This conversation drives home the point that economist only see solutions in terms of economic levers and not policy levers, while glossing over any indicators that the economic issues might be caused by policy decisions about non-economic things like market consolidation in housing or meat processing. As inflation has come down, the breakdown for the causes of the inflation has become fairly clear with ~2% being baseline inflation, ~2.5-3% from direct payments and ~4-6% from monopoly power. This means the problem is the market not being well regulated and co-opted by monopolists. Changes to tax rates aren't going to address this issue.
But the monopolies are still here and the inflation rate has come down. Huh? I agree that we need to do something about monopolies but I don't see how this works out.
@@Dan-dy8zp the argument is that consolidated markets that were not seeing cost inflation used the cover of inflation to unilaterally raise prices. With inflation coming down, continuing to raise prices would be notable and a PR disaster. While monopolies have a lot of power to manipulate prices, getting caught doing it risks legal jeopardy and consumer backlash, so most monopolies try to implement their plans too slowly to be noticed avoiding the political fights.
@@Dan-dy8zp looking more holistically, consolidated markets and monopolies can use their position to ignore economic pressures especially competition (because there isn't a lot of it) to make more money. In this case it was raising prices on meat, which wouldn't have been possible with sufficient players because someone would have kept price low to gain sales. The defense industry is the same way with so few manufacturers and suppliers (52 in 1980 to 5 today) that there is no one for the government to choose between (see how SpaceX underlined the lack of innovation in the space).
@@Dan-dy8zp I recommend Matt Stoller's substack newsletter, there has been attempts to tackle monopolies across pharma, groceries, tech and it is having some effect
Agreed, we have had successively less and less productive classes of Congress, leaving the Fed with a single lever left to cut with the crudest, broadest stroke. And now with Chevron deference overturned after nearly a half century of SCOTUS precedent, we are giving monopolistic and oligopolistic powers too much control of this economy. The only pillar left at present is Lina Khan at FTC. Watching the future cautiously
Ezra is one of the only nyt hosts I still tune in for, I’m not really willing to reengage with the wider nyt ecosystem if he’s gonna be walled off inside it. (I’m probably in the minority, though.)
They have to make money somehow though. The money for reporting has been going down down down since TV showed up in the 1950's. Worse since the internet, even worse since social media, and smart phones. It's really balancing on a knife edge now. Making shit up that readers want to hear instead of reporting real events is just too much easier and cheaper. How can we tell the difference without going there in person? Sorry, I'm ranting.
So I'm hearing the US economy is the best it's ever been. I guess that's a clear signal that my friends and family aren't a part of this "economy". We're apparently not getting anything from this "great economy"
Real median income is the best metric of how well the average person is doing in this country. But that is based on the market basket upon which the Consumer Price Index is based and that doesn't seem to be realistic. One should look at what family budgets would look like in different locales, assuming people are making rational choices. But that doesn't seem to be part of Jason Furman's universe, or that of Larry Summers too. The New Democrats are a far cry from the New Dealers.
❤️I've been reflecting on how copy trading has truly transformed the lives of so many traders, including my own. Purchased my first house for 3.4m last week. It's been a lifeline, and I can't express enough gratitude for the impact it's had on my journey.
Congratulations on your new house. Who do you copytrade from?. That's a huge milestone, and it's great to hear that copy trading has been so beneficial for you. It sounds like you're in a positive place right now.
Yes Managermenon copytrade has really been of great help. Just last month and I have made up to $420k. I just want to compound my profits and see how much I cna get before the year end
Todays jobs report highlight: - “Very strong” according to Jason Furman on X. - Unemployment rate down to 4.1% from 4.2% - 254,000 jobs in September - Upward revisions for July & Aug. - Black unemployment: 5.7%, down from 6.1% - Hispanic unemployment: 5.1%, down from 5.5% - Employment rate up - Wage growth moderate
I think one of the things that nobody talks about when they talk about "all this money that was just handed to people" and how those people went out and spent it immediately is the fact that poverty was greatly lowered by that measure. And that's a good thing in an absolute perspective. So could there be an analysis that the economy, such as it was, relied on a large number of people living in poverty and when those people saw their situation improved, even momentarily, it all went haywire? This seems to reveal an imbalance in the economy not a strenght. Maybe the fact is that the US cannot sustain and some would say afford to have so many people in such dire financial circumstances. Economists have to start looking beyond single indicators and need to look at the whole system. Unless they do that, they'll never be able to provide any kind of truly pertinent and society worthy advice.
@marie-andreec5164 yes, but that's another issue entirely. More and more I get the sense that the actual field of economics is getting almost entirely divorced from the "economics" being discussed in news form. Not to mention anything too out there, and even using the democrats as an example given the republicans are often much worse: calling a tariff a tax and saying the side enacting them pays for all of them, is patently false. It can behave somewhat like a tax, but while not even mentioning elasticities, industrial policy, or terms of trade, it means the discussion is almost entirely divorced from the field. And this is an econ 101 thing. It's not some advanced or controversial phenomenon.
@@Martcapt Given that most people don't even understand the most basic things about money, there needs to be simple explanations of economic phenomenons for people to get the gist. I can understand likening a tariff to a tax because people understand that a tax comes out of their pocket. I get that their message was that tariffs used without discernment ended up costing more for the public on things which are very inelastic. Because of our modern ways of doing business, with low inventories and seemingly evereything we consume on a daily basis coming from further and further, the price of very inelastic goods like oil finds impacts eveything, because even if you don't consume that product directly, the stuff you do buy depends on it. The economy adjusts as a whole eventually and it gets back to a certain balance, but shocks are hard to go through and although thinks look fine on the macro, a lot of individuals get caught in the middle and that's just tragic.
At one hour in, I have to disagree about the trade deficits not matter for jobs bc we created so many jobs last year. The thing is, the trade deficit requires us to have massive budget deficits to stimulate the economy and avoid job losses that would result from the trade deficit. Ideally, our trade would be balanced and we'd import as much as we export.. that would give us more room to reduce the deficit. So yes we had great job growth, but we also had record deficits
@@kgblankinshipStats can be made to look purposefully misleading. It's a rather common practice. People notice their groceries and rent have gone up a lot, and no amount of tinkering with the stats to make the current admin look good will change their experience. The Dems at this point have tried to convince people not to believe their lying eyes.
