This week in 1974, the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO for short) went to #1 on the charts with their song “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.” The song is famous for its rhythm guitar and stuttering chorus with the words “b-b-b-baby, you just ain’t seen na-na-nothing yet.”
The story behind the song is strange, to say the least. At first, a lot of critics thought the band was copying the stuttering tendencies of the band The Who. But the song was actually written from improvised lyrics during a jam session and performed in one take as a working track. Singer Randy Bachman’s stuttered chorus was an inside joke to make fun of his brother, Gary, the band’s first manager, who also had a speech impediment. Bachman intended to send the recording to his brother, have a good laugh at his brother’s expense, and move on to a better, less chaotic version of the song.
So much for brotherly love.
Turn on any classic rock station today, and the song is in regular rotation. It’s pure 70s—unkempt facial hair, big, open collars, and choreographed guitar solos. The stuttering is just weird enough to make it unforgettable.
This month’s economic indicators are a lot like that—chaotic, stammering, and hard to forget (or make sense of, which we’ve been saying for months). Take, for instance, average wages and building valuation, where Rapid City set record highs. These indicators would be amazing in most months. But in the current state of the economy, where the prime interest rate is 8.5%, we’re left wondering again: when is it going to come crashing down to earth?
Just last week, the Fed decided to hold rates where they are but also served up a lot of word salad on whether or not they would increase rates further down the road. Translation: we don’t know what’s going to happen.
We’ll go out on a limb here and project that the Fed is done raising interest rates. We’re pretty sure they don’t want to overshoot this economy while they still have the chance to thread the needle on inflation, but we’ll know a lot more when we see holiday spending figures coming in.
Layoffs continue to be the possible specter that haunts us past Halloween.
Here at the local level, we continue to see strong consumer spending ($876 million last month alone in Rapid City proper), strong demand for housing, low unemployment (1.9%), and a strong commercial real estate sector. So, despite the headwinds of two wars, interest-rate uncertainty, and a semiconductor chip war between China and the US, we just ain’t seen anything yet.
Stay safe and God-speed.
Tom
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