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Right now, every investor is asking the same question. Are we about to enter a recession or is our economy about to boom and the data is split? On one hand, the stock market keeps breaking brand new record highs while the economy is still growing and unemployment is still close to historic lows. If we look at this side of data, it looks like the economy is ready to boom. But if we look at the other side of the economy, well, things don't look so good. Credit card delinquencies just hit the highest levels that we have seen since the 2008 great financial crisis. Americans are saving less money today than they did before the pandemic started. And companies are going bankrupt and layoffs
are rising at some of the fastest levels we have seen in years. So, instead of doing what most people do on the internet, which is trying to tell you how you should think, I'm going to use this video to show you five of the biggest threats to the United States economy today, and then five of the biggest boosts to the economy today. That way, you can start to see the different risks and opportunities in our economy. That way, you can have a better idea of what might be coming in the future, because all of this can create new and unique investment opportunities. So, make sure you stick with me until the end of this video. This is also one of the reasons why on June 16th, 2026, I'm hosting a live free and virtual
investor workshop where I'm going to be showing you my firm's research as to where the economy has been moving, but also how it creates new and unique investment opportunities. So, if you've been thinking about how you can invest your money better through this Trump economy, through the changes with AI, through all the changes with geopolitics happening around the world, how you can use these as an opportunity to get better returns. I invite you to join me on this workshop on June 16th. When you register for free, you're also going to get Market Briefs, which is my newsletter for investors, completely free. And when you actually show up live on June 16th, you're also going to get a
copy of my team's new book, How Money Changed Forever, for free digitally on June 16th, but you have to actually show up live on June 16th at 12:00 p.m. Eastern time, noon, to get a copy of this book. So, if you're an investor or want to be an investor, I invite you to join me on June 16th for free. Again, I have that link for you down in the description below. And just a reminder, our software has a limited number of people that can actually join me live. So, if you are interested, make sure you register soon and show up on time and a few minutes early. That way, you can secure your spot. So, let me start by
going over five of some of the biggest concerns in the economy right now. Starting with the capex crash. What that means is that companies have the ability to spend in what's called capital expenditures. This is essentially a way for a company to invest in themselves, grow their company, invest in their future. And what we're seeing right now is that companies have been significantly shrinking their capital expenditures. And this is why some people believe that a recession is going to be coming because if companies are not willing to invest in themselves and their futures, that means they're concerned about what's coming ahead. To put this in perspective, pre- pandemic, companies were trying to generally increase their capex spending by
somewhere between 5 to 6% a year. Well, then the pandemic hit in 2020 and not surprisingly, this capex spending crashed. We saw it fall by around 10% because companies had no idea what was going to happen because of this pandemic. Well, let's fast forward out of the pandemic time and take a look at what was going on in around the year 2023. Again, this was kind of that time where companies were saying, "We still have some extra money. We think the economy is going to boom." And so now in 2023, companies were increasing their capex spending by around 10% a year. Then fast forward to 2024, and capex spending went back up to around 5% of growth, which is back to kind of the normal levels. And now we take a look at what happened in 2025. And capex
spending only increased by around 3.9%. Which means the rate of capex spending while it is still going up, the rate at which it's increasing has been slowing down. And this is where some people are getting concerned that businesses are slowing down how aggressively they're investing in their futures. Maybe because they're concerned about where the economy is going to be in the future. The second biggest threat is inflation, the growing cost of living. We faced a big inflation problem post pandemic and then everybody said that the inflation war was over. Well, here we are today in 2026 and oil prices are still high, gas prices are still high, and inflation is going up, not down. And
this is one of the reasons why credit card debt not only is breaking new record highs, but we're seeing the 90-day delinquency rate on credit card debt hitting some of the highest levels that we've seen since the end of the 2008 crash. Why are people using credit cards? Well, one of the reasons is because, well, they can't afford their groceries and their gas, so now they're putting it on their credit card. The reason why this inflation and credit card number matters is because our economic system runs on spending. The more money you spend, the more money somebody else makes. Well, if somebody doesn't have the ability to spend because everything else is so expensive,
now that could hurt the economy because that means I don't have the ability to go out and spend money at Chipotle. I don't have the ability to buy the extra guac. I don't have the ability to buy the extra meat or whatever else people are doing. And if people are cutting back on spending, that can hurt other businesses, which can then hurt the economy. So the question is, how long is this inflation problem going to stay? And if inflation stays higher for longer, you bet that can have more pain in the economy. Number three is Americans are saving less money. And this goes handinhand with what I talked about in number two, but I wanted to talk about it separately because you can start to see common trends with savings
