Money Life with Chuck Jaffe

Joe Saul-Sehy, host of the Stacking Benjamins podcast, visits Money Life to catch Chuck up on the things he missed at FinCon 2026 — held last week in California — but also to discuss how the personal finance world is changing in the face of lingering inflation, rising interest rates, increased influence from artificial intelligence, Robert Kiyosaki's $1.2 billion debt problem and much more. Saul-Sehy also discusses so-called "safe withdrawal rates," and says the "4 percent rule" drives him crazy, because it puts the focus on accumulating wealth rather than "creating a fulfilling life."
Author Renee Bryan discusses her book "The Morality of Money: Remove Fear and Discover Financial Freedom Through Simple Economic Principles and Universal Truths," and the intersection of faith and finance. Bryan talks about how economic principles can align with being a good person, and advocates for using moral principles to guide financial decisions, suggesting that a positive mindset can lead to personal prosperity.
Plus, Carlo Versano, director of politics and culture at Newsweek, discusses their recently reached American Dream Index, which examines how Americans perceive their ability to achieve success, prosperity, and upward mobility, looking at the issue from perceptions for the whole country down into attitudes in cities and states. The overall scores indicated a struggle across the board and, in fact, no state achieved a score above 70 on a scale of 100. That doesn't mean the American Dream is dead — far from it, according to Versano — but it does mean that people may need to choose different paths and different locations to have the best chance of achieving it in their lives.

Matthew Timpane, senior market strategist at Schaeffer's Investment Research, says he expects the market to rally once the midterm elections are through, particularly because the third-year of the presidential cycle tends to be the most bullish, most notably the first half of those years. For the short-term — as the market finishes a September in which it has shown none of the usual seasonal signs of distress and rolls into October — Timpane sees a market that could get to roughly 8100 on the Standard & Poor's 500, with downside support at 7500, and growing firmer at 7,250 should some news trigger a slightly bigger sell-off. 
David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group and owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, discusses his new book, released today, "Inside the Owner's Box: Conversations on Power and Leadership in Sports." In a wide-ranging interview, Rubenstein also discusses the impact that gambling generally and prediction markets most recently have had on sports, on how measuring success as the owner of a sports team is different than weighing it in the ordinary business world and more.
In the Market Call, Elliott Gue, editor at Energy & Income Advisor, discusses how the buildout of artificial intelligence and its seemingly insatiable need for power is impacting energy stocks. Gue, who publishes the Free Market Speculator on Substack, notes that the capital expenditures boom may force energy/income investors to decide if they want to trade some steadiness of income for the hope of a higher total return.

Alex Edmans, author of "The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions - And How to Exploit Them," says that even smart investors sometimes make poor financial decisions, noting that overconfidence, fear, excitement, and the tendency to overreact to market news can cause investors to trade too frequently and buy high/sell low. Edmans says the financial industry is amplifying these mistakes by making trading easier (encouraging activity that generates fees or spreads), and recommends identifying and acknowledging psychological weaknesses and favoring simple strategies such as diversification, long-term investing, and broad-market index funds. He also discusses how seemingly irrelevant emotions -- including reactions to sports results -- can influence investment decisions in ways most of us would never consider as possible.
 
In "The Week That Is," Vijay Marolia, chief investment officer at Regal Point Capital, discusses whether the creation of an "A.I. Force" and appointment of an "A.I. czar" could control and improve the development process or slow it down and set it back. Speaking of setbacks, Marolia also discusses Anthropic's plans for an IPO that could be valued at $2 trillion, and whether the company whose CEO set off a lot of the alarm bells on A.I. should pause its offering until there is more clarity on the future regulation of the industry. Plus, personal finance guru Robert Kiyosaki has had some setbacks and is $1.2 billion in debt; the amount is crazy, but Marolia considers whether the best-selling author behind "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" is crazy like a fox.
Kyle Guske, investment analyst at New Constructs, says that one overlooked aspect of the A.I. build-out is that all of the ballyhooed capital expenditures are starting to show up on company books, but they're doing it in places that mostly go unnoticed. Guske says that if the AI companies in the top 25 of the S&P 500 wanted to earn an adequate return on invested capital on their trillions in new AI-related debt, they must generate $1.4 trillion in new profit on top of what they already earn, and says he doesn't think most investors are pricingin that risk. As a result, he put "the most wanted earnings manipulators" in The Danger Zone, and documented how the A.I. buildout is ballooning the balance sheets of some of the world's largest companies.

Dan Sotiroff, associate director of passive strategies at Morningstar goes "Off The News" discussing the firm's just-released "State of US ETFs 2026" report, which found that heightened competition is increasingly pushing fund firms to open "complex, narrowly focused strategies that may resemble gambling more than long-term investing. He says that the issues are strange and getting weirder, citing examples of ETFs now tied to everything from election results to hockey scores, and while many of those new funds have not opened to investors yet, they are the logical extension of single-stock funds and other new issues that offer investors new ways to play the market. While Sotiroff notes that there have been sound improvements in a few of the newfangled funds, there are more potential gambles than real investing.
Ian Cassel, founder of MicroCapClub, discusses his new book, "Stock Picker: How to Develop the Mindset, Temperament, and Strategy to Outperform Wall Street," and the importance of finding solid fundamentals and profits to select tiny stocks with the potential to beat the odds and grow into big profits and status as a large- or mega-cap company.
And in "The NAVigator," Young Choi, portfolio manager for the XAI Floating Rate & Alternative Income Trust, says the explosion in specialty ETFs dedicated to investing in collateralized loan obligations has changed the CLO market, compressing spreads and changing some buying opportunities. In "The NAVigator," Choi also  discusses differences between the private credit and CLO markets, noting that any blow-up or problem in the private space could have spillover effects that create buying opportunities in CLOs.

Emily Roland, co-chief investment strategist at Manulife John Hancock Investments, says that investors have been making themselves miserable while living through "the greatest four-year bull market in S&P 500 history," which may make them too worried about interest rate hikes. She says the market and economy are strong enough to push through rate hikes, at least until the Federal Reserve moves them up at least three times, and the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury gets to about 5.5%, which she thinks could be "the line in the sand" where the market stops shrugging off the hikes. "Economic cycles don't die of old age," Roland says, "they're killed by the Fed." As a result, she is recommending investors lean into high-quality bonds in the middle of the yield curve, noting that "Every stock on the planet is loved and every bond on the planet is hated right now; I will tell you from experience that investors tend to hate bonds right before they love them again."
In the Book Interview, Lindsay Crouse discusses "The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out," which is as much about personal habits as it is jobs and work. Crouse says people learn about themselves just by considering breaking habits, giving up things that "they've always done" that no longer play the same role in their lives, and just by considering what would happen if they simply stopped doing certain things in their lives, noting that it can reaffirm their commitment or help them see the benefits of change.
Chip Lupo discusses the latest retirement savings survey from WalletHub, which found that 7 in 10 people believe a pension is better than a 401(k). To that end, more than half of Americans say they would prefer to pay a 12.4% Social Security tax to get double the benefits rather than the 6.2% tax that delivers current benefits levels. Lacking the stable, consistent support of a pension and dealing with current Social Security benefits levels is why 43 percent of survey respondents believe it is not realistic for the average American to expect to retire comfortably.