David Brancaccio reflects on thousands of conversations

A reminder that whatever the headline, when it comes to investing, do not do anything rash. I'm David Bruncaccio in Los Angeles. First, there's news the Iran conflicts effect on gas prices has driven up the consumer price index which shows today prices up 9-10 percent in March, up 3.3 percent in a year, the highest in two years, gasoline up 21 percent last month. The keynote here today is a conversation with the Princeton Economics Professor who has argued for half a century that you cannot time when to get in or out of stocks, Burton Malkiel. Princeton Professor Emeritus, as author of what is arguably the most influential investing book of all time, a random walk down Wall Street, now in a 13th edition. Here's an excerpt from our conversation about concern now that stocks related to artificial intelligence are a bubble that could pop. Is it possible that we are in the midst of an AI bubble? Absolutely. We have had bubbles in the stock market with every revolutionary event. We had this with the internet revolution when the market then collapsed and went down 40 percent between the beginning of 2000 and the end of 2002. But we don't know if we're in the top of the third inning of an AI bubble or the bottom of the ninth. Some say it's a bubble, others say relax. I personally never relax. For those worried it's a bubble that could pop, what should they do given your experience over more than half a century? For those listeners who are worried, the market is a lot lower in terms of its prices relative to earnings today than they were at the top of the internet bubble. When a lot of those internet companies sold at 100 times earnings or more, the market's not cheap today, but it is far more reasonably priced than it was then. Yes, rebalance. If your equities are too large now, definitely rebalance. Do not try to time the market. You'll never get it right. Random walk author Burton Malkiel is still going strong at 93. Our full conversation is streamable from Marketplace.org now. If you're a business leader, Intuit QuickBooks Payroll is an essential tool that completely integrates payroll, time tracking, HR, and your financials in a powerful all-in-one command center. More juggling platforms are switching between vendors. All your data synced into one platform offering clarity and confidence to make smarter decisions and focus on what matters. This summer, QuickBooks Payroll evolves to support the entire team lifecycle, HR, time, benefits, and payroll all working together in one connected system that fully integrates with your books. You'll be able to onboard employees in one seamless flow that feeds directly into payroll. This is my last day hosting the Marketplace Morning Report. I'm shifting to a new role, still over here, that I'm very jazzed about. I'll be our special correspondent covering future effects decisions now that shape our economic futures, a sleuth for consequences, if you will. But thinking back on the 13 years covering Brexit, the inflation surge, and now let's call it reverse globalization, things stick with me like from April 2020. The economic narrative now is horrifying and we've been facing it head on. For instance, today we'll be reporting data likely showing that more than 20 million Americans were thrown out of work over the last four weeks. Also from the archive, the time I pressed famed economist Paul Krugman on freer trade and globalization being a big cause of economic inequality, Krugman's research says trade is unfairly blamed and listen to how he swats this flee. You think the trade issue is overblown? I've got a lot of personal human capital invested in trade because that's what I did. That's what the... I got the Swedish thingy for. The Swedish thingy, yes. The Swedish thingy. These are the ones I have. But look, very... Dr. Krugman essentially clobbers my point using his Nobel Prize at economics, final score Krugman 1, Brancaccio 0, the only Swedish thingy I got is a packet of meatballs from Ikea. Another moment reminds us of the importance of local journalism. I was working on a series about news deserts. In America, places essentially devoid of local news coverage now. I was along the border in Del Rio, Texas, site of a big story a few years earlier when thousands of refugees from Haiti were detained under a bridge across the Rio Grande. Border patrol wasn't talking and to get the story, it took an experienced local reporter. One of that reporter, Karen Gleason's long time connections was Del Rio's mayor, an official who had permission to enter the camp of migrants where news media had been excluded. Gleason told it like this. He goes, we're going to hide you in the back of my car. They covered me with blankets and we went through the border patrol checkpoint at the fence and he'd tell me like, okay, nobody's looking. Gleason then got her first hand account to residents on a fledgling local news website that had sprung up to try to fill the void in a town that now had no daily paper. And you get to meet childhood heroes, including the day I'm in the marketplace New York Bureau and who walks through but James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise himself, William Shaddener then 87 was in the house on his way to a gig at Canadian Broadcasting down the hall. I grabbed him for us because Shaddener the actor is also Mr. Shaddener, entrepreneur, who talked to me of the resilience needed for both the acting and the business game. Being an entrepreneur really means dedicating yourself to the thing that you think is important and you may fail. In fact, you have to fail. Because being an entrepreneur is taking risk, right? And sometimes it means fail. And if you're taking a risk, you don't know what the outcome is going to be and a great deal has to do with luck. So if you're not lucky this time, gather yourself up, try again sooner or later. If you're smart, if you're aware, you will learn by your mistakes and only by making the mistakes can you learn what not to do and what to do. Shaddener told us how he was paid very little and saved nothing from the first Star Trek series but got passionate about nest-egging after that experience. Anyway, I'll still be around here but not getting up every day at 2am to go live. Thank you for being there for public media, especially this year. In Los Angeles, I'm David Bruncash. From APM American Public Media. What happens when your kid's childhood becomes your business? I'm Rima Gres and this week on This Is Uncomfortable, we step inside the world of family influencers. Where childhood turns into content and content turns into income. What does it do to the kids at the center of it all? And what does it reveal about modern motherhood? I think part of the reason that mom influencers and family vloggers are so popular in the United States specifically is because American motherhood is so lonely. Be sure to listen to This Is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.