Why are we not talking about people buying multiple homes and creating and controlling the housing market. We need landlord registration. We need to know how much these people are charging for rent and how many houses they own.
Landlords have nothing to do with our high cost of housing. Landlords charge what the market will bare which is determined by how much housing exists relative to the size of the population. There are enough people who are open to renting or buying that the home prices and rent prices tend to fluctuate in tandem over the long term (not counting mansions). Sadly, you can't fix insufficient supply in any other way than building more housing. Unfortunately, this WILL, without question, mean significant money that would have entered the pockets of people lucky enough to already have housing will not get there. More housing, rental or not, will without doubt reduce home value appreciation on a regional scale over the long haul. That's why we don't have enough housing. People fear this and have always been leary of more housing supply in their own local area. After decades of that we are way low on housing.
@@Dan-dy8zp in some markets, Landlords have everything to do with the high cost of housing -- specifically in markets where a large number of the available units have been bought by wall street investors, who can then exert serious control the market -- which is why you will find large number of vacant units in some areas with high demand -- the investors/corporations can afford to wait it out until people will pay their inflated rents -- which then raises rents for everyone else. You are under the misapprehension that it is not possible to manipulate the market -- when controlling a slice of the supply makes that manipulation pretty easy to do.
The problem is not only insufficient demand but also that owning houses to rent is just too profitable of an investment. If it wast so profitable, a big chunck of the demand going to landlords would go to people buying these houses to actually live on them. Think about it. The landlords are hoarding part of the supply...
@@dablodabs They tried banning new real estate investment in a some places in the Netherlands recently. Rent went up because there soon weren't enough rental properties and poorer people started to move out of the neighborhoods. Didn't do anything to home prices. Landlords are providing a service that some people need because they aren't anywhere near ready to buy a house. When there aren't any rentals, you have gentrification and poor people are forced to move. You could have government funded rentals to replace private landlords but you can't just get rid of landlords and expect that alone to improve the situation. We made it not lucrative to build affordable housing in this country with various NIMBY zoning laws and here we are.
He does talk about that at 54:30 when he addresses antitrust concerns in the housing market a la private equity, algorithmic price fixing, etc. He goes into detail about how the dynamics of supply and demand tie into the housing crisis.
The lack of discussion on economic tradeoffs among the Dems is right on point! The unwillingness to talk about the trade offs of the Covid stimulus and Trump tax cuts when messaging about inflation has been a total missed opportunity
The only thing that matters in regards to inflation for someone like me 32 years old looking to buy a house in Massachusetts is the housing cost inflation could be over 10% per year but if my house still cost $200,000 not $800,000 with an 8% mortgage I could easily absorb all of that. There are really two different camps Americans who have owned homes since 2020 or before and who mortgage them at a low rate are doing extremely well with huge growth in their home equity and all their other inflationary costs are coming down but if you are unlucky enough to not own a home and you have to buy a these extraordinarily high prices with very high rates all the other inflationary costs that are coming down don't matter at all. For example my oldest brother in Massachusetts bought a house He's 10 years older than me in 2010 for $150,000 refinanced it in 21 for 2.8% that same house or one just like it his neighbors went up for sale for 1 million and assuming 8% mortgage that's more than 10 times the mortgage cost plus 10 times the real estate tax. Now my brother has almost 900,000 in home equity him and his wife make a total of $170,000 a year they're doing extremely well inflation doesn't bother them. But for me and my younger brother there's no way we could move back there even though we also make about $140,000 each still is not nearly enough to buy a house there So instead we live in smaller cities in the Midwest or housing cost is 10 times less and we can make higher salaries.
Your brother is doing incredibly well, probably better than 99% of the rest of the population. So don't regard his success as normal. Your brother and sister-in-law have an income at the edge of the top 10% and they made some shrewd financial moves to get where they are. Also, the Midwest is not the edge of civilization in America. It's not Boston, but Chicago, Madison Wi, and Minneapolis-St Paul have a lot to be said for.
For those of you in the comments section frustrated by what is said here, there's a difference between perception and data. Yes technically, prices are up, but so are average paychecks. Maybe that doesn't mean YOUR paycheck, but wages on average are up. An economist's job is to look at data to get information about the economy. Our vibes on how the economy is doing doesn't always match the Data.
What “perception”? Prices are up 30% on average across the economy since 2021. Wages are up 10% in the same period. What about this data screams “perception” to you? People’s purchasing power has dramatically gone down, and they’re right to be frustrated.
I don't want to live in a big city (for housing costs, human density, traffic), but my job opportunities are largely limited to them. Remote work would let me live where I want to.
Lots of people found this during the COVID shutdown. Moved from San Fran to Montana etc. Makes sense. Until it doesn't The shutdowns end; the boss says "Everybody back to the office!" Or you lose your job. See, rural Montana doesn't offer a lot of local jobs. And they don't pay big-city compensation. Moving out from the big urban center is a one-way trip. You sell your house (if you have one) & buy a MUCH cheaper bigger house. You log in for work, remote. All's good! You've arbitraged your location! But you cannot sell your house in the country & buy back into that urban market. Big city markets appreciate faster than small-town rural real estate. I know people who have experienced this. Some are still very happy they moved out. The earn way less in rural towns but are happy with the trade-off. And some found alternative remote work when they needed to where they could continue to Zoom in for work, continue to arbitrage location. They're REALLY happy. While it lasts. But it doesn't work long-term for everyone.
Hilariously myopic understanding of the causes of inflation in the post-Covid period. The guests’ explanation didn’t even mention the rampant price gouging and the part of retailers, which has proven to account for roughly HALF of the increase in consumer prices. The cost of basic needs, from housing to food, all skyrocketed thanks to opportunistic greed. Landlords colluding through software-driven rent increases. Grocery store executives admitting they took full advantage of pandemic-induced circumstances to raise prices as high as possible, not merely in response to higher costs. The same goes for auto sales, where sticker shock left car shoppers reeling at absurd levels of dealer markups. Consumers have been under siege, with greed sucking them dry from every direction, and this clown, in a fashion typical of his field, ignores the single most important driver of this bout of inflation: pure human avarice.
