Economist Justin Wolfers wings it after accidentally swallowing fly during live CNN segment on jobs report

The economy may be hard to swallow lately, but a fly is tougher.

A live CNN segment on the state of the US economy came to a screeching halt when an expert accidentally swallowed a fly on air.

University of Michigan professor and economist Justin Wolfers was deep into a discussion with CNN host Omar Jimenez on Saturday about newly confirmed Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh and the surprisingly weak jobs report released on Friday — showing US employers shed 23,000 jobs last month, far short of the 80,000 gains economists had forecast.

Wolfers had just finished telling Jimenez how the US labor market has been “remarkably resilient” so far when he suddenly broke into a coughing fit.

Jimenez — trying to remain as professional as possible and not have the conversation derailed — kept talking as his guest continuously coughed and covered his mouth.

He eventually asked Wolfers a follow-up question, forcing the economist to address the on-air choking fit.

“Mate, I just swallowed a fly on live television,” Wolfers explained.

“I was trying to keep talking while you were coughing, so you could figure it out. It’s all good,” Jimenez replied.

“Aussies love eating flies,” Wolfers, who is Australian, quipped while pretending to snatch a fly out of the air and put it in his mouth.

Wolfers further winged it by turning his coughing fit into a “metaphor.”

“It might actually be a metaphor, because the biggest thing going on at the Fed is Kevin Warsh feels like I do right now,” the economist said.

“Kevin Warsh doesn’t feel like talking about what’s going on, and it makes both of us a little harder to understand, and a little harder to interpret. So you could think about Kevin as having swallowed the fly as well.

“I might swallow a horse; that will get the fly,” Wolfers added — a playful nod to the children’s nursery rhyme “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” in which the protagonist swallows progressively larger animals to catch the ones before.

After the broadcast, Wolfers posted on X to further clarify what happened and poke fun at the on-air hiccup.

“A fly just zipped into my mouth while gabbing on CNN. Next question was about the Fed, so I did what Kevin Warsh won’t—I swallowed hard and kept talking. I figure folks deserve some clarity about the economy,” he wrote.

“(Postscript: The fly is dead. And I’m no longer a vegetarian.)”

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