rates and what's happening in the economy. Take a look at this chart. This is a chart showing how much money Americans save relative to their incomes. And what you can see is that right now Americans are saving less than 3% of their paychecks. To put that in perspective, pre- pandemic, Americans were saving something like six 7% of their paychecks. Now, obviously a big reason Americans are not able to save money is because of inflation. But the reason why I want to talk about the separate is because if people don't have financial cushion, they don't have an extra savings. But what happens then is if something bad happens financially, people don't have the ability to actually protect themselves. Your car
breaks down, you get sick, and you can't work for two weeks or you lose your job. Well, now people don't have any cash savings to fall back on, which can create more pain in people's finances, which can then hurt the economy. Risks number four is because of layoffs. What we're seeing happen right now in 2026 is the layoffs have been going up month over month, partially due to AI. Now, the concern here isn't just that layoffs have been rising in 2026, but that AI layoffs have been rising yearover-year. We're seeing more AI layoffs in 2026 than we saw in 2025. And right now, AI is not the number one leading cause of layoffs. It's not the number two leading cause of layoffs. It's the number three
leading cause of layoffs. Why does that matter? Because if AI continues to get smarter, if it continues to ramp up at what it can do, could that cause an acceleration of layoffs? Well, this is where time will tell. A lot of tech people say yes. Some other people are saying no, but this is where we don't know what's going to happen. But I would recommend you really start to get hip with AI because I can see in my own company, Briefs Finance, how fast AI has changed how we operate, how we hire, who we need to hire, and how we run our entire business. So, if you're not learning and using AI, start doing it now. And the fifth concern in our economy that I want to talk about is our national debt for a couple reasons.
Number one is that the fastest growing expense for our government right now is not the military, is not healthcare, it's not social security, it is our national debt. And the reason for that is number one, our national debt is growing. While number two, our interest rate on that debt is also high. Not to mention that five years ago during the pandemic time, our government was ramping up how much money they were spending, but they were borrowing this money on short-term loans. And now in 2026, a big chunk of our national debt is readjusting. More than $9 trillion of our national debt is readjusting in 2026.
Well, in 2021 when the United States government was borrowing this money, they were borrowing it essentially for free for just a few percent. Today, interest rates are a whole lot higher, which means that when this nome trillion dollars of debt will readjust in 2026, it's going to readjust at a higher interest rate, which means our cost as a country is going to go up. And the government has one source of revenue, tax dollars from taxpayers. Which means more of our tax dollars will have to be used not to actually provide a service or benefit to us, but to pay back our national debt. Well, our taxes are not going up. In fact, the Trump administration recently signed the biggest tax cut bill in the history of
time in 2025 called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So tax revenue is actually going down while expenses are going up, which means that the government will likely have to borrow even more money in the future. If we continue borrowing even more money, that means we're also going to have to print more money. If we print more money in order to continue funding all of our spending, that makes the inflation problem worse. That creates concerns about the United States dollar. Again, this is not an imminent collapse type of thing, but it's something you want to be concerned about or at least aware about because this can change how our economy operates and it can change how investment opportunities are formed as
well. So, these are I would say five of the biggest threats to the economy right now and this is why some people believe that we have a recession coming in the future. Now, let's take a look at the other side of where are the biggest opportunities in the economy that we can balance this with this. And I do want to say that recessions are a part of our economy. They have happened in the past and they will continue to happen in the future. We've seen about 16 recessions in the last 100 years. 25 market crashes in the last 100 years. It's not a matter of if we're going to see a recession. It's a matter of when. That's what you have to understand. Well, now let's take a look at five of some of the biggest
opportunities and boosts to the economy right now. And again, this is why on June 16th, I have my live investor workshops. If you haven't registered for that yet, I have that link for you down in the description. Number one is that the stock market is booming. No matter what happens in the economy, whether we invade Venezuela, whether there are new tariffs, whether we invade Iran, we continue to see the stock market rise. Despite concerns about inflation, despite concerns about oil prices, despite concerns about wars, the stock market keeps defying everything and it keeps booming, which shows that people still believe in the American economy,
which shows that people still have money to invest in the stock market, which shows that people still believe in the future of what is coming. There's a saying on Wall Street that goes, "The stock market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent." And what that means is you might think that all of this shows that the market should be crashing. Well, the stock market can be irrational for a long time. And if you keep betting against the market, it can be irrational longer than you can afford to bet against it. So, just understand that the stock market doesn't always match the economy, but it doesn't always have to. Because with the stock market, you don't have to be a genius economist.
