‘How to Money’ with Joel Larsgaard | Fed Cuts Rates

Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and... many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song about it. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. rewatch on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shoutouts to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get. your podcast. I'm Nick Totoro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Tatoro, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing my belt? To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called Happiness, Delivering Happiness. And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tuttle. And listen now. I'm Jake Brennan. And on the Disgraceland podcast, I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history. These are the stories you haven't heard. The kind you'll end up telling someone else. Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of where that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bundy. Listen to disgraceland on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to KFI, AM 640, the Bill Handel show On Demand, on the IHeart Radio app. It don't make dollars, it don't make sense. KFI AM 640, Bill Handel here. It is a Thursday morning, December 11th. A quick word about Ask Handel Anything, which happens tomorrow at 830. And you've got to help us do it, because without you, it doesn't happen.

And here's what you do is during this show, you go to the iHeart radio app and you will be listening to this show. And you'll see a microphone in the upper right hand corner. And all you do is press click onto that and record a question, ask, handle anything. And it's hugely entertaining because it's usually hugely embarrassing. And Neil picks the recordings and we have fun. The more the merrier. Okay. And we have to have you record so you can do it anytime before the show ends today. Joel Larsgaard every Sunday from 12 to 2 p.m. is heard right here on KFI, how to money. His social address at how to money, Joel. His website is how to money.com. Good morning, Joel. Good morning, Bill. Ah, now I have a question. I want to throw something at you. And that is how cash is a joke. I have one checkbook, one. And. When I first started, actually up until I met my current wife, she's number four, number five, is that it? I feel like the big Lou commercial. Anyway, she started laughing at me for writing checks. And I still think of checks, but then I'm a dinosaur. I'm getting better at it, where today, of course, particularly Gen Z, do they even know what cash is? Well, they know what cash is, but they treat it like it's got no value at all. And, you know, it's interesting because this was the problem with credit cards a decade ago in particular, but still is with a lot of people who treat... using plastic right oh tap to pay i've got my auto fill uh of my credit card payment information on my favorite retail websites and people use tend to use credit cards and they don't know what they're spending they're not keeping track and so credit cards that were the slippery slope or have been for previous generations but for gen z Cash is kind of the slippery slope. Like they're used to everything being digital. And maybe they have like a, you need a budget, YNAB account, or they have a Monarch Money account or something like that. And so all of their spending is done from a digital thing, whether it's from one of their payment apps or a credit card or a debit card, everything lives and filters into that website. And so it's easy for them to go in and look at their dashboard and say, well, what did I spend here or there? But if they get randomly 100 bucks or 200 bucks or something like that. dropped into their life that's cash. They're like, well, this doesn't compute with my digital system that everything's set up on. And so they treat it like it's obsolete. They just like go wasted on stuff. And so it's just really interesting to see kind of generational differences in how we think about different types of money. Yeah, Goo, you can figure out what you spend on a credit card in three seconds. Cash, you have to bring the receipt and you have to look at it and compile it. Also, now the tap to pay or even using your phone, usually anything under $10, I reach in my pocket and take out cash and I pay for it and then I wait for the change. Now if it's $3, I'll still just take out my credit card, only because it's so much easier than actually dealing with money.

