Fed's 'Frayed Nerves,' 'Statistically Impossible' Jobs Data, & A Recession Could Get Pinned On Trump

Today, he's like, wait a minute, what happened today? Uh-uh, we can't have any more days like this. What caused this? Oh, the Fed said that they're not going to lower interest rates but two times next year instead of four. Okay, somebody get J-PAL on the phone. That's the conversation that was had today. Why did the stock market go down? That's all he wanted to know today. Do you think we need to stop using that as like the proxy for everything? Yeah. I do. That's why I'm saying, if we can get Trump to grow up, then he can secure a legacy. Because then he'd be a leader who leads. It takes a really strong constitution to do what needs to be done. Hey, everyone, welcome back to another special in-person episode of The Julia LaRose Show. We are joined once more by Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO and Chief Strategist of QI Research on the last FOMC day of 2024. They're all over. You're super bull. Now we've just got eight more to look forward to for 2025. Just give me a few weeks off. Oh my gosh. Yes. And look, I've watched you today. You've been everywhere. And so hopefully we'll ask some questions that you haven't been asked today. But we do have to get just your reaction to the meeting. We did see one dissenter, which was kind of interesting as well. But just maybe more of your bigger picture take of the FOMC today. So my takeaway today was that there are a lot of frayed nerves at the Fed. For being theoretically an apolitical, independent entity, they sure did seem to be spooked by something. And since the only something that's really changed since they last met is an outgoing administration and a new incoming administration, I have to think that they're nervous about this incoming Trump administration. They shouldn't be when it comes to necessarily the economy, however, because there's no reason to believe, given the fact that incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Besant basically went on a roadshow to introduce himself to the world, doing long-form interviews with everybody who would interview him, really laying out his philosophy. I believe in carrots, not sticks. I really want to give companies, United States manufacturers, a good two years to reshore. I don't want to impose tariffs overnight, shock the economy. Everything we know about him, unless there is going to be a crisis of confidence in his incoming Treasury Secretary, then there's no reason that the Fed should be in complete freakout mode that we're going to see tariffs overnight. And even if we did, it still took a full 12 months in 2018 before we saw those tariffs show up in goods inflation. Right now, we've got goods deflation. And yet the Fed appears to be spooked by something. Do you think it's inflation? Like, if you had to place a bet, what do you think the spooked nature is for them? Well, that's the only thing that it could be. I mean, they raised their expectations for where they see inflation ending 2025. They lowered their expectations for where they see the unemployment rate, which I found to be highly curious. So they went in the opposite directions of what the presentations at the FOMC would have said. I'm talking about the staff presentations. OK, so opposite direction of the staff presentations, maybe elaborate a bit more on that. OK, so last week, the Philadelphia Fed came out with a report and they said, based on the revisions that we've seen to date, it looks like rather than having expanded in the three months ended June 30th, 2024, we now see payrolls as having declined by at negative 0.1 percent. So the Philadelphia Fed would have been prompted to make a presentation at the Federal Open Market Committee and explain how, based on revised data, it looks like the U.S. economy was in recession and call it March or April of 2024. Now, if you're a central banker and you're told that you're in a recession, is the next thing you do become more hawkish? I don't know. It seemed like a strange reaction function. Even more surreal is the Cleveland Fed, the dissenter. She was a dissenter. Go, Beth, go, I guess. I mean, if you really want to come out of the gate and make a name for yourself. However, in the aftermath of the pandemic, we saw that home price increases were filtering through to inflation gauges at such a slow pace that the Cleveland Fed research staff took it upon itself to come up with a more real-time shelter inflation metric, which shows that inflation actually rose much more rapidly. It also shows that in 2025, which starts in a few weeks, that they expect shelter inflation to tick down from about 4.6 percent. We've already seen shelter inflation start to come down, and they expect for it to end the year starting at 4.6, ending at 2.0 percent by the end of 2025. So either she disagrees with her staff because she basically refuted the data. That's curious. It's 46 percent of core CPI is shelter. And that is more of an anchor than goods inflation that takes 12 months to show up in the data if tariffs are enacted immediately on day one. So it was a very, very, very curious event for me. Obviously, markets didn't like it one bit. No, equity markets sold off across the board. Then Treasury yields, the tenure spiked. And then the tenure closed down on the day, the yield. What do you make of like the move in the tenure? What do you think that's signaling? Well, I mean, look, if the Fed is we've gone from one of the lowest median durations of unemployment, we've ticked all the