BREAKING: Jobs Report Show MAJOR Miss; Warning Signs for Economy

Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my

Bullwork Colley Catherine Rampel author of the

receipts newsletter and we have economic news.

It's Friday and we have jobs reports and

Oh,

I'll America lost jobs.

Not not job growth.

We went backwards.

So lost 92,000 jobs in February,

Catherine.

Not something that happened a lot in the

Biden administration.

No, but but here we are.

And just to clarify, jobs numbers are not like golf lowest score

wins.

You want them to be positive, right?

Yes, you want them to be positive, ideally positive enough to,

you know, keep up with population growth and reduce unemployment and

all of the hopefully obvious things.

Instead, I think we have net job losses since May,

of 2025, because this is not the first time we've lost jobs under the

term administration.

Yeah, I think we have a chart actually showing job losses.

Yeah, exactly there.

So you can see, look at that.

Boy, look at all those blue lines back in 2022 and 2023 and 2024.

Wow.

I guess America really hated that.

Yeah, well, they didn't like those blue lines.

America was really mad about the economy.

So mad.

I mean, not because of the job market, per se, because of other stuff

happening in the economy, but yeah, this was not sufficient at the very

least to stoke a lot of enthusiasm about the Biden economy.

Whereas as you can see here, we now have six months of job losses,

not consecutive, but, you know, over the course of Donald Trump's second

term.

So not great.

I should clarify that the job losses in February were partly about the

fact that there was a big strike in health care at a hospital system.

But like the economy should be resilient enough to still show job growth

without, you know, even with some doctors and nurses in one hospital being on

strike and actually health care had been basically the only

reliably bright spot, yeah, in the economy.

So we are going to talk about the job stuff.

We're going to talk about Iran and the economic ramifications of the new war.

And we're going to try to tie it all all together for people.

But I just want to, again, expectations, very important.

This jobs report seems to have come a little bit out of nowhere.

Nobody seems to have expected job numbers this week.

Wall Street kind of having a little bit of a minor freak out this morning.

And the administration's response seems to be, yeah, but it's because of all the

immigrants were deported.

Yeah, it's funny.

That's part of the line.

I think we actually have Kevin Hassett saying a version of that.

Can we play that?

Astrosks in Jim's words to make this number make more sense.

Well, I think, you know, Jim.

Nope.

We have some sound.

Yeah, there we go.

There are going to be strong indicators this month that it's something of a surprise,

but there are some weather, there are strengths on the west coast.

And I think that we also have this birth death model, a change in the procedure at the BLS.

That's what I think what we need to start doing with these jobs numbers.

At least on the payroll side is take the average over a few months.

And if you take the average over a few months, we had a surprisingly positive one last month

and a surprising negative one, this one.

But on average, it's about what we expect to be seeing because immigration has gone down

by so much that break even employment is probably in the sort of 30 or 40,000 jobs

a month range.

And so yeah, I think I think it's consistent with everything else we're seeing,

which is that the economy is really strong.

Okay.

So let me decode this a little bit.

Yeah, can you impact that for us?

Sure.

So aside from like the technical stuff that he talked about, which there's some truth to it,

in birth death model, I won't get into all of that.

That would be the case in any administration, the immigration thing.

So we had been hearing for years by Trump and from Trump and from his allies

that if you pulled immigrants out of the economy,

then you would have a lot more job openings for native foreign Americans

that immigrants were stealing all of the jobs that should have gone to, you know,

red-blooded Americans, and therefore, if you just yanked them out of the labor force,

maybe yanked them out of the country, that would create, you know, an abundance of riches

in terms of job opportunities for native-born Americans.

Heritage.

Many of us.

American.

Heritage.

Americans, thank you.

Many of us argued at the time like that's not really true, the jobs that immigrants

disproportionately fill are different from those that native-born Americans disproportionately

fill, for example, like immigrants are more likely to be in the construction sector,

food services, health care for that matter.

It's not really talented in this report, but agriculture.

