Rebuilding American Prosperity

0:00Is your multi-entity management creating more confusion than clarity? You need the Intuit ERP. Intuit Enterprise Suite. It's the AI-native ERP solution that's powerful, painless, and proven. Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. J.P. Morgan announced a new program today. It's a venture aimed at expanding economic opportunity in local communities across the country. It's called the American Dream Initiative. It'll span six focus areas. It includes small businesses where the effort will focus initially on, well, housing and financial health.

0:49Yeah, and we really wanted to talk more about the American Dream and how capitalism and the economy can be more inclusive. It is the subject of a new book. It is by John Hope Bryant. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Operation Hope. It's the nation's largest on-the-ground financial literacy and economic empowerment nonprofit. He's also the founder of Bryant Group Ventures and Bryant Group Advisors, previously led the Promise Homes Company. He's also advised the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama in financial literacy and author of many books, including his latest, Capitalism for All, Inclusive Economics, and the Future-Proofing of America, really gets to the heart of, I think, really what is a problem here in America when we think about where we are today.

1:32John is here with us in studio. So nice to have you here. I was telling these guys, I'm a fan too, of how many conversations we had around the pandemic and coming off of what happened to the murder of George Floyd. We've just talked so much about diversity, inclusive. Tell us a little bit about this book, because you've talked about this subject a lot. Tell us about what your mission was with this book and what you were looking to get at.

1:57John Hope Bryant:It's not the morals message. It's the math message. My goal here, I'm going on tour starting tomorrow, and I'm going to go to Black and Brown Urban. I'm going to go to Poor, White, Rural. I'm going to go from Main Street to Wall Street. I'm going to go from the penthouse to no house. and I want people, I'm literally looking for people to start like this. To be skeptical in the beginning? And then my goal for myself is within 15 minutes, they're doing this and their heads are a little cocked and they're, hmm, this is interesting. I'd rather you respect me and learn to like me than like me and never respect me.

2:40The math is the message

2:43John Hope Bryant:and if I can combine the math with a narrative and then layer in a little bit of emotionalism about all of us, giving people an excuse to come back to the middle. I mean, most Americans and most people around the world are somewhere in the middle. They're not on these extremes. And I found that the only universal color is the economic green. is not about black or white or red or blue. It's not about some partisan view of the world. Once you start understanding that really the lesson, and my book makes this very clear, Capitalism for All, the lesson of KKR that just got announced where they built a company, bought a company, and sold it, and then provided profit sharing to the employees.

3:35John Hope Bryant:Watch the story, read the story, listen to the story, look at the faces of the employees, and they explode with, I'm part of this, and you say, that's America. That goes back to the early 1900s of the Henry Fords and the Rockefellers, and that's America. Look at what Walmart did and said, I'm not going to lay off any employees. We're going to train them in AI and upskill them. They're the largest employer in the world. Look at what Apollo's doing with some of its subsidiaries around employees, stakeholder ownership. Look at what Delta Airlines, one of the forwards in the book is Ed Bashan, the CEO of Delta, is doing with their own 100 ,000 employees in financial coaching.

4:18John Hope Bryant:I was on a Delta flight last night. And on the way to the flight, the Delta person talking my ear off about her new credit card. And now she's just got a limit increase. And she's managing her finances. I didn't say a word to her. That's interesting. For 20 minutes. Yeah. She's wearing me out about her credit score. and people coming on the plane, the flight attendants talking about that$1 ,000 emergency savings account they got because they got financial literacy and how that changed their life. Now, they're all in on Delta. They feel like they're owners and they're profit sharing. Delta does a couple billion a year every year.

4:50John Hope Bryant:That weds them to capitalism and free enterprise. The last thing I'll say is in the book, I knew there'd be skeptics and critics and people making assumptions. I put right up front a 50-year impact study that's already done on why inclusion works. It's a 50-year study about women. In 1972, and just to make this really clear, it was white women, just to be really blunt. 1972, a woman, a white woman, your mother, your mother, and by extension, my mother, not white, all couldn't get a bank account. Not 1872. That's amazing. And there was a whole debate in this country about women's roles and should they have, da-da-da.

