Where are we at? So what are you seeing in the economy and markets and what should maybe bank executives actually be paying attention to? Yeah, just

for perspective, Brian, I did spend 15 years of my life following the banks from the buy side.

So I was doing recommendations into portfolios in the banking space.

And more recently, the last 15 years, I've been doing more of a generalist top-down strategy role.

And what I see in the economy right now is actually pretty encouraging.

We're having about 8% nominal GDP growth in the second quarter.

At least that's according to current consensus.

So what are you seeing in that space, Mark? I mean, why has it grown so much and why should bankers care?

Is that is that the right take away that this is another one of those dichotomies between facts and feelings?

Well, absolutely.

We've seen this really enormous trend since COVID, frankly, where the difference between what people say, which is in the business referred to as soft data, versus what people do, which is referred to as hard data.

That gap is normally you would use soft data as a anticipatory mechanism for hard data.

That absolutely has not been true.

You would see it with investor sentiment versus investor behavior, consumer sentiment versus consumer behavior.

CEO surveys, small business surveys, pretty much every group out there has very consistently been more pessimistic in survey data than they have been in the actual behavior itself.

Like, is that what you think is gonna