May 30th, 2026 - Trump Bills, Tech Thrills, and Market Spills: A Financial Fable

Steven, Adam, and Joey navigate the ups and downs of recent market trends, emphasizing the soaring success of the technology sector amidst a potentially overheated rally. They delve into intriguing financial news, including the innovative “Trump account” savings plan for newborns and a whimsical proposal for a $250 “Donald” bill, underscoring the ever-evolving economic landscape. The show blends expert insights with humorous anecdotes, ensuring listeners are both enlightened and entertained.

Transcript

Steven Van Wie 0:00

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

Adam Van Wie 0:06

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 0:07

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie 0:09

And we are all here together once again and will be for the whole hour. And I hope you guys take the hint and stick around for the whole hour too. Uh, the regulars, welcome back. You keep listening, we keep talking. That's the rules. And, um, if you're new, try to hang in for a while, whether it's an accident or on purpose that you found yourselves listening. I think you'll find something good in, in the course of an hour, probably more than one thing, but we always like that. And if you're the kind to ask a question, then we will talk about what we want to talk about unless you pick up the phone and dial 904-222-8255,

Steven Van Wie 0:49

and then we'll interrupt our train of thought and put yours on instead. So remember, there's no stupid questions. If there's something you don't know, a lot of other people don't know it as well. You can count on that. And if we don't know it, we'll get back to you by next week having learned it. I always kid people and say, if we don't know, we'll just make something up. But that's not really true. We'll figure it out sometimes even faster than next week. So don't be afraid. We don't bite. And all of that.

Steven Van Wie 1:21

Well, we'll have a trivia question after the first break as usual. And in the interim, we just wrapped up an absolutely miraculous 2-month period. It ended yesterday at the close. And I'll let Adam take it from there and tell you all about it. It'll be fun this week.

Adam Van Wie 1:39

Yeah, it's been a really great quarter to be invested and it's been an amazing quarter to be invested in technology. The NASDAQ is now up 24.9% this quarter. And if you look at the technology sector of the S&P 500, it has been even better. It's up 36.1% this quarter. That's 2 months of performance. Really insane.

Adam Van Wie 2:02

Obviously not sustainable over a long period. So I would not be surprised if we see some kind of break in this rally in the near term. But that doesn't mean a market crash necessarily. Necessarily. It just means perhaps we see some sideways trading or even a pullback. But it's really gotten, I would say, overheated. I would say, I don't know, it's hard to put an exact term on it, but it just feels like a lot in a very short period of time.

Joey Loss 2:27

Yeah, I mean, if you ended the year right now, we'd all be like, what a great year.

Adam Van Wie 2:30

Exactly. That's, that's not a comfortable feeling.

Joey Loss 2:34

No, there's 7 months left.

Adam Van Wie 2:36

Um, the other indexes have also had good quarters despite not being quite as good. The S&P— or sorry, the Dow is up 10.1% and the S&P is up 16.1%.

Adam Van Wie 2:48

Remember that a good portion of all of these gains, especially in April, came while rebounding from the drawdown in March. The NASDAQ was in bear market territory at that time while the S&P was off over 19%. Despite that, it's been an amazing quarter to be an investor and one of the best 3-year runs that any of us on this show can remember. Despite that, there still may be room to run in this bull market. It just became the 9th longest bull market on record, which means there is plenty of precedent for it to go longer. The current run is longer than the average bull market, but in order to get to the top 5, it would have to last until December of 2027. That would put it in the top 5, and that's still a year and a half away.

Joey Loss 3:32

Yeah, I'd be okay with that.

Adam Van Wie 3:33

I'd be okay with that too. Yeah, I think we all would.

Steven Van Wie 3:36

Agree. Make our lives a little easier, wouldn't it?

Adam Van Wie 3:38

No doubt about it. Despite all the gains in technology, the S&P Equal Weight Index tracked by the ETF RSP surpassed its previous all-time high from mid-April recently. This is a good sign that the rally isn't concentrated in just the mega-cap tech stocks and other industries are also participating. Despite that, just over 55% of stocks are trading above their 50-day moving averages. So there's still upside in a large portion of the market. One reason we're seeing tech, the, the tech rally to the extent that it has recently is that software stocks have started to bounce back from the AI doom trade of earlier this year. IGV is the ETF that tracks software and it got absolutely battered early this year under the theory that AI was going to replace every company in the index. I think those fears were a bit overblown, as does the market. The index has been rallying and is up 35% from its April lows. So I, at the time, I remember we talked about it a bit and it felt pretty overblown that you look at the profits on the software companies and they were still going up. And so to say that all of them were going to go out of business within the next 5 years seemed a bit ridiculous.

Joey Loss 4:53

Yeah, I think we just needed clarity on like, what, what does the future of business revenue look like for them? 'Cause for a lot of these softwares, they're charging per head. You know, all of this could theoretically change. Yeah. I think we just need to take time to figure it out.

Adam Van Wie 5:01

Right.

Adam Van Wie 5:07

I could see margins shrinking in a lot of these, no doubt about it. I think that that's inevitable. When you see profit margins like the size of NVIDIA, well, they make actual products, but some of these software companies have 60% software margins and in that neighborhood.

