September 5th, 2026 - Labor Day Weekend

Adam, Joey & Steve banter their way through a Labor Day weekend show, mixing Florida weather jokes with a detailed but lively rundown of markets, interest rates, jobs data, and investor expectations. Callers jump in with real-world questions about lawsuit protection, umbrella insurance, and how the Fed’s rate decisions affect small business owners, sparking clear, practical explanations. The hosts wrap things in stories—like car makers’ massive EV write-downs, Trump accounts for kids, and Tim Cook adding $32 million an hour to Apple’s value—turning economics into an energetic, fast-paced conversation.

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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

And I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey | 0:08

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie | 0:09

As promised, he's back. We, we put a lasso on Joey and brought him back in now because he's been having too much fun. So he'll tell you all about it, I'm sure. Yeah. Well, he's been having too much fun for a day or two out of a few days. But anyway, I digress. Um, here we are and we're facing Labor Day weekend, which means it's the unofficial end of summertime. And a lot of places up north that makes people really sad, but down here it makes people very happy. We get, maybe lose a few points of humidity and maybe not quite so many days above 90 and And then we go into cruise control for the rest of the year and the whole spring.

Joey | 1:00

We're getting closer to that time of the year where, uh, when I step out of my car with sunglasses on, they don't fog up. That's how you know.

Steven Van Wie | 1:05

Exactly. Yeah, in fact, in our, in our house, we know when it's really humid because I'll wake up in the morning and the windows will have had condensation all over them. And, and I was— Sarah and I were talking about it just a day or two ago, because it happened. But it took us all the way to September to have a day like that. And I didn't know it. I didn't realize it until I started thinking about it. But when I walked outside, Friday, maybe Thursday, I can't remember, it was really humid. And when you think about it being humid down here, it's humid down here.

Adam Van Wie | 1:45

Yep.

Steven Van Wie | 1:45

So we'll get a little break in that pretty soon. A glorious place to live. And yet another beautiful Saturday morning in a long line of beautiful Saturday mornings. So we hope that all of you who don't live here stay where you are because we have enough people. Just keep listening. That's the only thing. Speaking of keeping listening, thanks to all the regulars. Welcome back. You're the people that we do this for. And I'd be remiss if I didn't say my usual line. You keep listening, we'll keep talking. If you're new to the show, by accident or on purpose, try to listen for the whole hour. I virtually promise you that you'll learn something useful along the way, and we'll talk about whatever we want to until somebody decides that they want to change the subject by picking up the phone, dialing 904-222-8255, and we will talk about what you would like to talk about. Rules are pretty simple around here. You get precedence over us just by calling. You can also reach us if you would, if you're kind of nervous about talking on the radio, which would be kind of not smart anyway, because we're all such nice people. We don't bite your head off. But you can get a hold of us at info@strivuswealth.com.

Steven Van Wie | 2:59

And we'll either answer the question if we get the note soon enough, but we'll definitely have it back next week. All right. All that said, interesting week in the market once again. And I'm going to just— I'm going to leave it at that and have Adam tell you all about it.

Adam Van Wie | 3:18

Yeah. Well, so the summer's over unofficially, I guess, but it is— has been a good summer overall. This week was a little ho-hum, but overall, yeah, it was not a bad way to go through the summer, although it may not have felt that way because I think we've been spoiled by some incredible runs in the market. And this summer, while it did go up, it didn't feel as good as perhaps some of the other times this year and in the past 3 years. And so I've been getting a lot of questions about, are we stuck in a rut? And then we're looking at results and we're like, well, no. Your account was up. Last quarter and this quarter.

Steven Van Wie | 4:05

It's a rut, we'll stay in it.

Joey | 4:07

Adam, the S&P only did 4.5. Are we in a recession?

Adam Van Wie | 4:10

Yeah, absolutely. So it is kind of funny that this market has started to change expectations, I think. And I mean, some of the 3-year results on even conservative and moderate portfolios are just insane at this point. It's been unbelievable. I don't wanna say it's unprecedented because I'm sure there's been a time in the market like this, but let's just say we're really grateful for how good the market has been over the last 3 years. But also—

Steven Van Wie | 4:40

Think what it could have been if the bond market weren't in a headwind position.

