good morning folks welcome to the sense of things  it’s Ron and Jeff here once again with our weekly  

update on what’s going on in the world what’s  going on in the economy and what’s a little  

bit of fun that you might not know hopefully  you will walk away learning something today if  

not we failed at our jobs and we never fail  so welcome to the show we’re going to have  

a little bit of a rundown on what’s gone on a  couple big things in the economics world this  

week in addition to that Ron’s got some stuff  on infrastructure spending and we’ve both got  

a couple fun facts for you so stay tuned  we’ll be right back on in just one second

all right folks welcome to the show hey Ron  how you doing bud good morning we’re official  

we expect to have triple digits for the full week  actually the scary thing is in Texas we’re like  

running in the high 80s it’s literally going to  rain for like the next seven days which Yeah but  

where’s your humidity oh yeah now humidity is  off the charts man you can cut the air when you  

walk well I’ll tell you what you could keep that  because the mornings here even at when it gets  

102 103 in the afternoon the mornings have been  fantastic and I’m assuming by about when it gets  

dark it probably cools down pretty fast sometimes  depending on the humidity yeah sometimes yeah the  

humidity what like 10% it’s low double digits high  singles sometimes yeah listen but when it hits 20  

or 30 Yeah oh you feel it you feel it if you’re  not used to it i go out there and I feel like  

somebody poured sand in my nose no it’s Yeah it’s  not that bad but no all good lots of good stuff i  

will tell you I’m getting more tentative as the  summer comes uh just what’s going on i look it’s  

great for everybody’s accounts everything is going  up but I don’t know i’m getting very tentative  

even though this is the last month of the second  quarter yeah and I’m I guess I’m feeling a little  

bit different i think we’re still gonna I think  we’re still going to stumble a little bit here  

but I just I gut feel like we’re going to have  a better second half of the year than the first  

half we We’ll see one of us will be right and  one of us will be wrong we need a I think we’ll  

be higher but I think we need a healthy pullback  but I’d like to see something signed too sure no  

like I said I agree with you i think there’s a lot  of stuff floating around but yeah we’ve really got  

to get some hard numbers to work from and we’ll  cover some of that today so you want to kick off  

i know you’ve got a fun fact and a couple things  that you’ve got on your side yeah so another state  

will let you now drive 80 miles an hour North  Dakota now what the hell are you gonna hit there’s  

no trees in the entire state so I do have a quick  funny story so when I drove across country three  

years ago actually three yeah three years ago  coming up I remember my mother being the worry  

wart she says “Promise me you will not drive over  75 miles an hour.” I said “Mom I’ll promise but  

I’m going to keep up with traffic.” Yeah so I was  driving just north of you i think it was Midland  

Texas it was somewhere either north or south of  there and it was 80 miles an hour so I called my  

mother and I’m like “Ma I’m sorry i’m driving the  speed limit you have to drive 80 why why because  

that’s the speed limit.” But I thought this but I  thought this was interesting if you look at it on  

some Texas road it reaches 85 i don’t know where  the hell Maybe that’s Ding-Dong Texas from where  

No no that’s that’s the bypass toll road that goes  from Georgetown Texas down to just to the east of  

San Antonio so yeah the whole Torah it is out in  the middle of freaking nowhere there are no towns  

around there nothing but the problem is yeah you  can drive 85 but it’ll cost you about $45 to get  

down the damn toll road so So that’s the Texas  Autobond that’s what you’re saying yeah it’s it  

is the Texas Autobon it is out in the middle of  nowhere but yeah it’s if you don’t want to fight  

with if you don’t want to fight with Austin  traffic coming through it it is the way to go  

it’s just extraordinarily expensive it’s one of  the most expensive toll roads in the country wow  

well and it’s interesting because this has been  around says 30 years yeah and you would think all  

right where are the fatal it’s an 8% increase in  fatality so you would be hoping that no I want to  

drive faster because it’ll create less fatalities  but but you look at that though it’s an 8%  

increase in fatalities but how many more cars are  on the road now than were 40 years ago 30 years  

ago uh tough to say but I think it’s interesting  plus hopefully the roads are Plus think of it the  

