MidDays with Gerard Gibert 2026-07-28

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Get ready to go beyond the headlines and join a meaningful conversation with people from around the state. You're listening to MidDays with Gerard Gibert here on SuperTalk Mississippi.

**Gerard Gibert** (1:01)
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to MidDays. SuperTalk Mississippi. I'm your host, Gerard Gibert, along with Rhino in the Element Wealth Studio, guiding you through the middle of your day with facts, fodder, and fine music. Morning there, Rhino.

**Rhino** (1:17)
Howdy, howdy.

**Gerard Gibert** (1:18)
I trust you had an enjoyable, extended weekend. How was it?

**Rhino** (1:23)
It wasn't quite long enough, but that's only because I took too many naps.

**Gerard Gibert** (1:29)
Well, there's nothing wrong with taking some naps, a little downtime, refresh, re-energize, refuel, all the various verbs and adverbs associated with a little vacation. Good for you. We got Gordon Fellows on the program today. He, of course, the president of the Mississippi Bankers Association. He'll join us at 11.05.
And then at 12.05, kicking off hour three of MidDays, it's Richard Ruberson, president and CEO of the Mississippi Hospital Association, and Dr. Kim Hoover, president and CEO of the Mississippi Hospital Association's Education Foundation. So we'll get some good reports and discussion with those individuals today. Looking forward to that.
The markets are mixed. The Dow is actually in the green doing quite well.
It's off its highs of the session. It's up about 360 points. It has been up as much as 450 this morning. But it's the chipmakers over there on the NASDAQ. Man, when you see a single stock that's down $88 in a day, that's big time. Big chip sell-off is deepening today. Taiwan Semiconductor, Broadcom, AMD, Micron, NVIDIA all down rather significantly. There's concerns about China. Oh, you've seen this. They're making a headway in the artificial intelligence race. There's concerns there.
And they're employing the same tactics they do in other industries. They just flood some particular industry. In this case, it's AI and chip making with government money.

**Rhino** (3:41)
But it seems like for the first time since their rise to prominence and their attempt to gain world power, they're having to seriously think about where they put the government largesse.

**Gerard Gibert** (4:02)
That's true.

**Rhino** (4:04)
Because they're having to prop up failing real estate markets that have been the topic of speculation for a decade now, with entire cities of skyscrapers, essentially empty, might have 500 people living in a city that looks like it should hold 50,000. So they're having to prop up that part of that sector of their economy, and they're speed running what we're dealing with as far as an aging population with an outsized reliance on the government, whether that be like in America, we've got Medicare, we've got Social Security, we've got all these things that deal with retirees and the aged.

**Gerard Gibert** (4:52)
Right, yep.

**Rhino** (4:54)
And how that's going to be a problem in the future because none of it was designed to handle a gigantic, aged population. Well, China, the only way you really have a retirement is if you work for the government and the government just keeps getting bigger and their population's not getting any younger.
They're experiencing worse side effects of the social revolution than we are as far as the decline in birth rate.

**Gerard Gibert** (5:27)
Japan is well, of course.

**Rhino** (5:28)
I mean, Japan is worse off than China, but China is worse off than America.

**Gerard Gibert** (5:32)
Right. And it's been Japan's been in this conundrum for a while, and they're still trying to figure out how to dig out of it. The bottom line is they got way more old people that are on the government payroll, if you will, than they do young people working and funding their retirement.
And because you get to a point where you just physically can't work, and if you don't have some income somewhere somehow coming in, then you just die. I mean, you just wilt away and die. So we're not going to do that. Their society is not going to do that. We're generally speaking not going to do that here. But it is exacerbated in China. Part of the problem, as you know, is they lie about it, and you don't know. You have to really dig some of that information you just shared. You have to dig to even understand that, and be enlightened and made aware of that.
But they're making some strides in chip making, and there are concerns about the government's involvement in that, talking about the Chinese government's involvement in that.