December 20th, 2025 - Pre-Holiday Consolidation

On this lively Saturday morning, the Van Wie Financial Hour team delved into the intricacies of recent financial market trends, holiday broadcasting schedules, and the curious effects of AI in the job market. Amusing banter interspersed the discussion as they examined economic reports, market corrections, and fiscal policies, while listener Greg chimed in with insights on LNG and AI energy demands. With a blend of humor and expertise, the episode wrapped up with reflections on long-term care planning and cheerful holiday wishes.

Transcript

Steven H 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 0:05

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 0:07

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 0:08

And we are all here on this Saturday before Christmas. And I think there'll be a couple of us here the next week and the week after that.

Adam Van Wie 0:16

Right. I will not be here over the next couple of weeks. I have some upcoming travel that I need to attend to.

Joey Loss 0:23

I will be here.

Steven H Van Wie 0:24

Good. Okay. So that's my way of reminding everybody, don't just assume because it's during the holidays that we're not going to have a live show next week or the week after. That's not true. We will be here and hopefully you will be here also because as I always say, if you keep listening, we'll keep talking. In fact, it's usually harder to shut me up than to get me to.

Adam Van Wie 0:48

Talk that I can absolutely affirm that statement.

Steven H Van Wie 0:52

Yeah, I wasn't looking for controversy

Steven H Van Wie 0:56

anyway. To the regulars, thanks for always being there. You know, you know who you are and you know how much we appreciate you. And if you're new to the show and we're just looking for something different or if you heard about it or whatever, we know it's growing by leaps and bounds. So try to stick around and find out why and we'll let you know that you will probably learn something in the next hour that some of it might even be useful. We kind of hope so. Meanwhile, we will have a trivia question after the first break and we'll talk about what we want to talk about. Unless you pick up the phone and dial 904-222-8255,

Steven H Van Wie 1:34

in which case we'll talk about what you want to talk about. And boy, is there a lot of talk to do. Very interesting week.

Steven H Van Wie 1:45

Kind of mixed bag, but quite frankly, I was kind of pleasantly surprised at the overall outcome based on everything that was going on. I'll let Adam speak to that if he agrees with me or not. But we walked away okay.

Adam Van Wie 2:00

Yeah, it wasn't bad. It was mixed. We had the Nasdaq and the S and P both posted small gains while the Dow posted a small loss. That's sort of the opposite of what's happened this month with the Dow being the only index that's positive, while the Nasdaq and the S and P have small losses. But really what's going on is that we're seeing a period of consolidation in the market and that's okay after the year we've had I'll take it. If we could just end the, if we just ended right now, I'd be happy with this year. It exceeded my expectations and I think everyone at this table's expectations by a decent amount. So we really. Nothing wrong with seeing those periods of consolidation, especially after a big run up like we've seen over the last three years. It was interesting because we saw the market fall in the first half of the week, but then it rebounded pretty strongly on Thursday and Friday and had some really good momentum going into the weekend before the holidays. Kind of makes you wonder, is there a little bit of a Santa Claus rally coming next week? Wouldn't shock me if that was the case. The economic news was a bit mixed over the week, but it, we saw some government reports released where it was kind of, we're unsure about how much of the data they were actually able to collect because of the government shutdown. So there's a lot of questions around the accuracy of these reports. And of course, the politicians on both sides were claiming either know it's right or it's wrong based on whatever narrative they were trying to craft. So it's. That didn't help.

Adam Van Wie 3:40

It added more uncertainty to the overall validity of the reports. But I'm still going to talk about them because they were pretty, pretty important reports. And we saw the three that I'm talking about were the November jobs report, the retail sales report and the CPI report. The jobs report showed a headline number of 64,000 jobs being added in November, which was slightly higher than the 50,000 that was estimated. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6% from 4.4%. The report also showed that 105,000 jobs were lost in October and another 33,000 were lost in September. So that brought the net loss for this report down to 74,000 jobs. Now that sounds terrible, but it's actually not that bad because much of it was due to downsizing in the government, which shed over 270,000 jobs since Trump was inaugurated. In October alone, 162,000 jobs were downsized within the federal government so that the loss for October was 105, 162

Adam Van Wie 4:47

were federal jobs. And so the private sector actually added jobs in October.

Steven H Van Wie 4:52

So round of applause?

