Financial literacy expert John Hope Bryant joins TheStreet and shares his reasons for still being bullish on the economy.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00You know, we hear all this negativity about the economy.
00:03Many people are worried about mortgage rates and interest rates.
00:06And but but you're so bullish.
00:09And I'm wondering what is rational?
00:11I'm not bullish.
00:11I mean, this is a radical movement of common sense.
00:13Look, when our parents were alive, trying to get a mortgage interest rates
00:17were in the teens.
00:18I mean, I mean, if you're trying to get a mortgage
00:21when Carter was president or whatever, or after that, it was, you know,
00:25you might be looking at a 12 percent, 15 percent, 18 percent interest rate,
00:29a five percent interest rate, six.
00:32And so what people say, well, John, we had one and two percent.
00:35It was free money.
00:37It was it was capitalism on crack.
00:39The government after the where did it come from?
00:41The 2008 pandemic, which we saw come show down right here
00:45in the stock exchange where the economy froze up imploded.
00:49Rightly so, because of the mortgage crisis was bad capitalism
00:53the way it was done.
00:54And the government had to lower interest rates to dang near zero.
00:58And put a lot of stimulus in.
01:00They didn't want to stop the party because every time they did it,
01:02the Wall Street would say, no, no, no, no, no, no.
01:04The pandemic was actually, I say this respectfully,
01:06those who lost alive in the pandemic, the pandemic was the crisis
01:10big enough, incredible enough for interest rates of Fed to raise interest rates
01:15because they knew they had to cool off hot money.
01:18You had all this stimulus money pouring into the economy.
01:21We never had a stimulus bill in the trillions.
01:23We never no government in the world has ever had a stimulus
01:28with a T in front of it.
01:29And so we had almost 10 trillion.
01:32And so you had to raise interest rates to cool that down.
01:34But they've only raised it to five.
01:36What I'm what I'm amazed with is that we're still standing.
01:39We're still standing. We're doing well.
01:41Now we're arguing over is inflation three percent or four percent.
01:44And is our interest rate five or six percent?
01:46Not are we still here.
01:48So where do you stand in this debate with with the Fed?
01:53There's some people who say the economy is already slowing.
01:56They need to. They need to
01:59loosen up a bit.
02:00Other people are saying, hey, they need to just stay where they are right now
02:03and wait a couple more months and see what happens,
02:06especially since you're in housing.
02:09I'm in multiple industries.
02:11What is your sense of where interest rates should be going
02:14and how fast should we get there?
02:16So personally, I would love to see interest rates down a couple
02:20a couple hundred, a couple of basis points.
02:22But professionally and from an American perspective,
02:25I think Powell needs to keep keep some vigilance
02:29and maybe wait till later to the year.
02:31And I think we're going to see one tick down.
02:33I don't think it's going to go up.
02:34I would see one tick down before the end of the year.
02:37I think he's looking at the long term and saying, what do I want my legacy to say?
02:41And you don't want to be wrong about this.
02:42There's two things you don't want to be wrong around.
02:44You don't want to be wrong about how much money to pour on a burning fire
02:47in the pandemic.
02:48So was there too much stimulus?
02:49Yes. About a trillion and a half dollars more than we needed.
02:53But you don't want to be wrong about it.
02:54So a bipartisan Congress poured too much water on the fire to make sure it was out.
02:59But where's the pandemic manual?
03:00I mean, what do you what do you pull that one out of the shelf?
03:03OK, 125 year old pandemic global.
03:05We pull that off. What do we what do we do?
03:07So it was you know, it was an overcorrection.
03:11Is he is he being cautious now?
03:13Yes. But you don't want to get this wrong.
03:15He gets this wrong, you know, because where's the lighthouse for the world?
03:19It's not China. It's not Russia.
03:21It's not it's not France or Germany. It's America.
03:24So America is the biggest, strongest, most vigilant
03:28and resilient economy in the world.
03:29And we want to keep it that way healthy.
03:31And I think that if if the tax on that is he keeps interest rates
03:35higher than we like, longer than we'd like to make sure economy,
03:39the inflation cools down.
03:41And by the way, for people who grew up in areas where you and I grew up,
03:44those tabletop economics, gas, food, whatever, as much
03:49as whatever you can do to get that under control.
03:51So the price still keeps spiraling.
03:53I think I'm a car insurance.
03:54That's going to the roof.
03:55Hello, car notes.
03:58I mean, car notes are like house notes these days.