James Castori's welcome back to Seeking Alpha.

Always great to talk to you.

Thanks for coming on.

James writes on Seeking Alpha.

You also run an investing group called Successful Portfolio Strategy.

Let me ask you, we saw GDP contraction in Q1. What would you say in terms of bringing that into context and how much that may mean

a recession or how much you're putting on the odds of a recession happening? How else would

you contextualize the GDP numbers and

maybe the economic data will be seen for the coming months?

Well, interestingly, I actually thought that GDP number was really good.

I think that anybody that's interpreting that negative GDP number in a negative light isn't

really familiar with how these figures work and what

these figures actually mean. The negative GDP number was actually caused by a spike in imports.

In other words, there was an increase in imports. But if you actually think about it,

what does it mean for there to be an increase in imports? It just means that there's more demand.

In other words, people have money and people decide to spend a lot of that money.

And it actually caused imports to rise.

But the thing is that in GDP accounts, imports are subtracted from GDP.

So it comes in the GDP accounts, this increase in imports, which is actually reflecting

an increase in demand on the, you know, in other words, U.S. consumers are actually spending

more and businesses are spending more. That increase in spending actually gets reflected in a

negative way in GDP. And that's actually what caused this negative GDP number. So if that hadn't been there, if we actually

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