00:00 Speaker A
But Angelos, is it as simple as to say that the stock market is at records and that’s what’s fueling spending with higher income consumers or is there something else going on here we need to know about?
00:11 Angelos
No doubt. that is a big supportive factors. Uh the stats is the 10%, the the higher, the top 10% on the income categories, they account for 50% of the spending. And we’ve seen gains not only in equities, in fixed income, talk about investment grade bonds that had the best uh uh year since 2020. Real estate prices have been appreciating. And yes, we are stuck in this low hiring, low firing uh type of labor market, but at the same time, the unemployment rate remains uh historically low. Uh so, you know, I think that again is a positive as we head into the next year.
00:41 Speaker A
Tom, hit me with the potential economic surprise for next year.
00:45 Tom
Well, I think I think the surprise is we’re underestimating what’s happening. We’re having both guns blazing with an easing cycle with the Fed. We continue to ease, we continue to cut, but oh, by the way, QE light is back. The Fed is going to be in the market buying 40 billion dollars of T bills at least through April. So that’s going to add a tremendous amount of liquidity. You had over 320 global Central Bank cuts in 2025. Uh highest you’ve seen since since the Great financial crisis. That works on a lagged effect. So you have a lot of liquidity there. You got these tax refunds of $1,000 to $2,000 going out to main Street. You potentially have if the Supreme Court turns uh turns off the tariffs or or uh unwinds them in a way, uh Trump is not going to give that money back to to foreign uh entities. He’s going to pay it out as dividends and then he’s going to figure out how to do the tariffs in another legal framework. So, you could have a a tremendous amount of fiscal stimulus coupled with an easing cycle, coupled with rising wages and really benefit Main Street in 2026. So I think people are kind of underestimating not just the earnings growth, not just uh uh main Street but uh fiscal and monetary policy guns blazing going into 2026. That’s a positive.