One of America’s most recognized and experienced broadcast journalists, Lesley Stahl has been a “60 Minutes” correspondent since 1991.
Stocks took a nosedive on Friday after President Trump threatened a big tariff hike on China. Until then, Wall Street had been at record highs for months, which is why we decided to check in with Andrew Ross Sorkin, one of the country’s most influential financial reporters.
He’s just written a book called “1929” about the market crash a century ago. We wondered if he’d run out of news to cover, or is he alerting us that what’s been happening in the markets lately – is a replay of what led to the most devastating financial collapse in our history?
Imagine the New York Stock Exchange back then: the crush of frightened traders dumping stocks, investors losing their shirts, businesses, their homes, sweeping away the Roaring ’20s, walking that same but transformed floor today.
Andrew Ross Sorkin says we’re in our own roaring ’20s: the 2020s. with stocks climbing for months, just like then.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: The crazy part about this is, from 1928 to September of 1929, the stock market was up 90%!
Lesley Stahl: When you say the stock market was way up, immediately I think of now. Are you scared?
Andrew Ross Sorkin: I’m anxious. I’m anxious that we are at prices that may not feel sustainable. And what I don’t know is we are either living through some kind of remarkable boom and part of that’s artificial intelligence and technology and all of that, or everything’s overpriced.
Sorkin has covered the markets for two decades. He joined the New York Times after college, soon founding the DealBook newsletter covering finance. He also co-hosts “Squawk Box” on CNBC, runs the DealBook Summit, where he interviews the high and mighty, he co-created “Billions” the TV show, wrote a bestseller about the 2008 crash, and now, a book about 1929.
Lesley Stahl: We’re always being undone by bubbles. There was the internet bubble in 2000, the housing in 2008. Are we in another bubble? An AI bubble or something like that?
Andrew Ross Sorkin: I think it’s hard to say we’re not in a bubble of some sort. The question is always when is the bubble going to pop?
Lesley Stahl: One symptom of a bubble is when the market goes up and up, but the underlying economy – the real economy – goes soft. And that appears to be happening right now.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: I would argue to you that the economy is being propped up, almost artificially, by the artificial intelligence boom. There are hundreds of billions of dollars that are being invested today in artificial intelligence. This is either a gold rush or a sugar rush and we probably won’t know for a couple of years which one it is.
1929 was a sugar rush caused by speculation and debt. People who didn’t really have much money were lured by Wall Street bankers to invest using a newfangled concept to take on debt, called credit. You only had to put down 10% of the stock price, borrowing the rest from your broker.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Prior to 1919, most people did not take on credit or debt at all. It was a sin. It was a moral sin to use credit-
Lesley Stahl: Oh, really?
Andrew Ross Sorkin: –to buy anything. And it was really General Motors that basically came up with the idea that we’re gonna lend you money so you can afford to buy our cars.
Lesley Stahl: Brilliant.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: And then the bankers realize what’s happening, and they realize that they can lend out money so that more folks can buy stocks. It was all sort of wrapped in the flag of democratizing access. And in good times, when the stock is going up, it’s like free money. In bad times, you’re on the hook, and you’re on the hook in a very bad way.
Since then, laws, regulations, and agencies have been put in place to protect investors – especially the less affluent – from being exploited.
Lesley Stahl: So those are coming down. They’re tumbling down one — the SEC rules aren’t as stringent anymore.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Yes. The Consumer Protection Bureau practically doesn’t exist anymore.
Lesley Stahl: Correct.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: That’s what concerns me. It’s not that we’re going off a cliff tomorrow. It’s that there’s speculation in the market today, there’s an increasing amount of debt in the market today, and all of that’s happening against the backdrop of the guardrails coming off.
Including guardrails that allow only the wealthy to invest directly in private companies that have fewer regulations, like AI startups before they go public.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: So over the last 20 or 30 years, folks who had access to, who could invest in private equity, in venture capital, clearly outperformed folks who didn’t. And so-
Lesley Stahl: That’s how you really made money. But you have to remember that these kind of assets are gambles.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Public companies, after the SEC was created, were required to have all sorts of disclosure rules so that the public could understand what’s going on inside them. Private companies don’t have that. But historically, the average ordinary American wasn’t really allowed to invest in the private companies. But in this flag of democratizing finance, there’s a lot of people who want access to that.
