RUSH: Steve in Cortez, Colorado. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Good, sir. Thank you very much.
CALLER: Hey, I’ve had a question I’ve been wondering about for a while. Do you think the three-hour swath your program cuts through the middle of the day helps or hurts GDP during that time?
RUSH: I think it helps. I think productivity goes up. People are happier. They work harder. They work more industrially because they are happy listening to this program when they do. I just got an e-mail from a stockbroker who said that this program today is having an impact on the market — that since this program began, the stock market has regained about 450 points. It was down a thousand or 900. Now it’s down 500 and some odd.
He thinks this program has caused the market to rebound a bit because there’s some optimism here and there’s some very, very minor fatalism, if any at all. He says, “It will be interesting to see what happens when your program ends.” No, I think the economy as far as the GDP has ramped up because of the program. It is a very good question, by the way.
CALLER: Well, I know when I’m in the office doing work, I’m probably less productive when I’m listening. But when I’m out on the job working, I’m probably more productive.
RUSH: Yeah, see? That’s the way it goes. It can cut both ways. There’s one thing about this program: Nobody listens to it in the background. There is no such thing as passive listening on the EIB Network. It’s all active, meaning it’s all your doing when you are listening. It’s not like elevator Muzak or… You know, a lot of television shows are background. You’re doing other things while they are on. You half notice and you listen halfway. But a radio program like this, you’re glued. There’s nothing passive about it. So if you’re glued and you’re just sitting around? Yeah. But if you’re working, I guarantee you it puts an extra spring in your step.
Okay. I appreciate the call, Steve.
Ralph from Tampa. What’s up with you, sir? I’m glad you let me sidestep you there for just a second. Welcome to the program. Hi
CALLER: No problem. Megaprayers, Rush. I want to get your take on this. I hear everybody talking about the coronavirus and inevitability and how it’s bad for Trump. When I think about the big picture, I think this is something that’s only gonna strengthen his platform in 2020. It goes beyond what I heard you and him talking about with border security and our medicine here, definitely contrary to where the left is taking us in the 2020 election.
I don’t think the stock market is pricing in an upset in the election and therefore I don’t think this is fear that’s taking the stock market down. I truly believe this is more of a supply chain issue with production and manufacturing in China. When you look at the ticket, Trump is the only one out there handling this. We cannot be tied to China as the only source of goods and what have you, and I wonder if you’ve given any thought to that with the stock market.
RUSH: You think the reason the stock market is down is because the supply chain for so much of American manufacturing is in China, and China is being negatively impacted, the workforce? That’s why you think the market is down?
CALLER: Yeah, I do. The only reason it would be down is if the American people and the stock market thought Trump would lose and —
RUSH: I’m going to tell you. Let me go all in here. I think that there are a lot of things that have not changed since Trump was elected. That is, there are all kinds of people throughout the American establishment that want him gone. We know… We’ve had Democrats admit that they would lose money if it took that to get rid of Trump. I think we’re looking here at a coordinated effort. I don’t know how much. But there’s no question Mulvaney is right. This is an opportunity to help the Democrats.
The Democrats and the media are saying it themselves. I kind of… In the last half hour of the program, I will admit, I lost it. I got so mad when I came across that quote, “Well, this could be an opening for the Democrats!” What does that mean? People getting sick? The way they are hyping this? A pandemic — people getting sick and dying — could be an opening for the Democrats? I think the tentacles of the cabal or just the people in general who hate Trump and would like to see him gone is very deep and it’s wide.
I’m not saying this is a coordinated conspiracy. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that somebody created the virus to pull all this off. These are just a bunch of opportunists. Now, the stock market as a reflection of the Chinese supply chain? We’re going to have a chance to see if your theory is right. Grab sound bites 22 and 23. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. Let me just… Before I play any sound bites, I know that you all know that I’m an Apple fanboy, but I’m an Apple fanboy for a whole lot of reasons.
To produce the iPhone alone, to have it routinely the far-and-away best, to be able to have a supply chain that provides… Look, if they sell 250 million iPhones, they’ve got to have 250 million of everything in one, and they have to have them at a precise time. They manufacture these phones by hand. They assemble them by hand at a record rate in these Chinese factories. It’s phenomenal. The Apple supply chain and the operations department of Apple to manage all this is beyond the comprehension of a single human being.
Most people don’t stop to think of this. The new iPhones come out, they decide whether or not they can afford it, and go buy it or not. Then they use it and set it up. It’s like that for many things. You don’t know what all is involved to produce a case of Diet Coke, for example, or to manufacture a car, unless you’re passionate about those particular things. But the supply chain that Apple has to maintain — and they can’t just use one supplier for these parts because what happens if something like this, like the coronavirus, affects one supplier?
They have to have the most diverse supply chain. They have to have dibs! They have to be the first company supplied by all of these suppliers. It is phenomenal what they are able to pull off in manufacturing a state-of-the-art iPhone and releasing it in September every year. You just don’t think about it unless you really delve into it and learn how they do it. It takes… The number of people… You look at one iPhone and say, “Maybe five guys could put that together.”
