Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wee.

Adam Van Wie 0:06

I'm Adam Van We.

Joey 0:07

And I'm Joey Loss.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 0:09

Still here?

Joey 0:10

Yeah. I've got an article here about depopulation and I feel like my son, we need him here. Wasting his time.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 0:16

No kidding. Well, as everybody who listens regularly understands that Joey's about to become a parent again and I pretty much promise you that it'll happen this next week because if not, I think his wife's going to kill him.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 0:34

That would be pretty bad. Anyway, here we are again to all the regulars. Just keep listening, we'll keep talking. So we're in year 11 now or. Yeah, 11 and a half. Something like. Halfway through 11, whatever, and still having a good time. Somehow the world keeps producing content, so the show kind of has to write itself, I guess. As long as they do stupid stuff, we'll talk about it. As long as they do smart stuff, we'll talk about that. So you want to just sit back and listen, we'll tell you all that stuff. But if you have anything you want to say, comment on or get answered, just pick up the phone and dial 904-222-8255

Adam Van Wie 0:48

Something like that.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 1:18

and we will put you right to the top. It was obviously a very tumultuous week, the week of 911 and with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And yet we look at the numbers this morning, they look pretty good. And this was a rare event. The NASDAQ hit a five bagger, so that's a new record every day of the week. That's amazing, isn't it?

Adam Van Wie 1:44

Yeah, that it is.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 1:46

And probably more to come in, my guess. But anyway, Adam going to take it over. Adam. Adam has been analyzing what the heck went on that made this week so good. And we tend to dwell on the lowlights, but there have to be highlights also, I think.

Adam Van Wie 2:04

Well, let's start with the, with the concerns. We've got inflation concerns. We have a stalled housing market. We have concerns over consumer weakness. We have labor market weakness and 900,000 disappearing jobs. We have a Fed that is either too political or not independent. We have valuations that are stretched on the high side. We have an extremely overbought market. We had a political assassination. We have divisive rhetoric and worries about the future of our nation. I'm sure I missed something, but like, that's a pretty good start. Pretty solid list of the concerns that are out there right now. And that's why the market if you listen to the news, should not be climbing. But did it listen to that? No. Nope. It just kept on climbing. Your favorite expression, the old saying, market climbs a wall of worry. And I don't know if it's ever been more true than right now. No matter what threat the market has identified on any given week, it seemingly just shrugged it off and continues to go up. And it's doing it in historically the worst month of the year, which is even more remarkable. So this week we saw The Dow climb 1%, the S P move up 1.6% and the Nasdaq gained 2%. The market is extremely overbought, as I mentioned, and you might think that that is bad news. However, runs like this tend to lead to outperformance over the following week, month, three months, six months and year time periods. So it's counterintuitive for sure, but the market is. Market often does what you least expect it to do.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 3:44

So it's the big mole. Momentum.

Adam Van Wie 3:47

Yeah, momentum, exactly. U S Stocks were not the only strong performers this week. Foreign markets were up about 1.8% and emerging markets were up 2.7%. Some notable performers included Korea, which gained 5.3%, Taiwan which was up 5.1% and Hong Kong, which was up 4%. The worst performing country I could find was Switzerland which was down 1.5% and is down this year. But I. I didn't look into the reason, but that is a bit odd. The rest of Europe seems to be doing very well. Gold and silver both had gains this week with gold up 1.4% and silver up 3.3%. It was also a good week to be in bitcoin. That was up 4.7%.

Adam Van Wie 4:29

Bonds didn't want to be left out of the rally. They were up 44 basis points as well. It was just a really good week all around. There was not much I could find that didn't perform well. Part of the good week was brought to you by Larry Ellison and Oracle. Larry Ellison actually overtook Elon Musk as the world's richest person. Person. Person. Because the company founded Oracle shot up 38 after releasing their earnings on Wednesday. That increase represented a market cap increase of $255 billion, which in itself is larger than 93% of all S P 500 stocks. That's crazy. And this is even crazier. That all happened on an earnings miss. The. They missed their forecast.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 5:09

It is nuts.

Joey 5:16

So I think he gained a hundred billion dollars of net worth.

Adam Van Wie 5:19

Yeah, I think something like that, yeah. Crazy.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 5:22

It was no, yeah, it was on a. Trust me, things are getting better. Trust me.

