Bulwark Takes - BREAKING: GDP Growth Revised WAY Down

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

Catherine Rampell and Sam Stein are going live to talk about the revised job numbers and other economic news.

The Bell Air Direct app includes crash assist, which detects an accident the moment it happens, and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident? Well, just keep on, keeping on. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Borg here with Catherine Rampel,

who graced us with her presence in the D.C. office. And yet we're down the hall from each other, and we're not even in the same room. What is this social distancing here? This is very March 2020. Yeah, it's like completely empty behind me. It's just this big vacant cavernous space. So anyway, whatever. I don't think that's a metaphor for the bulwark.

But we did move into new offices. Catherine's in D.C. Because logistically, it's a pain in the butt to do this in person. We are just sitting about 100 feet from each other. We're going to talk about the economy. A couple big headline numbers today. Look, I'm not the guy who knows the number is. That's JV.

but JVL's got a bunch of things he's recording today, so I'm sitting here for JVL. So, Catherine's going to educate me. Let's start with GDP. So I saw this morning revisions to GDP went way down. Now, there's been a bit of theorizing about why it is. It was revised down to 0.7% growth. It was an estimator.

It was going to be about 1.4% growth. Well, below the consensus for that Jones, which is 1.5% growth. I'm throwing a lot of numbers out here, considerably slower than the 4%. 4.4% gain in the prior period. All these numbers always get revised. First of all, why do they always get revised so much?

Because the government statistical agencies that are collecting these data are getting more and more data in. So, like, their first shot at GDP numbers, you know, it'll be based on certain information that they actually have, and then some of it is just imputed. Like, they're just, they're guessing, basically, some of the key elements that go in. And then they get more stuff. And yet we go crazy over the first round of numbers. and we treat it as headline news, knowing very well that it's going to get revised some way.

Yes, that's true. Noted. Noted. Okay. So what do you make of the revisions? They're not great. And it suggests that the more information... That's why we pay her for the analysis.

Exactly. Yeah. Look, the numbers suggest that we are not in the economic golden age that Donald Trump had promised. And I've seen a bunch of comments from various Republican lawmakers, among others, suggesting that the reason why the numbers were bad that we only grew 0.7% at an annualized rate is that Democrats shut down the government and are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy or whatever. And first of all, I would say, like, we already had those government spending numbers before. like actually the government number, the government piece of GDP did not change a whole lot. It looks a little bit worse than the first imprint, but not that much. And even if you stripped out government spending, government spending only like locked off about a percentage point of GDP growth, you know, again, at an annualized basis.

So what that would mean is even if you like got rid of all of that and you didn't have government dragging on things, you still. would see overall GDP growth at a little over 1%, you know, 1.7% thereabouts, which is still not great. I mean, the long-term average from the past, however many, you know, recent couple of decades is more, is higher than that. And, you know, let's say 2%ish, you know, or one, you know, somewhere around there. And Donald Trump had promised like 6% growth at various points. Or I think recently he said something like, why can't we have 12% growth? I forget what it was. He threw out some crazy numbers. He did not say 12. Come on.

It was something double digits, as I recall. What's like the top growth rate that China's had? It's like 10% or something like that. It's like crazy. That would be nuts. Okay. Yeah. And besides all of that, so it's like first of all, we're not meeting the metrics that Donald

Trump said we would get before. The other thing I would point out is that when the government shuts down that, you know, that subtracts off of GDP when it reopens, that adds back to GDP. Because like you have all of those people going back to work and those. paychecks going back out and all of that. And we haven't gotten the numbers for the first quarter of this year, but you'll probably see some bounce back. And I am sure, you know, you can, I'm on record now. You can take my word for it that when that happens, no one in this administration or in the Republican Party is going to be like, aha, thank you Democrats for shutting down the government before

and giving us a bounce in January. No, they're not going to, you know, they're not going to allocate responsibility for whatever slight little boost, you know, symmetric boost we get to the government reopening, they'll claim any good numbers, if there are good numbers in the first quarter, are related to, of course,

you know, Donald Trump. Good things that Donald Trump did. Anything bad is something the Democrats did, anything good is something Donald Trump did. Well, we've gone through these cycles where if like the Dow goes up, it's like, you know, they're tweeting out, like hashtag Trump economy, Trump boom,

and then, you know, And then it's still Joe Biden's fault when it goes down. The other sort of macro data elements here are that inflation remains kind of sticky, right? It's not like, put it this way. The most bearish prognosticators thought it might be worse because of the tariffs. And yet it's not great, right? It's in that sort of 2.4 to 2.8 range. It remains there.

