Speaker 1: And Hello, how are you doing. How's your Friday going?
Welcome to the Big Podcast on this Friday, the twelfth
day of December, year of Our Lord, twenty twenty five.
My name is Tom Sullivan, So man live. We got
we got ourselves at boatload today. The University of Michigan,
the football program, the coach. We now know what the
problem was there. We'll fill you in. Healthcare, the idea
about the premiums are going to go much higher. Yes, yes,
that is pretty much a given. But the Republicans are
being blamed for a program that the Democrats put in
place back of the Obamacare, and it's never been right since,
and they're blaming the Republicans for it. Minnesota, the fraud
over a billion dollars. Photos released by the Epstein Estate
today will fill you in on who were the smiley
faces on that. And if we get to the economy,
a couple of people talking about what they think the
economy is going to be doing going forward from here.
Let us start today with the coach at Michigan, Sharon Moore.
The guy had been within the you know, one of
the other coaches, not the head coach, but doing all
the various other coaching jobs. He's had a number of
them at Michigan for a number of years, and he
worked his way up to become two second year now
that he had his head coach of Michigan. Michigan is
one of the more prominent football programs in the country.
I've heard it reported they're the most winning, winningest football
program college football program in the country. And this guy's
been running the thing for the last two years. Well,
I've got a bunch of people that are talking about
this and it's not good. One of the things that's
coming to Well, what happened. Let me give you the well,
fillering with the blanks. Apparently the university found out about
the fact that the coach was having an affair with
his executive assistant and it's been going on apparently for
quite some time. The coach is also married with three
young daughters, little kids, so that wasn't good. When Michigan
found out about it, they went to the coach and
they said, you have to you have to get rid
of her. So he fired his executive assistants. What we're
finding out so far, he fired the executive assistant. She
was not happy. She has lots of receipts of love notes, messages, text,
you name it, she's got it, and she brought those
to the administration of the university. She's mad. So they
saw that and they said, okay, now we need to
fire the coach. So they called the coach in. They
fired him. Well, he is now mad and despondent. He
apparently goes over after being fired, goes over to her place.
And it depends upon which story you want to listen
to about how he got in. But he got into
her place and he was despondent. He went to the
kitchen and pulled out a butter knife and threatened to
kill himself, that she would have to watch him commit suicide.
And so this it just went downhill from there. So
she calls the police. The police come, they arrest him.
He's been in jail the last couple of days. And well,
let me play for you. This is his appearance in
court today. The prosecutor got up and talked about how
he terrorized this woman. She was afraid. He did not
threaten to hurt her, but she was afraid of the
whole commotion, emotion and him threatening suicide. Uh, so she
wanted him. She's going after him with everything. His attorney
stands up and basically didn't offer a defense. But they're
all this is all the arraignment, and so they're gonna
have He says, I don't know. I don't have all
the details. I'll figure it out by the time we
get to trial. So the judge then laid down the
law on Sharon Moore. The coach.
Speaker 2: Mister more, did you state your name please?
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 2: You are not to use alcohol, marijuana, or any other
controlled substance that is not prescribed to you. You are
not to possess or purchase a firearm or any other
dangerous weapon. You are not to engage in criminal conduct
of any kind whatsoever. You may not leave the state
of Michigan without permission of the court. Prior to your release.
You will be placed on a GPS tethers. You will
not be released before that GPS tether is placed upon you.
You must continue all mental health treatment as a condition
of your bond. The named victim in this case will
not be placed on the record. You may not have
contact with that individual. That means no calling, no writing,
no video chatting, no texting, no emailing, or any other
form of contact. The human mind can possibly fathom. No
one in the world thinks that this person is going
to reach out to you, should they do so, And again,
no one thinks that they're going to you. May not
reply in any form or fashion. The name victim's address
will not be placed on the record, or you may
not go to that location for any reason whatsoever. Are
we understood on the no contact and no go to sir.