Adam Van Wie 4:54

Yeah, so like I said, it wasn't as bad as it sounded. Another 6,000 of the jobs that were shed in November were federal government government jobs as well. So really not, not that bad. Overall, private sector payrolls were increased by 52,000 October and 69,000 in November. And the Increase in the unemployment rate was due to 323,000

Steven H Van Wie 5:03

So.

Adam Van Wie 5:19

new entrants into the labor force, which is actually a good thing. Those people were sitting on the sidelines, not looking for work, and now they are. That makes the unemployment rate go up, up, but it isn't really a negative for the overall economy. So just a couple things to keep in mind when you're looking at the numbers. One other point from that report was our average hourly earnings rose 0.1% month over month, but they're now up 3.5% year over year. So that's a positive for workers as well. The retail sales report wasn't bad, but it did miss expectations. It came in flat month over month versus an expectation that it would be up 0.1%, much like the last report. It's not as bad as it sounds. Retail sales are up 3.5% year over year. And for this month, if you exclude automobile sales, retail sales were up 0.4%, more than double the expectation of 0.2%. The biggest drop was in autos. And this was because the tax credit for up to $7,500

Adam Van Wie 6:21

for buying electric vehicles expired in September. That pushed a lot of buying into quote into the third quarter. And so we're not seeing those vehicles get sold today. And that really explains the entire retail sales lower than expectations, miss. So kind of an interesting phenomenon with, with government incentives and, and what happens when they go away?

Steven H Van Wie 6:44

Gasoline is falling too, so people are spending. If you use the same amount of gas that you usually do, you're going to be paying less. Right now that, that hurts the look of the sales, but it sure helps the sales.

Adam Van Wie 6:59

Yeah, if you look at core sales, that takes out autos, gas and building materials, that was actually up 0.6% month over month. That's a really strong number. And then the best number of the month was that non store retailers think Amazon, they increased 1.8% month over month as holiday shopping kicked off. That's a big number. That is a really good omen for the Christmas sale season, I think.

Steven H Van Wie 7:25

I think that's the first year that nobody really has been telling us that Christmas was going to be worse than.

Adam Van Wie 7:32

It's so odd because everyone's saying how bad the economy is, but that's one thing that people are very positive about.

Steven H Van Wie 7:38

Yeah, you could. Well, Adam and I grew up watching this stuff and it was a household joke every year. Well, don't expect this year to be as good as last year. And then of course, it would come in. They do the numbers and it would be way better than last year. And this year we were a little taken aback because we weren't hearing that thing about, oh, it's going to get worse before it gets better. So I just hope that their string of being wrong doesn't get extended. Because that would be bad news. At this point though, there's, there's a lot to talk about out there and a lot to look at, but basically things are looking pretty good. We do need to spend a few minutes talking about the real rate of inflation and the reports that happened this week because it was pretty good. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 8:26

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 8:28

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 8:29

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 8:30

And Joey had a comment before I give up the trivia question for today.

Joey Loss 8:35

Yeah. Adam was talking about positive private sector job growth, which as we said, just doesn't agree with the sentiment that we're seeing is the overall story right now. People are saying the economy is bad, but if job growth is good, then I'm a little bit confused. Well, Vanguard just did a study and the findings are very interesting. What they looked at was how are AI sensitive jobs doing? Are they growing at a lesser rate than jobs that really aren't that sensitive to AI automation at this point? What is the state of them? What they found is that recent growth in jobs for job occupations that have high sensitivity to automation protocols for AI technology are growing twice as fast in number as anything that is not in that category. And the wage growth is significantly higher. And so the takeaway from that is AI, at least in the short term so far, has been augmenting these jobs and allowing people to be more productive. And as a result, companies want more of these people and they're willing to pay them more for the work that they're able to accomplish. I thought that was fascinating.

Steven H Van Wie 9:38

There's definitely a new concept out there that something like slope. That means all the man hours that are spent correcting AI. That's part of it, yeah. They need people to correct.

Joey Loss 9:51

Adam sent me that article this morning.

Adam Van Wie 9:53

Yeah, There was a reporter. We get these requests for comments on different news articles and a reporter sent it out to the group and it was like asking about AI slop. And that's a term I'd never heard before. And I sent it to Joey, just said AI slop question mark. What is that?

Joey Loss 10:09

Yeah, I was like, who gets to make these. Yeah, terminology.

Adam Van Wie 10:12

That's a Terrible name.