way up to 10 and a half weeks. So if you lose your job in the United States today, the median expectation for when you find a new job is 10 and a half long weeks. Now, when we were entering the Great Recession in December 2007, it wasn't until October of 2008 that we had gotten all the way up to 10 and a half weeks of the median duration of unemployment through a different prism. If you'd prefer, we know that the probability of finding a job if you lose one is crashing. We saw that in the latest non-farm payrolls data. If you prefer, continuing jobless claims are at a three year high as of November and stubbornly so. And yet the Fed reduced its expectation for the unemployment rate at the end of 2024. There's just something that is very strange going on there. And that's, again, why I don't know what possessed them to say we're going to stop sooner because the economy is so strong. Yeah, I wrote this down during the presser. Jay Powell said that their decision was it was a closer call, but the right call. I also I just thought that was kind of curious language, too, like the closer call bit. I don't know if you caught that or if you make anything of it. So obviously there was a dissent. And for there to be a dissent means that it was basically cats and dogs, something that'll never be caught, even in the transcripts five years from now. We'll never know how heated that room got in 2008 and 2009 when they were like, no, we don't need the zero bound. Yes, we do need the zero bound. No, we don't need a 2 percent inflation target. Yes, we do. Clearly, there's a lot of disagreement on that committee or you would not have the predictions from the 17 members for the terminal Fed funds rate being anywhere between 2.4 percent and 3.9 percent. And anything and everything in between. That's not normal, right? That's not normal. It's it's normal to have a few kind of outliers, a few who are more hawkish and a few who are more dovish, but it's not normal to see them all scattered throughout. Got it. Yeah. OK, so one thing that I'm a bit more curious about, they often talk about like their their dual mandates and I kind of get the sense like they talk about that they serve like the everyday American or Main Street, if you will. Do they really? So I'm going to I'm going to play devil's advocate to myself. OK. And if you believe that Trump being elected is going to ignite private sector hiring tomorrow, then maybe you could see upside for inflation. My buddies over at Macro Edge tell me that there is going to be a December lull in layoffs, which is typical around the holidays. So we're going to kind of drift down from about a hundred thousand run rate for most of twenty twenty four to about half that level, maybe forty thousand layoffs announced for the month of December, but that they can foresee looking out about one hundred and ten thousand bouncing right back up in January. January is your typical seasonal throw the baby out with the bathwater month. Lots of bankruptcies, lots of layoffs announced, just clean house. If that's not going to be the case, if if corporate if the private sector is going to be so happy days are here again, despite household balance sheets not being anywhere near cleaned up, then you could make a case for inflation being reignited. But hard to do on a day when General Mills precedes the market opening by saying we sure are lucky that most of our customers eat at home because that's what they're doing. And that's the only thing working towards our benefit, because our business in terms of selling to restaurants is garbage, which we saw in the retail sales data. Right. We saw a negative print in front of restaurant sales. So, again, it's going to have to be an instantaneous recovery. I'm not talking about this cute little 18 by two mile island of Manhattan where everybody's benefited from Nvidia and Bitcoin and this pocket of wealth, the one percenters. I'm talking about the rest of the country, because you asked me about the Fed making, as is on the front page of its website, policy for the public good. That's a, quote, policy for the public good. Right now, the public is paying still near high credit card rates right now, auto rejection rates, mortgage refinancing, rejection rates, credit card application, rejection rates, they're all at record highs. So clearly, interest rates are not low enough for banks to ease off of those standards, mainly because they're still taking massive charge offs on debts going bad. And this is as we look two weeks down the road to credit reporting bureaus for the first time since March of 2020, hearing about the half of student loan borrowers who haven't paid since then, it's finally going to get a report it. And so and they're mostly higher income earners that didn't qualify for all of the for all of Biden's. I'm going to dismiss your student loan because you make so little money because you work in the public sector for whatever reason. We're talking about three, four hundred thousand dollar student loan balances. Those people are going to get dinged in January. So even further up on the income food chain, you're going to see bankruptcy start to accelerate as their credit reports get hurt because they haven't been. They say of the 37 million or so Americans, it's 37 or 42 million Americans who have student debt that 50 percent are not paying, but they haven't been penalized. Yes, it's March of twenty one. Why pay if you're not going to be penalized? Right now? Yeah. Yeah. So that's why I don't understand how and why Powell seems to think that pricing