Well I think this fits into the broader narrative that we have already for a while now, talking about the K-shaped outlook for the consumer. Some consumers are doing well, some are doing less well. Now, we're also having a k-shaped for the broader economy, where you have a booming industrial renaissance, but the consumer is facing more headwinds, facing headwinds because of this little bump on the road, which suddenly now imports from China becoming more expensive. That's a headwind.

Well, this is why this issue of why is job growth slow? We don't have job growth at the moment, but why has job growth been slow going into the shutdown? Is it simply because of less immigration? Because if there's less immigration, then for the fed, that doesn't mean anything. They should just say, well, there's less immigration, but that doesn't mean the economy is slowing down. Or is it because there is a slowdown going on where the economy is slowing rapidly and therefore labor demand is weaker? So the key question here becomes for the fed, especially going into the meeting here in 2 or 3 weeks time, is exactly this issue is the slowdown in the labor market because of slower supply, or is the slowdown because of lower demand? And if it is simply lower supply, border encounters are basically zero. And I think that there is a much more likely story that this is not driven so much by slowdown in the economy. You still have strong growth when it comes to Red book, same store retail sales. The weaker data we get is still strong. The daily data for how many people go to restaurants from OpenTable is still strong. You also have weaker data from staff or hotel. Demand is also very strong, both consumers and for businesses across the country. So it is exactly as you're saying, Mike, very inconsistent that the labor market is slowing. But why is it consumption CapEx spending in particular is still so strong, and that suggests that it is actually still the case that GDP and the economy is actually doing still well.

Because the risks are now rising, that if they do cut simply because of a slowing in immigration, that we might simply have even more lift in inflation, because now there's more lift in inflation coming because of tariffs. There's also lifting inflation because of the weaker dollar. So as a result of that, if inflation is going up and we now start cutting too much, that of course raises the risk that the fed should not be talking about rate cuts. They should maybe even talk about rate hikes.

Well you had in the last earnings season. There's also Friday. Several of the retailers are talking about the impact of tariffs. They're talking about how to deal with it is having an impact on their cost side. But it certainly also having an impact on how you think about pricing.

Well, that's why long yields in some sense have been drinking the Kool-Aid here and said, oh, the next move from the dot plot is saying rates are going lower. But the issue is here of course. Are we going to see a repeat of 2022, where, of course, stocks went down and rates went up because there was more inflation in the pipeline. So that's why the consensus today has the view that inflation over the next 12 months will be 3%. That is drastically higher than the Fed's 2% target. So if now we have further upside pressure on inflation coming from potentially more tariffs. And at the same time the dollar also going down has been putting lift on inflation. It does raise a lot of risks that maybe the fed should not be cutting more. And this is what I think is most important in this market. Namely that the biggest underappreciated risk is that we are simply not done fighting inflation.

But the dot plot is of course telling us all rates are going down. So the market is expecting the rates will go down. But this is the question are rates going down simply because inflation will be coming down? Or maybe the risk is that inflation is not coming down, especially with new shocks such as upward pressure on tariffs and inflation. And again, the dollar that is in the pipeline.

Well I think there are three reasons why gold is going up. First of all the inflation risks are still here. There's still a lot of risks for the tails to play out in one way or another, given everything that's going on, especially again now with the trade war coming back. The second reason why gold is going up is because Chinese households in the ETF data are buying significant amounts of gold. And you also see on the sanctions side, central banks globally are still divesting from US treasuries and buying gold instead. So those retail winds have continued to provide very strong growth in gold prices. And we should expect that to continue.

I think some of them will be the central banks because of sanctions. They're definitely price insensitive. And I think also a lot of the demand from China has actually also been price insensitive because Chinese households can really only buy two things, namely apartments and housing and stock prices. They don't have the option of buying US equities the same way that we have here in the US and Europe. So because of that, they have been diversifying away from their traditional investments more towards buying gold. ETF demand in Chinese gold has been very, very strong in China.