10 06 25 We talk SC economy with Dr Joey Von Nessen

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Jonathan and Kelly Show.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Try to name a Democrat leader who hasn't called the president.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hitler, Kelly Nash.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Try to name one who hasn't said Republicans and our
policies are an existential threat to democracy.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
The Jonathan and Kelly Show.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Woc Well, we're pointing out that we need to dial
back the political heat. How's that working out for us?

Speaker 4 (00:30):
Kelly, Well, that's so good. That was the lieutenant governor
for Virginia win Some Seers that you just heard the
voice of, and her political opponent, the front runner for
governor right now, has called her a white supremacist. I'll
point out that the Democrat is a white liberal, and

(00:50):
that the win Some series is an African American who
doesn't understand what it's like to be black in Virginia.
She doesn't understand those struggles, according to the white liberal.
More importantly, the attorney general who's running in that race.
In twenty twenty two sent text messages to a fellow
House member. He was in the House there and someone

(01:11):
he was very upset with the way a vote recently went,
and the Speaker of the House in Virginia came down
against the idea of any gun legislation. We're just going
to keep allowing it to happen over and over again.
He was so upset about it that he sent this
fellow Republican house member. Now this is a Democrat sending
it to a Republican. I would if I name the

(01:32):
three worst people in the world, and if I only
had two bullets, I'd put him both in his head.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
Which is an old joke amongst Democrats. But this guy
decides to up it with a little more descriptive for
a bitch.

Speaker 4 (01:46):
Yeah, and I was surprised. I mean he mentioned Hitler
as one of them. Now, Pol Pott, I would have
thought that would have been a guy after his own heart.
For those of you who are not familiar, mister Pott,
was the Ugandan excuse me, the was it Uganda? Was
it Uganda? It was Cambodia. Cambodia, Cambodia. He killed about
a million. But this was in the name of justice. Yes,

(02:09):
he said that it the rent was too damn high.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (02:14):
He said that the people weren't getting enough medical care.
He literally sounded like Zorhan Mamdani. Yes, we need to
get all this taken care of. For the people and
anyone who obstructs me, we will we will fight. Oh,
they loved a fighter, They loved the fighters and Cambodia
back in the day. And so he killed a million
of them in his like a little ten year reign

(02:36):
of terror. And so but for some reason, this democrat
doesn't like it when people fight for free health care.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Anyway, he wouldn't kill.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
Polpot, he wouldn't kill Hitler. He would have killed this
guy twice.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
That's right, because we have to save democracy.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
But then he had another interesting, bizarre twist which he
then followed those text messages up with a phone call
to the Republican lawmaker and said, now she's paraphrasing because
she doesn't remember it word for word. But he has
admitted that it's true that what he really wished is
he could take those two bullets and put him in
the two kids' heads, that of this politician, and they

(03:15):
could die in their mother's arms. They wouldn't die when
I shot them. They would die when they get Eventually.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
He's a sharpshooter. He knows how to shoot them, so
they would live long enough to die in their mother's arms.

Speaker 4 (03:25):
I want their mother to feel their bodies go limp,
he said, and that way maybe he could come around
on gun reform. They got to feel the pain.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
If you're going to feel if you're going to affect change, Kelly,
they got to feel the pain themselves.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
Now, is that disqualifying? Did you fantasize about the death
of your political opponents, or that you fantasize about the
death of their children? No, not in Virginia, apparently not.
Not the Court of the Democrats.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
They love Abigail, and they love well, they love this
guy too. Yeah, of course, And Abigail is the one
if you remember. I don't know what she was doing prior.
I'm surprised she doesn't have her Wall Street credentials because
she's a hell of an investor.