Adam Van Wie | 4:44

Yeah, although last year was like a roughly 7% year on the bond market. So we did get a good year finally. This year has not been the case, but again, there's still time for that to turn around too. It really depends on what interest rates do next, which I'm gonna talk about little bit. Anyways, the NASDAQ, the NASDAQ was up, as was the S&P. They're both up less than half a percent. The Dow retreated by 0.3%. So all in all, pretty flat week. Actually could have been a nice week had we not gotten good news on Friday, which really killed the market. So we'll get to that in a minute too. The first 2 months of the 3rd quarter have been pretty good. The Nasdaq is up 1.1%, the Dow up 1.5%, and the S&P up 2.9%. So again, just, it's been a good quarter so far. It just doesn't feel that way for whatever reason. So far in 2026, only one sector of the S&P is negative, and that's consumer discretionary. It's down just 0.6%. Energy has been the best performer, up 43%, followed by technology, which is up 23.1%. And the only other sector that is higher than the average is materials, which is up 15.2%. Utilities and communication services are the other 2 worst-performing sectors, and they are both up less than 2%. This week, something happened that hasn't happened since 2001. The yield on the S&P 500 dipped below 1%. Now, you might think that that's some ominous sign going forward, but it isn't. It's not really a sign of anything, but it does start to make yields on long-term Treasuries look much more attractive at today's rates. As yields march towards 5% and you're getting 1% on your stock holdings, it kind of gives you pause and makes you think, even though we've had these 3 great years where— and now expectations are 10-plus percent for a large portion of the population— 5% is also, you know, a safe 5% is nothing to turn away from. So this happened, so this has happened before, and the opposite of this has also happened. So much of, throughout much of the 2010s, when interest rates were less than 2%, the S&P yield was actually higher than long-term interest rates. Again, that was a pretty good time in stocks, But then if you go back to much of the 1990s, we're in the situation we are now, and that was also a pretty good time for stocks. So again, this doesn't signal anything in particular. I just thought it was pretty interesting that we're in this situation where the yield on the long-term Treasury is about 5 times the yield on the S&P 500.

Steven Van Wie | 7:37

There's a little underlying anomaly in there too. warming up lately is value stocks.

Adam Van Wie | 7:45

Oh, they've been pretty strong.

Steven Van Wie | 7:47

Value stocks are the dividend payers, and yet the dividend on the S&P is falling below 1.

Adam Van Wie | 7:52

So, but that could also spark interest in higher dividend yielding stocks. So that kind of makes sense. Yep. The job posting site Indeed publishes a report that shows year-to-date job listings by profession. The top 3 jobs this year are all in engineering. And if you look at the top 10, it's almost all STEM-related jobs. Not too surprising. The bottom, however, is made up of childcare, accounting, construction, education and instruction, and other various industries that almost have no correlation to each other. Just kind of a— I couldn't figure out any common thread in the ones that are losing the most jobs. So, but there was a very common thread in the ones that are gaining the most, and that is that that science and engineering type background. So if you're going to college, think about it.

Steven Van Wie | 8:43

Yeah. Anybody who pays attention to the news in any way knows that that's going on and has been for a while. Like your son, for instance.

Speaker 4 | 8:52

Yep.

Steven Van Wie | 8:52

Well, we'll take a quick break. 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 | 9:01

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey | 9:02

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie | 9:03

And I remind everyone that lines are open, 904-222-8255. And we do have, as usual, a trivia question brought to you by Paul Lloyd at First Coast Alarm. You can call Paul at 904-636-7888. Well, we recently said goodbye to one of the titans of industry of the modern time, a fellow named Tim Cook, who stepped down as CEO of Apple after about 15 years of service. He's still involved Some some way, probably just so he can get his health insurance paid. I'm sorry he's concerned.

Speaker 4 | 9:46

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 9:46

Well, he's not a pauper, but come on. Could you get by on what this guy's worth?

Adam Van Wie | 9:51

Probably.

Steven Van Wie | 9:51

Maybe. All right. Here's the question for the day:

Steven Van Wie | 9:58

What was the change in value of Apple as a company? Every hour of every day that Tim Cook served as CEO?

Speaker 4 | 10:08

Hmm.

Adam Van Wie | 10:09

Good question.

Steven Van Wie | 10:10

I'm going to give you one hint. It went up.

Adam Van Wie | 10:13

Thanks.

Steven Van Wie | 10:14

Yeah, no problem.

Joey | 10:15

Are you looking for a dollar or percentage?

Steven Van Wie | 10:17

I'm looking for a dollar amount that the company gained in value. And you're talking every hour of every day.

Adam Van Wie | 10:23

Market capitalization is what you're looking for.

Bob | 10:25

Exactly right.

Joey | 10:25

Okay.

Steven Van Wie | 10:26

And everybody should understand it. It's probably significant.

Adam Van Wie | 10:32

Yes.

Steven Van Wie | 10:32

How significant? That's why I'm asking it.

Adam Van Wie | 10:35

But CEOs get paid too much. Oh, sorry.

Steven Van Wie | 10:39

Whatever. All right. Let's, let's get back into the market wrap. There's a lot more to talk about.

