Moody's Talks - Inside Economics - Good Report, Great Music

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

The August jobs report couldn’t have been much better.  Dante and Cris called it a good report, while Mark and Marisa thought it was a VERY good report.  Either way, the report has soft landing written all over it.  In standing with the good cheer over the jobs numbers, the group recounted their favorite music. Some surprises there.For the full transcript, click hereFollow Mark Zandi @MarkZandi, Cris deRitis @MiddleWayEcon, and Marisa DiNatale on LinkedIn for additional insight.  Questions or Comments, please email us at [e-mail]. We would love to hear from you.  To stay informed and follow the insights of Moody's Analytics economists, visit Economic View. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Inside Economics. I'm Mark Sandy, the chief economist of Moody's Analytics, and I'm joined by my regular team of colleagues here for Jobs Friday. This is, what is today? The September Friday, September 1st, we got the August jobs numbers, and we've got Dante D.N. T.O., ooh, I've botched that, didn't I? Dante D. Antonio. Hi, Dante.

Hi, Mark. How you doing? Good to have you. You're a regular here on Jobs Friday, and we'll get back to you in just a second to get the rundown on the jobs report. We've got Marissa, Marissa De Natalee. How are you, Marissa? Hi, Mark. I'm good.

How are you? You're feeling better? I am, yeah. Yeah. We were just commiserating over the COVID. We've all had another bout of it and lost smell and taste. Yeah, which I was reading is a rare symptom these days. Like in the early days of COVID, it was very prominent.

But with these latest variants, I read an article that said, Only like 5% of people are losing smell and taste now. Huh. So I'm in that lucky minority. I must know all the all 5%. Yeah. Everyone I'm talking to is taste and smell. Recently.

Recently. Yeah. Really? Okay. With this recent bout. Yeah. And it's like I can't, here's my Wawa coffee. This is pumpkin spice.

Don't ask me why you have pumpkin spice. I can't tell if that's pumpkin spice or hazelnut or vanilla. or regular. I can't tell. Just stick with the regular. I got the pumpkin spice because I thought maybe I could taste it. You keep chasing the flavor, hoping. Yeah, I was thinking maybe, you know, give you something really weird so I can taste it.

Yeah. Okay. That was the logic, but, you know, to no end. And of course, there's Chris. Chris DeReedies. Chris, how are you? I'm doing it. I still can't smell, but.

Oh, you see what I'm saying, right? Yeah, it's really bizarre. Anyway, it wasn't bad, though. I mean, for me, it was like a day or two, like a bad cold, right? Was that same for you, Mercia? Yeah, there was one day where I had flu symptoms, but it lasted maybe a few hours, really. And then it was just a bad cold congestion.

I still have a little bit of congestion, but that's been the main symptom. Right. Okay, well, good to have you back. Thank you. Thank you. the full team and Dante, let's get the rundown, give us the gory details here. And I'm just, I don't want to pre-you know, influence your thinking, but I thought it was a very good report. So I'm just saying, but I don't want to do. I was going to say, I think it's mostly good news,

at least from my reading of things. If anything, the top line number, it wasn't strong at 187,000, but maybe a little bit stronger than we expected, given some of the sort of known headwinds that were out there with large business. closure and some strike activity going on. So, you know, came in probably a little bit stronger than, than we would have thought. But the, the details were still fairly weak in terms of revisions to prior months. You know, the combined revision in July and June was 110,000. So that brings the three month, yeah, downward by 110,000. And that brings the three month average to 150K, which is, you know, the lowest that it's been, you know, since the pandemic recovery started in terms of average monthly job gains.

across industries, the weakness was where we would expect it to be, given that strike activity and given the large business closure. So transportation warehousing was down a little over 34,000, but most of that can be attributed to shutting down of yellow corporation, big trucking company, I think was about 30,000 jobs that were lost. Information was down again, but again, that's where the Hollywood actor strike falls into. And so down 15,000, it's roughly in line with the expected sort of size of that strike, at least the impact for August. The other big negative was in temp help services. And again, that's not a new story. That's been the case for most of the last year at this point. It's sort of a signal that firm labor demand is certainly getting pulled back

a bit. Firms are cutting their need for temp help as they pull back on hiring more broadly. And then most other industries were sort of roughly in line with where they've been. Healthcare continues to be the strongest performer. Manufacturing actually rebounded a little bit this month, came back from a small loss last month to post a decent gain. Construction keeps holding up sort of in the face of expectations that it might slow down. It's still adding roughly 20,000 jobs a month. So across the board, you know, sort of employment, payroll employment-wise,

I think things looked pretty good in line with what we've seen in recent months. Government? What happened to government? government was up a little bit 8K it's definitely slowed in the second quarter it was averaging something around 30,000 jobs a month and that's come in dramatically here in the last two months so it's not been nearly as big of a contribution wage growth just going to say that's the one sector big sector that has not even come close to fully recovering the jobs lost during the pandemic all the other major sectors have recovered and then some yeah and it looked like they were

making some inroads there in the second quarter, you know, the story seemed to be that as private sector hiring was starting to cool off as, you know, government was sort of finally starting to catch up a little bit and being able to compete for workers. And that may still be the case, but it seems to have slowed a little bit here over the summer. There's also, you know, some pretty big seasonal adjustment quirk sometimes in the summer with government payrolls with all the, you know, education, you know, hiring, rehiring. So probably wouldn't read too much into that in July and August. earnings was a positive story.

It's the weakest gain on a monthly basis since back in early 2021. Year over year hasn't changed much. It's still north of 4%. But certainly it's a positive sign that wage growth might continue to come in here in the near term. Because someone listening to that from another world would say, what the heck are you talking about? Why is that a good thing? So why is that a good thing? Yeah, obviously the Fed's worried that wage.

growth is still too strong and yes there's some pass-through effect there to inflation particularly for you know service inflation so you know slower wage growth would be a positive in terms of getting inflation sort of that last mile back down to to target got it uh the household survey was i would say a little bit confusing the unemployment rate jumped by three tenths of a percent up to three you know three point eight percent um that was mostly because of a huge jump in the size of the labor force. So, again, it's, it rose, but really for the reasons that we want it to be rising at this point, it's that the labor force is growing more quickly than we're adding jobs. So that's, you know, it's not a negative, even though the unemployment rate went up. Again, that signals some

softness in the labor market, but that's actually what we and the Fed want to see at this point. So it's one of those where, you know, sort of bad news is good news. And I think we, you know, expect that to continue to happen here through the rest of the year where the unemployment rate might creep a little bit higher, you know, close to or even slightly above 4% by the end of the year. I would say mostly because of an increase in the labor force. The unemployment rate jumped 3.5 to 3.8%. Mostly, it looked like it was all labor force growth, right? Because employment, household employment, employment is measured by the household survey also increased pretty solidly, I think, right? Yeah, it was up by about the same as the payroll survey.

