Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is a joy Claudia Sam with us. And it's not like the fed day. We got to be adults. It's not the job's day boring, Claudia. Is there a recession? What a joy to have Doctor Sam with us here Chief Economists, News Century Advisors Today. I just heard back from Torston Slack. One are the magic things, folks, is we go back and forth with
our guests through the show. If I say something stupid, Neil Dutt is the first one to email in and you see Tom, you don't know what you're talking about. Torson Slock comes back on the price of beef and Doctor Sam, I did a log chart of beef back to nineteen sixty six, and the thing that is striking is the duration of the expensive cow that's out there. What is the duration the X axis look like of our inflation we're living now.
Right Well, I think you know what we've seen in recent years, really going back to the pandemic, is we've had a whole series of supply shocks of different kinds, and some of them are very severe. In the pandemic, it had like echoes and it took you know, several
years to work its way through. I think if you look at beef prices, that's another one where the supply chain for beef prices, it takes long time to make more beef, right Like, so it just once you have a disruption, it's a very long tail to it, say, as opposed to chickens, which have a shorter production cycle. Like, we're learning so much and reminding so much about the physical nature of production, and so it's just one more
supply shock. And frankly, as kind of came up at the press conference with Powell, you know, we've kind of had to run a bad luck in terms of one supply shock, cause shock after another, and that's kind of become the norm. And that's what we've got to be prepared for, these shocks that do have sometimes some pretty long tails to them.
Claudia, you have posts on LinkedIn recently how you say that the tip reception rules of thumb are no longer working. What do you mean by that?
Right?
So there's we I think there's been a lot of discussion recently about you know, what's a good payroll number, right like, what's this break even rate? And discussions about well, we've got a lot less labor supply out there. We immigration really took a step down, We've got an aging population, and so what we've seen since the beginning of twenty twenty five, forty percent of the months we've had a
decline in payrolls. That kind of pattern is something of a we're in a recession or the year after a recession, that's when you see those kind of pace. But actually, right now that's a labor market that's doing pretty okay because the amount the number of jobs the economy needs to create to keep up with the workers coming in is really low. It's it's practically close to zero. So that means in any month you've got weather, you've got some kind of shock. We just have some noise in
the measurement of the data. We're going to have this bumping around zero, some decline, some positives, and so I think this is a normal we're in which normally should send off like recession is coming. We're in a recession, but that's not what this is. We are in a low growth type of economy. A lot of discussion already about in terms of payrolls. I think you know in a moment today where we get GDP. We got to
understand that's going to start showing up those GDP numbers too. Right, low is as good as it gets.
So the heart of the matter quickly here, doctor Salmon. We're going to come back with you after we get the market open. The key thing to me is the real wage. Are you suggesting we get a literal negative real wage?
What the real wage discussion is? There's a lot more too that. What we've seen is the real wage is not reflecting all the productivity gains that we've had and wage growth, nominal wage growth is still slowing, so we're not seeing the gains of this having fewer workers. So we're not like in a shortage economy where the tables
are turning and workers are getting the upper hand. But we're just in an economy that we've got fewer resource, fewer workers, you know, kind of adding to it, and that's going to show up in a lot of statistics. We're used to being bigger.
Claudia, Sam, please stay with us as we get the market opening. Thrilled, we have Claudia Slum of New Center Advisors with this. What's the state Claudia that you see of what I'm going to call private non government investment, which is made up of any number of parts. What do you see as a state of investment.
I have to say, we've you know, big picture, gotten some pretty good news on that. So our most recent reading on like core goods orders, really it was pretty broad based in terms of being a solid reading. Like if you look at the data, it's not all just AI, it's not all just data centers, right, there is more going on in terms of investment. Now, you know, more is always better, but I think there's there's a little more breadth than maybe the news gets in terms of
what's happening on the investment side. So investment and still holding up, consumer spending still holding up, but it's you know, the backdrop is difficult with inflation being hotter. That really does you know, cut into the real gains.
Claudia Ken, the US economy or any economy for that matter, grow consistently without population growth.
So you know, the two ingredients for growth are going to be the growth of the labor force and then the growth of labor productivity. And so if you get down to a place where you're not growing the labor force, it is all about productivity, you know, And again with the immigration policy such as it is, like growth is really going to be held up by labor productivity, Like we need AI to really deliver if we're flatlining, if we're flatlining labor force growth.
On Claudia, we got to run here. But we just had a fancy guy from HBS and he was talking about vibe coding. Does Claudia some vibe code?
I certainly use the the AI coding to try and do some tasks. So frankly, I'm still learning how to use the tools, so I'm still faster coding on my own, but I think it's important to try it out and get better at the at the tools that are out there.
It sounds like my to do list for April. Yeah, Claudia Sam, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your commitment to what we're doing here at Bloomberg Surveillance. Can't say enough about her out of Michigan. We didn't have time there at Tark Michigan Basketball No, you know how about that? Ye, But there it is. Claudia Sam, thank you so much, and we really look forward to a job's day and a fed day. Commitment from her. Dector Samas with New Sentry advisors,