The Dispatch Podcast - What's Brewing on the Horizon?

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

Economist Jason Furman joins Declan Garvey on this episode of the Dispatch Podcast to break down the confusing economic state of the U.S. The unemployment rate is great, the rapid pace of job growth is on an uphill trajectory, and inflation is low. But, is that too good to last? Furman breaks down the scenarios that could cause the economic successes to come to a screeching halt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. This is Declan Garvey, editor of the morning dispatch. And today we're going to talk about the economy. President Biden made economic growth the central theme of his State of the Union address earlier this week. And for the moment, at least things are looking pretty good on that front. Gross domestic product data for 2022 came in stronger than expected. Unemployment is at its lowest level in over 50 years. Inflation is finally a start to slow a little bit. But there are certainly some storm clouds on the horizon. And joining us today to talk through some of those storm clouds is Jason Furman, Professor of Economic Policy at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He also

has over a decade of experience in Washington, serving for eight years as a top economic advisor to President Barack Obama. And the last four of those years were as chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors. What I really appreciate about Jason, though, is that he's one of the straightest shooters I've talked to in my economic reporting over the past several years. He doesn't stretch the data to fit any partisan narrative and has been willing to raise the alarm about even Democratic programs when he thinks it's necessary, including he was one of the first people to warn about impending inflation months before it really began

to dominate the conversation a couple years ago. Jason, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Thanks much for being here. So glad to be with you. So I want to start, you know, we're recording this on Thursday, February 9th. We're two days out from President Biden's state of the year. union address. It was a state of a union that focused primarily on the economy. It was the first thing that he mentioned after he welcomed everybody. And I think that's something that, you know, wouldn't have been necessarily expected six months ago, three months ago to kind of that he would be

in a position where he could spend so much of the speech on the economy and really drive that message. But because we've seen inflation coming down, because the labor market, he got a really great job report a couple days before the speech, it really was something that he felt confident that he could hammer home. I want to ask you, just to kind of start as a broad overview, how do you see the state of the economy? We've got a lot of data coming in, kind of give us the 2000-level view. Yeah. So if you take a snapshot at the point of time we're at in the economy right now, it's really good. The question, though, is what's going to happen. over the coming year.

The unemployment rate of 3.4% is just extraordinary, not something I ever thought I'd see in my life, the continued very rapid pace of job growth. And inflation has come down quite a lot. Core inflation was about 3% over the last three months. And if you look at headline inflation, that was more like 2% over the last 3%. over the last three months,

and workers are finally getting wage increases above inflation. So that's all the good part of it. The question is, is that too good to last, too good to be true? And I do have a lot of nervousness on that score. I worry that inflation's gonna start picking up again, that it'll be hard to get inflation down sustainably

to 2% with the unemployment rates staying where it is right now. It was very hard to engineer sort of small tweaks to these variables without, you know, oversteering in one direction or another. But to take a moment and savor where we are right now, I understand why he'd want to do that. Right. It was perfect timing for him to be able to make those points and we'll see if it sustains. I want to dive first into inflation. You know, the latest CPI report that we have is a little out of date at this point because we're due to have.

January's early next week, I think on Valentine's Day, that can be a great romantic date that we talk about the inflation report. But what we saw in December was actually deflation very, very slightly. It was, you know, prices down 0.1% on an adjusted basis. Is that expected to continue in next month's report? What do you expect to see when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases that on Tuesday. I think we're almost certain to see higher headline inflation than we had in December. So prices rose again in January after falling in the month of December. Even when you take the volatile things out, we are reasonably likely to see a faster pace

of inflation. And the issue is that in the last quarter of the year, some of that was a durable change to a more sustainable economy. but some of it was probably temporary, unusually low inflation. Things like used car prices fell quite a lot at the end of last year. If you look in the wholesale market, you see those prices rising. Now, we've just been talking about inflation in the month of January. The bigger issue is over the course of the year as a whole.

And then I think you want to worry less about stories like used cars and eggs and gasoline and all the individual products and start thinking. at the macro economy as a whole, the labor market wages and, you know, the overall macro stance. Right. And this is something that I know you've been talking about a lot for the past, I mean, 18 months, however long inflation's been, the main economic story here, but that, you know, you can tell whatever story you want to tell depending on the data that you include or not include. And so, you know, we'd have people saying, well, if you just take out used cars and eggs and specific things, then it's not so bad.

