The World and Everything in It: June 17, 2024

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like you. This is our June Giving Drive, and I’ve got great news: between now and the end of this week, WORLD donors are matching every gift that comes in.

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REICHARD: Everything makes a difference, and now a double difference. So I hope you take advantage this week to help us make biblically sound journalism available in the marketplace. And I hope you enjoy today’s program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! The Supreme Court shoots down another instance of agency overreach.

CHENOWETH: You can't rummage around in an old statute and redefine a term and create new criminal liability.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also, the Monday Moneybeat. Today: Elon Musk gets his payday. Economist David Bahnsen is standing by. We’ll talk about that and explain the power of the bond market.

Later, the WORLD History Book. Today, the life of the 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon.

CHANG: He understood that the power behind his ministry wasn't human effort, rather, it was God's grace.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, June 17th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: It’s time for the news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Ukraine » Peace in Ukraine can only come when Russia respects Ukraine’s borders.

Leaders from almost 80 countries reached that consensus at a peace summit in Switzerland over the weekend. Vice President Kamala Harris:

HARRIS: It is in our interest to uphold international rules and norms, such as sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the international system we helped create following World War II, which bolsters America's security and prosperity.

The leaders signed a document declaring that the territorial integrity of Ukraine must be the basis for any peace agreement to end Russia's two-year war.

The vice president also announced that the United States will provide more than 1.5 billion dollars in humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

It follows last week’s announcement by G7 leaders of a $50 billion loan package for Kyiv that will leverage interest and income on a quarter of a trillion dollars in frozen Russian assets. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen:

YELLEN: The Russian assets remain in this institution. They've been impounded. Um, the investments that Russia had have matured. So Russia's funds are sitting in cash, but they're generating income for the institution, which Russia has no claim on.

Ukraine Rejects Putin ultimatum » Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the summit said he was confident that the peace effort would continue, but he said the so-called peace offer extended by Vladimir Putin last week was not a serious one.

ZELENSKYY:  Putin is trying to expand the war and make it more bloody, but together with America and all our partners, we protect the lives of our people.

Putin offered to order an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine. But many said his offer sounded more like terms of a Ukrainian surrender. Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna:

KHANNA: Putin's peace deal on the table. He wants one fifth of all of Ukraine. He wants more territory of Ukraine than he's currently occupied.

Putin wants Ukrainian troops to start withdrawing from the four regions Russia began occupying in 2022.

Garland contempt reaction/Republicans on DOJ weaponization » Republicans are sounding off on the announcement by the Department of Justice that it would not prosecute Attorney General Merrick Garland for contempt of Congress.

Sen. Ted Cruz charged that the Justice Dept. under Garland exists to do two things:

CRUZ: Attack the Democrats enemies and protect the Democrats friends. The degree to which DOJ has been weaponized trying to stop the voters from electing Donald Trump is ridiculous.

House Republicans voted last week to hold Garland in contempt of Congress and to recommend criminal charges over his refusal to comply with a House subpoena. GOP members demanded that Garland hand over a recording of President Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur related to Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Garland accuses Republicans of abusing the authority of Congress for political ends.

U.S. terror concerns » Fears are growing of a possible terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Authorities last week arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with possible ties to ISIS after they crossed the U.S. southern border.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner told CBS’ Face the Nation:

TURNER: We have terrorists that are actively working inside the United States that are a threat to Americans.

He said even some Biden administration officials have come forward to the committee to share their concerns.

FBI Director Chrisopher Wray has openly warned that many with terrorist ties have crossed the southern border.

Congressman Jim Himes is the top-ranking Democrat on the Intel Committee.

HIMES:  The fact that there are lots of people who, uh, uh, who are here on an undocumented basis is a threat, and the FBI director is right about that, and the FBI director and the chiefs of all of the intelligence community are very, very focused.

Turner is calling on the Biden administration to declassify information related to terror threats.

Trump Michigan campaigning/immigration » Former President Trump continues to hammer border and immigration issues on the campaign trail. He stumped in the key swing state of Michigan over the weekend.

TRUMP:  The choice for every voter this November is clear. You can have a president who lets thousands of radical Islamic terrorists into our country.

Or, he said, you can have a president who secures the border.

His appearance came as authorities in Maryland charged an illegal immigrant from El Salvador with rape and murder in the death of a mother of five. And authorities in New York City arrested a pair of Venezuelan migrants for allegedly carjacking an off-duty NYPD officer.

