Neil Bradley Transcript: Sept. 18, 2025
Anne Godlasky/NPF (00:00:00):
We are starting out with Neil Bradley. Neil is executive vice president and chief policy officer and head of strategic advocacy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The US Chamber of Commerce, of course, is the sponsor of this program and has made it possible for us to bring you all here and, of course, the US Chamber of Commerce also, has 2000 members across the country, so I am sure that you all are familiar with your local one and have probably used it as a source for your stories. And if you haven’t, then I’m guessing that you probably will soon. In addition to his work as the primary policy and advocacy chief at the US Chamber, Neil also has more than 20 years of experience on the Hill all in chief policy positions, so it’s one of those things he kind of knows in and out. He has written recently a lot on tariffs. He’s written on the Fed’s independence. He’s written on AI – and so he’s going to have kind of a wide ranging discussion here. He will speak for a few minutes and then open up your questions. So join me in welcoming Neil Bradley.
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:01:27):
Good morning. How’s everybody doing this morning? Good. I am told for your last day people got out last night. I was like, man, everyone’s here bright and early. 9:00 AM ready to go. Quite impressive. How many of you are familiar with the US Chamber? OK. Sometimes when we’re visiting around the country, people go, oh, you’re part of the government. You must be the Department of Commerce. We are not part of the government. We are what’s considered a trade association. We’re an organization that represents businesses. We were founded 114 years ago actually at the request of President Taft, and at that time, the US economy was changing dramatically. Modes of transportation were changing. People were visiting Washington by train much more frequently to engage with the administration and Congress. And one of the things that President Raft noticed noted at the time was we have all these wonderful state and really local chambers of commerce who bring business leaders in to talk about the things that are important in their local community or in their state or region.
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And we have all these trade associations who represent the bankers or the retailers or the insurance brokers or the candlestick makers. You can imagine all the industry representatives, but we don’t have anyone who comes and says, we’re looking out for the interests of the American economy and the American business community as a whole. And so he asked a bunch of business leaders to come to Washington and form such a group. The first time it failed, they were like, yeah, sure, president tat, yeah, we’ll get right on that. And nothing happened. About a year later, he was like, no, no, no, no. I was actually quite serious about this. The American economy is an incredibly diverse place and the American country is an incredibly diverse place and we need some way of bringing that diversity together. The second time it took hold and the US Chamber was formed and that diversity of ecosystems, what’s really guided us for the past 114 years, so our membership at its root was all of these local chambers of commerce from all across the country.
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And when you’re next in town, I hope you’ll come visit us at our headquarters right across the street from the White House. We face Lafayette Park, and when you come in the building, you’re going to see this wall that’s just one big bronze plaque and it’s lists of local communities, those initial communities who came to together to help fund and build the Chamber of Commerce. And so Dayton’s mentioned, Cincinnati’s mentioned, I happen to be from Sapulpa, Oklahoma. It is a really tiny town. Sapulpa is right up there on the board. It actually reflects what the US looked like at the time. You’ll find Havana on that list and Manila because at the time of course these were protectorates after the Spanish American War and they had local chambers of commerce. Our membership consists of those same chambers of commerce all across the country. Those trade associations, many of whom predate the US Chamber, who represent these industry sectors and of course businesses themselves.
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We represent 80% of the Fortune 100. If you’re quick at math, that’s 80 and tens of thousands of small businesses all across this country and everything in between. They come from every state in the union. Some of them are global multinational companies that work around the world. Some of them are mom and pop operations, some of them are publicly traded. And so you can buy their stock. Some of them are multi-generational family businesses and people often say, well, gosh, it must be really hard, that much diversity that you’re representing. And the truth is, is that we actually think it’s a strength and it actually makes our job easier because we have the benefit of representing the ecosystem that is the American economy. And that’s exactly the way that we look at it. For those of you who are fans of biology in school, you’ll remember that the ecosystem or if you weren’t familiar, maybe it’ll still resonate.
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The whole concept of an ecosystem is it’s lots of different things working together and supporting each other. Not always harmoniously by the way. Sometimes there’s friction and conflict within an ecosystem and we have predators and prey, but all of those things work together to create an environment and with life functions and flourishes. And that’s the same way that the American economy works. Sometimes we like to talk about small businesses as if every business is a small business on Main Street, and there are certainly lots and lots of those, but half of Americans work for a large employer who has more than 500 employees. People sometimes tend to think that there must be this great conflict between small and big employers. We actually don’t find that at all. Our board has members who are really small and Fortune 100 companies, and if you put them next to each other, you’re sitting next to each other today what they talk about is how much they need each other and they rely on each other.
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And so the small business is the supplier to the big business. The small business is the customer of the big business. Sometimes the small business aspires to be the big business and they want to learn to figure out how they can grow and turn into that. And there’s a real recognition as much as there’s competition, fierce competition and a free market system, that this really is an ecosystem in which we can’t have just small businesses or just big businesses. We need the scale that big businesses provide. We need the innovation that startups and small business provide if we really want to have a growing, thriving economy at the chamber. We’re big advocates of free markets. We kind of ascribed to a version of that old Churchill saying, Churchill once remarked that democracy is the worst form of government except for every other form that’s ever been tried in the history of mankind.