And then the next month, the basket of goods that you include in that changes. We're now talking, you know, you hear tell of supercore inflation. That is even more niche than core inflation, which takes out energy and food prices. Could you talk a little bit about what super core is, why people are talking about it now, and why you think it might not necessarily be the best indicator of what, what's going forward? The big thing for me is that you can think of inflation as micro. Here are 15 different markets and let's tell a story for each one.

Or you can think of inflation as macro, which is people are going to spend a certain amount. The economy is going to make a certain amount. We don't know exactly where the inflation is going to show up, but if it doesn't show up in eggs, it'll show up in, you know, bacon or something. like that. So that, to me, is the broad economics of it. Supercore subtracts used cars and subtracts housing, in addition to subtracting food and energy. I don't mind that. I think there's a certain logic. I publish that number every month. Look at that, on Twitter, I look at that number every month. So I think that's a fine number to look at, especially right now when the housing

data we're seeing is actually lagged and it's telling us more about past rent increases. than current rent increases. But, you know, Super Corps is not telling that different a story from Core. Both of them have come down from their highs, and both of them are well above the Fed's 2% target. And both of those statements are true. Things are less bad, but things are very far from where they're supposed to be. Right.

And before we move on to kind of the labor market aspect of this conversation, which I think is arguably the most important one, now, as you mentioned. You know, when inflation first started to pick up a year and a half ago, whatever it was, a lot of people, including Federal Reserve members, were talking about transitory, transitory, that this was kind of a short-term blip that, you know, supply chains were messed up by COVID, and once those on snarl, things will start to return to normal. is this timeline that we're on that, you know, there's a bank that was estimating inflation

would be back down to 2% by the end of this year. Things are starting to drop now. Is this within the bucket of transitory? Is this what those people were talking about? Or kind of how do you see the timeline that we've seen over the past couple months here? Yeah. I mean, the problem is that a lot of the transitory narrative was things like unusually high goods price growth will fall. And we've seen that. The transitory narrative has happened,

but other things have moved in the other direction. So goods price growth fell, but service price growth grew, and services have three times the weight in the consumption basket as goods. And that's just another good example of why you want to think about the macro, think about it as a whole, because if something goes right in one area and gets undone by another area, it basically doesn't count. So we've seen a lot of the transitory stuff materialized. Now, the question is, will service prices start to slow? Right now, they're moving unusually high. Some of them, like the cost of housing, rent, likely will slow, but a lot of other ones are very dependent on the main input, which is labor, and their main cost is wages. And so you have to look at the

labor market to understand where the bulk of inflation is coming from and where it's likely to go. And that's a perfect transition to our next topic, which is last Friday's jobs report that, you know, blew expectations out of the water. It was 517,000 new jobs. I think the expected was under 200,000 kind of consensus expectation there. And then the unemployment rate falling to 3.4%, which is its lowest, level since 1969 or tying it since 1969, why, I know there are some seasonal aspects of this that I want to ask you about after this, but why do you think the labor market remains as hot as it does despite these record Fed interest rate hikes that we've seen and a concentrated effort by the Fed to slow these job growth? It's pretty amazing. I think the broad macro story

in 2022 is that both monetary and fiscal policy, long and variable lags. And if you look at the economy consumption, which is 70% of GDP, was really strong or reasonably strong, that reflects the lagged effect of fiscal policy. We did, gave people lots and lots of money. We did fiscal stimulus, which totaled 25% of GDP in 2020 and 2021 combined. And people didn't spend that money right away, in part because they never spend it all right away. And that was even more true in COVID when you couldn't buy specialty services. And so even though it's only a year or two, even though it's a year or two years after the stimulus happened, people still had that money. It's sometimes called excess

saving. We're spending it. So that was moving the economy one direction. Fighting against that, moving at the other direction, the interest rate increases, you really do see them in the residential construction part of GDP. We saw the housing sector fell for three straight quarters. It was the largest decline that we've seen since the financial crisis. It just wasn't big enough to overwhelm the boost from consumption. So on net, the economy grew pretty strongly in the second half of the year, grew okay if you look at the year as a whole. And as a result of that, job growth continued to be strong throughout the year, probably a bit stronger than I would have expected maybe reflecting some continued gradual improvements in labor supply as

well. I'm sure some of our listeners will be curious and want me to ask this, that we're seeing all these kind of headlines coming out about Google lays off 10,000 workers, Amazon lays off 15,000 workers. Just yesterday, Disney announced 7,000 layoffs. At the same time, we're getting these incredibly robust job numbers coming out month after month after month. Where is the disconnect there? Is it, are those layoffs confined to specific sectors? And kind of why do you think that these high profile companies are not necessarily following the same trends that we're seeing as a country as a whole? Yeah. So first of all, I think to understand is there are

