Ep. 221 – Andrew Opdyke – 2023 Mid-Year Economic Update for Retirement

In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs speak with Andrew Opdyke about a 2023 mid-year economic update and the future. Andrew is a Certified Financial Advisor and Economist at First Trust Advisor.

Listen in to learn the expected and unexpected turn of events in the economy today and why inflation might not allow for rate cuts this year. You will also learn about the things in manufacturing investment and geopolitics that are taking place today and how they’ll change the American and global markets.

In this episode, find out:

• The expected and unexpected turn of events in the economy for the year’s first half.
• Why the inflation stickiness might not allow for rate cuts for the remainder of the year.
• Understanding where the rest of the world is standing in terms of inflation and rates.
• The possibility of a recession or prolonged inflation due to a slowdown in demand and spending capacity.
• The importance of broadening out the market to see a sustainable market that can last years.
• The geopolitical shift happening in the world right now and how it will impact things.
• Second half of the year concerns – market pullback due to AI, commercial real estate, geo-political issues, and quantitative tightening.
• Second half of the year potentials – manufacturing investment that will unlock incredible things in the future.
• The direction the market needs to move to increase earnings on overpriced things like AI.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “Geo-politically the world could look very different in five to ten years.”– Andrew Opdyke
• “Something that we should be observing as we progress through the second half of 2023, there are signs that growth could and should flow as we move towards December.”– Andrew Opdyke
• “There are incredible things taking place today that are building for what could be a very strong foundation as we emerge from the feds’ job being done.”– Andrew Opdyke

Get in Touch with Andrew:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewopdyke/

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Radon Stancil:	Welcome, everyone, to Secure Your Retirement podcast. This is a very special episode. We’d love to have what we call our… I don’t know why we claim him, but our economist, Andrew Opdyke. And everybody loves this episode, that we do on a quarterly basis. First of all, let me just say, Andrew, thanks for coming on and coming back to visit with us here, on Secure Your Retirement.
Andrew Opdyke:	Oh, I absolutely love our discussions. I’m happy to be here.
Radon Stancil:	Good, good. I think we can just, maybe, get it started with, I think, the format that we normally try to say, “Okay…” We got a quarter behind us. Did it run as expected, according to your thoughts? What were the cliffhangers? And then, maybe, what are the things that we still have going for us, in a positive way, and a negative way, for the last quarter?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah. Hey, look, first things first. We’re halfway through the year, a little bit more than halfway through the year, and it was a much more comfortable first half of this year, particularly from a market’s perspective, versus what we saw in 2022, when the Fed started the rate hike cycle, markets really felt the impact of it. But it’s interesting, because as we stand here, there’s still a lot of questions outstanding. The question’s on, what is the Fed going to do? If we think back three months ago, go to the end of the first quarter, we’d had things with Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank, and First Republic. And there was a thought from the Fed, at that point in time, that maybe the banking issues meant that the economy was tightening up, banks would pair back on lending, the Fed’s job was done. As we sit here today, the Fed has changed that tune and said, “Hey, we have more work to do.” Inflation is trending lower. If you look at the headline readings, it’s about 3% year-over-year. I think that number’s a little misleading.
	The number that we would really focus on is core. If you look back and say, “How much has inflation moved from a year ago?” A lot of the movements in the overall number are energy related, right? You remember last year, in that second quarter, we were feeling the impact from Russia and the Ukraine War? Energy prices spiked, food prices spiked. That had a big effect last year, slowdown this year. If we look at everything else… Take out food and energy, if you look at everything else, inflation has moved lower, but it’s moved from about 5.96% a year ago, to about 5% now. The Fed is looking out. We finished the first half of the year. The reason they’re saying, “We still have some more work to do,” is that inflation has remained stubbornly sticky. At end of July, they’re expected to raise rates. They may do another one later this year. It’s trending in the right direction. The Fed’s job is almost done. But there’s this, still, outstanding question that we’ve talked about in the past.