Trump spoke at a conservative forum and at a traditionally black church in Detroit.

TRUMP: The black community is being hurt more by the illegal aliens, 16, 17 million. They're taking your jobs. You were, you're down six, 7 percent from where you were just three years ago with me.

Biden star-studded fundraiser » Meantime, President Biden attended a glitzy fundraiser for the president surrounded by Hollywood star power. George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Barbara Streisand were among those who took the stage at the Peacock theater over the weekend.

The fundraiser reportedly raked in almost $30 million dollars.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: The Supreme Court checks a government agency’s authority. That’s ahead on Legal Docket. Plus, the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 17th day of June, 2024. So glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

I’m going to take a couple of minutes here for a quick story: I wrote a piece for WORLD the print magazine that’s in the mail today, and I’ll put a link to the online version in the program transcript.

I’ve been closely following the unrest at NPR over its near-total ideological capture, so I got in touch with Congressman Bob Good’s office after he filed a bill in the U.S. House to defund the network.

It’s tightly written, really tight, shuts off direct funding to the network and bolts the backdoor too by disallowing public stations receiving government grants from using that money to license NPR programming. And that’s where the real money is, by the way. So it’s a potent bill.

As we were talking, though, Congressman Good offered up that back in the day he was an NPR fan.

BOB GOOD: You know, I grew up listening to NPR, you know, back when I was a young college kid and young professional in the mid-late-80s and early 90s. I would listen to Morning Edition, I would listen to All Things Considered, coming to and from work. Those were the days of Daniel Schorr and Cokie Roberts and Nina Totenberg, and I knew they were left-leaning. But yet they had some semblance of fairness and objectivity. They weren’t a total mouthpiece for the Democrat Party. And that was a time when the media felt a great responsibility to hold government accountable, irrespective of which side of government it was.

I’ve been thinking about this awhile since a former NPR business and economics reporter there, Uri Berliner, became a newsroom whistleblower. He wrote his dissident piece for the substack of Bari Weiss, The Free Press. Now, I didn’t put this in my column, but in Berliner’s piece he wrote this and I want to read from it.

“For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon.”

“We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.”

“No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.”

That’s what the Congressman was talking about. That’s what I always admired about NPR that’s gone now.

So clearly, NPR doesn’t want to be NPR and pair up good journalism with those lush audio pieces that are so unexpected and really engage. Now when I listen, I feel like I’ve been scolded.

But you know, that’s fine. If that’s what they want to do that leaves the lane wide open for us. Because that’s what we want to do and always have.

REICHARD: I agree with that! And I just want to say, as you put it in your piece, we want to compete with that NPR, and I’m just grateful for donors who share that vision with us, who make it possible for us to build an NPR style that’s surprising and engaging and not hyperventilating like so much media can tend to be these days, and pursue all of that from a Christian worldview, which means a biblical interest in “The World and Everything in It” telling it true and finding what’s fascinating about this wide world God has given us stewardship over.

EICHER: Good word! Well, Mary, one important corner of The World and Everything in It is the American legal system, and it’s crunch time for the court, with opinions coming fast and furious.

REICHARD: The Court’ll have to keep pace, because it has about a third of its caseload still to release, and now just two weeks left to release it, assuming they want to be done the end of this month.

The last two days of last week the court issued six opinions. So on Friday, early afternoon, I called up petitioner Michael Cargill to ask how he got the news about his 6 to 3 win:

CARGILL: I literally fell out of bed. I was laying in bed, and I was refreshing the Supreme Court's website, and all of a sudden it popped in, and I fell out of bed and yelled at everyone inside the house.

Yelled in a happy way, of course, because Cargill is the owner of the Texas gun shop that sells the devices at issue in the case: bump stocks. These are aftermarket add-ons that make it possible to shoot hundreds of rounds per minute.

After a couple of deadly mass shootings, one at a high school in Florida, another at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump pushed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to make a change. The ATF changed its definition of machine gun to include bump stocks, and voila! The half-a-million or so bump stocks in circulation were made illegal.

So Cargill surrendered his, but then sued to challenge the ATF for exceeding its authority.

