Catherine Rampell

innovators and things like that.

And now China, I think in many ways, is trying to eclipse the United States or has eclipsed the United States, at least in select industries.

So that's kind of a longer term story.

I think that has been facilitated certainly by Donald Trump and hastened by the Iran war.

If you look at like who President Xi has met with just in the past month or a couple of months, you know, it's the leaders of a lot of Asian countries, Southeast Asian countries.

Even before the war, you had the PM of Canada, the PM of the UK, the president of South Korea all coming together.

to Beijing for the first time in many years, in part because they were seeking a relationship, a tighter relationship with a different authoritarian leader as opposed to Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump had sort of forced them into the arms of the Chinese government.

And so all of that is kind of the subtext of that one photo.

Yeah.

I mean, this is why no one should ever take financial advice from me because I frankly do not understand what is going on in the stock market right now for pretty much the reasons you laid out.

Stock markets seem almost euphoric.

When there's bad news, they dip a little bit.

Bad news like we don't have a deal with the Iranians, for example.

When there's good news, they rocket upward.

And it seems very asymmetric to me.

And if you look at the valuation of stocks versus how much the underlying companies are actually earning, so like what is the stock price relative to what that company actually earns?

If you look at the long-term relationship, it seems totally out of whack.

The last time it was this...

Out of whack, that ratio was that this off was during the dot-com bubble in 2000.