it seems kind of like we can't jar it loose and certainly the war in Iran's not going to help with the gas prices. We're going to get into that as well. But what do you make of the stubbornness around inflation? You know, the Fed's always like targeting 2%. That seems like not a silly goal, but it seems sort of like, how do you want to characterize it kind of?

I don't know. It doesn't seem, it seems reasonable to me. Is it arbitrary? Is it not arbitrary at all or now? It's slightly arbitrary in that, like, that specific number. They want some very small positive growth in prices for complicated reasons that I won't get into. Consumers always want prices to go down. That is not what monetary policymakers want. They want, you know, very, very modest, stable growth for a whole bunch of reasons,

including that it probably like helps create some more flexibility. I don't really want to get into all of that. But, you know, 2% has been their target for a very long time, and we have been overshooting it for, I think, about five years now, fairly consistently. So we have been above target for a while. And up until basically Liberation Day last year, which was April of 2025, it had been trending downward. Like we were coming closer to that 2% target.

And then after Liberation Day, after Trump announced these tariffs, whatever progress we seem to be making, we've been backsliding on. And we've seen inflation tick up a little bit and kind of stabilize, as you point out, like in that high two percent, you know, close to 3 percent level, two and a half to 3 percent level. And that's obviously. not great. Again, that's my prize-winning analysis for you. And it is partly because of a lot of things, or I don't want to say exclusively, but largely because of a lot of the things that Donald Trump has done. Donald Trump came in promising to whip inflation now and to, you know, in fact, bring down prices, which, as I said, actually we don't want to happen and the Fed is not targeting and did not happen. Instead, he added tariffs.

He's been trying to politicize the Federal Reserve, which is bad for long-term price stability. And he's been doing a bunch of other things like, I don't know, deporting our agricultural labor force and our construction labor force and all of those. And like things that will also, at least in specific sectors, potentially put pressure on higher prices. And then there is this war, which is not factored into any of these data, by the way, because the war is, much too recent. But that's going to be putting pressure on not just oil prices, lots of other goods to oil, gas, lots of downstream things that are made from oil and gas and petrochemicals and the byproducts of processing gasoline and all of that good stuff. So we can get into all of that, but, you know, it's always, it's always the case that these data are somewhat backward looking

because there's a little bit of a lag between when they collect the numbers and when they are released. but now it is really dated. I don't want to say obsolete, but the information in the GDP number and in the inflation number is not so valuable right now just because the state of the world has changed so much in the past couple of weeks.

Look, and I'm not going to harp too much on it, but you keep saying these data and it's this data, okay? No, it's plural. I'm sorry, I'm a pedant about this. I know you are because I edit your copy. I'm not going to let it bother me. I'm not going to let it bother me. I think Adam is on my side on this.

He's definitely on your side and that's why I relent. The state of the economy in the aggregate, though, it's always tricky, obviously, to sort of say, oh, the economy is doing, you know, because there's so many components to it. But if you step back for a second, you look at the big numbers and then you look at what's happening in Iran and then the stock market, which is,

as you've pointed out many, many times, it's lagging significantly compared to our contemporaries. You look at the job market. We lost, what was it, 75,000 jobs last month? 72. No, 92, I don't remember. It was. And those numbers get revised, too. I just want to be clear.

But let's just say you had to sort of, you're at a bar, you're hanging out with people. They're like, hey, you're Catherine Rampel. I read your newsletter. How should I feel about this economy? What would you tell them? Wow, you are really projecting a lot onto my social life here. You don't go to bars. Okay, sorry. Okay, you're having a cup of coffee. Well, I have, I have an infant. So my social life is somewhat a book right now.