And that's not even generational. It's just, it's easier. I mean, I don't like change clinking around in my pocket. So that's one of the, like my dad used to always have a pocket full of change. And I'm like the complete opposite. I'm like, if I. cash if i have like pennies and you know pennies going the way of the dodo bird but if i have any of those coins jingler in my pocket i got to get them out i'm just like oh it's so annoying and so yeah i'm the same way like even with with small uh small purchases i'm typically using my credit card and if you use your credit card responsibly i'm a big fan of people using credit cards as a method of payment i guess What I want to stress to Jen's ears or to people who feel like cash is becoming this thing where it just slips right out of their hands when it comes in. One, it's okay to splurge, like when you get cash, right? So let's say you get birthday, holiday money, something like that. Yeah, it's totally fine to spend that money on something that. you might not have otherwise allocated it for. But I also love the idea of people having an envelope. And so when they get cash, maybe instead of just frittering that money away, they have a bigger thing that they're saving for, whether it's like a vacation or a down payment for a home. Think about even just those jar. I'm sure you knew people, Bill, who had a big jar of coins at one point. That's me. And that adds up to real money. You save up and you go to one of those cash machines at the supermarket. You throw it all in there. The coin machines, they grab 15% or 18% you walk out with, in some cases, in my case, it was hundreds of dollars. But that took, yeah, it took free. Yeah, it took forever to save that. By the way, the point of having change in your pocket, I enjoy having change in my pocket. and a fair amount, because here's what happens. I'll be walking down the street, and there'll be some homeless guy sitting there and say, hey, mister, do you have any change? Well, I reach you my pocket. I jingle all the money so you can hear it, and I say, why, yes, I do, and I just keep on walking. The entertainment value of doing that is very high. All right. Yeah. I guess if that's what you're into, if that makes you smile. Yeah, it does. Makes me smile big time. All right, Joel, Instacart with algorithmic pricing. Is that dynamic pricing? It's not just dynamic because that's already been happening, right? And that's happening all across the internet. And we're talking about, yeah, you log in in the morning to look for a flight. It's one price. Yeah, no, I understand that. But this is Instacart. This is going to the supermarket. That's right. So this is different. This is less. Hey, prices are changing based on the price we pay. And it's more.

prices are changing based on who you are and where you're buying from. And it's seemingly random. So there was this test done by Consumer Reports. The Consumer Reports is one of the stalwarts in the business of looking out for consumers. They do an amazing job on so many different fronts. They partnered with this company called Groundwork Collective to look into what's going on with Instacart pricing. And basically, it's not just that. the prices are dynamic, it's that they're seemingly random. And so even when like 20 different shoppers at the very, very same time are adding a specific item to their cart, let's say something as basic as eggs, one person might be paying $4 for a dozen. The other might be paying closer to $5 a dozen. And Instacart's kind of like caught with their pants down here. They don't really know what to say. It's, I find into cart fascinating. I really do for a couple of reasons. One, it is, on the one hand, it is the easiest way of shopping. You literally go and do a cart and you actually save money because you're not at the market. If you're hungry, particularly, you should see the stuff that I throw into the shop, into the, the, into the shopping cart. So Instacart is easy, except have you ever, do you use Instacart at all? So I do. And I've really come around on this because I agree. I think in so many ways what happens, especially like, Bill, I know your fondness for Costco. When you go to Costco, like there's something about you, you don't stick to the list, right? Oh, no, I do not. I buy stuff. It's a treasure hunt mentality there. If you can, I have a freezer in my garage that is my Costco freezer. Also smart and final. I sort of, you know, I hate to say it, but I also shop as smart and final. It is filled with my crap. Filled. I'm not kidding. A full freezer that's top to bottom. Jammed in there looks like a display case at Costco. And it's only because I shop there. But here's the other thing with Instacart is you also shop for produce. And they don't pick and squeeze the tomatoes and actually squeeze the avocados to get the perfect rightness. That is the problem yet with produce. Have you noticed that? Yeah, for sure. I mean, like when my wife or like she eats spinach, like it's her job. And when when the spinach comes, it like expires the next day sometimes. And I'm like, you didn't look in the back. Like you didn't rifle through the spinach to find the furthest out expiration date. And that's one of my frustrations. But I will say, yeah, it saves time. And I think in some ways.

