March 7th, 2026 - Oil Spikes and War in the Middle East

In this lively financial talk show, hosts Steve, Adam, and Joey explore a whirlwind of economic events, including the surprising market effects of a new conflict in Iran and dramatic shifts in asset performance like software and commodities. They delve into intriguing topics like AI’s influence on jobs, new investment regulations, and even share historical trivia about Coca-Cola’s bottling division. With insightful discussions and listener interactions, the show combines expert analysis with engaging storytelling.

Transcript

Steven H Van Wie 0:01

It's Saturday morning, it's 10 o'clock. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 0:07

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 0:08

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 0:09

Full house today, boys and girls. It's always fun so if you can stick around for the hour, I'd like to welcome everybody back. If you've been a regular, we're starting out year 12 about a month ago and as I always like to remind you, if you keep listening, we'll keep talking so we come back over and over again. As long as you do. Well, some things have happened since one week ago this minute and they're far reaching in their impact. I don't think it's going to, is my personal opinion. I don't think it's going to change the history books very much. There's something that's got to happen and then hopefully we get back to normal. But I'll let the guys issue their feelings about that because my perspective at my age probably a little different than theirs but it was, you know, I try to, sometimes I try to come up with a word or a phrase that describes the week really well and this week I narrowed it down to one thing. Wednesday was fun.

Steven H Van Wie 1:19

So on that happy note, taken away.

Adam Van Wie 1:22

Yeah, so it was a really interesting week. Obviously something new dominated the headlines and it's almost like wait, what AI Apocalypse? What were we talking about? Last week it certainly wasn't Iran but this week that's what we, what we were talking about and it was dominating every headline and the trading as well. And interestingly every trade that was working in the first half of 2020 or half, first part of 2026 is, did almost the exact opposite this week. So if you were, if you were up big going into through February of 2026, you probably did not have a great week and vice versa is also true. Look, just look at software if you want a good example. It fell more than 30% from its all time high into the end of February and it's now rallied almost 14 in just over a week. So, so interesting the way things work out and also counterintuitive because what about a war in Iran would create a software buying opportunity? It just, I don't, I can't follow that logic. It just doesn't, doesn't seem to make any sense. This week we saw the Dow fall 3%, the S&P down 2% and the Nasdaq 1.2% and a lot of that was on fears of the higher cost of oil oil and also the Forever. Another potential, forever war in the Middle East. The price of oil spiked 30%, one of the biggest weekly moves in history. And interestingly, energy company stocks gained just 1.4%, which kind of signals to me that traders don't believe that this oil price spike is going to last for very long. Because I think you would have seen energy companies move a lot more if that were the case.

Adam Van Wie 3:12

The worst performing asset classes this week were silver, which dropped 10% again, something that had been rallying almost uncontrollably for the last year. International stocks which dropped 7%. International stocks had really led the market higher over the last year. And then emerging markets were also hit pretty hard, much worse than developed countries. They were down 8.2% which was, it was a pretty uniform sell off all around. One bright spot, ironically was the Israeli market which gained 6.2%. So go figure. I cannot explain that.

Steven H Van Wie 3:48

Can you explain the comfort trade of gold and silver go not just down

Adam Van Wie 3:54

but dramatically down dramatically, exactly.

Steven H Van Wie 3:57

This is going contrary to our intuition, which is why I deduced it was temporary. I don't know if that's good logic or not.

Joey Loss 4:05

I think there's some of that. I think it also reveals just the amount. If you look at like the last few years, the movement from Bitcoin to gold to silver to now oil, there's a lot of retail play money that's just flying around. I think it's not the whole story, but it's hard to say that it's

Steven H Van Wie 4:21

not a part of this flavor of the month club.

Adam Van Wie 4:23

Yeah, they just jump around within the S and P. Materials, healthcare and consumer staples were the hardest hit areas. Typically those are some of the defensive sectors of the. So when things get rough, that's where people go normally. And they were all down more than 5%. Outside of energy, technology was the only other sector to remain positive for the week, just slightly. Bitcoin had a good week. It really needed it. It gained 5% but it was down more than 25% going into, into March. And commodities had a good week. Despite gold and silver falling, the commodities basket gained over 9% this week. Bonds got hit by spiking yields and the aggregate bond market lost more than 1%. 10 year spike from about 3.9 to 4.1. I think that move could turn around just as quickly as it happened if this thing gets resolved in a, in a short, in a relatively short timeline, matter of weeks. If you're looking for reasons to be optimistic, the, the pattern that the market most often follows after geopolitical Events like the Iran war that we're currently in is pretty well established. Short term the market falls on the news, but in the longer term the market tends to recover and rally to new highs and it really doesn't take that long. Also, the market opened down more than 1% three times this week. On Monday it erased all of that gain to end positive. Tuesday it erased all of that loss, but it took until Wednesday afternoon to do it. And then Friday we didn't recoup the complete loss, but recouped about half of it. And that was with oil sitting at $90 per barrel. Historically, weeks that see 31% gaps down come come very near market bottoms more often than not. And so not that history is a perfect guide, but that is a pretty good thing that you're seeing. That kind of trading action could signal that we are near a market bottom. One year later the market has an average gain of over 19% when we see weeks like this. So that would not be a bad thing.