150 million jobs in our economy. And when you're looking at headlines about, you know, Google and meta and whatever else, you're looking at companies that employ maybe between them a million people. And so you're looking at a very small subset, less than 1% of the employment in the country as a whole. Moreover, many of those people being laid off may not have lost their job already. It may be a planned layoff. Or if they have lost their job, they may already have found another job somewhere else. And these paper reports suggest a lot of them have. So it doesn't surprise me that the aggregate data doesn't match up.

And tech is especially unrepresentative because it's staffed up really heavily during the pandemic. It's probably over-optimistic about how much some of the pandemic stay at home, do everything on screens, et cetera, would last. And so some of the layoffs we're seeing there really are just returning employment to where it was a year and a half ago or something like that, not some big dramatic change. And you don't have that same type of overcorrection elsewhere in the economy. And that's why, you know, I read the newspaper articles too.

I think they're important to I try to understand. But really, you want data, the data provided by the government, not just a series of anecdotes. It's hard to add up the economy as a whole with those anecdotes. Right. And you talked about, you know, employment returning to pre-COVID levels. I think total employment has surpassed where we were in February of 2020. The labor force participation rate has stayed a little stagnant. I know in this recent jobs report we saw that one of the biggest holdouts in terms of the COVID economy was, you know, working women are now back in the economy at a much higher rate than they were.

Why do you think that kind of the labor force participation rate has held pretty steady over the course of this as we're adding all these hundreds of thousands of workers back to the economy? Yeah. So, first of all, let's distinguish between two things. One is the level of the labor force. There's about 166 million people who either are working or looking for jobs. That's what is called the labor force. That is a couple million lower than we thought it would be because, um, There have been less immigrants and because of the premature deaths from COVID.

And so there definitely is a smaller labor force. There's then a second thing, the labor force participation rate, which is what fraction of the population is in the labor force? That's around 62% right now. And as you said, that's been roughly stable over the last year. And the percentage of the population is a battle of two forces. One is demography is trying to take it down because we have an aging population, more older workers, more older people and older people are less likely to work. At the same time, you have some people that have been returning because, you know, they ran out of the money the government gave them, or they're okay with COVID now, or they finally have child care, you know, whatever their reason is, they're coming back in.

And those two seem to be roughly canceling each other out. I actually don't think there's much of a mystery or problem about where the labor force participation rate is right now. Sort of roughly within the margin of error, you would have expected it to be prior to COVID. And prior to COVID, I thought it was going to fall because of the aging of the population. The issue is not the 62% of the population is working. It's just the population is smaller than it would normally be. The thing you're multiplying that's 62% by because of the lack of immigrants and the premature deaths.

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Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. I mentioned it earlier, but I do want to touch on there is some wonkiness, I think, generally speaking in the January jobs report that we see year after year in terms of that's when the BLS recalculates some population. it kind of adjusts for different things. Do you see that as kind of a major factor in why there was such a blowout, 517,000 jobs this year? Can you kind of walk listeners through how that number is calculated and why we might want to take January with a grain of salt?

January is always, as you just said, a tricky month. It's a tricky month in part because there's just huge seasonal changes in employment that they have to seasonally adjust away, in part because once a year they adjust the population and update it and through the rest of the year, they do a projection. For wages, it's tricky because a lot of people get their raises

in the month of January. And they try to deal with all of those quirks. They can't be perfectly successful in dealing with all of those quirks in the data, so it can be a little bit more volatile. I do think, though, the numbers in January were just so large and so, striking. It is unlikely that even if you made all sorts of corrections, that you still wouldn't

end up with something large. The headline was 517,000 jobs. You know, was the truth 300,000? Maybe. Was the truth 800,000? Maybe. Was the truth zero? I highly doubt it. So it was almost certainly a strong month, even if you throw whatever adjustments. But look, in general, you just never should change your view of the economy that much based on one month's data. The data itself could be wrong just because of noise. And that month itself just could have been a weird month. So I did update my views a bit, but not nearly as much as just the initial shock of seeing that very surprising headline number. Right. And the reason that, I mean, the reason that the Federal Reserve is paying so close attention to these job reports and the reason why I think a lot of

