July 18th, 2026 - The "Vibecession"

Hosts Steve, Adam, and Joey kick off by unpacking a wild two weeks in the markets, from Iran-driven oil and rate jitters to a sharp global tech and AI sell‑off tied to a new Chinese large language model. They balance the bad headlines with surprisingly strong earnings (think Taiwan Semi, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley), robust housing starts, rising auto sales, and eye‑opening stats like record-low jobless claims and 1,200 new U.S. millionaires created every day in 2025. Along the way, they dive into retirement readiness versus flashy car spending, explain “accredited investor” risks with products like Yrefy, and warn listeners not to let politics or “vibecession” pessimism derail long‑term investing.

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 0:07

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie 0:08

And we have yet another in our fantastic string of beautiful Saturday mornings up here on the first coast. And everybody should go out and enjoy it. I suggest right around 11 o'clock.

Adam Van Wie 0:21

Yeah. After this. Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 0:22

I figured I'd get a little acknowledgement there anyway. To the regulars, welcome back. You're always here. You keep listening. We keep talking. That's the way it works. And working now into our year number 12. I can't believe that most days, including this one, but it does go by and here we are. So let's keep at it. New people, if you stumbled on this or somebody told you to listen or whatever, try to stick around the whole hour because during that time we virtually guarantee that you'll learn something. I remind everybody, there are no dumb questions because your job is to make us look smart. So the easier the question, the better answer we give sooner. And it is important to us. You know, the reason we've been doing live radio basically all of my adult life, it's different than other radio. And the difference is you. Because when we go off on our various and sundry tangents, we're going to say what we want to say and talk about the subjects we want to talk about. We don't really know what you're thinking out there. So if you pick up the phone, dial 904-222-8255

Steven Van Wie 1:36

and give us your question or statement or whatever, and we'll talk about what you want to talk about. So all that said, we missed last week. As you all probably know, there was a very important funeral service for our former producer of many years, actually. And that brings us to our new producer, Lance, who's watching me right now. And I have already cleared with the boss that it's okay to give him the rules. Every new producer gets the same rules. If the show goes flawlessly with no gimmicks, glitches, anything, it is 100% the quality of the host. On the other hand, if it doesn't go absolutely perfectly, it is 100% on the producer.

Steven Van Wie 2:24

And he understands completely. So don't try to trip him up though. He's a young man and we're very happy to have him. We're of course devastated by what happened, but that's out of our control. Anyway, um, Since we missed last week, we'll give you a little bit of what happened over the last 2 weeks. And it's as easy as this: good week, bad week. There. How'd I do?

Adam Van Wie 2:48

Yeah, that's not a bad summary.

Joey 2:49

I'll take it.

Steven Van Wie 2:50

You can probably expand on that a little bit.

Adam Van Wie 2:52

Actually, a lot has happened in this time. But first, before we get to all that, I have to say happy birthday to my beautiful wife. She's 29 again. Again. For— this is the first time that's happened. Yeah. She's old enough to drink.

Steven Van Wie 3:01

Again?

Joey 3:02

Yeah.

Joey 3:05

Yeah. She's been 29 for what, 5 years now?

Steven Van Wie 3:09

Something like that. My sister, when she got up about that age, started counting backwards. And after a few years, she said she's— she has been counting backwards so long she was no longer able to drink legally. So she had to reverse and start.

Adam Van Wie 3:09

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 3:24

Good plan. But yeah, happy birthday.

Steven Van Wie 3:27

Yes, happy birthday.

Adam Van Wie 3:28

It does seem like just a couple of weeks ago that the Iran war was winding down. Oil prices were falling pretty fast and interest rates were also falling. And the dollar looked to have peaked after running up to a recent high. That's because it was just a couple of weeks ago. But what a difference a couple of weeks makes. Iran is pretty much seemingly unable to stick to whatever promises they have made. And so we have resumed bombing and the Strait of Hormuz is basically closed again. Oil is climbing and, and interest rates are also on the rise. So it's— but a lot has happened in the last two weeks and none of it really good as far as the market is concerned. How does all of it end? We thought it already had. And Iran has almost no functioning military. And but apparently they're just not going to go down without testing the limits of our resolve. So I have no idea how this is going to end at this point. It's— but I will say, we've said it before when this all started, as long as oil is going up and interest rates are going up, I don't think the market is going to do very well. The good news is there isn't much more Iran can do to fight back and there will be some sort of resolution to this and oil oil prices will come down eventually, as will interest rates.

Steven Van Wie 4:46

So the other good news is July is a terrible month normally, so all this is happening in a month where we don't expect anything anyway.

Adam Van Wie 4:53

That's, that's a fair point. Um, yeah, but so again, I, I think that, I think that it's pretty clear that this all will resolve. I just— the timing is extremely unclear of when that will happen. I think that the, um, the pressure is on to get it resolve sooner rather than later. And so will that work? I don't know, but I do think that there is a clear path out of this. I just don't know what and when that looks like.