Adam Van Wie 5:25

That's— you're always going to have competitors looking at that and saying, I want that. And how do they get it? They have to undercut them, and that's how margins get squeezed. Now AI is making that easier for them to make a competing product. I think there is a case where they are going to get squeezed.

Steven Van Wie 5:42

Yeah, yeah, it seems logical that AI would write software.

Adam Van Wie 5:47

Yeah, it already is. I mean, there's, there's no doubt about that. Yeah, how complicated can it get?

Steven Van Wie 5:50

Just how much.

Steven Van Wie 5:53

You still need idea people, but as far as execution, it should change the world quite a bit.

Adam Van Wie 5:58

Yeah, I just saw, uh, an article in the Wall Street Journal, um, about— I think it was ChatGPT's models solved an 80-year-old math problem. Yeah, that no mathematician could solve. So listen, it's coming. There's no doubt in my mind it's coming.

Joey Loss 6:08

Yeah, Wall Street Journal.

Steven Van Wie 6:15

Sounds like the beginning of Goodwill hunting to me.

Adam Van Wie 6:18

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 6:20

The precious metals trade, which is one of the hottest areas of the market over the last year, has come back down to earth a bit this year. Gold is up just over 5% year to date and silver up just over 6%. This follows 2025 where gold was up over 63% and silver was up an astonishing 144%.

Adam Van Wie 6:39

Both metals are down from their previous highs set earlier this year. Despite that, the 86% gain in the price of oil this year has kept the commodities index rising. That index is up almost 33% year to date, despite falling 3% this week as the price of oil dropped below $90 for the first time in a while. It was a light week for economic data with no real surprises. New single-family home sales declined 6.2% in April and are now down 11.3% from a year ago. There is now a 9.4 months supply on the market, indicating a buyer's market. Despite that, the median price of new homes sold was up 2.2% from a year ago, which continues to, to defy logic and economic principles. GDP was revised down for the first quarter to 1.6% lower, lower than the consensus estimate of 2.0%. However, core GDP, which consists of personal consumption, business investment, and home building, rose at a 2.4% rate. So not a terrible number. The best number in this report, though, was corporate profits. Those rose 12% from a year ago. And that is why you're seeing the market rally like it is. That's all I had.

Steven Van Wie 7:54

You know, when push comes to shove, what drives the market is profits. In the short term, it can be all kinds of things. It can be the price of oil. It can be any number of things, a little conflict of interest here and there, or an actual conflict can do it. But in the long run, this is why, as we've been saying for a long time now, this is why today's NASDAQ is not like your father's NASDAQ from the '90s.

Adam Van Wie 8:20

It is nothing like that.

Steven Van Wie 8:22

No, that was based on speculation, unknown things, and piles of money being fed in by people who eventually ran out of money.

Adam Van Wie 8:30

Yeah, and people slapping a dot-com at the end of their name and suddenly they had a billion-dollar valuation.

Steven Van Wie 8:36

Yep. And this one If you add up all those corporate profits on the Nasdaq, it is an astounding number.

Adam Van Wie 8:43

And the growth rates are insane. Look what Nvidia did over a year. Anthropic's not publicly listed, but look what their profits are growing at. And they will be listed soon.

Steven Van Wie 8:47

Look what—

Steven Van Wie 8:53

Yeah, I've got a kind of a funny thing for a little later. But first, we got to take a quick break. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 9:04

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 9:05

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie 9:06

And I remind everybody the lines are open, 904-222-8255. And we have a trivia question as usual brought to you by Paul Lloyd at First Coast Alarm. You can call Paul at 904-636-7888. And I think it's time to bring this up. There's a new proposal which may be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, may not actually, but They're proposing, the Treasury is proposing a new piece of currency for our various and sundry dollar bills and fives and all that stuff. This one's going to have a face value of $250 because of the 250th anniversary of the country, birthday, anniversary, however you want to say it, and it would have a picture of Trump on it if they could figure out how to make it. Legal, and then we would refer to it as the Donald.

Adam Van Wie 10:03

I honestly, I saw this article and I had to check and make sure it wasn't like a Babylon Bee.

Steven Van Wie 10:08

Well, actually, it was proposed a long time ago. Yeah, months ago it was proposed, and they're, they're just doing a little mock-up and workup on it now. Anyway, as many of you know, the largest bill that we have today is a $100, what they call the Benjamins if you're in Congress. And that has been the case for quite a while. In fact, since 1969,

Steven Van Wie 10:37

it's been the biggest bill that we actually print.

Adam Van Wie 10:40

Yeah, it makes sense to have a larger bill. I think that is a good proposal.

Steven Van Wie 10:42

I, I, it does.

Steven Van Wie 10:45

Now I'm going to tell you— well, I'm not going to tell you, I'm going to ask you, how good an idea is it? What has happened to the value of a $100 bill since it first became the highest number in 1969? In other words, what would it take to actually replace it with an equal value bill with the inflation-adjusted dollars? Yeah, I think so. It's kind of interesting. It's something I got a charge out of when I, when I was looking at the reports about the Donald and they were holding it up. But when I dug into it a little bit, it started to actually make a lot of sense.

