Everyone keeps telling us that inflation has gone down. It has not gone down. It is not gone down. It has slowed down, right? And so we are still stacking. It's called compound interest. So the price of goods is compounding every single year. And so you can sit here and say, no, inflation has gone down. No, it hasn't. It's slowed down. It's only up by two and a half percent over last year. But that's still over last year, which was up like 30% over the following two years. You're listening to Carrie Lutz'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 financialsurvivalnetwork.com and get your free newsletter and gift. Financial survival network now more than ever. Welcome. You are listening to and watching the financial survival network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. Well, hey, election right around the corner. We got great job numbers out. Everything's doing well, unless you live in a state that gets hurricanes, in which case, not so great. And how really these numbers, what is the Fed going to do next? All these questions and more. Eddie, give her its worth us. TACTIVWILTH.COM. Eddie, great to have you back on the show. If you got a question for Eddie or myself, shoot me an email, kl@carrylutz.com. So, it looks like we're in the calm before the storm, both in Florida and the country. Yeah, definitely. You know, we're in this situation where it's funny because you get one job print that's better than expected. And you just forget everything that's happened the last six months, right? I mean, we had a lot of good job prints all year long. And then we had a dramatic and then all of a sudden we have a good job print when the election was around the corner. Now, I don't know. It just kind of strange to me that when we get adjustments upward, they're like, I was there at 2000, very, very small margin. But when we get the adjustments down, they're like significant. Like, I mean, we're talking when they came forward and said, oh, sorry, you know, we didn't actually create 800,000 jobs. But it's okay because, you know, the most recent print was good so that everything is good to get. And of course, the interesting thing about it is that it really has caused like an about base on the cuts from the standpoint that there's like nobody expecting a 50 basis point cut after that. And the Treasury market is telling us that the Treasury market. I mean, gosh, the tenure got back over 4% today. Like, we haven't been there in forever. And so that that is concerning, Kerry, because you can have every job for you, you can have everything you want, you can make it like China just did a really big stimulus. We live in a global economy. And a lot of the things that are happening right now are more inflationary. And I know one wants to talk about the fact that inflation could come back, but it did it in the 70s. I couldn't do it again. And why couldn't it be worse than it was in 2020 chairs? And I think that's kind of when you actually look at it and think about what could happen, you can't eliminate that possibility. Yeah, well, look, we've talked about it before. Inflation goes in cycles. It doesn't just go away. And as Milton Friedman, what are the greatest economists of all time? No question about it said inflation is first and foremost a monetary phenomena, right? What did he get wrong there, Ed? Oh, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, I think that, well, the funny thing about it is that we want inflation, too. The Fed is always targeting. They're not targeting 0%. They're targeting 2%. And of course, they don't include things like sugar in the CPI. Why would they do that? It's only every single thing that you can buy in a grocery store nowadays. And so it's always interesting to see CPI versus actual, because I know the people that I talk to every day right now, they're hurt by the fact that they're maxed out on the credit card and guess what? A 50 basis point cut didn't really do much for them. And the other thing is, is that everyone keeps telling us that inflation has gone down. It has not gone down. Get that out of your head. It has not gone down. It has slowed down, right? And so we are still stacking. It's called compound interest. So the price of goods is compounding every single year. And so you can sit here and say, no, inflation has gone down. No, it hasn't. It's slowed down. It's only up by 2.5% over last year. But that's still over last year, which was up like 30% over the following two years. And so we're at this just like breaking point. And of course, it's like on the cusp of the election. And of course, there's these storms happening that are inflationary, right? Because now all of a sudden that could mess with supply change and all of these things. And then, oh, guess what? We got wars and that causes the price of oil to go up, which is also inflationary. And so there's a lot of things that we can't control that are going to have inflationary action. And then we have the Fed, which all they can do is control that thing, right? And when you think about it, at this point, with everybody being maxed out on credit cards, anyways, a rate hike might as well be considered inflationary because it's just increasing the cost for the consumer. And so like the only thing that fixes it is true demand destruction, which is where we, you know, we start