The Rundown - Andrew Ross Sorkin on Trump’s Unrivaled Economic Power, Fed Politics, and the New Speculative Era

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Andrew Ross Sorkin joins The Rundown to break down the lessons of his new book 1929, and what the most devastating market crash over the last century tells us about the current AI economy. We talk power shifts between Wall Street, Washington, and billionaires — from the 1920s to today — and why there is no amount of 'F You Money' that can over-power President Trump's influence. Sorkin explains why Fed independence matters, how political pressure warped decisions in 1929, and what today’s bond market may be quietly signaling. Plus, a sharp debate on speculation, prediction markets, AI hype, and why the Dow remains relevant.

Welcome back to the rundown interview edition. Today, we are talking to Andrew Ross Sorkin. Andrew is an absolute legend in finance media. He's the anchor of CNBC Squawk Box every morning. He's the founder of the New York Times Deal Book newsletter. He's also the co-creator of the show Billions and a best-selling author. He has a new book out called 1929. It's about the stock market crash leading up to the Great Depression.

So in today's conversation, we talked about his book, the similarities between 1929 and today his secret to being a great interviewer and also an interesting debate about the importance of the Dow Jones Index. Let's just say I was not expecting his response. We got a great one for you today. Let's get into it.

I'm really excited to talk to you today about your book, 1929. But before we get into this thing, I got to say, man, I was, I think you might have the highest approval rating amongst the boomer dad demographic that watched CNBC because I was telling my dad this morning.

I was on my dad this week that you were coming on. And he's like, man, Andrew, he asks a lot of great questions. So before we really get into it, I want to ask you. You know, you've interviewed. Love the boomers. Love the boomers. They watch a lot of TV. You know, my dad watches it all the time.

I got to get you watching it. Well, you know, I'm more of a YouTube guy. More of a YouTube and Spotify guy. I know, I know. So we've got to get you more on YouTube and Spotify, which is why we're excited to talk to you. But what's the secret, man? Like, how are you so good at interviews? You know, you've interviewed hundreds of

CEOs from Elon Musk, that Jamie Diamond. Like, how are you able to go in there and just be a calming presence and ask such great questions? Oh, this is like, yeah, now you're throwing the ball underhand here. What am I? I don't know. How am I supposed to answer that? You know, I've been sort of blessed and lucky to be born with sort of a, a super sense of curiosity, honestly. Like, even when I was a child, I just wanted to, I would want to meet my parents' friends

and ask some questions. And it's not really about even business. I would ask the guy on the corner of the street who sells the bagels questions. I just, oh, I'm fascinated by people and what makes them tick and why they do what they do and just trying to understand who they are and what they want to be. And I think it's a little bit, I think the one thing that I may do that might help is I think I'm always putting myself in their shoes. so that when I, even before I ask a question, I oftentimes am thinking, okay, if I ask a question like this, how would I react? Would I flinch? Would I lean in? Would I shut down? Do I feel? I think I feel the speed bump in a way for the other person. So as a result, I think I'm thinking about how can I, how can I get to the same result, maybe? You know, get the same, you ask a question that, that, where they open up and want to answer the question. And I'm genuinely curious about the answer. I think that that's a big thing.

And the last piece, maybe, and I think I learned this, frankly, the hard way, listening. The best interviews are really just about listening. I mean, some interviews you could honestly go into it with, you know, three, four, five questions that you really want to ask. And the interview just sort of, you know, works by itself in a way. Because if you just listen to what they're talking about, but you can often then just follow up with something to sort of go to some completely new place that you've never even imagined.

Yeah. I mean, that's fantastic advice. Now, as someone who's still relatively new to this, I'm trying to get better. And so I look at your interviews a lot, and I'm just like, how does he, you know, how is he so calm? And so that's great advice. I'm going to be, you know, taking that advice as I try to do this. And over, overprepared. I mean, honestly, the other people is just over, like I, I spend an extraordinary amount of time reading and talking to people about people before.

I'm doing doing these interviews so that I just have a lot of places to go, meaning I've a lot of options, a lot of options. That's awesome. A little bit like being, I'm not a pilot, but I think of it a little bit like you're, you know, you're starting to JFK and you know you're going to land at LAX eventually, but you're probably going to stop, you know, in O'Hare and maybe Dallas and maybe Denver or whatever, but the weather's going to change. The weather's going to change. You're not going to be able to do the plan the way you want to do it.