Speaker 4 (04:04):
Well has she made a lot of money, Abigail? I
know that, Abigail if you go to Justthnews dot com.
I don't know if it's on any other websites this morning,
but Just the News that's John Solomon's website. He does
a great job of investigating reporting. Abigail responded to the
attacks of September eleventh, and a unique Only Abigail could

(04:26):
imagine doing this. I suppose Abigail responded to the attacks
of September eleventh by in January of two thousand and two,
so that's literally what like nine weeks after the attacks.
She took a job working at a school. She wanted
to help the children, but not just any children. She
wasn't going to teach her just a public school. She
went to a school that was founded in nineteen ninety

(04:48):
seven by Musa Mohammad Abu Marzak, who was working as
the chairman of Hamas at the time. Now as the
chairman of Hamas, he had moved to northern Virginia years earlier. Interesting,
I don't know why we would have the member, the
leader of Hamas living in Virginia, but we did. And
he was dissatisfied with the education that his kids were getting,

(05:08):
even at the private schools in Virginia, because it was
too American. So he decided to partner up with some
of his buddies in HAMAS and the Saudi Arabian government
and launched the Islamic Saudi Academy. This is almost exclusively
for the training of terrorists.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
Almost exclusively.

Speaker 4 (05:27):
Yeah, I mean this is where all the Hamas people
would send their kids.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
And I had to look up the pronunciation, and now
I've forgotten what it's called. It's not a mosque, it's
a must have forgotten how to pronounce it. But it's
an educational institute set up by the mosque.

Speaker 4 (05:42):
So she took a job as a teacher, teaching terrorists'
children at the Islamic Saudi Academy. Now, if you go
back to two thousand and two, two thousand and three,
even Democrats were protesting this school, Why is it allowed
to be here? So on and so forth, But that
she crossed the picket lines in order to help teach

(06:03):
the kids. Now you would think, okay, maybe, look we're
talking twenty two years ago, twenty three years ago, this
was happening. It's a long time ago. People had a
lot of time to reflect. Perhaps she's now embarrassed in hindsight.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
Maybe she thought that wasn't a good idea.

Speaker 4 (06:17):
Proud of it to this very day, she says, why
would I be embarrassed that I helped raise children in
northern Virginia. Well, you should be embarrassed by that. What
you should be embarrassed about is that you raised terrorists.
That's what you should be embarrassed about. You should be
ashamed that you've betrayed your country. But how in the
world is this woman the front runner for governor again

(06:38):
after you called the African American a white supremacist. It's
all defies logic.

Speaker 3 (06:44):
As we're sitting here scratching our heads about Mandami in
New York, this even tops all that craziness.

Speaker 4 (06:50):
By the way, the front page of the New York
Post right now, Mam Donnie is apparently when he went
back home to get married and got was it you've
gone to that he was married in I believe I'm
obsessed with Uganda this morning. Apparently, yes, and the secluded
Ugandan compound owned by his family he took time to
pose with a politician over there apparently went to her office,

(07:12):
Rebecca Kadaga, who is famous in Uganda for one main
hardline piece of legislation she authored, which would call for
the imprisonment for life without the possibility of parole, of
any individual caught in homosexual activities.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
Well, maybe she'll soften her stance after she realizes that Mondami,
in his position here in the US, will be much
like some of the House members like Omar from Somalia's
told you that she's a Somalian first, So he's actually
going to be working for Uganda.

Speaker 4 (07:45):
Well, she said, she did say in this thing, say
what you got to say to get elected, and he said,
that's what I'm doing exactly. I'm telling the people of
New York what they want. We love the gays, we
don't want to imprison them for life. We certainly don't
want to hack off their genders. That's not anything that
Mom Donnie would be about, No, Sirreebop. He loves the gays.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Toll And we were for all those years we were
told that the Maga crow was destroying the Republican Party. Yeah,
the Maga policies that even some of the most hardcore
leftists I talked to here in Colombia. I love his policies,
but I just can't stand it when he tweets they're
talking about he.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Doesn't even have Twitter anymore.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Right, But I told the person I was looking to
do over the week is I got it. He's not
the most tactful. The head of the magis Donald Trump
is not the most tactful on social media. But his
message gets a point, or his point gets across very quickly.
Maybe he should soften it a little bit. I don't know.
The message to BB over the weekend was pretty clear.

(08:51):
Just to add a little sass on it.