Adam Van Wie | 10:44

Yep, definitely. So like I said, there's an interesting mix of professions that are losing or having less job postings this year. I don't know that that means that they're actually losing people. That just means they don't need as many people in those positions. It could be Less turnover. There could be a lot of reasons for that. On the other side, the engineering jobs—that probably is not related to turnover. More so, the growth in the in the technical fields lately, I think, is what's driving that. Overall postings are still trending a bit lower from their 2022 peak, but it's almost flattened out. And if you look at the JOLTS jobs openings report. Actually appears to have bottomed out and be increasing slightly. So that's pretty good news on the job front that we're not seeing the erosion of job creation that we were recently in the last 2 years, I would say, is when it really kind of peaked out. Never went negative or anything like that, but it has definitely slowed down from the craziness of 2022. Speaking of jobs, Friday morning saw the release of the government jobs report, and it was, I would say, way better than expected. The headline showed 162,000 jobs created versus an estimate of 55,000. The household survey was even stronger than that. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.1%, while the labor force participation rate edged up to 61.6%. All in all, I would say that's a really solid report, but it did follow a pretty disastrous July report. So let's look. My, my thing with reports is always look at the trend. Do not look at the individual report. Look at it, but take it for what it's worth. The trend here is that the economy is, is creating jobs at a slightly higher rate than it was last year. And while it's positive, it is definitely not rate hike positive on that front. We also got some good news this week with Governor Waller, who is kind of noted as the best signal for where rates are headed, saying that the current inflation situation would be enough for him to hold rates steady instead of hiking. But if the inflation prints this week are higher, he will support a hike. So I think that's a pretty good summary of where the Fed stands today.

Steven Van Wie | 13:08

Did you bring up the 55,000 jobs that they added back for June and July?

Adam Van Wie | 13:12

I did not. But that is a good thing to note.

Steven Van Wie | 13:14

You add that to the report that came out and, A, things weren't as bad as they looked, and 2, things are better than they appear. And yet you said something last week and it's been tugging away at me ever since. You said something about if you ask the average person on the street right now how the economy is, they'd probably say it's in recession.

Adam Van Wie | 13:36

I mean, if you want proof of that, go on any Facebook thread or Reddit thread that has nothing to really do with the economy and you will see someone in there saying, well, in this economy, we can't expect that. And that to me sums up where America's head is today. I think the average person feels like we're in a recession.

Steven Van Wie | 13:56

Because they're told all day, every day that we are.

Joey | 13:59

Yeah. The hard part about online though is like, that's a joke my friends and I use. Like, do you wanna pay for this? And it's like, in this economy? You know, like we always make that joke. It could be awesome.

Adam Van Wie | 14:09

But it's all context related. What I'm talking about is not a joke. Like, I think people really believe that. And I think if you did a—

Joey | 14:17

I agree with you. That was the vibe session we talked about.

Adam Van Wie | 14:19

Yeah. do a, like, a street interview and go person to person on the Jax Beach Boardwalk, I think 7 out of 10 people would tell you we're in a recession.

Joey | 14:28

Yeah. And the challenge with— you ask how the economy's doing, people don't— the definition of economy is going to be wildly different.

Adam Van Wie | 14:36

It's going to mostly be like, what do I feel about my personal situation?

Joey | 14:40

Right. It's just like, how are my financial vibes? Which is not the economy.

Adam Van Wie | 14:42

Exactly. No, absolutely not. But I still think it's a relevant uh, like kind of feeling. Yeah. Compared— like, people aren't gonna say, oh man, everything's awesome. Like, one or two of them will. Yeah. But not all. Not even close to half of them.

Joey | 14:57

Yeah. The economy?

Speaker 4 | 14:59

Blessed.

Adam Van Wie | 15:00

Yeah. No one says that. No, we're good. No. So no complaints. It's just an interesting situation to be in where the numbers all say we're doing pretty well. Not fantastic, but pretty well. But the average person is like, and things could really be better.

Steven Van Wie | 15:16

Yeah. The ADP report, private payrolls report that comes out on Wednesdays, it showed manufacturing lost 17,000 jobs. The BLS report from the government on Friday said manufacturing gained 16,000 jobs. Anybody confused besides me?

Adam Van Wie | 15:39

I mean, those numbers are a rounding error when it comes to the United States. You look at the unemployment, the unemployed people in this country, there's 7 million. So 16,000 is a rounding error.

Joey | 15:50

Yeah, I think it goes back to Adam's comment about the trend, which the trend has been positive in that.

Adam Van Wie | 15:54

Yes, very much so. In fact, we got a, uh, non— no, a— what is it— the ISM non-manufacturing— oh, that was the non-manufacturing, but the manufacturing index is at 54.6, slight decline from last month, but anything over 50 is expansion. So Anything around 55 is a really good number.

Joey | 16:16

And a few months ago, I was talking about that number at 51. So, yeah.

Adam Van Wie | 16:21

And it was not that long ago, it was 49, 48. So yeah, that's a very positive momentum in the manufacturing field right now.

Steven Van Wie | 16:29

Let's talk voluntary job quits. You want to hear something really weird? This past month, It was down to 121,000. Now, what does that mean? Or what does it seem to mean? It means to me that people are not very confident about getting a new job if they quit, because they're not quitting. One year ago exactly, the voluntary quits were 785,000.

Bob | 17:02

Wow.

Steven Van Wie | 17:03

What has happened in one year? To cause something like that?

Joey | 17:07

Well, we've talked a lot about how the job market has felt frozen relative to the years prior. And of course, this current report makes it look like it's getting a little bit better, as Adam said. But that is what the sentiment has been.

