Moody's Talks - Inside Economics - Turnover and Trash Talking

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

Mark, Ryan, and Cris welcome back two colleagues and regulars on the podcast, Marisa DiNatale and Dante DeAntonio of Moody's Analytics, to discuss the April U.S. employment report.Full episode transcriptFollow Mark Zandi @MarkZandi, Ryan Sweet @RealTime_Econ and Cris deRitis 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. Today is Jobs Friday for the month of April. And I've got a number of my colleagues here to help me out and figure this out. We've got my two co-host, Ryan Sweet. Ryan's Director of Real-Time Economics. And you were trash talking at me again on Twitter. It's not trash talking. that's not trash talking no but you better get used to it's going to be a weekly Thursday night tweet yeah well I thought I responded in a pretty clever way

you did I was impressed yeah oh good it took me a little longer than I would have liked to come up with that retort I was impressed that you do I respond to Ryan's trash talking but anyway it's good good to have you Ryan

and Chris Chris Greedy's deputy chief economist Chris is no trash talker. He doesn't trash talk. He doesn't do that. You're down the middle. How are you doing, how are you doing, Mark? I'm doing okay.

Not too bad. And we've got Marissa, Marissa Dina Talley. Marissa, good to have you back. Hi, hi, everyone. Nice to be here. And Marcia has many bona fides, but I think the key one for today is you were formerly from the BLS,

the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So you know this data better than it. anybody. At least that's the rumor. Except maybe you're out there guest, who was also with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I was going to say, yeah, Dante, Dante Di Antonio, yeah. Dante generally doesn't come on unless the ADP really messes up. You let me have a final break.

ADP was pretty close this month. We'll come back probably and talk about that. But way to go, Dante. So did you guys overlap at the BLS in any way? No? No, and we weren't. Dante, you weren't in Washington, right? Yeah, I was.

We worked in the same. You were, okay. Oh, okay. Because you did state and metro employment, right? No, I did, I did the household survey. Yeah, yeah, the unemployment rate, CPS. So, Marissa, when you were at BLS, you focused on the household employment survey, which is obviously a big part of today's numbers.

Right. And Dante, you focused on state and metro area employment? Yep. Oh, cool. Very cool. Was it one division more prestigious than the other? the national divisions get more attention obviously than the state. You say really?

How unfair. So you'd be getting like, Marissa would get a call from like the, you know, the assistant secretary of labor and you get a call from someone from Boise, Idaho. Right, like a reporter in Cincinnati, right? A reporter in Cincinnati.

They're giving you all kinds of grief for, you know, why was this number, that number? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, good. But today's job Friday, again, for the month of April. And Dante, you want to give us a sense of the report? You know, give us a rundown. What did it say? I mean, can we call it business as usual with everything that's going on? But, I mean, job growth was right in line, dead in line with what it was last month, you know, in line with averages that we've seen. You know, the industry breakdown of employment was maybe a little bit surprising, I think, in some cases. You know, trade, transportation, was up, I think, more strongly than I would have expected manufacturing was pretty strong, sort of despite all of the other headwinds that are out there. But on the establishment side, I think, you know, is right in line with expectations for the most part. Maybe not Ryan's

expectations, but, you know, broad expectations. Yeah, Ryan was wrong this month, wasn't he? He was overly pessimistic, which is unusual. He usually nails this number. Just wait for the revisions. That's what you're forecasting now, the final revised number. Is that? In the establishment survey, obviously, is the, so there's a household survey. That's what Marissa worked on when she was at BLS. And then there's a survey of establishments or businesses. And that's what you're referring to, that the employment gain there was, what was it, 400 and something?

428,000, right? I did notice going back to the revisions, they were. down this month, not big down, but down. And that's a change, right? Because for the last more than a year, I think every single month, we get upward revisions to the preceding couple months. This was a little different. And sizable, right? Was it sizable? I thought it was no, no. In previous months, the, uh, previous. Right. Yeah. These were relatively small and down. Yeah. Do you read anything into that? Is that, is there anything, uh, information in that?

I think the good news is hopefully it means revisions will be smaller moving forward. I mean, hopefully some of that volatility is getting rung out. You know, response rates get better. You know, they get a little bit more accurate on the first print again, as we had seen, you know, prior the pandemic. Well, the response rate was low again. Was it low again?

Typical April, it was low. Right. And also the seasonal adjustment factor was small relative to past April. So I think we were setting out for another down revision. It was pretty close, wasn't it? It was like 100,000 less than an average April. Well, let's go back big picture before we're seeing we want to go right into the DNA of the report. Confused the heck out of everybody.

But before we do that, that's fair game. I'm sure actually with the statistics game, we're going to go pretty deep into the battles of this thing. I can feel it. I can feel it right now. But going back to the big picture, so what's the big picture here, Dante, in terms of the job market? It's what? The job market is strong? It's steady and strong.

It's like rolls on. You know, it keeps chugging along as expected, despite everything else in the world. Right. So strong job growth, broad-based across industries. Okay.

And on the household survey side, there felt like there's a blemish or two there, though, right? Unchanged, you know, a prime age employment population, I think, ticked down. by a 10th. Ryan can correct me if I'm wrong on that. The job growth in the household survey was weak. It was down a couple hundred thousand,

which in any given month is not all that surprising to see a divergence like that, but certainly keep an eye on it moving forward. But yeah, it's probably not quite as rosy as the establishment side, but still, you know, nothing overly concerning, I don't think. So that dip down in labor force participation, it went from 62.4, which is already pretty low. I mean, it's coming back from the pandemic hit, but it's still not nearly all the way back. We've got a long way to go. Tick down to 62.2. That, you didn't read anything into that.

One month, I'm not going to worry too much about. If it ticks down again or stays low next month and the month after that, maybe start to worry, but it may just bounce right back next month to do. Okay. All right. So the bottom line, solid, steady as she goes, kind of, that's your takeaway from the report. It is, yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Marissa, what do you think? Dante missed anything? Well, first of all, do you agree with his kind of overall picture that he painted and anything you want to flesh out? He's right. I mean, it's a gain of over 400,000 again. So it looks good. And if you take other labor market data into account, like the Joltz survey that came out this week, too, which is for a previous month, but that all still looks pretty good. Yeah. I mean, yes, you don't want to read too much into one month of data, but this was, there were more blemishes in this report than we've seen in a long time. I feel like every month when we talk about it, we say, oh, it's, you know, it's hard to find something negative in this report.

