Gerri Willis, Not a Member of the Cavuto Crime Family, Gets Imus Psyched for "The Willis Report"

Fox Business Network newbie Gerri Willis’s new show The Willis Report will debut this evening at 5pm, and the Southern belle told Imus that she’s ready to go. She also confessed admiration for fellow hillbilly Dagen McDowell. 

“Dagen has the cajones to have a southern accent,” said Willis, a North Carolina native. “And I don’t.”

Hopefully she’s got the cajones to accomplish the goal of "The Willis Report," which she said is to navigate people through all the bad news.

“You don’t have to continue worrying about the deficit, what’s going on overseas in Europe, the concerns about earnings in this country,” said Willis. “Because at the end of the day, we’re going to be okay. We just have to get through this gap.”

Her show will also strive to help people guard their wallets. “Whether it’s Congress that’s trying to pick your wallet, or it’s some company that has hidden fees they don’t want you to know about,” she said. “We’re going to be all over it.”

While laypeople like Imus and Charles focus on the Dow Jones Industrial Average as an indication of market performance, Willis recommended looking at a host of factors to determine each day’s financial outlook.

“It’s only 30 stocks at the end of the day,” she said of Dow Jones, and suggested Imus also look at the S&P 500; the NASDAQ; tech stocks; bonds; and real estate transactions.

But "The Willis Report" will be about more than just investing. She’ll also tackle personal finance, but promised it won’t be the typical mantra, “put aside $25 each and every month for the rest of your life, and you’re going to be really, really wealthy.”

As for newsier topics, Willis believes the cost of oil is going down because of the weak economy, and that banks are still too nervous to make the loans they should be making. “They’ve gone too far,” she told Imus.

Initially a newspaper reporter in Lima, Ohio, Willis became interested in finance when a local Ford plant there laid people off, and residents had so little money that they turned to an informal barter system to get by.

“At the time, I was covering City Hall, and I realized City Hall couldn’t do a thing about it,” she recalled. “Their hands were tied.”

She then became interested in money and peoples’ lives, and turned her back on politics; lucky for the Fox Business Network, where today at 5pm she’ll talk about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“You think we gave the banks a lot of money, the automakers a lot of money—we’ve given Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac even more,” she said. “These are our dollars just going down the drain, and there is no hope of redemption here.”

It’s a feel-good program. Kinda like this one.

-Julie Kanfer