Kyle Risdall

Did you have a moment of clarity where you said, OK, now I know what's going on in this economy?

Amar, do you think Jay Powell and the gang would have made a different decision had they had the data?

Because, of course, it came out like 10 days after the meeting, a week after the meeting, whatever it was.

You have been writing, though, Amara, about Stephen Myron and John Williams in New York and sort of their diametrically opposed views on what will be happening with interest rates, right?

It's interesting, Heather, because, you know, and Powell said this last week, we have one tool, monetary policy, and we have competing problems, right?

We have inflation, which is higher than we want it.

And we have a labor market that's weaker than we want it.

And the solution is not the same thing for both of those.

Yeah.

Amar, let me ask you about the long-term consequences of, of the data gap that we have now, right?

Like we, we are never ever going to see, uh, the consumer price index for October of 2025.

So what does that mean?

Like next year when October rolls around and we say the year over year change in CPI was, Oh wait, we didn't have it last year.

You know, what do we do with this?

Heather, I'm going to turn now to consumers, and we've got Sam Fields coming up on consumers here in a second.

But we are still spending, even though we are cranky.

It is, of course, what drives this economy, and yet we're in a hiring, you believe, a hiring recession.

Six, eight months from now, where are we if we are still relying on consumers?

I mean, where's economic growth?

Where's the labor market?