And so you just have to have lots of options of ways to get to the next place. Okay. Overprepare and then have a genuine curiosity, which I think really comes through whenever people watch your. And listen, focus on the weather. Listen for the weather. You need to hear the weather changing so that you can pivot yourself. Well, speaking of listening, I have been listening to your audio book, given an audiobook version of your new book, 1929.

This book, I mean, this book, I got it over the holidays. It is a thick one for the audio. listeners here. Like, it is, there's a lot of information in this book. It's, you know, you talk about the, um, the financial, the market crash right before the Great Depression. And it's funny, like your last book was also about, uh, the market crashed in 08. I love a disaster. That's what I wanted to ask you. What is it about these financial disasters that just gets you so curious? And what is it specifically about the 1929 story? Well, I love a disaster really not because I like watching people in pain. I love a disaster because I,

I love the lesson of it all. And I think that when you have a crisis, you actually get to see people in their best and worst moments. And this book, 1999, in very many ways, is similar to this book I wrote Too Big to Fail about the 2008 crisis. It's really about people. Again, it's a story about characters. It is not, I mean, it's a story about economics and systems and all that,

but not really. It's really a narrative. It's a bring you inside the room so you can, feel it. You can be with these people. You can see what they're saying and thinking and who they were talking to and what they were saying to their wives and girlfriends and, you know, some of them were drinking and doing all such a crazy thing. Some of them are shooting, you know, shooting themselves in the head literally. And you really get to understand the sort of human condition that leads to these, to these moments of both euphoria on one end and, you know, panic on the other.

Yeah. But so how did you, what was that process like? I mean, you, an extraordinary amount of research. And I do like the way that you kind of broke it down as characters. Like you start the book by listing out all the characters, the main characters of the story. So like, what was that process like of like getting in the room of these conversations? Because they're very detailed. Well, it was a lot more complicated to be honest than writing too big to fail because, you know, back then Ben Bernanke and the president of the United States and Jamie Dime and all those people were alive. And you could go talk to them if you wanted to.

Everyone in this book is dead. Everybody in the book is dead. And so the big challenge, one of the reason it took me eight years to do was I was trying to be able to write the story with the same kind of granular detail, the same, the quotes. You know, you'll see people talking to each other. Those are all real quotes. That's what they were saying to each other. And the only way to get that kind of detail was ultimately to find diaries and letters and memos and depositions and trial transcripts and all sorts of things like that. And that's what took so long because just even to figure out who the characters were, who I wanted to focus on, you know, were they all in the same room together? Where were they in any given moment? And, you know, finding all that information was not all sitting in one archive somewhere, unfortunately, for me. It was spread out, frankly, in archives and universities and libraries across the country. It was collecting documents from the federal. Federal Reserve. It was going to Washington. It was in some good parts going to Europe. It was all over, all over. I think a lot of people are trying to make comparisons of like 1929 to the

conditions today. Like is this, are we having another market crash? But what I want to focus more on is like what I took away from this book so far is that back then it seems like the business titans, like the Henry Ford's, the Charles Schwab's the world had a lot more power and influence than the political people, the politicians back then. Do you think that, you think that, that's the case again today where like you have the the hundred billionaires today, the centa billionaires, potentially trillionaires with Elon Musk. Do you think that that's the case today with the wealthy class having as much power as the political class, if not more?

Oh, totally. I mean, I think we're in a unique moment now where our president, our current president has probably more power than we've ever seen. but I think underneath that, yeah, the business class clearly is powering. By the way, think about just the power of the crypto community in terms of even getting somebody like President Trump elected, frankly, or creating and changing some of the laws around things like crypto. So, yeah, I think the business community has an extraordinary amount of influence today that

to some degree is similar to what was going on in the 20s. you know, I was surprised at just how frequently some of these CEOs would just be literally sitting in the Oval Office on the phone with President Hoover or Roosevelt. Roosevelt, too, by the way. People think that Roosevelt was some kind of progressive who hated business. He was in there with these guys all the time, too. So not that different than some of the meetings that President Trump is having today. I do think, though, with President Trump, though, he's the X factor that we've never seen before. Like this week is the perfect example of this. The joke that I was making is like, I wonder if like these CEOs have, uh, notifications on for true social posts because like this week we saw Trump threatening to, to ban institutional

investors from buying single family homes. I'm like, I'm pretty sure Steve Schwartzman, the CEO of Blackstone, did not see that one coming. Not on his bingo card. I do not think that was on the Schwartzman bingo card. So I wonder like, like with the president Trump dynamics here, like what that does to like the power dynamics of Wall Street versus. Well, I think what's unique now is that this president, it sort of uses his power in a way that no president, I think, in modern history, has.

