Moody's Talks - Inside Economics - Survey Says…

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

John Leer, Chief Economist at Morning Consult, joins Inside Economics to discuss the mood of the consumer. John shares some interesting nuggets from Morning Consult’s survey, including differences in sentiment across regions, how consumers are feeling about AI and data centers, the job market, the War in Iran, and what this may mean for the upcoming Midterm Elections. Matt Colyar also makes an appearance and gives the group the run-down of this week’s CPI and PPI reports, which both came in hotter than expected. But first, Mark quizzes the Millennials in the group on their knowledge of Gen Z slang words.Guest: John Leer, Chief Economist, Morning ConsultFor more from John Leer, check here: https://morningconsult.com/articles/author/john-leerHosts: Mark Zandi – Chief Economist, Moody’s Analytics, Cris deRitis – Deputy Chief Economist, Moody’s Analytics, and Marisa DiNatale – Senior Director - Head of Global Forecasting, Moody’s AnalyticsFollow Mark Zandi on 'X' and BlueSky @MarkZandi, Cris deRitis on LinkedIn, and Marisa DiNatale on LinkedIn 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 one of my trusty coes, Marissa, Marissa Dinaali. Hey, Marissa. Hey, Mark, how you doing? I'm doing well. Good morning. Good morning. I hear Chris is in Bermuda. That's what I heard. Is that right? Do you know? I didn't know that. But he does this every year. I don't, why does he get to go to Bermuda? Why don't I ever get to go to Bermuda? Well, that's a great question. I think he's there for the insurance industry. hangs out in Bermuda, I think, on a regular basis. I think it's what he goes for. Looking for incoming hurricanes, I guess.

So you need to suck up to the insurance industry, I think, Mursa. That's how you get your invite to Bermuda, just for the record. Have you ever been to Bermuda? No, I haven't. Oh, you'd love it. Yeah, I used to back in the day when I was about Chris's age, I'd be, I sucked up to the insurance industry, you know? Okay, that's the inside tip.

Okay. Oh, and I also remember the structure of finance folks, you know, There was this big conference. I don't know if they still do it. ABS East, asset back security east. This was before the financial crisis. And they would hang out in Bermuda. I don't think they still go to Bermuda to do that.

But that was a big conference. So I'd go and, yeah, you'd really enjoy it. It's a very beautiful island. Yeah, expensive, but beautiful. Yeah. Well, good for Chris. Yeah, good for Chris. He needs a little bit of Bermuda sunshine.

And we got two other guests. We got Matt, well, Matt's not. Not a guest, really. Matt Collier. Hey, Matt. How are you? I'm going very well. Congratulations. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. We're talking about your daughter last podcast, Lucille. I love Lucille. I love that name. She appreciated the shout-out, just nice. Yeah? Yeah, we've got to work on Collier, though. That's, you know. Yeah, that's going to be a problem. Her whole life, yeah. Could be. And we got John Lear. John, good to have you back. Great to be back. Thanks for having me, Mark. And John, of course, is the chief economist of Morning Consult.

all things related to consumer sentiment, and we're going to go dive deep into some of the work John's doing and get a sense of how people are feeling about different things. But good to have you aboard. Have you ever been to Bermuda? I have not been to Bermuda. I also haven't sucked up to the insurance industry. I think the crypto industry was briefly located there, right?

That makes sense. You kind of have to match the industry, I suppose, was with the time horizon when they're really flourishing. Yeah, yeah. And John, you're a new father as well. Me am, yeah. Like Matt, second time around. So I have a three-month-old here, a few doors down for me right now.

So I'm living that life deep, deep in the trenches. So you guys are, you guys are both Matt and John. You guys are millennials, right? You're in the millennial generation. Is that right, Matt? I believe so, yeah. And, John, you're in the millennial generation. I am, yeah.

Okay, so I got, you know, there's this great Washington Post piece this morning about words created by generations. And so I'm going to test you to see if you can get any of this. And I have to say I'm a boomer. And I mean that in a very non-pejorative way. I'm a boomer. And I got most of these right, but I'm just curious if you guys get it right. Okay, ready? This goes to Matt first.

If you're dating someone, and of course you're not dating someone, but just assume that you were dating someone, what should you hope they don't get according to Gen Z? A, the ick, B, the T, C, the TIG, D, the Tick. What is it? You got this right? I got this right. Oh, wow. I love this one. The ick is the only word that I've heard used, but I think if I'm dating, we've already gotten past that. I don't know. I'll go with that. The other one is. Once, okay, the ick, yeah, yeah. The ick is correct. Correct answer. Sudden feeling of dislike. Okay.

That describes my breakfast. I eat the same breakfast every morning and I eat it until, you know, I reach a morning when I get the ick and I got to go on to something else. I switch. Interesting. But I'm well past dating, but, but. Would you've gotten that one right, John? I'm just curious. I was in between that and the tea, because I think the tea is spilling, you know,

all the background information on someone. So that could also be problem at it. Oh, wow. Interesting. That's good. You're pretty deep, John. I'm deep. Yeah, I have some nephews who are in Gen Z, so I, are, you're deep. All right, John.

I'm the inside source. All right, John, here's this is for you. All four of these expressions have circulated among Gen Alpha, so obviously the youngest group. As of October 26, 2026, which one has earned its own standalone entry in Merriam-Webster's main dictionary. A, phantom tax, B, oro farming, three, skibbidi, D, LARPing.

I got this right. You don't know, John? Oh, come on. I mean, LARPing is a thing, right? Live action role play, that's larping. I don't know that it's been alpha. How does he know that? I had no idea that's what that was. What was the first one, Mark? Phan-M-T-A-X, F-A-N-U-M-T-A-X.

I've never heard that that micrower I don't know This is Gen Alpha got this into Miriam Webster's dictionary Give up Well I guess it's definitely not larping

So I'm I'm wrong there I don't think it's Phantom Tax It's a little bit like Wait wait wait don't tell me here I'm waiting for you to just give me the answer So I think What are the two middle options

ORA farming and Skibbidi Let's go aura farming Oh my gosh You got it wrong my friend Oh my gosh I even got this right. The boomer got it right. Skibbittie.

Can you explain Skibbitty? I would not have... I would not have used Skibbitty. Okay. Skibbitty has its own entries. It's defined as a humorous, nonsensical, and sometimes insulting expression or meme with its first recorded use in that sense dating back to 2023. The word spread through Skibbitty Toilet, an absurdist YouTube series that became a sensation

among young viewers. Yeah, I thought it was profane. I'm boomer and I got skipping. How did you know that, Mark? I don't know how I know anything. It's a good testicle. That's an epistemological question. I don't know.