You just want to get rich. Yes, as a long-term investor, it's very profitable to understand the macroeconomic factors and how it impacts the stock market because that can help you find better opportunities and really take advantage of the stock market. But you don't need to try to time the stock market with the economy because that process doesn't work. Number two is that our economy is still growing. In the first quarter of 2026, we got a report saying that our economy grew faster than expected at around 2%. And the reason why this is so important is because a lot of people thought that our economy would have shrank in the first part of 2026 when it in fact actually grew. And the reason
why this is important to understand is because recessions are backwards looking. When you have to declare a recession, you must see six months, meaning two quarters of economic contraction. That means if hypothetically our economy started to shrink today and next month and the month after that, it would be after all six of these months after the data was then reported for then the economist to go back and say the economy is in a recession and it started 6 months ago. So when you start to look at this economic data, understand that it is lagging data. It's looking at the past, but based off of the data that we have today, our economy is still growing.
Number three is that our unemployment levels are still historically low. If you take a look at the reported unemployment levels, it shows that our unemployment is still in the low 4%, which historically is very good unemployment levels. Now, there's a few things that you do want to understand about this unemployment data. Number one is that the unemployment levels can be kind of skewed depending on the definition of unemployment that you're looking at because you might be college educated. You might have a degree in computer science and want to be working at Google or Microsoft, but right now you're flipping burgers at McDonald's. So technically you're not unemployed, you're undermployed. That doesn't show
up in the unemployment numbers. Also, sometimes the unemployment numbers don't show you if you are unemployed depending on how long you've been unemployed. So, yes, the unemployment numbers are showing great results, but a lot of people still feel that the economy, specifically the job market, is not the strongest right now because it is very hard to find a job competing against AI. So, this is also one of those lagging indicators. And I just want to say as an employer who is employing people in this AI economy, AI is changing the job market. Especially if a company is hip with AI. If you are not using AI, if you don't know how to use AI, if you don't understand AI, it's going to be
significantly harder for you to get a job. Period. Then we have number four, which is arguably one of the most positive things that you can say about the economy, which is that corporate earnings are still relatively high. We're still breaking a lot of expectations with corporate earnings. And what that means is that companies are reporting that they are making more money than they thought that they were going to make. The reason why that matters is because our economic system runs on spending, which means people are still spending money. Now, sure, people are not spending money that they have in their savings account. are spending credit cards and they're spending debt or whatever. But from an economic
perspective, nobody cares. People are still spending money. And so if we take a look at a snapshot of the economy, corporations are saying, "Hey, overall it's pretty good. People are still spending money. Our profits are still growing. So we don't have that many concerns." Which is interesting considering we're seeing this growth in credit card spending. We're seeing this shrinking of savings. So you can start to see the concerns about what might be coming in the future because people are struggling to pay their bills, but corporations are still saying we're still making money. Now the one other caveat that I want you to understand about these corporate earnings is that
the corporate earnings are being pulled up by a select few companies. The mag seven, the seven largest companies in the stock market, which are primarily your tech companies, have been extremely successful lately. The Magnificent 7 is Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla. And if we start to take a look at these same corporate earnings outside of those seven companies, what you start to see is that corporate earnings aren't as strong as people originally thought. So, the corporate earnings in general in the United States look very strong because of these magnificent seven companies, because of how large they are and how big of an influence they have on the rest of our economy and the stock market. But if we take a look at the
rest of the companies in the stock market, we look at hundreds of other companies or thousands of other companies. Now these corporate earnings don't look as strong and many of these companies are now starting to struggle because of what we talked about here. So overall corporate earnings are strong. But the reason why overall they're so strong is primarily due to the fact that the seven largest companies in the stock market today have such a big waiting such a big impact on the overall stock market. And those seven companies have overall been doing very good, which has been boosting the overall corporate earnings. But if you dig deeper into general corporate earnings outside of