If you have any questions about that, you have a
good attorney simply asked them. You understand. Bond will be
set in the amount of twenty five thousand dollars cash surety,
as requested by the prosecution's office. Scourt does not determine
innocence or guilt. This court determines flight wrists and community safety.
Court finds with these conditions in place, it has been met.
Speaker 1: So this coach, in a matter of this week, went
from top of the mountain to his whole career, his family,
everything shattered. I mean, you talk about the powerful falling
sky was about as powerful as you can get. So
the question is now coming out. And by the way,
he was in he wasn't in the courtroom. He was
in a remote camera at the jail, and he was
in a jail garb in this narrow little cubby. It
looked like a phone booth, but with concrete walls around,
there wasn't enough room to walk by him. It was
really tight. And so he all he ever said was yes,
your honor, and yes your honor, and he gave his name.
Rich Isisen, big sports guy for a long long time.
He goes into an area that a lot of people
are starting to wonder and Lee Steinberg I have some
from him to the superagent about when did the university
know about this? Because all of this went down, he
was told to fire to get stop the affair. Fire
the assistant the monday after Michigan lost to Ohio State,
and there's a lot of people wondering maybe or there's
in college football. That was a huge game and it
determined who was going to be the Big Ten champion.
And so Michigan lost to Ohio State. And out of
all of that, there's a whole bunch of just before that.
The week before that was the signing day where there
are a bunch of prospects, the superstar kids coming up
through the system about which university they're going to sign with.
And so that happened the week before this, so did
the university delay this until after the National Signing Day.
But the other problem behind this is is that there's
been a lot of Major league coaches that have switched schools,
and all the big powerful coaches are basically they're committed
to other schools. So where they're going to find another
superstar coach and they're going to play in. I think
it's the Citrus Bowl on December thirty first, and right
after that, I think January tewod is when the portal
opens up where superstar college kids can move from one
team to another. So this the timing on all of
this is pretty important. Here's Rich Jeison talking about how
he measures this thing.
Speaker 4: It took no less than ninety minutes after Ohio State
thumped the University of Michigan for me to hear the
rumor about this, no fewer than four times from four
different people calling me up, texting me, did you hear this?
Did you know that? Clearly there's going to be lawsuits
and recriminations and talks and this and that about all
of it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you better believe it. This woman, first of all,
who was having the affair, she is mad because he
dumped her. He was told to Donna Rotuno, is a
defense lawyer, and she said the same thing about there's
going to be lawsuits.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is such a crazy story, and as a
Michigan football fan, it really bothers me to my core.
But the bottom line here is that this is a
tremendous fall from Grace and it now sounds that we're
learning that the call did come from the assistant's home.
I think at first we were unclear as to was
it another home, but now it sounds like it was
from the assistant's home. So there's definitely a history here.
It's clear that she has these messages. The university clearly acted,
And what I find really interesting here is regardless of
what happens on the criminal side, there's definitely going to
be a major lawsuit by this assistant to the university
and she will probably walk away with the big payday.
And this coach's wife.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Michigan just had a big scandal a couple
of years ago where they were stealing signs and other
things and there were all kinds of suspensions. Jim Harbaugh,
the coach, then had to set out some games. Christine Brennan,
longtime sports reporter weighs in on this. She's also a
Michigan fan.
Speaker 3: Kay, college football is certainly one of our national pastimes.
Everyone seems invested in one way or the others an
a Lumur fan. It's huge. The money is huge. It's
getting bigger and bigger every year. Michigan University of Michigan
is one of the behemoths in college football, winning national titles,
Heisman Trophy. Of course, Tom Brady among many many others,
came from Michigan. It is the big house. It's where
I grew up going to football games. We had season
tickets for Michigan football. We watched Beauchamp Beckler beat Woody
Hayes of Ohio State. The rivalries, the aura, everything about Michigan.
You can make the argument it is the biggest or
certainly in the top five of all college football programs
in the country, a country that absolutely adores college football.
Speaker 4: Certainly, what we're.
