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Welcome.

My name is Dan Hugar, librarian and research associate at the Acton Institute.

And today I'm joined by Dave Hebert, returning guest.

Love it.

Senior Research Fellow at A-I-E-R and an affiliate scholar here at A-E-R. Dave is one of my favorites. I always say, are you up for economic potpourri? And Dave says, smells nice. Dave, thank you for being with us.

Oh, thanks so much for having me today. So we got a new year. Do we have a new economy? So how did the United States finish 25 in terms of, in terms of, you know, the sort of standard economic growth, employment, market performance, all the things that people usually think about when they talk about the economy,

even though that's not all of the economy. Right, right. So, you know, right now we're still waiting

on fourth quarter GDP figures that come out. They should be out sometime next week or the week

after. I forget the BLS's exact release calendar right now. So for some contexts, you know, we're recording this on January 14th.

Yep.

So those number, that last quarter's growth rate has not come out just yet.

What we have seen, though, are the Q3, Q2, and Q1.

So remember that Q1 actually shrank, right?

GDP went down in Q1 of 2025. It resurged in Q2 and it resourged again in Q3 with that headline, you know, 4.3% quarterly growth rate.

Everyone was talking about that. Yeah. So here's what I did. And it's somewhere on my substack. And so I went through and, you know, de-annualized those quarterly growth rates and then annualized the total, which is a ridiculous sentence to say.

But at the end of the day, what it came out to was through the three quarters of data that we have so far.

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