| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Thanks, C-SPAN, for all you do. | |
| It's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard, where hard questions are asked, and where people have to answer to them. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss the latest on U.S. economic news is Politico Economics correspondent Victoria Guida. | ||
| Victoria, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me on. | |
| We'll start with the news of the July jobs report that was released yesterday. | ||
| Tell us the best way to look at the numbers, look at the job creation numbers for last month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So job creation was relatively low. | |
| It wasn't bad. | ||
| It was 73,000 net jobs added. | ||
| That's a little bit lower than economists were expecting. | ||
| They were expecting around 100,000, but it's not a terrible number. | ||
| The unemployment rate did tick up to 4.2%, but that's also still quite a low number. | ||
| And basically what it reflects is that the job market is really kind of, you hear people describe it as sort of frozen, where there are a lot of people that are employed, but you're not seeing a lot of movement around, not necessarily a lot of hiring, not necessarily a lot of layoffs. | ||
| And there's a sign that demand for workers is weakening a lot, but also the supply of workers has been coming down because of the administration's crackdown on immigration. | ||
| And so we're sort of seeing a labor market cool, but we're not necessarily seeing a really troubling rise in unemployment. | ||
| You mentioned a couple of the factors, but what else has contributed to job loss? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, so again, it's not necessarily job loss. | |
| It's just that they're hiring at a much lower rate. | ||
| And one of the problems with this is, you know, if you're, for example, a younger person who's coming into the labor market and you're looking for employment opportunities, there might be fewer of them. | ||
| And so there is sort of fewer employment opportunities for new entrants into the labor force. | ||
| And so over time, that is going to drive up joblessness, even if you're not necessarily having, you know, active layoffs across the economy. | ||
| But it's sort of ticking up. | ||
| And also announced yesterday was revised numbers for the previous two jobs reports. | ||
| How significant are those numbers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This was actually the thing that most people really focused on from this report because it was a really surprising shift where basically total between the months of May and June, the number of jobs that were added had been now the BLS believes overstated by 258,000 jobs, which basically means that the job market is looking a lot worse than we actually thought. | |
| You had a headline yesterday. | ||
| The job market isn't as good as we thought. | ||
| There might be an upside for Trump. | ||
| Elaborate on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So one of the things that President Trump has been repeatedly calling for is for interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve. | |
| And the Fed has been holding off on cutting interest rates while they see through how tariffs feed through the economy because the Fed has two things that it watches. | ||
| Inflation and it wants to keep rates elevated if it's worried about inflation and employment. | ||
| It's supposed to also pursue maximum employment and it wants to cut rates if it's worried that growth might really be slowing in a way that's going to hurt workers. | ||
| So those are sort of telling you to move in two different directions. | ||
| So they've sort of been holding steady until they're for sure they really understand what's happening in the economy. | ||
| And so if there are signs that the labor market really is starting to weaken, that could help prompt the Fed to cut interest rates sooner. | ||
| Our guest is Victoria Guida. | ||
| She is a economics correspondent for Politico. | ||
| She'll be with us for the next 40 minutes or so. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for her, you can start giving us a call now. | ||
| The lines, Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| And a reminder: you can also send us a text. | ||
| It's 202-748-8003. | ||
| Victoria, when we see these recent jobs reports, especially July, what sectors are being hit the hardest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So one of the really striking things about this report is that we actually saw employment net go down in basically every sector other than health care and social assistance. | |
| And so it's sort of leading to this question of, oh, you know, is the economy broadly sort of starting to slow down? | ||
| And again, these are net jobs. | ||
| So it's not like, you know, nobody is getting hired at any of these sectors. | ||
| It's just on net, they're losing jobs. | ||
| And particularly notably, you know, for the last few months, manufacturing jobs have shrunk. | ||
| And, you know, this is something that has been very important to President Trump is to bring back manufacturing jobs. | ||