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In the same way, free markets are the worst form of allocating goods and services and wealth except for every other system that’s ever been tried in the history of man. You all know that next year we’ll celebrate America’s two 50th also happens to be the 250th of Adam Smith’s the Wealth of Nations. And when we think about the changes that occurred in democracy in society 250 years ago, and we think about the changes that occurred in economics and how economies are organized to us that’s not just a mere coincidence. We think of it this way. Both democracy and free markets kind of emanate from the same place. A fundamental respect for individual self-worth. So if you believe that individuals have inherent worth, then you have an obligation to kind of respect the decisions and the choices that they make in democracy in the society. We do that at the ballot box.
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And so it doesn’t mean that we all get our way. It doesn’t mean that we like every election outcome, but we have the opportunity to express our will collectively through our individual votes. Same is true in markets. The way we respect the individual choices of every person is we let them make their decisions in the market. I tell folks a lot of times that someone will come to me and say, well, you must really hate that one of your members is doing X, Y, or Z that they find just kind of personally distasteful or offensive, et cetera. And the truth is that I might personally agree with that. I might personally disagree with that, but a fundamental belief in the markets is that the markets will sort that out. That if it turns out that everyone agrees that it’s distasteful, they’re not going to do very well in the marketplace.
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If it turns out that you’re in a minority and people really do tend to disagree with you, that’s going to show itself in the marketplace or what normally happens. It turns out there’s some people who agree with us who share our taste. There are other people who don’t agree with us and don’t share our taste. And the way that we work those things out is in the market. The last thing I’ll say is a kind of general matter, and I’d love to kind of get to your questions is we view free markets is just incredibly dynamic and I can prove that to you with kind of facts and statistics, but also incredibly important to the wellbeing of Americans. And even as corny as it may sound, the concept of the American dream us, lots of other people talk about GDP all the time. Oh, well GDP growth was only 1.8% and isn’t that bad? I don’t know. Is 1.8% bad or is it I sounds better than 1% but is as bad as 3%? I don’t know. People don’t understand these things, but what I do think they understand is the opportunity to see their lives improve and free markets that fuel economic growth have had a long tradition of making that happen in a competitive marketplace.
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I don’t know if the Wharton professor who was in talked at all about the rule of seven. Anyone ever heard of the rule of seven? It’s all about how quick it takes to double something. When an economy grows at 3% a year, real growth, it takes just over 20 years for the economy to double. When an economy grows at 2% a year, real growth, it takes over 30 years, about 35 years actually for the size of an economy to double. From 1950 to 2010, the American economy grew at 3.4% a year averaged out including recessions and economic downturns. The size of the pie was doubling pretty much from the time someone was born to the time they entered the workforce in their early twenties. Today since 2010, we’ve been growing at about 2.2% a year. Economists forecast that will grow at 1.8% a year over the next decade.
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And if you’re interested in why, we can get into that too a little bit, that means the size of the pie doesn’t double until someone’s in their mid thirties. If you ask me why is it frustrating for many young people today about the concept of it felt like my parents, it was easier for them to get ahead than it is been for me to get ahead to afford a home. There’s lots of things that go into the individual transactions, but at the end of the day, it’s about how quickly can you grow the pie so that each person can have a chance at a little bit better size of the pie? And that’s what traditionally the American economy has been really, really good at and we’ve been really good at it because of competition and dynamism. When I was the age of many of you in this room, general Electric was the behemoth behemoth company of the United States, right?
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So they made your light bulbs, they made your refrigerator, they own Saturday Night Live, Rockefeller Center. There was nothing that GE didn’t do. Almost always them or an oil company were the largest by market cap. And the view was, man, those big companies, they’re so entrenched, they’re never going to go away. GE is essentially no more. It’s split into three companies. It comes nowhere near the top 10 in market Cap. But by the way, that’s not in a unique story in America. If you looked at the top 10 largest companies in 2020 by market cap top 10 companies, and you go back and you say, OK, 20 years before that, in 2000, how many of them were top 10 companies? Any idea?
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Three down, 0, 0 1, 1 company? I’d have to go back and look. Exxon, actually, Exxon, the companies that comprise most of the top 10 list didn’t even exist in 2000. So imagine that an economy’s so incredibly dynamic that we can do that kind of turnover. And so when people talk to me about, wow, these companies, they’re so big and dominant, I say maybe, but when I talk to ’em, you know what they tell me? They’re looking at that small guy right behind them who’s nipping on their heels, who they’re afraid is going to make them the next ge.
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And that’s what American history and free markets has tended to produce. And the good news is, is that dynamism means that we’re not stuck with what people created or sold us in the past or the services they delivered. We get an economy that grows faster and that is more responsive because the way you get into the top 10, the way you’re successful as a new business owner is you do something that people want to pay you to do. And if you do something that no one wants to pay you to do, you’re not going to do very well. And so the whole concept is how can business be responsive in a free market to what people want to buy? And you’re not going to serve every customer, you’re not going to serve the whole populace, but if you can serve enough people and be competitive in the market, you’ll do really well. So I’m happy to talk about any of those issues or talk about some of the policies that from our perspective, both drive real strong economic growth or impede it or cover any other topics you’d like to ask. So consider this, ask me anything.