power is going to make a comeback because who's going to pay up? Who can? Who can? Who can? Yeah. You know, it's interesting, like even hosting this show, I get to talk to a lot of like very successful people. And I'll hear from my guests even talking about like how expensive it is to eat out. And you might think, oh, like that person's really, you know, wealthy and successful. But if they're feeling it every day, Americans are feeling it as well. And and to a greater extent. Yes. To a much greater extent. I mean, at our favorite little hole in the wall where we eat now, we drink water. We just do. Because at some point it's like, what do you mean? Two dollars and seventy five cents for a glass of iced tea. Are you kidding me? And so you just it doesn't matter what income cohort you're in. You find ways of pushing back against what you view as being ridiculous, either by choice or by necessity. I don't know. This might just be more of like a theory I have. So my age group, millennials, I'm married, would have thought like I would have owned a house by now. Housing's crazy. So I'm kind of hoping and praying maybe for a little correction or something. But because I haven't bought a house, right, I don't have kids yet. I would like to have kids. So I'm like, all right, maybe I would have been spending that money on a mortgage and other things. And so then I'm able to still eat out and stuff. I still feel I don't eat out. I don't eat out that much. But OK, I'm still able to do those things. Sure. But I wouldn't say like, oh, my gosh, it's a robust, like amazing economy. Like I would love to own a house. That's just not in the cards right now. And you're not alone. And, you know, if there's one point to burn my side, it just burns my biscuits. If there's one thing that as somebody who sent herself to night school to get her second master's in journalism, because that's what I thought I was going to do when I retired, clearly I'm not. But as a card carrying member of the fourth estate with a master's in journalism, if I read one more story about how delighted young families are to be renting homes in the right neighborhoods, I'm like, if you're renting a home in the right neighborhood, you're never saving 20 percent for the down payment. You're spend you're maxing out what you can spend on housing. And I'm happy that you found the one person who moved into that one neighborhood. But that's not the American dream. No, it's not. You live in a reasonably priced apartment and you save up for your 20 percent down payment on your house. You have your first kid. You squish the first kid into the corner of the apartment. You borrow some money from mom and dad. You add that to what you've been putting in savings for that down payment. And you set up your first house and home with a mortgage. Yeah, not renting, not renting. Yeah. That's why I'm like, I wonder if that those dollars are being reallocated elsewhere because it's like, all right, it's just not it's not the reality right now. Well, that's what we've seen. Right. That is what we've seen. Yeah. And then this degree of nihilism with millennials, with Gen Zers who are like, I'm never going to be able to leave home or maybe I'll have one kid, maybe. I mean, I have four kids. It's the joy of my life. But I started house and home in a different generation. Yeah. So when hosting the show, I also just get so many different viewpoints of the economy. And I can also see that in the comments section when I have various guests. I can just see the divergent views among the folks who watch the show. And by the way, I love you viewers. I love all of you guys. Nice people on the Internet. So why do you think that is? Why is it so divergent on just like the views of the economy? Some will say we're in a recession. Others like, no, this is great. It seems odd to me that it's murky. Well, as a factor of time since Greenspan came to office, right, when whatever the national debt was, two trillion dollars at the time. Yeah, something like that. That's like thirty six. Thirty six and ticking higher. Yeah. So when you live in a world where the government is buying the economy time, and when you live in a world where monetary policy, where the Federal Reserve is making the wealthy wealthier, you will always have a widening divergence of perspectives on the economy because there is a certain portion of the U.S. population, 45 percent or so, that doesn't own a single stock, that doesn't benefit at all from whatever Greenspan and Bernanke and Yellen and Powell have done for the wealthy. And they're the ones that don't even have the optionality of considering renting a single family home in the right neighborhood, in the right school district. They're stuck. They're stuck in an apartment. Probably multiple generations of them. And we wonder where the anger element comes from when so much government spending and so much of monetary policy has driven a divide between the haves and the have nots that critically has continued to expand. That gap has continued to grow. Yeah. You and I have spoken about your views of the economy. I think the last time you still thought we were in a recession. Do you still hold that view? Well, I don't hold the view, but I think the Philadelphia Fed has told us that that is what is being being borne out in the data. Right. If they're saying we believe payroll losses started in the second quarter of 2024, you don't tend to have payroll losses unless you are in recession and you don't tend to have payroll losses until you're several months into recession because