How to Fix the Economy
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2022
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last month, inflation hit a new 40-year high. Americans are feeling it in their grocery bills, at the gas pump, in airline tickets, electrical bills, and rental costs. What can be done to combat rising prices in the current economy – and at what price?
Guest: Jordan Weissmann, senior editor and writer at Slate focused on economics, politics, and public policy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sometimes I look at the prices I'm paying at the grocery store, or the way my electric bill is skyrocketing. |
| 0:13.9 | And I wonder, how did we get here? Here being this very weird economy, whose chief feature at the moment seems to be ballooning inflation. |
| 0:23.8 | It does not help that I have a car, and that car needs gas. |
| 0:27.7 | It is nearly five bucks a gallon where I live. |
| 0:33.2 | It's the only price that every single American sees a sign for on every stretch of every highway, right? |
| 0:40.5 | Like, it's the most omnipresent price that Americans regularly encounter, except for maybe milk? |
| 0:46.7 | No, even more so than milk. |
| 0:48.1 | There aren't highway signs with milk prices. |
| 0:50.9 | Slate's Jordan Weissman is the guy I call when I have questions about the economy. And I've got a ton of those at the moment. |
| 1:04.6 | I feel like there are so many things happening at once in the economy right now. Like housing prices are really high. The stock market is |
| 1:12.8 | behaving erratically. And of course, inflation is like all around. Do all these things have the |
| 1:20.3 | same cause? |
| 1:25.6 | That is a interesting question. That's like kind of a philosophical question um like |
| 1:34.5 | like you know how i do jordan you know it depends on how you want to answer that question i'm |
| 1:41.5 | going to say no um but you could say yes. |
| 1:47.7 | All right. Depends on how you want to look at it. |
| 1:50.9 | Jordan is like the Marie Kondo of the economy. By that, I mean, he loves mess. What he sees right now, it's certainly messy. |
| 2:00.3 | A pile up of causes and effects that are not easy to tease out. |
| 2:05.4 | In my mind right now, the way I think about inflation is like sort of two phases, right? |
| 2:10.1 | And if you go back to like 2021, right, that spring and summer when prices first started to surge, |
| 2:16.0 | it actually seems like it was a pretty simple story of what was happening, which is that, like, we just cut people big checks, and they spent them. And they're as a result, and they spent them at a time that supply chains weren't, you know, were a total mess, and they were not ready to absorb all that demand. And now it's sort of evolved, right? We've gone through months and months and |
| 2:34.9 | months of, you know, what was known as the Great Resignation, right? And what was the great |
... |
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