Sorkin took us to the Fifth Avenue mansion of one of the big bankers back then, who pushed democratization.
Lesley Stahl: If this idea of bringing a regular guy into buying stock, if that was a big problem back in 1929 why are we going there again? Doesn’t it defy some kind of logic?
Andrew Ross Sorkin: There is a view that it’s been only the elites that have had access to these investments, Facebook before it ever went public, Uber before it went public. So there is this idea that it’s unfair, actually, to the ordinary investor because we haven’t allowed them to get access to some of these investment opportunities early. And there is a real push, partially by the Trump administration, partially by the industry itself, which wants to-
Lesley Stahl: Get more money.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Get more money in– to open up the market to more and more people.
Lesley Stahl: So we have these guardrails for a reason. I mean, they’re there to protect, and they have protected.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: They have protected a lot of people, but some people would say they protected people from getting rich.
Larry Fink: Many people don’t believe in capitalism anymore. And I think a lot of it is because they were not a part of the growth of the economy.
We went to Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest money manager, handling $12.5 trillion in assets, like pension funds. His annual letter to investors is a kind of industry roadmap. This latest one he suggested opening our retirement 401(k)s – bastions of caution – to riskier private investments in the name of, wait for it: democratizing investing.
Larry Fink: As I wrote, there are many great opportunities to be investing in the s- in startup companies, to invest in AI or data centers. Right now, we’re precluded to put those type of assets in many retirement products. And the Trump administration has now said we’re going to allow in our 401(k) products the opportunity to invest in these private markets.
Lesley Stahl: But, they are risky. Aren’t they?
Larry Fink: Yes. But everything is risky other than keeping your money in a bank account overnight.
Lesley Stahl: Investing out of retirement accounts.
Larry Fink: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: You’re risking the nest egg or part of the– a little part of the nest egg.
Larry Fink: But what the markets will teach you over the last 100 years, even at the worst moments, if you have the ability to persevere and you have a long-term horizon, you’re going to do fine. And a diversified portfolio is essential. We’re not suggesting, you know, one shoe fits all. We are suggesting the opportunity to have that ability to invest in these private market investments.
He also believes we should be investing in crypto.
Lesley Stahl: It wasn’t that long ago that the big bankers, Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink, were saying that crypto was stupid and a fraud.
Larry Fink: I did say Bitcoin, because we were talking about Bitcoin then, was the domain of money launderers and thieves. But you know, the markets teach you, you have to always relook at your assumptions. There is a role for crypto in the same way there is a role for gold, that is it’s an alternative. For those looking to diversify this is not a bad asset, but I don’t believe that it should be a large component of your portfolio.
But Sorkin says some crypto can be abused in ways similar to 1929. Take meme coins: cryptocurrencies that can be manipulated by speculators who pumped them up, then let them crash.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: There are a number of examples where it felt like there was an inside group of people who were colluding to pump up some of these cryptocurrencies, and other things. I’ll give you a bizarre story of my own. I was on television with Larry Fink, and he makes a joke, I think, about how there should be a Sorkin coin. Well, two hours later, somebody makes a Sorkin coin. And all of a sudden, this Sorkin coin is now worth millions of dollars. And I’m watching it.
The sorkin coin peaked at $170 million worth of trading in a day.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: And I think today it does something like $20 or $21 a day, so…
Lesley Stahl: [makes spiral noise]
Sorkin is trusted by the world’s top business leaders, who talk to him often exclusively.
Lesley Stahl: What role do you think these business leaders should be playing now?
Andrew Ross Sorkin: My own view is that most CEOs in America today are very scared to speak out publicly about anything. They are so worried that they are going to be potentially attacked by the administration, or regulated. They’re gonna have a merger in front of some agency that’s not gonna be allowed to go through. They are so nervous about criticizing anything that’s going on with this administration.
Lesley Stahl: There are some economists who suggest that because Mr. Trump ties his success to the success of the market, that he’s not gonna let anything like what happened in 1929 happen. And that we should feel secure because of that.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: I think it’s hard to know how things get out of control. When confidence disappears, it happens like this. [SNAP]
Lesley Stahl: So, you spent nearly 10 years on this book. The inevitable question is: do you think that we will have a crash or not?
Andrew Ross Sorkin: The answer is we will have a crash; I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn’t saying this, we will have a crash.