payroll job losses always lag the onset of recession. We know that the industrial economy's recession has continued to deepen in the United States, the factory sector recession. We know that that's continued to get worse and worse. We also know that it was only in excuse me. We also know that in the recessions of 1970, I want to say 1984 and 2001, that there were three recessions in modern U.S. history that saw consumption never decline. Interesting. It is the private sector that dictates whether the U.S. economy and its private investment that dictates whether the U.S. economy is or is not in recession. I mean, if I was to tell you, according to all of the forecasts that are out there right now, buy now, pay later should be should cross the 100 billion dollar outstanding mark in 2025. That's a tenth of all credit card debt outstanding in the United States. And it's so easy for you to do it, too. It's easy for you to do it. It's not recorded and it's not reported. It's like literally every time I check out, it's like the buy now, pay later. Affirm, affirm. You can buy a Mai Tai and pay for it and you can buy a twelve dollar drink and pay for it in four installments. But we know from credit card debt that's continued to grow. We know from buy now, pay later and from banks seeing increased credit card charge offs, banks are finally connecting the dots because buy now, pay later, the way it works I've never done it, but from what from how I understand the actual mechanics work, if you don't pay, they've got the ability to go in and claw the money right out of your checking account. So if somebody is taking the money out of your checking account to satisfy your buy now, pay later payment, guess what? You're not paying on your credit cards. No. And that's why bank charge offs are going haywire. It's because banks are not accounting when they're doing their underwriting and due diligence for a given borrower what all of their debt looks like because the credit reporting agencies, because the powers that be, the regulators that Trump's administration is apparently about to blow up and make go away to make life even easier to take credit on. But we don't see a big chunk of borrowing in America. But I think the banks, because they're licking their wounds and they're continuing to see losses mount, that they're just going to start to incorporate assumptions. It's amazing as they underwrite. We don't see that, but I mean, we obviously see that Affirm thing literally everywhere. Like if I buy a plane ticket, it's like, do you want to do this in four installments? Like it anyway, it's everywhere. I mean, a year ago, a year ago, December the 1st, 2023, is when Walmart and Affirm partnered up and at any given self-checkout kiosk for non-grocery purchases. This is again, this is a contract that started a year ago. You could get from $400 to $2,500 of buy now, pay later credit at the self-checkout kiosk without ever seeing a human being at every Walmart across America. OK, that was an interesting point you made, like during recessions, there were recessions where consumption was still really high. That's fascinating. The Dallas Fed did the work and they laid it all out. It is unusual. Declining consumption is not a prerequisite to recession. And that's just data. Yeah. I wonder if you would even see like, you know, almost peak in consumption. We are a credit nation. And until there's a correction in the stock market, because the top 20 percent of earners account for 40 percent of U.S. spending. So until you see a correction in the stock market or Bitcoin or Nvidia stock or whatever it is, the 20 percent of Americans who are the highest earners, who account for 40 percent of consumption, they're going to make your guests view the economy as not being in recession. Yeah. OK, you just have my wheel straight like that. It's just so it's a skewed perspective and it should be a skewed perspective. Right. Because they have money. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. It almost creates like this sense of like, well, too, like I might feel more prosperous if I were. Sure. Of course you do. And that's what the traders and the portfolio managers and the money managers and the bankers, they're not in recession. Yeah. And therefore, why would they believe that there is recession? It's not like they're going to go driving down a country road in America or or even bother to check in with the North Texas Food Bank or the Tampa Food Bank that have been overrun. My parents volunteer at the food bank where I'm from. My mom brings her students to the food bank, which is incredible, like amazing work that they do. And you're right. The lines are incredibly long at food banks across the country. Yeah. But I don't think most people on this island are aware of that. Yeah, it's I live in North Carolina now, but yeah, you're right. It's it's a different world when you come visit Manhattan. And they're inconvenient truths to people who don't who are not exposed to it and don't feel it. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good point. Do you think, well, things operate on a lag. Do you think there's a risk that maybe Trump could inherit a recession maybe early on in the administration and could he get blamed for it? These bureaucrats are out for blood and and they're being told that they're in the bullseye. They're being told that they're redundant. And it was in July of twenty twenty three when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that July was actually revised up and then you had to look underneath the hood and then you found that those upward revisions to nonfarm payrolls for July of twenty twenty three were more than 100 percent government jobs that had been created and that actually the private sector had been revised down for that month. So when you look at the consecutive stream of downward revisions to nonfarm payrolls, which is something along the lines of 18 months to private, I didn't my statistics class in business school didn't cover that. There are not that many sigmas exist. The tails aren't long enough in the distribution. If that's the case and if we're now seeing, oh, sorry, the private farm, the private sector didn't create two point four million jobs in the year and at June 30th, twenty twenty four, it only created one point four million jobs. Sorry, slider, which trickles in through to personal income. What's to stop bureaucrats under attack from, as I say, releasing the Kraken and letting all of the truth that they've been hiding in statistically impossible data stretches. You don't have 18 months in a row of private nonfarm bills being revised down. It's statistically impossible. It's wild. Yeah. Unless somebody's monkeying with the data or unless their models are that bad. Either case, it's it's it's statistically impossible to have seen the string of negative revisions that we've seen. All I have to do is start reporting the truth. And the average American is not going to know any different. They'll pin it on Trump. OK, if we get the truth, what do you think? How how would you react to it or handle it or not going to surprise me? Not surprising. Yeah. Clearly, it will surprise officials at the Federal Reserve. Uh huh. Then what do you think we'd see from the Fed? Then they're going to backpedal. They're going to be like, oh, we said that if the labor market was to deteriorate, that we would come in and and not be as hawkish and and and be more of an easing mindset. It's a bad look, though. Do you think it's a bad look for the dot plots to go from four rate cuts to two rate cuts to what for rate? It's just a bad, bad look. And again, staffers at the Cleveland Fed said shelter and shelter inflation is coming down. Staffers at the Philadelphia Fed said job losses started in the second quarter of twenty twenty four. Why be tone deaf? Yeah. OK, so BLS data is just totally off. I mean, obviously, but what it's unless we have rewritten the laws of statistics. Yes, I would like to see like what I want to see the real numbers. We all do. Yeah, we all want to see the real numbers. I mean, it's to be in my profession and. And know that you're being lied to is excruciating, it really is, and it's not because I want my life as an economist and as a chief strategist to be easier. It's much more so because. I make myself come into contact with people, I I asked my Uber driver on the way to the airport, especially if he or she's in their 70s. Yeah. I'm like, why are you doing this? Because I have to. Why are you doing this? Because my kid lost their job. They moved back in with me. I've got to help feed the grandkids. Why are you doing this? Talk to people, maybe not in Manhattan, but talk to people. And and when you see that part time employment in America is higher than it was in 2010 at the peak of the aftermath of the Great Recession. It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense because we didn't have Uber in 2009, so we didn't have this gigantic shock absorber for the economy to absorb millions and millions and millions of people. In December 31, 2021, there were five million gig workers in the United States. Today, there are more than seven million just Uber drivers. Believe it. It kind of makes me want to tune in. It might be a little bit more like anecdata just from people I know, like, you know, folks who've lost their jobs, who haven't actually collected unemployment insurance. Would they be if they can make three times that much? They'll do some gig work or some sort of consultancy or fractional work. And I find that I'm like, that's interesting to me because that might tell me that maybe it's the numbers bigger than we realize. It is. But at the same token, by the same token, they don't have benefits. No, they don't have benefits. And I'm saying that they're not safe. It's like they're barely getting by. It's not like it's not a full on they're looking for that next job. But it's hard to get a job. I don't and I've never got a job from a LinkedIn application ever. No, ever. No. Yeah. LinkedIn's anyways. Well, I just assume it's hard, like in general. But it's like not to pick on Wall Street, but the weird thing is your average buy side or sell side analysts can write about the exploding trend in multigenerational household formation and see the data on a graph. But not understand the story behind it. You're like, do you really think he or she wanted to move back in with mom and dad unless that was a forced situation? I mean, look at the story behind the data. Gosh. And understand that those are human beings. And then the other part of that story, Danielle, is people are living longer, but also care for the elderly. It's got to be a huge thing. It's expensive. In 2023, you know, about 40 percent of multigenerational household formation was not kids moving back in with their parents. It was parents moving back in with their kids because who can afford nursing home care in America? Private equity ran roughshod over the entire sector, just filled it to the gills with debt and let them all start to go bust. Yeah. And where are you supposed to put your parents? I