This is the first one where you can find some negative things, particularly on the household survey side. that decline in the labor force participation rate is interesting. Just, and I will probably get into this more, but just in the context of reaching full employment and how much excess labor supply is out there, if you look since the beginning of this year, you're starting to see a slowdown in the number of people coming back into the labor force that had left. So BLS publishes these labor force flows. So you can actually break down. in the household survey where people are, the categories people are moving between.

So the number of people that are not in the labor force to employed, unemployed to employed, employed to unemployed, et cetera. So you can kind of see all of that. The number of people moving from out of the labor force back into it, whether they're getting jobs or they're looking for jobs, has been trending down since the start of the year. You know, we saw a really strong labor force growth through the end of 2021. that looks like it's weakening. And one of our key assumptions has been there's a lot of excess labor supply out there, right? There were a lot of people that left during the pandemic.

Maybe they retired early and they're starting to come back in again. Or there were a lot of particularly prime age women who left because of child care concerns coming back in. We saw that kind of going on through the end of last year. It looks like that's slowing now. So that's, I think we're going to get to. we're only a million jobs, right, away from the pre-pandemic employment peak, if you look at the payroll survey. So we'll get there and we'll get there earlier than we were predicting originally. I mean, probably within the next two, three months. But it looks like that impetus

to come back to work may be slowing. How do you square that? Well, maybe it is consistent with, but the number of people not in the labor force that say they want a job, that still remains a bit elevated compared to pre-pandemic. I think it's rounding like 6 million people are saying that compared to, I want to say 5 million people, you know, right before the pandemic. So that's about an additional million people. I've always thought of that as kind of the folks that would come back in at some point. But you're saying, yeah,

But it seems like that hasn't really happened over the last. It's happening. It's just happening more slowly. You know, there's still people coming in every month from out of the labor force. But the pace of that has slowed significantly this year compared to where it was at the end of last year. Right. So I don't know what, you know, what's spooking people to come back into the labor force. I mean, certainly if there's households where someone isn't working and has the ability to work with inflation, what it is, if, if, if,

You need another paycheck. This is a great time to come into the labor force, right, just given the huge number of job openings. But it just seems like that's slowed since the start of the year. Right, right. One factoid, just to throw into the mix and see what you think, if you look at the participation rate, which did decline from 62.4 to 62.2, all of the decline was for folks with less than a high school degree. That bell, I want to say about a percentage point, a big decline. But labor force participation for everyone else with a high school degree,

college degree, either held its own or rose during the month. I don't know how you interpret that. My kind of instinct was, well, that kind of calls into question the data. You know, it just doesn't feel like something fundamental going on. It feels something more related to measurement, seasonal adjustment, you know, whatever. Any thoughts around that, comments around that observation? You kind of see how that might correlate with the mix of industries that added strong job growth, you know, had strong job growth last month compared to previous months like financial services added more jobs.

But leisure hospitality, again, added a lot of jobs, but less than it normally has, right? construction less than it normally has. So it could just be a industry mix of who's hiring. Right, right. Okay. Okay. So you're, it sounds like you're saying, okay, reasonably strong report, but maybe not quite as strong as what we've been saying.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. A blemish or two here or there, particularly on the household survey side. Okay. Ryan, anything to add there on the report? I mean, anything you noticed that we haven't talked about already? Well, if you strip out leisure and hospitality, employment's back to where it was pre-pandemic.

So really the weaknesses is isolated to that one segment of the economy. I ignore average average earnings, but the markets are responding to the softness in average hour earnings, which were up 0.3% month over month. And there's this calendar quirk because the payroll reference or the household reference week and payroll reference week included the 15th of the month. And when that happens, usually average hourly earnings are strong. But that didn't happen this month. So I think people are looking into this and saying,

all right, maybe this is a sign that the labor market is starting to cool off. So I don't remember the data, but it looked like over the past three months, wage growth. And again, average hourly earnings is not the greatest number to be looking at because it's affected by the mix of jobs, occupations, industry, and so on. But abstracting from that, the growth in which, wages over the last three months is meaningfully less than the kind of growth rates we were getting towards the end of last year. So it might suggest there's some kind of moderation going on in wage growth at this time. Yeah, I would agree. And markets are going to whipsod because

yesterday we got unit labor costs that went through the roof and now we have some softening and average value earning. So until it shows up in the employment cost index, I don't really buy into the view that wage growth is meaningfully slowed. So we'll have to wait. You've referred to markets. I've been a lot busier than you, Ryan, this morning. So I haven't had a chance to look at markets. It's nice that you've had.

Whatever happened to your Thumper principle. You know, we're on a client call and Mark's like, oh, I, you know, I follow the Thumper principle. He's right. We were on a call the Thumper. Did I, I've told you about the Thumper principle, haven't I, on the podcast? Does everyone know what the Thumper principle? I don't know what it is.

You do not know what the Sumber principle. Okay, well, have you seen the movie Bambi? That's not a true question. I think I did when I was three. Yeah, well, I watched it many times when I was. Well, I was a little more delayed, probably six or seven years old. I don't know. There wasn't a whole lot of choice.

Like when you were a kid, you had a lot of choice. I had to watch Bambi. I came from a big family and I was the oldest. So I'm watching, you know, whatever, you know, I have no choice here. Anyway, so you remember Thumper? Thumper is Bambi's friend. You know, now that I say this, I may have this dead wrong, but this is what I have in my mind. So anyway, Thumper said something that wasn't, you know, it was a little off color.

And I think it was Thumper's mom or Bambi's mom. I can't remember which. It said, Thumper, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. all. Yeah. That resonates. I didn't know that quote was attributed to thumpper. Oh.

Well, maybe it's, maybe it's not. But in my mind, it's, I call it the thumper principle. Yeah. And it applies to everyone, but Ryan, I'm just saying. Because he's trash talking me. It's fair game now. You think that's trash talking. You just wait.

I know. I know. I'm nervous. So, Mark, it's like this or don't like this? So, yeah, what happened? What's going on with markets? With the average hourly earnings, you said they reacted. I haven't checked the bond market, but the stock market sold off.

Oh, so. I was surprised. I thought you were going to say the opposite. Yeah, I thought you're going to say. The stock market's interpreting it one way. The bond market is interpreting it the other way. Oh, I see. So do you think bond yields came off a little bit then?

