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00:00The Fed of Atlanta estimates that the growth rate in real terms was 3.8 percent.
00:06And this is in spite of all this other conflicting information that we have.
00:18Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Myers Report Fast 15. It is Friday, October 10th, 2025.
00:25Well, Gary, let me just say we're all very excited about the peace agreement that's been breached.
00:33And it looks like we finally, finally have a great opportunity to get peace in the Middle East.
00:39The interesting thing is the Myers Group forecast that back in November of last year.
00:45We originally forecast as a group that there would be a peace agreement in the Middle East sometime in January.
00:53There was almost an agreement there, but it was broken up.
00:57And we did say it could come later in the year.
00:59And we're hoping that this is finally it.
01:03And having forecasted in advance was kind of a small victory for our group.
01:08But it's really a bigger victory for the world if it can hold.
01:12Yeah, I'm really proud to say our forecasting team, which consists of more than 22 diverse people with international subject matter experts, people from around the world.
01:25And we have an accuracy rate of over 95% on our 174 forecasts that were made for 2025 and 2026, which was made in October, November and December of 2024.
01:42And anyone can see them at MyersReport.News.
01:47In the meantime, Don Day is still in Albuquerque.
01:54And we got some stuff to show that he had sent us.
01:59Don is still at the Albuquerque Balloon Festival, which is running for about 10 days and ends on the 12th.
02:06Don is the chief meteorologist and responsible for the weather forecast made for 600 balloon crews and their passengers and their equipment.
02:21Don's official title is chief of weather.
02:24This is the balloon launch at 7 o'clock in the morning.
02:31Here's some more.
02:32This is quite an event.
02:38People are coming from 41 states and I think about 15 countries.
02:48Anyway, Don's responsibility is to make sure that everybody is safe.
02:57We have 41 states and 11 countries, including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.
03:11Gary, is it true that the Chinese balloon crew has been cautioned that if it gets too far off course, that they'll be guided back by Air Force jets?
03:20We've heard rumors to that effect.
03:22Right.
03:23Because we've been down that road before.
03:25Isaac, what are the biggest challenges switching gears?
03:33There's a lot going on this week.
03:35What are the biggest challenges that trucking carriers are facing right now?
03:40Yeah, rising cost of almost everything and dropping rates across the board with almost every mode of transportation.
03:47The rising cost, one of them in specific that's getting a lot of attention right now, is the rising cost of insurance.
03:54You're looking at 10% to 15% increases across the board, regardless of claim history for carriers.
04:02And most carriers have renewal here in the upcoming months at a time where, again, you know, freight demand is soft, rates are soft, and not many people are going to have money to get through their insurance down payments here.
04:16A lot of potential pain in the trucking industry to come.
04:20What's driving the rate increases, Isaac?
04:24Nuclear verdicts across the nation has been something that we've been lobbying in D.C. for the last five years.
04:30Nuclear verdict is anything defined by a $5 million judgment or above.
04:35And that's becoming more and more common with all the, you know, billboard attorneys that you see and all the attention versus us big, fat, and ugly trucking community.
04:46A lot of attention to take money away from us.
04:49Big insurance claims, deep pockets that often go, I know Warren just settled one for $55 million.
04:55That's what's causing, very, very specifically, that's what's causing these insurance rates to increase.
05:01And I know some of those situations can be somewhat contrived.
05:07Last week, you showed us a, thank God that we've worked out, you showed us a situation where one of your trucks was driving in the right lane below the speed limit.
05:19There was another truck to the left of it, so your truck could not go into the center lane.
05:26And then a woman jumped out of her car and stepped in front of your truck as an attempted suicide, which certainly could have put you in a difficult legal spot.
05:41But the strange thing was, thank God, the woman's total injuries were a broken wrist after being hit by a semi.
05:49Yeah, Gary's absolutely correct.
05:51It happened on October 1st.
05:52A woman jumped right out in front of our semi trucks doing 70 miles an hour.
05:56Thank God.
05:57The little sway of the driver going to the left saved that woman's life.
06:02Broken wrist and a couple broken bones.
06:05But yeah.
06:05Yeah, it's a, thank God we had the camera.
06:08Could have been a completely different situation for us.
06:10She was apparently a drug addict and was trying to commit suicide.
06:14But that's the insurance piece, though.
06:16You know, when I first got in the industry, you know, my father taught me, you know, it's always the trucker's fault.
06:21We're professional truck drivers.
06:22Unless we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn't our fault, it falls on us.
06:27And that's what happens in court as well.
06:29You know, anytime that life is lost, unfortunately, you know, things like punitive damages sometimes balloon up.
06:34And we have these insurance issues across the industry.
06:38Isaac, how are current import volumes trending across major U.S. ports compared to this time last year?
06:47So they dropped like a rock here in September.