I just know. Yeah, just know. You're osmosis. Anyway, I highly recommend that piece. It's really, really entertaining. Yeah, very, very cool. We're into words here at Inside Economics, John. Did you know that?

I love it. Yeah. It's really key. We really focus on the words because we have to describe, you know, the economy and how people are feeling and getting the right word is absolutely necessary. I'm sure you're on board with that kind of thinking. You might need multiple words. It could be hard if you're not in one word. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

All right, well, before we get down to how people are feeling, which is a really hard question. because it depends on what minute it is. That determines how I feel. But, you know, really hard to do. But let's talk about the data of the week, and it was inflation, right, Matt? CPI, consumer price index, PPI, producer. Everything was really, as we were wont to say, hot, came in hot, right? I thought you were going to say ugly, but hot works.

Ugly and hot, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So. Hot and ugly. That doesn't, that's, that's, that feels like. In some context, I could see how that would be an oxymoron. Oxymoron. In this context, I think when we don't want inflation to be hotter, it was an ugly couple of days of data. We got the CPI and the U.S. Consumer Price Index rose 0.6%. That was, that's a very strong increase. It's, it was expected to be on the high side because of energy prices, what we've seen with gas, with diesel over the past. You know, six weeks, really, we've seen a rapid acceleration. But 0.6% was higher than we expected.

It's higher than consensus expectations. It lifted the year-over-year growth rate from 3.4 to 3.7, almost 3.8. And that 0.6 increase was almost 0.7. So really kind of no good way to look at it. Underneath the hood energy, as expected, 9% increase on the month in gasoline, the CPI for gasoline. We're about 436, 435 average throughout September for a gallon of unleaded gasoline. That's up about 30 cents from the month before. We had some data for October.

We're looking at maybe a modest decline at best, but we'll see over the coming weeks whether we can get some relief. But certainly no relief in September. Food fluid inflation, another key thing to watch. What's the spillover effect from higher energy prices? Still a pretty positive story there. soft again in September. That was the biggest surprise, wasn't it?

At least to me. On the downside, yeah. A grocery on the downside. Yeah, the point, you know, if you tell me that we're getting this big increase and pretty consecutive increases, hot increases and energy prices, yet grocery store prices fall 0.1% on the month. That's certainly a surprise. It's a good thing.

Can I just throw out, because I saw a pretty big declines and there was a fair amount of declines across different food products, but I saw beef was done. Could that be tariffs? The president relaxed tariffs on Brazilian beef. Could that have been part of it? Beef has fallen for three consecutive months. I don't have off the top of my head when the easing of the trade restrictions was, but you are seeing a fall and we're about now, about two and a half percent. So you're not dismissing that, but you don't know for sure. No, and I just don't think of it as a big enough driver. Yeah. So on the other side, coffee prices up almost a percent on the month.

That's more of a weather story. Don't take anyone's stat. I might have. I wasn't too specific about it. I don't think I should be boxed in. So food inflation, 0.1% decline in food at home. The CPI for food at home. That's our proxy for grocery prices.

That's a positive story. But in general, yeah, food has kind of been mild over the past few months. core CPI so excluding food excluding energy 0.33 so a 0.3% increase on the month. Again, that's higher than we expected. It's not too much higher than expectations, consensus expectations, but it was. Lifted the year-over-year growth rate from 2.4 to 2.6%. That's kind of the headline story there. We knew we were going to get a strong increase because of gas prices. We know what's happening in energy markets. So we look to core CPI to exclude that and kind of focus on underlying trend. And there we see an acceleration on the months.

We get a 0.3% increase in August, 0.3% increase in September. We're running there almost a 3.5% year, three-month annualized basis. You know, a different narrative than we had a few months ago. But if there's still year over year, it's still what? 2.6% or 2.56%. So the lowest and the best of the four inflation measures that we think about, PC, Core PC, CPI, Core CPI. but a step in the wrong direction after what had been a pretty, you know, encouraging moderation of late. Hey, Matt, so here's the overriding question in my mind.

How, there's no question that the Iran war's fingerprints are all over these reports. The question is, in my mind, how much of what we're observing is the Iran were? And, you know, is there some broadening out in the inflationary pressures that we're observing? That, to me, is the key question. How do you answer that question? Yes, you're right. It's the primary driver. That's why we're...

The war. The war is the primary driver. Up until this month, and I don't want to get whipsawed by a month of data, I would say that the spillover effect has been pretty concentrated, and we haven't seen it show up everywhere else that you might expect. Sure, airfares jump. But we haven't seen, as I mentioned, the food inflation, and we haven't seen it really broad now.

September, especially if you start to pull in, when we start to look at the PPI report, I think you see a clearer. and kind of uniform coordinated increase in a bunch of second order effects of the energy shock. I still think you call that an Iran, the Iran war story. That's a fancy way of saying there's passed through the second order meaning, you know, it's not the direct impact,

but it's the indirect impact that we're starting to observe. I think that's fair. Yeah. So transportation and warehousing, if it's on a truck, that's diesel costs. Those prices are going higher. That's going to be increasingly passed through. But it's still just in the distribution costs, I think is what we see most clearly in September.

So if you're asking me, for what the number would be, if absent the Iran War, where would headline CPI be? I think you can take a percentage point off of headline CPI, and you're still over two and a half percent, but you're getting a significant boost up to 3.7 percent year over year because of all these energy-related inflationary pressure points. You know, speaking of second order effects, I think one of the things that we see very clearly, one of the reasons why I think food inflation has not been, or grocery inflation hasn't been what we thought it would have been is that there is a lot of kind of demand destruction happening.

So we see consumers increasingly saying they're walking away from grocery prices or trading down to cheaper alternatives. So I just don't think in the grocery space there's that pricing power to pass through full costs to the same extent as there are, maybe in some other industries. Ah, that's interesting. We have a consumer who's gotten very smart. and they really have learned how to reallocate and adjust. And, you know, it's like everyone over the last five years has been through a primer in household finances. Right, right. Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

Groceries is where you're seeing a lot of competition and consumers is very discerning. Yes. And as a result, it's just hard for, if not impossible, for these, the grocery. change to pass through these higher prices to their consumer. And that's what we're observing. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Makes a lot of sense. So, Matt, if not for the war, are you saying that inflation would be still a problem, you know, still an issue above the Fed's target or not so much? I think we would be above the Fed's target, but in a tolerable way. We'd be a 2.5% CPI inflation. That's not with the Fed targets. That's just barely above what's commensurate with the PCE deflator at the Fed's 2% target. So I think we'd be talking about the conversation would be, are we there? Or are we not? Not does the Fed need to aggressively lift rate the Titan policy right now? So yeah, I certainly don't think we'd be below 2%. There are still inflationary pressures happening. It's maybe not driven on the consumer side. It's not a tariff story. It's more an AI story, but it's not broad enough. I would argue.