This is partly true but not nearly as hellish or as literary as you make it out to be. The fact is, inflation has had many different faces. Gas. Which means everything else. Shipping containers. Covid. Ukraine grain. Etcetera. Soon, it'll be more tariffs! I will concede that I can't write nearly as prettily as you, but I do wonder if you have any names to put on the "roughly HALF". Any sectors to differentiate?
Companies just discovered greed post Covid? Is the ability to raise prices a new function hitherto undiscovered? Prices went up for 2 reasons. Supply chains got screwed up due to global shutdowns. Government printed trillions in new money in record time, causing a massive inflation spike. “Price gouging” if it happened at all, was a fringe factor.
He does address antitrust concerns at 54:30 and specifically mentions the current DOJ suit against alleged algorithmic price fixing in the housing market. I agree however that he couldve talked more about antitrust overall especially when the FTC under Lina Khan has been filing a host of antitrust suits, which according to 60 Minutes has led to special interests calling for her removal. Also, at 24:30 and 1:27:00 he makes clear that trickle-down down economics ie tax cuts for the wealthy is senseless and did nothing meaningful. So, while it's concerning that he didn't directly discuss inequality except to say it fell starting in 2000 after it ballooned in the 1980s and 1990s, overall it sounded like a balanced perspective.
@@tuberific454 Great take! It's seems like there's some classic overlap between algorithmic pricing, 'dynamic pricing', and greedflation that some great economist could figure out. I do wonder if somebody can simply prove that inflation was more than half greedflation or less than half in the last two years. Also: greedflation should be understood in relation to costs rising on the other side, right? You can't call greedflation and then NOT examine the costs the companies were making. As the other commenter said: companies didn't suddenly wake up. It was there, and there may have been some opportunism, but supply chains, gas, gov support and even the resulting interest rates seem to have contributed much more to me. But I'm not a brilliant economist!
@jochemfisher7786 Consider the FTC suits back in March and more recently against against oil execs who colluded to fix prices. Also, there is no significant evidence that not raising prices as high would've been unsustainable ie unprofitable. Per the EPI, which admittedly is a progressive think tank, 53% of inflation is corporate profits. However, the St Louis Fed does not dispute that statistic but instead points out that this was due to that stimulus programs had subsidized an unknown but significant portion of that. It adds the caveat that it's nearly impossible to delineate the individual contributors to high profit margins during the pandemic. But Milton Friedman famously said when he debunked the Phillips Curve that inflation is largely speculative. Brazilian economists proved this in the 1990s when they stopped hyperinflation by tricking the public into thinking that the national currency was appreciating when the opposite was true. NPR's Planet Money did a story on that. Also, economists generally agree that there are systemic antitrust issues in the economy, which as I mentioned is why Lina Khan is fighting to protect her post at the FTC. So, it's arguable that while "greedflation" is a phantom menace due to the external factors you mentioned, the data makes clear that actual costs were not a driver and as a result consumers were paying a premium in excess of what makes markets sustainable.
Re. The Coming Paywall We get it. Google is putting traditional media out of business. We sympathize. But you need to understand consumers We're seeing EVERY service we use turn into subscription models. We're seeing EVERY software product we used to buy, turn into subscriptions. We're seeing ALL media turn into subscriptions. We're even seeing Advertising-paid media turn into subscriptions! Ads + subscription. This adds up Frankly, we're done with it! We cannot afford this relentless monetization of everything we do. If major corporations could monetize the air we breathe, they'd do it! Proof: they've succeeded in monetizing water supply in places. It's resulted in a massive public backlash: that's a step too far. You're approaching backlash in monetization of all media. Think you can survive viewer attrition due to unwillingness to pay ANOTHER subscription? Knock yourself out. Been nice knowing you. What's the alternative? Here's what strikes me. There are MANY UA-cam channels that have 1 million + subscribers. WOW. These channels are pulling SIGNIFICANT revenue, from advertising, from Google (that makes money from the advertising). The UA-cam model WORKS. These UA-cam channels aren't demanding subscriptions from viewers. That'd kill the golden goose. Set up a Patreon Site Plenty of YT creators ALSO have a Patreon site they pitch to YT viewers. Patreon subscribers pay something (though often not a lot) to subscribe there for additional value and to support the YT creator. They're happy to do that. Set up a NYT Patreon Site Put the archive there. Offer additional value THERE. Slap a subscription on your YT channel & you'll lose us all. Fast.
I would recommend everyone watch Jason Furman's interview with Jon Stewart on the Weekly Show Podcast along with fellow economist Kitty Richards, which he himself references early in the episode. In it, his hypotheses about fiscal policy are actually challenged. They don't stand up as well and you can watch him lose his cool. This interview he's certainly portraying a gentler outlook on refundable child tax credit for the working poor and slightly higher taxes on the rich, but he's sticking to his guns about catastrophizing about the national debt, despite a significant proportion of it being held by US citizens in the form of treasury bonds. That serviced interest comes back to (albeit disproportionately wealthy) Americans. I do find his positions on housing and immigration to be much more reasonable. With regards to the two vices of economic analysis for each political persuasion I see some merit, but perhaps we can borrow from the analogy of pre-innoculation against misinformation and as progressive policymakers say, "Yes, we acknowledge this proposal has a significant cost, and we see the worth in it's benefits *because* we are willing to spend this much on this investment." Seems like an honest way to present an argument for, say, climate legislation if humanity is to survive on Planet Earth.
@@BrowithStoryCool the government isn't an individual that has to balance their budget every interval in time. What is the distinction between a COVID stimulus check and interest paid on a Treasury bond with regards to how much capital is injected into demand-side economics (other than the prototypical person to receive each time of money from the government)? That's why it matters that the overwhelming proportion of debt is held by the public. Another 20% of debt is between different branches of the government. That means the overwhelming cost of servicing the national debt is a benefit to its citizens for loaning the government money. If anything, I think a better argument for diminishing the proportion of the national debt would be that it disproportionately benefits the wealthy, who are able to hold a larger total of bonds if they wish.
@@lawrencetchen Treasury bond is always fed gov debt, stimulus check could be debt or it could be paid by tax revenue, so that's apple to oranges. The mere fact that most of the debt is held by public pensions or the American public doesn't help things, as treasury bonds have low interest yields, even adjusted for risk, vs other bonds or investment instruments, and an oversupply of treasury bonds drives down the interest further. The American public will invest their money somewhere, whether it's treasury bonds or other financial instruments. In one scenario you have high financing costs for federal expenditures, in another you have low financing costs or zero costs. Your argument reminds me of the argument for Reaganomics: it's fine we give massive tax cuts to the wealthy because they'll reinvest most of their wealth into domestic companies that employ average Americans anyways....
