Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Rebecca Marquez, Business Intelligence Coordinator with PMMI. Today we're going to hear from Taylor St. Germain, Research and Consulting Economist with ITR Economics. Taylor will be covering the findings of PMMI's third quarter 2018 Quarterly Economic Outlook Report. Taylor is an economist at ITR Economics. He provides economic consulting services with a great deal of insight and action oriented advice for small businesses, trade associations and Fortune 500 companies. Taylor has also brought in-depth insights of industry trends to the ITR Economics team with his willingness to go above and beyond in his daily research for his clients. Taylor's attention to detail, ability to understand the client's specific needs and organizational skills create an enjoyable partnership with each of his clients. Today Taylor will interpret the information included in the Quarterly Outlook and provide insight on how today's economy may be affecting your packaging and processing operations. If you have any questions that you would like to ask Taylor, please type your question in the chat box that is located in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. At the end of the presentation, which will last approximately 30 to 40 minutes, he will answer your question. And at this point, I would like to hand the webinar over to Taylor with ITR Economics. Thank you very much, Rebecca, and thank you all for joining me here today. Like Rebecca said, I am an economist here at ITR. I'm also a speaker on the road. I know you've seen some of you might have seen some of our speakers in the past. Brian Bolio, our CEO, I hear was just out in May.  And they're an update from previous reports. And then also I have some new slides as well. My general topic of the discussions today relies around the current events in our Outlook for 2018, 2019, and beyond. So we'll cover key ticket items like tax cuts and tariffs. And I'll give you some insight into the future of where we're headed as an economy. So I have a lot to go over with you today. So I want to get started right away and first start with our general economic outlook. Starting with U.S. industrial production. This is our benchmark for the overall industrial economy. You can see the chart on the left is looking at the 12 month moving average in dark blue. The dark blue lines you're looking at are the history with the teal bars representing our forecast expectations moving forward. The chart you're looking at here on the right is the 12-12 rate of change. That is your year over year growth rate. And once again, our forecast expectations are represented by the teal bars on the chart here. Currently, we are in what we call at ITR economics a phase B accelerating growth trend. So we are accelerating in the pace of rise and the rate of change. But we are approaching a peak. And we expect that peak to occur here in the third quarter of 2018 before we transition to the back side of the business cycle. I do want to mention we will still see growth in the overall economy through the early 2019 into the first half of the year before we fall below the year ago level in 2019 and endure a mild recession in the industrial economy. I'm sure if you've listened to ITR in the past, you've heard about this mild recession coming in 2019. Again, you hear me saying mild and I want to make that very clear as we look at the contraction here and at the end of 2019, amounting to only 1.2%. So very mild compared to this 0809 period when we were looking at about 13.5% contraction. So what we're telling our clients is 2019's more of a slowdown. Use that slower period of activity to prepare your business, your employees, and your technology for the rising trend that we see coming in 2020. We see the early 2020s being very positive years in the U.S. economy. So really use that slowdown in 2019 to prepare for that positivity we see coming back in 2020. Now this next slide I want to share with you. Usually it's animated, but for this presentation we don't have animations. So all of these lines you're seeing on this chart are our leading indicators for industrial production with the triangles overlapped in the background, the diamonds here representing our forecast expectation. The point I'm really trying to convey with this chart is that we have a lot of evidence supporting that third quarter 2018 peak we're expecting in the industrial economy. So the indicators you're looking at overlapping our forecast here are the G7 indicator, which represents the top seven major economies in the United States. We know we have the G7 summit recently that went oh so well, if you can sense my sarcasm there for the industrial or for the U.S. Well that is one of our indicators we watch and it already has passed through that cycle. The second indicator is the Purchasing Managers Index, which is a more U.S. centric indicator. It is one of our manufacturing indicators that we look at. It gives us an idea of overall manufacturing activity and you can see that green line here is essentially right on top of that peak for industrial production. The light blue indicator you're looking at here is a stock market indicator, that's the Wilshire Market Cap. We know the stock market is not always the best indicator, but in this case it is certainly corroborating that peak there. So again another piece of corroborating evidence. Corporate Profits is here in the orange line. That's my favorite indicator when we look at leading indicators for the industrial economy seems to make the most logical sense to me that when corporate profits are up the economy will follow.  So that is a benchmark of overall global manufacturing. Like I said the point here is really that all of these indicators are supporting that expectation to a slowdown in the industrial economy by late 2018. I just want to once again review our business cycle methodology with you quickly. So we do identify four phases of the business cycle. Phase A recovery is when the rate of change is below the year ago level but rising. Phase B accelerating growth is the best phase of the business cycle because we are above the year ago level and growing and then once we hit that peak we're into phase C slowing growth and headed back down towards that zero line and finally phase D, the dreaded R word recession. The reason I wanted to bring this chart up again is to give you an idea of where we're at in the industrial economy. We are about right in this late phase B area approaching that peak. And the reason I want to point this out to all of you is because given what phase of the business cycle you're in we do have some management objectives for all of you leadership members of your different organizations. So I just wanted to share a couple of our insights in terms of management objectives with you all. So first, ensuring your quality control keeps pace with your increasing volume. If you are tied to the industrial economy you're probably seeing some great growth in your figures so make sure your quality control is there. A big thing we've heard from our clients lately is that retaining employees has been a hardship. We know it's a really tight labor market out there. So just taking training and retention into consideration as we transition and then of course we're getting some pricing pressures from those tariffs and from rising input costs as well. We'll get into that in just a few minutes but consider those price increases and spacing them out through the end of this year. I also wanted to share with you some of our phase C management objectives because we will be transitioning to the backside of that business cycle by late this year. The one I really want to point out to you all is cash is king. Consider building those cash reserves as we move into 2019. Phase D, that recessionary period that we're calling for in 2019, can be a real great phase for businesses if you're prepared for it. So make sure that you start considering building those cash reserves so you can take advantage of all of the other people who weren't ready for that 2019 recession. So just a couple tips from us to keep in mind. I want to