Ep. 93: Netflix, Bank Earnings, Publicis + Paramount vs. the AGs and More

Well, there was a lot of news this past week.

I mean, where to begin? On the economics front, anything that stood out to you?

Yeah, lots of reads on inflation, CPI and PPI, both cooling, unsurprisingly, with gas prices down.

I mean, we see the gas prices in real time, so no surprise inflation took a step down.

Similarly, retail sales slowed a little bit, but that's the headline number, again, including fuel retail sales.

So everything is so wrapped up into the conflict, which, of course, just kicked off a little bit more.

Anything else stand out from your end?

Well, on the retail sales number, again, whether it's inflation-driven or not, I do think it's actually notable just how strong retail sales came out over the last quarter or month, rather, and specifically that we had these 6% growth rates for retail sales for two consecutive months.

It's kind of significant.

Now, again, inflation is absolutely a factor, but this is still elevated.

And of course, it comes back to the point we've been making that all the strength that we're seeing in the underlying economy is despite government policies, not because of them.

And a reminder that all of our ad revenue forecasts are nominal.

So media prices go up with every other price and price increases count.

So

it's

another

indirect support for growth.

Absolutely.

And it's like, are we going to have to raise our numbers again?

Well, we're headed into the heart of earnings season next week with Google.

So we'll know soon enough.

Indeed.