	There’s this question of when, and if, does the USC that dreaded our word, a recession, when will, if… Will companies let go of employees if things start to slow down? And as we stand here today, employment is still progressing. Consumers are still spending. Right now, a bit ironically, we have manufacturing production in new orders down, but their construction activity is at all-time record highs. And some of that is the effects of the CHIPS Act, things that went into effect 12, 18 months ago. Midpoint of the year, have things progressed as we expected, sort of, roughly in line. I’ll say, the market side has moved a little bit different from how we expected, very concentrated performance at the beginning of the year, in very tech-related names that, historically, as the Fed is raising interest rates, as the cost of borrowing go up, are not where you would expect to see most of the movement. But there are, again, a lot of questions for the second half of this year. To be honest, I think it may get a little bumpier.
Murs Tariq:	Yeah, Andrew, that was a nice summary. You touched on the fact that it was only, when this episode comes out, it’ll be a couple of weeks ago, that we heard about CPI, and core numbers coming down a little bit. And leading up to that, there’s probably going to be a few more rate hikes. And now, you read and hear people talking about rate cuts, which… People were talking about rate cuts last year too. What is your thought on that now? How many more rate hikes do we have? And then, do we actually see cuts at the end of the year, or is that going to 2024?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah. My base case as it stands today, hike at the end of July, and then, probably, one more, as we progress throughout the year. Here’s the thing. And it’s a little tricky, because I’m an economist, I like the boring stuff. If you look at something like CPI, the year-over-year numbers, which get a lot of that focus, are heavily dependent on what happened a year ago. The Russian-Ukraine war, again, it kind of shifted. It makes it look like there’s been a larger decline of late and inflation, but now, that’s going to roll off. When we get the numbers for July, which will happen at the midpoint of August, when that number comes out on inflation, it looks like oil prices are higher, some of the input numbers are higher. That inflation number’s going to take higher. I’m not going to react too much to one individual report, like the one that we got in July, for the month of June. I think we need to see a couple pieces of data. And the Fed really needs to see a couple pieces of data.
	Because remember, right, if you are the Fed today, your question is, “When is inflation defeated?” Not “If we’re just trending in the right direction,” “When is inflation defeated?” Because their nightmare scenario, the thing they all read about, wrote papers about, during their grad school, PhD dissertations, is that period in the early 1970s, when they quit too early. That is, I think, on a lot of their minds. July is almost set in stone. As we progress from there, they’re going to say they’re data-dependent. Let’s think about last year. Let’s think about this year. Starting last year, the Fed said they were going to hike rates three times. Then Russia, Ukraine hit that, turned to seven. Then they got a little bit further in the year, inflation remained sticky. They got up to 13. At the end of the year, they ended up hiking the equivalent of 17 times. They started the year at three, ended at 17. They only missed their forecast by 14 rate hikes. This year, they said, “We’re going to raise rates three times.”
	Then we got the banking issues, and they said, “We’re done.” Then we started to see inflation continuing to run. And they said, “Maybe two more times.” They’re not quite sure. And I think a lot of it has to do with their models that said inflation was going to be transitory, that told them inflation should be coming into check by this point in time, in fact, should have been in check a year ago. Their ability to guide and navigate where we’re going to be in three months, six months, much less a month from here, I think they’ve lost some confidence in that, and justifiably so. Even the Fed can’t tell you where their rates are going to be by the end of the year. I think inflation’s going to be sticky enough that they cannot cut this year, that they can in 2024, but that they raise one, probably two times, between now and December 31st. And then, they hold rates for the remainder of the year, as we watch inflation continue to trickle in the right direction. It just takes time to work it all through.
Murs Tariq:	I have one more follow-up question to that. While we’re stuck talking about inflation and rates, and everything like that, how does the US stack up to the rest of the world, as far as this battle with inflation, and getting their economies back in line?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah. Most countries are seeing a similar thing to what the United States is seeing. Central bank rates are a little bit higher. Inflation is trending in the right direction. That’s not all places. Germany’s are a little bit higher. The UK is, essentially, flat from a year ago. And if energy prices continue to rise here, that could put some more upward pressure on places like the United Kingdom. But across almost every country, inflation has remained stickier. There’s not like a great example, a golden example to say, “Look, this central bank, the ECB, the Bank of England, the Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of Japan…”
	There’s not a bank that you can point to and say, “They’ve got it right. This is exactly how we should be doing it.” Because let’s face it, none of these banks, none of us, have a history of looking back and saying, “What happens when we have a global pandemic, when things shut down, we stimulate an economy, and reopen?” And that is, essentially, what happened across the world. Everyone is trying to figure this out. It’ll be a great case study to look back on. My kids, maybe, if they go to business school, they will think about, talk about this period, and look back, and say, “What could we have done differently?” But as it stands today, most of the world is facing similar issues.
