🚨SECRETS of Trump FAILING ECONOMY is Finally EXPOSED!!

What this episode is about

The discussion highlights the alarming state of the consumer economy, revealing increasing consumer debt of $5.1 trillion, which underscores a broader issue of economic inequality. It also examines a rare moment of bipartisan agreement between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump regarding capping credit card interest rates, emphasizing the urgency of addressing the systemic weaknesses affecting consumers.

Key takeaways

• Consumer debt's rise is an illusion—burgeoning credit card use masks deeper economic fragility.
• Even politicians as polarized as Trump and Warren converge to tackle skyrocketing credit card rates—desperate times, indeed!
• Flat December retail sales amid soaring credit card debt: consumers are borrowing, not thriving.
• Top 10% skew spending data, revealing how inequality shapes our economic landscape—wealthy flippers vs. struggling masses.
• With credit card interest rates nearly doubling in a decade, is consumer finance becoming a legalized predatory game?

Who speaks in this episode?

• Max (Guest) · 14 min speaking
• Elizabeth Warren (Guest) · 1 min speaking
• Donald Trump (Guest) · 1 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Donald Trump, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Midas Touch Network, UNFR
2. 6:00 – 9:00: Donald Trump, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Mastercard
3. 9:00 – 12:00: US, COVID-19

Notable quotes from "🚨SECRETS of Trump FAILING ECONOMY is Finally EXPOSED!!"

• Hey, this is Max from UNFR for the Midas Touch Network. When I put together last week's macro take, it was before the late day release of some pretty eye-opening data that came out on.

  about Midas Touch Network · at 0:00

• President Trump reached out to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren for a conversation that the White House called productive. So the question then is he raises the point about a cap on.

  about Donald Trump · at 0:56

• Now, the Biden administration made moves to try and get fees under control by capping junk fees and late fees, but they did it through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And there.

  about Joe Biden · at 6:00

• What they're really upset about is this, and make sure you're sitting down for this one. Visa's profit in 2025, according to their earnings that also just dropped a few days ago, $20 billion profit. Their net margin, mind you, 50%.

  about Visa · at 7:20

• Versus treating the cut argument. So, just resharing this, this is the cut, the cost of capital in terms of credit card interest rates, 21% on 15 trillion.

  about US · at 11:01

• Going to be a lot of juicy stuff in that one because we got some pretty big releases. Don't forget you can also sign up for my free weekly newsletter at unftr.com where we cover politics, economics, and some random fun stuff.

  about UNFR · at 15:16

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Donald Trump — Person · Referenced political actor (administration framing) · 2 mentions · first at 0:50
  Presented as unexpectedly engaging with Warren on a credit-card rate cap; also positioned as leading an administration whose broader policies (tariffs, Medicaid cuts) worsen inflation and household stress.
• Senator Elizabeth Warren — Person · Referenced policymaker (credit-card regulation) · 2 mentions · first at 0:48
  Used as one pole of a surprising, momentary alignment with Trump on capping credit-card interest rates; her long-running consumer-finance agenda frames the segment’s policy discussion.
  Well, you probably heard or saw the news a couple of weeks ago that Senator Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump had a bit of a dant around the idea of capping credit card rates.
• Joe Biden — Person · Referenced policymaker (historical credit-card/bankruptcy policy) · 1 mention · first at 6:26
  Cited both for attempted fee caps via CFPB during his presidency and for earlier Senate-era actions protecting credit-card companies and tightening bankruptcy discharge—used to explain structural roots of today’s consumer debt burden.
• Bernie Sanders — Person · Referenced legislator (proposed fee-cap legislation) · 1 mention · first at 6:10
  Mentioned as having proposed legislation (with others) to cap credit-card-related fees through Congress, underscoring that legislative routes have stalled despite public-facing proposals.
  They did it through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And there was proposed legislation from Bernie Sanders and others to cap these fees through a legislative process…

Companies & orgs

• Visa — Company · Business focus · 1 mention · first at 7:12
  Discussed as a major credit card company with significant profits and impact on consumer debt.
• Mastercard — Company · Business focus · 1 mention · first at 7:24
  Discussed alongside Visa as a major credit card company with significant profits.
  Mastercard reported a record 15 billion in profit for 2025 as well with revenue up 17% year-over-year. So spare me the profitability excuse. Credit card companies are pillaging American.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at 6:06
  Mentioned as an entity involved in regulating credit card fees and consumer protections.
  Now, the Biden administration made moves to try and get fees under control by capping junk fees and late fees, but they did it through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And there.
• Midas Touch Network — Company · Broadcast · 1 mention · first at 0:00
  The network hosting the podcast and providing the platform for the discussion.
• UNFR — Company · Host · 1 mention · first at 0:00
  The organization producing the podcast and providing the analysis.