Adam Van Wie 6:31

It was an interesting week for economic data to say the least. Up until Friday the news was looking pretty positive. Then on Friday we got a jobs report that looked. There's no way to hide it. It was pretty ugly. The estimate was for 50,000 jobs to be created and instead the economy shed 92,000 jobs. So it didn't even instead of going positive 50, it ended up negative 92. Plus the previous reports were revised down by 69,000. So that didn't help. The unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.4% which is historically still pretty good. It's just that's not the right direction. One bit of good news from the report was that wages continued to grow at about 4% year over year, which is outpacing inflation by a decent amount of. Despite that bad news on Friday during the week we saw some pretty good numbers. The ISM Manufacturing report showed a strong 52.4 expansion level reading. And the services report was an even better 56.1.

Adam Van Wie 7:32

Well into expansion territory. The ADP private payrolls report showed an increase of 63,000 private jobs during the month. So that jobs number was not so bad. I don't know.

Steven H Van Wie 7:44

Yeah, that was distributed strangely too. The smallest, the companies that employ one to 19 people. That's where most of the gain was. It looks to me like people are reorienting themselves to do something different or go, go to work, get a gig, whatever. But I can't back that up with other data. That's just usually what happens there. Also, the very largest companies made a nice gain. But people look at the manufacturing number, that was down again. But if you look at the construction number, that was huge. 

Adam Van Wie 8:16

It was, it was a big number.

Steven H Van Wie 8:18

And what have we been saying for, well, ever since Trump got in that first you build the thing and then you operate the thing. So construction wins first and manufacturing wins second. Plus, a lot of the people that, that are going to be hired in manufacturing are actually robots. Manufacturing is not going to employ the same number of people that it did in the past. And that's pretty much a given because there's no reason not to automate everything you can when you're starting a new factory or retrofitting one. All right. Lots more to say about this topic and many others. We've got to take a quick break. And we'll be right back. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 9:00

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 9:02

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 9:03

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 9:05

And I remind everybody that lines are open 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 9:11

And that as usual, we have a trivia question. And also as usual, sponsored by Paul Lloyd at First Coast Alarm. You can call Paul at 904-636-7888.

Steven H Van Wie 9:25

This one's about big business. Everybody knows about Coca Cola, right? Kind of ubiquitous across the world, actually. But long, long time ago when they were just getting their start, the guy who was running the show had an idea that he didn't want to get involved in bottling because it made things needlessly complex. He just wanted to make Coca Cola. So he sold the bottling department of the company. And I want to know for how much, just a number of dollars, you can round it any way you want to. But it was, it was a while back. And then we'll see if it was a good decision or not. All right. Anyway, back to the market there. I want to bring one thing up before I turn it back to Adam. I always like the perspective during a really heavy down week of what did we give back? Time wise, the Dow was this low below this last on December 2nd. The NASDAQ was November 21st. The S&P 500 goes back to December 17th. And the small cap Russell 2000 goes back to January 2nd. So we gave back that much time. You know how long, how long it's going to take to reclaim it when this is over? It won't be three months, I don't think. But of course, nobody knows until after. That's why I always estimate after it's done and I've calculated it. Never miss that way. Pretty good.

Adam Van Wie 10:44

Depends.

Joey Loss 10:57

Yeah. I mean if you have an investor's mindset, it just doesn't really matter when it happens. Right. It's not going to be 25 years.

Steven H Van Wie 11:04

And we talked about that last week, said who's planning to sell out on Monday if it starts going straight down. And then of course Wednesday we had the big update and we had another down day. You can't time the stuff.

Joey Loss 11:15

Yeah. I think it's always the case that it's harder for traders to figure out what to do. But if you're a real investor, it's just. Yeah, there's happen constantly.

Steven H Van Wie 11:22

Yeah, you got a long term horizon. Adam, you want to wrap up anything else? I just got a few words about the jobs numbers. When you're ready.

