I — The Fed’s Foggy Lens

So the Fed did what everybody expected them to do, by cutting their target rate by a quarter of a point.

Over the past year, they have reduced that rate by 175 basis points. And it now stands at three and a half and three quarter percent.

Noteworthy, in today’s meeting, there were three dissents. President Trump’s man Stephen Miran wanted a half a point cut. President Obama’s man Austan Goolsbee didn’t want any rate cut. And the the Kansas City Fed’s Jeffrey Schmid also voted against the rate cut.

Stock markets roared with the Dow up almost 500 points, the S&P 500 almost hitting a new high, and bond yields coming down, including the 10 year, which dropped by 3.5 basis points.

And Mr. Trump, being the nation’s best Fed watcher, said this to business leaders in real time: “You know, growth doesn’t mean inflation.” 

He added: “we should be able to do a lot better than three and four. We’re scheduled to be at 4 percent.” 

Of the Fed’s move, Mr. Trump said, “He did a rather, I would say a rather small number that could have been doubled at least.”

So, Mr. Trump wants lower rates and I think he has a very good point.

The Fed’s economic projections for next year moved up to a still-paltry 2.3 percent. And then fades back to the usual 1.8 percent over the next couple of years. Inflation moves slowly toward 2 percent.

Yet their growth estimates are really laughable. Here’s one way to look at GDP which should be 3 percent to 4 percent rather than 1.8 percent.

Over the past three years, productivity has grown by 2.1 percent yearly. And by the way that doesn’t really include the enormous AI effects that are coming.

Then labor force growth over the same three years comes to 1.3 percent annually.

Putting the two together, you get 3.4 percent growth in real GDP.

That is a widely accepted construct, but AI could jump those numbers much higher, so could Mr. Trump’s basic platform of supply side tax cuts, deregulation, “drill, baby, drill,” and reciprocal fair trade.

Mr. Trump has a very energy-centric view of inflation. And he’s right. Lower energy prices permeate every nook and cranny of the economy, including food.

So this year, oil has dropped to $60 a barrel from $80. That’s 25 percent.

Very little of that has hit the CPI inflation index. But it’s coming. Just like gasoline under $3.

Lower inflation adds to real GDP. Just like productivity and supply side tax cuts.

That means you could get to 4 percent growth with less than 2 percent inflation.

That also means Mr. Trump is a better forecaster than all of the Fed’s economists put together.

II — The Consumer Economy Tells the Real Story

It may well be that there’s an affordability crisis and consumers have no confidence in America or President Trump. Yet sometimes facts speak louder than political conjectures or biased polls.

Black Friday spending surged this year to new highs, fueled by record breaking online spending that reached $11.8 billion on Black Friday alone, according to Market Data.

Online sales on Black Friday made up about 10 percent of total sales for the entire month of November. The number was just above $111 billion, according to an Adobe Analytics report.

Adobe tracks over $1 trillion U.S. retail site visits. And they are predicting that the 2025 holiday season will be the biggest online spending in American history.

Of course a lot of this is AI driven, with artificial intelligence boosting traffic to online retail sites.

Those referrals by the way popped 805 percent compared to last year. So, when Mr. Trump tells today’s White House economic roundtable that he inherited President Biden’s problems, but he’s the one fixing them, he has a very strong point.

Take a listen to what he said just a little bit ago: “We inherited a mess. Affordability. But you can call it affordability or anything you want, but the Democrats cause the affordability problem, and we’re the ones that are fixing it. So it’s a very simple statement. And they caused it and we’re fixing it.”

Here are some more facts worth considering: people worry about the labor market, but probably the best high frequency indicator is initial unemployment claims, where the latest four-week average has dropped all the way to 214,000.

In recent weeks, that’s actually been falling. You know what constitutes a recession? Something like 350,000.

We’re nowhere near that.

Wait a minute, a couple more facts: wages are rising faster than prices. This is so important.

In Mr. Trump’s first year, wages are already clobbering prices. That’s the way it should be.

Wage income from the latest numbers is up by 5.3 percent. The core personal consumption deflator, that’s the Fed’s inflation measure, is 2.7 percent.

That means working folks take home pay is now ahead by 2.6 percent. Ahead of prices by 2.6 percent. And there’s a lot more coming with tax refunds next year and the One Big Beautiful Bill. 

Plus, gas prices are below $3 a gallon across the country.  That permeates every nook and cranny of the economy. 

And Mr. Trump’s policies of supply-side tax cuts, business deregulation, “drill, baby, drill,” and free and fair reciprocal trade, is launching a business boom.

Feature, say, the jump in business construction for factories, machinery, and equipment. All of that is up 9.1 percent percent for the past year.

That’s a big number. You know what happens? You start up a factory and you order in new equipment and machinery, you have to hire people. But unemployment is so low, that you’re going to have to pay them a very decent wage.

And that is going to make people, also known as consumers, sitting around the kitchen table, very happy.

So I say, affordability crisis? What a load of baloney.

Lawrence Kudlow is a Fox News Media contributor and host of both “Kudlow” on weekdays and the nationally syndicated “Larry Kudlow Show” each Saturday. This column is adapted from his monologues on “Kudlow.”

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