also share with you a longer leading indicator looking at more of the long term which is U.S. personal savings as a percentage of disposable income. That is in this blue line here. It has a much longer relationship, about an 18 month lead time to the economy and that is supporting that recession that we have in 2019 built into our forecast and as you can see on this chart is also supporting that slow down in our retail sales expectations there. So just wanted to give you some insight too. Since I showed you the near term leading indicators, give you a look at one of our longer term indicators that's showing us that weakening consumer in 2019 which is really contributing to that recession. Now I wanted to give you just a quick global snapshot before we transition to talking about tax cuts and tariffs. These are our global leading indicators we'd like to track here at ITR. One of them being the Eurozone PMI. So looking at manufacturing in those respective countries. The EU manufacturing PMI, again another manufacturing indicator for all the countries in the European Union. And finally that JP Morgan Global Manufacturing PMI that I showed you on the recent chart. The idea I want you all to take away from this is that like with the industrial economy in the US these indicators are supporting a slow down in all of the other major global economies. So prepare for that as we move into 2018 as well because all of the indicators are telling us that this slow down will occur not only in the US but in the major global trading partners. This next chart is just a snapshot of where all of the countries throughout the world are in terms of industrial production. There's of course a few things I want to point out to you here. First, Canada. We are expecting Canada to transition to slow and grow along with the US. The Canada Purchasing Managers Index and the Canada Leading Indicator have transitioned to a downward trend which is supporting a slow down coming in the Canada economy. The US of course is approaching that peak. I did want to shed some light on Latin America. We are expecting Brazil to transition to a slowing growth trend and Argentina has already made that transition. Of course we can see some negativity coming in the surrounding countries due to some political uncertainty there. So we are advising that you take some caution when looking into Latin America. In terms of Europe, we are seeing a little bit of the Brexit activity going on which is why we see some of the negative numbers up top here. But we're really seeing some stable growth out of the majority of Europe. Western Europe of course is a very mature market. We're seeing stable growth just like in Western Europe as we are in the US. So some good growth opportunities there. Asia is the interesting region over here. The thing I would like to point out to you all is that China and India just in 2012 about five or six years ago each were growing at 15% and 12% respectively. So those economies have certainly slowed down in the pace of rise when comparing just to a few years ago. But a lot of that positive activity is coming to Southeast Asia. That's that near sourcing phenomenon that Southeast Asia is facing from China, India, and of course the US. Those countries taking advantage of relatively cheap labor in the Southeast Asian countries and technology is starting to come online in these countries making them more attractive. So that's why you're seeing a lot of the positive growth rates there. So that's my global spiel for you. I want to transition to talking about tax reform. Before I get into tax return reform I do want to mention that ITR is a non-political firm. We do not bleed red or blue. I am strictly going to present you what the data is telling us. So I'd just like to put in that little caveat before we start talking about tax reform because there are some political pressures. So first I want to talk a little bit about, I've had a question recently come up very frequently which is, have you changed your economic outlook given President Trump in office? And the answer to that is no. And this chart is helping me try to illustrate why. So what you're looking at on this chart is the 312 rate of change for the US real gross domestic product. So we're looking at US GDP here. Now in the background overlaid is the color of the party that held the presidency during that time period. Now the interesting thing I want you to notice about this chart is where this white line crosses the zero line the most. And you will quickly notice that that's in the red. However it is oversimplistic to associate Republicans with recessions in the industrial economy and I'll tell you why. And the reason why is because it often takes about 6 to 12 months for us to pass legislation and then another 6 to 12 months for us to really see that legislation manipulate the data. So therefore it is oversimplistic to associate any, either of the two political parties with the recession. I always fall back to the Warren Buffett quote here which I'm sure you've heard in the past. We like to use that quote on this slide at ITR and that's red or blue you can still make green. So I just wanted to debunk that notion before we move forward talking about tax. This slide I think you've seen before, if you've seen Brian or Chris are the latest presenters for PMI from ITR. This is looking at the corporate tax rate in purple. So that purple line is the tax rate. You can see the Reagan cuts of the 80s there. The interesting part about this slide is this bottom line you're looking at here which is gross business investment as a percent of GDP. And the reason this is interesting because even as we have cut taxes throughout history, businesses in turn are not investing more in the overall economy. Instead what we're seeing businesses do is we're seeing of course a lot of stock buybacks. We also see businesses mainly putting themselves in a better financial position. So getting rid of debt. And we've also seen some corporations pass along bonuses to their employees. Now if there are any businesses that are investing back in the economy, we found that that's the smaller firms. And that's corroborated by this statement from the Atlanta Fed Reserve chair, Rafael Bostic. So I'll just give you a second to read this. He's basically reiterating exactly what I just said. So I wanted to share his opinion, another opinion besides ours, that's supporting that notion that we're really not seeing businesses investing back in GDP. Now you could have heard in the news that we are getting a bump from the most recent tax cuts. And that's what I wanted to illustrate with this slide, is that we do often see a temporary boost from these tax cuts. The blue line you're looking at is the top marginal tax rate with the orange line being GDP growth on a 312. Now you can see after each one of these cuts we've seen a spike in GDP growth. But that's a very short-lived spike before we return in a general decelerating pattern. So again, another notion that I wanted to sort of put to rest is that we will see GDP growth due to the tax cuts. It'll be a temporary boost if anything, as suggested by what we've seen historically. However, I do want to mention that we do believe there's good things that did come with the tax cuts. The big one that stands out to me is that provision that you can deduct 100% of the purchase of capital equipment new or used through 2022. We believe that's a great thing for businesses to take advantage of. But of course the question is, when will businesses take advantage of that? But we do believe that that is one of the highlights of this tax bill that could really benefit companies and corporations. Now I wanted to share a little bit of information while we're on the topic of tax cuts about the U.S. debt situation and just sort of paint the picture. Again, if you've heard Brian or Alan, our president or CEO in the past, you've probably heard about this Great Depression coming in 2030. So I again wanted to shed a little light on that subject. So what you're looking at on this chart is the red line is current transfer payments, which is things like Medicare and Social Security. This next purple line that you're looking at here is current tax receipts, so that's what we're currently paying in taxes. This pink line here is consumption expenditures, which is things like schools, post offices, et cetera, things along those lines.  