Speaker 1: The market has ebbs and flaws.
Speaker 2: I mean, when you look at market history going back
a couple hundred years, there are good decades followed by
bad decades followed by good decades, and this is just
the way the market is gone. You're going to have
a bad decade where for as long as twenty years
there may be ups and downs in the market, but
at the end of that decade or two long.
Speaker 1: Period, no growth at all in the market.
Speaker 2: And then those decades are going to be followed by
decades where you have double digit returns.
Speaker 3: You are listening to Carrie Let's's Financial Survival Network where
you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere else
to thrive in today's trying times. You need the Financial
Survival Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork
dot com and get your free newsletter in gift Financial
Survival Network now more than ever.
Speaker 4: And welcome. You are listening to and watching the Financial
Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. Will had a
little mini crash yesterday today it's December nineteenth. We had
the FED cutting rates by twenty five bases points, but
saying hold on not so fast. If you could believe
anything they say, and of course the market responded negatively.
The dollar, interestingly enough, was up. Rates went up. The
thirty year went up to roughly four point seven and change,
what is going on here? Let's talk with our good
friend Anthony's carro get the load. Anthony. Great to have
you back. So what what the heck happened yesterday?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Kerry, thank you for having me that great to
be here on FSN. Love your show. Yeah, yesterday was interesting.
You know, when I looked at the stock market in
the morning, it was up, you'll up a decent amount,
I think, I remember I was up over a couple
hundred points, and then later in the afternoon, after the
Fed chair spoke, it wound up going down negatively several percent.
The reason, as you noted in your introduction, is really
because of the fact that there was a more of
a hawkish tone set for twenty twenty five as far
as lowering interest rates.
Speaker 1: At the beginning of this year.
Speaker 2: You might remember that, you know, the Federal Reserve is
going to lower interest rates six or seven times this year,
and that didn't materialize. They've lowered interest rates by you know,
now one hundred brips, including yesterday, and they were widely
expected to go maybe another one hundred BIPs next year,
but the hawkish tone essentially said no, not so fast.
You know, we might not do that, We might not
need to do that, And of course the sock market
doesn't like that. The sock market's been banking on low
rates for decades, quite finkly and really other than the
past couple of years of rates bet up, they've been
banking on rates continuing to go down.
Speaker 1: So when Jay.
Speaker 2: Powell talks about the fact that, you know, they may
not have to lower them as much next year, that sent,
you know, the stock market in somewhat of a tail spin.
And I think it was the tenth day in a
row that the Dow Jones was down, something that hadn't
happened since. That hasn't happened since like the mid seventies
of them correct, So it all had to do with
that hockage tone. That's primarily what happened with the market yesterday.
Speaker 4: Well so interestingly enough, if we had this election, as
he said, free call capitalism or whatever you call it,
freedom is good for another four years. Anyways, we had
the failure of the continuing Resolution and pork Leyden spending
in the Congress, and that was only going to take
us for three months. And yet in the rest of
the world, all their governments are crumbling, from Canada to France,
to West Germany to China. Now that Trump's been elected,
don't you think that the international flow of funds is
going to go way, way up to the US. It's
already high because of the relative safety. You know, we're
the best We're the best looking house in Baltimore. But
now the house has got some new drapes and a
paint job, and and the lawn's been trimmed and put
in some sod and we're looking really good. It's going
to be a flood of money here, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny that, you know, the cleanest dirty shirt
of the lobby basket, right, you know, And I agree
with that everything is going haywire, you know, internationally and globally,
and America is certainly the you know, the highlight of
world economics. And you're right, that flood of money is
going to come in. It's going to make the dollars stronger,
it's going to make it harder for exporters to come in.
And then if Trump adds the tariffs, which we we
know that he's going to do. They're already there from
his pre era. He's talked about adding them, you know,
additional that's going to make things more expensive as well too.
The concern that I think the fad has and why
they were so hot as yesterday, is because GDP is
doing really well.
Speaker 1: That was also shown in the report that came out today.