Speaker 4 (08:53):
For you, Well, you mentioned BB not in Yahoo over
there in Israel, and you know, I'm sure some lunatic
will say, I'm hearing Donald Trump to King David, the
greatest king of all time in most people's estimations. But
King David was a brute who's also a murderer, who's
also an adulterer. I mean, there's a lot of flaws

(09:15):
in King David. And if you study the Bible, you
know that King David was not allowed to build the temple.
God said, you've got too much blood on your hands.
Your kid will do it. But King David was described
as a man after God's own heart, and there's a
lot of reasons for that. But the point being, there
are certain people for certain times, certain seasons in a country.

(09:37):
Donald Trump is not the president that a lot of
people would like in the sense of, to your point,
the statesmanship. He doesn't have a lot of that statesmanship.
But he's what we needed right now. We are responding.
It's so ironic that Joe Biden and the whole Democrat
Party spent four years more than four years, telling us

(09:57):
that the existential threat to a Marrior was global warming,
when the reality is the existential threat is actual invasion
of gangs, terrorists, mobsters. They've been pouring over the border
for more than four years.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
Now.

Speaker 4 (10:17):
You need somebody with a hard, heavy hand to clean
up the mess. You can't do this statesman like. You
can't do it pretty like it's good. Yes, you're gonna
take over entire apartment buildings in Chicago. You're going to
take over city blocks in Portland, Oregon because they are resisting.
They want their their legal terrorists here.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
Speaking of the Portland, Oregon situation having to do with
the Stata Oregon, this is what led to you know,
and I don't know where that judge has a beach home,
but this is why you're being told that the magis
absolutely blew up the Judge Goldstein's home at a Stowe,
Island not Goldstein Goodstein, Okay, sorry Judge Goldstein. So and

(10:58):
I don't maybe you'll find somebody set a bomb in
the house. I don't know, maybe it was just a
gas leak. We don't have any information yet, but the
headlines have already been formed. Social media posts have already
been made. That's the way it is as far as
Americans will perceive it. There's no reason for a page
three correction anytime soon in the New York Times.

Speaker 4 (11:18):
No, I hadn't seen that that had been reported as
a terrorist activity.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
That's what social media obviously.

Speaker 4 (11:27):
Oh, social media is posted. Yes, yes, yes, oh, okay,
I know SLED hasn't said that.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
No, No, SLED is investigating as to what exactly happened
in the.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
House right now. It seemed like it might be some
sort of gas leak or something, but possibly, I guess
a bomb, probably by a maga guy.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
Oh, I'm sure that's that scenario is going to play
out before your eyes again today, and I'll tell you what.
Hold on a second. We got to take care of it.
We got a hotline call here.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Now.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
We did not get an update because of the government
shutdown for the jobs numbers on Friday. That would have
been when we're scheduled to be released. So you would
think that why will we talked to doctor Joey von
Nesson Because he's smart enough to know other things. You'll
explain that coming up in the second. We don't have

(12:13):
to have just the jobs report. When doctor Joey von
Nessing gives us the report. It's from many different leading
economic indicators. Let me go to the hotline. Kellen ash
Welcome on the phone from the Darlamore School of Business,
University of South Carolina, Doctor Joey von Nessing, Good morning, sir.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Heyti, you guys.

Speaker 4 (12:30):
What's going on, doctor von Nesson. I didn't expect to
hear from you today. Normally this would be the time
we analyze the jobs report that came out on Friday.
But there's no job report.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
No.

Speaker 5 (12:39):
Unfortunately, we don't have a job support but we do
have other data that we're looking at, so that the
job support is very important, but it's one metric among many.
And one analogy I like to use when we look
at the different sources of economic data and jobs data
is you can think about when you're trying to assess
the economy, think about it like you're trying to assess

(12:59):
the high temperature in Columbia, right. So you can look
at thermometers that are all over the area. You can
look at the thermometer at Owen's Field, at the airport,
you can look at a thermometer at usc you can
look at one in the sun You can look at
one in the shade and you have all these different
thermometers trying to assess what the high temperature is, and

(13:20):
they're all telling you something slightly different because they're placed
in different locations, and so you have to know exactly
what you're reading and what the differences are in order
to assess really what the trends are looking like. And
so you can think about economic data the same way.
There are a number of different sources, but you have
to compare them and know what they're measuring in order

(13:41):
to get a sense of how the economy is trending.