Joey 5:22

Yeah, and I'm sure you have more to share on the market, but we said good week, bad week. I'm not convinced really that the bad week is that much related to what's going on with oil in Iran. It seems like there's other factors that have really hit the market this week.

Adam Van Wie 5:35

Maybe, maybe. I mean, it was definitely a tech sell-off. Globally, um, and that is probably not related to that. But I do think the timing

Adam Van Wie 5:46

for it to happen when all of this is going on, I think it's too much of a coincidence to not be related in some way.

Joey 5:52

In some way. I just don't think it's the heaviest factor.

Steven Van Wie 5:55

You know, do you know how long, how much backwards we went? In other words, what was the last day that the Dow and the NASDAQ were at their level after this horrible sell-off?

Adam Van Wie 6:05

You mean like the all-time high or a 50% sell-off?

Steven Van Wie 6:08

No, just from this, from the last time they were at this level. Oh, what day? For both of them, it happens to be the same day, June 26th.

Adam Van Wie 6:13

I don't know.

Steven Van Wie 6:19

Duh.

Adam Van Wie 6:20

Okay, so a few weeks ago.

Steven Van Wie 6:22

Yeah. Yeah. So there's nothing in the panic button arena there, I don't think.

Adam Van Wie 6:28

Yeah, it was, it wasn't a pretty week in the market, but it wasn't devastating either. The NASDAQ led the way lower. It was down 2.9%. The S&P was down 1.6%, and the Dow was down 0.9%. So much of the losses were in AI-linked tech companies, and that was especially true overseas. As I mentioned, the 10 largest AI tech companies across Asia have dropped 24% in the last month. Thursday was especially brutal, with the Japanese market dropping 2.7% during the session, with the end, uh, it actually closed below its 50-day moving average. So that's never a good sign. The Japanese tech sector dropped 6.1% on the same day, and the financial sector was down 4.9%. So you can really point to, uh, the heavy, heavy losses in the tech sector dragging down the market. And I think that's what Joey was talking about earlier, saying that it wasn't the Iran situation, that it's actually more AI-related. A lot of that was due to, um, the release of Kimi K3. It's a new Chinese, uh, large language model by a company called Moonshot. It's an open-weight model, meaning code will be released publicly, and that happens, uh, on the 27th of this month. So anyone can download it and run it, and apparently it's much cheaper to run than the leading US models, including Claude and ChatGPT. This news also, uh, cratered the Chinese tech sector, which dropped 7% and brought their overall market down 3.6%. This isn't the first time a Chinese large language model release has brought the market down. In fact, you only have to go back to the first quarter of 2025 to find the last time this happened with a large language model called Deepseek, which brought the NASDAQ down 13.2%. So if you're having a little bit of flashbacks, not surprising. It was just last year that this happened. Pretty interesting. So we're, we are coming up on a break here pretty soon. I have a little bit more to get to. Um, there actually was some pretty good news this week too. It just got overshadowed. Overshadowed by a bad market.

Steven Van Wie 8:24

Okay.

Steven Van Wie 8:28

Okay, well, after we pay a few bills and come back, we will have a trivia question, of course, and then we'll get back into the market. And there's, there's a lot to say about a lot of things. I haven't even asked Joey what he's been watching, but I like his first observation that I think this whole tech thing— the, the thing I keep reading, the word I keep reading lately is rotation. Yeah, and rotations is another way, in my lingo, of saying profit-taking. Yeah, take it out of this thing, put it over there. They call it rotating, I call it being smart. We'll be right back, don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 9:12

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey 9:13

And I'm Joey Lusk.

Steven Van Wie 9:14

And I remind everybody, the lines are open: 904-222-8888.

Steven Van Wie 9:20

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

Steven Van Wie 9:33

One of the interesting things that's been going on for quite some time now with the market on a general increase is that there have been a lot of millionaires created over the last several months and years. How many millionaires were created in the USA per day in 2025? New millionaires per day in 2025. And if this doesn't surprise you, you're a lot smarter than I am.

Adam Van Wie 10:04

All right, yeah, good question. So despite that bad news in, uh, uh, the stock prices in the tech sector, Taiwan Semiconductor released its earnings on Thursday, and it showed that their sales are growing at a 30% year-over-year pace and show no signs of slowing. Net income beat by about 13%. Operating margins were about 2% better than expected. They also raised their CapEx estimate by 15% to accommodate new plants despite already having 6 plants under development currently. Yeah. So do they think that the, the AI thing is going away? Absolutely not. European automaker Stellantis reported much stronger than expected sales volume this week, led by a 14% beat in North America. Wow, that was a pleasant surprise to the upside and very unexpected. And you can probably tell by Joey's reaction, he was not expecting that either.

