JPMorgan's Michele Says Economy 'Just OK,' Recession Remote

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00:00How is the U.S. economy right now? How do you see it?

00:02I think the U.S. economy is just okay. It's not great. I think recession is remote, but it's a

00:11little bit squishy. So it feels as though businesses and households are still struggling

00:16a little bit with tariffs and the ultimate impact to cost of goods. I think that's a headwind.

00:23Certainly the government shutdown hasn't helped with sentiment. And of course the Fed has

00:28highlighted for a while that interest rates are a bit on the restrictive side. And I think

00:33all of those things are conspiring to take a little steam out of the economy right now.

00:38The part of the labor market part is what I'm really interested in hearing from you.

00:42Absent government data for a couple of months, what's an accurate view of the strength of the

00:46labor market right now? So the government data is one thing, but you and I both work in franchises

00:53which have ungodly amounts of data. We use that. We look at the chase data. We look how

01:00the consumer is performing. The consumer looks okay. Deposit balances look okay. We're seeing

01:08big ticket purchases starting to tick up a little bit. But of course, all of that is concentrated

01:13in the top quintiles of earners. From businesses, our equity and credit analysts talk to literally

01:21hundreds of businesses a day. And what we're hearing there is they don't feel an urgency to

01:28do any hiring. They're in pause mode, headed into year end. And of course, that would weigh

01:34on the labor market.