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Well, for more on the Federal Reserve's latest decision to hold rates steady, we want to welcome in Stephen Whiting, City Wealth interim chief investment officer. Steve, it's great to see you as always to get your thoughts on this. I want to pick up a little bit on what Jared was just talking about, which is that the Fed now sees the risks as more balanced, meaning the risk of inflation a little bit lower, but the risk to the labor market perhaps a little bit higher. And so I'm curious how you're thinking about that balance.

I think it's pretty clear that the labor market is decelerating and if you want a story of collapse, you're not going to get one. Uh but we've had a very large drop in unfilled job openings, about four million. Um the pace of employment gains, we take a look at the second quarter, 146,000 for private sector employment, the weakest of the post-pandemic recovery thus far. If you take a look at the downward revisions that we've seen for 12 months, they've averaged 33,000. Uh for non-farm payroll revisions. So what's happening in every likelihood is when you see Friday's payroll report, it's an overstatement of the actual strength. So things like the narrowing the breadth of employment gains that Fed Chairman Powell cited at his last press conference, FOMC press conference, was pretty critical for do they really want a five and a half percent funds rate uh in that environment where you're decelerating on inflation and employment.

And Stephen, I'm curious how you thought about the, I want to say a groundswell, but certainly more and more folks in the last few days discussing the notion that maybe the Fed should have just gone ahead and cut rates today, rather than waiting for September, which is what, you know, markets have clearly priced in. Um, did that ever seem realistic to you? And I guess the question would also be, are markets already doing the Fed's job for them, that the cut might be academic by the time we get to, you know, that September meeting?

Well, certainly markets are leading the way, but they're also interacting with Fed speak. So pretty clearly here, if the committee had come up and said, uh, well, this is just unacceptable, we need to act soon, markets would have been priced towards. So what we see when you actually get to Fed day, uh, is generally speaking, you get more than a 90% hit ratio of no surprise. You take a look back through the history since around 1994, uh, you would have seen that markets are pretty well braced for what the Fed actually does. And this is a case again where they're not seeing sort of any emergency action here. The press release which you just saw ahead of Powell's actual comments, you know, it's really about why they held rates steady today, not how their outlook for monetary policy evolves. Let's just remember, their last summary of economic projections for a little more than two years from now, they have policy rated at 3-1. So, you know, their outlook to keep the economy from having an unacceptable period of labor market weakness is one in which they're easing monetary policy. I think Powell, in a short while, will probably explain to the broader public that this isn't just about recession or boom, that this is really again that we've set monetary policy restrictive. We have to ease back from that if we want to keep to a very full maximum employment situation.