Adam Van Wie 11:09

Good question.

Adam Van Wie 11:25

Yeah. Yeah, it does make sense. I mean, I— yeah, there's— it is 100— having the same highest dollar bill value for that many years, it seems like it's time to add something. Well, get rid of— get rid of the penny. yeah, $50.

Joey Loss 11:39

Yeah.

Speaker 3 11:41

Add the—

Joey Loss 11:43

But I don't know. Would you carry any?

Adam Van Wie 11:46

Personally, not really.

Joey Loss 11:48

I don't even like carrying hundreds.

Steven Van Wie 11:50

I'd get a new one from the bank and frame it and put it on the wall. But that's about as far as I'd go. Everybody knows that a hundred doesn't go like it used to. When Sarah and I got married back in 1972, we were like all young people on a very limited budget. And we kept getting these nickel and dime things, which were actually $5, $10. And as time goes on, it was $20 and then it was $50. And really all that is, is a reflection of the value purchasing power of the dollar over years of inflation. And there were some mighty years of inflation in there.

Adam Van Wie 11:56

Commemorative or something.

Speaker 3 12:00

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 12:26

Actually, funny you say that. I had to go hit the ATM to give out some graduate gifts this week. And I was at the ATM thinking, man, I haven't done this in so long. I never carry cash anymore.

Steven Van Wie 12:39

I always carry some, but it's more my age than anything.

Joey Loss 12:43

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 12:44

40, maybe. I don't even know. I have nothing.

Steven Van Wie 12:47

It's— yeah, I just don't, don't even have a fraction of what I used to carry because we did so many things with cash. But, you know, I'm thinking that even that was over 25 years ago when I carried a lot of cash because we used to buy groceries and stuff and pay cash a lot. Nobody pays cash anymore when you can get cash back on your credit card.

Joey Loss 13:06

Exactly. The only exception is if I'm going to like a Virginia Tech or Florida State game or something. You stop by, get a bunch of cash before you go.

Adam Van Wie 13:13

You know, a lot of the venues have gone cashless though. Really? Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Joey Loss 13:18

Is that the last—

Steven Van Wie 13:19

get used to it, right?

Adam Van Wie 13:20

I had kids recently. Don't do anything.

Speaker 3 13:22

Exactly.

Steven Van Wie 13:22

You're gonna stop off at your crypto joint machine and pay some of that. Yeah, yeah. What are they gonna do, put it in your hand? I'm the only guy I know that owns a Bitcoin that I can put in my hand. Thanks, Joey. yeah. You're welcome. It was pretty fun. Oh, great. I could become a collector. All right. Well, we talked about Trump. Let's talk about Trump some more. Most of you by now should know about the Trump account, which is that account that is tailor-made especially for kids born between January 1st of last year and 2028, December 31st. In other words, during Trump's term. And what it is, essentially, it's a savings account for babies.

Joey Loss 13:35

You just—

Joey Loss 13:37

I've got a Dogecoin for you too.

Steven Van Wie 14:12

And it will be started,

Steven Van Wie 14:16

ante up, as they might say, with $1,000 from the government. And it has to be invested correctly, meaning in low-cost mutual funds and ETFs that are based on the American stock market.

Adam Van Wie 14:32

Do you know what the options are there yet? Okay.

Steven Van Wie 14:35

I do not. They— I think you might be able to find something at Robinhood because they've been the ones that are assigned custodians. Oh, okay. And since we're now just 1 month and 4 days away from funding these things, I would bet that they are starting to talk about them on their website. But that's just a guess. Yeah, I have not been there.

Adam Van Wie 14:56

I'm guessing it's going to look like a VOO or SPY or something like that.

Steven Van Wie 15:00

And there's a There's another company, a co— I can't— BNY, maybe the Bank of New York is also going to be a trustee. So you're not limited to Robinhood and these things.

Joey Loss 15:14

My understanding was they were going to set up through the Treasury a central custodian and then it disperses to everybody, like all the custodians.

Steven Van Wie 15:21

I think that's probably exactly right. And the things you need to know Yeah, it is BNY, by the way. It's in my notes here. A lot of people say that a 529 is going to be a lot better way to invest your money if you're doing it for a child or grandchild, but it's really very personal, like so many things, and nobody's going to give you a free grand to go into your 529.

Adam Van Wie 15:47

That's the only important thing. It doesn't— I mean, the vehicle is less important than the fact you're getting a free $1,000.

Steven Van Wie 15:53

And the other important thing about that $1,000 invested in the market, it will grow over time because that's what happens, but nobody can touch it for 18 years. Your, your, uh, ne'er-do-well parents and brothers and sisters and, and whoever else can't touch it until the kid is 18. Then the best thing about that is when you're 18 years old, you are probably not earning a bunch of money. So the thing to do, you take that account, the Trump account, and it automatically on your birthday converts to a traditional IRA, meaning from that day on, if you pull anything out, it would be taxable. But if I were you and had one of these, or if I were anybody who had one of these and turned 18 and got my traditional IRA, first thing I would do, assuming I didn't have a lot of income, would be to convert it to a Roth 100%, because that conversion would only be the amount of money in there, be your only bit of income, and you would either pay very little or no income tax.