| And so, you know, that will be an important number to track over time. | ||
| But of course, one of the things that's been a dynamic in the first half of the year is some of the uncertainty around his trade war has led to a lot less economic activity where people aren't necessarily, where businesses aren't necessarily investing because they're not sure how the tariffs are going to shake out. | ||
| And so it'll be interesting to watch, you know, as businesses get more certainty about what the tariffs are going to look like, what kind of investments they make and whether that can sort of help boost that employment in manufacturing or not. | ||
| And how could these recent jobs numbers from July, how could that affect future decisions from the Federal Reserve about rate cuts, which is something President Trump has been pushing for for several months now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so as I mentioned, it could potentially prompt them to cut sooner. | |
| Their next meeting, they just had a meeting this past week, and it could prompt them to cut at their next meeting in September. | ||
| They will get a fair amount of data, more data, between now and then. | ||
| And so we'll have to see. | ||
| I mean, they're going to get another jobs report at the beginning of September, and they're also going to get inflation data. | ||
| And we've started to see inflation tick up a bit because of the tariffs. | ||
| It hasn't surged, but you can definitely see it in certain sectors, like apparel, like furniture, like toys. | ||
| And so a big question will be in the coming months in inflation reports, are we starting to see that tick up in a way that is really concerning to the Fed? | ||
| And it's sort of the balance of that data that will determine how quickly they start cutting. | ||
| And you mentioned that the Fed had their meeting. | ||
| It was this week. | ||
| Right after that meeting, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced rates would stay the same. | ||
| How did he justify that decision? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So he said that right now the economy doesn't look like it needs, you know, that it's really suffering. | |
| Interest rates are set at a level where the Fed believes that they are what they call restrictive, which basically means that it is to an extent cutting into economic growth. | ||
| And they're doing that on purpose as sort of a guard against inflation because they've been engaged in this process over the last few years where inflation was very high and they brought it down into the twos of percent because the Fed's target is 2% inflation. | ||
| But basically right now, they still feel like they don't totally have certainty. | ||
| And he was basically saying, you know, the economy doesn't seem to be crying out for help right now. | ||
| Although then we got this jobs report that suggests that actually the jobs report was maybe a little bit weaker than we thought over the last couple of months. | ||
| But as I mentioned at the top, it's not like a horrifying jobs report. | ||
| It's just that it looks like things are a lot weaker than we thought they were. | ||
| And on the topic of the Federal Reserve Board, there were two members, two governors who dissented with Powell's decision to hold rates where they are. | ||
| How significant is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was a very unusual move. | |
| So the Fed, about 12 people vote on the interest rate decision that we all see. | ||
| And some of those are board members and some of them are regional bank heads. | ||
| And it's much more normal for, but, you know, there hasn't been that much dissent lately over the last few years. | ||
| But in general, when you see dissents, you tend to see them from those regional branch heads. | ||
| And this time we saw a dissent from two governors, two board members. | ||
| And that hasn't happened since 1993. | ||
| Now, both of these people were appointees of President Trump. | ||
| But the case that they were making for a rate cut is that they're worried about the job market. | ||
| And it's especially notable because Chris Waller, who is on President Trump's shortlist to be the next Fed chair, is somebody that is consistently a really respected economist on the Fed that people really listen to. | ||
| And so it'll be really interesting to see whether the argument that he made is something that starts to sway some of his fellow Fed officials. | ||
| And more news about Reserve Board governors. | ||
| It was yesterday that one of them announced they will be stepping down earlier before their term is over. | ||
| For our audience, remind them what the responsibilities of the governors are and how significant it is that they're stepping aside, what it means for President Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So Adriana Kugler, her term was up in January anyway, so she was going to be leaving, but she's leaving early, which is, you know, it's unclear the reason, but she says that she's going to be going back later this fall to be a professor at Georgetown University. | ||