Radon Stancil:	Yeah. Now, I just wanted to shift, I think it’s connected, obviously, this idea that we have been talking about throughout the year, last year, even looking into this year, that the likelihood of a recession is going to hit. We’ve talked about that happening the second half of the year, really, that being classified as a recession. I was reading an article though, the other day, that said, “If consumers and businesses continue to spend like they’re spending, for the people that said, ‘We’re not going to have a recession,’ it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, in all essence that…” You know what? People just continue to spend, and they don’t stop. And we go through this year without a recession. But, I guess, I wanted to get your perspective on it. Here we sit, like you said, midway of the year, what’s your anticipation, at this point, about this idea of a recession?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah, I would say, a recession is very… If I had to put odds on it, I would say there’s an 80% chance, right now, that we see a recession. Now, the timing of that one is tricky for a lot of the reasons you just mentioned. Do we see it later this year? Do we see it in the early parts of 2024? A lot of that comes down to, how confident are businesses? Do businesses continue to hire? Do they continue to invest in property, plant and equipment? Now, those things, if you think about that manufacturing, it’s pushing economic growth forward. They’re doing all this manufacturing, building, despite the fact that they don’t have the new orders, and they don’t have the same level of production. Now, they make these facilities now. And it helps boost, it helps keep up economic growth, here, in 2023. You’re not going to build those factories again in 2024. To a degree, you’re pulling activity forward. When that ends, that, I would continue to view as part of the overall stimulus. As that wanes off, you need strength to come from somewhere else.
	And I’ve been reading a lot of the reports. Banks have been issuing their information for the second quarter of the year. And what you’re seeing across a lot of the banks is them saying, “Hey, yes, consumers still have more money than before, but it’s starting to wane down.” They’re getting to a point by… By the end of this year, the extra cash they have in their accounts, checking accounts, savings accounts, is going to be back to where it was pre-COVID. And at that point, if they don’t have additional spending power, and the Fed still has interest rates elevated to fight inflation, that’s a difficult environment to support growth. I still think it’s likely. Is there a way that we could escape it? Is it possible we see a soft landing, [inaudible] landing scenario? Yes, but I think, in that type of scenario, it’s probably meaning that we’re going to be dealing with inflation for a little bit longer. If we get inflation in check, it’s really because of a slowdown in demand, it’s because of a slowdown in spending capacity. And if that’s the case, it’s probably because we’re in a recession.
Murs Tariq:	It’s amazing. With the talk around recession, and where we came into the year, you would not think the markets are where they are. It’s incredible that the markets are up, the NASDAQ’s upgrade, the S&P’s up, the Dow’s trickling upwards, but I don’t think anyone thought that that was going to be the market that we’re walking into in 2023. And some of that has been… You said it earlier, it’s been very concentrated because of AI, and what’s going on in technology, and pros and cons to that. But it’s been driving the market. As we sit in the middle of the year, now, are you starting to see it broaden out, as far as where money’s being made in the markets, or is it still in that specific type of subset area? And where do we go from here?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah. The good news is, it has broadened out a little bit. If you went back to end of May, beginning of June, the big seven, big eight companies represented, essentially, the entirety of the market returns for the year, we have seen a little bit of broadening out. Now, there’s 3%, 4% of market performance for the year, that’s coming from everyone else. It’s still largely concentrated. In fact, it’s still near the most concentrated levels that we’ve seen, going back to the late nineties. But it’s an interesting thing to me. Because if you look at it, and you were to go back to December and tell people, “Hey, Fed’s going to keep raising interest rates. You’re going to see some slowdowns in things like retail sales. You’re going to see some movement in energy prices.” And you ask people before all of this started, “What does that mean for the tech sector? What does that mean for some of these companies that are very heavily reliant on borrowing investment for growth?”