@@lawrencetchen lol the government can't balance their budget in every interval lmao. You can not be serious. What's the deficit right now, 10% of GDP?
@@BrowithStoryCool that's my point, if an individual doesn't balance their budget, they go bankrupt, but the government doesn't balance their budget and can go on operating because of the trust we have in its integrity to honor those debts. If the government finds that an expenditure will stimulate the economy more than it costs to service that debt (multiplied by the rate it is taxed at) over the same interval of time, then it's in their interest to accrue that debt. National debt isn't necessarily a death spiral. But there is one instance in which it is: running a deficit to give tax cuts to the rich and their corporations, because they only hoard and spend a lot less of it than working people, who spend most of what they make (hence economic activity, and tax revenues)
The housing issue is a really tough problem to solve quickly. If we want to leverage our money, we should put everything into one city as a 'Manhattan Project' (pun not intended but left in): NYC, Chicago, LA, or San Francisco-pick one. Hire a German project manager to run it, and have a Vienna public housing developer propose effective ideas. Get structured block-by-block or district-by-district community feedback, and bring in a Josh Shapiro type to help clear the red tape. Mixed income, mixed zoning, and transit should be part of the plan; we don’t want another Bijlmermeer. But seriously, a focused effort in one city might solidify the will for other cities or the country to follow
I love how, as we turn away from neoliberalism, 2 generations of economists are going to need caveats when their bios are read at the beginning of interviews 🤣
i've followed your work for a long, long time. i even remember your cooking video experiments. & it's been kind of soul-destroying, the way you've ignored or succumbed to the propaganda around endless sars-cov-2 transmission -- that intellectual & critical abandonment. the cumulative downstream harms of reinfection are stark. the devastations of longcovid are apparent. & yet you've mirrored the silence around the health supremacy & eugenicist training that's fueled normalizing the deaths & increasing harms to disabled people, which is also a refusal to acknowledge the overlapping vulnerabilities of so many people, not merely the ones who were marked to "fall by the wayside" a la fauci. mask bans? more silence. the biden admin has arguably done more harm to the health & safety of americans -- & to trust in public health -- than the trump admin. but abled public intellectuals have carved an island of indifference & incuriosity out of this pandemic. i don't understand how you, too, have failed to do better, more humane & rigorous work on the subject.
And and in the United States productivity per worker is down in almost all industries or stagnant besides technology mining and agriculture. For example construction workers in the United States are 50% less productive per hour. My best guess as to why is because it aligns perfectly with extremely large regulations that came on in the late '60s and early '70s and it stayed with us ever since That's when productivity growth slow dramatically besides technology mining and agriculture.
Is it me or does it seem like all of this could be solved if they just raised wages so that people could actually afford not just the bare minimum, but prosperity?
What Democrats should be doing to fix all this: - Campaign finance reform - Enforce the antitrust laws, which Jason Furman seems to have ignored. - Raise income taxes on the rich. - Stop funding government sprawl - not all social problems are remedied by social programs. - Right-size regulations. Tiptoeing around isn't going to get anything done.
@@kgblankinship Good luck convincing the Dems (or even neo-cons and rinos) to shrink government. They will always try to solve everything with more government and endless spending.
He said it’s up a little, the problem is that the typical pattern is going up a little is followed by it going up a lot. The “a lot” is the potential, the likely outcome without course correction
I wonder who this robust economy is for ? Is it the tech sector middle class? If you worked for verizon, or intel, or the like youre job hunting against your peers right now. If youre a new home buyer, youve been in a ridiculous sellers market with no end in sight. This episode is tone deaf.
Paywall.. I just started listening to you in the last 6 weeks. Unfortunately your going to lose a listener if you go through with that. Isn't ad revenue the name of game. Just saying man. Ur gonna kill ur reach
How in the world can Ezra have anything but fawning, hagiographic superlatives to offer about the state of the JoeBiden Kamala Harris economy? Oh and Inflation is over 😂.
Because Biden is in a contrast with a lunatic who wants to put across-the-board 20% tariffs on all imports backed up by brilliant amazing best in the world ever concepts of plans to solve everything else. Oh and deport undocumented immigrants that the US depends on to pick, clean, package and process all the nasty stuff that citizens won't that will blow inflation through the roof because of labor shortage.
This conversation drives home the point that economist only see solutions in terms of economic levers and not policy levers, while glossing over any indicators that the economic issues might be caused by policy decisions about non-economic things like market consolidation in housing or meat processing. As inflation has come down, the breakdown for the causes of the inflation has become fairly clear with ~2% being baseline inflation, ~2.5-3% from direct payments and ~4-6% from monopoly power. This means the problem is the market not being well regulated and co-opted by monopolists. Changes to tax rates aren't going to address this issue.
But the monopolies are still here and the inflation rate has come down. Huh? I agree that we need to do something about monopolies but I don't see how this works out.
@@Dan-dy8zp the argument is that consolidated markets that were not seeing cost inflation used the cover of inflation to unilaterally raise prices. With inflation coming down, continuing to raise prices would be notable and a PR disaster. While monopolies have a lot of power to manipulate prices, getting caught doing it risks legal jeopardy and consumer backlash, so most monopolies try to implement their plans too slowly to be noticed avoiding the political fights.
@@Dan-dy8zp looking more holistically, consolidated markets and monopolies can use their position to ignore economic pressures especially competition (because there isn't a lot of it) to make more money. In this case it was raising prices on meat, which wouldn't have been possible with sufficient players because someone would have kept price low to gain sales. The defense industry is the same way with so few manufacturers and suppliers (52 in 1980 to 5 today) that there is no one for the government to choose between (see how SpaceX underlined the lack of innovation in the space).
@@Dan-dy8zp I recommend Matt Stoller's substack newsletter, there has been attempts to tackle monopolies across pharma, groceries, tech and it is having some effect
Agreed, we have had successively less and less productive classes of Congress, leaving the Fed with a single lever left to cut with the crudest, broadest stroke. And now with Chevron deference overturned after nearly a half century of SCOTUS precedent, we are giving monopolistic and oligopolistic powers too much control of this economy. The only pillar left at present is Lina Khan at FTC. Watching the future cautiously
Re the paywall: "Democracy Dies in Darkness", just saying.