Cargill was inundated with media requests and congratulatory customers when we spoke, so he had to duck into a closet to finish up our conversation:

CARGILL: I read what Judge Thomas wrote, and I was just astonished. The detail they went into as far as the definition of a machine gun, and also the detail they went into talking about how bump stocks actually work and comparing them to machine guns. You know, I thought it was just amazing that they got it right. They understood exactly what we're talking about.

EICHER: Friday’s breathless headlines aside, this was not a Second Amendment dispute.

An opinion headline in the Washington Post read: “Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have decided that more Americans must die in mass shootings, because they have a quibble over the word ‘function.’”

Other headlines ran along these lines: “Supreme Court rejects ban on bumpstocks.”

That’s true, but not the whole truth.

The whole truth would read, “The high court curbs agency overreach.”

REICHARD: Because it’s a simple matter of reading statutes, which is the job of the courts. I called up the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the firm that represented Cargill. Its president is Mark Chenoweth.

MARK CHENOWETH: Yeah, that's, that's right. It's not a Second Amendment case. It's a case of an agency regulating where it doesn't have statutory authority to do so. Congress didn't give the agency the ability to go out and ban things that it wants to ban. The Congress only banned machine guns, and the agency tried to get around that by redefining a bump stock to be a machine gun in a way that wasn't consistent with the statute, and the Supreme Court rightly put an end to that.

For years, the agency explicitly said bump stocks were not machine guns. But redefining words to achieve a desired outcome is easier than going through Congress. Even the late Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein said that’s not how to do things.

EICHER: As for Cargill, he will get his bump stocks back.

But what about other people who were ordered to destroy theirs? They won’t, unless they sue the government for compensation, but even then, no guarantees.

Lawyer Chenoweth says all federal agencies should hear a clear message from the high court about overstepping:

CHENOWETH: Justice Alito said that Congress can ban bump stocks if they want to, if Congress thinks that that’s the right policy move. Today’s decision is going to reverberate broadly across the administrative state, because it's telling bureaucrats at every one of these federal agencies, you cannot write laws that Congress hasn't written. You can't rummage around in an old statute and redefine a term and create new criminal liability. Only Congress can rewrite laws, not agencies.

EICHER:  More decisions are soon expected concerning agency power, or the administrative state, or the deep state, however you want to say it.

REICHARD: Now for our second opinion in FDA versus Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine … a rare win for the pro-abortion side, and the Supreme Court left little doubt: This was nine-to-zero, a decision based on legal standing alone, not the merits of the case.

Here, pro-life doctors challenged the way the FDA removed safety measures for the abortion drug Mifepristone. Important safety precautions, such as an assessment of how far developed the child is and whether it’s an ectopic pregnancy.

But because of the FDA’s changes, women can get the pills through the mail — without ever seeing a doctor in person. That is, until an emergency arises and they have to go to the hospital.

EICHER: That leaves emergency-room doctors to finish the job a teledoc started, making physicians with conscience objections to abortion complicit.

So thousands of physician members of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine sued the FDA for not following proper procedures when it changed Mifepristone’s safety precautions.

Listen to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during oral argument in March:

JUSTICE JACKSON: So I'm worried that there is a significant mismatch in this case between the claimed injury and the remedy that's being sought and that that might or should matter for standing purposes. ….The injuries that the Respondents allege…are conscience injury, that they are being forced to participate in a medical procedure that they object to. And so the obvious common-sense remedy would be to provide them with an exemption, that they don't have to participate in this procedure. And you say… federal law already gives them that. So I guess then what they're asking for in this lawsuit is -- is more than that. They're saying, because we object to having to be forced to participate in this procedure, we're seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all.

REICHARD: I’ll say this decision wasn’t all that surprising, given the obstacle of standing.

I contacted the firm representing the doctors to inquire why it brought the case. Here’s Chief Legal Counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, Jim Campbell sticking to the script:

JIM CAMPBELL: These doctors have built their professional practice around bringing life into the world. Instead, the FDA actions have forced them to divert their attention to dealing with the fallout of chemical abortions.

EICHER: That’s ADF’s argument on standing, and it persuaded no one on the court. But Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurrence offered a roadmap of how associations like ADF’s doctor group could achieve standing in a future case.

It’s a kind of fishing line in the water to see if enough justices will bite.

The scope of FDA’s authority as deployed in the case of the abortion pill is still a little murky, but could be cleared up—with the right plaintiffs. So this is likely not the last word.

