Elon Musk moves closer to buying Twitter, revitalizing hopes of free speech as big tech censorship looms, OPEC cuts oil production, and the White House is fighting mad. Plus, Joe Biden travels to Florida to visit the Hurricane Ian damage. Today s show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. If you re not using ExpressVPN, you re missing out. You ll get 20% off your first month of coverage when you switch to PeerTalk. That s $30 a month and you ll get unlimited talk, text, and 6GB of data for just $30 per month. That s grocery money or gas money, and PeerTalk never raises their rates. By switching over to Peertalk, the average family of four is saving over $75 a month. And if you re using one of the big guys, Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, you ll be realizing they simply don t need as much data as they thought they did. The answer is too much money. Join the hundreds of thousands who are making the switch to peer-to-peer today. When you switch, you will get 50% OFF your very first month, and you re getting 50% of your very FIRST MONTH of coverage. Plus, do not forget to tell them you heard about Blinds. It s a fantastic sale and make your home look truly beautiful! Blinds is the number one online retailer of custom window coverings. Blindz is the world s most beautiful and eco-friendly design and installation tool. You can change the entire look and feel of your home, and make it yours with Blindes. Now through October 12th, 2019! You can get up to 45% off everything you veer off the standard retail price of $99.99 plus free shipping, and up to $45 off the regular retail price, plus an additional 15% off the price of your purchase, and free shipping on your purchase when you sign up for the offer starts at $99 or $99, plus you get an additional $5.99. and a free shipping discount when you become a patron! All you have to use the discount code: BLINDS. Ben Shapiro's Note: Rules and restrictions may be subject to PayPal Credit. PayPal Credit is subject to credit! . Plus, you can pay over time with PayPal Credit! Check it out at PayPal Credit at PayPal credit is possible, but no credit is required.
00:03:18.000There's a lot of talk that perhaps what he was actually doing was looking for an excuse to liquidate some of his Tesla stock.
00:03:23.000So if he actually liquidated some of his Tesla stock in order to quote-unquote buy Twitter, and then he didn't end up buying Twitter, and then he just ended up paying some sort of SEC fine, he would still have been able to liquidate some of that Tesla stock without having tanked the Tesla stock because everybody knew that he was doing so in order to buy Twitter. Bottom line is now Elon Musk is saying that he is interested in buying Twitter again. According to the Associated Press, the tumultuous saga of Elon Musk's on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter took a turn toward a conclusion on Tuesday after the mercurial Tesla CEO proposed to buy the company at the originally agreed-upon
00:03:53.000price of $44 billion. Musk made the surprising turnaround not on Twitter, as has been his custom, but in a letter to Twitter that the company disclosed in a filing on Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
00:04:02.000It came less than two weeks before a trial between the two parties is scheduled to start In response, Twitter says it intends to close the transaction at $54.20 per share after receiving the letter from Musk.
00:04:12.000The company stopped short of saying it's dropping its lawsuit against the billionaire Tesla CEO.
00:04:16.000That's because if they say they're dropping their lawsuit, then presumably Musk could drag this on for months longer.
00:04:20.000So they're using the lawsuit as a sort of cudgel to make Musk buy the company, which is a So the first thing, honestly, it's the first time I've ever heard of a company forcing a prospective offerer to go through with a sale.
00:04:31.000It's a unique situation, that is for sure.
00:04:34.000You remember that what Musk said is, I want to buy you, but, you know, I'm noticing that you got a lot of bots over there, and I think maybe you violated our agreement.
00:04:41.000And Twitter was like, well, you knew that going in, and so that's what the crux of the argument was.
00:04:45.000According to Andrew Jennings, professor at Brooklyn Law School, quote, I don't think Twitter will give up its trial date on just Musk's word.
00:04:52.000It's going to need more certainty about closing.
00:04:55.000Well, again, the trading on the Twitter stock jumped as soon as this announcement was made.
00:05:00.000It moved all the way up to $52 a share, all the way down from, like I say, $39 to $40 a share for a very long time.
00:05:08.000A letter from Musk's lawyer dated Monday disclosed by Twitter in that SEC filing said Musk would close the merger sign in April provided that the Delaware Chancery Court enter an immediate stay of Twitter's lawsuit against him and adjourn the trial scheduled to start on October 17th.
00:05:22.000Again, many people are saying the reason that this happened is because his case against Twitter wasn't strong enough for him to get out of the deal, so he's avoiding the legal costs and potential fines.
00:05:30.000He did tweet out yesterday, quote, buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.
00:05:35.000So as always, Elon Musk thinking big, the idea here is that Twitter would become part of a much broader app, almost as the kind of like how Facebook eventually morphed from those status updates to your close friends, to pretty much everything.
00:05:48.000It's where you get your news, it's where you shop.
00:05:50.000He's attempting to create sort of a parallel universe here via Twitter.
00:05:54.000Somebody tweeted back at him, I think it would have been easier just to start X from scratch though.