Adam Van Wie 11:30

No, the only thing I would mention is retail sales On Friday also they were down 0.2% but the estimate was actually negative point three. So they came in higher than expected. It wasn't a blowout number, but they are up 3.2% versus a year ago, which is not bad. And if you get rid of autos, that which are, you know, highly volatile,

Adam Van Wie 11:53

up 3.9% in the past year. So not bad.

Steven H Van Wie 11:57

Well, in those jobs reports, there's some things that you probably wouldn't notice and I'm not trying to justify anything or, or create a situation like, well, don't believe your ears and your eyes and all that for the administration, but there has been a strike by Kaiser Permanente and there were several. I think There are about 32,000 health care workers that are striking and therefore were not on the roll. So those are jobs lost temporarily. That's one of them. And every at the end of every year they recalculate the population of the country and make adjustments to the 2000

Steven H Van Wie 12:42

census. And this happened as usual in January, except for the fact that they didn't get it done because of the strike, the government shutdown and therefore by the time they got the numbers they couldn't, it was too late to do January. So they actually applied those changes for the February numbers that we just got. And what that means is a comparison between January and February is relatively meaningless and a comparison between December and January is relatively meaningless. And the next number we get, which will be marsh jobs will be more meaningful. These were not inconsequential changes. The population change for people age 16 and up was 231,000. But the adjustment increased the number of people not in the labor force by 1.2 million and decreased both the total civilian labor force and the number of employed people by 1.4 million. And that all took place in these numbers. What does it mean? I don't know. It means next week I'm going to trust them a little bit more. But the three of us were talking in the break and I concur we're in a kind of a holding pattern in the job market from what anybody can see. And I don't see any reason it's going to change right away.

Adam Van Wie 14:02

Lots of uncertainty out there.

Steven H Van Wie 14:04

Yeah, there is no. We got a big graduating class coming up in May from the colleges and they all hit the labor force as they graduate. And will the jobs be there for them? I don't know.

Adam Van Wie 14:16

I don't know either. But I do know that the narrative around young people unemployment rate is largely false. The numbers don't back it up. There's actually been

Adam Van Wie 14:30

the labor force. The percentage of people that age getting jobs is roughly equivalent to where it was two years ago. And so this narrative that it's gotten worse and worse for grads just hasn't really played out yet. But this year could be different.

Joey Loss 14:45

Yeah, well and I think the Conner narrative is coming from certain pockets where we see like entry level coder jobs are significantly down. Big tech like in 2022 was hiring like 36% or something and now it's like 5% of entry level jobs. And and so I think if you went into certain vocations thinking you were headed in the right direction, you're now seeing okay, the landscape is changing and it hasn't fully changed for people to know where to aim.

Steven H Van Wie 14:55

Sure.

Steven H Van Wie 15:12

Yeah. Look what's happening in places like Amazon. You know AI is having an impact. It is not having its full impact it but it is definitely having an impact. There's no doubt the more automatable. It's a terrible word. Any job that can be turned over to AI is going to be turned over because they're all paying for the AI anyway. So it depends when you graduate, what degree you have and what knowledge you have, what experience you have. They're all going to play into whether or not you'll get a job and how much you'll make.

Adam Van Wie 15:22

Yeah.

Joey Loss 15:47

And if you look away from entry level the amount of job opportunities for higher level software related jobs has actually increased year over year beyond the average over the last several years. So and the thought there is with AI the output of a senior level coder or developer is two or three times what it used to be. So they're actually getting paid more and they have more opportunities.

Steven H Van Wie 16:09

Right. That's called efficiency. And that's a good thing. It keeps prices of things down. All right, my last comment on the jobs report, 10,000 of those losses were the federal government. Those are the good ones. We don't want any more of that. The total says right here. And this is from PJ Media. 386,000

Steven H Van Wie 16:32

federal jobs have left under Trump.

Adam Van Wie 16:35

Yeah. That's a record, isn't it?

Steven H Van Wie 16:37

The other record is. And no one noticed.

Adam Van Wie 16:43

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 16:43

Badly missed. Except those affected, of course.

Joey Loss 16:46

Well, I bet the DMV noticed.

Steven H Van Wie 16:49

Yeah, probably.

Joey Loss 16:50

But anyway, I remember us citing some data at the time when it was when Doze was really firing off that that was no pun intended, I guess.

Steven H Van Wie 16:57

Yeah. Actually announced layoffs are at an all time high. But I thought that was interesting. 386,000 people go. And there's barely a blip on the radar screen. Good for him. I say, all right, I don't want to. I got one for right after the break. I want to ask Joey because Joey's really good on taxes and I want to run this past him and see if I'm right because I'm pretty sure I am.