Folks, the number of people it takes to plan, to find the parts… You know, you can only make… If you’re going to make an iPhone, you can only produce what the latest mass-producible ingredients are — and to be state-of-the-art tech at that scale, hundreds of millions of new ones every year? State-of-the-art tech? It’s phenomenal — and their supply chain is all over the world, not just China. It’s in Taiwan. It’s in Vietnam. It’s in Singapore.
It’s in South Korea, the United States. But all of that stuff has to be shipped to China for final assembly because that’s where the iPhones and the iPads are assembled. Some in India, and some in Vietnam and Brazil and Taiwan. They are trying to diversify that now precisely because of what’s happened with the coronavirus. So let’s listen to Cook, okay? He is the CEO and he can’t lie. A publicly traded company like this, he cannot lie.
The media can lie all day about Apple, and they do. But the CEO of Apple, the CEO of Disney, anybody talking about profit and loss and earnings, they cannot lie, because if they are found out to be lying, they can go to jail, securities and exchange, they can’t lie.
So let’s listen to Cook. Fox Business Network Cavuto: Coast to Coast. It was Susan Li doing the interview. First question, “The stock market, obviously, is reacting, and Apple has been down in the past few weeks. Do you think there’s value that investors are missing here by not snapping your stock up at current prices?”
COOK: I don’t really focus on the short-term gyrations of the market. I think for me and with the way we run the company, we work to the long term. And I see no long-term difference between what was happening four weeks ago versus what’s happening today. And so, no, the market takes time to recognize that and so forth, and it’ll do what it’s gonna do. And I’m the last person to be able to predict it. But I would, you know, for me, I look through that, look through the noise and concentrate on the future. And the future looks very bright.
RUSH: He can’t lie about this, except under penalty of punishment that would include prison and massive fines, personally and for the company. These guys, these CEOs and the chief financial officers, they can’t lie. You know what happens to them if they do. You’ve heard of insider trading and all that other stuff.
Next question: “You’re the architect of this low inventory, fast-moving supply -” That’s another thing. Folks, you wouldn’t believe the inventory for Apple at an Apple store and the online store, they turn it over every five days. They don’t have inventory. It is the most incredibly well-run, they do not have stuff sitting on shelves unsold. It is the most amazing thing.
And Cook was the architect. Steve Jobs hired him to actually do that a long time ago when Apple didn’t know what it was doing in this regard. He was the operations chief, now the CEO, and he’s got a bunch of people under him. Operations are the primary mover of Apple, not design, as people believe. “You’re the architect of this low inventory, fast-moving supply chain that Apple currently has. Do you have any ideas to maybe move some of that supply chain outside of China more?”
COOK: It is important to recognize that our products are built everywhere. I mean, they are truly global products. And so you have several parts that are made in the United States that serve the world. So not only for the iPhone sold in the United States, but those sold around the world. And so what will happen to the supply chain as we look back on this, I wouldn’t want to say at this point because the question for us always is what kind of resilience did the supply chain have.
It’s not was there a problem, because there will always be unpredictable things that come up. But as you know from following us, we work through earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, floods, tsunamis, SARS. And so we’ve had a long list of things, and the operational team is very deep at working through these.
RUSH: Bottom line, he’s not panicked because they’ve been through so many things like this, they have alternatives. They have emergency plans. They have alternative sources. Let me tell you how this works. Remember the iPhone 10 came out and it was the first phone that was priced at basically a thousand dollars. People reacted, “How dare you? It’s a phone. How dare you charge a thousand.” But it was the first one with facial recognition, facial ID. First one with an OLED display.
It was state of the art. It was a thousand bucks. It had two cameras. Three years later, they are selling a version of the iPhone 10 now called the iPhone 11 that is better than the iPhone 10 for $300 less. They are selling the iPhone 11 for $699, and it has more in it. It is a better phone than the iPhone 10. The iPhone 10 was the first of its kind. It had to be priced that high in order to buy in all of the high-tech stuff that was in it.
The early buyers, the people who don’t care about price, they bought it in droves, and that is what allows Apple to now sell a phone, bigger screen, bigger battery, longer battery life, better cameras for 300 bucks less. It’s flat out amazing. You don’t have to spend a thousand dollars to get the state-of-the-art phone. You can. They’ve got one even better than the iPhone 11, but not much, because the guts of iPhone 11, the 11-pro, are pretty much the same. You just talk about screen size and the kind of screen.
But it’s flat-out amazing. He’s not worried, folks, and the bulk of their assembly is in China and he can’t lie about it. So that is the answer to “do you think the supply chain is the problem with the stock?” It could be because I’ll guarantee you over half the stock market analysts telling their clients whether or not to buy Apple do not know 10% of what I just told you about the company. It’s outrageous how ignorant some of them are.