cars back when they were testing this originally  were made out of real steel so there wasn’t there  

wasn’t a whole lot of fatalities because you just  plowed through we got plastic and fiberglass we  

got plastic and fiberglass carbon fiber whatever  the hell it is I hear you all right so the next  

thing I thought was interesting I love the  the visual capitalist the top 30 economies  

in the world there are nine states that would be  equivalent to basically the world’s economies are  

from nine states wow and of course if you want to  include just US as a whole essentially we have 10  

nine really of the world’s largest economies and  I knew Germany was up there but Germany’s number  

three if you think about size of how big Germany  is they’re the third largest economy right behind  

China okay but which is when you compare the size  of China versus or even the US versus Germany it’s  

pretty impressive that they’re in third place  though because they’re a pretty compact country  

think of the manufacturing i think that’s where a  big part of it is i know I know they’re involved  

in tech and some software development but even  interesting when you look at that though you’ve  

got like Poland which you know you wouldn’t  typically think is that big but it’s starting  

to be a player out there surprising to me Yeah  but they’re actually not as much manufacturing as  

it is on the tech side as I’ve reported a couple  times they’re becoming huge like in the AI side  

of things and stuff like that it’s interesting to  see how some of these places are and I’m trying  

to figure out what that one is tq i don’t even  know what that is turkey oh is it oh Turkey yeah  

that’s because they’re now spelling it weird or  I guess they’re spelling it they’re not friends  

of the US i don’t know if you know that but that’s  another whole thing but the other reason I wanted  

to bring this up because of the constant tariff  talks this will tell you who’s really important  

to us with tariffs because of their world economy  size but I thought it was interesting essentially  

we’re nine of the law actually interesting i’d  like to see where Arizona is going to be in this  

in the next five years yeah are you seeing more  industry moving out there at this point all the  

headquarters are moving out here from Look from  California they’re either moving here or to Texas  

yeah don’t forget I I mean I know it’s partially  open production but we got the Taiwan I got the  

Taiwan semiconductor less than 15 miles from me  and then the other way I got Intel half a half  

an hour for me but there’s a lot on semiconductor  there’s a lot of big software companies that have  

headquarters here so it’s growing remember I told  you quick fun fact in the last I think six years  

could be seven years at this point of the six  most populous cities Arizona is number five it’s  

now ahead of Philadelphia it’s the only one that  had population growth huh that’s interesting and  

that’s a lot of that’s the migration snowbirds  coming here we’re growing my business really  

expand too because of it yeah and I’d look at  California just can’t get out of its own way  

with a lot of stuff and I think if we see the  if we see the all the stuff going on with the  

tax bill the way it’s looking with 100% expensing  on factories and stuff like that why wouldn’t you  

take the chance and say “Hey you know what there’s  lots of land in Arizona it’s a good place to live  

weather’s nice why Why wouldn’t you move out there  i would say the only issue is power and I don’t  

know what your power situation’s like out there  yeah but actually it’s good the thing that keeps  

coming up is the water issue because we got our  water from Colorado and a lot of the lake levels  

have been down but with all the aquafers that we  have underground they’re number one they’re not  

saying anything’s at a critical level and number  two they’re not talking about hey if we don’t do  

something in the next three to five years we’re  going to be in in a desperate situ we haven’t  

heard any of that yet but I will tell you these  factories and also the data centers that are  

being built here too they require a tremendous  amount of energy yeah and I think they’ve got to  

figure out okay how can you recycle some of that  water that isn’t going to go back into the system  

maybe you can recycle it and reuse it or  something like that in these facilities  

like that because definitely but the other big  thing is we have sun here 330 days of the year  

sol solar is pretty big too on every every data  center lot of big buildings or whatever they all  

have solar panels yeah which makes sense i mean in  that case it makes sense and Okay so you make sure  

you’ve got battery systems to back everything up  y and then of course infrastructure i don’t know  

about by you i just drove down another road near  me fully paved it’s fantastic but I just thought  

it was interesting i think that this amount the  1.2 trillion by 2030 I feel confident if it’s not  

going to go up by 100% it’ll probably go up by 50%  and if you just take a look at where the money is  