Joey Loss 17:23

I've got a short story that of a client situation that happened this week that I think, let's do that.

Steven H Van Wie 17:27

We got about three minutes left before the break.

Joey Loss 17:29

That's plenty of time. So if you've listened to the show for a while, you know that required minimum distributions are something that you don't want to miss when you reach that age. The penalties for failing to distribute the mandated amount from a retirement account each year can be hefty. Up to 25% of the missed amount can be. That's the penalty, plus ordinary income taxes on the amount distributed. If you listen regularly, you may also know that one of the best tools we employ with clients to satisfy required minimum distributions is something called a qualified charitable distribution. For newer listeners, these are gifts that you give directly from your IRA to a charity. And gifting this way has two primary benefits. Number one, the gifted amounts satisfy a portion of your required minimum distribution amount for the year. And number two, the gifted amounts don't count as taxable income on your tax return. This helps in a multitude of ways. Number one, you're eliminating some income tax. But number two, for that three headed beast of Irmaa, you're lowering income. So you're not going to see you have a lesser chance of seeing higher Medicare premiums. So this week we had a call from our Custodian notifying us that a qualified charitable distribution we did for a high net worth client did not reach its destination. And this could be a big deal because we did that amount to satisfy part of that rmd and we counted on that. And so we got this notice and thanks to the resources available to us, we were able to work with that team to get another check issued. It was lost in the mail and the check was reissued with the original date for last year. And so it just goes to the charity. And this is one of those things. Like it could have been thousands of dollars in taxes, thousands of dollars in penalty, a couple of, you know, not our favorite phone calls. But thanks to these kind of systematic relationships we've got based on the size that we're at, we got a notice and we're able to fix it. And I just think this is one of those things that's really easy to overlook, but logistical errors are going to happen, especially when you're counting on the mail to get things done these days. And I was just, I was just kind of excited that, you know, what could have been a big deal was really a 10 minute phone call series and it was handled.

Steven H Van Wie 19:34

I read a couple stories about that kind of thing happening just recently, but

Adam Van Wie 19:39

that's the first time it happens more. Actually it's happened to us before. I just handled it. But yeah, it happens more often than you would think because the charity may get the check and then sit on it for a while for inexplicably or there's just countless ways that this can happen. And another thing, if you're doing QCDs, you have to have documentation from the charity that they received the check and that it, the contribution was made. If you get audited, they will want that. And you cannot go back to the charity and request it at that time. You have to already have it. So just be aware of that little, little tidbit.

Steven H Van Wie 20:19

Yeah. That the quick, quick and dirty on that one that I read was as long as you did not take the money yourself and, and then write a check to the charity that if a problem occurs with the, the timing or the handling or whatever that they are most likely to tell you, you're fine, don't worry about it. We'll do exactly what you guys said. It's kind of consistent with what I know or what I think to be their policy anyway. All right, we got to take a quick break again. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 20:53

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 20:55

And I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 20:56

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 20:57

And we have Marshall on the line. But I want to repeat the question first. I'm getting a buzzing. We're all getting it. There we go. Working on it. Thank you. All right, question, the trivia question for today. The Coca Cola company a long time ago decided to sell off their bottling division because it was making things too complicated. How much did it sell for? It's real simple. Good morning, Marshall.

Adam Van Wie 21:04

Yeah, me too.

Marshall 21:30

Good morning, gentlemen. Let's go for $100,000.

Steven H Van Wie 21:35

Let's not. It was less than that.

Marshall 21:39

Okay.

Steven H Van Wie 21:40

Wow. But thank you. See, we went from an infinite universe to a nice tight range.

Joey Loss 21:41

Let Marshall down easy.

Marshall 21:48

Well, I just trying to help out, just trying to help out my radio family.

Steven H Van Wie 21:53

That way nobody calls them looks ridiculous because they were going to guess 200 million and it's actually under 100,000.

Joey Loss 22:00

Oh, wow. Yep.

Marshall 22:02

Understood.

Steven H Van Wie 22:03

You did them a favor.

Marshall 22:06

Joey and Adam are of those that learned so much about automated systems early in life to carry a lot more, whereas Steve and I learned much later in life. And I have a thought that probably most of your audience is more in Steve and my contemporary.

Marshall 22:31

And that's why my question, okay, what have y' all done to educate yourselves on using AI and what you use and what you use it for?