00:05:57.000And Musk said, Twitter probably accelerates X by three to five years, but I could be wrong.
00:06:03.000Gotta love the fact that the guy is a very, very honest on Twitter.
00:06:08.000Well, this has created the predictable specter of all of the Twitter employees freaking out and running into walls.
00:06:15.000I mean, they're just losing their minds over there as they should, because it turns out that Twitter heretofore has been a censorship app for many members of the left, which is why you will see people Just being banned and unbanned almost randomly.
00:07:19.000Another billionaire is going to own... Okay, I would like for you to name a giant tech company that is not owned by a multi-multi-millionaire.
00:07:26.000Really, name a big tech company that is not owned by somebody who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:07:39.000Twitter employees heard news of the latest development in Musk's potential purchase while they were in a meeting discussing the company's goals in 2023, according to Bloomberg.
00:07:47.000Roman Chadhoury, the Twitter Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability, tweeted, quote, Well, I think this person will not have a job for particularly long.
00:08:02.000Again, the Director of Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability means, presumably, the Director of Censorship over at Twitter.
00:08:10.000And of course, CNN's Daniel Sullivan then tweeted, this Twitter employee sums up what I'm hearing from folks inside the company today.
00:08:15.000Yes, because as it turns out, Elon Musk has different ideas about censorship than you do, and this is why you are so upset.
00:08:21.000EJ Samson, who works in global business marketing, tweeted, I encourage every Twitter employee to go outside and take a walk.
00:08:28.000Twitter's head of global development, Noah Weinstein, simply indicated what a rollercoaster it has all been.
00:08:33.000The good news is that Musk is actually creating a self-cleansing mechanism here at Twitter by buying presumably all these people who either out themselves and be fired or quit.
00:08:42.000And it'll be great because Twitter needs to be completely restaffed.
00:08:45.000There's a deep state over at Twitter in the same way there was a deep state in the federal government, meaning an entrenched bureaucracy that has ideas of its own.
00:08:52.000And all of those people can simply go away.
00:08:56.000Kevin Ruse, who's a longtime critic of open speech on the internet, he's making some predictions over at the New York Times on what exactly is going to happen now that Elon Musk takes over.
00:09:05.000Presumably, he's going to clean house starting with firing Twitter's chief executive, Parag Agarwal.
00:09:11.000According to Roos, a juicy set of text messages between Musk and his friends and business associates emerged last week as part of a legal battle.
00:09:17.000In them, Musk made clear he was unhappy with Twitter's current leadership, in particular with Parag Agrawal, the chief executive who took over last year from Jack Dorsey.
00:09:24.000The texts showed that Agrawal had initially sought to work constructively with Musk, but the two men eventually clashed.
00:09:29.000Agrawal at one point told Musk via text message his habit of tweeting things like, is Twitter dying, was not helping me make Twitter better.
00:09:34.000What did you get done this week, Musk Shotback?
00:09:48.000So, really, go into a market that is desperately looking for people who need to learn to code.
00:09:55.000I mean, you already know how to code, so presumably you'll be able to find a job somewhere else.
00:10:00.000Twitter, more so than any other social media platform, has a vocally progressive workforce and many employees who are deeply invested in the company's mission of promoting, quote-unquote, healthy conversation.
00:10:08.000By healthy conversation, of course, they mean things we agree with.
00:10:11.000Those employees may believe, for good reason, that under Musk's leadership, Twitter will abandon many of the projects they care about in areas like trust and safety to the most Orwellian areas of the entire Twitter mechanism.
00:10:21.000By trust, they mean left, and by safety, they mean left.
00:10:23.000They do not mean safety, as in we're going to prevent violent threats.
00:10:26.000The Ayatollah Khomeini is still on Twitter like everyday talking about wiping six million Jews off the planet.
00:10:32.000They don't seem to care about that very much.
00:10:34.000And when it comes to trust, they're perfectly happy to distribute misinformation so long as it comes from the left. What they really just mean is Twitter is a great mechanism for sucking in a billion people and then presuming to offer them only left-wing information in the name of truth. Some employees have already quit anticipating a must take over.
00:10:51.000It's a safe bet that many more will follow if the deal actually closes.
00:10:54.000It's worth noting that in his text with Musk, Edgar Wall claimed a large silent majority of Twitter employees supported Musk's vision.
00:11:00.000Virtually every Twitter employee I've spoken to, says Kevin Roose, has told me that he or she plans to leave if Musk takes over, which is great.
00:11:06.000Again, more jobs for those of us who aren't in favor of online censorship.
00:11:10.000Also, you can assume that Trump will be back, which My prediction, by the way, is that Trump on Twitter is actually not going to help Trump's brand a whole hell of a lot.
00:11:18.000in fact an important political leader even if people on the left would prefer to see him kept off of places like Twitter. My prediction by the way is that Trump on Twitter is actually not going to help Trump's brand a whole hell of a lot. I think one of the things that actually helped Trump over the course of the last couple of years is precisely what he should have done during his presidency which is tweet less.