being spent you know it’s roads and bridges you  know that that’s where so much of that was built  

in the 1950s and they’re showing their age and  everything else at this point so yeah they need  

to they need to spend money on it look they’re not  building bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge anymore  

that thing isn’t going anywhere nope can you I  I would love to I don’t know what it costs to  

build that i knew it one time i’ve seen a couple  documentaries it was amazing how they did things  

back there in the 1880s but I would love to know  with the exact same materials and labor what that  

would cost oh my god you can’t even imagine what  it cost to build a bridge today out of steel i  

cannot even imagine making it out of brick and  having to do what they did with the sandhogs  

going in there and you know putting the pylons in  and those guys being under underground underwater  

yeah no way for I met somebody back east 20 at  least 25 years ago that was part of the New York  

Planning Commission and I had asked him because  he was involved with a lot of infrastructure i’m  

like I said just out of curiosity what would it  be cheaper to build a bridge or a tunnel he goes  

a tunnel he goes absolutely and if you think  about it I guess so but I just think it’s a  

I just think it’s amazing and also one other  quick fun fact i don’t know why I’m throwing  

this out there but I can’t remember i think it  was a Lincoln Tunnel they actually dug from both  

sides do you know when they met they were like an  inch off that’s awesome if you How is think about  

the tools and the technology building from both  sides down a certain amount still being able to  

do that they were like an inch off and they show  the line where like it’s incredible i don’t know  

i You gotta marvel at it from where we are today  and where we were then oh yeah it’s I think it’s  

going to continue to be that way i think we’re  going to continue to do stuff like that spending  

as much time as I have in Boston thinking of how  long it took to do the stupid big dig you know  

but when you go there now it’s like a totally  different city from when I started going there  

you know 25 30 years ago it is and just a quick  fun thing maybe you have been transient i think  

the number is 16 jobs you may have had in your  lifetime and you may have had some legacy 401k  

403bs tsps whatever it may be maybe you’re not  aware they may be still out there so this little  

lost and found from the government will help you  research that because everything’s connected to  

your social security number so this will give  you a list of those accounts that is awesome  

yeah I never had heard about this i knew about  the state lost and found stuff which everybody  

should do you’ll be shocked at stuff that you find  on that type of stuff my my mom is obsessive with  

this she constantly is out looking for this type  of stuff well if she’s on there every year what  

is she losing on an annual basis that she’s got  to find i don’t know but she does it for family  

she just looks it up for family it’s hilarious  okay but this me about a couple of CPAs told me  

about that back east and here and I think it’s  a great idea yeah no this is a fantastic one so  

we’ll make sure we put that in the show notes  for people to to pull it up and look what do  

you got let me go through this real quick here  and I’ll share some of what I’ve got going on

to begin with did you know let me get this  into slideshow mode did you know that the  

Nobel Prize in economics is not a real Nobel  Prize what is it it was actually established in  

1968 by Sweden Central Bank and it’s called the  Spherge Ricksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in  

the memory of Alfred Nobel i thought that was an  interesting but they refer to it to as the Nobel  

Prize years Nobel Prize in Economics yeah exactly  but it really isn’t actually a Nobel Prize it’s  

not awarded by the Nobel Committee was a Nobel  Peace Prize and there’s a Nobel economic whatever  

yeah but the peace prize and the I think the  literature one all that all of them are actual  

Nobel prizes this is the only one that isn’t an  actual Nobel issued prize it’s actually right by  

the Swedish National Bank okay hardest workers in  the world who do you think those are definitely i  

know we talked about I would have thought it would  be Germany but maybe you would say China or Japan  

you know what i’m going to go with Japan okay  so it’s actually the Greeks they work one and a  

half to 1.4 to one and a half times more than the  Germans or anybody else they’re actually they’re  

not the hardest workers in the world they’re  second only to the the South Koreans as far  

as I don’t understand that because there’s always  been that thing out there about the Northern and  

the Southern Europeans and the Southern Europeans  are the vacationers and the Oh yeah or the Yeah  

but the Greeks are in Southern Europe i know  but they work their butts off so yeah it’s very  

intriguing i thought this was a very interesting  thing today all right a couple things for this  

week june 1 or June 11th 2025 we got CPI data and  it was up.1% and the annual inflation rate’s 2.4  

so all the people that have been whining and  bitching and complaining about inflation and  

tariffs and all that it’s really not showing up  yet it was up slightly from the previous month  

it was interesting to me as I started looking  at this a little bit because I wanted to get  

into the numbers a little bit so first off if  you look at this chart this is CPI going back  