You saw the odds of the Fed going 75 basis points at an upcoming meeting that came down after the report. And I think that's mostly average hour earnings. Got it. Okay. All right. The tenure is up three basis points. Yeah,

I think it was might have been up more, even more before the report came up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, okay. All right. Anything else on the report, Ryan?

Do you want to call out? No. No. Okay. Merced Dante covered it. Yeah. You know, just if there's any blanks that we missed here,

if there are any blanks. Anything you'd like to point out. Oh, mean. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Missed that. Yeah. Yeah. I think they covered it for the most. One thing that stuck out or jumped out as I was reading through the industrial detail is the, looks like all for the majority of industries are up above the February 2020 level, except for leisure hospitality. So now it's, quite concentrated there. So that's good. Construction was weak. There wasn't a decline, but there's no real acceleration there. So that's informative as we think about the housing market.

It doesn't look like the activity is really picking up to any degree there. One other thing that jumped out, just looking at the demographics, I saw that African-American men, the participation rate for them did increase this month. Now, those are always a little volatile, but certainly, I think, good to see something like that and certainly could explain some of the weakness perhaps in the unemployment rate overall. That is an interesting point. Ryan made it too, that leisure hospitality is the only major sector where employment's

not back to pre-pendemic levels. I wonder if we're ever going to get back those jobs, right? Because it feels like hotels really have kind of changed fundamentally, you know, what they're doing. Like, you know, if you go to a hotel now, you may not get your room clean. every single day, right? Yeah. And you can see the staff is much less,

there's as much less staff than there was before behind the desk or at the gym or, you know, wherever you go. So I wonder if we're ever going back, you know, to that. Do you think that's an intentional change or is that a change out of necessity because they don't have enough workers that they would like to restaff completely and they

just can't right now? My sense is that at first they had no choice, right? but I think they're figuring out how to, because this is improvement in productivity, right? I mean, presumably. So I think they'd want to hold folks that operate hotels and motels and other establishments in that industry would like to hold on to these productivity games. I would think. So they're going to fight it by, you know, and some of the things that I, you know, I'm a careful consumer of leisure and hospitality services. I travel a lot, not as much as I did pre-pandemic, but, you know, it feels reasonable to me, right?

I mean, if I'm in a hotel room for a couple nights or three nights, it doesn't really bother me that, you know, my room isn't made up, you know, cleaned every single day or, you know, vacuumed every single day. Nice to get new towels, but, you know, can limit that too. So, yeah. Okay, so let's maybe tackle a couple of broader labor market issues while we're on the topic. Although before we do that, should we play the game? Should we play the statistics game? Maybe we should do that so that we don't take any thunder. Who wants to go for?

So the game, of course, which by the way I've been doing quite well at. You know, recently I'm just pointing out for everyone. And that's why Ryan's trash talking me ad nauseum now. So the game is we each. State of statistic. The rest of the group tries to figure out what that is through questions and clues and deductive reasoning. The best question, or excuse me, the best statistic is one that isn't so easy. We get it quickly. We also don't want it too hard that no one can get it. And then the bonus is if it's related to the topic at hand, which obviously is jobs, but it doesn't have to be.

It can be anything that's relevant or most recent. So who wants to go first? There might be a first mover advantage here because maybe we should let Dante or Marissa go first. Okay. Dante, you want to go first? I went first with you first. No, let's go with Marissa. Marissa, you go first.

That's fine. Yeah, sorry about that. All right. 4,500,000. 4,500. Oh, Chris has it? Chris? What you say?

Yeah, you could. That was it. All right. Wow. Oh, my goodness. A cowbell. right off the bat. There you go.

Here we go. There you got it. So, Marissa, you want to explain? Yeah, this is from the job opening and labor turnover survey. It is the highest number of people quitting a job in a single month that's ever been recorded since the inception of the survey, which goes back to the early 2000. So kind of showing that the job. market is still, you know, as Dante said, still really humming along. I mean, people must feel

pretty confident still, despite the environment of high inflation, right, in order to quit jobs. So it's a good indicator of people's confidence in their ability to get another job. So there's a quit rate, the norm of people quitting just percent of the labor force up across the board, across kind of all industries. I think we have it at a state level too. I don't know if you've looked at the state level data. Is it pretty much up across the board? I think so across industries. Dante, you probably looked at it more than I have. I don't know about the regional detail, though. I know relative to like a 2019 average quit rates are higher in every industry than they were prior to the pandemic still. Some industries obviously much more than others, but yeah, they're definitely

up still across the board. Right. And we've talked about this in the past, but, you know, what's your sense is, is these, are these high quit rates here to stay, or is it just a function of the current idiosyncratic character of the labor market? What do you think, Mercer? I think it's, yeah, I think it is still an abnormal sort of functioning labor market. And just given the number of job openings, you know, I mean, it's, it's an extremely strong job market across the board. And I would expect if the economy does start to slow, we're going to see people stay in their jobs. People also know that if they switch jobs, they can get a huge raise,

right? And I'm sure that that's factoring into it as well. People are seeing the increases in salary people are getting if they move from one company to another. So that's a huge incentive to quit. So, yeah, I don't think it's, I don't think that there's, I don't think that there's, any, I can't think of any structurally significant reason. What about remote work? You know, the ability to connect, you know, via LinkedIn and switch jobs without, you know, leaving your home. So you're saying the friction in the labor market is, is less.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point, too. I guess if you don't have to pick up and move across the country for a job and you can just stay put, that makes it a lot easier to decide to leave your job. Yeah. or take a job with an employer in Paris or Dubai or wherever, right? It doesn't matter because you can work from anywhere. Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah. Hey, the other key, and I hope I'm not stealing anyone's thunder is the other key statistics in the Jolt's survey was unfilled positions. I think we at least alluded to it a couple times already. They were, I think they were at record high. It was record high too, wasn't it? 11.5 million. Something like that.

job openings, yeah. Yeah, job openings. Yeah. Unfill positions. Let me ask you a question about that. It just, you may not know the answer, but could it be the case that because the labor market has been so tight since the economy reopened a year ago with the vaccines, it felt like everyone put up, every business put up a help wanted sign at the same time

as the economy reopened. That businesses just don't want to take those, those help wanted signs back down again. because they just, you know, they just are nervous that they might not be able to find qualified workers, even if they really don't need to fill that unfil, that unfilled position at this point, they just keep it there just in case, because quits are high and, you know, they're just, maybe someone's going to quit next month, and I just want to keep that unfilled position there. So, you know, you get where you go, you hear what you sense where I'm going. Maybe that unfilled, the number of, record number of unfilled positions isn't quite what it seems to be.