And there has been less of a governor in terms of Senate or Congress to shift that balance. And so it's very interestingly, I talked to a lot of CEOs just in my day job. That's what I do. and you know I used to think that people of enormous means I mean people of you know billionaires and whatnot you would have great independence and ability to push back to say whatever they want to feel free to do whatever they want that's what that's you know people talk about a few money you know the idea is that you have it so you can say it and the one person they can't say that to in this moment is is this particular

And I think that's in large part because you've seen some of the steps that he and the administration have taken, whether it's looking at what happened to some of the law firms early on in the presidency, the universities, some of the media companies. So you've seen the leverage that this White House has used, which I think is different. Yeah, no one wants to be a target. And what I'm interested to see is how these oil executives are going to respond to the Venezuela stuff, right? Trump is pushing for these oil companies to kind of go into Venezuela, which is going to require, what, tens, hundreds of billions of dollars of investments to start pumping oil out of Venezuela. I'm pretty sure they don't really want to do that right now. I'm from Houston, so I'm very familiar with the oil industry. That's, you know, with a barrel of oil at $60, like, that's not a very profitable investment right now.

Are they going to still do it in order to not be a target of the president? That's going to be very interesting to see. I think it's going to be fascinating. I ultimately would imagine that there's going to be a game of chicken gun. going on where these oil companies are going to be getting something for it. It's not just that they're going to be scared of on one end of being attacked by the president. I think it's going to be more than that. They may seek to get rebates.

Companies like ExxonMobil think that they're due, you know, $20 plus billion of money from Venezuela. They may say, you want us to go in there, send us, you know, you got to go give us that money first. So I think there could be things like that, or maybe maybe even say, you know, you're going to been saying, you know what, we'll go in. You put boots on the ground. And, you know, there's two different balance sheets. There's ExxonMobil's balance sheet. And then there's going to be the balance sheet of the taxpayer, the American taxpayer, who's going to pay for the boots on the ground

to effectively allow ExxonMobil to do what they're doing. But when you look at the price of oil and the price of a barrel of oil, or you look at, you know, you go fill up your car, and you see that price, that's a different price than if you add in the amount of money, that the U.S. government and taxpayers will be paying to get you that oil. So that's going to be the distinction. Yeah, that's going to be an interesting story this year. The other big story this year is going to be the Fed, right? The Federal Reserve. And I want to point out something that you mentioned in the first part of the book is like you highlight the tension between Wall Street back in the back in the 20s and the Fed. You know, back then these business leaders were publicly

blaming the Fed essentially for like causing all the panic, right? Today, it's not necessarily business leaders. I feel like the business leaders kind of want more stability. Instead, it's the president. Do you worry about the Fed's independence because, you know, Trump is going to nominate a new Fed chair this year? How do you see that playing out? And do you see any comparisons to 1920s? Look, I do in the following way. I think the lesson of 1929 in a certain way was that politics do matter with the Fed. And you want a Fed that feels completely independent from political pressure. One of the reasons the Fed didn't do more than it did in 1929, and they were talking about what to do in advance of the crash, meaning in terms of

trying to tamp down speculation, they were worried about the politics in the moment. They were worried that if they actually raised interest rates too high to stamp out speculation, that they would get slaughtered politically. And back then, the Fed was so new, it was considered still an experiment to some degree. It had just been born in 1913. They thought Congress could shut down the whole thing. So it wasn't back then so much that they were worried that Hoover was going to come after them so much as they thought Congress could come after them. And the reason that's important is because one of the lessons we've learned about a financial crisis is you often have to do things that are super politically unpopular, like bailouts, for example. Think 2008. that is the proper, that is the playbook, that is the right thing to do. But if you're under the thumb politically, and therefore you decide not to do that because

it's politically unpopular, you could really have a problem. And that's why the independence piece matters. Yeah. And I think that's something that the markets were freaking out about earlier in the, or in 2025. I think we've found some stability a little bit. And so I'm really curious to see. what direction that goes because you never know.

You know, things could get. I'm not convinced that the, you know, the bond market, you know, goes out of its mind. If they put somebody in that you think is under the thumb of this president, I don't think that that is the case. I think they, the bond market will freak out when we get to a moment where the Fed should be doing something that it's not doing. Yeah. But I think it's going to be a show me case. situation. I don't think that the market is necessarily going to get ahead of that. Because I think ultimately two things. One is most professional investors at least are also professional optimists.

