Can Our Economy Handle This?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2020
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the face of the coronavirus outbreak, U.S. political leaders are moving faster than they have in years. But it still might not be fast enough.
Guest: Jordan Weissmann, Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone. We've got Jordan Weissman on the show today. He has a tendency to curse, |
| 0:05.1 | especially when he's staring down a financial crisis. You've been warned. |
| 0:14.8 | Last week, Slate's Jordan Weissman came on the show, and we tried to answer this question. |
| 0:23.0 | Will the coronavirus tank the economy? And since then, I got to say, the signs have not been looking great. The stock market |
| 0:29.0 | has continued to plummet. Washington has been scrambling to do something, anything, to make a difference. |
| 0:36.1 | Last week, the House passed what they called the Family's First Coronavirus Response Act. |
| 0:42.2 | Jordan says this bill, it's still not enough. |
| 0:45.4 | Yeah, I just, I think we need to get more creative. |
| 0:48.8 | You know, the administration is talking about things like bailouts for certain industries like cruises and airline. |
| 0:56.7 | Sorry, just saying that we're going to bail out the cruise industry is still a little bit of a mindbender for me. |
| 1:08.7 | You know, we're talking about bailing out certain select industries like airlines, like hotels, like cruises. |
| 1:15.1 | But we already need to be thinking more creatively and more boldly. |
| 1:21.9 | It's interesting, like listening to you, it's like you're just like, we need to think bigger. |
| 1:26.7 | Like if you're thinking of something, just like, think again and think more. Yeah. But before we do something |
| 1:34.6 | bigger, Congress is going to have to do something at all. While Jordan and I were talking, |
| 1:40.0 | that coronavirus bill, it was pretty much put on ice. A single Republican lawmaker, a guy named Louis Gohmert, he was threatening to hold the whole thing up, insisting he should be able to read 80-odd pages of legislation aloud into the record before passing the bill on to the Senate. |
| 1:59.0 | How much faith do you have right now in Washington solving this? |
| 2:03.6 | On a scale of 1 to 10, like a 6.5, and I think that's maybe a little bit more. |
| 2:14.0 | That's because I'm an optimist. |
| 2:15.3 | You think that's optimistic? |
| 2:17.5 | And probably. Yeah. a little bit more. That's because I'm an optimist. You think that's optimistic? Probably. |
| 2:22.7 | I mean, have you watched the negotiations over the House bill? |
... |
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