Steven H Van Wie 10:14

I think it probably is an acronym for something, but maybe not. Sounds like maybe it's just what it is.

Joey Loss 10:19

Yeah, the future of prison food served you by a.

Steven H Van Wie 10:27

Anyway, as usual we do have a trivia question and as always it's been sponsored by Paul Lloyd at First Coast Alarm. You can call Paul at 904-636-7888.

Steven H Van Wie 10:39

But an interesting thing happen in the market this month. You've heard us talk for a long time about the socks, in other words the semiconductor index. For about the last 10 years or so the semis have been what they call the new transports. The old theory was you could tell how the economy was going to do when transportation was picking up because more goods were moving from to more places.

Adam Van Wie 11:03

I still think that's true.

Steven H Van Wie 11:05

I do too. Absolutely. And you could see it after things like Hurricane Katrina. The east west traffic on trucks and railroads was unbelievable for the next year or two. But anyway, a lot of people now have dubbed the semiconductors the new transport transports. And the reason is because the great growth in our society over the last 10 years or so, 20 years really has been largely in electronic type things. And what do you need for electronics you need semiconductors. So as goes the semiconductors supposedly goes our economy at least in the near term. So we've had the fifth occurrence ever of having these semis hit a 52 week high and, and in the next five days they corrected by over 10% and that does not happen very often. Interestingly in the four priors

Steven H Van Wie 12:13

one year later the semis were up nicely on average. How much did the semis gain in the 12 months following those four super corrections? So it's just a percentage between zero and limitless. Not limitless.

Adam Van Wie 12:31

I just on a whim googled or actually chatgpt. How many semiconductors are in the average new car? Oh, it's between 1,000 and 3,000 chips in every new car. So that's how important they are to the economy.

Joey Loss 12:46

No, that's why I only buy cars from like 2004.

Steven H Van Wie 12:50

You guys remember 70,000 during the supply problems, supply chain problems that we had. When was that?

Joey Loss 12:59

Yeah, 2021. You talking about car when the car chips was a big problem?

Steven H Van Wie 13:03

Yeah, there were cars that were built sitting on every lot in the US waiting for somebody to go in there and plug a semiconductor into this port and that port and the other port. Once they got them then they could drive the cars.

Adam Van Wie 13:17

That's why used car prices soared during that time.

Steven H Van Wie 13:21

Now that this, this little oddity has in the Past not been it. It hasn't foreseen a problem or it hasn't forecast a problem or at least correctly didn't forecast a problem in the industry. The industry moved right past it by how much on average, that's what I want to know. Oh, and by the way, Those occurrences happened one in 1997 and, and two in 99 and one in 2000 and those last three were during the sort of meltdown, if you all remember the.com meltdown those were in. Those three occurrences happened in less than one year's time. So it's been since 2000 that this has happened. That's why it kind of caught my eye. Interesting. Okay, back to this inflation report.

Adam Van Wie 14:13

That was, that was the last thing I wanted to talk about actually. The CPI report. Do you want to, do you want to take it or. Okay, that came out, it showed that inflation ticked up 0.2% over the two months ending in November because there was no report for the previous month. So not bad for a two month span. Year over year. The number sits at 2.7%, which is below the long term historic average of 3%. And the problem is the Fed, out of nowhere, as we've discussed many times, has now stated that their goal is 2%, which I feel is completely ridiculous. It is and, but the media has just gathered like they just take that number to be gossip hole. And even though it's been 3% for 100 years, they now say that Trump is responsible for not getting it down to the 2% target. And it's just ridiculous. It makes no sense. Like who cares about the politics? There's 2% is not. I don't even think it's achievable outside of this weird period prior to 2020 where we basically had no inflation and low interest rates for 15 years. But there's not been another time where that has happened that I know of.

Steven H Van Wie 14:19

No, go ahead.

Steven H Van Wie 15:28

That first, that same hundred years you were talking about, which is roughly the amount of schooling I got between grade school, high school, college, all that. I studied economics for decades and full employment was 5%. Yeah, we're at 4.6. We're up to 4.6. It's been lower than that almost consistently. Why all of a sudden isn't 5% a good number or full employment number? Yeah, no one announced it. They just did it.

Adam Van Wie 15:58

Right. I don't understand why we changed. Based on a very snapshot of, in the history of the world economy where things were kind of very unusual to have that low interest rates and that low inflation and almost full employment or under full employment for that entire time. It was like a, like a goldilocks economy for 15 years.