Places & events

• US — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at 10:00
  The primary location discussed in the context of consumer debt and economic policies.
• COVID-19 — Event · Key argument · 1 mention · first at 10:47
  Mentioned as a significant event impacting consumer debt levels and economic trends.
  Valleys are near zero. So hold that thought for a minute while we look at mortgages. The floor for mortgages was around 3% for the 30-year after COVID, but mostly it's been between 4 and 6%.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Hey, this is Max from UNFR for the Midas Touch Network. When I put together last week's macro take, it was before the late day release of some pretty eye-opening data that came out on Friday. So, I tucked it away for this week, but then another piece of information came out that when you put them together is pretty alarming. So the headline here is that the consumer economy is getting crushed, but there are so many other stories that are masking this underlying weakness that I wanted to split it out to give it a proper reading. So I'm going to go through this information first to set the table and then show how the consumer is really being sacrificed at the altar of inequality.

0:45 Well, you probably heard or saw the news a couple of weeks ago that Senator Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump had a bit of a dant around the idea of capping credit card rates.

0:56 President Trump reached out to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren for a conversation that the White House called productive. So the question then is he raises the point about a cap on credit card interest rates something that had come up in the speech and that I've been working on for years and that is trying to get interest rates down and he said he wanted to work on that and I said great

1:22 it's highly unlikely that this kumbaya moment will actually materialize but it's worth walking through what this would actually look like. So, and we'll get there in a bit, but we should start with the problem statement because the big takeaway here is that these polar opposite politicians were aligned on this single issue, if even for a moment. Now, there's good reason for it as we can see in the data. I always start with the caveat that it's important not to get lost in a single month data release. What's important is to look at the overall trend. Now having said that, it's rare to see a single month explosion like this. Even in a holiday month like December, the total consumer indebtedness figure grew to 5.1 trillion at the end of the year. That represents modest growth over the year, which is why you didn't hear analysts going crazy about it when it came out. But the reason it increased at all was due to

2:17 the staggering single month growth in revolving credit, i.e. credit cards. As you can see in the circled figures, a 12% change month overmonth, and that pushed the total revolving credit year-over-year increase to 3.4% which is higher than it had been throughout the entire year. So, this figure is exclusive of mortgages, which we'll get to in a moment. So, outside of credit cards, things like auto loans, student debt, and other installment loans also increased by 3.2% in December. Now, there were competing takes on why things surged in December that I found at odds.

2:56 One prevailing take was that when you pair this with holiday spending and smooth it over November and December, it showed that holiday spending increased slightly. So, obviously, the administration pounced on that as a sign of a healthy consumer. But some looked at the surge in December as a sign that holiday shopping was compressed, which they interpreted as the sign of a shaky consumer because they were making snap decisions because they're concerned about job losses or income declines. So the concept of a healthy consumer has been pretty thoroughly debunked because it's widely understood that consumer spending is being propped up by the higher end of the income spectrum. the top 10% is basically skewing the overall picture. And it should be noted that the increase in revolving credit in December was triple that of consensus estimates.

3:46 Either way, it doesn't really matter. Yes, the consumer is making spur-of-the- moment spending decisions and putting off bigger items unless they're in the top 10%. But the point is that when they do it, it's on credit. And now to show how fragile things really are, we have the second release that paints a clearer picture. According to census figures, advanced estimates of US retail and food service sales for December were 735 billion, virtually unchanged from the prior month. Now, analysts were expecting an increase of4%, not zero.

4:21 So, it turns out that spending was actually flat to November. Now, like I said before, it's important not to get caught up in a single release like this, but in this case, there's a really important takeaway. That massive increase in credit card debt didn't actually correlate to a massive increase in holiday spending after all. So that means that the consumer just kind of hit a wall in December. And December isn't like every other month. There are entire industries that revolve around holiday spending habits. So while I don't look to look at things in isolation, it does tell a very specific story. So that brings me back to this meeting of the minds between Trump and Warren.

