This Gen Z-er Is Making Waves on TikTok by Making Finance Fun and Accessible For Everyone

Making finance accessible one TikTok at a time

While the world of finance may not interest everyone, we can all agree to the fact that it ends up affecting our world and ways in one way or another. While many feel it's all easier said than done to grasp the concept of finance and economics, Kayla Scanlon, a Gen Z TikToker, is taking the leap to demystify complicated economic concepts for the younger generation. Scanlon who started making TikTok videos in December 2020 has since attracted a loyal follower base. She currently boasts 168.3K followers on the video-sharing platform as of 2023 and has over 2.1M likes on her handle. 

Scanlon's take on 'Taylor Swift Boosting Economies' 

Most of her videos are actually smaller clips of the longer expositions on her YouTube channel, and this one on Taylor Swift concerts is no different. The short clip begins with the question, "Did Taylor Swift save the world economy?" She then talks about how the tour is set to generate more than $5 billion in global revenue. "People are spending around $1300 on the whole experience, across food, hotels and costumes, boosting the local economy substantially." Scanton also talks about how some countries like New Zealand adapted to the craze by adding more flights to accommodate the "swift surge" as people wanted to leave the country and head to  Australia, one of the nations the singer was performing in. She makes the case for Swift's impact by saying, "We have the Taylor Swift Policy, the fiscal policy, and the monetary policy, and Taylor Swift policy was pretty effective."

Scanlon's Advise on 'How To Beat Inflation'

In one of her talking-head videos, she begins by saying "the best way to beat inflation is to build more homes" before referring to a Bloomberg article that talks about Minneapolis tackling inflation by building more homes. "To caveat that, they have also had no population growth which helped stabilize the prices." She talks about how the state has also "eliminated zoning that allowed for only single-family homes and invested $320 million for rental assistance and subsidies over the past 5 years." She talks about how the residents of Minneapolis are not spending too much of their money on housing. "Housing is a huge part of the inflation metric" she concludes. 

Scanlon Explains 'What Happened to Europe's Economy?" 

She begins the video by stating, "American Economy is doing well comparatively to Europe and the wages in Europe have declined since 2019." She highlighted a key difference in how "the US have fiscal stimulus helped the people to keep spending, while Europe's stimulus went to companies" She cited the Russian gas crisis as the other key factor impacting Europe. She also highlighted the impacts of fiscal austerity (government spending less and increasing taxes), and how it didn't work for European nations. She thus concluded that America was ahead of Europe in the Inflation cycle as a result.

Scanlon on 'China's Economic Problem'

"China's whole economic model has been upturned," says Scanlon. She then talks about how the country has always relied on real estate spending so much so that now 1/5th of China's apartments are empty. "The country has relied on investments to boost their economy and hasn't really relied on its people to do so." She then talks about the country's economic model, adding that China has always built factories and skyscrapers which have gotten them to where they are today. She then claimed the "economic model is no longer sustainable."

Scanlon's take on "The Fall of Silicon Valley Bank"

"This is the second biggest bank failure in US history," she explains, before detailing the major reasons behind the downfall. She talks about how the bank benefited from the big tech run but couldn't keep up when the Fed started raising rates. "When the tech run began imploding they began losing customer deposits and then also began to lose new customers" she added. She labeled the whole incident as "a perfect storm" that led to the bank's downfall. She also shined light on the panic caused by the company trying to raise money to stay afloat. She concludes by saying, "This is the doom loop, the reflexivity, that is what happened."