00:11:34.000The fact that he's not in the public eye every single moment of every single day means that people aren't polarized into their beliefs about him every single moment of every single day.
00:11:42.000Him being on truth social means that people are a little bit removed from him.
00:11:45.000I think this has actually benefited him somewhat politically.
00:11:48.000Him being back on Twitter, he thinks it's going to help him.
00:11:50.000I'm not sure that that's the case, but regardless of whether I think it's good or bad for Trump, it is certainly good for tech, generally speaking, for Trump to be back on sites like Twitter.
00:12:00.000Also, the Babylon Bee, presumably, would be unsuspended.
00:12:03.000The Babylon Bee, when we did an interview with Seth Dillon just a couple of weeks ago, you can go listen to it over at the Sunday Special, in which we talked about the fact that the Babylon Bee Twitter account has been banned for about a year for suggesting that men are not women and women are not men.
00:12:15.000We've seen Libs of TikTok, who works with Babylon Bee, also banned and then not banned and suspended and not suspended.
00:12:20.000So, presumably, Musk is going to end all of that.
00:12:24.000Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is urging Musk to reinstate her, along with other right-wing commentators, including Alex Jones, along with one-off reversal of high-profile bans.
00:12:32.000According to Kevin Roose, I'd expect that Musk would tear up Twitter's existing rules and rewrite new ones, and that he might dismantle Twitter's content policy and trust and safety teams, which are responsible for enforcing the platform's rules as they currently exist.
00:12:42.000Which is right, because again, if you actually read the Twitter rules, they are just vague enough to allow for political bias to destroy the entire free speech system.
00:12:52.000One friend of mine suggested that he might install someone like Blake Masters as Twitter's head of enforcement if he doesn't actually win that Senate seat in Arizona.
00:13:00.000And all of this is scaring the living hell out of the left.
00:13:02.000Because what they are afraid of is that there might be dissemination of information they don't like and it will affect elections.
00:13:06.000And Kevin Roose says the quiet part out loud here, quote, it probably won't change the midterms, but 2024 could be the Elon election.
00:13:12.000Right, so again, what's amazing about that is that that is a tacit admission that the Twitter bans on particular figures make 2022 the Twitter election, meaning that if reversal of their current policies affects 2024, that means their current policies affect 2022.
00:13:29.000That is the logic of the statement that Roos is making.
00:13:31.000Basically, by keeping certain information off Twitter, this has affected elections like 2022, and that changing those policies will affect 2024 in a way that does not benefit the left.
00:13:42.000According to Ruse, the 2024 election will be a different story by then.
00:13:45.000If the deal is consummated, Musk will have been able to more fully mold Twitter in his own image.
00:13:48.000The platform could look radically different.
00:13:50.000More right-wing trolls, fewer guardrails against misinformation and extremism.
00:13:54.000Or it could be largely the same, but Musk will be still firmly in charge.
00:13:58.000This is pretty astonishing admission right here.
00:14:02.000More importantly, Twitter is going to kill some of the most unpopular features about Twitter.
00:14:07.000So he's getting rid, presumably, of Twitter Blue, which is the subscription-based product that gives users access to premium features like ad-free articles and an undo button for tweets.
00:14:15.000He's also skeptical of proposals to rebuild Twitter on a decentralized blockchain.
00:14:20.000He has said that that is not going to work.
00:14:22.000So many of the products like Twitter Blue are probably going to die.
00:14:27.000The left is freaking out because again, their standards of censorship have been upheld by the big tech companies.
00:14:33.000You have the government that is basically called on big tech to shut down information it doesn't like ranging from climate change to COVID.
00:14:39.000And so the reversal of that is going to change, I think, the face of how speech is done back toward what it was just a few years back before the consolidation of all media into big tech and then big tech using its censorship power to quash the ability to actually disseminate that information.
00:14:54.000By the way, this is not just with Twitter.
00:14:56.000So yesterday, Rana Romney McDaniel, who's the head of the RNC, she said publicly that Google has basically, a few weeks after elections, stopped fundraising emails from the RNC.
00:15:05.000They use Google's email servers in order to disseminate those emails.
00:15:09.000And she says that Google has used its power to prevent them from actually getting out their fundraising emails, which is pretty astonishing, actually.
00:15:16.000We are trying to raise public awareness.
00:15:18.000People should be aware that if you have a Gmail right now, Google is suppressing your turnout emails and your registration emails from the Republican Party.
00:15:26.000And it's not just a little bit, Maria.
00:15:40.000Google is only doing that to one side of the aisle.
00:15:42.000Obviously, that is a serious violation of free speech principles, if not the law.
00:15:46.000Meanwhile, Meta, which is the Facebook parent company, they announced that they're going to give users more control over what they see on the platform.
00:15:53.000What I'm hoping here is that the unlocking of Twitter by Musk will allow people like Mark Zuckerberg to go back to the free speech position that he was holding in 2017-2018.