Speaker 2: I think it came out at three three point one
percent if I looked correctly. But the reality is that
GDP is strong, the labor market's strong, inflation is tained,
and everything looks good, and people are feeling good about
going forward.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: That is if you're in the Trump camp. If you're
in the not so Trump camp, then you might not
be feeling so good. But the general sentiment, consumer sentiment
is up a little bit, and people are feeling good.
Speaker 1: It's the wealth effect.
Speaker 2: The wealth effect is a very simple effect that says,
the better you feel about life, the more you're willing
to spend. And right now everyone is feeling pretty good,
so people are out there willing to spend, and even internationally,
people are feeling good about America. So it's not just nationally,
but it's also internationally and if you're going to be
investing where you can invest one of the countries that
you mentioned, or you know, the country where everyone including
its own citizens, are feeling good about going forward. The
concern that I have, though, is that the market has
ebbs and flows. I mean, when you look at market
history going back a couple hundred years, there are good
decades followed by bad decades followed by good decades, and
this is just the way the market is gone. You're
going to have a bad decade where for as long
as twenty years there may be ups and downs in
the market, but at the end of that, you know,
decade or two long period no growth at all in
the market, and then those decades are going to be
followed by decades where you have double digit returned and
you know, that's just the way history is. If you
go back the last two decades, you go back twenty
five years to the beginning of the century, from two
thousand to twenty thirteen, there was no growth in the market.
Speaker 1: Crash of oh one and a recovery.
Speaker 2: We had the crash of eight and a recovery, but
no growth over that thirteen year time period. And then
from you know, for the last fourteen years, the market
has gone up well over fifteen percent a year. So
we've followed the trends that we've seen over a couple
hundred years. We had a bad decade and then we
had a good decade. And if history repeats itself, as
we know that cycles do repeat themselves hence the term cycle, uh,
then you know we could be in for not such
a good decade going forward. And all the bad decades
start with the major crash. The crash of the decade
starting from two thousand to twenty thirteen started with that
fifty percent crash in the tech stocks, you.
Speaker 1: Know as well.
Speaker 2: And by the way, since we're at it, if you
go back and you look a few years before, you
look at nineties ninety seven to ninety nine to even
two thousand.
Speaker 1: The market went straight up.
Speaker 2: And if you take a look at what's happened in
the last couple of years, market's been up over twenty
percent for two years in a row. Now it's what
if it closes above this level, it looks like it's
going to and that's something that's happened only four times
in the last hundred years. And after that, the story
is mixed, but the reality is that that that signals
just from an economic standpoint, it signals the fact that
we could have problems ahead. And my biggest fear carriers
that people that are in their sixties a little bit
behind in retirement, getting that FOMO caught up in this.
I'm gonna take all my retirement money and throw it
in in video or go it in you know, the
the QQQ.
Speaker 1: Right, go it in NASDAC.
Speaker 2: And now all of a sudden, right before they want
to retire in the next you know, one to five years,
the market crashes.
Speaker 1: Now they can't even retire.
Speaker 2: And that's the biggest fear that I have for the
baby boomers, the biggest generation you know at this point
that's that's ever retired. So a lot going on, a.
Speaker 4: Lot going on. So where do you think AI fits
into all this, Anthony? I think, Look, I'm a broad
test owner, not because I think I'm saying the world.
I'm probably doing more harm to it than anyone driving
their big Mercedes. Maybe not, who knows. I don't really
care about it. I love the experience, but I'll tell
you what. The latest update for full self driving, as
they call it, supervised FSD is I'd say ninety eight
percent of the way there. When I first started with
the FSD, which was two and a half years ago,
after they released it to the general public, that thing
was scary in certain instances. You had to watch it
like a hawk. Now the thing could drive in New
York City and avoid New York City taxis. It's a
freaking amazing thing here. But what is really amazing is
six months ago I said, and maybe six months a
year a guy I said, Oh, it'll be five to
ten years before they work this out. Now I'm thinking
six months to a year. And that's the thing. The AI.
