S8 Ep346: SEGMENT 1: RETAIL SALES AND ECONOMIC OUTLOOK Guest: Liz Peek Strong retail sales signal consumer confidence as Trump takes office. Peek discusses holiday spending numbers, the stock market's performance, and economic expectations for the new administratio
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
SEGMENT 1: RETAIL SALES AND ECONOMIC OUTLOOK Guest: Liz Peek Strong retail sales signal consumer confidence as Trump takes office. Peek discusses holiday spending numbers, the stock market's performance, and economic expectations for the new administration. Conversation touches on inflation pressures, interest rate concerns, and whether the economy's momentum can continue under new policy directions.
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| 0:57.2 | I'm John Batchel. I welcome my good colleague, Elizabeth Peake, a columnist at the Hill, a columnist at Fox News, much on Fox Business. And when last we spoke, Liz, you and I told anecdotes |
| 1:04.1 | of Christmas shopping. The Christmas shopping anecdotes that I liked was my bookstore in Kent, |
| 1:10.0 | Connecticut, did a |
| 1:11.0 | banner-waving season. And if a bookstore is doing well, reasoned John on air, then the people |
| 1:17.4 | at the head of the line, not books, did extremely well at Christmas. You also saw people |
| 1:23.7 | wiped out, shelves empty before Christmas. Well, the retail numbers are in. An anecdote turns out |
| 1:32.2 | to be a fairly good metric. Are you surprised, Liz? Good evening to you. Good evening, John. |
| 1:37.6 | Absolutely not surprised because to your point, I think I mentioned that there were two stores that I visited |
| 1:43.0 | right before Christmas. They both |
| 1:44.7 | were struggling with inventory shortages, didn't really have much to offer. One was a toy store. |
| 1:49.8 | Of course, toy stores are supposed to do well at Christmas time, but this, I think, manager just |
| 1:54.6 | simply didn't anticipate this big rush that came right before the holiday. So, yeah, the Christmas, |
| 2:02.2 | the holiday spending was up around over 4%. And that was the top of the range that most people had expected. And really |
| 2:08.5 | signals, I think, a number of things. Number one, that the consumer is in pretty good shape. And we've |
| 2:14.0 | been talking about this every week. I mean, I get repeated updates from Bank of America, |
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