Hello and welcome to the Felix Wrote a Book episode of Slate Money, your guide to Felix's book.

We will talk about the business and finance news of the week insofar as it comes up in this

conversation.

But for the purpose of this show, I am not just Felix Hammond of Axios.

I am Felix Hammond, the author of the Phoenix

Economy, Work, Life and Money, and the New Not Normal, available wherever good books are found,

and even in quite a few places where bad books are found. I am here with Emily Peck, my colleague

from Axios. Hi. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times and lots of other

places. Hello. And I get to kind of sit back in this one, I think, and just answer some questions.

All right, Felix. I really liked your book and congratulations. This is so exciting. Thank you.

Maybe you could start, kind of how you start the book and tell people why you called it the Phoenix economy in the first place.

The economy came to a halt in March 2020.

And one of the things I've been saying is that one of the symptoms of trauma is memory loss.

We went through a very traumatic period in 2020 and a lot of us are already forgetting what it was

like, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But one of the things we forget is how deep and

terrifying that 2020 recession was. The entire global

economy basically just stopped spinning. It came to a screeching halt. All supply chains were

broken. Massive international barriers went up. You know, we had the largest negative GDP prints of our lifetimes. We had the highest

unemployment rate of our lifetime. It was terrifying. My ex-Boss, Noreal Rubini, was coming out

from saying we were headed into a greater depression that was even going to be even deeper than

the Great Depression of the 1930s.

And there was a lot of real pain and catastrophe going on in the world.

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