Stephanie Roth

You have consumer stimulus that's going to hit goods prices for the next quarter or so.

And then beyond that, you're going to move to an environment where goods are running at roughly 0% year-over-year, and then it's back to an environment where it's all about the service sector.

i think they will be positive for the consumer but this is a consumer that is already doing fairly well spending was has been fairly solid in the fourth quarter and everyone's rise up their gdp numbers in in the fourth quarter q one should be equally pretty solid i think the the main takeaway is that yeah maybe even you do get a bit of a bump in consumer spending people will spend the stimulus checks that come to them that is the american consumer but then beyond that this is an environment where you have positive momentum in the economy so

I think it will be important.

That's entirely fair.

But it's also an economy that's performing a lot better than many expected towards the back part of the year last year when everyone was concerned about the health of the consumer, which was a journalist in the news conference asked the question, why wouldn't that lead to higher inflation, given how in some parts of this economy we are supply constrained?

The answer is that you'll see some sticky inflation through the first part of the year, in which case the next Fed chair is going to be in an environment where inflation is running roughly 3%, the economy is fairly firm, and they're going to be trying to cut interest rates and they're probably going to have trouble at first.

It's going to be later in the year when inflation starts to cool again, you lose a little bit of that momentum where it becomes a little bit easier of a conversation.

Well, certainly you'll see that better consumer for the first part of the year.

It will fade into the election period of time, in which case then the focus is going to continue to be on affordability.

So that's the opposite of stimulus from a sentiment perspective.

And this is going to be the biggest challenge for the administration they're going to be dealing with all year, and they're going to have a lot of trouble.

They've been throwing a lot of different things at the wall to see what will stick.

And there is not that much they can do to change.

There is not that much can be done.

The one positive is not about anything the administration can do.

It is just a cyclical pickup in the economy that will help at the margin for a lot of the bottom end of the K who has been left out.

They've been left out for a whole lot of reasons.

Yeah, you're gonna be sitting

five percent, a little bit higher.