Shownotes Transcript
It's Tuesday, April 8th. I'm Jane Koston. This is What Today, the show that was formulating a conspiracy theory that the Trump tariffs are tethered to a misogynistic fantasy in which women need to be pushed out of the workforce because of a crisis of masculinity. And then Fox News host Jesse Waters just said it.
If the field of gender studies survives this administration, boy will there be lots of material to study.
On today's show, the Supreme Court weighs in on two immigration actions at the request of the Trump administration and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House for a second time during President Donald Trump's second term. But let's start with your wallet and 401k and your kids' college funds. You know, your money.
As you may be aware, the stock market is having a not very good time right now as a result of Trump's tariffs on everyone and also some penguins. And while the stock market isn't the economy, it sure doesn't help the economy.
especially as policy appears to be determined by one guy who may have never been grocery shopping once in his life. Here's CBS News. Markets took a quick nosedive for a third day today as President Trump doubles down on his sweeping tariff agenda. The Dow slipped 3.1 percent when markets opened this morning. The S&P 500 also took a tumble, dropping 3.5 percent.
And counter to the desperate hopes of the markets, economists, and a whole bunch of people, Donald Trump is not, in fact, looking to pause the tariffs. Here he is in the Oval Office during his meeting with Netanyahu Monday. Would you be open to a pause in tariffs to allow for negotiations? Well, we're not looking at that. We have many, many countries that are coming to negotiate deals with us, and they're going to be fair deals. And
In certain cases, they're going to be paying substantial tariffs. There'll be fair deals. Now, there are a few reliable signs that things are not going super awesome for Donald Trump. Yes, one of them is the stock market, which Donald Trump used to care about a whole lot. Another is when elected Republicans who love Donald Trump suddenly sound weirdly removed when asked about the president. Like Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy on CNN Monday. Do you think it's Donald Trump's economy now?
Oh, I think it is. There's no question. I think once he decided to add the tariffs, clearly, I mean, he will be held responsible as he should, whether it turns out good or it turns out badly.
But don't worry. Texas Republican Representative Roger Williams has found the bright side of massive tariffs that will increase prices for everyday Americans. And people with used cars, their used cars are going to be worth a little bit more. And when it's worth more, they have more down payment, they have more equity, and they can make their payment less than it was. But you're not Texas Republican Representative Roger Williams. Your job is not to make excuses for the president of the United States. Your job is to provide for yourself and your family and maybe, on occasion, buy something.
And Donald Trump and the Republican Party have decided to make that harder for reasons that seem to differ depending on which Trump advisor you hear from. So what about you? What should you be doing to keep your money safe and stay sane right now? I am not a personal finance expert. So I had to talk to Jessica Roy, who is. She's the personal finance and utility columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Jessica, welcome to What A Day. Hi, thank you for having me. Now, obviously, everyone's financial situation is different, but people are also pretty freaked out at the moment because there's reason to be. So to start, what's your top line advice to people worried about their finances right now? Don't panic and don't touch anything. Don't mess with your 401k. Don't move stuff to cash. Just leave it alone.
I love that. I love telling people not to panic, especially as a noted panicker. One of the big groups of people who are really stressed right now are those who are at or nearing retirement age or maybe just retired and whose savings are tied up in the stock market. I know you just said don't pull your money out, but why? Because I know that for me, the apparently great depression grandma who lives deep inside me is like, take the money, put it under your couch. That's where it's safe.
That's definitely true. And yeah, it's a super scary time for people who are like, I don't have decades for the market to recover from this. I think the best indicator of what's going to happen in the future is historic performance. And that's true in two ways here. One, the market has always recovered. Sometimes it takes a little longer. If we look at the last big dip like this with COVID, it recovered really fast. Two,
Two, I would say, is Donald Trump's historic attitude toward the market, which is that he has, even way before he got into politics, always judged a president's performance by how well the market was doing. And the fact that it is not doing well under him right now entirely because of decisions he is making suggests
And nobody can say for sure what Donald Trump is going to do ever, but strongly suggest he is going to find like a victory channel out of this to pivot. He's going to say, look, we showed the world how strong we are. Unfurl the mission accomplished banner tariffs undone. He is going to find some way to get the market back to where he was because really his priority has always been how can we get the stock market to be doing great?
That is a very optimistic view of what's going to happen here. So even people who are about to retire, who have just retired, they should just sit tight.