5:02 Remember, Trump has access to all of this information before we do. And we know this because he keeps sharing it ahead of time, which of course no one has ever done before. But he's never seen a rule that he didn't break. The administration knows consumer debt is a huge problem. So much so that one of the people that he hates the most had an idea that sounded good to him and so he jumped on it. Now, I know it sounds like a great idea, and it is a great idea. So, take what I'm about to say in that spirit. The cost of credit card debt is disgusting. I mean, look at these numbers. This is criminal. This is the commercial interest rate on credit cards as tracked by the Fed. Look at that spike from the middle of Biden's term to where it is today. 14% to 21%. Going back a full decade, it's almost double.

5:55 So, there's no question the credit card companies are getting away with murder. Now, the Biden administration made moves to try and get fees under control by capping junk fees and late fees, but they did it through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And there was proposed legislation from Bernie Sanders and others to cap these fees through a legislative process, but neither went anywhere because the court struck down most of the fee regulations and Congress never seriously took up the legislation. So, in the spirit of balance, I think it's important to remember that as a senator, Joe Biden was the one who led the charge to protect these credit card companies from regulation and even sponsored legislation that made it more difficult to discharge credit card debt and bankruptcy. You you got to call balls and strikes on that one. So, we're living with the results of what he put in place as early as 2005. Now, the

6:48 credit card industry obviously responded immediately to the idea that Warren and Trump were going to cap rates for a year, mind you, not permanently, saying that most of their portfolio would be unprofitable under the cap, which is interesting because it's not like we can't see their profit margins. In 2016, when the average the average rate was 12%, Visa's net income was $6 billion. So, we know that they can get by, right? What they're really upset about is this, and make sure you're sitting down for this one. Visa's profit in 2025, according to their earnings that also just dropped a few days ago, $20 billion profit. Their net margin, mind you, 50%.

7:39 Mastercard reported a record 15 billion in profit for 2025 as well with revenue up 17% year-over-year. So spare me the profitability excuse. Credit card companies are pillaging American households. Now, if we continue with the thought experiment of capping rates, it would be a net positive for the consumer and probably provide a short-term boost to GDP because it would loosen things up for consumer spending to pick up. And under any other administration, this would be fine, but this isn't something that can be done by executive order. And the credit card and financial lobby would bury this in Congress. Now, the reason it can't be by executive order is because the credit card companies have other ways like fees to boost income.

8:26 So, it's just one pocket to the other. What you would really need is comprehensive legislation that contemplates fee reduction, time to pay, late fees, discharging debt, and so on. You would also have to limit the extortionary tactics of alternative debt providers like payday loans because the credit card companies would respond by just throwing out subprime and lowincome households. Now, with inflation remaining elevated, this would drive lowerend households into sharkinfested debt waters. There's no way that anything comprehensive is coming out of this Congress unless it's more military spending or more tax cuts for the rich.

9:05 My bigger issue is the larger debt picture and the true cost of goods and asset inflation in the US. Households just are not on a level playing field. So here's my lame but very on the- nose analogy. Capping credit card rates is like a cancer patient getting a cut on their hand on the way into the hospital for chemotherapy and then the oncologist stitching them up and saying that's enough healthcare for today. You can just skip the chemotherapy. Actually, it's worse because the cap is only for a year. So, it's like that same doctor just putting a band-aid on it and then saying that, you know, this will hold for a few minutes, but you should really go to the emergency room and get some stitches and still telling them to skip chemo. Only when the patient gets to the ER, they're turned away because they don't have the right insurance now because this administration has forced so many people off the rolls and is

9:54 slashing Medicaid. Sorry. Credit card debt is a symptom of a much larger problem. So let's look at the total debt picture for the US. US federal debt continues to rise unabated. So it's the biggest change over time, but household debt and business debt have also increased dramatically. The point to focus on is when things sort of separate around the financial crisis. So you can see that business and household debt slowed down a little bit while the federal debt exploded between 2008 and 2014. That was a direct shift where the government went through quantitative easing to fill the coffers of the business world and to some extent the consumer. Taking the consumer in isolation, you can see it more clearly here. We're at historic debt levels.