06:48We had a really, really busy August through, I'm sorry, May through August with all the front loading due to the tariffs.
06:58All the holiday stuff is here.
07:00If you guys have been in your local Home Depot, Lowe's, or Walmart, Christmas product is already up as of locally here from two weeks ago.
07:07A Halloween product was up middle of July.
07:10The warehouses are filled.
07:11They brought in their product.
07:12And we're definitely seeing the volume start to decrease due to that front loading.
07:17It was down 9% volume for down across the board.
07:219.5% in the month of September.
07:24We're predicting 22% nosedive here by the end of October.
07:29Isaac, I assume that an awful lot of these carriers are going to go bankrupt in here.
07:34I mean, with the insurance costs going up through the roof and with the rates going down, it's got to be a tough, tough market to stay in business with.
07:43It's been extremely difficult for many carriers.
07:46And this is like the perfect, well, this is the trifecta now that's coming towards the tail end of 2025.
07:51We've been plagued with overcapacity now for the last three years, soft demand for the last three years.
07:56You know, that's still rising costs for the last three years.
07:59All that's coming to a head right now with the addition of the English proficiency and the focus on the work visas that are coming in.
08:10Again, they're predicting 200,000 drivers across the board will be wiped out by the end of October.
08:17Now, Chicago specifically is arguably the epicenter for all of these imported truck drivers that would be affected by this.
08:26This is going to be a bloodbath in Chicago.
08:29But many, many, you know, many, I say good American trucking companies that aren't taking advantage of drivers.
08:36And yes, I'll say it, that aren't taking advantage of drivers.
08:39I think this is going to be the catalyst that really gets us where we need to be here in the next six months.
08:46Okay.
08:47Bob Janetsky, Dr. Bob.
08:50Yes, sir.
08:50How did the markets do this week?
08:54Very little change in the markets.
08:56Either the stock market.
08:57We did have some new all-time highs, which you would think would be great.
09:02But when you look at where they were relative to a week ago, very little difference, either up or down.
09:09The Dow was down a little bit.
09:11The S&P was up maybe a tenth of a percent.
09:14Really quiet markets.
09:16And that was true not just for the stock market.
09:18It was also true for the interest rate market.
09:21We've had a very, very gradual lowering of the long-term rates.
09:27They're finally down to like 4.1% on that 10-year Treasury.
09:33And anything below 4.5% I think is encouraging.
09:37It means that the markets are convinced the Fed is on the right track to get inflation down.
09:43So pretty good results in the markets.
09:46But a pretty quiet week, especially since there wasn't much in the way of economic news coming out.
09:53Because the government workers that produce an awful lot of the data are not there.
09:59They're home.
10:00Could it be that the markets anticipated the peace settlement, which is why it perhaps did not impact the market?
10:09I'm not sure about whether they did or not.
10:12But the markets, I think, are responding to a couple of positive things.
10:19The analysts who have very closely tracked profits of companies, there are reports that they have been raising their estimates for the third quarter.
10:29Third quarter profit reports are just coming out now.
10:33And if the analysts are raising their estimates and the profits have already been booming, that's really good news for stocks and the stock market.
10:42And our short-term model of where the pressure is in the stock market just continues to suggest that there's an awful lot of upward momentum in the market, in spite of the fact that it's run so far and so long.
10:59That's very interesting, Bob.
11:00I mean, you know, if you think of stock market valuation as being sort of the multiplicative sum of earnings in multiples, right?
11:07But, Bob, a related question I have for you is I read that the returns in the market are concentrated in a very, very small number of companies.
11:17And they're all AI, kind of high-tech companies.
11:21And there isn't much breadth in the market.
11:24And there's a great deal of uncertainty around whether or not the massive investment that's going into AI is going to pay out in terms of the returns on the companies that are using AI.
11:39And it looks a little, to some people, it looks a little bit like the year 2000.
11:45And many of the AI companies are cash flow negative.
11:49And this could suddenly come down.
11:52And how do you think about that?
11:55Well, I'm looking at the profits.
11:57And the profits for the mid and small cap companies have been hit very, very hard.
12:02But they, too, are coming back.
12:04And their stock prices suggest that they're actually growing in the economy.
12:09So we've seen, I think, an awful lot of movement throughout the market now.
12:14Even with the small and mid-cap stocks, we've seen kind of a rebound there.
12:19To me, that's an indication that there must be some more strength.
12:22I was also at a, I gave a speech yesterday to a bank and its customers.
12:28And they were talking about the profit situation with them and their customers.
12:32And they were all really upbeat about what was happening.
12:36And these are small, mid-sized companies that are very diversified, dealing with a lot of areas.
12:43And they said, no, the third quarter looked good.
12:45And the fourth quarter was looking pretty good as well.
12:48But that also suggests that the tariffs are being largely absorbed by the importers and not passed on to...
