The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

The Wealth of Wall Street with Oren Cass

February 11, 2026

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  • The core problem discussed in "The Wealth of Wall Street with Oren Cass" is the over-financialization of the economy, where financial activities generate profit without creating commensurate real-world value, leading to a disconnect from productive investment. 
  • The historical success of capitalism, as described by Adam Smith's 'invisible hand,' relies on self-interest aligning with public interest, a condition that requires political and regulatory constraints to maintain against the natural tendency toward extracting value. 
  • The modern political right's embrace of market fundamentalism, stemming from the post-Cold War coalition of libertarians and traditional conservatives, represents a departure from earlier conservative views that accepted necessary government intervention to shape markets for broader societal benefit. 
  • The focus of the elite's policy priorities, even on the left-of-center side, has often been on issues like climate change and social justice rather than core economic concerns like domestic investment and job creation, which connects to the broader problem of financialization. 
  • Restructuring the economy to benefit typical workers requires broad rules, such as tariffs designed to make domestic production cheaper than foreign production, though tariffs risk being regressive taxes on consumers. 
  • The ultimate problem underlying financialization is a cultural shift that equates any pursuit of profit with productive value, exemplified by the rise of gamified finance like crypto, which is the antithesis of building industrial stability. 

Segments

First Amendment Ad Read
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) advocates for government neutrality on religion through education, advocacy, and legal action to uphold the Constitution.
  • Summary: Politicians are pushing prayer into public schools, challenging the separation of church and state. FFRF works to hold the government accountable to the Constitution by ensuring public institutions remain neutral on religion. Listeners can support this effort by visiting ffrf.us/slash newyear or texting state to 511-511.
Sponsor Spot: Genesis
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(00:01:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Genesis of White Plains is promoting President’s Day offers on its 2026 G70, G90, GV70, and GV80 models.
  • Summary: Exclusive lease and finance offers are available for select Genesis models during the President’s Day season. The brand emphasizes athletic elegance, intuitive technology, and advanced driver assistance features. The dealership offers a customer lounge, Korean tea bar, and indoor garden experience.
Intro and Political Commentary
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(00:01:38)
  • Key Takeaway: Jon Stewart expressed frustration over the right’s reaction to a musical performance, contrasting it with historical political hypocrisy regarding language.
  • Summary: The host opened the episode of “The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart” by mocking the outrage from the political right over a musical performance. He highlighted the irony of complaints about Spanish language use, referencing Mar-a-Lago’s Spanish origin. This segued into introducing the main guest, Oren Cass, to discuss economic financialization.
Defining Financialization
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(00:03:44)
  • Key Takeaway: Financialization is defined as the increasing role of financial markets where transactions prioritize generating cash over creating real-world value.
  • Summary: Financialization involves activities like high-frequency trading, where profit is extracted through speed rather than utility, and private equity buyouts that squeeze workers and customers to extract cash. While financial markets are crucial for deploying capital productively, the share of activity dedicated to real investment is declining relative to the sector’s growth in GDP.
Historical Cycles of Capitalism
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(00:09:47)
  • Key Takeaway: Capitalism requires political intervention to realign self-interest with public interest, as seen historically during the Industrial Revolution and the trust era.
  • Summary: The concept of the ‘invisible hand’ describes how self-interest can serve the public good, but this alignment requires constraints, such as early labor laws preventing child labor. Later, Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting demonstrated the need to curb monopolistic self-interest. The current era of financialization and globalization represents a swing away from these productive constraints.
Sponsor Spot: Ground News
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(00:12:09)
  • Key Takeaway: Ground News provides a tool to navigate news by aggregating stories globally and showing bias comparisons across the political spectrum.
  • Summary: The service helps readers see the full picture of a news story rather than just partisan slices designed by algorithms. Its bias comparison feature highlights specific differences in reporting across outlets. Listeners can get 40% off the Vantage Subscription by visiting groundnews.com/stewart.
Critique of Economic Dogma
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(00:17:03)
  • Key Takeaway: The modern economic consensus, influenced by figures like Milton Friedman, incorrectly assumes pure profit pursuit automatically serves the public interest, leading to policies favoring finance over labor.
  • Summary: The shift toward supply-side economics in the 1970s and 80s, fueled by a coalition including free-market libertarians, incorrectly interpreted Adam Smith by advocating for minimal government intervention. This ideology, which became market fundamentalism, created a priesthood that dismissed critiques of deregulation and free trade, even after negative outcomes like the 2008 crisis became apparent.
Pendulum Swings in Policy
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(00:24:47)
  • Key Takeaway: Economic policy operates in pendulum swings, moving from New Deal over-correction to supply-side under-correction, necessitating pragmatic tools to rebalance the system.
  • Summary: The New Deal emerged as an over-correction to minimalist government, followed by a swing toward Great Society programs, which conservatives later critiqued. Supply-side economics correctly identified the need to improve business incentives but swung too far, leading to unchecked financialization and tax cuts. The current need is for blunt, broad-based constraints, like banning stock buybacks (illegal until 1983), to correct the imbalance.
Political Incoherence and Uncertainty
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(00:46:14)
  • Key Takeaway: Despite a growing intellectual shift on the right toward industrial policy, the executive branch’s non-ideological, impulse-driven decision-making creates policy incoherence and undermines the stability required for economic planning.
  • Summary: The Trump administration’s economic policies, characterized as ’tantronomics,’ involve contradictory actions like targeted corporate stakes and arbitrary tariffs, making coherent policy difficult. This uncertainty is the worst outcome for the economy, eroding the stable rules of the road that underpin investment. The challenge is how to rebalance the economy without creating a kleptocracy benefiting the president’s patrons.
