00:00 Speaker A
As you just mentioned, there’s a lot of investment in artificial intelligence, data centers in this country, and companies are obviously still investing heavily in their business, even outside of artificial intelligence. Why didn’t the U.S. economic growth exceed 2.7%?
00:13 Speaker B
Well, 2.7 is the global outlook for real GDP. For the United States, our new estimate is 3.4%. So that’s a substantial increase for the full year. Again, a lot of it is front-loaded because of taxes. And there’s a lot of business investment. We see this happening in the United States and globally. You’ve almost reached the point, um, in terms of sources of growth, consumption is certainly a key driver of the economy, business investment as businesses continue to try to use artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence tools to stay ahead of the curve.
00:53 Speaker A
Will this be a jobless recovery?
00:58 Speaker B
Well, it’s going to be a slow recovery, but it’s really the demographic change that we’ve been talking about. Once again, I find that 11,400 people will turn 65 every day between now and the end of this decade. That’s a lot of people. Not all people will retire at 65, but many of them will. Uh, immigration was down to, I think last year, uh, the final numbers aren’t out yet, but maybe two or three hundred thousand people came into the country. And we don’t have kids yet. So we talked about this before. So between those three events, the print run is expected to probably be 50,000 copies. I mean, our breakeven point right now is about 40 to 50,000. Any number above 50,000 would cause the unemployment rate to fall further. So we’re going to see that we have to really recalibrate how we think about jobs because over the last four decades, 150, 200, 250,000 jobs a month was the norm. Well, for the foreseeable future, the average will be 30, 40, 50,000. It will be much slower. Of course, we’ll see periods where that number is actually negative.