It's not just the AI is growing by leaps and bounds,
it's the rate at which it's advancing is like nothing
we've ever seen before in life. Here, Anthony, nothing, and
that goes for coding. I'm looking at my iPhone, just
got the update, and you know, I know that the
new iOS system, a lot of it was written by AI.
There's no way they could have added all these features
this quickly without AI. I don't know where we're heading,
but we're hitting there really quickly. Anthony, Yeah, one hundred percent.
It is amazing. I don't quite understand it. I've heard
the CEO of Nvidia talking about it. And when you
listen to someone who actually knows what they're doing and
really in the forefront of it, and video is certainly
on the forefront of that. You know, it is amazing
exactly what it can do. A couple of things about AI.
Speaker 2: It certainly is going to be a massive disruptor to
your business as we know it making everyone more efficient.
Speaker 1: Uh and it's it's coming at the speed of light.
Speaker 2: As you suggested, The reality is that we get questions
from investors fairly frequently, you.
Speaker 1: Know, wanting to know how do we invest in this?
And it reminds me of.
Speaker 2: You know, investing in tech stocks back in you know,
two three, as we started to come out of the
tech crash, people were just wanting to do that. Uh men,
even even back in the late nineties, tech stocks were
even more so in the late nineties, I would say,
you know, tech stocks were the thing that people were
asking about. It then also reminds me of people asking
us years ago about cannabis. You know, it's like, what's
that one stock that's going to take us to the
next level? And what you know, what you have to
remember is you have to remember that for every Apple,
there were probably ten thousand Apple want to bees that went.
Speaker 1: By the wayside that you know, you would have lost
a lot of money in.
Speaker 2: And there are people now that are looking for, you know,
for what is the next Apple in the AI space?
And I don't think you want to be looking for
the one stock to take your money and just put
it into one company.
Speaker 1: Not a wise thing.
Speaker 2: To do, you know, if you're going to focus on
the AHI, or if that's the direction you want to go,
I think what you really be better off doing is
focus in on companies that are utilizing AI to some degree,
regardless of what platform that they're using. But AI itself
is very in some ways scary. I mean, if you're
not excited out of your mind or scared out of
your mind by AI, I think you just don't understand it.
It's it's going to be one or the other. And
quite frankly, I'm a little bit of both, you know.
I you know, on a very simplistic level, I almost
don't write an email anymore. Without AI. I can tell
chat GPT what I want the email to say, and
it spits it out A professional email in about ten
seconds that what might take me fifteen twenty minutes to write,
even if it's a simple email and it's a copy
and paste. You know, that's very simplistic using AI for
our business. I've got all of my team members using
AI when it comes to things like putting job advertisements.
You know, AI, when it comes to more advanced AI
in the pharmaceutical world, can analyze you and analyze the
results of a test in a mathematical way that you
and I or any human being could just never do.
And it's going to accelerate. It's going to accelerate some
of the cures that we potentially have by being able
to take massive amount of data and analyze them and
then give you and I, you know, the results. So
you know, so the reality is is is there's tons
of positive and all of that excites me. What doesn't
excite me is the fact that you now can be
someone that you're not so and there's a lot of
ways to do that. You know, we you know, on
a very simplistic form. You know, we're hiring people. I
just hired three new people that are all starting within
the next two weeks. And the reality is when they
submit their resume. I really now have no idea whether
it's their resume or AI.
Speaker 1: So you don't really I mean, you don't really know
whether it's them.
Speaker 2: You know, before if I would see a resume, you know,
going back twenty years, I want to hire someone. If
there's a spelling error or something, I know that they're
not attention to detail, and it's something that I keep
in my mind. Maybe I don't hire them because of that.
Maybe I do, but I know that it's their resume.
I can see their writing style, I can see how
they think. I can see if they run all their
paragraphs together. I can see whether they're spelling errors or
grammatical errors, or whether they have a flow. Nowadays, you
take whatever you are put it in the AI. You
could just give them a couple of sentences and it's
going to make you look like anything you want to
look for.
