Biden Economic Advisor: We Don’t Watch “Daily Wiggles” of Stock Market

CLAY: It’s painful — I know it’s painful — to be looking at the stock market in the last year, particularly painful, Buck, when I feel — and I’m not even kidding about this. I feel like you and I would have been better at advising Joe Biden on the economy than anybody who was actually advising Joe Biden on the economy, because if you just listen to this show, we have nailed a lot of what was coming and a lot of the threats that are out there. And when I hear some of these guys giving their opinions on the economy, be it doesn’t make me feel better.

So this is Biden’s economic adviser Jared Bernstein. The S&P 500 has officially entered a bear market. The market has for the last year been a disaster. The market is now down for Joe Biden’s entire tenure. That is, if you had bought stock on the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated because you thought that Joe Biden was gonna lead us back to an economic revitalization the likes of which we hadn’t seen before, then you have lost money over the last 18 months. But important to know, according to Jared Bernstein, the Biden administration, they don’t pay attention to the “daily wiggles” of the stock market. Listen to this.

CLAY: First of all, we should make “daily wiggles” a famous lampoonable phrase because when the “daily wiggle” every day goes the same direction, it ain’t a “daily wiggle.” It’s called a collapse, all right?

BUCK: It used to be, Clay —

CLAY: And it doesn’t make me feel better to have an economic adviser talking about “daily wiggles” out there on television.

BUCK: It used to be that I could say my money don’t jiggle, jiggle, it folds. But I don’t know if any…

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: I don’t know how many people on TikTok out there. But that’s from a rap song. But my money is not folding these days ’cause there’s less of it because we all have less of our money.

CLAY: Yeah. I am a when you have the top guys out there and they won’t accept responsibility, either. And listen to Biden here. He talked outside of Air Force One in L.A., and he consistently is saying Russia’s invasion has caused gas prices to be where they are. Even though, Buck, if you look at charts and you look at the Joe Biden administration, gas was pretty daggone expensive before anything happened in Ukraine a little over a hundred days ago. But Biden is still peddling that lie. Listen.

BUCK: Here’s the thing. Here’s why the gas price situation makes Democrats so upset. There is no spinning of it, and there is no hiding from it, and that’s something that they’re not used to, right? Let’s go to the southern border. Southern border is a disaster. It is lawless. We have more people coming in to the country illegally than ever before. If you don’t have reporters there covering it and you don’t make an effort to tell every day in and day out, by the way, I agree with you, I think we should have on different channels, I think there should be a counting —

CLAY: I’ve been arguing it, yes.

BUCK: — what would you call it? A little, like —

CLAY: A ticker, you know, for lack of a better way to describe it.

BUCK: — counter that would say how many illegals this month, how many illegals for the year so people really know. If everyone’s fine with this, the Democrat Party, fine, what’s the problem? People should know about this. But you can hide that. People in this country drive. They need gas. And the price is the price. For as much as they want to say, “It’s so pathetic, all the gas companies.”

Oh, the gas companies just suddenly decided to gouge everybody when Biden’s president? When Trump was president the gas companies were humanitarians, they didn’t want to gouge everybody. Their arguments are so stupid. No one really believes them, but they’re desperate so they’re just throwing stuff out there to make noise. They cannot hide from the price of gas, and they know it is a truism of American politics: People don’t like high gas prices and they blame the people in charge. In this case they should blame the people in charge.

CLAY: I agree. And listen, by the way, if you’re frustrated, Joe Biden blaming Vladimir Putin as he just did is not gonna make you feel any better. This was Biden, by the way, in L.A. talk about the fact that gas — as you well know as you listen to us out there across the country — has now crossed $5 a gallon, the highest price that any of us living have ever had to pay for gas per gallon in the history of the United States. Here’s Biden saying, it’s not really our fault.

CLAY: Do you have any sense, Buck, that Joe Biden, one, understands anything at this point? There’s a video while we’re live on the air. Biden of course went to his home in Delaware, his beach home for the weekend. He showed back up on Monday, first day of the week, 12:30 Eastern lands at the White House to walk inside. Now, I understand, you can say, “Well, the president’s always working. You know, it doesn’t matter where he is.” I think the message that you send when you show up on Monday at the White House where your government is centrally located at 12:30 is not a good message to be sending, right?

BUCK: You can’t have the optics matter sometimes and not other times, right? You can’t have Joe Biden wearing a mask backstage at Jimmy Kimmel only to take it off for the campaigners to show everybody, “I was wearing a mask,” and then say the fact that he shows up for work on Monday after lunchtime at a time… You know, be one thing, if the economy was amazing and people were feeling really good.

It would be one thing. You know, maybe Joe wanted to play a little extra golf because he’s celebrating too like all the rest of us. The economy stinks right now. He never knows it. People are under a lot of stress. I mentioned this I think at the top of the show. New York City has its highest rent average ever right now. The City of New York, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment — people who live in the middle of the country, they’re gonna freak out — $4,000 a month.

CLAY: I don’t even know. So $50,000 a year you have to spend basically to live in an apartment in New York City.

BUCK: In a one bedroom. So imagine if you’re a family of three or family of four, one bedroom apartment, average in New York City is at 4,000. Average the Manhattan in approaching $5,000 a month, folks. So —

CLAY: That’s more than the average family of four makes, by the way, in America, by and large, $5,000 a month. Not even spending 60K a year, right? That’s more than most people who are listening to us right now I bet make at their jobs just without even having to pay for anything else.

BUCK: And yet we have all this inflation happening, we have the economy looking like it is going to go into a recession, and what is the…? You could just say this. This is an observable reality. What are the Democrats more focused on right now than anything else? Is it inflation, is it energy, is it people paying for their groceries? It’s the “January 6th insurrection!” of 18 months ago.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: The real messaging, if you can just get past the propaganda veneer on the networks that are covering this stuff and running with it constantly, the reality is any American who sees this would say to himself or herself, what are these clowns doing? There are real problems. And people say, “Oh, they could walk and chew gum at the same time.” The government is spending, the Congress is spending more energy on the January 6th show trial —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — than anything else they are doing right now.

CLAY: All they’ve got is Trump. He’s not even in office or even running for office this fall. It’s all they can talk about.

BUCK: Ridiculous.