00:16:00.000So Zuckerberg has become a big bugaboo on the right for some good reasons, including the fact that he funded all of these efforts to quote-unquote get out the vote in areas that were heavily democratic during the 2020 election.
00:16:10.000But if you go back and you read the speech that Zuckerberg gave at Georgetown in 2018, it was a very pro-free speech take in which he essentially suggested that places like Facebook should not be the arbiter of politics.
00:16:21.000Well, perhaps Facebook, under pressure from places like Twitter, is now, for market reasons, going to move back into the free speech space.
00:16:27.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the social media company said users can now choose show less or show more on posts, which will allow them to curate the type of content they want on their feeds.
00:16:35.000Choosing show less will lower that post's ranking score on a temporary basis, and choosing show more will do the opposite, according to Facebook.
00:16:41.000Facebook has been working to cement its place in a changing social media landscape, with rival platforms like TikTok becoming hugely popular with younger users.
00:16:47.000Facebook said soon users can decide to show more or less by selecting the three-dot menu in the upper right-hand corner.
00:16:52.000Facebook is also trying out something similar in its Reels offering as well.
00:16:57.000Again, they're trying to move toward an earlier iteration of the social media platform by boosting also its friends and family feed.
00:17:04.000Other social media platforms like Twitter and Meta's Instagram have also provided ways to control how feeds look to individual users, which, by the way, would be good if they would get rid of sort of the algorithmic programming of informational dissemination.
00:17:16.000That would definitely benefit companies like, for example, The Daily Wire, where that means our users can now actually upvote all of the content they like to see rather than seeing it artificially suppressed by the big tech companies.
00:17:27.000This could be, again, a return to a better time in American life where people could kind of say what they wanted and that information would just get out there, as opposed to having the gatekeepers established by the Democratic Party in place preventing that information from ever being seen by human eyes.
00:17:41.000And meanwhile, Joe Biden's economy is running into a real oil slick.
00:17:48.000OPEC right now has now agreed to restrict its production of oil despite Joe Biden going over to Saudi Arabia and kissing the ring of Mohammed bin Salman.
00:17:56.000He went over there after insulting the Saudis for a couple of years talking about their human rights violations.
00:18:00.000He apparently has no such Qualms when it comes to Iran where he's trying to cut a nuclear deal still as they're shooting people in the streets OPEC has now decided they're going to restrict their oil production because as the prices fall there's no reason for them to continue to pump oil at extraordinarily high levels so instead they're restricting supply which means the price is going to go up so while inflation is still continuing to be at really really high pitch and while you can't afford anything oil is about to go back up so again
00:18:27.000The Biden administration unable to apply leverage where it actually needs to be applied in any sort of successful way.
00:18:32.000According to Reuters, OPEC key ministers known as the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee have agreed oil production cuts of 2 million barrels per day, according to three OPEC Plus sources.
00:18:42.000Meanwhile, the Biden administration is fighting mad about all this as well they should be, considering that it puts the world economy on the brink.
00:18:51.000Higher energy prices means more contributions to inflation.
00:18:54.000It means higher steady pressure upward in terms of pricing.
00:18:58.000Also, it puts a lot of pressure on the Europeans with regard to oil and natural gas supply for the winter, as that winter is about to hit and as Russia is putting on the pressure itself.
00:19:09.000According to the New York Times, the OPEC and Russia's agreement to cut oil production helps Russia pretty significantly.
00:19:16.000Quote, Saudi Arabia and Russia, acting as leaders of the OPEC plus energy cartel, agreed on Wednesday to their first large production cut in more than two years in a bid to raise prices, countering efforts by the United States and Europe to choke off the enormous revenue that Moscow reaps from the sale of crude.
00:19:29.000Again, there would have been an easy way to avoid all of this, and that would have been not restricting the oil and gas leases being used, not Disincentivizing investments in the oil and natural gas industry, not allowing DEI considerations to prevent investment in the energy sector in the most efficient possible way over the course of years.
00:19:47.000President Biden and European leaders have urged more oil production to ease gasoline prices and punish Moscow for its aggression in Ukraine.
00:19:53.000Vladimir Putin has been accused of using energy as a weapon against countries opposing its invasion of Ukraine.
00:19:57.000The optics of the decision could not be missed.
00:19:59.000According to the New York Times, the White House is, of course, very, very unhappy.
00:20:02.000Brian Deese, Director of the National Economic Council, and Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, said, quote, Oh, you mean that counting on your friends in Russia and Saudi Arabia to make up for your bad foreign policy and energy decisions?
00:20:11.000You mean that didn't work out for you?
00:20:12.000negative impact of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Oh, you mean that counting on your friends in Russia and Saudi Arabia to make up for your bad foreign policy and energy decisions? You mean that didn't work out for you?
00:20:23.000Who could have predicted such a thing? By reducing output, OPEC Plus was also seeking to make a statement to energy markets about the group's cohesion during the Ukraine war and its willingness to quickly defend prices according to analysts.
