In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the key themes shaping the 2025 economic outlook — from the Federal Reserve outlook and potential Fed rate cuts in 2025 to ongoing tariffs, inflation, and the evolving role of AI and the economy. Joined by returning guest Tom Siomades, they break down what retirees and investors need to know as we head toward the end of the year. This conversation goes beyond headlines, providing real perspective on what’s happening with the economy, stock market outlook, and how global events—like China trade tariffs and the race for rare earth metals—could influence your retirement investing in 2025.

Listen in to learn about

the trends behind money market rates, the S&P 500 outlook, and how market volatility in 2025 could shape retirement planning strategies. You’ll also hear how shifts in AI, international trade, and interest rates may impact your ability to plan for retirement, stay on your retirement checklist, and continue retiring comfortably with confidence.

In this episode, find out:

·     Why ongoing China trade tariffs and access to rare earth metals are creating ripple effects across global markets.

·     How the Federal Reserve outlook and potential Fed rate cuts in 2025 could affect money market rates and long-term investing strategies.

·     Why Inflation in 2025 still lingers above target and how it’s influencing both spending and retirement portfolios.

·     The growing connection between AI and the economy, and whether the market might be in an “AI bubble.”

·     What retirees can do now to balance safety and growth in a world of market volatility and changing stock market outlooks.

Tweetable Quotes:

“The most important thing you can do is have a plan—and have people you trust to help you stick with it, especially in turbulent times.”

 — Radon Stancil

“If rates come down, that’s good for the economy, but it also means retirees need to rethink how they generate income.”

 — Murs Tariq

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome, everyone, to Secure Your Retirement Podcast. As always, we’re super excited

to have the guests that we have with us today. Tom Siomades, he comes all the way

from Kansas City to talk with us a little bit about how things are going on in

the economy, how things are going on in the market. So first of all, Tom, thank

you so much for coming and chatting with us today. Hey, it’s great to be back.

Good to see you folks again. Yeah. So, Tom, what we love about having you on is

that it’s not just this idea of like, you know, where’s the stock market or do we

think it’s going to go up, or do we think it’s going to go down? We’re kind of

looking at this overall perspective of the economy from a really big picture. And I

will say that things have not been boring since the last time we came on and

chatted. So why don’t we just start off with the big picture of where you see

things at right now in the economy? We know there’s some things right now that are

happening as we speak on this. There are things from still going on in a geopolitical

scenario. We got things here in the country with the shutdown of the government from

that perspective. So, kind of how do you see things where things are right now?

Yeah. So, when I was in here January, and I know we’ve been on since, but you

know, the big topic of the time was like, you know, hey, you had this change of

administration, right? You were going to have gone from one set of policies to

another, right? And then lo and behold, the tariff stuff came along, right? And that

just kind of dominated all sort of facets of the economic cycle. We had a huge

drawdown in April, and then we came back. And, you know, my thought with the

tariffs are, this is just one of those things. As so long as we have this

administration in place, it’s just going to be a thing, okay? Because the Chinese,

as you guys well know, long planners, you know, definitely have their visions of how

they want to see the world economically. And they’re willing to wait, right. So, I

think a lot of the stuff where we thought, oh, they were going to, you know, push

these guys to the limit and we’ll get all these new deals. And it was going to be

this nice, tidy little bow that was going to get tied up and we would just move

on. That’s not going to happen. So, one of the things I’d leave with folks is that,

listen, so long as we have Trump administration and or some form of that,

you’re going to have tariff issues, right? And we just saw that last week, right?

Chinese didn’t want to give up rare earth metals. Trump says he’s going to hit him

with 100 percent sheriffs. And then over the weekend, he says, you know, well, it’s

not as bad as it is. You know, me and gee, we get along. Everything’s good. I’ll

make this thing, I’ll make this thing work. And then the market comes back a little

bit, but, you know, still, the worry is there, right? The other aspect of it is,

you know, this whole government shutdown thing, although, you know, research has shown

that government shutdowns don’t necessarily impact the economy. But, you know, when

you see things that are normally expected not happening, there’s a huge psychological

impact, right? So, as it was, people are kind of frayed anyway. Interest rates are

high. Inflation is better. It’s still running close to 3%.