	I think most people would’ve said, “Okay, they’re going to have a tough start to the year.” But that hasn’t been the case. In fact, it’s moved counter to what most people expected. It also hasn’t been… If you look at market returns from these companies, it hasn’t really been driven by earnings. It hasn’t really been driven by revenue. People are paying higher multiples. In fact, multiples for some of these companies now look like the multiples we saw pre-COVID, when we were in an environment where interest rates were much lower, and the growth outlook, I think, quite honestly, looked a little bit stronger. As we move and progress through the year, to see a truly sustainable market run, a sustainable bull market that can last multiple years, we’ve really got to see that broadening out. And I think that’s something…
	I think those big 10 companies, if you look at the big 10, S&P 500, take the top 10 companies, they’re trading at a multiple. Price to earnings exceeds 30. If you go down to just the next grouping, 10 through, let’s call it, 50, or 11 through 50, you get down to a more normal level, about 18, 16, 17. And that’s true across most of the rest of the market. There are companies that are appropriately valued. There are companies that, as they’re generating returns, could lead the market forward. But I think, the front end of it, the very tech-heavy side has overdone it. And one of the things… This is throughout history. Think back to the late nineties, think back to blockchain a year or two, three years ago, these technologies can far exceed our expectations in the long term. If you go back to 2000 and said, “What’s the world going to look like in 2020?” We’re doing things today that they couldn’t have even dreamed of.
	It exceeds expectations in the long term, but it tends to underperform expectations in the short term. We tend to think we can see progress faster, that we’ll see results faster, that the impact, because we’re talking about it, these companies are working on it, is going to be near immediate. And the truth of the matter is, it takes time. I look at GDP, and I look at employment, right? If GDP’s up 2% in the last year, employment’s up 2.5%, which is, roughly, where we’re at, that means that the productivity from employees is down, not up. If we’re looking at the AI revolution and say, “This changes things. It makes us more productive. It’s going to help us increase output.” It hasn’t materialized yet. The hopes, the expectations, I think, are being priced in. The reality of it may see some downward pressure on those companies later in the year. Will it be transformational into the future? I think, probably, but not in 2023.
Radon Stancil:	Great. Just to hit on another topic that we talked a little bit about prior to this recording, if we look at the international scene, and… And in particular, I’ve got a couple of things. And you can hit on anything you want, international. But one of those is, as I was… Heard this morning, prior to this recording, that China, right no, is not seeing the bounce back in their economy after COVID, that they thought they were going to see. And their expectation, they said that they were projecting a 5% growth, which a lot of people said, “Well, that’s really, really low by itself,” comparatively, speaking for China. And now, it’s a question of whether or not they’ll be able to hit that. And then, right in conjunction with that, we know that there’s big moves in certain ways, where some manufacturing, even Apple is moving over to India, and how that’s going to, obviously, impact them in a positive way. When you look at just a couple of those topics, what’s your thoughts about that?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah. Absolutely. India is seeing movements. From Apple, it’s seeing movements. Tesla, right now, is talking about moving a big production plant, and producing over in India. I think we’re seeing a shift, a geopolitical shift, taking place from China. India, by the end of this year, should be the largest, population-wise, country in the world. I think they are going to be a major force to reckon with. As we progress into the future, China’s dealing with some demographic headwinds, and the fact that… At the end of the day, communism doesn’t have a good track record. And if you look… Here’s the thing that’s devastating to me. I think about the people of China. When you live under a regime that is doing top-down leadership, it can work in short bursts. You can say, “Hey, we’re going to focus very heavily on manufacturing. We’re going to focus very heavy on…” Whatever that may be, and you can do well, that can produce in the short term, but it’s very difficult to pivot. If you think about this, technology has been such a boom for the United States over the last 20, 30, 40 years.
	China has tried to participate in that for a long time. There was this misunderstanding. They thought copyright meant the right to copy, so a lot of technology was making its way after it had been produced, used in the United States. It was making its way to China. They were replicating. They were, essentially, importing growth by taking ideas, innovations that had come from the rest of the world. Now, they’ve caught up. And some of these tech companies that were leading over there, the government came in and said, “Look, you guys are generating some immense wealth, but you’re doing it amongst your people. And from a communist perspective, it doesn’t look good.” And so they started putting the clamps down on things like Alibaba. They started putting the clamps down on some venture capital, some tech investment, and that scared other countries away.