| In terms of the duties of Fed board members, so obviously they have a vote on interest rates, but also the Fed has multiple other jobs. | ||
| They regulate banks and they are involved in the payment system. | ||
| They, you know, depending on which governor you are, they have different internal committees that they sit on. | ||
| But, you know, there's statistical parts of the Fed. | ||
| And, you know, Adriana Kugler only joined the board in 2023. | ||
| So she hasn't been there that long. | ||
| You know, Fed board members, a standard term for a Fed board member is 14 years. | ||
| But yeah, They sort of split up the duties and all the different things that the Fed is responsible for. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with Joe, who's in Texas on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
| Joe, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm seeing. | |
| Yeah, you got me? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Go ahead, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to ask this later: do you think you're going to get a true draft report now? | |
| Trump has fired himself since he did a report that he didn't like. | ||
| I believe every time something don't go the way he wants to go, he fired him. | ||
| So now, and people can keep on believing everything Trump tells you, and you're going to fool around and he's going to bankrupt the United States where he did all his businesses. | ||
| So, as you mentioned, one of the things that happened yesterday is that President Trump did fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics later in the day after we got this jobs data. | ||
| And President Trump basically said that he thinks that the numbers were wrong. | ||
| And we can talk about that too, about how the BLS calculates its data. | ||
| But I would say that it's still sort of unclear now what that means for the agency. | ||
| People who, economists who rely on this data and investors who rely on this data, and people who were at the BLS previously, the person who ran BLS during Trump's first term, | ||
| you're seeing a lot of people really express concern about this and the idea that he might put someone in there who isn't going to necessarily approach the statistical aspects of this job with as much independence as the BLS has been set up to do. | ||
| But we don't know that yet because we don't know exactly, you know, we don't know who they're putting in there. | ||
| And, you know, it's definitely something that people are watching very closely. | ||
| Victoria, explain how they come up with the job numbers you just alluded to it, but how they came up with the jobs numbers, as well as what we saw with the revisions in previous reports, how those happen, and how common they are, how common it is to have revisions in past reports. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, the way that the BLS calculates these numbers is based on surveys. | |
| So, they talk to households and they talk to businesses. | ||
| And, you know, when they talk to businesses, they track their employment over time, how many positions they have, whether they've added some, whether they've subtracted some, what kind of jobs they've added. | ||
| And they have, you know, they send out these surveys to businesses across the country. | ||
| Obviously, they are not polling every single business in the entire country. | ||
| That would not be possible. | ||
| And so, there's also some, you know, some economic assumptions that you have to put into that. | ||
| For example, they have to have a good sense of how many businesses exist in the country, right? | ||
| How many workers? | ||
| You know, this has been an interesting question under President Joe Biden when we saw a big jump in immigration of like, you know, what is the worker base? | ||
| And so there's a lot of complexity to what the BLS has to do. | ||
| And, you know, from month to month, they sometimes get survey responses from businesses after they've initially reported the information. | ||
| And there's also a bunch of other additional data that they get that might affect the number. | ||
| So the revisions themselves are completely normal. | ||
| The BLS regularly updates the numbers in subsequent months. | ||
| The thing that was really striking about this report is the revisions were quite large. | ||
| And another thing I'll note is that the BLS also has had staffing shortages. | ||
| There's been a hiring freeze. | ||
| And that has also limited their ability to deal with the fact that response rates from businesses have gone down since the pandemic. | ||
| And it's a little bit harder to address that, where you need to sort of follow up and find the proper responses that you need without the proper staffing. | ||
| Victoria Ben in Arlington, Virginia, sent us a text with this question. | ||
| Is it true that most of the prices used for the CBI are now just guesses and inflation could worse than assumed? | ||
| We don't have enough accurate data under Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So most of the prices are not assumed, but I do think that there is the caller is referring to something that it's called imputation, where there are certain prices that factor into the consumer price index that are not observable prices. | |