So the reason I want to share this with you is because if you were to total the green line, the pink line, and the red line, that is coming in well above what we're currently paying in taxes, which is suggesting our debt will continue to increase, which is why I have a tough time in my research justifying why increasing our debt and cutting taxes was a good thing to do at this time. Given we don't already don't have enough money to cover these three avenues already, cutting taxes didn't seem like the right move from an economic standpoint. And to shed even more light on this, looking at the long view, currently our debt as a percent of our GDP, I say our, the U.S., is 120.5%, which is approaching World War II levels in terms of percent of GDP. Now to me, it makes sense that we are spending or we are increasing our debt in World War II at a time where we are fighting for our way of life and for humanity, but it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me why we're increasing our debt to this level at this point in time. However, the caveat I would throw in there is compared to China, we're in a much better position, their debt is currently 250% of their GDP approximately. So we're not in a great position, but I guess at least the silver lining is at least we're not China right now. Again, to continue along that topic, this is a really interesting chart that came from the Congressional Budget Office. So this was a separate entity from ITR that did this research. A very interesting chart here. What we're looking at is column B is net interest payments in billions of dollars, column C is healthcare payments in billions of dollars, and D is social security payments in billions of dollars. So, and then column E is overall total government spending. So what column A is showing you is it's summing columns B, C, and D, so adding those three together and dividing it by total spending to show you what percent of total spending these three avenues are making up. In 2015, that was 56%. By 2030, given nothing in our political environment changes, we're looking at about 69%, almost 70% of total spending going to just these three organizations. A little bit of an alarming fact there. So that's why we're expecting this 23rd time period to really be a great depression and mirror that previous great depression of the 1920s and 1930s. So the real issue here, of course, is not issue per se, but the problem is that that baby boomer generation is so big that we're going to have to spend a significant amount of healthcare, of our healthcare spending on that generation. So it is a demographic issue that is really leading the charge here. We're not the only ones that have the demographic issue, though, to put this in perspective for you. Last year was the first year that adult diapers outsold baby diapers in Japan. So other countries around the world are also seeing that baby boomer demographic issue. If you'd like to know more about 2030s, I only highlighted a couple of the causes that we'll be facing, but Brian and Alan, our president and CEO, did write a book called Prosperity in the Age of Decline. So if you're interested in hearing more of what they had to say about that 23rd time period, please check that book out. Next, I wanted to transition to the big one currently, which I'm sure all of you are very interested in, which is the tariffs on trade. First, I wanted to paint the picture of what President Trump is looking at when he says we're being ripped off by other countries in terms of trade. He's looking at something similar to this chart, I would imagine, which is looking at our trade balance for goods and services. You can see in billions of dollars on a 12mmT, currently at negative $573 billion. So I have a feeling that this is what's incentivizing all of the trade talks in the recent tariffs that we've seen. Now the first round of tariffs we know we're looking at steel and aluminum tariffs, so I wanted to share this chart with you, which is Census Bureau data that is looking at the share of U.S. steel imports by country out of 2017. Now I think the interesting thing to notice about this chart is that the top few countries you're looking at here are majorly our allies, which is why they were excluded from that first round of tariffs, which we now know that they are included as of the last few months. But the thing to notice is that China actually makes up the smallest portion compared to the rest of these countries, which drives the idea that these tariffs slapped on China originally was more of a political move. We were trying to bring China to the negotiating table. So this was a way of the U.S. to sort of flex our political muscles, if you will, and bring China to that negotiating table. But since we have slapped tariffs on most of these other countries, we can see that's making a much more significant effect. Now President Trump defended his tariffs saying he was going to bring employment back to the steel industry. That's one of his original campaign promises. Well, employment was already coming back to the steel industry. As you can see, we've been in an upward trend since 2009. This bottom line is looking at employees in terms of thousands with the top line corresponding to that left axis, which is the 1212 and 312 growth rates. So you can see we're actually at the highest level since 1992 in terms of jobs in the steel industry. So again, President Trump supported those tariffs with this claim, but I would say that very safely that employment was already on its way back to the steel industry without those tariffs. Now, so China responded, as we know, with some tariffs on the products you're seeing on the screen here, as well as some of these products as well. So again, they didn't have necessarily the large immediate impact but it was a way of China saying we're not going to back down. So they did target some of those industries. But this latest round of tariffs is really what's concerning. Now, if you saw Brian speak recently, this chart looked about the same but instead of having 200 billion in the top left, or 200 billion, excuse me, we had 100 billion. So since we know that Trump is considering another 200 billion in tariffs besides the 34 billion that he just slapped on China, but the thing I want to make very clear here is that it seems that China will still suffer more than the US will from a high level perspective. And that's due to these two facts up top. So exports from the US to China are about 0.7% of US GDP, but exports from China to the US are almost 4% of China's GDP. So much more significant portion of the GDP. However, of course, with this recent round that China has retaliated with, it will certainly not be risk-free and that's because of these three bubbles you see down at the bottom of this chart. Of course inflation and price rise, I think that's self-explanatory and we're all starting to see that. But it's really the downstream production and the job loss here. We're now talking about billions of dollars in these industries that you're looking at here to the right. Much more significant than that first round of tariffs, especially when I flip to this next chart, aerospace being the number one target, you can see based on this chart which is US top goods exported by state that aerospace plays a very, very significant part in many of these states across our country in terms of exports. So much more significant impact than this most recent round of tariffs. I also want to mention China targeted soybeans as well. Eight out of ten of those states who are major exporters of soybeans voted for Trump in the last election, so they clearly had an agenda targeting those states as well, really going after Mr. Trump himself. From a high level, I just wanted to paint, again, along the tariff talk paint the picture of how much manufacturing really does contribute to our exports. About six in ten export dollars