So there are a lot of sectors that if you take the immigrants out there,

there's not like a queue of American native-born heritage Americans

who are willing to fill those jobs, willing and ready to fill those jobs.

And it's not just about like what are the jobs that people are interested in.

It's also just like how many are how many people are there because you have native-born

Americans being much skewing much older, skewing more likely to drop out of the labor force

because they're approaching or in retirement age.

So part of the reason why we did see this, what looked like an increase in immigrant

employment, such a big increase in immigrant employment versus for a while,

what looked like a decrease in native-born employment.

I'm not actually sure that that bears out after all the revisions,

but at the time at least this was the case.

It was because Americans were retiring and immigrants were coming into the country,

yes, and definitely higher than historical numbers, but also they were working age.

So they were coming here and they were working.

So anyway, so that's the backdrop for all of this.

Today we are hearing from Kevin Hasett, your favorite economist, I know,

that actually when you pull those immigrants out of the labor force, maybe you don't get as much job

growth. So like what is it? Is it that we should have expected more job growth for

native-born Americans? Or it's like, no, obviously we would have expected less job growth overall.

So they kind of wanted both ways, and either way they're just trying to cope, I guess,

with the fact that the numbers are not great.

And I do want to say you should never read too much into one month's report.

Hasett is right on that. Every economist will tell you that.

But it's not just one month's report. We've seen, again, six months now,

under Trump's tenure in which we've had low job losses.

And when there's been growth, it's been really slow.

Yeah, and it's been low growth, yeah.

It's been low growth, and it's again, it's been really lopsided.

Can we pull up the chart actually of industries? Do we have that?

So this is over the past 12 months.

And I'm sorry, it's a little bit ugly as a chart, but you can see that this is every

major sector. And most sectors have lost jobs. The ones that have not are private education

and health services. And if you break that down, it's almost entirely health.

Leisure in hospitality has done okay. Other services have done okay. Construction, I guess,

is modestly up. I don't know what that looks like in the past few months, but I'm,

my guess is it's not great, given, again, that we've been deporting much of the workforce.

So, yeah, the manufacturing, mining and logging, those are like real alpha male,

department of labor, you know, area and picture type stuff jobs.

Yeah, not making a lot of them, are we?

Exactly. The blue collar sector has been doing pretty badly, you know,

the, I think this is supposed to be Trump's people, like, right? Right? He cares about these

macho jobs, these white, you know, blue collar, hyper masculine jobs, white people jobs, white collar,

white person blue collar jobs. Yeah. So those are the, those are the jobs that he's supposed to be

most devoted to that he said he would bring back. And instead, those are struggling. And those

are struggling in part because of Trump policies, like tariffs, right? So like when he tariffs

steel and aluminum, you have a whole bunch of other downstream manufacturing companies that

rely on purchasing steel and aluminum to make cars and appliances and other stuff.

So unemployment takes up to 4.4%. Just a reminder, that would be 10% higher than it was for almost

the entirety of the Biden administration when unemployment was below 4% for something like 36

consecutive months, something I don't have the exact count, but it was, you know, whoo, it was

pretty good. Wow, look at that. So this is just to clarify this chart that we're showing is

long term unemployed, which I wanted to emphasize because it's, it's like, it's the case that

unemployment itself has ticked up a little bit. As you point out, you know, it's like 10% higher,

but it's still, you know, it's not super high 4.4%. Not yet. Not yet. Look, and I'm not rooting for

to get a lot worse because it's disproportionately the most vulnerable in the population who

bear the brunt of job losses and recessions and everything. But the reason I wanted to show this chart

is that it shows that if you get unemployed, your chances of getting re-employed have gotten a lot

worse. That's what this is showing. So this is how many people, of those who are unemployed,

how many people are long-term unemployed, which is like approximately six months, 27 weeks.

And that has been growing pretty fast. And that's concerning because it used to be like every

month, like even when we have gangbusters job numbers, a lot of people lose their jobs too.

