Barry Habib

Pat, look at what's happened since the end of COVID, since COVID peak 2020.

Look at what's happening to the number of multiple job holders in the United States.

Look at that.

That they can count.

And this is people that have full-time employment.

So it's like a subset of a subset.

So you have to treat this as a trend line and look at it across the population.

This is exactly what Barry is talking about.

It's such an unhealthy sign.

I'm going to play devil's advocate, though.

So I actually...

Disagreed with you guys last time we spoke where you guys were saying that we should cut rates.

I was saying that we should hike rates because I think that disposable income is getting hurt because I think inflation is understated, if anything, between housing and food.

But with the oil situation now, that's why they're talking about hiking rates instead.

But I think they're misreading that.

Now, there's some debate about this, but

Typically, when oil goes up like this, there's argument that, yes, it makes everything else expensive, but also destroys disposable income.

So a lot of things actually go down in price because people don't have the extra disposable income to buy it.

So I think an argument can be made that maybe you do need to either keep rates the same or cut rates now that oil's this high.

Because this situation tends to make everything deflate because people don't have as much disposable income.