Extra: Is The American Dream Dead? Mr. Wonderful Weighs In.
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And Lisa Brady. With a tight presidential race going down to the wire, voters aren't the only ones making up their minds. Investors are weighing the pros and cons of two very different economic agendas, trying to be ready for whichever plan wins. So we spoke with Kevin O'Leary, chairman of O'Leary Ventures and star of ABC's Shark Tank.

about what might or might not work for the economy and the campaigns, and why he's rooting for the American dream with any U.S. president. We made some edits for time and thought you might like to hear the whole thing. Thanks for listening. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to the Fox News Rundown weekday podcast. Now here's Kevin O'Leary on the Fox News Rundown Extra. ♪

All right. Well, first off, I do want to start with the presidential race. So I'm going to dive in with that. Let's go. What are you hearing from other investors and business people about the state of the race right now? Are they nervous? What's unique about this race is how close it is because a lot of investors that are institutional buy data. They buy poll results. They or sometimes sponsor their own panels.

to try and figure out because we have a real difference in policy between these two candidates said thing about investors don't really get that emotionally involved who wins they care more about the policy and i'll give you an example

If you thought Harris was going to win, that's going to be sort of a top-down government that chooses sectors, decides which sectors to fund. If you look at something like the Chips and Science Act, that is a very sectoral act. It's a lot of money, a lot of taxpayers' dollars for one sector. Or the Inflation Acceleration Act or whatever, that's what I call it, because, boy, that caused inflation like crazy. Right.

That is government handing out money. In the case of that act, none of it went to small business. It's just the S&P 500. And then to pay for that, they raise taxes by 30%, 40%, up to 28%. So the government is taking money from everybody else and they're deciding where to deploy it, which is kind of a European model. You're talking about the corporate tax rate? Corporate tax rate, which makes... That's very concerning because...

Last time we raised corporate tax rates to 28 and ad state on top of that, we had many headquarters moving to Ireland, and that will start again pretty quickly. That's the unintended consequence of a policy like that.

You have to look at where you sit in the G20. And so Ireland is the destination for pharma, for example. They'll start moving their headquarters again. So I'm not a big fan of that idea, but I have to deal with it if it happens. In the case of a Trump mandate, taxes probably stay where they are. He extends his tax cuts.

He lets it be jump ball. He doesn't support one sector or another. So in the case, if you thought he was going to win, you would be going long energy. It's the lowest P of all the sectors in the economy. So I'd be investing in energy stocks, exploration stocks, fracking stocks, oil pipelines, that kind of thing. Anwar would be probably back on the table again with him. But you don't know that because the data coming, there's 43 counties in seven states,

And the panels are sometimes less than 1,000 people. So the margin for error is 4.7%. And the spread is 4% or, you know, less. And so you just don't know. I have no idea who's going to win. But I don't show for politicians. I show for policy. Because I know with certainty, when I wake up in the morning, who's ever president, I have to work with them. And so my counterparts in institutional capital, we've never seen a race this tight.

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The former president is, as you kind of alluded to, backing more energy production as a way, he argues, you know, if you lower energy costs, then you're helping to lower prices on many things. He's also talking about more tariffs, though, which critics argue could raise prices on things. Right.

Well, let's let's discuss the tariffs for a minute, because I have been extremely vocal in the last couple of weeks about tariff policy. And there's been a lot of confusion about what Trump is doing. And not that I'm an advocate for Trump, but I am an advocate for using. Let's just take China. Let's let's get let's get focused for a second here.

I don't like tariffs with trading partners. I would prefer to have a non-tariff level playing field with every country we do business in. But when India throws on a 10% tariff onto something, we have to reciprocate. And so within our own trading partners that are not adversaries and European partners and allies in NATO or whatever, we do have tariffs back and forth. Obviously, we have a NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico. It's a different situation. But China's different.