Adam Van Wie 5:27

Yeah, it was Guidance is what it was. Guidance was revised up for their cloud business over the next five years from the current period, which was 10.3 billion in revenue, I believe, to more than 140 billion five years from now in revenue. So that's a pretty big increase. And it flowed right to the bottom line and to the stock price.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 5:51

But Elon took his position back.

Adam Van Wie 5:53

Oh, I didn't see that. Okay.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 5:55

He lent it to, to

STEVEN H VAN WIE 5:59

Oracle, but yeah, took it back.

Adam Van Wie 6:01

Those things, you'd be surprised how much those things change and how often they change over time. And it's because it's so, so dependent on stock prices in almost every case.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 6:11

That Tesla is on a tear. They're losing sales percentage around the world and they're on a tear. But when you think about it, Tesla's a lot more than a car manufacturer.

Joey 6:21

Definitely.

Adam Van Wie 6:21

Well, that's the thought. They're not. They don't actually do that much more now, but they are working. They have other things in the works where I think the robotics is what I keep hearing pointed to as their next big thing.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 6:33

Yep.

Adam Van Wie 6:35

Perhaps the reason the market keeps climbing is that sentiment is working in our favor. Bullish sentiment fell for the second week in a row to just 28% while bearish sentiment climbed to 49.5%.

Adam Van Wie 6:48

That I know, again, sounds like that's a bad thing, but it's usually a good thing. When retail investors get scared, the market makes money. One data point that we use to track the economy is first time unemployment claims. The this week those claims surged over 250,000 for the first time since last summer. However, the entire increase was due to a spike in one state, Texas.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 7:12

Why?

Adam Van Wie 7:13

Even more oddly, the same thing has happened in the last two years. Around this time there's been a spike in Texas that caused those claims to go over 250,000. If you remove Texas from the data, claims actually went down this week and fell were well under the important 250,000 mark. Now, this odd trend in Texas for the last two years was explainable by natural disaster events this year. I'm not sure what the heck caused it.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 7:41

I. It could just be we always do it this way.

Adam Van Wie 7:44

Yeah, exactly. It's kind of a strange thing.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 7:47

You know, reporting is not always perfect, as we've found out.

Joey 7:52

No, the jobs reports are always perfect.

Adam Van Wie 7:54

What are you talking about?

STEVEN H VAN WIE 7:58

I was blown away reading that. Really? Texas had that kind of influence. Usually when they make a mistake that biggest because California fails to report or something like that, and then it comes in late, then everybody goes crazy again. There's so much to be said about that kind of statistic. It's way too important to way too many people to have it be so disastrous.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 8:22

Application. We'll talk a little bit more about that after the break and we'll have the trivia question and we'll keep moving along, so don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. This is the bandwidth. Welcome back to the Van We Financial Hour. I'm Steve Ban We.

Adam Van Wie 8:35

I'm Adam Van We.

Joey 8:36

And I'm Joey Loss.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 8:37

And I want to remind everyone that lines are open 904-222-8255

STEVEN H VAN WIE 8:43

where you can take a shot at our trivia question brought to you as usual by Paul Lloyd at First Coast Alarm call Paul at 904-636-7888.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 8:54

It was a really good week in the market. There have been some days and some weeks that were even better. One day that sticks out in My mind was July 5, 2002, when the Dow went up 4% on a day. Why? What happened? Tell me. Shoot from the hip if you have to, and we'll figure it out. All right. Adam has a few more things on the market, including some talk about the kind of stubborn inflationary numbers.

Adam Van Wie 9:29

Yeah. So we got CPI and PPI reports this week. That's the Consumer Price Index and the Producer Price Index. One is prices that consumers pay, obviously. The other one is what producers or manufacturers businesses pay for their goods. So the Consumer Price Index was slightly above the estimate. It came in at 0.4% versus 0.3%. That brought the CPI up 2.9% from one year ago. I would say that's slightly elevated. It's nothing I would be super concerned about. Of course, the media made a huge deal out of IT sector saying that, oh, this is tariff inflation coming back. I don't know that that's true or not. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the, the, the fact is the inflation rate below 3%, the historic target is, is pretty good. Now the Fed more recently has been using a 2% target. I, I'm not sure what brought 3% down to 2% except that we saw this sort of crazy period of no inflation for 15, 20 years. And so maybe they just thought we were through the era of 3% inflation. But 3% historically has been the number. So I don't know. I didn't really bother. Me seeing a slight miss on the high side there.