I think it was about 200K. So, yeah, I mean, right, it's probably almost. entirely from that increasingly recourse because we still had job growth in the household survey. And the participation rate jumped, right? Finally moved. Yeah. I mean, it had been stuck at 62.6%, I believe, for five or six months. And then it jumped up to 62.8%, which is the highest that's been this cycle, still a

little bit below the February 2020 mark, which, you know, I don't think there's any expectation that we get back to given aging of baby boomers. but certainly a marked improvement there. Other participation measures, employment to population ratio, there wasn't a whole lot of change, particularly for prime age workers. Those measures are already high. They're sort of at cycle highs, close to historic highs.

So there's not an expectation that those participation measures are going to move a whole lot higher at this point, but certainly nothing negative to read on that side of things. Anything else? Anything else you want to point to? I mean, any anything you would consider to be a real blemish then, except the revisions, I guess. Even that, though, we're kind of looking for slower job growth. So that is not such a bad thing, right?

Yeah, I mean, I view the downer revisions as a positive, right? I mean, we want job growth to be closer to 100,000 than 200,000 at this point, I think, if we're going to get some additional softening in the labor market. I think that's a positive. Anything, I think the headline number is the negative maybe being a little bit stronger than you'd want it to be, given that sort of the business closure and strike activity should have shaved about 50,000 off of that headline number. So if you add that back, you're at, you know, whatever, 235,000, which feels a little bit

strong. But, yeah, I think we'll talk about later. August tends to have some corkiness in terms of its reliability. And that may be revised. Given the revisions we're getting here, they're consistently down. so this may get revised. It wouldn't be surprising if it's got revised now. Right.

So, yeah, it's not a huge concern to me that that number is a little bit strong at this point because, you know, they very well change. Okay, so that's a great rundown. Broadly speaking, how do you feel about the report? Is it good, bad? You know, how should someone out there interpret this? I say good. I mean, yeah, the faults are very minimal, if any.

So I, you know, for Dante to say it, as plainly as that without the qualifiers and everything else, like, which, you know, because he's such a careful economist, unlike me, that's saying something.

He said, I think it's good. I heard him say that. Did you hear him say that, Chris? I sure did. I sure did. Okay.

Okay. Long record. Yeah, very good. Okay, well, good. Marisle,

let me turn to you then. And any gaps there in the rundown? Anything else you want to point out? And how do you characterize the report? I would agree that it's good. And I think it's pretty much in line with expectations. So there's nothing shocking here. It's a continuation of the slowing that we've seen for the last few months.

That's corroborated by other reads on the labor market from other surveys that we got this week and over the past couple of weeks. As Dante said, if you add in the actors strike and you add in the bankruptcy and trucking, you'd get about 230K, which is a bit stronger than we were expecting. But that's still below the three-month moving average we had previously seen. The revisions were substantial and downward. That seems to be a trend. Yeah, I don't see anything concerning. It's kind of in line with what we want to.

to see, I think. Yeah. Okay. And the 3.8% it feels like we've got a couple months here recently where we get these big moves.

And then it kind of comes back into the F%. Because obviously this growth in labor force, I'm wrong, but I think it was like 7,800,000. It was like 700,000. Yeah, I mean, obviously that's not reality.

That's not what actually happened. So it stands the reason next month you'll get things moving back back in again. I'm not sure it's going to stay at 3-8, but it does feel like the labor market is easing up. Okay. So you're in the camp that this was a good report. Yeah. Could I stretch it and say it was a very good report? I'm just asking. There's any qualifiers you want to put on the good? It's just good. I think it's good. I think there's a good chance. I think there's a good chance that it gets revised.

sorry, I'm sorry, I'm playing. I was just saying, I think there's a good chance this gets a substantial revision in subsequent months, so I don't want to hang too much on this one report. But, yeah, I think it's a very good report. Oh, okay. Good, very good. Now we go to Chris. Here we go.

Chris, any gaps in the rundown? Anything, any detail you want to add? And again, what's your broad characterization of the report? I wouldn't add anything necessary. I think Dante Marissa did a great job highlighting everything. The one area I would focus on is the revisions. I think we said that a couple of times. And the size of the revisions are substantial here, right? June job growth went from 185,000 to 105,000. That's pretty big. And that's actually more consistent with my script. So I think the revised data is important to watch because it, It does suggest this labor market hasn't been as strong, perhaps, as originally reported. So I'm a little suspicious of the top line number this month as well, right? That 187, I think traditionally, or maybe over the last decade, August has actually been revised upward, typically, but this might break the streak. We might actually see a downward revision given what's happened recently.

So I put an asterisk on that headline number there, but yeah, overall, I think this matches. with the Fed's objective of seeing a slowing but not falling apart labor market. Okay, so good, very good. What would you say? Good, good, good. Good, good. Okay, good report. Two goods, yeah.

Two goods and a very good. Okay. The one statistic you didn't mention in the rundown was hours work per week, which I think we need to start watching more carefully because it feels like businesses are, you know, they may not be laying off workers, but if they have some weakness in their sales, they are adjusting by scaling back temp help. So we are, as Dante, you pointed out, the number of people in the temp help industry continues to steadily decline. But they're also calibrating the hours work per week. And that actually ticked up a little bit. It had fallen the month before back in July, now it's back up again. But it's very consistent where it has been, you know, pre-pandemic, you know, in that very, very,

very good labor market pre-pandemic. But that kind of adds a little bit more to the strength of demand, right? It's the jobs, the 185, even if they do get revised down. But you get a little bit of juice from the hours' work. Yeah, I look at that report and I go, I mean, that is like you couldn't write a better report. You know, if you were at the Federal Reserve or you were the administration, right? This is, yeah, it's slowing, but that's exactly what you wanted to see. And it's coming in, even if the underlying job growth is 100K, that's okay.

That's kind of sort of where you want it to be given underlying labor force growth. I mean, labor force growth has been much stronger than that, but we're getting to a place where I think that labor force growth is going to slow, just given demographics, participation rates aren't going to keep on rising. and we are going to see much slower labor force growth going forward, something that is closer to 100K, maybe even a little south of 100K. And so we do need to see, you know, job growth kind of modulate back into that. And it feels like that's exactly what's happening here.

