Dr. Alan O'Sullivan

because a lot of people are focusing in on agriculture at the moment, and the nature of our global economy, the people that suffer the most are the poorest, and there is concerns, somewhat maybe alarmist about drought, huge food shortages arising from this energy crisis, but there's definitely concerns in relation to this.

In terms of the chart, you can't ignore, I'm moving quickly because I'm already behind time, but

We saw a release from the Index of Consumer Sentiment from, this is a survey done by the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment.

What is it?

They go and survey 500 US households and they ask them a couple of questions, qualitative questions about how do you feel about the economy?

What's your expectation?

What's your confidence level with retail consumer sentiment?

And the upshot of it is that it's the lowest rate

Reading on record.

And you might look at my chart above and say, okay, well, that's just going back 10 years.

But this data series actually dates back to the 1950s from memory.

So if I scroll down, see this data is coming from University of Michigan via the FRED database, the Federal Reserve Economic Database.

And you can see, going all the way back, this is the current reading, going all the way back, 1970s, never been lower, even through all previous oil crisis, the 2008 financial crisis.

So that really tells you something about the lack of confidence in the US.

Remember, the US economy is predominantly a consumer-based economy, so you would have to worry about that.

The other chart, I couldn't refuse putting this up, the Great Disconnect.

Remember earlier I spoke about...

how this S&P 500 is just looking through what's going on in the US economy.

So the blue line is the S&P 500, just that March higher, whereas the green line is US job openings.

So we can see US job openings starting to trend significantly lower and a fair decent trend.