Joey 10:50

Not that we aspire to Russia's metrics but their bank just cut the rate from 18 to 17. Just, just solid to put things in context. 3% is a solid situation.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 10:59

Yeah, no kidding.

Adam Van Wie 11:02

Yeah, yeah, it's. If you look at a longer term graph of inflationary data, you'll see that we're moving pretty much sideways right now ever since the spike in 2022 and then the subsequent decline.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 11:15

Have you guys been watching truflation this week?

Adam Van Wie 11:18

It was right at 2% last time I looked.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 11:20

Yeah, it actually dipped under. I think it spent three days this week under 2% and then crept up on Thursday and again on Friday. It was 2.15 this morning. You know that kind of number, That's a rounding error. 1 8.2.1. Oh yeah, whatever. But you know, I put this in juxtaposition with the Chapwood Index and the Chapwood Index, for those of you who don't know, was started many years ago by a fellow named Ed Butowski and he who by the way is a very interesting man, that discussion for another day. The Chapwood Index samples

Adam Van Wie 11:30

Okay.

Adam Van Wie 11:36

Yeah.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 11:57

the same goods over and over every six months from the same cities. And they compare city by city over time every six months. And you will find if you look it up, just Chapwood C H A P W O D index, it'll take you right to it. And the Chapwood Index shows us that in almost every city in almost every year, inflation is actually in double digits, including the most recent six months.

Adam Van Wie 12:26

Well, I don't think he does it anymore though.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 12:28

He does. He, he took time off in the, during the COVID years because it could get people out looking around. But he restarted it. And you, you do, if you're going to search it, do Chapwood Index 2025 and the new one will come up.

Adam Van Wie 12:46

Oh, okay. Because I'm only seeing data through 2024.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 12:50

The new one came out, if you can get that. I was looking at it a little bit ago. And anyway that you look at that and then the truflation which does the same thing, it samples spot things day to day at 2%. Then you look at the government who says, well I think the Social Security increase is going to be about 2.7%.

Adam Van Wie 12:51

Okay.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 13:11

And then they estimate that the Medicare increases will be for part B premium, that's the one we all pay in case you're interested, that's going to go up 11.6%.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 13:26

Now the same government that'll give me a 2.7% raise for my Social Security check will then take away 11.6% more for my Medicare B.

Adam Van Wie 13:38

Makes total sense.

Joey 13:39

Yeah, good. So our 401k contribution limits will go up 11% too, right?

STEVEN H VAN WIE 13:44

Yeah, exactly. The part B deductible. And don't think this doesn't impact people. That's going up 12%. That's money out of your pocket, people, right there. Part D deductible. If you are on the drug plan through Medicare, that Part D base premium will go up 6%, the deductible 4.2 and the catastrophic 3 threshold where they start to pay everything up another 5%. Now those are estimates, you know darn well they're really close estimates because we're almost to September 30th when all this stuff is going to get put out. Now, if anybody can explain to me how older people on a fixed income are supposed to handle this kind of thing, please feel free to pick up the phone and dial 904-222-8255

STEVEN H VAN WIE 14:38

and you'll have the floor. Because I can't figure it out and I don't think anybody else can either.

Joey 14:43

I think the government giveth the senior bonus deduction and taketh right after that.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 14:49

Is probably the best thing that's happened in. In the whole working families tax cut. I love that I am not an unbiased observer in this regard and I don't pretend to be.

Joey 15:04

Yeah, I haven't felt anything yet. It's weird.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 15:08

You just got to be patient.

Joey 15:10

30 more years.

Adam Van Wie 15:10

So speaking of inflation, the PPI actually surprised to the downside that it was actually expected to go up 0.3%. It went down 0.1% in August. Producer prices are up 2.6% versus a year ago. Some of that was due to energy prices falling in August. And so this is good news. I look at the PPI as the precursor to the cpi because if producers are getting lower prices as inputs, they are able to sell for cheaper with the same profit margins. So they may pass some of that savings on to consumers and the CPI will be affected maybe in a month or two. So I. This is good. This is great news, honestly.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 15:52

Let's go back to the jobs report for a minute. The 911 jobs that were taken away from the last year of the Trump administration followed last year's revision, which was down 818,000

STEVEN H VAN WIE 16:06

that you said Trump, the Biden.