5:32John Hope Bryant:And women couldn't get a loan unless her husband co-signed it. So women were outside the economy. Because of blacks' pursuit of affirmative action, which is Kennedy, Johnson, and then Honorary President Dr. King, they opened that door. And then Nixon comes in as a reaction to Johnson, Kennedy, and King. And he codifies affirmative action for women. By the way, he doesn't get credit because of all the other stuff he did. He did a lot of good stuff. Anyway, it gets codified. Make a long story short. Come now to present moment. Women are a third of the U.S. economy. Eight to ten trillion a year. I've got to remind myself it's a T, not a B, because it's such a big number.

6:11John Hope Bryant:Eight to ten trillion dollars of GDP are women's participation in the economy. If we had not gotten that experiment right, we'd also run a country in the world today. and there's so many more examples of the math in 200 pages of this book but i make it so that it is really there's no other door to go through you you bring up a lot of examples of of companies that are profit sharing with employees or or doing well by by doing good good capitalism and i think a lot of the folks who work for those companies are already a step ahead of a lot of other americans who don't have the opportunity to work for those companies who are worried about the cost of education who are drowning in student loan debt, how do they get included?

6:56The ones who don't yet work at these companies.

6:59John Hope Bryant:So this is the reason for the book and why I think there's a fierce urgency of now. If we were just talking about poor people and with the question you just raised, I wouldn't be sitting here. Not because you don't care. It just wouldn't be relevant to your audience, but half of, what was it, 70 % of the U.S. economy is consumer spending. Right. 70 % of all Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck. All right. If you're making$100 ,000 a year, 50 % of those are living from paycheck to paycheck. Okay. Let me get closer to your viewer now. If you're making a quarter million dollars a year, a third of those are living from paycheck to paycheck.

7:35John Hope Bryant:And that's before cost of living has gone increased with the oil prices popping and all the rest of this stuff. So now you have a fierce urgency, and now it's going to affect politics. It's going to affect lifestyle. It's going to affect choices you make. And now we get to decide what kind of country we want to live in. Is this okay? When the reality is that the third, the bottom third, have always come from the bottom up to the middle class. The middle class has always pushed. That's what's driving the U.S. economy. We have a K-shaped economy now with the top end and really the market gains giving people, I think, a false sense of safety.

8:12John Hope Bryant:That group is now almost half of the consumer spending. Not good. Correct. Not good, because when they turn off the faucet... What's left. Yeah. So we are in the 250th anniversary of America, to answer your question. We have to figure out, do we reward work? Are we giving up on the worker and saying AI has the end of jobs? That's a false... I think that's a complete false narrative, and I can prove it. So it's going to be tough because everybody's being thrown into brutal capitalism and free enterprise with no or and no training wheels. But this is the time to teach financial literacy and have a fierce urgency of now.

8:51John Hope Bryant:This is a time for this legislation like the right to vote where we say we demand, we the people demand, K through 12, that this is taught and embedded in our school system. This is a time where we get tax codes that incentivize internships and apprenticeships. So you have tax breaks for that. This is a time. I think everything gets reimagined in the fierce urgency of now so that you support those with too much a month at the end of their money. We have a million questions. We're talking with John. I'll try to keep my answers. No, no, no, no, no, no. We got extra time. Don't worry. We love it.

9:23We just want to remind everybody. We just kind of blew our break because we want to talk more with you. John Hope Bryan, founder, chairman, and CEO of Operation Hope. so many other things, but we're talking about his newest book, Capitalism for All, Inclusive Economics, and the Future-Proofing of America. John, I remember one of these conversations during COVID and we talked about an individual and it was with regards to George Floyd and about, we talk about having seats at the table. And not everybody has seats at the table. And I feel financial literacy, I've been doing this for a long time and we've been talking about this a long time too.

9:58How do we really finally get there so that not just income generation, but wealth generation? Right. We finally change the conversation. Hallelujah. But how do we then really move the needle on that? Because buying a home, we've talked about this, right? It's also so important to creating wealth and generational wealth. How do we finally get there?

10:19John Hope Bryant:So as you know, since I've seen you last, we've had a reversal of our approach in this country. is no longer safe, just to be really blunt, is no longer safe to bluntly support what people call, I don't know, minority activities. To me, it's just green. Just emerging market customers. But it's more complicated now. Okay, fine. DEI is a bad word now. Yeah, and I don't care about DEI. Just to be really clear, black people were fourth on the list anyway. Women, by the way, were first, and veterans, et cetera. But I could care less about a program. What I care about is when you look at the CEOs who call me, Fortune 500 CEOs, they're like, shh, John, we're still in.