It's not the intensity of the demand that seems to suggest isn't quite as high. Do you have a sense? Anyone have a sense of that or view on that? I would agree. No, I think, I mean, and I've even heard of anecdotally companies hiring people in certain industries and then immediately cutting their hours back because they don't need as many people as they hired, but they don't want to lay anybody off. However, I would think that that would happen normally in a hot job market regardless

of the reason, right? So if you go back to other times where the unemployment rate has been extremely low and job openings high, I would expect that there would be some amount of labor hoarding to put it in that way. Well, unfortunately, I don't think we have this data back to the last time in America really excruciatingly tight, you know, around Y2K. I think this begins in that in that 2000. It does. It begins in, yeah, very early. Yeah.

So we only have one other. Well, I guess we have two business cycles. so that we can look at. Yeah, but I mean, even going into the pandemic, the labor market was quite tight. I mean, the unemployment rate was lower than it is now. When I think unfilled positions peaked at, correct me if I'm Ron Dante, by like seven and a half, eight million, you know, something like that, not 11 and a half, but it was pretty elevated. Right.

It was an all-time high before the pandemic, but now it's an all-time high that's sort of stratospheric, yeah. The other thing I wonder about unfilled positions is whether it's just easier to post them, You know, everything is electronic, you know, so just it's easy. There's no costs, right? It's not like I, you know, used to be the case back in the day. I have to, you know, put an ad in the newspaper, help, you know, the people forget this. But that was like a big business at one point, help wanted ads, you know, in the paper. I mean, that generated billions of dollars for the newspaper industry.

That's completely evaporate. So the costs we're doing this are pretty low, I think, for employers, you know, to post jobs. I don't know. Just another thought. But I just wonder whether kind of the underlying level of, you know, positions, open positions is just higher now because of, you know, these changes that have occurred. To that point, does anyone know how the data is actually collected? I wonder if the same position might be posted in multiple sites, right?

Is there any chance of double counting or how is it? Do they go to the sort, to the employer? Yeah, look at the establishment level. Yeah. Go ahead, Dante, explain it. Yeah, so it's based on the same establishment type survey as the payroll report. It's a much smaller survey. But yeah, they're going to the source of the posting.

So even if you're posting the same position across, you know, five or six different services, you know, that should be counted as one open position. You know, the one thing I have one, to your earlier point, Mark, I would get the sense that companies may be more inclined to keep like evergreen postings up. Yeah. Because of the rate being so high. Yeah. Because of turnover being so much high.

You're trying to build a pipeline of people, even if you don't have an opening today, you know, you still want to collect resumes and the hope that if you have an opening next week, you're ready to go to try to fill that. So I certainly think, you know, it just seems strange to me that openings have stayed, you know, essentially the same for a year, despite adding, you know, have jobs, five million jobs of the last year. You know, is labor demand really increasing at that rapid of a rate that openings haven't come in at all since we've had strong job growth? And so I'm very skeptical, you know, kind of the, we were talking about this with Jared Bernstein from the Council of Economic Advisers a couple weeks ago. There's this new way of looking at the labor market, just add up the number of jobs plus the unfilled positions and then compare that to, you know, labor supply. And I don't know that that this doesn't feel right to me in the context of what we've been discussing, that this feels like the number of unfil positions is this going to be perennally high in, you know, as a result of these, you know, dynamic. we just discussed. Yes, I was looking at that measure of labor demand this morning, you know, openings plus

employment. And, you know, if you take, you know, the pre-pandemic level and you sort of grow it out by the 2019 growth rate, you know, we wouldn't be nearly as high as we are today, which feels strange, right, to say that labor demand is higher today than it would have been in the absence of the pandemic. That just doesn't seem to make a lot of that. Yeah. That's an excellent point, actually.

That's a fantastic point. Right. You guys are good. That was my stat. Which was? Sorry, Chris. A 5.6 million. That's the jobs to workers gap.

Oh, I see. Yeah. Sorry about that. You got it. I got a backup. I got it back up. Let's go to you neck. No.

Chris, we're using a defined labor supply. Oh, the, um, let me check my notes. Yeah, labor force. Yeah,

labor force. Shouldn't we add in, you know, the number of people that are not in the labor force but want a job? Yeah. That's a pool. And when you do that, that gap shrinks. Right. Right. Well, anyway, before we go to the next person in the game, this does bring up another question, which may be becoming a little bit more academic, but I think still somewhat important, is full employment.

Are we at full employment? You know, a lot of things would say, yeah. I mean, the record number of open positions, the record quit rate, you know, would all indicate the strong wage growth, you know, would indicate that we're at full employment. But are we at full employment? I mean, can the economy be creating four to 500,000 jobs each and every month if we were at full employment? That doesn't seem plausible to me, right? So what do you think? Marissa, do you think we're at full employment?

No, but I think we're really close. Okay. It's academic almost, is what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I think the month-on-month pace of sustained job growth that we're seeing suggests that there's a lot of people out there that we can still hire. So until you see that tick down meaningfully, then I, then I don't think we're there yet. If we can still keep creating almost half a million jobs every

single month on net, then that suggests there's some slack out there still. I don't think we're going to get back to the participation rate that we had prior to the pandemic, but it seems that there's still a supply of labor out there, particularly among prime aged people that could come back into the labor force. And even though, as I said at the top of the podcast, that the pace at which that's happening seems to be slowing, there's still people out there that I think could come back in. And Ryan, I think based on your favorite indicator, which I'll let you articulate, I would guess you don't think we're at full. No, I don't think so. I mean, in prime age, employment to population ratio, so those 25 to 54 tick down in April, not a lot, but it just edged a little bit lower.

and we're below 80. I think we can get north of 80 on a consistent basis. And then you mentioned those that are not in the labor first, but want a job. It's still a million higher than it was pre-pandemic. And those that are permanent job losers are still higher than it was pre-pendemic. So I think I agree with Morris. We're close. We'll get there by the end of the year, but we still have some ways to go.

Okay. Dante, Chris, do you disagree with that assessment? that we're close, not quite there yet. Increasingly an academic question, I guess, because if we're not there yet, we're going to be there pretty darn soon. Yeah, I would agree. I don't think we're quite there,

but I think it's close. And the other thing, odds are on our side. I mean, how often is the economy really at full employment, you know, at least historically? So it's safe to take that we're not at full employment. Say it again?