talking about recession, we start talking about that's in P going back to the 22 letter range. No, that can't happen. Yes, it can. It's happened. It's happened two times in the last 25 years. And so it's creepy. I'm going to tell you what I think is going to happen. Now the inflation, it's going to run its course, assuming they don't tank the dollar, which would mean tanking the entire global financial system, including the bricks. They would go with it because all of our currency is fiat based. But I feel we are in a similar position to where we were in the 90s. And that was before the advent of the internet for most of us for public consumption as being the greatest communication tool, networking tool, and monetization tool ever created. And really, I felt like that brought the country out from an utter collapse that was going to occur. I think we could be in a similar situation with AI. And I don't know how AI will work. But I think AI is far more profound than the internet. It's already affecting so much of what I do, both for business and pleasure, for show notes, for plotting out the show. I'm working for a company. I'm doing a marketing plan for them. I'm working in another company. I have to figure out what went wrong with a company. It has become a force multiplier for me because I can dispense with so much of the ordinary thought tools. Now, whether it'll replace me or not, I don't know it, but conceivably, it could drastically increase productivity throughout the economy. And then there will be job displacements, just like there always is. And in the end, technology in the past, the past is prologue. Technology has always led to more jobs. It might not be the case here. But I think that is our one light at the end of the tunnel. It might have this kind of effect. Imagine if our productivity went up four or five or even 10%. What would happen to the economy then, Ed? Well, that's the thing, right? Efficiency drives productivity and the AI component is more and more and more adopted because how people are. They don't change. We don't think differently. Why would we think differently, even though that everything tells us to think differently? The human print doesn't work that way. We don't like to be rewired. But the reality is that the AI is kind of a rewiring of business. It's a rewiring of the way that we think as business owners or as employees or as just like everyday people. And so definitely productivity, they always say technology is deflationary. And so the question is, to your point, does this AI have the ability to kind of deflationize the incoming inflationary storm? And I think that a lot of it just depends on adoption and trust. And that's the thing that is steering. I think a lot of people away from it, too, is that can I really trust this? Is this thing really going to work? And then when you buy 80 and you start using it, you're like, oh my gosh, I can get 10 times more stuff done. Because I only got to do the last 10%. I don't know that I did the first 90% anymore. And so unfortunately, that does mean a lot of people lose jobs within theirs. Also, on the other side, there's a lot more different types of jobs that are created. And instead of being on the factory line, now you just got to spot check things before it gets to that final decision for that last 10%. So it could totally do that. I still think that we're in a situation where that's what brings us out of things getting really bad. I don't know if we can avoid what's coming. And that's my biggest fear right now. Just an advisor. It is 2008, 2009, really bad, 2000, 2002, really bad. Why were we able to recover 2000 and 2002 and 2000, 2008? A lot of it had to do with technology. And I think that the technology will be the same that saves us from disappearing. But I don't think it's without a little bit of painters, unfortunately. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think AI is already taking over the government. There's a utility. I just happened to buy some shares in it. I'm not saying anybody should call it dominion energy. They're primary areas like Virginia, Northern Virginia. And they just sent notice to everybody that if you want to open a data center in Northern Virginia, you have to make a reservation. If it's like 500 megawatts or higher, they have to reserve it because they're out of capacity. And that's something that's like, and that's the reason I bought them. I said, hey, to me, electricity is the best play on the economy because no matter what happens, they might not have figured out how to make money off of AI yet, but they're going to. There's no question. Some people are already doing it who got it early. It's not just Nvidia, all of them. Like I said, I'm not saying anybody should buy this stock, got up like, not that high for me. I've had it for a few months. It's up like 10%, which isn't bad, plus it pays a dividend. What I'm not saying anybody should buy it. I'm not a financial advisor. But I just thought it was a cool play on AI. And so electricity utilities, they're going to have to do dramatic expansions here. And it's not going to be enough just to put in solar cells and batteries. They're going to be building power plants here, right? Oh, absolutely. I think that, you know, it's interesting that you talk about that because we were huge advocates of utilities this