 Hello. This is the Minor Issues podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Well, are we starting to go down? Several stats are starting to go down, and the best one of all is inflation, price inflation as measured by the consumer price index. It came in this month, reflecting last month at 5%, down from 6% the month before, which is the smallest increase since May of 2021. But that's the year-over-year calculation, so that if CPI was 100 index number a year ago, and today it's 102, this month a year later, that represents an increase year-over-year of only 2%. But the good news today is that the month-over-month CPI calculation is only up one tenth of 1% from the prior month, so that the consumer price index was almost unchanged for the latest monthly report. And that's good news for Americans. We're experiencing lower prices in the grocery store. Egg prices have come down significantly from their peak. Gasoline prices are relatively low. And if you buy natural gas, you're probably never going to get it cheaper than you could today, at least at the wholesale level. So all of those things have come down, and that's really a good sign. I'm not convinced that somehow the inflation is in evaporating, that we don't have to worry about it anymore. There could be significant inflationary problems in the pipeline. On a negative note, consumer spending growth is down, and also importantly, job openings are also down. We've been tracking that. We've seen it come off an all-time record high, and now it's below the 10 million mark of new job openings. So we're going to be looking at that, keeping our eye on that. It may be what some people consider a minor issue, but we think it's a leading edge issue here at the podcast. Now on a related note about things going down, landlords are starting to see signs of trouble, and that they may be going down too. We've seen rents and leasing at urban office space go down. We've seen leasing and renting at shopping malls go down. Part of that is structural change in the economy, but now we're seeing the first cracks in the apartment renting marketplace. After surging rents in many places in the economy and people moving from state to state and moving out of the inner city into the suburbs, rents have been going up at an enormous clip along with the price of houses and new houses. Of course a lot of that was fed with cheap debt fed by the multi-trillion dollar fed fiasco. Landlords are starting to get into the same general condition that our friends at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank found themselves. The Fed is raising the interest rate. This increases the cost of capital. Whether you're a landlord buying a thousand apartments or whether you're a bank making a million dollar loans, the cost of your capital is up. At the same time, the Fed's price inflation is cutting into our real incomes, the real purchasing power of our dollar so that consumers have less to spend on everything. Also, the Fed monetary policy is starting to have indications of having an impact on the superb job market that we've been experiencing over the last many months. Things are starting to change there as well. Not only is the higher interest rates raising the cost of capital making it difficult on the supply side, the Fed's policies are also hurting the consumer in terms of their income and in terms of their jobs so that their demand for things like apartments and everything else is also hurting and this is having downward pressure on rents. So landlords are starting to feel the leading edge of this problem, the sort of tsunami effect of Fed policy that is coming home to roost.