The, you know, it's like, there's just tremendous churn exactly. There's tremendous churn in

the economy. And the hope is that if people lose their jobs, there are still lots of openings

for them to find. You know, if you lose a job at McDonald's, maybe you can get a job at Burger King,

or you lose a job on one construction site, you can find another one.

And so that doesn't seem to be happening. And I think this is partly again about the trade wars

and about the fact that there's just this paralysis in the economy that companies are actually,

they're not firing in huge numbers, but they're also not hiring. So if you are one of the unlucky

people to have lost your job, getting back into, you know, gainful employment has gotten a lot

harder recently. So I want to walk us then into the trap that America seems to be sleepwalking into.

So we have, we're going backwards in terms of job creation. It is getting harder for people to

find jobs once they've been unemployed. There is a real hesitancy in the, just in the business

community to spend money because of all the uncertainty. These are signals that traditionally would

say to the federal reserve, hey, we got to cut rates to stimulate the economy.

Usually? Yes, usually. The problem is that at the same time, we have oil prices jumping by,

I don't know what the percentage is. I think we had a 25 cent per gallon increase this week alone

in the price of gas. And we have a war in the Middle East, which is about to mess up

huge swaths of the global economy. Not just oil, not just energy, but trade and commodities like

aluminum. You mentioned aluminum already. We'll talk about that fertilizer, which is a precursor

for food production. And so it sure seems like in the short run, we are headed towards a bunch of

inflationary pressures. And so again, I'm just a guy on YouTube, but it seems like a

moment in which the economy is slowing and moving backwards, and the Fed wants to stimulate things

in order to get businesses to invest a little bit more money in order to hire people.

The Fed is going to feel a little bit handcuffed if there are also a bunch of inflationary

pressures pushing up against them. Yeah, I mean, the Fed is in the worst possible position,

and it is almost entirely Donald Trump's doing. I was talking with a friend earlier today about,

like, can you imagine how different the economy would be if Donald Trump had just come in to

office and done nothing? Just gone golfing. Gone golfing. As some of us advised him to do, I literally

wrote a column way back in the day before we got into office saying, just please go play golf

and don't do anything on the economy. He inherited an economy with great tailwinds. We were

very close to that coveted soft landing, meaning even ring inflation out of the economy without

crashing it, without having a recession. Job growth was still strong. And instead, pretty much

every economic policy or even non-economic policies like bombings have made stuff worse.

I mentioned the tears. So you can inflate your impressors on the war stuff, because you wrote

a great newsletter yesterday about this. People should go to the blowwork.com and subscribe to it.

But I think people need to hear this and understand that there are a bunch of second and third order

economic effects, which stem from war, which do not seem to have occurred to anybody in the

administration. Nope. No, they do not. Yeah, I wrote. We can blow stuff up. Explosions, dude. Yeah,

chug, chug, without any understanding like, oh, oh, maritime insurance. What's maritime insurance?

How does it work? How do gas prices work apparently? Like this should have been totally obvious.

This is probably obvious to most Americans, but like, you know, normies who are not paid to

pay attention all of these things. And look, I want to start by saying it always feels a little

icky and crass to be talking about the economic fallout of a war. The most important thing about the

war is the loss of life and other casualties, including of our service members and the children's

school that was destroyed and all of those things that I hope that is obvious.

Okay, I'm sorry. I do interrupt you here to say that the reason we do have to talk about this

stuff is not to be callous, but because wars are about political will. This is what bombs do not

win wars. Political will is what determines the outcome of wars. And in America, it is well

established that our political will largely follows economics. And gas prices in particular.

Yes. Yes. There is a strategic reason why we have to talk about the economics of this as it

relates to war. So don't feel like you need to apologize for this. This is, it's all very

I just, well, I'm not apologizing. I'm just trying to put stuff in context because I don't want

people to think like that's the only calculus that we should care about. Sure. In any event, sorry,

for that throat clearing. It also matters, by the way, because I'm not sure a lot of America,

like most Americans have heard all that much about the war. And they may be dimly aware of it.