Adam Van Wie | 17:22

If you see your coworkers getting laid off, that makes you less likely to jump ship and get a new job because of the— you feel luckier to have a job. And taking a big risk in a time where people are getting laid off. You don't want to be the, the last person in because that often makes you the first person out at a new job. So I think there's a lot of psychology there that would make people want to not quit their job.

Steven Van Wie | 17:50

You're probably right. Another thing out of that report, little things that you have to dig in to find, the number of people working only part-time because that's all they could find. Combined, excuse me, dropped 414,000. They went full-time.

Adam Van Wie | 18:06

That's significant too.

Steven Van Wie | 18:08

About 600,000 people reentered the job market last month. They— we have not yet figured out why so many people aren't in it, but 600,000 came in and almost all of them got jobs or at least went to work. Now that can mean they're working for themselves or whatever. But that is a sign that perhaps there's some change. But let's contradict that with more data, shall we?

Steven Van Wie | 18:38

The Index of Current Confidence is up 5.9%, an astounding number. But the 6-month-out expectation at the exact same moment is down 7.8% to the lowest in years. So we have this— what's the word I'm trying to— cognitive dissonance going on out there. How are things? Fine. Well, how's your outlook? Awful. Something bad is going to happen. And that seems to be all over the place.

Joey | 19:13

Like if bonds could talk. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the 2-year Not looking great. Everything's moving up.

Adam Van Wie | 19:19

But everything's okay right now.

Joey | 19:20

But everything's fine. Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 19:22

All right. Before the break, on a happier note, the number of states now that require a course in personal finance to graduate from high school, they're up now where there's only about a dozen left that are— and that last number I came up with was 30. And that number's now up closer to 38 or 39, apparently. And again, Thanks to Florida and Governor DeSantis for getting that madness going. So far, who's not doing it? Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts are among the big ones. All I can say is that figures. They don't want people to know anything. They have a vested interest in leading these people around by the nose ring. So just a few little anomalies that I pulled out that I thought might be interesting. All in all, how are things truly? Pretty good. There are things I'd rather have, like $3 gas.

Adam Van Wie | 20:19

The, uh, I would agree with that sentiment. The other interesting thing was the non-manufacturing index, uh, ISM puts out. That's the services. So think bars, restaurants, hotels, all of that kind of thing. That was up to 55.4 in August. That's a really strong number.

Steven Van Wie | 20:36

Very good. And if you also look at little things, and I think you brought this up last week, the, the higher-priced airline seats, stuff like that. Yeah, they've sold out. You can't get enough of it.

Adam Van Wie | 20:50

Delta's increasing the percentage of their planes that is dedicated— that are dedicated to the higher-priced seats.

Steven Van Wie | 20:56

Yes. So everywhere you go, there are these conflicting numbers, and I absolutely guarantee that it is only because it's a political season which is even sillier than usual in economics. I'll read your quote when we get back. We've got to take a quick break. 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 | 21:19

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey | 21:20

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie | 21:22

And we remind everyone once again, the lines are open, 904-222-8255, where you can tell me what you think the value of Apple Computer The market cap. How much did that increase by every hour of every day while Tim Cook was in charge? Think big. It's pretty, pretty nice. All right, we have probably a lot more we could say about the market and all that junk, but I think it's— it's— we've beaten it bad, badly enough. You get— you kind of get the idea. What's happening here, and we're all trying to be pushed and shoved in in different manners. And I'm I'm not going to buy it personally. I hope you guys don't either. Let's see. There was one oh

Steven Van Wie | 22:16

something that I don't know how this is going to impact the economy, but I wanted to bring it up and ask you guys. You know how much the three Supposed domestic automobile companies lost on their EV mandates from the government.

Adam Van Wie | 22:31

Ford got absolutely destroyed on that. I don't know what the totals are, but the canceling the Lightning and I mean, how much R&D did they put into that truck? It's incredible. Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 22:43

Well, I'm, I'm wondering, as you were, now that Lincoln's coming back to domestic, if that some of that infrastructure at least will be able to lessen the cost of getting Navigators or whichever one it is back. And hopefully some of this— this is not the money that they lost selling cars. It is the money that they invested only to basically—

Adam Van Wie | 23:12

Yeah. So the R&D basically, not the actual the per unit price that they lost.

Steven Van Wie | 23:20

Ford, $19.5 billion in write-downs. General Motors, $7.6 billion in write-downs. Stellantis, ready for this one? For those who don't know, it's Jeep and— yeah, used to be Chrysler. Stellantis, about $26.3 billion for a tidy little total of $52.1 billion. Wow. That our car companies blew because of the mandates. How do you survive that?

Speaker 4 | 24:00

Good morning, Al, it appears. Yeah, I have a question. If you had a lawsuit against you, what's the liability on your IRA and SEP IRA and Roth IRAs?