Still, those with the most to lose have no legal standing either: the unborn. So for now, doctors with conscience objections are left with what they regard as an impossible choice.

REICHARD: Okay, moving on to our third opinion. It’s an 8 to 1 win for Starbucks in a labor dispute.

The company fired several employees, who in the course of efforts to form a union, violated company policy.

The National Labor Relations Board filed an administrative complaint against the company—NLRB alleging Starbucks was guilty of unfair labor practices. Then it sought a preliminary injunction that would keep the status quo—while the case went forward. Keeping the status quo meant reinstating the fired employees, among other things.

EICHER: The question was whether the NLRB had to follow the same four factor test required of every other agency in order to win a preliminary injunction.

You could’ve guessed how the court was going to go when Chief Justice John Roberts back in April said this:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Do you agree with your friend on the other side that we can dispose of this in a short opinion? (Laughter.)

 And dispose it did, using that predicted short opinion: the NLRB is not special. It must follow the same standard as other agencies, not the less stringent two-factor standard the NLRB sought.

REICHARD: On to decision four: a unanimous ruling in Vidal versus Elster, a dispute over a trademark.

This case arose out of the rather tasteless spat between Marco Rubio and Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential debates. They sparred over their, I’ll just say, biological prodigiousness.

A man tried to register the phrase “Trump too small” for his t-shirt enterprise, but the trademark office refused him.

Bottom line? The trademark office can refuse to register any trademark that includes the name of a living person if that person hasn’t given consent to use his or her name.

EICHER: Moving right along now to the fifth opinion in a bankruptcy case, US Trustee v John Q Hammons, LLC. It’s a loss for debtors who use chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code.

Here, a disparity among the states existed for fees imposed on debtor companies to fund the bankruptcy system. Recently, the Supreme Court found that disparity unconstitutional.

A hotel operation in chapter 11 had already paid the higher fees, so it sued for a refund after that ruling came down.

But bad news for the bankrupt hotel. The majority said no refunds, only application of the new rule going forward.

REICHARD: Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a blistering dissent, joined by Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett. He pointed out that because the court already held that geographically discriminatory treatment is unconstitutional, and I’m quoting now: “a provision that, we stressed, was not 'toothless.’ Today, however, the Court performs a remedial root canal, permitting the government to keep the cash it extracted from its unconstitutional fee regime.”

EICHER: A remedial root canal! Alright!

Our final opinion is in a case called Campos-Chavez versus Garland, a matter of immigration law.

It’s a loss for a man from El Salvador who entered the U.S. illegally almost 20 years ago. The government sought to deport him, but he says the government failed to give him proper notice to appear for a hearing.

But a majority five justices say the government has no such obligation. The court held the government is required only to give noncitizens all the information at one time about time and place of the hearing, so long as it does eventually send it.

REICHARD: Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent joined by Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch. She accused the majority justices of trying to “help the government avoid the consequences of its chronic noncompliance with Congress’s mandates.”

You could hear that dissenting opinion in this from Justice Kagan during oral argument—

JUSTICE KAGAN: We're living in this world where this is a strange statute because the government has been out of compliance for so long and it leads to some kind of strange results.

Strange results or not, that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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 advisor David Bahnsen. David's head of the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group. hJe is here now and David, good morning.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, good morning. Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: All right, so a flurry of activity last week, David. We had the inflation report, the CPI Consumer Price Index, and then the Fed had its latest policy meeting. So lots of data stories. What's the bigger of the stories do you think?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I think it was exactly that. Two different inflation reports that came out, the CPI on Wednesday and then the PPI that came out on Thursday, both indicating downward pressure on inflation month over month. The producer prices, in particular, went negative, and they were expected to be up about 0.1% and they were -0.2% on core and .3 on headline. And so you had a good move for what you know the Fed is looking for in terms of cover to get to that point of rate cuts. Was it just superficial and not sustainable and not really all that noteworthy? Well, that would be news to the bond market. Nick, we were talking in late April, and the 10-year was at 4.7%, and we were talking about whether or not it would hit 5% again, as it had last year. As I'm sitting here talking, it is at 4.22%. You're talking about the 10 year down, 50 basis points, half of a percentage point in six weeks. So really strong indication in market pricing of downward pressure on inflation and inflation expectations.

