The Grant Williams Podcast Ep. 120 - Danielle DiMartino Booth

**Grant Williams** (0:10)
Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets.
You're about to listen to a very special preview edition of The Grant Williams Podcast, featuring my very special guest, Danielle DiMartino Booth of Quill Research. Danielle is a name who I'm sure you'll be familiar with. And as always, there is plenty to talk about from economic data to midterm elections to the Fed, the Treasury and the dollar. All kinds of subjects came under the hat in what was a hugely enjoyable conversation. Every episode of The Grant Williams Podcast, including The End Game, The Super Terrific Happy Hour, The Narrative Game, This Week In Doom, Kaos Theory, Shifts Happen and The Hundred Year Pivot is available to Copper and Silver tier subscribers at my website grantwilliams.com. Copper tier subscribers get access to all the podcasts, while members of the Silver tier get both the podcasts and my monthly news sets of Things That Make You Go Hmmm. So if you enjoy what you hear on the show and you'd like more high quality content like it, then please make your way over to grantwilliams.com and join our exciting community today. And now on with the show.
Danielle, it has been a long time. How are you?

**Danielle DiMartino Booth** (1:44)
I am well, Grant. We should not wait years, but yet we have.

**Grant Williams** (1:47)
I know. It probably has been a couple of years, right?

**Danielle DiMartino Booth** (1:49)
It has, yeah. Yeah, not much has changed either, so, yeah.

**Grant Williams** (1:53)
It's still as baffling as ever. But look, there are so many places we can start. We can talk about inflation.
Obviously, we're going to talk about the Fed. We can talk about Iran and oil prices and energy. But I want to start somewhere a little off the wall, and that is the University of Michigan Conference Numbers, which came out a little while ago. I saw you commenting on, and you seemed to have a similar view to me as to how actually important this was, because it was quite the outlier. So, the number came out. Your thoughts on that?

**Danielle DiMartino Booth** (2:24)
So, it's interesting you asked, because a buddy of mine, Peter Shear, was in town last night. I hadn't seen him in Dallas ever. And he calls it the confidence number, like a con man. And we got to talking about that, and he said, except this time confidence among Republicans was just as dire. And I said, yeah, that's pretty notable. The base is getting hit really hard. And what we pay attention to the most closely, in fact, we call it the QI research holy grail, meaning it's our number one go-to economic indicator. And that is higher unemployment expectations. We consider higher unemployment expectations to be the most reliable gauge of how the US consumer is feeling. And what's been beyond extraordinary, absolutely historic, is the sheer number of months that higher unemployment expectations have been north of 60
In fact, they came in at 68 percent.
April preliminary, one point shy off of the absolute high for the cycle. Usually, when higher unemployment expectations cross 50 percent, you're inside of recession. They cross 60 percent, you're deep inside of recession. And to Christopher Waller's point, who I think is one of the most credible Federal Reserve officials in a very long time, there's something missing in the labor data. It gets revealed every three months or so with these massive revisions.
And it's also been revealed in real-time revisions, which is different than the benchmark, different than the quarterly census of employment and wages, different than the bed adjustments. These are real-time revisions that you see through UMich. You see that clearly through the University of Michigan. And if we were talking in 2022, it might have been inflation, inflation, inflation, inflation, inflation.
Now it's good god I'm going to lose my job and I'm really worried about it, or I can't make ends meet. A friend of mine told me that he was leaving a baseball tournament and his kid goes to a rather prestigious school in the Northeast of the United States. And he said he did a double take because the baseball coach had a lift sticker on his car. Eighty million Americans are gig workers, and so many of them are doing it in addition to whatever their full time job is, just to make ends meet. And yet policymakers are as blind as they've ever been.