September 12, 2025 • 15 mins
LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE on:
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WATCH and SUBSCRIBE on:
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Bad news is good news on Wall Street—but not for the rest of us. Jobless claims are climbing, inflation is still squeezing families, and the government’s interest bill alone now tops $1.2 trillion a year. In this episode:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watchdog-on-wall-street-with-chris-markowski/id570687608
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2PtgPvJvqc2gkpGIkNMR5i
WATCH and SUBSCRIBE on:
https://www.youtube.com/@WatchdogOnWallstreet/featured
Bad news is good news on Wall Street—but not for the rest of us. Jobless claims are climbing, inflation is still squeezing families, and the government’s interest bill alone now tops $1.2 trillion a year. In this episode:
- Why the Fed’s “dual mandate” creates perverse incentives in the markets
- The real numbers behind gas, food, housing, and wages over the last five years
- How endless government spending and tariffs keep making life more expensive
- Why only 1 in 4 Americans now believe they can improve their standard of living
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast, explaining the news coming
out of the complex worlds of finance, economics, and politics
and the impact it we'll have on everyday Americans. Author,
investment banker, consumer advocate, analyst, and trader Chris Markowski.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Oh, it's in my intro. It's in my intro from
my Watchdog on Wall Street show. I love my intro,
been using it for over twenty years now. A little
bit from Gordon Gecko and his tel Doars paper speech,
a little political and economic reality, and that's what we
serve up here. And unfortunately I don't have a lot
(00:36):
of good news today. Ken. I love good news. I
will love to spread great economic cheer. But we got
to go through some of these numbers at this point
in time. First and foremost, the initial claims. Initial jobs
claims surge to two hundred and sixty three thousand from
(00:57):
two hundred and thirty seven. The numbers have been creeping
higher this entire year. Now. Wall Street's thrilled by this.
Wall Streets thrilled by this. Big firms are thrilled by this.
Because again, the Federal Reserve has something called a dual mandate.
I'm not a fan of this. I've made this clear before.
(01:20):
Dual mandate. Remember I talked about the word priority. Well,
if you think about it, it can't you can't have
more than one. It can't be a plural. You can't
have priorities. Doesn't make any sense, right, There should be
one priority. One. You got one job to do, that's it,
(01:43):
and you should do it one priority. And again they don't.
They've got priorities, which is part of the problem. Their
priorities is obviously inflation and the job market. So yesterday
off to the races went the markets. And that was
due obviously to the fact that, oh my god, look
(02:03):
at this job's number. This is terrible, look at the revisions.
So the Fed's dual mandate has got to kick in,
and they've got a cater to that. And Wall Street
is expecting an interest rate cut next year, whether it's
twenty five basis points fifty basis points, who knows the
odds of three cuts this year are going higher. We're
in a situation where bad news is good news that
(02:28):
makes sense. Bad economic news, bad employment news is actually
good news for the market because it's going to entice
the FED two lower rates. All right, inflation, all oh
is another part of that mandate. Right, the FED is
supposed to be dealing with inflation. Donald Trump was interviewed today.
(02:52):
It sat on them. Well, he can't even call it
an interview Sun, Fox News, Fox and Friends. It's not
like they're going to ask him any sort of difficult questions.
We all know that he claimed that he conquered inflation. Again,
it's Donald Trump, you know. And there's a lot of
things he says. It's fake it. Do you make it right? Right,
(03:13):
Let's go through some of these numbers here. Again, he
says it with a straight face. He actually I think
believes it. I probably he's got people in his ear
telling him, Eh, mister president, inflation's way down. No, it's
way down out there. He does. Seventy one point six
percent of CPI components rose and an annualized paste greater
(03:34):
than two percent in August. That's the highest share since
August of twenty twenty two. Let's just do price changes
over the past year. GUS natural gas, your home utilities
up thirteen point eight percent, electricity up six point two percent,
(03:58):
use cars up six percent, medical care up four point
two percent, food away from home restaurants up three point
nine percent. Shelter up three point six percent, transportation up
three point five percent, food at home up two point
seven percent, and we'll get into a little bit more
about that in the second. New cars up point seven percent.
(04:22):
Things that are down oil and gas oil and get
gases down six point six percent, and fuel oil for
your home is down point five percent. The grocery prices
last month most certainly accelerated. They jump by point six percent.
