Tom Barkin

Well, we'll have to see how it evolves.

If you go back to the fall, the conversations I have with businesses suggest to me that they believe their pricing power is very limited.

Consumers are exhausted by inflation, affordability.

People are pushing back, whether that be not purchasing or private label or trading down to lower-priced retailers or repairing rather than replacing.

And so, in the conversations you have,

you do have a sense that we're on the backside of this inflationary period.

We'll head back to normal.

And the numbers in the fall, absent the government shutdown, were saying much the same thing.

I will say over the last month and with the PCE numbers that we're expecting next week, you've got a couple months of relatively high inflation.

That certainly puts pause to any conclusion that we're done fighting this.

But we'll see where we go.

Well, that's where we come back to productivity as being so key to this whole story because most every business I talked to last April that got tariffs was going to pass it on.

It was just clear and they needed to maintain margins.

The consumer was going to have to take it.

And when they experimented with that, they got a lot of pushback.

And so prices didn't increase the way that a lot of those folks expected.

Now,

their margins have been very steady.

And so corporate margins are quite healthy.

Earnings were up, I think, 13% fourth quarter year over year.