John, would you agree with that kind of assessment? I mean, if not for the war? If we just rewind the clock a little bit, right before that war broke out, we had the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs. We had businesses all of a sudden, what we saw in all of our small business surveys is that they were hesitant to pass through cost, given the, uncertainty of the duration of tariffs. And so as soon as there was that sort of clarity that tariffs were not here to stay, it was like, cool, let's go ahead and eat this temporary cost increase because long term we don't want to be, you know, disadvantage relative to our competitors. So I think we were actually in a pretty strong spot, you know, in January, early February

for not where we were at that time, but the trajectory was really encouraging. This was by all accounts a negative supply shock, I mean, kind of a textbook negative supply shock. And that is permeate in ways that have been somewhat foreseeable, but I think a little more challenging maybe than we had anticipated to. You know, the Fed or some Fed members have been talking more hawkishly around inflation, you know, arguing that there's signs of inflation becoming more, I think the word is entrenched or persistent, you know, broader-based. Do you have the same concerns? I do. I mean, it's certainly the case that inflation. tends to be kind of, you know, there's has a lot of non-linearities to it, to use a technical term.

It rises very quickly. It takes a long time to fall. And so, you know, and there's a lot of history, right, of supply shocks that ostensibly are concentrated in these, you know, non-core segments trickling into core inflation. I don't think we've seen that yet, in part because we haven't seen it play out through that kind of the labor. channel, that would be the transmission channel where you'd start to think people would be demanding higher wages and then you'd start getting this sort of vicious cycle. I don't think we're there yet, but it's certainly the case that the longer inflation lasts above target, the more dramatic the remedy, the medicine is going to have to be to get it under control. Okay, so you're saying,

you're not observing any persistence or entrenchment yet. I mean, the tail would be if... I mean, really on the inflation expectations front, if we're being, I mean, that's where we have yet to see a dramatic increase in what we measure is indirect consumer inflation expectation. So how much would your wages have to change to make you equally well off for the expected change of the price of goods and services you buy? And there's a whole lot of reasons why that's, I think, better and more grounded than this concept of inflation, which is kind of a boogeyman and subject to a lot of partisan bias. that looked to me like at the end of 2025 tariffs were finally starting to hit inflation expectations. People had really are indirect consumer inflation expectations. But they haven't blown up the way that they did in, you know, Ukraine war style where gas was at for 50. And I do think it's important to contextualize all of that, right? Like gas at 430 in 20206 is not the same as gas at 430 in 2022. Prices in general have increased.

And so as a share of wallet, gas is not taking up as much as it was now. Sorry, as much as it was in 2022 as it is now. Okay. So again, just to make, so I want to make sure that I understand what you were saying, saying, okay, yes, if we have persistently high inflation, let's say because of the war, that will potentially ultimately become a problem, become more entrenched in kind of wage dynamics and you get into kind of a wage price, so-called wage price spiral. You're not observing that yet. Correct. You've not observed that yet. Okay. So there hasn't been, there's reason to be nervous about

that, you know, given the backdrop, but, you know, as of this point in time, you're not, you've not seen that happen. Yeah, I think it's the double-edged sort. I mean, if you go back and think about 2022, that labor market was so strong. I think in hindsight, it was even stronger looking back on it than we maybe appreciated at the time. And I don't believe that that's the case right now. And so the likelihood of these price pressures translating into wage pressure seems less likely now than it was then. And we don't see consumers or workers saying that they're asking for raises at elevated rates compared to what they were a few years ago. So do you think that it's reasonable for the Federal Reserve to be hiking interest rates

given that backdrop, given everything you just said? Yeah, I do because what we have been focused on, I think most folks have been focused on interest rates rather than looking at real rates or financial conditions. And if you go sort of look at those other metrics, there are very few signs that we are really in kind of restrictive policy where interest rates stand today. I mean, real rates certainly are not high by historical standards. You just offset that by inflation. Financial conditions, it doesn't look to me like it's dissuading the massive investment that we're having across the AI industry. Now, obviously, there's kind of a structural shock there that maybe is disrupting how you kind of read that. But,

you know, the Chicago Fed has their measure of financial conditions. You've got a lot of other. Goldman has some, nobody who's out there monitoring loan activity or investment activity is saying that the cost of capital is so high that folks are walking away from making these big investments. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, so you're saying, okay, I'm on board with rate hikes, but not because inflation is the issue, not because the economy is too strong, but because financial conditions are too easy. No, I'm thinking about what is the mechanism, right? So you raise rates.

I mean, there's an open question, I suppose, in today's economy, how rates actually are going to go affect the consumer. But conceivably, you raise rates that makes it harder to borrow money, more expensive to borrow money. That is the mechanism that slows down the economy. There's also kind of this expectations channel, I suppose, but those two, neither of those two are suggesting that rates are overly restrictive right now. Right. Right. I guess I push back a little bit on the financial conditions, because I don't know, I know the Goldman Index, I don't, not sure. in the Chicago Fed Index, they have long-term rates.

They don't have like to fix mortgage rate. And that obviously feels like that's a tightening in conditions, right? I mean, I know it's just housing, but refinancing, but, you know, that's not nothing. The housing market is certainly challenging. I would say that that, right, that's less about what the Fed is doing and maybe more about some of the fiscal situation that we're in. But okay, okay. Let me ask one more thing to Matt about the CPI-PPI report.

And let's come back and then we'll talk. talk about, you know, what you're observing in your surveys about people's attitudes towards inflation more deeply. Hey, Matt, AI. So, you know, one of the other arguments that's been put forward, again, by some folks on the FMC, is that inflation is becoming more of an issue on the demand because of demand, and that goes back to AI. The AI infrastructure buildout, pushing up costs for, you know, everything from construction workers to electronics, and that's showing up in our CPIs and PPI's, PCEs. Did you observe that in the report, anything there to report on?

Yes, in the PPI, but I would point to this morning's import prices for an even stronger signal. So much of the big increase in import prices in September can be backed into semiconductors, computers, peripherals. For the PPI, we look at 1.3% increase on the month. that's going to be energy. You strip that away where you're getting and looking at capital goods, core capital goods, the kind of things that'll represent or capture the AI buildout. And again, it's another strong month. But what really caught my eye is the import prices and where that inflationary pressure is showing up. And that's a more direct AI story than we're, but then we're certainly seeing in the CPI and even the PPI this month.

