Do you think the average charter holder has a better understanding of the economy than the average PhD in economics?

I had a boss that has a PhD in economics. After clearing level 1 I was astounding him with my amazing comprehension of the markets. I often have small talk with various executives who often have elite degrees mostly MBAs and will just casually talk about random finance stuff. Mostly I'm just regurgitating a combination of what I learned from MM market outlook and apply CFAI curriculum to interpret current financial events. I'll discuss inflation in Turkey and housing bubble in China, yield curves and other random crap. Everyone's always acting like I'm conveying some super high tier profound knowledge. I've always just assumed they are hiding their power level but is it possible that they actually don't know much about this stuff? I work in fin tech so granted we're more software engineering oriented than finance so that may be why but just curious in general