Tom Barkin

I mean, let's see what happens on the unemployment side.

We'll get some important data in a couple minutes here on the inflation side, and I think we'll get there when we get there.

I mean, what I definitely see happening is there are cost increases that suppliers want to pass on.

There's no question about that.

And tariffs are a big part of it.

But you could put health insurance and other places, other costs in there, too.

But those costs are going to attempt to get passed on to a consumer who's, frankly, exhausted of price increases.

And so we're seeing a lot of trading down, branded to private label kind of choices.

But we're also seeing people trade off.

And it wouldn't surprise me at all if people who are forced to accept certain price increases therefore don't buy something else on the other side.

And that's your classic relative price tradeoff.

And that may mean that you won't see as much broad-based inflationary impact as you'd see price increases on particular items.

We'll see.

Well, we have inflation moving in the wrong direction.

Unfortunately, we also have unemployment moving in the wrong direction.

And that was the backdrop.

of the last meeting, you have to ask yourself, are the risks still the same as you saw them two, three, four months earlier when you had unemployment in the right direction and inflation in the wrong direction?

My overall thesis, though, is that while it's not ticking in the right place, the downside is relatively limited.

I see the inflation downside is limited by this customer pushback that I just talked about.

Also productivity, which I think is, we're seeing that at real scale.