came from manufacturers, so that's 60%, much larger portion than wholesalers and others. So we will see more of a significant impact if this trade war continues. Now, while we're on the topic of manufacturing, I did just want to mention, I've heard recently that people believe manufacturing in the US is disappearing. What I'm telling you is that's entirely untrue. We are approaching record level highs in manufacturing, coming down from this record high before that 2008-'09 recession there. And the reason manufacturing won't disappear in the US is because some of these factors have listed them on the left. The big one I want to point out to you is that consumer base we have. We still have the largest consumer base for manufacturing, and that's a reason why we'll see this manufacturing trend generally heading out. Now, what is disappearing is jobs in manufacturing. So when we hear that in the news, we're really hearing jobs are what's disappearing. And that's mainly due to automation and innovation, especially in the most recent interest rate environment. Interest rates have been relatively low and favorable. We've seen a lot of clients and organizations really automate and innovate to take advantage of that interest rate. So it's not manufacturing overall that's disappearing in the US, but it seems to be that manufacturing jobs are disappearing, as you can see by this downward profile in the blue line, which is manufacturing employment. So I did just want to share some pricing interest rates information with you all. This is my last section before we get into the PMI market specifics. This is non-defense capital goods new orders. It's our business-to-business proxy here at ITR Economics. It has a coincident relationship with industrial production, but the reason we like to look at this indicator as well as industrial production is because this indicator is a dollar-denominated series. So we start to understand the impact of pricing pressures and commodity prices. We've seen an increase in commodity prices over the last year or so, which is driving some of the positivity in new orders here in that dollar-denominated value. Which does bring me to my next slide, which is taking a look at some of the major commodity prices. You can see the majority of the commodity prices on a 312 rate of change or quarter-over-quarter growth rate are in a decelerating trend, but above zero. So we're seeing growth just at a slower pace. However, the one to know, of course, is steel that is headed back in the positive direction, seeing accelerating growth in steel, and that is due to the tariffs. So the tariffs do present an upside risk to steel prices without a doubt. I know you've all probably seen this one before. If you've seen an ITR presenter, one of our more comical slides, we often joke that we forecast the bond yield the 10-year base-off-fed share height. You can see that has held true with the last four fed shares.  So we would expect that bond yield to head up in that upward direction. But on a more serious note, we do have that 2019 recession built into our forecast. So when we see times of recessions, we often do see a little rise in the yield. So we would expect that yield to head in the positive direction. This chart here is private sector employment. Again, I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but it's just showing you some statistics that we do have a tightening labor market there.  So just something for all of you to have in your repertoire. It is a tight labor market out there. So something I wanted, another slide I wanted to share with you there. This next chart is an interesting chart, which again, I'm sure you might have seen in the past. But what this chart is looking at is interest rates. Each of the dots you're looking at on this chart represent a Fed Open Market Committee member in their interest rate projection. We know the Fed just had their June 2018 meeting, and these projections are representative of the most recent data in June 2018. The Fed has raised rates twice this year and has another two scheduled for the second half of the year. Chairman Powell also mentioned that he would expect by 2020 a interest rate between 3.25 and 3.5%, which is corroborated by the cluster of projections you're looking at here. So plans for interest rate rise. So we're starting to see commodity price rise. We're seeing interest rate rise as represented by these last few charts. Again, just wanted to pass along the idea that price increases may be something you want to consider if you haven't already. It will be a lot easier to pass along price increases in 2018 when the economy is doing well than in 2019 when we take a turn in the downward direction. Again, just something to consider as we move forward. And then this last sort of pricing indicator I want to take a look at is our Benchmarks for Inflation. So the blue line you're looking at here is producer inflation, and the orange line is consumer inflation. Now what I really want you to take away is the general trajectory of these trends, and that is in the upward direction. We are forecasting for these trends to continue rising through 2018. So another notion that suggests you might want to consider those price increases in 2018 if you haven't, to avoid those inflationary pressures really squeezing your margins. So now I want to get into the PMMI market outlook specifically. So this outlook is coming directly from the quarterly report that we share with you all. So I just wanted to give you an update on these slides. I'm sure you're very familiar with them if you've looked at your quarterly report. So the moving averages, the 12.0 moving averages for the next few slides are on the chart on the left. Again, our forecast expectations in the TO bars. And the 12.0 rates of change will be this chart on the right with the forecast noted as well. The industry outlook in the bottom right corner are our year-end expectations for the respective year. So this first chart we're looking at is foods preparation production. You'll read in the most recent quarterly report that we had a data revision from the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. So we did update these forecasts in the most recent iteration of your report. So I want to shed some light on these different industries. Food production, to give you an idea, we expect production to reach a peak here in this quarter before we transition to the backside of that business cycle. Expect production to rise at a slowing pace through the first half of 2019. But again, we are avoiding recession as you can see on this chart. We don't expect food production to fall below the year ago level. One of the few manufacturing indicators of our major series at least that we don't have falling into a recessionary period in 2019. The highest performing segments in food production currently are fruit and vegetable preserving production. Seeing a lot of positivity in that segment. The lowest performing segment in food preparation production is animal slaughtering and processing production. So if you're involved in either of those industries just wanted to give you an idea of where they're trending fruit and vegetable at the top and the animal and slaughtering down at the bottom in terms of performance. Next is beverage copy and tea production which is a good segue right off food production. We also have this industry avoiding recession. We expect production to largely rise on the 12 MMA basis through 2020. However of course it's important to note the pace of rise and we expect that to slow in late 2018 and in 2019. So reach that peak soon in that 12-12 rate of change and transition to the back of the business cycle as well. And that is supported by U.S. food production as we're expecting that transition to happen here in the next quarter as well. A weaker consumer in 2018 and 2019 is driving a lot of this forecast. However we do want to mention that wholesale trade of grocery and related products could pose a downside risk to our forecast in the near term. It actually transitioned to the back side of the business cycle already. So that suggests we could see a little more