Hello, everyone. I'm Sarah Longwell, and I am here with Catherine Rampel, our new economics reporter and

newsletter writer. Catherine, what's up? It's great to see you. Great to be here. Is this your first

take? I think it is, maybe? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've done some other stuff with you all,

like even before I joined the Bullwark, But I think this is my first official take.

All right. Well, let's get our take on. Okay, so consumer sentiment. That's what I want to talk about.

I'm just going to read a little bit from CNBC here. Worries over the government shutdown surged in the early part of November,

pushing consumer sentiment to its lowest in more than three years and just off its worst level ever, according to the University of Michigan survey that was released on Friday. So, Catherine, set the scene here.

This month's consumer sentiment saying it's the lowest in years. How scared should we be about that?

What's it mean? To be fair, people have been getting progressively more bummed out about the economy over the years in ways that don't always reflect what's actually going on in the economy.

But I think this grimness is pretty much grounded in like actual concerns about what's going on.

It's the government shutdown.

It's tariffs.

It's the fact that affordability issues are not going away, as we've already seen happen

in an election quite recently. So, you know, people are upset and worried about prices,

about losing their jobs. The only thing that seems to be doing well in the economy,

potentially propping it up, is the AI world.

And if you look at those same consumer sentiment numbers, there is one outlier group, which is people who own a lot of stocks, like the top terseil, I think it is, the top third of people in terms of stock ownership.

They're pretty happy. They actually got

happier in the past month, but everybody else is pretty bummed out. Yeah, I mean, I saw we lost,

JVL and I did a take earlier this week, 1.1 million jobs lost since January. And I keep trying

to figure out, because when you say, well, people were like

overreacting. And maybe that was us. Maybe it was us during when the, when the tariffs hit

...