Odd Lots - The White House’s Brian Deese on Supply Chains and Biden’s Economic Agenda

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

GDP is booming. The labor market is booming. However inflation is elevated, and consumer sentiment is deeply depressed. So where does the White House go next with its economic strategy? On this episode, we speak with Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden. Deese walks us through what the White House has done over the last year on supply chains, what's working, and where the administration is going next with its economic agenda.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask, Alexa, play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, obviously, as we talked about all the time, one of the most extraordinary moments in the economy that I think we've ever seen. So many different debates, obviously inflation is elevated. The labor market is booming. Growth is booming. The dispersion of views about how good things are, how bad things are, what to be done policy

wise. I don't think I've ever seen it as wide as it is right now. No, it's funny. We talk about how you should never call a turning point in the broader economy, or at least we used to. But it does actually feel like we entered a new environment over the past year or so. And of course, the big questions here are to what degree our supply chain. constraints coinciding with booming demand and creating the inflationary pressures that we've seen

recently. Well, we have a great guest to talk about what's going on. And of course, the policy responds. And I want to jump right into it. We are going to be speaking with Brian Deese. He is the director of the National Economic Council serving President Joe Biden as a top advisor on policy on getting things done. So Brian Deese, thank you so much for coming on odd lots. Thank you for having me. So let me just start with like the simple first question, which is do you and or in the White House have a view on what's driving this elevated inflation? Well, I think in order to answer that question, we have to step back and look at their trajectory

of the economic recovery to date. And as you noted, we are seeing a lot of historical firsts, first in many years or decades. start of the macro side, we're seeing strongest growth in 40 years. On the labor market side, we saw in 2021 labor market outcomes that are the strongest on record. And in that context, it's in that context that I think we have to understand the elevated price pressures that we have seen. So to get to your question, I think that if you look at where we are in the economy, By most measures, the U.S. economy is not running beyond its potential or capacity. If you look at sort of the projection from pre-pandemic levels, we're getting close to potential in a number of places.

And we have moved back to that trajectory faster than most folks participated. What you have seen that particularly, I think, breaking down the price story is a historic compositional impact on the demand side. So, you know, the shift, the compositional impact of significantly elevated demand for good, a lot of that shifted from services. And then a supply shock on the supply side, both to labor supply and also to the broader supply chain as well. And so, you know, when we think about the drivers and the inputs into where elevated prices are, those are the two places we principally focus on, which is the compositional side on demand. And so that leads us to spend a lot of time thinking about and looking at as everybody is these days, the questions of how that normalizes across time and whether it's normalizing and trying to assess that. And then on the supply side, what we can be doing sector by sector and also

in the aggregate to try to address those supply side issues, some of which operate very immediate short term, near term, and you guys spend a lot of time focused on issues like that, some of which are more medium and long term, but the sooner we start to address them, like building semiconductor capacity in the U.S., the better positioned we will be. So that's how we understand the dynamic, but in a more capstone way, we find ourselves in a place where what's unique about the United States right now is unlike almost any other G7 country, any other industrialized country, we are facing the challenges of elevated prices from a position of historic economic extreme. So whether it's in GDP or it's in labor market outcomes or it's in real income outcomes for

the economy, we are in a stronger position than almost ever any industrialized country to address elevated price issues that every country is addressed. So you mentioned going sector by sector there. And of course, one of the biggest components of inflation has to be higher energy costs. and we've seen oil prices shoot up recently. At the same time, despite those price increases, we haven't really seen much of a reaction from U.S. shale in terms of boosting capacity. What's the White House's impression

of what's going on in the energy space right now? Why won't producers actually increase production? And is there anything you can do to encourage them? And I guess also, how would you square that with the administration's clean energy goals? Well, I think in terms of the, in terms of energy markets and impacts on consumers in the U.S., one piece of that is obviously natural gas and home heating and otherwise where we've actually seen a bit of moderation and a reduction in projected cost impacts over the course of this winter. Some of that has to do with market development. Some of that has to do with the weather and it being a bit warmer than other I's expected. On the oil market side, I think this is where you are going. I guess I'd say a couple things. Number one, we are now, seeing, and if you're following rig counts, you're seeing significant uptick over the course of even the last couple of weeks. And most forward projections suggest a significant ramp up over the

course of the first half of 2022 in terms of U.S. domestic production. I will leave to oil market analysts to really unpack that, but certainly from what we hear and what we see, that reflects a market reaction from a market that pulled back in the face of the face of the market. of getting historically chopped down during the pandemic and a lot of pressure on capital discipline in that sector and also a reflection of current prices leading to bring production back online. So there's a question of this sort of timing of that, but I think that the ramp, certainly over the course of the last several weeks here, is you're seeing that come online. But what's driving the price of oil is global developments, a commodity set on a global market.