economists are as well is largely because of or looking specifically at the wage growth number that you mentioned earlier and what that could spell for inflation going forward. Could you kind of talk through what the trends are there in terms of how, you know, the labor market is obviously still very hot. Are pressures on wages equally hot? Are they going to continue to contribute and filter into the services sector inflation that you were talking about earlier? or kind of how do you think that the Federal Reserve is thinking about that after last week's report? Well, I'll tell you how I'm thinking about it. I think it's similar to how they're thinking about it, but they can reserve the right to differ for me, of course.

Nominal wages, wages not adjusted for inflation, are currently growing at about 5% a year. The exact rate depends on which measure you're looking at. Some measures are a bit lower. Some measures are a bit higher. Let's call it 5%. That is about 2%. percentage points faster than the pace of wage growth prior to COVID. If you look historically, that is associated with about three and a half to four percent inflation. So whenever wages are

growing at five percent, the inflation rate is generally growing about three and a half or four percent. Why might wage growth slow? Or why might price growth slow, even if wage growth doesn't slow. The best scenario is if businesses become much more productive than they can afford to give workers higher raises without that much inflation. I think that's possible, but certainly not a reasonable thing to expect because, you know, inflation, productivity can go up, it can go down. Businesses could absorb those wage increases without passing them on to prices by having lower profits. I wouldn't mind that. In fact, if I could root for something, I'd root for that. But, But you asked me for a prediction, not what I'm rooting for.

And my prediction is that businesses won't absorb those wage increases. They'll pass them on in the form of prices. That's generally what they've done historically. A third thing is wage growth could come down. It could come down maybe because the number of job openings fall without the unemployment rate rising. That's what some people were hoping for. We haven't seen that happen. In fact, the openings have gone up lately, not down.

And then the last thing is we could see a big increase in the unemployment rate. And if that happens, then yes, I do think we would see lower wage growth. And that, I think, would feed into lower price growth. And that's the so-called hard landing scenario that I still think is one of the main ways in which we should expect to see inflation come back down to something resembling 2%. Yeah. And that kind of leads me to my, the next subject here, which is Federal Reserve in their reaction to the recent data that we've seen. Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman, was asked earlier this week at an event here in D.C.

If the Fed would have done something differently, had they had a meeting last week where they raised interest rates by 25 basis points, it was a slower increase than we've seen or become accustomed to over the past several months, but he was asked, would you have done something more if you knew that this job report was coming? He didn't answer that question, but he did say that it shows you, quote, why we think this will be a process that takes a significant period of time and that it was, quote, stronger than anyone I know expected. Do you think that they're going to be back to 50 basis points or 75 basis points at their next meeting? Or do you think that kind of they're now in a more of a wait and see approach and think that they're kind of close to where they want interest rates to end up? My guess is they'll still do 25 and the next meeting and that the big variable will be

what they publish in terms of the dots, which tell you where they expect interest rates to be at the end of the year, and then the words they use around how many more hikes are coming. I don't think there's any question that they're going to continue to send the message that they expect that they're not cutting rates any time this year. That they've been very clear about. the market doesn't completely believe them, but the issue is how much higher will they go? I think that's the main degree of freedom they have, and they're not that focused on how quickly they get to something.

They think the terminal rate is more important than the exact path to that terminal rate. There's a lot of data between now and the next meeting, but I think it's a decent chance that inflation picks up a bit again, not as bad as it was last summer, but, worse than it was in the last couple months. And that that, plus the jobs data, send a little bit of a spooky message to policymakers. And remember, they have a dual mandate, employment and prices. Their employment mandate is being fulfilled right now. There's no problem there. In fact, if anything, the economy is below the natural rate of unemployment as they believe it to be. And their issue is entirely on the price side. So even if we didn't have a lot of

inflation with unemployment at this rate, they would want restrictive monetary policy. Obviously, they're going to be looking at the next jobs number. They're going to be looking at CPI next week. What are kind of the under the radar economic indicators that you watch or that you think they'll be watching in addition to those two, whether it be job openings or consumer spending or even trade data or what else are you looking at in the next? in the coming weeks here. Well, I look at everything, but what do I obsess over the most? Frankly, the pace of wage growth, to me, is the most important indicator.