China came into the WTO in 1999. World Trade Organization. Yes, World Trade Organization. And the promise was basically imputed in that entry, because they had been held back for decades, was you're going to play fair. You're going to have reciprocal rights on property, on IP rights, on litigation, ownership, all of these issues.

That is not what happened at all. They became worse. In fact, they steal our U.S. intellectual property, right? Yeah, I love it when people get, yeah, you're right, but it's worse than that. I mean, I actually do business there. I invest there in molds, manufacturing, distribution. They cheat, they steal, they lie, and they laugh about it. They think it's so much fun.

because we look like idiots to the leadership there, not the Chinese people. You know, I deal with people in China who run factories and all the rest of that. There's nothing wrong with those people. The government policy there by the Supreme Leader is all about how much can I steal IP? How much can I give you an example? Let's say you're running a consumer good product and you make a mold. You spend, I don't know, a million bucks on five molds or four molds.

and you get a manufacturing plant to make your product. The minute it hits $5 million in sales, which is very early in a product's life cycle here domestically,

it's on Alibaba at 70% less. It's your molts, in many cases, they're using to make the knockoff product. So they'll run your product during the day and run theirs at night. And they bring it into the US and then you try and stop them. You can take them down on Amazon, which respects IP, but you can't take them down on Alibaba. And then you find it leaking into retail.

They do this all the time. All the time. Countless examples of this. The one that everybody in America understands that they should focus on, because it's coming up to a theater near you quite soon, is TikTok. So Congress, who represents the people, made a bipartisan decision to ban TikTok, which everybody knows is Chinese spyware. It's going to be shut off midnight, January 19th. Unless it's

the parent company divests. To an American or approved syndicate of buyers. I'm one of those syndicates. I'm trying to buy TikToks. I'm very familiar with this situation. The Chinese leader, the Supreme Leader, he did something remarkable. He brought a suit, a lawsuit. He used the American courts to sue Congress, the people of America, to stop this from happening.

Do you think I could do that in China and not be thrown in jail or executed? One of the two or both? Definitely not. So why in the world would we let him do that? I mean, my attitude about China is different than the other trading partners. I'm far more to the right than Trump himself is.

The Supreme Leader respects nothing, but he does respect staying in power. The last thing he can have is people rioting in the streets because they don't have jobs. So here's what we should do. I would raise tariffs to 400%, not long term. I would attempt to shut down his economy because we still represent the largest buying group, the largest economy. We're still larger than China.

I would squeeze him into submission. He would fly here in 48 hours and say, look, let's work this out because he can't afford to have, you know, you're making a yoga mat there, a million yoga mats a week or something. 400% tariffs on yoga mats. Well, they'll move to India. They'll move to Vietnam.

And there's lots of choice where you can get most of these goods and commodities from. It doesn't have to be China. But by forcing him to the table with the pain of maybe losing his power because he loses his economic economy, because their economy is starting to crack a little bit, let's accelerate the decrease in their economy by shutting them down. That's how I'd like to play ball with those guys because that's all they understand. They don't understand anything else. And so it's a short-term strategy.

basically come up, say, you know, I'm the new president, whoever it's going to be. Tomorrow, I'm putting an executive order out. All goods from China, 400 percent tariff. Not some, all. Watch what happens. Trump routinely calls Harris a socialist. She called herself a pragmatic capitalist this week. How do you see her?

I'm in a really precarious position because I don't chill for politicians. If she becomes president, I want her to be successful and I'm going to have to work with her because I do a lot of government private projects, some data center building right now, for example. You have to work with both local and federal government on this stuff. And so my problem with her right now is I don't know what her policies are. I really don't know.

All of the celebrity interviews and the Kumbaya stuff with Oprah, that's all worthless to me. I mean, there's no information in that. You know, the politics of joy and all that, that's just...

