Hey, welcome to the Weekend Bite presented by the Wall Street Breakfast.

I'm Daniel Snyder, and thanks for tuning in this week.

So earnings are strong.

Where are they?

The market year to date returns are currently negative 11.8% on the S&P 500 down 8% on the Dow down 16.2% for the Russell and down a 20% on the NASDAQ.

And we found out this week that the US first quarter economy

has shrunk at a 1.4% annual rate, which is why this show is hopefully going to give you some insight as to where we go from here. So let's go ahead and bring in our first guest joining us today. The true audience favorite Eric Bazmatian from EPV macro research a service found here on seeking

Alpha Marketplace. Eric it's always great to have you join us. Now you've been on a few times

reiterating to our audience that the economic growth rate has slowed down pretty dramatically. It feels like we've been talking about this for months, right? So let's start there. Is that still what you are seeing?

And is this slowdown in growth leading you

to believe that a recession is coming in the future?

Yeah, thanks Daniel.

So I was on over the last couple of months outlining the case for growth to slow much more than consensus was expecting and the reason for that was primarily because of a significant deterioration in real income.

And I brought a chart of that which shows the growth rate of real income falling

extremely significantly since the spring of last year.

So since March or April of 2021,

real income was growing at about a 5% annualized rate that slowed pretty dramatically cut right through

what the historical or longer run trend has been to about 1.1%. Now we're going to get this number updated on Friday, so maybe by the time people are watching, the

March number will be updated. The projection is that this real income number is going to slow pretty close to 0% Daniel and historically when real income is negative it's very difficult for the economy to expand at all. And the reason for that is because the economy runs on unit volumes and this cycle has been very difficult for investors and

an analyst because of how high the inflation rate is and the gap between

nominal growth and real growth. So a lot of investors are used to measuring growth nominal or real and sort of looking at it

interchangeably because inflation was always kind of one and a half 2% and there was really no

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