I was just saying, if you look historically, it's rare for the, economy to be at full employment. So, you know, if you're a betting person, it's better to take the odds that we're not at full employment. Oh, I see. I see. I see. Yeah. And you are a betting person, I know. I am not. I am the most risk adverse person in the world. Is that right? I did not know that. Did you know that, Chris? I did not. I assumed he was. How do I give off the persona that I'm a gambling or wage? Because you're always talking odds. You know, 75% percent. Because I'm an economist.

percent that, you know. It's my day job. I guess you're a baseball guy, too. I am a big big guy. They're always gamblers. Trash talkers. Trash talkers highly correlated with, with the, you know, risk on kind of people. On the Pete Rose of the podcast.

All right. Well, let me ask you one more question then before we move on back to the game. Again, related to are we at full employment? How do you square that we're not at full employment with? the strong wage growth. How can we have such strong wage growth if we're not in full employment? Because we have high inflation. Okay. All right. Yep, that's the answer. That would have been my answer, right? So the wage growth, the strong wage growth reflects this very high rate of inflation that's, and we've discussed it at, nozi, we've debated, but largely resolved supply side shocks,

supply chain disruptions. And of course, what's going on with Russia's invasion are Ukraine and higher oil prices. And so workers are saying, look, I got to pay a lot more to commute to work. You know, it costs me $4.40 at the local walleye here to fill my gas tank. And food costs are up because diesel prices are up. So you need to, you employer need to pay me more to compensate for that for me to come into work. Yeah. Okay.

And business is a fine. fine, no problem, at least up to this point in time. Yeah, okay. Okay, let's go on with the game. Mercia, I'd have to say your statistic was pretty weak, you know? Thanks, Mark. Yep, it was weak because it was just too easy. Because it was too easy?

Too easy, too easy. Here's the trash talking. See? I got to add. I got it. Oh, man, I forgot the thumb for principle. You need to rewatch Bambi. It doesn't be like a very strong.

I got to rewatch Bambi. All right. I had two and I went with that one. Oh, you would probably not like the other one I picked either. Oh, we can come back to that if we have got time. But Dante,

you go next. I'll see if I can make it even worse then. I'll try to lower the bar further. 7.5%. The number of the number of people that are teleworking because of the pandemic. The percent of people. Hello working because of the pan. I think it's close to that, but that's not what I'm thinking about.

I think it's exactly seven. No, it's negative. It is negative. I left the negative out on purpose because I don't want to take you. Well, hold it. What? Now I'm totally confused. Negative, negative, negative seven and a half percent.

Wait, is this productivity? It's productivity. Yeah. Yeah. You lower the bar. Yeah, you're really lowered the bar. Man, that's terrible. The largest decline since the late 1940s.

in 1947. Annualized decline since the late 1940s. So I'm just throwing it out there for a conversation later. Okay. I'm just saying you got to bring your A game to this thing. You know, sometimes you got to throw an overhead. You know,

quarter to quarter changes on productivity. No, I'm only joking. He also left the negative sign off. Yeah. That was intentional because I didn't want Christopher. Oh, it was intentional. Yeah. That was intentional.

Now I'm totally confused. That was the point. Oh. And Marissa is right. actually I think seven and a half percent is the number of people that said they telework because of COVID this month. Didn't they? It was not a pretty good decline, I think, too, wasn't it?

That was a pretty big drop from. Yeah. It would like 10 to like 10. There's 10 minutes. Yeah. I think that's statistics meaningless, but. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. Why? Why do you think that's meaningless? Because if you look at the question, you know, the way they word the question, I think it's very. at this point, very open to how you interpret that question. Like if somebody asked you why you're working from home, and is that because of COVID, what would you say at this point?

At this point, I'd say not because of COVID, but it's a good question. I could have answered it the other way. Yeah, because that was the, that's why you're able to work from home originally, but at this point, it's not really directly because of COVID. That's a great point. So the number of people were actually working at home is many, many times higher than that. Absolutely. Yeah.

All right. I think some of the data I've seen are 20 percent-ish, even in size 25 percent. Yeah. Oh, so Dante, back to you, seven and a half percent decline in quarter to quarter in productivity in Q4. No, was like Q1. Q1. Q1, sorry. Okay.

So what's going on there? Why is that an important statistic? Well, for our ongoing debate about what productivity growth is going to look like moving forward, you know, it just adds to the support for my case of weak productivity growth, you know, the, as I sent you earlier last night, the, you know, coming out of this recession, productivity growth is weaker than it's been coming out of the last three recessions already. And over the last six quarters, it's basically been flat, right? It was only really up the first two or three quarters.

And that was almost certainly compositional, right? You lost all of these jobs in, you know, sort of low value. added industries, which boosted up productivity. And then over the last year and a half, it's basically done absolutely nothing. So Ryan keeps telling me to just hold on and wait that it's coming. It's coming. But how long do we wait before it's not coming anymore? Well, with productivity, you got to wait a lot more than six quarters.

And that data is really volatile. The number of job openings and, you know, how much incentive there is for firms to find ways to increase productivity. Shouldn't we be seeing something a year and a half in, you know, in. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's not like it happened sooner. Yeah. Look at business investment in intellectual property is going through the roof.

That's, I think, a better indication than productivity. Because that drives productivity. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, Dante, you would, I'm sure agree that that 7.5% down was kind of an outlier because of the wacko GDP number we got. So productivity basically is I take GDP output, the growth in that, and I subtract the growth in labor hours, the number of people working in their hours. And businesses are just like a machine hiring, you know, close to 500,000 people a month trying to fill all those positions.

