>> well, i mean, i think if you're an end vester, an exec -- investor, an executive, or anyone, franklyalk back in april on the u.s. side and on the china side that a deal was very close. they were arranging a meeting between president xi and president trump to finally sign it and it never happened. in the last three or four days, we've been all over the map on what direction we're going. you just have to kind of reserve judgment and see how things play out and, frankly, for executives running big u.s. multinational corporations or any corporation for that matter, it's not a good place to be. they're just now -- we're heading into september. they're starting to write their budgets for 2020. when they start putting down numbers for how much they want to invest, how much they want to hire, it's very hard to put down numbers when you don't know what the landscape is going to be and i think that's why we're seeing an economy slowing down, business investment slowing down, and the market so volatile. dagen: can the u.s. consumer, john, -- it's been very strong. we've seen that in retail earn