Darkness happens when no one can afford to pay good reporters
Ezra is one of the only nyt hosts I still tune in for, I’m not really willing to reengage with the wider nyt ecosystem if he’s gonna be walled off inside it. (I’m probably in the minority, though.)
They have to make money somehow though. The money for reporting has been going down down down since TV showed up in the 1950's. Worse since the internet, even worse since social media, and smart phones. It's really balancing on a knife edge now.
Making shit up that readers want to hear instead of reporting real events is just too much easier and cheaper. How can we tell the difference without going there in person?
Sorry, I'm ranting.
@@masonstoveAt this point, especially regarding elections, recuperate that mone using add
@@lt_dreams96 I just think it’s a little hypocritical for all of us to whine about why we aren’t paid more but then also want everything for free
So I'm hearing the US economy is the best it's ever been. I guess that's a clear signal that my friends and family aren't a part of this "economy". We're apparently not getting anything from this "great economy"
Real median income is the best metric of how well the average person is doing in this country. But that is based on the market basket upon which the Consumer Price Index is based and that doesn't seem to be realistic. One should look at what family budgets would look like in different locales, assuming people are making rational choices. But that doesn't seem to be part of Jason Furman's universe, or that of Larry Summers too. The New Democrats are a far cry from the New Dealers.
❤️I've been reflecting on how copy trading has truly transformed the lives of so many traders, including my own. Purchased my first house for 3.4m last week. It's been a lifeline, and I can't express enough gratitude for the impact it's had on my journey.
Congratulations on your new house. Who do you copytrade from?. That's a huge milestone, and it's great to hear that copy trading has been so beneficial for you. It sounds like you're in a positive place right now.
He's mostly on telegrams using the user name
@Menonmanager
I have heard about copytrade but honestly I don't know how it works. Is it really profitable?
Yes Managermenon copytrade has really been of great help. Just last month and I have made up to $420k. I just want to compound my profits and see how much I cna get before the year end
Todays jobs report highlight:
- “Very strong” according to Jason Furman on X.
- Unemployment rate down to 4.1% from 4.2%
- 254,000 jobs in September
- Upward revisions for July & Aug.
- Black unemployment: 5.7%, down from 6.1%
- Hispanic unemployment: 5.1%, down from 5.5%
- Employment rate up
- Wage growth moderate
I think one of the things that nobody talks about when they talk about "all this money that was just handed to people" and how those people went out and spent it immediately is the fact that poverty was greatly lowered by that measure. And that's a good thing in an absolute perspective. So could there be an analysis that the economy, such as it was, relied on a large number of people living in poverty and when those people saw their situation improved, even momentarily, it all went haywire? This seems to reveal an imbalance in the economy not a strenght. Maybe the fact is that the US cannot sustain and some would say afford to have so many people in such dire financial circumstances. Economists have to start looking beyond single indicators and need to look at the whole system. Unless they do that, they'll never be able to provide any kind of truly pertinent and society worthy advice.
Economist here. We do. At least the good ones.
But a pretty story is better told if you just ignore all that.
@@Martcapt True, there's probably a lot of info out there, it's a question of which is being heard by those who decide.
@marie-andreec5164 yes, but that's another issue entirely. More and more I get the sense that the actual field of economics is getting almost entirely divorced from the "economics" being discussed in news form.
Not to mention anything too out there, and even using the democrats as an example given the republicans are often much worse: calling a tariff a tax and saying the side enacting them pays for all of them, is patently false. It can behave somewhat like a tax, but while not even mentioning elasticities, industrial policy, or terms of trade, it means the discussion is almost entirely divorced from the field. And this is an econ 101 thing. It's not some advanced or controversial phenomenon.
@@Martcapt Given that most people don't even understand the most basic things about money, there needs to be simple explanations of economic phenomenons for people to get the gist. I can understand likening a tariff to a tax because people understand that a tax comes out of their pocket. I get that their message was that tariffs used without discernment ended up costing more for the public on things which are very inelastic. Because of our modern ways of doing business, with low inventories and seemingly evereything we consume on a daily basis coming from further and further, the price of very inelastic goods like oil finds impacts eveything, because even if you don't consume that product directly, the stuff you do buy depends on it. The economy adjusts as a whole eventually and it gets back to a certain balance, but shocks are hard to go through and although thinks look fine on the macro, a lot of individuals get caught in the middle and that's just tragic.
At one hour in, I have to disagree about the trade deficits not matter for jobs bc we created so many jobs last year. The thing is, the trade deficit requires us to have massive budget deficits to stimulate the economy and avoid job losses that would result from the trade deficit. Ideally, our trade would be balanced and we'd import as much as we export.. that would give us more room to reduce the deficit. So yes we had great job growth, but we also had record deficits
The Klein archive will be worth the subscription alone.
Great interview
Okay, I learned a lot. So not out dated. Thanks for the show.
The economic data released half an hour ago says unemployment went down... DAMNIT, BIDEN!
I believe the federal stats, not how certain Republicans 'feel' how things are going.
@@kgblankinshipStats can be made to look purposefully misleading. It's a rather common practice. People notice their groceries and rent have gone up a lot, and no amount of tinkering with the stats to make the current admin look good will change their experience. The Dems at this point have tried to convince people not to believe their lying eyes.
Too many people own more than one home they might own 3 or 4 homes so they can rent them or hold them until the pricing goes up and then sell
Why are we not talking about people buying multiple homes and creating and controlling the housing market. We need landlord registration. We need to know how much these people are charging for rent and how many houses they own.
Landlords have nothing to do with our high cost of housing. Landlords charge what the market will bare which is determined by how much housing exists relative to the size of the population. There are enough people who are open to renting or buying that the home prices and rent prices tend to fluctuate in tandem over the long term (not counting mansions).
Sadly, you can't fix insufficient supply in any other way than building more housing.
Unfortunately, this WILL, without question, mean significant money that would have entered the pockets of people lucky enough to already have housing will not get there. More housing, rental or not, will without doubt reduce home value appreciation on a regional scale over the long haul. That's why we don't have enough housing. People fear this and have always been leary of more housing supply in their own local area. After decades of that we are way low on housing.