You know, full percentage point nearly above what the Fed would like to see. We’ve

seen some cuts, but I don’t know that anybody is experiencing, you know, like a

euphoria, right? The point was at the beginning of this administration was they came

in and they were going to deregulate stuff, and they were going to jumpstart the

economy and, you know, we kept on hearing about this golden age, golden age, golden

age, and I mean, I’m not seeing a lot of golden age just yet right? I just see

a lot of angst and yet the funny thing about the whole thing, and I know we

didn’t want to specifically talk about the market itself. But the interesting thing

about it is that, you know, this year feels like we should be up 40%, right? And

yet somehow, we’re up about 12, which isn’t horrible. But it just goes to show you

that, you know, when you introduce volatility, as has happened probably in the first

nine months of this year, you’re going to get these big, you know, movements up and

down. And even though we’re up 12, it doesn’t feel we’re up anything. It should

feel like we’re up a lot more because there was a lot more action, but yet I

think we’re just kind of in this place. We’re just wait and see. And every time

something new comes along, it’s another day on the wait and see cycle, right? And

that’s the challenge that I think the economy has. Then, of course, we don’t have

data because, you know, people are out of work. They’re not compiling data. We had

the person from the Bureau Labor Statistics gets fired, and then you had those job

revisions. There’s just a lot of turmoil, but I don’t think that things are,

they’re worse in the feeling’s thing rather than in the reality of it,

as I guess we’re going to say. Yeah. Tom, I think that’s a great kind of summary

as far as what’s going on and all the headlines that are listeners and just

retirees are very concerned about right now. So, let’s take one topic, which is you

mentioned at the beginning, which is tariffs, and that’s

as far as is it going to be good or is it going to be bad or is it going to

be just nothing and we’re glad it’s at least there’s been resolution around it

that’s my first question and then the other one if you could talk a little bit

more about here recently with China and the tariff around rare earth metals maybe

just explain to people why the rare earth metal piece is so important in the

economy yeah so let me start with the second part of that right the second part is

we don’t we don’t have much of them, right? And therefore, and all that stuff goes

into military stuff and, you know, a lot of the modern technology that we have. So

it’s a rare, it’s a rare component that they seem to have a lot more access to.

Now, we could develop that here, but it’s going to take time. There’s a lot of

stuff going on the ocean floor. There’s a lot of places out west that you could

dig this stuff up. But, you know, you have to make it somehow. I mean, the other

one that was really interesting is we’ve got so much electronic junk that we’re

trying to get of anyway. There’s probably a recycling component of that that we can

get to. So, it’s super important for the future. And they seem to have sort of,

it’s like a bottleneck, right? Because if you don’t get the materials to make the

futuristic stuff to be as simplistic as you can, you can’t make the futuristic

stuff, right? So that’s the component where it makes it super important. And I think

in one respect, although we have a lot of leverage over the Chinese with other

type of stuff, that’s one point that they have a lot of leverage with us, right?

And so back to the tariff thing, I don’t know that the tariff thing is really

going to change the overall thing, the overall economy per se.

It’s just going to make it different, right? So, the big thing when they announced

the tariffs were that was going to lead to inflation. I look at it differently,

right? I look at it from the standpoint of inflation is created by people having

more money and a scarcity of product, therefore those products go up in price,

right? We don’t have a scarcity of money. The money supply has been contracting. But

if there’s one thing that goes up in price, that just means if you had $100 and

something that used to cost $10 now cost $20, you still don’t have $90 to spend.

You just spend, if you really want that thing, you spend $20 on it. Now you’re

going to spend $80 on the remaining things you want, right? And that puts pressure

downward on those prices, right? Because they want to compete for a piece of the

pie. So, I don’t think we’re going to, you know, this whole thing was we were being

told that it was going to like reassure all these manufacturing jobs. I don’t think

that’s going to happen. But I think at the end of the day, there’s just going to

be just a disparity of what you were used to seeing stuff, both good and bad.