Joey | 24:17

Adam just pointed at me. So first I should say I'm not an attorney, but I do understand Florida law as a financial planner might for this question. So in Florida, all things IRAs are totally protected except for an inherited IRA. That is the one exception. So If you have money in Roth IRAs, traditional IRAs, SEP IRAs, um, and 401s, which are protected by ERISA as well. So you have layers of law that protect those assets. Another thing that's protected is the home equity that you own outright in your home, uh, as long as it's on half an acre or less. And then there's a formula for if it's on more than that.

Speaker 4 | 25:00

I got it. Okay. All right. So you don't really— you wouldn't, uh, if you had an umbrella, you probably really wouldn't need one if most of those assets are covered, right?

Steven Van Wie | 25:13

I still— you know what the one thing about an umbrella is that nobody else can say or nothing else can do? They cover your defense. Do you want to pay your own lawyers or do you want your PLU to pay them?

Joey | 25:26

Yeah, so the answer is no, the number would not matter in Florida. That's a special thing for Florida. Numbers do matter with IRAs in other states depending on where you live. But to Steve's point, there's nothing easier than having a good personal liability policy to help deal with that. Because in practice, most of the time, if they find out you have that policy and there's a million bucks on it, that's what they're going to sue you for. And then they're going to, you know, people shake hands and it's over. Right.

Steven Van Wie | 25:50

And you walked away. I always tell the story this way. Sitting at home one day and this ugly, mean, rotten attorney walks up and rings your doorbell. And you go out to the door and he says, I'm suing you. Do you have a personal liability umbrella? And you say, yes, I do. He said, can you give me a copy of it? Uh-huh. And then he says, have a nice day, and leaves. That's it. You don't have to ever see him again. If that isn't worth peace of mind, I don't know what is.

Adam Van Wie | 26:25

But in general, I do think you're thinking about it the right way. Yeah. You, you, if you're calculating the amount of umbrella, uh, coverage that you need, you look at your non-protected assets and generally you want at least that much to cover you from losing those in a lawsuit.

Joey | 26:41

Yeah. And tongue-in-cheek, the question that we ask people is, are you throwing big parties? Because if you're throwing big parties at your house, you need more than that number.

Steven Van Wie | 26:49

That's the truth.

Joey | 26:50

And if you don't ever have people at your house, then it's probably a little bit less of a concern. Although, you know—

Speaker 4 | 26:55

Probably liquor liability.

Joey | 26:56

Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 4 | 26:58

Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate this. Did you care to take a shot at our trivia? Oh God. I would say maybe $1 million.

Steven Van Wie | 27:09

Well, I like that because it sets a bracket, but it's too low.

Speaker 4 | 27:13

Too low. Yep. Okay. All right. Well, thank you much. Well, thank you. We appreciate the call. Okay. Thank you.

Steven Van Wie | 27:20

Great question. Yeah. You know, we haven't talked about PLUs, personal liability umbrellas, for a long time. And I love that call because we got to bring up a few of the things that makes it salient. Brilliant. And I would never be without one.

Adam Van Wie | 27:33

No, I don't think I'll ever be without one.

Steven Van Wie | 27:34

Too many opportunities, especially a homeowner. They can't come and take your home away from you in Florida, but they can sue the heck out of you if somebody breaks a leg on it or something like that.

Joey | 27:46

Yeah. There's so many, like those assets are protected, but there's garnishing wages. There's all other ways to create pain. And that's why you would still want some sort of liability, as you said.

Adam Van Wie | 27:56

And even if you have—

Steven Van Wie | 27:57

I'm always discouraged by how few people insist that their clients and their friends and so on get one. But in 25, 26 years I've been doing this, I have recommended to everyone I ever met to have one. Nobody has nothing, if you'll excuse that sounding like bad grammar. You would be amazed what you have that they can get. You got a job, as Joey says, they can garner some wages and all that. Protect yourself. It's not real expensive. They don't give it away, but it's not real expensive.

Joey | 28:29

Yeah, it's a good deal for what it is, unless you've got driving-age teenagers, in which case it's going to be a little bit more expensive until they're out of the den.

Adam Van Wie | 28:39

It is, but that's insurance in general on teenagers. So, you just kind of have to build that into your projections.

Speaker 4 | 28:46

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 28:47

I had a friend back in Wisconsin many years ago, Somebody you know well who didn't tell his car insurance company either time when his 2 kids got driver's licenses.

Steven Van Wie | 29:02

He took all that. I don't know when he eventually got them insured, but he didn't tell them when they started driving that they were driving. And don't do that, people. Tell your insurance company. Pay up, because if something happens, when something happens, you don't want them to be surprised at the fact that you have a kid driving in your house.

Joey | 29:26

Yeah, definitely not. Setting yourself up to have to commit a crime to have coverage. And that's, that's not a good idea.

Adam Van Wie | 29:32

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 29:32

Actually, as someone who's been through it and is going through it again right now, Adam, you probably know as well as anybody what the potential is and what you should do about it in advance.

Adam Van Wie | 29:43

Yeah. So when they get a permit, you don't actually have to to raise— it doesn't raise your insurance. It's not until they get a driver's license that it goes up, and it goes up pretty substantially.

