Charles Payne on Inflation, Recession, and AI

WASHINGTON DC, July 14 — If there is anyone who knows how to make money, it’s Charles Payne, host of the Fox Business show, Making Money.  Payne is also the CEO and principal financial analyst of the Wall Street Strategies stock market research firm he established in 1991.  He joined Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens and host of AMAC’s Better For America podcast, for a discussion focused on the Biden recession in the aftermath of the historic inflation he brought with him when he became president.

Payne said a recession was inevitable in the aftermath of “the greatest inflation that we had in over 40 years.  We’ve never, ever been in a position like this … [and] now what we’ve got is the Federal Reserve trying to rest this economy, slow it down because nothing hurts us more than runaway inflation.  If you make 100 bucks a week and all of a sudden 200 bucks a week, and yet when you walk in a grocery store, you come out with fewer bags, it illustrates just that, ultimately, money is only worth what you can purchase.  So the recession game’s been a little bit tough because we’ve never had this much money on the sidelines before.  There are some real serious lingering issues out there that go even beyond the current business cycle.  And some of it was exacerbated through actions taken during the pandemic.  I think paying people not to work is something that’s going to reverberate for a very long time.” 

In addition, Payne said President Biden’s “student loan debacle, is [also] going to reverberate for a long time.  I think it’s going to hurt a whole lot of young Americans who might have otherwise been paying their bills, saving their money and working toward, maybe ownership of a business.  So a lot of things have been skewed.”  It may look like we have a strong economy, but the reality is “we’re on borrowed time.”

Payne went on to suggest that while inflation and recession are bad enough, this time the cycle is exacerbated by the emergence of the new, unanticipated threat of A.I. — Artificial Intelligence, the use of computers to do things that traditionally require human intelligence.  “I’ve seen estimates that anywhere from 70-90 million to 300 million jobs could be lost around the world.  In fact, we have already seen job losses attributed to A.I. in this country, albeit just 3900.”  However, Payne said that millions of jobs will be lost over the next ten years and that the new jobs that will emerge will require knowledge of computers and technology.

“And that’s why I’m afraid.  If you look at our education system today, it is woefully underprepared.  It is so bad, it’s hard to imagine that it’s gotten a lot worse. And it’s not just because of the pandemic.  Kids’ reading for fun has dropped by 50%.  Just everything is absolutely imploding.  Now, the good news is you don’t need a four-year degree to participate in the economy.  But you do need more than a high school diploma.  And therein lies the rub.  That’s why I think we’re going to have a period of time when we lose a lot of jobs and a lot of people are going to be out there searching, hurting, and desperate.  Many are going to give up.  Then of course there’s a sort of retraining that we’ve seen in the past where, depending on how old you are, how set in your ways you are, retraining doesn’t necessarily work.  They’ve taken folks who worked on the auto lines in Detroit and they’ve tried to teach them coding skills.  And for the most part, some learn, but most of them didn’t.  What we need to do is to start training people for those particular jobs right now.”