I guess what really matters is if there's higher import, price is bleed through into CPI, PPI, and you're saying yes to some degree, but not as much as you might one might think looking at the import price data. Yeah. And I think there's a reason that that channel to consumer prices is going to be less direct. These are enterprise products that aren't off the shell. I mean, you can buy cloud code and have a new computer to run all these capabilities. But in general, these are enterprise, this is software that the companies are buying. That may mean that they can't afford other things or they may need to protect margins by raising prices elsewhere, but it's far less direct. And I don't think we're going to get the inflationary

signal that we might through just energy, like an energy shock or tariffs, much more direct to consumer goods. But the inflationary story from AI is interesting, is growing, has grown in the second half of 2026 dramatically and I think is really challenging for the Fed because you're nowhere near making policy to John's point restrictive enough to slow that down and that's yes it's an inflationary source but is it big enough is it worth slowing down and how dramatic would how dramatically tightened would policy need to be to make that happen I find that to be really challenging and every month data that we see provides more proof that that's a source of inflation but all these other caveats about how much it's going to pass through.

You know what worries me a little bit, or maybe even more than a little bit with the Fed tightening, is, I mean, if the inflationary pressures are coming from the AI sector and we're saying that, you know, a quarter point, a half a point, three quarters of a point, a full point on the funds rate isn't going to do a whole lot of damage to the AI sector because it's running on a whole different dynamic. You know, it's hurdle rates or it can easily get over. these interest rates, no problem, you know, digesting them. That means that the only way you get some effects is if you knock out the non-AI part of the economy, which feels pretty fragile to me as it is. So it kind of runs the risk of, you know, sinking the part of the economy that's not related to AI to kind of get what you want. So it feels like a pretty risky endeavor. Does that, Does that resonate with you, John, that argument? Is that the concern or not so much?

I mean, it's kind of a classic argument around, you know, how you deal with monetary policy as this blunt instrument in a super head of genius. You know, you can think about the euro area and, you know, what does it mean to have a single interest rate across all these disparate economies? Yeah. The U.S. in this sense right now is feeling a little bit like that, where you've got a couple industries that are kind of racing ahead and a lot that are really struggling, having a single policy that governs all of them that's optimal is going to be pretty challenging.

Pretty challenging. So how are, you know, kind of the narrative, at least my interpretation of the narrative, with regard to the kind of sentiment of consumers broadly here in the U.S., is that they're not, they don't feel very good about how things are going. They're upset, and it's largely, there are many reasons for that, and we'll walk through them. but at the top of the list of reasons is the cost of living, affordability, the high inflation numbers. Is that narrative correct? I think that's part of it.

It's those. So your narrative on consumer sentiment being low is correct. I don't think it's as low as you would see in the University of Michigan for reasons we could dive into, but it is certainly down across the board relative to where was the beginning of the year or even where it was in early 2025 when Trump was inaugurated. So consumer sentiment has taken a negative shock. I think the affordability issues are part of it. That's kind of the cyclical, if you will. But there are also these big structural issues around uncertainty in terms of AI, what that

means for people losing their job, even though they haven't experienced it yet. There's just this growing kind of angst over what it might mean for them. And then the geopolitical situation as well. And I know we often think about that directly in terms of. of kind of gas prices, but there's just this growing fear that we don't know what the world around us looks like and how, you know, to what extent are we able to operate either as a business or, you know, consumers being safe, having the U.S. being kind of this, the envy of the world. And so there's these sort of longer-term structural shifts that are also magnifying some of the

affordability concerns that you mentioned. So, John, kind of the broader narrative here is that around the consumer, the American consumer, that sentiment is weak, it's low. I mean, it depends on which survey you look at. But if you're looking at the morning consult numbers, are they low? And the other part of the narrative is there's a long list of gripes. You know, people have got lots of concerns that we can walk through. But at the top of the list of concerns is affordability, the cost of living, the inflation statistics we were just talking about.

Is that a fair characterization of what you're observing? and the reasons for, you know, why people are feeling so, so low? It is certainly the case that elevated gas prices was kind of the, the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. And so we saw consumers starting to actually positively respond to developments in early 2026 as there was a greater certainty around the tariff picture as the stock market started to kind of stabilize. And then right as the Iran war was announced, and we started to see elevated gas prices, that was really the tipping point. And so you have this kind of confluence of factors, right, that the elevated gas prices right now are coming on the back of what was a roller coaster of a year in 2025 in terms of, you know, tariff policy, geopolitical policy. Then you had this long structural trend of housing affordability or lack of affordability. that's also, I mean, let's remember, most people now are not essentially able to live this American dream.

So you've got a lot of factors that are kind of headwinds in reshaping how consumers feel about, you know, their five, 10-year outlook. Got it. So you're saying there's this melange or dark brew of things that are bothering people. But the thing that kind of the catalyst for the recent weakening and sentiment is obviously the, there's, the fallout from the Iran War, the higher gas prices and diesel. That's exactly right. Okay. 2025 was a different story. That was all a story of tariffs.

Right. And that was a story of when will tariffs pass through to prices for what goods? And then to what extent is tariff uncertainty, you know, driving a pullback and hiring, driving elevated layoffs, all those sort of things. And so that 2025 story was really concentrated among lower income. income adults. That's what we saw in our data. 2026 looks like things have kind of expanded. So that's a quality, but maybe not in the right way, where everyone is essentially feeling pretty gloomy right now.

Right. Okay. I should say maybe we should take a step back. Morning consult is your business is surveying consumers around a broad array of questions and you provide that information to, you know, businesses and policymakers and so forth and so on. How do you line up relative to kind of the other surveys that are around that have been around for quite some time, the University of Michigan survey and the conference board survey? How would you characterize your survey relative to those? Well, from kind of a basic questionnaire perspective, we are at a – asking the exact same five questions as the University of Michigan. So there's no difference there.

We are just conducting daily surveys as opposed to monthly surveys. We do about 5,000 per day in the U.S., 20,000 per day globally across the largest 50 economies. So orders of magnitude different. And then we are an online survey, have been from day one going back to January 2018. The University of Michigan moved from a phone survey to an online survey in April of 2024. and that's created a lot of concerns around a structural break in their data with the Chicago Fed measuring it to be roughly 20 points lower now than it would have been pre-transitioned to the online survey. But in the conference board survey, how do you line up? The conference board survey is, I mean, over longer time horizons, you see similar trends, but their questions are different. They're more focused on labor market outcomes and they're more focused on kind of near-term.

they tend to use three and six-month time horizons. So whereas the University of Michigan and morning consults are focused on, you know, 12-month, five-year time horizon. So I think we're more likely to be picking up on some of these, you know, AI anxieties around how things might shift over the next five years.