There's some polling, I think, from Ipsos that showed that I forget what the share was, but it was

only like a quarter of Americans had heard a lot about the war. And you know, it's going to come

home to them. Like they may not be aware of what's going on in the world. They may not be aware,

even if service members who have died, but they will notice when they go to their local gas station

and gas is a lot more expensive. So yes, gas, gasoline, the most obvious disruption here. I think

S&P global had said that this could very well turn into the largest disruption of oil markets

in history because about 20% of global oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is on

Iran's southern coast. And if you look at what has happened to traffic on Iran's southern coast

in the Strait of Hormuz, it has rapidly declined. I think we actually have a chart showing how it's

yes. So this is another chart. So that blue line, you can see that's how much the daily ship

crossings have plummeted there. I think they're not quite at zero, but they're pretty close.

And would you want to go through this Strait? Given that you're probably uninsurable, I think like

nine different ships of various kinds have been attacked at this point, mostly by Iran, but I'm

sure all of them have been attributable to one side or the other. So it's very dangerous. And

the results of all of that is that as you can see, the shipments have been coming to a virtual

standstill and also production has been cut back a lot. So like in Iraq, they have dramatically

cut back oil production because they can't ship it and they're running out of storage. And you

have a bunch of refineries in the region. And I think Bahrain, maybe UAE Saudi, I can't wait.

I don't remember. They're a bunch of them. I feel like every day there's another one that

again, have either been shutting down entirely or have been having to scale back because there's

nowhere to send the oil to. So that's going to trickle down to gasoline prices. You also have

liquefied natural gas, which is used to power factories among other things.

Industrial? Yeah. It's usually important for industrial-based manufacturing.

Exactly. Including in that region. I mean, a lot of the LNG that comes from the Middle East

goes to China and goes to Europe, but it's also used for production just in the Middle East.

And so you've had aluminum. I think you mentioned this aluminum smelter has been shut down.

You've had disruptions in production of various kinds of chemicals, including fertilizer

or component ingredients that go into fertilizer. So you have this cascading effect from

the energy markets getting massively disrupted. And then you have all of the downstream companies

that don't have energy or otherwise would ship stuff through the straight. And they can't produce,

they can't ship it. So you're going to have all of these effects throughout the world,

not just on energy prices, but also on fertilizer, which, as you point out, is a feedstocking

to literal food. You're going to see food prices go up probably, not immediately, but you know,

probably in all terms. That's a longer term. Right. And then you also have lots of other

products that people may not realize that use. Yep. Oh, here we go. Thank you. This is a measure

of fertilizer prices. Your Rea is a very common fertilizer ingredient. You can see prices have

gone way up. And that's, I think, as of yesterday, I think that chart is. I don't know what it looks

like today. But in any event, so fertilizer prices are going to go up. That's going to get passed

along to food prices. You have a lot of other products, as I was about to say, that include oil and

gas or the sort of cast off products from oil and gas refineries that will also get more expensive

in the longer term. So it's almost, it's amazing like how many products I was looking through this

list that the department of energy put out. But it's like shampoo, shaving cream, footballs, almost

anything made out of plastic, anything with petroleum, petroleum, all petroleum products. This

is, yeah, everything. So garbage bags, all that stuff. And then just the last thing, sorry,

is that, of course, anything that gets shipped, even if it doesn't include petrochemicals in it,

freight uses energy. So that stuff's going to get more expensive too. When energy costs go up,

that is an underlying inflation for everything. Correct. And so this is one you know, when oil

prices go up, it pushes up inflation because anything that needs to be shipped, then has increased

costs. I just want to explain to people a little bit about the insurance problem. So for people who

don't maybe think about this a lot about shipping and maritime, big ships, super tankers, cargo ships,

they are enormous capital investments. They're incredibly expensive. And the stuff they carry

is also incredibly expensive. You know, a fully laden oil tanker is worth hundreds of millions of

dollars. If you are the owner operator of the ship or you are the owner of the cargo and are

paying to have it moved from one place to another, losing an entire shipment of something can be

economically catastrophic, which is why you ensure it. And when maritime insurers come in and say,

no, we will not write policies for a ship going in this area, that makes it so that it is just not

viable for you to do. You can't simply can't tolerate that risk. And this is again, just jumping

back. When the Pentagon was planning this war, they seem to have said to themselves, we believe we

can prevent the Iranians from militarily closing the strait. And so what they mean was,

we can stop them from getting their capital boats out there undergoing a mining operation.