Steven Van Wie 10:56

Well, look at the interest rates we've got now. They're not given free and 0.1. No, those things—

Adam Van Wie 11:03

no, you're getting like 6 to 9% on car loans if you have good credit.

Steven Van Wie 11:07

But One thing that I've been noticing for quite some time now is the quality of American cars is getting so much better. And I know this technically might not be called American cars, but to my—

Adam Van Wie 11:20

well, they have several American brands under that umbrella, like Ram and Jeep. Yeah, but they are technically a foreign company.

Steven Van Wie 11:28

And as Adam knows, the Ram truck is very popular with good reason.

Adam Van Wie 11:32

Yeah, I have one and love it. That's my second one, actually.

Joey 11:34

So.

Steven Van Wie 11:38

I don't want to talk about cars necessarily, but what I have found, and you have found fairly recently, is they've decreased the number of cylinders on these good-sized cars. I drive a 4 and you drive a 6, and if anything, they're quicker, more powerful. It's amazing what they've done with internal combustion motors these days.

Adam Van Wie 11:59

Yeah, I talked to a lot of people that are like, I wouldn't buy a truck with with a 6-cylinder. it's pretty awesome.

Steven Van Wie 12:03

What if you— Yeah, the price and drove the thing.

Joey 12:06

Absolutely.

Adam Van Wie 12:07

Oh, so yeah, that is a big change. Um, so yeah, I, I was, I was surprised to see that though. I did not think we'd see auto sales going up when, when the narrative is clearly that the, the economy is not doing well. But that is not the sign of a bad economy when 14% increase in auto sales. Anyways, um, on the other hand, IBM reported a sales miss of 4% and a forecast of what appears to be a pretty bad report. That report is actually coming next week, but they released like a pre-report and it was ugly. Their stock dropped like a rock. Um, their revenue decline year over year appears to be about 7% total, with the bulk of that decline coming from the software business. So this could be a case where AI is significantly damaging their business. Um, but to be honest with you, I'm not sure what IBM does anymore. Do you know? I, I don't know.

Joey 12:57

I honestly haven't paid attention. they're just like out of the interesting rotation for me.

Adam Van Wie 12:59

Yeah, I'm just not—

Steven Van Wie 13:02

Basically a consulting firm from what I know.

Adam Van Wie 13:05

They do a lot of consulting and that side of their business wasn't down as much apparently. Um, anyways, BlackRock also reported this week and showed a 9% increase in inflows to their funds and their, um, their— that resulted in an earnings beat of about 10%. So apparently the economy is not slowing down people from investing right now. Morgan Stanley reported an earnings beat of 18% on higher revenue across all of their lines of business. Overall earnings for the second quarter seem to be off to a good start with a beat rate on both revenue and earnings that is above 70%. So I don't think that the market is going down on bad news from companies right now, which is, which is really good news. There was a few interesting

Adam Van Wie 13:55

economic reports this week. Housing starts rose 19% in June. 19%. 19%.

Steven Van Wie 14:00

Interesting.

Steven Van Wie 14:03

I missed that one.

Adam Van Wie 14:04

Yeah, kind of off the charts good in that. And then retail sales were up 0.2%. That's a solid post. But the biggest number of the week was that the CPI, which is, which measures consumer prices, declined 0.4%. That's the largest drop in about 5 years, I think.

Steven Van Wie 14:24

So that was, that was a really good number, followed immediately by the producer prices.

Adam Van Wie 14:29

Yeah, that one was not— I think it was

Adam Van Wie 14:32

steady?

Steven Van Wie 14:32

Mine? Well, it depends if you do the core otherwise, but -0.3.

Adam Van Wie 14:37

Okay.

Steven Van Wie 14:38

In other words, folks, we're getting some deflation. In other words, we're getting some actual price drops, but it's only because things are getting back to normal. It's not because things are bad out there.

Adam Van Wie 14:50

With an asterisk, they were as oil prices came down, but now oil prices are going back up. So who knows what's going to happen here.

Steven Van Wie 14:57

Truflation this morning was up to 2.02. Which is a lot higher than it was even a week ago.

Adam Van Wie 15:03

Yeah, I feel bad.

Joey 15:04

We've got a host— like, I have literally a list of clients who are like just hanging on for the next opportunity to refi. And they keep getting— it's like they go from red to yellow and they get excited, start putting their gas on, and then it goes back to red over and over. What a bummer.

Adam Van Wie 15:10

Oh yeah.

Steven Van Wie 15:21

Yeah, that is funny.

Adam Van Wie 15:23

Yeah. And so, yeah, so it wasn't all bad news. There was a little bit of bad news this week, but it wasn't— it didn't match the market movements. The amount of bad news. It was actually fairly positive overall.