	Countries like the freedom to operate, the freedom to innovate, and knowing that what they do, their innovations are protected. And in China, it’s really hard to tell exactly where they stand, because the data, historically, has not been super reliable. You can look at a place like China, and they’ll tell you, “Hey, we’re growing at X percent.” There is data we can see, outside of… We can look at the emissions data from their factories. We can tell whether or not their steel factories, their production factories, are producing, or putting out as much output as they used to. And that’s not the case. They say, “We’re 4%, 5%, 6%.” It’s really hard to tell. Companies across the board, if you look at US imports, from China, if you look at this for a lot of major countries, they’re moving away from China. They’re moving towards Vietnam. They’re moving towards India. There’s some with Japan.
	The US put new trade deals in with Canada and Mexico. If we are having this conversation in 10 years, I think we will look back and say, “That was kind of the pivot point.” That was that turning point for China, the turning point for India, where the world said, “We need more reliable supply chains. We need the freedom and democracy to grow, to produce.” And that was the point where Chinese growth slowed. They could see a Japan moment here, over the next 10, 20, 30 years, where it’s really hard to see growth. But some of these other countries that are embracing it, embracing companies coming in, putting in new factories, the education, the training, they could see a boom from here. Geopolitically, the world could look very different in five to 10 years.
Murs Tariq:	Yeah. That’s a interesting insight. As we come up on time here, we like to put you on the spot and ask you a few different forward-looking types of questions, one of which, I’ll start with, is… Because Radon will tell you that I’m a little bit more of the pessimist of the two of us, so I like to always ask, what headwinds do you see? First six months of the year was, obviously, dealing with inflation. What’s the Fed going to do. Then we had the regional banking issues there, with FDIC, and then also, the debt ceiling type of stuff. That really got built up in the media. Nobody’s really talking about the debt ceiling anymore. What are you worried about here, in the next six months, as we close out the year?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah. Second half of this year, where are the concerns? Because, quite frankly, there are some. One is these elevated P’s in the big, big names. If confidence wanes on that front, if their production… If the excitement over AI wanes, we could see some pullback. And because they’re so heavily weighted, you could see some downward pressure on the market side, just from this normalization in expectations. That’s something I think we’re likely to see during the second half of this year. Some of the other things that I would be watching out for. Commercial real estate, we heard about it a little bit at the beginning of the year. We are seeing more and more companies as loans and leases are coming due. Some of the defaults are picking up. Now, the big banks, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, the big banks don’t have a lot of exposure to that, but we could hear more rumblings as we progress through the year, that the regional banks, the local banks that have more exposure to local businesses, local buildings, there could still be some turbulence there.
	There is, still, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, and there are these ongoing questions about China, and whether or not they’re going to do anything with Taiwan. My base case is that they will not, but if we start seeing them talk about it more, if we start seeing them do more training activities in the area, geopolitical tensions could rise as well. The major things I’m focused on, the things that I think are the biggest headwinds, are the fact that we’ve overpriced on expectations, and some concerns, that there may be some fluctuations on the banking side. Last thing I’ll say is, and this gets a little bit into the weeds, from an economic standpoint, the government is taking some money out of the system. There was massive money injections in 2020, and in 2021, PPP loans, stimulus checks, direct benefits, with unemployment.
	Now, they’re doing quantitative tightening. They’re removing some money from the system, the treasury. After the debt ceiling got passed, the national debt has already risen by a trillion dollars. And in order to pay for that, they’re putting out more treasuries. They’re rebuilding the bank accounts at places like the treasury. That’s also going to pull some money out. You give people money, they spend it, you pull that money out. And you would expect, historically, we’ve seen, growth slowed down. I think that’s certainly something that we should be watching carefully as we progress through the second half of this year. There are signs that growth could, and I think, should, slow as we move towards December.
Radon Stancil:	Excellent. Okay. Then I’ll take the positive side of this. Going forward, for the rest of the year, what do you see that’s positive? What do you see that’s, hey, something to look forward to, or potentials that we could see, on the good side?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah. The potentials, one… We talked about that manufacturing investment that’s taking place. Right now, that is supporting economic growth. That’s also going to be something that lasts for us for years. We’re bringing back, and we’re building a semiconductor capacity. I was reading an article the other day about how we’re starting to get better at alternatives for rare earth metals. I was reading yesterday, an article about how we’ve used some of this AI technology. We haven’t fully seen the production gains from it, but they started to use it in order to identify things for treatment of cancer. They’ve now figured out how to identify cells, chromosomes, cells that have extra chromosomes. And they believe they’ve unlocked what is starting the cancerous process. When I look at that, there are incredible things taking place today, that are building for what could be a very strong foundation, as we emerge, from the Fed’s job being done.
