Which Political Party Is Better For the Stock Market? Senator Elizabeth Warren Pt 2

I live in LA now, but lately I have been craving the seasons. Snow, hot cocoa, the whole thing.

I don't even ski, but I have been daydreaming about working remotely from somewhere really cozy on the East Coast, like a cute little ski town for a little bit.

And whenever I know I'm going to be gone for a while, I always remind myself that my home can actually be working for me while I'm away because I host my space on Airbnb.

It is one of the easiest ways to earn passive income from something you already have, and that extra income feels particularly helpful this time of year as we approach the holidays.

A lot of my friends say that sounds amazing, but where do you find the time to manage guests and bookings? And that's when I tell them about Airbnb's co-host network.

Through Airbnb, you can find a local co-host who can help you set up your listing, handle reservations, communicate with guests, provide on-site support, even help with design and styling.

I like to give a personal touch when I'm hosting on Airbnb. So I make a list of my favorite restaurants in the area and I hand write a note welcoming my guests to the property.

My guests love it, but I also know that some of those little personal touches can take a lot of extra time. So this is the exact kind of thing that you would want your co-host to help you with.

Whether you're traveling for work or chasing the snow or escaping it, or you've got a second place that just sits there empty more often than you'd like, your home doesn't have to just sit there.

You can make extra money from it without taking on extra work. Find a co-host at airbnb.com slash host.
I love boba. My go-to-order is black milk tea, 25% sweet, light ice, and brown sugar boba.

It's my favorite afternoon pick-me-up, but it also meant my wallet was permanently packed with those tiny stamp cards. I swear I can never finish a single one.

The shop would hand me another and tell me, just combine them. Yet somehow the next time it came time to check out, I'd need to start a new card.

So I almost never get that free boba I'm supposedly working toward. All that changed when my favorite shop switched to Square and started to use Square's loyalty program.

Suddenly my stamp card was digital and my loyalty was actually being rewarded. While it feels like a perk for me, it's also a big benefit for the shop.

Loyalty customers spend 53% more per visit on average, but that's not all Square offers.

With Square, you can track sales, manage inventory, and access reports in real time, whether you're in your shop, on the go, or running things solo.

With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at sqare.com slash G-O slash MNN.

That's square.com slash G-O slash MNN. Run your business smarter with Square.
Get started today. If you take only one thing away from today's episode, Money Rehabbers, let it be this.

In my not so humble opinion, Public is the best brokerage for investing in bonds, stocks, ETFs, options, and even crypto.

You can try it out for yourself and see why I love it so much at public.com slash money rehab. Public is legit the only platform I use to buy bonds.

Before Public, I used to buy government bonds the hard way. Slow websites, confusing interfaces, website designs straight out of the early 2000s.
Just picture where fun goes to die. That was it.

And then I found Public about five years ago, and I have not looked back. I can now finally buy bonds without wanting to rip my hair out.

Public makes it so easy to buy bonds, whether you're into treasuries or corporate bonds. You can browse thousands of options right from your phone.
But like I said, Public isn't just all about bonds.

You can also find stocks and ETFs, and they offer a high-yield cash account with a 4.1% APY, which is higher than the national average. They even have retirement accounts.

You can now open a traditional or Roth IRA or both right on Public. So your future self covered.

And for a limited time, you can earn a 1% match on all your IRA deposits, IRA transfers, and 401k rollovers.

If you want an investing experience that's both smart and simple, head to public.com/slash money rehab. One more time, public.com/slash money rehab.
This is a paid endorsement for public investing.

Full disclosures and conditions can be found in the podcast description.

I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab.

If you caught part one of my conversation with Senator Elizabeth Warren yesterday, you know that we went deep on insider trading in Congress, the current proposal that would make the system a whole lot more fair, and what it means about our system if the proposal isn't passed.

Well, today we're talking about the most nuanced financial issues of the current moment. We talk about trading apps like Robin Hood and the line there between regulation and financial freedom.

And we also talk about the new narrative that Democrats are anti-business and the line between governance and free markets. There are a lot of lines here, and it's important to get into all of them.

I'll also ask her about some of the most urgent headlines in American economics today: billionaire influence, the vibe session, how to help the 99% get ahead, and whether or not she's ready to throw her name back in the ring for president in 2028.

I said this yesterday, but it bears repeating. I know we've got listeners across the political spectrum.
You might not agree with everything Senator Warren says, and that's okay.

But remember, this is someone who used to be a Republican, who spent decades studying bankruptcy and financial markets, and who has taken on some of the biggest names on Wall Street.

And I genuinely believe her when she says she cares about the middle class and helping everyone afford the American dream. So take with that what you will.

And as always, if you have any thoughts, I want to hear them. Hello at moneynewsnetwork.com.
Now, here's part two.

When we talk about the stress on American families, do you know one of the biggest expenses that's out there? We don't count.

And that is how much you're spending on credit cards. How much are you paying on debt on student loans? How much are you paying all your debt? It's actually left out of the calculation.

That's nuts.

