Kevin Gordon, head of macro research & strategy at Schwab Center for Financial Research, joins Scarlet Fu and Tom Keene on "Bloomberg Money." They discuss how young Americans are 'treating' themselves as the typical American Dream is harder to achieve.
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What Kevin Gordon said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy at Charles Schwab, discussed the 'treat economy' among young Americans, particularly Gen Z, who have shifted from the traditional American dream of housing to the stock market as a wealth-building tool. He noted a blurring of investing and gambling since 2021's meme stock craze, with pervasive risk-taking among younger investors. Gordon highlighted the bond market as favorable for shorter durations, acknowledging limited interest among millennials. He commented on market breadth improving, with over 70% of S&P 500 companies above their 200-day moving average, contrasting with late 2021's top-heavy market. He touched on the FIRE movement's prevalence, younger generations' supplemental income streams, and their general indifference to the national debt due to its incomprehensible scale.
Key takeaways
Younger generations, especially Gen Z, have shifted from housing to the stock market for wealth building, embracing the 'treat economy'.
Gordon dates the blurring of investing and gambling to the 2021 meme stock craze, which he says did not lead to wealth.
Over 70% of S&P 500 companies trade above their 200-day moving average, indicating a rotational market rather than a crash.
Younger Americans are indifferent to the national debt, seeing it as the new norm with no political will to address it.
Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy at Charles Schwab. And you know, I look at this and as far as I can see with personal finance and distant retirement, the younger crew, which you're arguably the voice on Wall Street, the younger crew takes it a lot more seriously than I did when I was 30 at the Wobbly Barn way up in Vermont.
Yes, it is a definitive shift. I thought that the huge shift was fascinating because, you know, I said it's such an interesting exercise, sort of talk about me being the younger voice on this. You know, all day I'm in the Wall Street world for work, but then I live in the Gen Z world and cusp. But I'm technically Gen Z still. I'm on the edge of it. It's a new but older Gen Z, younger millennials. Exactly that I'm speaking. But you know, this whole idea around, you know, and you see it survey after survey, anecdote after anecdote, but younger people today, especially in Gen Z, they just don't really believe in that classic American dream of a house being a wealth generator. So they have shifted a lot to the stock market. But that has really important implications for how they think about saving and how they think about building wealth over time. Not, you know, better or worse than what it was before. It's just a different environment than what we've had.
They think about income generation through these like fancy schmancy ETFs that cost a lot of money. But also, I guess when it works, it works, but it feels like there's a lot of risk taking involved that they may not be aware of.
Yes, there has been a, you know, a blurring of this sort of investing versus gambling kind of mindset over the past several years. I would sort of date it back, I guess, to 2021, when a lot of people were treating that meme stock craze as, you know, a new way to wealth, but obviously they didn't.
Well, I think I want to interrupt you. This is too important. Your colleague Lizzy Saunders is leading the way on this. Yes. She is the number one voice in the racket over what it means for kids in your milieu. When you're a hipster and you're out on the weekend and all that. How pervasive is the gambling?
Oh, it's incredibly pervasive. I mean, because, you know, it's all in front of us all the time. You know, that we all see the stats on screen time and how much people are buried in their phones, and it gets, you know, larger and larger percentage wise when you...
Well, the statistics on gambling versus investing are definitive in terms of how much money the average person loses for the former. So investing over the long term is statistically and empirically, it is, that's, you know, it's the better way to sort of build wealth. But I think also what has sort of taken hold, and this was sort of embedded, I think, a little bit in the story that you were discussing earlier, is that we have, because of housing being so much at the center of how people view wealth building now and the fact that housing is frozen for a huge chunk of out of reach, out of reach. We've been living in what has been called this little treat economy, where people are treating themselves to smaller things, not necessarily thinking about saving for a big down payment or a big purchase. Not painting that across the board for millennials, but that is increasingly becoming the norm. And the feeling, and hence why you see now also a lot more money being put into the stock market. So again, it's not necessarily an outright bad thing. It's just different in how people are treating their wealth.
I mean, this source of demand for equities kind of continues unabated. If people are treating gambling as investing when they really want to go to something safe, what is that safe thing?
10 more exchanges in this transcript
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Gordon, K. (2026, August 21). Young Americans Living In 'Treat Economy': Kevin Gordon [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3012455/
MLA
Kevin Gordon. "Young Americans Living In 'Treat Economy': Kevin Gordon." Bloomberg Television, 21 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3012455/.
BibTeX
@misc{gordon2026_3012455,
author = {Kevin Gordon},
title = {Young Americans Living In 'Treat Economy': Kevin Gordon},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {aug},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3012455/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