Speaker 4 (13:44):
I hope the economic that is not as brutal as
the temperatures in South Carolina.

Speaker 5 (13:48):
Fortunately, no, it's not. It's been much more calm, much
more pleasant than what we've seen, although the weather's been
nice recently. Got to admit that. Yes, well, so.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
Far this year.

Speaker 5 (13:59):
If we if we look at where the economic landscape
is headed, we've seen a more sluggish economy in twenty
twenty five. I think that's the one term we can
use that describes where we are right now. Sluggish growth,
positive growth. We're still moving in a positive direction, but
growth that has been consistently slower this year than what

(14:20):
we saw on twenty twenty four. And one measure to
see that is to look at GDP growth, which has
been up by about one point five percent this year
compared to about two point five percent last year. And
there are a couple of reasons for that. Number One
is that purchasing power is still down for consumers. In
other words, we're still wrestling with these lingering effects of

(14:42):
high inflation over the last several years, and so consumers
are still struggling with purchasing power. The dollar still doesn't
go as far as it did on the eve of
the pandemic. And the other factor is to back and
forth on tariff policy, on trade policy, which has caused
businesses to go more to a weight and see mode.
So hiring has slowed a bit this year. So you

(15:04):
put those two together and you see you still see
positive growth this year, but growth it hasn't been as
strong as it was in twenty twenty four.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
You know, outside of the housing industry talk to us
about what could be the ramifications of the Feds lowering
the rate again since we get a little bit of
a reprieve most recently, well.

Speaker 5 (15:23):
What the Fed has done is they've seen weaker job
growth throughout the summer months, and they recognize that that
can eventually lead to the layoff of workers, and that's
what they're trying to avoid. So in a real sense,
slower job growth isn't as much of a problem in
and of itself as it is to the extent that

(15:44):
it's a leading indicator for future layoff activities. So sometimes
when companies pull back on hiring, that eventually means that
they could lay workers off because it shows that they
are not seeing as much demand. So the goal the
FED in lowering interest rates to help stimulate economic activity
across the board. So certainly housing is part of that,

(16:05):
but also providing ways for businesses to get to be
able to get to borrow money more cheaply, have easier
access to capital, and for broader consumer loans. It's not
just about housing, but about consumers across the board, and
so we expect to see an uptick in economic activity
throughout the rest of twenty twenty five into early twenty

(16:26):
twenty six. As a result, it's not something that happens overnight.
This is going to be something that we see slowly
worked in. So the effects of interest rate cuts slowly
make their way through the economy, but that should help
bolster growth as we as we look ahead next year,
especially if inflation stabilizes at its current level and if

(16:48):
the tariffs don't have a significant effect on inflation, which
they really haven't yet and we can talk more about that.
That's a recipe for stronger growth next year, lower interest rates,
and hopefully inflation that stays fairly stable where it is today.

Speaker 4 (17:04):
Talking with doctor von Nessen from the Darlamore School of Business,
and you know when we talk about job growth is slow,
how much of that is because the United States education
system seem to de emphasize trades years ago. And you
know now we see from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

(17:25):
that there is literally millions of jobs open right now
in America for tradesmen.

Speaker 5 (17:30):
That's a great point, and that is a significant contributing
factor because we do see a number of jobs that
are open, as you say, millions of jobs across the US,
and we have deemphasized those, and that looks at a
long run challenge that the US spaces because remember these
especially today when we're looking at the development of AI

(17:54):
and what that means for either worker augmentation or displacement
when we look at when we look at that impact,
AI is going to disproportionately affect office jobs, white collar jobs,
and so that is, but they're not going to affect
the trades at least not not nearly as much. So

(18:16):
we're looking at a scenario where you have a lot
of open positions that that we don't see students exposed to,
particularly early on in K through twelve UH and so
that creates a long run challenge. So that's something that
South Carolina actually does a pretty good job of in
terms of providing opportunities to train UH trained students for

(18:39):
these trades. And when you look at salaries, you if
you go to a trade school, you have a few
years of experience, and you're making a wage that is
as high, if not higher than most other jobs in
the country that that you would get with a with
a four year degree. So they're very competitive, they pay well.