00:20:36.000At a news conference after the meeting, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said OPEC Plus was acting amid signs of a downturn in the world economy that might cause demand for oil to weaken and prices to fall, so he would rather be preemptive than be sorry.
00:20:48.000And this, of course, created a price spike almost immediately.
00:20:53.000The Biden administration said that the president will order the Energy Department to release 10 million additional barrels of oil from the Strategic We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:21:00.000lowest levels of my lifetime, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which means at some point it's going to have to be refilled.
00:21:05.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:21:07.000First, if you own a business, the past few years have been pretty rough out there from COVID lockdowns to Biden inflation to, you know, the shortage in the employment market.
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00:21:22.000If your business has five or more employees and managed to survive COVID, you could be eligible to receive a payroll tax rebate of up to 26 grand per employee.
00:22:12.000Also, you may have noticed that your car has actually increased in value over time.
00:22:17.000It is a thing that is happening right now because of all the supply chain problems.
00:22:20.000And this means you better protect your car, especially because there are states like California and New York that eventually are just going to phase out gas-powered cars entirely.
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00:23:20.000Well, the administration is very, very angry about all this because it highlights all the shortcomings of, again, their energy and foreign policy.
00:23:27.000Corinne Jean-Pierre, our incompetent White House press secretary, she says this decision is short-sighted by OPEC Plus to cut oil production.
00:24:05.000So as you know, we've been working on this for months.
00:24:08.000The president has made, has made, taken historic steps to keep gas prices down.
00:24:13.000So here's, you know, so if you, so gas prices, we haven't, we've seen increase in the West and the Midwest in recent weeks because of specific refinery issues.
00:24:26.000Okay, meanwhile, the Pete Buttigieg, our wonderful Transportation Secretary, who has not done anything so far, as I'm aware, to actually help on any level.
00:24:41.000It has continued to be his pitch because it certainly isn't being a very good Secretary of Transportation.
00:24:45.000I'm not aware of any problem he has solved in his time as Secretary of Transportation.
00:24:48.000We have narrowly averted a railroad strike.
00:24:51.000Which had very little to do with Pete Buttigieg and the fact that that strike was even threatened is kind of crazy.
00:24:55.000We still have supply chain issues and we are two years in to the Biden term.
00:24:59.000But he is historic, and that's the thing that really matters in this administration.
00:25:02.000You can be as incompetent as you want to be so long as you are a historic appointee, meaning that you check certain intersectional boxes to get your job.
00:25:08.000Pete Buttigieg, he says that the OPEC production cuts are actually, they're good because what they're going to do is boost green energy.
00:25:15.000Again, you gotta love the silver linings crowd over here.
00:25:18.000So you're paying a bajillion dollars for gas.
00:25:20.000If you're in California, you're paying north of $6 a gallon per gas.
00:25:24.000And Pete Buttigieg says, well, the good news is this means eventually we will all invest in electric cars.
00:25:30.000You know, I definitely think we'll be in a better situation when we're not dependent on a commodity that is largely being produced in foreign dictatorships.
00:25:40.000It's one of many, many reasons why American energy security will benefit from homegrown clean energy, which is, of course, exactly the direction we're trying to go into for the long term.
00:26:05.000It's not like we can assume that just tomorrow the sun's going to come up and we don't need any fossil fuels, right?
00:26:11.000We're in a transition, and transitions are complicated.
00:26:14.000And again, it's one of the reasons why you saw the president act so aggressively to bring gas prices down, make it easier for Americans to afford gas, because most Americans are driving a gas-powered car.
00:26:26.000He is doing an amazing thing, bringing the gas prices down.
00:26:29.000You may not have noticed it because he's not, but he is, says Pete Buttigieg.
00:26:32.000Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve continues to raise those interest rates as they have to do in order to drive out the inflation.
00:26:38.000Jason Furman is an Obama former economic advisor.
00:26:40.000He has a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that the Fed has to stay the course against inflation.
00:26:44.000The left has been pushing back very hard against the Federal Reserve because they are concerned that it's going to sink the economy under Joe Biden, and this will lead to a Republican resurgence.
00:26:52.000But Jason Furman, who again works for Obama, and at least is still tethered to the earth, he says, yeah, you know, there's only one way to quash the inflation problem, and that is to raise the interest rates.
00:27:01.000He says a growing chorus is urging the Federal Reserve to slow down lest it break things.
00:27:05.000If you're paying attention, you should be nervous about growing financial strains in the U.S.
00:27:10.000inflation rate is worse, and employment is stronger than they were when the Fed announced the tapering of asset purchases in November 2021.
00:27:15.000Until there has been tangible progress on inflation, not mere wishful forecasts, the Fed should not let up, a process that could easily take the Fed funds rate above 5% next year.
00:27:24.000Those urging the Fed to slow down make four reasonable but uncompelling arguments.
00:27:27.000The first is that monetary policy works with long and variable lags.
00:27:30.000Let the medicine that has already been administered do its work before continuing to step up the dosage.