So, you know, it’s a tool in a way to help, you know, motivate people to trade

with us and behave in a different way. But at the end of the day, it’s like, you

know, change is hard for people, right? We’re used to doing things the way we’ve,

we had no tariffs in this country for nine, 80 years, right? And a lot of that

was because we wanted people to sell their stuff to us because we wanted them to

stay sort of in the Western fold, right? They didn’t want them to become Soviet-era-style

 communism, right? That goes on for 80 years, and now a sudden, you know,

one administration comes in and wants to turn it all upside down, and I think

that’s what freaks people out more than anything. I mean, things are, you know,

whether you pay $10 for a bottle of French wine or 15, that just means that you

got that much less money to spend on other things. Right. Yeah. Thank you for

bringing that, kind of helping us kind of see all that, Tom. So, you know, I know

this is a topic that we talked about last time, but I still think it is one that

we really do need to kind of revisit. From a couple different perspectives, you

know, we are seeing development of AI continuing to kind of, you know,

blow us away with some of the things that’s happening in that part of the economy.

And I think there’s a few questions. Number one, you know, you’re starting to hear

this thing now that we’re in an AI bubble and that we’re going to see this get

corrected. We’re also seeing some developments where, you know, different companies are

saying, hey, we are now being restricted with some of these things that are going

to, you know, not being able to keep up with the computer power that they need and

all those kinds of things. Where do you see that at right now? And how I’m more

interested in how you think it’s going to affect the economy or affect the markets.

Yeah, from a market standpoint, I definitely would agree that we’re probably, you

know, very, very bloated on the AI side. Longer term, economically,

you have to think that, think about back other technologies that have come along,

right? I mean, the people that are in the lead today probably are not going to be

15, 20 years from now. And the challenge is, like, it’s all the things that are

going to be flying under the radar while we’re too busy focusing on Nvidia and AMD

and all these other people. And that’s the challenge, right? Because right now, I

think people know very little about the potential. And so, they’re just going with

the known leaders, and that’s what’s putting pressure on the big companies that are

there now. And, of course, that’s elevating their valuations. Longer term,

listen, just like anything, you know, whether it was cars or the telephone or trains

or the Internet or whatever, this will yield a different and probably

thing for as far as our economy is concerned and as far as our productivity is

concerned. But just like all the other stuff, there’s a bunch of silly stuff too

that’s coming along, right? I mean, if we need all this computing so people can

take old videos and slap political figures face on them so they could, you know, do

silly things, that’s not a good use of, but there’s a lot of that type of stuff.

So that adds to the whole like, you know, mess of computing, right? I mean, you

need all these data centers and you need all the stuff that’s built. But who’s to

say that’s Thank you.

But, you know, where are those guys now, right? You don’t see Pets .com anymore,

right? But yet, and will you see NVIDIA maybe or some of these other guys? 20

years or now? I don’t know. But AI as a tool, I think,

is very, very powerful. It’s just a question of how we choose to use a tool,

right? It’s like a chainsaw, for example, you could use it to cut down trees and

do things. Or you could waste your time, you know, carving like wooden bears,

right? I mean, that’s kind of where we are. But it’s hard for people to step away

because they’re afraid to miss out, right? Same thing with cryptocurrency. We don’t

know if Bitcoin is going to be around 20 years from now, but the blockchain is an

important component of that. And I think that’s something that’s going to remain with

us. Although the question for people now is if you can’t see what the future is,

the only game in town are these companies, and they are overvalued in a lot of

ways. I mean, they dominate the S &P 500 right now, something like 30 % of the S

&P. Right. Yeah, and that’s, I think, been a lot of the reason for a lot of the

growth in the S &P and the markets in general over the last couple of years all

these tech companies. But I agree there’s a lot of, I think really good use cases

for AI, but some of it’s just pure fun. And then some of it is getting to a

place where it’s malicious, where people need to be very vigilant about, you know,

things that they’re clicking on and all that stuff. So, you mentioned the Fed earlier

and rate cuts and inflation. We’ve had a couple rate cuts. So where do you see

this going? And I’d like to also kind to speak to the, you know, the retiree or

the person last year that I was able to get a money market at 5%, which we

haven’t seen in decades and a CD. And so, a lot of people shifted their investment

strategy to just getting safe, easy money, but now we’re seeing those rate cuts and,

you know, maybe a money markets at three and a half, 3 .75, and maybe you can get

a CD at 4%. So maybe speak to that person that, you know, went all in on safe,

easy money, but now that rate is declining. And so, what, what do you do? And where

do you see rates going? Right. So, I’ll answer the first part, the second part

first. I think rates are going to come down. We’ll probably see another half a

percentage points drop between now and the year end. A lot has been made about the

difficult relationship. I’ll be as polite as I can between Trump and Jerome Powell.

