Bethany McLean
speaker
391 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Bethany McLean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It benefited well-off individuals who, because the stock market soared, obviously, in the wake of the Fed's actions.
So people who had exposure to the stock market did really, really well.
It benefited small companies who didn't have access to the capital markets, not at all.
And the government obviously tried to come up with a lending plan for them that
was much better than nothing.
But it doesn't benefit small companies.
And then it allows the big to consolidate, which makes life even more hard on the small.
And this action really didn't benefit consumers who are less or citizens who are less well-off, who don't have exposure to the market because it helped cause inflation.
The debate of how much Fed policy contributed to
The inflation we experienced and are still experiencing is a raging debate, but it definitely didn't help matters.
And inflation hurts people at the lower end of the income spectrum a lot, while the gains in asset prices don't do much to help them.
Yeah, that's funny.
It's just something I'm thinking about now, especially with the IPO of SpaceX and the possible coming big IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic, because this retailization of the market is a really interesting phenomenon.
I think one thing that concerns me, although it is true of professional investors as well,
that I just wrote a piece for the New York Times on SpaceX, and I used my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, which I'm going to mangle as I try to paraphrase it, that the true mark of genius is being able to hold two competing notions in your mind at the same time and not go crazy.
And it is something that people are less and less capable of doing.
And so if you're going to be a really good investor, you should be able to
hold one thought in your mind, which is that, say, SpaceX might be this, it might rule the world, right?
But you should be able to hold the other thought in your mind too, which is that this company has a ton of debt and needs a ton of debt, and there's a lot of danger here.
And people are just increasingly vehement and monomaniacal about one side of the equation, and that's not being a good investor.
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