Speaker 4: A congenius, like a genius either it'll really know anymore.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, And that's that's on a simplistic level, but
on a more advanced level. I was watching a video
the other day of one of my buddies who created
a presentation, and at the end of the presentation was
about a fifteen minute presentation. We were watching great presentation.
At the end of the presentation, he got up on
stage and said, that wasn't me. You know, we were like, well,
what do you mean that wasn't you. The reality is
it was all Ai generated. It was him talking, but
it was typed in the script talking. And you now
can go hijack any other person and essentially get them
to say things that looks like it's coming out of
their mouth, but it's not really them. And that's the
scary side of things there right now, not right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is writing.
Speaker 4: Well, I just wrote a book. I took a compilation
of all my interviews with noted economist Martin Armstrong, been
interviewing him for fourteen years. I had to transcripted, I
had to clean up the transcript, and then I would
write things down to create summaries and key takeaways. But
it formatted it and it's almost perfect, and they're just
waiting for the go ahead, and it's going to go
press and I think it's a valuable book. He was
when I first started interviewing him in twenty eleven. Stock
market the Dow Jones was at just under twelve thousand.
He assured me it was going to thirty five and
then forty five. In twenty eighteen, he said it would
hit forty five thousand somewhere between twenty two and twenty four.
You spot on point is, you know, I think the
world needs to know about this, and I wouldn't be
able to publish it without the AI. It would have
cost me tens of thousands of dollars. I would have
had to have the thing transcribed and then edited and
then cleaned up. I would have paid an editor probably
twenty five to fifty thousand dollars to get this book
to the point where it is now. So it's a
force multiplier if you use it right. But at some
point it's like, what does it need us.
Speaker 1: For at all? That's right? Yeah, You're a hundrederent it right.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to be coming out with my second
edition here, and I'm going to I'm going to do
some rewrites on it probably over the course of the
next twelve months. And the first time I wrote the book,
we didn't have AI, and it was all you know, handwritten,
you know, and all my thoughts and everything else. But
there's some things I want to change, and I know
that I'll be able to go in copy a paragraph
that's currently there, plug it into AI, and tell it
this is what I want to change about it. Change
this number to this, change this number to this, bring
the current you know, the current statistic up to this,
and it will just do it automatically. And it's just
it's scary, amazing. But it's also very efficient as well too.
And you know, and I think the efficiency of it
as we start to learn how to use this, companies
start to learn how to use it. I think it
is going to go directly to the bottom line of companies.
And I think that it's something that should be exciting,
something that people, you know, will be excited about. And
there are people that are worried about it's going to
take jobs. I think as many jobs as it may take,
I think it will also replace because of the fact
that there are still has to be human beings, you know,
behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: At least.
Speaker 2: I don't believe it's ever going to run by itself.
You know, some people say that AI is going to
take over the world and you know, collapse the world.
That to me, that's garbage. I just don't see that happening.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, it's it's so interesting because you know, if
you really know how to program the AI, you can
program it to like automatically scan your emails consistently, shoot
out a summary every time one comes in tell you
which is garbage. You know, you can do things with it,
updating calendars, writing stuff. I mean, you can basically automate
eighty percent of your workflow. So it's going to be interesting,
that's for sure. In the meantime, before AI takes over,
humans are going to be running the show. Do we
expect more of the same from Trump? Or is this
really this administration going to be different? You and I
were really close in age. We've seen a lot of
administrations come and go, making promises, most of them never fulfilled.
The only times I ever saw an administration that really
wanted to change things like this where JFK, which I
was kind of young, he won the nineteen sixty election
and Reagan and then Reagan he was talking about the
Federal Reserve and all of that. Then there was the
assassination at times on him, and then it just became
more of the same, right, the corruption which led to
the Bush corruption, the CIA I ran contra. Are we
going to see something different this time?
Speaker 2: So, you know, the first thing about Trump, I know,
you know, people love him where people hate him. I
don't necessarily love the antics and the criticisms, and you
know how he deals with things. But we're not hiring
you know, we didn't hire an emotional therapist. We hired
someone to run the country. And you have to have
a backbone to run the country. And if Trump had anything,
it's a backbone that you know, most people couldn't handle
anything that or any any any of the things that
he's gone through and then still come out. You know,
in the first four years, he did what he said
he was going to do, and you know, putting tariffs.
