Michael Batnick

Housing.

I mean, the resale market might be getting a little better.

Like, I don't think there's much improvement in, uh, in new home sales.

I mean, if you look at new home sales so far this year, they're down about six, 7% against the same period last year.

Like there's builder margins that are still under pressure.

Like there's,

there's not a whole lot going on with respect to residential construction.

And I don't think that's going to happen this year.

Um, but you just have, I mean, I think we're probably going to talk about this, but the AI boom is quite spectacular in how much it's, I think helping lift, uh, growth.

I mean, there are, I think, a decent contingent of people on the street that think that this is having a fairly modest effect on the economy, right?

Well, no, I mean, it's sort of like GDP accounting, right?

So one of the reasons why, I mean, it's true that information processing and software is, what, 6%, 7% of GDP.

It's also true that a lot of the growth from AI leaks abroad in the form of imports.

So that actually counts against

Well, I just think that there's a little bit,

It does.

I mean, in a sense, I mean, just because the dollars don't show up in GDP doesn't mean that it's not like it's vanished or something.

You know what I mean?

So I think what economists miss about this is that there are lots of kind of –

linkages to other areas of the economy that are not neatly captured, I would say, by GDP, like simple GDP accounting.