So I'd go with the, I'd go with a very good, you know, good, good, very good, very good. I mean, it was a very good report. I'm hard pressed to, you know, find a blemish. The one thing that I will point out, and I think, Chris, you're kind of alluding to this, is, you know, as you're soft, as the economy is starting to slow, the concern you have is, and it's a, you know, kind of I think it's just intuitive concern is, well, is it going to slow and then stop slowing or is it going to slow, continue to slow and start turning negative, right? I mean, that's kind of sort of the word. It's like if you're using the soft landing metaphor, you know, the plane's coming into the tarmac. act, but as it's coming in, you're going, oh, is it actually going to soft land or is it going to, you know, slide off the runway here? So, but I think that's, that's just a natural kind of concern that you would have as this process is unfolding. It doesn't say anything about actually what is happening.

It's just, you know, your, you know, inherent concern that, you know, maybe this thing isn't going to throttle back as gracefully as we think it is. Is that, did I kind of characterize that correctly? You're thinking, Chris, or your, you're sent in. That's right. And I mean, the economy is not typically a plane. We usually do have some cyclical, right? We overshoot a bit and then undershoot, right? So, you know, I expect that.

But, yeah, I think as you get closer and closer, the risks of something else going wrong, certainly. Right. And I guess the way to add that metaphor to express what you just, or I think what you're saying is, okay, you're coming in for a landing, and that's when the plane is most vulnerable to a big gust of wind coming along and shoves you to the side of the runway. That's kind of what you're saying. Yeah.

Have you ever had the bounce? Yeah. Sometimes it's a moment. Yeah. Maybe the soft landing metaphor isn't going, or maybe it is, but we should use a rocket ship like one of those Starlinked, Tesla, you know, what do they call it? SpaceX, SpaceX ships that are coming. they've fired off the satellite now the rocket engine's coming back down to the platform and I'm saying it's because I'm in Florida and I just saw a rocket launch.

They have a camera on the whatever it is, the rocket, that comes back and lands, you know, on a platform in the ocean. And so you can see it coming in. And it's kind of like as it's coming in, you're going, oh, please don't crash. And that's when you are vulnerable to something going wrong, you know, because you are, you know, exposed, you know, to whatever could go wrong. That's kind of sort of what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Let's take a little bit of a diversion and go into the weeds a little bit. A lot of technical things going on that we've already talked a little bit of that. But I want to go into them in a little bit more detail. And for the, for the listeners, you know, if you are uncomfortable with, you know, going down. into the DNA of this stuff, you could tune out for a little bit, but yeah, I think it's important.

And we've mentioned these revisions a few times. So Dante, or maybe, Marissa, I'll go to you, maybe you can explain these revisions. There's different kinds of revisions, these monthly revisions, there's the benchmark revisions, and actually we got a read on that coming as well. So can you just, and give us a sense of what these things, what these revisions are, why they happen, and, you know, why are we seeing, in your view, why are we seeing these so-called downward revisions right now. Yeah, I'll try to do this in a way of sense. So this from the payroll survey, it is a survey that the government is sending surveys out to businesses. They ask businesses to respond by a certain date. Not all of those businesses do respond by a certain date. So in the

first month that they're producing a statistic like this past month for, you know, the August report, right? They only get, I think, Dante, I don't know what the number was. It was like 60% of the respondents come back to them with their count of payrolls. And that's pretty typical. It's somewhere between 50 and 70%, say, the first time they send out the survey. They keep collecting responses, though, for another two months after the initial survey. So, So what will happen is that next month, when we get the jobs data for September, they will have more responses in from the August survey, and they'll revise that August number again. And then they'll do it again the following month.

So every time they produce a payroll statistic, they revise it in the subsequent two months after that as they get more responses in. So that by the sort of quote unquote final response two months after the fact, they have about 90% of businesses responding. So it's a firmer number. Then every single year, they benchmark, this is the benchmark revisions you were alluding to. They take the payroll survey of businesses, and they benchmark that to actual unemployment insurance records where something like 90% of businesses, pretty much every private sector and government business other than railroad workers have to pay into the unemployment insurance federal system.

So they have a very hard count of employees that they get once a month, and they benchmark that every single year. They do it with the release of the January employment data that comes out in February. And they give us a sneak peek of this every year, and they did that last month. And they told us that the data for March of 2023 looks like it's going to be revised down by about 300,000 employees. I think it's 400,000, right, Dante? I think it's 400,000. I think it was closer to 300,000.

Oh, is it? I'm wrong. Okay. I mean, I was forecast it 400,000. You forecast it 400,000. You wanted it to be 400,000. Okay, it's 300,000. Okay, there you go.

Yeah, so it's somewhere between three and 400,000, 300 something,000, lower than what the establishment survey, the payroll survey, is actually telling us. So the BLS will go back and they will revise the historical data to reflect that benchmark revision. So what it's looking like is that the data between basically March of. of 2022 and March of 2023 is probably going to show something like 25,000 fewer employees on the payrolls in every month in that year. So two revisions happen after the initial release of the data. That's just because of more survey responses. And then once a year, BLS does kind of a hard benchmarking of the survey data to actual unemployment insurance claims. And, I mean, you can really dig into the revisions and look at how they've trended in the business cycle.

There are certain industries we know that are more difficult to count employees. Like, one we always look at is construction, right? Because there's a lot of people that come off and on payrolls very frequently. There are undocumented workers. There's all kinds of things going on in the construction industry that makes it historically difficult to give a hard count of employment in that industry. So that's an industry that typically gets a large revision a lot of the time. And there's other industries where there's strange things going on, like ironically, government is one that typically gets a very large revision, even though it is a

government survey. The government is notoriously bad at sending in their survey responses, so that a lot of times gets big revisions. And sometimes you see larger revisions. And sometimes you see larger revisions at the turn of a business cycle too because there are businesses opening and closing at a faster rate and that becomes more difficult to capture in a survey environment. So these revisions that we're getting have been now on a monthly basis consistently down. So they're lowering the BLS is lowering the job, the gain that is occurring in the month. And we also got this a read on this so-called benchmark revision that will be released at the start of next year. That benchmark is for March of 23, and that's also downwardly revised.

So that'll be in the data with the January job report released in February. Yeah. So when you add this all up, it feels like job growth probably is actually even a little bit softer than the current data would suggest. That's right. So it's probably, you know, closer to certainly sub-200,000. a month, somewhere between probably 150 and 175,000 a month. Yeah.