Anyway, so what would I say? I would say that the economy has been pretty resilient. A lot of, a lot of stuff has been thrown at it. Again, even before this war. And there's some fragility there. Like, like we are not in a recession. I don't think. we wouldn't know until like several months at least after the fact, given the way that these things are actually like decreed, you know, when they determine there is a recession. But I don't think we're in a recession right now. But we've lost jobs in whatever it is, like six of the last 12 months at this point. And if you look at, for example, firing among or job gains among younger people, they look really, awful. So there are certain pockets of the population that have been hurt worse than others. Why is that? People would say, oh, AI and technological changes and things. But that seems too simplistic. It's a little hard to say. It's probably partly AI, but actually the numbers don't look great either for people who don't have college degrees, who you would think that they are, pardon?

Yeah, blue collar workers. Like you would not think that they would be. as susceptible to AI churn and, you know, AI disruption as like white collar workers. So I think we don't entirely know, to be clear. I think it's partly just that we're in a low hiring, low firing environment right now because there's so much uncertainty in the economy. Lots of businesses are just like holding off on all plans. Many of them because there's a lot of uncertainty about specific things like tariffs, right? Like if companies don't know what their costs will be, they're going to hold off on hiring and firing in general because they don't know, they don't know what their business is going to look like going forward.

But it's not exclusive to companies that import a lot of goods. You know, this has knock on effects. Like every company is looking around and saying, well, if my customers are worried about their environment, like let's say you're a services company that doesn't import a lot of stuff. I don't know. You do marketing for like retailers or something like that. So maybe your clients are the Walmarts and Target. in Costco's of the world that are being hit by tariffs.

But if they're holding off, then you're holding off. So all of these things are interconnected, and there are a lot of these knock-on effects. So there's a lot of uncertainty in the economy. The overall numbers suggest very low hiring and also low firing, just not that much churn in the economy. So if you have a job, you know, you're probably okay. If you are among the unlucky people who don't have a job, you are, you know, basically so well

because you can say shit it's okay whatever I don't know you got on my case some other time for saying shit too much on one of these things

like it was gonna I was gonna let me I was gonna hurt the algorithm or something no this is YouTube I'll just say a Royter's headline just crossed

and I think it's just based on the morning data which I think it summarizes what you're getting at says US job openings rise in January but hiring remains tepid so there is opportunity

but people are just uncertain. Look, I will say this. The administration has been, you know, presenting a very bullish demeanor around all this stuff, as they always do. They think things are great. But there are occasionally these instances where the curtain is pulled back a little bit and you get a sense that they're a little bit panicky. And that came yesterday, I believe this interview was yesterday, where the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson was in the middle of an interview pulled away because of something. We don't know what it was. But apparently, apparently, the president called him and he left and then he came back and he was in like a bit more of a dire tone and posture. Let's watch what happened. I want to get your thoughts afterwards. Sorry, the president wasn't very white. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, as you heard there, we were interrupted as the secretary was pulled away by the president to join him in the situation room in the White House. We picked up our conversation again a little over an hour later. Mr. Secretary, I have to say it's a first, I'm sure, alas, as well, that an interviewer has been pulled away to go to the situation room.

How is the president? Was he stressed? No, the president is in great spirits. The Iranian mission is proceeding well ahead of schedule. First of all, has that ever had... Actually, let me take two points. One is, I freaking wish I had a British accent because you just sound so much better when you're interviewing people.

I might try to adopt on... You should make it. Yeah. Or do Scottish or something. Has that ever happened to you where a principal's been pulled from an interview to take a really important phone call in like an hour and a half,

they goes by and they come back? Not for that period of time. I mean, I've had meetings certainly with White House officials where like the aid comes in with the little slip of paper. Yeah. And, you know. They look at it and then they just get back. Yeah. Yeah.

Or they're like, oh, we got to wrap this up. Like, I have to get pulled into something. But it's not usually. Well, I don't know. I guess I don't know necessarily what other communications have been going on. It's weird. I guess we should put it that way. that the interviewer was kept waiting for an hour and a half.

