What Next - Trump’s Getting His Economy. Yikes.
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
Donald Trump has been calling for the Fed to cut rates to bolster the economy, and yesterday, they announced they would. The bad news is that’s because the economy is going to need a lot more bolstering.
Guest: Justin Wolfers, economist and professor at the University of Michigan
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | MI5 Official Secrets. |
| 0:03.0 | Head to the National Archives in queue to discover a hidden world of espionage. |
| 0:07.0 | In the first exhibition of its kind, |
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| 0:22.6 | Visit now, no booking required. |
| 0:24.6 | What will you uncover? |
| 0:26.6 | Tap the banner to find out more. |
| 0:32.6 | There are a couple of ways to look at what happened when the Federal Reserve's |
| 0:40.4 | Board of Governors met in Washington this week. |
| 0:43.7 | One story goes like this. |
| 0:46.3 | It was a clash of the Titans. |
| 0:48.7 | For months, President Trump has been pressuring Fed Chair Jerome Powell to slash interest |
| 0:53.7 | rates, which he said would supercharge |
| 0:56.5 | the economy. In the process, the president has threatened to fire Powell, along with another Fed |
| 1:02.8 | governor, he dislikes. Then, just hours before this week's meeting, Congress confirmed a new |
| 1:09.6 | governor, a White House economist. Presumably, |
| 1:13.3 | this guy showed up to make the president's case in person. This all sounds tense, right? |
| 1:20.4 | But economist Justin Wolfer's, he sees this meeting differently. |
| 1:25.2 | It was relentlessly dull, uninteresting. |
| 1:28.3 | There's not much to talk about. |
... |
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