Business Rundown: Trump Victory Ushers In A Wall Street Boom
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Wednesday, November 6th, 2024. I'm Brian Brenberg. And I'm Taylor Riggs. This is the Fox Business Rundown.

We are back on in the middle of the week for a special 2024 election episode. Former President Trump has won the presidential race, expected to exceed about 300 electoral votes. And the markets have been reacting to the Trump victory. At the time of recording, stocks have been seeing a historic rally with the Dow, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq all hitting all-time intraday highs.

So let's get into what is driving this and what kind of economy Americans can expect under a second Trump administration. Brian, there is no one better to get into it than you. We just came off of our show. We had Kevin O'Leary and Anthony Pompliano. These are what? Billionaire, businessmen, entrepreneurs, right?

so excited about this economy and not just excited because stocks are higher today, right? It's deeper than that. It's more long-term. Well, they were pumped about the possibility of unleashing entrepreneurship. That's their thing. That's what they do. And so right away, they got into the conversation of deregulation, which is one of Trump's signature things. And he's really talking about two things there. One, deregulate, pull back on the bureaucracy. Two,

You got Elon Musk, the guy who's going to actually cut government spending, cut all those folks in D.C. making all that regulation. Their prediction is this is an economy poised for much stronger growth because there's much less of a government wet blanket sitting on top of it. But some people would, you know, when they say pull back on regulation, people get nervous, right? I don't get nervous. Okay, but please.

Play devil's advocate with me. Well, you're playing devil's advocate. I'm playing devil's advocate and you're here along for the ride. Okay.

Less regulation means am I less safe as a consumer? Are products less safe? Are banks now no longer going to protect me? Are oil companies going to take advantage and not think about the climate? Right. So if you think about the other side, people hear less regulation and they think, but what about the protections? Dispel the narrative I just set out. Look, it's a good point. It's a fair point. I don't blame people for thinking that way. But.

The best protection in any economy at the end of the day is the competition of different companies providing products and consumers gravitating to the ones that they think are best and serve them well. And let me just say, like on energy, for example, we talk about clean energy. OK, I think we'll get more clean energy innovation in an economy that's less regulated because

producers will have better access to capital, cheaper access to capital. They'll be able to try more things and innovate more freely. And even on fossil fuels, which can be a cleaner form of energy, we've got the cleanest fossil fuels in the world, but we've got a regulatory regime that slow rolls permits and doesn't allow us to build pipelines. So

I don't think anybody's saying get rid of all regulation, but they're saying tilt back to competition being the source of protection for consumers, for the economy. And I think that's a good move because I think entrepreneurs are a better path forward to prosperity than government.

It sort of reminds me of what we heard on the show today. Kevin and Anthony Pompel said, innovate, don't regulate, right? And that leads to competition. If you can innovate, then that in itself provides enough competition where you don't need regulators to come in and say, oh, no, you're violating antitrust or anti-competitive agreements.

Right. As long as you're all innovating, then there is a natural, healthy balance of enough competition to keep us all in check. Good ideas. I mean, that like that we talk about Elon Musk on the show. He's doing this in the speech space. Right. We're trying to figure out what a free speech look like. He bought a company, put a lot of money at risk. Did he get everything right with Twitter slash X? No. No.

but he's showing a path forward. And that's the point of an entrepreneur, right? They reveal to you the world that could be, and you want a lot of that. You talk a lot about sort of competition and regulation and money and entrepreneurs and growing ourself out of some of this debt. A lot of people have talked about the policies of Harris, right? Of just giving a business owner or a homeowner like a 25 or a $50,000 check, but that doesn't help you once you're,

Right.

Well, you don't want to plant seeds, which is kind of what giving money to everybody is, and then snip them as soon as they start to grow up into little green shoots. And that's what regulation does to businesses. So it's the old adage of give a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish. And the point is...

You want more people to learn more quickly how to fish more effectively. And the less they have to run through hoops and mazes, the faster that they do that. So that's the dynamism piece of the economy that ultimately raises wages, increases

creates jobs and gets us to a point where more of the population is flourishing with less of a need to like take money from one person and hand it to somebody else. Another way you can do that is lower taxes. So I want to talk about personal taxes. If we think about the expiration of the Trump tax cuts, which now may not expire. Big deal. And then let's do corporate tax rates later. Let's do personal, right? Because a lot of people on the left said that,

He's just cutting taxes for the billionaires, the wealthy. Dispel that notion. The Trump tax cuts help all, right? Well, you probably do a better job at this than I would, but the Trump tax cuts were most beneficial to people in the middle. There's just no question about that on a percentage basis. They were getting the biggest...

change in terms of the income that they kept. And that is such a big deal right now in a world where inflation is still really biting into people's wallets. In 2025, either we're going to get these tax cuts extended or

or they're going to sunset. And where the election just moved yesterday probably raised the odds big time that Congress is going to be able to get those personal income tax cuts. You mean bigly? Wow. Yeah, you would say bigly. I would not say bigly. The incoming president might say bigly, but you talk about corporate taxes too. Okay. Okay. So talk to me about that because so I'm on the left, right? And I say, I keep pretending like I'm on the left, but

It's a devil's advocate thing. You're playing that side and I'm fine. You can play that side. I'm trying to help not be a cheerleader for the market, but to really sort of deep dive, understand what's happening. Right. So I'm trying to sort of understand it on a deeper level. Corporate tax rates. Let's say I'm against you lowering corporate tax rates because I think it's a free handout to the corporations.