20 years so we’re rolling back into where we were  I would say 2017 to 2018 range that’s where we’re  

back to at this point now the feels like from  a cost standpoint is that we’re still absorbing  

all this garbage out here when we were up around  9% so the prices are very elevated they’re just  

not going up as much but it is coming down which  is great it’s it started a few years back it was  

flat and then it started working its way down but  we’ve really seen it accelerate slower which is  

good that tells us that all right we’re at least  moving back into kind of the normal range I guess  

if I were to say anything it’s inflation relative  to what i got to tell you I don’t get a Starbucks  

coffee every now and then i only get I get it  every night i went there the other day it was  

six bucks i was like or 630 or whatever the hell  it was when you get some kind of You getting some  

kind of frufu drink there or I get a venty white  mocha with non-fat milk and no whipped cream okay  

i don’t know maybe it’s a Mine’s usually about  Mine’s four and a half dollars for Yeah for venty  

cappuccino is like four and a half bucks by me so  it’s because you live in high flute in Phoenix oh  

no but is that a grande avent is that the largest  that’s the venty man that’s the biggest so one of  

the things I wanted to look at is okay that’s fine  it’s 2.4% let’s look through the numbers a little  

bit because I thought this was a bit interesting  i wanted to see where the numbers are at when it  

comes to these costs and it’s interesting where  there’s some spikiness meats poultry and fish  

and eggs 6.1% so that’s still up there and that’s  not necessarily a I mean we import some stuff but  

we pretty much produce a lot of this here in the  country so it’s not really a tariffy thing that I  

think is causing any of that energy and commodity  or energy commodities way down for fuel oil and  

gasoline but here was an interesting one nat gas  up 15.3% which more of our electricity is being  

produced through nat gas and that’s that’s not  good we’ve got to get that number down but it’s  

something we can control because we’ve got the  largest supplies of natural gas in the world so  

I think more supply online does that as I went  through and looked at a few of these things the  

other big one that I heard was “Oh with all the  tariffs we’re gonna have car prices are going  

to be up new vehicles 4% used cars even 1.8%  interesting service stuff maint motor vehicle  

maintenance and repair up 5.1% vehicle insurance  is still off the freaking charts up and I think  

part of that is the cars are just getting so  complex today that if they get into an accident  

especially a let’s say a Tesla or something like  that it is wildly expensive to to fix those things  

yeah i have a different theory on that cannabis  okay just tail it people are still at the bars  

yep the cannabis everybody there’s a lot of  people still out there that are just looking  

for a kick high on a kite or high as a kite and  getting into that or just under the influence  

not necessarily high as a kite but just under the  influence yeah yeah which theoretically it should  

be like drinking you should be persecuted for that  also look tobacco and smoking products are up too  

up 6.3% yeah i’m just saying it all goes into that  that whole thing and I’m not trying to sound like  

some old codger but just saying it’s the reality  it is the reality of it but so that looks through  

some of the numbers and like I said you can see  with with Nat Gas I mean that rolls through a lot  

of the electrical production in a time when we’re  needing more and more electrical production at  

this point and we’re coming into the summer yeah  coming into the summer months that the other piece  

of it is you know yes the administration’s worked  on hey we want to add more nuke power and stuff  

like that but that’s going to be 15 years down the  road that we see some of that some of it’s easier  

to deploy some of the smallcale stuff is easier  to deploy but it’s going to take time to get those  

things online it just doesn’t happen overnight but  hopefully we move down down down that direction  

where we’re actually we’ve got something that can  generate power that is clean and keeps going 24  

hours a day last but not least I wanted to share  we saw some stuff about the preliminary US China  

trade agreement this is the agreement that we  agree but we don’t know for sure i’m still trying  