Okay. That's where you put underlying job growth right now, 15 and 175. Okay. Okay. Very good. Dante, the response rates, you know, historically I have in my mind that August is always a squirrely month. You know, we've had some, it seems to me the jobs numbers generally are pretty close

to expectations, give or take. except for one, two or three times every year you get this kind of off the wall, where did that come from kind of number? And often that is the August number because I think the response rates are even lower than typical. Is that the case this go around? Do you know, do you have any sense of that? Yeah. So the August response rates, at least for the first release of data, tend to be sort of lower on average than other months. And for this month, it was actually exceedingly low. It was just under 60%. That's the lowest in August since I think 2006. So even in a month where response tends to be a little bit low, it was sort of very, very low. As you mentioned, August tends to historically,

if you go back to 2000 and you exclude 2020 for obvious reasons, August has the highest average absolute difference in terms of revisions out of any month of the year. And that's in part, not necessarily because the revisions are sort of large all the time, but it's that they were almost always in the same direction for the last 20 years, right? August, I think, you know, 17 out of 20 years was revised higher and not lower. And so that gives you that big absolute difference, whereas in most of the other months, you get a more closely even split between revisions that go up and revisions that go down.

So you'll have this, I'm curious to see what happens because you have this sort of converging trends here where August almost always gets revised higher, but we've seen almost every month get revised lower this year. So it would be interesting to see what happens over the next couple months. Right, right. In the House, this is what we've been talking about, the payroll survey. That's the survey of businesses. The household survey, which is used to calculate unemployment, participation, labor

force, growth, that kind of thing. That does not get revised. Right. Correct. Yeah. You can get some revisions because of seasonal adjustment, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics seasonally adjusts the day because they have to because the liver market is very seasonal,

and they'll adjust those seasonal factors, correct? And so you can see some changes, but they don't have these kind of revisions we're talking about that we're having with the payroll survey. Do I have that right? Right. They don't introduce new sample. Once the sample they get at the initial release is the sample that they use,

they don't add any more respondents as months go on like they do on the payroll survey. Okay. So Marissa is thinking, you know, given her all their expertise, you're a former BLS economist. your sense is that, let's call it underlying job growth, abstracting from the vagaries of the data, you know, the revisions and all the seasonal adjustment and timing and all the things that can affect the actual number for a month. Your sense is that underlying job growth, monthly job growth, is about 150 to 175K.

That's Marissa's view. Dante, what do you think? I think that's fair. I mean, I might even go a shade lower than that, but I think, yeah, I mean, that's a in ballpark. Yeah. And Chris? Yeah, that's my lower end as well, probably closer 150, but yeah. Sounds like a reasonable estimate. Yeah, I'd say 125 to 150. I think in that ballpark, including the benchmark revisions that are going to come in. Yeah. Yeah. And just for context, again, you know, once the labor force actually settles down to something consistent with

underlying demographics. And we've seen a lot of labor force growth because the pandemic really messed things up and still kind of normalizing because of that shock. But once we get to the other side of the shock and it feels like we're getting there here, labor force growth would be somewhere between 50 and 100K per month. So you would think that job growth has to get into that ballpark on 50 to 100K on a consistent basis to ensure that the labor market doesn't get overly tight. Yeah, okay. Everyone kind of sort of agree with that, that those heuristics as kind of rules of thumb.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. Very good. Let me ask another set of questions before we play the game, the statistics game. And that is, you know, what one or two or three measures are you looking at in the labor market or elsewhere to gauge, you know, if things are moving? in the right direction here in the sense that, you know, we are going to continue to see positive job creation consistent with the non-recessionary economy, but slow enough job growth and wage growth so that inflation continues to moderate, goes back to the Fed's target, the Fed doesn't need to raise interest rates anymore. So what kind of, what indicators are you looking at to kind of, to try to gauge whether that kind of script is being written here? But, Crystal, maybe I'll go to you first on that. Do you have any one or two or three favorite measures that you're looking at?

Yeah, so the top of the list would be earnings, right? So whether it's average hour learnings in this report or the ECI employment cost index, we think is a better measure of that earnings growth, the controls for the population itself. We're looking at the same workers over time. I think that's key to the Fed's decision. at the end of the day, right? That's what's driving or potentially driving the service sector inflation that they're worried about. So that'd be my number one. The employment, I think the hours

worked, right? I mentioned earlier that that's certainly an important one as well. That's probably the first place where you would see businesses making their adjustments. Maybe we can measure that a bit better than the overall labor market numbers or the payroll numbers themselves. I do look at the indices, right? The BLS produces these aggregate payroll and aggregate hour hours worked indices. I found this useful as well to gauge how strong the labor market is. I'm sorry, what was that last set of was last? Yeah, these aggregate indices of payrolls and hours worked. Oh, you mean like a total aggregate hours worked? Correct. That's right. Oh, I see. Yeah, I didn't even look at that. Did you look at it this month? I did. It's kind of,

consistent. Consistent. Okay. With some positive growth, but not overly excessive either, right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Good.

Dante, what one or two or three measures are you looking at? Yeah. I mean, I think, Chris, I think, yeah, the earnings measure is obviously important right now. I think, you know, for me, UI claims are still towards the top of the list, even though they've been sort of uninteresting lately and that they haven't moved a whole lot, which is good in this context. But I still think, yeah, we're talking about this. either a rocket ship or plane landing or whatever metaphor you want to use. I think it's easier to

imagine a world where we get that soft landing if layoffs stay pretty steady, right? And you just have this sort of slow reduction in hiring that's causing job growth to slow. If you've got hiring getting pulled back and layoffs going up at the same time, I think that obviously makes that soft landing more complicated. You know, it's much more likely that you tip into job losses in that environment. So, you know, if we continue to see claims or pick your other measure of layoffs, you know, the Challenger report, whatever it may be. If we continue to see those sort of hold steady and layoffs not increase in any material way, I think it, you know, dramatically increases the likelihood that we can see that, you know, sort of steady slowing of job growth

and not, you know, a crash. And UI unemployment insurance claims. So every week, we get data from the Labor Department on initial claims for unemployment insurance. That's a read on people losing their job saying, hey, help me out. And I think last week, what was it, 220? 25, 230, something like that. 228, yep, right there. Do you have a rule of thumb there in terms of what's good or what's bad? I mean, if we start

to get north of 250 on a consistent basis, I would start to get a little bit worried. There's always week to week volatility. So if you get one week that's at 260, that's not a whole lot to worry about. But if you start to get, you know, the four week moving average north of 250, if

you get consistent readings that are starting to move that high, I would start to get a little concerned. Again, that's not, you know, full-blown recessionary territory by any means. But I think given how consistently they've been at, you know, roughly 225, 230, 235 for a couple of months now, I think if you got, you know, sort of that uptick on a sustained basis, it would catch my attention. Yeah. Okay. So 200 is really, really low. That's kind of sort of where we were before the tech layoffs back. They started late last year. They've abated now. We saw a rash of tech layoffs. last year early those and they're gone.