Steven Van Wie | 29:53

No, but—

Adam Van Wie | 29:54

But you are required to notify them within, I wanna say 30 days, but I would check on that. I'm not exactly sure, but it is a requirement and it will go up substantially. The figure that I always hear for a 16-year-old boy is about $250 a month.

Steven Van Wie | 30:13

I can believe that easily. Yeah. What's the best way when your kid does get a license? Put them on your car, get them a car and nothing, nobody else is on it? Or what's the—

Adam Van Wie | 30:28

I don't know how it actually changes, but they're basically going to be listed on your policy as a driver. And I For me, it was just the fact that we added him to the policy. It had nothing to do with how many cars. The cars all have their own coverages. And then his portion of that was just included with all of our cars. They didn't specifically, specifically ask me which ones he was driving.

Steven Van Wie | 30:56

Okay. We're going to— good morning, Bob.

Bob | 31:00

Good morning, gentlemen.

Steven Van Wie | 31:01

How's everything?

Bob | 31:03

Everything is great. I'm out picking grapes and listening to my phone in my pocket.

Steven Van Wie | 31:07

Great. Grape, whatever.

Bob | 31:11

It's a grape morning because I have grapes and the Van Wie Financial Hour.

Steven Van Wie | 31:15

There you go. Just a bit of a warning here. We've got a couple of minutes and if we want to chat for a little while, I'll probably have to have you hold through the break. Is that going to be okay?

Bob | 31:26

Yeah, that's fine.

Steven Van Wie | 31:27

Okay. All right. So what's on your mind?

Bob | 31:30

Hey, um, great, uh, market recap this morning. Um, And I can tell you entrepreneurs, people that own their own business, are very concerned. Per a conversation I had yesterday with one of my sons, that they're concerned about the unemployment rate and the interest rate and that being tied to it. Can you guys expound on that?

Bob | 31:59

You know the fact that they're tied together in terms of that's the way the Fed looks at. you know, unemployment, and they either go up or down with the interest rate to either cool it or add fire to it.

Steven Van Wie | 32:13

So, Joey.

Joey | 32:15

Yeah, happy to talk about it.

Steven Van Wie | 32:16

So he had a couple weeks off, so I'm gonna pick on him today.

Joey | 32:19

No, I like these kinds of questions. They reveal whether I've been doing my econ homework or not. So when the Fed is looking at rates, they look at a lot of things. They look at unemployment, they look at the amount of money moving around in the economy. They look at jobs. And so one of the things that they're trying to figure out is if we were to— you know what, we're about to run out of time as I start this ramble. Yeah. So I'm going to save it for after the commercial.

Steven Van Wie | 32:45

I wanted to read a quick quote and then I'll put you on hold and we'll take the break. And this is by Peter Lynch, who's a very, very famous mutual fund manager. He says, if you spend 13 minutes a year on economics, You've wasted 10 minutes. It's pretty good. All right. Please hold. We'll be back shortly. Don't go away. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour and we shall return with more Bob. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie | 33:14

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey | 33:15

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven Van Wie | 33:16

And I remind everyone that lines are open,

Steven Van Wie | 33:21

904-222-8255. And we have been on the phone with Bob. We're going right back.

Bob | 33:25

Hey, thanks for bringing that question up because that was the first 2 questions I got in my check-in with, uh, the kids on Friday night. Did you catch the interest rates? And did you look at— did you get the unemployment numbers? And you know, that's, that's how they, that's how they think. So yeah, I know, yeah, I know there's a lot more to it than that, but when you're running a business, that's— those are 2 critical numbers.

Joey | 33:48

Those things matter. And firstly, congratulations on Having 2 entrepreneurial kids, that's pretty awesome. Yeah. Um, yeah, but, but yeah, the reason that this matters is because when the Fed is looking at how to handle inflation rates, again, they can, they can impact the short end of the curve, which affects things like lines of credit, which matters a lot to certain business owners.

Bob | 34:06

Oh, you're speaking, you're speaking the language right there.

Joey | 34:09

Okay. So what they look at is, is inflation high or low? And is unemployment high or low? They look at other things than those 2, but those are probably the 2 big ones. And when unemployment is low, that says, okay, the job economy's pretty healthy. If we were to make it a little bit harder to— and if inflation's high and they want to combat it, that's sort of the combination that says to the Fed, maybe we want to raise rates because it looks like the job market could handle a little less easy money out there, which means lines of credits are going to cost a little bit more to business owners.

Joey | 34:45

And they might be able to stifle some of the spending that's contributing to inflation. Now, the opposite set of circumstances results in the opposite response. They might lower rates if unemployment's high because they think if they make it easier for businesses to spend money and hire people, then they're gonna combat some of that. But by doing that, they're probably gonna raise inflation, so they have to make sure inflation's low or in a healthy spot before they do something like that. So that's the relationship.

Bob | 35:11

There you go. Thank you. That's a good explanation.

Steven Van Wie | 35:14

I have a question for everybody. Yes. And I'll, I'll tell you the source of it once we hash it out. Is economic growth in and of itself a contributor to inflation or not, or even something else?

