Ep. 285 – Andrew Opdyke – 2024 – 3rd Quarter Economic Update for Retirement

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE

In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss the state of the U.S. economy with insights from Andrew Opdyke, an economist for First Trust Investments. As we approach the end of 2024, Andrew shares his expert outlook on critical economic trends, including the Federal Reserve’s recent rate cuts, the potential impact of the upcoming elections, and the ongoing geopolitical risks that could shape the year ahead. He provides valuable perspective on what these developments mean for both businesses and individuals as they plan for their financial future.

Listen in to learn about the economic forecast for 2024 and beyond, how geopolitical risks may affect markets, and what to expect from the real estate and tech sectors. Andrew explains these complex topics in an approachable manner, helping listeners understand how global and domestic events might influence their retirement planning strategy.

In this episode, find out:

·      How the 2024 election could impact the U.S. economy and markets.

·      The effects of Federal Reserve rate cuts and what to expect moving forward.

·      The role of AI growth and technology advancements in economic growth.

·      Geopolitical risks and their potential to influence inflation and trade.

·      What to expect in the real estate market in 2024 and beyond.

Tweetable Quotes:

·      “The Fed’s actions aren’t about a single move; it’s the broader trend that matters for the economy.” — Radon Stancil

·      “When it comes to planning for retirement, we must think long-term and not overreact to short-term market fluctuations.” — Murs Tariq

