Our Very Weird Economic Recovery
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2021
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the passage of Joe Biden’s big coronavirus stimulus package, economists expected to see a huge jobs report in May. In the end, only a quarter of the expected 1 million new jobs materialized. Why is that? And what are the chances that $1.9 trillion in stimulus funding is backfiring?
Guest: Jordan Weissmann, Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent
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Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Davis Land, Danielle Hewitt, Elena Schwartz and Carmel Delshad.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone. Salty language ahead. But we're talking about the economy. So, you know. |
| 0:10.2 | Jordan, can you choose an emoji for the economy right now? |
| 0:18.7 | The head exploding emoji, I think. |
| 0:21.3 | I was going to go with lull sob. |
| 0:23.3 | No, I think the brain exploding emojis. |
| 0:26.6 | Why? |
| 0:28.3 | Because everyone's brain is kind of breaking as we're trying to figure out what exactly is going on during this reopening process, which is economically, it's a bit chaotic right now. |
| 0:42.3 | This chaos Jordan's talking about. It's mostly in the minds of people like him, |
| 0:47.5 | analysts whose job it is to issue some kind of judgment about the way money moves in this country. |
| 0:53.7 | They've got all kinds of metrics to |
| 0:55.4 | measure the economy's growth, take the consumer price index. It currently shows costs rising. |
| 1:02.9 | The average price of a new car above $25,000. We've never seen that before. Airfares, those are |
| 1:09.3 | also going up. Then there's the monthly jobs report. |
| 1:12.7 | At the desk, we're going to bring in the numbers right now. And the answer is a giant miss, right? |
| 1:17.1 | It is. It's only 266,000 jobs added in the period, which is a real disappointment for April. |
| 1:22.5 | You had economists looking for more like a million. One thing you would expect to see is that as the vaccination rate rises, more people would go back to work, right? You would see the jobs recovery kind |
| 1:32.2 | of speed up. Is that what we're seeing? Not really. And so it's, as far as you can kind of tell |
| 1:39.0 | from eyeballing the data. You know what I see when I look at how the numbers are being talked about generally, I see so much impatience. And I just think it's really interesting because I think there's an impatience on all levels in our lives right now and impatience to take our masks off and impatience to get the economy back. |
| 2:04.4 | And I keep thinking to myself, we've never done this before. Like we've never kind of brought our |
| 2:12.1 | economy, not quite twist-creaching halt, but almost, and then tried to like restart the engine |
| 2:17.1 | before. |
| 2:18.0 | Yeah, and we're having trouble revving it back up a little. It's making some strange noises as we |
... |
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