Speaker 3: Seeing in college sports in general, especially men's college sports,
but women's too, everything's getting bigger sports. I played sports
that looked like Tiddleywinks compared to now. The money is extraordinaries.
I mentioned the TV money. Everything about college sports, especially football,
men's basketball, women's basketball do a certain degree, especially d one.
It's the wild West out there.
Speaker 2: The money, the.
Speaker 3: Superstar power of coaches, the money they're making, tens of
millions of dollars. These are the stories of people here. Obviously,
that does not mean we should have allegations like this.
This is a horrendous story.
Speaker 2: If true.
Speaker 3: What we know so far is absolutely just chilling. However,
and there's so much more yet to come. Of course,
we're being very careful in terms of reporting it. But
the big takeaway here is out of control. Football programs
out of control in many ways. We know about sex
abuse scannels from Michigan State gymnastics, Penn State, the horrors
of child rape, that's what that was with Jerry Sandusky
at Penn State under Joe Paterno, so many more over
the years. And again another story that I think so
many people are shaking their heads. How can this happen? Well,
it can happen because, unfortunately, among many stories and reasons
here with this, one is that sports are out of control.
But we're going to I hate to say it, We're
going to see more of this, not less, because of
the nature of money, the power invested in coaches and
the difficulty to keep everything under control and under review
from these major universities in our country.
Speaker 1: I think she's way over the line. Sports is not
out of control. It's a very popular business. But the
NFL makes more money, and they had their problems. They
had their bad boys. So it's not like there aren't
bad boys in banking as well. I mean, it's just
but there is a lot of money and a lot
of pressure to win. John Bacon has written a number
of books on the history of Michigan football. Here's what
he had to say.
Speaker 6: That story changed yesterday morning when she went on the hill,
as we say, the administration office, with the receipts, the
text messages, the emails, documents and so on, laying out
the details of their relationship and the conflicts thereof, and
that of course resulted in Shuran Mare being fired.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that story did change, but the story is still
coming out. I mean for two days they wouldn't say boo,
and now we know that there was a very sad episode.
I mean, it was a guy wanting to commit suicide.
He knows his career is over. He was making almost
six million dollars a year. That has been he's not
going to get another dime because of the contract talks
about no money if any moral interpitudes or to clause
the wife and daughters, the lawsuits from this woman's going
to sue him. I don't know if he'll wind up
with a dime when all this is said and done.
At Lee Steinberg, who I've known for many years, he's
probably the number one super agent, especially in college and
pro football. He thinks that not just the coach, but
the university may have some trouble as well.
Speaker 7: So I think the question will be what did they
know and what did they do with the information they knew.
There's some question as to whether admitting this after the
letter of intent day which commits the new crop of athletes,
was something they were aware of and postponed. But this
is one of America's most prestigious academic institutions and strongest
sports power, and so there's going to be tremendous scrutiny here.
It was only a couple years ago that a spygate
situation ended up with the university being fine, and so
what happens to the flayers on campus who might want
to leave Michigan or might have made another choice if
they understood what the facts were, what happens to alumni,
given what happens to the transferportal that will come up
next month, the ramifications move in many different directions, so
there's going to be tremendous focus on the university president
and the athletic director to see what they plan to do. Director,
He've got a situation here where there's going to be
all sorts of shrewdiny, all sorts of retrospect and potentially
sanctioned in one way or another, Which is sad because
Michigan said a great program, but this is stunning in
the middle of a situation where I head football coaches
are being paid exorbitance amounts of money and they have
tremendous value.
Speaker 1: So the question is is the university going to be
drug into this as well? Like Lee Steinberg said, how
much did they know? There's one more clip from Lee.
Speaker 7: Because reports are still coming in. As again it's a
question of who knew at the university, when did they know,
and then what did they do about it? And again,
the one timeline that's for sure is that athletes committed
to University of Michigan for their athletic future and football
future without knowing what the scandal was about to be
and was that fair to them? So it's sad for
the victims. It's you feel some empathy for a man
who's trying to commit suicide. It's just a bad news
story way around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a bad news story everyone where you look.