And the difference between caring, as you know, $5,000 of debt at...

5% and $5,000 of debt at 36%

is the difference between whether you got a shot at paying it down and whether or not you're just overwhelmed and you're going to be in debt for as far into the future as you can see.

I you alluded to the fact that I know this all too well. I was in credit card debt myself, which is why I started this work to try to help people who might be struggling as well.

And we don't learn this stuff in school. But once I got out of debt, I was really hell-bent on investing and growing my wealth.

You have some beef, Senator Warren, with Robin Hood.

Tell me about that beef. No, no, no.
Because, you know, this idea of democratizing investing is really important. I'm a first-generation American.
The idea of investing was brand new to me.

So starting investing for the first time and seeing my money grow for me was very exciting. And it should be.
I love, love, love this.

And I actually want to make a point here that a lot of folks don't always link right on to

paying down debt when you have credit card debt, I'm talking about short-term debt like that.

Paying down that credit card debt and savings really are kind of like two ends of the teeter-totter, depending on where you have to start this.

When you're paying down debt, you are putting yourself in a much stronger financial position.

And whatever you've managed that you can take out of your daily spending so that you can pay down that debt, yes, I give exactly the same advice: roll straight in to investing it, roll straight into savings it.

Now, I'm also very big on consumer protection and savings. I very much believe in democratizing investment.
I love the phrase you use for that.

I just

want to make sure everybody's following the rules and that

nobody gets to hype things

where there's some shenanigans going on behind the curtain so that those who are in the know get to make out really well, and everybody else is paying a high price for that. That's my only concern.

Where is the line, though, between democratizing wealth opportunities and potentially regulating?

So you're essentially saying that Robin Hood, for example, does all sorts of pay-for-order flow behind the scenes, which it sounds like you're alluding to, or confetti on the app that makes it much more exciting to take on more risk.

So what's the answer there? I mean, we

let people drive cars, even though they can get into an accident, but we have licenses and seatbelts.

We don't let anybody drive a car without brakes. We just literally don't do that.
We don't let anybody get on the freeway and zoom that car up to 60 miles an hour and not have a set of brakes on it.

We put regulations in place. And here's always a deal for me.

Most of the regulations are not that fancy.

They really are about things like make sure your customer understands fully what's going on here and a bunch of tricks and traps you just can't get to do because you're fancier and know how all the little quirks and twists work and you can hide it.

That there has to be in the same way you go to the grocery store. You buy stuff at the grocery store.

You don't run any scientific tests on what it is, the juice you're drinking or the can of soup that you open. You don't run tests on that stuff.

You count on the fact that there is someone out there known as your government that has run a set of tests that made sure the kitchen it was put in was clean and made sure that the chemicals they put in there, things that were going to kill you, and that if they were going to put peanuts in it, that they had to put a big warning sign on it, right?

And in fact, we have, and I love that we have this, we have fights sometimes over that. And we say, whoa, you're letting them put these chemicals in this stuff.
And I don't like this.

This is why organic foods grew up as a way to say, you don't have to worry about that stuff. We do that with food because it makes no sense to ask every person who consumes food to go run that test.

I want the same basic things in place for investors.

You want to sit down and make a decision between whether to drink juice or eat soup. Totally up to you.

You want to make a decision whether whether or not to invest in clothing manufacturing or to invest in some new outfit that's going to have a new process for developing steel. Good for you.

You make those decisions on whatever information you want to.

But what you shouldn't have to run the tests on, because you actually can't see it, is that somebody behind the curtain is charging a little off the top for this and pushing a little of that,

all to make themselves themselves richer at your expense. That's all I'm looking for.
So, I have a warning label like on cigarettes.

I love markets, and sometimes warning labels are the right thing, but sometimes it's you just don't let people cheat other people.

We don't let people put arsenic in soup and juice. We shouldn't let people run scams behind the curtain that the investor can't see.

And it's not good enough to say, hey, there may be somebody behind the curtain running a bunch of scams. No, we should just say there are certain kinds of scams.
You just don't get to run. Because

if we play a fairly clean game, if we make sure folks are playing a fairly clean game,

more people can invest.

And more people can invest with confidence that

your only mistake you have to worry about is,

oh, you decided to go with clothing instead of steal. Not,

I trusted somebody who was stealing from me. That's the mistake.
That's what the cop on the beat is there for. So you don't have to worry about that one.

Well, I don't think a lot of people realize how much you love markets. I do.

And you left the Republican Party years ago because you said they stopped being the party of markets, which I think is so interesting with more of a shift now in the Democratic Party more to the left.

Can you explain how Democrats, you believe, now are more the party of the markets? Oh, absolutely. I think Democrats are the party of the markets precisely for the reason we just described.

Let me do antitrust law.

Antitrust law, as you know, was passed more than 100 years ago, big parts of it. And the bottom line just says

you can't grow a monopoly. And if you do, even if people like you, if you are giant and start using your giganticness

in order to stomp out all the little businesses, ultimately the market fails. And when I say the market fails, it's not just that the monopolists can charge higher prices.