11:03John Hope Bryant:Right? We can't say it publicly. We don't want to get our heads knocked off politically or in the public. But this is good business. Right? It's not just about it makes us feel good. And we've got some of that off air when we talk to people, too. Oh, absolutely. Go ahead. And this is saying, I'm sure we could trade names. These are the biggest names in the most conservatively run institutions because these are emerging markets. It's not just a feel good. Look, I've already said a third of our customers, a third of our economy is women. 40 % of this economy is black and brown. 40 % of the country is black and brown.

11:35John Hope Bryant:It's going to be a majority of minorities. Here's a shocker for you. 10 ,000 baby boomers are walking out of the economy every day. Let that sink in for your audience. Not a year, not a month, 10 ,000 a day are retiring. Bye. Going to play golf. everybody's going to play golf at the same time. Who's going to replace them? And even if you don't care about them, I mean, the them, my rich friends, my poor friends would do better if only to stay rich because it's a circular firing squad. You know, you're shooting your replacement. We have got to understand, unless we want to speak Mandarin in 20 years, Chinese, and have them be the biggest economy in the world, we are all we got.

12:17John Hope Bryant:Here's another shocker for you. It's all this is in the book. And I have asked really smart people these questions. Like, what do you think the banking, the traditional banking sector is? What percentage do you think are non-immigrant, foreign-born people? What percentage of the banking new account activity? Oh, 5%. 54%. 68%. And people are just shocked. What do you mean? Because 95 % of America is banked. 95 % of traditional America already has an account. So the new activity is coming to all the big banks, and I've seen the data, from foreign-born, new to country. That's where the boost is. Well, that's what happened in the early 20th century when the Irish and the Polish and the Jewish and whoever came to America.

13:03John Hope Bryant:This is not a new story. It's just these folks look a little different, right? So I love the math, to quote Melody Hobson, because it doesn't have an opinion. I think we had to push back, and now America, I think, is going to push forward, and the business plan, the balance sheets are going to push forward. Why? You can't grow an economy by shrinking it. I'm going to say that again. You cannot grow GDP by making the economy smaller. And we have made, this is not a political statement, it's just the facts, we have made the economy smaller because there's less people participating in it. The unemployment rate for African Americans has doubled.

13:45John Hope Bryant:last year 300 black women lost their jobs in the first two quarters of 2025 these are not good signals for the economy and these aren't lazy people these are folks who want to work so I think Citigroup reported in this book discrimination against black alone between the year 2000 and the year 2020 cost the US economy 16 trillion dollars trillion. And if you just knock it off, it returns a trillion dollars a month. You add the trillion dollars a month to the GDP. These are meaningful, big numbers. You are speaking our language. When you're talking about these numbers, you're talking about GDP.

14:33You've advised a couple presidents on financial literacy. Would you run for president?

14:39John Hope Bryant:I've been asked a couple times. sometimes never on air well the reason i ask is because when you said you were going on tour yeah for this book it sounded like the way you were approaching it was almost like a politician approaches and i don't mean that in a pejorative sense because a lot of people think you know that's a pejorative thing to say but it sounds like the way somebody who's running for something approaches reaching everybody to get their vote or to communicate to them so my model uh i'm glad you actually said this because get this out of the way my model is dr king not john jfk you know our president brock obama or president clinton who i absolutely love i think that guy is amazing what he did in reducing the deficit and increasing uh the economy for all people at the bottom um and and uh but i know i have no interest in in running for political office and this is not what that is about i am though uh moving a get it done party not a party but i am moving i am moving like this is I just told my team this morning think of this as if it's a presidential uh national effort I'm going on tour I want to talk to everybody because we need we need to have a third way we got to break this cycle of the the far right and the far left going in their camps and just talking to their echo chambers when the biggest group in America are independents and they're going to have a voice at all and I just want I want there to be a a a moment where the middle forces the edges back to the middle from both parties, because both parties, in my opinion, are out of sync with America.

16:09John Hope Bryant:And if I can do that by not running, by not being political, by not being partisan. In fact, I said this morning, I'd rather I hope that the mayor of New York and the mayor and the president of the United States and the administration steal every idea in this book. Don't give me credit for it. Rip it off and use it. because if they win, we win. If they lose, we lose. So I have no agenda personally other than continuing Dr. King's unfinished work, the Poor People's Campaign when he was assassinated, and Andrew Young, my mentor, Frederick Douglass' work 100 years before that. I think this is the third Reconstruction is what I'm telling you.

