Hello and welcome. It is Eric Erickson here. The full number is 877-97-9-37-7-4-25. Should you wish to be a part of this here program at the bottom of the hour, Congressman Ted Budd of North Carolina is going to be joining me by phone. Right now, probably the biggest story of the day is the markets are not doing well.

The Dow down over 1,000 points, the NASDAQ down over 667 points.

S&P 500 down 150 points right now.

NASDAQ composite down 482 points. It's just not a good day.

Comes after the Federal Reserve raised half a percentage point interest rates,

50 basis points, they would say. Other outlooks, inflation, still not doing well. Private

markets, CNBC reporting that the private sector data suggests inflation is not peaked, but it's still going up.

There's just a lot of worry, a lot of turmoil.

Someone who knows how to navigate these situations better than most is my friend Clark Howard, who's joining me by phone.

Clark, thank you so much.

Spur of the moment, jumping on here with me.

I'm happy to do it. And first thing, take a deep breath. It's all going to be okay.

Yeah, you know, it is. And we're kind of in this weird situation we haven't seen in a while with,

I mean, it's been a 40-year high inflation.

People forget how to navigate that, how to think about it, and then market instability right now with people worried about their 401k.

So it will be okay, but in the meantime with all the ups and downs, what would you tell people they need to be thinking

about? Well, first, let's set some frame of reference. So if you go back two years ago,

right when we were dealing with the COVID shutdowns and fear of a worldwide depression,

central banks around the world coordinated, throwing huge amounts

of money into the economies of every developed country. And we in the United States, the

Reserve essentially printed $9 trillion. And that plus depressing interest rates, and then the Congress, both in 20 and 21, throwing so much money in the economy, that was where the inflation came from, principally.

I mean, we've got the supply chain disruptions, but more

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