And there's not necessarily anything nefarious about that. Yeah, we have no idea what it's about. I mean, it presumably has to do with Iran, but, you know, maybe not. It was just a very interesting moment. Yeah, it's also weird because I had seen that Bessent was like giving comments about military strategy as well, you know, about escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz and things like that. And then I'm thinking, why is that the Treasury Secretary's call on any of this? Well, because it's affecting obviously global markets, right? I mean, that's – but it doesn't make sense that he would have to be briefed on, like,

opening up the straits, right? Yeah. Well, it would – yeah, I mean, he should be briefed on it, but the idea that he would be guiding – Well, who knows? I guess. There's not necessarily anything nefarious going on here. It's just – I think the broad – or takeaway is that they did so little planning going into this thing that I would not be surprised

if the meetings like the one that I guess Bessett was called into are happening a little bit more haphazardly than they. Well, they don't, they are not conceding. They're not conceding that they did little planning. If you saw it, did you see Pete Hagseth this morning? No. What did he say? You missed a doozy.

I'm going to play you a clip in a second. But I think he was challenged. about, you know, there's been, so just for people who are watching, there's been a lot of reporting that the administration was caught off guard by the Iranian resistance, and specifically that they did not anticipate that the Iranians would move to close the Strait of Hermuz, which is where a large, large sum of our, of global oil goes through. Even though basically, and JVL had this in his newsletter, any war planning documents that were put together prior to this war.

said this is exactly what they would do. So it was very much easy to anticipate. So Hague's Siff was asked about this morning. He was just absolutely defiant. We've planned everything. We're just doing things by the book. He's like, everything's going as we anticipated. We've not been caught off guard whatsoever.

He has this thing where he adds adverbs to his speech to make it sound like important. So he's like, and he throws in like sequentially and lethality. And he's just like, if he just throws enough adverbs at you, you're going to be wooed over. But then he had this moment where he was talking about the strait. And it was honestly one of the most, I don't want to say ridiculous because I used that word a lot. But it was dumbfounding. It's a seven-second clip, but I want to play it. It's a lot of buildup for the seven-second clip.

It's a really good clip, though. Let's play it. The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that. Who could a node? Yeah. Yeah, it's open. if they just stop shooting.

So it's not open. I mean, what are we doing here? Geez. A friend of mine was telling me a story about Billy from his first grade class or whatever it was and about how there would be snowball fights in the first grade class. And you could tell the teacher to like put your name on a list if you didn't want snowballs thrown at you. And Billy's name was on the list. Okay.

But Billy did not understand that when you. throw snowballs at other people, that means that you're like effectively no longer on the list and people get to throw snowballs back at you. And he was like, I think Billy is now our president. He did not understand. This president did not understand that if you, you know, throw dump bombs on the Iranian regime, the Iranian regime is likely to respond in some way. And the best tool that they have at their disposal is essentially holding the global economy hostage by blocking all of these tankers and other commercial vessels that are trying to get through the straight of Hormuz. So this is totally obvious to pretty much anyone. And then there's the other element of it, which you've highlighted,

you highlighted in one of your recent newsletters, which is Trump's sort of cavalier attitude about it, right? Like he was just sort of, I think he said something like, have the balls to go through it. He's like, just do it. Like, you know, take the risks and, you know. Have the guts. Yeah. Have the guts. You go first, right? You go first, buddy. So let's break down the economics of it, though. What does it mean to have the straight effectively closed? I mean, there may be a couple ships going in there. And there's some reporting now that some of the European countries are trying to talk to Iran about getting certain ships done. And obviously, Chinese have their own relationship

to the Iranians. But effectively, much of the traffic through the strait is closed. What does it mean for the global economy? And the other thing I kind of am curious, about, and you talked about the sort of, it goes up fast and it goes down like a feather, right? Why? Like, why is that the case that it's going to take weeks, months to get all the oil back online if you open up tomorrow? Well, there are a few things that have happened. Let me take those questions one by one. What is the effect on the global economy? Again, nothing good. That's my sparkling analysis for you because this is, again, like 20% of the world's oil supply that goes through there. I forget what the fraction is for the world's liquefied natural gas supply, but it's

also quite large. And if you disrupt the flow of those things, you also disrupt the flow, the production for that matter, of a lot of downstream goods. So like if natural gas can't get through, then you have an aluminum smelter, and I think it was cutter that had to shut down. because it needs natural gas to run the factory. And the aluminum smelter is shut down and is going to take, I think it was months before it could reopen just because of how complicated that whole process is for reopening a factory. It's not like, you know, turning on an office switch. So you have a lot of downstream effects here. And even if you reopen the strait today, you would not have the resumption of oil at the same level that you had before, in part, because it's not only a shipping issue.

