Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Hello, Hello, happy new Year, and welcome to the Morning Filter podcast.

I'm Susan Jibinsky with Morning Star.

Every Monday before market open, Morningstar Chief U.S. market strategist Dave Sikara,

and I sit down to talk about what investors should have on their

radars for the week, some new morning star research, and a few stock ideas.

All right. Well, Dave, good morning. Happy New Year. Let's kick off our first episode of the

new year by looking back at 2025. Now, the economy held up better than some expected.

Inflation was pretty mild, and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates three times last year.

So any surprises in any of that?

Well, that's a loaded question.

So good morning, Susan.

Happy New Year.

So, yeah, so coming into, you know, 2025, Morningstar's economics team projected that the real GDP rate for the year would be 2% even.

And then, you know, following DeepSeek and the Liberation Day tariffs, they dropped that GDP expectation all the way down to 1.2% in April of 2025.

And as you mentioned, you know, the economy has really done a lot better than what we and pretty

much everyone else had expected after that.

At this point, it looks like GDP is going to come in pretty close to our original expectation.

You know, right now we're looking for 2.1% for the full year.

And in fact, I'd say I think we see a pretty similar pattern in inflation as well.

Coming into the year, our original projection was 2.5%. That was ratcheted all the way up to 3%

following the Liberation Day tariffs in April. And it turns out, look, it's like it's going to be

...