Adam Van Wie | 35:32

I would say no.

Steven Van Wie | 35:35

I'd at least agree with that.

Joey | 35:39

Joey?

Adam Van Wie | 35:40

Inflation is monetary. It's not—

Joey | 35:42

Yeah, I don't think it is. Bob?

Bob | 35:45

I'd say no too. Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 35:49

You know, if you want a really good short take on, on a lot of stuff like this, Larry Kudlow at 4 o'clock on Fox Business is—

Bob | 35:59

Oh, I love him.

Steven Van Wie | 36:00

Yeah. You know, he's, he's up there with the all-time greats in the economic world. And he was explaining yesterday about the economic growth and why it does not impact inflation. And it's because more productivity keeps inflation down. The bigger you are, the bigger you can get. And all the investment that goes into that is not in itself inflationary either. And the Fed is in an interesting position right now. where the things that they can control are already not inflating. They can control their level of business if they want to. They can control the unemployment if they want to by just doing stupid things. But they can't control the price of oil when it's based on a conflict in the Mideast and that sort of thing. So in my opinion, they would be very foolish to do anything.

Joey | 36:52

That's a, that's a good question to ask. I think a good example of this is also if you look at San Francisco right now, which is about to have its largest IPO ever out of the San Francisco area, which is saying something. In fact, if you take all the other IPOs that have ever happened in San Francisco, it would be a quarter of the size of the projected IPO of Anthropic when that happens. But anyway, the thing I'm saying there is obviously that means there's a lot of growth, but that growth alone is not the reason that there's housing inflation. The reason there's housing inflation is because you have a significantly limited supply of houses and you have growth. And so it takes a combination of factors to create bad inflation, and it's not the growth's fault alone.

Adam Van Wie | 37:35

If you look at the decade of the 2010s, we saw pretty good growth rates and pretty low inflation the entire time.

Steven Van Wie | 37:42

If, if you wanted to do something, to do any kind of experimentation, I would fool the public. There's a Fed meeting in 2 weeks. I'd drop the interest rate a quarter point.

Adam Van Wie | 37:55

I don't think that's the right move. I think it's hold.

Steven Van Wie | 37:58

No, that's it. If you want to try something just to prove all this out. Yes. But gotcha. But the smart thing, you and I have agreed on this completely for as long as I can remember. Don't do anything. First off, there's never been a rate increase after— within 6 months after the jobs report was negative. We had one that was negative recently.

Speaker 4 | 38:20

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 38:20

That would be unbelievable, as is raising rates going into an election cycle when you're going to be accused of— by no matter what you do, you're going to be accused of trying to interfere with it. But in this case, I think if you raise rates and Trump just appointed this guy, Trump doesn't want to raise rates. But that's less important than whether or not the raising of the rates would do anything to curb inflation. And I'd argue No, it won't.

Joey | 38:45

Yeah, I think we can look at the government's own data next month when we get the next inflation report. That's actually within the next 10 days, I believe.

Adam Van Wie | 38:51

I think it's this week.

Joey | 38:52

Yeah. And if we see that it's more than just oil and gas contributing significantly to inflation and that the effect of increased cost on oil has officially dissipated across other goods and services, now I think you're in the arena, okay, maybe we're approaching right territory. But if that's not the case, I think There's nothing that you could do that's going to help inflation. It's just an oil problem.

Steven Van Wie | 39:14

Yep. Interesting, huh? Good question, Robert.

Bob | 39:18

Thank you, sir.

Steven Van Wie | 39:20

You want to take a shot at the trivia?

Speaker 4 | 39:22

Oh yeah, excuse me.

Bob | 39:23

Yeah, I'd say, I'd say $4 million.

Steven Van Wie | 39:26

Oh, that's a lot of money, but it's not enough.

Bob | 39:30

Oh my God. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. I'll send you guys— there's some other things I'm watching on long term on what's going on worldwide. I'll send you guys an email. on some of the stuff that I'm looking at.

Adam Van Wie | 39:43

Good. Sounds good.

Bob | 39:45

All right. Talk to you soon.

Steven Van Wie | 39:46

Thanks. Always fun.

Joey | 39:47

Take care.

Steven Van Wie | 39:47

Bye-bye. Well, now that was interesting. Yep. We are winding down here. We've only got a few minutes. I'm going to leave the phones open, 904-222-8255, for a couple of minutes before we talk about the answer to this question.

Joey | 40:04

I wanted to share that Trump account note. Can I jump that in?

Steven Van Wie | 40:07

Absolutely. I knew, I knew I was having something on the tip of your tongue.

Joey | 40:11

So, um, so obviously, I think by this point most listeners will know that the Trump accounts for children born from 2026 to 2029, you get a free $1,000 injected when you open the account. Note that you have to go and open the account to get that free $1,000. It could not be easier. Download the Trump Account app, doesn't matter if you have Android, iPhone, and there's— it's very obvious where to get to the form, and it takes, I don't know, 25 clicks, and you've submitted it, and 2 days later—

Adam Van Wie | 40:38

Please do not let your hatred of Trump stop you from downloading it.