But we were at, and I think seasonal adjustment issues probably played something of a role. We were probably at 200K. We're now like at 225 and you're saying if you get north of 250 on a consistent basis, then yellow flares start to go off. I'm putting words in your mouth, but 275, 300, you're saying, okay, I got a problem. That's a problem. That's losing jobs at that point. Right.

I think, yeah, if you get up that high, that would signal that we're probably going to see, negative prints on the payroll employment report. So that would be bad. We're losing jobs. Okay. So you are claims. Okay. Merison, what about you?

Do you have any one or two, three indicators you look at to gauge whether we're sticking a script here or not? Yeah. The same as Dante and Chris, so I won't repeat them. I'm looking at wage growth. I'm looking at the labor force, too, to see if that continues to grow month after month, which it has remarkably. There's still supply out there, clearly.

But the other thing I noted in this report that I didn't mention before was the diffusion index in the payroll survey. Gains were very broad-based across industries. So there's been a lot of talk about could you have recessions in certain industries of the economy? Could you have sort of a rolling recession where there are industries that are losing jobs? And we've seen weakness in some industries over the past year or so. but the breadth of job growth was quite wide this past month. In the private sector, it was almost two-thirds of industries were either adding to payrolls or holding them steady.

So there's nothing red flag like there either. We don't see industries that are shedding, you know, tens of thousands of workers month after month. And that's a good sign as well. So things are just kind of slowing in a broad-based way, but nothing alarming coming out of any one or two industries, really. That's a great point. And sort of adding to that, going back to job growth in construction in manufacturing,

those are the two most rates sensitive sectors by orders of magnitude. And if you're going to see a recession, you've got to see job loss in those two sectors, right? Right. Actually, the most interesting thing, one of the most interesting things is we're getting a slowing, kind of a graceful slow. and job growth. And those two sectors are still adding to payrolls on a pretty consistent basis, right? I mean, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, you can dig into some of the manufacturing detail and see some sub-industries that have sort of wavered from month to month, but nothing extremely concerning. The housing market, obviously, the residential side of construction is not doing

great given high interest rates, but we're not seeing massive layoffs in the construction industry. There's plenty of non-residential work to be done. There's plenty of remodeling and infrastructure work, public work. So it's being made up for in other areas. Yeah. So if I had to pick a few indicators to gauge where the wrong script, the one I would focus on, a lot of it would come from the Joltz report, the job opening labor return of a survey report, even though it's got its problems. It's a month lag. It's talk about response rates. I think the response rates to the jolts are low.

So you have to take that in consideration. But it's such a nice report because it kind of gives you a sense of the underlying dynamics in the labor market. And key there is the quit rate, right? That actually is really critical to the wage growth that you've got as identified as indicators you watch. Because if you have high quit rates, if people are quitting their jobs at a high rate, that tends to push up, measured wage growth because when people switch jobs, that's when they get the biggest pay increases. And so if you go back a year, year and a half ago when the quit rate was very high, that's when the wage growth was at its peak. Now the quit rate, according to the last jolt's numbers,

is really all the way back to where it was pre-pandemic. So it's completely normalized. And that would be consistent with, you know, getting wage growth back into something that's, you know, in the bottom more consistent with the fed's 2% inflation target. So I think that's really important to watch, you know, a good indicator. Dante mentioned UI claims as a window into layoffs, but there are actual counts of layoffs in the Joltz numbers. Again, a month lag is not as timely as the UI claims. But that remains, you know, it's pushed up a little bit from the bottom like UI claims, but it remains very low below pre-pandemic levels. And I think that's really critical. It's the layoffs that cause recessions, right? Because when you have layoffs, I think Dante,

you mentioned this just to reiterate, that's what's. spooks people, consumers, they pull back on their spending, and you get that kind of self-reinforcing vicious cycle called a recession. So you don't have the layoffs, very difficult to see how you get a recession. So we've got, you know, those two measures give you a read on, you know, the strength of the economy broadly and recession risk, and the other gives you a sense of wage and price pressures, and they both are pointing in the right direction here. And then just to round it out, I do think it is important to watch the hiring rate. That's the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

people were all apoplectic about, you know, you don't hear much hand-wringing anymore recently is the number of open job positions. That was incredibly elevated a year ago, year and a half ago. come in quite dramatically. In fact, the last report it came in very sharply. I tend to put less weight on that just because, you know, very difficult to measure. And I do think businesses are managing their open positions very differently today than they have historically because it's just it's costless to have an open position. So, you know, I place less weight on it, but certainly something to watch. So if you watch those kind of the jolt, that jolt's data gives you a really good

internal sense of the labor market, they all feel like they're, you know, kind of sort of move, if they're not in the right place, they're kind of moving in the right direction very quickly. Any reaction to that? Agree, disagree? What do you think? Dante? Yeah, I agree. I avoided mentioning the quits rate because I was going to use it for my stat. Oh, sorry. I knew it. I knew it. I think, you know, when we do our, you know, sort of real-time forecast of the employment a cost index, the quit rate is it. Yeah, that's basically what gives you the measure, you know, on a one or two quarter lag, the quit rate is, you know, almost, you know, 100% in predicting what wage growth will be. So the fact that it is continuing to come down, you know, signals that we're

going to get weaker readings on the ECI and, you know, things are moving in the right direction with, you know, almost certainty, I think. So, oh, that's interesting. I didn't realize the correlations were that high. Yeah, it's very strong. I think it's the only thing we, there's, yeah, that's, that's the only variable we use when we look at ECI. Sorry about that. Sorry. Yeah, but it sounds like Mercer was going to say the same statistics. So I'm glad I took it away from it.

It goes to the importance of those statistics. Yeah, that's the point. Yeah, great point. Great point. Hey, Chris, before we go to the stats game, how's the market react, the markets react, the bond, stock market reacting to all this. Do you have a sense of that?

Yeah, as seems usual these days, there was a little bit of a whipsaw in the reaction first. the interest rates went down in the 10 year, then they've crept back up. So pretty flat. I think this is largely in line with expectations. I look at the FOMC Fed Watch tool to see how market expects the Fed to react. And that now is pretty firmly in the hold camp that the Fed will not increase rates or decrease rates potentially at the September meeting. I think November is still maybe on the table, December, a little bit more split, but the consensus still seems more aligned with this is it. We're holding here throughout much of 2024 before the first cut comes.