We'll see where this goes for the coach, for his family,
for his for his career, for the university, for the players.
I think Lee is exactly right. There's a lot of
these are superstar players that had their pick of which
university they wanted to go to. They chose University of Michigan,
and then they find out after they have committed that
all of the plans that they had are all thrown
up in the air. All right, Speaking of scandals, the
Epstein estate brought out a whole bunch of new photos today. No,
not nude new photos. Listen, turn the volume up. This
is no, it's not funny because these are these are
This is also a tough thing to deal with because
of the heinous crimes against these young ladies. But there's
photos of all these people that you don't know if
they were involved. Were they at Epstein's house, Yes, But
does that make them guilty of anything? This is let
me look at the list here. There's the photos today
that I have seen. It looks like people normally just
visiting with other people. Yes, Donald Trump is in some
of the photos, but we know that he and Epstein
used to be fairly good friends. Bill Clinton's in some
of the photos. No surprise on either of those two.
Richard Branson, Bill Gates, No surprise. Mister Andrew formerly known
as Prince Andrew, Steve Bannon, Woody Allen, the movie producer,
Alan Dershowitz, Larry Summers. There all these photos and they're
in these photos. So did they have a friendship with Epstein?
Epstein cultivated these kinds of friends. Did they do anything illegal?
We don't know, but it's advancing the things that have
come out. This again came from the Estate, the Department
of Justice. The law that was passed and signed by
the President last week. They have until I think the
nineteenth to get all of their files released out there. Massey,
the Republican from Kentucky who has been one of the
leaders trying to push for the Epstein files to be
fully released, reacted this way today.
Speaker 4: But we'll see.
Speaker 8: Have you seen some of these photos that Democrats on
the House Oversight Committee put out this morning from the
Epstein estate. I have not Generally, the DJ is on
the clock. They have less or just about a week
to comply with your law and release files. Do you
have faith that the Department of Justice will do that
and comply with the law.
Speaker 9: I've been encouraged. They went back to the three judges
and asked them to release grand jury material in light
of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and all three judges
have reversed their prior stance, but for a good reason.
They cite the Epstein Files Transparency Act. So you've got
three grand juries that are going to release all their
materials redacted with the victims' names to the DOJ. So
it's a good sign that the DJ went back and
asked for that grand jury material.
Speaker 8: If DJ doesn't release the files it has by next Friday,
is there anything Congress can do to compel that to happen.
Speaker 9: Well, I mean it's a crime if they don't. It's
not like they're in contempt of Congress because they didn't
respond to a subpoena. This is a new law with
criminal implications.
Speaker 4: If they don't.
Speaker 9: Follow it, but I was encouraged again by the fact
that they went back to these three judges and got
the judges to release the grand jury material to the DOJ.
Speaker 10: Thank you.
Speaker 9: Is that grand jury material enough, you'd think, if you
comply with the law. No, the grand jury material is
just a small fraction of what the DOJ needs to
release because the FBI and DOJ probably has evidence that
they chose not to take to the grand jury because
the evidence they're in possession of would implicate other people,
not Epstein or Maxwell. So the grand jury material is
probably going to just be mostly facts and evidence that
was used to convict those two. And what we want
to see are the facts and evidence that the FBI
and the DOJ have never given to a grand jury.
Speaker 1: And when they finally released that, we'll see just how
much is redacted. Another scandal that's out there across the
country today, this is the one in Minnesota where there
have been over a billion dollars worth of money stolen
from the state programs federal programs in the state of
Minnesota by Somali citizens who are sending the money to
Al Shabab, the terrorist group in Somalia. So Governor Tim
Waltz addressed it.
Speaker 10: Today, we are a state that chooses not to let
people go hungry or homeless or uneducated. However, that generosity
has been taken advantage of by an organized group of
fraudsters and criminals. Any amount of fraud is too much.
