00:00Let's go stick with the story of consumer sentiment. Joining us now is Stuart Paul. Stuart, that's not great. That's a much weaker consumer than we expected. Then you add that into the retail sales data that we already got. Yeah, it's pretty dismal data that we're getting so far for the month. And when we look at the conference board data, it looks like it's really expectations that were deteriorating. Now, even just coming into this report, one thing that was most notable about the economic landscape about consumers expectations was
00:29that the share of consumers that were expecting to lose their job in the six months ahead was far greater than the share expecting to find a new job. We also saw a labor differential. That's the share of workers who saw jobs as plentiful, less the share of workers who saw job offers as hard to get. That labor differential pointed to material weakness in the labor market. It had been improving somewhat since the summer. We had been thinking that we're getting basically through the trough of the labor market as we got deeper into the
00:59fall. But based on what we're seeing in terms of expectations, things are pretty weak. When it comes to pending home sales, I'm just taking all the data with a grain of salt because as Matt referred to earlier in the program, cancellations of contracts just continues rising. So the extent to which we could look at today's pending home sales data and read anything about November's existing home sales, we can't read into that very much. And so churn in the housing market is still just going to be slow.
01:26It's important to put a month to each of these data points because the retail sales numbers we got out were for September, which is like three or four years ago now. And pending home sales was for October getting closer. But as you point out, a lot of those have been canceled. And then the consumer confidence data is from now. It's an actual November reading.
01:46What can we take from this considering the I hate I hate the term K shaped economy because it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But, you know, we're going to talk to Carolyn Stein from the loop group, a high end restaurant a little bit later on.
02:00And I'm sure she's going to tell us that sales are great because the top 10 percent or the top quintile are still out there spending. The problem is the majority of the country is feeling a lot of pain right now.
02:10Yeah. The way that I've sort of characterized everything for a while now is that there's just a tenuous balance. There's a tenuous balance in the labor market.
02:17There is a tenuous balance when it comes to firms willingness to extend credit to consumers to fuel spending going forward. And if we see anything, if the dial turns in any direction based on today's data, it's towards weakness.
02:30And when that's the case, it just, again, solidifies what should be odds of a December cut when the Fed ultimately meets on December 9th and 10th.
02:40All right, Stuart, thank you so much for your time today. Stuart Paul from Bloomberg Economics, breaking down some of the many data points that we're getting in.
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