Steven H Van Wie 16:21

Yeah. And then maybe because of politics, I don't know, but something changed it. And you always got to be a conspiracy theorist to a degree. As J.D. vance said the other day. Yeah, I'm a conspiracy theorist. I believe the conspiracies that are true. The difference between conspiracy and truth is six months.

Steven H Van Wie 16:49

Really? I wish I'd said that. I got to give him credit though.

Adam Van Wie 16:51

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 16:53

Anyways, one of the reasons that the CPI number over the last four years has been so high has been rents. Rents have been increasing at shocking rates during that time, but that is not the case anymore. Over the last two months it's increased just 0.2%.

Adam Van Wie 17:09

There were actually several notable categories that saw prices come down in this report, including airfares dropping 6.6%. I think we can all celebrate that. Hotels were down about 1.7% and apparel was down 0.7%. And lastly, vehicle insurance was down 0.4%. Those I think across the board we can, we can call big wins for the economy because those are all things that have gotten pretty crazy here in the last four or five years. The, the craziest thing is that I read countless stories trying to blame tariffs for this elevated and I quote unquote elevated inflation numbers. Well, first of all, as I said before, these aren't elevated inflation numbers and I do not see any direct consequences of tariffs in my day to day life. I don't know if you feel differently, but call us if you do. But I just am not seeing it. The prices for the last year have been relatively stable and I'm just not seeing it.

Steven H Van Wie 18:16

I mentioned a couple times in the last month or so the problem with all the tarifflation advocates is they think that tariffs directly impact prices more than anything else. Well, there's two parts to this. One of them is a tariff can change the price level, but inflation is not a change in price level. Inflation is a series of things that happen where prices are rising constantly due to whatever factors. A one time jump up is not technically inflation, it's a change in price level. But the real thing is that they're measuring the wrong thing. Tariffs have much more influence on unemployment than they do on prices. So if you want the unemployment rate to rise, a good way to do it is tariffs. And what happens is there's less demand for things. People lose jobs because of that. So if you look at what's happening and you look at the analysis of it, there's kind of a big disconnect. And I will guarantee you that most of that disconnect has a direct link to politics.

Joey Loss 19:26

Yeah, I think so. I mean, if we spent 15 years under 5% which as Adam said, historically is a very healthy place to be. The news are running out of stuff to talk about. If they can't scare the pants off you, why are you going to keep watching? So let's just lower the bar. 4% seems to be something we can jump over and below. Yeah, all the time. Let's get back to that.

Adam Van Wie 19:45

And also, if you want to, if you want to know what's happening with inflation, look at the M2 supply of money. That is, it's a monetary phenomenon. The more money that's in the economy, the more likely you're going to see inflation. And as that contracts, you're going to see less inflation. That's where we are right now. And in fact, a lot of economists who follow these things expect inflation to continue to trend lower in the coming years.

Steven H Van Wie 20:10

We have to sign off for a short break and pay some bills and then we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. We're going to have a word about Mitt Romney and some things that are relative to stupidity. This is the, this is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Sometimes I crack myself up. 

Steven H Van Wie

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie

Adam Van Wie 20:30

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 20:32

And I'm Joey Loss

Steven H Van Wie 20:33

 And I remind everybody the lines are open 904-222-8255 or 222-talk. And the trivia question is there on average, after a quick correction in semiconductors, on average, what is the increase, the percentage increase in semiconductors over 12 months?

Steven H Van Wie 20:56

I'll put this, it's not insignificant. That might give people a little bit of a clue. I mentioned Mitt Romney. He, he wrote an op ed yesterday. I believe it was, that was borderline insanity for what is obviously a very bright person. He said essentially the,

Steven H Van Wie 21:20

what was the right way to put it.

Joey Loss 21:23

He wanted taxes to go up, right?

Steven H Van Wie 21:25

Yeah, yeah, that, that was the worst part of it. He wanted taxes on the wealthy people to rise because of the level of the national debt. And that's just ridiculous.

Adam Van Wie 21:39

It's so, it's backwards thinking is what it is. It's, it's not admitting the, it's not tackling the problem. The problem is out of control government spending with no caps, no checks and balances. They just increase it every year. And it's, it's to a point where, I mean, our national debt is what, $38 trillion or something? It's, it's insanity. So taxing the rich is not the answer to the problem. It is maybe one thing that could slightly help it, but it really wouldn't help it very much because then they just take that additional revenue and spend that too.