We have a market that doesn't clear competitively to have supply reflect demand. And one thing we've seen over the course of the last half of 2021 is that the supply of oil on the global market was not being allowed to meet the strong recovery in demand globally, including in the United States. And the reason for that is because supply of oil globally is controlled and modulated by by OPEC. And so that's why the president has invested the time and the energy and our entire administration and working diplomatically with oil producing and oil consuming countries to try to address those issues. And we obviously have, you know, really pressing challenges that are

affecting risk sentiment and the risk premium in global oil markets now around Russia and its provocative actions with respect to Ukraine. So all of those things are weighing. I think in terms of your final point, I think that what's going on in the U.S. market right now is the market responding to demand. And I bet the president's vision for a long-term clean energy future is really the long-term answer to this issue, that gas prices are higher now than they should be. We're going to work to try to do everything we can to try to bring them down. We recognize that, you know, in practice, that hits typical families. It hits their budgets. it makes people uncertain and uncomfortable about the economic environment.

We're going to do what we can in the very immediate term to try to address that. Over the long term, the right strategy is to put the United States in the leadership position of driving toward zero carbon, clean energy technologies and be the global innovation hub for innovation and exports of those technologies and of those capabilities. And whether that's on the transportation side, which is driving most of oil consumption, around electric vehicles and the infantry to facilitate the transition to electric vehicles, or whether it's on the power sector side and driving the innovation around not only wind and solar, but carbon capture, sequestration, hydrogen, other answers in this context.

The president's clean energy strategy is grounded in the idea that we can and must have an industrial strategy that positions the United States as the locus of innovation on that front. And I think that that is a long-term strategy where we need long-term incentives to drive that transition. And it's absolutely the right thing to do and not inconsistent with an approach that also is looking at how we can take immediate measures to make sure supply and demand are aligning in the market today. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra.

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chains. A, are there specific things you can point to that have been done in the last year where you can say, yes, this is working better than it was prior to the EO? And B, what can still meaningfully move the dial as people think about the economy, I guess, of the short and medium term? Yeah, so we are releasing on the occasion of the one year anniversary of the president's executive order, a raft of longer term supply chain strategies across the federal government. This effort and the reason why the, if we step back, the reason why the president prioritized signing an executive order on supply chain resilience a year ago was a recognition that the issues that the pandemic had exposed and highlighted were fundamental to national and economic security and were not going to be solved overnight and we're going to be through a different approach at the executive branch and federal level to this over time. So a year later, I would note a couple of things. This year has been a story of progression and adaptation. First, in responding to real-time evolving supply chain challenges that reflect the unique and historic nature of this pandemic-affected recovery. That's a lot about the work that we have done working with the logistics and transportation logistics supply chain to try to unstick bottlenecks at ports and freights and others. You guys have covered all of those issues. But that's one big piece of where we have learned a lot.

We have made a lot of progress. To your point about, you know, we have, we can, we can see that progress tangibly. There's a lot of different ways to think about that. But the way that I most think about that is how far have we been able to bring that dwell time down, which your listeners are familiar with, but to those who aren't what share of containers are sitting on ports on the dock for more than nine days. that dwell time. Since we launched the port action efforts about five months ago, that that 12 times come down 70%. So that's a sort of concrete manifestation, significant increase in fluidity through the ports. But the second thing that we have been doing in the supply chain context is trying to demonstrate

that we can actually build greater resilience in our industrial base here in the United States. And that is a longer-term project. But I think if you look over the last year, we have really made historic progress on that front. You know, you can see that in the macro, the 67,000 manufacturing jobs created last year in the U.S. That's the highest in decades. But we can also see it in companies making decisions to build and expand domestically in sectors and at a scale that we haven't seen for some significant period of time, which reflects, I think, both, you know, the policy environment, but also their recognition that supply chain resilience takes on an increase importance.

