Ashby Jones
Appearances
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
Yes. I mean, there's so much to keep your eye out for.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
You need like one of those big video screens that has like, you know, 10 TVs that are each showing a different kind of economic program or something like that. I am most interested at the moment in sort of this spending consumer sentiment piece of it, because I think that's really important. something that could portend, you know, broader trouble ahead.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
And of course, that's tied in with the stock market. If stock markets start to drop, people get a little bit worried about their own pocketbooks. And all of a sudden there's a vibe in the air, right? And the vibe is things are not doing well. Let's everybody hold on to our money and not spend. And that can then lead to recessionary forces or pressures because people hold on to their money.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
businesses suffer and then they hold on to their money and you get sort of a spiral. So I think we're just going to have to wait and see how stocks do over the next couple of weeks before we come to any judgment on this.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
what a lot of economists have seen is that Trump inherited a pretty solid economy, not perfect by any great shakes, but the job market was steady. The inflation numbers are not exactly where they need to be, but they have come down to a great degree from their 2022 highs. And, you know, things are looking fairly solid.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
There's been a lot. I mean, he's thrown a fire hose at the economy, cuts to the federal government, tariffs, and then a stricter immigration policy. You know, those have been the three main legs of the stool, right? I mean, this is what Trump said he was going to be doing in his second term. And this is exactly what he's doing.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
He's coming out of the gate really hard and he's putting these policies into action.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
What's happened is you've just seen a lot of uncertainty, people sort of gearing up, bracing for these tariffs, and then they get pulled back, and then they get put back on, and they get pulled back off. And so there's just a lot of uncertainty, and it's sort of, you know, you do it once, people will go along with you.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
You do it twice, then people start to wonder whether or not you're serious about this whole tariff business to begin with, and they really start to wonder why. What's going on here? So I think that injection, again, of uncertainty into the economy has been as damaging as anything.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
Yeah, I think that's right. And you're right. I've noticed the word whiplash and whipsawed in a lot of our stories. Those two verbs are getting a lot of exercise here in Wall Street Journal copy. But I think they're very accurate and they're in our stories for a reason.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
The inflation numbers, I mean, what the economists talk about is tariffs are going to be inflationary. They're going to drive up prices and they're going to make life harder, actually, for American companies that import a lot of goods to make their own products. So it's going to have a general inflationary effect.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
I think it is going to have ripple effects throughout the economy in a number of ways. And I don't think we're starting to see this quite yet. But I do think, you know, it could over time sort of blip up unemployment if the people who are getting laid off don't have jobs lined up.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
So if you're talking about consumer spending, well, now you're adding a whole big chunk of the workforce that are probably not going to be doing as much spending anymore.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
We had, you know, these earnings from Kohl's, which show that just overall maybe consumer spending on household goods and the like is down a little bit. People are starting to pinch their pennies a little bit.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
I don't think so, at least not with the federal government, with, you know, very targeted cuts to the federal government. We really slimmed down the size of the federal government in the 1990s. This was sort of a Clinton era policy back then. But the economy was so good otherwise that those cuts kind of got absorbed and kind of like just lost in the... in the fold here.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
So I don't think there is any sort of historical parallel to this, at least not one that would kind of give us any sort of, you know, guidance or signposts on where we're headed at this point. The big data that we pay attention to on jobs, on inflation, on GDP, these are lagging indicators, what they call lagging indicators, right? So, you know, they follow the actual phenomenon by several months.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
And we're only several weeks into the Trump administration. So we're really not going to know.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
Yeah, it feels like a bit longer than that. But I think the main one economists look to is sort of the tip of the spear in this is like consumer confidence and consumer spending, right? I mean, what are consumers doing? Because that's really, you know, a big part of the ballgame here is are consumers, you know, pulling out their credit cards?
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
Are they going ahead with the home renovation that they had planned? Are they going ahead with the big summer vacation that they thought they might take with their families? And, you know, that kind of behavior stimulates the economy, right, and keeps the economy sort of humming. And we've had a pretty good economy for several years now coming out of COVID.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
And now, only now, we're starting to see some cracks in that.
The Journal.
What's Going On With the Economy?
We're starting to see some cracks. We're starting to see companies talk about declining demand for their products and services. So we're starting to see some sort of slippage, I think, in the economy. Maybe in the long run, it'll prove to be very beneficial to the economy, but I think what it's done at the outset is inject a lot of uncertainty into it.