Adam Van Wie 16:08

Last year, the Biden administration.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 16:10

Thank you. Don't let me get away with that. The third year of the Biden administration they revised down by 818,000. But that actually got decreased a little bit, so they took that to 600,000. So you add them up, there's a little over a million and a half jobs that they just made up. And I don't know what anybody's supposed to do about it. Larry Kudlow on his show on Monday, I believe it is, it was either Monday or Tuesday, explained how some of the old sampling processes worked at the bls. They have sampled the same companies for the establishment survey for as long as anybody can remember. The usual response, a monthly basis is 43% of those companies respond 57, don't even bother. Now, if that goes on for, well, let's say three or four decades, what do you think we have left in our sampling process? Guessing.

Adam Van Wie 17:15

And also, why are we sampling the same companies that we sampled for 30 years?

STEVEN H VAN WIE 17:20

That makes no sense. And why is it something like 0.15% of all the big companies that are big enough to sample? Yeah, this the guy who took the job at BLS after they fired the previous head. He better be good and he better be prepared to work hard.

Adam Van Wie 17:38

I mean, there's so much opportunity there. It's just unbelievable that they're using. It's just so typical government. Like this is the way we've always done it. There's no incentive to change and do things that are going to actually make the data better. Just that let's just keep grinding away at the same old stupid process that we've done for a million years.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 17:58

And one more thing. We all should keep in mind that part of the

STEVEN H VAN WIE 18:03

decreased jobs, I guess, is a heck of a lot of federal employees that are no longer employed. We'll, we'll applaud that one for as long as they keep doing it. There was, you know, everybody knows my feelings about Clark Howard. I think he's one of the greatest Americans alive. And what he does for consumers is just a monumental service. But he quoted something that a listener sent to me this week and it said right in it, the short lived Doge department.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 18:38

And it just hit me like, no. So I looked it up and there's a lady named Amy Gleason, I believe, who is the current administrator of doge who's hiring people.

Adam Van Wie 18:50

But wait, I wanted, I read that article. You sent it to me and I read it. And the one thing that I noticed about that is she was saying that we need to hire really skilled tech people. And I felt like it was the, the spirit of what she was saying was more along the lines of we need These people to come in and automate things that have not been automated. So I, I don't, I don't know, but that was how I read that article. Okay, so. Well, I would be all for that.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 19:18

Yeah. I would have to say that's an excellent idea. Yeah. But DOGE is not defunct.

Adam Van Wie 19:22

No, no, definitely not.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 19:24

Don't, don't confuse it with a dead agency. You know how hard it is to kill a government agency? Yeah. This would be the one that might.

Adam Van Wie 19:30

Oh, it's impossible.

Adam Van Wie 19:33

Be like, well, every time you kill one, three more pop up.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 19:36

And in fact, the fcc, Trump, Trump's had been winning a lot of very quiet court cases here lately, too. He got the authorization to fire the Democrat on the FCC and replace him with his person, which might help some things, like, what do they call it? Net zero or whatever.

Adam Van Wie 19:56

And also they did the nuclear option, I think in the.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 20:00

Yeah, we're going to get about 100 more people.

Adam Van Wie 20:02

Yeah, they hadn't, they hadn't confirmed a single appointee of Trump's.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 20:06

Yeah, we are, we are being hosed by the Democrats in the Senate, and it's about to end. And I could not be happier. Things are working well. Think how much better they're going to work as soon as we get some of these things passed. Much more. Right after a quick break. So don't go anywhere. This is the Ban We Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Bandwidth Financial Hour. I'm Steve Ban We.

Adam Van Wie 20:29

I'm Adam Van We.

Joey 20:30

And I'm Joey Lost.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 20:31

And I was just asking the fellows if we talked about the Trump accounts, which are part of the OBBBA or the working families tax cut. And they, they said yes, we had talked about the one thing I don't remember saying, and I, I may have, so excuse me if I'm repeating myself, but aside from they're going to. Joey's going to have a new one in the family. It won't be funded until next year around the Fourth of July. But how many of you don't know that you don't have to be born in 25, 6, 7 or 8 to have a Trump account? You could have been born in 2024, and your parents can open you a Trump account, but the government won't fund it with the initial thousand. But you can put your own stuff in it. If you compare that to, say, a Roth ira, it's kind of an interesting trade off because if you're gonna help a kid fund a Roth, the kid has to have work, actual work, for which he's paid Actual money. That money doesn't have to be used to fund the Roth. You can do that. The kid could spend all the money, but you could still fund it. Excuse me, but the 2,500 or so that the parents can put in does not require any kind of W2 work or anything like that. So if you have a young baby and you want to get the baby started, this might be one way to look at it. But don't think this is easy. It's a very complicated decision.