So, you know, we've seen that in semiconductors, electric vehicles, aircraft, batteries. We've seen that across the board. And third, we have a national security strategy that now says we have long-term things that we need to do as a country to protect core national security areas like pharmaceuticals and critical minerals. And now the U.S. government actually has a viable long-term strategy to address those. Last point on your question, though, is where can we continue to really make progress and move the dial? Absolutely. We have some very practical things we need in the short term. Semiconductors is front and center. We've seen historic investments by the semiconductor manufacturers

to come to the United States. But what they're all saying is unless we move to have a long-term public investment strategy to build a sector, that is all going to be short-lived. So we have, we got to pass. There's a bill that has passed the House and past the Senate. We've got to get a version of that to the president's desk that would give us a historic $52 billion in public and capital to invest to build that sector and build supply chain resilience in that sector across time. I belabor that on semiconductors, because if you want to think about supply chains, you know, they are a component in everything, but they're also relevant. to every supply chain. We've made a lot of progress on that front. We know what we need to do.

We just have to get that done. So one big component of some of these supply chain strains has to be infrastructure, especially at places like the ports. How is the administration actually regrouping when it comes to infrastructure spend and the build back better plan? Is there going to be another push? And what might that actually look like? Your question, is absolutely on key because if we think about the areas where we can most effectively operate on the supply side of this economy, to actually increase capacity and give us the ability to actually move, produce more goods and services with more fluidity and actually expand our productive capacity, outside of the labor supply issues, our investing in improving

our physical infrastructure is right there at the top of the list. And the good news is that because of the infrastructure law that the president shirped through and we passed in a bipartisan way last fall, we now have a historic set of tools to actually make these infrastructure investments in the right way. This was a bill and we have a strategy that is not about short-term stimulus. It's not about shovel ready at the expense of other objectives. This is about how can we actually build a modern supply chain, physical transportation supply chain across the economy, and how can we do that in a way that's comprehensive? So, you know, if you fix the ports, but you don't fix the roads and the bridges, if you, you know, fix the airports, but you don't fix the interchanges, you don't actually

create a new environment where it's more attractive to invest. and build here, you don't create an environment where you actually get those benefits of reducing cost in terms of the whole supply chain. But we now have those tools, right? So historic investment in ports, historic investment in airports, in roads, in bridges, and also in areas where we know we are behind the game like high-speed internet. You know, getting high-speed internet operating across the entire economy and bringing all segments of the country into the 21st century economy of, you know, strong internet-abled economic activity is a huge potential way to expand our capacity, to bring more people in to contributing to our economic capacity.

And we now have the tools. So on that front, our big focus is implementation, implementation, implementation. We need to demonstrate that we can do things well. and the president has been very clear and given us clear direction. We brought in Mitch Landrieu as our partner in all of these efforts to try to demonstrate that we can do this effectively, effective use of money. We can build things in the United States again, where we have to demonstrate that we can do things on time and under budget. And we also need to demonstrate that we can do these things in a way that actually brings all parts of the country and more people who have been

left out of prior big public investment campaigns into that process. So we're bullish about the ability to do that. We often get the question of, well, you know, those investments are not going to happen overnight. You know, how does that affect people who are worried about, you know, the cost of goods for shipping right now? I think you guys know, but what we're seeing in real time is some of these things can actually have a real impact really quickly. But some of these things are five or eight year undertakings that we want to do right. So we want to, you know, we want to rebuild all the major bridges in America that are those bottlenecks for commerce and have a huge economic impact across time. But we want to do that right. This is a once in a generation opportunity to get that

done. And build back better? Yeah. So I think if you think about, you think about the intersection between the theory of what we can get done, that big public investment strategy around physical infrastructure, and we think about the economic challenge of the current moment. The other thing that we want to do, in addition to operating on the supply side, to make our infrastructure ready made for the 21st century, is we also want to make things more affordable for typical families who are, you know, on the one hand, benefiting from an economy that has a historically strong job market, but on the other hand, are really having to deal with higher prices and the impact that that has of the grocery store or the gas pump. And so if you think about

what are the best ways go right at making things more affordable for families, it is look at the bulk of what a family's typical budget is. So a typical family in a month spends about 60% of their disposable income on healthcare, prescription drugs, child care, and housing. We now have proposals that would go right at reducing costs for those families. Reduce the cost of prescription drugs and cop out-of-pocket costs, reduce the cost of child care, which will have a positive labor supply impact by helping more parents, more women get back to work. And also reduce the cost of energy. Because to the question you were raising before, Tracy, about our energy strategy, the clean energy tax credit provisions that we have been pushing for, the principal impact that they would have would be to