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 special episode today. We’d love that when we get the privilege of having Andrew Dyke come as our, I don’t know, we like to claim him as our economist, but thank you very much, Andrew, for coming on and chatting with us a day.
Andrew Opdyke:	Absolutely. I love our conversation.
Radon Stancil:	So, for those that maybe are just tuning in, maybe haven’t been listening to the podcast all the way through, we try to get Andrew on every quarter. And the goal with this is to say kind of like where are we at for the year? Then where do we see things playing out for the rest of the year? So, we are recording this the 1st of October 2024, so before the election, but very deep into 2024. And so, I guess if you could maybe just bring us up to speed for like, Hey, this is where we are now, right now in the year, and then maybe we can move into where you think you see things going and what’s on the radar right now.
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, it is kind of crazy that we’re already sitting here in the fourth quarter of 2024, the year so far from an economic standpoint, we have continued to progress. Jobs continue to grow. Businesses have been investing. Obviously, there’s been certain themes, whether that’s related to semiconductors or technologies like ai. There are some international concerns. There’re things that have popped up on the horizons, things like what’s happening with Israel and Gaza. There’s still the Rush Ukraine War obviously going on. So, there’s things that we must be watching. But from a domestic standpoint, earnings have been rising for US-based companies. The economy continues to grow, and now as we progress here into the fourth quarter, we’ve got the Fed starting to cut rates. They’ve started their rate cuts here recently, and we’ve got an election a little over a month out. So there’s certainly periods that historically if you look back, have brought volatility in the fourth quarter of years like this. Historically, the election, something that tends to be emotional, tends to get us to, I would say, overreact to what’s taking place. But from an economic grounding standpoint, we continue to grow and we’re growing at a relatively healthy pace.
Murs Tariq:	It is amazing to be sitting here in October. I mean, if you think about December of 2023 coming into January, there’s a lot of worries around, hey, what’s the Fed going to do? When are they going to cut? What about the election? That’s nerve wracking and now we’re in that and we’re knee deep in that. And then obviously overseas issues as well. So, let’s talk about the Fed because I think as we’re talking to clients, we’ve always been updating them as far as the reasoning behind why the Fed hasn’t cut yet. And then here recently they did a 50 basis points cut a few weeks ago. And so now from your side of things, there was a lot of pressure on Powell as far as does he do 25, does he do 50, does he do nothing at all? And there were some reports that were up and down leading up to that decision that made it even more difficult. But then he came out with the 50. So, your opinion on that and then also what’s he doing for the rest of the year?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah, so essentially the Fed, if you think back over the last few years, inflation has been their primary concerns since late 2021. They have a dual mandate. They’re tasked with two things, inflation, and employment. They want to see the unemployment rate remain relatively low. There’s not a clear target on inflation. They say we’re looking for 2% on the unemployment rate. They say maximum employment, whatever that means. So earlier this year, coming into this year, there was a question of when the Fed was going to start cutting. Inflation was still elevated, but coming down and the unemployment rate was low. At the beginning of this year, back in January, the market was expecting the Fed to cut six times this year. The Fed itself was saying, we think we’re going to cut at least three times. And all the betting, if you looked at how people were positioning in portfolios, they were pricing and that the first-rate cuts were going to happen before the midpoint of the year.
	They were saying by May there was a 95% probability priced into the markets, the Fed would’ve started cutting. Well, when we got to the June meeting of this year, inflation rose through January, February, March, April, may. In June, the Fed said, hey, we might need to take a bit of a more cautious approach. And then in the back half of the year, we started to see some deterioration on the employment side. We started to see some weaker numbers coming in. We saw downward revisions about a month, month, and a half ago. We saw one of the largest revisions to payrolls that we’ve seen since 2008, 2009. Every year government goes through the reports that they’ve been putting out and says, hey, let’s just update our numbers, make sure that we’ve got all the survey pieces in. Let’s collect other data that supports our numbers. And they said, hey, we overstated jobs over the previous year by about 820,000.
	So that was a big number that got the Fed to start acting. And with that, they said, maybe we not just start, but we start a little bit more aggressively. Let’s do 50 basis points. One of the things that the Fed knows that as economists we think about is when you hike rates or when you cut rates, the impact isn’t instantaneous. It takes a little bit of time. So, the Fed said, start this process. Let’s see how that flows through the economy as we progress through this year. But Powell, the fed chair, warned at that meeting, look, we’re starting with 50. We’re starting by dropping by half a percent. We expect a slower pace from here. We expect a quarter of a percent. In fact, they told us at the last meeting that by the end of this year, they would probably have two more cuts of a quarter of a percent.