these top seven companies, it's a very different picture. And then positive number five is that spending is still happening in the business world, especially when it comes to AI. The big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, hoping to win the AI race. This is that piece of the economy that many people are saying is propping up the economy right now because people still have this excitement over AI and what it could be. And yes, if a country or a company wins the AI race, it could drastically change their trajectory. But this is something that is keeping people employed. It's keeping the economy moving. It's keeping companies moving. Has all this spending
into AI because companies want to be the global leader in AI and it can change the way that our economy works depending on how AI plays out. So now that you understand the risks and you understand the pros, let me talk about how this could create potential investment opportunities depending on where you think the economy is going to go. Opportunity number one is let's say you're concerned about the economy, but you still want to be in the stock market. So you want to be a little bit more defensive in the way that you invest your money. There are some opportunities that you can consider investing your money in. Now, I can't tell you what to invest in because I'm just a random guy on YouTube. I'm not a
financial adviser. Investing has risks. You are never guaranteed to make money when you invest. In fact, you will lose money at some point. So, make sure you always do your own due diligence and never blindly trust a random guy on YouTube. I'm going to go over some examples. This is not me telling you what to invest in. This is me showing you how you can start thinking like an investor. Here are three different ways or strategies to be a defensive investor. Number one is to go down the dividend route. SCHD is an ETF that I'm personally invested in. I love investing in dividends. The idea is you're going to invest in a company that's making big profits and now because they have such big profits, one of the things that they
do is they just give it away to the shareholders generally every three months, meaning every quarter. So you get cash deposited into your account every quarter for doing nothing except owning the right stocks or the right fund. Well, SCHD is an ETF that gives you exposure to these strong dividend companies, not only that have been paying out dividends, but have been working to increase their dividends year after year. And the reason why I like this type of cash flow is now you can work to stack your cash flow. You can reinvest your dividends to own more shares and you don't have to sell your stock to get paid. The reason why people don't like this is because the growth is generally slower because now these
companies instead of reinvesting their profits to grow their valuation as fast as possible, they're just giving their cash away. So it depends on what you want to do, but it is more of a defensive play. Then generally we see that these types of value investments do better when people are concerned about the economy because people want more of these safer types of investments. Another defensive play would be to invest in something that consumer staples. A consumer staple are the things that people need whether you were in an economic boom or a recession.
These are things like your toothpaste and your soap and your Coca-Cola. People buy this stuff regardless of what type of economy that you're in. And so these type of staples are generally more stable. It doesn't mean that they don't go down, but they're more stable than other parts of the economy because people continue to spend on these things whether the economy is up, down, or sideways. And XLP is an ETF that can give you exposure to these types of consumer staples. Then one more defensive play, again different than what we just talked about, is the utility space. Well, people also spend money on energy and electricity and other things when you're in an economic boom or recession. And so if you want to
invest into these utilities that people will always need no matter what type of economy that you're in, you can invest into the utilities through something like XLU, which is an ETF that gives you exposure for these types of different utilities. Or maybe you say, you know what, Jos, I think that we're going to see a stock market crash soon. I don't want to be in the stock market. I want to wait it out. Now, I don't recommend that you try to time the market, but I'm not here to judge or tell you what to do. I'm here to show you how there are different opportunities depending on what you want to do. If you are in that I want to wait it out type of camp, okay? Well, there are ways for you to
invest your money into things that are backed by the United States government, backed by the United States Treasury, and you can generate some income. Instead of investing your money directly into the United States government, you can invest your money into a fund that's backed by United States Treasuries and you can generate some income while you wait. Now, generally, you're not going to see these funds move in price. They only move when they pay out the interest. So, your money stays the same, and then you're going to get out your interest payments generally every month.
