Mark Zandi

And if you told me at the end of the year it's $80, I'd say that sounds about right.

Now,

For the U.S.

economy, that's obviously not good.

We're paying more for oil and other products that are coming from the Middle East, agriculture, chips, aluminum, lots of different commodities.

So it adds to inflation.

It weakens growth.

It adds to the ill effects of the tariffs, which do the same thing.

They raise inflation, weaken growth.

But, you know, the economy can navigate through without an economic downturn.

It's much diminished by what's happened and what's going on, but it's not pushed under by what's going on.

Now, I'm just obviously focused on the very near term.

You know, next month, next six months, next year, there's other longer term consequences of all this.

And, you know, you mentioned about the kind of the implicit threats around using nuclear weapons.

You know, those things have consequence, I think, in the long run.

They're not cliff events per se, but they're corrosives on economic growth and just creates general angst, uncertainty.

And that's just not good for business in the long run.

Yeah, I view this as a part of a broader, very corrosive trend, and that's the deglobalization of the economy, that the U.S.

is pulling away from the rest of the world very quickly.

I mean, you know, tariffs, immigration policy, you know, what we're doing geopolitically.