It's now a supply, a production issue, basically. That Iraq, for example, was running out of storage, right? it couldn't send out its oil through the strait, and it can't store oil indefinitely. So you've also had production ratchet back in these countries that are affected. So, yeah, I guess if you reopen the straight today, if everything went back to normal, the stuff that's like waiting on tankers that hasn't already been set on fire, because some of it has. The stuff that's available could be shipped, but then you have a backlog of production

that did not happen of oil, of liquefied. natural gas. And so you have a backlog of all of that. That needs to come back online. Refineries, my understanding is that refineries also take a really long time to sort of like turn on and off. And one of the worst things that can happen to a refinery is to like run out of the crude inputs, right? Literal crude oil. Because it is so devastating to have to turn off, you know, to shut down all production. So, even refineries that have a lot of oil on hand may be very slowly actually processing it because they'd rather pace themselves and keep the refinery open for longer than capture those really high

oil prices today. Like on the one hand, you would think that, oh, they're seeing the market prices for refined jet fuel and gasoline and diesel and whatever. And like, you'd think that they'd want to like churn out as much refined product as they can to capture those high prices. But in fact, they're having to pace themselves too because they don't want to run out of that feedstock. So there are all of these cascading effects,

you know, these ripple effects from this disruption here. And, you know, I've mostly been talking about oil, but there's also fertilizer, huge fraction of fertilizer. I think it's like it's over a third of maybe Urea, Global Urea, which is, again, something that goes in. Yeah, we talked about this on the pod with Tim. I was like, what is urea? But, yeah, it's kind of like a problem.

I mean, it's also in P, but that's not what literally goes to playing cross. They're putting that right through the Straton for Mus. I know you have a little bit of a heart out here, and I have a couple more topics. So I want to make sure you don't miss your train. One thing that is happening here is that the administration is desperately searching for other avenues to get oil online. And so what happened last night is it was reported that they are going to ease sanctions on Russia

because Russian oil had been sanctioned over the war in Ukraine, and now the administration is just like, you know what, we need the oil. So let's listen to our dear friend Scott Bessent talk about how, yeah, Russia is going to benefit from the war. But don't worry, it's just a limited benefit. Is it a matter of regret? to you that Russia is benefiting from this conflict? Well, again, I think it's an inevitability,

and that's why we give a 30-day waiver, because the Russian barrels are on the water, and it is a quick source of, for the Indian refineries. The other way to think about it is those barrels are going to end up in China anyway. So. But is it a shame that Russia benefits?

Sorry. Again, that it is unfortunate and we hope that it will be in a micro period that they will benefit. Okay. War is war. Yeah. But they are also, I will just say, Russia is also providing intel to the Iranians for strikes. And they are providing medical. clear to the Iranians. We are funding the people who are funding our opponents. It's ridiculous.

We are funding the people who are helping our opponents figure out how to better kill our soldiers, our service members. That is really what this is about. And there have been many losers from this war economically, you know, diplomatically. And in, you know, the, you know, the, the mortally, right? Children in an Iranian school, U.S. service members, et cetera. Lots and lots of losers here. But the one unequivocal winner is Putin, because Putin benefits from much higher oil prices in and of itself, right?

That is very good for his war chest. And the fact that Putin now has more customers he can sell that oil to because we are relaxing our sanctions. There have been a few different ways in, which we have relaxed our sanctions, in fact, on Russia. And it's just so short-sighted because you help Russia, you enrich Putin, you enrich Russia's military operations. And that, again, like enhances the ability of Iran to kill our people.

