June 6, 2024

Taylor St Germain:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to TrendsTalk with ITR Economics. I’m your host, Taylor St. Germain. And we at ITR are your unbiased and apolitical source of economic intelligence.

And today I’m joined by two special guests, our account executive, Lyndsay, and one of our economists, Lauren. And they are the co-hosts of By the Numbers. And they’re here to share with you more information about By the Numbers, how to tune in, what they’re discussing. We’re really excited about bringing both Lyndsay and Lauren to you to read through some of this economic noise.

So thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Lyndsay, for being here with me today.

Lyndsay Wornham:

Thank you, Taylor.

Lauren Saidel-Baker:

Thanks, Taylor. Great to see you.

Taylor St Germain:

Great, I figured we’d start off with you, Lyndsay. Could you give our TrendsTalk viewers a little bit of background about behind the numbers? What is it? How can they access it? When do your episodes come live? Some of that general information, if you don’t mind.

Lyndsay Wornham:

Sure. So by numbers is a new podcast platform, a new show here at ITR economics and a really exciting opportunity for ITR in general, but for Lauren and I to kind of act as the voice and the logic behind some of these articles that are out on a weekly basis with these clickbait style headlines.

And you know, they’re generated to drive readership, which is great. They’re doing their job, but we need to do our job here at ITR to, as you mentioned, bring our unbiased, apolitical, business minded, economist point of view and share some of the numbers with our followers and our listeners to make sure that they can take away correct takeaways from these articles, rather than, you know, some of the fear and the noise that they perhaps are made to generate.

Our episodes are available on Tuesdays through on demand with a free preview available on YouTube on Wednesdays. That’s just a small one segment portion of our entire episode. If you are an insider subscriber or not, you can upgrade to an Insider Plus membership that includes the Insider and the By numbers podcast on a weekly basis, or you can subscribe to the podcast as a standalone subscription through ITR on demand. And we’re really excited. Yeah, we’re just really excited to be able to bring this new form of information to the ITR followers really.

Taylor St Germain:

Yeah, Lyndsay, I can’t tell you the number of times I get an email every week with a headline from the Wall Street Journal or somewhere else with our clients saying, hey, this seems at odds with what you’re saying, or what do you make of this? So I think it’ll be really beneficial for all of our clients and our followers to be able to put some of these clickbait headlines, as you mentioned, in context.

Lyndsay Wornham:

Yeah, definitely. And you know, it’s great to hear that our clients, our existing clients are already going to you with these headlines and these concerns. And hey, we welcome people saying, Hey, this, this is, you know, combating what you’re saying, because, as I’ve mentioned before, we have the numbers to back it up in our in our accuracy rating speaks for itself. And that’s really what we want to be able to provide to not only our existing clients, but a broader, broad, excuse me, broader audience base as well.

Taylor St Germain:

And Lauren, when we talk about some of these clickbait headlines, I guess, could you give us some examples or maybe even talk more generally about some of the things you have discussed on by the numbers or plan on discussing in the future?

Lauren Saidel-Baker:

Well, the sky’s the limit, so we’ve had several really great conversations so far, some about the US consumer that seems to be just a perpetual source of, I don’t want to call it misinformation, but maybe skewed information, you can take a number and make it sound horribly scary, right?

I don’t remember, Lyndsay, what was the number today about a record high credit card debt level? And there are all of these headlines about record high US credit card debt and delinquencies and it’s in the trillions and every time you say trillions, everyone’s mind explodes.

But when you look at that in context, well, we have more people in the US now, so it’s no surprise there are more credit card accounts and we typically have higher prices, inflation’s usually positive. So it’s really, it shouldn’t be a surprise that that total credit card holdings is, yes, a record high, it typically is. So we put that in context, what does it mean as a share of earnings? What do those delinquency rates mean over time? Not just ticking up one month to the next, but compared to a longer term average.

We’ve talked actually last week a lot about China and the next day those tariffs went into place. We had had a really great discussion about the hypotheticals of tariffs the day before it happened. So we want to keep this very timely, really helping businesses make better decisions today and in the moment based on the headlines they’re reading that day. But we’ve talked about everything from global trade to the consumer, to the housing market, to just what is sentiment doing right now? So it’s pretty broad ranging and we’re having a lot of fun.

Taylor St Germain:

And so to all of TrendsTalks followers, instead of sending me those questions, just tune in to By The Numbers and you’ll be able to have some background there. And Lauren, I imagine, especially as we get closer to election time this year, again, for everyone, we are apolitical, but I imagine some of this misinformation, or I guess misleading headlines is maybe a better way to put it, will probably be ramping up. So I think it’ll be important for everyone to tune in.

Lauren Saidel-Baker:

Absolutely. And to your point, yes, always what we typically find is the numbers are true. They’re not wrong. It’s not just an outright lie, but it’s told in maybe only telling one side of the story. And so I think we’ll see a lot more of that leading up to November. Actually, in next week’s episode, we’ll be talking about some more political bent. What does a Republican versus a Democrat think of this data? And it’s very telling. There’s a really great story behind these numbers. So we just want to bring the numbers out to tell it themselves.

Taylor St Germain:

Yeah, and everyone knows from listening to TrendsTalk, that’s that’s our our job here is to weed through all of this noise all of the politics legislation data and really let the data do the talking and I think for all of our followers. Lyndsay and Lauren are going to be a great resource for you there.

Is there anything Lyndsay, Lauren that I haven’t asked that you would want to want to make sure that TrendsTalk followers know about by the numbers.

Lyndsay Wornham:

No, I think that, you know, we kind of covered the gamut on it today, we’re just super excited to be able to add this added benefit to everybody out there and we welcome our listeners and your listeners as well to, you know, write into us and if there’s articles, you know, maybe if you’re sending them to Taylor already, he can just forward them to us and we can add them to the docket of things for us to go over because we want to make sure that we’re answering the questions that you have and that’s really my job on the set here is to make sure that I act as, you know, your voice and as like an avatar for our listeners our business leaders.

Lauren Saidel-Baker:

And Lyndsay said it before, but I’ll just reiterate, we are so thrilled to be creating this show. Taylor, you know this, but I am such a nerd and I just want to dig deep into those numbers and just get every last data point that we possibly can and see what the story is. I’m so lucky that I have Lyndsay to reel me in and bring me back up to a normal human level when I just do my deep data dive. So it’s a great conversation. I bring the numbers. She brings what it means to real business leaders and individuals in their own life.So hopefully we can get out there and combat some of this buzziness in the headlines and make a difference.

Taylor St Germain:

I think there’s a real need and certainly an appetite for a show like this and for the expertise that both of you have. So really appreciate you coming on TrendsTalk to chat with us about By the Numbers.

And just as a reminder to everyone out there, please like and subscribe to TrendsTalk wherever you get your podcasts, but also By the Numbers now, I guess I’ll expand my conclusion here. And if you have any questions or need any more information, please feel free to reach out to myself or visit ITReconomics .com.

Thank you both for being here today. Really appreciate it.