So they want to believe it's going to work. They do. And historically, by the way, betting being the Cassandra has not been the profitable trade. And so I think you're going to, you sort of want to watch to see that play out before you, before you sell everything. The other thing is, but I mean, this is interesting, I don't know if we think about this with the bond market. I've always thought for years. We all thought the bond market would get rattled about all sorts of things. I've always thought there was some invisible line that would turn into a red line about how much debt the U.S. government could have. You know, $38 trillion.

You thought, okay, at some point, they're going to say, no, we're not doing this anymore. And yet we continue to do it, and the bond market's been fine. So, you know, those are the things I worry about. but yeah the bond vigilante you know that's that that's that's the whole um that's the storyline the bond vigilantes will come out and he'll freak out the bond market and then the then the administration will have to do something i mean we kind of saw that with the tariff situation um in april of last year where where trump did back off on some of the tariffs that that he was implementing because the bond market was going crazy um and and and something that you mentioned

that it pays to be an optimist i mean the tariff example is a perfect example of that where it's like if you were an optimist and you bought the dip in april i mean you were an optimist and you bought the dip in April. I mean, you are, you are looking pretty by the end of the month, essentially. Totally. I mean, that, so that's interesting, because I don't know if that's about being an optimist or not. You know, I go back and think about 1930, smooth-holy tariffs ended up a year later. You had global trade fallen by something like 60%. So it was bad. I think in this case, you had to believe, what people always say about this president, do you believe them literally or figuratively. And so when I think the, you know, people today go, oh, there were some people with

the hair on fire in, in April, and they shouldn't have had their hair on fire. Well, the reason why people maybe have looked wrong, by the way, including myself to some degree at some point, was when those numbers, those first numbers came out, that was pretty aggressive. And if you believe that that was what was going to be the situation, and you didn't believe they were going to come down materially. Yeah. You know, the outcome, but the outcome's different now because those numbers did come down. The numbers did come down.

And also, like, the narrative kind of changed as well. Like, I just remember this, like the tariff story. I was watching CNBC, believe it or not, like, almost every morning to, like, see all the interviews and see what Trump was saying. See, exactly. You're not just on YouTube. You're in TikTok and the gram. Come on.

I know what's going on here. I had to get a YouTube TV subscription so I could watch you guys because you guys were interviewing. Exactly. You got to get your information from a real, real place. I do want to, I do want to hit on a couple points before we wrap up here. Just the overall speculation boom that's happening right now, right? AI is one of the stories, right? AI, AI, AI bubble, there was a fear. I think that some of the fears have kind of cooled off a bit. You know, the AI stocks have kind of kind of come down a little bit. Now there's like this other boom of like the prediction markets. There's La Boo-boos. There's Pokemon cards.

The boo-boos, the love of the boo-boo. Yeah. People are calling the financialization of everything. How concerned are you about that when you see just everything get turned into like a derivative or a bed or a polymarket trade? Like it's getting crazy, you know? It does feel like it's getting crazy. I worry about it to some degree. I think the biggest thing to watch for is just how much debt people go into to actually make these bets.

That is the biggest thing to be concerned about. Every financial crisis and every time speculation gets out of hand, it gets out of hand because people are using borrowed money. I don't know if you know this. If you go to the supermarket to buy a lottery ticket in virtually every state in America, they will not let you buy the lottery ticket with a credit card. Andrew, my dad owned a gas station growing up. So you know this. Sell these, yes. You can not buy, you can not buy with a credit card.

You cannot buy the lottery ticket with a credit card. And we, from a social perspective, it's decided we don't want people going into debt to be making bets like that, right? Lottery tickets, unfortunately, even though I buy them, it's like a tax on the stupid, giving your chances. And so that's what I worry about.

I think we have to keep an eye out for just how people are financing all of the prediction market stuff, sports gambling, everything else. Do you get concerned about these partnerships that these prediction market platforms are making with like news companies. You know, I think CNN, Dow Jones is one of those. Including CNBC.

That's right. CNBC as well recently. So I don't get concerned about it. I actually think that the good news about these things, but it's a different use case, is to think about the prediction markets to some extent as a indicator, a potentially leading indicator of what's going to happen in the world. it's just to me another sort of signal in a lot of noise about what's happening in in in news. So I actually think that piece of it's actually quite valuable.

