| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Avoided Recession
00:02:16
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| Well, I've been a reluctant bull. | |
| I'm fully invested in the stock market. | |
| Stock market is also suggesting that the economy is doing really well despite the efforts by the Fed to keep interest rates high. | |
| And, you know, the whole issue on the trade and how that's going to affect production and productivity and that sort of thing. | |
| So I've been a skeptic, and so I am, I have to admit, I'm surprised by the data. | |
| The data's been looking good in the last few months. | |
| We've avoided a recession that most economists had been predicting because of the tight money policy. | |
| After easy money, usually you have a boom bust, and there's been no bust. | |
| So maybe Trump is doing the right thing in so many ways, especially in the tax bill, which I think gave a lot of incentives. | |
| And also in the tariff wars, you're seeing a lot of money moving back into the U.S. Although the dollar's been weak, so it's really hard. | |
| You have these mixed signals that are going out there to some extent. | |
| But on that balance, things look pretty positive. | |
| For almost over a year, business spending, business investment, if you look at the breakdown of GDP, gross domestic product, you can see that consumption has been growing rapidly. | |
| Government spending has been growing rapidly. | |
| But business has been tepid. | |
| And there was actually a recession there last year. | |
| It was a mild recession in business spending. | |
| And business spending is the key to economic growth. | |
| And I've tried to demonstrate that with my gross output statistic. | |
| So that's why I was worried in my last press release on gross output. | |
| It was growing at a very slow pace. | |
| But that seems to have changed. | |
| And as an economist, it's extremely important to look at the data rather than just on a theoretical basis, we should be in a recession. | |
| Well, we're not in a recession. | |
| It looks like we're coming out of slow growth, which is really important. | |
| I'll go back to Ronald Reagan. | |
| You know, in 1983, the real GDP grew over 8% under Reagan. | |