it can save money, like if you're really diligent and you're shopping. And I also keep my eye out for discounted Instacart gift cards, which just helps bring that price down a little bit. But I think what this reveals, one, is just kind of that Instacart is like, they're testing some things out here. And they're testing to see how much people are willing to pay and how price conscious people are. And I think if you were to do a poll, the average Instacart user is less price conscious than the person who's going into the grocery for every week. Right. It's a convenience. Hey, in terms of dynamic pricing, has it reached supermarkets? I'm thinking, let's say eggs, which used to be $14, $15 a dozen if you bought the fancy, if you bought the fancy, schmancy, you know, brown eggs, organic stuff, you know, grain fed or whatever they do with chickens and expensive eggs. But as the inventory goes down, you would think the price would go up. Have they reached that point? So we are seeing more supermarkets put in like digital display readers, but most of the supermarkets are saying that the reason for that is not so they can institute dynamic pricing. It's just so that it will be less labor intensive to change the price labels. And especially when prices are going up more regularly and you have to change the pricing labels more frequently, I get that. It makes sense. And I think people still have like a backlash against prices going up. Like, you remember when Wendy said, hey, we're thinking about charging more during lunch and maybe less during some of the people were so upset about that. And Wendy's had to change on a dime. So especially, I think, for everyday necessities, people are revolting a little bit more when they're being told they're going to have to pay more if they come at the wrong time of day. But this is, like I think with Instacart, you're going to see because people using it are less price conscious. You might see some of that shifting upward of prices, and they might see, oh, you know what? Bill in California is, well, you know, he doesn't care if the eggs are $3.99 or $4.69, so we're going to keep pushing up prices on him, but somebody else might abandon some of the items in their cart or start using this. It's fine. And then they might start trying to pull you back in with discounts and coupons. Like, it's just one of those buyer beware things in the modern age of Internet grocery shopping. All right, Joel, we'll catch you this Sunday at 12 to 2 p.m. And we can reach you at at How to Money, Joel, and then the website is how to money. All right. Now, moving over to what happened yesterday, the feds cut interest rates a quarter of a percent, not enough for President Trump. He is going to name a new Fed chairman when Jerome Powell's term ends early next year. He hopes that interest rates will be cut. Donald Trump wants to control the Fed. It's real easy. And unfortunately, the Fed is independent. It's a quasi-independent. And all he can do is choose the members of the Fed. After that, it's up to the Fed to determine interest rates. Okay, one of the things about the Fed, and this is what drives this administration or any administrations, completely nuts. And the president said this. and complained about this. You get an initial, we get an initial number of unemployed, federal data. And what the chair, Jerome Powell said is that the data is overstating job creation by up to 60,000 jobs a month. Wait a minute. How is that possible? Well, they come back and revise.

And that was the problem that Donald Trump had, because these revisions coming in later actually make it worse most of the time, sometimes better. And here's what the Bureau of Labor statistics. That's the... That's the... administrative arm of the Labor Department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They have a birth death model. And these are new businesses have historically overstated job creation, which is why downward revisions coming up later on. And I'll explain what they do is they take current jobs. And they sort of extrapolate because they don't know exactly how many people are hired. For example, you start a new business and it has five people working. Well, they don't know that until a month later. You know, if you start a business today and they're doing their modeling, you're not going to know how many jobs there actually are. So this is the quandary with the Labor Department when measuring hiring, which is a huge. determinative of where the economy is going because the Department of Labor statistics also tells us the number of jobs that are added. You know, 50,000 jobs added, 200,000, or we lost 20,000 jobs. They're the ones that come up with it. So how do they measure the number of jobs? Well, jobs can't be surveyed directly because, as I said, governments don't reach out or the government doesn't reach out to brand new companies or companies that no longer exist where jobs are gone. They have to figure it out at least a month later. And so what they do is they use a statistical model and they make a guess. And that's the birth death model, not birth death as in people dying, but birth death of businesses and the number of people who are being hired. And so what he has said, Jerome Powell, and what is known is those estimates overstate job creation initially by hundreds of thousands of jobs a year and revisions later on go down. And now they're changing, they're trying to change the model, and they're trying to make it real-time numbers more accurate. And that's starting in February. They're going to give a different model.