Steven Van Wie 15:34

Well, the other thing that's happened, there's an inflow in equities. If you, if you look at BlackRock, they— something like $9 trillion or I can't remember what it was. Maybe it was 9%. But they're selling off certain things right now. And as we were talking, is it profit taking or rotation or whatever? But equities and ETFs are actually getting an inflow. Buck of money. People aren't running to the money markets, although fixed income is also booming. Yeah, new money. That's true. Well, you know, we've got interest rates that you can get on bonds now over 5%, which is fantastic. And if the market rates go down, they go up.

Adam Van Wie 16:14

Yeah.

Joey 16:17

Is there any bias in that from the creation of the Trump accounts? That's a pretty big inflow.

Steven Van Wie 16:24

Like, that's a very good question.

Joey 16:25

Like, if you— I wonder what those— with those— because SPYM is the fund that's in these Trump accounts. Mine got set up in the last 3 weeks for my son. I didn't fund it. You know, the government did. And, um, I just— yeah, that's probably a big number.

Steven Van Wie 16:35

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 16:38

It wouldn't— this whole concept wouldn't have worked unless they did automatic funding.

Adam Van Wie 16:43

It is, it is a big number, but is it really a big number compared to the amount of volume that goes through SPY on an annual basis?

Steven Van Wie 16:52

The biggest, the biggest volumes I was seeing as I was looking over history were back in June, and these things didn't get funded until the 4th of July. So. I don't think it's as big as when the market actually is looking to make some changes.

Adam Van Wie 17:06

Yeah. And plus they're trickling in $1,000 at a time. Over time. So it's, it's not like that all happened on one day. That, that, that July 4th day was probably the biggest day that will ever happen because there were so many people in the backlog. But now as new babies are born, it's going to just happen on that pace. So I don't think it'll be a huge effect going forward.

Steven Van Wie 17:09

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 17:27

Yeah. There were some changes made in some of the indices too. Who was it? A notable one got kicked out because stock doesn't go anywhere. And I should have written it down, but I forgot.

Adam Van Wie 17:38

You're talking about in the S&P? I didn't catch that.

Steven Van Wie 17:40

S&P. Oh, and by the way, SpaceX,

Steven Van Wie 17:46

this has a bearing on things. SpaceX went public with that gigantic IPO. And in the last week, they have lost one $2.6 trillion of market cap.

Adam Van Wie 17:58

It's trading below its $135 IPO price.

Joey 18:01

Yeah, it's $124 right now.

Steven Van Wie 18:02

Yeah, I told everybody I didn't have any interest in this thing at all at the IPO price or above, and I'm not ready yet, but I'm looking at it. It's down from $2.6 trillion valuation to $1.6.

Adam Van Wie 18:16

Yeah, that's a big change.

Joey 18:17

It is. It just makes it a normal IPO for the last several years. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's nothing really abnormal about it. It's just, it's funny each time you're like, oh, this story though, it's going to be so great, and then it does exactly what every other—

Steven Van Wie 18:29

yeah, the only, the only part of it that has that bearing, I think, was the hype on this one was so big.

Joey 18:36

It was crazy. I was feeling it that day, like, watching. I was like, oh my gosh, where's space? You know, I was like, Elon got me.

Adam Van Wie 18:37

It was crazy.

Adam Van Wie 18:44

I didn't buy any, but I mean, you can just— knowing what they do and knowing what the possibilities are, or not knowing what the possibilities are because they're so vast. It is a cool— you can see this stock really being something huge in the future.

Joey 18:57

Yeah, I mean, you— when I was watching the coverage that day, I couldn't help but wonder, I was like, you know, what companies compare to this, you know, from our time? It's like Amazon, Google, these companies that genuinely changed life. And, uh, I was just trying to kind of forecast what does that mean for us in 20 years.

Adam Van Wie 19:09

Yeah, Apple.

Adam Van Wie 19:14

Things that they're doing, I, I think if you go and look, if you could look forward 20 years and, and see what, what's actually happening with that company, it would be— it would blow your mind.

Joey 19:22

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 19:23

I think one of the more consequential parts of it was probably going to be Starlink, which is a— It is. And you've noticed the first airline now has converted to it. And you have basically office-speed internet while you're sitting on an airplane. That is a world-changing event for a lot of travelers.

Adam Van Wie 19:29

which is an amazing product already.

Adam Van Wie 19:35

I saw that.

Adam Van Wie 19:41

That's awesome.

Joey 19:44

If Starlink was its own company, I'd probably be a buyer. Definitely like it.

Adam Van Wie 19:47

I would too.

Steven Van Wie 19:47

Oh, absolutely. Well, I think he's smart to consolidate a lot of those things because some are burning money and some are throwing off money. And you know, when you got to put the things in orbit yourself because there's no government anymore that does it, and he's doing that too.

Steven Van Wie 20:05

What are you going to say? Who's going to bet against Elon Musk and the intelligence and capital and everything that he brings to the table? Not this guy.

Adam Van Wie 20:14

Yeah, who knows what, what will happen with the stock price. It's, it's anyone's guess. But if you were betting that the company will do well, I, I think I would be a buyer.

