This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
It has been some months since Liberation Day. We have seen tariffs come on and off — and go up and down. We have seen all kinds of other economic policies applied and pushed. But the amazing thing about the American economy right now is that it’s shaky but pretty stable.
The place where we’re seeing some stress is in the job market. You’ve seen the jobs numbers revised downward for recent months. So was the beginning of all this really putting pressure on the American economy? Or is the underlying resilience and power of the economy going to push through?
Then there is this other thing happening: The administration, and Donald Trump, in particular, is not acting like someone with a lot of confidence in where the economy is going. After the jobs numbers were revised down, President Trump, in a seeming fury, fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, replacing her with a seemingly more ideologically compliant person and calling into question the future reliability of government data. Trump has also been pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. The administration seems to be acting like they think they need more power over the tools of economic policymaking and the flow of economic data. So what is that going to mean?
Natasha Sarin is the president and co-founder of The Budget Lab at Yale. She’s an economist and a law professor. She has experience in academia and in government. And her lab has been very closely tracking the effect of these policies on the American economy.
We recorded this conversation on Aug. 8. As always with President Trump, things move fast, so we were not able to talk about his new nominee for Bureau of Labor Statistics. But I think the conversation paints a pretty clear picture of an economy under a fair amount of stress.
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