That's not going to be reflected in the conference board data. I got it. And I did notice, and this might be too much into the weeds, but the conference board survey took a big dive last month. I don't know if you noticed. I'm sure you follow that data carefully. Does you observe that in your survey results? Any kind of break there?

Yeah, I mean, I will say when we go look at some of our labor data, so on that same sentiment survey, we're asking people if they worked last week, if they looked for work, essentially a simplified version of the BLS's CPS supplement. We did see some weaknesses last month, and we really started to see some growing anxiety around near-term. term job loss. I don't think that that is going to be a permanent feature of the consumer. I think that you will see the conference board probably bounce back to something similar to their kind of downward trend, but not, there's no reason to think that there's an acute shock right now

in consumer sentiment. Okay. So it's kind of anomalous. You think it's going to get ironed out here as we move forward. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, the other kind of question. Well, I would say, you know, But the point there is, you know, when you're running a point in time survey, it really matters the day that you're talking to people. Oh, right? So, you know, what is the announcement that happened? What is the news story that captivated people who took the survey that day? It's one of the challenges, I think, in this kind of crazy news cycle of doing a legacy survey work. Right.

Got it. Got it. So, you know, the other question is, a key question is the link between sentiment and what people say how they're feeling, but actually how that relates to what they're doing in terms of their spending. It does appear that spending is held up well, and despite everything that's going on and despite the weaker confidence. Has there been any kind of fundamental shift or change in the relationship between what people's say how they feel and exactly how they're behaving or not so much? No, I think COVID was really the beginning of that shift. And we see it in our data that,

you know, that was a really dramatic change in how people felt about, you know, not just the economy, but things like the government, their overall happiness, some of these broader indicators. And then I mentioned earlier, you know, the downward impact of things like geopolitical uncertainty, stock market volatility, AI transformation, those are all these kind of pretty broad structural headwinds that I think are driving down sentiment. I would say it is still the case that if you go look at, you know, large, acute shock, something like in the order, you know, magnitude of 20, 25 percent month over month or 30-day changes in sentiment, you're going to see that that responds, you know, that captures a pretty dramatic pullback in spending. And then on our

side, what we tend to do is we combine our sentiment data with the employment data, right? Because you want to know both how people feel about their personal finances. That's like the willingness, but then also the ability to spend. And so those measures together, I think, have been better indicators of spending. Oh, that's a good way of thinking about it. So the measurement surveys are measuring the willingness, but it's also the ability. And you're saying you look at the employment data to try to capture that as well in terms of what it means for spending. Yeah, it makes sense. I don't know any reasonably sophisticated economist who just took sentiment as a pure proxy for spending. I think there's always been some sort of transformation that happened. And usually there's a

there's an equation of some sort and you've got to add different variables in. Yeah, got it. Although I had kind of a pet theory that sentiment, you know, really doesn't drive spending decisions in most typical times. It's just reflects what's going on in terms of inflation and unemployment. But there are times when people kind of lose faith and kind of run for the bunker and sentiment surveys collapse. And it's a good near-term leading indicator of, you know,

a problem. There's a kind of a non-linearity, as you put it, kind of break in people's thinking in their behavior. And that's when it takes on added importance. Yes. And I think, I think that's all true. I think that the timeliness of it is very valuable and then the fact that it's not, you know, revised. So for us, you know, getting a daily pulse on the consumer is really valuable. And we're not going to go back and change that. That's where things stand as of that day. The inflation or, you know, the non-farm payroll, right? Like people are all running. those regressions using the revised data. Right, right.

So right now when you look at your sentiment result, survey results, and you marry that with kind of what's going on in the labor market, the job market, the employment data. Does it all feel pretty consistent with kind of the spending behavior that we're seeing? I think so. Consumers are hanging tough. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're hanging tough at these headline numbers.

But again, I do think that there's a lot of very thoughtful, allocation essentially that's going on underneath the hood. That might not be as true for some higher income folks who have been able to weather these last few years pretty well and a benefit from asset prices, et cetera, et cetera. But for middle and low income folks, they are really getting very, very wise in terms of how to, again, things like grocery prices, even things like gas prices, how to be very thoughtful in making their income. stretch a little further. I know you do the surveys, you get a lot of responses, so you've got a lot of data points.

Is there anything when you look under the HUD in that there are differences like regional differences or differences across income groups or are you observing anything there? There's so much heterogeneity. It's kind of crazy. And in fact, I have a fragmentation score that I use of the top 100 MSAs and it's reached essentially a series high over the last 10 years. Really? Yeah.

So there's a lot of people are responding very differently. And I think it speaks to this labor market story, again, looking at top line numbers and not appreciating how differently, you know, different industries. I mean, the role of health care and the labor market right now is absurd. And so if you're in a community that is not benefiting from that, that's very different than if you're in a health care forward community. So that's part of it. The geographic feature, from 2024 to present, all consumers, 100 and 4 out of 106 of the largest MSAs are down 10 percentage points or higher. So it's a pretty broad trend in that sense over the last two years. The more recent development is that, you know, not to conflate maybe economics and,

politics, but Republicans have turned pretty negative now over the last two or three months. So there was a broad expectation that the Iran war would last roughly three months or shorter to our survey data said. And then as that war has progressed, we have very clearly seen Republicans start to lose faith or revised downward their long-term expectations for the economy. In a way that was different than the tariff war, I think you saw Republicans hold out hope there that tariffs were going to be a net positive for them in the broader economy. The Iran war is really a pretty universally hated in terms of people's impact on people's finances. Wow, that's very interesting. So you're saying very recently sentiment is kind of downshifted and it's because Republicans are losing faith.

That's right. Yeah. Oh, that's really interesting. So how does this play into the election? I mean, I'm sure you're getting a lot of questions about, well, what does this mean for how people are going to vote? You know, and the kind of the broad, again, the kind of the narrative is that people are upset by all these affordability issues. You throw in the mix, some of these other factors, AI and everything else, they're going to vote against the incumbent party, the Republican Party and that the Democrats are going to do quite well in the midterms. Is that kind of sort of what you're observing? It's broadly what we see.