Adam Van Wie 22:47

Okay, good question. But we do use it. We use it for several things. The main one is that we've implemented an AI note taker for our meetings and it is one that's customized to the financial services industry, financial planning industry. And it is, I can honestly say it's pretty amazing. It not only takes notes. That's nice. So you have a record of everything you talk about, but it allows us to interact with our clients more and spend less time writing down details that we're inevitably going to miss some of them

Adam Van Wie 23:25

so we have better conversations. And then on top of that it picks out key pieces of information, puts them in a very user friendly chart. It suggests updates to our financial planning software. It puts the notes into our CRM for compliance. I mean it just is a huge time saver. So that's the main thing. The other thing we use it for primarily is research and prep for radio, for writing different communications. I, I don't use it and put that out as my own work, but in, in, in order to get ready to do something like if I'm preparing a segment for the, the radio now I first go to AI and say what I want and See what it comes up with. And then that gives me a good basis to. To create my own product. It probably saves cuts my time in half for prep.

Joey Loss 24:24

Yeah, I think that's a good summary. I think the big distinction is we use it for things that help us elevate our ability to participate in the human side of financial planning. So we'll use AI to help us gather, organize, and prepare information and store it the right way. We distinctly do not use it to make decisions. It doesn't automate any. We don't have it making any decisions for us. We're trying to use it in a way that helps us do the background stuff and be more prepared and more efficient in that regard so that we can make good decisions with more organized information.

Adam Van Wie 24:47

Absolutely not.

Marshall 24:59

Well, thank you. I specifically had asked somebody else who does a lot of legal research, and he has his different pieces, but he threw out something I never thought about. He asks AI to suggest a script to find the information he wants to find.

Adam Van Wie 25:22

Nice.

Steven H Van Wie 25:23

I like it Seems we don't.

Marshall 25:25

Is there any particular AI generically that you all find easier for you or you've gotten more comfortable with?

Joey Loss 25:35

I think we've each got our, like, kind of preferred tools. I enjoy using Gemini.

Adam Van Wie 25:39

I use Gemini as well.

Joey Loss 25:41

And the more you use a particular tool, the more it learns about you, so it kind of communicates better with you. There's. There's some risk in that you. You can kind of create your own echo chamber. So you gotta push the limits on it a little bit and, and tell and remind it how broadly you want perspectives.

Steven H Van Wie 25:57

But I use it far less than guys do because, you know, I'm. I'm not that involved as I used to be. And it's all new, but I am taking some online courses.

Adam Van Wie 26:08

But you short things, you may actually be using it more than you think. Cause if you do a Google search now, one of the main things that pops up is the AI summary. And I find that to be the best result many times, more often than

Steven H Van Wie 26:23

not, when Sarah sends an email over to me because she read something that I might like, she'll send it over and the first thing I get in my email is a little AI summary of what it is. I really like that.

Adam Van Wie 26:33

Definitely.

Joey Loss 26:35

Yeah. And people use AI a lot more than they realize. Like the other day, Elizabeth and I were watching some show about a female chess master from Hungary. It was on Netflix. I forget Queen of Chess. I think it was great. And so I downloaded some chess app and I realized, you know, the whole teaching mechanism in the app is AI based. You know, it's not old school algorithms. It's like an active thinking, you know, so it's everywhere.

Adam Van Wie 26:58

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 26:58

I think what we're in right now is a time period where the rate of change is still accelerating for sure. So it's got a long ways to go.

Marshall 27:07

Great. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen.

Steven H Van Wie 27:09

Well, thank you. Great question. Question. I. I do have some fear that there are going to be people out there who tend to use it as a crutch or a pen or something. And I don't. I'm not saying they will lose their ability to think and reason, but I'm saying just make sure you're keeping your own brain moving and, and pay attention to your business and so on.

Adam Van Wie 27:10

Good call, Marcel. Thank you.

Joey Loss 27:35

I have contacts who have said that, you know, whatever company they work for hires marketing agencies and things like that to do big projects for them and they make a lot of money and multiple times they've received entire proposals. I mean, 20, 30, 40 pages that are paid heavily for. And it's completely AI generated and it's crap. This is just entry level or, you know, love of people being lazy.

Adam Van Wie 27:53

Ridiculous.

Adam Van Wie 27:57

My kids say they're surprised by how many kids are just lazy now. They don't do their homework, they just have AI. They. They turn in AI stuff and it's just, you know, they just don't want to do the work.

Steven H Van Wie 28:11

Human nature maybe.

Adam Van Wie 28:12

I guess.

Steven H Van Wie 28:14

Well, anyway, as I said, great question. Thanks. Marshall. Always fun to hear from him. Marshall is one of those guys that is a thinker and, you know, he looks at the world and he ponders things and he's much like me that way. And only he is not reticent to put it out on the table. We always appreciate that. You know, though, only 5% of listeners will ever call a radio station. And I always like the ones who aren't afraid to do so. All right. One of the things I don't like, I don't like people who supposedly write facts about finance and economics. Oh, I'll get back to this after the break because.