Steven H Van Wie 22:01

It is that.

Joey Loss 22:15

It's like if you took, if you just made this a household situation and you've got a high income person, but they've got a ton of debt. And then you say we're just going to jack up the credit card payments, but you keep spending how you've been spending and we're not going to worry too much about it. It's not going to make it.

Adam Van Wie 22:29

Right. What does it do?

Steven H Van Wie 22:30

It's the underlying problem that is the problem. Yeah, yeah. Now he also said, and he was right about this too, he said we need to index Social Security to the increase in life expectancy. And I've been arguing that for a long time, but they recently did that and that was not a bad thing. So, you know, you got to be careful what you say when you're supposedly

Steven H Van Wie 22:58

sort of a revered and knowledgeable person, which he has been, maybe not so much lately, but that it's not the answer. You know, I talk about this a lot too. You cannot pay for anything. Congress can't pay for anything. So when, when people bring bills to the floor and it's going to be, it's going to involve cost, as everything does when you're dealing with the government, they say, well, you got to pay for it. Meaning if you're going to spend money, you got to raise somebody's taxes. That's what most people on the left say, but you can't pay for anything. We're, we're adding to the debt at a trillion dollars a year just rounded off. You have to stop spending that trillion before you can pay one penny. And you can't take this, even the, let's use the tariffs as an example. You can't use the tariffs to pay down the national debt. The tariffs reduce the deficit, which is still rising. And then annually you move that over on the scoreboard and you put it on the debt side instead of the deficit side and you start bringing up deficit. There is no way the government can pay for anything until spending goes down a trillion dollars a year.

Adam Van Wie 23:49

That's right.

Adam Van Wie 24:20

Yeah. And, and the thing is, the other thing about tax the rich or increasing taxes, it doesn't work. You, you, you end up generating less Revenue for the government when you raise taxes because economic activity declines, which is more harmful to the economy. And you. And I mean, it's a really good way to potentially put us into a recession.

Steven H Van Wie 24:44

Yeah, Ronald Reagan sat down with a very young art laugher back in the 80s, and they were having lunch and there was a napkin there. And Laffer started to explain to Reagan what became known as the Laffer Curve. And it's the trade off between interest rates and unemployment or tax rates and unemployment, that sort of thing. And Reagan looked at it and said, I like that. So Reagan's approach to that was to take the high marginal tax rate of 70%, reduce it to 28%, which he did. And guess what? Things got so much better.

Adam Van Wie 25:24

The economy went crazy.

Steven H Van Wie 25:26

And the part that nobody wants to talk about ever, revenues to the government doubled after that. It is not. It is not static. That's the word I'm looking for. If you try to do a static analysis of things like that, you're always going to be wrong. What matters is people. And what people do in reaction to what governments do. It's exactly the same as we were talking about in the charitable gifting. The charitable gifting. When Reagan was doing this, one of the talking points or shouting points from the left was, well, all these charities are going to just bleed dry. Nobody's going to give money to a charity because the only reason they do that Is to save 70% on taxes. Well, guess what? First year, 28% charitable giving went up. People had more money. It's the way people think that if you don't, if you don't look at that and you're talking economics, you're wrong. You're guaranteed to be wrong. Because people change. It's dynamic. And they won't allow the cbo, Congressional Budget Office to use dynamic score.

Adam Van Wie 26:39

The other, the other thing you have to take into account is that a dollar in the private sector is worth so much more than a dollar run through the government because the government effectively destroys the value of a dollar. That dollar, once moves into government coffers, is probably worth 50 cents or less. Whereas in the, in the private sector, that dollar will be spent and actually create more value. It's probably worth a dollar. 50. 2.

Steven H Van Wie 27:04

50 is the historical number. That's called the velocity of money. How many times a dollar is spent when, you know, I'll, I'll go to Publix and buy whatever, and the people who made that whatever get paid from them and it goes around and around. That dollar can do a whole Big turnaround and. And it keeps moving. The economy grows the velocity, they said. When I was studying, I don't know if it's changed a bit. It was 2.5 and it was about 1 in the government.

Adam Van Wie 27:34

Yeah, that's. That makes sense.