| So for example, there's something called owner equivalent rent, where so there is rent, which is an observable price, right? | ||
| Like there are people out there who are charging rent. | ||
| But there's also housing costs that are faced by homeowners. | ||
| And one of the ways that that number is included in the CPI is through owner equivalent rent, which is basically like if you had your house up for rent, what would it go for, right? | ||
| And that kind of data is a little bit, you know, more based on imputation, as they call it. | ||
| But that's not like the majority of CPI. | ||
| I mean, there is, it's consumer prices. | ||
| So it is, they're largely looking at prices that are faced by consumers. | ||
| There's also something called the personal consumptures, personal consumption expenditures index, which is another key inflation metric. | ||
| And that looks at a broader range of prices, including things like health insurance that's paid for by your employer. | ||
| And so both of these kind of give you different snapshots of price pressures in the economy. | ||
| But to answer the question, no, it's not like they're just making stuff up. | ||
| Let's talk with Roy in Greensboro, North Carolina, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Roy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| I've been noticing a lot lately. | ||
| This is anecdotal evidence of a declining job market. | ||
| But for one thing, the restaurants I like to go to, one's a seafood restaurant my sister works at, and their business is just like falling off a cliff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's terrible business now. | |
| I guess people are holding on to their money. | ||
| They've laid off people. | ||
| A couple of Mexican restaurants I like that you usually had to wait to get a booth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They have practically nobody in them. | |
| Even the Walgreens that I go to, it has hardly any customers. | ||
| I think it's obvious that the job market is declining. | ||
| Like a caller said a few callers ago, Trump is going to do what he did to all his businesses, run them into a ground. | ||
| That's what he's doing. | ||
| That's what he's done. | ||
| Get ready for a real depression here. | ||
| So, you know, we have, I mean, obviously the United States is a very large country. | ||
| And so we might see different job market trends that look a little bit different in every place. | ||
| But one of the things that we have seen across the country is, you know, based on data from the Bank of America Institute, which looks at aggregate bank account data, we have seen declines in spending, particularly from people who are on the lower income end, where they're spending less money on discretionary things like restaurants, | ||
| because they're spending a lot more on things like rent, which has obviously gone up a lot over the last few years. | ||
| And so that's something to really watch for, as you were indicating, because economic activity is ultimately really driven by consumer spending. | ||
| And it's all kind of tied together where if you have businesses, businesses do well when people spend there. | ||
| And so they're able to employ people. | ||
| And when people are employed, they're able to keep spending. | ||
| So everything is kind of connected to each other. | ||
| Victoria, the caller, listing off some places where he's seen changes in the workforce. | ||
| And we talked about job sectors that were hardest hit in recent reports. | ||
| Are there areas that have seen above average hiring or no changes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Healthcare has seen the biggest amount of hiring. | |
| It's consistently been an area of growth. | ||
| And as I think I mentioned at the top, it's actually this past month, it was other than social assistance, I think the only sector that by itself net added jobs. | ||
| You know, it will be very interesting to see the data going forward. | ||
| Obviously, as I mentioned before, we don't know who the next head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to be. | ||
| And, you know, but presumably the process will not change. | ||
| I guess we'll have to see how that plays out. | ||
| But we'll have to see whether that trend continues of other sectors net losing jobs. | ||
| Let's hear from Bruce in Maryland, Line for Independence. | ||
| Hi, Bruce. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Considering that the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they liked he liked Trump liked the statistics the day before, but now when he got the ones he doesn't like, she's suddenly doing a bad job. | ||
| Do you think if he hires somebody that is not doing it correctly, are there other ways to derive that data? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| This is actually something that Fed Chair Powell was asked about at his press conference, not in the context of anything to do with President Trump, but because of what I was mentioning earlier, which is sort of the statistical challenges of what the BLS has to do and the fact that they have staffing shortages, less response rates. | ||