	And I think that’s still reasonable. I think that’s probably still the path that they will go on. And then they’re looking to cut rates four times next year by a quarter percent each time. Quite honestly, I think it’s too early to tell what’s going to happen in two next year because we are seeing some weakness on the employment side, but we’re seeing spending remain healthy. The GDP numbers, the output of the country remains healthy. This is really a time period where the Fed is taking it one meeting at a time, one report at a time. And I think that’s a good reminder because of how much things have swung to not overreact to a single report, don’t overreact to a jobs number, don’t overreact to one fed action because I think it was Mark Twain who said it about the weather in New England. He said, if you don’t like it, wait five minutes and the weather will change with the fed’s expected pass, wait five days and that will change. We got to just be patient. We’ve got to watch what they do. And we’ve got to remind ourselves too that whether they go 25 basis points or 50 basis points at their next meeting right after the election, it doesn’t have a substantial impact from an economic or a market side, whether they do 25 at that meeting or 50, it’s that broader path, a broader trend that has a greater impact over time.
Radon Stancil:	So we’re definitely going to ask you a little bit about how you see things playing out. I’m just saying this now in case anybody’s listening, I don’t want ’em to think that we’re not going to at least say, Hey Andrew, what’s your opinion about whether or not it’s Harris or Trump as far as who gets elected and how that might’ve be on the economy? But I do want hit one topic before we get to that one. Things have escalated just a little bit here with Iran’s involvement on the geopolitical scene of things. We’re starting to hear that there’s US troops that are kind of going to be heading out there. They’re increasing that number. How do you see things? How do you see that issue? Lemme ask you this, what’s your concern around that? If that were to pick up a little bit, we saw gas going up as far as, or oil rather going up as far as the expectations there of what could happen. I mean, how do you see that? I mean, what’s your reconciliation on that Issue?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah, so I would say geopolitical events, particularly in the Middle East, they have a risk of upside surprises in inflation. And part of that is the oil production that comes out of the region and whether there’s concerns on that. But the other major piece that I would watch is the impact specifically with Israel and Gaza. It’s surrounding the Red Sea, right? And in the Red Sea is the Suez Canal. It’s the single most important trade route heading into Europe. We’ve already this year seen a substantial escalation in shipping costs internationally. Recently there was some concern that may rise further because of the dock worker strike here in the United States. That’s been resolved already. All they had to do was agree to a 60 plus percent wage increase. That’s going to bring some inflation pressures as well. But the further we see escalation, particularly in that Israel Gaza region, not so much Russia, Ukraine, but Israel, Gaza, it puts some pressure on the Fed because you could see whether it’s energy prices or the fact that virtually everything, every industry, every sector gets portions of their supply chain shipped in.
	It has the risk of pushing inflation higher at the tail end of this year into the early part of next year, the more they have to reroute. Because what’s happening right now, if you can’t get through the Suze canal, you go down below Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, and today roughly half the tonnage that was being shipped through the Suze Canal has been rerouted. If that further escalates or there’s further pressures, the Fed is certainly going to be watching that to see does inflation start ticking higher rather than trending lower as it’s been doing.
Murs Tariq:	And while we’re still on the Fed and rates with rates starting to be cut and maybe promises of cuts down the road here, how does that translate to people are kind of stuck in the world of real estate and how do I buy a house with mortgages where they are? So where do you see rates going? Are they going to move with the Fed or is it going to take a little bit longer on that side? And then also your smaller companies that have still kind of been underwater or slowly recovering since the pandemic, they don’t have cash on hand like an Amazon does to grow and thrive. They rely on lending. So also your take on smaller companies and where they’re headed.
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah, so let’s start with that. Secondhand small and mid-size businesses have the greatest exposure to where the Fed has interest rate. They are far more exposed, they’ve got more adjustable rate debt versus the large companies, they don’t have the same access to the capital markets the large companies do. So historically, those companies have been well positioned and in fact, if you look at market performance since Powell kind of hinted back in July that the Fed was considering an actively thinking about cutting rates at their next meeting. Since that point in time, we’ve seen that outperformance showing its way in the markets as the Fed cuts. Those groups I think do really stand to benefit. Now on the housing side, that one’s a little more interesting. As the rates have started to moderate and the feds started cutting, we have seen things, we’ve started to see some pickup in prospective home buyers.
	We’ve seen them touring more. We’ve seen some pending sales. What we see through history, I think the best period to look at to say where do we go from here is to look back at a time period like 78 to 81. It was another time period where interest rates shot up and then they started to kind of moderately come back down and when they shot up, just like we just saw, people tend to stay in their homes when they have a 3% mortgage, let’s say from 2020. You don’t want to sell your house and buy something if you’ve got to pay a 6%, a 7% mortgage. So over the last few years, housing availability has been a significant concern in the United States to the degree that both of the candidates Harris and Trump has said, Hey, this is something we want to focus on in the next presidency.