00:27:34.000One issue with this view is that two-thirds of the tightening, as measured by Goldman Sachs, actually happened more than five months ago.
00:27:39.000A lot of tightening is already working, and it still isn't doing enough.
00:27:42.000More important, in the past three months, the Fed's preferred price index measure, Core Personal Consumption Expenditures, PCE, has risen at a 5% annual rate.
00:27:49.000More troubling, this rate was actually held down by financial factors, like the large decline in the imputed price of investment advice, a component of the index, even though no one actually pays it, that resulted from declining asset values, which means A more reliable median PCE price index grew at a 6.9% annual rate over that same period.
00:28:08.000Furman says optimists point to signs that inflation will moderate.
00:28:11.000The latest signal is the large decline in job openings, but there are also falling home prices, falling shipping costs, falling commodity prices.
00:28:16.000But with the recent improvement, labor markets are still much tighter than at any point before the pandemic.
00:28:21.000There are other arguments that there might be an unnecessary recession, but again, the risk associated with doing too little means a continued inflation bubble that does not soften.
00:28:31.000Also, the notion that the Federal Reserve is breaking up financial markets because stocks are down and the dollar is strong and liquidity is drying up.
00:28:36.000But that is what the central bank is trying to achieve.
00:28:38.000You're just complaining about what exactly they're trying to do working.
00:28:42.000And then finally, there's an argument that the strong dollar and high U.S.
00:28:44.000interest rates are wreaking havoc around the world, exporting inflation, forcing countries to raise their own interest rates more than they would like, leading to capital outflows.
00:28:51.000These conditions make debt repayments by emerging and developing economies more difficult.
00:28:55.000All this has a certain amount of unfortunate truth to it, says Fuhrman.
00:28:58.000Although it shouldn't be exaggerated, the problems most countries face flow from their own domestic policies and high commodity price.
00:29:03.000Again, if you're a fiscally responsible country, the U.S.
00:29:06.000raising its interest rates is not going to kill you.
00:29:08.000If you're fiscally irresponsible, then of course, it is going to hurt you.
00:29:11.000And that's precisely what has happened over the course of the last 30 years or so, really, since the end of the Cold War.
00:29:16.000Every single industrialized economy went on a massive welfare spending binge.
00:29:20.000In the 90s, there was some talk about fiscal balance, and then it just got completely blown out of the water.
00:29:24.000And now, all of those bills are coming due, because that's what always happens when the economy cools down.
00:29:29.000So trying to blame all of that on the attempt to rein in the hot spending by centralized banks is nuts.
00:29:38.000The problem is not reining in the spending by the central banks.
00:29:41.000The problem is not raising interest rates.
00:29:43.000The problem is you guys were irresponsible, and now the credit card bills are coming due.
00:29:46.000And you can't push that off down the road a lot further.
00:29:49.000All of this is going to have some global impact.
00:29:51.000WTO is now projecting that world trade is going to slow sharply next year under the weight of high energy prices, rising interest rates, and war-related disruptions, raising the risk of a global recession.
00:30:02.000According to the WTO, total exports and imports of goods are likely to grow by just 1% in 2023.
00:30:07.000That'd be down from their previous forecast of 3.4% and its forecast of 3.5% for the year.
00:30:22.000I mean, if you've been alive over the course of the last 15 years, those rates are really unparalleled.
00:30:28.000The contract rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage rose nearly a quarter percentage point in the last week of September.
00:30:33.000The steady string of increases resulted in more than 14% slump last week in applications to purchase or refinance a home.
00:30:39.000Again, you're going to see the prices of real estate drop pretty significantly in certain markets around the country.
00:30:43.000Meanwhile, has any of this dissuaded the Biden administration from stopping its idiotic fiscal and economic policies outside of whatever the Federal Reserve is doing?
00:30:53.000Joe Biden has now been busily appointing A treasury department advisory committee on racial equity, because if there's one thing we know, it is that in times of difficult economic turmoil, what you really need is a fairer distribution of resources, not based on merit, not based on fiscal responsibility, but based on skin color.
00:31:10.000Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that inaugural members of her department's Advisory Committee on Racial Equity will now be appointed.
00:31:17.000According to the Daily Wire, the committee will provide Yellen with advice and recommendations on, quote, efforts to advance racial equity in the economy and address acute disparities for communities of color with respect to matters such as housing and federal supplier diversity, according to a press release.
00:31:29.000Yes, what we need is more subprime mortgages.
00:31:35.000Well, there is Michael Nutter, a Democrat, former Philadelphia mayor, very much to the left, and Roosevelt Institute CEO Felicia Wong, who will serve as the vice chair.
00:31:45.000Yellen says, a critical piece of executing on our racial equity goals is bringing a wide set of outside perspectives and lived experiences to the decision-making table.
00:31:52.000See, I always thought there was going to be a financial acumen that solved this problem.
00:31:56.000I always thought that if you have a financial problem, typically what you want to do is bring in a financial advisor who has a record of running things well.