to figure out how we ended up with US tariffs on  Chinese goods at 55% and they have tariffs of 10%  

on incoming mainly because they don’t import  very much this is what I’d like to know maybe  

we do this for the next one where was it to where  this is going to be yeah exactly yeah so good for  

us and good for them where was it that it was  so bad before yeah and I think the other part  

with the the rare earth minerals and magnets and  stuff like that I think the other part we’ve got  

to worry about and we’ve got to deal with in this  country is we’ve got to start producing that stuff  

here because we cannot have this held over our  heads through this trade agreement there is no  

detail on theft of intellectual property and all  that i’ve not heard any of the details on any of  

this so it it’ll be interesting to see and I  think you’re seeing it in the markets that the  

market’s kind of just let’s wait and see what’s  going on before we Well look the market did get  

a pop and pull back yesterday it’s up it’s up  now today like I said until something’s signed  

yeah look but if nothing else this will definitely  help multinational companies because even if it’s  

a little more a little less this gives them at  least a baseline to do better you can Yeah you  

can you’ve got your numbers okay if I know it’s  going to be 10% going in do I absorb that do I  

pass that on in price or whatever i think it’s  realistic and if you’re an importer okay I know  

I’m going to have let’s call it I’m going to pay  50% more that’s the maximum I’m going to have to  

worry about in this case and a lot of the stuff we  import isn’t like major expensive stuff it’s a lot  

of just garbage that we import so a 50% increase  isn’t necessarily going to be that big and I think  

a lot of that is going to be passed on i think  China is going to absorb a lot of that at this  

point as it comes in we’ll see i hear you yep so I  think it’s an interesting week it’s an interesting  

time to live in right now i think there’s going  to be a lot of changes we’re still waiting on  

the tax legislation and the Senate’s working on  that right now that could be an intriguing part  

like I said with the tax legislation if if  that gets through we’ve already seen a lot  

of corporate spend in the first half of the year  this year it could be interesting to see what the  

back end of the year looks like if the the tax  bill gets knocked out in the next month or so  

and you’ve got expensing firstear expensing  on everything from industrial equipment to  

even factories that could be a massive boom at  least in the construction world for the next year  

yeah there’s a lot of there are some good things  in the bill there’s some things that I’m not crazy  

about but you know what at the end of the day  I hate to say it this way because that’s why  

you got a lot of people on both sides of the the  aisle basically going through it and they’re like  

you know what they like some things in it but  they got to hold their nose to sign it because  

they can’t just sign off on what they like and I  don’t know we’ll see we’ll see yeah and I hope I  

I heard Senator Marshia Blackburn talking about an  idea that I thought actually was interesting okay  

we get it to where we think we can get it right  now and then what we do is we set out every month  

to put up another recision bill that uses that get  some of the cuts that a lot of these the ones that  

are real hardliners want okay let’s put a recision  bill up and let’s get that going because it’s only  

a 5050 bill at the end of the day at the end of  the day it’s tax and spend and we’re not lowering  

our deficit yeah we can if we grow they think the  tariffs are going to do that we got to cut this  

thing in half we got to go from 36 to 18 trillion  that’s only where we were six seven years ago and  

there’s no will on either side to do that yeah  yeah i don’t know i have hope but I think it’s I  

think it’s I just know how politicians work and  they tend to not do as they say something but  

they don’t actually do it because it’s whatever  happens keep it on this my man the crazy thing  

about this was a year ago this happened just  servicing our debt the interest alone is higher  

than our military budget yep which is a trillion  this year i don’t know how you follow up with  

anything other than no big deal don’t look over  here there’s nothing to see sorry that that’s a  

problem and a lot of people a lot of big ones I  know Jamie Diamond and Ray Dalio and Paul Tudtor  

Jones they’ve raised the flag on this but again  where’s the will to get anything done so yeah  

that’s another conversation absolutely i think a  lot of good information this week and folks make  

sure that you subscribe to the channel because we  put these out every week and we’re here for you  

to make sure that you have a good understanding  of where the market’s going where the economy is  

going at any time so thanks a lot for joining us  and we will see you back here the very next week