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00:00Put this in perspective, a quarter inch of ice on a power line, your normal standard power line, is 500 pounds.
00:08If you get an inch of ice, you're talking of ton, one ton of weight on a power line.
00:23Welcome to the Myers Report Fast 15. It is Friday, January 23rd.
00:302026. With us today, we have Don Day, our weather and climate guru.
00:36If it's weather and above the water level, whether it's or down below the ocean depths or even in outer space, Don's our guy.
00:47For economics, we have our chief economist, Bob Janetsky, formerly chief economist for the Harris Bank.
00:55And teacher and, well, teacher and, I guess, mentor to a raft of some of the nation's most well-known economists.
01:05He also gets the economy right, usually.
01:07Okay, Don, before we start, I want to share something that has come up regarding Trump, which I thought was rather interesting.
01:19In terms of what he is doing, it's not being said out loud.
01:26While we're doing this Greenland issue, what's also been going on is that Trump has been boxing in China and Russia on all the choke points around the world for shipping.
01:40China was getting very much involved with the Panama Canal, and Trump has stopped that.
01:46China had a contract or authorization to build a base down around the Cape Horn by the Straits of Magellan in Argentina.
02:01That has been stopped.
02:04The British still have Gibraltar, which is obviously important.
02:09We also have friends in the Suez, Israel and Egypt.
02:14We are cutting a deal in the Gulf of Aden with Somaliland and possibly Somalia, giving us bases there to protect the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
02:24The Straits of Hormuz are protected because right now, if the Iranians try to do anything in terms of blocking it, they will lose their entire military.
02:37The Gulf of Malacca, the Straits of Malacca are secured by Singapore, which has a very strong military presence.
02:47Philippines, Philippines was where the latest battle is with the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea, is being redeveloped by our own people.
02:56One of our own guys is building things down there.
02:58So the point, and then of course you have the Cape of Good Hope with South Africa, where there's a movement afoot to make the West Cape region of South Africa going independent,
03:12and their desire is to become a protector to the United States.
03:15Now, the Cape of Good Hope and the Cape and Cape Horn are important as secondary routes if anything happens to either Suez or the Panama Canal.
03:27All in all, and then of course we have Greenland.
03:30Hey Don, there's, you know, the talk about the Greenland ice melting.
03:35Is that really melting?
03:36I know, you get summer melting, but the ice accumulation on Greenland has been there for a long time.
03:45It's still there and it's not going to be ice for any time soon.
03:48So anybody thinking we want Greenland because we can start farming it or growing grapes again, not going to happen in our lifetimes.
03:56So it's really about submarines that can go through those routes and also things that fly over it.
04:05Yeah, if you look at it on a map, as you just showed, it's in a very strategic location in terms of, as you said, trade routes, overflights, and all of those other things.
04:15But Greenland is not thawing is what you're saying?
04:18No, you know, and any natural resources that are underneath that ice would be very, very difficult to get, you know, whether it's minerals or possibly oil or natural gas.
04:29You know, it's a very icy, very rocky place, and really that's about it.
04:35Okay, Don, how is this winter going in Chicago?
04:40You've told us it was only going to go down to zero.
04:42It's down to 11 below this morning when I got up.
04:46Yeah, I mean, what we have here is a historic, this is going to be potentially the next seven to ten days historic in terms of how large this winter storm is going to be for the nation.
05:00Two-thirds of the nation, estimated over 230 million people are going to be impacted by this system.
05:06And I'm showing you a satellite image, and you see all that blue up there in Canada pushing into the Dakotas and northern Michigan.
05:13And the satellite is seeing temperatures on the ground between 30 and 40 degrees below zero.
05:20Wow.
05:21That's the blue.
05:22And all of that's heading south.
05:24And it's going to go all the way down to the Gulf Coast.
05:28It's going to go all the way into Mexico.
05:30It should only give you a glancing blow, Bob.
05:33But this is going to impact.
05:38Look at the National Weather Service warnings for the country.
05:43It's very rare to see this many locations under a warning or advisory, either for severe cold in the blue or winter storm warnings there in the pink.
05:55And, you know, the deep south is just going to get creamed.
05:58And if we were to kind of put in motion through Monday of where that Arctic air is going, you can just see it kind of pulsing and heading in.
06:06And then this is the snowfall that's going to happen.
06:09So from El Paso to Washington, D.C., from Maine to Michigan, this is going to be a massive widespread area of 6 to 12 inches of snow or more.
06:22So the pink is snow?
06:23What's the gray?
06:26This is all snow.
06:28All of it?
06:29All of it.
06:30All of it.
06:30And the pink and the white and the light purple is where the snow is going to be the heaviest.
06:36And then this is what is most concerning.
06:38And I think this is, you know, we'll just wait and see what happens.
06:41But I think this could be the biggest problem is the ice.