Speaker 1: There were no wars in that four year time period.
Speaker 2: I strongly believe that, you know, if someone with the
backbone had been in the office for the last four years,
I don't think a lot of these wars would have occurred.
I think he would have kept them from occurring. And
I think that a lot of them will end. Uh,
you know, because he gets back into office, So I
think it's going to be I think it's going to
be more of the same, which was good because he
actually did what he said he was going to do.
Unlight most politicians, he got tax cuts through with tax
cuts and Jobs Act, and that you know, helped increase
profitability for for for companies. And a lot of people
don't understand that, you know, if you're on the left
or you want to tax the rich, the reality is
it's the rich that give everybody else jobs. You know,
this year, we're just finally finalizing up with our taxes.
And I paid over a million dollars in taxes this year.
And I was talking to my staff, one of my
staff members the other day, and I said, you realize that,
you know, if I'd paid half that amount, I could
hire ten more people. And that means that you have
ten more people that are actually out there productive, buying stuff,
paying sales tax, paying income tax, and and and it's
not because they you know, it's it's because of the
fact that that it's pro growth and Trump is pro
growth and all of his policies are pro growth. And
I and I think because of that, the next you know,
at least nine months or a year, I think are
going to be good. It goes back to the cycles
we talked about carry that at some point in time,
it doesn't matter whose president's cycles are going to happen,
and anything geopolitical could happen to cause us to you know,
to turn around.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think it's going to be more of
the same, which is good.
Speaker 2: But the one concern that I could have, and it's
it's not a major concern by any means, is that
this is his last term and because he doesn't have
anything at this point to lose, you know, the question.
Speaker 1: Is does he go overboard a little bit? He is
zealous for this country. I believe that.
Speaker 2: I believe that as a businessman, he sees the debt
we're in. You know, you can look at any company
and realize there's waste in the company. You could look
at the government, Oh my gosh, how many billions of dollars.
Speaker 1: Of waste are there.
Speaker 2: The fact is that he's got doze started or you know,
going to go that jaction with Musk. There there is
so much waste and you know, so I think all
that's good. But does he go a little bit overboard
because he doesn't have anything to lose? That's the one
concern that I you know, that that I could have,
although I don't, I'm not terribly concerned about it.
Speaker 4: Well that's a plus and a minus, right, And what
is overboard when the country's got, you know, facing upwards
of forty trillion dollars in debt by the end of
next year, can you go too far overboard?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 2: And you know, if they go in, it's scary to
me to think how much waste they can actually cut out.
Speaker 1: It's just going to be hard to do.
Speaker 2: What you have is you have government agencies that were
started for some reason and had a mandate and then
started moving into other things that they were never even
supposed to do moving and then no one ever checks up.
There's no guardrails on any of that stuff. And now
you've got tons of agencies that are overlapping each other,
and you go in and clean that up. The hundreds
of billions of dollars is just you know that they
could save and no one would notice. You know, I
guarantee you no one would notice with all these you know,
all this space that is going on, which is.
Speaker 4: Great because you know, we have five hundred somewhat agencies.
They said, I remember it's four hundred or five hundred.
Musk wants to cut it down to one hundred. Do
you think most the average person's going to notice other
than the consultants and the people living off the fat,
the grifters. Will anyone notice it? To Anthony, No, that's
the thing is, they're not even gonna notice.
Speaker 2: There's so many different you know, bureaucracies going on right now.
And that's one of the things with you know, last time,
you know, where he deregulated a lot of things. Look,
I'm for regulation. I think regulation needs to be there.
You can't just let the banking system run willy nilly
without any type of guardrails or without any kind of oversight.
Regulation is a big deal. But you can have too
much regulation. You have to give corporations the ability to
you know, in the freedom to be able to operate
within a structure. And the more regulation you put on them,
the less choices we have, and the more winds up
costing just for compliance purposes, and the less effective.