Steven H Van Wie 27:36

It's that big hole in the lake. Like you take your boat. Same thing. You throw money down that hole and you never see it again. That if we, if we could teach classical economics to everybody in this country, the government would absolutely be disbanded and reconstituted with smart people.

Joey Loss 27:58

Yeah, well, people like Thomas Soule never come up in academic economic discussions. But they're. How many books does that guy have? 35. And they're just all phenomenal. Yeah. I mean, the guy doesn't stop and he never comes up in academia. You know, we studied some good people there, but it's very narrow.

Steven H Van Wie 28:07

Know what the numbers.

Steven H Van Wie 28:15

Yeah. It actually should be taught more. I, I've often mentioned that I'm very happy that, that Governor DeSantis has started the ball rolling on having personal finance get back into the curriculum. And now there are 30 states doing the same thing. Yeah. This can only be good for long run for the country. One final note about the market. Yesterday was the last quadruple witching day of the year. And what that means is stock index, futures, stock index options, stock options and single stock futures all expire on the same day. And the true definition of quadruple witching is the last hour of that Friday. And you can see in history, if you look very often, that'll be awful. A terrible, terrible day. And other times. No. Well, yesterday it wasn't great, but it was. You wouldn't even know it if you weren't watching that. It was quadruple witching. So I think the market is, is stable enough to say that next year could be pretty good. You guys agree with that? Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 29:30

The, the. I mean, if you look at the. Yesterday was a really good day. There wasn't any indication towards the end of the trading day that it was anything going on other than normal trading.

Steven H Van Wie 29:42

Right. Good morning, Greg.

Greg 29:45

Good morning. Well, first of all, I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas to the crew. And I did get the Publix card, so thank you. Yeah, that was great.

Steven H Van Wie 29:54

Great.

Greg 29:58

I just wanted to bring something up that's near and dear to your heart. I was reading an article about how LNG is going to potentially play a very important role in the AI rollout since it's available and you know, it's something that these data centers can tap into because of the existing infrastructure. The only problem is that we have several export terminals and I think there's six more that's approved for export. And based on the article that I read, there isn't really enough capacity to service both. So, you know, obviously America first would probably go inside. But the problem there is as you can, you know, pump the, get the gas out of the ground here and then sell it in Asia for, you know, 10x or better over the spot price here. So like to hear your comments since I know you've been hanging in with that with LNG for a long time.

Adam Van Wie 31:14

Yeah, that might be true today, but it sounds like it wouldn't be true for very long if, if what you're saying is accurate. I think that the market would reprice that in a way that would, would, would put it to the best use. So unfortunately that probably means prices would go up here and that's not what we need right now. And that's, that's been a big topic too with these data centers and their massive need for electricity. So I expect more regulation to come down and surrounding that in the not too distant future.

Greg 31:48

Yeah, that's an interesting take. You're probably right. I'll, I'll shoot you the article over the weekend. But you know, market forces are what they are. You know, it tends to go to the best price to the, you know, to the best bid. So, you know, it's interesting to see because, you know, without, you know, AI right now is the energy.

Steven H Van Wie 31:54

Good.

Steven H Van Wie 32:13

Greg, can you hold for, can you hold for a couple minutes? Thanks. All right, we'll be right back and finish up with Greg. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 32:23

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 32:25

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 32:26

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 32:27

And we're going right back to the phones.

Greg 32:31

So I just want to finish up real quick. You know, the pinch point right now in AI is, is the electrons. So you know, trying to roll out a nuclear plant here or there is going to take several years and a ton of money versus lng. So until we can get that figured out and get, get that up and running, AI is AI is really at a, a choke point or will be soon?

Steven H Van Wie 33:04

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. That, that's pretty well known. Know who's been building those little nuke plants now?

Adam Van Wie 33:11

The Chinese are way ahead of us on this.

Steven H Van Wie 33:13

Yeah, well, we've got some, some guy named Trump is starting up the Trump is that it's. He's the major shareholder the kids are really running it. But the symbol is DJT, which, you. It went up 46% one day this week when they announced they were getting into these small and on site nuclear reactors and merging with a company that does that.

Adam Van Wie 33:27

Know, go for that.

Adam Van Wie 33:39

Okay.

Joey Loss 33:39

There's a couple other small companies doing it. Another one is called vayla. It's a private company. But yeah, the for, for numbers. I think China has something like 30 thermonuclear reactors being built right now because the, the regulatory landscape's wide open for them to do that.

