Eric Balchunas on Stocks, Gold, ETFs & AI

interesting so one of the reasons we want to have you on was you wrote a piece on bloomberg um about how the stock market is too big to fail.

And I actually took a screenshot of it and put it in my newsletter.

So basically, I'm gonna repeat your thesis back to you and tell me if I'm incorrect.

Sure.

But the market's been going up for 18 years.

Everybody is putting all their retirement savings in the stock market.

Everybody is fully invested.

So if we get a correction of 30 or 40 or 50%, it doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? Like there's serious social and political consequences to that if that happens.

Therefore, the authorities cannot allow it to happen.

They will do anything possible to prevent that from happening.

Am I right? Yeah,

that's basically the gist of it.

It really is going to be much more of political pressure.

Those are the two words I would think about, political pressure.

Think about who owns the stocks now.

Used to be 5% of Americans in the 80s owned stocks.

It was just like the rich guy and like, you know, Alex P. Keaton types, right? Now, 57% of Americans own stocks, right? Our government has pushed us from a pension system into a 401k defined contribution system.

And America is way ahead of the rest of the world.

58% is way ahead of most countries.

Most countries are 10%.

They're like where we were in the 80s.

So we are unusually into stocks.

Stocks are now more of a household asset than real estate.

They just took over.

The other thing is that if you think about the 58%, there's a lot of voters in there.