So they were concerned with the Iranian navy mining the strait and making it literally

impassable. They do not seem to have considered the fact that by simply presenting a threat profile

to shipping, that would make insurers unable to take on the risk of issuing insurance,

which would then prevent the shipping from happening just as a matter of economics,

which is stunning to me. It is stunning to me that they thought that the the only consideration they

had to take into account was like the bomb stuff. But can we stop them from laying sea mines?

If the answer is yes, then shipping will be fine.

If there are so many obvious things that they didn't consider, there was this almost

comical story in Politico a couple of days ago that said that Chief of Staff Suzy Wiles had tasked

everyone in the White House with brainstorming ideas for how to get gasoline prices down. And it's

like, did you consider not starting a war in the Middle East? Here's one. Don't start a war.

That would have been brilliant. That would mean whatever the other considerations they have had,

they may have had militarily, geopolitically, maybe if you really care about gas prices,

which by the way kind of sank Democrats in the 2022 midterms. And then again,

the Democrats in 2024, Biden Flation was still a major issue. But I remember talking with

the Biden White House in 2022 about how they were also like leaving no stone unturned to try

to figure out how to get gasoline prices down. How do we get companies to pump more oil?

And at the time, people like myself were writing things like, look,

presidents don't control gas prices. Voters think that this is very salient for voters.

And voters always blame the president, but the president doesn't really have control over

gas prices per se. They wish they had a dialogue. And then it turns out they do have a lot of

upside control. They can do upward pressure. And it's been interesting to see what their

solutions, such as they are for dealing with the very predictable energy market fallout of their

war of choice is. So Donald Trump said that he was going to have naval ships like escort

these tankers through the straight. Good luck with that. I mean, think about how much fuel it

would use just to have like a fleet of naval warships escorting whatever it was like 40 different

tankers every day prior to this war. He said that he was going to provide insurance. It's not

clear what that means. I saw that today, I think it was Scott Besson. I don't know if we have

this tweet. But if we do, I'd love to pull it up. Scott Besson basically said, yeah,

to enable oil to keep flowing to the global market, the Treasury Department is issuing a temporary

30-day waiver to allow Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil. So again, to decode this,

because they did not think about what the fallout would be for oil prices, for gasoline prices,

we are now rolling back our sanctions on Russia, which is supporting Iran in order to

deal with the fallout, the economic fallout from our war in Iran. I mean, there are a lot

consumers. Yes. I mean, let's just again, I'm going to underline this. So we report today that

Russian intelligence is providing all sorts of assets to the Iranian government, including

targeting information on U.S. forces and positions and information about U.S. air defenses.

And so the Trump administration's solution to the war they started is to ease sanctions on a country

which is helping our opponent target American military assets. Yes. It's insane. It's totally insane.

And as much as voters and consumers and businesses in the United States may be

the losers in terms of the effect on gas prices, there are some definite winners. Some of them

will be oil and gas producers in the United States. But another big one is Russia,

because Russia is still a petro state. I mean, they are less so than they used to be in part

because of sanctions. But they're going to get a lot more money now for their war in Ukraine,

for their other kinds of military operations, including apparently providing guidance to the

Iranians, because we are driving up oil prices, which in and of itself would be a windfall.