negativity than what our forecast suggests. But the majority of evidence suggests this forecast is on track. But of course we like to be transparent and highlight any risk to our forecast. So the next indicator I want to share with you all from the report is pharmaceutical and medical device production. Now the thing to notice here is that this 12-MMA forecast we don't have a whole lot of growth planned for this industry. We actually don't have growth returning to 2015-2016 levels throughout the entirety of this forecast. Starting to approach by late 2020 but for the most part staying well below that level. One industry that we're starting to see some positivity from is US hospital buildings construction. So that's driving this little growth that we're seeing in the rates of change here. So we do expect to see a short period of accelerating growth but again not a very significant growth in the next 12 quarters in the pharmaceutical and medical devices market. Personal care products production is the next indicator I want to share with you. Now interesting enough when the Federal Reserve revised this data the major part of this series that was revised was soap and toiletries production. They actually downward revised that component by about 6%. So that's why we revised this forecast. The timing of the upcoming peak and trough do align with our industrial production forecast though. So we are expecting that we'll see a slowdown in 2019 in line with our expectation of a slowdown in that consumer in the overall industrial economy in 2019. This near term positivity you're looking at though is supported by the chemical industry capacity utilization rate one of our indicators we often look at. For this series in particular. So again we'll see very mild growth returning to 2016 levels by those that 2020 period. So in terms of right sizing your business if you're involved in this industry expect for late 2019 and the 2020 to about mirror where we were at late 2016. The next indicator is chemicals and cleaning products production. So this series I do want to mention is under review the forecast. We don't expect any of the timing to change but based on the most recent data we've received we could be downward revised in these expectations a little. So expect the timing of the upcoming peak and recession to be largely the same. We just could see a bit of a downward revision due to the most recent data that's been revised. That of course we will update you in the quarterly report and on our next review as we move forward. But I did want to mention expect the timing to be the same but we could see a mild downward revision here. And that's US single unit housing starts are starting to slow. So that's indicating some weaker demand for homes on part of the consumer. So we're starting to see that and then we're also seeing some of the utilization rates turn as well. So that is supporting some of that near term negativity we've seen in the data. And like I said we'll be sure to update you on this as we move forward. The last indicator I want to share with you today is durable hard goods in parts production. We expect a business cycle peak to form in the fourth quarter of this year. We expect the low to occur in the last quarter of 2019 which is unchanged from the previous report you looked at. So basically the general idea from durable hard goods and components in parts production is plan for growth in 2018. Mild decline in 2019 and growth to resume again once in 2020. Again one of the indicators we watch is durable manufacturing capacity utilization rate which is showing us we're going to see some near term acceleration. So those were the market specific forecast I wanted to share with you just to wrap things up in summary. This is a peak of where we're headed through 2019. So 2017 was a big accelerating growth year and into 2018. But by late this year we'll transition to this phase C slowing growth trend headed back down towards that zero line. And then we have the mild recession plan in 2019. From a management perspective just some of the takeaways from the presentation today. Budget for expansion through 2018 certainly will transition to the backside of that cycle. But it's still growth it's just at a slower pace. So definitely take advantage of that positivity we're seeing in the economy which leads into the next one. Invest in your business in the next quarter. We have accelerating growth through the next quarter before we transition late this year. So make sure to still take advantage of those opportunities out there. The third being as we transition to the backside of the business cycle we still say hiring salespeople isn't a bad idea. Of course taking the consideration if your business will slow down in 2019 with that recession. But certainly if there's anyone to hire late in the business cycle we say that salespeople. Number four is just talking about diversifying as we head towards that 2019 recession. Consider some new products, new pricing strategies as we move into 2019. Any way to mitigate that decline that we're expecting in 2019 in a lot of the major markets. And then five and six I hit on frequently focus on talent retention. That tight labor market is only getting tighter. So make sure you retain those A and B employees as we move into 2019. And make sure and keep them in place for 2020 when all this positivity comes back and we'll all be very busy once again. And then six is consider raising those prices. We saw a lot of those pricing pressures, tariffs of course. Avoid squeezing your margins because of inflation and prices. And consider doing that in 2018 when it will be easier than 20. So lastly if you want to receive any of our updates just email updates at itreconomics.com with PMMI and the subject line. These are blogs that myself and other speakers on the road write updates on our leading indicators and news from our president and CEO. So please feel free to subscribe to that. That is all entirely a free service we provide here. And with that I will turn it back over to Rebecca for any questions any of you may have. Taylor, thank you for the great reflection on the current economy and the issues at hand for packaging and processing industry. And now I'd like to open up the session for questions. Please enter any questions you would like to have answered in the chat box. Or you may press star two to unmute your phone. And I see that we already have a question on any information you may have about packaging equipment. Perhaps that would be like any more information you could provide on capital expenditures. Sure, sure. Yeah, I think it's interesting if I were to go back to the non-defense capital goods slide. That is our cap X slide. And we're actually seeing capital expenditures are starting to slow in their pace of growth. They're starting to transition to the backside of the business cycle. I would expect to see growth through the end of the year to be upfront about packaging specifically. I don't have that data on hand which I would be happy to get more specific packaging data in terms of cap X spending. Prior to the call if you'd be happy to get in touch with me. But in terms of overall capital expenditures, we are expecting to see capital expenditures transition with the overall economy and head in the slowing direction. Again, that weakening consumer. So I would say that based on our overall expectations, you should expect to slow down in overall capital expenditures spending. Again, how that translates to packaging specifically, I could get more specific data for you. But from a high level, I would expect that pace to slow compared to what you saw in 2017. And we do have some additional data at PMMI as well on packaging equipment. And I would be happy to provide that to anyone who is interested in seeing some of that. Or you could reach out to Taylor directly as well since he also has some specific packaging equipment information that he would also be able to provide. And I do have another question, Taylor. I'm wondering, we talked a little bit about the pharma industry. And recently in the news we saw that Amazon is now dipping their toe in the pharmaceutical