	But we’re starting to see some of those signs. When I spoke recently with the National Association of Realtors, they said it’s kind of in those fives, the mid fives to low fives on the 30 year mortgage rates that they expect to see a notable pickup in activity. Now that typically follows the later part of the yield curve. The 10 year is typically what moves the 30 year mortgage rates more than the Fed who cuts short-term rates. But the 10 year had come down, it started cutting earlier this year, it came down by about a full percent. I think we’re nearing some of those levels. How aggressively the Fed gets from here is certainly going to be a question, but as we progress into 2025, I do expect that over the next 12 months we’ll see a pickup in some of that home buying activity. It’s important to remember the 30 to 39 year olds are one of the largest population groups in the United States, and that’s prime home buying age, that is prime family formation age, and they have capital, they’ve got the capacity to purchase homes. We could see some notable activity in that space over the next 12 to 18 months.
Radon Stancil:	Alright, let’s talk about the big one now. We’ll talk a little bit about the upcoming election. I don’t know the best way to ask this question, so I’m just going to give you the setting and then you can kind of go with it how you want. I think that my question is, I guess if you say you get a Trump elected, how do you see things playing out there economically and then you get a Harris elected? How do you see things playing out economically? Just to give us some kind of a balance on the two, and I’ll just say this on a podcast scenario, Merc and I act pretty agnostic on this. We’re not trying to go in any kind of direction. We just say, Hey, what’s the outcome of this? Regardless of who it is?
Andrew Opdyke:	No, it’s a great question and it’s one of those things where I care less about politics than policy. And here’s the thing is there are kind of two outside scenarios. If you were to see a Republican sweep or a Democratic sweep, you could see the potential for substantive changes in policy. If it was a Republican sweep, I think you’re going to see a full extension of the Trump’s air tax cuts that are set to expire next year. If you were to see a democratic sweep, you’d see an ending of a lot of those personal tax rates would go up, corporate tax rates would go up, potential changes to things like cap gains rates. However, I think the most likely scenario is that the Republicans are probably going to take control of the Senate. If you look at the Senate, what’s up for grab this cycle?
	The Republicans have zero seats that are up for grabs in democratic states, whereas the Democrats have three in Republican states including West Virginia, Joe Manchin seats, which looks very, very likely to go Republican. The Ohio seat, which is looking like it’s probably going to go Republican. On the flip side, the Democrats look like they’re going to have the house as it stands right now. So my base case is that we’re going to have a lot of yelling, a lot of screaming calling of names between the House and the Senate, but it blocks out the chance for substantive changes in policies. But quite frankly, if we get that outcome on the house and Senate level, I think who’s in the White House is going to have a lot less impact than most people think. It’s going to be very hard to get much policy put through. I do think that tax hikes are probably coming here in the next few years, and that’s less to do with who I think will be in office.
	It’s more to do that. We just ended September and that is the end of the fiscal year for the US government there being a fiscal year runs October one through the end of September, and it looks like we just ran a $1.9 trillion deficit here in the United States after a 1.6 $1.7 trillion deficit the year before. And interest costs on US debt are up close to 200% here in the last four years. And so when we look at that, we went through a whole 15 ish 20 year period where interest rates had gotten so low that people felt free to spend. Washington felt free to spend. As interest rates have risen, our cost of debt has risen. I think regardless of who’s in the White House, you’re going to see focus over the next two to four years on managing the debt, figuring out how do we get costs under control?
	What do we need to do? On the taxation front, I would look at this again, kind of akin to in the sixties and the seventies, interest costs rose up to the point where we were spending 3% of GDP 3% of the nation’s output just to pay the interest payments we’re basically back there right now, if you look through history that caused voters to shift, that caused more pressure on politicians to pay more attention to the fiscal side of the equation. I think that is going to be the major discussion points here over the next two to four years, regardless of which candidate makes it into office, if the Senate and the House move in opposite directions, they’re going to be focused on what can we agree on? What do we need to address here over the next two to four years? What mark can we make?
	So when I talk about the election, I always remind people specifically from a market standpoint, when the election results come in, roughly half the country is going to be happy, roughly half the country is going to be upset, and then we’re all going to go back to work and Apple’s going to build another iPhone regardless of who wins the presidency, Amazon is going to try to put a distribution facility closer to your house. What the people do matters a lot more than what the politicians do. And during periods of distress and strain and anxiety and emotion that builds up, that’s I’m really thankful, really, really thankful for financial plans because our outcomes, our planning for retirement is not dependent on who wins this election here in 2024. It’s based on this much, much broader, much more powerful group of people, the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the workers who are going to push earnings, who are going to progress us forward. So honestly, I wouldn’t spend too much time. I know there’s poll watchers, I know there’s people who love to talk politics. If you don’t love talking the politics, rest assured that the impacts we are very likely to see are going to be far muted versus what you hear in the political attack apps.
