Zanny Minton-Beddoes

The real economy right now in the here and now, I think being hit by particularly the tariffs.

And on the other hand,

This optimism in the markets that comes around the expectations for AI.

If you look at really the stocks that are doing extraordinarily well, it is the big tech companies.

The Magnificent Seven, as they're often called.

Meta, Tesla, Alphabet, formerly Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple.

It is the big tech companies that are driving this frenzy, and then other companies that investors think are going to benefit from it.

If you took those out, the performance of the stock market is much more lackluster.

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.