I think especially right now, while it's all so new and so fresh and we don't know what's going to happen, if you sell off your stocks right now, that's what's called locking in your losses. You're saying, I'm betting that the market's never going to recover within my lifetime, within while I need this money. I think especially right now with everything so crazy, my advice would be, yeah, just hang in there. Don't do anything really rash with your money. And especially if you're living off that money right now.
Now, let's talk about buying things, a thing people enjoy doing and also have to do. Some of the goods facing the stiffest tariffs are cars and car parts. Cars are already very expensive. As someone who recently went looking for maybe buying a car and said, oh, no, I can't do this right now. And practically every expert out there says those prices are looking to go up now. If you've been looking like me or are thinking about buying a new car, should we just bite the bullet and get one now?
That's a tough one because I think a lot of the tariff stuff is already built into car prices. It's not like automakers were waiting to see if Trump was gonna keep doing tariffs and holding their prices low. A lot of the time, companies know what's going on. Companies are paying attention to the economic news and they are building in that uncertainty and that possibility into prices. And so even cars that have already landed are
automakers are likely to up those prices and say, well, tariffs, what are you going to do? I think if you have to buy a new car, you have to buy a new car. It is what it is. Buy one that's sensible, secondhand within your budget. I don't think it's a great time to be like, I'm going to buy my dream car that I've always been wanting to buy before that gets
too much more expensive. Like I would really focus on, like you said, like Great Depression, Grandma, sensible financial decisions right now. If you need to buy a car, you need to buy a car. If you don't really super need to buy a car right now, I wouldn't buy a car right now. There's something about this moment where...
which is really giving March 2020, which is funny because we're doing this to ourselves. There is no giant pandemic. But March 2020, people rushed out to panic buy a bunch of things. As the reality of the pandemic really started to set in, we had so much hand sanitizer. I think we still have hand sanitizer, actually. So many people gave it out. Like I went to events in like 2022 and I was still getting little hand sanitizers and I still have those kicking around.
I have hand sanitizer in my purse. I just realized that. But obviously, it's not quite that bad. But I've heard at least one story of someone buying and freezing a year's worth of coffee beans because they're worried about tariffs, which iconic behavior on their part. Is it the worst idea to stock up on stuff like that right now?
There is no such thing as having too much coffee on hand. I'll say economic factors aside. You know, Mark Cuban was saying on Friday, he tweeted, he was like, this is a good time for people to be stocking up on essentials. I think so much of the economy is based on vibes and based on people's feelings. And I think it's a mistake to pretend that that's not the case and that everybody is like only making statistics based decisions.
I totally understand. I think if it makes you feel better to be like, I'm gonna put in a big Costco order and get a big bag of rice and a big thing of tuna and have that in my closet and that's gonna help you sleep better at night.
Yeah, do it. You know, if it's especially non-perishables, if it's stuff you're going to use, I think you would have to buy a lot of groceries and toilet paper before you are like realizing major cost savings in your budget, even if prices do go up another five or 10%. But I don't think it's like the worst idea in the world, just if it makes you sleep better at night.
I think one of the hardest things about this moment for everybody is how unpredictable it all feels. I realize the stock market isn't the economy, but even on Monday, an erroneous tweet suggesting the Trump administration might pause the tariff sent the market careening. Like, things seem really out of control. And at moments where things seem really out of control, how should people be thinking about their pocketbooks amid all of this uncertainty?
Absolutely. You know, you brought up it's all feeling very like March of 2020. And I saw the New York Times had a great chart that was like this was the biggest one day stock sell off since like 9-11, since COVID. And there is a lot that's uncertain right now. A lot of people are like this time is different because these are
Unpredictable people are in charge. This time, the market's not going to recover. If you think about 9-11 and COVID in particular, those were things we had so little control over. You know, we couldn't know after 9-11, is global travel going to collapse permanently? Is no one ever going to fly in a plane again? With COVID, is the global economy going to fall apart?
You know, are our hospitals going to collapse? Is every senator going to be hospitalized and nobody's going to be in charge anymore? We couldn't just like snap our fingers and undo those things. We really didn't know what was going to happen. And with this one, one person could snap their fingers and undo all of it. And I think is likely to try to undo at least some of it in the pretty near future.
And so it's not financial advice so much as it's life advice. Like as much as you can close the tab with your 401k balance, as much as you can like take a step back and take a deep breath and try to focus on what's in your control right now. I would really try to do that because I think things are so unpredictable. And I think any big move you're going to be making right now based on stress or panic might not be the right move in the long term. Now, the word recession is getting thrown around a lot right now.