@@Dan-dy8zp in some markets, Landlords have everything to do with the high cost of housing -- specifically in markets where a large number of the available units have been bought by wall street investors, who can then exert serious control the market -- which is why you will find large number of vacant units in some areas with high demand -- the investors/corporations can afford to wait it out until people will pay their inflated rents -- which then raises rents for everyone else. You are under the misapprehension that it is not possible to manipulate the market -- when controlling a slice of the supply makes that manipulation pretty easy to do.
The problem is not only insufficient demand but also that owning houses to rent is just too profitable of an investment. If it wast so profitable, a big chunck of the demand going to landlords would go to people buying these houses to actually live on them. Think about it. The landlords are hoarding part of the supply...
@@dablodabs They tried banning new real estate investment in a some places in the Netherlands recently. Rent went up because there soon weren't enough rental properties and poorer people started to move out of the neighborhoods.
Didn't do anything to home prices.
Landlords are providing a service that some people need because they aren't anywhere near ready to buy a house. When there aren't any rentals, you have gentrification and poor people are forced to move.
You could have government funded rentals to replace private landlords but you can't just get rid of landlords and expect that alone to improve the situation.
We made it not lucrative to build affordable housing in this country with various NIMBY zoning laws and here we are.
He does talk about that at 54:30 when he addresses antitrust concerns in the housing market a la private equity, algorithmic price fixing, etc. He goes into detail about how the dynamics of supply and demand tie into the housing crisis.
The lack of discussion on economic tradeoffs among the Dems is right on point! The unwillingness to talk about the trade offs of the Covid stimulus and Trump tax cuts when messaging about inflation has been a total missed opportunity
I never got why Jason Furman didn't become a Republican. This man doesn't have an ounce of regard for the economic well-being of the common American.
He operates entirely in postulates, hypotheses, and numbers, but very little in what those mean for the people actually experiencing the consequences.
If it's old news it is needed as a source.
Could the New York Times sell its articles individually for a dollar for download ?
Many libraries pay the get the news and then keep archives of old news print. If you need them for sources, you might look there.
Importing helps keep the USA an important customer. It gives the US power of the purse.
Bringing more factories into the US also will bring more pollution. Weakens our importance to other countries.
The only thing that matters in regards to inflation for someone like me 32 years old looking to buy a house in Massachusetts is the housing cost inflation could be over 10% per year but if my house still cost $200,000 not $800,000 with an 8% mortgage I could easily absorb all of that. There are really two different camps Americans who have owned homes since 2020 or before and who mortgage them at a low rate are doing extremely well with huge growth in their home equity and all their other inflationary costs are coming down but if you are unlucky enough to not own a home and you have to buy a these extraordinarily high prices with very high rates all the other inflationary costs that are coming down don't matter at all. For example my oldest brother in Massachusetts bought a house He's 10 years older than me in 2010 for $150,000 refinanced it in 21 for 2.8% that same house or one just like it his neighbors went up for sale for 1 million and assuming 8% mortgage that's more than 10 times the mortgage cost plus 10 times the real estate tax. Now my brother has almost 900,000 in home equity him and his wife make a total of $170,000 a year they're doing extremely well inflation doesn't bother them. But for me and my younger brother there's no way we could move back there even though we also make about $140,000 each still is not nearly enough to buy a house there So instead we live in smaller cities in the Midwest or housing cost is 10 times less and we can make higher salaries.
Your brother is doing incredibly well, probably better than 99% of the rest of the population. So don't regard his success as normal. Your brother and sister-in-law have an income at the edge of the top 10% and they made some shrewd financial moves to get where they are.
Also, the Midwest is not the edge of civilization in America. It's not Boston, but Chicago, Madison Wi, and Minneapolis-St Paul have a lot to be said for.
For those of you in the comments section frustrated by what is said here, there's a difference between perception and data.
Yes technically, prices are up, but so are average paychecks. Maybe that doesn't mean YOUR paycheck, but wages on average are up.
An economist's job is to look at data to get information about the economy. Our vibes on how the economy is doing doesn't always match the Data.
What “perception”? Prices are up 30% on average across the economy since 2021. Wages are up 10% in the same period. What about this data screams “perception” to you? People’s purchasing power has dramatically gone down, and they’re right to be frustrated.
There's also massacring the data in order to tell a pretty story.
I don't want to live in a big city (for housing costs, human density, traffic), but my job opportunities are largely limited to them. Remote work would let me live where I want to.
Lots of people found this during the COVID shutdown. Moved from San Fran to Montana etc. Makes sense.
Until it doesn't
The shutdowns end; the boss says "Everybody back to the office!" Or you lose your job.
See, rural Montana doesn't offer a lot of local jobs. And they don't pay big-city compensation.
Moving out from the big urban center is a one-way trip. You sell your house (if you have one) & buy a MUCH cheaper bigger house. You log in for work, remote. All's good! You've arbitraged your location!
But you cannot sell your house in the country & buy back into that urban market. Big city markets appreciate faster than small-town rural real estate.
I know people who have experienced this. Some are still very happy they moved out. The earn way less in rural towns but are happy with the trade-off. And some found alternative remote work when they needed to where they could continue to Zoom in for work, continue to arbitrage location. They're REALLY happy. While it lasts. But it doesn't work long-term for everyone.
@@jamesthompson7282 yeah, obviously I'd have to trust that companies were going to sustain the remote positions.
Opportunity is always there
Hilariously myopic understanding of the causes of inflation in the post-Covid period. The guests’ explanation didn’t even mention the rampant price gouging and the part of retailers, which has proven to account for roughly HALF of the increase in consumer prices. The cost of basic needs, from housing to food, all skyrocketed thanks to opportunistic greed. Landlords colluding through software-driven rent increases. Grocery store executives admitting they took full advantage of pandemic-induced circumstances to raise prices as high as possible, not merely in response to higher costs. The same goes for auto sales, where sticker shock left car shoppers reeling at absurd levels of dealer markups. Consumers have been under siege, with greed sucking them dry from every direction, and this clown, in a fashion typical of his field, ignores the single most important driver of this bout of inflation: pure human avarice.
This is partly true but not nearly as hellish or as literary as you make it out to be. The fact is, inflation has had many different faces. Gas. Which means everything else. Shipping containers. Covid. Ukraine grain. Etcetera. Soon, it'll be more tariffs! I will concede that I can't write nearly as prettily as you, but I do wonder if you have any names to put on the "roughly HALF". Any sectors to differentiate?