year, like one from a standpoint that they were just so they had a reform so much relative to the S&P 500. But then also just because of this demand that you're speaking of. And so like the funny thing about it nowadays is that utilities, generally speaking, are the thing are, if you're staying in equities, it's to blight the safety in equities. When things get bad, people, money managers, big money rotates, right? Because they can't sit in cash, they're not allowed to. They rotate to utilities, they rotate to value stocks, they rotate to dividend payers, right? And that's where they go. Well, now we've got this thing called AI. And you know, we still have this thing called cryptocurrency, which is very tech heavy. We still have a lot of miners out there. We still have a lot of that. That is driving a lot of demand for electricity. You know, like a lot of these miners, it's not that they can't make money or that they don't have the money to buy the machines to be able to continue to make money, even post having a mistake, they can't get the energy. And so, you know, obviously supply and demand is always the king. It doesn't matter what you're talking about. And if you need more energy, then the cost of energy is going to go up, right? And so, I think you're absolutely right there. I think that as people figure out, and we have more adoption on the AI side, we have more adoption on the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency side. That's just going to drive like more demand for energy and, you know, to your point, like, yeah, I know that Elon wants to just carve out of a corner of Texas and just put a solar form, but it luck with that. That's probably not going to happen. And that takes time. You know, it's the same thing that we've talked about with the whole like, you know, grain energy for this last administration. It's like, that's nice, but like, we don't have the infrastructure to be able to produce what we need to produce already. So if you start taking stuff away, well, guess what? That's also going to raise the price of energy. And so there's a very, very strong supply and demand story. And again, it's typically the area that is most valuable when things get bad, not that it doesn't go down, but it doesn't typically go down as much. And these utility companies, people still pay their energy bills. They've got to keep the lights on. Got to keep the lights on. And that's why the dividend keeps coming, you know, so it made it challenging as a money manager this year because sometimes it's hard to decipher. Is the energy play, the utilities play, is this a risk off factor, or is this a supply and demand factor? And I think that that's what's caught a lot of tactical money and there's off guard is that they've leaned into utilities as like a risk off play. And what's happening is it's becoming more of a supply and demand play. And so like, it's ciphering that is becoming much more challenging when you look at your traditional intermarket relationships and the coming storm. That's why you got to go back to basics and look at our good old favorite, good old gold, right? It's been sending a warning. I mean, not saying that you need to jump on the sidelines, but we do have a significant warning being said by gold. I mean, you look at today, right? Like everything in the market is down except for Bitcoin. That's interesting, right? And so maybe conflict, you know, some of it, a lot of it could be just distrust and fiat, like you were speaking about. So it is very, it is very interesting and the new supply and demand dynamics that are coming out as more technology becomes available. Yeah. Bitcoin is up. You know, it's going to break that 65,000 mark. But he's like, he'd get into 66 minute trading. So we'll see if he can do it this time. Because I think we're in the 73 range. So I think maybe he probably got to 100. But I was first 75 is psychological resistance. Yeah, 65 kind of is our current resistance point, but the, but it broke through 60 again and 64. So it's going to be interesting. It's market cap now is 1.3 trillion. And I'd expect to see in the next couple of months, especially if there is a lot of election post election civil unrest, I'd expect to see it go higher. And so we find you at taktivwealth.com, correct? Yes, yes, taktivwealth.com slash Eddy dash gifford. Obviously just go on the Google and you can also just look up Eddy Gifford. That's Eddy with a Y G F F R T. But yeah, that it's about the exciting Jerry. Never at all. Hey, and I'll do you one better. If you go to the show notes, this interview on financial survival network.com, you just click that link. It'll take you right to Eddie's site. While you're there, please sign up for your free newsletter. We're over, I think we're getting close to 35 or 40,000 subs right now. As we speak, goal is by the end of the year. First quarter, Q one of the 25 to hit 100,000, which would be a huge milestone. Ed, appreciate you coming out. We'll talk to you again real soon. Oh, if you got a question for Eddie or myself, shoot me an email kl@carrylutz.com. Ed, we'll talk to you again soon. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Carrie Lutz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to financialsurvivalnetwork.com. Financial survival network. 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