Claudia Sahm

But we're just in an economy that we've got fewer resources, fewer workers, you know, kind of adding to it.

And that's going to show up in a lot of statistics we're used to being big on.

I have to say we've, you know, big picture gotten some pretty good news on that.

So our most recent reading on like core goods orders, really it was pretty broad based in terms of being a solid reading.

Like if you look at the data, it's not all just AI, it's not all just data centers, right?

There is more going on in terms of investment.

Now, you know, more is always better, but I think there's a little more breadth than maybe the news,

gets in terms of what's happening on the investment side.

So investment's still holding up.

Consumer spending's still holding up.

But the backdrop is difficult with inflation being hotter.

That really does cut into the real gains.

So the two ingredients for growth are going to be the growth of the labor force and then the growth of labor productivity.

And so if you get down to a place where you're not growing the labor force, it is all about productivity.

And again, with immigration policy such as it is, growth is really going to be held up by labor productivity.

We need AI to really deliver if we're flatlining labor force growth.

certainly use the AI coding to try and do some tasks.

Frankly, I'm still learning how to use the tool, so I'm still faster coding on my own, but I think it's important to try it out and get better at the tools that are out there.