I mean, I think at a, you know, state-by-state level, we clearly see that support for Trump is, Trump is underwater in states that you couldn't, wouldn't fathom him being underwater in, places like Kansas, Texas. So the national sentiment is working against some of these Republicans running in open seats right now in a way that hasn't been kind of the case historically. The thing I think that is interesting is, you know, maybe this is the view that the political spectrum is more of a circle than a line. which is that basically, you know, Republicans and Democrats pretty strongly agree that banning data centers should be one of the top priorities of the next Congress. So when we go ask them to list, you know, rank order, the top priorities for the next Congress, it's issues like affordability, housing, but data center regulation jumps out by far and away

as the largest area, particularly where people have reached a consensus. So I think there's, you know, as we are economists and we're trying to play out maybe how the election, how the economy influences the election, but then the election is going to influence the economy and thinking about what the regulatory landscape looks like for these data centers and the extent to which, you know, future AI progress on the macro front is contingent on ongoing sort of data center development. That is an area that I'm looking at very, very closely. I'm very, so looking at that state level data you mentioned, does any particular state or states kind of stand out? And you go, oh my gosh, I would have thought that.

You know, I think places like Texas and Kansas are all very surprising to me that we're seeing Trump as being underwater in those states. That's just not, these are places that he carried very strongly in 2024, 2020, 2016. So there's a broad, I would say a very broad sense that there are basic kind of meat and potatoes issues that are not being addressed right now. And those are the affordability concerns, right? This is what people, when people say what bothers them, it's energy prices, food prices, housing affordability. And then data centers, but also data centers is kind of a proxy, not a proxy, but is clearly related to some of these cost pressures that people are feeling. What about on the other side, the Democratic side? I mean, any states that are thought to be going democratic that don't look that way in your data?

There's nothing right now that looks like, yeah, not really. I mean, I don't want to overplay everything, right, because, you know, there's a lot of time and blah, blah, blah, but really... Not really. There's only three weeks, right? In the political landscape, that can shift pretty quickly. Something can happen. I think the relative, the harm that Trump, I think, is going to impact on the ticket in some of these seats, Senate seats that are open seats is maybe underappreciated. And then the affordability concerns are very real.

And you've got to figure out which candidate I think is most likely to address those concerns. Yeah, got it, got it. Hey, I want to play the game, the stats game. do. Let me get, Rissa, I've kind of pushed, I've ignored you the whole podcast. Sorry about that. Let me, let me, there's, we covered a lot of ground here. Any, any ground, additional ground you want to cover? Do you want to go double back and get a little bit more detail? It's all yours. Just, I, just two things that jumped out at me, back to the, the conversation about the Fed and the Fed weighing, what to do about rates in the, in the face of some of the inflation coming from AI. and that seemingly being sort of impervious to the at least current level of rates, right?

AI is also contributing a lot to economic growth right now. I mean, it's contributing more to growth than it is to inflation right now, probably double on a magnitude, right? Order of magnitude of double. So I don't really think the Fed, I don't know that the Fed, I don't know that the Fed, Fed really wants to slow AI that much because that means taking a big chunk out of economic growth right now. I mean, yeah, they're concerned about the inflation coming from AI, but slowing that down means probably slowing growth to below potential growth. And I think they have to be weighing that as well. The second thing that... Before you go on, though, that's where I get confused, right? Because

we're growing up potential, right? The GDP growth is kind of tooish. That includes AI and non-AI. Yeah. The way monetary policy, and you're worried about inflation and you want to get inflation down, the way monetary policy does that is by slowing growth. Somebody's

got to slow down. Either that's going to be AI or non-AI, but either way, we're going to be growing below potential. Right. Right. So you're taking a pretty big potential risk there. You know, you're saying, I, but I'm willing to take that risk, meaning risk of slower growth and even getting to self-reinforcing negative cycle or recession, but I'm willing to take that risk because I'm more worried about inflation today. No? Is that, I mean, is John, does that resonate with you, that concern? That already is that, I mean, it's right. I mean, just to the, the dual mandate is inflation and, and full employment, which, you know, obviously GDP growth and full employment are together. But I, um, it seems very,

clear, you know, just reading the, you know, the basic statements of the, of the FMC members that they are, they have moved away, you know, late 2025, they were focused on the full employment mandate. That is shifted and now they're back focused on inflation. So that, to me, seems like where the, I guess, the upside risk or the, you know, the downside risk of inflation is very high right now. Right. Okay. What's the second thing, Marissa? Oh, I just wonder, well, John, kind of wondering, you know, you said looking across geographies, you see this differentiation and some of it might have to do with the job market and how exposed, you know, different regions are to different industries. I wonder if you also see differences in inflation across regions. I mean, we know different parts of the country are hit differently depending on how much they drive and what gas prices might be and how dependent they are on. home heating and those kinds of things. Do you see differentiation on the inflation front much across

the country? Well, we definitely see differences in terms of how people are responding to price changes. So we're not directly monitoring inflation per se. We'll not measure inflation expectations, which we know are very closely related to gas prices. And so you're going to see differences in inflation expectations based on gas prices. The other thing maybe that just, you know, to show that I'm not totally a Luddite is, you know, it's not, inflation expectations are also driven by people's news consumption. And in fact, we've shown that it's driven by their social media presence as well. And so that's a whole paper we have called the expectations of others. And it turns out that if you are Facebook friends with people who are in

living in high gas price zip codes, you are more likely to think inflation is a high. is a big problem than not. And so it's not just your personal experiences, but also the experiences of all the people who may be your C on your phone. But we clearly see that, you know, just as a very basic kind of heuristic, the income groups have experienced

this most recent price increase very differently. One of the reasons is because homeownership varies so differently across the income spend. And so it's a, It's a very bizarre thing to say, but one of the reasons I think the consumer has held up reasonably well over this most recent period of time is in fact because homeownership has stagnated. And you have see a lot of folks who have actually have that down payment that wasn't enough to actually buy a house and said it's just a savings. Oh, interesting. And they're used, like they're renters.

They're not homeowners, they're renters. And so they've got cash saved up that they wanted to buy a house. They are unable to buy a house. That is a negative shock, Mark, to explain this difference between spending and sentiment. That's a negative shock to your sentiment. You're not living the life that you wanted to. You feel like you've been cheated. And yet you are actually cash flush because you didn't make this investment that, you know, over time is likely to pay off.