That's where over the last several years, we've made many
systematic changes to state government to both detect fraud and
hold those accountable after it happened. Year after year, we
brought new ideas to the legislature to stay ahead of
the evolving tactics. And they are evolving.
Speaker 1: Well, you could tell he was reading off of something prepared,
probably by the legal staff in his office. Jason Shave
is the former congressman from Utah. What reacted this way?
Speaker 11: No, I don't buy any of what he's saying. First
of all, they asked the attorney general there, Keith Ellison,
if he would have done anything different. He said, no,
this didn't happen on day one. This happened over a period,
a long period of time. Those are the allegations. And
he reads this statement like, oh, our state chooses to
be generous and help the downtrodden and the needy and
educate our kids. Every state does that. Every state does that,
but they don't have the waste to fraud, the abuse
the open borders that allow these people to come in
and take advantage of Americans like this. He's a sanctuary
state's sanctuary city. So if ice can't get in there
and do the work that they need to do, so
nobody's buying a governor. And then to utter the word
Donald Trump as if he had anything other than cleaning
up the mess that this guy made. Donald Trump has
nothing to do with this. His words are not dangerous.
He's pointing out the obvious. He wants to deport the
people and hold other people accountable.
Speaker 7: That's what should happen.
Speaker 11: Instead, this governor stands up, stands up like a clown
show and says, you know we're trying. No, you're not,
you're failing.
Speaker 1: Oh, once again, we've got another story that There's a
lot more to come on this Minnesota fraud story. But
I don't think Minnesota is alone. But they happened maybe
be the largest fraud, but so much fraud being taken
from government funds, and government just doesn't have their arms
around it. They just do not the economy. Well, before
we get to the economy. Let me get this in well,
trucker's Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary is cracking down, wants
to crack down on truckers. He says, New York is
just one state that is handing out commercial driver's licenses
without any kind of review.
Speaker 12: The reason we're here today, as we've done this nationwide audit,
we found the worst defender, which is the state of
New York. fIF of New York's non domiciled CDLs were
issued unlawfully or illegally. So what New York does is
if an applicant comes in and they have a work
authorization for thirty days, sixty days, one year, New York
automatically issues them an eight year commercial driver's license. That's
contrary to the law. That's one offense. But we also
found that New York many times won't even verify whether
they have a work authorization, they have a visa, or
they're in the country legally. So they're just giving eight
year commercial driver's licenses to people who are coming through
their DMV and sending them out on American roadways. And
again they're endangering the lives of American families. I don't
like that I have to do this, but the law
requires me to do this. I'm going to give New
York thirty days because that's what the law requires to
come into compliance with the rules that have been long
standing at the Department of Transportation. If they come into compliance,
we're going to work with them. If New York refuses
to come in a compliance because Kathy Hokel for some
reason believes that we should have on qualified truck drivers
on American roadways, we are going to pull tens of
millions of dollars as phase one for the state of
New York. We don't want that to be the case.
We don't want to have conflict with New York or
California or Minnesota. That's not the mission here. The mission
is to get compliance to make sure we have safe
commercial drivers on American roadways and Americans are safe. That
is the mission. But if we have state governors who
are unwilling to cooperate and collaborate and make sure that
Americans are safe, we will use every single tool at
our disposal to make sure they do come in a compliance,
and if they don't, the federal tax payer, the American taxpayer,
should not be funding these states. So we will pull
every dollar possible from every single state that's not willing
to work with this administration and these long standing rules
to make sure that when American and a family gets
in a car, they shouldn't be worried that they have
an unqualified foreigner operating an eighty thousand pounds big rig
that could endanger their lives, by the way, or an
unqualified driver operating a motor coach. Again, if you get
on a bus you're going to travel across the country,
you'd expect that driver has been well trained and they're
well qualified to operate that vehicle. We've seen in recent
news stories that that's not the case. And when bad
drivers that aren't qualified from other countries drive a bus,
many people get hurt and some people die. We find
that to be unacceptable, and again, we will use every
tool at our disposal to make sure that this ends well.