Adam Van Wie 22:02

Where are those held? Are those held at custodians or are they held by the government?

STEVEN H VAN WIE 22:08

Where do you get. The reason that they're not being funded yet is that the final regs are not written yet. That's why it won't be funded till next year, because treasury is working on revising the rules. But it looks to me like advisors are going to be able to do this. It'll probably be. Excuse me, Something to go down. Well, it'll probably be like, we handle 529 accounts. We have several clients that have these for their kids and we can administer them, we can help them invest all that we don't charge for it. I strongly suspect because. Because the nature of the investments in Trump accounts are going to be so specific. Equity funds in the US that's pretty.

Adam Van Wie 22:56

Much it right now with low fees.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 22:59

And maybe, maybe there will be some time that expands, like if the account grows and it becomes 20, 25, 30,000 down the line, maybe they'll allow some foreign stuff in it, target date retirement funds or something like that. But for right now, there's. There's a lot of things we do not know at this point in time. But I did want to make darn sure everybody understood that if you have been looking for some way to help a kid, that this is one of the things you could consider the Uniform Transfer to Minors act accounts. I know we have some of those in our business too, that's pretty flexible as to how it's invested. And then the kid gets hold of it. And there are a lot more restrictions on getting the money out of a Trump account than there are of a utma. And the parents can get a better control over it, I guess. On the same vein, funding a529 has its advantages too, especially if you're quite wealthy in that the money that's in the 529 that you control is not in your estate. So if, if you die and there's a big 529 or two or three in the family, that's out there that you're controlling. Then you just. Your successor administrator takes over and there's no tax implication and you will not be charged any estate tax on it and there's no gift tax on it. There's of a lot long as you stay within the guidelines. They were going to 19,000 in January on the amount of money any person can give any other real person. If you want to start a 529 and you got a lot of cash sitting around, you can do the first five years all at once. That's about $85,000 that you can put in, but you can't then contribute until year six. So just some things to remember if you're looking to pass money down to the younger generation. We've got a lot of options and don't ever hesitate to ask us for any of them. All right, moving along.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 25:09

Last week we went home and I didn't stay up late enough to know this, but the lottery drawing was held. So woke up Sunday morning to hear that there were two people that had actually won. They're splitting the one called 1.8 billion. It's pretty close. That's not too bad. I, you know, I would have been very disappointed if I only won half of it.

Adam Van Wie 25:34

I know, just a real bummer.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 25:35

Yeah. But you got to do what you got to do. But that the media on this is being so misleading, flamboyant, whatever else want to call it. I don't care as to just how much these people are going to wind up with. The media likes to call people billionaires and they do it in a very condescending manner. And it could be further from the truth, but not that much. When you split this kind of money from a lottery, first off, it's under a billion dollars when you divide it by two. But then Uncle Sam comes in. Well, Uncle Sam's not next.

Adam Van Wie 26:14

Even if. Actually, even if they had just one outright, they still wouldn't be a billionaire.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 26:21

No, absolutely not. By the time most people take the lump sum. And I think it's the only smart thing to do, assuming that you will take care of it. And that means a lot of things that I'll get into a little bit more. But the first thing that happens is if you're doing take the lump sum, it gets discounted to present value. That means instead of each of these people getting $900 million, they're each going to start out with about $410 million. Now that's a big haircut right there. But then comes Uncle Sam, who will take 37% of that amount? These winners were in Texas and one in Missouri. Texas has no state income tax. Missouri has 5%. Oh, that 5% is not applied to whatever's left over after the government. It's on 410 million. So there's another $100 million.

Adam Van Wie 26:26

Yep.

Adam Van Wie 26:57

It is.

Adam Van Wie 27:27

Wow.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 27:28

And if you don't realize these things, you should. It's still. It's a lot of money. Everybody knows it's a lot of money, but it's not making billionaires out of people. And you should not be left looking at these people derisively.