EICHER: Yeah, and then that Fed meeting, David. I wonder what you thought of Chairman Powell’s statement afterward? And you know, from what I can discern, it appears the central bank has penciled in one rate cut later this year. Wasn't too long ago, we were talking about two.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, but they didn't pencil anything in. I think there's a little misnomer there. But let me clarify: The Fed in November of last year, basically indicated that they were not going to be raising rates again, and they put out what's called a dot plot, where their own governors were predicting what they think rates will be. It's not the same as stating what they're going to do. If you think about it, the Fed can't do that, because their whole point is, "We're data dependent, we're objective." Meeting by meeting, if the Fed knew in November of '23 what they were going to be doing in December of '24, it would kill data dependency. It would just mean we've already determined a path. So the dot plots are meant to be the Fed's own predictions. And as I've said most of my adult life, not entirely, the dot plots have changed to mirror what the market is saying. The market has not changed to mirror what the dot plots are saying, but the Fed's own predictions are. Well, it's true that the Fed came out with dot plots, half of the governors predicting one rate cut this year, half predicting two. I think it will end up being two, but I don't think they'll start in September. I think they'll end up starting in November and do another one in December. But it really is at this point, when you're talking about the very end of the year, somewhat token, and then the next rate cut in January. Either way that at least is what the market and the Fed are predicting is some modest rate cuts at the very end of the year, and even those are subject to change, as we've seen this year, the Fed's own predictions and the market's own predictions have been kicked out several months a couple times.

EICHER: Well, bad political luck for President Biden. I mean, I say that advisedly, but six, nine months ago, the smart money was on Biden benefiting from earlier rate cuts in the thick of the campaign season, but now he's not going to get it.

BAHNSEN: Well, I don't happen to agree with that. I think that if you want good luck as a president, you want easy monetary policy in the third year of a term. The fourth year of a term, it's generally going to be too late. But I'm not sure that this would matter a whole lot either way. And the sense that I---and now I'm more politicking than I am economizing, but I think this election comes down to as far as issues go, with President Biden immigration and inflation, and I think that most of his narrative around those two issues is pretty well baked in, and in both of those two issues, it's not very good for him. Now, of course, this election may not be determined by issues. It may be determined, in the end, by just which of the two candidates independent voters find more tolerable. I mean, we know it's going to be a close election, but I think as far as the idea of rate cuts coming, let's say in July or September. I don't think it would have mattered at all. It isn't like unemployment is really high and rate cuts will come in and boost jobs. Unemployment is already low. It's not going to move higher or lower based on a quarter point move between now and then. So where Biden is lucky versus unlucky is that in the Fed raising rates from May of 2022 where it was 0% to July of 2023 when it went to 5.5% and we didn't go into recession, the recession probably would have been a total presidency killer, as it has been throughout history, and we didn't get a recession. And so you could argue he's kind of lucky in that regard.

EICHER: Yeah, so David, could we talk about super CEO Elon Musk for a moment? He was all over the news last week, working to get his pay package restored, an eye popping $48 billion stock compensation that when we first started hearing about this, it was over 50 billion, but owing to the decline in Tesla shares, it fell back a bit, but still a staggering number. What is your takeaway on that shareholder meeting last week, and also the notion that a judge can set his pay?

BAHNSEN: Well, this comes down to a board-approved comp package that was passed sometime back that was going to pay him 10% of the value created, and the market capitalization of the company went up $600 billion as he very successfully at that time, executed a number of major initiatives, and he was to receive something in the range of $60 billion and then a judge In Delaware threw it out, which was, in my mind, absolutely outrageous. Board approved shareholder approved private transaction between free parties, wherein the people that have skin in the game made $600 billion and a judge in Delaware determined it was unfair. Now, look, any one of us can feel, I don't want the CEO getting paid that much. No problem. Don't own the company. Sell the stock. You have no requirement to hold a stock in a company where you feel the CEO is being overpaid and your interests are being damaged, but in this case, the shareholders are only paying Elon Musk that much money, because they benefited, and this was a transaction between private parties. So I feel very strongly about the rule of law. So the people with skin in the game voted, and now this week, there was a new vote, and it was upheld, and I think it was appropriate as a matter of rule of law, and then going forward, it will either prove to be a good investment or a bad investment. But the people who should determine if it's a good investment are people who have a chance to make money if it goes well, and people have a chance to lose money if it goes poorly. And on that hinge is one of the most important cornerstones of all classical economics, the principle of skin in the game.