That's the biggest one month jump since August of twenty
twenty two. All major grocery categories are now more expensive
(04:46):
than they were a year ago, some substantially so. Coffee's
up twenty one percent, Steaks are up sixteen point six percent,
Fruits and vegetables are up two point three percent year
over year. I can go on now, Okay, that's just
year over year. This is part of the problem. We've
talked about wage gains over the past several years. Again,
(05:12):
price increases over the last five years five years. New
cars up twenty one point four percent, family health insurance
up twenty four percent, food at home up twenty four
point eight percent, use cars up twenty six point seven percent,
Shelter up twenty seven point eight percent, food away from
(05:35):
home up thirty percent, electricity up thirty eight percent, gasoline
up forty one point nine percent, transportation of forty four percent.
Home prices up fifty percent, gas and utilities up fifty
four percent, fuel oil up fifty five percent, auto insurance
(05:58):
up sixty percent. A dozen eggs up one hundred and
seventy percent. Now, I hope everybody out there has been
doing well in their career, their business, their jobs. I
hope everyone's been making more money, getting raises. They actually
showed well. We talked about this here on the program.
The great the absolutely price the salary increases the people
(06:21):
at the top. It was the top ten percent of
the country is the top five. I can't remember exactly.
It was up four percent year over year. These numbers
are huge. I mean, these are It's just a five
year period of time. It's tough. It's tough. Again. Let's
(06:45):
take a look at government spending, which leads to a
lot of this. Now, you want you to actually again
try to focus in your mind. It's difficult to do
again because we throw numbers out. You know, I remember
the day back in the nineteen nineties. I keep thinking
of doctor Evil and Austin powers one million dollars. And
(07:07):
number two is it's not a lot of money anymore.
Billion dollars. Huh, what's that? The interest expense? Okay, the
interest expense on US national debt is one point to
(07:28):
one trillion. That's over the past twelve months. In the
past four years, that interest expense has more than doubled. Now,
if the United States came into my office and asked
for the Markowski brothers to manage its finances and put
(07:49):
money away, I tell them to take a hike. I
can't help you. There's no way I can How how
can I help you unless you're going to deal with
this problem. I've explained this before. This happens to us often.
You know, people wanting to work with us, contact us,
set up you know, all sorts of you know, financial
(08:11):
stuff for them, their kids, whatever it may be. And
these same folks have you know, eighty ninety hundred thousand
dollars in credit card debt at twenty five thirty percent.
And I'm saying to myself, what am I going to
do for you? Unless you take care of that? You
think that I'm going to show a higher rate of
return than the interest you're paying on your credit cards,
(08:34):
and unfortunately not all the time, but nine out of
ten times. Most people they don't want to deal with
their situation because it might look bad on social media
or Facebook, and they don't want other people to think
less of them. So again, they keep digging themselves a
hole that they'll never get out of. And what's that
(08:56):
going to lead to? But anyway, it's the same thing with
our Fredergrammy. Think about it. I want you to understand, Okay,
you work hard, you pay taxes. Think about the amount
of money. What is it now? In fact, I had
the number here somewhere, the percentage of every dollar collected.
I don't know that that gets spent on interest payments
(09:17):
at this point time. I'll find it. But think about
one point two to one trillion dollars flush down the
toilet every single year. Not to mention the fact, you
know where we're were conci You know they're can't hearing
about the tounting, about all this wonderful tariff revenue that
they're bringing in. Well, our budget deficit was three hundred
(09:41):
and forty four billion in August. Was supposed to be
three hundred and forty It was three forty four. That's
just further in the hole. That was the budget deficit
for August US government spending right now, I want to
take it as a percentage of our gross domestic product.
(10:02):
In the nineteen fifties it was seventeen percent, nineteen sixties
it was eighteen percent, nineteen seventies twenty one percent, eighties
twenty two percent, nineties twenty one percent, two thousands, twenty percent,
twenty ten, twenty three percent. We are at twenty seven
percent right now, twenty seven percent, And again we're being
(10:23):
told that we can grow our way out of this situation. Again.
Another another bit of nonsense that we've been told is
in regards to who's eating the tariffs, who's eating intest
we're told that foreign governments are eating the tariffs. Well,
(10:44):
if that's the case, why are why are import prices
continuing to rise? Well, why are import prices continued? We're
at import prices are at their highest level since COVID,
and obviously we had all sorts of supply chain issues
with COVID. Those pictures that we're going around with the
lumber trucks and look at the millionaire driving by highest
(11:06):
point in time since COVID. Now, again I always like
to talk about these things in terms of societal issues.