But we'll see. There's still, of course, lots of script to be written, but the immediate reaction seems to be this report is in line with the Fed pausing here. Okay. Or continuing to pause. Perfect. Okay. So the market says a good report. We're going on not quite very good, but good.

Good. Good. Good. It feels like that should be somehow the title of this podcast. We'll come back to that. Good, maybe great. Good may be great. Good, maybe very good.

You know, something like that. Hey, Marissa, we're going to play the game, statistics game. You're going to go first. And of course, the game is we prefer it a statistic. The rest of us try to figure that out through questions, deductive reasoning, and clues. Best that is one that's not so easy. We get it immediately, which is actually getting harder to do these days. Yeah, I think this is going to be an easy one.

Yeah, well, now we'll never get it because that's the other thing. We'll want to be too hard. You'll get it. And you want it to be apropos to the topic at hand or a recent release. So what's your statistic, my mind? 3.7%. 3.7%. 3.7%. Is that a demographic unemployment rate? No. Is that from Jolts? Yeah. I think that's the hires rate, isn't it? It is. It's the hires rate. Yeah, I was going to go with the quits rate, but we talked about that. I was going to go with the diffusion index. I talked about that. So I ran out of things to be really interesting. It's the hires rate that you mentioned 3.7%. It's the lowest, this is the lowest hires rate since 8%. April of 2020. So it's basically back to pre-pandemic levels now. And the quits rate was going to be my

first statistic. That's 2.3 percent. And that's the lowest since January of 2021. So, you know, sort of coming out of the depths of the pandemic there too. So these things are all coming back to Earth, coming back to normal. The quits rate, as Dante said, is key to wage growth because that's when wages change is when people change jobs, right? Most people don't see a change in their wage unless they take a new job. So that's really critical to getting wage growth down. So the Joltz rate, the Jolt's data, as you mentioned, is a little bit fraught because response rates are down to like a third month after month. The sampling error is very, very high on these now. But nevertheless, if you look at the rates and you look

over a period of time, they're coming back to Earth. And just to make clear, the quit rate is the, in the numerator is the number of people quitting their job. The denominator is the labor force. Is that right? The nomin, no, the denominator is the number of people on payrolls during the course of the month. Oh, oh, because it is, it comes from the payroll service.

It's an establishment survey. Yeah, yeah. All right. Okay. And the hiring rate is the enumerator the number of people hired. Yeah, it's a cumulative number of people hired over the course of a month as a share of companies. He's a non-aurs, a quit rate. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, very good. That was good. Dante, you want to go next? Yeah, I'm going to go a little bit deep in the weeds here, I think. Yeah. First three were off the table. So 106.1. 6.1? 106.1.

That's Mark's favorite radio station. Was that like an old fogey? I don't know. Classic rock. Classic rock. Zero beach. Yeah. Led Zeppelin and Queen and yeah.

Those were those are classics though. I'm actually proud to be a 106.1 listener. Okay. A fictional 106.1 listener. A fictional 106.1. The fictional 106.1. Is that an index? It is an index, yeah.

It's not the aggregate hours worked index. It's not. But is it in the, it's in the employment report? It's not, no. Oh, okay. I had to go way off script here. Okay, okay. Okay, that is a little bit, yeah.

Oh, is it from the ISM? I don't think so. It's not. That would have been really mean because that came out just before we got on. I did not do that. It's earlier this week. It's not pending home sales or something like that, is it? No, I'm not Chris.

I didn't bring up the housing market on Jobs Friday. It's labor market related. It is. Oh, it is? Well. Oh, is it from the conference board survey? It is, yeah. Oh, it's the, um, is it the actual, it's the service.

Isn't that the overall number? It's the aggregate. I gave you the headline that the point I want to make is more in the weeds, but I didn't want you to get too mad at me. Because I was thinking the labor market. I was thinking jobs, easy jobs, hard to get. right that that's actually where I was going yeah the the labor market differential within the conference board survey so the difference between you know people who think that jobs are plentiful

and people who think that jobs are hard to get that differential has come in quite a bit in recent months I think that's part of the reason for the headline decline in that consumer confidence measure I just you know it's another sign that sort of points in alignment with what we see in jolts that you know job openings are coming in hiring is slowing you know there's still a lot of opportunities, but fewer opportunities than there were six months or a year ago. So I think, yeah, just another sort of notch in that argument that things are definitely tightening up a little bit. Yeah, it's funny.

It does feel like, so the conference board survey is a really good survey in that, particularly in terms of gauging the unemployment rate, right? Because they ask a question, are jobs easy or hard to get? And then they take the difference between the two, the percentage of the response to the two. and that gap is a pretty good leading indicator of unemployment for the month. And that did show that unemployment was going to rise. So I think it was easy to say that unemployment rate was going to rise this month, but the 3-8 was more than anticipated.

But directionally, we knew it felt like it was going to rise. It does feel like to me things are slowing a little bit more than, you know, things seem like they're rip-roar and now they do seem like everything is easing up here. pretty quickly. Back to Chris's angst about this. It does feel like things are really starting to cool off. And that conference board survey is a good example of that. If you look at the switch from July survey results to the August survey results,

they felt like there was something pretty significant shift there. I mean, I don't want to restate the case because 106 is kind of back where it was three months ago. So I don't want to. And of course, a lot of it's related to gasoline prices and get their backup again. And, you know, that plays a big role in these confidence measures. But nonetheless, it did feel, I felt softer than I expected. Yeah. And I think, yeah, to Chris's point earlier, too, I think just given the size of how big

revisions have been across lots of data lately, but particularly with payroll employment, I think it puts you a little bit more on edge when you start to get those lower readings because who knows what it looked like in two months. Yeah. All these things, though, add up to basically, just to make the obvious point, no more Fed rate hikes, please I mean come on yeah although the one counter to all of this I'm going to throw it out there because this is yours and hopefully I'm not taking anyone's statistic but that tracking estimate for Q3 GDP growth what is it it's like it's strong right it's not it's uh 4.9 yeah oh wow

after the big spending number yesterday and ultimately it feels like GDP growth leads job growth by about a quarter or two so this this job growth we're seeing now reflects you know kind of the first half, kind of GDP growth, which was 2%. And that Q3 number is coming in, I suspect, as we get more data here, this thing will come, the tracking estimate will come down. But, I mean, it's held up a lot better than I would have thought up to this point. Well, and the Atlanta Fed number is even higher than that. You know, it was up to 5, 9 and came down a little bit, but it's still, it's north of 5% still,

which, you know. But still early on in the quarter, given the data flow, right? We still have gotten, we're all we're getting, right now all the data we've gotten is for the month of July, really. We haven't gotten... Correct. Yeah. We're just getting July data in. Yeah, right. So in July, it looks like it was a very strong month, but August weaker. Okay. Very good. Chris, you want to go next? Sure. My number is not labor market related. Okay. I'll lay that out housing related. What's that? Housing? Maybe. Okay. I'm going to give a shout out to a listener. This is a, it was suggested by a listener, James. That's unfair. I want to.