Anne Godlasky/NPF (00:16:34):
And just a reminder, folks, wait for the and introduce yourself with your news outlet too. Thank you.
Lucia Maffei | Boston Business Journal (00:16:42):
I’m Lucia and I cover tech in Boston for the Boston Business Journal. I’m curious to ask you, based on the conversations with your members, is there anybody who is happy about tariffs and if yes, who are they and why?
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:17:01):
There are just not very many of ’em. So yeah, well, and not many who are our members, but certainly companies we talk with and deal with. Yeah, there’s some steel companies who for example, are very much on the record in their supportive tariffs. You will find small manufacturers occasionally whose major competition in the US for the market for whatever it is that they make is a foreign producer and they really like the fact that the federal government has elevated the price for their competition. By the way, one of the reasons they really like it is it allows them to raise their own prices, which is exactly what tariffs are designed to do. So the whole concept of a tariff is that we’re going to, particularly if you’re trying to protect a domestic industry, you protect a domestic industry by allowing them to raise prices by using the power of government to raise prices on their foreign competitors.
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That’s the whole premise. So it doesn’t work to protect a domestic production source unless it raises prices, because otherwise, if it doesn’t raise prices for the foreign exporter, your competition, then it doesn’t help you in the marketplace. And so as you would expect, there are some people who would like the power of government to protect ’em. They are a minority, particularly when you have really broad based tariffs. But it’s because it turns out that almost no company is an island unto themselves, right? In the same way that you have an ecosystem, you may be manufacturing something in the US but you need a component part from somewhere else that you import, and all of a sudden if the price of that is higher, the price for you to manufacture your good is higher and you’re negatively affected. And so it’s not to say there aren’t sometimes people who support businesses who support tariffs, but most of ’em look at it as a kind of net negative.
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The other reason it’s a net negative is once you raise prices in an economy, the ability of consumers to continue to purchasing more of your product and your customers can be your consumers, could be individuals or it could be other businesses, is diminished. And so that’s why economists pretty universally view tariffs as anti-growth because it is an artificial increase in the price of things, which if you adjust to by consuming less means that you’re poor. So if I have a hundred dollars to spend and something that used to cost $50, now costs $75, I might have that thing, but I’m $25 poor, maybe I don’t buy that thing. So maybe you can say, well, I bought something else instead and I didn’t increase, but that thing that was valuable to me, I don’t have anymore and I’m now poor.
Judy Farah | Comstock’s business magazine (00:20:24):
Hello, Judy Farah with comstock’s Business Magazine in Sacramento, California.
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:20:29):
Wonderful.
Judy Farah | Comstock’s business magazine (00:20:30):
Yesterday we heard from the Washington DC business group and marketing and tourism group that they talked about how they’re trying to revitalize their downtown after COVID and I go, wow, Sacramento’s not the only town trying to do that. We’re trying to do the same. What are some of the common concerns you’re finding from your members all over the country? What are their concerns for their cities?
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:20:56):
A top concern today is affordable housing near a place that’s convenient for their employees to live and get to work. Affordable housing is a huge problem, not everywhere in the country. In some places it’s acutely worse than others, but it’s a very common theme and it’s not surprising because it’s a supply and demand story. We just haven’t built enough houses to keep up with demand and when supply is constricted, prices go up. And that’s exactly kind of what’s happening to folks and there’s a lot of reasons that government policy has impacted that, but that’s a big concern. I think second, if you take the politics that we’ve seen of late about crime and how you deal with crime, crime has for some time been an issue. We started hearing from local chambers of commerce around the country about retail theft and in particular organized retail theft probably seven or eight years ago. It’s a real problem because it is not just a cost issue, but it’s a sense of safety and kind of quality of life issue. And so there’s a lot of places where that’s still an aspect of it and if I –
Judy Farah | Comstock’s business magazine (00:22:22):
Can make a comment about that? We hear a lot of governors saying our crime rate is down, we have fewer murders, but I don’t know if anybody has this been California. When I go into my supermarket, my shampoo and deodorant and everyday items are being — you have to get someone to come help you get it from locked cabinets and so to the average person, we feel like crime’s all around us.
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:22:44):
Yeah, that’s what I mean. These are the effects of, and by the way, there’s some aspects this that’s government, there’s some of it is business. And so the combination of employers saying, understandably so for the safety of their employees, we don’t want you to confront people combined with governments kind of unwillingness or policy decisions not to pursue people has kind of meant that there was no punishment, no stopping this. I mean we have members who they didn’t just report, they have video video and now we have audio of people coming in with a bag and a calculator because they know that the prosecution threshold is say $800 and that as long as they steal less than that, nobody’s going to do anything to them. That’s a problem. That person’s, they’re not supporting their family when was growing, the shoplifting that I used to see was kids on a dare felt they could line something and people who were desperate, that’s not either of those, that’s actually organized crime and that’s actually what it was. They weren’t using all of that shampoo, they were actually selling it often actually through the web.
