Trump vs. the U.S. Economy

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2025

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is going on with the economy right now? There are a lot of mixed signals. President Trump slashed taxes, but he’s also bringing in a lot of money through tariffs. Inflation is creeping up, but the stock market keeps rising. Eye-wateringly large investments are flowing to A.I., which could lead to an explosion of productivity but also mass job loss. And then Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a disappointing jobs report, raising concerns that the government’s data on the economy might get shakier. Natasha Sarin is the president and a founder of the Budget Lab at Yale. She has been tracking these trends and modeling the potential economic effects of many of Trump’s policies. I invited her on the show to walk through what she is thinking about the economy. Mentioned: “The Tariffs Kicked In. The Sky Didn’t Fall. Were the Economists Wrong?” by Jason Furman “Does the Stock Market Know Something We Don’t?” by Rogé Karma Book Recommendations: Showdown at Gucci Gulch by Alan Murray Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Katharine Abraham, Skanda Amarnath, Kimberly Clausing, Kathryn Anne Edwards, Matthew Klein, and Claudia Sahm.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The It has been some months since Liberation Day.
0:35.1	And we've seen tariffs come on and off. We've seen them go up and down.
0:40.6	We've seen all kinds of other economic policies applied and pushed. And the kind of amazing thing
0:48.7	about where the American economy is right now is it, it's shaky, but pretty stable. The place where we're seeing some
0:56.4	stress is in the job market. You've seen the jobs numbers revised downward for recent months.
1:02.1	So is that the beginning of all this really putting pressure on the American economy? Or is the
1:08.3	underlying resilience and power going to push it through?
1:12.4	Then there is this other thing happening.
1:15.1	The administration, President Trump in particular, is not acting like someone with a lot of confidence in where the economy is going.
1:23.1	After the jobs numbers were revised down, President Trump, in a seeming fury, fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, replacing them with a more ideologically compliant, it seems, person, calling into question the future reliability of government data.
1:38.9	He's also been pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.
1:42.2	The administration seems to be acting like they think they need
1:45.0	more power over the tools of economic policymaking, over the flow of economic data. So what is
1:52.5	that going to mean? Natasha Surin is president and co-founder of the L Budget Lab. She's an economist and
2:00.2	a law professor. She has
2:01.6	experience in academia and in government. And her lab has been very closely tracking the
2:07.7	effect of these policies on the American economy. We recorded this conversation on August 8th.
2:13.7	As always with President Trump, things are moving fast, so we're not able to talk about his new nominee for Bureau of Labor statistics,
2:20.8	but I think the rest of it paints a pretty clear picture of an economy under a fair amount of stress.
2:28.1	As always, my email, Ezraqlind Show at NYTimes.com.
2:41.9	Thank you. at NYTimes.com. Natasha Serin, welcome to the show.
	...

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