EICHER: Skin in the game. All right, David, I want to go back to the beginning, where you talked about the importance of signals out of the bond market and what they say about inflation expectations. So let's do a defining terms here before we go on the bond market itself, and why it gives such important information on the direction of the economy.

BAHNSEN: The term today is the bond market, and let's be clear what we're talking about. When we say the term bond market in financial markets, we're referring to the United States Treasury bond market. But when you talk about the bond market in the United States, United States of America, you're really referring to interest rates. There's no credit risk. we're just simply talking about the up and down movement of interest rates. And therefore you get a really good, clean, isolated look at how people are feeling about yields, about what they are willing to charge to be separated from their money. With a treasury bond you're taking for granted that you're getting paid back by the full faith and credit of the United States government. Same way people feel so good about FDIC insurance, a CD, things like that. This is literally a treasury bond backed by the government. James Carville, Bill Clinton's campaign manager in 1992 famously said, "If reincarnation was real, I want to come back someday as the bond market," because bond markets have an ability to have tremendous influence and indications over financial markets, over the economy, over so much of the world.

And when I refer the bond market, I'm referring to trillions of dollars, we happen to know there's $34 trillion in national debt. So at any given time we know how many treasury bonds are out there. It's equal to the amount of the national debt. And then there's bonds they're paying back, every month, and bonds that they're reissuing to issue new debt. And so you're constantly dealing with a new supply and demand. And it gives you an indication of what the appetite is out there, what investors are wanting, and what they require, and so forth. It's heavily liquid, heavily transparent. That's what we mean by the bond market.

It gives us a lot of indication of other financial conditions. And when I talk about the 10 year, it's a longer bond. So it's actually really telling us kind of what investors think about growth. Then you say, okay, look, if the economy is going to grow by 3% a year, I'm going to want 3% or more, because you would think I could get that amount of money somewhere else by having my money, you know, invested in a different place. So the interest rate of the 10 year bond gives us a lot of indication of what people's structural implications are but of course, growth, nominal growth, includes inflation plus real growth. And so if you think there's going to be 3% real growth and 1% inflation, that's four, but if you think there's going to be 3% inflation and 1% real growth, that's also four, but it's a very different four.

So the bond market gives us a look at inflation and growth expectations, and that's why I consider it such an important financial instrument.

EICHER: All right. David Bahnsen, Founder, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of the Bahnsen Group. You can check out David's latest book, it's titled, Full-Time: Work and The Meaning of Life, and you can check it out at fulltimebook.com. David, I hope you had a great Father's Day weekend. So belated happy Father's Day to you, and I hope you have a great week ahead.

BAHNSEN: Well, happy day after Father's Day to you as well. Both, both you and I have lost dads who meant a great deal to us, and it's a special day for so many, so happy belated Father's Day, my friend.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, June 17th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book.

One hundred ninety years ago this week, Charles Spurgeon is born into a world at war. Not a battle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers. Here’s WORLD Associate Correspondent Caleb Welde.

CALEB WELDE: June 19th, 1834. Newlyweds John and Eliza Spurgeon hold their first baby for the first time.

Charles grows close with his grandfather who is a Puritan minister – immersed in hymns and sermons and drawn to the illustrations in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. His favorite book is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. At twenty, he gives a copy to a girl named Susannah … writing a note in the front … wishing her:

SPURGEON: …progress in a blessed pilgrimage.

Ed Phillips there…reading from Susannah’s copy. The country preacher has already delivered almost seven-hundred sermons when he accepts a pastorate in London. He continues holding services the same year despite a deadly Cholera epidemic ravishing the city. Even riskier– he seeks out the infected.

The work is costly.

SPURGEON:My friends seemed falling one by one, and I felt or fancied that I was sickening like those around me.

He remembers mournfully walking home after another funeral when he noticed a paper posted in a shoemaker’s window.

SPURGEON: In a good bold handwriting, these words:

“Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”

The effect upon my heart was immediate. I went on with my visitation of the dying, in a calm and peaceful spirit; I felt no fear of evil, and I suffered no harm.

The epidemic passes by the end of the year and Spurgeon marries Susannah.