actually lower utility bills for consumers. We had the CEOs of the largest utilities in recently to have a conversation about this. And to a person, what they said was if you pass these long-term incentives, we will accelerate the transition to zero carbon energy. But the way we'll do it both practically and legally is we'll pass on those benefits to consumers because those tax credits flow right through to consumers bottom line. So we view those core investments, which are the core components of the bill back better bill that passed the house as meeting the current economic moment of making things more affordable for people. And we can do that in a way that won't add inflationary pressure because it won't add to aggregate demand because it will be paid for

and actually would reduce the deficit across time. So that's, you know, we think there's a compelling economic logic. We think that for anyone who is of the view that high price now are the top priority and we need to focus on making things more affordable. We have these practical answers right now. Healthcare, prescription drugs, child care, energy, we can, we can act on that. And so we're going to give a state of the union here in a couple of days. We're going to get through getting a funding bill hopefully done so we can fund its operations. And then we're going to try to make real progress on those policies and try to deliver on that other piece of making things more affordable for families. Brian, obviously so much of the discussion and

just this moment really is all about things going on on the supply side, a particular physical infrastructure, which we've been talking about and when is this going to ease. There are a lot of people and even some of the market. Tracy's written about this pointing to corporate behavior and increased margins and people probably within the White House who believe that it's greed and that we don't necessarily need to have the price increases we have right now, even with the disruptions, because a lot of it can be explained via corporate greed. Is that a factor? in your mind, simply changing corporate behavior and are there policies that theoretically could be put in place to discourage companies from trying to opportunistically expand margins?

I'll tell you where our focus has been on that front, which is, it's interesting. The president has, for some time, including before he ran and before he won the presidency, has been focused on the question of the intersection between corporate consolidation, and our economic potential. And it's been concerned and compelled by the growing body of evidence that actually demonstrates that in many industries, the trend of consolidation has actually had negative intended impacts for the economy that manifest in higher prices and fewer options for consumers and also for negative outcomes in the labor market as well.

And so that's technical. There's a, there's a study by an expert in NYU that tried to put that in dollar terms and basically said that consolidation over the course of the last couple decades has basically reduced by about $5,000, a typical family's economic outcomes that takes into account both the impact on the price side and also the impact on the wage side as well. So that has been a persistent concern of the president and a persistent priority of the administration. That is separable from the question of whether consolidation and or corporate behavior is responsible for the current inflation.

There, you know, I think our view is that those issues of consolidation have been operating over the course of years and decades. And so they're not the principal or primary driver of current pricing trends. But we do believe that by addressing those issues, we can have a really positive impact on the supply side of the economy and actually produce better outcomes across time. So there's a nuance there, but I think it's an important one, which is no, we're not out there making the argument that says, you know, the dominant reason why we have high prices today is because we've seen corporate consolidation over the course the last two decades. But at the same time, those who say this argument is all kind of, you know, is all without merit. And therefore, we should

look through the negative attended impacts and the positive opportunity we have for more innovation, more economic growth and lower prices for consumers by addressing these consolidation issues. We think that they're missing something very important there. I mean, setting aside the longer term consolidation that you just described, we have seen a very wide variety of companies over the past earning season come out and say that they're raising prices to offset costs. And one of the things that could be worrying if you're concerned about an inflationary spiral is that the companies that have been doing that have been rewarded by shareholders. You know, obviously the idea of raising prices to offset costs sounds great to people who are interested in profits. And if you can do that without actually getting pushback from consumers, then that would seem like a really great thing. Is that dynamic where you do start to see more and more companies raising prices?

Is that concerning to the administration? And is that something that they would be looking into? Certainly. Certainly it's a concern and it's something that we are paying attention to. At the same time, I think that if a company's strategy is to ignore or downplay long-term investments in its own competitive positioning and doesn't have a viable strategy for long-term profitability and is trying to sort of ride the wave of short-term price increases at the expense of its stakeholders, it's unlikely that that's going to be a successful strategy across time.

them, you know, are, that's certainly been how our capital markets have responded in the past. So certainly a concern, absolutely. I think we're trying to look at the question of the underlying trends and where are there issues in our policy apparatus that have encouraged dynamics that actually end up producing worse outcomes for the economy. So the reason why I went to the point about consolidation is that that is a, you know, a well-documented problem that policy has actually exacerbated very significantly, and we need to do something about. If you look at the, you know, the long-term trend away from companies making more investment in capital and R&D, you know, the troubling increase in buybacks, for example, that's an issue that we think should be

addressed by policy. And, you know, we have been pushing, for example, to try to normalize the tax treatment between buybacks and dividends to try to eliminate the current implicit incentive for companies to, you know, opt toward share buybacks. And so those are the kinds of issues that we have tried to zero in on where we think that policy can, we have a problem and policy can make a important contribution while at the same time thinking about how we can take concrete actions directly from a fiscal policy standpoint to make. things are more affordable and to operate on the supply side like we were talking about before. This is Tom Keen, inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast.