Marlon Hyde | WABE News (00:24:20):
Marlon Hyde, WABE News in Atlanta. I wanted to kind of ask, do you still believe with the federal policies that have been going on this year that the market is still free in a way I’ve seen since the pandemic, a lot of those top 10 companies have only gotten richer and especially given the policies of this year, they stand to gain more wealth. So do you still believe that the market is still free?
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:24:50):
I do believe that the market is still free. I would say that, and it’s not just this year. I would suggest to you that it’s a pattern that’s been going on across administrations of both parties for some time, which is a much stronger willingness to intervene in the market when the market produces or doesn’t produce outcomes that they politically find desirous. And so materially like companies like producing markets sometimes do too. And in a free market, just like you have to tolerate when your side loses an election, you have to tolerate that. Gosh, I wish that there was different programming on TV and the market demanded that. Well, if the market was demanding that it would probably produce different programming and if not, it’s going to spur someone to start a new channel and compete with that. But government intervening to decide that is when you begin to lose free markets.
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So I don’t look, for me, the concern is not the value of individual companies or the market, although I can make a case too that the market on price to earnings ratios and some other things that’s slightly inflated today, but that’s my personal opinion and the market’s going to work that out. And if it turns out I’m right, then there’s a way for people who share that view to make money on that aspect of the market. What I find more concerning is when government is intervening in the markets to pick winners and losers to direct the way companies operate.
Rowan Hetzer | Dayton Business Journal (00:26:41):
Hi Rowan Hetzer with the Dayton Business Journal. So I feel like with a lot of the policies that are going on right now that there’s a big push for onshoring and a lot of other companies are looking to establish other facilities, plants and other hubs in certain areas. The companies that you talked to, this kind of bouncing off Judy’s question earlier, what are they looking for in a new location? What are they looking for, whether that’s the specific building or the town, the state, what do they need to be drawn there? What do they want?
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:27:10):
Yeah, let me start bigger. What are they looking for at a national policy level and then let’s go down local. The most important thing is a national policy level is stability and certainty. So you ask business leaders about a particular policy and they say, I might not like this policy, but if you tell me this is the way it’s going to be that this is the tax rate or this is the tariff, then I will figure out how to adjust my business to operate in that. Because what I have to do, I’m not going to shut down my business, I’m going to figure out a way to adjust to meet that. But by the way, don’t then change that a month from now or the next time we have a presidential election and we seesaw the other way because my business can’t adjust that fast and I can’t recoup the investments that I make.
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So when businesses are saying I’m going to make a big investment in the us, if they’re making that investment on the basis of this is what federal tax or tariff policy or trade policy or any of those things are going to be, what they want to know is that it’s not going to suddenly reverse course on them because then the economic decision that made sense might no longer make sense. We call it penciling out that deal pencils out all of a sudden if you change a factor of federal policy, that deal might not longer pencil out and you won’t make that investment unless you have some sense of certainty that it’s going to pencil out under a bunch of different scenarios. When you’re looking at kind of a local decision, certainly it’s a part of a state or a community’s business climate environment. So things like what is the tax rate that matters?
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Taxes are cost of doing business and the higher the cost of doing business, the less attractive a place can be. What are the labor policies, labor policies set by state? Is this a right to work state or is it not? That can have a big indication, particularly if you’re doing something in manufacturing, you are going to look at other costs of inputs, not all of which are government. So the cost of land, the cost of utilities, like a lot of places who have an electric crunch today, if you’re in the northeast and you have a crunch on the supply of natural gas, that means the cost of operating your facilities just higher in the northeast than it is somewhere else. They’re obviously always looking for labor. If you exit local government policy, one of the biggest things is is there a supply of labor and they’re looking for a community that’s either likely to supply or likely to attract and people who want to work for their company.
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So there is very much an aspect of this of is this a town that’s attracting new talent? Are people moving there? Do people want to live there? Does it have an local educational system that my employees want to enroll their kids in school there? Does it have parks, does it have the amenities? So all of these factors kind of factor in. It can’t be the case. My advice to local communities, some communities try to compete on one thing. We have a really high tax rate and man utilities are super expensive and we don’t have a lot of labor, but we have great parks. The parks and the art districts are phenomenal. That’s wonderful. And if everyone else had your same tax and utility costs and everything else, then you might win out. But the truth is, is that communities are competing on all of those things and you have to figure out how to compete on multiple, you don’t have to be the best at everything, but you have to present a package that resonates with the things that employers are looking for that they think their employees are looking for.
