BUCK: Larry Kudlow on producer price index inflation combined with consumer price inflation.
BUCK: It’s basically just telling you, if you look at what people really need to buy and what they have to get to keep the household running inflation is really worse than you think. Welcome back to Clay and Buck of course third hour here. We were a little too much in the happy zone talking about Top Gun and stuff. So now we have to bring you back to the reality of a Biden regime that is completely inept, incapable, and…
That’s not surprising. Look at who is running the show. Look at who’s around him. Look at the kind of people that Joe Biden relies on for top-level advice, particularly on the economy, look at Mayor Pete running the transportation agency and the realities here are too stark for anybody, I think, to miss or avoid.
We may very well be heading into a recession. I see the crypto world, which I’ll just say this: I watched the crypto world, I own a very little, very tiny bit, you know, I own a piece of a couple of different coins. I’m not a crypto investor. People who are — and some of the people listening to this, I’m sure, are. They’re like evangelists for crypto.
CLAY: Oh, yeah.
BUCK: The crypto bros, the crypto folks out there when it goes down, down, down, even when you have Coin Base which is the largest exchange for cryptocurrency buying and selling, publicly saying that it might go bankrupt if things don’t turn around. The crypto guys and gals just say, “Great buying opportunity! Great buying opportunity!” (laughing) They do not blink. They do not move an inch off of their crypto fondness, I guess you can call it.
And, Clay, I will just give you this. While that’s all happening there was a tweet — oh, I think — I think it might have been from Reuters or the AP, but they posted last night — “Elon Musk boasts that highs acquiring Twitter to defend freedom of speech, but he has long used the platform to attack those who disagree with him.”
CLAY: (laughs)
BUCK: I actually think the left is gone so crazy on this issue, on censoring and silencing that they fundamentally do not understand what freedom of speech actually is. They reject the foundational understanding of free speech now, and that’s part of what is driving their panic over at Twitter and about Twitter.
CLAY: Well, think about how radical it is that media — companies that owe their very existence, by and large, to free speech — are troubled by the existence of free speech. What they’re really upset by is speech they don’t agree with. And, by the way, this is turning into quite story, Buck, because as we’re speaking, unfortunately, first of all, the stock market is nearly to the point where you are about to go underwater on the Joe Biden administration.
In other words, if you came in and you were a super left-winger and you said, “My goodness, there’s never been a better time to buy stock than right now! Joe Biden’s gonna be the greatest economic president. He’s gonna bring us all together. We’re coming out of covid! This country is gonna be on fire. “We’re almost to the point, just barely above water right now, going all the way back to January 20th in both the Dow and the S&P 500, Buck, where you are almost underwater.
In other words, the market is about to turn negative for the whole first 17 months or so of Joe Biden’s presidency. That’s a pretty significant fact, okay. And people out there who say, “Well, a lot of people don’t own stock.” Well, it’s not really true. A lot of people have 401(k)s, and those values in those 401(k)s, if you’re looking at ’em, are down a lot so far this year. I believe, Buck, I saw this is the worst start for the S&P 500 through whatever we are — mid-May, May 12th — in a hundred years.
That’s nearly $10 below what Elon Musk has bid for Twitter. That’s a lot of expectation built in that this deal still get may not done, whether it’s SEC, whether it’s the FTC, whether Elon Musk might come back and say, “Hey, by the way, I know I bid 54.20 but the stock market has collapsed a lot. I’m actually only gonna bid $48 now — and if you say ‘no,’ I’ll pay the billion-dollar penalty your stock is gonna cut in half.”
BUCK: I was thinking about this just the other day, Clay, because as you see what’s going on in the markets, the economy, we started off with am so commentary on inflation and how it’s actually worse in terms of how it affects people, particularly people who are just trying to meet their monthly and weekly bills. I remember when Joe Biden got elected, and put aside… (laughing)
I hear people screaming, but he is the president; so this is what we’re dealing with, okay? Is it unfair? Is it crappy? Does it make me sad too? Yes. But as Joe Biden came into office, I remember thinking, all this team, this cabal of libs around him and his advisers, all they have to do is not mess things up, and they should have —
CLAY: Yes: The wind at their back, all the advantages out there.
BUCK: Exactly. They got reopen, they’ve got the vaccine, thanks to Operation Warp Speed already in place, and that should mean that everyone’s gonna calm down, we’re gonna reopen, right? I mean, who could have foreseen that it would have been not been one shot, two shots, three shots, four, you know, all the things. But if you go back to, like, January of 2021 you’d think to yourself, all right, the economy no longer has to be — or it should never have been.
But the economy is less likely to be artificially shut down because of the pandemic. We should have a huge surge of economic activity and just ebullience. I mean, people that are optimistic, positive, feel like everything’s gonna get better I remember thinking I was concerned because not that I don’t want that to happen. I actually do want that to happen, but I was thinking to myself, “People may attribute that natural force to Biden and the people around him.”
But that was the talking point, right? He was the president, things were recovering, and he was taking credit for the recovery. The bounce-back was what I anticipated I thought might happen with Biden, and I just bring it up because here we are — and not only are they not getting credit for a bounce-back they don’t deserve, we have to credit them right now with taking the economy off the tracks and running it into a ditch! (laughs) That’s where we actually are. So it went in the opposite direction. I was hoping they just wouldn’t mess it up and then they’d say, “Look at what geniuses we are.” Instead, it’s, oh, my gosh. This is a bunch of clowns.
CLAY: Buck, to your point, maybe the single most important thing that people could buy for purposes of food is baby formula. The number one thing that you could buy is baby formula. That is of the utmost importance. ‘Cause look, if you like bananas and there ain’t bananas on the shelves, you can go buy oranges or apples. If you like Coke, buy Pepsi. If you like Bud Light, go buy Coors Light or Miller Lite instead. In other words, there are lots of fungible products.
Much of America, sometimes you just have to freeze at the natural abundance of choices sometimes when you just go buy something like pepper and you just stand in front of all the different peppers and seasonings and everything else that are there. It’s almost an abundance of riches to such an extent in terms of options that sometimes you freeze when you walk into a Publix or a Kroger or whatever grocery chain you are out there shopping at right now.
We don’t have baby formula on the shelves over two years after covid shutdowns happened, “15 days to stop the spread.” The stock market is about to go negative in the entire Biden regime. And, by the way, if you consider nearly 10% inflation, you’re already nearly double digits down just based on what the value of your own money is because of what you have to pay for everything else.
I don’t even know what they can be thinking right now in the Biden White House. It’s why, Buck, they are so desperately arguing, “Oh, my gosh. You know what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna take away your contraception, you’re not gonna be able to buy condoms if Republicans are in control! You’re not gonna be able to buy birth control.” That’s what they’re trying to argue already because they are so desperate, because they have failed on an epic level the likes of which we’ve never seen most of our lives, Buck.
BUCK: Saying something. That’s not good for right now.
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