I get questions about this all the time, and the
rise of socialists and WIA socialism popular and man domie
and I talked about it here on the program. But
(11:26):
these are things that make they make me sad. And
this is where again I understand the President of United
States has got to be a cheerleader for the country.
He's got to try to keep people positive. But he
actually has to we have to actually start doing something
about some of these issues. Google actually offers a tool
(11:50):
that enables observing employee strife. It's called Google Trends, and
it's a it's a sample of search requ us made
to Google. And these numbers, Okay, sell my house fast
(12:10):
has skyrocketed, give car back, skyrocket, borrow against stock, skyrocket,
borrow against life insurance, up sell my Rolex watch through
the roof bankruptcy lawyer, through the roof us credit card
delinquent balances continue to tick higher. None of this is good.
(12:35):
And this is the worst one of them all, quite frankly,
and this is this is something quite you know this,
this has got to be a hole. I'm gonna say,
whole of government. But nobody gets together. I wish, I
wish they would be honest and address this. I really do.
You take a look at this survey, and this is
(12:57):
going back. Boy, it's going back to nineteen eighty five.
People the SARI question as people like me have a
good chance of improving our standard of living. Nineteen to
five was about seventy five percent. It dropped came down
(13:18):
to around what sixty percent. This was during the recession
in the early part of the nineteen nineties, then went
through the roof up until two thousand. This is again
dot Com Clinton years was up over seventy five percent.
That's three out of four people came down, came down. Actually,
(13:42):
you know, you would think that it would have really
hit a low in two thousand and eight, two thousand
and nine, It really hit a low in twenty twelve,
but it was still at fifty five fifty five percent. Okay, again,
it's still over one in two. People thinking that things
were going to get better, popped up again right before
COVID again, this is the first Trump term, to almost
(14:06):
sixty five percent. Now it's falling off a cliff where
it's twenty five one out of four, one out of
four people that are surveyed saying that people like me
have a good chance of improving our standard of living.
That's a disconnect. America doesn't work when people feel this way.
These are things that need to be addressed. I've talked
(14:27):
about it. When it comes to real estate, we have
to deal with the inflation problem. There's a myriad of
different things that we need to do, and most certainly
it's involvement in getting government out of the way. Again,
I don't know, Like I said, I don't know who
has the president's ear when it comes to this. I
(14:48):
don't know. I don't know if he's just quite frankly,
if he's not aware of the problem. But there most
certainly is one when one out of four are saying,
guess what, I'm not going to be be able to
get ahead and we can continue, you know, like I said,
you might fake it till we make it. Yeah, inflation's down, okay,
whatever it's not, it's not It must be dealt with.
(15:14):
Watchdog on Wall Street dot Com
The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast, explaining the news coming
out of the complex worlds of finance, economics, and politics
and the impact it we'll have on everyday Americans. Author,
investment banker, consumer advocate, analyst, and trader Chris Markowski.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Oh, it's in my intro. It's in my intro from
my Watchdog on Wall Street show. I love my intro,
been using it for over twenty years now. A little
bit from Gordon Gecko and his tel Doars paper speech,
a little political and economic reality, and that's what we
serve up here. And unfortunately I don't have a lot
(00:36):
of good news today. Ken. I love good news. I
will love to spread great economic cheer. But we got
to go through some of these numbers at this point
in time. First and foremost, the initial claims. Initial jobs
claims surge to two hundred and sixty three thousand from
(00:57):
two hundred and thirty seven. The numbers have been creeping
higher this entire year. Now. Wall Street's thrilled by this.
Wall Streets thrilled by this. Big firms are thrilled by this.
Because again, the Federal Reserve has something called a dual mandate.
I'm not a fan of this. I've made this clear before.
(01:20):
Dual mandate. Remember I talked about the word priority. Well,
if you think about it, it can't you can't have
more than one. It can't be a plural. You can't
have priorities. Doesn't make any sense, right, There should be
one priority. One. You got one job to do, that's it,
(01:43):
and you should do it one priority. And again they don't.
They've got priorities, which is part of the problem. Their
priorities is obviously inflation and the job market. So yesterday
off to the races went the markets. And that was
due obviously to the fact that, oh my god, look
(02:03):
at this job's number. This is terrible, look at the revisions.