Steven Van Wie 20:27

There are also car companies that are going out of the electric car business every day in favor of the hybrids, but he's not going to change. He's going to do the electric ones. So all the electric demand now is starting to consolidate around Musk. I think he's going to keep a market share that's going to make that company— Tesla should be getting better and better, I think. So there's a lot to think about, a lot to talk about, and we'll continue doing exactly that after another short break. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 21:04

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey 21:05

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie 21:06

I remind everybody, lines are open: 904-222-8255, where you can take a shot at this

Steven Van Wie 21:12

trivia question. In, in the year, the entire year of 2025, how many new millionaires were created every day?

Steven Van Wie 21:25

Think generously. I don't give out my clues very generously, so you got to take them for what they're worth. All right. I just asked the guys here an opinion on something This is, this is from a recent, um, I'm not even sure who it was that put it together, but the compilation is very recent because it has to do with the first half of this year and we're only at the 18 mark in July.

Steven Van Wie 21:54

There, we've been talking about the job market that just doesn't seem to change much. And this statistic caught my eye. The first half of 2026, saw the lowest level of jobless claims since— wait for it— 1969,

Steven Van Wie 22:13

when I was a sophomore in college. Was the last time layoffs have been this unusual, this low, in other words. And I just thought that was something very, very intriguing.

Steven Van Wie 22:27

The college graduates that happened 2, 3 months ago, They're not meeting every sector with good news, but one of them is healthcare, and they are hiring a lot of people and laying off virtually nobody. So if you're thinking of an area that you'd like to get involved with, that might be one of them. And you also know that that particular sector is very big on AI. AI is going to help the medical system a lot in what they do. So if you're one of those people that understood that learning AI was a really good idea. It's just another reason that you were right. So something to think about.

Joey 23:06

I look forward to the day that AI produced cost savings in that sector, because I was talking to an agent this week about healthcare, and, um, that's expected to go up in the realm of 11% next year for premiums on private company policies.

Steven Van Wie 23:20

Ouch. Yep.

Joey 23:22

I was just like, golly. Yeah, they're hiring. They have better technology than ever. Care costs more.

Adam Van Wie 23:28

What doesn't make any sense—

Joey 23:29

what is going on?

Steven Van Wie 23:30

Let's, let's go back for a minute and have a little flashback to when we were talking about cars. This, this is disturbing, this one. It's from Investopedia, and I, I like those people. I read them a lot. Um, a lot of workers right now have retirement balances that are smaller

Steven Van Wie 23:50

than the value of their cars.

Steven Van Wie 23:53

What is wrong with this picture?

Steven Van Wie 23:57

Better yet, maybe what's right with this picture? Not much. Perhaps people are finding that their preferences and inclinations and wants and all that aren't quite what we would like them to be. So if you're one of those people that's paying lots and lots and lots of money on a car payment. You know how many of them now have 4 digits in them. You may want to rethink things for a little while. Young workers who can put some money away are going to be the old workers who have some money. The worst thing about compounding and investing in general is how long it takes to be truly successful. And every year that you go by and put it off, means it's going to be that much longer until you're truly successful, or when you get out, you're not going to have as much money as you feel like you need, and you'd probably be right. So just something to think about there. There are some rules of thumb about how much you should have at certain ages. And I don't take a lot of stock in this, but I'll buzz through a little bit and just tell you what some of the experts are saying. By age 30, you're supposed to have retirement savings equal to your annual income. But by 35, they say twice your annual income. What does that mean? You better be pounding it away when you're 30 years old, by the time you're 30 years old, and keep at it. And then by 40, it's 3 times. Age 45 is 4 times. You see, They're, they're adding big increments for every 5 years and you get up to age 60, 8 times your annual income, age 67, 10 times your annual income. Those are heavy numbers. If you're making a hundred and a half or two, when you hit age 60, 65, something like that, then that means you gotta have a lot of money. And as we all say in the office, more times than I could count. A million dollars just doesn't go as far as it used to. It's the truth.

Adam Van Wie 26:07

It does not.

Adam Van Wie 26:10

But I really, I really don't like using your salary as a, as a guideline for— Yeah, I think there are much better ways to set goals related to what you're going to spend in retirement rather than what you earn today. Yeah. And salaries are, are changed— can change dramatically, especially in your peak earning years. You might earn $40,000 for the bulk of your career and then something happens, you start a company and suddenly you're earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which number should you use as the baseline there? I just don't think that's a very good way to do it.

Steven Van Wie 26:14

I'm not big on that either.

Steven Van Wie 26:44

Yeah, that is— that's a tough thing about doing what we do when we're here is that when we're in the office, we're giving advice to people individually and it's tailored to what we know about them and what their situation is. Here we're trying to generally just give out concepts so people can learn. If we don't teach anything else, I like to say we teach people what questions to ask and who to ask them of. So by the time they get so far as to schedule an appointment to come into the office and see one or more of us, then they already have some concept of why they're doing this. It makes it much easier. So always remember that what we're doing here is not telling you what to do. We're telling you what can be done and how to find out more about it and ask questions.

