E.J. Antoni

If you look at in this last GDP report that we just got, I know people were disappointed by the headline number, but I actually wasn't.

Part of the reason for that is if you look at how GDP is calculated, it includes government purchases, and that's going to include all of this spending at the federal level.

Well, what happened at the federal level, if you just look at non-defense spending specifically, it fell by the fastest pace since 1972.

Now, some of that was because of the shutdown.

So there were certain purchases that are going to get pushed forward into the first quarter of this year.

But it's also because this administration has made such great progress in terms of reducing federal expenditure.

No, I'm happy to report, Vince, that the Hunger Games have not yet started in the United States of America.

No, look, all of the doom and gloom, it turns out, of course, it was all wrong.

If you look at inflation, it has not been exploding as the Democrats all said it would.

In fact, even

though a lot of our headline inflation indicators, like the PCE price index, as it's called, that ticked up in the month of January.

But interestingly, if you look at the versions of that that remove outliers, like trimmed mean and median PCE, and same thing when you look at the consumer price index, you look at the trimmed mean and the median.

Again, these are ways of removing the fastest and the slowest growing or decreasing parts of the index.

And what we find there is that inflation is actually falling to the lowest level in about five years.

So really, really good news there.

Good progress on the inflation front.

In other words, it's one or two outliers that are causing the big increases.

And that's driven by things like what's happening with the beef supply right now in terms of the overall size of the cattle herd in the United States.

So again, getting rid of the extreme shows that inflation is actually doing better, not worse.

it's still not where we want it to be but again doing better not worse and same thing when we look at when we look at the labor market uh when you look at manufacturing specifically all of the the things that we were told are going to fall off a cliff because of trump's tariff policies none of that came to pass