The Majority Report with Sam Seder - Best Of 2025 Mark Blyth May 12 Trumps Tarrifs And Inflation

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

It's our last Best of 2025 episode. We will be back live on Monday. Live-streamed on May 12, 2025 Sam speaks to Mark Blyth to help unpack Trump's topsy turvy tariff policy and how it relates to inflation. Blyth is the Director of The William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance and a professor at Brown University. On today's program: All that and more. The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Check out IceRRT.com to find an ICE rapid response team nearest to you. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: SUNSET LAKE: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% on their full lineup of CBD products to support your New Year wellness goals and Dry January aspirations at SunsetLakeCBD.com  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com

Majority with Sam Cedar. We are every day, casual Friday. That means Monday is casual Monday. Tuesday, casual Tuesday. Wednesday, casual hump day. Thursday, casual thurs. That's what we call it. And Friday, casual Shabbat.

The majority report with Sam Cedar. It is Friday. January 2nd, 2026. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live. Two tape steps from the industrially ravaged

Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's another one of our best ofs. In fact, the last of our best ofs. Yes, the last of our best of those. And I'm here.

There she is. That is the last of our best ofs of 2025. This is, we have a great interview with Mark Blythe. Spoke to him on May 12th of 2025 on Trump's tariffs and the notion of inflation. You could see what he got right or wrong. But let's be honest, the economy is in the shitter right now. I don't know if he would say that. No, he definitely would say something like that.

Yeah, I don't think he'd have a problem with you saying it. No, he certainly wouldn't. We have inflation. We have falling job numbers. The Fed has dropped rates, I think, two or three times now over the course of this year. I think it's three because of concern of a stagnant economy. However, we do have inflation. That is a problem.

That can lead to something called stagflation, which is bad, bad, bad. We will see what happens in 2026, but if I had to bet, I don't think it's going to be great. But in the meantime, like, this is a perfect opportunity for us to, we can either look back on 2025, but F that to 2020 to 5. It was a crap show. 26. I think this is going to be a lot to be looking forward to this year. I think so. Well, we got the midterms, hopefully,

going in a certain hopefully direction. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Yeah, honestly, three or four months ago, maybe five months ago, I was like, I wasn't sure that there was actually going to be midterms. Yeah. Yeah. I think Trump's power cracking has allowed us to exhale just a little bit.

You know, like his era, his like this aura of, of inevitability or like invincibility is the better word for it. It's just, that's cracking. Napoleon was like 30 when he did his monarchical takeover. Yeah, I'm a little bit past my point. That's given us, I just feel like we can exhale slightly. Yes.

All right. All right. Predictions. That's what we should do right now. We're going to do some prediction. I'm out of that game. Oh, well, here's my prediction. Oh, and we get predictions, you know, like people send us,

at this time of year, people send us predictions. And they're, they, some of them, we, pretty wild as they get out there. But I'm going to predict definitely midterms. We're going to definitely have midterms. Okay. I'm also going to predict that Donald Trump will not be president this time in 2027. Wow. I was going to do a major health emergency. I think I think it's, I think he's going to have a health problem. I definitely think he's going to have a health problem. Now, I know this is aspirational and wishful thinking. And speaking into a assistant. But here's why this is an okay prediction to make.

Right. Because the opposite is not he's going to get super healthy. Right. And he's going to all of a sudden become really vibrant. It's just that he's just not, he's just going to be marginally worse than he is now. That's the opposite of where we are. That's actually a bold prediction. Exactly.

One year old who lives off McDonald's might have a health emergency. Exactly. And also there's no downside. There's no downside. No, the downside is. Emma is afraid of saying anything. but like well because obviously we have what do you think he's going to do live like he's going to like like like you know what guys

I woke up this morning and all of a sudden look here look it look it I'm cut now I'm cut I'm going to get on the Barry Bond's Belko resume exactly a six-back yeah no no no one in here is saying new testosterone regimen and I am a monster I mean RFK could probably hook him up but no nobody here is saying that my magical thinking makes any sense is just a way that I feel like I have control over my life. So just in the world. This may never air. You don't have control over the world?

What? The superstitious element, you know, I just... I know, but I'm just saying, like, there's no downside. Like, he's not going to get, he's only going to get marginally worse from now. That's the best case scenario for his health situation. Understood. Understood. Understood.

But you made a more definitive prediction about, like, whether or not he would be president. And that's the kind of thing that gets me freaked out just because so much hinges on. He's probably going to be president, but I'm just going on. I'm going to, like, he's going to have a health situation. He's not going to be president. It's probably just me that can't make the predictions. That's, I think, maybe how I can square this circle. Yeah, I think it's a little bit of a little bit of helplessness.

I'm not talking about that, especially about sports. That's where this all came from. Honestly, just give me your opinion. Do you think the Knicks are going to, like, You're not being savvy about playing a track. Who do you think he's going to go further in the NBA playoffs? The Knicks or the Celtics? Just out of curiosity.

I have no opinion. Oh, the Knicks? Is that what you said? I know. Someone named Matt said that. Okay. Jalen Brown is doing great, but he's not going to be able to beat the Knicks in a playoff series.

All right. Well, that's what Matt says. I hope that doesn't. I hope that doesn't. Zero chance take it to the bank. Emma was right here listening to you saying she didn't take an issue of it. I heard you're knocking on the door. All right, folks.

Well, there's no more predictions. That's it. It's just the Celtics and the Knicks. The Celtics will go further than the Nix and the playoffs. No, wait, one more prediction. You think we'll bomb a country other than Venezuela? I think, honestly, by the time this plays, we'll have already attacked Venezuela. But you think another country is on the menu?

Yeah, like, I'll say Mexico. Yeah. Oof, I don't know. I mean, I want to be wrong about that. He did say land war. That's the type of thing. thing that I want to throw out there just so I hope I'm wrong. But if, if, if I'm not wrong, then at least I got to bet right.

We're too dependent on him. Like Jamaica or something just to show that he's a, exactly. He's a boy. Yeah, that's true. Mexico like, I mean, the way, Shinebound was able to spank him because she's like, yeah, you are this dependent on us for trade. Like, like you cannot fuck with us here. Greenland.

Yeah. Obama and Greenland. Oh, that's also not inconceivable. Yeah. All right, folks. But in the meantime, we're still going to look backwards a little but this is an interview with Mark Blythe from May of 2025. And then there'll be a couple of like Matt Picks gems or a gem or half a gem.

And then we're definitely going to see you Monday, noon Eastern live. We are back. Sam Cedar on the majority report, it is a pleasure to welcome back to the program after far too long of a time. Professor Mark Blythe, he is the director of the Will. William R. Road Center for International Economics and Finance and a professor at Brown University, co-author of his latest inflation, A Guide for Users and Losers, which is out now. Mark Blythe, welcome back to the program. That's great to be with you.

Let's start with, I'm going to start with the book, and we're just going to sort of blend into what's happening literally today. but the inflation um your argument is that when we talk about inflation um we often get it wrong at least in terms of the impetus and it often in the response uh but why don't you just start with like basically like what is inflation the way that it's defined popularly and what is it actually all right so let's do it this way. Inflation, the best of her definition was given by Mrs. Thatcher, and I can never find the source, but I'm sure she said this, which is it's a rise in the general level of all prices. So it's not when houses get maddenly expensive. It's not when a particular part of the market gets suddenly really expensive. It's when everything goes up. Okay. Now,

remember last year and the year before, there was this whole conversation about the disconnect between the way that people were feeling about inflation and the official numbers, there's a huge insight in that moment into the whole core of this thing, right? So let's think about it this way. Have you got a glass of water with you, Sam? No, I've got a cup of coffee. All right, just go with a cup of coffee instead, right? Imagine we could see through that coffee.

When people like me talk about inflation, what we're interested in is the rate of change of the level of prices, right? The delta, if you want to be fancy about it. And that's a bit like looking at like the surface tension on the glass of water. Now, if you're a normal punter, you don't care about that. What you care about is the level of water. Now, if the level of water is the level of prices, what people experience is the level was here and now it's here.

So when my people say, yeah, the rate of inflation is slowing, and they say, yeah, but eggs still cost 12 bucks, what are you talking about? They're actually more correct because what they're looking at is the total level of prices. Now, why does this become even more? It's almost analogous to what happened today with, or I should say, you know, over the past 24 hours with tariffs on China. You know, putting aside any relationship between tariffs and inflation, if you start at 145 and go down to 30, you're still at 30. Yeah, exactly. You know, six weeks ago, we were at whatever, 10% or zero.

Yeah, or zero. Absolutely. It's the actual question. It's a level's question. Absolutely, right? Now, why does this matter and why did you get this big disconnect? Well, you know better than most that we're living in possibly the most unequal economy that we've seen in up 100 years, if not more. So the bottom 60% of the income distribution in the US hasn't had a real wage increase in decades,

because inflation's eating away what meager gains they've got. So imagine that you're spending 60%, 70%, your disposable income on consumption goods. This is what inflation measures. Why, CPI, consumption, right? So the poorer you are, the more you spend. If you're shopping at like dollar general and prices go up 10%. You and your family have to have a serious conversation about what you're going to do without. You're in the top 10%, you're shopping at Whole Foods.

You clearly don't give a shit about inflation anyway because you're shopping at Whole Foods. But you also use a much smaller proportion of your income for direct consumption. So the way that people actually feel and experience inflation is hugely different across the income distribution. So the professional classes are looking at the rate of change. ordinary people are looking at levels. And if you're in the bottom 60, that squeeze on levels really hurts. If you're in the top 10%, you barely notice. And in fact, you're probably winning because of equities are going up at the same time.

You're making it that side of the equation rather than losing on the inflation side. And when we talk about what is measured in inflation, a lot of the things that are measured in inflation, or I should say aren't measured as inflation because they have other drives. drivers of increases that aren't necessarily universal, those things tend to be the most important, particularly if you're in that, like, I don't know, the bottom 70, 80% of the income distribution. And this is where rents become really, really painful. I mean, a large part of what's still driving inflationary forces in the U.S.

is a long-term problem, which is we stop building houses for normal people sometime around 1980. And we turned the entire housing market into an asset. class, and that's why it's ludicrously expensive. Now, it started by saying that that's not an inflation. Well, it's not, but again, it's about your personal consumption. If you're spending 30, 40% of your income just paying the rent, and

basically what happens is the Fed takes rents and adjusts them and plays with them to make them statistically comparable, and they worry about the volatility of etc. And then the Fed talks about core inflation, which is you take all these volatile items out. Well, what do the things include? They include things like

fuel. They include things like food. They include things like food. They include things like the way rent is adjusted. So essentially, you end up with this figure that looks like 4% or 5%, but people are paying 40% of their income and rent, they're like, this is not the inflation I'm experiencing. Absolutely not. So again, that disconnected people felt was very real. Let's go back to the 70s and talk about inflation then, because one of the things that has occurred to me over the course of particularly watching, you know, the inflationary pressures of COVID, And what drove that is there is, there seems to be some type of like a disconnect between

the idea that prices are going up and that the fix for inflation seems to be static, regardless of what might be driving it in any given time. So let's, and in part, I think your argument is that this, this is a function of what, of learning the wrong lessons in the 70s. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's not even our argument. What happened is this as an ex-central banker and economics professor called Alan Blinder. And he's actually been going on about this for years.

He's a whole series of papers on this. And it kind of makes sense, right? So here's the basic story. When Europe's inflation rates went up in 2022, what happened? Basically, they had no gas anymore. They've been importing it from Russia, right? So suddenly you don't have any gas. You've got to scramble for gas.

World prices go up. European prices go up, all that sort of stuff. And then your response is, let's look at the labor market and let's raise interest rates. What does one have to do with the other? This is clearly just a big supply shock. You can't get supply prices go up. Now, interest rates are part of the response to that, because if it is the case that basically these prices are going to go up, you want to chill the economy a bit so it doesn't get out of

control, etc. But the fundamental story that we get is it's money that drives these things. There's two basic narratives. The first one is the government spends too much money. This is the Biden stimulus thing, which falls down on the fact that there was one Biden stimulus, but about 30 countries got inflation, so they can't all be blamed on that one, right? Which is not to say that it can't be important, but it can be universally important. And the other one's the labor market.

Basically, the labor market's too tight. People are going to bid up wages. Prices will go up. You'll get caught in the spiral. None of that seemed to actually describe what was going on in 2021, 22, and 23, pretty much anywhere. And to their credit, the central banks figured this out. By about 2023, the European Central Bank figured out that 40% of the inflation they were facing was literally price gouging from companies.

And they actually admitted that. But a lot of this comes back to the 1970s. You'll remember Milton Friedman's famous line that inflation is always in everywhere a monetary phenomenon. That's the shorthand. That's the short hand from what we learned. For the sake of like, you know, and this may be a little bit rudimentary, but explain to when we say monetary policy versus fiscal policy, and then these other elements that can drive, you know, logistics, supply shocks, whatnot? Yeah, so the basic story that I was trying to get

out there harm-handedly is the following. We look for monetary causes for inflation, right? And what that means is there's too much money chasing too few goods in the economy. So what you want to do is increase the price of money, the interest rate the jacks up, so that you counteract those forces. But if what's driving inflation is ultimately a series of supply shocks, logistics, ships not arriving, you can't get what you want, what you need, etc., then it's not clear that that's the optimal response. There's going to be other ways of dealing with it. And again, as you said, Sam, this comes back from this particular reading of the 70s, but are very interested in these papers by Allen Blinder challenged us and say, what actually happened was a whole series of discrete supply shocks. Everything from fighting the Vietnam War off the books, incorporating women in the labor markets for the first. time at scale the same with minorities, failed wheat harvest, oil shocks, all the sort of stuff came along in the 70s. And it lasted a decade, but it was actually a bunch of discrete supply shocks. And if you see it that way, money is not really your problem in controlling the money supply or the interest rates or whatever. It's about adjusting the supply side of the

economy so that the inflationary pressures dissipate. And this is kind of when you learn the less in the 70s, it's always an everywhere on money to phenomenon. You reach for interest rates. And then we figured out this time around, employment went up. It didn't go down. That wasn't meant to happen, remember? So the responses we got this time were weird, which is what made us kind of start thinking about this. Okay. And I want to just slow down just a little bit so that people, you know, in starting from the end backwards,

the Fed has a dual mandate, and that is to keep unemployment as low or employment as high as possible, but also to keep inflation under 2% and they can change that target rate at different times. So back in the 70s, the assumption was that people just simply, we had put too much money into the system and that there was just too many people had too much cash and they were going out trying to buy goods.

But talk about how, let's just start with Vietnam. You've got a lot of people go into the military. How does that, how does that impact a how does that create a supply problem as it were either for labor or for anything else

well labor's the easiest one when you've got half a million people tied down fighting the war in Southeast Asia and you don't really want to raise taxes you're going to have to fund that some way and you do that by allowing the deficit to rise when you've got all those people not in America doing things they're off doing

something else then you're going to have incredibly tight labor markets that means that anybody who wants a job in that environment is probably able to get a higher paying job. So you're bidding up wages because of the tightness of the labor market. That would be one example as to how this works. Let's take the oil shocks in 74, 79. This is America is a much more industrialized economy. This is still the heyday of manufacturing, et cetera, in the United States.

So oil is this input that goes into everything. When you could quadruple the price of oil, the prices that everything comes out the other end of that, they're going to have to be more expensive. So you have all these different forces that are all pushing in the one way, which is basically you've got a fixed amount of stuff in the economy, and you create an excess demand because there's too much money chasing it, and that means prices has to go up. That's the basic story.

And it's not completely wrong. It's just incomplete for the moment that we're in. Well, okay, so why is the, was the response to that, okay if you have these different sort of like supply bottlenecks a supply of labor a supply of fuel essentially um if you have these supply bottlenecks why is it just that the only response is we need to essentially readjust people's expectation and ability to access labor to access oil or fuel or access whatever goods that we need and so the only way that we have to control that is essentially to make them poorer, right? I mean, that's what,

when we, when we talk about raising interest rates, that's what's supposed to happen down, downstream is that people have less money. Which is why it's so interesting that this time we raised interest rates and more people were employed rather than less. So it tells you something weird is going on. But that's exactly the model. That's exactly the way they were working with it. And, you know, we started this by saying, was that just like puritanical? I mean, what, like, Like, is that just some type of more? No, it makes sense. Thinking from the point of view, you've got to think of this word of expectations.

It's not like changing your expectations to access labor or something. The way that we began to think about inflation is a problem in the 60s was really about expectations, right? So if you see prices rising now at a certain rate, what are you going to do? You're probably going to try and buy things now. When you try and buy things now to compensate, what does that do? It creates a shortage, which pushes up the price. So what do you then do? Well, you try and get ahead of it again.

So you begin to expect rising prices. And the argument that Paul Volcker made and basically became the wisdom was you've got to break these expectations. People have to not expect rising prices. And that's a huge part of the control valve for doing it. Now, the other side of the story on that one is if it's really just a bunch of supply shocks, like eventually you stop fighting the Vietnam War, right? Eventually American industry adjusts to higher fuel costs. You don't need to do that because it's not really a story about expectations.

So if you think it's all about breaking the psychology of rising prices, you jack up interest rates, you make people poorer and that shatters the expectations. But according to Blind and other people follow in the supply shock version, you didn't need to do any of that. All those forces were on the way out by the early 1980s. So what you did was you just created a huge destruction of American capital and jobs for no apparent reason. Well, that to me feels like what happened during COVID. I mean, there is an obvious story as to why we might have. Exactly.

I mean, there's an obvious story as to why we had, you know, inflation. I mean, frankly, you could find this with a lot of different, you know, social phenomena. Like, why is there more crime? Why is there? I don't know. It could be this one in a lifetime, knock on wood, event that just took place. And the fact that a container ship cost three times, five times what it did. six months earlier because it's in some far-flung part of the world and we don't have access to it.

That's exactly. Now, if we think that, follow that through some, right? What does it tell us? It tells us that it's these, to use lack of a better word, supply shocks, right? Basically, you can't get what you want at the price you're used to. Now you're going to have to pay more. Let's think about tariffs for a minute. What is tariffs?

Tariff's sort of policy-induced supply shock. Now, usually what you're trying, and this is why the Fed treads very carefully at the moment, right? What you're trying to do of you of the Fed is you're trying to create an economic environment where you don't get big shocks. And now you've got a guy in the White House who's determined to create big shocks. And these are supply shocks. They are making things more expensive deliberately for this project of bringing industrial jobs back to the United States. So imagine a world in which it's not just once in a lifetime events like COVID. We now start to shock ourselves.

that means that you're not going to get these once-in-a-lifetime events. Let's think about climate change. What is climate change? Climate change is basically a giant supply shock inducer, whether it's droughts, whether it's breakdown of food webs, whether it's simply things being too hot to farm in certain areas. All of this stuff's coming down in the future means that we need to get more attuned to the idea

that inflation is going to be around a lot more than it was for the past 30 years. I don't... What I still can't... sort of wrap my head around is is that there's in and COVID seems to be you know having lived through that that period it seems to be the most obvious example but if if blinder could see that there was a series of supply shocks um why was there seemingly very little effort if it's about breaking expectations um to articulate this Is it just the sense that, like, no one's going to listen to us anyways.

We just need to literally take more money out of people's pockets. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good way of summarizing, actually. We looked into this in the book. We were like, okay, expectations, right? So it's all based on this weird model whereby the central bank sets these expectations as to what monetary policy will be, which basically means what interest will be and how much credit will cost, right? And then the public internalizes this, and then they adjuster.

And they're like, does this really happen? Do people really think this way? Turns out there's remarkably little evidence that actually that is the mechanism. One of the favorite papers I discovered doing the research from this was one from the Bank of Spain and they basically scraped the web of New Zealand, who knew you could do this.

And they basically looked for people in the financial sector in New Zealand to figure out if they were at least listening to what the central bank was saying. And it turned out you were thousands of times more likely to pass your mate and finance a puppy video than to actually pass around a central bank forecast. So if that's not the mechanism, what is it? And I think, Sam, you've got it, which essentially, look, if prices are rising too high and it's got something to do with people expecting higher prices, let's make things really expensive so that they calibrate those expectations down.

That's basically what the model is. The question is, if it's a supply shock, that's really different from an expectations thing, right? One of the mechanisms in your head, that's what's driving it up. The other one is you just don't have shit anymore and it costs more. And it's not clear that if you're trying to play an expectations game against the supply shot, you're going to win because the supply shot doesn't care what your expectations are. So let's go through COVID, because I'm also sort of fascinated by like the ineffectiveness, it seems to me, of the rise in interest rates in this country anyways. it's unclear to me that that's why inflation went down as opposed to well all of a sudden and and people started getting pissed I mean accordingly you know according to corporate America

Joe Biden was very hostile to them which I think is a little bit of an overstatement despite the fact that corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are number 12 and a half percent are the highest they've been in history. So the Biden economy was really terrible, right? Well, but there was a rhetorical sort of like disposition towards corporate America, and certainly maybe out of like the FTC that basically said, we're not going to let you get away with this. So do we really have a definitive sense of like the inflation that we went through in the wake of COVID and during COVID was a function of X percentage logistics, X percentage of profiteering.

And then X percentage of, well, Americans, you know, had extended unemployment. We took half of our children out of poverty for a year, which of course means that they're buying more stuff. Right. You know, food or maybe a toy or something like that. We had more money in the economy than we would normally have, at least. least in terms of being put out there by the government. Do we have a sense of like what the balance of those three elements and if there is another one as to what contributed to the inflation? Yeah, there's loads of these so-called decomposition analysis that are out there. And you can tweak

them a little bit. But essentially what it says is that, you know, the Biden stimulus checks or the big deficit, etc. Did it contribute to inflation in the United States? Probably. Was it the majority cause? No, because it was simply that that meets a supply shock. If you give people more money because they're poor and you want them to survive COVID, at the same time as you can't get anything, that's going to add pressure of prices. It simply has to. But if you look at a country like Germany, they had inflation too. They had very high inflation actually for a brief period. And that had nothing to do with stimulus checks that had everything to do with the fact that the gas price just went through the roof and they're an incredibly gas dependent economy. So it varies by country.

There's no one accounting on it. The most controversial one remains price gouging. in the sense that you can cut it up one way and basically show that people were just protecting the profit margins. They were absolutely pushing prices, but nothing changed in terms of their net margins. But you can count it another way as the European Central Bank has done and said, no, they actually really took advantage of this and pushed through and got prices through. There's also windfall profits. We don't think about it often enough, but there's a good analysis in 22 from UMass that came out that basically said Americans carbon majors, the big oil companies, made 220 billion in excesses.

profits in 22. Now, if you think that 50% of all shares are owned by the top 1%, and half of that money is dispersed to shareholders, that means that the top 1% of America got over 110 billion just from owning carbon shares at the time of the inflation, which massively offsets any losses that that class would have ever made from inflation. So the distribution of politics of this gets really wild. Why, when the Fed raised interest rates, it of course it made it I it made rentals and home ownership just go through the roof in terms of expense um and it kept people sort of locked in uh where they were on some level like people couldn't even downsize without to save money I mean you could not sell there was you know uh and and and so there was at least I mean I read a little bit and I didn't see this terribly developed but that this rise in interest rates was actually having the opposite effect as one would have anticipated.

Was that because it wasn't, I mean, was that the case? And if so, why? So by the opposite, what you mean is that higher interest rates lead to higher prices. Yeah, we were actually like driving up prices for things. And that it was, I mean, I think there was a lot of. probably like AI plays or internet plays that went under because all of a sudden they had to start making money to pay their employees instead of just keep rolling over these like 2% or 3% loans.

But aside from that, like what, did it really have the impact that we want or was just sort of like coincidental that inflation started to slow down because the logistics and the sense that you could get away with it went away? I would personally go with more of the latter, right? That basically what you have is a kind of a phenomenon with inflation where you get hit with a big shock. And then it goes up. There's a kind of like impulse shock goes up and then it peaks. And then ultimately the economy adjusts in various ways and then it starts to decline and it dissipates.

And we got hit with a couple of those. There were logistic shocks. There were like energy shocks, et cetera. And they take time to work out. So I would definitely go with that one. If you think about it the other way around, right, it's kind of interesting. So imagine it's just a pure expectation story. People begin to have these unhinged expectations, and that's what we have to control.

Then it becomes really interesting as to why central banks were very timid this time around. Okay, it came up. People talk about these unprecedented rates. They were unprecedented because it was at zero, right? At no point did it actually go up above the actual rate of inflation in any of the places that we examined. Now, why was this? because that dual mandate actually means something. When Volcker was elected,

and it was a feeling that this was unprecedented, the post-war model was falling apart, there was this nightmare of inflation, it was close to 20% in some places, that we needed to do this. Now, whether we need to do it or not, we kind of touched on it, but that was the feeling.

You did this, and you got this really big recession that people were not bargaining for. This time around, particularly in Europe, think about what Europe's been through. It went through the financial crisis, the bond market crisis. Then it did a decade of basically the damage control from the austerity stuff that they did.

They haven't grown in 10 years. They've got high unemployment in many countries, huge debt levels. And the central bank's going to jack up interest rates like Volker did. The place would be on fire. There's no way that they had the room to do this. So they were very careful about how much they were doing it. And as they went through it, they started to look at different things. They were like, okay, maybe we need to not think the labor market's driving this.

Maybe this is not excess spending, because the problem in Europe is governments haven't been spending. That's the damn problem. So then they started to look at the supply side. Then they started to look at price gouging. And they ended up with a much more nuanced view by the end of it than a kind of like pure Volcker jacklerates up and cause the recession model. They just didn't want to do that this time around because they thought the political price would be too high. Oh, that's interesting. So the politics of the day made them go slower and going slower made them be able to

to sort of have more inputs and see what the implications of their of their rise was. All right. So let's let's jump forward to where we are sort of today. I mean, we're pre-taping this, you know, a couple hours before the show. So everything could be different by the time we get to airtime. But so Trump comes in, does anybody like have an idea as to why he's imposing these tariffs? Like we saw the tariff regime, you know, in his first term, 10% on China. People didn't pay too much attention to it.

Then we saw tariffs employed in the context of the IRA and the Chips Act, which was met with as much, if not more, on the sort of internal domestic development side, where we're going to subsidize the building of these things and we're going to recognize we need to train and educate people. to work in these type of factories and and then the tariffs are there also as like a you know a carrot stick there's been like three different reasons for why trump has done these tariffs and all of which contradict each other like you can't raise all this money to get rid of the income tax if it's actually people are not going to buy these products and they're going to buy them domestically it does it like i think we know why he's doing this yeah well i think it's because you know Trump himself has a long-standing hatred of German cars and has a thing about tariffs, and fair enough, right?

Then there's the whole coalition around him, the different people who want different things, right? So I try and think of it in terms of who's close to the king. So there's a bunch of people that will tell you the following story. Look, the problem is global imbalances. At the end of the day, we've been getting, for the past 30 years, endless stuff from all these exporters. They don't consume enough.

We consume too much. We're paying with the whole thing with digital dollars. And eventually one day they're going to say, where's the real stuff backing this up? And it isn't there. And COVID taught us that we don't make basic things for ourselves. We have to reindustrialize. Story one, right?

Who's around that? Your national conservatives like Banan, they're your main drivers, but also some of the macro people around like Besson and others. They'll believe this one. Then there's the other ones which are the hardcore tariffs for the sake of it, right? So the Navaros, et cetera. Maybe you get reindustrialization or not, but ultimately what this is about is,

beating down China because China is the bad thing. So who's around that? That's your Rubio Republicans that have done a deal, right? And then also your Navarrowites. Now you've got another set. You've got your tech lords and you've got your tech lords. Where do they sit in this one? They want two things. They want the universities' research budgets because they're all massively over-indexed on AI. But what do they also want? They want us not to be bad to China because their supply chains depend on it. And they would like some tax cuts. So then they ally with the other

the Rubio Republicans, but not on the China. of stuff. And it's just like spin the wheel of fortune as to what you get each week. So the rationales are going to change according to which agenda is emergent within the White House that week. Whenever you hear about it, it's really about the income tax. That's because the tax cut guys have got easier this week. And I think that's the only way that I can make sense of this. Because the industrial, the reindustrialization story makes sense, right? Think about it this way. If you go to start with a lot. We had car prices go through the roof because we didn't have, you know, the technology that we needed for, you know, the computers and the cars.

Yeah, just the chips. Right, exactly, right. So, you know, are you ever going to get to like complete autarchy even in an economy the size of the United States? No, meaning you'd make your own Ford F-150s that cost a quarter of a million dollars and the rest of the world's driving electric. You don't want to go there. But if you think about the comparison with the IRA, this was an attempt to build new green sectors behind protected tariffs. What we've got with Trump is, if you think about the business model of most Republican states, They're all carbon-based. Fules, farms, fertilizer, food, feedstock, plastics, petrochemicals.

That's what they do for a living. So the green stuff has to go because that's a mortal threat to their assets. So imagine this is doubling down on a kind of re-industrialization strategy based on carbon assets, based upon a kind of imaginary of a 1950s, 1960s economy of male breadwinners, the social politics of the 1940s and the foreign policy of regional blocks, which goes back to the 19th century. Now, you know, can you actually execute all this? Probably not.

But I think that's what's in the imaginary of all this stuff. It's almost like a big pork bill, as it were, for his constituent. Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, that makes sense. And then the resent towards a Green New Deal is a function, is a... You're protecting your assets. I mean, if the Green New Deal works, right, you don't need cars. carbon assets anymore, they go to zero.

And, and, and, and, and, I mean, the, the, the prospect of us making gas vehicles, uh, 25 years from now when the rest of the world is EV is going to make it increasingly difficult for us and also vulnerable, it seems. Exactly. Like, all of a sudden, we're out on a limb. And, uh, that's why you have a hundred percent tax on EVs from China, even if we've now drop the tax on everything else or the tariff on everything else, the 30%. Because you're protecting that business model.

And we know from history, when you protect business models like this, they just get shittier over time. We're protecting the wrong business model, too. I mean, we could let in, you know, it's one thing to say we're not going to let Chinese EVs in here because we need to build our own EVs. Right. But not to have any. Right.

But to not, like, basically say, we still want to have the horse and buggy seems to be a problem. Let's talk about what is curtailing Trump because we saw the stock market dip, but it was really, what's going on with the bond market that it really became sort of disciplinary for Trump. Totally. So here's how I think about this. It's a fancy word, but for once it's a fancy word than economics, it makes sense, right? Why are Treasury special? They're special because everybody uses them as the savings asset for the world, because there's so many of them. Most people don't know this, but more dollars are manufactured outside the United States than inside the United States in the form of dollar lending.

So if you're Pakistan and you want to do some trade with Bolivia, you do so little trade with each other. Trying to clear that directly with each currency is waste of time. Everything gets priced. Everything gets billed in dollars. So there's a huge surplus of dollars. Cash dollars don't do you any good. They're a liability. What's the easiest asset?

Turn it into a treasury bill. You get paid 3% interest. You got all your money back 10 years from. now, what could go wrong? It's the universal savings asset. Here's the fancy word. Treasuries are information invariant assets. What does that mean? The news cycle doesn't matter. A treasury is a treasury or treasury. It doesn't affect his value. What did Tom do on April 2nd? He made it an information sensitive asset because people suddenly went, oh shit, this guy's real. If he's going to do tariffs like this, then that whole Mar-a-largo thing comes in where he wants us to

swap out all our bonds for like a hundred-year bonds and maybe we'll get some interest rate. This guy's really crazy. He's either that, he doesn't know what he's doing. Either way, I want to get out of dollars and you started to see a lot of selling of dollars. Some of this was unwinding a thing called the basis trade and the hedge funds. But a lot of it was people just going,

okay, maybe we thought 20 years from now we need to find an alternative. We need to start finding an alternative now. And once you do that, yields go up, price goes down, volatility increases and that's what disciplined Trump. Basically, he broke the bond market.

So just, you know, in layperson's terms, the people investing in the Treasury bond market are basically saying we think that the Treasury bonds are going to be just as stable down the road as they are today. But he undercut essentially the confidence in that premise. But even though maybe down the road people are like 50 years from now, 30 years from now, that may not be the case that they're, the dollar, and he undercut that premise in such a dramatic fashion. Is there repairing that? Like, does that confidence return or, you know, maybe in 10, 15 years? It turns out, okay, people are back to thinking, or are we at a point, is there a critical mass where it's like, we've started this ball rolling?

Like, you know, China's dealing with the bricks. Canada is looking to the east or the west and not the south. Like, is there a like a, like a, like a. a tipping point, I guess. But if you're one of the people that believes the big global imbalances story, this isn't a problem. This is actually something you want. So the euro's gone up and the dollar's gone down.

You care about American exports. That's good news. If you think the problem is that you're getting real stuff and swapping it for digital dollars, which is just adding endlessly to your debt, then people buying less treasuries is a good thing. So it's not as if this is actually, you know, complete error. in a way it's part of the strategy if you really want to change the way

the world works. So it's a classic line of there is a method in the madness here. So was it unexpected? Yes. Was it a reaction? Yes. Did it sober them up? Yes. But is this the direction of travel long term? I think that it is. I think that ultimately you're going

to see this. Let's think about the level of tariffs now. We're down to 10% and 30% right? That's huge. Like you were saying, right at the top, right? That's kind of huge. This is designed to change the world. What do they anticipate? What's the benefits that's going to happen in this vision of America,

that we're going to reindustrialize, that we're going to, but that seems just sort of strange. It almost seems like they're looking to create a underclass that, or like a new type of underclass that has no mobility. because simultaneously we are getting rid of like, you know, we're attacking universities. We're attacking like we're shutting out the HB1 type of people. Like we're not bringing in like we don't seem to. It's like a fortress mentality, I guess.

It is. And I'll give you Steve Bannon's version of this because I heard them talk about it just the other day in D.C. it's not that we're creating an underclass. We're basically bringing what is currently the underclass up because what we're going to do is ban every visa that we can and create a massive constriction on the labour supply so that nobody gets their lawn cut by somebody who's an illegal for $5. You want to cut your lawn, you go cut your loan yourself.

And then what we do is we put these tariffs up and we bring manufacturing back home. And then what you end up is this kind of imaginary of like the prosperous 50s, where men go to work in manufacturing and we solve our demographic problem, not through immigration, but because women have more kids. Yes, I know how problematic this is, both socially and actually. But that's very much the vision.

It is very much a kind of let's reinvent the sort of the good times of the 50s and 60s with the social policies of the 40s. That's clearly the imaginary. Is anyone really want to sign up for this? I don't think so. But is it even possible? No. I mean, that's the other thing, it seems like, highly unlikely. It's not possible.

I mean, I said this to Byron and director. I said, look, you missed the boat because ultimately it's demographics. He just didn't have enough kids. And it's like, well, then you just artificially tighten the labor market. There's plenty of people who are not working that could be brought into the labor market in our own country. We don't need these foreigners. That's clearly the way they're thinking about this.

And if you've spelled 12 million people who are currently working, you will create a shortage of labor and wages will go up. But it doesn't seem like there's, any reason for it to go up in manufacturing as much as it would just like the service economy. Like we have to fundamentally change the economy, which means that we would have to resure manufacturing. And it's hard to imagine that that's necessarily going to happen without any type of, because people are just going to wait out Trump, it seems to me. Right?

I mean, a lot of these, I mean, they're just going to wait out Trump because they just don't think it's going to be sustainable. And it depends on the industry you're in. I mean, if you're Apple, right, I mean, you can't build an iPad here. I mean, it's a global product, right? You literally can't do this. This is an impossibility. If you're a farmer, the executive order that came out today on farm is really interesting,

it's specifically designed to equalize the prices between the US and the EU. And a lot of farmers made in the EU banked basically the intellectual properties controlled by offices over there because they pay lower taxes, et cetera. And if you change that calculus, you can get pharma back on. That's pretty straightforward. How many jobs do you create doing that? Not nearly as many as you think, right? So you can do things. Is it going to end up in this kind of like, you know, 1950s world of a rebirth of manufacturing? No, I mean, you look at modern factories. They don't have any people in them. They've got robots in them. Well, we'll be all fixing the robots. Is that the plan that, um, uh, uh, uh, uh,

I can't remember. What's his name now? It said the Commerce Secretary. We're going to be just fixing the robots. Yeah. So again, you know, once you start to get into this, you can be on the left or the right and support reindustrialization for various reasons,

whether they're national security reasons, whether they're sort of in-equem equalization reasons. There's loads of reasons to talk about this. But usually when you do it, you realize that tariffs alone are insufficient. Right. Anybody who's ever done this has done it with a full industrial strategy, which means that if you're basically trying to shoot your

universities, your training institutions, whilst knee-capping your state and you're putting all the weight on tariffs, it's just not going to happen. Where is this going to leave us? I mean, this is so in flux that it's hard to say, but it feels like there's a certain inevitability at this juncture, regardless of if he went back down to, we're just going to do 10 and 10, which is also,

I find sort of like the whole point is that we beat them. And if we're both at 10 for reciprocal tariffs, it seems like it doesn't. You haven't really done anything, except for basically increased inflation slightly in both countries. But where is this going to leave us sort of short term and in midterm? So short term, you know, you're going to, you're going to already have a supply shot from all the ships. that aren't crossing the Pacific, right? So we know that there will be shortages of certain things, et cetera. Game consoles, toys, et cetera.

I mean, are these critical national security issues? Probably not. Is it going to hurt some people, definitely? Will we get that supply back from somewhere else? Probably, right? The real risk is the volatility. The fact that there's so much uncertainty into this. The markets have rallied because now we have a 30% tariff on China.

Let's think about that for a minute, right? You're rallying because you've got a 30% percent. percent tariff on the second largest economy in the world. We're still on the 90-day pause. Who knows what he's going to do? He might just come out and go another. Here's another tariff schedule. We'll have this one, right? So when you're a business and you're trying to plan, you don't know what to do. And the way that you destroy economic growth is you generate huge amounts of uncertainty.

Because when you're uncertain about the future, there's a phrase in finance describes this, which is cash is king. You go to cash. Why? Because it gives you options. You don't have to commit to anything. You're not going to go, all right, lads, we're all in on reindustrialization. Let's do a five-year, seven-year commitment, let's build all this stuff in New Jersey, let's go. And then three weeks from now the policy changes.

Right. Just that. So you're a long-frey's frozen. Everybody's frozen. And the definition of a recession is basically everybody's frozen. Nobody invests. So you're kind of baking it into the cake in the longer term simply because of the uncertainty associated with the environment.

And the irony is every time he tries to make it better or is pulled back by someone like Scott Bassant, it just indicates that you can't rely on anything more than a 30-day window or a 90-day window. All right, let me ask you this. In terms of like a democratic response, there is sort of, we have this antitrust movement that in many ways and pro-labor that in many ways define the Biden administration, at least relative to past democratic administrations. There is a sort of a burgeoning deregulation movement within the Democratic Party right now. Give me your sense of that, the abundance thing and where, how Democrats respond both in terms of what may exist in terms of our economy in the event that they're in a position to do something about it two or four, you know, two or three years from now. and what will address these problems, which have translated at least into, you know, Donald Trump winning the election two out of three times.

Well, let's remember that, you know, although Lena Khan was very good in pushing things forward, it's actually this administration that's got Microsoft and Google in the dock. Yep. Right. So there's a continuation there. So you can't go back to that as you're safe. Look at us. We'll do this because they're already on this one, right? in terms of labor, you've essentially lost the working class vote completely to the Republican Party, so you need to do something really drastic. And in a sense, what that is, and again, this comes from a conversation with Bannon over the weekend, I think I was in D.C., is the Democrats have to discover their left populism on economics. Because if you don't, you've got nothing.

Because at the end of the day, and this is a line from a guy called Henry Farrell, the Democrats have become inadvertently the party of the status quo. everything's fine for the top 20% right what was it that Kamala actually wanted to change what exactly were the suite of policies that were going to be transformative in American life for loads of people who feel that the current system isn't working for them there was nothing there it was literally a campaign based around oh look I got another celebrity endorsement so you have a bunch of people who are sort of the old guard of the party who still feel this way don't touch my 529 college savings plan is very much for the top 20% the whole Whole Foods crowd if you want to put it that way. And they've got nothing to offer dollar shoppers. And until they have that kind of agenda, then, you know, I don't think the future looks very bright. Now, who's trying to do this?

AOC's trying to do this. Bernie's trying to do this. But their own party, the mainstream of their party, hates them. So there's this kind of horrible, it's like the worst type of passive aggressive couple getting divorced where they won't talk about it in public, but everyone knows that they're feuding in private. And that seems to me to be the current state of the Democratic Party. what do you think about this i mean uh there is this uh this big debate about this abundance

agenda which is uh it's sort of hard to pin down it seems to me a little bit uh you know maybe there's specific local things but as a broad uh movement it's a little bit hard to pin down but how much of what we are dealing with uh from an economic standpoint has to do specifically with inequality i mean it is that that question gets, where that phenomenon can be addressed as like we have a problem with the oligarchy, or we have a problem with billionaires, we have a problem with millionaires, the idea being that we have such an unequal distribution of money that we have a commensurate, unequal distribution of political power. And this is both, you know, maintaining the status quo and

inhibiting our ability to provide for more people. I wouldn't differ from that at all. I think that's entirely correct. I mean, the big problem with it macroeconomically is when you've got so much wealth and income skewed to the very top, your economy is driven essentially by rich consumers, which means that the people at the bottom who the vast majority of people are living on very expensive credit. And that's not a sustainable model over the long run, because ultimately they have to have real wage growth,

but that would be negative against the gains of the top 20%. They're the people that fund campaigns, politics, the whole lot. Again, if you think about the Democratic Party versus Republican Party, I remember I went on Chris Leiden's show, and Chris is talking about, look at the cabinet. It's a cabinet of billionaires. And I was like, who do you think funds the Democrats? Right. It's just a different. Our billionaires are nicer than your billioners.

That basically seems to be the argument at this point. And nobody really wants to do anything serious about wealth inequality. I think it's fascinating when you get sort of these random tweets from Trump about, you know, I think we should actually raise taxes. But then they tell me I'll lose the election if we do it. We should be able to do this. there's a weird the weirdest thing about this moment is the possibility space for what you can actually think out loud in the republican party is actually wider than the democratic party that i think that is so when you've got to that moment in history where like they'll actually talk about this stuff openly and the old guard your rubios your traditional republicans are like just no no no tax cuts for me tax cuts for me but the ban on wing is entirely about like everybody earning over a million should pay 40% tax like Nobody in the Democratic Party said now, apart from AOC and apart from Bernie. Yeah.

And how much of that wealth inequality do you think is driving like the inflationary pressures and things like housing and whatnot? I mean, how much of our housing shortage is a function? You say we're not building houses like we did in the 80s. We're building it so that it's an asset and they're out of reach. Look at any development that's going on. Are you ever seen a condo go up? that isn't called a luxury condo.

Right. Right. There you go, right? So, yes, the assets and incomes of the top 20%, top 10%, are basically geared towards acquisition of a series of assets that are in short supply, which dries up the price. If you want to do something about inequality, and, you know, I've said this to people in the Labour Party in Britain and Democrats and anyone who will listen,

just build houses. It's amazing what would happen if you'd build houses. Because to do build houses, you need to revamp all your training. And housing these days is very different from housing back. then. You're talking about different materials, different needs. You need HVAC people. You need plumbers. You need sparkies, electricians. You need to generate all these skills. Once you do that, you create not just new skills that are transferable into green sectors and all the sort of stuff, right? You're upskilling the whole of the working class and you're giving them places

to live, which means you create labour mobility. There's so much you could do for inequality just by going through that channel. But if you do that, guess what? Your luxury and condo in Boston can't cost a million and a half anymore. And that's the people who vote for the Democrats. Well, that is the always the dilemma, right? Like the incumbent wants to maintain housing prices and the Challenger wants the lower housing prices. And so would you start in that, as you're talking about that sort of like a chain of events in terms of like dealing with housing, just simply say, we're going to expand vocational training. We're going to. We're going to. put more resources into it. We're going to have an accelerated training program so you don't have to be an

apprentice as an electrician for like whatever, four or five years. You can get out there quicker and start to make some money, but that means that we're going to just, we're going to put more money into training. Yeah, and also this is where the deregulation on the left thing comes in as well. I mean, the abundance book got a lot of attention, but it's a really good one by a guy called Mark Dunkelman called Why Nothing Works. And it really goes into this indeed. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things as to why we can't build houses. Have you ever heard the conservation easements? This is one of the best scams in the tax book, right?

So basically you got a 40% tax right off if you buy a big piece of land and say it's for conservation. So you've got a nice house and a nice part of the world. You and your neighbors get together. You buy all the land around. You got 40% tax rise and you just sit and watch as the land values go up and the price of your house goes up. And nobody gets to build anywhere near you. anywhere near you. And this is all because of process regulation. You have to make sure everything goes over. Everybody's game this system out. It's incredibly hard to build anything anywhere.

So there's a whole left deregulation agenda, which would allow us to do not just the skilling, but also the building. And if you did this, this would create an enormous difference to the economy overall. How do you get there, though, without, I mean, how do you, I mean, there's a quality to that that strikes me as, you know, I could fly if I had wings. Right. I mean, you're still constrained by the money that is taking advantage of the moneyed interest that are taking advantage of these regulatory, you know, sort of like, not loopholes, but just sort of like, you know, niches. They're also going to. Oh, yeah, you've got to fight multiple battles. You've got to close the loopholes. You've got to simplify the regulations. you've got to give the right incentives. Nobody says

this is easy. There's a problem that's built up over 30 or 40 years. But it's a crisis point. I mean, you can't spend in sort of a non-hub coastal city. Like, think somewhere like, what's a good example of this, like Austin, Austin, Texas. Like, you spend 50% your income on rent.

It's an utter madness. It can't continue. But unless you're willing to expand the supply side and allow people to build more houses, it will continue until it becomes completely unsustainable. And, you know, that That's where, if I were in the Democrats, that's where I would press on that and try and get this done. One way to think about this is where's the money coming from?

Well, people in the private sector understand this, that a house is an asset. If you're a bank, it's a liability because you want the mortgage payment, right? But to most people, these are assets. If you're actually an owner of 100,000 houses, right, these are very important assets. And if you don't build crap and you're renting them out to people and you borrow it 4%, but you make 5%, percent, that 1% your quids in. Why can't the government do that? Why can't state and local governments do that? Why can't state and local governments in cooperation with B-Corps, with 501c3, with the private sector, get together and do this? And then we can both share in the gain

that comes from it. We'd end up with less debt and more assets. Right. Well, I guess, I mean, from a sequencing standpoint, I think you've got to take out those money and interest who are going to prevent that from happening because they don't want to lose the value of their homes. Absolutely. And they're your major Democratic donors, so you've got a big problem with this. But there's a good line in a book by a guy called Brett Christopher's talking about, as he calls it, asset manager capitalism. And he says, you know when the big asset manager started to buy up private housing and all this sort of stuff, you know, on mass, black rocks and people like this. How do you get them to go out? Just show them cranes. The minute they see the cranes going up,

they're gone, they're on to the next thing. So many of these things are paid for tigers. They've gotten away with them for 40 years, not because they're powerful, because nobody's ever tried to take it away. Mark Blythe, director of the William Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance, Professor at Brown,

and the author, or co-author, I should say, of new book, Inflation, a guide for users and losers. We'll link to that at majority.fm. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Always great to talk to you, Sam. Chris Cuomo used to be a, an anchor on CNN.

I don't know. What were the circumstances in which they let him go? So, I remember this. It was when his brother, Andrew Cuomo, you may have heard of him, was in the midst of the wave of sexual harassment and, I mean, assault in some ways, allegations. And it was found that he was basically

serving as an informal advisor to him, despite being a journalist at CNN. That seems like a conflict of interest. Yes. CNN basically said it was a conflict, and they parted ways. You try to identify one of the accusers. I mean, he tried to docks one of them. That's fine. And, you know, incidentally, I should also say, just as a side note, I mentioned the other day that I had remembered a story where the Mario Cuomo did not

attend Andrew's 50th birthday. And I can't find the article on that. But somebody sent me an article where Andrew was. not invited to a celebration of Mario Cuomo's legacy because all of Andrew Cuomo's, I mean, all of Mario Cuomo's, you know, advisors and confidants, they didn't like Andrew. They felt like he was a stain on his father's legacy. And I also think that he may have, there was some issue that he may have, like, been, inappropriate or Italian, as Andrew Cuomo would say, with one of these advisors' wife.

Oh, my God. Yeah. So anyways, but folks can Google for that story. But that's neither here nor there. Here is Chris Cuomo. And coincidentally, he has a problem with Zoraamani. I mean, it's just like he's an observer of the news and he sees that there's a problem. And he even has come up with a new slogan that nobody else except for him uses.

So it's not really a slogan, but he's come up with a nickname for people who want more affordability. Is that it? I guess so. He doesn't do a great job. It's not in this part. He calls it mega, but nobody knows really what it means. I think it's make the economy great again, but he doesn't explicitly say it in this. Yeah, which of course is.

He thinks it's so clear that he can just say it. it yeah so he's going to say like there's a maga versus mega thing and it really is like um it's also a cry for help i think both are right about what feels wrong about the economic realities in america and both are more about the anger than they are about the answers maga and mega are about the anger not the answers okay don't take it for me take it from his honor. Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. Must be true.

Let the pros we write still rhyme and let us build a shining city for all. Okay. There was a lot of anger in the speech because the anger is what got. Okay. Now, I'll tell you something what just happened there. They played the wrong clip. And they actually played a quote from Chris Cuomo's dad by mistake. You know what this tells me?

Nobody at News Nation likes Chris Cuomo. Right. And he thought that they were going to play an angry thing. And they literally quoted, they played the Mario Cuomo quote that Mamdani added and just said, like, we can, you know, we can have rhyme, which I think he's just sort of implying like we can be a little bit more exciting. We can govern poetry as well. Yes. And we can actually do things. which of course is not really about anger.

Wait, I just don't. Why do you think they play the wrong clip? I honestly think it's because nobody there likes Chris Cuomo. But, but this is the, but, but, watch his look on his face. I don't think, well, he might be recognizing that that's his father being quoted. Yes, no, he does. He, he thought they were going to be playing a clip that was angry.

it's angry because he's basically saying he's not being a unifier he is taking a pacha that my dad that is his definition of anger we're going to get to the van joan clips later they're they've sent out the talking points whoever it is the zionist donors whatever it is uh zora mom dani is angry

he's a radical he's crazy van jones says angry same thing they are going with this narrative and so that's what he's running with i think he's trying to say it's divisive he's still taking shots at my poor, poor, narcissistic sexual predator brother in his victory speech. But that's not the part they played. They played was him literally saying what Mario Cuomo. He comments on it being on.

Let's go back. Okay. Let's go back. Just go back. And like look at his face coming out of that thing. And I think he clearly, he takes a moment and he realizes like, oh, this is not a place for that clip. Shining City for all.

Okay. There was a lot of anger in the speech because the anger is what got them there. Okay. The question is who is they, right? And whose time is it no longer? And what will that look like? Now, that was a reference in there, which was a very weird mix. He just paraphrased Mario Cuomo and Ronald Reagan.

I don't know if he knows that. I think he did because he was trying to be petty. But my father's line, again, I don't think it was an accident. I don't care what you think you know about the left, okay? This guy, AOC, Bernie, compared to my father, these are posers when it comes to being true democratic values, all right? My father was a doer and a fighter and a fixer. He loved America. He believed that he would never have become anything like he was able to become here.

And he believed in a big part of that was capitalism and that diversity was our strength. Okay, pause. Hold on for a second. He is quoting your father, dummy, to mock your brother, to stick a little knife in him and not even say the name Cuomo, but to have you react to it and have Andrew understand, yeah, I'm using your own father's words against you as I beat your ass for a second time. He was trying to just like be, I mean, this is his rapper background. He was just being like awesome, basically. And there was a great article in Politico, maybe we were a reference. referencing it where they just like completely lay into Andrew Cuomo about this with a bunch of

quotes one from state senator Liz Kruger and then from Bill de Blasio too about basically how Andrew Cuomo is constantly chasing his father's legacy and constantly unable to live up to it. Yeah. On top of Andrew, I mean this is like a mom Donnie's reminder to Cuomo. You're not your dad. Yeah. And the idea that A. Chris Cuomo sort of like sort of like elides the fact that like well he was first generation immigrant my dad and he loved this country

because this is the place where it could happen which of course is almost like the centerpiece of Mamdani's campaign right the immigrant experience in New York specifically that speech and then on top of that him saying diversity is our strength the last time

I heard anybody comment on the question as to whether diversity is our strength was this guy's brother when he said it's also a danger it can be a weakness on MSNBC and then repeatedly confused

two black host's names on the network yeah let's to divide needed to be dealt with okay he was stronger than all of them combined but sweeter as well these are mean people and that's why half

the city came out against them. But they are right about what is wrong when it comes to affordability. The question is, do they want to make things right or worse? Three big points. MAGA and Mega are following playbooks. Project 2025, you can say, oh, that's a boogeyman. No, the choices are all over the. I feel like this is like the both sides type of thing.

I don't remember a single mayoral campaign where there was. was more specifics about what the guy wanted to do. I mean, Mum, Donnie, we'll see if he can do it. But it is quite clear what he's going to be, he's going to be judged on, whether he can deliver those four things, the free buses, the universal childcare, the freeze on the rents and the grocery stores. I mean, everybody in the country knows those are his four things. And not one can name an Andrew Cuomo policy. that he was presenting. Except, right, him being a total purve. But like, also, that was a promise.

Yeah, but the way he's talking about his father. I'm not going to not be Italian. Yeah, the way he's talking about his father is this like unifying figure. That was there in nine, it was in the 1970s when Cuomo did lose the Democratic primary and ran in as an independent, which his son tried to echo. And that was when they were running the ads, vote for Cuomo, not the homo. Against Ed Koch, who was a closeted gay man. So this is total revisionist history as well. Yeah, but Mom Dany and AOC never brought him cereal in the morning. Right.

You know? Right. Like he was sweet as he was powerful. Yeah. Well, actually, dad wasn't, you know, there is a, I imagine that there's a real story about the relationship in this family. Well, this is why Cuomo was blue Trump. I mean, it's all there.

Nepo baby comes from a father who is more successful than you, constantly trying to live up to them, built on bullying and transactions and corruption. I mean, they are very, very similar people. You mentioned the vote Cuomo,

not the homo thing. Did you see the update that Andrew Cuomo's daughter did on that recently? Oh, my God. I did see this. This is the most cringe thing. I will say, it's not racist. It's not a homophobic and it's not it's just atrocious it's just yes this is i it's amazing this came out after um you know it's amazing about it it's at cool girls for capitalism event and can i get an invite

did they have to put her father in a cage no but you should see the pictures he's looming in the background but is it a straight jacket yeah they need cuffs for that guy and not in the way you're thinking Andrew. But why is it the biggest simps for capitalism have absolutely no sense of what they're putting out and how

it will be received by the public? No demand for this. This is one of the worst product rollouts I've ever seen. Go ahead. No, no. Yes, like even he was like, sweetheart,

please. I love you. You're my daughter. but stop stop my god stop no fomo vote quomo no fear of missing out vote quomo what are we missing out on some lower back touching i'm sure she's a very nice person but i don't think uh i love even his comment like it's great how you just came up with that kind of says like you know this was off the top of her head everybody who i am you know that uh saying uh the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Well, sometimes it does. Sometimes there's a tree and it's on like a hill and sometimes the apple falls off the hill off the tree and it rolls all the way down to the hill. And there's a stream there. And it rolls into the stream and the stream takes it down out

to the ocean essentially and then it just goes miles and miles away. Well, I think that's what we're watching. There's another saying for that, which is shit rolls down. gosh. Should we do this Jim Brewer thing just to get it out of the way? Sure. You know, the Jimmy Kimmel thing is going to pass. And then we can do a little bit more serious stuff. What do you mean should we do this Jim Brewer thing? You've been dying to do the Jim Brewer thing. I've been dying. I know, but now it's like almost getting timed out. This I found really funny. Apparently, Jim Brewer now is not getting booked in the shows that he was getting booked when he had decided that his career was going to be anti-COVID stuff.

Too much truth. Too much truth. And to be fair, I've actually watched probably more of his videos that I care to admit. He is skeptical of some things that probably have made it more difficult for his like sort of like anti-vax crowd. He recently made a video where he tagged Ron DeSantis in the video and asked him to explain the airplane vapor trails that he could be he could be following some narratives that are starting to make some of the more mainstream lunatics uncomfortable um but here he is god boy takes on chem trails i also as well make you become go boy i mean honestly this could be like the last video of brewers

that we could ever really talk about without starting to feel like awkward uh if you know what i mean But here he is, did you ever see that movie, King of Comedy? Oh, I love that. Of course. And there's that scene where De Niro is... Pumpkin. Yeah, he's performing stand-up. His mother's basement.

Yeah, the basement with a recording of laughter and, like, a picture of an audience. I know. know why that came to me but uh here's jim brewer doing stand-up i think he by himself oh where's the sound no sound okay go back go back go and he's talking about jimmy kimmel now we should also just say uh this is he did this uh before uh he was returned uh he was returned to broadcast by the Sinclair group because they had a kill fee in their contract. Good. Jimmy Kimmel.

I guess he's coming back tonight. Certain places are not going to air him or whatever. You know, I watch some people get all bent out of shape and they were screaming. The First Amendment. Okay. Well, that is true. But here's the thing. He basically said when it comes to letting people in a hospital during COVID-

Pause it for a second. Now, listen, let me clear. this guy's like the past four years to the extent that he had a revival of some sort was almost exclusively based upon the First Amendment and to see him say well okay then just dismiss it like it's been his life's work for the past like three years all these truth tellers and it's like well first amendment but and then wait to the joke that apparently Jim Brewer has been like nurturing

in like a like four years five years that Jimmy Kimmel delivered that me that according to Jim Brewer makes Kimmel like he doesn't even get the first of it. I'll just point out the song he's using in this is the song that was using the 28 days later trailer by

Godspeed you black emperor. Well because all the Vax are zombies yes thing to he basically said when it comes to letting people in a hospital during COVID the number of new cases is up more than 300% from a year ago dr fowgci said that if hospitals get any more overprouded they're going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bet that choice doesn't seem so tough to make vaccinated person having a heart attack yes come right on him we'll take care of you unvaccinated guy who's gobbled horse goo rest in peace wheezy. Now, yes, we can argue that's the First Amendment. But I think there's repercussions when you're

that hateful towards other humans. And just because you're paid really well to sell hate, some of us would put morals in front of that price tag. Some of us. Pause it. Possible. Okay. And I'm like, I'm like, okay, I mean, this is sort of like a little bit crazy. But I mean, I was watching this. Like somebody sent this, but I'm like, okay, this is a little crazy. But he's, I like how he's building to a crescendo, and he's just going to make this about morals, okay? It's not about First Amendment anymore. It's about morals. And if you're going to be on a late night show, you can't make jokes.

Right. About people who refuse to vaccinate. We like our Ivermeccan, sir. Excuse me. Right. That's morals. And you can hear the music at crescending, and I'm like, wow, this guy has sort of changed his style. He's no longer has to act like a moron to sell his point.

And it turns out egg on my face. Really well to sell hate. Some of us would put morals in front of that price tag. Some of us. Some of us will go, I'll take the money. What do I got to say? Hey, if you're not vaccinated, go eat some horse goo. Weezy.

He's so brilliant. He's on our side. He's smart. He listens to the scientists. He listens to the specialist. He must be right. He's on television. Quack, quack.

Yeah, quiet down. I'm trying to watch my programs up here. No noise complaint. Jimmy, stop podcasting in the basement. The lasagna's ready. I got to I listen to the scientists. I can't why he was making the wheezing noise.

It didn't. He's making fun. It's just like just total association. He said the joke about wheezing people, so I will make the wheezing noise. But it seemed like he was trying to transition to... Yeah, my God. Honestly, I laughed out loud.

when he immediately, he's just got that point. Like, people need to have morals. Oh, my God. He did miss a chance to do a horse. The horse goo. Well, that's true. That's true. I don't know if that's in his wheelhouse.

Or barn. Or barn, for that matter. Oh, my gosh. He did the 28 days later soundtrack to make it sound like he was transitioning to serious comedian, to Samirius comedian pundit, but he couldn't help himself. turned out like the virus in his own brain. Yeah. The thing is, is like,

we're like just starting to cross into like Joker territory. It's like he's doing sort of like these goofy characters, but they're getting like just darker and dark. Joe Rogan has his boss on. The podcast. It is There is no

There is no bootlecking There is no sort of like Cringy And I don't even think Rogan's You can actually see him in this But you You can feel his energy And his laughing

At I don't know Does Musk set this up as a joke Yeah And give Rogan credit He's been doing stand-up for 30 years So he knows a good joke He knows a good joke

What's fascinating about this to me is Musk is about to give a critique of something that he doesn't realize what it's a critique of. He thinks it's one thing. It's a different thing. And he doesn't realize

he's giving a liberal critique of this thing. But I think part of it is just because he's so enraptured by the scatological being able to say these words on radio that he can't help him. He was so giggling. He's like,

Giggling, like honestly, I've had conversations with Saul, which are almost identical to this. Of course, Saul's more articulate about it. And frankly, the things he's talking about is not poop. But here we go. Because they'll measure any job, no matter even if that job is a dumb job, that has no point and is even counterproductive. So like, so like the joke is like there's two economists. Pause it for a second. He's talking about economists measuring any.

drop, even if it's counterproductive. Now, this is supposedly a freaking genius. I don't want to say, he may be smart about some things. I don't know. He may have been smart at a different time before the ketamine and the Coke. I don't know. But this is one of the dumbest,

the sort of like understandings of what he's talking about. I saw a video of him the other day saying that Diet Coke is the worst branding, and someone pointed out, this is the guy who has the website that everyone still calls Twitter. Okay, but here he is talking about how economists, the way they do things is messed up. Now, on some level, I agree.

But it's, we'll get to that. But yeah, here he is. This is a performance. This is a great storyteller. We're going to hike in the woods. So like, so like the joke is like there's two economists going on a hike in the woods. they come across a pile of shit and one economist says the other

I'll pay you $100 to eat that shit The economist eats the shit Gets the $100, they keep walking Then the other economy They're going to come across another pile of shit And the other economist says Now I'll pay you $100 to eat the pile of shit Says

Say face Still doing the setup buddy Okay He's laughing throughout this whole thing. The irony is is that we can't see what Joe Rogan's doing, and it's also, like, hard to know

if, like, Joe Rogan is, like, thinking, wait a second, am I one of these people who's getting $100 to eat this shit right now? Exactly. I'm eating shit for money right now. Exactly. More like $200 million from spot of time. It's a little bit more.

The Convist eats the shit, gets the $100. They keep walking. Then the other economy, then it come across another pile of shit. And the other economist says, now I'll pay you $100 to eat the pile of shit. So he pays the other economist a hundred dollars to pile of shit. Then the way they said, look, wait a second. We both just ate a pile of shit. And we're no, and we're no, we still don't have any more extra money.

Like we both, you just gave the $100 back to me. And we both ate a pile of shit. this doesn't make any sense. And they said, no, no, but think of the economy because that's $200 in the economy. That basically, eating, eating shit would count as a, as a, as a job.

This is, this is too ill shit the episode of economics. Of GDP, you idiot. Okay, that's the thing. He didn't know that he's talking about GDP, it's not economics. It is the measure of the gross domestic product. Talk about gross. There is $200 worth of economic activity that takes place in that, that is counted towards the gross domestic product. Now, I will say it has been a long time

critique by the left in this country that the gross domestic product does not take into account externalities and other things. So for instance, somebody breaks into my house. They steal my computer. I've got to go buy a new computer. I've got to have the locksmith come and change my locks. I've got to have the contractor come and fix the window that they broke, whatever it is, and the GDP goes up. But there's no account for how much time did I lose at work? how, you know, the cost to me is actually considered a value to the economy. Or you could look at like, what is the cost of, okay, the GDP goes up because you cleared a forest and you sold the wood. But what's the cost down the road in terms of like climate change and how that's going to undermine?

This is a longstanding critique of GDP. he doesn't realize he's talking about GDP. Yeah. No idea whatsoever. It's not about their jobs. It's about economic activity. There is value for where, you know, to see where the money is going. But it's, he's just so, he's so intrigued by the idea that poop is involved.

I know. Eating poop. It's, it's really. just to establish that this is a long-standing critique of GDP, this is from our friends over at Current Affairs, an article written, not, this is about Javier Malay, written in October of 2025,

and I'll just scroll down to this portion here, where, Elexcopic, the writer, includes that entire thing about these economists. There's a juvenile poop joke that illustrates this poem, well, two economists walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit, the first economist, but it's just basically,

without this. So I don't know for sure that Elon read this one because it's also from Hacker News three years ago that the same sort of point was made. Listen, this has been, I'm not talking this critique is of five years old. This critique is 30 years old minimum. I mean, they were talking about recalculating the back when it was the GNP in the early 90s. I remember this conversation. I mean, I was basically when I was old enough, to be sort of aware of these things. When the Berlin Wall fell, in the wake of the Soviet Union, the idea was like, we need to start to recalculate the GNP at that time, and now it's GDP. This is a longstanding critique, and this genius who can't deliver a freaking joke, he's got his bootlicker laughing across from him. Oh, man.

Wait, can I just see the punchline for this actual joke? Can you just scroll down to the punchline for it? it's the same it's that's not true we increase but he said but we increased gdp isn't that not what no he no he didn't say no it's for the economy you know and again in the joke delivered properly is you know i gave you 100 bucks to eat shit then you gave me the same hundred bucks to eat shit yeah i can't help but feel we both just ate shit for nothing that's not true says the second economist we increased the GDP by 200 bucks that's exactly so that makes sense yes that makes sense no it's also funny if you say but there's no extra money gross domestic there's no extra money

incidentally um he's also um his lament there is also a good argument for why we need a fiat currency uh because you know apparently there's a problem with the money just going back and forth here plus kind of what's going on with AI uh investment sort of Ouroboros in one company, out in another company, and sort of circular investment thing going on right now with AI. It's kind of similar, maybe inflated in our GDP numbers in a way that's not actually sustainable. Edeb says the gross national product, or it's a gross domestic product, does not allow for the health of our children, quality of their education,

joy of their play, it does not include the beauty of poetry and strength of marriage. Yeah, on and on. All the externalities. Yes, I'm saying it's been a left-wing critique of the GDP, GN, for decades. That was RFK in the 70s, right? Of course, the 60s. Well, he was still alive then.

Kewanon says, so. That's amazing. Do you think that Rogan even knows, like, what he's responding to anymore? Or if he's, it's just like, I mean, really, really lazy, fake laughter there. Joe Rogan, his favorite music is AI covers of 50 cents songs. So I don't think no. He doesn't know what he's reacting to. He's got a lot of practice of laughing at execs.

It might take all strength that guy to get to where I want. But I know somehow I'm going to get there when I just got caught. You see the truth and love.