James Altucher
speaker
316 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 1 Apr
James Altucher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, I hate to sound like overly conservative, but let's say you're a manufacturing company and you're like, oh, my gosh, steel prices just went up. So it's going to be it's going to cost us more to build cars or whatever. Oh, my God. Now the minimum wage. Now it's going to cost us more to have labor.
So they're going to what's going to happen is they're going to just switch to robots eventually. And. They'll raise the price on their cars or they'll insource steel as much as they can because steel does come from the U.S. also. Those have to like make more of it.
So, you know, what happens typically is you start looking for alternatives to the things that are going up in cost, which is why overall inflation never occurs when there's tariffs. So take any basket of goods. If some of the goods go up, other goods are going to go down. Again, overall inflation only happens when you're printing up just a lot of excess money to your earlier point.
But what a home does is they look for alternatives. So they don't shop at, I don't know, Whole Foods, they shop at Costco or Walmart or whatever. And I bet you didn't know, you can go to any site that sells gift cards on the planet and you could buy infinite amount of Uber gift cards to do Uber rides for 75 cents on the dollar. You can get 25% all your Uber rides just by buying gift cards.
Nobody does it, though. But that's an alternative to whatever people are doing now, which is just straight riding Uber. So when people look, there's always alternatives. to find cheaper goods or goods that are trying to be more competitive because they're made domestically. So they're cutting prices to to compete with when they couldn't compete before with the Chinese products or whatever.
So, yes, it's true. People don't care where the inflation comes from, but there's not going to be individual products might rise in prices, but you can't have overall inflation because where there's no money for that if there's not extra money in the economy.
Yeah, so if money is printed, if money is printed, then there will be inflation. But that's not necessarily a bad thing either. We've had... 30,000 or whatever percent inflation since 1903, right? So three cents in 1903 could buy what a dollar could buy now, more or less. But our quality of life has gone up amazingly. Inflation is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's what basically fueled all the innovation and discovery in the United States because there was excess money floating around that went into inventing new things for our money hungry consumers to buy.
No, I'm not, I'm not saying that. I'm saying even in a, right now, for instance, you could buy Amazon gift cards and buy all your groceries through Amazon at 80 cents on the dollar. So this is just, what I'm saying is there's an alternate, people will start being creative and think of alternatives to way they're spending now.
It doesn't matter if you're rich, not rich, poor, middle class, whatever. You might not buy a car that just went up from $80,000 to $100,000. You might say, look, I'm fine with the car that's $70,000. And so people will just start looking for alternatives, particularly if you're not making more money.
Now, if money is printed, which it could be, people will have more money in general and there will be inflation in the economy and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing will have to be determined in the future but that is one way to avoid a recession that's why they printed money in the pandemic to avoid a depression so and it worked i mean there was inflation but we avoided a depression
Yes.
It's a great story.
I'll say what is bad, though. If tariffs are too big, we get into the Smoot-Hawley Great Depression era. If money printing is too big, we get into hyperinflation. So mild inflation is good. Tariffs are good. They'll generate revenues for all the reasons you mentioned. They'll generate revenues. They'll generate strategic possibilities for the administration. They'll move some businesses onshore.
So there's good, there's some prices of products will raise, but some products of prices will go down. But too much is too much. Then you have the Great Depression. So people are trying to determine, are these tariffs too much? And my- Maybe yes, maybe no. Well, I'll say the one difference is The tariffs that started Great Depression were 50 to 60%. Here we're talking about a 10% blanket tariff.
All the other tariffs are reciprocal tariffs that could be negotiated. So countries will bring their tariffs down and we'll bring our tariffs down as a result, or there'll be some other negotiation. or we'll switch to other products, or we'll insure, or whatever. And similarly with avoiding a recession, yes, we'll print money. That will lead to inflation.
But we've had inflation for the past 100 years, and we've flourished. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's only bad if it's hyperinflation, if it's too much. So people could get worried about that, but it hasn't happened yet in the U.S. So overall... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Showing 201–220 of 316 · page 11 of 16
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