Steven H Van Wie 33:55

You know who else has a lot of them going on? France. I thought, yeah, isn't that nuts?

Joey Loss 33:58

Wow.

Joey Loss 34:01

That surprises me.

Adam Van Wie 34:01

Crazy.

Steven H Van Wie 34:03

One thing they seem to do right.

Joey Loss 34:05

Coming into the Trump administration, we had three and so obviously that's not a good start. No, but he's kind of cleared the lanes.

Steven H Van Wie 34:12

Yeah, Adam was working on it. When, when Adam was pounding rocks, so to speak, selling concrete, he had the nuclear plants going on and they stopped him.

Adam Van Wie 34:22

There was one being built on the west coast of Florida. They stopped it. Wow.

Steven H Van Wie 34:26

Greg, did you want to take a shot at the trivia?

Greg 34:28

Well, let me just finish up with this. Oh, shame. Yeah. That's why there are so many data centers being built in the Permian section of Texas is because it's so close to the natural gas that they can actually get it cheaper than they would if they were to get it from the Henry hub in Oklahoma.

Steven H Van Wie 34:30

Please do.

Adam Van Wie 34:49

Nice.

Greg 34:51

I'll take a shot at the question once I know what that is.

Steven H Van Wie 34:54

Okay. We just had a five day period in which the semiconductors dropped over 10%. A true correction. And it started the day after they set a new 52 week high. This is the fifth time it's happened. What happened to semiconductors the four other times? One year following that quick sudden meltdown. What, what percentage up were they? And it's hefty.

Greg 35:23

Well, I can tell you that the SMH is, is at a just, just touched a channel low. So it's a great opportunity to look for a trade to go long. But percentage wise, the upper channel is pretty high. I'm gonna just take a guess at this. It looks like maybe I was just looking at this this morning. Dang. If I would have known the question, I would have the answer already.

Steven H Van Wie 35:53

Well, that proves we don't send it out in advance.

Greg 35:58

I should try remote viewing then. I'm gonna say like 38%. That's a wild guess.

Steven H Van Wie 36:11

It's substantially too low.

Greg 36:14

Okay, wow. Well then I'll be sure to get in the trade on Monday.

Steven H Van Wie 36:19

I'm thinking when you hear the number, you'll. You'll do exactly what you just indicated.

Joey Loss 36:24

We can neither bless nor reject that trade.

Adam Van Wie 36:27

Nope.

Steven H Van Wie 36:27

That's right. Yeah, Greg, thanks for the call. Have a very merry Christmas.

Greg 36:31

I will. You, too. We'll talk to you in New Year. Okay, bye.

Steven H Van Wie 36:34

Great. Thanks.

Joey Loss 36:34

Thanks, Greg.

Steven H Van Wie 36:37

Yeah, 38 is too low. So, you know, people worry about the semis when they see these things going on, but somehow the reason that they're called the new transports is when things are going well, they do very well. Well, here's I got this one on my bad pile,

Steven H Van Wie 36:58

you know, for the years and years and years on this show, how much we detest it when the lawmakers don't settle things before they leave town for the year. So we as tax planners always have to figure out what the hell they're up to. So annoying guesses. Guess what happened Thursday night with all kinds of things undone. The House of Representatives packed it up and went home a day early.

Adam Van Wie 37:27

Yep.

Steven H Van Wie 37:28

That is all I'm going to say about that.

Adam Van Wie 37:31

Not surprising. Not really.

Steven H Van Wie 37:33

Not. All right, let's switch the other way a little bit. I was talking about the,

Steven H Van Wie 37:41

the Trump accounts and how, how the Dells came in and added on to that big time, like six and a quarter billion dollars. And in my blog last week, I wrote that I would have. I'm going to watch for other rich people to come in and add to this. This thing could get really big and it could get there fast. Well, Ray Dalio came in this week and BlackRock came in this week doing the Trump account thing. It was authorized in the act that companies could do this for the children of their employees. And anybody, like a private Ray Dalio can do it in general. And they, they are. Let's see, there's a set, several of them, MasterCard, Visa, Uber and Charter Communications already contributed into the Trump account thing. Yeah, that's kind of new news. It made sense to me when I predicted it and I'm very happy to see it come back and say, right,

Adam Van Wie 38:36

Nice. I didn't know that.