Rayonna Burton-Jernigan | Capital B News (00:30:57):
Hi. Hi. My name’s Rayonna. I work with Capital B news and I’m listening to you talk and thank you for being here. Thank you. But I can’t help but think about the flip side to all of it. Like you said, we have affordable housing concern. We have the minimum wage is still like $7.25 and just these different things, especially with tariffs coming or if they’re already here. It’s like how, I hate to be this way, but how are people supposed to afford to live at this point? Especially if people are charging, let’s just say D.C. I know you could come here, get a one bed for $1,800, it’s probably like 400 to 600 square feet. You still got to eat live, do all of these other things. And it’s like, can y’all hear girl? Ashley says higher, it’s expensive to live here. Well, yes, even higher, but I don’t know. I don’t even know the question I’m asking, but could you talk more to how you guys are really trying to help your local US chambers to help the local citizens that are in my community? Most of my community is 60 and up, so they’re worried about their SSI. They’re worried about so many different things and when the tariffs do go into effect, so how are you guys advocating or really talking to your local chambers and stuff like that?
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:32:12):
Yeah, we need policies that at its core increase supply. So it really, it’s economics 101, it’s a supply curve and a demand curve and the price is set where those two cross and if you can’t change demand and demand is constant and supply is constricting, prices are going to go up. By the way, the solution to that in a lot of local communities is highly unpopular. Let’s talk about housing. The real issue in a lot of communities have housing problems is we have overly restrictive zoning requirements that prohibit building density. That’s true in my neighborhood here, there’s a fight in my house, I’m on the side of more density, my wife is not. These are deeply personal things that people feel about the neighborhood that they live in. And if you live in a neighborhood of single family homes, the idea, even if you’re on a major thoroughfare, the idea that someone might build duplexes along that thoroughfare, you’re like, we’re a single family neighborhood.
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We have yards and fences, but duplexes and single family homes are pretty easy to figure out which one increases supply and which one doesn’t. And we have a fundamental supply problem. We have a regulatory problem as well. Our friends at the National Association of Home Builders say that the regulatory costs, permitting additional requirements, et cetera, equate to about a hundred thousand dollars on a new house normally show up in the value of the house. It’s just a kind of sunk cost. I hear people say, well listen, people aren’t looking for new homes, so that’s fine. You want new duplexes and you want deregulation, but I’m looking for a home that’s 50 years old. Well, guess what? Someone’s living in that home that’s 50 years old and if they don’t have a place to move into a new house, then that place doesn’t become vacant. So this is a supply problem at the end of the day.
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That’s also true in demographics. So think about the old age demographics as destiny. This is a problem for the United States. It’s a real problem. So I talked about 3% economic growth and some of the things that fueled that. Beginning in the early 1960s, the baby boomers started entering the workforce, my parents, and they kept coming and coming and coming and coming and coming. And about 20 years ago they started to retire slowly at first because they were the oldest. Now we’re at about 10,000 retiring every day. Our generations aren’t big enough to replace those. My parents retired a few years ago, thank goodness they’re still with us. They’re in great health. What do they like to do? They like to go out and eat. They like to spoil their grandkids. They are consumers by the way. They’re consuming a lot more healthcare now because they are older.
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The supply of people to serve in the restaurants to work at the hospital or at the doctor’s clinic is constricted. And so our friends at a EI estimate that the US working age population might decline for the first time ever this year. The nonpartisan congressional budget office thinks it’s about 2030 depending on what happens with immigration. But this is a real problem. And so if you want kind of things and services to be affordable, you have to have a population that can help provide them and if a population can help provide them, it will generate the income for people to be able to maintain. I’m not concerned about the minimum wage. It’s not that we don’t think there should be a memo. There should and it can be adjusted, but you can find a dishwashing job in Ocean City today. I was just talking to a chamber from there for $20 and they can’t get it filled. The issue isn’t the wage. The issue is at this moment our supply of lots of things. Yes ma’am.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (00:36:15):
Hi, Ashley Murray from States Newsroom. I was wondering if you could talk about the recent events with the government and Nvidia kind of piggyback Nvidia off of Marlon’s question about pre-market is the market still free. So I read arguments that say like, wow, this is what Russia does. And so I’m wondering if there’s a devil’s advocate argument that I’m missing. And then I’m also wondering if there are past examples in the United States of the government saying to a private company, ‘Hey, you can do this, but we are taking a 15% cut of your profits.’
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:37:04):
So first there is good reason that a government can utilize export controls. So the ability to ship sensitive defense related material to enemies, it’s an intervention in the market. Let’s be clear. It’s an intervention in the market, but sometimes interventions in the market, particularly in national security grounds can be justified we’ve never seen before. And it’s, I think it’s hard to come up with a good defense to say, we’ll control this on national security grounds, but you can still export it if the government has a cut of the revenue. What some of critics over generalize is more akin and people do conflate the Nvidia a MD 15% revenue with the intel 10% stake in equity or the golden share and US neon steel or the reported golden share that we may learn about tomorrow and whatever the new configuration of Twitter is. And that’s the government taking equity stakes, ownership of a company.
