This week in 1999, the greatest debut single of all time hit #1 on the charts. It changed the course of music history forever and spawned more covers than a king-sized bed in an Airbnb.
The lyrics were infectious. The beat was fresh. The song was everything you didn’t see coming and didn’t know you knew you wanted. But you secretly did, didn’t you?
The song I’m talking about isn’t by Tom Petty, The Police, or even Michael Jackson. The song I’m talking about, the one that will go down in history, is “Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears.
I know. I know. Go ahead and laugh, you music snob. But let’s just admit something right now. We’ve all sung the chorus “hit me baby one more time.” You’ve sung it. I’ve sung it. And we both know it. The karaoke fever you caught the first time you heard it never truly goes away. It just lies dormant until the next time you’ve had a few too many. As one Rolling Stone critic noted, it was “one of those pop manifestos that announces a new sound, a new era, a new century.”
The video for the single might be even more famous—Spears in a school-girl outfit (complete with pigtails) dancing through the halls of Venice High School, the same high school used in the film Grease in 1978. The video has over 1 billion views. The song has been covered by artists as wide-ranging as Ed Sheeran, the cast of Glee, Weezer, Tori Amos, Selena Gomez, Tenacious D, Meghan Trainor, the Scottish band Travis, Postmodern Jukebox, Bowling for Soup, Fountains of Wayne, August Burns Red, Rachel Webb from the Broadway musical & Juliet, dark wave band Dead on Sunday, the German Rockabilly band The Baseballs, the cast of the Spanish series Rebelde, Dweezil Zappa, The Marias, and my personal favorite, Norwegian metalcore enthusiast Leo Moracchioli. Try the last one on for size with the volume up and the earplugs in.
This month’s economic indicators are a bit like that. Intense and in need of hearing protection. For starters, check gross sales, which are up by nearly 10% and approaching a billion dollars. That’s loud. Airport passengers? Up big time, almost 30% year-over-year. Holy cow. Even louder.
Combine this data with a 6% increase in average weekly wages over the last twelve months, and you can only conclude that people are spending and traveling. As a result, people are working (labor force participation is at all-time highs) and they are seeing wages rise. Combine this with the most recent blowout jobs report, and it’s clear the US has avoided a recession.
The beat of the economy is thumping so hard that it’s unclear whether the Fed will do additional rate cuts in 2025. So, while we’re seeing jobs and spending and GDP growth above 3% for the last four of five quarters, homebuyers, car buyers, and developers aren’t going to see rates come down soon. There are also signs that spending will soon be ending. Bankruptcies hit a 14-year high recently. And there’s no way of understanding today what the implications of the new DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) will have on federal budget spending and economic conditions.
And the stock market? Your guess is as good as ours. Higher rates typically draw investors to bonds and treasuries, so it’s likely to continue to be a bumpy ride for equities in the coming months.
Stay safe and God-speed,
Tom