Adam Van Wie 27:46

However, if you invest it wisely and don't touch the principle, over the next 15, 20 years, you might have a shot.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 27:53

You might. And the first thing anybody should know is if your state allows you to. To not claim. Oh, by the way, I gotta throw this in. I am so happy that I don't know either name. I fear when people do something like this and they jump right up and go on TV and, hi, here I am. I'm the winner, they do not know that that single act will ruin their lives, period. And there's much more to be said about those things. So I'm, I'm hoping this means that they're being well advised. I hope it doesn't mean that they just haven't looked at their tickets yet, but I hope they're well advised to, if they can, under the rules in the state they're in. If you can take it next year, take it next year. You don't want to be taxed on it this year under any circumstances, because then all this extra stuff is due on April 15. You do it next year, then you got a hundred million or whatever it is extra you're going to pay that you can Invest for another 15 months at a pretty good rate. Yeah, Adam's doing some of this in a much smaller scale with some clients. And it. It's pretty nice when you just take away the months and you look at the hundreds of thousands of dollars that can pour in

STEVEN H VAN WIE 29:09

when you have that figured out, even before you have that figured out. The best way to handle this is with a little team of the right kind of people. Now, I say this out of two things. Of course I'm biased a little bit there, but also because I believe it's the right thing to do, and we've proven it. Start with a certified financial planner who's fee only and won't ever try to sell you something. Then you branch out to an attorney and a CPA for Rounding out the team of people you're going to need. That comes real fast. You want to do that before your name is known, before the money comes in. And then you got to figure out how you're going to stay safe. The one thing that people under, I think under plan for is personal safety. You would be amazed. People all over the world think you owe them something because you won, that you didn't earn it. And man, have we seen it. I can tell some stories that won't be out of school only because it's irrelevant anymore. But there was one guy from India who wrote a letter to some new minted wealthy people and he wanted them to send him a quarter of a million dollars because his dowry was light and his intended wife's father had said he had to come up with more of a dowry or his father wasn't going to let her father wasn't going to let him marry the seven year old.

Adam Van Wie 30:50

That makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 30:52

Seven year old. That's just one of many, many, many stories. So just think about this. If you ever get in a position where you get sudden wealth and that does not have to be be a lottery winner. We deal with some pretty fair size inheritances also. And it's exactly the same thing. When anybody finds out that you came into some money, you will have more friends and more enemies than you ever dreamed in your life. It could be a professional sports figure. We have one in town that was a classic example of how many friends you suddenly have. People that just kind of climb out of the way would work. That's part of personal safety. The safety of your money is very complicated too. And after the break, I'll just tell you a little bit about that. But if you, if you do not prepare to carefully receive this money, you can't guarantee yourself that it's going to be there when you start to do more things.

Joey 31:51

I actually have a book recommendation on this. There's a book called Sudden Money by Susan Bradley and she's committed her career to talking about this and all the things that you pointed to. There's a whole body of knowledge there.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 31:53

Good.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 32:02

Wonderful. I'm very happy. I've read quite a few things on it, but most of them were the negative ones like the guy who's in his basement or in the floorboards of his garage. I guess. More to come. Don't go anywhere. Right back. This is the Van We Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van We Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van We.

Adam Van Wie 32:22

I'm Adam Van We.

Joey 32:23

And I'm Joey Loss.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 32:24

I wish some of you could hear some of the conversations that go on during the breaks.

Joey 32:30

We need a director's cut. We need like a director's cut. Yeah, no kidding.

Adam Van Wie 32:35

The outtakes, the bloopers.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 32:36

Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to get into too many of them, and I'm not going to dwell on the Southern wealth. It didn't happen anybody in Florida, which A, ruled out, my family and B, ruled out.

Adam Van Wie 32:47

I will tell you that I. My picking of numbers, I just do the quick picks, but it improved a lot this week. I got one. One number that matched one number on the actual ticket.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 32:54

Really? Yeah. Wow.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 33:00

I need to train you. Better get you back to zero where I used to land.

Joey 33:04

How many numbers are on there? I've never even.

Adam Van Wie 33:07

So it's. What is it, six plus the Powerball or something like that. And I had 10 total, so like 60 or 60.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 33:17

Something of about 215 million to one or something like that.

Adam Van Wie 33:20

Yeah, well, my odds are probably worse than that.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 33:23

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you. You probably bump them up for everybody else. You're welcome. Yeah, no problem. Anyway, if you. If you just go to the bank, you're not going to be covered. If you're bringing in $300 million, let's say you. And you try to just deposit it in a bank, then somebody could steal it from you just like that. 250,000 per account is the FDIC number. You would have to open up more than 1,000 accounts to put these winnings in them and have them all FDIC insured.

