The team discusses the troubles with forecasting in uncertain times and state of the economy in the region and nationally. Touching on topics such as retail sales, labor marketing and housing.

Creators & Guests

• Fouzia Awan - Guest
• Hart Hodges - Host
• James Mark Gbeda - Guest
• James McCafferty - Host
• McK Mollner - Guest

We rang in the new year in Seattle much like we are bringing you this podcast – with a lot of fog obscuring the show. If you think weather forecasts are unreliable, try predicting the economy with incomplete data, revised later, using assumptions that stop holding the moment you publish. But at least weather forecasters and economists have one thing in common: if their predictions were consistently right, no one would listen to them anymore.

Here we sit on January 13, 2026 hitting record for another in-depth economic discussion. A word of caution in what has become a quickly evolving economic climate – check your watch and your calendar as we talk – it is highly probable that things have shifted.

We published our latest regional report about a month ago. Honestly it felt like a published with dark sunglasses and one hand tied behind our backs as large slices of federal data were not available and they just started to appear last week. We took a narrative approach in our report – a nearly numerical free edition.

Topics Discussed today:
- Government shutdown effect on government data
- Private Data sources
- Q4 Retail Sales and expected Q1 numbers
- Housing and Construction data and impact of non-policy on the forecast
- Trade Deficit and Tariffs

The team covers myriad hot topics, including the impact of the government shut down on economic statistics, the impact of AI on the job market and the economy, how tariffs are or are not impacting consumers and how all of this impacts the Puget Sound economy.