Program: Fox Business Tonight
Date: 6/22/2021
Station: Fox Business News
Time: 5:00PM

BRIAN BRENBERG: Well, a handout from a Democratic state Governor Gavin Newsom announcing the state will pay off all past due rent left unpaid during the pandemic. The news coming just days before the state and federal moratorium on evictions is set to expire. Here now, Long-suffering Vikings fan Scott Martin of Kingsview Asset Wealth Management. He’s also a Fox business contributor. Scott, so good to see you. Funny how when there’s a recall election in California, the governor’s got a ton of money to pay off everyone’s rent. What do you make of this thing?

SCOTT MARTIN: Yeah, the governor wants to help, right? We don’t want to buy votes or anything or sway a voter that may be on the fence as far as recalling old Gavin Newsom. But we actually want to try to help here. Here’s the interesting thing to me is a couple of fold on this, Brian. The first is this is a huge program, by the way, and we’re talking about billions and billions of dollars. I mean, by some counts, Five Point 2B – as far as this bailout. And also the fact, too, that you have a lot of these folks that have not paid their rent in many, many months. In fact, you go all the way back to early 2020. And so you’ve got a lot of folks that as far as landlords, you need to make hole here and a lot of folks still that even so with, say, 10 million jobs open in the country and a lot of those in California available for the taking, a lot of these folks are still saying they can’t find work and that’s why they can’t pay the rent. So it’s just an interesting take to say, hey, here’s the money we’re going to pay off, make you your hole, wipe the slate clean, but you still can’t find a job. You can’t go out and make the money, even though, as we know, with the economy reopening, things are out there for the taking.

BRENBERG: You can’t square that. You just can’t square it. And it’s a lot of money. As you said. We’re talking about a B behind that five. I got to ask you about this. One kid’s costing parents more financially, in fact. Thirty one percent of parents say they think they’re supporting their children more now than they did before covid-19. That’s according to a new study from Bank of America. Scott, you throwing more money at your kids these days? What’s going on with this?

MARTIN: I am. I mean, my kids are basically stealing money out of my wallet these days, and they’re seven and 10. So, I mean, they should be out working and they should be living on their own by now. Right. So it’s really happening. I mean, in all walks of life and all ages, really. I mean, you talk to a lot of folks out there and whether they have kids in their 20s, kids obviously in their teen years or kids in their 30s, as some of the studies have shown, a lot of kids are still home or at some point or some leisure getting some of that help from from mom and dad. So this has become obviously something that was going on prior to the coronavirus outbreak, but one that has gotten worse as many of those kids stayed home, didn’t get work, came home from school and so forth. And they’re just basically continuing in that mode.

BRENBERG: All right, Scott, the requisite question of the day on Bitcoin, plunging below 30 K, bouncing back just a little bit really quickly. How do you read it, especially with this whole issue of China ramping up pressure?

MARTIN: Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of pressure from China. There’s pressure probably coming from the US, Brian. Just regulators in general want to get their hands on this thing, at least get their hands around it. When you ever see a pullback in something like this, just remember, it’s very volatile. I mean, Bitcoin was up close to sixty thousand just a couple of months ago. Ethereum also was 50 percent or so higher than it is today, just a couple of months ago. So these are areas when, if you like the currency, the cryptocurrency, if you like it as an asset class, you’ve got to hold your nose and buy some of these dips because you may not get many more of them.

BRENBERG: Scott, you can put your money in crypto or you can put it in a great suit and tie combination like you’re bringing to us today. It’s always

MARTIN: It’s the best Viking colors I got man.

BRENBERG: You got it. You got it. You nailed it. Scott Martin, as always, thank you, sir. So good to see you.