mean, it's long term care insurance in this country is most other developed nations spend double what the United States spends on long term care. And instead, we prefer to have people with acute chronic diseases in our hospitals, which is where we spend all of our money as a nation. You know, give the country ozempic, you know, get rid of all this chronic diabetes and heart disease. And what about what do you make of some of the initiatives from the Trump administration? Maha, for example, make America healthy again. Does that mean that everybody who's got a chronic disease gets ozempic? I don't know. But maybe you would take all those chemicals out of some of the food. OK, fine. Look, you can talk all day long about corruption at the FTC, corruption at the FHA, the need to blow the Department of Education off the planet. Amen. Hallelujah. Let's do it. I mean, think about what happened in America's big cities during the pandemic. Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City. Those kids in the public school systems who were thrown out of the classroom by the teachers unions will never catch up, ever catch up to public school students who were able to go back into the class. They were masked up, they were distanced, but they were back in the classroom with the teachers. Blow up the Department of Education. Go for it. I don't I have no issue with bold initiatives. I think Trump is making a big mistake by pulling two members of the House of Representatives into his administration. When that happens. House Speaker Johnson's going to have a one vote majority. One. That means that if anybody in the GOP is out with a stomach flu, you've got a tied House of Representatives vote straight down party lines. So I would have left those two Republicans in the House if you want it for the House to be stronger, if you're trying to push forward with big initiatives. But backing up one step further, we still don't have term limits in America. So what makes us believe that politicians who are career politicians like the new we all know who they are, the new head of the Senate? What makes us believe that just because we come up with some great ideas to make America healthy again, that all of the special interests and lobbyists who've been padding their pockets all these years, that they're just going to say, I don't need your money anymore. I'm going to do something for the good of the country. All of you and the promise of working for you as a lobbyist after I got out of Congress, I don't need that job either because I'm no longer self-centered. I'm just going to be a politician that is that is for the people. OK. But this stuff has to pass Congress and it has to pass a Congress that's quite full of career politicians in the Senate and in the House, one with a razor thin majority. And from the minute you you have this new Congress sworn in, you have 11 months. That's it. Eleven months before they break for the holidays a year from now to go campaign for the for the for the midterm elections. That's it. Eleven months to legislate and change the world. Yeah. How about. OK, so look, I want it to happen. I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer. I want for there to be change in America. I want for them to cut out waste. We pay taxes. Why do they get to waste our taxpayer dollars? Did you see Vivek's tweet of like the bill? That was I don't know how many, like over a thousand page. It's longer than a Harry Potter book. But like, yeah, I'm full of pork barrel. I just wonder, like maybe like sunlight could be a good disinfectant. Sure. Let's shut the government down. I don't know, but Julia, I'm not trying to be combative, but that's what you're saying. You're saying if we're not going to change the way things are done in order to change the way things are done, you've got to light a match to it, blow it up and say, no, go back, start again. Write a clean bill, which means shutting the government down. Merry Christmas and a happy new year. I'm just saying, yeah. People want change. And Vivek, look, he and I visited for an hour in Columbus, Ohio. We went over everything that needs to be done to reform the Fed. He's got it. I wrote it. It's got to be done. People, it's it is so awesome to talk about these things, it's so wonderful to tweet out about them. Somebody's got to play follow through. And I don't know if Mr. I gauge my success based on the level of the S&P 500. Mr. President, I don't know if he's your guy. If he's grown up since when he made that comment a week ago. Great. That's fine. Somebody is going to have to play the adult in the room and take the lumps. You want sunshine? Let the sunshine on and shut the government down. Bring it on. But somebody's got to be courageous enough for the follow through. Yeah. Danielle, I always love having you on the show. I don't know how much time we have. I think I just raised your blood pressure. I'm sorry, Julie. I don't want to argue with you. No, it's not that. No, we love you. I think you're probably more realistic about it, too. Then, you know, some people come on and then maybe they're like way too hopeful. And I might be too hopeful, too. Look, it's just the Wall Street Journal did a decent job recently of saying you might get a half a trillion. But but when you when it comes to I mean, my cynicism is born of a real thing. My mother retired from the U.S. government after a 37 long year long career. And this is a woman who was in the office seven days a week, seven days a week, because she worked overtime to help me get through school. She