industry a little bit with the purchase of Pill Pack. And like a lot of parts of the retail sector, Amazon has a pretty big impact. Do you see Amazon impacting pharmaceutical with this recent purchase? Yeah, you know, I do. But the thing I'd like to point out is that in terms of overall retail sales, Amazon is still a very small fish in that large pond. So I don't think it will go unnoticed by any means. But I don't think it will have as significant of an impact as the news portrays it will. But yes, I think we'll see some near-term uncertainty. We've seen that in a lot of other similar markets that Amazon's dipped into. The one that comes to mind first is the commercial refrigeration industry. We saw a lot of uncertainty and some negativity when Amazon dipped into that industry. But we've seen a lot of positivity come back. So I could see some near-term uncertainty and negativity due to them dipping into that industry. But if it's anything like previous industries Amazon's dipped into that are mature industries like pharmaceutical and medical production, I would expect that the overall trend still continues the same. We don't see that significant of a downward impact. And we'll give a couple more minutes for any additional questions that anyone may have. You can feel free to put them into the chat box at the bottom of your screen. And it looks like we have no further questions. So I think we can conclude here. On behalf of PMMI, thank you all for participating today. As a final note, you'll receive an email to complete an evaluation on today's webinar. We'd like to provide the best webinars possible for you. Please take a moment to complete the evaluation as soon as possible. And let me know how or if we can improve our webinars for you. This webinar has been recorded and will be posted on PMMI.org within 48 hours. And Taylor, thank you so much for your great insights. And we can conclude here. Thank you all very much for having me. I appreciate PMMI giving me the chance to share the insight with you all. And I hope to speak with you all again real soon. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.


Hey, what's going on guys? Welcome to a new video. So in this one, I'm gonna show you how to find proven products to sell and dropship in 2020. So when it comes to being successful at dropshipping, the easiest way to give yourself the best chance of success is to dropship a proven product. The reason being then is because if we can find a product on AliExpress that has say a proven sales history of let's say 50 units a day for the past couple of weeks, then essentially we know that product is in demand. Therefore, we can take that very same product, put it on our Shopify store, start running some Facebook ads and find the same success. So that's exactly what I'm gonna show you how to do in this video. The AliExpress dropship and center has recently been kind of like refurb. They've added some pretty cool new features and filters, which I'm gonna show you how to use, which make the whole product research process a whole lot easier. Now, before we jump into the video, I just wanna very quickly say, if you do enjoy it, please do make sure you let me know by hitting that like button. I do read every single comment too. So if there was a question you wanna ask me, make sure you post it down below and I will reply to you. And finally then the last thing I wanna say is that I do upload four videos every single week. So if you want regular content from me, then please do make sure you subscribe to my channel as well. So that being said then, without any further ado, let's jump straight into it. So first things first, you need to head over to the AliExpress dropship and center. You will need an AliExpress account to do this. And if you haven't activated it yet, you will need to do so. But don't worry, it's a fairly straightforward step-by-step process. Only takes a few seconds and then essentially it will take you to this screen here. So this is essentially your dashboard but what we're interested in is this button here which is gonna take us to this screen. And this is where we can now start to look for products just to give you kind of like a quick introduction and then we have these three different tabs at the top. I haven't worked out yet why this is called sponsored products. To me, it just looks like kind of like all the highest rated suppliers that are probably paying to be up here. But what it is useful for then is if you have your heart set on a specific niche but let's say you've found a particular product that you want to find the best supplier for, we can click in this category section here, find the niche you're in. So for example, we could go to probably not home appliances. Let's go for computer and office and then internal storage and it's gonna give us the best supplies for that particular niche. The previous dropship and center did have a similar kind of function but it never works that well to be honest. It seems a lot better. Now where things get interesting for us then is the different kind of filters and options that AliExpress have handily added for us. But number one is the fact that we can choose a ship from and ship to. So me being in the UK, I will always start with the UK. So in fact, that's quite a common question people ask me is where a dropship to. And I'll always start in the UK and if I can do it successfully, i.e. profitably to the UK, then I'll start to scale out into other countries. But what this button now gives us is we can now choose the countries in which the item is located. So for example, then if we choose items that are located in Spain, shipping to the UK, typically they will arrive a lot faster. And sometimes you can even find products that will arrive in less than a week. Just to give you guys a quick example then of how quickly you can actually source some products. Let's try and find one. So let's go for this blackhead remover. It's on the list in like four or five different product listings. So once this loads up, as you can see, we can choose all the different countries we wanna source this from. If we go for Spain, in fact, it can't actually deliver to the UK but there are a couple of other European countries we can go France or Italy, both the same and it's guaranteed deliver. So as you see, as it says, delivered before the 2nd of February or a full refund. So that's two weeks from today and that's worst case scenario as well. So as you can see, you don't actually have to put up with those three to four weeks delivery times. And just to show you the fast scope of products too, there's 250 pages of products that you can source in that timeframe. So another thing you can do as well, which you didn't use to be able to, if we go back to China, we've got this E-Packet checkbox here too. So we can make sure we're only gonna be looking at product listings that offer E-Packet. If you are gonna drop ship from China, then I thoroughly recommend you only stick to E-Packet because it is tracked and typically it is the fastest option too. However, if we go back to the step-by-step process then there's a couple of pieces of criteria I want you guys to stick to when you're looking for products. So number one then is the cost to you is less than $15. The reason being is because the majority of people who watch my channel are from the UK and once you go over that threshold, that includes delivery as well by the way. Once you go above that threshold then you may be liable to some import duties and taxes. And then I want the cost to you, so to us as the drop shipper, to be more than $3, preferably.  