| And there are private sources of data. | ||
| So for example, during the pandemic, a lot of people really turned to, there are things like ADP, which is a private payroll company that I think it's something like a quarter of the workforce or a quarter of companies. | ||
| And so that gives you a snapshot. | ||
| There's also data from Home Base that gives you some employment data. | ||
| You can look at Indeed to get senses of hiring and job postings and things like that. | ||
| And they have all sorts of statistical ways of trying to estimate what's happening in the economy. | ||
| But what you hear consistently from Chair Powell and also from just economists in general that really rely on this data is that there's no good perfect substitute for the data we get from the government. | ||
| I mean, this is something that actually, you know, other countries, not all other countries, but like many other countries don't have access to this, you know, high quality of information about what is happening in the labor market. | ||
| And so it's really something that we maybe take for granted here that we have this kind of data and this kind of snapshot into what's happening in the economy. | ||
| Victoria, on the topic of the jobs report, Donald in South Bend, Indiana sent in this question. | ||
| Asked Ms. Guida if moving the report of the jobs numbers be pushed to the middle of the month to give a more accurate number instead of the first Friday of the new month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I don't really have a sense of whether certain weeks of the month offer a more better snapshot than others. | |
| But the survey week I think is in the middle of the month and then it's reported because then they have to go through the data and it's reported at the beginning of the month. | ||
| But unfortunately, I can't speak to whether that timing is better or worse than it should be. | ||
| Sharon and Aloa, Oregon, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Sharon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| I have a couple of questions that we got an expert here. | ||
| She can help me with. | ||
| Okay, with the jobs report, yesterday's thing was down 25% of projection. | ||
| In other reports like earlier in other administrations, that would be seen as a big dump. | ||
| But you're saying that it really wasn't. | ||
| It's not that big a deal, 25%? | ||
| So, yeah, it's a great question. | ||
| The thing is, there is, as we were sort of talking about, right, there's usually revisions the later that you get. | ||
| And actually, eventually, you know, we actually get hard data on how much employment there is. | ||
| It just takes a while. | ||
| It takes, I think it's like a year. | ||
| So eventually you can literally go back and see more about the accuracy of the BLS's data. | ||
| And this is, you might remember what happened last year when there was a huge revision in August. | ||
| And this usually happens in August. | ||
| And that's because they got a lot of hard data that they didn't have before on employment numbers. | ||
| But in terms of a miss, something like 25,000 jobs, when you consider the churn of the U.S. economy, I mean, at any given time, in a given month, there's roughly 6 million people leaving their job and 6 million people getting hired. | ||
| And then the net number is what you see. | ||
| And so something like 25,000 difference is not that large. | ||
| There's also some margin of error. | ||
| And so, you know, something like that level of a miss is not that unusual to have it like 73,000 instead of, I think it was 104. | ||
| But obviously the base number matters, right? | ||
| And the fact that it was only 73,000, that's something that's getting closer to where the margin of error is just kind of like, it's unclear whether we added jobs at all, right? | ||
| And so that's one of the reasons why it's something to watch really closely. | ||
| The last thing I'll say here is We also are in a situation in the economy right now, as I mentioned earlier, where demand for workers is slowing, but also supply of workers is slowing because of the immigration crackdown. | ||
| And so, in order to sustain the employment rate, the economy doesn't actually need to add as many jobs. | ||
| And so, that's another reason why you kind of have to look at the whole picture. | ||
| And something like adding 73,000 jobs isn't enough to cause crazy, crazy amounts of concern right now. | ||
| Sharon, did you have a second question for Victoria? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I did, if I could. | |
| Okay, because the other question is: you know, the tariffs have gone in, and that will cause prices to go up. | ||
| You know, the Potter and Gamble has already said they're going to raise tide and dawn, and Walmart says they're going to raise prices. | ||
| Target does. | ||
| We're already seeing it at Costco. | ||
| And in the tariffs, we have now come to learn that we, the people, pay them, just like Procter Gamble raising the taxes or raising the prices. | ||