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each and every business day. So I want to pivot just a little bit, and I'm not going to ask you about monetary policy because I know that no one at the White House would ever do such a thing as comment on the independence of monetary policy. But there is this widespread expectation pretty obvious that we are going to have several rate hikes in 2022, at least on the current trajectory. Is there any concern about how this is going to be managed? And I'm thinking particularly, you said earlier that we're coming at the inflation problem in the U.S. from a position of strength, good labor market outcomes, high growth.

Nonetheless, if you think about any sort of efforts at slowing the economy, not only could that impede growth the labor market, but we see things such as, you know, the last hired, often first fired. And the black-white unemployment gap is often a casualty of slowing labor markets. And good labor markets, obviously. have a history of tightening that. Is that a concern at the White House some of these second order effects of perhaps losing momentum on some of the social justice and other societal gains that come from a very robust and hot labor market? I was laughing to myself about whether we were going to engage in the back and forth about you asking me about monetary policy and me not confident. No, I know you would never comment on such a thing. We can move right on by. Look, joking aside, the president made the picks for the Federal Reserve chair and members of the Federal Reserve intentionally.

He has spoken to that, and I can speak to our confidence in Chair Powell and that team to make the right decisions. And the recalibration that they are actively engaged in right now is appropriate. And we fully expect and trust that they will continue that in a thoughtful and independent way. Look, I would, I think you're raising an important point. and I guess I would just underscore, I don't think that the issues that you are raising are about social justice or equity alone. They are about the strength and the durability of our macroeconomic recovery. And one of the things that I think has actually gotten lost in the debate about this economic recovery, what role has policy had, you know, we're needing spending a lot of time appropriately

focused on inflation right now is just what are the conversations we're not having, right? We're not having a conversation about a protracted slow labor market leading to more and more people joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed. We're not having a conversation about elevated unemployment leading to scarring, which is a sort of economic, technical way of saying human suffering that extends and calcifies and means. that millions of people across the country are robbed of the economic potential of working and moving up in that way. And it is striking. Just to put one specific thing around it, we pay a lot of attention to the question of the long-term unemployed precisely because that issue of, you know, scarring or hysteresis, you know, of making it really hard for people to get back into a position to get to economic outcomes is a, you know, long-term unemployment is a proxy for that, right?

If you look back to prior recoveries, one of the, you know, persistent drags on our economic potential as a country has been the slow, you know, plotting recovery of long-term unemployment. In this recovery, we have seen that dramatically. We're almost back to pre-COVID levels in terms of long-term unemployment. And then, you know, if you go back to 1982, right, there's a lot of, there's a lot of analogies back to that period in terms of, you know, last time we've seen a lot of these economic outcomes, growth and inflation. The long-term unemployment that persisted in the years after, you know, there's a big body of economic research that has shown just that that had like a decade-old

negative impact for a lot of groups of people and a lot in geographies. And that has a macro impact for our economy as well. That's true for you. unemployment. It's true for black unemployment, to the point you said any, any, the groups that are have been the most structurally or excluded from our labor market are the most at risk when you have a weak labor market recovery. So we think that that's really important. We think it's important for the macro economy. And we think that the progress that we have made is part of what puts us in a good position. And, you know, I'll end on your point. Am I worried about it? Look, yeah, We're worried about everything.

We're worried about all manner of things that could go wrong. But what's striking is we are in a better position than we have been in any modern recovery to actually demonstrate the benefits of that reverse histories, that pulling people, having a strong labor market recovery, actually pulling people into the labor market, giving them upward opportunity. And that's, you know, that's something that we should all be, we should all be worried about, but we should all be focused on in prioritizing as well. So I realize we don't have that much time left, but since you just mentioned, you know,

stuff we should potentially be worried about. We'd be remiss if we didn't ask you whether or not you're thinking about the situation in Ukraine and with Russia and what the economic impacts or risks to the U.S. might actually be if Russia did choose to invade. We're deeply concerned. and we are very focused on the sustained diplomatic effort that the president has led across our allies and partners to underscore to Putin and the Russians, the stakes and the costs associated with their choices. In terms of the economic context, we've made very clear to the Russians that their decision and President Putin's decision to invade would be met with history. historically strong economic costs in the form of sanctions, financial market sanctions,