Adam Van Wie 17:00

Absolutely. That's 100% what most folks should do.

Steven Van Wie 17:03

And there's more to this. Oh, we have a phone call. Good morning, Ron.

Speaker 3 17:08

Good morning, gentlemen. How are you today?

Steven Van Wie 17:10

Oh no, doing this again.

Adam Van Wie 17:12

Hold on one second while we get the phone worked out.

Steven Van Wie 17:15

I'm going to try this, and if we lose it, please call back.

Adam Van Wie 17:19

Yeah, I think—

Steven Van Wie 17:20

yeah, yeah. We had this phone problem solved last week and we have it again. So from, from this moment on in the show, I'm going to have Roger take care of the phones. So if you can call in again, I'll have him put you on right away. Sorry about that. We weren't expecting this to recur. So good. You want to put him on?

Adam Van Wie 17:39

He just called back. All right, we'll go. Yep.

Adam Van Wie 17:43

I think he is.

Steven Van Wie 17:44

Okay.

Speaker 3 17:45

Ron. Hello, gentlemen. How are you? You? Doing very well. I have something I need to thank you for regarding last week's show. Really? I'm a reformed Uber driver.

Steven Van Wie 17:47

Excellent.

Steven Van Wie 17:57

Oh, okay.

Steven Van Wie 18:00

Yeah.

Speaker 3 18:00

I only did it for about 3 months and I didn't think I was making a lot of money until you guys told me how little I was making.

Steven Van Wie 18:07

$9.01 an hour or something like that.

Speaker 3 18:09

Yeah. I'm retired and it was just something to fool around with. And I thought it was so easy that I didn't think I was going to be making a lot of money. I'm from old, the old school. You know, if you, if work was real easy, it probably didn't pay much.

Steven Van Wie 18:24

You're probably right about that. People don't realize every mile you drive on your own personal car is costing you a lot of money.

Adam Van Wie 18:32

Oh, especially at today's car prices and depreciation is going to kill you.

Speaker 3 18:37

Yeah. And that's not to mention the fact that I could not drive to the jet. I could drive to the Jacksonville airport with a passenger, but I couldn't take anybody out of Florida. I had to get back to Georgia before I could pick somebody up.

Steven Van Wie 18:49

Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. They could loosen those rules.

Adam Van Wie 18:49

Oh yeah. That will hurt it too.

Speaker 3 18:51

No kidding.

Speaker 3 18:55

25 miles where I have no chance at all of taking a passenger. So that's just dead miles. That's another gallon of gas.

Steven Van Wie 19:01

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 19:04

It costs you just as much expenses.

Speaker 3 19:08

Looking back, I'll be lucky if I even broke even, probably.

Steven Van Wie 19:11

Probably. You padded your Social Security account a little more.

Speaker 3 19:16

Yeah, that's true. Possibly. But, uh, could I take a shot at the trivia question? What do you think? What, uh, what, uh, is the, uh, how close do I have to come? Do I have to be on the head or can I give a, You can—

Steven Van Wie 19:22

Absolutely.

Steven Van Wie 19:32

I've got a little range written down here. I won't tell you how big it is, but no, you don't have to be deadly accurate.

Speaker 3 19:39

Okay. I was going to say it would take 800 $100 bills.

Steven Van Wie 19:44

You're too low by too much.

Speaker 3 19:47

Wow. Yeah. Okay.

Steven Van Wie 19:49

I can't give it to you on that range, but I can, I can have all of the other listeners thank you for putting, putting that little floor on there because nobody would be thinking that.

Speaker 3 19:59

It was my pleasure, guys. Have a great show. Have a good one. Thank you, guys. Bye-bye.

Steven Van Wie 20:03

Thanks so much.

Steven Van Wie 20:06

Kind of scary, isn't it?

Adam Van Wie 20:08

Yeah, definitely.

Joey Loss 20:08

Well, I think the '80s had a lot to do with that.

Steven Van Wie 20:10

Well, it really started right about the end of the '70s. Yeah, yeah. And when Reagan got in and Paul Volcker was trying to fix it in the early '80s, starting in '81 when he was inaugurated, then they that Congress wouldn't let him cut the tax rates for 2 solid years. So it kept the inflation higher than it should have been, and it kept the economy down for longer than it should have been. The fix was correct, but Congress delayed it because they didn't believe in it, didn't like him, all that stuff. It's a sordid story. We don't need to go into it. All right, we're going to take another break. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour on Trump 250 Day. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 20:56

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 20:57

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie 20:58

And lines are open,

Steven Van Wie 21:02

904-222-8255. And you can take a shot at the trivia question, which we just got some help with from Ron. We have a new proposal in front of Congress right now for a new $250 bill for the 250th anniversary, or birthday, as they like to call it, and it would not even replace the value that the $100 bill has today. So our biggest bill right now is $100, but it's not really worth $100 in 1969 terms. How big would that bill actually have to be to replace the old $100 at its old value, its original value? And we know that it's more than $800.