06:46So the numbers you're seeing there is the potential of ice accumulation in inches that's going to be occurring this weekend.
06:53So you can see all the way there from El Paso through Texas.
06:56Because look at the entire state, almost the entire state of Arkansas could see, you know, a quarter to over an inch of ice or more.
07:08An inch of, put this in perspective, a quarter inch of ice on a power line, your normal standard power line, is 500 pounds.
07:17If you get an inch of ice, you're talking a ton, one ton of weight on a power line.
07:27And then add wind, and there's going to be wind.
07:30And then look at this ice as we go further east.
07:34All of, almost all of the Carolinas, almost all of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee,
07:39and then the ice could get all the way up into near D.C. and even Manhattan before it's all said and done.
07:46So if you add up the Arctic temperatures, 30, 40 below in the upper plains, the big snow and the big ice,
07:54this is going to cripple travel across a good chunk of the nation well into early next week.
08:01And this cold wave holds all the way through next weekend.
08:05By the way, the power outages that have not yet hit us, all the states are pretty clear.
08:12The only state that has any issues at all is Texas, and they have like 1,600th of a percent of their people don't have power.
08:24Yeah, well, it hasn't started yet.
08:25It's going to hit when?
08:27It's going to hit this weekend.
08:28It really is going to ramp up tomorrow and Sunday.
08:30This, I think, could be a really big problem because I can see a ton of power outages.
08:39And you've got to remember tree branches and trees coming down onto power lines.
08:43This is akin to the tree damage and the power line damage you would get in a major hurricane.
08:50But the problem is, I just showed you the geographic scope of it.
08:56You know, this is like a hurricane force winds from New Mexico to Virginia type damage.
09:03How is it looking for Iran and Eastern Europe?
09:07Eastern Europe is bitter cold with snow.
09:11And some of that cold weather is getting into Iran.
09:15So Eastern Europe has been hit very hard with extreme cold as well.
09:20Wow.
09:23Dr. Bob.
09:24Yes.
09:25With all the craziness around Greenland, tariff threats, the Davos meeting, Minneapolis, as well as the fraud, and everything else, how do the stock markets react this week?
09:40As if everything is fine.
09:42The stock market simply just, I mean, yes, up and down, down significantly this past week when Trump announced major tariffs and the takeover of Greenland.
09:58And then when he went back and said, no, we've got a framework for dealing with this.
10:04And the Europeans came back and said, yeah, we agree.
10:07There's a nice framework for dealing with this.
10:09So everything's going to be OK.
10:10And bingo, the market comes back up.
10:13You average it out.
10:14And really, not much has changed.
10:16Well, we've had a pretty flat, maybe slightly uptrend for the past two or three months in the market.
10:23But nothing really dramatic in a significant direction.
10:28And the reason for that is that we've got a lot of data that's come out on the economy.
10:32And that data has been really good.
10:35The best data is for the second and third quarters of the year.
10:40And that shows the economy booming, 4% real growth and accelerating going into the fourth quarter.
10:47Now, we've got some monthly data for the fourth quarter that just came out this past week.
10:53And I know the Atlanta Fed is saying real growth is about 5.5%, according to their estimates.
11:00And that would be nice if they're right.
11:02I don't think they're right.
11:03At least the monthly data shows something closer to 3% real growth, maybe 3%, possibly 4%.
11:11But I think that they've gotten overexcited, at least based on the monthly data.
11:15Now, let me quickly add, economic data is not as reliable as we would like to have it.
11:22And the reason for that is always-
11:24Has it ever been?
11:26Yeah, it can be.
11:28But when you have major changes in the economy, and that's what we're going through,
11:31a period of major change.
11:34These are phenomenal changes.
11:35It's the reason why all of a sudden the economy is booming this past summer, booming again into the fall.
11:42And possibly, if the data get revised, the Atlanta Fed will be right, and it's booming even further at the end of the year.
11:51But we don't have confirmation for that yet.
11:54The point is, we've had major changes.
11:57They've been in a positive direction.
11:59And all those changes are reverberating through the industries, different industries in different ways.
12:05But the changes in employment, the changes in where we're heading in the future are all occurring.
12:12It makes it very difficult to track the economy at this time.
12:16We've been saying all along that we believe these changes are positive, that we're going to see accelerating real growth in the coming year.
12:23And when the data all get revised, that's exactly what we're seeing.
12:27But the preliminary data might still be based on, you know, analyzing old industries and what's coming there.
12:35And the preliminary data say, yeah, we're still growing, but it's just not that spectacular growth that we had before.
12:40I still think the end result is policies have been positive.
12:46We're seeing once the data gets fully developed, that we have rapid, very rapid growth.
12:53And the final thing that we really haven't seen completely yet is that the inflation rates are going to continue to come down.