10:43 This is credit card debt again. But you can see that there were two leveling events, the financial crisis and COVID. Outside of those, the trend line is pretty steep and pretty ugly. Now, here's where we see the imbalance, the true inequality, because not all debt is the same. This is the treating cancer versus treating the cut argument. So, just resharing this, this is the cut, the cost of capital in terms of credit card interest rates, 21% on 15 trillion. It's disgusting, don't get me wrong. But if we think about the overall debt picture and the cost of living, the imbalance is in the cost of capital and the asset class. For example, this is the federal funds rate, the core interbank borrowing rate on which all commercial rates are loosely constructed. The peak in 2019 was 2.5%.

11:34 The level now is around 3 1/2%. But the valleys are near zero. So hold that thought for a minute while we look at mortgages. The floor for mortgages was around 3% for the 30-year after COVID, but mostly it's been between 4 and 6%. See, when the Fed goes in for the business sector, it goes allin. The cost of capital always favors the business class. Now, this is somewhat deceptive because the federal funds rate is the interbank rate. So, the real corporate rates are built on top of them and so they're higher. But understand that consumer rates are always built on top of the business rates. So, if a business is borrowing money at two or 4%, the consumer is getting it at four or 6%.

12:20 The key to everything though is the quantity and the flow of money that led to asset price inflation. Even if you don't have a mortgage, you're paying for someone else's mortgage through rent. So, when home asset prices are inflated, you pay for it whether you're paying the mortgage or you're paying the rent. That's why upwards of 30% of the nation's earnings go toward housing. And in many urban areas, it's a lot higher than that. It's just not supposed to be this way. What the corporations did during the low to no interest rate era is go through a massive refinancing where they took out their expensive debt and replaced it with less expensive debt. And that's the difference. See, even though business debt increased over the same time frame that consumer debt did, we were operating under different costs of capital. They were getting more money for less than the rest of us were.

13:12 The reason people have to put so much discretionary and now non-discretionary spending on their credit cards is because the core assets in their lives have increased beyond wages and savings. If you had enough disposable income to manage credit card debt on a monthly basis, so you were using it for convenience rather than to live, then the rate wouldn't be as much of an issue. nor would they be able to get away with charging such punitive interest rates because you would simply be able to refrain from using them at a minimum or just never carry a balance.

13:46 See, the real cancer is the asset inflation that resulted from the overupp of cheap money into the corporate sector, not the consumer. So, the nicest thing I could say about the Trump administration is that it's not all their fault. And the nicest thing I could say about Warren and Trump being on the same page is that at least it's a an acknowledgement of one of the problems and a lovely distraction from everything else for like a minute. But the reality is that this legislation, even if they could get it passed, would be the band-aid on the gaping wound of the cancer patient. See, the bigger problem is that every actual real life policy of this administration is making the cancer worse. Tariffs have increased input prices, which just came through in the PPI data. That's why every analyst on the street is forecasting more inflation growth for 2026. The cost of health care skyrocketing, and we're only

14:42 in the early stages of really feeling the effects of plan losses, bankruptcies skyrocketing, student debt and auto defaults also increasing, tourism was down 5% last year because the world is so mad at us. Other rates like mortgages are still elevated because US treasuries are carrying a risk premium to put it nicely, but it's really just an tax if we're to put it bluntly. Links to all the releases that we just discussed are going to be in the description below. And we have a macro take still coming out for this weekend. So, make sure to look forward to that. There's going to be a lot of juicy stuff in that one because we got some pretty big releases. Don't forget you can also sign up for my free weekly newsletter at unftr.com where we cover politics, economics, and some random fun stuff.

15:27 You can follow me on Blue Sky and YouTube at UNFR. Enjoy the rest of the week and I'll catch you online. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our Substack at Plus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Philowski, ad free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at midasplus.com.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "🚨SECRETS of Trump FAILING ECONOMY is Finally EXPOSED!!"?

Max (Guest), Elizabeth Warren (Guest), Donald Trump (Guest).

What is "🚨SECRETS of Trump FAILING ECONOMY is Finally EXPOSED!!" about?

The discussion highlights the alarming state of the consumer economy, revealing increasing consumer debt of $5.1 trillion, which underscores a broader issue of economic inequality. It also examines a rare moment of bipartisan agreement between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump regarding capping credit card interest rates, emphasizing the urgency of addressing the systemic weaknesses…

What is mentioned in this MeidasTouch episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Donald Trump, Senator Elizabeth Warren, US, Joe Biden, Visa, Mastercard. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "🚨SECRETS of Trump FAILING ECONOMY is Finally EXPOSED!!"?

The episode runs 16 min; the transcript is about 2,709 words in 22 timestamped sections.

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