But in the near term would drain you. Yeah, that's a fascinating point. It's consistent with it. I heard this isn't hard data that's in the public domain, but I know that sounds cryptic, but I can't be any more forthright about that. But I've heard that curtailments, this is, you know, curtailment, I didn't know this, that, you know, most people, when they have a mortgage, they tend to pay a little bit more each month than the mortgage amount that's due because they want to pay down the principal,

and therefore their total interest bill at the end of the day is lower. And I didn't realize that people, tend to do. And that's called a curtailment. But curtailments have come off considerably. So people have been, you know, using that as a source of cash, too. Instead of, you know, paying down their mortgage, they're now using that to supplement their other cash and to maintain their spending. So very consistent with that. But that's a really interesting point. Hey, guys, oh, go ahead, John. Well, I would say, so we just run, like, if you're familiar with the Consumer Expenditures Survey, we have a monthly version of the Consumer Expenditure Survey. And we very clearly see that

that share of spending allocated to housing has fallen for middle and low-income adults as housing affordability has become more and more of a challenge. So it's a compositional effect. They're increasingly renters. And as a result, they're spending less of their incomes and their monthly outlays on housing. It's so interesting. That is very interesting. It makes total sense.

Well, let's play the game. The stats game. We each put forward a stat. The rest of the group tries to figure that out with, clues, questions, deductive reasoning. The best stat is one that's not so easy we get it right away, one that's not so hard we never get it. And tradition has it, John, we always begin with Marissa. So Marissa, what's your stat? My stat is minus 1% and minus 1%. Oh, minus 1 and 2 stats. Yeah. Are they related stats? Yes. Are they inflation statistics?

Yes. in the CPI? Yes. Okay. So, are they products and prices for certain products and services? Yeah. Okay. Year over year or month, is it, are they month over month?

One is year over year and one is month over month for the same item. Same item. Okay. So we got it. Oh, guys, okay. What is it? What is it? Matt, you should know.

I'm drawn a total blank here. I know. Inflation maven. So down one percent. year over year down 1% in the month. Is it a big item or a big share of the budget or a small item? It's probably, it's about to become a bigger share of John and Matt's budget. Oh, that sounds like a great.

Daycare went up by more than that. Yeah, education services. Is it, wait, goods or services? It's a good. It's a good. It's a good. Okay. Toys?

Toys. No. No. Oh. They went up by more than I knew that. But much more. About to be. So these are for toddlers.

It's a product for toddlers? Marissa? No. No. Maybe in like three months to six months. Oh. You know more about parenting than I do. You guys, what are you going to be doing in three to six months?

Apparel, some apparel item? No. I'm getting closer. Not a toy, not an apparel item. It's the new Apple iPhone for six months old. Oh my God. No? No, it's not.

Oh, okay. That doesn't exist. Please tell me that doesn't exist. Yeah, no, I'm just making that up. That's skibbidi. It's a skibbitty. It's a skibbitty. I don't know.

I think we're going to give up, Marissa. Okay, it's the CPI for baby food. Oh, wow. Very good. How can we not get that? I know. Why is that down? Baby food and formula.

I don't know. I don't know. You know, a lot of these food items, as we talked about, are kind of all over the place, right? Right. A lot of the imported stuff like bananas and coffee and those kinds of things are up. but a lot of the stuff that's made here, and that is primarily made in the United States, is experiencing less inflation than imports.

So I don't know, but... Well, you know, I think I can tell from... I know John, I know John pretty well. I know John pretty well. I think, you know, they don't buy baby food. They grow their own stuff in the backyard. They're, you know, very helped... That very well could be.

Yeah. Make it yourself. Yeah. Yeah. They get their own, you know, herbs and sput. and, well, I guess babies don't have herbs and spices, but. It may be, well, I mean, if you have to go out and buy bananas and fruits and vegetables to make your own baby food, it might actually be more expensive to do that now than it would be to buy, to buy pre-packaged baby food. I don't know. That's a good one, though, Marissa. That was excellent. Approposite the group at hand.

Yeah, well. Yeah, I'm a little ashamed, I have to say. Yeah. You know, how I couldn't go down. I guess, yeah. I think if you're, yeah, I was going to say something, but I won't. My brain is not functioning at full capacity right now. I think there's got to be some level of handicapping here in this game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get a bit of a handicap. All right, John, you're up.

What's your stat? I've got, how about 1.5%? Is that an inflation statistic? It is not. Is it from your survey? It is not. It's a government statistic. It is not.

Oh, okay. Is it a Fed statistic? Is it an interest rate? No. No. Okay. Is it a financial, is it come from financial markets in some way? No.

No, I don't think so. Oh, you don't think so? No, no. No, the answer is no. No. Forest data is not from financial markets. Okay. One positive 1.5 percent.

Is it a year-over-year growth rate? It is a month-over-month growth rate. Industrial production-related? Reasonally adjusted, month-over-month. He said it's not a government statistic. He was hesitant on the Fed, though, so I wasn't sure. No, no, it's not Fed. No, no, sorry.

That was just being slow. Sorry, no. That goes back to, you know, not getting enough sleep. Is it a private industry or trade group statistic? Yes. Did it come out this week? Yes. Oh, what came out this week?

Um, NFIB come out this week National Federation, is it the NFIB survey related? It's not. I think NFIB did come out or I'm not, it's not NFIB. It's not.

But you're getting hot, you're getting warmer. Okay. Mark, I really thought you would have this. This is your bread and butter. Right, my bread and butter. Jeez. Is it housing related?

Yes. Is it house price growth? Nope. Is it mortgage apps? No? We give up, John. What is it? Existing home sales.

Oh. A percentage increase. It rose. See, you know, Jen, I don't look at existing home sales on a percentage basis, right? I know. Well, that's why I did it. If I had told you three points. Oh, good point.

I played this game once before. I know how good you guys. Oh, tricky, tricky, tricky, tricky. Got it. Well, that's a good one. Do you want to explain why you pay it? picked it? I picked it because I think housing is underappreciated. Is this long-term

kind of drag on the economy that is manifesting itself in ways, I mean, just like we discussed, in ways that are kind of negative but positive in some near-term sense. And it's really going to be one of these things. I think 10 years down the road, we're going to look back and look at how kind of crazy this period of time has been. Yeah, totally. Totally. Hey, Matt, one more. Let's see you. Do you have a good stat? Yes, negative 0.7%. Inflation? It's part of it. Part of it. Is it in the CPI report? Oh, is it retail sales?

Not retail sales. Is it in the retail sales report? No. Hmm. Huh. It's not in CPI or P is it in CPI? It's CPI is part of the construction. So is inflation adjusted something? You're there, John. You're there. Is this something that came out this past week, Matt? Um, it's, inflation adjusted.

