Mark Zandi

And goodness knows, I mean, things are not sticking to anybody's script here for the past year.

If something else doesn't go exactly right, I think recession odds are over even and it's going to be very difficult to avoid a downturn.

Economists use the word uncertainty a lot.

I mean, and that's what we're talking about here.

You know, I talk about distributions of possible outcomes.

I talk about the baseline in the middle of the distribution.

But the distribution isn't a kind of a nicely bell-shaped normal distribution.

It's like a fat distribution, mostly to the downside.

I mean, there's just a lot that could go wrong here.

And, you know, in that world, it's hard to assess risk and price risk.

And therefore, you would expect higher risk premiums, which are reflected in things like higher insurance premiums.

I will say though, Ed, you know, if you look into financial markets, you know, like the equity, you know, obviously the equity market or even the corporate bond market, you don't, you don't see the same kind of risk premium built in.

Right.

I mean, valuations are high.

I mean,

with this rally today in the equity market, we're back close to, within spinning distance of the record high.

Now, some of that can be explained by dynamic artificial intelligence and AI, and that runs its own dynamic.

It has nothing to do with anything.

The rest of what's going on in the world does not matter to what's going on with these companies, these hyperscalers.

They're on a different dynamic.