13:00Gary, you mentioned great growth.
13:02We had an uptick, Bob.
13:03We had an uptick in the fourth quarter.
13:05Why was that?
13:06Uh, uptick really in the third quarter, GDP numbers, uh, from inflation in the total economy.
13:14And we kept going back and forth on this.
13:16Turns out I checked it out.
13:18Yeah.
13:18The inflation rate, GDP inflation rate in the third quarter was 3.7%.
13:24And GDP inflation, uh, means the whole economy, not just the consumer sector.
13:31And I believe that that was the result of the tariffs.
13:35I know a lot of people have claimed that the tariffs didn't raise prices.
13:39I think they did.
13:40I think they naturally did.
13:41I think they disrupted the economy.
13:44But it's a one-time hit to inflation and a one-time disruption.
13:50As we go into the new year, so long as, and I don't think we're going to have more disruption with tariffs.
13:57But as we go into the new year, we've got a new regime with tariffs.
14:01And I think things are going to move more smoothly in a rapidly positive direction, both for the economy and for inflation.
14:10So I'm still very optimistic about what's going on.
14:13Energy costs, the price of fuel seems to be going down.
14:19Going down significantly.
14:20Secondly, I know you've, uh, you've done some work on oil prices in the fourth quarter, down 9% from the third quarter, if I remember correctly.
14:30That's for the average, yes.
14:31And they've fallen further in the first quarter of the year.
14:34And we know from history that energy is a very important component of driving inflation.
14:41If those prices are coming down, we should be seeing some relief in the rest of the economy in terms of inflation.
14:48And of course, that's our forecast.
14:49And we have to wait and see if it turns out.
14:52But I'm confident that so far, the forecast has turned out very well for last year.
14:58Actually, we were low in terms of what we expected.
15:02We've had faster growth.
15:03And the inflation has come down about as we anticipated.
15:07I believe that's going to continue in the year.
15:09Overall, the forecast that we made hit at an accuracy rate of 93.2%.
15:17What economic data do we have coming up for next week, Bob?
15:20Well, we have the Fed meeting.
15:22They're going to be announcing what's happening in terms of monetary policy.
15:29I'm forecasting, and most people are, no change in short-term interest rates.
15:34That's not the important part.
15:37The Fed acts like a Russian commissar in terms of setting interest rates.
15:42It doesn't move the money supply to affect interest rates, which is what it should be doing.
15:48It simply arbitrarily picks a number, and then the economy has to accommodate it.
15:55And the number they picked right now, I think they're going to stay with.
15:59But the real important thing is, at their last meetings, they talked about they were going to start purchasing securities.
16:05Now, what does that mean?
16:06That means they want to start putting money into the system to basically create money out of thin air.
16:13And they want to put in about $40 billion a month, which is potentially significant.
16:19And that will relieve the pressure on interest rates if they were to continue to do that.
16:24The unfortunate thing is, if they're doing that just to stimulate the economy and drive spending even further,
16:33it could create problems in the financial market and have those markets keep interest rates a little higher than we'd like to see them.
16:42And so far, that's what's happened.
16:44Long-term interest rates have stayed pretty high in the 10-year, which is a key rate.
16:49Don't look at mortgage rates.
16:50The reason I say don't look at mortgage rates is the government has been playing games with mortgage rates to try and get them artificially low.
16:58That's not a good thing to do.
17:00That's like acting like a Russian commissar.
17:02But the key rate, the 10-year Treasury, is at 4.25% this morning.
17:09That's kind of high.
17:10We like that rate down a lot lower.
17:13But the financial markets are nervous that the Fed may simply be succumbing to political pressures
17:19and trying to overstimulate the economy at a time when they really shouldn't be doing that.
17:25What does your stock market model show?
17:28Should we be buying or not?
17:31Well, it's very close to neutral.
17:34It's modestly positive.
17:37Modestly positive, what does that mean?
17:39Sit back.
17:40Relax.
17:41But if you're really nervous about the stock market, no, we're too close to neutral for my game.
17:47The best advice then would be to watch the playoff games for the NFL.
17:51I think that would be a good idea.
17:54Okay.
17:55Don, are you optimistic about the future?
17:59Yes, I am.
18:00Yeah, I am.
18:02And Bob, you sound optimistic.
18:04I am.
18:04The economy, if the economy is doing well, if inflation is coming down, if profits are
18:10going up, the stock market is going to do well.
18:13It's very, basically, I like to look at momentum.
18:17Right now, we don't have the sort of strong upward momentum that we would like to see.
18:22But I think it's going to reoccur.
18:23If our forecast is right, and we believe it is, the stock market is going to continue to
18:29rise in the year ahead.
18:32Okay.
18:33Have a great weekend.
18:35Stay safe.
18:36Stay warm.
18:38And God bless America.
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