Explain again why we cut corporate tax rates, but that follows through into higher wages for employees and better opportunities for employees. Well, first of all, I just want to say you're a cheerleader for the market and that's okay. It is okay to cheer for the market. You could cheer for capitalism, Taylor. I've got to accept who I am, right? That's right. Corporate taxes are not a giveaway to companies because...

Companies do something with every dollar of revenue they bring in. They invest it. They build something. They pay employers or they pay shareholders back. But they're doing something with the money. They're not putting it under the corporate mattress and having it sit there or something. These are not Scrooge McDucks swimming in piles of gold coins.

That's the main problem with the conversation is that's the conception that progressives tend to have about corporate profits. Okay, so what is the point of giving them more money to keep? It's so they can do something useful with it, which they have to do because if they don't do something useful with it, they will lose control of it because somebody else will. And what ends up happening is these guys, they build plants, they innovate, they hire employees, they produce new products that make our lives better. Right.

That's what we want. That's why you cheer for the market. That's why you're a cheerleader for the market, Taylor. I do. You know what? Because the market is a lot of these U.S. domestic companies. And I root for capitalism. I root for U.S. innovation. I root for America. You want them here. Yeah. And when I think about the S&P 500 or in some cases the Dow, I think about American companies who were born and raised here who want to change our world. So that's why –

On a bigger picture note, I do love rooting for the markets because I'm rooting for America and I'm rooting for capitalism. There you go. There you go. On that note, this feels a little bit like 2016 Trump 2.0 in terms of the feeling in the market.

equities are higher, yields are higher. You're seeing dollar strength that always goes back to trade and tariffs. You're seeing crypto, right? So you're seeing exactly what we saw in 2016. The only caveat to that is Trump has his work cut out for him.

We're facing still really high inflation. We've talked about how the rate of inflation has slowed. Cumulative inflation, yeah. But cumulative inflation is up 20%. People still feel like, frankly, things suck, right? This doesn't feel good. Right. So how do you cut taxes, maybe think about pressuring a federal reserve to lower rates,

But now you're spurring all this growth, but you don't want inflation to get out of hand. Are we confident that this time will be the same as 2016 where we can grow without inflation? Yes, yes, we can.

You grow without inflation when you get more productive. Productivity is the key to raising wages without raising inflation. And is that AI too? And we can do that. And we found different ways to do that throughout history. And probably the next leg of that is AI. It's going to supplement the work that we do and help us be more productive and raise our wages. But you got to have a lot of experimentation in the economy to do that because we don't know what the applications of AI are. We know it's going to change a lot of things. We don't know how.

The faster we iterate, the faster we learn how to do that. And we want to do that faster than other countries. We want to do it faster than China. Of course, it's a race. We want to do it faster than India. We want to do it faster than everybody. Yeah. But we can't shackle ourselves in order to make that happen. You are a former, do I still call you an economics professor or are you a former economics professor? Like once a professor, always a professor, right? Yeah, let's go with that. Okay. So economics professor. Yeah.

My worry, as you know, debt and deficits. I love that we can come in and cut spending. We're doing that with maybe Elon Musk government efficiency. If you cut $2 trillion out of a $6.5 trillion budget, great start, right? But my worry is sort of the long-term debt trajectory of this country, $35, $36 trillion is sort of, if you think about it, total, total debt.

My gut says, and according to history books, the only way we get out of this is you inflate your way out of it. Bingo. We tried that four years ago. It doesn't work. Right. We need a better way. Are you confident we can tackle this issue? Confident? No, because we don't have a great track record of it. But I would say this. You can you you grow faster. You grow your economy faster. You grow wages faster than you grow federal spending.

That's realistically what we need to do. Restrain federal spending as much as we can. And I think Elon Musk is a great guy to try to do that. Nobody else has been great at it. He could be good. But then grow the economy, grow people's incomes. That's where your tax revenue comes from. It comes from paychecks that grow because the economy is more productive. When we like we came out of really high debt levels after World War Two. Right. And we got as a percentage of GDP, as a percentage of national income, we got them down.

Because our economy grew and we actually had the good sense to restrain government spending. We've done that before. We can do that again. I mean, 40 percent of the spending we've got in the books right now is COVID spending. It's stuck on from COVID. We're done with that. Enough of that. We need somebody to come in and just speak the plain truth on it, do something about it.

And then put more money back in people's pockets. I think whenever we talk about debt and deficits, sometimes our viewers' eyes can sort of glaze over. But I always remind myself that if I'm managing the budget of my household, I need a government who can do the same. I take a look at my income and I take a look at my expenses. And hopefully at the end of the day, my income is a little bit more than my expenses. And if we're not doing it on a federal government, I can't ask the citizens of this country to do the same.

Hopefully that's a little bit of a lesson. I think that's a fair ask of our government, Taylor. Financial conservatism. Yes. A minute left. Any sort of last words, last thoughts on sort of the field today, the hope, the optimism? You and I have talked a lot about who we are as a people, right? Days like today, you wake up post-election and you sort of look at yourself. Who are we as a people? I think at the end of the day, we're an optimistic people. We are an innovative people. We are...

an intellectual doer over a thinker type of people. I think this is a country that wants to get to work. I want to build. I want to engineer. I want to create. I want to innovate. Do you share that same hope and optimism today? I just want to give that a big amen. I am on board with that, Taylor. Nice summation. I say you do what you can with what you got, and we've got an opportunity to do some great things in this economy, and we need it. So let's go.

Brian Brenberg, Taylor Riggs, sounding off.