Hi, my name is Chad Taylor, Managing Partner with MDT Financial Advisors, here in Houston, Texas. I hope everyone's having a great start to the New Year, and I just wanted to hop on real quick and do a quick video on this on a couple of charts that we came out with, we being Wells Fargo Advisors Investment Institute. And I know we're going to be having a presentation, the outlook of 2022, but these I just found interesting and I wanted to share them while they were fresh on my mind. So this chart that you're looking at, or this screen that you're looking at, kind of talks about some different things, what we think is going on. So if you can see there at the top left, you see inflation. Inflation is expected to stay above the Fed's target rate through 2022.

Chad Taylor:
So it's probably going to be higher than they really care for it to be. And I know I had a video on that a couple of weeks back where I talked about that specifically, that it probably will go higher before it starts trending down, but we do expect it to start heading down, hopefully in the second half of the year. GDP growth is expected to remain strong through 2022. And you can see some of the takeaways, the reason being vaccine deployment, ample household and corporate cash, still low interest rates, and until recently, the massive government support that's been going on. Wage growth, we expect to increase, but when you mix it with inflation, it's rising, but real wages are still negative at this point, and it's what we're predicting for this year.

Chad Taylor:
Unemployment is we're predicting it to head down, improving with a strong recovery of labor intensive services. Consumer confidence, we expect that to be up this year, as pandemic worries are replaced by optimism as the growth rebounds. And then finally volatility. We got that nice Santa Claus rally at the end of the year. This year started off volatile already, and we expect that to continue through this year. Now, one last chart that I found interesting was, this just says the Fed's patience tested by inflation. US inflation has risen sign significantly above the target.

Chad Taylor:
And you can see that with the orange versus the five-year, the purple, where they try to keep things. So inflation is higher right now, and that's the big component out there. We don't think we're going to see 1970s style inflation that sticks with us, but there are risks out there, and those are things that we just need to keep in mind. So I know that was real quick, I really appreciate it. If there's any questions that you have, please don't hesitate to give us a call. We always look forward to talking, and I hope to see you on our Zoom meeting that we're having here in a few weeks.