(19:02):
But you're right, because we have de emphasized them, there
is a major shortage and that's something that we have
to take seriously.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
You know, anecdotally, we're hearing from agriculture or maybe construction
in particular that some of these small business owners and
persons that we would have an opportunity to speak to
or talking about a lot of people are self deporting.
We're seeing people that they usually would have a full
crew now they do not. And I know those are
anecdotal positions and conversations, but statistically, are we seeing where

(19:32):
that is actually self deportation or the ice effect is
starting to affect some of our industries.

Speaker 5 (19:38):
You're right, we're seeing it anecdotally right now, so we
don't have any specific data at the local level. Agriculture, construction,
retail tend to be affected, and of course that would
impact South Carolina as well. We do see that immigration
rates are down this year, and that may be part
of why we've seen slower job grow in twenty twenty

(20:01):
five because what's interesting when we look at the job
numbers is that the unemployment rate has remained fairly stable,
right around four point three percent, even though job growth
itself has been fairly weak, which when you think about
it on the at first, that seems fairly unusual because
if we're not creating as many jobs, why is it
that the unemployment rate is continuing to stay low. Well,

(20:24):
that would be the case if we don't have as
many people coming into the labor force. In other words,
if we don't need as many jobs, if we're not
seeing as many people come into the labor force that
are looking for work, and so that implies that we
have lower demand and lower supply at the same time.
So going forward into twenty twenty six, if we're going

(20:46):
to continue to have lower growth of the labor force,
if we're going to have lower rates of immigration, that
means that in order to get GDP growth up, we're
going to have to look at higher rates of productivity.
When you're looking to grow an economy to produce more
goods and services, you can do it by either bringing
more people in more people can produce goods and services,

(21:08):
or the existing people can produce at a faster rate
an increase in productivity. So, if we're going to be
bringing fewer people into the labor force, then in order
to expand economic growth, we have to make our existing
workforce more productive. And that gets back to the conversation
around AI. How can AI realistically generate productivity gains to

(21:31):
get us back to GDP growth. It's closer to three
or even three and a half to four percent compared
to where we are right now, which is closer to
one and a half to two percent.

Speaker 4 (21:40):
All politics is local, everybody, you know, We've heard that
phrase for years, and so yes, we're concerned about the
United States as a whole. But I'm far less concerned
about how the you know, Seattle Washington market is doing
than I am any city in Columbia. Are we set
up pretty well? At what meaning? I'm looking at some

(22:01):
of the manufacturing jobs that are allegedly coming. So all
of these seem to be coming in twenty twenty seven,
like Scout Motors, Azuzu, Eaton's expanding Mega Metal, and Ridgeway
Fine Organics, and Union County euro charm in Kershaw County, Rolls,
Royce and Aiken. Does it seem like we've kind of

(22:22):
positioned ourselves as the place to be or one of
the states to be in as we get ready for
this next wave of manufacturing?

Speaker 5 (22:28):
Very much so. South Carolina is in an incredibly strong position,
and we are very bullish on the long run outlook.
And it's important to recognize the difference between the short
run out look for the state and for the US
and the long run outlook, especially for South Carolina, because
despite the fact that we've had some disruptions and we're
having some the ebbs and flows of twenty twenty five

(22:51):
that we've talked about. We are still in a very
good position and we do have a major competitive advantage
when it comes to manufacturing. It's a number of the
manufacturers we have in South Carolina and that's likely to
continue going forward. South Carolina's actually been ranked number one
in the country for employment growth in twenty twenty five.