And all for like a sort of short-term benefit in the oil market that you're screwing up with this war anyway. So it's very circular. I mean, and also on top of all of this, reportedly we are asking the Ukrainians for help in how to- They're giving us help. They are giving us help on how to deal with the Iranian drones. Yes. So it's like we are helping Russia kill Ukrainians whose help we need to protect our service members from Russian intelligence. Meanwhile, helping the Russians. Makes you think they didn't think about the ripple effects here. I want to get you out, but I have to do this one.

I'm sorry, if you miss your train, you can blame me. There's a new, we knew that he was going to do this. He was going to do this coin. You see it right there. This is the U.S. Mint. It's part of America 250, which is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country. It's got Trump's face on it. Look at that.

This is the first time a living president will have appeared solo on a coin. I'm not shocked. that it was Donald Trump who broke this taboo. There he is. Looks like a nice coin. I asked you in the lead-up to this, who would be the most ridiculous person to put on a coin if not Donald Trump? And I have my choice.

I don't know if you have yours. I mean, I can throw something out that's silly, but I would say it should be Pete Hegseth, but only the photos that he found too unflattering. from his Pentagon press conferences, so unflattering that he threw the photographers out. Only use those as a template for what goes on the coin. What's your real answer?

Mine was baron. Just put baron on there. Let the little, he's not little. Let the big man have his moment. You know, he's all in crypto. He should be on some hard currency. This would be nice. It'd be like a little nice gift for them.

I'm not going to get one of these coins. Maybe I'll have one as a collector's item, but kind of a silly moment. All right, you got to catch a train. It was a pleasure talking with you. Why don't you come to D.C. more often? It's just, I know you have a small kid, but we need you in the office. I aspire to be here more often, and I think I will be back more frequently than I have.

Okay. Well, it's a pleasure having you in the office. Just for the pleasure of being 100 feet away to you. Yeah, so we could talk into our computers while sitting 100 feet apart. All right, Catherine Rimpel, everyone should, we didn't even get to your newsletter. I'm going to give it a quick plug. Catherine wrote a newsletter last night for receipts, which is an incredible newsletter. She and I were talking a couple days ago about the idea, and we were trying to figure out,

because I think the conventionalism was if all this terrible stuff was happening to the oil market, then it would create this incentive to go to renewables. And maybe that was sort of this one sort of silver lining effect of the award that actually incentivized purchase of wind and solar and things like that. And then as you reported, how you discovered it's actually the opposite. Do you want to do a quick 30-second plug for what you discovered? Yeah. So basically the issue is that Europe's climate change agenda is the main game happening in the world.

The U.S. is useless on all of this. And Europe has a complicated series of like carbon pricing and tariffs on on the carbon for goods that are imported into the EU, lots of stuff there that has been having these positive spillovers to the rest of the world so that like almost all of the G20 right now has some form of carbon pricing except for us, Russia and Saudi Arabia. I wonder what those three countries have in common. So in any event, Europe has been leading the way and the massive oil shock that oil and natural gas shock that is affecting Europe right now threatens to like basically undo this very tenuous political agreement that has to keep this decarbonization agenda

going and there are calls now to get rid of it to get rid of having a price on carbon and if Europe goes then there'll be this domino effect elsewhere in the world that that basically like you you pull one thread in the sweater and the whole sweater unravels. So what matters is what Europe is doing. Europe has been destabilized by our war. And as a result, our best shot potentially at curbing climate change now looks a lot less likely. I don't think it's dead entirely. But basically, it's like, I thought this was going to be a good news story that we were going to have this, you know, surge in political support for renewables, and in fact, it probably just further entrenches our global dependence on fossil fuels, unfortunately.

What an uplifting end to this live show. Catherine, thank you so much. I feel so much better about the world. All right. Everyone should honestly subscribe to her newsletter. It's so good. It's so freaking good. It's called receipts. It's on the bulwark. You should be subscribed. She's a Blerc anyway. And we have so many channels, but you should be subscribing to our YouTube channel. We get great conversations just like this. We are doing this weekly, folks.

It's an economic live discussion. Tune in. We'll be back next Friday. Catherine, take care. Good luck with a train ride home, okay? Thanks. All right, take care. Bye, everybody.