Joey | 40:40

No! If you want, we can call it a 509 account.

Speaker 4 | 40:44

Yeah.

Joey | 40:44

Because that's what it is. And at some point, depending on who political power presides—

Adam Van Wie | 40:49

They might change it.

Joey | 40:50

They might change it to calling it that. It doesn't matter. What matters is there's a free $1,000 tax-deferred available for your children. And so I've been on a quest because I have one child who was born in that time range and one that wasn't, and I want to be fair to them. So one got a free $1,000, the other did not. So I went and put about $1,000 in the second child's account. And then a couple days later, I logged in and a gift from nowhere, $250, appeared in my account.

Adam Van Wie | 41:15

But it is from somewhere.

Joey | 41:17

It is from somewhere. It's part of the Dell Foundation's gifts to people that live in zip codes with children under age 10 that have zip codes with median incomes under $150,000, which surprisingly Neptune Beach qualifies because that's what was on our tax return. I didn't— I wouldn't have thought that, but it does.

Steven Van Wie | 41:36

When, when you think about it, there's a lot of people in a lot of zip codes that are going to qualify for this. When you get the median income, was it, or average income?

Joey | 41:46

Median.

Steven Van Wie | 41:47

Median income, $150,000. That's a pretty swanky area.

Joey | 41:51

Yeah. And so, yeah, I logged in and weirdly it landed in one and not the other. So now I'm waiting to see if the other one's going to get caught up because I'm—

Adam Van Wie | 41:59

Did they not get it because they got the $1,000? Maybe.

Joey | 42:02

That's what I couldn't find. any information on that, because based on the criteria I saw, it said under 10.

Steven Van Wie | 42:09

I read a lot about this, and I don't remember ever having that question asked or answered.

Joey | 42:14

Yeah, I didn't see anything exclusive about that. It was like, if you're under 10, you live in this zip code, you have a Trump account, boom, you're in the dels.

Steven Van Wie | 42:24

If that information is available, we have another show next week at this time. Yeah, if we can pass it along.

Joey | 42:29

Yeah, if we find out definitive answers, we'll bring it to the show.

Steven Van Wie | 42:32

The best thing I've seen.

Joey | 42:34

Yeah, it's cool. So now I'm just waiting to see, is this other $250,000 going to land or do I have to do more evening up? These Trump accounts are starting to cost me a lot of money, man.

Adam Van Wie | 42:44

Thanks a lot. Wait till they get older.

Steven Van Wie | 42:46

Well, other family members are allowed to contribute, aren't they?

Speaker 4 | 42:50

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 42:51

Similar to a 529 plan. Yeah. We always tell everybody, if you're going to open up a 529, be sure to tell your parents and your Cousins and all that.

Joey | 43:00

It is actually remarkably good for that just because they set up the tech well. I'm not saying this is not tax advice about whether it's the best place to receive the money, but if you want an easy one, I mean, you literally send a QR code or a link and somebody can Apple Pay money into it.

Adam Van Wie | 43:15

Oh, that's awesome.

Joey | 43:16

It's incredible because what I've done historically is when people give birthday money to my kids, we deposit it into our account and then I go to our custodian and I put money in their UTMA. And it's like—

Steven Van Wie | 43:27

And unlike some new government websites that get set up for various reasons, this one is easy and works.

Joey | 43:34

Yeah, yeah, it's clean. Robinhood backed it and they did a good job. Yeah, it's a good partnership.

Adam Van Wie | 43:38

Nice.

Steven Van Wie | 43:39

All right, well, every hour during Tim Cook's reign at Apple, the company value went up $32 million.

Adam Van Wie | 43:51

Geez, that's incredible.

Steven Van Wie | 43:53

Take 24 hours a day times 365 times 15, and you get a big number. When you take a big number like that and multiply it by 32, you got a really big number.

Adam Van Wie | 44:05

Yeah.

Steven Van Wie | 44:06

Can you imagine that? It's, it's almost beyond comprehension that some company could be that effective. And you can credit the leadership of the company if you want to. And I would suggest you have to. You have to.

Joey | 44:21

He's going to be one of the all-time best CEOs. No question.

Adam Van Wie | 44:23

Absolutely. Yeah.

Joey | 44:24

And I— and when he came in, nobody—

Steven Van Wie | 44:26

Oh, remember that?

Adam Van Wie | 44:27

Oh yeah. You don't ever want to be the guy.

Steven Van Wie | 44:30

I mean, we felt sorry for him.

Adam Van Wie | 44:32

Yeah, definitely.

Steven Van Wie | 44:34

I took it back a long time ago, by the way. His vision for the company has been as good as Steve Jobs ever had, in my humble opinion. So, all right, well, this was really fun today. Thanks to everybody who called in and welcome Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming back, Joey. We will do the same thing next week and hopefully have just as much fun. So we'll see you then. Thanks for listening. This is the Van Nuys Report.