I graduated from college in the Great Recession of like 2008. I would prefer we not do that again. I would also prefer lots of things to not happen. And yet here we are. Again, lots of uncertainty. But other steps people should be taking now to prepare for a possible recession.
Absolutely. I'm a recession grad too. I was class of 2009. I worked like a lot of crazy part-time recession jobs. I ghost blogged for one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, all kinds of wacky stuff back then. So yeah, I remember what it was like and I don't want to return to that in any way, shape or form. And so I've
this is a really great time to get back to those fundamentals. If you don't have like a full budget in place, I get that. That's a big task for a lot of people, but like tracking your expenses and knowing where your money is going, building up your emergency fund. How long could you stay afloat if you got laid off? How long could you stay afloat if, yeah, the government canceled the contract and now the university you work for has had a hiring freeze and is letting everybody go? I think it's really a time to look at that.
and try to stay calm, even though it's very, very hard. I think this is a good time to take a hard look at what you spend money on and does what you're spending money on align with your priorities. Classic budgeting advice. Do you need 17 streaming services? Do you need to have a gym membership to a super expensive place and a Peloton membership at home right now that you don't ever use? Just really keep track, take stock, and make sure your spending is in line with your priorities and that your savings are in place. Jessica, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me.
That was my conversation with Jessica Roy, personal finance and utility columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. We'll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads.
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You know how I feel about the Gaza Strip. I think it's an incredible piece of important real estate. And I think it's something that we would be involved in. But, you know, having a peace force like the United States there controlling and owning the Gaza Strip would be a good thing.
During Trump's Oval Office visit with Netanyahu, they talked about Israel's war in Gaza, Iran, and tariffs. The two spoke with reporters in the Oval Office, which was, you guessed it, an absolutely batshit event. Trump referred to the Gaza Strip as, quote, beachfront property, and again suggested the U.S. should control it. He also laid out a plan for what to do with Palestinians who already live there, and it sounded a lot like ethnic cleansing.
And if you take the people, the Palestinians, and move them around to different countries, and you have plenty of countries that will do that, and you really have a freedom zone. You call it the freedom zone. A free zone, a zone where people aren't going to be killed every day. That's a hell of a place. I wonder why they're being killed every day.
Anyway, Trump said the U.S. will begin direct engagement with Iran starting Saturday to negotiate a nuclear deal. The two countries have not had direct talks since 2015 when they negotiated another nuclear deal, which Trump almost immediately pulled out of. Trump threatened that if the negotiations don't go well, quote, Iran is going to be in great danger. But Iranian officials disputed Trump's characterization. They said the talks will be indirect, using representatives from Oman as intermediaries.
The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration two temporary wins Monday related to its hardball immigration policies. Late in the day, the justices lifted a lower court's order that barred the White House from deporting alleged foreign gang members under the Alien Enemies Act. For now. The decision was unsigned, but the three liberal justices dissented. They were joined in part by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
The court's decision will let the administration resume using the wartime pirates to swiftly deport some people, while federal judges and lawyers have a high-minded debate of whether what the White House is doing is legal. But the justices also said the administration has to notify people of their pending deportation with, quote, reasonable time to challenge it. Also Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts agreed to pause the deadline for the Trump administration to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
The temporary order comes after the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to block a lower court judge's mandate to bring back Kilmar Abrego-Garcia by Monday night. The administration admitted last month that Abrego-Garcia was deported to El Salvador due to an administrative error. The Social Security website does not appear to be offering people much security these days.
According to anonymous officials who spoke with the Washington Post, the site has crashed several times in recent weeks. Some outages have lasted almost a day. But just getting the site to load isn't the only problem users say they're having. Some say they can't log into their accounts, while others have reported some of their information is missing. Not something you want an agency that serves tens of millions of elderly and disabled Americans to be dealing with.
Darcy Milburn, director of a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities, said SSA's response has been, quote,
The chaos comes just as the Social Security Administration is pushing beneficiaries to its website for things like identity verification. It also comes in the wake of the Department of Government Efficiency's effort to slash tens of thousands of jobs across the federal government. The Post says around 7,000 jobs were cut from Social Security alone. Agency officials told the paper even more employees could be pushed out soon by Doge because 7,000 eliminated jobs is apparently not enough.
