E.J. Antoni

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

I think it's huge, Vince.

It's a great point.

I'm glad you raised it, because if we look at the GDP reports that we were just talking about earlier, we are seeing that investment boost, which is lifting overall economic growth.

And then if you want to talk about individual sectors of the economy,

In this last jobs report, we saw a surge in construction jobs of 30,000.

And if you drill down within construction, where are the jobs being created?

It's in factory construction.

So even though those factories aren't yet employing, let's say, manufacturing workers,

just their construction is employing workers already.

So you're creating high-quality, high-paying, blue-collar jobs in areas of the countries that desperately need that relief on the labor market.