Joey 27:32

And when we do that individualized advice, it focuses almost entirely around the expenses of the people as opposed to just random income choices. Because to Adam's point, it could look really different in different chapters of life, but spending tends to be a lot less volatile.

Adam Van Wie 27:46

Yeah. As you make more money, you generally spend a bit more, but it's not a 1-to-1 ratio. Your spending doesn't always increase exactly what your income increases.

Steven Van Wie 27:57

All right. Question for the general audience. How many of you are hearing ads for places like Y-Refi? And there's a couple others. And have you noticed that in the lead-up to those or during the course of the discussion, there's a term called accredited investor? Anybody know what those are? You know, when you're just using it in a narrative about a product you're doing and you say accredited

Steven Van Wie 28:28

investors can do this this or that or the other thing, what does it mean? And it— there are actual several ways that you can be deemed an accredited investor. For instance, if you have a $200,000

Steven Van Wie 28:42

annual income, $300,000 if you're married, for 2 years in a row, you're accredited. Or if you have a net worth over $1 million excluding

Steven Van Wie 28:54

the equity in your home, you can be accredited. Also, for instance, if you're a certified financial planner like all of us in this room are, we're accredited by designation of the licenses we have. Now, how long has that been true? I couldn't find any change ever in it. Apparently that $1 million thing has been decades long. The $200,000 thing has been decades long. You know what that means now? Take an inflation chart, that means today an accredited investor, $200,000 income and a million, is not a big hitter like would have been true 40 years ago with those same numbers. And this concerns me. It's not something I gave a lot of thought to for a long time, except now there's a congressman in Michigan who's trying to lower those standards.

Joey 29:38

That's true.

Adam Van Wie 29:50

Standards. Lower them.

Steven Van Wie 29:52

Yep. Now I'm going to ask you guys for an opinion on this proposal, and I'm not going to lead you by nose ring or anything like that. What would you say if every client of an RIA were deemed an accredited investor?

Adam Van Wie 30:11

That's ridiculous. Why? Because you can be a client with no money. I mean, we take We sometimes take young couples that have a decent income and a bright future but don't have any money saved. So what, what about that situation would mean you're accredited?

Joey 30:12

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 30:28

Well, that depends on one thing. What does being an accredited investor get you? What, what benefit do you get from that?

Joey 30:40

The most common thing we see is, you know, an accredited— there'll be an accredited investor requirement on illiquid investments, certain private credit funds, things that have a place in a high net worth portfolio where there's a lot of liquidity and the investment on the table is something that would represent a small piece of their overall picture.

Adam Van Wie 30:59

In most cases that you could afford to go to zero and it wouldn't affect your overall picture, right?

Joey 31:04

And the idea is like this, this little thing is going to behave significantly differently and has different risks than the rest of my portfolio. I've got enough money. I'm willing to take that bet. If you lower the accredited investor thing, I mean, a lot of these products have very sly investor— or sales processes. And if they're getting people to invest in this instead of the whole spirit of the Trump account, for example, which is invest in the top 500 companies in the United States in the public markets, very different ethos between those two sets of investments. One of them is a good idea in my opinion, one of them is a very bad idea for someone with not a lot of money.

Steven Van Wie 31:35

I couldn't agree with either of you more. I hope they get this thrown out because it, it is not giving people the privilege of doing anything except failing as a long-term investor. That's the way I look at it.

Joey 31:49

A lot of these investments don't work out. Some of them do, and they do tremendously well, but it's just a different risk profile. I don't have any and I don't want any at this point. It's not for me.

Adam Van Wie 31:57

You know, I don't either.

Steven Van Wie 31:59

Have you guys looked into Yrefy and what they do?

Joey 32:02

No, no. They're in my inbox all the time. But I don't read them.

Steven Van Wie 32:05

They are— they, they pick out troubled student loan people. Yeah, they buy them for, for the deep discount. They're like 30 or 40% on the dollar. And then they somehow believe that they're going to get paid all this money back. Now, when I hear this, little bells are going off in my ears going

Adam Van Wie 32:10

Oh, I know that.

Steven Van Wie 32:31

Danger, danger, Will Robinson.

