Moneybeat: Jobs, jabs, and joy

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group. He is here now. Good morning to you, David.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: Let’s start with the latest jobs report. It showed 139,000 new jobs—higher than I’d seen in the consensus forecast. The unemployment rate held at 4.2%, but there were downward revisions for March and April totaling almost 100,000 jobs. I believe the labor force participation rate also declined. So, a mixed picture. What’s your read?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, you summed it up well. Kind of a mixed bag. There was a little bit better of a number for the month of May than had been expected. Remember, what had been expected wasn’t great, and what we got was still well below the normal average. But it was a little better than expected there, and revisions a little worse, and then the unemployment rate itself didn’t change.

So as is often the case when a monthly report has four or five different data points that sometimes can pull in different directions. There’s a little something in there for everybody

EICHER: Let’s shift to something a bit less economic and a bit more dramatic. There’s this odd back-and-forth between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Musk criticized the “big beautiful” bill, and we’ve had our own critiques of that bill. But is there any actual economic news value here, or should we just steer clear?

BAHNSEN: You know, people want to ask me about various events that may be relevant, and from a financial and economic standpoint, that’s the lane in which I work and live. Sometimes these things overlap, Nick, with politics or with the just kind of big news stories of the day. The Musk Trump issue is pretty big story for the political realm, what it could mean for midterms, and whatnot. There’s a drama there that I certainly understand.

But when you look to policy, will this impact the Senate’s appetite to vote for the big, beautiful bill? I don’t really think so. I think it helps a little bit to give some of the senators that want to make the bill a little better. It gives them a bit more leverage.

But in the end, are they likely going to get to a place where they get the “yes” votes for the bill, and the bill will end up being pretty close to what it is now. Now that’s my best guess.

The other issues around DOGE, I'm pretty sober about this. Soaking wet, they may not be at $100 billion of the savings, and there had been talk of $1 to $2 trillion. And I think that the phrase DOGE has now become a meme to talk negatively about the cause of deregulation and trimming governmental fat. So there's a lot of unfortunate things out of this.

Yet, where it goes from here, this stuff moves so fast. There’s such a high turnover in the administration. People could mean it as a compliment or as insult, but there's a sort of reality TV element to the presidency—and yet the economy moves on. Right?

The issues that are going to happen with this tax bill, the issues that are going to happen with the trade deals, those things are far more important to me, economically and financially, than this drama with President Trump and Elon Musk.

EICHER: Before we go, David, I wanted to commend you on this week’s Dividend Café. Very timely, especially with graduation season. You offered advice for young adults—some new, some revised. We don’t have time for the whole thing, but could you highlight one or two key takeaways for recent grads?

BAHNSEN: Well, you know, I think that the way I concluded that Dividend Café is probably the one. Advice to young people about credit-card debt, about home purchases, about avoiding temptations of get-rich-quick ideas, of how capital ought to be compounded over time—all of these are very important. But they still presuppose certain things about one’s income, one’s career, one’s direction of their life; and those things I tried to summarize my conclusion. But I’ll say now for our listeners, that most young people—and by young it could be an 18-year-old right out of high school, it could be a 22-year-old right out of college, it could be a 25-year-old who never went to college—there’s a lot of different paths that someone may have at the young-adult stage of their life. But regardless of where exactly one is in that journey, the universal takeaway is that we are in a position in society right now that we need more and more young men and women of faith to choose a life rooted to virtue and character.

A lot of distractions exist from social media, the online world, the temptations of AI, the temptations of our phones and a life on a screen, as well as just, you know, the worldly elements that have been there forever. But then, I think right now, in this stage that we find ourselves in, there is a cynicism that can take over, where people believe that the system is rigged against them, that AI is going to take away all the job opportunities, that the state is out to get them, or the man is out to get them, or the system is out to get them.

When I talk about virtue and character, what I’m encouraging young people to do is realize that God has a plan for their life that is not going to be derailed by self-pity and by victimhood, that you have it in you to do the right thing, to make the right decisions, and to overcome evil with good. In doing so, and in taking a career path, choosing every good endeavor to produce goods and services that meet the needs of humanity, you find a calling in that; you find a good life. And I think that this is a message that needs to become universally preached and taught and, hopefully, adhered to, and we’ll all be better off for it.

EICHER: All right, David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer at The Bahnsen Group. He writes regularly for WORLD Opinions, and at dividend-cafe.com. David, thank you so much. We’ll see you next week.

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