The next point I want you to consider as well is I want you to check the amount of drop shipping orders and make sure it's at 100 plus. Now that is as a guide and the reason being is why I'm gonna show you. Now in the past, AliExpress never used to show you how many drop shipping orders a product had. So this is quite an important piece of information. The reason being is because AliExpress isn't just a drop shipping site, there's a lot of end users that come on to AliExpress and buy products. So just because a product has a ton of orders doesn't necessarily make it a good product to drop ship. But because of now, we can see exactly how many drop shipping orders a product has. If there's people selling and drop shipping this product profitably, then again, there's no reason why we can't. Essentially it makes it a proven drop shipping product. If we go back to the Google document, then there's another number as well that I want you guys to consider when you're choosing products to kind of put on your list and test. So if I just draw your attention to this Google document here, it's called product ideas. The reason I keep it up there is because when I'm just scrolling through Facebook or on AliExpress or Thieve, whatever it is, if I come across a product that I like, I'll put it on this product idea, Google document, and then I'll just kind of like slowly walk my way through testing each individual product. So as I said then, the next number I want you guys to consider is the daily orders and check the analysis of a product to see if this is at 5% plus of the total orders. So what I mean by this then is if we take for example, let's just go for this random product here, it's like this koala bear here. Then the numbers we're interested in then is this total orders here, which is 8,600. The drop shipping orders is 5,000, which is pretty good. It's a high percentage of that amount of orders, which is a great sign by the way. The rating is 4.8, I'm not quite sure what that's based on at this moment. And then the sales performance is marked as good. But what I'm interested in then is once I hit this analyze button, once it loads up then it's gonna take you to this product analysis page here. And this is a great page by the way, any products you look to drop ship, you should always come to this page. Because what it's gonna do is it's gonna give you the daily sales volume for this particular product. And I want this number to be consistently higher than 5% of the total amount of orders. So if I remember correctly, then this was at a total of 8,600 if I do my maths. We're looking at over 400 orders per day for it to match the criteria of this Google document. The reason being is because the higher the number is, then the stronger the current demand for this particular product is. So the higher, the better basically. And as we can see, we're kind of consistently at 600, 500, 400, 2,000. And only for the kind of like past couple of days has it dipped below that. But then we've had another strong day over 2,000 orders. Now the reason for these spikes in sales volume, if I had to guess, is probably because whoever's drop shipping these, then these are the days in which they've placed their orders. So it doesn't really mean much to us as somebody looking for a product. What we're more focused on is these lower, more consistent numbers. And as long as they are above that 5% benchmark that I've set, then you've got the signs of a really great product that has strong demand, that has current proven strong demand and therefore makes it a great product to drop ship. Now, if we go back to the Google document, the next point I wanna say is that you can use this product analysis by the way for any product that's on Aliexpress. So for example, if you're using Thieve and you find a product like this lever, Apple Watch Strap, as long as you can get the Aliexpress product page URL, you can head over to product analysis here on the left, put it your product URL and there click analyze and then you can find the sales history for pretty much any product. Another pretty cool feature you can do as well within this drop shipping center is if we go back to the dashboard, you can see this checkbox here that says video and we can find products that come with videos. So if you are struggling for content to use as your Facebook ads, then even if you haven't found your product on here, you can put in here like dog bed. As long as you keep that check mark, check marked, if that's the right terminology, we'll click search and then we can find all the dog beds that come with videos that then you can chop up to use as your own Facebook ads. So as a quick summary then, if we just quickly head back to the Google document, I've shown you how to use the Aliexpress drop shipping center, I've shown you how to find the previous sales history of a product so you can see if it's proven or not. And there's also another step you can do. I know I talk about it in every single video, but trust me, if you're not using Google trends, just to give you an example then, so the Apple watch strap here, we can clearly see whether the Apple watch strap is currently a popular search term on Google now and that's gonna give us solid insight into whether people are actually buying this product or not. So it's definitely kind of like a failing step or an extra step that you should be doing. So if you find, for example, let's say you wanna go for this dog bed and within the drop shipping center and you're going in the sales history is really good, just to make sure that you come across to Google trends, put in dog bed, you can go for the country. So obviously I only drop shipped to the UK in the beginning as the United Kingdom for the past five years. And what this is currently telling me is that the current popularity is at 73%, which isn't too bad, but what it is also telling me is because the spike has happened here, if history repeats itself, it's gonna continue to go down. So this is a product that's currently falling out of demand. Back to the Google document and there's one final step I want you guys to make sure you do with every single product, sorry, that you're going to test and make sure you find it on Facebook or at least do a couple of different searches for it to see what kind of content and results come back to give you an example of search for dog bed. And what you're looking for is essentially not this. If we look at the one, two, three, four, five, six, eight, that looks the same, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. There's over 15 people selling this different product. It's the very first thing that comes up. It's the same products everybody's selling. The views are pretty decent as well, 15,000, 1.5 million. These are pretty poor, 50,000, quarter of a million to 50,000, so there's quite a lot of people who have advertised this product quite extensively. And this means one of two things then. Number one is to sell this successfully is going to take a ton of budget because you'll have to create original content and there's going to be a lot of competition for the same product, which brings me onto point number two, which is if you were to advertise this product, the chances are it won't be the first time somebody has seen it. With that being said then to kind of wrap the video off with the last couple of points is, third from last end, depending on the products, use Instagram or Facebook ads to market the product. Facebook works best to target a specific country and audience because obviously you can't really do that to the same degree on Instagram. And then Instagram works best for fitness and fashion and brand heavy products. For example, if you're selling clothing or shoes and trainers, then people tend to buy those products, those items because of the brand on them and to give your brands that instant credibility, then you need an influencer to do that essentially. So that's when influencer marketing comes into play and is far superior to Facebook ads in my opinion. Doesn't just have to be Instagram influencers either. It can be YouTube influencers, Facebook influencers, Snapchat influencers, pretty much anybody as long as they have a significant following and they represent your brand the way you want it represented. Anyway, with that being said then guys, that wraps up the video. If you're still with me, thank you very much. I really do appreciate the support on the channel. If you enjoyed this and learned something new, I really hope you did by the way, please make sure you let me know. Comment below, let me know what you've learned or just simply hit that like button. Please do make sure you subscribe as well for regular content every single week. And finally, thanks again for watching and hopefully see you in the next one.