Steven Van Wie 32:33

This is not for the faint of heart, investing that way. Now, it's a lot different with SoFi. That's a much different thing. And I'll, I'll bring that up again right after the break. 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 32:51

Hi, I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey 32:52

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie 32:53

And lines are open, 904-222- 8255, where you can take a shot at this. In the year 2025, how many millionaires were created in the USA every single day? We don't have any boundaries on this yet. All right. Um, I wanted to wrap this thing up on the Yrefy. If you remember in the Yrefy ads, which are ubiquitous, the, uh, the, all the investments, so to speak, they're all fixed income and it rises by the number of years you're willing to commit. And for 5 years you can get supposedly 10.25%

Steven Van Wie 33:36

annually fixed. Now, interest rates are higher than they were, but how risky do you have to believe something is in order to believe that you're going to get paid out at 10.25% a year. That is beyond my risk profile personally, and I would never suggest it to a client. You know, somebody says they're going to do it, fine. Get an account with them, keep it out of our business and buy away. Adam says he's been contacted. He met the guy that does this and gets contacted all the time. But the guy's wasting his time as far as I'm concerned.

Adam Van Wie 34:16

I don't normally speak for Adam, but it's not something that would be appropriate for our business. But, um, but yeah, I mean, if you're an accredited investor and you're doing it on your own and you feel like it fits your risk profile, that's on you. But again, this is why accredited investors— that rating or that designation exists.

Steven Van Wie 34:34

Yeah, exactly. And I guess that's one of the reasons that I started getting into this whole thing about accredited investors, and then Course, when I saw that article about the Michigan congressman trying to make it even easier, that just hit me hard the wrong way.

Adam Van Wie 34:47

I wonder what the— it's got to be like a fairness argument, like, oh, why should these people have special privileges or something?

Steven Van Wie 34:54

Yeah, yeah.

Joey 34:55

Well, I don't know if you look at the data over the last 20 years, it would be not favorable to private markets. I mean, public markets have been so excellent, way outperformed in general. We have a podcast that There's a podcast that Adam and I listen to that is literally just 4 technocrats talking all the time. These guys are $100 million billionaires and they're just talking about the market from their perspective. And they're talking about how even participating on the private side of all of these amazing ventures, which they have access to, we don't, a lot of people don't, those have underperformed. If you just owned like the NASDAQ 100 and some of these other indices of public markets that everyone has access to for a fraction of a cost.

Adam Van Wie 35:32

And these are people who got rich by investing in a single company, right?

Steven Van Wie 35:37

Peter Thiel, people like that. Yeah.

Joey 35:39

Now this is a selected time period that won't always be true, but I think if there's a time to make the argument about fairness and that wealth lives in private markets exclusively, this isn't really that time.

Adam Van Wie 35:50

Yeah. Well, and just look at the millionaire creation. I guarantee you 90% of those are people that had just invested in the stock market and have 401s. Oh, for sure.

Joey 35:59

I mean, 2025 was a what, 25% year for the S&P?

Adam Van Wie 36:02

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie 36:03

Yeah, um, back to this topic a little bit. Um, SoFi, a lot of people have heard of that. That is a much different company. It's subject to the accounting rules, and they make loans to people that are secured, all kinds of loans— housing, student loans, everything. A much, much different entity than the other. And if anybody wanted to look at owning that, I would not have a problem helping with a little research on it. Not that I've done it, but to me, when you listen to the two ads, they sound too similar and they are not similar. Just so you all know where we stand, that the risk involved with an accredited investment is horrible. So one of the big companies now is developing a tracking index for private

Steven Van Wie 36:58

equities. And I read that and said, why?

Steven Van Wie 37:02

Why would you do that?

Joey 37:05

Why wouldn't they? I don't know.

Steven Van Wie 37:06

It just seems crazy.

Adam Van Wie 37:07

I don't think it's crazy because I think it's interesting.

Steven Van Wie 37:10

Well, maybe for the right people, but for routine investors, I just— I don't see it. And here we have 3 generations roughly sitting in this room right now, and sometimes we get a little different viewpoint on them. And at my age, no, thank you, but I won't invest anyway. All right. So you wanted to— Yeah, I mean, things.

Joey 37:35

So on the earlier, we were talking about the relationship between people's car choices and the size of their 401s. I wanted to talk again. I know we bring up the Michigan survey all the time. I guess Michigan's just the topic today.

Joey 37:49

The Wall Street Journal just put out an article commenting on this, which means it's a very serious topic if Wall Street's finally talking about it in their paper.

Adam Van Wie 37:59

We're talking about the Michigan Consumer Confidence Survey, correct?

Joey 38:02

Yeah. Thank you. And so the question, the whole premise of the article was, is the survey broken? Which is the thing that we've discussed many times on this show. For one, sentiment is at record lows. Which is— and it's worse than the 2008 crisis, worse than peak COVID. Makes no sense when you look at the underlying data of how people are actually choosing to navigate day to day right now. Growth is above 2%. We've had steady unemployment, relatively speaking, very steady. Um, we got recession odds at a 1-year low. As I mean, that may have changed in the last week, but it's still pretty low.

Adam Van Wie 38:19

Makes no sense.

Steven Van Wie 38:39

It would have to get a lot worse before that.

Adam Van Wie 38:40

I think so too.