Murs Tariq:	Yeah, thanks for that update and a good balance on both sides. I think as far as what could potentially happen, speaking of innovation, AI has been a big thing that has kind of driven the markets. You got your large companies, technology companies, semiconductors that have done a lot of the work this year as far as market growth, and I think in one of the quarterly recaps that we’ve done, the talk of AI was relatively new and what’s it going to be? So here we sit three months later, what are you seeing in the AI space and where does that go? Nvidia has unlimited potential, all these different things that people are just jumping on board with.
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah, I mean obviously it’s still getting a lot of attention. People are still very focused on it. I’ve had the opportunity, I travel pretty much every week. I’ve had the opportunity to go see some of these facilities, some of the work that’s being done, projects that are being built like the plant, new Albany, the Intel’s building. What I would say, and I think we mentioned this before, but the more I’ve dived into it and the more I look at it, it’s one of those things where I think we need to remember, we always overestimate how much is going to happen in the short term. We underestimate how much is going to happen over time. And if you think back to 1999, right? The internet was really gaining steam. These companies were skyrocketing in price. Now, I’m not saying this is a.com bubble. The companies today have far more earnings than the companies back then, but if you remember back to 1999, we were excited for a reason.
	And if you look back, it was a completely legitimate reason. People were saying Internet is going to change how we work, how we live, how we purchase, how we watch tv. It’s absolutely done all those things. It just took us longer than we thought. And from a markets perspective, of the top 10 companies back in 1999, the top 10 biggest companies in the world, only one of them is still up there. And so when we look out, and I don’t spend a lot of time focused on specific names, Nvidia, Microsoft, apple, alphabet, here’s what I will say is that regardless of which of them wins, we are seeing a massive investment in energy infrastructure, in water infrastructure. We’re seeing massive investment into things like cybersecurity. One of the big activities that’s taking place today is building up the infrastructure needed to support this over the next two years, the increase in energy demand expected from the data centers to do the processing to run that over the next two years, energy demand in the US is supposed to grow by an amount equivalent to the entire annual usage by the country of Japan.
	It is a large allocation, and recently there was a meeting at the White House. They’re talking about, do we need to build 500 gigawatt factories across the United States in order to produce this much electricity? So we’re putting in the framework, again, be patient. I do think it’s going to be impactful. I do think it’s going to be massively impactful, but I don’t think we know quite yet who the winners are going to be. And I always get a little concerned when we see big market concentration in the last three months, we’ve seen some broadening out, which I view as a very positive sign for the markets as we see how it’s getting used, who’s using it, where those revenues are flowing through to. I think there’s absolutely opportunity in that space, but some groups may have gotten ahead of their skis right now. I would focus on the broader picture and that I think will develop more in 2025, but we really need to be patient because a lot of companies are still figuring out how to implement their, figuring out how it generates money or generates efficiencies.
Radon Stancil:	Great. Well, as we like to do each time on these, we kind of like to sum it up with an always ending on the positive. So I’m going to start off with the concern part. As you sit here in October looking just again for the next couple of months as we close out 2024, what would you say right now is your concern?
Andrew Opdyke:	The geopolitical conflict is kind of the key thing that I’m looking at. One is, as somebody who’s got kids at home, I’ve got a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old who’s about to turn 10. You turn on the TV and you see how many families, how many people are being impacted by the war that’s going on. It has economic impact if it were to escalate, and that could be Israel, Gaza. I think if we were to see something with Russia, Ukraine really significantly escalate, or there’s always that lingering thing out there. China’s been kind of circling the sea of China around Taiwan. If we were to see some geopolitical flashpoint, that’s my concern that it throws off the planning on so many other things. That’s what I’m concerned about today. I wouldn’t say it’s a high level concern. I’m not on red alert for it, but I think right now, that’s the thing that I’m watching that I think a lot of economists and a lot of market participants are watching, saying, if something caused us to shift our attention away from investment, away from growth, away from production because we have to respond to something war related, that would be the biggest disruptor ranking.
Murs Tariq:	Yeah, I agree. Let’s end on a positive note. What are you excited about as we close out this and walk into 2025?