| And so, my question is that the people that really get hit with that are the middle class and the poor, because the poor spend 100% of their income just to live. | ||
| The middle class spend a lot more than the very rich. | ||
| And so, what that's doing is, in effect, the tariffs are really a tax on the poor and the middle class through raising the cost, the prices. | ||
| And then they talk about if inflation goes up, and it is because Procter ⁇ Gamble, they're all saying they're going to raise chocolate, everybody's raising their prices. | ||
| At the same time, if these jobs numbers continue to go down, what will that mean for our economy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is exactly what the Fed is worried about, the situation that you just described. | |
| You know, some people may remember that in the 1970s, we experienced something known as stagflation, which is basically where you have high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. | ||
| And, you know, we're not in that place right now. | ||
| Unemployment is at 4.2%, which is quite low. | ||
| And, you know, inflation has ticked up. | ||
| As I mentioned, we have seen some price increases. | ||
| And as you mentioned, we have seen some price increases as a result of the tariffs. | ||
| But so far, it hasn't been a large jump. | ||
| But the concern is that we will see both of those effects where inflation is pushing up and everything else is slowing. | ||
| Now, the way that that could just play out is that the slowing is enough to kind of make inflation not so much of a concern in terms of economic growth, because this gets a little confusing, right? | ||
| But like the inflation that the Fed is worried about is sustained price increases, as opposed to just, okay, businesses are leveling up their prices one time in response to tariffs. | ||
| That's not something that the Fed can really do anything about or stop. | ||
| What they're worried about is a situation where prices go up because of tariffs, and maybe they keep going up because of tariffs, either because the policy is really dragged out and how it's implemented over time, or because things just get more expensive for businesses. | ||
| And so they keep having to raise their prices. | ||
| And then they also then have to pay their workers more because their workers are having to spend more money. | ||
| And then that leads to a situation where things, everything just keeps going up. | ||
| But also, the economy could just slow to where if you're spending more money on things that you need to spend money on, food, gas, rent, things like that, and then you don't have enough money left over for a lot of other stuff, which then just, instead of being able to sustain price increases, just leads to a slowdown or even recession in the sort of worst case scenario. | ||
| Let's hear from Shirley in Alabama on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Shirley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, and thank you for the program. | |
| And thank Ms. Victoria for her information. | ||
| I talk about the economy because I go from day to day. | ||
| I don't have any kids in school, have grandchildren, great-grands. | ||
| But I look at the parents that have children that they have to feed every day. | ||
| They have to clothe every day. | ||
| And the working class families are really struggling. | ||
| I believe that the last job information for May and June was not accurate. | ||
| I think it was fudged to make the president look good. | ||
| July is more accurate. | ||
| I see they went back and did some corrections. | ||
| But I need to ask her, what am I supposed to look at to judge the prices of everything because of tariffs? | ||
| I see everything going up. | ||
| I'm in a small town. | ||
| There's no stores. | ||
| Drive 35, 40 miles to Walmart. | ||
| Walmart went up on their prices when the president first announced the tariffs. | ||
| I don't know if anybody was watching except me, but the prices are already up. | ||
| So could you ask her, what are we supposed to look at to judge the economy, whether it's going up or down when day to day people are struggling and suffering? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll wait on her answers. | ||
| So I think what you're asking is how do you judge whether tariffs are pushing up prices as opposed to whatever else is going on? | ||
| I'll come back to your jobs point. | ||
| You know, you do, to an extent, you get some direct explanations from businesses themselves on earnings calls, you know, when executives talk to their shareholders, and they're actually bound by SEC rules to not be misleading to investors in explaining their strategy. | ||
| So, you know, a lot of them will talk about tariffs and the extent to which that might drive price increases. | ||
| It's a little bit hard to always know exactly, though. | ||
| Obviously, businesses have had a bit more power to raise prices lately for a very long time. | ||
| We didn't see significant inflation. | ||