	And we are certainly closer to the finish line than we are to the starting line. I do not see the fed raising by another 500, 550 basis points before they start the cutting process. It’s just this matter of getting over that last hurdle. We’re running the 100 yard hurdles, 90 yards of it is done with this difficult process. Once they get over the last one, we reach that finish line. I think we can… We’ve got a clear path ahead of us. We’ve just got to get there first. Underlying the US economy, underlines the global economy, the level of education, the level of literacy, what we’re seeing in food production, what we’ve now… We got a report yesterday, talking about improvements in things like sanitation, access to clean water. There are truly incredible things that are taking place today, that are falling… People aren’t hearing about them because everybody’s focused on our word, that could be coming.
	We may have to hear more about that, our word, before we get to it, but never lose sight of the human ingenuity that is exploding around the world, that’s going to drive us forward as we look 18 months out, 36 months out, 60 months out. And when I’m thinking about investing, which is what we get to at the end of the day, those things are so core to me. Because I can’t time what’s going to happen in the next week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. But we’re looking at, do we get to participate in this unlocking of wealth generation, unlike what the world has, really, ever seen? Those type of factors matter more to me, on that path forward, than what’s going to happen here between now and, let’s say, the end of the next quarter. Awesome things happening, but we got to get through the tough stuff first.
Murs Tariq:	Yeah. Speaking of the tough stuff, and the R-word, last question for you. At the beginning of the year… You work with First Trust, a very large investment company. And you always put out projections, as far as, where do we think the S&P’s going to be by the end of the year? Right now, it’s sitting at the time of recording, around, 45/12. Where do you think we go from here? And are we standing by what we said back in January?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah. Our forecast in December of last year, looking out to this year, was 3,900. And what we use to look at our market forecast and tell when the market is overvalued, undervalued, is a model. We’ve been using the same model now, for 17 years. It essentially says that the two most important variables over time are interest rates and earnings. How much does it cost to invest in people, product, and projects? And how much return do you get from these companies that you are investing in? I stand by it. I think those are the most important factors. Now, what this model does not do is try to estimate human emotion. Whether or not people are going to say, “Yeah, I’m willing to pay 30 times earnings, 40 times earnings, 50 times earnings,” for a company, I think that emotions can win out in the short term, but the math wins out over time.
	If we see some reservations about how much people are paying to be in some of these tech names, I do think that we could see a little pullback in the markets. I’m not going to say, “Here’s the number. 4,200, now, is the exact number we’re going to get to at the end of the year.” What I’ll say is, “I do believe the markets have gotten ahead of themselves. I do believe that we could see some easing on that side of it, that it could bring things back.” Because, ultimately, what we’re getting back to is that strong foundation, realistic, appropriate valuations based on where earnings growth is going to be, GDP growth is going to be. Are we going to get back to 3,900? Now, it seems like market sentiments pushed it a little bit further, but based on the math, that’s where we think it should be.
	If we start moving in that direction, if we see a little pairing back, or some flattening out during the second half of this year, I think that would make a lot more sense than seeing another 15% rise between here and year-end, barring some major unforeseen growth factor that we’re not talking about, an explosion in the actual profitability on something like AI. If that materializes, it would also change our models. Because it would increase, it would boost up what we’re seeing on the earnings front. But based on the data we’ve seen so far, profits, right now, are flat to a little bit down. Earnings, right now, are flat to a little bit down. And the question is, what path do they take between now and the end of the year? If we look at the forecast, they’re essentially flat. And if that is the case, if that does hold true, people are going to have to, really, evaluate, are they overpay for something that is not yet performing?
Radon Stancil:	Excellent. As always, Andrew, we truly do appreciate you coming on and talk. And I know our audience is very appreciative of your insight. Thank you so much for buying out a few minutes of your day. And this has, certainly, been very helpful and insightful.
Andrew Opdyke:	Thank you for having me. Great to talk with you.