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It’s not the case that the government’s never taken ownership and equity stakes in companies before. Absolutely not the case that has happened. And so when people say this has never happened before, that’s not true. But if you look back and we’ve researched this going all the way from the thirties up until COVID in the 1930s, a depression error created agency actually had equity stakes in two thirds of the banks of America because if you’ve seen, it’s a wonderful life. You know that banks, we had bank runs and banks were closing and going belly in 1980, the Congress declared that Chrysler was too big to fail and it bailed Chrysler out and took an equity stake in the 2008 financial crisis. We had stakes in major banks, we had stakes in GM and Chrysler, not Ford, but GM and Chrysler during COVID, when COVID hit, we told everyone, you can’t fly.
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It turns out airlines don’t make very much money if no one flies. And the government came in to bail out the airlines and took warrants in those. There are other examples kind of in between those, but the things that are consistent in those examples are there was usually some type of crisis or some too big to feel. There were usually guardrails kind of created by government usually almost always. In fact, the government sought not to exercise control over the company’s operations, so it would often take warrants or preferred stock, a preferred non-voting stock, meaning they didn’t exercise kind of control over the company and perhaps most importantly, they had a view towards a quick exit In the 1930s as a condition of the government investing, it took preferred shares in those two thirds of banks and said every quarter that you earn any profit, you have to set 10% of that aside to buy back the government so that we can get out of owning you. And so what is different is that we don’t really know what the crisis is that motivates it, what the rules are, is this a quick exit? And so those are things that we think about that without adequate answers could be a source of concern.
Katherine Lin | Mississippi Today (00:40:41):
Hi, Katherine Lin from Mississippi today. One of the things I’ve heard from business leaders in our state is that there’s a skill gap between what’s available in the market and what they need. And I’m curious what you’re hearing from the people you talk to across the country.
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:40:56):
Absolutely the case and there’s a lot that we need to do now and that we’re going to need to do in the future because of AI disruptions on skills gaps. I think we and business by the way, I hope you’ll get that. I’m not a reflexive defender of business by the way, sometimes businesses at fault here a little bit because businesses defy that it’s going to fix its local skills issue in Mississippi by going to the local community college and saying, for my plant down the street or my operation, I need students with x, y, z skills. And then the other employer down the street will come in and say, I need w, x, y skills. And then the other employer will come down and they see I need r, s and y skills and the local community colleges. What do you want us all to run bespoke programs for you?
(00:41:56):
And kids are wondering, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to study communities who are fixing this? Well, and we have a program through our foundation that has brought employers together and says, you got to cut this out and you got to get together with the training and come up with the common things that you all need. And then if you want to add something onto that in the employment context, do that. But that will give you a good supply of workers. I think we have to thank the same. Last night the college board and the Chamber launched a new initiative for an AP business and personal finance course debuting in your communities fall of 2026. Here’s the most interesting thing about it, 36 now I learned it’s gone up by two recently have personal finance requirements to graduate high school. By the way, no one ever doesn’t graduate because they failed personal finance.
(00:42:49):
So that should tell you how good the personal finance requirements are that kids learn. It is a check the box exercise in most states and we don’t have any type of kind of normalized business class. Here’s the thing that I’m most passionate about, this business class. It is part of a new series of AP classes that are designed for kids who are on the college track and who want to get college credit by taking the AP exam and kids who aren’t going to go to college or might go to community college who want to get a credential that businesses could recognize that they understand the things that you all were learning from the Wharton professor about profit and loss and marketing and all the things that you need to do of basic knowledge to work in a business today. And so I am super excited by the idea that there are kids, Mitch, I grew up in Sapulpa, Oklahoma.
(00:43:48):
Some kids were on the college track, some kids were on the technical track. I had 232 kids in my graduating class. I realized graduation week that the 60% of ’em I’d never set in the classroom with. I was on one track, they were on another. That’s by the way bad for society. But by the way, for those kids who were in that 60%, the pathway to personal wealth and success was probably running a local business in Sapulpa and it was learning a skill and taking it over and running it. My dad ran a local business, he was really good at fixing radiators and air conditioners on cars. He was not good at understanding profit and loss and how a business operates. And I think back today to what would be possible if kids learned a little bit of the skill or thing that they would do that would be successful in their community and just a little bit about business so that they could own the plumbing shop, own the auto repair store, own the local retail boutique, own the local restaurant and manage it like you would manage it if you went to college and you got an MBA.
(00:44:54):
And I think that is hugely profoundly a way to fundamentally change the skills dynamic that isn’t I need coding at tier three, A, SC, whatever, whatever, whatever. It’s a way of giving people the basic skills that they need to work in lots of different places. Sorry, I’m really passionate about that thing.
Noor Adatia | Dallas Business Journal (00:45:17):
Hi, I’m Noor with the Dallas Business Journal. First of all, the zoning requirement thing I cover a lot and it’s always somebody on a busy thorough why this is the perfect place for, yeah. Anyways, I was wondering if you could elaborate on that. Do you think there’s a way to frame zoning? I don’t know. Do you think there’s validity in their argument at all? What the single family owners, I’m curious what your wife is saying I guess what are their, sorry.