(23:14):
We have a strong we have strong population growth throughout
the southeast and especially in South Carolina. And when we
look at all the competitive advantages that we have, we
are set up well. And I'll just mention too very briefly.
Number one is workforce. We talked about earlier, the importance
of the trades, and South Carolina's Technical college system does

(23:38):
an exceptional job of meeting South Carolinian I'm sorry, meeting
the demands of employers by training South Carolinians with the
skills that they need to become employed locally. And many
companies that are locating in South Carolina, many manufacturers explicitly
state that that is a reason these workforce training programs,

(24:00):
largely administered through the tech college system. That's one reason
why they are in South Carolina, and then the second
is our geography, the fact that we are located. We're
a coastal state in the Southeast. We are in a
very good position to be able to manufacture goods here
in South Carolina and then either ship them elsewhere in

(24:24):
the US or ship them abroad through the Port of Charleston. So,
just from a geographic perspective, manufacturers are ideally suited to
locate in South Carolina because they have access to both
the global and the domestic market, especially in the US
where we see more and more of the population growth
happening in the Southeast going forward. So if you're a

(24:46):
manufacturer and or you're selling consumer goods, you're a wal
Mart or an Amazon. If you want access to the
US market increasingly, you want to be located in the Southeast.
And South Carolina is geographically positioned better than most other
Southeastern states to have access to the greatest number of
people in the least amount of time. In other words,

(25:09):
you can reach more people from South Carolina than most
other Southeastern states. So we have a lot of competitive
advantages in South Carolina.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
I know we're taxing your time a little bit this morning.
But I have a generic question which we usually don't
have time to ask because we're talking about the specific
jobs report. But we've always heard the barometer of at
four percent unemployment, you're actually fully employed. Can you explain
if that if is that true?

Speaker 5 (25:35):
And if it is, why, Yes, it's a rule of thumb,
so we have to take that with a grain of salt.
But yes, if we're at four percent unemployment, typically we
economists call that quote unquote full employment, which just means
that in general, again, overall, everybody is everybody's experience varies,

(25:57):
but in general, the reason people are unemployed today when
you have an un when you have a four percent
unemployment rate, is not because of a lack of job availability.
It may be a lack of of of UH skills.
In other words, they don't have the skill sets that
they need. It may be they're living in an area
that doesn't have as much job creation in that particular region.

(26:20):
But overall, what it means is that for the economy
as a whole, UH, the the reason for unemployment is
not because of a lack of general job acts. The
second point is that it it means that the bulk
of the of the of those who are unemployed are
disproportionately people who are in transitory unemployment. In other words,

(26:43):
they're moving from one position to another, which is a
regular part of the job market as well.

Speaker 4 (26:47):
Got it, doctor von nesson any do you have a
quick estimate on how much money it is costing whether
the state of South Carolina or the federal government, or
I should say, the people of the America in public
every month that the government stays shut down or every week.

Speaker 5 (27:04):
We don't have a specific estimate. That's a good question.
I would say in general that again, looking overall from
an economic growth perspective for the nation, if we're talking
about a few days or a week or two in
terms of the government shut down, is that going to
have a meaningful impact on our outlook or overall economic

(27:25):
activity or growth patterns. I would say no. Once it
gets above about thirty days or so, that's when we
can begin to see some more significant effects, because that's
when you start to see the federal workforce going without paychecks,
and of course that's going to affect what they're able
to spend, and that's where we can see some secondary effects.
And for businesses too that are contracting with the government.

(27:48):
They're going to be disrupted as well. But again I
think thirty days is a good cutoff or good rule
of thumb again for when we would see more substantive
effects on the economy. This last for again a week
or two. The impacts overall will be fairly fairly low.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
Doctor joy von Nesson. We may be speaking to you
sooner than usual if in fact we are able to
thankfully get or hopefully get this shutdown avoided, so we
don't go up full thirty days, and when we do
get the jobs report as it will be released by
the federal government, we'll have an opular opportunity to speak
with the youth in particular about how that affected South Carolina.
We thank you for your time.

Speaker 5 (28:27):
My pleasure. Thank you guys, always a pleasure.