Companies just discovered greed post Covid? Is the ability to raise prices a new function hitherto undiscovered?
Prices went up for 2 reasons. Supply chains got screwed up due to global shutdowns. Government printed trillions in new money in record time, causing a massive inflation spike.
“Price gouging” if it happened at all, was a fringe factor.
He does address antitrust concerns at 54:30 and specifically mentions the current DOJ suit against alleged algorithmic price fixing in the housing market. I agree however that he couldve talked more about antitrust overall especially when the FTC under Lina Khan has been filing a host of antitrust suits, which according to 60 Minutes has led to special interests calling for her removal. Also, at 24:30 and 1:27:00 he makes clear that trickle-down down economics ie tax cuts for the wealthy is senseless and did nothing meaningful. So, while it's concerning that he didn't directly discuss inequality except to say it fell starting in 2000 after it ballooned in the 1980s and 1990s, overall it sounded like a balanced perspective.
@@tuberific454 Great take! It's seems like there's some classic overlap between algorithmic pricing, 'dynamic pricing', and greedflation that some great economist could figure out. I do wonder if somebody can simply prove that inflation was more than half greedflation or less than half in the last two years. Also: greedflation should be understood in relation to costs rising on the other side, right? You can't call greedflation and then NOT examine the costs the companies were making. As the other commenter said: companies didn't suddenly wake up. It was there, and there may have been some opportunism, but supply chains, gas, gov support and even the resulting interest rates seem to have contributed much more to me. But I'm not a brilliant economist!
@jochemfisher7786 Consider the FTC suits back in March and more recently against against oil execs who colluded to fix prices. Also, there is no significant evidence that not raising prices as high would've been unsustainable ie unprofitable. Per the EPI, which admittedly is a progressive think tank, 53% of inflation is corporate profits. However, the St Louis Fed does not dispute that statistic but instead points out that this was due to that stimulus programs had subsidized an unknown but significant portion of that. It adds the caveat that it's nearly impossible to delineate the individual contributors to high profit margins during the pandemic. But Milton Friedman famously said when he debunked the Phillips Curve that inflation is largely speculative. Brazilian economists proved this in the 1990s when they stopped hyperinflation by tricking the public into thinking that the national currency was appreciating when the opposite was true. NPR's Planet Money did a story on that. Also, economists generally agree that there are systemic antitrust issues in the economy, which as I mentioned is why Lina Khan is fighting to protect her post at the FTC. So, it's arguable that while "greedflation" is a phantom menace due to the external factors you mentioned, the data makes clear that actual costs were not a driver and as a result consumers were paying a premium in excess of what makes markets sustainable.
I subscribed to the New York Times for 5 years now. Great source of recipes too
Re. The Coming Paywall
We get it. Google is putting traditional media out of business. We sympathize.
But you need to understand consumers
We're seeing EVERY service we use turn into subscription models.
We're seeing EVERY software product we used to buy, turn into subscriptions.
We're seeing ALL media turn into subscriptions.
We're even seeing Advertising-paid media turn into subscriptions! Ads + subscription.
This adds up
Frankly, we're done with it! We cannot afford this relentless monetization of everything we do. If major corporations could monetize the air we breathe, they'd do it! Proof: they've succeeded in monetizing water supply in places. It's resulted in a massive public backlash: that's a step too far. You're approaching backlash in monetization of all media.
Think you can survive viewer attrition due to unwillingness to pay ANOTHER subscription?
Knock yourself out. Been nice knowing you.
What's the alternative?
Here's what strikes me. There are MANY UA-cam channels that have 1 million + subscribers. WOW.
These channels are pulling SIGNIFICANT revenue, from advertising, from Google (that makes money from the advertising).
The UA-cam model WORKS.
These UA-cam channels aren't demanding subscriptions from viewers. That'd kill the golden goose.
Set up a Patreon Site
Plenty of YT creators ALSO have a Patreon site they pitch to YT viewers. Patreon subscribers pay something (though often not a lot) to subscribe there for additional value and to support the YT creator. They're happy to do that.
Set up a NYT Patreon Site
Put the archive there. Offer additional value THERE.
Slap a subscription on your YT channel & you'll lose us all. Fast.
I would recommend everyone watch Jason Furman's interview with Jon Stewart on the Weekly Show Podcast along with fellow economist Kitty Richards, which he himself references early in the episode. In it, his hypotheses about fiscal policy are actually challenged. They don't stand up as well and you can watch him lose his cool.
This interview he's certainly portraying a gentler outlook on refundable child tax credit for the working poor and slightly higher taxes on the rich, but he's sticking to his guns about catastrophizing about the national debt, despite a significant proportion of it being held by US citizens in the form of treasury bonds. That serviced interest comes back to (albeit disproportionately wealthy) Americans.
I do find his positions on housing and immigration to be much more reasonable.
With regards to the two vices of economic analysis for each political persuasion I see some merit, but perhaps we can borrow from the analogy of pre-innoculation against misinformation and as progressive policymakers say, "Yes, we acknowledge this proposal has a significant cost, and we see the worth in it's benefits *because* we are willing to spend this much on this investment." Seems like an honest way to present an argument for, say, climate legislation if humanity is to survive on Planet Earth.
Debt is really bad. Why do you think it matters who holds treasury bonds?
@@BrowithStoryCool the government isn't an individual that has to balance their budget every interval in time. What is the distinction between a COVID stimulus check and interest paid on a Treasury bond with regards to how much capital is injected into demand-side economics (other than the prototypical person to receive each time of money from the government)? That's why it matters that the overwhelming proportion of debt is held by the public. Another 20% of debt is between different branches of the government. That means the overwhelming cost of servicing the national debt is a benefit to its citizens for loaning the government money. If anything, I think a better argument for diminishing the proportion of the national debt would be that it disproportionately benefits the wealthy, who are able to hold a larger total of bonds if they wish.
@@lawrencetchen Treasury bond is always fed gov debt, stimulus check could be debt or it could be paid by tax revenue, so that's apple to oranges.
The mere fact that most of the debt is held by public pensions or the American public doesn't help things, as treasury bonds have low interest yields, even adjusted for risk, vs other bonds or investment instruments, and an oversupply of treasury bonds drives down the interest further.
