variety of cities. it s fascinating! - variety of cities. it s fascinating! simon, | variety of cities. it s fascinating! simon, good to talk to you, thank you for being on the programme. show you markets, it s the middle of the weekend you can see it is the same old story. i have to say, they have been complaining that the markets have been a bit boring this week, we like a bit of drama but actually maybe you don t because you might lose money or you might make a lot of money. at the moment they are treading water. inflation data coming out of the us which is being watched closely in terms of any moves the federal reserve may make but at the moment markets are betting that the us central bank will not change its policy making decisions for some time to come. as you can see, us markets again, very little movement stopping the nasdaq, the tech weighted index up by a third of a percent once again but these markets are covered, hovering at around record highs. so you are up to date. thank
retailers fell as well after reporting results today. the only index up, utilities. that sector doing well. now, the trouble wasn t confined to the u.s. stocks fell in europe and asia as investors sought offty. only 4 dow stocks were up, including mcdonalds, j&j and coca-cola as consumer stocks did well. liz, back to you. of course, i looked at the fear index. it jumped 43%. that means for those of you that don t know, there s a lot of nervousness at the moment. sure is. thanks for pulling that apart for us. do folks that are counting on tax cuts this year have excessive expectations? the war of words between the president and the gop leaders mount, we will ask the top republican point man on tax cuts, kevin brady. he s here next. mark steyn blasting the media with fire and fury as they zero
here every year at the end of the year for this show, at least in recent oh, thank you. so, these are your numbers bill coming out of the nfib it sounds good, they ve they ve optimism index jumped two points but, how excited should we be. give us some perspective. the two point jump is nice, that means we had a 20% point increase in positive answers to the ten questions in the index. that s a pretty significant jump. the caveat here is that the total jump is really accountable by just two of the questions in the index. that is expectations for business conditions six months from now. those got a lot better. 16-point gain. that s really a big one. and a five-point gain in expected real sales. so that s nice but what we didn t see in the index was any change in the job creation plans, or inventory investment plans or capital spending plans, things that would generate, you know, gdp, which is what we re really looking for. but it s really nice to see the index up. the sad thing is
but it s really nice to see the index up. the sad thing is, of course, that we usually approach the average, which is 98 is the average for 42 years. we usually approach it from the top down you know, after having a really good time, and we haven t done that yet. we just crawled up to the average. you know, does it make sense that there is a slight lag as you see in history of doing these surveys, so that you think things are going to get better, you think and sales are getting better well then you ll start hiring soon after? sure. the first thing is you have to believe in the future. then, of course, you have to act on that belief, and then that s when the hiring and the capital spending and inventory investment takes place. and that s what we re looking for now. so we hope this translates, and translates soon. all right. okay. well j.d. we ve got the numbers. you talked to small business owners every day. what are you seeing? what kind of the word on the street from people you