Andrew Opdyke:	Yeah, as we close out this year, I’d love to see, again that market broadening out. That is what we really need to see from a sustainability standpoint. We’re also seeing earnings growth right now for 2024, it looks like earnings are supposed to be up somewhere in the nine to 11% space. Earnings are expected to continue to grow into 2025. I’ll say the Fed still has some work to do, but if we continue on the path that we’re on and if we can really address over the next 2, 4, 6 years, some of the spending issues that are coming out of Washington, we are the center of the tech universe. As AI does get that footing as it takes hold, I think we stand specifically the United States stands to benefit massively, right? You think about the 1920s, they called it the roaring twenties. I think there’s a possibility here that as we get to the end of this decade into the 19 or the 2030s, that we could see between the unleashing of human potential, we’re seeing around the world with better education, better food, better sanitation, and the fact that more people have more tools available to them, productivity’s picking up, and I think that’s going to be an incredible thing to watch.
	Again, as I think about my kids, the 9-year-old and the 7-year-old, what they’re going to have available to them by the time they’re entering into the workforce, I think it’s something that we can’t even imagine. So positive developments on the market, earnings front, positive developments continue on the economic front, pay less attention to what’s happening on the political front because it always gets escalated, often emotionalized. But there is real progress taking place, and I think that’s a great thing to see as we close out this year.
Radon Stancil:	Excellent. Well, as always, Andrew, we certainly do appreciate having you come on and share your insights with us, and I know that our listeners really do appreciate it too. So thank you very much. We certainly do appreciate it.
Andrew Opdyke:	Thanks for having me on.
Radon Stancil:	All right, very good. Hey, real quick question. This is something, I was on my walk this morning and my head has gotten wrapped up in this. So we talk about the United States with paying interest on the debt. Who gets that interest? Where does that interest money, that payment go? Who gets that?
Andrew Opdyke:	So it depends on which interest. It’s, some of it goes international, right? There’s international holders of US debt, and so we’re essentially paying other countries for the borrowing that we did from them. Some of it is intra-agency, US debt. So some government agencies owe other government agencies money that essentially gets canceled out. But the other group that’s getting a lot of this is the us, it’s the treasury holder. So one of the things I’ve been talking about in my conversations with advisors, the biggest spending group today in the United States has been the retirees and where is their funds coming from as they’ve been traveling, eating out, as they’ve been early in retirement, they’re getting a lot of their funds in things like fixed income where they’re getting paid at the highest rates they have oh 5, 0 6, and this led to a strange conversation at the Fed. The Fed was looking at this and said, wait a second, are our higher rates, are they stimulating US growth?
Murs Tariq:	Right?
Andrew Opdyke:	Because the group that’s been impacted, their goal with raising rates is we’re going to make it more expensive to borrow them by a house, borrowing, buy a car, borrow, and go to school, borrow and invest in a business. If you look at who’s having the issues with delinquencies, they’ve seen their credit card debt move into serious delinquency or the auto debt. It’s almost entirely the young demographic. It’s 35 and under. They have been tremendously impacted by the fed’s higher rates. They pulled back on spending, and yet overall spending has increased. And the Fed was like, oh, the group that’s doing the activity is not the group that responds to our tool set.
	It is boosted spending. Now, there’s a question on that. If people have moved, let’s say into money market funds, or there’s been a lot of short duration debt that people have gotten into as the Fed starts cutting rates, it brings into this question of could we see a slowdown in spending from the retiree group? Or if the market doesn’t continue to grow as it has, if there was any level of pullback, there are concerns that markets could be more responsive because that group doesn’t have another way to replace that income. We don’t have enough data on it. We don’t get enough data specifically on who’s spending, but I talked with United, I was talking with Marriott, with Chase, with Bank of America. This is something we were thinking about is where’s the money going to? Who’s paying the higher rates and who’s receiving the money from the higher rates? And that’s exactly what it came down to, the group that’s receiving it. But the one thing I would always think about is even if you’re paying your own people, if the interest on the debt, let’s say, gets to 5%, and the US is paying their own people, they still have to generate that money from somewhere. They either have to just issue more debt and more people have to buy it, or they’ve got to raise taxes in order to pay for it.
Radon Stancil:	It’s kind of like a circle of money. I mean, yeah,
Andrew Opdyke:	Exactly. It’s a closed system at the end of the day for the most part. I mean, some of that money flies out in the international, but for the most part, it’s like a closed loop system, and it’s just who’s handed it in And three to 3.2 has historically been that number as interest of the percent of GDP, where, I mean, the two things I think are really going to push politicians are one where that net interest number is at. People are starting to realize it, and two, we have an aging demographic. We’ve got more and more people that are now in retirement. The labor force participation for the 18 to 54 year old is up over the last few years, but total labor force participation is down because the baby boomers have been retiring and they’ve got a heavy focus on, am I going to get my benefits right? Social Security is supposed to hit that number in 2033, less than a decade from now, where it can’t sell self-fund anymore. So that is a group that tends to be politically active, that is a group that has the voting numbers in order to press for, and I think that’s the group that’s ultimately going to push the politicians to take it seriously.