worked in the disability section of the Social Security Administration. She spent her entire career rejecting applicants for disability because they were trying to defraud the United States government. If you look at the exploding roles of people on disability in the United States today, they're considered mandatory spending, spending that cannot be cut. That's what worries me, is that so much of the spending is classified, whether it's Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, disability as mandatory, that I don't even know how how much they can cut without needing an act of Congress. So you're right. We do have mandatory spending. We also have 36 growing in debt, deficits that grow. And a Fed that's just told us it's not going to get much cheaper to service that debt. No. So what do you think? What do you make of like what do you think the future looks like or how do you think this plays out or ends? Does it come to a head at some point or I think we just I think it comes to a head quicker than we think. Inauguration day is what is it? January the 20th. And, you know, it's it's the soundbites are gorgeous. I'm going to let Musk come in on day one with his machete. Wield it. Chop, chop, chop. Poke the bear, poke the bear. I was going to say as soon as the S&P goes down, they'd have to stop, right? Well, today, he's like, wait a minute. What happened today? Today, Donald J. Trump is saying, uh-uh, uh-uh, we can't have any more days like this. What caused this? Oh, the Fed said that they're not going to lower interest rates, but two times next year instead of four. OK, somebody get J-PAL on the phone. That's the conversation that was had today. Why did the stock market go down? That's all he wanted to know today. Do you think we need to stop using that as like the proxy for everything? Yeah. Yeah, I do. That's why I'm saying it's tied to it. If we can get Trump to grow up, then he can secure a legacy because then he'd be a leader who leads. That means telling the people on this 18 by two mile island where they can stick their valuations. It's a hard person to be. It's a real honest to God grown up. He's pushing 80. He should be grown up. But that it takes some. It takes a really strong constitution to do what needs to be done. OK, as I said, we love having you on. I got to say, I love doing this in person with you because it's so much more fun than over the screens. I want to ask you a final question, and this is what I asked you last time. I mentioned before, like you're really good at connecting dots. You're good at uncovering narratives that maybe others miss. So I want to ask, what's that narrative, maybe that risk out there that's not getting enough attention that kind of keeps you up at night that you're thinking about? And then to counter it, what is something that you are optimistic on? So what keeps me up at night is more than anything else, mainstream media. We're not told the truth as an American public, and the media doesn't see any reason to change its ways. But what I've seen on the ground in Tennessee, in North Carolina, with my institutional clients telling me, you tell me, where can I send the check? Because the media left Helene behind. As if it didn't happen, there's still 300 missing kids. But when I see grassroots. People responding and rejecting what the media is not telling them by getting their checkbooks out and by helping where they can help. And when you see that there is a good, wholesome, charitable, backbone filled with integrity, majority of Americans, because I would argue with you that it would be the majority of Americans when you find out that the majority of Americans actually have a heart and want to right the wrongs that have been done by the media. That gives me hope. That gives me tremendous hope in tomorrow. That means that that the way I'm raising my kids is not in isolation. Other people are raising their kids the same way, to care for others, regardless of what you hear in mainstream media. Look deeper. Always ask. Find the people who are right there on the ground delivering tents and RVs and generators to people who are freezing their asses off as winter sets in where Helene ripped a path. But there are still good people out there. And that gives me a lot of hope. I love that. It is so beautiful. Danielle, will you let folks know more about QI Research, how they can follow you and find your work and anything that you want to plug in any parting thoughts that you'd like to share with this audience? The floor is all yours. So, yes, find me. We're running our 20 percent off our annual until the end of the year for The Daily Feather. I've got a cult following. It's very humbling. Thank you to all my readers out there. Follow me on Twitter at Demartino Booth. And this is my this is my parting thought. We have to remember what the season that we're in. It's about it is not a cliche to say it's better to give than to receive. If you believe a word that came out of my mouth about the plight of your average out of work American, then as we work towards Christmas and Hanukkah happens to fall on the same day this year, give, give to your charities, give to your food banks, give to those who don't have and thank me for it. Danielle Demartino Booth, CEO and chief strategist of QI Research. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time, all of your knowledge, your wisdom, your incredible words here at the end. Such a great way to end this conversation. I wish you a happy holiday season, a merry Christmas and a prosperous new year. Thank you so much.