| And then when you get to a situation where, you know, like the pandemic where we saw shortages, it was kind of hard to separate out how much of that was because they saw increased costs and how much of it was because they also had a little bit of wiggle room to raise prices. | ||
| And so I feel like you'll probably see a similar dynamic here with the tariffs. | ||
| But it's also not totally surprising where the tariff price increases might come. | ||
| You know, I mentioned earlier things like apparel, which is heavily imported. | ||
| And so it's not surprising that that would be an industry that is particularly affected by tariffs. | ||
| In terms of where to look for data, I mean, you know, the government does put out a lot of really high quality data. | ||
| And it's not even just from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. | ||
| We also have the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis that all put out a lot of data. | ||
| But I will also mention, I mean, the U.S. economy is huge. | ||
| This is a huge country. | ||
| And, you know, it's not simple and it's not straightforward to get a sense necessarily of what is happening across the economy. | ||
| And, you know, there's regional trends, there's local trends where the things that certain places, parts of the economy are experiencing is different from what other parts of the economy are experiencing. | ||
| So it's a very difficult thing to constantly have to try and figure out. | ||
| Clarence is in North Carolina on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Clarence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Hi, everyone. | ||
| I'm listening to everyone. | ||
| I stay here in Charlotte, North Carolina. | ||
| Walmart, I go to Walmart every other day. | ||
| I'm retired. | ||
| It's packed every time I go into Walmart. | ||
| I don't see the prices going up because I shop there every day. | ||
| Matter of fact, the economy here in Charlotte is booming. | ||
| More houses. | ||
| Matter of fact, to get a home here in Charlotte, you got to at least have $500,000 because so many people are moving here in North Carolina and South Carolina. | ||
| Matter of fact, I'm getting ready to buy me another house down in South Carolina. | ||
| The economy here is booming. | ||
| They got jobs open everywhere I go. | ||
| All the people here, if you want a job, you can get a job. | ||
| I sat here and I listened to the people say the economy is bad. | ||
| I'm retired. | ||
| I'm retired. | ||
| My money is great. | ||
| I get over $6,000 a month. | ||
| I can work if I want to. | ||
| I'm over 65. | ||
| I'm 72 years old. | ||
| I'm a black man. | ||
| I don't see more black folks are moving here, own homes than I ever see. | ||
| Just met a man move here from New York City. | ||
| He said he didn't know black folks that owned homes until he came here to Charlotte, North Carolina. | ||
| And I told him, one of the best economy in the world right now, I think, is here. | ||
| So when I hear people complaining about the economy back, I'm just, where are they staying at? | ||
| What are they going through? | ||
| And I realize most of the people are senior people. | ||
| And I understand they don't work and they can't everywhere you go to winter side and buy a home is buy. | ||
| But the economy here is booming. | ||
| So move to Charlotte. | ||
| If you haven't that much problem, I promise you, it'll be a blessing if you move here. | ||
| So God bless you. | ||
| And put God first. | ||
| Well, I'm glad to hear that. | ||
| It's good to hear Charlotte is doing well. | ||
| As I mentioned, all of these experiences can be true. | ||
| This is a large economy. | ||
| There are a lot of different places that people live and have a lot of different experiences. | ||
| I mean, it is really interesting where, you know, this question of moving to places where the jobs are. | ||
| You know, we did during and after the pandemic see a lot of people move and that's created to an extent in some places a housing problem because now there isn't necessarily enough supply of housing in the places where people want to live and that's contributed to an affordability problem. | ||
| Of course, also some people don't have the ability to move for various reasons, whether it's because of their job or maybe they're caring for an aging parent or whatever. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I think that also the nature of this economy is that some places are always going to be doing better than others. | ||
| Bernie is in, sorry, Bernie is in Louisville, Kentucky, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Bernie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning, Tammy. | |
| Good morning, Victoria. | ||
| I had a question about the jobs numbers. | ||
| Are you familiar with the term soft money? | ||
| And do these numbers, do they include people who are hired using soft money? | ||
| I assume you're, I don't know if you're familiar with what that means, people who are hired full-time benefits. | ||
| They're full-time employees, but they're paid through a certain grant or a project. | ||
| And as long as that project or grant money is coming in, they have a job. | ||
