Zanny Minton-Beddoes

Well, if they're invested in the stock market at all, they're not doing nearly as well as if they were invested in those companies.

And if they don't hold shares, and many Americans don't, then the economy is much tougher because you're seeing inflation quite a lot higher than it really should be.

Maybe not as high as we might have feared six months ago, but still pretty high.

You're seeing the labor market weakening.

Although the unemployment rate hasn't risen very much, the pace of job growth is

Of course, we don't exactly know what's going on right now because we aren't seeing any economic figures being published because of the government shutdown.

Well, the story of the tariffs, Terry, is interesting, because if you cast your mind back to the beginning of April, if you remember, President Trump stood in the Rose Garden with that big board on which somebody had printed countries and the new tariff rates, and it was called Liberation Day.

And there were incredibly high tariff rates being proposed.

And at that point, and I think you and I spoke soon after that, there was a very real fear that

that we would go into something like the 1930s, when there was a trade war, you know, globally, and the US put up its tariffs under the Smoot-Hawley Act, and then other countries retaliated.

And the depression was made much worse by that.

Compared to that outlook, it hasn't been as bad as we feared.

In fact, I would be the first to admit that the impact of the tariff's

has not been in the short term as dramatic as I think I probably suggested it would be back in April.

And the reasons are several fold.

Firstly, President Trump threatened a lot of tariffs and then backed down.

You know, there's now this acronym, the TACO.

He's the TACO president.

Trump always chickens out.

And so a lot of the tariffs have not been put in place.