But output, at least as measured by GDP, is going up and down and all around quarter to a quarter given Amacron and Russian invasion and that kind of thing, inventory swings and stuff. So it was up big time in fourth quarter of last year, down big time in the first quarter. So they probably overstates the weakness. But nonetheless, you're saying even abstracting from that doesn't feel like we're in the this new world of productivity growth? Yeah, it's abstracting from the, you know, down seven and a half percent isn't where we're headed, but I think abstracting from that month quarter to quarter volatility, it just feels

like it's very flat or very slow growing compared to what we would have thought it might be. Okay, two things, just to push back a little bit. And I do agree with Ryan's point about investment spending. I mean, that does feel like it suggests that we should have stronger productivity. Not that it's proof positive. It doesn't mean that necessarily translates. But first, if I take a five-year moving average of productivity growth, it's kind of abstracting, certainly from the quarter to quarter movements, but even from the business cycle

movements, productivity growth is 1.7, 1.8% analyzed. And that is definitively up from where it was, you know, back in 2015, 16, when it was well south of one. It's up at least a full point, you know, on that basis. So that makes me feel. And by the way, productivity growth has average since World War II, 2% almost on the nose. So it feels like we're coming back to something that is more typical. So how do you react to that? Well, I'd say, so it was already coming off of that bottom before the pandemic. I mean, it was averaging like 1% for a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was already coming off of that, you know, something like 1.5%. And yeah, so I don't think we're going back to 1%. I think my argument is that we're not headed higher.

you know, we're going to stay at that one and a half, maybe 1.6%. I don't think we're going into two, you know, back to that 2% average. I see. I don't think we're getting this boom coming out of the pandemic. And to the, you know, intellectual property in my mind, some of that is, isn't some of that just necessary investment because of the pandemic? I had to invest in software and other things to make remote work possible, which could lead to productivity gains, but it also could just change the way companies were working.

really lead to a whole lot of gain and productivity. It was just a necessary investment to be able to make that shift to remote work for a lot of people. Yeah. So I don't think it necessarily guarantees we're going to see a boost of productivity moving forward because of that. Right. The other thing I just caution is that, you know, that GDP number, my guess is that's going to get revised higher because if you look at GDP compared to gross domestic income, and Ryan was pointing this out in some of email exchanges earlier in the week. GDP has been a lot weaker than GDI, and generally GDP gets revised to GDI.

Chorosimic income is just another way of measuring output, just looking at people's incomes and profits, kind of the income side of the accounts. GDP is, as we talk about it, as really the consumption side of the accounts or the output side of the accounts. And my guess is I'd be pretty surprised if we don't see GDP,

maybe not in Q1, of 2022, but, you know, over the past year or two, when we get all the revisions and that gets revised higher. Here's the other thing I want to just point out, and again, I don't know that there's, you know, anyone who know the answer, but it's confusing me in a little bit. If you look at the productivity gains for non-financial corporations, so the data you were referring to is non-farm business. So it's a very broad measure. But if I do non-financial corporations, it's been much, much stronger. Have you noticed that?

And I don't know if that means anything to you. Any reaction to that? Except to say, Mark, you're right. But okay. I don't have any particular reaction. Chris reacted. I don't know if he has anything more to say. Chris is shaking his head.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So the difference there is larger companies, right? Isn't that the primary difference? Yeah. And non-financial. I don't.

No, no, financial might swing things around. I mean, financials might swing things around, you know, certainly quarter to quarter, you know, quite a bit. Right, right. Right. Yeah, but I was interpreting that as a large versus small business, productivity growth differences, which I think is interesting. We probably should take a closer look at that.

Like, who's driving this? Well, who's driving the investment and then who's driving the productivity gains? Yeah. It could very well be the larger companies that have been able to. capitalize and have had the larger incentive to find more productive ways to deal with higher wage costs or input costs. Yeah. Well, I guess Dante's got a point.

The burden of proof is now shifted. Yes, he does. I mean, the data is definitely in his camp at the moment. The productivity growth is going to be more pedestrian. It's volatile, though. No, okay. Yeah, there you go. I keep expecting remote work to show up in the data,

but maybe it's one of those things that, you know, takes a while to show up in the data, like computers. It took a lot of time. Like computers. Yeah, you always tell that story about how, I forget who said it, but they said, you know,

productivity is everywhere with the software. Yeah. Robert Solo said that, I believe, yeah. That's economic folklore. You got to. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Let's move on. Chris, you want to go next? As you can see, I'm setting up a real battle between Ryan and I here. I was just going to say for the listener, if you're keeping the score at home, Mark's O for two. Look, I have to win every single one. Actually, I have my standards. I will not chime in. No, I'm going to stop there, Thumper Principle.

All right. All right. So my backup was productivity. So now I'm going to have to go to my second backup. Gracious. No way. We're on the same wavelength, which I like. But I'm going to, I'll give you the overhanded the softball here, Mark.

$4.26, $4.26. $4.26. Oh, they're giving them copper. Yep. $4.00 and $26? Yeah, $4.26. Yes. Oh, okay. Well, we haven't talked about copper prices in a while, but yeah, they've come in a little bit. They're still high.

Anything over four bucks is pretty high. Way to go, Ryan. Good job. I think that's a cowbell for Ryan. No, that's easy. That was too easy. Okay.

I actually think we're getting pretty good at this game that, you know, it's hard to come up with a statistic that isn't, you know, too easy. Interesting. I got another one, but it's way off.

But why did you pick that one? So what's your thought process there? It's been a while since we revisit our recession, indicators. We do touch on, unemployment insurance claims once in a while they're still low little bump up this week but nothing major um and then we always talk about the 10 year and the uh and the yield curve but we haven't talked about cop for in a while which is your favorite uh yeah yeah it seems to suggest it is weakening

it's down 10% over the year maybe it's not going to be quite as useful as a business cycle barometer because all commodity prices have been shifted higher because of, you know, Russia, Ukraine and disruptions to commodity market. So maybe, although copper shouldn't be that affected by Russia, Ukraine, right? They don't produce. No. So I do think the bar is set higher now because of electrification. Oh, okay.

So I don't know, $4 is the right benchmarking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Okay. Okay. Ryan, you're up? all right so this one's going to be a little more difficult

you're going to have to think a little bit outside the box minus economic statistic you're still economics we're still economics we're still economics we're not going to baseball or hockey or no no no we're you know batting average batting average okay yeah right he was one for three last night though

oh that always makes nothing better than that when your kids playing well yeah all right minus 65,000. Minus 65,000. Is it in the employment data? It is. Is it employment for some sector of the economy?

No, it's a measure of employment, but not industry. It's not industry. It's a demographic. It is not. Minus 65,000. is it something in the household survey? It is. It is.

And it's some measure of labor market utilization, some kind of measure of... No. No, it's that, yeah, it's 65,000. It's not a percent. It's down. So just minus 65,000. And democratically. We've talked about it before.

It's kind of like a... It's a difficult. I'll give you a hint. You have to adjust this number in the household survey. Oh, yeah. I remember him talking about this before. Slips my mind. Is it the employment change adjusted to the payroll survey definition?