We get every month average hourly earnings. We also get every month the Atlanta Fed does a better version of adjusting for composition. And we got those numbers for January, and they show wage. just grew, I think, it's 6.1% over the last year. I look at different measures of labor market tightness, but private and public, trying to look not just at unemployment rate, but job openings, quits, and the like.

But then to understand the economies a whole lately, there's been a little bit of a disconnect between the soft indicators, surveys about confidence and about plans, especially on the part of business, have been much more negative than the hard data has been in the economy And trying to understand what matters, the soft data, the hard data, how to reconcile those

is, I think, a little bit of an ongoing mini puzzle in reading the data. Larry Summers, who former Treasury Secretary, somebody who over the past two years has kind of been very willing to talk about where he sees the economy, not through it necessarily a partisan lens, kind of pushing back on some of the administration's points, said that even he is more optimistic about the prospects of a soft landing, which would be bringing inflation back down to the 2% or so target rate without a massive spike in unemployment, but that were still, you know, not out of the woods yet. He's not entirely convinced. Where are you on that? I know you mentioned you saw a hard landing as a very real possibility, but kind of if you

had to put odds on it or kind of trend lines, do you think we're trending? closer to a soft landing or things haven't really changed all that much? Absolutely trending closer to a soft lending, but I also used to be at a 10% probability, and now I'm at a 20% probability. So I still don't think it's the odds-on favorite. And just to understand there's four things that could happen in the economy. Soft lending, inflation comes down without a recession, hard lending. We have a recession, but it does bring inflation down.

It is also possible that we have a recession that doesn't bring inflation down below, say, 3% or to 2%. A lot of our recessions historically have only cut inflation rates by one percentage point. So maybe we have a recession and we'll come out of it with an inflation rate of 3%. I wouldn't call that a hard landing because we won't have landed. And then finally, there's a fourth possibility, which is we don't have a recession and we continue to have inflation above 3%. I actually think that might be the most likely thing to happen. Again, any one of these four could happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if we don't have a recession. And if we don't have a recession, then I would expect we continue to have inflation above 3%.

Fifth option, we don't raise the debt ceiling. And the whole economy collapses, and we don't have to worry about any of this. This is not a debt ceiling podcast. We don't have to get into all that. But I do want to ask you a couple questions about we're hearing reports of kind of some swap-ups in the Biden White House's economic team. This is obviously you served as the council or on the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama. We're seeing so Brian Dees, who's the National Economic Council Director, is stepping down as is Cecilia Rouse, the C.E. And reportedly, there's nothing final yet, but we're hearing reports that Lyle Braynard might take over the NEC job and Jared Bernstein, the CEA.

I'm sure you have worked with all these people in the past. What are your kind of thoughts about the job that they've done over the past two years? And if there are any differences that you can expect to see or the American people can expect to see in the administration's economic policy going forward with that possible switch. Yeah, so all four names you just had are personal friends, people I know, for anywhere between 15 and 25 years ago, depending on which one you're talking about. I think Brian and Cici have just done great jobs in the administration. There are a number of names that I've heard for both of the other slots, but certainly the names you mentioned, Lale, has done an excellent job at the Fed. So the question is, I have no doubt she would do an excellent job at NEC, but does the president, would he rather see her at the state at the Fed, or would you rather have her come over?

She's an economist, has her Ph.D., I think from Harvard, taught at MIT and focuses on international issues, but knows a huge amount domestically. And Jared is somebody that the president trusts quite a lot. He was his chief economic advisor at the beginning of the Obama administration when he was vice president. And they have a good rapport. And Jared is a very smart, sensible person focused, especially on labor markets and macro. So it would be other great people for those two jobs. And those two people would also be great for those two jobs.