Steven H Van Wie 28:57

Good morning, Bob.

Bob 28:59

Good morning, gentlemen.

Steven H Van Wie 29:01

What's happening?

Bob 29:02

Oh, not a whole lot. Just enjoying another beautiful day in Jacksonville. Question for you on RMDs.

Adam Van Wie 29:10

Yeah.

Bob 29:11

My wife turned 73 in December.

Steven H Van Wie 29:16

You're in trouble now.

Bob 29:18

Yeah. We have until what, April 1st. We have to take an RMD.

Steven H Van Wie 29:24

There's April 1st. When did she turn?

Adam Van Wie 29:27

December.

Bob 29:28

December of last year.

Steven H Van Wie 29:31

And she didn't take one last year.

Joey Loss 29:33

Yeah, she has until April 1st of 26.

Steven H Van Wie 29:36

Exactly. And then another one by December of 26.

Joey Loss 29:39

Yes. You'll actually have two this year.

Bob 29:42

That's what I. That's what I thought. I just wanted to confirm that. That's kind of what I'm afraid of, but okay, no problem.

Steven H Van Wie 29:48

I wish there were a better way to do this because there's a penalty involved in doing that. The plus of it is you pushed your taxes forward till this year. But the downside is you have to take two RMDs based on last year's closing balance on December 31, which did not get depleted by the amount of the first rmd. So you get a penalty, a tax penalty for having it to be bigger than it would be otherwise.

Adam Van Wie 30:18

It's not a true penalty, but it's a.

Steven H Van Wie 30:20

No, it's a de facto penalty. Yeah, yeah, an extra tax.

Bob 30:23

Yeah, that makes sense. I can see that.

Steven H Van Wie 30:26

For a lot of people it's a good thing because they do get to move their taxes forward. So it depends on, on your income and all kinds of other things.

Joey Loss 30:34

Now, if you give to charity, I mean, that's a good. There's a couple tools you have at your disposal. You could give to a qualified charitable distribution from the ira, maybe a bigger one this year and skip next year or something to fight some of that off.

Steven H Van Wie 30:46

All true. So, yep, you nailed it.

Bob 30:50

All right, well, great. Thank you.

Steven H Van Wie 30:52

Did you want to take a shot at the trivia, Bob?

Bob 30:54

Oh, let's see. Less than a hundred thousand. Unbelievable. But I would say 60,000.

Steven H Van Wie 30:56

Yes.

Steven H Van Wie 31:02

That is a bit too high.

Adam Van Wie 31:04

Wow.

Steven H Van Wie 31:06

Just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

Adam Van Wie 31:07

It's really unreal.

Bob 31:09

Unbelievable. Thanks, guys.

Adam Van Wie 31:11

Have a good one.

Steven H Van Wie 31:12

Our pleasure. Thanks for the call.

Joey Loss 31:13

If it goes much lower, it's going to be like one year of daycare for a.

Steven H Van Wie 31:16

Bob.

Steven H Van Wie 31:19

Bob mentioned what a beautiful day it was out there, and I had to. The place was busy this morning. I had to park quite a ways away and I took the slowest walk from the car to the building I've ever taken. It was perfect. 72, sunny and absolutely perfect. So I don't want anybody to think we are not all grateful. All right, I'm going to get back into the tax thing, but I wanted to. I'm going to log this one into things that never die. So Ro Khanna, congressman from California, is joining Bernie Sanders now in wanting to tax the wealthy on their wealth, but not the old fashioned way. The original one was 1% a year for five years. This is 5% a year.

Joey Loss 31:33

It's perfect.

Steven H Van Wie 32:11

And guess who Signed on to the program. Tall, dark and handsome governor.

Steven H Van Wie 32:18

Idiot.

Joey Loss 32:19

Did he sign on Newsom?

Steven H Van Wie 32:21

Newsom supports it. One of the few decisions he's ever actually made. And it was the exact wrong one.

Adam Van Wie 32:27

Are you sure he's been anti wealth?

Joey Loss 32:29

He's been pushing back on that just this week.

Steven H Van Wie 32:31

It was amazing to me. All right, I will have to take a break and be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour.

Steven H Van Wie 32:41

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 32:43

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 32:44

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 32:45

Remind Everybody, lines are open. 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 32:50

And the trivia question. Years ago, Coca Cola spun off, sold off its bottling division. What did they get for it? And we know it's under $60,000.

