Episode 1: Concern about the Economy

 So why am I so concerned about the US economy, even though we're getting some good numbers? GDP growth hit 4.4% in October of 2025, and the estimates for the end of January are over what, 5%? Yet, in my opinion, those numbers are misleading, and I'm gonna do a bit of a deep dive on my first podcast to explain why I have these apprehensions. So I'm gonna start with a very basic metric, just the overall unemployment rate, and I'm gonna start from 2023 to today's date. Now you could see unemployment was, around 3.5% in 2023, and it started to slowly climb up even into the beginning of 2024, but it was what, 3.8% as you could see in this chart.But it kept creeping upward, even up till June of 2024. October of 2024, dropped a little bit in January of 2025, but you could see the trend in unemployment was already rising and that was already a. Pretty good cause for concern, and that's one of the reasons why the Federal Reserve was raising the interest rate.Like I said, one of the reasons, there is a whole plethora of reasons why the Federal Reserve decides to do what it does, but they do want to maintain optimal employment or maximum employment. Now, I have to say. The tariffs and all of the economic uncertainty as a result of that, including just trust in the American market.Trust in America's political system hasn't really helped with global market certainty, and I think it's made a lot of these. Problems worse. So this increasing trend in unemployment that we saw even during the Biden administration, in my opinion, has only been made worse. And yet we have that little gap of knowledge in October of 2025 because of the shutdown. And unemployment is just going to be one of the many metrics that I'm using to show that the economy was heading towards a bit more instability during the end of Biden's term, which may not have been any real fault of its own just because we were still recovering from one of the worst economic disasters of the decade.