One example of this is SG OV. This is backed by short-term treasuries. At the time of me recording this video, they're paying out a yield of about 4% interest a year. Again, you're not going to see the value of your fund go up. The idea is that the fund price stays the same and you're just going to be getting about the 4% interest a year paid out every single month. But it's different than a high yield savings account because now this is not FDIC insured because it's not a bank. It's backed by the United States Treasuries. So if the United States were to go bankrupt, you're going to lose the value of your investment, but there's going to be a lot of other problems if the United
States goes bankrupt as well. And because this is backed by treasuries, you also generally do not have to worry about paying state or local taxes. If you have your money in a high yield savings account, you do have to pay your state and local taxes. So, if you're in a high tax state, this could be a way for you to generate more interest and pay less taxes on the money that you earn. Then if you're really concerned about inflation or national debt and the value of the dollar, well, this is where you can look into some of the inflation hedges. This would be an opportunity for you to turn your United States dollars into an alternative currency, something like physical gold. And again, the idea
here is you're not really investing your money. You were investing your money into a hard asset, something like gold. Now, you can go and buy the physical gold. That would be my recommended way is to actually own the gold yourself. The alternative and the easier way would be to get exposure to that physical gold on the stock market with a gold ETF. This would be something like GLD. Again, there's multiple out there, but this is going to give you that paper exposure to gold. Just know that gold prices don't always go up. When people are concerned about inflation, the dollar, and a recession, that helps gold prices go up. When people are less concerned about inflation and the dollar and recession,
then gold prices have fallen in the past. Or maybe you believe that all these concerns about the economy are overblown and the economy is going to continue to boom. Well, there are many ways for you to play now the stock market. I mean, you can invest in whatever industry you think is going to boom or you can invest into broad sectors that are going to give you exposure to the economy if you believe the economy is going to continue to boom. Here's a few examples. You can invest your money into the top 500 companies in the stock market. This is called the SNP 500. One ETF that's going to give you exposure to the S&P 500 is VO VU. As a disclosure, I'm personally invested in VO. And so what this does now is going to give you exposure to the
broad American economy. If the American economy is growing, your fund is going to grow. The American economy is not growing. You're going to see that fund fall. If you want to get a little bit more niche, more into the technical side of things, QQQ gives you exposure to the NASDAQ 100. This is a group of the 100 largest companies in the stock market that are not financial. So these are primarily tech companies. A lot of them are in the AI space. And this is more volatile than something like the S&P 500 because now when markets go up, these tech companies go up even higher than the general market. When the markets go down, you start to see QQQ go down even harder. And so over the last couple of
decades, we have seen QQQ outpace the S&P 500. But you see more volatility and things like QQQ. That's why a lot of people end up losing money because they panic when things go down and then they buy and get excited when things are going up. But if you understand how it works, it can help you grow your wealth even faster. If you want to invest in the NASDAQ 100 or if you want to get a more niche, you wanted to invest into semiconductors because you believe that the AI boom is just getting started that there's going to be so much more demand for all these new technologies. Well, you can invest into the semiconductor space. And SOXX is an ETF that's created that's going to give you exposure
specifically to semiconductor companies. So if you believe the AI and this technology world is going to continue expanding, this is one way that you can get exposure to that. And this is where I just want you to know you don't have to necessarily pick one. I invest some money into multiple places. I believe that the American economy is going to continue to boom for the long term. So I invest in a lot of ways into the American economy. But I also invested in defensive things like dividends because I love cash flow. But I also have some protectionary investments that give me exposure to countries and companies outside of the United States. And I also have investments in growth as well. So
there are many different ways that you can invest your money. You don't have to necessarily just pick one. I mean, you can. It makes some people incredibly wealthy if you're right. But what I've learned from years of doing this is that you can protect yourself against yourself by investing into different things. that way. No matter what happens, you have something that is going to win because at the end of the day, the people that become wealthy are the long-term investors. Period. And there are many ways to become wealthy regardless of what it is that you're investing in or believe it's going to happen assuming that you are investing for the long term. So, what we talked about in this video is that there are
some concerns in the economy. We're seeing companies slow down their capital expenditures. We're seeing concerns about inflation and people spending money. We're seeing concerns about layoffs accelerating with AI. and we're seeing concerns about our national debt. At the same time, we're seeing some positives in the economy. The stock market is still booming. Our economy is still growing. Unemployment is still low. We're seeing corporate earnings overall still rise and AI spending is still happening. Now, based off of all of that, all of this can create investment opportunities depending on what you believe is going to happen, whether markets are going to go up, down, or sideways. And we talked about
different ways that you can have defensive investments, whether it's investing for dividends or consumer staples or utilities. We talked about different ways that you can generate interest while you wait and see. We talked about ways that you can protect yourself against inflation and concerns about the dollar. We talked about different ways that you can win if you believe the economy is going to boom. If you got value out of this video, the best thank you was a referral. So, if you could please share this video with a friend, family member, colleague, or fellow investor. That way, we can continue to spread this type of financial education. Thank you.
President Trump just launched his new plan to save the United States dollar from the $39 trillion debt crisis. No, it's not by having the dollar backed by gold. And no, it's not by having the dollar backed by oil either. It's by having the United States dollar backed by crypto. Let me explain. The value of a money depends on if people believe that it has value. If I walk into