Speaker 1: He said New York was the worst of all of them,
but there's apparently a lot of states that are doing
the same sort of thing. New York, fifty three percent
of the commercial driver's licenses are issued illegally, fifty a majority.
I'll tell you what, I'm going to start looking more
carefully at the trucks on the road around me to
see that they look like they know what they're doing
the economy. Here we are on Friday. David zerbos he's
head investment guy over at Jeffreys, and he was on
the short list to be the next chairman of the
Federal Reserve, and he was asked today about where he
sees the economy going from here.
Speaker 13: Because I think the forecast that the Fed gave us
in the SEP was actually quite remarkable. We saw growth
revised up across twenty five, twenty six, and twenty seven
by seven tenths, so they're much more optimistic on the
outlook for growth, almost no change in the unemployment rate
over that same horizon, and the inflation rate was marked
down three tenths. So I took away this look that
the overall committee, the nineteen members, actually are really embracing
the supplies scrough. They're embracing this productivity story, They're embracing
this idea that we can grow without creating a lot
of inflation risks. And I think that's much more dubbish
than the setup we had, which was for folks to
think that this was going to be some sort of
hawkish hawkish cut by j Powell and by the committee.
Speaker 1: Well, like he said, he almost was considered, almost chosen.
He was in the top ten to be the next
FED chairman. He's not in the top five. But he's
a smart guy and he thinks that basically the FED
cutting interest rates this past Wednesday by a quarter of
a percent was not hawkish. He thought that they laid
out of decent growth, productivity growth, economic growth for two
thousand twenty six. Austin Goldsby, who is on the Federal
Open Market Committee, he's the president of the Chicago Fed. Uh,
let's check it see if he agrees with Zervos.
Speaker 10: Well, looks.
Speaker 14: You know, I've been saying for months I'm pretty optimistic
that for twenty twenty six rates will will be able
to be a fair bit lower than they are today.
But I've just been uncomfortable front loading too many rate
cuts and assuming that what we've seen in inflation be transitory.
It's all amplified by the data being shut down, and
so I just felt that we ought of weight that
we don't lose a lot, We don't take a lot
of extra risk in my view, to just wait to
Q one twenty twenty six and make sure that we're
back on path to two percent inflation.
Speaker 10: I don't know that.
Speaker 14: I see it exactly the same way, in that most
of the measures of the job market have been pretty stable,
and the chance that things in the job market would
fall apart rapidly within one to two months before we
would revisit this again feel relatively low. We're in this
environment where anything measured in rates like the unemployment rate,
the layoff rate, the vacancy rate, et cetera, those have
shown stability. Where you've seen the number fall off has
been raw aggregate monthly payroll. But that's the one with
the biggest question mark because because of immigration, because of retirements,
we don't know what the break even is. So as
we look at an environment that's been characterized, I would say,
is this low hiring, low firing. It's worth remembering that's
not what the business cycle looks like. You have low
hiring high layoffs, or you have low layoffs high hiring
for both to be low at the same time. To me,
that says more like uncertainty than it does slow down.
Speaker 1: Well, uncertainty leads to slow down. I mean, if you're
uncertain about where the economy is going to go when
you have you own a business, are you going to
be out hiring a bunch of people. No, You're going
to wait. So uncertainty does lead to slow down. But
that's Austin Goulesby's take on it. Wall Street. Today, we
set some records yesterday, we undid those records today. Dow
Jones Industrials down two hundred and forty five. Coming off
the record yesterday, we're at forty eight thousand and four
fifty eight. The S and P down seventy three, the
NASDAC down three hundred and ninety four. Gold was up
seventeen dollars to forty three twenty nine. Oil was down
a few pennies fifty seven dollars for a barrel of oil.
So that's it for today. Have a wonderful weekend. We
will be back on Monday, and I hope to see
you then