00:00We have seen, obviously, Americans upset about gasoline prices.
00:04They may be a little bit feeling better about the labor market
00:08because the conference board numbers is much more based on what's happening with the labor market.
00:13Current conditions, 123.8 up from 123.3, not as much of a move.
00:19And expectations, 72.2 from 70.9, which are still pretty low numbers.
00:26Here's the release is just coming out now, and I can take a look in a second here
00:32for what's happening with the jobs figures, but this is a better number than we had seen.
00:37We did see a little bit of improvement until the last couple of days in gasoline prices,
00:43so that may also have contributed to people feeling a little bit better about how things are going.
00:49The current conditions for the labor market are little changed, according to people who answered these surveys.
00:57But the six months from now, which would put it about Election Day, as Meredith was saying,
01:03employment, more jobs, people think there will be more jobs, 16 percent from 15.4.
01:09And also, people think there will be fewer jobs.
01:13It is the unchanged part that is up.
01:16And so, people think that the labor market will get a little bit better, and the same is true with
01:21incomes.
01:22They think incomes are going to be about the same, which may get to your point about the government
01:27putting out whatever money it can to try to improve people's views.
01:31More people are going to buy cars, more people are going to buy homes, they say,
01:35and fewer people are going to buy major appliances.
01:38When you look at, Mike McKee, oil at $100 or gas at $4 and I think 17 cents is where
01:47we were at the national average yesterday,
01:49is that as high as you expected it would go with a two-month closure of the Strait of Hormuz?
01:54I mean, it just doesn't seem like things are quite as bad as we would have thought before.
01:58And maybe that's why we're not seeing markets collapse.
02:02I mean, Paul Dobson had a great piece saying, like, you know, so far AI is allowing us to keep
02:08up with this concern around oil.
02:10Okay, well, I'm not an oil analyst, so I didn't really have an expectation other than that oil prices would
02:15go up
02:16and gasoline prices would go up.
02:17I think what has surprised people is that they are not rising in the futures market as much as they
02:24are in the spot market.
02:26And the spot market is what really matters in this case.
02:29In terms of AI, the AI spending to build out is helping.
02:34AI itself hasn't done a lot for the economy yet.
02:37So it's really this six months and beyond what's coming that the conference board tries to capture
02:44because the other thing that's coming, and Bloomberg's written about this a lot,
02:47is prices are going to rise and shortages are going to start showing up from this, especially the longer this
02:54goes.
02:55There was, I think, a Bloomberg headline the other day that said, you know, a tsunami is on the horizon.
03:01It's hitting Asia right now.
03:03It'll be here soon.
03:05And people are going to have to rethink their expectations for what's happening with the economy
03:10unless we can solve something very quickly.
03:12Well,
03:13Well,
Comments