Yes. So it's a prior, it's a prior, is it, is it, uh, wage growth or something? Real wage? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the difference. It's the difference in average hourly earnings.

earnings year over year. I mean, there's, so average hourly earnings are up 3% in September, year every year, CPI, 3.7% so negative 0.7%. So speaks to, yeah, real earnings. I mean, there's a bunch of caveats we can have with average hourly earnings. It's not the perfect measure of wage growth, but speaks to, and I find John's point about the adjustments, especially lower income households are making, whether it's, you know, trading down, generic store brand. I mean, those kind of adjustments are helpful and savvy, but how long can they last? Is I think the most important question,

how long can we see real wage declines amid high inflation and what that's doing and crowding out people's household budget. So certainly plays into the sentiment, too. That's a great statistic and under-reported statistic because you've got to do a little arithmetic.

Yeah. Yeah. Hey, we're running a little long in the tooth here, John, but I didn't want to come back and maybe try to end on high note, I mean, if it's at all possible, is there anything out there that people are feeling good about, better about? I mean, like, you know, they're upset about affordability. They're upset about, you know, home ownership. You know what is maybe a little surprising is sentiment around AI. And so I think, you know, while there are broad concerns around data centers, actually when you go look at employed workers in particular, they're extremely. And so I think, you know, while there are broad concerns around data centers, actually, actually when you go look at employed workers in particular, they're extremely. extremely optimistic about AI. Now, I do think this is a little bit of a case of kind of adverse selection. You know, these are people who have opted in broadly to using AI already, but we really see people who are

using AI in the workplace as by and large saying that it is, you know, complementary to their work. They're doing more. They're more productive. There's a lot of reasons to believe that, you know, the AI story is is very broad and there's a lot of ins and outs to it but I think yeah I think that that that narrative in itself and then the other piece would just be job business formation and again I don't know that that'll show up in the in the you know government data but you've got a lot of folks out there we see something like 4% of the general population saying that they have started or thinking of starting a new business because of AI so there's I think You know, if you think about this world where the cost of capital to create a business has been dramatically reduced, I think that unlocks some period of innovation that we probably haven't fully wrapped our heads around.

That's interesting. So people are pretty upset about data centers. They want that stopped. They're not happy about that. But if you're someone who is using AI for your work, you're on board. You're feeling pretty good about it. It's a compliment, not a supplement to what you do. Correct. Interesting. Interesting. So do you use AI in your work, John? It's all I use. It's all you use. I mean, it's hard to describe how much we are using AI.

All of our data is accessible through all the connectors. So if you were a clawed user or an open AI user, you can just go in and pull up the data directly and build the dashboards with the skills. Right. It's a new world for data companies. New world, new world. Mercer, are you a proponent or? opponent to AI. I, I've used

kind of like a kind of a rabid, you know, out there very negative AI. No? On AI? No, I'm a proponent. You're a proponent? Oh, okay. I got you. I picked you wrong. With guardrails. I mean... Oh, with guardrails. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Got it. Got it. But you feel pretty good about AI. You're not overly worried about it. I do. I feel pretty good about it on the whole. I mean, have specific concerns, but, but yeah, on the whole, I'm a proponent. Yeah. And you, Matt, are you a proponent or an opponent? Yeah, absolutely a proponent.

I find it as a research tool and turning ideas into graphs used to be a lot of my time, and that's now so much quicker. This is, you know, it's a conversation to get to something that was just, you know, a half-baked thought 10 minutes before is fantastic and makes me much more productive. Yeah, I'm a proponent, but I do. I do worry about, as you put it, the guard rails. I mean, it feels like if we don't have some guard rails here, we got a problem at some point. It just feels like that, you know, cyber or whatever, terrorist, whatever it is.

It feels like something's going to go off the rails. But if we don't have guard rails. Okay, let's end in the conversation with this new feature of the podcast, and that is, what is it you're looking out for in the coming week? What do you think people should be thinking about what's on the radar screen? Matt, what's on your, what are you looking out for for next week? neutral about it, but we're getting closer to the midterms, just more and more poll results for Senate races that I think are the most interesting. You're a junkie. I can tell you're a poet for junkie. Yeah, I'm a bit of a junkie.

So, and that really... You need to make friends with John, because John's got plenty of stuff to satisfy that need to be... He would regret that immediately. But yeah, that's, you know, as we get into November, very second half of October now, so that's where a lot of my tension's going to be at three in the morning with a baby in my arms. Got it. Marissa, what are you looking out for? I think the same as we get closer to the midterms watching what's going on in the Middle East.

And if anything, if there's any impetus to wrap things up or, you know, ameliorate the situation at all as we're counting down the days to the election. So, yeah, that. And there's actually a couple consumer sentiment surveys coming out next week. So we'll see. There's conference board, L.E.

and Michigan at the end of the week. Got it. And John, what are you looking at? Well, I mean, I start every day by looking at my data. So that's like the baseline. Ah, looking at. Daily consumer sentiment, what's happening across the country. I think, you know, we're two weeks out now from the next FOMC.

So I'm, it's kind of a slow, maybe a dark horse, but I still look at weekly UI claims. Do you? Yeah. I just, you know, it hasn't moved every week. kind of breathe a sigh of relief, but it's worth watching because at some point it won't be at or below consensus. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a quiet week coming up, right? There's not a whole lot of it. You mentioned the survey sentiment, but there's no major, I think, report coming out. And it's a dark period for the Fed, right? Because Fed meets at the end of the month. And so I think the quiet period

is next week, so very, not a lot going on. But there's a lot of earnings. You know, that's another big, if you're trying to find something that's really positive, businesses are making a lot of money, you know, in aggregate. Certainly the tech companies are, but, you know, just broadly. And so we're going to get reads from a lot of kind of bellwether companies in the coming week. 3M will be, I always, do you guys know 3M? I'm a boomer. 3M was like really one of these businesses that were, you know, high, it's still very respected, but it's not on the people don't think about it the same way. maybe today is when I was growing up,

but they're into everything. And so I often watch 3M earnings as kind of a bellwether, but I think that's, and Moody's is coming out next week too, I think, I believe. See how they do, how Moody's does.

Okay, with that, oh, I did want to mention the New York conference where that's what people should be watching out for, right? You got to listen to, because Matt's going to be speaking there, Marissa's going to be speaking there,

Chris is going to be speaking there, and they're going to make news. So that's the big, that's the big news for next week. But it's sold out. We've capped out. So that's good. And looking forward to seeing everyone in New York.

Hey, John, I really want to thank you. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. I know you're doing Yeoman's work at home and you came on the podcast as well. Really, really appreciate that. So thank you. My pleasure. Yeah.

Thanks for having me. Always enjoy speaking with you and Marissa. And great to meet you, Matt. And I will give Chris a hard time the next time. I'll be in the podcast. I'll meet me check. Well, thank you. Thank you, John.

And with that, dear listener, we are going to call this a podcast. Take care now.