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:45:46):
No, no, I introduced it so it’s fair game. And
Noor Adatia | Dallas Business Journal (00:45:50):
Then, sorry, my other question was with housing, you were talking about how young people, it’s harder for us to get ahead today. I guess more personal question too, but do you think it’s housing is the biggest issue facing young people today and I think nowadays it’s become more popular just to rent. I feel like all the advice here, just keep renting for as long as you can, which I dunno if you could elaborate all on that.
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:46:15):
Sure, sure.
(00:46:19):
Does my wife have valid arguments? Yes, very much so. This is a little bit of what I mean by markets. I love our single family home neighborhood. I think it’s great. Did we choose to live there in part because that’s what it offered after living more urban. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Do I think that the government should come along behind and pull up the drawbridge so that no one else can join our neighborhood in a different construct? Do I think that market forces should be prevented from figuring out the best utilization of the space to meet the demand issues of a growing community? No. And by the way, I might move if they built duplexes behind us, maybe we would move. I don’t know. But I know that just like in other aspects of the market, asking government to come in and basically freeze the market from changing tends to lead to bad results. That doesn’t mean there’s not a role for zoning. We’re not going to put an industrial plant next to someone’s house. There’s a role here, but we have to understand that every time we do that there’s a cost. And what we’ve gotten really good at is talking about all the benefits and not recognizing any of the costs of those government interventions.
(00:48:03):
I think housing is a symptom for our people today. I think it’s a pie issue. At the end of the day, it’s a pie issue. And so if you can grow the economy, and I talked about macro nurse, but take my hometown community aging in similar. Ana has talked about 60 local communities that are disproportionately older and fewer workers are just going to have really slow growth and it’s going to become really hard for the people who are working age to get ahead there. And so whether you’re talking about local or a national economy, you need growth and that growth enables people to compete for a better opportunity in slice. I just think that’s in Dallas. I mean you have high housing costs, but man, that is a dynamic economy in the DFW area and it’s lifting a lot of things up. Yes, sir.
Jason Delgado | Spectrum News, Bay News 9 and News 13 (00:49:07):
Morning sir. I’m Jason Delgado. I’m a reporter with Spectrum News down in Florida. I’ve got more of a philosophical business question for you, if that’s OK. I’ve gotten a sense in recent years that there’s a growing sentiment of distrust, if you will, in whatever the public considers big business or business advocacy or pro-business policy. I’m curious if you’ve gotten that sense, if it’s a concern, and then if that sentiment were to deepen how that shapes the chamber’s future in the years ahead.
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:49:38):
Yes, I have gotten that sense. Yes, it’s concerning. Yes. I think it’s growing. No, it’s not new. We’ve had spikes in kind of anti bigness for a long time. If you go back 120 or so years ago, and a huge kind of antitrust movement that formed that basically was, let, let me tie a couple things together. In the previous administration, Lenahan who ran the FTC, they often referred to their movement as neo Brandan. That was a reference to Louis Brandeis. Brandeis was a member of the Supreme Court before that, that he was a lawyer in Boston 120 years ago. He had local clients in Boston that was like the local trucking company and the local train. We had local trains then, not national trains. We had local trains. Turned out hugely inefficient trains and things stopped at the end of Boston and you couldn’t get to New York and all kind of this stuff.
(00:50:50):
And so people were coming along and buying the local trains and joining them together. He ended up, this is all in his book by the way, so I’m not making any of this. He ends up losing when the local train station got bought out by someone in New York, he lost his client and he thought, that’s awful. The train should be owned by people locally and all these things. And it started a huge antitrust movement. That big is bad. And there’s always been a sense of we like the small guy, we don’t like the big guy. Not true in the business community, but there’s always been that sense. And it laid into it, by the way, it got really ridiculous over the 50 years that that school of thought was dominant. The Supreme Court affirmed blocking the merger of two shoe stores in California in the 1950s because they would’ve controlled 5% of the shoe market retail shoe market in LA that we don’t believe in monopolies.
(00:51:47):
But this idea that controlling 6% of the shoe market somehow makes you an oppressive power in LA for selling shoes. That’s what naturally leads you to is well, big is bad, and that thing looks kind of big and this next thing, it might end up becoming big one day and you end up in a really place that is detrimental to economic growth. We threw that all out by the way, because we recognize the consumer welfare standard and antitrust and we said the real goal ought to be what happens to consumers being deprived of a choice. Are consumers being deprived? Are they being forced to pay monopolous prices and if not, let the market work? And that’s worked pretty well.
Kelley Bouchard | Portland Press Herald (00:52:33):
Sure. Hi, Kelley Bouchard with the Portland Press Herald and Maine where I’ve written about some of the changes that we’ve made on the forefront of undoing those real estate holds to free up development and undo those restrictions that you were talking about. I’ve also written about some of the impacts of the immigration crackdown and tariffs and a lot of other things, but speaking to the immigration concerns in particular, I’m wondering with so many factions or interest groups opposed to what is happening, whether it’s small business, elder care, you name it, across the board, there are so many agriculture farmers. Exactly. Manufacturing. Do you see either it happening or the potential for these diverse interest groups to get together to find an alternative that either will stop what’s happening or perhaps maybe bring about the immigration reform that is several decades overdue?