00:32:04.000But apparently, what we really need is a wide variety of perspectives.
00:32:07.000I've noticed, by the way, that everybody is of the same class.
00:32:10.000Neither Michael Nutter nor Felicia Wong are low-income people.
00:32:14.000I think what we really need, if we're really going to do this right, is we need populations appointed by income sector to be part of this new equity committee.
00:32:23.000So we need a broad spectrum of people who are earning less than $30,000 a year to give financial advice to the federal government.
00:32:32.000She co-authored a paper last year contending that police budgets should be reduced and for-profit prison systems be done away with.
00:32:37.000She actually did that four years before the death of George Floyd.
00:32:40.000She also co-authored a paper last year saying policymakers should censor race in every single decision, quote, because our racial disparities are so severe across all elements of the American economy and society.
00:32:49.000No policy, even if facially race-neutral, is race-neutral in practice.
00:32:56.000There's no such thing as an actually equal policy just applied equally to everyone.
00:33:01.000Because people are differently situated and the rain falls on everybody equally, that means that the rain is going to hit the taller people before it hits the shorter people.
00:33:08.000And that means that we have to have some sort of equity policy and affirmative action policy in place.
00:33:11.000Quote, the design of all policy proposals, big and small, must be attentive to racial outcomes, All policy from vaccine distribution to higher education funding for tax to tax reform will have racialized effects. Recognizing this reality and always considering race and policy design is therefore vital. So presumably she is she's advocating for people of certain races to get vaccines before people of other races. Again, amazing, amazing stuff. Beyond the Committee on Racial Equity, the Treasury Department also hired a person named Janice Bowdler.
00:33:38.000She spearheaded JPMorgan's Chase Initiative to invest $30 billion in underserved committees as the first counselor for racial equity at the end of last year.
00:33:47.000The Treasury Department also tapped Wei Chen, a former official at the New York State Department of Financial Services, to serve as Chief Climate Risk Officer for the Office of Comptroller of the Currency.
00:33:56.000So we now have climate change extremists who are going to be helping to regulate the national banks and federal savings associations.
00:34:03.000I can't imagine why our economy is on the brink.
00:34:06.000With geniuses like this, people who are experts in climate change and racial equity, in charge of our economic policy, why is economic policy falling behind?
00:34:57.000They've changed the home security game entirely with Ring Alarm Pro.
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00:35:21.000If anything happens, professional monitoring will call me and can request emergency services.
00:35:24.000So, whether I'm across the country or across town, I know everything at home is protected and connected and that it will stay that way.
00:35:30.000To protect my home, I've gone pro with Ring Alarm Pro.
00:35:42.000Also, this Monday is Columbus Day, the holiday you're not supposed to celebrate.
00:35:45.000Yes, that is a day on which Christopher Columbus apparently discovered the Americas.
00:35:49.000This is supposed to be a bad day, according to the left.
00:35:51.000It's a terrible, terrible day, except for the expansion of Western civilization across the continent of America, which truly began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
00:36:01.000Apparently that's a bad thing, say all the people who have benefited from Western civilization being on American shores and who are speaking into their iPhones right now, thanks to Western civilization reaching American shores.
00:36:10.000Well, while many woke companies will ignore or attempt to rebrand Columbus Day, Jeremy's Razors will honor it.
00:36:17.000From now through October 12th, you can purchase a Founders Series shave kit for 40% off, plus free shipping.
00:36:23.000It's time to stand up and celebrate history and defiance of people who wish to cancel that history or pretend that Western civilization is really, really bad.
00:36:29.000Stop giving your money to woke razor companies that hate you.
00:37:16.000In any case, Joe Biden arrives in Florida and he hangs out with Ron DeSantis.
00:37:20.000By hangs out, I mean he did what people typically do in this situation.
00:37:23.000The governor of the state is there, the president is there, they greet each other cordially, and then the president speaks and Ron DeSantis speaks.
00:37:29.000One thing that I will say Ron DeSantis did not do is the Chris Christie bro hug with Barack Obama, in which he pretended that Barack Obama was coming in to save the state of New Jersey, which of course was really, really silly.
00:37:39.000Apparently, President Biden said he was in complete lockstep with Governor Ron DeSantis during a visit to Southwest Florida.
00:37:53.000Which means, because we're not hearing about it, that DeSantis is doing a really good job.
00:37:58.000That's what's actually happening right here.
00:38:00.000And the fact that Joe Biden is even admitting that DeSantis is doing a good job is fairly telling here.
00:38:04.000So here was Joe Biden yesterday praising Ron DeSantis for doing a good job presiding over his state in the worst natural disaster that's hit the state in probably a decade and a half.
00:38:45.000Also very obvious that DeSantis is doing a good job because if Biden had the opportunity to stomp all over Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 rival for the presidency, he absolutely Meanwhile, the President of the United States continues to say some things that nobody understands.
00:38:58.000He'll spill things out of his face hole and no one knows what he's talking about.