I need answers, for example, because I'm in real estate. Specifically, how are you going to build 3 million new homes when zoning is at the state level? Or are you going to allow us as developers to actually build on federal land and license it or let us buy it specifically? Those are important details. Well, I need to interview her because no one seems to be willing to ask her that question. Secondly, price gouging...

on grocery, a business that I invest in, 3.5% gross margins, the thinnest margins of any sector in our economy. Specifically, how would you put price controls into that sector? Because can you imagine the Ministry of Price Gouging being an additional regulatory force on a small corner grocer?

That's basically un-American. And we've tried it. They tried it in the Soviet Union. They tried it in Venezuela. They tried it in Cuba. It leads to... Now, either she doesn't understand this, or she doesn't want to answer it, or she's using it as rhetoric to get votes. And that's all fair in election politics. Instead, what she's done is she's left those policy...

nuggets, if you want to call them that, still floating around. And she uses proxies or advocates to go out to the press and say, she's just kidding. She's just kidding. Don't worry about it. What if she's lying and she's not kidding? I mean, those people are going to look stupid. Maybe she really does want to do that. How about raising taxes to 28 percent, putting this economy at

the most uncompetitive place it's been in decades. I need to know that. I need to specifically ask her, is that for real? Why would you do that? Do you understand the impact that would have? I mean, instead we talk about irrelevant stuff. And I listened to that town hall yesterday. I thought, I wish she could do better in communicating. And when she was asked again about immigration policy...

What a big miss she had the second time. You know, the truth, and it's getting out there, in the early days of the Biden-Harris administration, they did allow a lot of people in here that they didn't know anything about in the very early days, the weeks in, long before there were bills to debate or any policy whatsoever. Some of those people ran around killing Americans. You have to show some compassion for that. What I would have liked to have seen is her say that,

I own it. I made a mistake and it won't happen again. And to that mother who lost her daughter, murdered, I feel your pain. I swear that lives with me for the rest of my life. I will be an advocate for you forever and I will make sure this doesn't happen to Americans again in a way that I would have never done in the early days of my administration. I made a mistake and I own it and I feel your pain. That's what leaders do.

I want to make a statement here to think about that I've come to realize over the last week, I guess. And here's what I think is happening. If you think about what occurred in her ascendancy to the top of the ticket, it seemed to make a lot of sense because they were trying to protect the $315 million they'd raised under Biden that she would immediately get access to. Now we know she spent billions, so it's a drop in the bucket. It's irrelevant.

Who actually made that decision? It was probably a combination of the seniors in the party, Obama maybe, maybe Clinton, you know, Schumer, Pelosi. What they did was essentially stock pick. They decided that they knew better than the electorate.

what the electorate wanted. And I'll draw the analogy to, because I'm in the financial services business, 88% of managers cannot beat the S&P 500. So if you give a manager a million dollars, 88% of the time, 12 months later, you should have just bought the index. They can't beat it.

So I would argue now that Obama's a bad stock picker. Schumer's a bad stock picker. Certainly Pelosi's a bad stock picker because they did this before with Hillary Clinton. They stock picked her. What they've essentially done is circumvent democracy to avoid having an open process, a convention.

And what I'm learning, and I think the party is going to learn if she loses, and the country and every electorate looking at this, including the Republican Party, is going to learn, is when you circumvent democracy, it turns around and bites you right in the ass. That's what it's doing if she loses. They will never do that again, because we've got to remember, she was the weakest candidate in 2019 and in 2020. She had zero traction.

What changed in 34 months? What makes her so great today? And I'm not saying she isn't. It's just that why not run the process? And if she had emerged through the gauntlet, she'd be much stronger because she wouldn't be using word salad and whatever else you want to call it. She can't answer questions and it's becoming painfully obvious. That would have been she would have been culled from the herd during the open convention.

