00:00But another big question is, will the Fed cut rates on Wednesday?
00:06We know the central bank hasn't cut this year.
00:09And to say the least, Donald Trump has been super frustrated over this.
00:16Frustration probably doesn't begin to describe his dissatisfaction with Jerome Powell.
00:21I think that a quarter point reduction is probably in the cards.
00:26And Jerome Powell, who's the head of the FOMC, which is the vote-setting body, and the object of Donald Trump's ire, really teed up a rate cut last month with a keynote speech that he gave.
00:40I think the big question is, what happens after that?
00:44Because one of the things that Powell said is that he thinks that rates right now are only moderately restrictive.
00:51That suggests that rates don't have that much further to fall, certainly not the full three percentage points that Donald Trump has said he wanted to see.
01:00Throw into the decision-making process, inflation in the U.S. hasn't gone away.
01:05It's going in the wrong direction, heading toward 3% at an annual rate.
01:09The Fed's goal, the Fed's target, is a 2% inflation rate.
01:12That's a pretty big gap.
01:14We also look at consumer spending, which is about two-thirds of the U.S. economy, such an important part of the U.S. economy.
01:21If you use retail sales as a proxy for consumer spending, retail sales rose quite a bit in the month of August, not 0.6%.
01:29That isn't adjusted for inflation, that number, but it's still a healthy rise more than economists expected.
01:34So it suggests that the consumer is still alive and well, even though there is evidence that labor growth is slowing quite a bit.
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