Sponsor Spot: Bilt Rewards
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(00:34:41)
  • Key Takeaway: Bilt offers a loyalty program for renters, allowing them to earn points on rent payments redeemable for travel, dining, and shopping.
  • Summary: Rent is the largest monthly expense for many, and BILT rewards this spending with points. Starting in February, BILT members can also earn points on mortgage payments. Join the program at joinbilt.com/tws to start earning rewards.
Sponsor Spot: Mint Mobile
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(00:53:32)
  • Key Takeaway: Mint Mobile offers premium wireless service with the same coverage and speed as major carriers but at a significantly lower cost, challenging consumer inertia.
  • Summary: Mint Mobile provides unlimited talk, text, and data for a fraction of the price charged by competitors, with plans starting at $15 per month for new customers. The service boasts high customer satisfaction ratings and a seven-day money-back guarantee. Switching is easy, requiring only an upfront payment for a multi-month plan.
Economics vs. Policy Credibility
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(00:55:13)
  • Key Takeaway: Economists often create a credibility gap by asserting that narrow technical models dictate policy, ignoring political consequences and alternative values, which leads to public distrust.
  • Summary: The discipline of economics provides useful analysis, but economists frequently overstep by claiming their models dictate policy prescriptions, such as unwavering support for free trade. This approach ignores political fallout and the fact that policy must account for values beyond pure consumption maximization. The 2008 financial crisis and the failure of free trade predictions severely damaged the credibility of the architects of those policies.
Financialization and Growth Fetish
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(01:06:35)
  • Key Takeaway: Financialization concentrates growth in narrow enclaves by prioritizing short-term profit opportunities over broad national investment and worker prosperity.
  • Summary: The focus of elite policy priorities often neglects domestic investment and job creation, concentrating on issues like climate change and social justice instead. Financialization drives investment toward the most profitable narrow enclaves, ignoring areas left behind in the rest of the country. This short-term profit focus prevents the boosting of broad industrial bases.
Tariffs and Economic Restructuring
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(01:09:09)
  • Key Takeaway: Broad rules, like tariffs, are proposed to make domestic production cheaper than foreign production, but they risk acting as a regressive tax on consumers.
  • Summary: Creating broad rules that make selling U.S.-made goods cheaper than foreign-made goods is necessary to drive investment back into the country. Tariffs are one mechanism to offset imbalances created by lower overseas regulation and standards of living. However, tariffs can be regressive, punishing the very consumers they aim to help if the resulting revenue is not reinvested effectively.
CHIPS Act and Industrial Policy
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(01:11:13)
  • Key Takeaway: Targeted industrial policy, like the CHIPS Act, is valuable for must-have industries, but broad economic restructuring requires addressing baseline labor and environmental standards.
  • Summary: The CHIPS Act, which divides the Republican party, is seen as a positive step toward boosting specific critical industries like semiconductors. However, industrial policy alone cannot solve the broader issue of why it is expensive to build things in the U.S. Addressing baseline wages and environmental regulations is necessary to encourage widespread domestic investment.
State Competition and National Baselines
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(01:13:08)
  • Key Takeaway: A healthy American system requires national baselines for labor and environmental standards paired with state-level competition in areas like permitting efficiency.
  • Summary: The U.S. faces a domestic ‘mini-globalization’ dynamic where some states undercut the protections and wages of others. The optimal structure involves setting good national standards for employment and environment while encouraging states to compete constructively on processes like permitting. This federalism provides flexibility that benefits the system overall.
Cultural Shift in Profit Justification
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(01:15:47)
  • Key Takeaway: The core cultural problem is the concerted effort to equate any pursuit of profit with inherent productivity, moving toward a gamified financial system.
  • Summary: The fetishization of growth is less the issue than the cultural belief that any profit-making endeavor is inherently valuable and productive. This cultural acceptance makes it difficult to advocate for necessary regulation or structural change. The trend toward gamified finance, exemplified by crypto, represents the antithesis of building human flourishing and stability.
Listener Questions: Washington Post
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(01:26:07)
  • Key Takeaway: Jeff Bezos’s stewardship of The Washington Post reflects a billionaire’s tendency to arbitrage assets rather than uphold the public responsibility associated with flagship newspapers.
  • Summary: The current state of The Washington Post is viewed as being ‘hollowed out,’ continuing a long trajectory of media decline. There was a hope that Bezos, having spent billions elsewhere, would treat the paper as a public responsibility rather than an asset to be optimized for profit. This situation highlights that success in one field, like logistics, does not translate to understanding how to run a quality newspaper.
Listener Questions: Doge and Epstein Files
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(01:29:26)
  • Key Takeaway: Elon Musk’s focus on the Epstein files is seen as self-serving, contradicting his ‘free speech absolutist’ stance with contradictory actions and statements.
  • Summary: Doge (Elon Musk) is characterized as the misguided tantrum of an entitled billionaire who seeks to cut value without understanding the provided service. His current obsession with the Epstein files is viewed cynically, given his history of threatening people who say things he dislikes. The contradictions in his public persona regarding free speech are obvious to many observers.
Listener Questions: Vegan Lunch Offer
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(01:31:31)
  • Key Takeaway: Veganism is described as an unexpectedly competitive and unwelcoming social sphere where adherence to strict dietary rules is constantly stress-tested.
  • Summary: The vegan world is surprisingly competitive, with adherents frequently asking ‘how long’ someone has maintained the diet to establish seniority. It is difficult to maintain without cooking, and there exists a significant amount of vegan junk food. The environment is characterized as unwelcoming, with constant scrutiny over minor dietary deviations like consuming honey.