But that's not what happened. So Obama or Pelosi did not do a service to the American people, circumventing

democracy has a huge cost and you're seeing it being paid right now. Well, and in the meantime, there's still a big disconnect between, you know, the various reports that show the economy kind of, you know, chugging along, improving in certain ways, like with cooling and inflation. That's not what people are feeling in poll after poll still. No, because what they're feeling is inflation in three specific areas. Energy costs,

housing, mortgage or rent and protein food. And those have they're still trading at 18 to 22% above where they were pre pandemic. And there is no question we printed too much money. The Inflation Acceleration Act was brutal. I mean, that thing just that was just insane. Because if you look at American job creation, 62% of jobs are created in companies between five and 500 employees, and none of that went to them.

it all went to the s p 500 which many jobs are offshore so that makes no sense whatsoever and part of what i do now on the hill because i'm very fortunate to be known as a bipartisan guy i'm an advocate for entrepreneurship even elizabeth warren wants jobs in in massachusetts but you know i was able to go and talk to the legislature in mass where my family grew up where my kids were born and raised

And I left there when they put on all the punitive taxes and I moved to Florida.

And most of my neighbors from my neighborhood and my school's friends, they're all in Florida too. So that state is no longer competitive. And I went and saw the legislation and said, you know who I am? I'm a neighbor of you people and we've got to fix this. But still, I teach at Harvard, but I make sure I don't spend too many days there. It's kind of a really perverse situation right now.

One quick thing about the retail and grocery chains that are slashing prices lately. Target, Walmart, Aldi. Is that an ominous sign ahead of the holiday season? It depends what category you look at. You know, they have multiple categories. They're very, very good at managing these categories, but they have to forecast demand in a 90-day cycle.

And so they're also in flux trying to figure out what's next after the election. There's a lot of volatility pre-election in any four or eight year cycle. And so if you really thought we were going to hit a recession, which we haven't had yet, you would be pulling back on expensive consumer electronics, not necessarily food, because that's something that's an essential.

But sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes it's specific to one large retailer. But post-pandemic, the market is now almost 50% direct to consumer, including those retailers all have online businesses because the economy has changed and yet it's...

People ask me, why is the stock market at all-time highs? Because the S&P is extremely successful in this post-pandemic period of direct consumer margins. If you own a customer direct, you don't pay 40% of cost through multiple tiers of distribution. And certainly my companies have enjoyed that. We're having the best quarter we've ever had this quarter in our history. Instead of making 15% pre-tax, we're doing 17.5%.

That's incredible. I'm not saying that stays forever, but my concern that I voice, you know, about leadership, any leadership, including Harris versus Trump, there's only one job a president has. And hear me on this.

People think, well, what's the number one export of America? Is it energy? Is it technology? Is it consumer good or service? No, none of those. For 200 years, the number one export of America is the American dream. That's the reason most capital comes to this country. That's the reason people drown in rivers under barbed wire trying to get in here. That's why I'm here. I'm half Irish, half Lebanese. This is the most successful economy on earth and has been for 200 years.

You don't want leadership talking about the American Dream in any disparaged way. Oh, it's gone, or it's lost, or anything like that. That's not what the president does. The only job they have is to protect the American Dream, and then they put in place a cabinet that executes on that mandate. And the American Dream covers defense, it covers immigration, it covers tax policy, everything.

You need to stay at the top of the heap in terms of the leader of the world in every category. So what I listen for when I hear a stump speech is protecting, emboldening and enshrining the American dream. And I'm not hearing that from Harris right now. I actually heard her say, and I had a violent reaction to this, the American dream is dead. It's not dead.

Your job is to make sure it's never dead. That's your only job. So you have to make sure that that narrative is not something you perpetuate. That's a mistake. And I want her to be successful. So, and I know many of her proxies and her advisors, and I call them up a lot and say, that was a mistake. Don't do that again. Let her know that's a big mistake. And so she

You know, I want success in the White House because I know it's a fleeting position. But what never dies is the American dream. And I'm part of that. I'm an ambassador for the American dream. That's what I do.

Kevin O'Leary, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. It was very good. Thanks. You've been listening to the Fox News Rundown. And now, stay up to date by subscribing to this podcast at foxnewspodcasts.com. Listen ad-free on Fox News Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts. And Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on Amazon Music. And for up-to-the-minute news, go to foxnews.com.

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