Adam Van Wie 33:26

That's true.

Adam Van Wie 33:54

Then also not make any interest.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 33:56

Exactly right. So again, I like having the certified financial planner as the home base and the director of the whole thing. And that way custodians can be selected, accounts can be readied, and by the time you go over there and you have for. If it's a big one in Florida, you have to go over to Tallahassee to claim it. And the second you do, if it's somebody they've been waiting for a big winner, you don't have to announce that you're coming, but when you show up and pull that ticket out and they look at it, somebody along the row of cashiers picks up the phone and calls the media and. And you can't walk out of that building without becoming identified. Just like that. That's how it works. Don't ever tell anybody it's you. They'll figure it out.

Joey 34:44

We'll give you a pass on a Covid mask for that day.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 34:47

Yeah, yeah. No kidding. All right, guys, Want to talk about any subject in the news or should I move on? Good. Got.

Adam Van Wie 34:55

I think you have a couple of them.

Joey 34:57

I've got some interesting stories we've talked over the last few weeks just about population concerns in America versus other places, but in general the phenomenon of declining population in the West.

Joey 35:09

So I'm just going to read a little bit from this article and I thought we might talk about it. It's called the Depopulation Bomb from the Wall Street Journal.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 35:16

That's an interesting take on the old Malthus, the population bomb.

Joey 35:21

If humanity's existence were threatened by a plague, nuclear war, or environmental catastrophe, people would surely demand action. But what if the threat came from our own passive acceptance of decline? This is not some theoretical curiosity. It is a reasonable extrapolation of globally declining fertility rates. Dean Spears and Michael Garuso, economists from the University of Texas at Austin specializing in demographics, want to change that. Their book, after the Population Progress and the Case for People, is a deep dive into the facts and consequences of depopulation and. And an impassioned argument against letting it happen. You know, there's some usual components to their argument about, you know, our economic system, our stock markets. All these things kind of rely on an implicit growth in the market.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 36:08

We have a phone call.

Joey 36:09

Oh, we've got a phone call. We're going to turn to that.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 36:12

Good morning, Lane.

Lane 36:14

Hey, how are you all doing?

STEVEN H VAN WIE 36:15

We're great. How are you?

Lane 36:18

Very fine. Very fine. I. Sorry to interrupt. I was talking about. Because that's a big topic, but just wanted to let you gentlemen know I sent you an email this morning. If you hang around this show for 11 years, the Sticky notes of Steve Isms start.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 36:21

Oh, don't.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 36:37

I got a million of them. Had to do something my desk.

Lane 36:42

And so I put them all, in a word, documents. I sent them to you. Maybe you could put them on the website because, you know, on a more serious note, I mean, the ability to track reasonable information on inflation,

Lane 36:58

you know, is important because the government's numbers just. It drives you nuts trying to figure out what's real and what's not. So I just thought I'd pass that along.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 37:10

Well, you're absolutely right. And it's the same Bureau of Labor Statistics. We were talking about this in one of the breaks BLS got assigned to the inflation thing, which if it, you might think that the Bureau of Economic Analysis or somebody like that would be more fitting. But the theory is and always has been that that labor Statistics should have this because they're they're in charge of things like labor contracts and the CPI is calculated for them is how they. They tell you which inflation rate you're going to use for certain labor contract COLAs and Social Security.

Lane 37:52

Absolutely. Yes, sir.

Adam Van Wie 37:54

I thought they got assigned it because they're so good at statistics and never make any errors.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 37:58

I think that's probably second or third. Okay.

Lane 38:05

Oh, okay. Well, that's all I had. I'd go back and listen to what Joey's got to say.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 38:10

No problem. Did you want to take a shot of why 7-5-O2 was such a good day?

Lane 38:19

Well, I was going to cheat and go to the Internet. I didn't really have time to get far. But all I'm finding is about the downturns.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 38:27

So I'm going to tell you, you and everybody else right now. It's kind of a trick question. Oh, wait a minute. It's not kind of a trick question. It's a trick question and you'll know it soon.

Lane 38:40

All right, Very good.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 38:42

Take care of yourself. Y' all have a good one.

Adam Van Wie 38:43

Thanks for the call.

