Despite a sharp market selloff, this analyst says the economy remains stable—for now.
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00:00Does this sell-off actually indicate that we're seeing worse fundamentals? Is the economy actually
00:05slowing? And that's where I'd like to say no, right? In the here and now, we haven't seen a
00:09slowdown. Now, there are a lot of people that are predicting that the economy is going to slow,
00:12but we don't know yet because we don't have the final results of what tariffs are going to look
00:16like. So we can't gauge what those tariffs will likely mean to economic growth and inflation.
00:21So I think it's more of a concern of if, in fact, we started to look at some worst-case scenarios
00:27on tariffs and immigration, and we never get a lighter regulatory touch, and we're not able
00:32to keep taxes where they are and they go higher, then we certainly would say that the economy is
00:37going to run into difficult times. I think in the here and now, we're in a wait-and-see mode,
00:41and I think that's true for investors, and I think that's the right place to be. But if you
00:44look at the current economic data, we just had a good jobs report a week ago. We just had a CPI and
00:49PPI this week, and both of those came very much in line. What you can get caught up in, though,
00:54is looking at survey data or soft data, as we like to call it. So whether it's University of
00:59Michigan sentiment surveys or the conference board sentiment surveys, and they basically
01:04will bring out the worst in people that are willing to answer surveys. They'll say,
01:07how do you feel about current conditions? Oh, I feel terrible. Well, everybody feels terrible.
01:11What do you think about the future? Oh, that's not a great either. But then you compare that to
01:15hard data like retail sales, and consumers aren't confident at all, and yet over the last couple of
01:21months, they spent more money than they ever have. So I would say keep an eye on the hard
01:25data versus the soft data. Surveys don't always give us a good viewpoint into what the economy is
01:30really doing. And in the here and now, in today, as we talk, the economy is doing okay. The
01:36potential for it to slip up would come if this uncertainty lasts for quarters and not for weeks,
01:42and that's the biggest concern, I think, in the market right now.