Adam Van Wie 21:45

Which also brings up an interesting thought. When people were walking around with hundreds back when they first came out, that's a lot of money. Yeah. To carry in your pocket.

Steven Van Wie 21:52

That is a lot of money.

Steven Van Wie 21:55

I remember when the, the $500 bill wasn't really common, but you'd see them once in a while and the $1,000 and the $10,000 and then all of that just disappeared because at least the excuse that I remember from the '69 when they outlawed it was they were too easy to counterfeit. And once you did one, it was worth so much.

Adam Van Wie 22:22

Yeah. That kind of makes sense.

Speaker 3 22:23

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 22:24

Kind of. Yeah. It wouldn't have made much sense at all if we were going to stay in a cash-based society. But even then you could start seeing We used to get credit cards in our mailbox. All right, we have Bob on the phone. Good morning.

Speaker 3 22:45

Hey, good morning.

Steven Van Wie 22:46

How's everything?

Speaker 3 22:48

Everything's good. How are you? We're on our way to Orlando to celebrate our granddaughter's birthday.

Adam Van Wie 22:54

Excellent.

Steven Van Wie 22:54

Get her a Trump account. Oh wait, not that young.

Speaker 3 22:58

Yep, we've got actually a blueberry cake in the car for her.

Steven Van Wie 23:04

Nice.

Speaker 3 23:05

Very nice. Hey, you have two, you have two guesses in the car because there's two of us here listening.

Steven Van Wie 23:10

It's only fair.

Speaker 3 23:12

Can we do that?

Steven Van Wie 23:14

Sure. Why not? I'm in a good mood.

Speaker 3 23:16

Mary says $1,000 and I say $1,200.

Steven Van Wie 23:21

Well, you're both too high.

Speaker 3 23:24

Sorry about that. Oh, okay. Now we have a really good bracket.

Steven Van Wie 23:28

We have a real— tiddlywinks thing here. You know, close is good enough. You're just, you're outside of the acceptable range a little bit.

Speaker 3 23:38

So, okay. Oh, outside of the acceptance range. Right. Okay.

Joey Loss 23:42

All right. He just made up the acceptance range when you made your guess.

Steven Van Wie 23:45

Depending on what you guess, I'll just trim it a little bit.

Speaker 3 23:50

Sounds like it's a moving acceptance rate.

Steven Van Wie 23:53

Not really. It moves year by year, month by month, as inflation plods along, but it's a fixed number right at the moment. All right, I appreciate it. Have a good trip. Be careful out there.

Speaker 3 24:07

Okay, you too.

Steven Van Wie 24:08

Bye. Take care. All right, people, now you know. $800 on low and $1,000 is high, and I'll let you do the math on that one. Let's get back to the Trump account for for a minute. This week the app was released, whether you have an Android or an iPhone, it doesn't matter. You just go to your store and type in the Trump account and look for the one that says— make sure it's the original, -original or -authentic or something like that. I don't know if the other ones that popped up are any good or not, but that's the one I downloaded and tested it and it works fine. So, if you want to be able to manage these things on your phone, eventually, you can do that any time now, even though the accounts won't be open until the Fourth of July. Now, I have a caution on Trump accounts also. A lot of grandparents want to do this for their kids, and grandparents know that they can open up a 529 or UTMA or something like that for their grandkids. But I don't recommend right now having grandparents open up Trump accounts, and there's a reason for it. And the reason is that is it's— there's a vague part of the law and it says in order to claim the $1,000 federal government contribution, the grandchild would have to be a dependent of the grandparents. So if you have a child who has a child and you're looking for that grandchild to get this account, go through the parents if you can. And if you can't, I would still wait a while until they clarify this regulation. So a little something to, to pay attention to. If, if you're a giving grandparent, you're interested in this thing, I just wouldn't do it yet. There's no reason to have to rush. You could even do it after July 4th and they'll still credit the account retroactive like that.

Adam Van Wie 26:12

A couple of things about this. The power of this is pretty obvious because if you put that into the S&P 500 and it yielded 10%, which is more or less what it's been doing for a long period of time, by the time that kid turns 18, that account could be worth

Adam Van Wie 26:34

$5,559. And if you took it out to retirement at age 67, that just that $1,000 investment could be worth $593,000.

Steven Van Wie 26:47

Wow. And you are allowed to contribute up to $5,000 a year to that account for your child.

Adam Van Wie 26:53

Yeah. Which we're not recommending. There are better vehicles for that money in a lot of cases. And so talk to a certified financial planner about your options if you do want to invest in your kid's future, because there might be better options than this. But that $1,000, definitely, definitely take it if your kid is born during the time period where they're eligible.

Steven Van Wie 27:18

It would be really dumb to have somebody want to give you free money and to say no.

Adam Van Wie 27:23

Yeah, even I don't care what you think about Trump or Whatever. Take the money.

Steven Van Wie 27:27

It doesn't matter. We have Bosco. Good

Steven Van Wie 27:33

morning.

Speaker 3 27:34

Morning, y'all.

Steven Van Wie 27:35

How's things?

Speaker 3 27:39

I'm out here in Fort Worth. It is cooking, baby. It is cooking good.

Steven Van Wie 27:44

I'm not surprised. Propane.