I won't use the last name to affect the innocent, but it was a good number. Minus 1.2%. It's not labor market related. No. It's housing related. It is. Did it come out this week? It did. And there are actually two housing related numbers that were minus 1.2%.

So I'll give you credit for either one. Is it an eight house price measure? One of them is? One of them. What do you mean one of them? Well, one of the two. Like I said, there are two statistics that were in minus one. The one I'm thinking of is not the house price, but you, I think the, I'll give a credit. I think the SMPK Schiller was down 1.2% year over year, wasn't it?

That's correct. So I'll give you partial cowbell for that. Partial cowbell. Because the 1.2% I'm thinking of is different. Oh, that wasn't the one you were thinking of. The more important one, I would say. Does it have something to do with pending sales? That's the other.

Nope. No. No. And I'm sorry. This one is not related to house prices. It is. It's related to housing, but not prices. Not house prices.

It's a release that came out this past week. Yes, but it's a private company. It's not a government source. Oh, goodness. Okay. Is it a Fannie Mae, one of those wacky-may surveys? You always dredge up? No, no.

It's another one I'm dredging up that you need to pay attention to. Oh, really? Okay. Is it like a Black Knight survey? CoreLogic survey? Nope. No. Is it a government survey?

It is not. No, no, you said, I'm sorry. You said it was a private sector survey. Is it a Moosey Analytics? No, it's not. Is it construction related? Nope. It's another price.

Oh, okay. Well, it's arguably the more... Lumber prices are down 1.2%. No. No, okay. I'll put you out of your misery. Okay. Go ahead.

It is the year of year change in rents. This is from Apartment List. Oh, that's interesting. Interesting, right? Because arguably this is the more important number to watch. That's really important. Yeah. So down 1.2%.

I don't know that data well. Can you just give us a sense of that data, the apartment? Yeah, it's Apartmentlist.com. So it's one of the numerous services that post apartments online and they have an index of apartment prices. rents, right? So asking rents. And based on their index, the prices are down 1.2% nationally. Right. And that's a far cry. They would, they had been up as much as 18% year over year back in 2021-22. So things are certainly coming around. And this arguably is a leading indicator for the housing shelter component in the, in the CPI or in the PCE.

inflation indices that the Fed is watching. So this continues to suggest that the script is here for housing inflation to deflate going forward. And you may have said this and I missed it. Is it July to July, July 22 to 23? Yes, that's right. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, it's August. It is August.

Oh, okay. And can you tell sequentially month to month? Is it stable down? What's happening? Down. It's down on the month? Maybe you can say that I love to, can you send me the link too? Sure.

Yeah, I will. Down. 1% on the month. Okay. And do they give you any across, you know, different markets? Are they, do they show you any? They do. They have actually a lot of detail in this report.

Okay. So can you have any sense of where the prices are, where rents are down most? Are they down, soft everywhere? I guess in the Northeast, based on my experience with my children's rent, it's, it's, It's not down a whole lot, but go ahead. Yeah, a little bit more in the West. More in the West, yeah. Right?

And some of the hotter markets, if you will. So if I look over the past 12 months, it's Austin, Las Vegas, Portland, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, are at the top of list. Right? So some of the, some of these were markets that were particularly hot. Right. So not terribly surprising that they're giving back some of those gains.

Right. But, you know, the national number is down. So pretty much across the board. But you're right. I think New York isn't quite as soft as other areas. I'm just saying, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Probably even Billy and D.C.

But, okay, well, that, given the lags between rents, market rents, which is what we're talking about here. When that shows up in the CPI for housing, the next six, 12 months, we should see some pretty meaningful weakness in that measure. That's right. That's right. That's a good leading indicator. You want to keep an eye on to understand where the CPI is eventually going to head.

Yeah. Okay. And that's a third of the overall consumer price index. Less of expenditure, consumer expenditure, like 15% of the consumer expenditure to player, but still, you know, very significant. Okay, that was a good one. That was really good. Yeah, we should, I need to follow that more regularly.

here's my statistic I think it's pretty easy 83.3. That's Marissa's favorite radio station. Yeah, that's right. More of the MPR on your AM dial.

On the AM dial. Yeah. No, no. What kind of music do you listen to? What's your favorite group? This is going to be very revealing because she'll probably say I'm not going to tell you now. What's your favorite

group right now? I'm going to go around. I'm going to ask everybody this point. Oh, really? Okay. I'm so curious now that I ask this question. Yeah. Pearl Jam has been my favorite band since I was 14.

Still? Pearl Jam? Yeah. I've been to like 20 Pearl Jam shows. Shocking. You're shocked? Yeah, would not have guessed that. Really?

Would not. Oh, now we've got to ask them, What would you have guessed, Chris? Yeah, what would you? Sort of stereotyping were you doing, Chris? Very style. Yeah. I don't know what I would have guessed, but it wouldn't have been privileged.

Okay, what's your favorite, Chris? Well, my favorite song. No. Favorite group. It has to be the group as well. Okay, give me the favorite song. It's Toto, Africa. I like, really?

Yeah. Oh. Now you're shocked. Now you're shocked. You don't, Toto isn't your favorite group, but Africa is your favorite song. Yes. Why is that? From, you know, I guess like Marissa from very young age. Young age. That's very good. Dante?

I don't know that I have a favorite. I'd probably say red hot chili peppers. Oh, they're great. I love red hot chili peppers. They're kind of pro-jim-esque, aren't they? Same era. Same era. Yeah. And they're still making music, aren't they? yeah yeah good all right i got you want to know mine yours is guns and roses we already know this no no no no no mark just discovered them like a i just discovered them and i blew through them very quickly yeah they were they were okay i like the few of the songs yeah they're good when you're in the gym they're good

good in the when you're pumping iron or like when you're 63 year old man pumping iron yeah so no i like the revivalists you know the revivalists oh if you haven't heard the revival They are. Do you guys know the revivalists? I don't. You don't know the revivalists? Oh my gosh. It's going to be earth-shattering for you.