By now, thousands are flocking to hear the charismatic young pastor in an era before microphones and loud speakers. Besides physical exertion Spurgeon brings spiritual weight to the pulpit.

SPURGEON: I could have wept my very being out of my eyes and carried my whole frame away in a flood of tears if I could but win souls.

He sleeps for twenty-four hours straight after preaching to a crowd of twenty-three thousand.

Seven months after Spurgeon’s wedding a crowd of more than ten thousand packs into a London venue to hear him. Then, someone yells, “fire.” Spurgeon tries to halt the stampede but collapses and has to be carried out. Seven people are trampled to death. Geoff Chang is curator of the Spurgeon Library.

CHANG: He never quite recovered from… I think the word trauma could rightly be used, from the trauma of that event.

The incident sends him into deep depression– the first of many seasons of despondency. 

Spurgeon preaches through the blackness. After a sermon on Psalm twenty-two verse one— “My God, why have you forsaken me?”... a man approaches him looking very disheveled. He says it was like Spurgeon was preaching inside his soul.

SPURGEON: By God’s grace I saved that man from suicide, and led him into gospel light and liberty; but I know I could not have done it if I had not myself been confined in the dungeon in which he lay.

At twenty-seven, Spurgeon delivers his first sermon in the London Metropolitan Tabernacle.

He calls it a tabernacle to emphasize the transient nature of a Christian’s journey. Several American visitors want to know the secret of his success.

CHANG: And so he takes them down to the basement of the church, and there's a prayer meeting going on. He's like, here's the secret. Here's the engine room of the church.

Thousands of people show up to pray every Monday night.

At twenty-nine, Spurgeon begins publishing a magazine titled the Sword and the Trowel– “A record of combat with sin … and labor for the Lord.”

CHANG: He takes that image from Nehemiah where they're building up the walls of Jerusalem. They're working on the walls, but they're also carrying swords to defend themselves.

Two years later he breaks ground for an orphanage inspired by his friend George Müller’s orphan houses. All the while he’s writing sermons, marrying and burying church members, editing the magazine, helping friendly churches, counseling the especially difficult cases and responding to five hundred letters a week.

Spurgeon preaches Sabbath rest while asserting,

SPURGEON: It is our duty and privilege to exhaust our lives for Jesus. We are not to be living specimens of men in fine preservation, but living sacrifices, whose lot is to be consumed. We can only produce life in others by the wear and tear of our own being.

His notoriety intensifies through his thirties and forties.  

By the 1880’s, he’s been a central figure in the British Baptist Union for several decades. Then … he sees pastors adopting a new religion?!,

SPURGEON: …Which is no more Christianity than chalk is cheese.

The “Downgrade Controversy” was an attempt to wed nineteenth century rationalism with the Bible. Geoff Chang:

CHANG: You know, trying to update Christianity for its times.

Spurgeon rages, writing,

SPURGEON: The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture is denied, the Holy Spirit is degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin is turned into fiction, and the resurrection into a myth.

He calls on the denomination to denounce the teaching.

CHANG: His denomination refuses, they take no action. And so in response, Spurgeon decides I need to withdraw. He's resigned from the Baptist union.

The Union publicly rebukes him,

CHANG: …writes articles, talking about him being uncharitable, being narrow, bigoted. So his wife says, despite all of his physical ailments, it was the heartache, the broken heart over this controversy that killed him.

On January 31st, 1892, Charles Spurgeon dies from complications relating to his various health conditions. He was fifty-seven. He loved the Church–who he often called “the army of God.”

CHANG: “That was, I think, his favorite image of the church. The church is not a resort, it's not a hotel. It's a place for us to join so that we can engage in this fight against the forces of darkness in this world, in a fight for the gospel.

Spurgeon referred to that Gospel fight in the closing sentences of his last sermon–looking to His King and Commander.

SPURGEON: He is the most magnanimous of captains. There never was his like among the choicest of princes. He is always to be found in the thickest part of the battle. When the wind blows cold he always takes the bleak side of the hill. The heaviest end of the cross lies ever on his shoulders. …His service is life, peace, joy. Oh, that you would enter it at once! God help you to enlist under the banner of Jesus even this day!

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Caleb Welde.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: America’s largest Protestant denomination now opposes in vitro fertilization. We’ll hear about the Southern Baptist Convention resolution that passed last week. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says: Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. —I Peter 1:13

Go now in grace and peace.

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