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:53:54):
Yes. Yes, because we’re helping to organize all those various factions to do just that. And I am actually somewhat more bullish on the idea that in the next, let’s just call it two years, we can actually get Congress to tackle these legal immigration issues and increase legal immigration. And I suspect as part of that, they’re going to have to resolve folks who haven’t committed crimes and who’ve been here a long time and who are in the workforce and working. And so when we talk to lawmakers on the hill, the pressure is building for exactly what you say from all those various groups. So put me down as an optimist.
Tanya Babbar | Hearst Connecticut Media (00:54:40):
Hi, Tanya Babbar, CT Insider in Connecticut. I stepped out for a moment, so if someone asks this, everyone please yell at me and tell me already. But when you were talking about, I think you said Ocean City, someone couldn’t get a job as a dishwasher?
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:54:56):
No, no. The dishwashers are being paid being advertised for $20 an hour and they’re still having a hard time filling them.
Tanya Babbar | Hearst Connecticut Media (00:55:01):
Yes. I thought that was so interesting. This might also be a selfish question. I’m young, I’m in a fellowship program, so once my contract ends, I’m also on the job market. And I feel like in the past couple of months I see constant stories in national news outlets that’s like, here is Joe Schmoe one through five, they graduated college with impressive degree number one through four. Here’s them looking sad at their kitchen table. They cannot get a job in the fields they wanted, nor can they get a job as a barista across the street. And I hear a lot about jobs getting more specialized or you have ai, people use AI to apply, you get AI rejections. That’s just like two robots talking to each other.
But when you were talking about there being jobs nobody wants to take, I was wondering, do you also hear that other side that you’re hearing that sense of frustration with young people, that there are even those technically low skilled jobs they can’t get because with business too, I wonder if you’re a young person, if you’re hearing that you can’t even get a job in your field, what would even make you feel confident starting a business when you see the dishwasher thing? That just struck me. I feel like I just constantly hear this narrative that it is hard to get a job at McDonald’s sometimes.
Neil Bradley/U.S. Chamber of Commerce (00:56:25):
Yeah, yeah. So it is always the case and you all as reporters do a great job of amplifying this tension that whatever story, and I’m glad you do by the way, that whatever story you can tell with macro statistics, you can point to individual examples that go against that story because the statistics are average. It’s also OK that the adverse is true that in an economy that is creating jobs and when people are finding employment, it’s not the case that every college grad today can’t find a job. We wish that more of them than are currently being able to find a job, can find a job, but the majority of them are exiting college and finding a job. And so that’s also kind of part of the story and true our goal should be to have an economy that is growing fast enough in a bunch of different places, that it makes it easier for people to find those jobs. It’s also the case that we then, in order to support a growing economy, need to balance that out with a flow of workers to take the excess jobs. One of my favorite ways of looking at the job market is to compare the number of open jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports every month with the number of people who are unemployed and looking for work that they also report every month. Anyone want to guess the historical norm of the relationship between those two numbers? Which one’s higher?
(00:58:09):
Probably historically, the number of people looking for work was higher than the number of open jobs, by the way, including in some good economies in the early OTTs. So these data series run back to about 2000. If you graph them together, by the way, BLS does this on their website. Or you can go to Fred, my favorite Federal Reserve statistics website, and you can graph those two things together and what you’ll see is number of people looking for work eclipsing. That changed actually right before COVID, beginning in late 20 18, 20 19, strong economy and largely demographic factors. As we started coming out of COVID, I mean early coming out of it, those flipped and up until last month, we had more open jobs than we had people looking for work every single month. We just slightly crossed the lines in the last month. So those two things can kind of be equally true.
(00:59:11):
The two things that concern me at the moment on the labor force is the uncertainty being a wet blanket. And if you look and we talk to our members, they’re not firing people, they’re not laying people off, they’re not cutting jobs. What they are doing is that when someone moves and takes another job, they’re doing attrition. They’re deciding whether to backfill that job. Why? Because they’re a little bit uncertain. On one hand, they look at it and go, it’s really hard to find good people. And so I don’t want to dismiss any of the employees that I have. On the other hand, I’m uncertain about what the future economic environment looks like, so I’m not sure I really want to go make an investment in hiring a new person. We should be trying to fix that as a policy uncertainty measure to give people more confidence to fill those jobs.
(01:00:02):
By the way, I’m convinced, given where labor supply is today, that this is the other thing I worry about, that if we had broad confidence, we don’t have enough people to actually fill where that demand would go. And so one way to look at that is how many jobs does it take? How many jobs do you have to create each month to keep the unemployment rate from going up? My entire professional career, you’ve had to create about 125 to 150,000 jobs a month in order to avoid an increase in the unemployment rate because of immigration, because of the demographic changes, we think it’s around 50,000 or maybe less, that have to be created every month. Some people argue it’s actually a negative number now to prevent the unemployment rate from going up. That signifies a situation in which you remove that uncertainty. We’re going to have a really hard time meeting demand.
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