Steven H Van Wie 38:49

you guys got something you want to talk about? I can throw topics out every day, but if there's something on your mind before Christmas or just in general, shoot it out. We got five minutes.

Adam Van Wie 39:01

I did want to say I saw a stat that led me to believe that there is. So part of the new tax bill was this feature where you can deduct capital expenses for a small business all in year one, in the year you make the purchase. So why is that interesting? Why is that important? It's really important because it changes the way that people who own businesses think about making big purchases. If you have to depreciate something over 5, 10, 30 years, it makes it less attractive in a lot of cases to buy it. And you might put off buying something because you don't get the benefit of it from a tax perspective right away. Well, that has changed. So if you're looking at a multi million dollar purchase, you may decide to pull it forward now into this year and that creates a lot more economic activity. We kind of knew this might be happening just anecdotally, but this week I saw that private jet sales are up 11% from a year earlier and 30% from a year before that. Now why do you think that is? What is a really maybe unnecessary purchase that you get a huge tax deduction to buy? Yeah, a private jet.

Steven H Van Wie 40:29

Yeah, there's some trucks and such too that are covered in that and. Yeah, right. These things are going crazy. Yeah, it's again, taxes are influencing behavior.

Adam Van Wie 40:41

Absolutely. They always do. People, people underestimate how much they do, especially with a business owner.

Joey Loss 40:48

Well, it's a dollar velocity accelerator, I guess. Right. Bonus appreciation.

Steven H Van Wie 40:52

All right, I'm going to throw this one out to YouTube for a comment. Dave Ramsey said this week that people should start planning for long term care expenses when they turn 60. It's all yours.

Adam Van Wie 41:09

Way too late. You can't do it at that point. I understand the sentiment around that comment. Most people probably can't afford to start thinking about it until then. But if you want long term care insurance, you better start thinking about it in your 50s because by age 60 you're not going to like the price tag.

Joey Loss 41:30

Well, that is definitely true. And then if you just step back more broadly, like what dollars are you talking about? How many people want to work that long after 60? So unless you're just going to take something from the retirement pot, arbitrarily label it potential long term care expense pot. Where is this coming from? Yeah, you need income to really make some agency there.

Adam Van Wie 41:50

Yeah. Even if you're thinking about buying a hybrid policy like a annuity policy or something like that, you need years to fund something like that.

Joey Loss 42:00

You need years to fund it. And I would argue by your early 50s, this is when it matters, like you said. And then secondly, you kind of know the velocity of your retirement plan. If you really sit down and take a look at it properly and you'll know, am I at risk of running out of money? If I have to self insure something like that. And that's when you start to plug in solutions.

Steven H Van Wie 42:20

All right, let's, let's add another discussion. How about medical underwriting at age 60 versus age 50?

Joey Loss 42:27

Not going to be better.

Steven H Van Wie 42:29

The real long term insurance insurance

Steven H Van Wie 42:33

plans are the ones that are really insurance. They're very strict on their underwriting. Now let's talk about a couple at 50 or going to 60 and they're going to start the compound chances, compound probabilities of wanting one or the other, needing it go way up. But what goes up even higher is the compound probability that they won't be able to have it underwritten. So I don't know what's happening to Susie Ormond and Dave Ramsey, but they're, they're drinking the wrong water these days. Both of them have tended to go a little goofy this year. I don't know why, but this is just ridiculous. In my.

Joey Loss 43:02

Yeah.

Joey Loss 43:18

I'm glad he's raising the topic. It's probably not talked about enough. But for listeners, the average long term care claim for a woman is two years. The average long term care claim for a man is three years. And if you want to get an idea of what costs would be like for different levels of care, you can go to Genworth.com's Cost of Care study, put in your zip code and figure out what it would cost locally.

Adam Van Wie 43:41

I warn you, it is not cheap.

Joey Loss 43:43

Yeah, it's not going to be a.

Steven H Van Wie 43:44

Fun number, but 92.6%

Steven H Van Wie 43:47

the next 12 months when you see action like you saw in semiconductors this particular week. Makes you think, doesn't it? Greg, I think has a plan made.

Adam Van Wie 43:54

Wow. It really does.

Adam Van Wie 44:00

He does, I'm sure.

Steven H Van Wie 44:01

Well, Merry Christmas everybody. Thanks so much for listening. We will be live next week, don't forget that. And we will see you then. Thanks for listening and all the.