But again, you know, all the people that are participating in it, I don't know. I don't know. Is it for entertainment? Is it actually, you know, some people go to Vegas and they say, you know what, I'm going to spend a couple hundred bucks over there because it's going to, you know, I'm going to play blackjack. for the next three hours. I get that. You know, you could do that or you could go to a show. Some people say they're going to spend money, you know, watching a sports game. Some people do this as, as I said, as a form of entertainment. I think when it gets into a form of investment, it's more complicated because I don't know, is it an investment or is there speculation.

I think that's the problem, though, is it starting to be marketed as an investment. You know, you see it, you know, like, in like investment platforms. They can go on Robin Hood and you can see, like, you can bet on who's going to win the college football game and you can invest in the S&P 500. And that's where like the lines get murky. And I'm just like, well, I feel like your broker probably shouldn't be your bookie. So that's where I have a problem with it. Right.

It's, look, it's, I was, I had always been nervous about sports betting in America for a long, long time. And clearly things have moved away from me on that. So I feel like I'm, I've been on the wrong end, you know, the wrong end, maybe on the right end, ultimately we'll see. But in terms of just the way society is moved. Yeah, I think that battle has lost, Andrew. I have a last question for you. And this is something that's very important to me. You know, one of the bits that we have on the show here is I don't understand the obsession that financial media has with the Dow Jones Index.

All right. So explain to me, you know, you've been doing financial media for a long time. Why do we talk about this thing? This is an index with 30 stocks. It's price weight, not even market cap weighted. It's a totally useless index. Why do I care that it's at record highs? Why do I care what it's doing?

Like, can we just stop? Can you talk to the people at CNBC and just have them stop talking about the Dow Jones Index? I'm going to disagree with you on so many fronts. First of all, I should get you the numbers and I wish I had them. The ownership of the Dow, meaning the audience and the investment community that people who buy the Dow is real. It is a substantial index.

No, no, no. It's crazy. No, no, but you may think it's. crazy, but I'm saying in terms of pure volume, it would be like saying, don't cover Nvidia because you don't think it matters for whatever reason. It's a high volume, it's a high volume, it's a high volume effectively mutual fund or index. I mean, that's what it is. It's become that. Now, you could argue that's a vestige of history. Yes, exactly. Or a function of history. Yes. But I've always thought that the role of the news,

media and journalism is to cover the things that that matter that are in the middle of that that touch people's lives you go look you go look at um people's 401k plans there are a lot of people who have bought a Dow Jones index like that's what they've done if you do the age breakdown though it's probably people that were born before 1989 before 19 you know 75 I'm not telling you that that's not the case yeah yeah it's a bit like I say it's a bit that we do on the show, but I do, I do kind of feel that. I'm like, you know, like, why do we, like, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a carryover from, like, you know, when numbers used to be printed in the Wall Street Journal every day. I don't know what to tell you. I think that when, when people stop buying it, I imagine, um, we'll

stop covering it. That's fair. That's totally fair. And I appreciate that someone's pushing back on it, because you're the first person, in fact, they ever pushed back on it. People are like, yeah, man, I don't understand this thing. We should get rid of it. So I appreciate you pushing back and giving the audience some context because I didn't have that before. So people are still buying it. As long as people keep investing in this index, we're going to keep covering it. There you go. All right, Andrew, thank you so much. 1929, Amazon, everywhere, audiobook. I mean, this is a book worth checking out. And there's a lot of information in it, too. So highly recommend checking it out. I've really enjoyed reading it. And so thank you again for hopping on talking about it.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it, Andrew. Nice to see you. too well all right guys hope you enjoyed that conversation with andrew ross sorkin i mean it was great talking to him and getting a history lesson and also a lesson on how to be a great interviewer and i also enjoyed our exchange at the end about the dow jones definitely go check out his book 1929 you know i got the hard copy initially but it's so big that i've been listening to the audio book version instead which is also great you know andrew is a great writer and this book has a great flow to it so i highly recommend checking it out and let me know the comments of what you guys thought about the interview i'm not going to lie to you guys i'm not going to lie to you guys

I was a bit nervous because I've been watching Andrew on CNBC for years, so chopping it up with him was pretty surreal to me. So let me know the comments on how you think I did. And while you're at it, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcast. You know, all that engagement really does help us out, like being able to book great guests. Thank you guys again for listening, watching, and commenting.

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