nal objectives um how will we collect public input I mean is there a dateline and would you probably want to get this online or by through the mail or something uh uh Ms Colburn uh is there a dateline you want this by I can't I don't have that chart I mean the dateline but if we want public input uh listen then public this is where we are and this is where we're going so this is your time to be involved and make suggestions so how would how would they best get that done so over the next few months you know we're going to be um working with departments to initially draft the some objectives and then we will be seeking whether we go to commissions like we did with the last plan or come to other public settings you know there will likely be opportunities to provide some input um when we present the proposed plan to the board in May that will coincide with the proposed budget and um subsequent to that either at that meeting or through budget hearings there would be an opportunity for the public to weigh in on everything that's been proposed before we finalize it at the end of June so there will be a series of points during which the public or commissions um or others who are key stakeholders can weigh in on what uh what we've put together for the board and I'll just a point of clarification regarding some of the other questions that came up we're asking for feedback right now for the new two year operational plan we're not suggesting making further amendments to the current operational plan most of what's been amended in the current operational plan has to do with impacts from um COVID-19 and the fire and so we've we've made some adjustments to timelines but we're we're really looking forward and hoping that we've received any guidance from you so that when we start to work with departments we know how to direct their efforts and can help you know work on different objectives that might be of interest to the board very good thank you um clerk is there are there any is there any input from the public any questions chair i do not oh hold on there is one hand up okay we do have one hand up if you give me one second i will share my screen okay caller whose telephone number ends in 2915 you will have two minutes to speak i am unmuting you please accept the unmute and start speaking once you do so the timer will start thank you this is back east time brooner can you hear me yes thank you thank you um i lost uh internet here for a while so i'm i had to leave the meeting but i'm now back and have just kind of come in in the middle of this report i i remember that from earlier reports there was a dashboard that was supposed to be available to the public and i did look at that and it was supposed to show these measurable exact actions that met the vision and i never really saw it functioning so i would like clarification in terms of public input in moving forward how will that dashboard really be made um functional and available to the public um i want to speak about the fire recovery and um operational excellence i have been very concerned that this county um eliminated the emergency services manager position full-time paid position um the supervisors were to come with a plan to possibly fund that position with jurisdictional input and i never have seen that happen what i have seen happen is a completely new department started up the office of resiliency and hiring a new person and today we see that pay could be anywhere from 65 to 87 an hour but no real clarification about what this job would be i also know that um the person that had been the assistant to the the manager was transferred over to the CAO's office and is not one of the three people that is being hired to assist this new person i feel like operationally this is really disconnected it will leave our county in peril for um when we really need to have the relationship to stab and chair i do not see any further hands up so that would be the end of public comment on this item okay um and uh i'd like to have a motion to accept and follow this report i think somebody who wanted to make that motion did yeah i can i can uh mr chair this ryan kunity i can make the motion um and i mean i think supervisor coding as a as a new supervisor should meet with staff to walk through uh any and all proposals as we all should but um i would add the additional direction that staff meet with each board member beginning at least one month prior to when the plan returns in may uh and to develop new objectives and provide guidance on remaining objectives and amended objectives and in addition before any operational plan objectives are amended or withdrawn from the plan the staff notify the board by memo outlining the amended and withdrawn objectives with with an explanation uh i'll uh supervisor cap and i'll second that and uh also if we can get more public input we've got to figure out how to do that virtually and everything we will we're moving that direction because we have to yeah that's our directive right now okay we have a motion and a second um i'm chair i would ask before i call for a role if uh supervisor kunity could please email the clerk of the board your um additional direction that would be great i will do thank you i'll now call roll yes supervisor conic supervisor you're muted sorry i was on mute i'll say i i just wanted to add um that um i will send uh in written form some of the proposals i had uh to miss coburn and for opportunity to review those and i also look forward to working with the public to review the objectives uh specifically in the first district when they come out supervisor friend kunity hi cap it hi chair mcpherson hi motion passes unanimously uh we will go to item number 10 to consider the final appointment of sharyl your ta i hope that's correct i'm sorry if it's not to the commission on justice and gender as an enlarge representative of the black african community american community for a term to expire april first 2024 the nomination was accepted on december 8th 2020 any discussion uh any any comments from the public there is no public comment chair okay uh entertain a motion i'll move to approve second motion second to uh to approve the final appointment uh item number 10 uh please follow the rule supervisor conic hi friend hi kunity hi cap it hi chair mcpherson hi we will move to item number 11 to consider the final reappointment of thomas john batley to the commission of the community action board as an enlarge county representative for a term to expire january 6 2025 this nomination also was accepted on december 8th 2020 any comments from the public i see no public comments and i i don't i don't think i see any coming from uh from the board uh we'll entertain a motion a second i'll move to approve supervisor capit second community community uh capit community please call the rule supervisor conic hi friend hi kunity hi capit hi and chair mcpherson hi the motion is approved unanimously on item number 12 the final item uh regular agenda item of the day consider the final reappointment of larry pegler to the sad cruise metropolitan transit district board of directors and at large general community members representative for a term to expire december 31st 2024 this nomination was accepted on december 8 2020 any any comments from the board members any comments from the public sure no public comments thank you chair i'll entertain a motion and uh second approval for kunity kunity moves you have a second i'll second it because i can do that as chair okay uh move in second please call the roll supervisor conic hi excuse me friend hi kunity capit hi and chair mcpherson hi that motion passes unanimously we are now uh ready to go into uh closed session mr. uh chief county council are there any reportable items there are no reportable items today okay are there any comments from the public on items that are on our closed agenda our closed session agenda i see no public comment okay um it is now just after 12 o'clock we will take a 10 minute break and meet at 12 15 in closed session we will adjourn this public meeting thank you