Speaker 3 27:47

I want to take a stab at, um, at the trivia.

Adam Van Wie 27:50

I'm going to go with $950.

Steven Van Wie 27:53

$950. You're just a little too high. Sorry about that.

Adam Van Wie 27:58

Good. No worries.

Speaker 3 27:59

No worries.

Steven Van Wie 28:02

Well, I can give a little here and there, but that's just outside of the range by a little too much. So we appreciate the try and there you go and have a good weekend and have fun down there. It's, it's a rockin' place as you said.

Steven Van Wie 28:21

Yeah, but I'll try. Take care of yourself. Thanks for the call. All right, Adam, you, you mentioned Anthropic and I'm going to start reading this thing. If you wonder why people like me don't get involved in things like that until a lot of time has passed, this is, this is an explanation from our guys at Bespoke of what's going on with Anthropic. Hang on, everybody. You're going to love it. The transaction seeks to provide Anthropic the capital to purchase compute at the lowest possible price. The deal sees a special purpose vehicle, or SPV, capitalized with some equity from an unreported source and a hefty debt load loaned by APO and BX. The SPV then uses that debt to purchase chips parentheses, tensor processing units, or TPUs, close parentheses, from Google and lease them to Anthropic. TPUs are a Google product but were developed in partnership with AVGO, creating free revenue for the company. That's half of this paragraph. And I'm so lost.

Joey Loss 28:23

Okay.

Adam Van Wie 29:34

Yeah, essentially it's a very complex financing scheme for additional computing power for Anthropic.

Steven Van Wie 29:40

In other words, I'm buying something with money that doesn't exist. That's the way I see it.

Adam Van Wie 29:45

Well, I think it exists somewhere.

Steven Van Wie 29:47

And who gets it? Who gives it? I have no idea.

Adam Van Wie 29:52

Yeah, that's so this whole topic of financing the, the, the capital expenditure that's going into AI right now, there's been a lot of news about it, not all of it positive. And there are— it does get people worried that there's some shell games going on to, to finance all this growth and infrastructure.

Adam Van Wie 30:12

And I think some of it's warranted. But again, when you look at the profit margins on some of these companies, they can afford to do these capital expenditures, but they are also at the same time placing large bets on the future of AI. So I can understand both sides of this argument and things like complex financing structures like that are not helping their cause at all.

Joey Loss 30:37

Well, I remember 6 months ago that that was a much bigger topic. We— that was before we saw Anthropic basically 100x their revenue. True. In 6 months. And so at that time, we saw these AI companies banding together, and that's when the AI bubble terminology was flying around all the time because we're saying, okay, well, they're all just giving each other ownership of each other's companies in exchange for cash that doesn't exist. This is very confusing. Yeah. Steve's point.

Adam Van Wie 30:40

It was.

Steven Van Wie 31:03

The only thing that I didn't see in there was one thing I didn't want to see in there. And it looks like the government is not going to play a hand in any kind of a partnership with this whole thing. That's for the best. Yes, because I am not a fan of what they did with Intel.

Joey Loss 31:15

Good.

Adam Van Wie 31:20

I don't like it at all.

Steven Van Wie 31:22

Breaching the corporation-government

Steven Van Wie 31:27

partnership. I understand that in Trump world, they did the accounting and we became worth a lot more money. Are holding. But I don't like— I just don't like—

Adam Van Wie 31:39

I hate it. I, I get, I get why it looks attractive, especially if we would have just done this with the Social Security fund. We'd be in such better shape. We had just invested it in, in part in a diversified portfolio. But the problem is now it feels like picking winners and losers, and I can't stand that in any form under government control.

Steven Van Wie 32:01

You know the old expression about the camel's nose in the tent, under the tent. You get involved in one deal like this where the government takes an equity stake in a private company and it'll happen again. And when it happens again, I'm not going to like it any better than I like it this time.

Joey Loss 32:19

Nope. Well, I only know one other country that does that and I don't like that either.

Adam Van Wie 32:19

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 32:24

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 32:24

Yeah. There is one that does that.

Joey Loss 32:26

China. Yeah. China. I mean, they do control their companies.

Steven Van Wie 32:29

It's not voluntary though. No. Yeah, you got a point there. All right. Lots more to come. We need to take one more little break and don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm laughing. Excuse me. Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 32:47

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 32:49

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie 32:50

We were just chuckling a bit during the break because there's a guy used to be— they say he's no longer with them, but he used to be a CIA agent. He lives in Virginia, and he was recently caught hiding $40 million worth of stolen gold bars in his Virginia home and a couple million in cash. And apparently he, he claimed to the CIA that he was buying these things for some project he was working on, and the project apparently was sneaking gold into his home. Which I don't think was authorized by the agency itself. But I was wondering how much it would weigh. And Joey just calculated it and it's only 600 pounds, which really surprised me. But then I got thinking about one of my oldest questions I ever did on the radio. What's heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold? You know the answer to that?

Adam Van Wie 33:55

They're the same.

Steven Van Wie 33:57

All right. How about a ton of feathers and a ton of gold?

Adam Van Wie 33:59

I would say the same.