So the Fed's dual mandate has got to kick in,
and they've got a cater to that. And Wall Street
is expecting an interest rate cut next year, whether it's
twenty five basis points fifty basis points, who knows the
odds of three cuts this year are going higher. We're
in a situation where bad news is good news that
(02:28):
makes sense. Bad economic news, bad employment news is actually
good news for the market because it's going to entice
the FED two lower rates. All right, inflation, all oh
is another part of that mandate. Right, the FED is
supposed to be dealing with inflation. Donald Trump was interviewed today.
(02:52):
It sat on them. Well, he can't even call it
an interview Sun, Fox News, Fox and Friends. It's not
like they're going to ask him any sort of difficult questions.
We all know that he claimed that he conquered inflation. Again,
it's Donald Trump, you know. And there's a lot of
things he says. It's fake it. Do you make it right? Right,
(03:13):
Let's go through some of these numbers here. Again, he
says it with a straight face. He actually I think
believes it. I probably he's got people in his ear
telling him, Eh, mister president, inflation's way down. No, it's
way down out there. He does. Seventy one point six
percent of CPI components rose and an annualized paste greater
(03:34):
than two percent in August. That's the highest share since
August of twenty twenty two. Let's just do price changes
over the past year. GUS natural gas, your home utilities
up thirteen point eight percent, electricity up six point two percent,
(03:58):
use cars up six percent, medical care up four point
two percent, food away from home restaurants up three point
nine percent. Shelter up three point six percent, transportation up
three point five percent, food at home up two point
seven percent, and we'll get into a little bit more
about that in the second. New cars up point seven percent.
(04:22):
Things that are down oil and gas oil and get
gases down six point six percent, and fuel oil for
your home is down point five percent. The grocery prices
last month most certainly accelerated. They jump by point six percent.
That's the biggest one month jump since August of twenty
twenty two. All major grocery categories are now more expensive
(04:46):
than they were a year ago, some substantially so. Coffee's
up twenty one percent, Steaks are up sixteen point six percent,
Fruits and vegetables are up two point three percent year
over year. I can go on now, Okay, that's just
year over year. This is part of the problem. We've
talked about wage gains over the past several years. Again,
(05:12):
price increases over the last five years five years. New
cars up twenty one point four percent, family health insurance
up twenty four percent, food at home up twenty four
point eight percent, use cars up twenty six point seven percent,
Shelter up twenty seven point eight percent, food away from
(05:35):
home up thirty percent, electricity up thirty eight percent, gasoline
up forty one point nine percent, transportation of forty four percent.
Home prices up fifty percent, gas and utilities up fifty
four percent, fuel oil up fifty five percent, auto insurance
(05:58):
up sixty percent. A dozen eggs up one hundred and
seventy percent. Now, I hope everybody out there has been
doing well in their career, their business, their jobs. I
hope everyone's been making more money, getting raises. They actually
showed well. We talked about this here on the program.
The great the absolutely price the salary increases the people
(06:21):
at the top. It was the top ten percent of
the country is the top five. I can't remember exactly.
It was up four percent year over year. These numbers
are huge. I mean, these are It's just a five
year period of time. It's tough. It's tough. Again. Let's
(06:45):
take a look at government spending, which leads to a
lot of this. Now, you want you to actually again
try to focus in your mind. It's difficult to do
again because we throw numbers out. You know, I remember
the day back in the nineteen nineties. I keep thinking
of doctor Evil and Austin powers one million dollars. And
(07:07):
number two is it's not a lot of money anymore.
Billion dollars. Huh, what's that? The interest expense? Okay, the
interest expense on US national debt is one point to
(07:28):
one trillion. That's over the past twelve months. In the
past four years, that interest expense has more than doubled. Now,
if the United States came into my office and asked
for the Markowski brothers to manage its finances and put
(07:49):
money away, I tell them to take a hike. I
can't help you. There's no way I can How how
can I help you unless you're going to deal with
this problem. I've explained this before. This happens to us often.
You know, people wanting to work with us, contact us,
set up you know, all sorts of you know, financial
(08:11):
stuff for them, their kids, whatever it may be. And
these same folks have you know, eighty ninety hundred thousand
dollars in credit card debt at twenty five thirty percent.
And I'm saying to myself, what am I going to
do for you? Unless you take care of that? You
think that I'm going to show a higher rate of
return than the interest you're paying on your credit cards,
(08:34):
and unfortunately not all the time, but nine out of
ten times. Most people they don't want to deal with
their situation because it might look bad on social media
or Facebook, and they don't want other people to think
less of them. So again, they keep digging themselves a
hole that they'll never get out of. And what's that
(08:56):
going to lead to? But anyway, it's the same thing with
our Fredergrammy. Think about it. I want you to understand, Okay,
you work hard, you pay taxes. Think about the amount
of money. What is it now? In fact, I had
the number here somewhere, the percentage of every dollar collected.