Exactly. Oh. That's a good job, Dante. Good job, Dante. Yeah. Well, yeah. Because the regular number was down three or four hundred thousand, right? Right.

So that'll be adjusting for adjustment. That's the first. decline since December 2020. So I was kind of looking for indications that job growth or the labor market is losing a little bit momentum. And this one, if it holds up, you know, declines again, you know, it may indicate that the job market is losing a little bit of momentum. So for the listener, explain this, you know, what do you, what's the six down 65K? What is that? Right. So Dante and Marissa may have to chime in as well because I may forget one or two things. But you take household employment and then you.

subtract out. So we're trying to make household employment and apples to apples comparison with the employment numbers in the establishment survey. So that 428,000 increase. And to do that, the household number, you have to subtract out agriculture, self-employed, unpaid homeworkers, I believe is also excluded. Family workers. Yep, family workers. People working in a family business. Yeah. And now you have a more of an apple to apples comparison. I mean, this is a justice number. The household survey is still volatile, more volatile than the employment data.

But typically they kind of move in the same directionally in the same way. And that didn't happen in April. Right. You know, I have noticed, though, since the pandemic hit. So if you go back and look at employment since the pandemic hit, the household survey has been stronger than the establishment survey. employment is measured by the household review has been stronger and that doesn't last generally for very long

they converge so maybe this is just part of that process that's going on but that's interesting so it was down 65K on the household basis compared to up for whatever 29 one of the establishment survey correct got it okay that was good

I'm going to have to file that away that you're kind of a go-to statistic I'll send you to the the mnemonic. Okay, okay, that'd be great. Yeah, I'd like to see that. Okay, I've got one. And this is a hint, you know, got to think more broadly than the employment report.

So I'm now going beyond the employment report. And it, in Marissa's honor, it's a negative $7.4 trillion, $7.4 trillion. And Dante Tua now. He claims to have done that on purpose, though. I don't think he did. Yeah. I'm not sure he did. I mean, Mark, aren't you getting concerned that a lot of the, our economists, our colleagues

are forgetting positive negative signs and we're economists? I do that all the time. So no, not really. Yeah. No. No. It's okay. As long as they, you know, they fess up or, you know, correct.

Sometimes you have in your head, like, this is a, this is a decline, right? What was the decline? 7.4% decline. So sometimes you just. That's the unsaid part. Give it up, Marissa. Give it up. I would like to give it up, Mark.

I would very much like to give it up. Good point. Someone won't let me. We will never let you give it up. That's hilarious. Sometimes I have to tell the story about swapping the X and Y axes, Mark. I'm sure I've told you that many, many times. Oh, yeah. I don't know on the podcast.

The podcast? All right. So I'll tell it because it's a great story. This is why, you know, Mercer, you know, no harm, no foul. So this is early days, you know, when we started a company, Carl and I, my brother, who runs the business now, we're sitting in front of a terminal and, you know, looking at data. And he plots this data. I can't remember what it was.

And I'm looking at it and I'm giving, you know, I'll, I know why this is happening. Here's five reasons why this is the case. And he goes, oh, I forgot to multiply by negative one. So everything was flipped on its head. So I had explained actually quite elegantly why this was the case. But it was obviously just the opposite of what I was saying. So it just goes to show.

Okay. Back to my statistic. This is serious business. Minus seven. Did I give you the statistics? Yeah, minus $7.4 trillion. Minus $7.4 trillion. And this came out this week.

This is coming out all the time. Oh, it's the Treasury report. I know where he's going. Yeah. So I'll give you head. It's market related. Is this the loss? I think I know where I know we're going.

No, go ahead, Ryan. No, go ahead. Is this the decline in household wealth because of the drop in stock market. Well, how to decline in how? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. I didn't explain it right.

Yeah, no, no. Yeah, that's exactly. I had to dissect, aside for the way you said that, but yes. I was kind of changing my mind as I was answering it. Oh, is that right? Okay. Yeah, it's the decline in market cap,

the capitalization of the equity market based on the Wilson for $5,000. This is really interesting. I didn't realize it until I went and calculated it this morning. The stock market's all-time high. was the first trading day of this of this year. You know, January 3rd, 2022 is the all-time high in the U.S. stock market. And it was in terms of market capitalization, the value of the stocks that being traded, was about $49 trillion, $49.

And now, you know, we're down, you know, I didn't look today, but based on yesterday's action, which obviously was pretty negative. We're down about 15% from the peak. and that's $7.4 trillion. That's starting to be real money, right? You know, we talk about the need for financial conditions to tighten in response to the Fed's actions to slow the growth rates in the economy. And financial conditions include everything from, you know, long-term interest rates to

the value of the dollar, to credit spreads, mortgage yields, but also most, arguably, most importantly, the equity market and the equity market is down quite a bit. So something to watch. Let me ask you a question. One thing that I'm getting a little nervous about is this is another kind of sort of key recession indicator, right? Yep. Right? I mean, the first one is the yield curve. That on the 10 year, two year basis, that inverted two year yields rose above 10 year yields a few weeks ago. That's a kind of an indicator of future recession. And then another really important one is the stock market. You know, that's down. I don't know if 15% is enough of a signal, but, you know, what do you guys think of that? Need any worries, nervous and spous? By that,

let me also give you a little more context around that. This goes to the monthly GDP estimates that you, Ryan, you construct based on monthly data. I don't know if you got the March number. The March number was down a lot. And if you look, March GDP is no higher or marginally higher than what it was back in last August. So GDP has actually not gone anywhere since August of last year. So you tie that into all these recession signals. I don't know. Should anybody's alarm bells going off yet or premature?

What do you think, Chris? Well, Ryan's bell has already been going off for a while, right? Yeah, it hasn't been going off. Yeah. Is yours going off now? That's the... Well, I'd say so far this is all still consistent with my probabilities, you know, one third this year, 50, you know, even odds over the next two.

It's not quite screaming recession, but, you know, only even odds? You're not bumping that up? No, not yet. You're at 60% or something. What's it going to take? What, uh... Probably a recession, actually, that per. It might change zones.

That might change something. No, no, look, if the stock market goes down 20, 25%, it stays down. You know, it doesn't go down for a day or two or a week or two, you know, down for a quarter or two. I'd say that's a pretty strong signal, you know, something's up. Then I start watching consumer confidence because that's the next thing that'll go if we're on the path to recession. So, but something, you know, very, very clearly to watch.