Steven Van Wie 34:01

Nope. Feathers are much heavier.

Steven Van Wie 34:04

The ton is a metric ton for gold. It's way smaller than a ton of feathers.

Adam Van Wie 34:10

Okay. So it's a technicality.

Steven Van Wie 34:11

It is a technicality. But it just took me back to my youth. Hell, I was your age then. That's a scary thought.

Joey Loss 34:19

You're our age the last time you had a ton of feathers. Our age the last time you had a ton of feathers.

Steven Van Wie 34:22

What was that?

Steven Van Wie 34:25

Actually, I got a feather story too, but that's for another time. All right, for discussion, Fidelity reported this morning that the number of 401 millionaires has dropped this year by 20,000.

Steven Van Wie 34:45

Really?

Adam Van Wie 34:45

This year? Did that reporting come out in April?

Steven Van Wie 34:48

No, came out this morning. Hmm. What supposedly—

Steven Van Wie 34:55

what would you think? They didn't say why, they just said that.

Joey Loss 35:00

I have a guess. Shoot. Uh, wealth effect. A bunch of people retired, rolled them out. Okay, because the market—

Steven Van Wie 35:07

you know, you make some sense because By the time you get $1 million in your 401, you're going to be older and people are retiring at $10,000 a day or something like that. It's very possible. They did not lump IRAs in here. So if they are rolling a bunch of money out, that's a good one. Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 35:25

Makes some sense after the 3-year run that we've had. It's entirely possible that retire— that we might be seeing more than $10,000 a day just because it's been so good.

Speaker 3 35:35

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 35:36

One that I thought of, it could be the fear factor. When things were getting really dicey, when S&P was down 19-point-something percent recently— April, yeah. I wonder how many people bailed and never bothered to get back in.

Adam Van Wie 35:53

I don't know. It's like, this drop was— it was a little scary, but it wasn't COVID drop. It wasn't— I mean, it was hardly even the tariff tantrum drop. I mean, it didn't— I don't know, it didn't feel that bad. If you've been an investor long enough to have $1 million and couldn't ride out this April, that's kind of surprising.

Steven Van Wie 36:15

Yeah. I would have thought that number would be considerably higher than it was at the end of the year.

Adam Van Wie 36:21

I would have thought so as well. Now we've had a good year. I mean, I read the stats earlier. It's been a very good year.

Steven Van Wie 36:29

It can't have anything to do with RMDs because they would have had to be gone. By December 31st. No. So it just, it struck me as an anomaly of some sort. And I just wondered what you guys thought. I like—

Adam Van Wie 36:42

Maybe it's business specific too. Maybe Fidelity has not had a good run in their 401 business and all those new millionaires are at Vanguard or something.

Steven Van Wie 36:54

Schwab or somebody like that. Another possibility. I don't know. I don't really follow Fidelity. Very much. We see statistics and such, but I did business there for a long time in the 2000s. But then when I got into the business full-time with Schwab, then of course Fidelity was gone. But they're big and they got— they gave the number of them. What, you know, you're big when you've got a reduction of 20,000, you said? Yeah, 20,000.

Adam Van Wie 37:27

Accounts. Accounts. Yeah, that is.

Steven Van Wie 37:28

401 accounts. Those are the ones that dropped. That's just mind-boggling to me. All right, here's another one. Let's talk about SpaceX. A SpaceX rocket today is a lot cheaper than the original rockets in Russia that took the first guy into space. How much cheaper? You're gonna love this. Now, the one thing we can't figure out for sure is nominal versus real dollars. It's gonna make the point one way or the other. SpaceX today is 97% cheaper than the old Russian ones were. Now, part of that is Musk's whole philosophy on this stuff is make your own stuff and you don't have to pay everybody else. So you've got better technology, you're making a lot of this stuff yourself. And it's 97% cheaper. And I think they probably count in this reusability.

Adam Van Wie 38:25

There's a lot of reuse. I think that plays a big part in it because all of the old ones are one-time use.

Steven Van Wie 38:31

Yep. And I just can't fathom how much money that reusability factor can be worth, except when you see numbers like this. So I really don't know much about this. I'm not trying to explain it or anything like that. I just found it as a point of of interest,

Steven Van Wie 38:47

especially because the IPO for SpaceX is set for, I don't know, they said May 20th it was applied for, I think. Company is spending enormous amounts of money to help power the AI era. A lot of people seem to think that the whole IPO is basically going to fund debt, ever-increasing debt.. And whether or not that makes it a good product to buy or good stock to own or anything, I don't know.

Adam Van Wie 39:17

Well, I mean, just— we talked about it last week, but looking at just the numbers, the valuation is insane. It doesn't, doesn't make any sense. You have to project forward and project a lot.

Steven Van Wie 39:30

It's a lot of what-ifs. I remember some extraordinary number you came up with.

Joey Loss 39:33

I think we said it would take 1,500 years for the dividend to pay for the stock.

Adam Van Wie 39:36

Yeah, right. It just didn't make any sense.

Steven Van Wie 39:39

But I don't think I have time anymore..

Adam Van Wie 39:41

But then if you compare it to where Tesla trades and it— that also doesn't make any sense.