Joey 38:46

The bottom line for the depopulation issue is just that. The national or the international fertility rate, this IS Global, is 2.25 as of last year. And for Western nations, it's far lower. More than two thirds of the world is below that figure. In the United States last year it was 1.6. And so the impacts of that over time are not something that we're going to see quickly. I mean, this is one of those compounding things Warren Buffett calls compounding the eighth wonder of the world. And it's an issue where. Oh, we've got another call. We're going to pivot.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 39:23

Good morning, Mike.

Mike 39:25

Hey, good morning, guys.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 39:26

How's everything?

Mike 39:28

Well, the good Lord allowed me to get to the age of 74 today, so happy birthday. Thank you, sir.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 39:35

You're catching up with me. But you're not there yet.

Mike 39:38

I'm not there yet. Hey, very quickly, Steve, when I was in the Holy Land, I was there with a guy by the name of Gary Gillingham, whose brother, Gail Gillingham, was on the offensive line for the Pack is during the Ice bowl when Bart Star beat my Cowboys with the winning touchdown. Do you remember the Ice Bowl?

STEVEN H VAN WIE 40:00

Yes. Absolutely.

Mike 40:01

You do?

STEVEN H VAN WIE 40:02

I was not in attendance, thank goodness.

Mike 40:05

Yeah. This guy, Gary Gillingham, he met all of them. Vince Lombardi, all of them. He said it was freezing that day.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 40:13

It was cold. Yeah, that's from people who know what cold means.

Mike 40:17

Exactly. Exactly. Anyhow, I'm going to follow up on the previous caller. And my sources tell me that it could have been the fact that there were no terrorist attacks. And also there was a binge in tech stock buying.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 40:38

You know what I'm going to say you are correct. This is a question that I personally made up based on the things that I saw. 911 happened in 01. And from that day forward, America was on edge all the time. But one of the reasons we were most on edge is that we had this big all American holiday coming up on July 4th. So all day long, everybody was nervous. Yeah, we celebrated and all that, but we were all nervous. Nothing happened the next morning. That's it.

Joey 41:12

Boom.

Mike 41:14

Yeah, I remember that well. Gentlemen, in honor of 911 and you good gentlemen, please give it to someone or some organization.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 41:25

Thank you. We will do exactly that and we always appreciate it. Thank you. You too. Okay, Joey.

Adam Van Wie 41:28

Thanks, Mike.

Mike 41:29

Got it. Have a good weekend.

Adam Van Wie 41:34

All right.

Joey 41:35

The bottom, bottom line is we need to start having kids because the population as it currently stands at a 1.6 replacement rate in America, 2.25 globally, will peak at about 10 billion people and then start steeply declining. And so if we try to course correct, then especially Western nations who are far below this 2.2 replacement rate, it's gonna be a long uphill battle. It could be centuries before the curve is truly reversed. And that's the power of conflict.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 42:04

Yeah. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who would just enjoy that immensely as the population, the depopulation goes on. They think there's too many of us already.

Adam Van Wie 42:13

Yeah, there's some countries where it's a real, real issue already. Like Japan, where it's just so expensive to live that, that people make that decision to only have one kid if they have any.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 42:25

I want to read you a paragraph. It's in a. An excellent article by a fellow named David Manny. It has absolutely little to do with the specific topics, but once in a while, somebody writes something that is so succinct. And it kind of made me think about it when you started talking about this. It's called a system that devours itself. Magic wands waved by President Ronald Reagan, Pope St. John Paul II and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn't cause a collapse of the Soviet Union. When countries insist that there's abundant scarcity and teach that freedom is slavery and people chant slogans they don't believe anymore, these countries cannot survive. When contradictions grow too heavy, the edifice cracks. Isn't that brilliant? It reminds me of, for instance, our Social Security system with our declining population. It was all built on an ever expanding base and we got to fix it. And there is no one in D.C. that I would trust to get that done at the moment, unfortunately. But it has to get done. There's no way around it.

Joey 43:42

Or else it's a collective narrative issue, too. I mean, just the thought around families and kids has completely changed. We could probably spend an hour on that.

STEVEN H VAN WIE 43:48

Yeah, easily. So it's not all bad news out there, folks. As Adam says, this market is climbing a wall of worry and it looks like it's going to go on for a while. We hope so. We'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. We appreciate it. This is the van we Financial hours.