The American public will invest their money somewhere, whether it's treasury bonds or other financial instruments. In one scenario you have high financing costs for federal expenditures, in another you have low financing costs or zero costs.
Your argument reminds me of the argument for Reaganomics: it's fine we give massive tax cuts to the wealthy because they'll reinvest most of their wealth into domestic companies that employ average Americans anyways....
@@lawrencetchen lol the government can't balance their budget in every interval lmao. You can not be serious. What's the deficit right now, 10% of GDP?
@@BrowithStoryCool that's my point, if an individual doesn't balance their budget, they go bankrupt, but the government doesn't balance their budget and can go on operating because of the trust we have in its integrity to honor those debts.
If the government finds that an expenditure will stimulate the economy more than it costs to service that debt (multiplied by the rate it is taxed at) over the same interval of time, then it's in their interest to accrue that debt. National debt isn't necessarily a death spiral. But there is one instance in which it is: running a deficit to give tax cuts to the rich and their corporations, because they only hoard and spend a lot less of it than working people, who spend most of what they make (hence economic activity, and tax revenues)
BEST ECONOMY EVER!!!!
The housing issue is a really tough problem to solve quickly. If we want to leverage our money, we should put everything into one city as a 'Manhattan Project' (pun not intended but left in): NYC, Chicago, LA, or San Francisco-pick one. Hire a German project manager to run it, and have a Vienna public housing developer propose effective ideas. Get structured block-by-block or district-by-district community feedback, and bring in a Josh Shapiro type to help clear the red tape. Mixed income, mixed zoning, and transit should be part of the plan; we don’t want another Bijlmermeer. But seriously, a focused effort in one city might solidify the will for other cities or the country to follow
It is hard to follow your story when you keep switching tense.
i will no longer patronise the times because i refuse to deal with paywalls!
I love how, as we turn away from neoliberalism, 2 generations of economists are going to need caveats when their bios are read at the beginning of interviews 🤣
i've followed your work for a long, long time. i even remember your cooking video experiments. & it's been kind of soul-destroying, the way you've ignored or succumbed to the propaganda around endless sars-cov-2 transmission -- that intellectual & critical abandonment. the cumulative downstream harms of reinfection are stark. the devastations of longcovid are apparent. & yet you've mirrored the silence around the health supremacy & eugenicist training that's fueled normalizing the deaths & increasing harms to disabled people, which is also a refusal to acknowledge the overlapping vulnerabilities of so many people, not merely the ones who were marked to "fall by the wayside" a la fauci. mask bans? more silence. the biden admin has arguably done more harm to the health & safety of americans -- & to trust in public health -- than the trump admin. but abled public intellectuals have carved an island of indifference & incuriosity out of this pandemic. i don't understand how you, too, have failed to do better, more humane & rigorous work on the subject.
So no more UA-cam money for archived shows then
The population of Europe is declining the population of the United States is still increasing
That's half of it the rest of it is their productivity per hour work is growing slower than ours.
And and in the United States productivity per worker is down in almost all industries or stagnant besides technology mining and agriculture. For example construction workers in the United States are 50% less productive per hour. My best guess as to why is because it aligns perfectly with extremely large regulations that came on in the late '60s and early '70s and it stayed with us ever since That's when productivity growth slow dramatically besides technology mining and agriculture.
debt, debt, debt, and you know what? even more debt
That paywall disclaimer 🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Is it me or does it seem like all of this could be solved if they just raised wages so that people could actually afford not just the bare minimum, but prosperity?
What Democrats should be doing to fix all this:
- Campaign finance reform
- Enforce the antitrust laws, which Jason Furman seems to have ignored.
- Raise income taxes on the rich.
- Stop funding government sprawl - not all social problems are remedied by social programs.
- Right-size regulations.
Tiptoeing around isn't going to get anything done.
@@kgblankinship campaign fiance reform as in make it so that billionares can no longer buy candidates? because Im all in for that.
@@Vincesylvain : Absolutely !
@@kgblankinship Good luck convincing the Dems (or even neo-cons and rinos) to shrink government. They will always try to solve everything with more government and endless spending.
paywall? good luck with that, I will never give u a cent for listening.
7:10 Demographics are destiny. We could have predicted all of this just looking at birth rates 30 years ago. 🤦🏻♂️
You two have very similar voices
Liars < Damn Liars < Statisticians < Economists
Does today's employment numbers make this show out dated?
Unemployment up a lot? It's at 4.2%, that's not a lot.
He said it’s up a little, the problem is that the typical pattern is going up a little is followed by it going up a lot. The “a lot” is the potential, the likely outcome without course correction
the overall trend has triggered the Sahm rule, though
@@DMoneys36 The historic average is 5.6% with the Fed keeping a close eye.
@@trails3597 once again, I'm talking about the trend.
@@DMoneys36 today Schwab called today's Jobs report a blowout for the bulls.
I wonder who this robust economy is for ? Is it the tech sector middle class? If you worked for verizon, or intel, or the like youre job hunting against your peers right now. If youre a new home buyer, youve been in a ridiculous sellers market with no end in sight. This episode is tone deaf.
How to fight inflation. Allow the government to increase taxes. What an ass-hat.
GOODBYE GREEDY NYT!!!!! PAYWAY ON A PODCAST??? LOL. WHAT A JOKE. THE ARE LITERALLY 4 MILLION FREE PODCASTS AND YOU THINK YOU'RE ALL THAT...
Paywall.. I just started listening to you in the last 6 weeks. Unfortunately your going to lose a listener if you go through with that. Isn't ad revenue the name of game. Just saying man. Ur gonna kill ur reach
No Pay, you suck..😢
How in the world can Ezra have anything but fawning, hagiographic superlatives to offer about the state of the JoeBiden Kamala Harris economy? Oh and Inflation is over 😂.
Because Biden is in a contrast with a lunatic who wants to put across-the-board 20% tariffs on all imports backed up by brilliant amazing best in the world ever concepts of plans to solve everything else. Oh and deport undocumented immigrants that the US depends on to pick, clean, package and process all the nasty stuff that citizens won't that will blow inflation through the roof because of labor shortage.
Gam Zeh Ya'avor
If you think things are amazing now, wait until we add tarrifs!
I'm so excited!