16:48John Hope Bryant:First Reconstruction was after slavery, after the Civil War. Does all the change happen in the private sector? And I'm just curious. You're really smart, by the way, to answer me that question. Have you talked to Mayor Momdani? Not yet. to the White House? I have been asked if I would, not debate, but I would have a conversation with the mayor, and I said yes, I'd be happy to, a public conversation. I have met last year with Secretary Besson, who I've considered a friend, I like him. I don't think the environment was right for him to talk to me and for us to have a bipartisan, I call it a Lincoln-Douglas conversation, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, to bring the country together through financial literacy.

17:26John Hope Bryant:I don't think the environment was right a year ago. is not still quite right, but I think it's warming up that the country is going to force, not me, but it's going to force this conversation because affordability is not affordable because folks got too much money at the end of their money. Because we've broken the promise that if I work hard, play by the rules, do the right thing, keep my nose clean, pay my taxes, I'll get a reasonable shot of success or failure on my own merit. And I'll say something about the administration. I don't care how smart you are. I don't care how well-meaning you are.

17:56John Hope Bryant:And I think most people are well-meaning. But if you're a billionaire for whom we all should aspire to be, okay, you can't do anything broke, right? If you're a billionaire or a centimillionaire and you've got private planes and private security before you got Secret Service, if you haven't been to a grocery store in 20 years, I mean, I don't care how nice you are, how can you possibly understand the pains of somebody who's got a red notice or a cutoff notice? And I'm not being pejorative or in any way political. It's just common sense. Well, it's similar. We had a conversation with Peter Atwater, who is an economist or teaches economics at William & Mary.

18:36But this whole idea that people, in terms of the K, you know, the upper rung need to spend some time with the lower rung to really understand what's going on.

18:43John Hope Bryant:Get on a Delta flight and coach for a week. Yeah. All right. Go through the airport, through the terminal. Stand in line. And those are still wealthier people. Those are the ones who can afford to fly. Go to a grocery store. Yes. By the way, those are still middle class people. If you're at a decent grocery store, you're still middle class. I think everybody just needs a dose of reality. I go to what I call a hood. I go to the community once a month. Just drive through it. If I'm on the highway and I have some time, I get off the highway. I go through a working class neighborhood and I'm nosy.

19:17John Hope Bryant:I'm just looking around. And it's amazing what you see. check casher payday loan lender rent our own store title lender as in car title liquor store forget your problems pawn shop one block church down the street trying to make you feel a little bit better once a week that's your neighborhood therapist in that neighborhood of 500 to 620 you live at 61 years of age by the way I've mapped every zip code in America by credit score with the data from Experian thank you very much, and from the U.S. Census. And we found that you lived at 61 years of age. For every 50-point increase in your credit score, you live five more years.

19:58John Hope Bryant:So 15 minutes away from every 500 credit score neighborhood where you live 61 years of age, you live to 81 years of age, and your credit score is 700 plus, and the economy has taken off. John, just 40 seconds. If you could change one thing beyond reading your book and sharing the book and the message, what would you change, just quickly? The anger. Oh. The Bible says a house divided cannot stand. It's also just good common sense. We have to all row the boat in the same direction. We have got to get out of our own way. Our problem is us. Everybody wants to be an American, but Americans. We've got to knock it off.

20:36John Hope Bryant:We have to knock it off. Russia wants our way of life. North Korea wants our way of life. China wants our way of life. They can't win in a fair fight. They need us to destroy us, and that we are helping them with. and so I'm hoping to shake up the debate in the discussion so it so an outsider maybe forces people to come to the inside of the hearts and minds of the average person watching this and their head is nodding saying my god finally common sense thank you so much we know you're starting a tour with the book when you circle around again come back I'd be honored anytime we haven't talked about AI and I know I know but you've given a lot of time to unpack and And one question I was never asked on air, I appreciate that.

21:19But running for president?

21:20John Hope Bryant:Oh, God, I didn't mean to repeat it. I have no interest. That's what we try to do here. John O 'Brien, so great to have you here. The new book is Capitalism for All, Inclusive Economics and the Future-Proofing of America. John, thank you.