And because we are loosening our sanctions for other countries to buy Russian oil. So

Putin is just like, lick in his chops here. While we're also messing up our relations with

India, which are already sort of in the toilet anyway, that's another. We don't have to do that. But

go go look up the Indian naval exercises and Iran, if you guys are interested in a little bit of

trivia about what's happened last week. All right, so Katherine, I want to paint a picture for you

and then you tell me you poke holes on it. Okay. Or not. My operating theory is that there are

lots of outcomes, which are possible from where we sit, but that the most likely of these outcomes

is probably that Trump sees things going south economically, declares victory and just walks

away. And it doesn't matter what's broken. It doesn't matter what humanitarian crises are left

behind, et cetera. But he's just like, we won, we won the biggest war that anybody's ever won

strong, alpha, america, man with tears in his eyes told me that he saw a bald eagle mating with a

ram pickup truck and it's it's so great. It's it's huge. It's so strong. At which point, the hope would

be like, okay, things can kind of go back to normal. But what and so this would avoid like catastrophe.

So you do not wind up with 20,000 American troops stationed in Iran and, you know, on the ground

fighting in Iran for a year or anything like that. The straight of hormones gets basically

opened back up. Global commerce can basically restart. And so like, you know, it's not great,

but it's not terrible. The problem is that there are a bunch of lag effects that happen here. And so

for instance, refineries, as you mentioned in places are getting shut down because they don't have

places to store the oil, which is coming off of the line. Well, it takes time to restart these

things. It isn't like flipping a switch. And the the best example of this is the aluminum smelter.

So I, I am simply reporting something I learned three days ago. I did not, it's not like I am an

expert in smelting processes. But a smelter is such a complicated piece of equipment. And the

heat requirements needed for it are such that it takes almost a full year once you have gone

into shutdown on a smelter to make it fully operational again. Like everything has to happen

really, really slowly. And there are a bunch of things in the system like that, right? So you've

you've got a gap in the supply that you normally get of precursor chemicals for fertilizers.

And so the people who normally make the fertilizers are going to be late in delivering the

fertilizers to the people who are the end users. And there's just going to be like 150 things like

that that even if we end the war in two weeks and everything goes back to normal, you do have

these economic disruptions, which are just going to have like ripple effects that are going to last

for a while. Yeah, that's that's crazy. Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not really equipped to assess like

whether we're better or worse off from a national security standpoint. If sure this scenario you

mentioned were to transpire, I will leave that to some of our colleagues. Just pretend that it

goes back to what it was before, but like 15% messier. But there are other geopolitical consequences,

including that we will have pissed off so many of our allies in the Middle East and elsewhere,

many of whom had, besides like probably buying a whole bunch of crypto,

Trump crypto, you know, had promised to make investments in the United States. If those,

if any of those were real, some of that stuff gets, you know, paired back and there I think

that was reporting in the FT about that specifically today. We have again quadruple pissed off our

allies in Europe by driving up their energy prices. They've actually seen a lot more pain

already than we have. So our relationships are hurt in addition to the sort of like logistical

nuts and bolts of cascading supply chain disruptions. And what does that mean for us going

forward? So yeah, there's a ton of fallout. It's not like, you know, Donald Trump's specialty

is always repackaging the status quo as a victory. And so like, this is what he does with trade

wars and negotiations like, oh, we're just going to go back to the way things were or what a victory.

We can't go back to the way things were. And it's partly because of these domino effects that

you mentioned. It's partly because we will have irreparably destroyed or afraid at the very

least, many of our relationships with allies in the region, which will have national security

consequences, but also economic consequences. So yeah, there are just so many reasons why,

again, I'm not commenting on like the military strategical wisdom of all of this just from a like

obvious things that they did not account for perspective when it comes to energy markets,

when it comes to fertilizer markets, when it comes to our relationships with all of what had

been our friends in the region and elsewhere, it is very clear that none of this was been thought

through, has been thought through. Yeah. And again, I, I, you know, we're not, we're not

doomers. I don't think I'm a little bit of a doomer. I'm a little bit of a doomer. But what I'm

saying is I think like the, the doomy scenario here is on the very low probability end of the spectrum.