| But as soon as it leaves, they generally, the job goes with it too. | ||
| Are they included in this 73,000? | ||
| So the jobs report does include a lot of different types of formalized work arrangements, and some of them are temporary. | ||
| And that's why, you know, so for example, when we do the census every 10 years, you'll actually sometimes see a temporary jump in employment because people are being hired to be census workers. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, I don't know all of the different categories because there are many of what is and isn't included because there are some work arrangements that are harder for BLS to track. | ||
| But they also ask households, right? | ||
| So they can also get a sense in terms of employment without having to ask businesses themselves. | ||
| So for people who are self-employed, for example, they would have to get that information from households. | ||
| But yes, that kind of arrangement is captured. | ||
| Just a few minutes left. | ||
| Let's hear from Tom in Maryland, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I have two questions. | ||
| One, when Trump first started with the tariffs, many economists said it would cause a recession. | ||
| Are we in a recession yet? | ||
| And if not, when do you figure out that we're going to? | ||
| And how would you rate today's economy versus the economy of last year? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All great questions. | ||
| So the first thing I'll say is if we were in a recession right now, if we were entering a recession right now, we might not know yet. | ||
| That is true at any time. | ||
| I'm not just saying that for right now. | ||
| It's that oftentimes these things seem obvious in retrospect as to when they started, but it's not always clear immediately. | ||
| However, looking at the data, we do not seem to be in recession. | ||
| As I mentioned, the unemployment rate is 4.2%. | ||
| That's quite low. | ||
| It would be extremely surprising if we were in a recession right now. | ||
| And then you asked, he asked a question about tariffs. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| This is what I was going to say. | ||
| You were saying that people were predicting the tariffs were going to cause a recession. | ||
| So this is an interesting arc of events because one of the things that happened was President Trump announced very high tariffs on April 2nd, what he called Liberation Day. | ||
| And those tariffs were at such high levels that you saw a lot of economists saying this is going to cause a recession. | ||
| So that was when we had all, in the wake of that, we had a lot of market turmoil. | ||
| And then ultimately, even the bond market started to get a little shaky. | ||
| And so at that time, the president then announced a pause of those higher rates. | ||
| Now, we've had tariffs in the interim. | ||
| You know, he had that 10% baseline tariff. | ||
| But the higher rates had been paused. | ||
| Now, more recently, as you may know, this past week, he announced rates for most countries, some of which were negotiated, some of which weren't. | ||
| Those are still not quite back to the liberation day levels. | ||
| And so the reason why I bring that up is because it was the Liberation Day levels in particular that economists said this is going to cause a recession. | ||
| The tariffs that we have now and that we are getting now as a result of these latest tariff rates that the president's announced are likely to slow growth, but it's unclear whether they're actually going to cause a recession. | ||
| You know, it seems like for a lot of corporations, they have healthy profit margins. | ||
| Maybe they can absorb some of that. | ||
| And the U.S. economy has been quite resilient. | ||
| You know, just over the last few years, people have been predicting recession. | ||
| You know, the Fed was able to bring down inflation without causing a recession. | ||
| That basically never happens. | ||
| And it's a testament to sort of the resiliency of the U.S. economy and the U.S. consumer. | ||
| And then the other question you asked was to compare this year's economy to last year's economy. | ||
| So I would say this year's economy is quite similar to last year's economy, but with tariffs added in. | ||
| So a lot of the impulses that have shifted have shifted as a result of tariffs. | ||
| So, you know, I think inflation is about, having ticked back up a little bit, is now back to levels that it was last year because it had cooled even more at the beginning of the year. | ||
| So at the beginning of the year, the economy was better than it was last year or now in terms of inflation. | ||
| In terms of the job market, it's pretty similar, actually. | ||
| So I think that to the extent that we've seen big macro shifts, it's particularly as a result of tariffs and sort of general uncertainty about where the tariffs are going to land. | ||
| Victoria Guida is an economics correspondent for Politico. | ||
| You can find her work online at politico.com. | ||
| Victoria, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
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