We listen to these. This is your favorite band of all time. Oh, no, no, no. I said my current favorite. Because my buzz... Oh, okay. I blow music so fast. Yeah.

So that's why I'm always hunting. You guys are useless because you're giving me all this... Stuff from the Pat Torto, Africa. It doesn't do me any good. Yeah. All right. Get a sharp race in there. Yeah.

All right, we digress. Back to 83.3. 83.3. 83 point. Is that a employment population ratio of a specific group? It's in the genre, but it's not an employment to population ratio. Is it a participation rate? Yes, it is.

Prime age. Crime age participation rate. Yeah, very good. It is? Yeah, 83.3. Yeah, I just bring this up in the context of labor force growth. I mean, that jump in participation. Participation, and I didn't look at all of the ages and demographic cuts that is available.

But pretty much everything is back to pre-pandemic and then some except just the one, the over 65-year-old is still depressed. And I don't think that's ever coming back. I think, you know, that's just not going to happen. My guess is because unless the economy goes really south and people can't afford to stay retired and they come back into the labor force. But it feels like, you know, that we're not going to get that participation rate back up, that people that have retired feel pretty good about their financial situation in retirement

and we're not going to get a bounce there. So, but all the other participation rates are, you know, fully recovered back. You know, everybody's working. You know, we're seeing a lot of labor supply has been very strong. And just adding to that story, if you look at the other number I was going to say was 3.1 million. Do you know what 3.1 million is? Consistent, same same part of the labor market. Is it the gap in, is it missing labor force?

participants or something? No. It's the year-over-year change in the labor force. The labor force is increased by 3.1 million people. So divide by 12, you know, that gives you average monthly labor force growth. That's a lot of labor force growth. That's a lot of labor force growth. So labor supply is really good. People are, you know, back to work. Okay. That was, I thought was very instructive, particularly the part about everyone's favorite. I thought that was very instructive. But let's end the conversation like we've typically done here

over the past year or so. Probabilities of recession in the coming year. What is the probability that the economy will enter into a recession at some point between now and this time next year, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research? So let me begin with him. Marissa, what's your probability?

I think you were at one-third, weren't sure? I'm still at a third. Still a third. No change there. Yeah. Okay. And I think I'm sure I just asked this before, but what would change your mind? What needs to happen to get you down below one-third?

I think a not soft landing in the job market evidence that this is going sharply into negative territory. No, what would make you lower the probability? Oh, lower the probability. Yeah. What could, I mean, at this point it feels like the bar is really high for you to lower your probability to a significant degree? So I think a few more months of inflation coming in and the job market sort of staying roughly where it is may make me lower my probability. Okay. Okay. All right, Dante. I think I'm, I think last time I said 35 and I'm still there. I feel like,

things haven't really changed. Your bar is high, too. 35. Yeah, I think if we can get a clear sense that the Fed is done, I think it's closer to that, you know, sort of signal that they're probably done, but it's still not a certain, you know, I still think there's some chance that we get one more rate hike here before the end of the year. And I think that would be bad.

So I think if we get a clear sense that we're finished with rate hikes, you know, I think that would probably make me come down a little bit. Okay. So you're still at 35. Yeah. This is at one third, you're at 35%. Basically the same thing. Okay, Chris, what do you say? You're at 45?

It was at 45. I'm going to lower that to 42. 40. Ooh. Really? Big moves happening here on Instagram. That's a little, 42's a little Easter egg for listeners there, meaning of life. Yeah, 42. Very good. Okay. And today's numbers push you from 45 to 42.

or was a preponderance of things? Today's number, the revisions again. The weaker numbers there make me believe that the Fed may in fact be done, may not make a mistake. But still lots to be worried about. That's your number one concern that the Fed just overdoes it here. Yeah, yeah. They're in the fog, right? They're in the fog.

We're looking at all these data revisions. Clearly, we might get some data that they react. that isn't real. Yeah. Okay. And I think I was at 35% wasn't I? Yes, I think so. Yeah.

I'm going to 30. I'm going down to 30 with a little down arrow. You know, the, like the rating agencies. It's on, it's on watch in, you know, for a lower probability. Negative watch is a good thing here. Yeah, negative watch is a good thing here. Yeah. Yeah.

But I can make up whatever I want here, right? Because this is my indicator. Yes, we are not the rating agency. We're not the rating agency. You make that very clear. Very good. So I'm at 30 with a tilt toward something lower than that. It feels pretty good to me.

I'll have to say the thing that now really worries me, and I look at it five times a day is the price of oil. This makes me so nervous. Yeah, because that thing is so important. We talked about that at the last podcast, but I think that's a really important thing to watch. Very difficult to gauge. Okay.

Price of oil or price of gas? Yeah, you're right. It's really the price of gas, but I just look at price of oil because that leads the price of gas. Of course, there's... There's been seeing to disconnect recently. Yeah, yeah, no, that's true. Yeah, the crack spreads, I guess.

That's the margin that the refiners are getting a little bit wider. And now we're in the middle of hurricane season. So that's something to watch. Yeah. So I really worry about that. Okay. Anything else we want to mention? Oh, we do want to make a plug for the business competence survey.

Chris, you want to make that plug? You're better at advertising than I am. You think so. I think we've mentioned on the podcast before, but we do have a survey of business confidence. That's free for everyone to, participate in. It's a long-in-standing survey.

I think 25 years, Mark, is that right? It's 2003. I can remember actually the first time we did it. It's actually, I find it a very useful survey. We'll have to talk about that a little bit more, which, you know, why I find it's so useful, but it's a weekly survey. Yeah, yeah. So unique from that perspective.

So 20 years. If you go to economy.com, you'll find a link to the survey. And the benefit to you is that if you fill out the survey, you'll get the results. You know, be able to compare and see what the business mood is each week. And then we do plan to have exclusive webinars where you can ask Mark Sandy anything you'd like from what the state of the economy is to his favorite musical tastes. That'll be a lot of fun, you know, I think.

Absolutely. Yeah. But you have to participate to get the invitation. You have to participate. Yeah. You have to participate. Okay. Very good.

Anything else, Dante? No, I'm going to fill out. the survey now so I can ask you questions though. I have homework to do. Oh, now I'm nervous. Now I'm nervous. Yeah. Marissa, anything? No. Chris, anything more? I've said enough, I think. Going, going, going. Okay. Well, dear listener, thank you for listening in this month, or this week, I should say, and we'll talk to you next week. Take care now, everyone.