and in the form of export controls as well, in a way that will be unified from the United States and our allies. They will put the Russian economy in a very challenged situation. Now, the question then is, how can we work to make sure that we impose those costs appropriately on the Russian economy while limiting the impact to the U.S. economy and our allies as well. You know, on that front, in terms of direct impact, the United States does not have very much macro exposure at all to the impacts of these sanctions and export controls, which puts us in a strong position to be able to move. The two places where we have been very focused are both in energy with respect to natural gas and working with our European allies to mitigate potential disruptions, principally for

access to gas across Europe. We, on the natural gas side, we will not be a major factor in terms of U.S. prices or supply. But then we've done a lot of work with our European allies to work on mitigation measures on that front. And then to circle back to where, you know, one of the first questions around oil markets, how we can work to mitigate the potential impact on oil markets. And the president mentioned on Monday that he has been working with allies and partners in oil producing countries to make

sure that we are prepared to take any and all actions necessary to try to address the oil market issue in a way that can maximally mitigate those impacts as well. So work on that front is actively underway. All options remain on the table on that front. And so that's that's where our principal focus has been in terms of mitigation. But you know, it's a very serious, a very serious situation that will have serious economic consequences. And we continue to work on the diplomatic side in every way that we can to avoid the worst outcomes. Brian Dees, director of the National Economic Council. Thank you so much for coming on odd lots. Thanks. Thanks to both. of you for having me. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Brian. Well, Tracy, obviously, that was a real treat

getting to speak with such a high-up White House official on the economy. You know, actually, the thing, the area that struck me most, or one of the things was this sort of, and we should probably talk about it more on the podcast, and I also know it's an interest of yours, this sort of threading the needle a bit on this sort of question of corporate behavior, greed, consolidation, and the current tensions now and this idea of sort of anti-monopoly or pro-competitive practice as one factor, maybe not acute, but one factor that could drive pricing pressure down over the long term. Totally.

And there's so much to say on that. And of course, there's like there's a very large body of academic research on things like price controls. And it seems to be an issue, but also the solutions don't. seem to work that well. In fact, they often seem to backfire. The other thing that struck me was his response to your question that wasn't on monetary policy, but it sort of was about it does feel like we are in this weird place at the moment where people are upset about the inflationary pressures. But on the other hand, the economy itself is in decent shape. And there's this weird kind of tension there.

And I think we've discussed this at one point or another recently, but it feels like one of the lessons we're learning is that in terms of politics, inflation seems to be a much bigger issue simply because it ends up affecting everyone in one way or another. Whereas when employment is at 4%, it's very hard to get the voting population to, you know, really care about that. care about inclusive employment and bringing in even more people at the margins to care about that as an issue. Yeah, and I think that's right. And I think it's one of the areas that I've had to sort of reformulate my thinking a bit because obviously post-GFC, the story was the other way. And I guess I'm surprised a little bit that the sort of extremely rapid labor market recovery is that. not seen as a sort of as a win publicly the same way. And I don't know, it's not obvious to me. Like if the unemployment rate had sort of settled here at 6%, but inflation were lower,

6% employment is kind of high and well above where it was pre-crisis. It would be interesting to know that counterfactual where inflation was a little bit lower, but we had unemployment 6% the assessment of the economy. But it definitely seems right now that inflation from a sort of the public's perspective, when you look at things like consumer sentiment, et cetera, the fact that it's a bad time to buy a house. It's a bad time to buy a car. It's a bad time to buy a washing machine. It's a bad time to buy a vacuum cleaner. It feels like that is overwhelmingly the number one issue and that most people are just the labor market is not top of mind. No, I would agree with that. But interesting times, you know, even setting aside Russia and

Ukraine, which is a whole interesting time in and of itself. Interesting to see the administration unveiling some more measures on the supply chain front as well. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway.

And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Brian Dees. He's at Brian Dees, N-E-C. Follow our producer, Laura Carlson at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca Today, and check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Hello, I'm Michelle Hussein, and for more than 20 years, I was at the BBC. But all the time I was delivering the headlines, I wanted to go further than the news of the day, to spend more time with the people shaping our world. And that's what I'm doing here on this podcast. speaking to people from Nigel Farage. This is a love you trying ever so hard. To tech journalist Karaswisher. And the tech industry is running wild.

You know, they've gotten what they wanted and they've seen a huge run-up in their stock prices. This will be a place where every weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world. So please join me. Listen and subscribe to the Michelle Hussein show from Bloomberg Weekend.

wherever you get your podcasts. You certainly ask interesting questions.