I don't know that that gets spent on interest payments
(09:17):
at this point time. I'll find it. But think about
one point two to one trillion dollars flush down the
toilet every single year. Not to mention the fact, you
know where we're were conci You know they're can't hearing
about the tounting, about all this wonderful tariff revenue that
they're bringing in. Well, our budget deficit was three hundred
(09:41):
and forty four billion in August. Was supposed to be
three hundred and forty It was three forty four. That's
just further in the hole. That was the budget deficit
for August US government spending right now, I want to
take it as a percentage of our gross domestic product.
(10:02):
In the nineteen fifties it was seventeen percent, nineteen sixties
it was eighteen percent, nineteen seventies twenty one percent, eighties
twenty two percent, nineties twenty one percent, two thousands, twenty percent,
twenty ten, twenty three percent. We are at twenty seven
percent right now, twenty seven percent, And again we're being
(10:23):
told that we can grow our way out of this situation. Again.
Another another bit of nonsense that we've been told is
in regards to who's eating the tariffs, who's eating intest
we're told that foreign governments are eating the tariffs. Well,
(10:44):
if that's the case, why are why are import prices
continuing to rise? Well, why are import prices continued? We're
at import prices are at their highest level since COVID,
and obviously we had all sorts of supply chain issues
with COVID. Those pictures that we're going around with the
lumber trucks and look at the millionaire driving by highest
(11:06):
point in time since COVID. Now, again I always like
to talk about these things in terms of societal issues.
I get questions about this all the time, and the
rise of socialists and WIA socialism popular and man domie
and I talked about it here on the program. But
(11:26):
these are things that make they make me sad. And
this is where again I understand the President of United
States has got to be a cheerleader for the country.
He's got to try to keep people positive. But he
actually has to we have to actually start doing something
about some of these issues. Google actually offers a tool
(11:50):
that enables observing employee strife. It's called Google Trends, and
it's a it's a sample of search requ us made
to Google. And these numbers, Okay, sell my house fast
(12:10):
has skyrocketed, give car back, skyrocket, borrow against stock, skyrocket,
borrow against life insurance, up sell my Rolex watch through
the roof bankruptcy lawyer, through the roof us credit card
delinquent balances continue to tick higher. None of this is good.
(12:35):
And this is the worst one of them all, quite frankly,
and this is this is something quite you know this,
this has got to be a hole. I'm gonna say,
whole of government. But nobody gets together. I wish, I
wish they would be honest and address this. I really do.
You take a look at this survey, and this is
(12:57):
going back. Boy, it's going back to nineteen eighty five.
People the SARI question as people like me have a
good chance of improving our standard of living. Nineteen to
five was about seventy five percent. It dropped came down
(13:18):
to around what sixty percent. This was during the recession
in the early part of the nineteen nineties, then went
through the roof up until two thousand. This is again
dot Com Clinton years was up over seventy five percent.
That's three out of four people came down, came down. Actually,
(13:42):
you know, you would think that it would have really
hit a low in two thousand and eight, two thousand
and nine, It really hit a low in twenty twelve,
but it was still at fifty five fifty five percent. Okay, again,
it's still over one in two. People thinking that things
were going to get better, popped up again right before
COVID again, this is the first Trump term, to almost
(14:06):
sixty five percent. Now it's falling off a cliff where
it's twenty five one out of four, one out of
four people that are surveyed saying that people like me
have a good chance of improving our standard of living.
That's a disconnect. America doesn't work when people feel this way.
These are things that need to be addressed. I've talked
(14:27):
about it. When it comes to real estate, we have
to deal with the inflation problem. There's a myriad of
different things that we need to do, and most certainly
it's involvement in getting government out of the way. Again,
I don't know, Like I said, I don't know who
has the president's ear when it comes to this. I
(14:48):
don't know. I don't know if he's just quite frankly,
if he's not aware of the problem. But there most
certainly is one when one out of four are saying,
guess what, I'm not going to be be able to
get ahead and we can continue, you know, like I said,
you might fake it till we make it. Yeah, inflation's down, okay,
whatever it's not, it's not It must be dealt with.
(15:14):
Watchdog on Wall Street dot Com
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