Growth Under Strain

**Mark Zandi** (0:14)
Welcome to Inside Economics. I'm Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics, and I'm joined by one of my trustee co-hosts, Chris Derides. Hey, Chris. Hey, Mark.

**Cris deRitis** (0:22)
Good to see you.

**Mark Zandi** (0:23)
Good to see you as well. Where's our other trustee co-host, Marisa?

**Cris deRitis** (0:27)
She's dealing with power outage. So she may make an appearance if she can.

**Mark Zandi** (0:31)
But she ran out of juice, as they say, huh?

**Cris deRitis** (0:36)
Yeah, I don't think it was her overconsumption, but she ran out of power from the power. She ran out of power.

**Mark Zandi** (0:45)
Okay. Hopefully, are they going to get power? What's going on? You know?

**Cris deRitis** (0:49)
Yeah, yeah. We have a tentative two-hour time frame here, but we'll see.

**Mark Zandi** (0:56)
Okay. Well, hopefully, she'll join in a bit. We'll miss her, but we've got Matt Colyar. Hey, Matt. Good to have you.

**Cris deRitis** (1:01)
Hey, Mark. Great to be here.

**Mark Zandi** (1:03)
You're becoming a regular on Inside Economics. Good to have you.

**Cris deRitis** (1:07)
Yeah. Trustee regular, because that's how Chris and Marisa are referred to, right? Trustee co-host.

**Mark Zandi** (1:12)
They're trustee co-hosts. You're a trustee regular. Yeah. We got a lot of data out this week and want to go through that.
To help us digest all of that and then more, we've got Michael Strain. Hey, Mike, how are you?

**Michael Strain** (1:24)
I'm great. Great to be with you.

**Mark Zandi** (1:26)
And where are you? Are you hailing from your office at AEI?

**Michael Strain** (1:29)
I am indeed. I am indeed here and deep in the heart of the swamp.

**Mark Zandi** (1:34)
Doesn't look too swampy to me.

**Cris deRitis** (1:37)
I like the books back there.

**Michael Strain** (1:39)
Yes. Yes. It needs to be better organized. That's a makeshift bookshelf.

**Mark Zandi** (1:44)
Well, it's very, what's the right word? Bibliotech-like, you know?

**Michael Strain** (1:51)
Luddite, perhaps could be a way to describe it. Yeah.

**Mark Zandi** (1:54)
Well, good to have you on board. This is, we were just going over this. This is your fourth time on Inside Economics.
Yes.

**Michael Strain** (2:01)
It's one of my favorite podcasts to go on.

**Mark Zandi** (2:06)
You say that to all the podcasts. Yeah.

**Michael Strain** (2:08)
I don't. I told somebody earlier today that when you go on with Mark, you know, Mark knows facts. You got to talk about facts.

**Mark Zandi** (2:17)
I got the facts. All right. Yeah, for sure.
Not much more than that, but the facts. But it's good to have you on and you're the Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Hey, can I ask how do you describe AEI? What's your kind of your pat line for describing AEI?

**Michael Strain** (2:34)
I describe AEI as a Public Policy Research Institute because, well, that's our legal name, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Also because I think the term think tank has been adopted by so many different types of institutions that it's no longer precise enough to communicate anything about a particular institution. So we do lots and lots of research about a wide variety of policy areas, economics, of course, also education, foreign affairs, constitutional and legal issues and a whole bunch of stuff.

**Mark Zandi** (3:12)
Yeah, you guys do great research. How many folks are in the economic policy group with you?

**Michael Strain** (3:18)
It depends a little bit on how you count it, because we have people for whom we're their secondary affiliation, people who are varying degrees of part-time, but you know, a few dozen.

**Mark Zandi** (3:33)
Oh, that's larger than I thought. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, you do a lot of great work. I've noticed recently you've been writing a lot about economic data and kind of these issues around statistics.

**Michael Strain** (3:44)
Yes, yes. That's something that I've been working on off and on for 10 or 15 years now, and it's becoming, I think, more important given some of the changes that Trump administration has made to the statistical agencies and also just given how rapidly the economy is evolving and the need for our statistical architecture to keep up with economic developments.

**Mark Zandi** (4:14)
Hey, you know, I've been asking everyone this question, and curious what your answer would be. What is your least favorite or most disliked economic statistic? Like, for example, Chris really hates the New York Fed data on consumer credit. You know, it's just, right, Chris? Am I making that up?

**Cris deRitis** (4:35)
Hate is a loaded term, but yeah. Oh, okay.