And what is going to do is hopefully make it more specific and more accurate. So now, where are the politics of this? Well, unemployment figures for any president are X number of unemployed, new jobs, lost jobs. When they go down, which they have been revised down, the president goes nuts. That's fake news. Those are politics where the numbers go down. And the Fed goes, but wait a minute, we're using Department of Labor statistics, numbers that we're seeing. It doesn't matter. If later on you say that the number of unemployed goes up or the number of employed goes down, then if it's down, it's bad news and it's fake. If it goes up, well, you know, that's helping the economy. Isn't that fun? Statistics. There are two kinds of statistics. Statistics that lie and statistics that really lie. And that's, you can't understand this. I mean, the longer I'm doing this, literally, the more I'm confused. All right. There's been a lot of controversy out there with the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, especially in the universities. And the president has come down pretty hard on the pro-Palestinian crowd and very much in favor of Israel. And the politics have run over into the universities big time. There are those that are pro-Palestinian that argue because we're anti-Israel doesn't mean we are anti-Jewish. Well, the reality is for most Jews, except some left-wing groups who believe that Palestine should have to be a second state or should be an independent state, which I happen to believe, by the way, and I'm certainly not left-wing. But do I believe that the pro-Palestinians, that those folks are, is it code for Jews? I think so. I think so. The administration thinks that also happens. One of the things about going to university, and this, I mean, this goes back to, you know, what I was in school, and I was going to school in the 70s, the underdog always gets the credit, always. The students and the professors are insanely left-wing for the most part, and therefore, if you're left-wing, you probably are not pro-Israeli. especially if you're a student and on campus. Well, one of the reasons that the president has come down hard on universities, not only the wokeism, but also the anti-Semitism. So a couple of cases just came down, a couple settlements. UC Berkeley is going to pay an Israeli visiting professor $60,000 and rehire her because she was rejected to teach a class.

Frankly, because she's Israeli. Pomona College agreed to a non-monetary settlement that includes hiring a Title VI civil rights coordinator and creating a task force on Jewish campus life. There were plenty of anti-Semitic groups or certainly anti-Israel groups on campuses. As far as pro-Israeli groups, pretty small, and there are a couple of organizations, Habad, for example, has, They have on virtually every campus in the country, they have a chapter. But for the most part, they're sort of isolated. And the schools are, are they caving? Yeah, they are. And should they cave? Yeah, because I truly believe that the anti-Semitism and anti-Israel are part and parcel. Now, Do I believe that Israel has committed war crimes? Yeah, I do. Do I believe in going out and demonstrating? I don't. Do I believe that school should divest and get out of Israel? Oh, here's news. I don't know if you cover this, Amy, but Eurovision, that European Song Festival. There are five countries that have pulled out. because Israel is still performing there. So you're going to see, I think, more and more of that, except in the United States, there's being a lot of pressure coming down for the universities. And good sneeze, by the way, Amy. Thank you. That's quite all right. I wish you had put that on the air. Okay, we are done, everybody. So much for today, Thursday is done. But coming up, it's Gary and Shannon. Tomorrow morning, all over again. It's a wake-up call with Amy and... Will. And of course, Neil and I are here until 9 o'clock. And Kono and Ann put all of us together. And that's why it sounds so bad. Also, it's foodie Friday at 8 o'clock tomorrow and ask, handle anything at 8.30. So Friday, last hour, always great fun. That's it, guys. We will catch you in the morning. KFI AM 640. You've been listening to The Bill Handel Show, catch my show Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and anytime on demand on the IHeart Radio app.

Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, A.O. rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and... many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. rewatch on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shoutouts to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get. a podcast. I'm Nick Totoro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Tatourl, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing my belt? To Bill Burke. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called Happiness, delivering happiness. And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Totoro. And listen now. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier. And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.