00:39:01.000So, for example, Joe Biden bragged about how he has personal experience with home disasters because at one point his home was hit by lightning.
00:39:10.000The actual story, according to the Associated Press, is that in 2004, Joe Biden's home was hit by lightning.
00:39:14.000There was a brief kitchen fire for about 20 minutes and it was put out.
00:39:17.000I don't think that's on the level of your home being literally washed away if you were on Sanibel Island or something.
00:39:23.000But, you know, Joe Biden always has a personal experience to call upon.
00:39:49.000So a few years back when I was newly married, I was at my parents' house one day.
00:39:55.000And I decided that I was going to make myself a frying pan of scrambled eggs.
00:40:01.000My parents had an old-fashioned gas stove and the pilot light didn't work, so I took a match and I used it to light the old-fashioned gas stove.
00:40:13.000I ran back into the house and what I saw was that the kitchen garbage can was completely on fire because apparently there was still a spark in that in that match and it lit all of the plastic on fire. So giant flames coming out there. So I take a, uh, I take the sink, right? I take the, the, the faucet from the sink is one of those hoses that comes off the sink. I'm like, ah, I will solve this problem. And so I start firing it at the, uh, at the kitchen fire.
00:40:58.000There was a mark on my parents' kitchen floor, which I promptly hid with a new kitchen Trash can, which that lasted for, I don't know, a couple of days until they realized what was going on.
00:41:07.000I called my wife on the phone at the time.
00:41:09.000She was laughing really, really hard at me.
00:41:11.000My parents apparently were right behind her on the freeway.
00:41:29.000Well, Joe Biden also suggested that if there's one thing that Hurricane Ian settled, it was the debate over global warming, which absolutely it did not settle because again, the data do not exist, suggesting that hurricanes have become either more common or a higher level because of global warming over the course of the last 30, 40, 50 years.
00:41:46.000Here's Joe Biden saying precisely the opposite.
00:41:48.000Colorado River looks more like a stream.
00:41:52.000And I think the one thing this has finally ended is a discussion about whether or not there's climate change, we should do something about it.
00:41:59.000But folks, I also want to, Jill and I have had you all in our prayers.
00:42:07.000Meanwhile, he also met with one of the mayors in Florida and dropped the line, nobody F's with a Biden, which apparently there was no context to this.
00:42:44.000Joe would never say anything like that, except he says stuff like that all the time, actually, as it turns out.
00:42:50.000Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, again, doing a really good job over in Florida of handling this hurricane.
00:42:56.000So he talks about how illegal immigrant looters should be sent back to their home countries.
00:43:00.000Again, this is fairly popular stuff with the American public, I would think.
00:43:04.000We've had four looters that were arrested, I guess a couple days ago, and they need to be brought to justice, and we're not going to tolerate it, but you know, three of the four are illegal aliens.
00:43:18.000And so these are people that are foreigners.
00:43:38.000Again, people on the left feel very insulted by this sort of stuff, but I fail to see anything that is remotely controversial about this.
00:43:44.000First of all, if you commit any crime and you're an illegal immigrant, you should be sent to your home country.
00:43:47.000If you're looting during a hurricane, I would imagine that the same should apply.
00:43:51.000Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis makes the absolutely inarguable point that if this hurricane had hit Tampa, the media would have been happier because they would have had more pictures of disaster to show and more things to blame on him.
00:44:03.000The media have been searching for some sort of angle to blame Ron DeSantis for.
00:44:07.000The one that they came up with, a dog that didn't hunt, is that only 21 hours in advance of the hurricane hitting Fort Myers, he told people they had to get out of Fort Myers.
00:44:14.000There's only one problem with that, which is that none of the networks said that people should get out of Fort Myers because that's not where the cone was.
00:44:19.000So here is Ron DeSantis pointing out this obvious truth.
00:44:23.000Everyone that I've talked to on the ground when we're delivering supplies, they're saying, I was watching the media.
00:44:28.000I know people personally on the island.
00:44:30.000Is there gonna be any accountability in the media?
00:44:32.000Well, look, I mean, I think part of it, quite frankly, you know, you have national regime media that they wanted to see Tampa because they thought that that'd be worse for Florida.
00:44:43.000I mean, they don't care about the people of this state.
00:44:46.000They don't care about the people of this community.
00:44:48.000They want to use storms and destruction from storms as a way to advance their agenda.
00:44:54.000Of course, the governor of Florida is exactly right about this.
00:44:57.000So the fact that they've been able to come up with nearly nothing demonstrates that DeSantis is doing a good job and they should be, in fact, pretty scared of him come 2024, especially if the heir for Joe Biden, if Joe Biden does not run, the heir apparent is Kamala Harris, who repeatedly has been announcing her love of Venn diagrams.
00:45:11.000That's an actual thing that she's been doing.
00:45:13.000I don't know why, but that lady really loves Venn diagrams.
00:45:17.000I've actually asked my team to do a Venn Diagram.