Okay. There was one other question I wanted to ask before we, called a podcast, going back to the labor market, and this is a question Ryan and I got on a call we did with the large client. What do you look at to gauge whether we are suffering a wage price spiral? So dreaded wage price spiral. Wages, inflation drives wages. We already talked about that already happening. But then wages start driving inflation. inflation. So service-based companies where labor costs are high, see the higher wages, and start passing that through to their customers thinking that, you know, that's okay because the customer will

pay it because they're going to get a bigger wage increase. And you get into this kind of self-reinforcing negative dynamic, which is, you know, the fodder for stagflation scenarios and certainly recession because Fed's going to be all over that and just raising interest rates aggressively to kind of short circuit that wage price spiral. We've argued, and we argued on this podcast already, that we're not in a wage price spiral, that so far it's mostly inflation driving wages, but we don't see evidence of wages driving prices.

But what is it that you look at to gauge whether that's actually the case or not? Any views on that? Brian, how would you answer that question? Well, one thing I've been looking at, and I don't know if I'm thinking about it the right way, is that the conference board, consumer confidence survey, they have that labor market differential, which is the percent of consumers that say jobs are plentiful, mine is hard to get. And that's among the highest on record. In the same survey, they have income expectations. So what percent of

consumers expect their incomes to be higher in the next six months, minus lower? And that's among the lowest. So consumers are really optimistic about the labor market, but very pessimistic about their future incomes, which would argue that maybe they don't feel that comfortable asking for higher wages. So that would argue against the wage price spiral. What do you think of that, Chris? Does that resonate with you? That's reasonable.

I guess more fundamentally, I would look at the prices of the various services versus goods, right? Are we seeing faster price increases in the service sector versus good sector? Right. And so far you say no. So far I say no, but yeah. Maybe changing. Yeah.

I think by and large, the service providers have been eating the increased cost to some degree, right? So they're not passing all of the prices there. Right. Okay. Dante, Mercer, any, what would you look at to gauge whether wage price spirals is, is starting to unfold? I think it takes some time, right? We need to see how things unfold over a little bit longer horizon, especially as some of the other factors influencing inflation get rung out a little bit, hopefully.

You know, if those factors start to weigh in and you see inflation still staying elevated, you know, and with wage growth seemingly leveling off, that would sort of lend some credency, the idea that we're not going to see that spiral happen. But if you'd see some of those external factors get wrung out of inflation, but overall inflation is still ticking up higher, then certainly that would set off alarm bells for me. But that's just going to take some time to see that. Yeah, so inflation is juiced because of these one-off,

you know, spiking oil prices, vehicle prices. They come in, but we don't see wage growth come in with it. But in that case, I mean, if wage growth is up because of the inflation, you would think as the wage growth moderates, we'd see wage growth moderated well. But I guess what you're saying is if that does not happen, then that's a bad sign. Yeah. That's a bad time. Okay. Mercia, anything that you would point to?

Those are all really good. I would just say how broad-based are wage gains. You know, once you start to see it spreading from a few key industries where we know that the market is very tight to kind of just an all-over. You know, right now there's a huge differential, say, in restaurants, hotels, leisure hospitality, wage gains over the year are like 15% or something like that the last time I looked, which was a month ago. Whereas on average, for other industries, it's like four or five percent. So until you start to see kind of everything moving up, I'm less worried about it being a pervasive problem. That was the answer I gave, right, Ryan? Yeah. You know, I brought up the Atlanta Fed Wage tracker, which again, I keep touting, go Google Atlanta Fed Wage Tracker.

and they follow the same workers and track their wages and it mixes, it corrects for the mix effects or accounts for the mix effects. And if you look at wage growth across the wage distribution, most or vast majority of the acceleration in wage growth has been in for jobs at the bottom half of the distribution of wages. And the top half, it's not been the case. And you look across age, you know, older workers like me, you know, their boomers, their wage growth is not, you know, accelerate to any significant degree or maybe a little bit on the margin, but nothing major. The other thing I brought up, and maybe Ryan, you can explain this. Ryan does this really cool Granger causality test.

You know, there's kind of a statistical test that looks at leads and lag relationships between variables to see who's causing who or not. And correct me if I'm wrong about Ryan, but those causality tests that you run continue to show that inflation prices are driving wages, but wages had at least up to this point not been driving prices. That's correct. The proxy for wages is the employment cost index. So so far, inflation is leading changes in the ECI, the employment cost index, by one

to two quarters. Right. Okay. And the causation runs one way because you can have instances where, you know, there's a causal relationship that goes both ways. but so far it's inflation driving wages. And you should be pretty proud of me because on that call, right, correct me if I'm wrong,

but I think I did a pretty good advertisement for inside economics on that call. You did. You made a very good pitch. I think we'll pick up a few listeners along the way. And I don't know if you guys are doing that or not, but I think you should if you're not, I get pretty, I take advertisement breaks in the middle of these presentations that I do

to talk about that. Twitter. My Twitter handle is at Mark Zandi. Follow me. And Mr. Sweet, what's your Twitter handle? At Real Time underscore Econ. Yeah. And that's where he trash talks me, by the way. Really got to keep up with that. I think we need another opinion of trash talking. Marisian may have to look at it and tell me if I'm ready. I've seen it. I've seen it. You're really enjoying Twitter. I see. Yeah. Well, is that trash talking? Is anyone doing? Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. He's goading you into an argument over Twitter. It's all in fun. Of course it is. Yeah. Isn't trash talking all in fun generally? Mm. Not all the time.

Yeah. Oh, so, so Mercy, you're on Twitter. Yeah. Do you tweet? No. Oh, no. I just followed you. Okay.

All righty. And Dante, are you on Twitter? You don't strike me as a Twitter fellow, but. Like, I'm an observer. I use it to the digital news information. Of course, Chris is LinkedIn. LinkedIn Maven. Yeah. Okay. Okay, good. Very good.

Well, I think any other things anybody wants to bring up at this point? No. Okay. Besides watching Bambi, watch the... Watch Bambi. No, Netflix. Watch the hunt for the Crypto King. Oh, yeah. You mentioned that. Is that a biography of Chris Dereides? That's the rumor. That's what we've heard.

The hunt's going to end in Chester County. Geez. So on that dark note, we're going to call this a podcast. It was a very good podcast. But thank you, listener, for tuning in,

and we'll talk to you next week. Take care now.