Joey 38:41

Yeah. And stocks near highs again this week. The NASDAQ was only down a couple of percent, which is the

Joey 38:46

most volatile of all the indices. Overall, not a terrible week. And that gap between sentiment and those several metrics has never been as wide as it is right now.

Steven Van Wie 38:57

And it's politically based, largely politically based. And that— there— don't let your politics influence your investing. If there's a single thing I could tell young people who wanted to get started in long-term investing, it would keep politics out of it.

Adam Van Wie 39:01

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 39:16

Yeah. Going back to those millionaires, if those millionaires today that are being created at this record pace had pulled their money out during years that they didn't agree with the government, regardless of party affiliation, they would not be millionaires.

Steven Van Wie 39:33

They would have somewhere between probably $200,000 and $400,000 based on the stats. Instead of having a million.

Adam Van Wie 39:39

Exactly.

Joey 39:40

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 39:41

That's right. So do— it is such a bad idea to let your political thinking influence your investment decisions.

Joey 39:49

And if you look at what people are doing— so watch what people do, not what they say— retail spending has held up even as the sentiment is down. This week, retail stocks gained 2.5% while the rest of the market fell, which is how we led the episode. Yeah. So it's, it's like, how is it possible that— I would imagine many of these people who contributing to the story of negative sentiment in the surveys are then turning around and either buying a bunch of things at stores, right, because they feel good enough to do that, or buying the stocks that represent those stories.

Steven Van Wie 40:03

Amazing, isn't it?

Adam Van Wie 40:21

It's just, it's astounding to me that the, that politics has— I mean, it's really taken over people's lives to the point where they can't answer a survey objectively because Donald Trump is the president or Joe Biden, whatever, it doesn't matter. But like, it's just, it's crazy to to me.

Joey 40:37

So what the article ended with was that we're in a "vibecession" where it feels like a recession to enough people. They're just calling it a recession even though nothing that they're doing actually matches the vibes. It really is.

Adam Van Wie 40:43

Vibecession.

Adam Van Wie 40:48

That's incredible.

Steven Van Wie 40:50

And when you see the breakdown between the left, the right, and the middle, it's just astoundingly different. These people have no clue what reality is on the outside. And if they wanted a job, they can get one. We still have, what, 6 million, uh, kind of the right age for working men in this country who don't have a job and don't look for one. Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 41:01

No.

Steven Van Wie 41:16

There's— are there that many trust funds out there? No, I didn't think so. I, I don't get it. Uh, how about this one? Taylor Swift has been in the news a lot, but not for this. There, there have been times in the past when if somebody had a neighborhood and a celebrity moved in, they'd be really excited. Well, Rhode Island is not experiencing the excitement of Taylor Swift having a magnificent beachfront property because the powers that be in Rhode Island decided they're going to sock it to the oceanfront homeowners, many of whom have been there for generations, and their house is now worth a lot. But they don't have money and they don't have the kind of place she does, but they're all mad at her for being in their neighborhood now because their taxes doubled overnight. How's that? Be careful, people, what you wish for. All right. Um, it doesn't appear that anybody's going to take a guess. I think everybody, including Adam and Joey, going to be surprised. Throughout 2025 in this country, there were 1,200 millionaires created every day. That is astounding

Adam Van Wie 42:34

Mm-hmm.

Steven Van Wie 42:38

to me. Maybe you guys follow it close enough that you know what's going on in the world, but 1,200 a day for 365 days. That's fantastic. Is this a great country or what?

Joey 42:53

And 500 of them every day were 26-year-olds working at NVIDIA or Google.

Steven Van Wie 42:59

And I do suppose that a good follow-up question would be, I wonder how many of them fell out of that class this week? Yeah, yeah, you just never know.

Joey 43:08

Hopefully they, uh, took some profits at some point.

Steven Van Wie 43:11

All right, then since we got a few seconds left here, how about this one? How many of you know Paul Krugman, the so-called economist? Familiar with him? He's the one that said if Trump gets elected, the market will crash. And then they said, well, when will it come back? He said, never. One of the reasons was tariff policy. Well, Paul Krugman just came out this last week and said, you know, looking at what's going on, I think there are some tariffs that might be necessary. Because we're finding out that free trade meant fair trade, and they never factored that in. And by the way, this is a mea culpa on my part too. I was guilty of that several years ago. I did not equate free trade and fair trade. So the free traders of the world are coming to, uh, apologize for some things. I could not be happier about that.

Joey 43:20

Yeah, I know that. Yep.

Joey 44:10

All right, that's widespread. That's becoming a broader position politically now. It is. I've listened to a podcast from the New York Times periodically when there's a good episode, and they did one on Xi Jinping, and they talked a lot about unfair trade and tariffs.

Steven Van Wie 44:24

Okay, well, on a final note, in our closing seconds here, happy 29th birthday, Jessica.

Adam Van Wie 44:29

Once again.

Steven Van Wie 44:30

Again. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour.