| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Haves and the have-nots. | ||
| Even the haves are recognizing that the degree, the four-year degree, is not necessarily achieving the American dream for them or their children. | ||
| And it's becoming, you know, the affordability issue, has kind of reached a fever pitch. | ||
| And we're kind of looking at how jobs are changing and how quickly skills become obsolete. | ||
|
unidentified
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Kathleen Dulaski with her book, Who Needs College Anymore. | |
| Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | ||
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| Joining us now to discuss the current state of the U.S. economy, including the April Jobs Report and other economic indicators, is Paul Kiernan. | ||
| He's a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Paul, thank you for being with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me, Tammy. | |
| We'll jump right in. | ||
| You had a busy week, a lot of news out, financial news on, and talking about job indicators overall, including the April jobs report, which was released yesterday. | ||
| Tell us about the report. | ||
| What were the expectations? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the expectations were for a pretty solid report, and what we got was an even more solid report. | |
| Economists at the Wall Street Journal surveys had expected the economy to add 133,000 jobs in April, and we got 177,000. | ||
| The unemployment rate remains steady at 4.2%, which is low. | ||
| What does it say that it beat expectations considering the economic uncertainty right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, really what it says is that the U.S. economy is resilient. | |
| It's like a big, complex machine. | ||
| Think about it like an ocean liner or a tanker ship or a container ship that's crossing the ocean from China right now. | ||
| Those things don't stop on a dime, even when they hit rough seas. | ||
| And talk about some of the factors that are considered when we look at numbers that come out of a report like that. | ||
| What overall are they looking at? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, the biggest thing, the biggest factor in the jobs report was private sector hiring was strong. | |
| The federal government shed a few jobs, but it really wasn't enough to make a dent in the overall economy. | ||
| Stepping back, I think, you know, I mentioned rough seas. | ||
| The Trump administration is throwing a lot of shocks at the economy right now, but the U.S. economy is big and resilient, and we just haven't seen anything really roll over yet. | ||
| Another report that came out this week was on the GDP. | ||
| It showed that the first quarter of, for 20, first quarter of 2025, it shrank. | ||
| Explain why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so the headline number doesn't look great. | |
| It shows that the U.S. economy shrank by 0.3% in the first quarter. | ||
| That was largely because there was a rush of imports, and imports kind of mathematically subtract from GDP growth. | ||
| So what most economists seem to think is that companies, businesses, and consumers were kind of rushing to get ahead of tariffs that Trump has been talking about since last year and even longer. | ||
| So there was really a surge of imports. | ||
| But the rest of the report was like pretty solid. | ||
| I mean, consumer spending was up, business investment was up. | ||
| Those are kind of the real engines of the economy. | ||
| And so, you know, the headline number was bad, but there wasn't much cause for concern, immediate concern in the report. | ||
| Our guest for the next 30 minutes or so is Paul Kiernan. | ||
| He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal covering the economy. | ||
| If you have a question or a comment for him, you can start calling in now the lines, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Another headline from one of your colleagues, Consumer Sentiment Plunges on Tariff Concerns. | ||
| Survey shows. | ||
| Explain consumers' expectations and what this report found. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so one thing that is really interesting that we're seeing in the economy right now is a split between what we call hard data and soft data. | |
| A great example of hard data is the jobs report that came out yesterday. | ||
| Soft data is expectation, surveys of consumer and business expectations. | ||
| So those have really kind of tanked this year. | ||
| I think that you're talking about the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index, which came out last week. | ||
| I think it's been going down for like five consecutive months. | ||
| And that's partly a function of news headlines and policy announcements and all the uncertainty that's out there. | ||
| So people's expectations for the economy are pretty low, but what they're actually experiencing so far is pretty good because most people have jobs. | ||
| There is when it looks, when we're looking at economic uncertainty, there's consumer sentiment, there's also businesses. | ||
| How have businesses been impacted or how are they reacting to the current economic state? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, we've gotten some first quarter earnings in the past couple of weeks. | |
| And companies like McDonald's and Harley-Davidson and a number of retailers and consumer products companies have seen slowing or declining sales. | ||
| So the sentiment seems to be getting felt by businesses. | ||
| But at a high level, consumer spending has been pretty good. | ||
| I want to play a clip from President Trump's cabinet meeting that he had on Wednesday. | ||
| During it, he was asked by a reporter about the state of the economy and who gets credit or blame. | ||
| We'll play it and then we'll get your response on the other side. | ||
| Some people on Wall Street have expressed concerns that the possibility of a recession is increasing. | ||
| And I want to know what you think about that. | ||
| Are you comfortable with the country potentially dipping into a recession for a period of time if you are able to achieve your long-term goals? | ||
| Well, you know, you say some people on Wall Street say, well, I tell you something else. | ||
| Some people on Wall Street say that we're going to have the greatest economy in history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why don't you talk about them? | |
| Because some people on Wall Street say this is a great question. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm getting at. | ||
| That's what I'm getting at, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a lot of people. | |
| There are many people on Wall Street who say this is going to be the greatest windfall ever happened. | ||
| And that's my question in the long term. | ||
| Is it okay in the short term to have a recession? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, yes, everything's okay. | |
| But we are, I said, this is a transition period. | ||
| I think we're going to do fantastically. | ||
| We apologize. | ||
| That was actually a clip from an NBC interview with President Trump. | ||
| It'll be airing in full on NBC's Meet the Press tomorrow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But Paul, tell us what you heard there. | |
| You know, I heard the president defending his economic policy and the economic outlook. | ||
| You know, no president is going to come out and say, you know, yeah, we're going to have a recession. | ||
| It's going to be terrible. | ||
| That said, we do surveys of economists, and I haven't really seen any survey responses from economists on Wall Street or elsewhere that suggest there isn't going to be some slowdown potentially from these tariffs, especially if they remain in effect. | ||
| You had a headline back in March. | ||
| Here's what to look for early signs of a recession. | ||
| Tell us about some of those signs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, probably, so we talked about the soft data and the hard data. | |
| I mean, we've seen the soft data, the expectations roll over, but we haven't really seen it in the hard data yet. | ||
| Traditionally, the first thing to kind of the first canary in the coal mine is initial claims for jobless benefits. | ||
| When people get laid off, they go to their state labor agency and they request unemployment benefits. | ||
| Those really have been range-bound for more than a year. | ||
| And last week, they ticked up a little bit, but it wasn't outside the range. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We will start with Guy in Oklahoma, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Nice to talk to you, Paul. | ||
| First of all, people seem to forget that a year and a half ago, we had two quarters in a row of negative GBP, which indicates the recession. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the media refused to acknowledge that. | |
| Oh, job numbers are up. | ||
| You know, everything looks good. | ||
| Economy is great. | ||
| And here we are in Trump's first quarter. | ||
| You know, we have negative GDP, but that's a lagging indicator. | ||
| The only current indicator is the job report, which was 228,000 added last month, 177,000 added this month. | ||
| The stock market is roaring back. | ||
| It's almost repeat all of its losses here in the last month. | ||
| Your take on inflation, Paul, because inflation, the last time I checked, it was at two-tenths of 1%, which has dropped from 2% when Trump came in office. | ||
| Could you explain the inflation outlook? | ||
| And the tariffs, also, by the way, they've all been put on pause except for China. | ||
| And now China is coming to the negotiating table. | ||
| So the tariffs have served their purpose. | ||
| Please give me your take on the inflation outlook, your outlook for the next six months to year. | ||
| Thank you, Paul. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So on inflation, I think you may have been comparing month-on-month numbers to year-on-year numbers. | ||
| What we had in the first quarter was the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge was, I think, up 3.6% from the previous three months. | ||
| And so that's, they target 2%. | ||
| So inflation, I mean, inflation stepping back has been coming down since 2022 when it reached like a four-decade high. | ||
| But it's not quite where we want it to be, which again is 2%. | ||
| Most economists in our surveys and out in the world and also consumers expect inflation to be pushed up, at least in the short to medium term, by Trump's tariffs. | ||
| And that's a concern for the Fed. | ||
| On GDP growth, I'm not sure what number you were talking about when you said that it declined last year. | ||
| If we look at sort of the first quarter of this year compared to the fourth quarter of last year, it contracted a little bit, and that was the first decline in three years, since 2022. | ||
| It's pretty rare for GDP to decline, but again, like I mentioned earlier, the underlying factors are pretty strong. | ||
| EJ in Atlanta, Georgia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, E.J. Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was wondering if you can tell me the difference between the economic indicators that you have now compared to what they were, you know, I guess in previous months since we had this changeover. | |
| Have they gotten better or worse? | ||
| Hi, E.J. | ||
| It's been remarkably steady. | ||
| I mean, you know, if you look at the policy announcements coming out of the administration, the Trump administration is, you know, seems quite different from the Biden administration, to say the least. | ||
| But the inflation or the economic data don't really show a huge change. | ||
| I mean, one thing to think about is average job growth in the first four months of this year, I think, was 144,000 per month, including April. | ||
| Last year was like 168,000, so that's come down a little bit. | ||
| But if you look at kind of the underlying elements of GDP, it's pretty strong. | ||
| So the hard data on the economy are still pretty good, but those are lagging indicators. | ||
| Along those same lines, a question coming in on X from Aztec asks, at what point do economic job numbers reflect the current administration, Biden-Harris fiscal year budget, and policies are still affecting much of what is happening? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think that's right. | |
| And it's a great question. | ||
| I wish I had the answer. | ||
| I mean, I think that the most significant policy that President Trump has enacted so far on the economy are the Liberation Day tariffs, which were partly rolled back. | ||
| But I think there's still 145% tariffs on a lot of stuff coming out of China. | ||
| Those went into effect April 2nd. | ||
| The jobs numbers that we just got were gathered early to mid-April. | ||
| And so we could maybe start to see some effect in May. | ||
| Let's hear from Jerry in New Jersey, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Jerry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Listen, I have a couple of questions for you. | ||
| One, I keep listening to the news media. | ||
| In the last couple of days, I heard them say the jobs numbers were going to be low and things were going to be really bad. | ||
| And oh my God, you've got to worry, everything's getting affected. | ||
| And all of a sudden, the job numbers come out and they're pretty good. |