As long as it's not me, I'm happy. I can understand why nobody would want to come to Washington right now. absolutely the um you know with with divided government uh we're likely not to see the you know three or four trillion whatever it was in uh additional spending that that was passed in the last congress for for a variety of reasons um you know that the main thing will be kind of this debt ceiling negotiation but do you think that there's anything that either that the president outlined in the state of the union or or anything else that's been kind of bubbling that could pass in an upcoming Congress that would meaningfully change the trajectory of any of the things

that we've been talking about the past half hour? Not raising the debt limit would change the trajectory of everything. We've been talking about that it would bring the trajectory down. Yeah, it would bring the trajectory down. Beyond that, you know, look, if we spend discretionary money smartly, we'll have a bit more growth over the long term. If we do stupid things, we'll have a bit less growth over the long term. It probably matters more for priorities like education, national defense, et cetera, than it does

for GDP particularly. Some of the main things economically the Biden administration is going to be doing over the next two years are implementing the big legislation, something like the Chips Act for semiconductors and microchips in the United States that the president talked about. That's not self-executing. It's not like Congress gave a very, very detailed set of instructions about how to spend that money. the administration has a team that's going to have to figure out how to spend that money.

I think if they do a good job, it could be a good thing. And if they don't, we could end up wasting the money. I'm hopeful it's going to work out. But that execution, the execution on infrastructure, the execution on climate change, and then some executive actions on things, especially in the area of competition, where I'm enthusiastic about some of what they're talking about, not all, and the area of Buy American, which the president stressed a lot in his State of the Union, where I'm generally very unenthusiastic, but, you know, as much as I don't like Buy American,

it's not going to show up in some huge negative way in the GDP numbers. It's a, you know, it's a negative thing, but not huge. So really the debt limit is the only thing that, and the Fed, are the only two government policy things that will move the needle on the macro data in some noticeable way. Yeah, I could hear my colleague Scott Lincolum shouting in my ear about the Buy American provision when you brought that up. I agree with most of Scott's read of the data, and I don't know that he would doubt me when I say something can be quite bad and still be 0.001% actually show up in a GDP report. Right, no, exactly. And while I do have you here, we've had this debate in Washington, pretty stupid debate if you asked me over the past couple days.

about Medicare, Social Security and Republicans' demands about bringing down the debt and deficit without meaningfully touching any of that. There seem to be some sort of agreement during the State of the Union that both parties are unanimous and their support for not touching that. You can agree or disagree on how important the debt and deficit reduction is in the long term. I know that economists have different views on that, but in your view, is it possible? to make a meaningful dent one way or the other without touching either of those entitlement programs?

Of course it is. You have to do more revenue. Frankly, you'd have to do more revenue than you could do with the constraints the Democrats have put on themselves of not raising taxes on anyone below. I think it is $400,000. But yeah, I would much rather that Speaker McCarthy had walked into the White House and said,

you know, I'm going to raise the debt limit tomorrow, not going to negotiate over that. but Medicare is running out of money in five years. Social Security is running out of money in 10 years. Let's work on those. And it's so important that let's also put revenue on the table, Mr. President, because we want to do this with spending. You want to do it with revenue.

Let's do a deal and do both of those. Of course, that's not what he said. I'm not sure if he had said that, what the president would have responded to him. And so we're in a conversation where basically everything, The two big things, revenue and the major spending programs are basically off the table from the very beginning of the conversation. And so, yes, once you take both of those off the table, then mathematically there's essentially nothing you can do unless you want to, you know, inviscerate in a way that no one wants to, everything else. I think you just described a good reason why you do not want to come back to Washington any time in the near future.

Yeah. Fair enough. Jason, thank you so much for joining us on the Dispatch podcast. I think our listeners will really enjoy this. Normally at this time of year, I would ask you how you're preparing to watch the Patriots in the Super Bowl, but obviously not the case this year. So how are you feeling about pitchers and catchers reporting in a couple days here for your Red Sox? Yeah, well, I mean, for me, the Bruin season has been just like the last jobs number,

just, you know, spectacular off the charts. maybe it's like mismeasure or some seasonal adjustment issue because the data just don't make sense they're so strong so I've been really happy about that and you know and a little bit like the economic data I'm sort of enjoying the moment while dreading that there may be worse things to come and that worst thing to come maybe the Red Sox this coming season yeah I was hoping you guys would not extend Rafael Devers so that the Cubs could grab them but congrats on that And finally opened up the checkbook. And look, I mean, my children have been living here for six years,

and it's just like every player they fall in love with is gone within that period of time. Yeah. Right. The idea that, like, you could have one player that they could spend, you know, their childhood being attached to. And maybe that player is an outstanding player even better. So, yeah, I'm glad we have. Anthony Rizzo, Chris Bain, Javi Baya is all gone.

Still recovering from that. But Jason, thank you so much for joining us and have a good rest of the day. Great talking. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply.

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