It's also, we actually know this statistically, they lower wages. And here comes the best part, they quit innovating.

And you can actually go back through history and look at this. How many giant companies that were Alcoa was going to be the aluminum company for the next billion years?

And it turned out they actually just kind of quit innovating. Boeing, right? They just quit innovating, right?

They got big, they got to be dominant, and then they quit innovating and producing a better product.

So, Democrats,

my favorite, Lena Kahn, the head of the FCC,

says we're just going to enforce the already existing antitrust laws so that big tech

can't stop out the competition.

So that if you're an app developer, you actually will have multiple places to go to try to sell your app and that they can't demand that they get the lion's share from the app developer.

If you believe in markets,

you recognize that having a cop on the beat, not to pick winners and losers, not to tell you that that's a cool game and that's not a cool game, that's for others to work out.

But to say you can't have one giant in the field knocking out all the small businesses and the startups, you can't have private equity move in and buy up every damn veterinary practice in the state and then triple the prices when folks come in to have their pets taken care of.

You know, you and I could use the examples on and on through this.

And that to me is really pro-business because it keeps the competition alive.

Look now at what's happening in this Trump administration. There are two big economic moves going on right now.
The first is consolidation.

Just watching how many in the whole entertainment industry, right? It's just moving into one giant industry. What's that going to do?

Your access to movies and sports, price is going to go through the roof. They got no reason to make new stuff.
Just be the giant and stomp out the competitions.

So, part of what's happening just over the last few months since Trump has come in has been it is open season for giants to merge and become

even bigger giants for private equity to come in and do roll-ups.

And the other thing is to engage in practices

that undermine competition, corruption.

Look, if the way you get ahead in America as a big corporation is to go spend a million dollars for a dinner with Donald Trump, is to put a billion dollars into his crypto doodad,

is to offer a bribe to the head of ICE.

If that's how you get ahead in America, that doesn't make markets stronger and we don't get the benefits of markets. So, a world in which

mergers have taken off like crazy and corruption is swirling around us in ways we've never seen before is not pro-market. The people who are fighting against that are Democrats.

The Republicans in Congress won't even say boo about it.

Who do you think is actually leading the Democratic Party right now? Right now, I think it's everybody. And I actually think that's right at this moment.

We've got 47 Democrats or independents who are with the Democrats in the United States Senate. We need every one of them, all hands on deck.

The Republicans are running out of money to fund the government. We've got to pass a budget by this September 30th or the government shuts down.

But they're going to need some Democratic votes for that.

And the Democrats have said, look,

you want our votes. Let us tell you what matters to us.
You've got to roll back some of those health care cuts that you put in place in the Big Beautiful bill. About 15 million people.

are about to lose their health care coverage. Almost everyone in America who has private insurance is about to see their premiums go up because of the Republican cuts to health care.

Rural hospitals around the country are literally already closing.

And

medical research, cancer research, has just been shut down in

dozens of labs. around the country.

All of those were ways that the Republicans wanted to save a trillion dollars so they could do more tax breaks for a handful of billionaires and billionaire corporations.

And so Democrats are saying, look, we're not asking you to spend new money. We're not asking to expand health care access.
What we're asking for is if you want our votes going forward right now,

you've got to roll back those health care cuts. We're not even saying anything about the taxes.
Just roll back the health care cuts.

And right now, Donald Trump has told the Republicans, don't even talk to the Democrats.

So if there's not a true leader in the Democratic Party now, some say AOC, some say Gavin Newsom,

what about you? Will you be running for president? No, no, no. Nope.
I'm really in this moment. I am in the moment

when healthcare

for millions and millions of Americans are on the line.

I'm in in this moment when Donald Trump was saying a year ago, right now, just put yourself back a year, he was out there saying over and over and over that people should vote for him because he would cut your costs on day one, cut the cost of groceries, right?

Cut all the costs that families were experiencing on day one. Those were his words.
And here we are on day 240-ish

and the cost of groceries is up. The cost of utilities is up, the cost of housing is up, the cost of healthcare is already up and about to take another leap.

The cost of back-to-school shoes is up, the cost of backpacks is up, the cost of baby strollers is up, costs are up, up, up for families.

I've spent my whole life

on

fighting for America's middle class.

And to watch now how families are so stressed financially. Billionaires doing great.
Even multimillionaires are doing great.

But just middle class, working class families are struggling so hard and it's about to get a whole lot harder. That's the fight I'm in.
And

that's the fight I think right now

really tells us about the direction of our country.

Donald Trump and the Republicans in the Senate sure seem to want a country that just works better and better for a smaller and smaller number at the top, or a country that really

opens up opportunity and opens up markets

for

working people everywhere.

Money Rehab is the production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin.
Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. Our researcher is Emily Holmes.
Do you need some money rehab?

And let's be honest, we all do.

So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com, to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me.

And follow us on Instagram at MoneyNews and TikTok at MoneyNews Network for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you.
No, seriously, thank you.

Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.