Steven H Van Wie 33:01

Sounds like a bargain to me. All right, let's talk about bad journalism. Or should I just say bias? I wanted Joey to hear this one because this is what I think. This that Social Security faces earlier depletion date, a report found, and that doesn't surprise me. They're saying 2032. And the current thinking was 2033. And you know, it was always in that range. But there are some things that have made it a little bit different. But this claims that part of it was on the obbba. One big beautiful bill causing a revenue shortage into the Social Security trust fund from income tax on benefits. Well, I know why they say it. They say it because Trump touts the no tax on Social Security. But that's not what happened.

Adam Van Wie 33:57

No, I don't think that's what they're getting at. I think they're talking about if you don't tax tips and overtime. Technically, there's a small amount of that money that would have gone to Social Security. Is it enough to change the date on the depletion of the fund? I really, really doubt it.

Joey Loss 34:15

But did they even remove payroll tax on that?

Adam Van Wie 34:18

That I don't know, because I don't think.

Steven H Van Wie 34:19

Oh, no, they didn't.

Joey Loss 34:20

They just removed federal. If that's the case, then there's nothing. There's zero. Zero change. You're just in a same economy as far as revenue for that trust as there was.

Steven H Van Wie 34:24

Yeah, you're right.

Adam Van Wie 34:29

Yeah, that is correct. Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 34:31

These people either aren't smart enough to write an article like this or they're too biased to write an article like this. But what happens with the no tax on Social Security is that became a statement, a selling point. I don't know what you want to call it that if you're 65 and up, you don't even have to be taking Social Security for these four years anyway. Each person that's 65 by the end of the year gets an extra $6,000 tax deduction. And you don't have to itemize to get it. You just get it. So seniors actually got a tax break, a guaranteed tax break, because they get the extra six or twelve thousand dollars for the couple. But it's not about Social Security. It just applies to people old enough for Social Security. And like I said, they're either not smart enough to know it or they're too biased. But this article should never have been written, at least not the way it was.

Adam Van Wie 35:29

Agreed. Adam Carolla says it all the time. You're either stupid or you're a liar. Which is it?

Steven H Van Wie 35:34

Yeah, which is it?

Joey Loss 35:35

Sadly, the intended impact will probably be achieved. I mean, that's just the way it works. Yeah, it's wrong, but it doesn't matter that it's wrong.

Steven H Van Wie 35:44

Yeah, by revolution reducing income taxes paid by seniors.

Steven H Van Wie 35:49

That's okay, people, but I told you.

Steven H Van Wie 35:54

Good morning, Bosco.

Marshall 35:56

Yes, it is a fabulous one at that.

Steven H Van Wie 35:59

Haven't seen any better than this.

Marshall 36:01

That's your trio. And I wanted to go for tossing this back and forth. Just. This is just like throwing horseshoes. 25,000.

Steven H Van Wie 36:03

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 36:12

And that, unfortunately, is a little too high.

Joey Loss 36:16

Oh, my.

Adam Van Wie 36:17

Wow. It is a year of daycare, you know?

Steven H Van Wie 36:20

But I just. I get such a charge out of trivia questions that surprise people because it surprises me when I find them. Then I bring it in here.

Adam Van Wie 36:27

That's crazy.

Joey Loss 36:29

It sounds like they could have recycled the bottles for the price.

Steven H Van Wie 36:32

No kidding. Anyway, thanks. I appreciate the call. Anything else we can do for you today?

Marshall 36:39

No, no, no. The weather you piped in here is fabulous. Fabulous, y'. All.

Steven H Van Wie 36:44

I'm taking credit.

Marshall 36:48

Ciao.

Steven H Van Wie 36:50

Yeah, I don't think anybody here would have guessed maybe I'm wrong. Don't know. Anyway, I wanted to bring that up. Just, it happens to this administration a lot. People want to find a reason they hate him so much. They want to find a reason that he's bad, and they want everybody to know who it is and what it is. All right, anyway, next topic. You all, at least regular listeners, will probably remember that I have talked about Kyle Busch and his wife having a problem with Pacific Life, and they'd lost over $8 million. And they have sued Pacific Life. And I said I'd follow up when it's done. They settled, and unfortunately, the nature of a lawsuit that settled usually involves not having to divulge the amount. But the point I'm getting here is not anything other than this. And it's, it could be pack life, it could be anybody buying a product. They were sold a. Apparently a very large package of supposedly tax free retirement plans that are actually self funded

Steven H Van Wie 38:16

insurance policies. And there are several people out there that peddle these things and they are,

Steven H Van Wie 38:24

I'm going to say it, they're a scam. What they do because of the nature of their regulation. They will sell these things with what are called illustrations and that shows your cash flow out into perpetuity. But they're allowed to put their own assumptions in. So you might have something like this where the guy showed them what would happen if they had annual returns of nine and a half percent.

