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Unknown A
Welcome to the show, everybody. Hope you had a good weekend. We are now officially more than one month into the second presidency of Donald Trump and I'm going to do what I told you I would do. We will track and compare economic metrics. We will not play politics. I will simply tell you, here's what the data says about the state of the economy under Donald Trump. One of the things we did on the day after Joe Biden left the White House and Donald Trump again became president was I told you, here is the unemployment rate that Joe Biden is handing to Donald Trump. Here's the inflation rate that Joe Biden is handing to Trump. Here's the stock market level that Biden is handing to Trump. And we will track in black and white where this goes as the Trump presidency progresses. Now, I don't know that I'm necessarily going to be doing this around the 20th of every month, but I'm doing it this month just to show that you can do this and you will see that the data is there for the having in black and white.
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Unknown A
So real quick, the unemployment rate at the end of Joe Biden's presidency was 4.1%. Trump's first month saw the unemployment rate tick down from 4.1 to 4%. Great. No significant change. No significant spike certainly, and a small reduction in the unemployment rate. The year over year inflation rate at the end of President Biden's presidency was 2.9% year over year. After Trump's first month in office, we saw the inflation rate go up just a little bit from 2.9 to to 3%. Not a significant change. Certainly one metric improved. One metric arguably worsened. Depending on what you believe is the ideal amount of inflation, generally believed to be 2 to 3%. We still don't have we on GDP. GDP is longer term. We would look at GDP quarter to quarter and year over year. We don't even have the Q for 2024 GDP number yet. So we're going to have to wait on GDP interest rates.
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Unknown A
We tend to look at the 30 year fix. That's kind of like the baseline metric we often look at at the end of Joe Biden's presidency. The 30 year fixed rate was at 7.04%. It has ticked down a little bit to 6.85%. Much of that, of course, tracks Fed activity. But not all. Consumer sentiment is the one place where there is an area of concern. Consumer sentiment, based on the University of Michigan study, which is one of the big ones that economists look at, tracking consumer sentiment, meaning the feeling about the direction of the economy, how frugal or lax people would be when it comes to spending. Consumer sentiment has worsened 10% since Donald Trump became president. So what we could. I think it's accurate to say that although no major economic indicator has yet worsened significantly, the opinion of the average American is that things are going to go in a negative direction.
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Unknown A
Now, that may be true, it may not be true. And then finally, stock market performance flat with the kind of very poor two trading days at the end of last week. We are basically at the exact same place in terms of the stock market over the last month. Now, there are people who will say the expectation is that over time the stock market appreciates and therefore flat is bad. I will leave that. I'm trying to be as apolitical as possible here. The stock market flat during the first month of Donald Trump's presidency. So that's where we are. We will continue tracking it, and I think the next month of data will start to point to a trend. We will either see things start to worsen or improve, or we will see everything seems flat. It seems as though the transition from Biden to Trump has changed nothing about the overarching state of the economy.
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Unknown A
That's where we are right now. Of course, we know eggs, right? Eggs are going nuclear. I don't have an egg report for you today. Other than yesterday. I found zero eggs at my local 2 grocery stores. I had to go to an inferior grocery store further away and the only choice I had was a six pack of one type of egg. And there were signs saying two packages max per customer. So that was the state. That's my egg report from yesterday. But at some point during the week, we will look at egg prices. Egg prices certainly up, but we look at broader metrics like inflation. Inflation going from 2.9 to 3. That's where we are.
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Unknown B
Well, I wrote a book.
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Unknown A
After a long journey and a ton.
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Unknown B
Of work, I am really thrilled with how it turned out and I hope you'll read it. The book is called the Echo Machine, and in a nutshell, it looks at how American politics got so broken, who has already figured out solutions and how we can try to fix it and stop the terror of Trump for the next four years. With Trump winning this election, the Echo Machine couldn't be more relevant. Not only a warning about how we got here, but also about what might be coming and how to prevent the worst outcomes. We've got to stay engaged. We need a plan. And that's what the book is about. There's a belief out there that unless you have corporate media behind you, you can't have a successful political book launch, that it's not possible. I think we can prove that wrong. Order the Echo machine today@davidpakkman.com Echo on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Audible, Kindle, anywhere that books, ebooks and audio books are sold.
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Unknown B
You can also call any local bookstore and say, please order me the Echo Machine by David Pakman. Wherever you get the book, you'll get the free pre order perks, including the signed bookplate. Head to davidpakman.com free bookstuff after ordering.