Joey Loss 39:48

Yeah, I think Tesla was at like 236 price to earnings last week or something.

Adam Van Wie 39:52

They're the largest car company in the world and they don't— I mean, they're just not. If you look at their business. Yeah.

Joey Loss 39:59

So Musk has the, you know, the Musk effect on stocks is remarkable. And so I— yeah, as an investor, you have to wonder how Is that a buy and hold because of the Musk effect or is it a— Are you just buying at an insane price and hoping that—

Adam Van Wie 40:10

I don't know.

Steven Van Wie 40:12

The opposite of buy and hold is wait and see. Yeah. I'm on wait and see. Yeah. You know, making robots and all kinds of stuff. Well, he's linking it in with AI.

Adam Van Wie 40:22

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 40:25

Like it or not, it's going to be in your 401 most likely because it's going to be added. It's going to IPO as one of the larger companies in the world and it's going to eventually work its way into the S&P 500.

Adam Van Wie 40:38

Every fund and every index that you own. So you're going to own some of it. So let's hope it works out for—

Steven Van Wie 40:45

I don't know if he's going to list on the New York or the Dallas exchange, maybe, or I don't know.

Adam Van Wie 40:51

I'm not sure.

Steven Van Wie 40:53

If I were a betting man, which I'm not, I would bet—

Adam Van Wie 40:56

I would say NASDAQ too.

Steven Van Wie 40:59

Well, I almost overruled myself on that one. That'd be the logical one. But what about the Texas exchange? He lives there.

Adam Van Wie 41:06

I don't know.

Joey Loss 41:08

I think in principle he would like to do that, but the benefits of being on the Nasdaq are going to outweigh— And because it's capital related, I think he's going to have to choose that.

Steven Van Wie 41:14

That's a good point.

Steven Van Wie 41:18

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 41:18

Well, actually, it is the Nasdaq because there has been talk about being added to the Q's.

Joey Loss 41:23

Yeah, that's why.

Steven Van Wie 41:23

Yeah. Yeah. And I think— haven't they reserved a letter for him? I don't know if it's going to be X or what.

Joey Loss 41:30

SPCX.

Adam Van Wie 41:32

Okay. Makes sense.

Steven Van Wie 41:32

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Joey Loss 41:34

Which there was like 2 months ago, somebody else had it and it disappeared. So that's how people were like, uh-oh, interesting. SpaceX is cooking.

Steven Van Wie 41:41

You said there's a lot of people retiring. I bet that was one of them. Yeah. You know, as far as I know, the New York Stock Exchange still has the letter M reserved as a stock symbol. And they've had that ever since Microsoft decided to go NASDAQ and they're leaving it open. Come on, come on. They haven't done it. Tough sell. Not these days, I'm pretty sure. All right. Here's one. I don't like this, and I'm going to tell you anyway.

Adam Van Wie 42:01

Not happening.

Steven Van Wie 42:11

I— you guys probably remember there was a change made in Social Security that eliminated the effects of the Social Security— it was called the Fairness Act, and I think it's exactly the opposite. The two rules that were repealed were called the Windfall Elimination Provision, or WEP, and the Government Pension Offset, or GPO. Those were eliminated. The reason they were there is that people were getting benefits who didn't pay into the system because they were working for companies that had a private pension or something like that. So it was only fair. But then these people reached retirement. The bunch of the do-gooders out there looked at them and said, well, they're not getting their Social Security that they didn't earn. So the Fairness Act got through Congress, of course, because everything they do to fix Social Security makes it worse. It is uncanny how many people are trying to ruin Social Security instead of fix it. But if you are one of those people who have been told that you don't qualify for Social Security spousal benefits or survivor benefits, ask again. The rules have changed. If you've never asked because you were told that you're, you're not qualified, ask. You just might be leaving money on the table these days under that provision. I don't have to like the law to tell people to use it.

Adam Van Wie 43:04

Always.

Adam Van Wie 43:10

It's so annoying.

Adam Van Wie 43:37

Yeah, I agree. It's like what you're entitled to.

Steven Van Wie 43:40

Yeah, it's like people getting unemployment benefits. I don't necessarily like the concept, but if you're entitled, just go get it, darn it. That's the way I feel. All right. Would have to be a bill with a strange value of $907.41,

Steven Van Wie 43:55

and I just added plus or minus $20 to it.

Adam Van Wie 43:57

So you guys, it does beg the argument, should we be doing a $1,000 bill instead of a $250 bill though?

Joey Loss 44:02

Oh my gosh, that'd be so uncomfortable.

Adam Van Wie 44:04

I would not carry one. There's no way.

Steven Van Wie 44:07

Well, you know, you could just use 4 Trumps or 4 Donalds, they're calling them now.

Adam Van Wie 44:12

Donalds. Yeah, I mean, I guess, but that's still 4 times the amount of bills that you have to carry around to just equal 100 from back in the day.

Joey Loss 44:19

I can't wait for the slang that's going to refer to like a stack of Donnies.

Steven Van Wie 44:24

This is probably not going to happen anyway, folks, but it's fun to talk about. Thanks for listening. We'll be here again next week, same time.