Joey Loss 38:53

Sounds like any public pension. Where they say, hey, we're going to.

Steven H Van Wie 38:55

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 38:57

I would love to sell our products on the last three years of market returns. Yeah, that would be pretty easy.

Joey Loss 39:03

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 39:03

Well, I think they're going to have to be a little bit more careful pretty soon. I will promise you that they got their 8.6 back because you know, he's got a big microphone, he's a very famous driver and if he didn't like the settlement and they kept going on this thing, he'd be singing it from the treetops. So I'm sure they got what they deserve. That's called failure to supervise your agents where I come from.

Adam Van Wie 39:35

Yeah, I mean I doubt that they lost 8.6 million though. It was probably just your 8.6. If the guy sold it at 9 and a half percent returns and it

Steven H Van Wie 39:45

got 3 now they actually lost. They lost nearly 8.6 through an index. Universal life insurance.

Adam Van Wie 39:47

How did they lose?

Joey Loss 39:53

I was waiting for those words. I knew that was that. I just had a client talk to me this week like they have a friend, friend in quotes that won't leave him alone about how they need to buy this. And it's like, look, there's a time and a place for those policies and then once you have it, you have to nurture it a very specific way. And you need understand how to couch the guarantee or the illustrations as you said. In reality those cases are almost exclusively very high net worth. Which if this guy was a proper case, he may not have been guided on how to nurture the policy the right way to get the intended outcomes. Or if the illustrations were just a lie. I didn't see him.

Steven H Van Wie 39:55

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 39:56

Wow.

Adam Van Wie 40:11

Yes.

Adam Van Wie 40:33

Well, if you lost 8.6, you have to think that what he was putting in was really a large amount.

Joey Loss 40:38

One of the problems outside of this article is these are being peddled to everybody. And I mean, if you're on TikTok, they call it Fin Talk. I mean, it's everywhere. I'm not on there, but I've got friends who send me videos all the time and I'm like, oh my gosh, how do you get this garbage out of their feed?

Adam Van Wie 40:52

Yeah, it truly is garbage.

Steven H Van Wie 40:54

I debunked my first case for a lady that was a neighbor across the street back before I was a cfp. And it took me a day or two to figure out what the problem was. And you knew you could just read it and you know there's a problem here. And what this guy wanted him to do was take a big old line of credit on their house and put it into the policy. And then he showed all the cash flows except one. He never showed that you have to pay back the line of credit. And I showed her that and she went ballistic.

Joey Loss 41:26

Yeah, Dave Ramsey is incendiary to that story. That is the opposite of the Ramsey. We're not all Ramsey, but he's right on stuff like that.

Steven H Van Wie 41:35

Yep. All right. Long time ago. It was around 1899. He thought the bottling process was going to be too cumbersome and complicated, so he sold it to a couple lawyers in Nashville and they paid him a dollar for the business. Now, last year they produced more than 30 billion cases of coca Cola.

Steven H Van Wie 42:04

Nice investment. Yeah, I love it. Another little tidbit I found in the same article. You know the classic Coke bottle, There's seven ounce Coke that we always got out of machines for a dime. And they say Coca Cola all over them in relief. Those bottles were specifically designed so that they'd be recognizable if they were dropped and shattered. Isn't that interesting? Just by the logos and the relief on the.

Joey Loss 42:32

So they can still be a marketing piece.

Steven H Van Wie 42:35

It's amazing to me he didn't do too bad either, though. Cook did okay even though they fired their bottle. I just got such a big kick out of that. Let's see. In a related item, not to Coca Cola, regulators are now starting to look into indexed annuity sellers who are doing things just like we were describing. And comments are due on these regulations by March 31. I will keep you all informed as to what happens here. These people are a blight on the financial services industry and they have to be stopped. It's all because state regulators are horrible regulators, and I hate to say it, and some are better than others. But there is going to be some more federal regulation in this industry because the states are not doing a good enough job. That's my opinion, my opinion alone. But that's the way it is right here today.

Steven H Van Wie 43:40

What's the real value of hiring a cfp? Another one. You know what you get, aside from returns that are 2 or 3% better, if you're better off financially in your own mind and on paper, the psychology makes everyone feel better, 18% higher in promoting their their planning to friends. So if you if you're good at this, you get a lot of referrals, which we know. And the factor was friends and family. Family felt better about the family. Money and kids get more involved. All good reasons. I love it. We'll see you next week. Enjoy this beautiful day. This is the.