• A good start to the new year

• AI or pro-cyclical growth?  Both can work

• Geopolitics are turning into a tailwind

• Trump populism is picking up steam

• Ignore the politically driven narratives

• Bank lending is accelerating

• Employment might be stabilizing

• Productivity on the rise

• Quick Hits

• Where did all the crypto money go?

• Chart Crime of the week

• Chavez took a page out of this guy's playbook

It has been a good start to the new year after a choppy Christmas period.  The Artificial Intelligence trade is volatile and becoming more bifurcated, but the root growth story remains intact.  The headlines are still flowing (Softbank finds the money to invest in OpenAI, Nvidia is likely to get access to China again, Nvidia put on a show at the poorly names Consumer Electronics Show, Meta is contracting a giant amount of nuclear power for future buildout, etc.).  But the rotational swings are not following the Google Vs OpenAI playbook like they were.  The economic data remains robust.  Employment appears to be stabilizing (an improving Employment report this morning but still not out of the woods), and inflation forces are still cooling.  The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow has 4Q GDP tracking at a whopping +5.4% growth (and the second read on 3Q GDP growth was much stronger than expected at +4.3%).  This nowcast is always skewed early in the data collection period, but considering the average professional guesser (economist) expects growth to be under +1%, 4Q data is shaping up nicely.  The NY Fed’s nowcast is around 2.1% growth.  The NY expectation tends to be slower moving and less reactive to individual data points.  Atlanta is surely too hot.  But NY might be too cool.  We think Productivity remains at the center of this economic growth.