The Post says the new cuts could include half of the technology division. You know, the ones responsible for the website. The one that's been having technical problems. One worker told The Guardian the best way to describe the Social Security Administration right now is, quote, complete, utter chaos. The Trump administration fired one of the top U.S. military officials at NATO headquarters Monday, adding to the already tumultuous relationship between the administration and many of its European allies.
The ouster of Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee, is the latest in some major military shakeups since Trump took office. Firings have impacted folks across agencies, including U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency last week, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chief of naval operations in February, and the commandant of the Coast Guard in January, among others. No explanation has been given for Chatfield's firing.
But she came under fire in conservative media a couple of years ago for comments she made in 2019 in which she used words like, quote, diversity and dialogue. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is eliminating diversity initiatives across the military, saying they're divisive. Chatfield was a career helicopter pilot and the first female president of the Naval War College. And that's the news. One more thing.
As the stock market continues to crater, I am learning something very, very important about some of our biggest business leaders and economic minds.
They are, without a doubt, some of the dumbest people alive. For reasons that, in my mind, range from wishful thinking to full-on delulu, many of the alleged smartest people in the world of finance thought that Donald Trump, who spent a ton of time during the presidential campaign and over 40 years waxing rhapsodic about tariffs, didn't mean it.
Maybe they had amazing memories of Trump's first term and didn't notice that most of the people involved in that administration were notably absent this time. Who knows? In any case, they bet their jobs, reputations, and online personas on the idea that a guy who says the same thing over and over and over again actually meant something else. I mean, let's be real here. This is a person who tweeted in December 2018, quote,
And this is what Trump said during his only debate with former Vice President Kamala Harris last year.
The tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. And here's Trump talking in a very meandering way about cars made outside of the United States back in October. I said, if I run this country, if I'm going to be president of this country, I'm going to put a 100, 200, 2,000 percent tariff. They're not going to sell one car into the United States.
Because we're not going to destroy our country. Because I know you're an anti-tariff guy, but I'm the exact opposite. And yet a bunch of his biggest supporters in the business world seem to have not heard any of this. Let's take Bill Ackman to start.
He's the founder and chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management and reportedly worth nearly $10 billion. You might remember that he spent a lot of 2024 writing very, very long tweets about anti-Semitism on college campuses. And over the last few days, he's been tweeting nonstop about how the tariffs Trump is pushing could cause long-lasting economic damage. On Sunday, he posted on Twitter that because of the tariffs, quote, we are heading for a self-induced economic nuclear winter and we should start hunkering down.
which is interesting to me. See, he endorsed Trump in July of last year, writing, quote, I assure you that I have made this decision carefully, rationally, and by relying on as much empirical data as possible. And here's what he said in December on Fox News about Trump entering the White House. We're stepping into, I would say, the most pro-growth, pro-business era
pro-American administration I've perhaps seen in my adult lifetime, certainly. We just had a nice little ceremony and CEOs of a broad array of big American companies. And I would say everyone is incredibly enthusiastic. But now Ackman is claiming on Twitter, quote, I don't think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.
Apparently, the, quote, empirical data he studied to help him decide to vote for Trump just didn't include any of the stuff Donald Trump said out loud with his mouth. And then there's Jamie Dimon. He's the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. On Monday, he said that because of tariffs, quote, we are likely to see inflationary outcomes, not only on imported goods, but on domestic prices as input costs rise and demand increases on domestic products.
Whether or not the menu of tariffs causes a recession remains in question, but it will slow down growth. He sounds worried. Which is interesting, because here's what Diamond said about tariffs back in January. They're an economic weapon, you know, depending on how you use it and why you use it and stuff like that. And, you know, people argue, is it inflationary and non-inflationary? I would put in perspective, if it's a little inflationary, but it's good for national security, so be it. I mean, get over it.
And now he's worried about the potential for a recession this year, as are Ackman and a host of other Wall Street head honchos. Hmm. If only there had been a presidential candidate who had warned of the potential for a tariff-based policy to slow down growth, accelerate inflation, and cause a recession. Donald Trump's plans for the economy would accelerate inflation and invite a recession by the middle of next year. If only. Before we go...
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That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate the wisdom of Donald Trump's understanding of baseball, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about Trump's description of the Los Angeles Dodgers World Series winning season, which I will now read, quote, win.
When you ran out the healthy arms, you ran out of really healthy. They had great arms, but they ran out. It's called sports. It's called baseball in particular. And pitchers, I guess you could say, and really particular. Like me, Water Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Kostand, and what a time we're living in.
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