12:56It's, yeah, it's not affecting the economy all that much.
13:01Hey, guys, don't forget that oil prices and fuel prices are trending down.
13:09And they have not been spiking up.
13:11They're down significantly.
13:12They're now down to about $61 a barrel for oil for West Texas Intermediate.
13:20And they are right in that groove that we had forecast of between $57 and $67 for the year.
13:28They're hitting it.
13:30Dr. Bob, mortgage, for the terms of the housing market, mortgage interest rates fell slightly for a 30-year fix down to 6.3.
13:38And the 10-year treasury rose barely to 4.13.
13:43But considering that some home builders are going to use buy-downs on their own mortgage packages so they could sell their homes maybe down to 5.5,
13:53does this mean that there is hope for the new home industry going into next year?
14:00Well, there's always hope.
14:02At the same conference I was at yesterday, we did have a number of builders and construction people in there.
14:08And they are really hurting.
14:10I mentioned the Home Builders Index, which is down the lowest rate it's been in a long, long time, which means a very depressed market for new homes.
14:21And all of those builders and contractors basically reiterated how poor current conditions are.
14:29One of the things that's driving them is not just the higher interest rates and the higher mortgage rates, but also the higher cost of materials.
14:38A lot of the things that they build have gone up in price significantly.
14:42Many associated with the tariffs.
14:45They've been saying the tariffs in their areas have really raised the cost of their equipment, raised the cost of a lot of things.
14:52And in addition to that, there are labor shortages in their particular businesses.
14:57As the market remains depressed, fewer and fewer laborers are out there on a regular basis.
15:03So they see real problems.
15:05And while there's always hope for the future, at the current time, the market appears significantly depressed.
15:12We're going to have a new number coming out for the Home Builders Index this coming week.
15:18I think it's going to be up a little bit from its low point.
15:21But these builders are hurting, and you're absolutely right about them.
15:24They have a lot of houses in inventory, and so they've been cutting the prices of their houses, which is not a sign of strength.
15:34They've been increasing their sales, but only at much lower prices, which is good for the homebuyers, but certainly not for the builders.
15:42Okay.
15:42Bob, since the government is still shut down, are the private economic indicators telling us anything?
15:50Yeah.
15:52Unfortunately, the building surveys, which are the best thing I think we have at the current moment, are still in conflict.
16:01We have the S&P business surveys that are showing us the economy in the third quarter, right up to the latest month.
16:08It's growing at a pretty good rate.
16:11You know, the numbers they have are like 53, 54.
16:1550 is break even.
16:17So 53, 54 means we're growing and we're doing a good job.
16:21The alternative surveys by something called the ISM, the Institute for Supply Managers, has been telling us, even in the service area, we're at break even and maybe even a little below that in manufacturing.
16:36So that's a conflict between the two private pieces of data that are the most recent.
16:42And it's telling us something that we're either between flat or moderate growth.
16:49My reading is that we're in moderate growth.
16:52As a matter of fact, we've got an alternative reading from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta that says third quarter growth.
17:01Now, third quarter growth was between the second and third quarters.
17:04And they estimate in that period is now history because we've finished that with September.
17:10But the Fed of Atlanta estimates that the growth rate in real terms was 3.8 percent.
17:18And this is in spite of all this other conflicting information that we have.
17:22My own estimate is that the growth rate was about 3 percent.
17:25So both the Atlanta Fed and my estimates would suggest that the economy is still growing at maybe a 3 percent, possibly even close to a 4 percent rate.
17:38And that's despite the weakness in the labor market, despite all the disruptions in trade due to tariffs.
17:46So that would be tremendously good news.
17:48And it would offset and off balance that news about a weak labor market.
17:53By the way, I guess as a point from my own personal experience in the truck stop business, the labor shortage began during the COVID period and has not really let up.
18:07It predated any effort to try and clean up the illegal aliens that have come into the country.
18:16I don't think that has any significant impact on it.
18:20Isaac, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future going forward?
18:27I'm very optimistic.
18:29Brighter days are coming, Gary.
18:31Bob, your view.
18:33Well, I'm optimistic.
18:34If we're growing and we're doing it without people working, that would be a really good sign for the economy in terms of...
18:43If you're one of the people, it's not working.
18:44The productivity.
18:46If you're one of the people that's not working, get a job, this show out there.
18:51So you're optimistic about the future, Paul?
18:54I am, yeah.
18:55Good.
18:56I am very optimistic about the future because I do see, I agree, interest rates are going to be cut.
19:04But I also see the new home building industry really getting a shot in the arm, not only from lower interest rates, but the point is that it will once again in 2026, I believe it's going to come out that it will be cheaper to buy than it is to rent.
19:23And that will really drive the housing market.
19:25Okay, and on that note, I want to say have a good weekend, stay safe, be well, and God bless America.
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