In that the most likely outcome is like, yeah, things are like 10 or 15% crappier than they

would have been otherwise. And they're like that for the next several months, like, you know,

maybe four months, maybe 10 months, maybe 14 months, not forever because supply chain disruptions

do work themselves out over time. But critically, there isn't, there's a political set of elections

coming during what that would time. And so this is where I, again, look projecting a little bit

forward with the rising unemployment, with the inflationary pressures, with the Fed being a little

bit handcuffed then in what it can do with an election now, what it's March. So eight months out.

And it doesn't seem like there's a lot of economic upside available. Like even if everything works out,

the best case scenario seems to be like, like, maybe things could get 5% better. Like, you know,

if we're born under lucky stars, something like that. And on my day, they can get a lot worse. Or maybe

they'll just like continue sort of like they are and get marginally worse, even if we leave a

ran in two weeks. And well, yeah, that's a political danger, I think, for the Trump administration.

I guess this is what I'm sort of building up to here is that all of this is good for Democrats

in the midterms. Yes, the doesn't mean Democrats won't still screw it up. But yes, the prospect of

higher gas prices alone is usually a major problem for the incumbent party. And the idea that

actually voters might be correct in attributing those higher gas prices to the president or to

actions taken by the president seems especially dangerous for the president's party.

You know, lots of things could change between now and then. But there are vulnerabilities in the

job market. There are vulnerabilities in what I will call warflation that are, you know, caused by

this president. And it's not obvious to me that any, that things will be calmer or that they will

not make more unforced errors. I guess this is how I should put it. Like, the problems that we have

with the economy right now are mostly of Trump's doing. If he had done nothing but go and play golf,

he could have just coasted economically. On Joe Biden's economy. On Joe Biden's economy.

With America hated. Which America did hate? Yes. He would have been in a much better position

certainly than he is now. And instead, you know, I ask like, I don't think he's trying to raise

prices. But if you were, I'm not sure what he would be doing. What would he do?

Friendly at this point. It's like the Russian asset thing. I don't think Donald Trump is a

Russian asset. But if he were, if he would have mentured in Canada itself, what would he have done

differently? Exactly. Exactly. So he, yeah, and affordability is I think not just among his major

political vulnerabilities or the GOP's major political vulnerabilities. It is the political

vulnerability. On top of Epstein, on top of people being upset about being promised no foreign wars.

And all of the other reasons why people might not be super enthused with this president,

things that are dragging down his approval ratings. If you look at the number one reason why people

who had been Trump supporters say that they have defected, it is about inflation. It is about

prices, cost of living, and the economy. And he seems to be doing his darnedest to drive from

away further. 53% of voters now say that they think Trump has made the economy worse than Joe Biden

who could possibly have worn them. I mean, I don't mind these voters. They saw this guy from

television and he promised that he would impose deflation, and it would be good for everybody,

and how are they supposed to know? All right, Katherine, thank you for coming. We're going to probably

try to do this every Friday. We're going to try to do this around 12, 13 on Friday, sit and have

a little bit of economy nerd talk about the world around us. I am super excited to talk with Katherine

about repaying tariffs that the government now seems to be saying we don't know where the money is.

I know we took all the money. We had the money, but it might be in the couch cushions or something.

I don't think we can give it back. It's been used to give bonuses to our troops, or pay for

the other tax cuts from last year, or over the other things, pay for childcare or pay for our

military. I like there are so many things that it does pay for. We may need to bring up a

billion times over. I'm talking about that with us, because one of the things that I, whatever,

I'm not to send this out of here on a tangent, but I am fascinated by the question of, okay,

the court says you have to give it back, you, the government, and you, the government says,

well, we can't, because it's gone. What is the law's response to that?

You can't send the legal man, right? How does that work?

Anyway, we'll do that on Friday. I bet you, Katherine, things won't be much better.

See, there's that humorism again. No, no, it's optimism, because it means we'll have a lot to talk

about. Guys, thanks for hanging with us. Do me a quick solid, hit like, hit subscribe and follow

the channel that helps us a lot. The algorithm needs to see your signal that you enjoy it. Otherwise,

it punishes us. Good luck, America.