So, I think Jerome Powell is kind of like, listen, he knows he’s going to be gone

next May as chairman, and he just wants to go out quietly. He doesn’t want his

phone ringing at 2 in the 2 in the morning or getting tweeted about. But that’s,

so that’s the anticipation, right? Yeah, I mean, it’s the pressure on the

administration and for markets are they want lower interest rates, right? And you

know, I think it would help the economy to have lower borrowing cost, but the

casualty of that is all of these type of you know, secure instruments, right? So

the unfortunate part of it is, is you have to understand that where you have

contraction, where you’re going to have growth for people that have put a lot of

money into safer CDs and money markets and things like that, you know, if you have

enough money and you could live with less of it, I mean, that’s fine, but I don’t

know too many people to do, right? So, you know, the pressure is going to be to

put a little more money into more risky assets to try to make up for that, right?

So, if you get lower rates, that should be fuel for the market to go up. So that

would be a good opportunity. Although, you know, we’re at all-time highs right now,

right? So maybe as your stuff matures, you sort of reverse dollar cost average into

the market, so you’re not buying at the high every time, but maybe increase your

allocation to those assets a little bit more. Because, you know,

if you’re looking to make up the shortfall, you’re going to have a shortfall.

There’s no, there’s no if -ends or butts about it. Interest rates go down, banks,

you know, literally, it’s like the gas station. Right. The minute oil goes up, like

that guy’s on the ladder changing those numbers. Like, as you’re driving there, you

see it pump, like, you know, rock it up.

Yeah. So, we’re sitting here at this time of year, really kind of entering into the

fourth quarter, kind of how do you see things playing out from here? If you had

to, if you had to put that little pretend crystal ball in front of you that you,

we’re trying to say, where do we think, things are going to go? How do you think

20, 25 is going to end? Yeah, so right now, you know, it’s hinging on a couple of

things, right? And first is, this China stuff needs to die down, right? We need to

get some quietness with respect to that because right now we’re getting some decent

earnings, right? This is just the beginning of third quarter earnings, and they’re

pretty good. And every time we get good earnings, news the market jumps up, but

then something happens on the China front and the tariff front and all of a sudden

the market crater. So, you’ve got an immense amount of volatility, But I think the

propensity right now for the market anyway is it wants to go up. It’s seeing

interest rates are going to go down. It’s seeing decent earnings. You know, God

knows what kind of numbers we’re going to get as far as GDP and things like that.

But they seem to be growing. So, I’m enthusiastic for the rest of the year.

I mean, probably I wouldn’t be surprised if we maybe even get up to $7,000 on the

and P from here, and that’s probably what maybe we end the year at 17, 18 percent

from the 12 we are now. So maybe another five and change. But, you know, anything

after that is next year is going to be an election year, right? There’s going to

be a lot of scrambling going around, a lot of, you know, a lot of shifting around.

And I’m not so clear on what I think, you know, mid-2026 might look like.

Right. Yeah. Well, Tom, you know, it’s always really nice to

to folks that are listening, the most important thing you can do is, A, have a

plan, B, have people you trust implementing your plan, right? And I think in this

day and age where we are right now, where you’re bombarded with all kinds of news

and things you may understand or halfway understand, it’s easy to make a mistake,

right? And especially in a retirement, you don’t have a lot of time to recoup. So

to me, I think one of the most important things you can do is have a relationship

with, you know, like you guys, that can help implement the plan and keep people

sticking to their guns, especially in these kinds of turbulent times. Yeah. Well, we

certainly, appreciate it. Tom, thank you for coming on and chatting with us. As always, it was a pleasure to have you. Thank you very much.