Speaker 1: Where you know, we're going to be.
Speaker 2: As capitalists and as owners of these corporations. And so
when you deregulate, it doesn't mean deregulate to where you allow.
Speaker 1: Everyone to be irresponsible.
Speaker 2: It just means let them do their business within certain confines,
and that is good for business. So that's another reason
why I think the next four years is possibly.
Speaker 1: Going to be good. But the reality is is these
cycles still are concerning.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the cycles, the debt cycle. You know, just getting
rid of a few wars has got to be a
big plus for the world.
Speaker 2: Huh, yeah, that's right, one hundred percent. And I you know, again,
I don't think that the wars would have started if
in fact Trump had been in office. And I do
think that they've they've got the ability to come to
a resolution. He just has the backbone to do it.
And you almost feel like Putin knows that he'll do
what he says he's going to do. You know, he's
done it before. China is a concern, you know, Shiji Ping,
you know over there, that's one of the bigger concerns
to me.
Speaker 1: And the potential technological warfare.
Speaker 2: You know, their military is built up a lot more
than ours there if they've surpassed us at a military standpoint.
Speaker 1: Over the last four years.
Speaker 2: So we've got to get back in and you know,
we don't necessarily need to get to a point.
Speaker 1: Where we're we're better than they are.
Speaker 2: We need to get to a point where we can
just defend ourselves if they attack us and make it
so that they can't attack us, or if they do
attack us from a you know, the standpoint of technology, that.
Speaker 1: It's going to be too expensive for them.
Speaker 2: So I feel like we're behind and that a we
in and I feel like that if there's one area
that they could get us, it is that technological killing
the Internet.
Speaker 1: What would happen if the Internet got killed?
Speaker 4: Oh man, that would be a massive instantaneous depression.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, think about banks not being able to
access your money anymore. We're so reliant on the Internet,
and that takes us back to AI. Carry I believe
that in the next two to five years we're going
to be just as reliant on AI everybody as as
we are now on the Internet. And that's kind of
what you were alluding to at the beginning of the show,
is that that's where it's going. You know as well too,
is we're going to be reliant on that more so
than the Internet. Imagine not having to go to uh
to Google. Imagine just being able to type in whatever
you want to Google an intent of having a whole
bunch of you know, Google basically says you type in
something you go, hey, I have a question about this
Google basically says I don't really know, but here's all
these people to go look at. Now, what's going to
happen is AI is gonna You're gonna type in a
question and you can already do this. We you know,
you type in a question about anything, and now it
knows and it takes all that information, assimilates it just
like that and gives you whatever you want. It'll give
you a college page report or if it'll give you
a one paragraph sorry, depending on what you tell it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, imagine when uh, one day when you say, what,
what's Google?
Speaker 1: That's right, that's exactly because.
Speaker 4: You're not gonna need Google anymore, basically, right, it's gonna
be right, We're gonna not anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're not. Yeah, you're not gonna need it. It's
it's going to be outdated or you know. And and
they're they're keeping up with it. So if they're smart,
they'll keep up with the AI great, and you'll still
need them, but it won't be to the degree that.
Speaker 1: We're using them right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, Well, a lot of interesting things come
and Anthony, tell us where do we find you? How
do we connect with you on the web?
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, so, Anthony, scar dot com is a
great place to go, and More Life than moneybook dot
com is a great place to go as well too
if you want to read about the ten most common
mistakes that retirees make in retirement and how to avoid them.
So Anthony Sicaro dot com or More Life than Money.
Speaker 4: All right, excellent. Hey, there's a link in the show
notes of this interview on Financial Survival Network dot com.
Please sign up for your free newsletter when you go there,
like sixty thousand other FSN members have. And I've got
a question for Anthony or myself or AI. Tell us
your experiences with AI, how it's helped you, how it's
hurt you. Kl at Carrie lets dot com is the
email address, Anthony. Appreciate your stopping by. We'll talk to
you again soon.
Speaker 1: Gary, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, your
solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to
Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than
ever