In short
Why Americans feel the economy is bad despite data that can look “fine,” focusing on persistent inflation/affordability (especially housing and child care), pessimism and “mental tax,” policy uncertainty (tariffs, war), labor-market fragility, and AI’s uneven effects.
Guests (backgrounds)
Annie Lowry, staff writer at The Atlantic; author of Give People Money. Catherine Rampell, economics editor for The Bulwark; MS Now contributor. Claudia Somm, chief economist at New Century Advisors; founder of Somm Consulting; former Federal Reserve Board staffer who developed the “Somm Rule” for recession detection.
Key claims
Consumer sentiment now reflects politics/media distrust and pandemic-driven uncertainty, not just bank-account conditions. Housing affordability is “broken” and hard to fix quickly because local zoning blocks supply. Tariffs and war create direct costs and uncertainty for businesses and consumers. Fed independence and rate decisions are politically pressured. AI may be used to justify layoffs, but evidence is mixed; the AI boom is concentrated and potentially circular/financially opaque.
Notable examples
RxKids cash-for-pregnant-moms program in Flint, Michigan (expanded to Ohio). 21st Century Road to Housing Act. Minneapolis Fed finding: only 53% of adults own their homes. Flint/Ohio maternal outcomes; Flint program. AI wealth effect and Magnificent Seven market concentration.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnderstanding Inflation's Impact
0:00 to 0:42
Explore how inflation has been perceived by Americans over the past years.
“I really think of, you know, the past six, seven years as basically being an experiment telling us how much do people hate inflation and they really hate it.”
Understanding Inflation's Impact
2:38 to 3:18
Explore how inflation has been perceived by Americans over the past years.
“One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them ever talk to each other.”
Public Sentiment on the Economy
3:47 to 4:53
The panel discusses how Americans currently feel about their economic situation.
“Annie, Catherine, and Claudia, thanks for coming on on.”
Factors Influencing Economic Pessimism
4:53 to 8:04
The experts analyze reasons behind the negative perceptions of the economy.
“It's a combination of high inflation, kind of stagnant economy, and frankly, a lot of political disgust that sort of ends up as referred pain towards the economy.”
The Ongoing Housing Crisis
8:04 to 11:51
An in-depth discussion on the challenges and factors affecting the housing market.
“But I think it is relevant still to policy.”
Federal Reserve's Role in Inflation Control
11:51 to 14:00
The panel evaluates the Federal Reserve's strategies and challenges under new leadership.
“So the 21st Century Road to Housing Act became a law earlier this month.”
Navigating Federal Decisions on Inflation
14:00 to 16:10
Discussion on the Fed's challenges in managing inflation amid political pressures.
“So the Fed can kind of focus its attention on inflation, but it still has a tough decision to make.”
Government's Role in Economic Solutions
16:10 to 17:25
Insights on effective government strategies for addressing economic issues.
“I'm a professor at University College London, currently in Italy.”
Community Programs Tackling Poverty
17:25 to 20:10
Exploration of successful community initiatives aimed at reducing poverty.
“So Catherine, you go first, and then Annie and Claudia.”
Impact of Tariffs on Economy
24:04 to 28:00
Analyzing the effects of tariffs and political decisions on the economy.
“After a temporary 10 percent global tariffs expired last Friday, he imposed dozens of new tariffs of 10 percent to 12.5 percent on goods from more than 80 countries.”
Show all 21 chapters
Economic Costs of Policy Decisions
28:00 to 31:00
Explore how government policies impact economic costs, inflation, and public perception.
“So a lot of it depends on how long the conflict lasts and how bad it gets, right, in terms of disruptions in like the Strait of Hormuz and the Middle East.”
Labor Market Challenges and Immigration Impact
31:00 to 34:30
Discuss the effects of immigration policy on labor shortages and industry reliance.
“Last month, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration's authority to end temporary protected status of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.”
Labor Market Challenges and Immigration Impact
35:14 to 36:11
Discuss the effects of immigration policy on labor shortages and industry reliance.
“Nobody is having a good time on either end of the line.”
AI's Influence on the Economy and Job Market
36:51 to 41:20
Analyze the role of AI in current job market trends and corporate strategies.
“So let's end by looking at how AI investment is affecting workers, companies, and the economy as a whole.”
Concerns Over Economic Resilience and Fragility
41:20 to 42:01
Examine the fragility of economic structures amid AI investment and market concentration.
“I know you feel bad that Elon's not a trillionaire anymore.”
Economic Interconnectedness and AI Risks
42:01 to 43:51
Exploration of how business debts and AI investments create economic risks.
“So one is that a lot of the companies doing the borrowing and the buying and the selling here, they really are profitable.”
AI Bubble Concerns and Market Responses
43:52 to 45:05
Discussion on the potential for an AI bubble collapse and its impacts on the market.
“So if we're headed for an AI bubble collapse, Claudia, how vulnerable is the broader market and who will be impacted.”
Job Displacement and Economic Opportunities
45:06 to 47:18
Analyzing the job market dynamics in light of AI advancements and economic transitions.
“So announcing more capital expenditures, the market pulls back some in the bonds or they're requiring bigger interest rates.”
Wealth Inequality and Political Economy
47:19 to 49:31
Examining the growing wealth gap and its implications on political sentiment.
“Globalization or automation or anything else.”
AI Sentiment and Policy Solutions
49:32 to 53:30
Discussing the public sentiment towards AI and the need for effective policies.
“And I think all of these things are wrapped up in one.”
Positive Developments and Labor Market Concerns
53:31 to 55:53
Reflecting on recent advancements and the challenges faced in the labor market.
“Catherine, you do it first, then Annie, then Claudia.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00I really think of, you know, the past six, seven years as basically being an experiment telling us how much do people hate inflation and they really hate it. And we had not had a big economy wide test of this in a really long time. We weren't quite sure. Right. It's a very different economy than the last time. Then we had this kind of like runaway prices. Plus, what's worse now is the price of housing, of child care. You know, they're nuts. and people just despise it. It's on!
0:42Kara Swisher:Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, we're talking about the state of the U.S. economy. Inflation has remained stubbornly high above the Federal Reserve's 2 % target since March of 2021. Rising costs for basic necessities like housing, food, and energy have led to what many Americans feel is an affordability crisis. The AI boom is fueling massive gains for a handful of tech companies, while nearly three-quarters of Americans worry that AI will eliminate jobs in some industries, according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll.
1:17Kara Swisher:Add to that the likely expansion of the Iran war and President Trump's renewed trade war, and it's no surprise that Americans' economic outlook is somewhat pessimistic. I've gathered a panel of experts to break down some of the biggest issues facing our economy right now. Annie Lowry is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Give People Money. Catherine Rampell is an MS Now contributor and the economics editor for The Bulwark. Claudia Somm is the chief economist at New Century Advisors and the founder of Somm Consulting. She previously spent 12 years at the Federal Reserve Board where she developed what is known as the Somm Rule, a way to identify recessions in real time.
1:55Kara Swisher:I think it's really important to talk about the economy. Obviously, it's going to be the biggest deal in the election, and it's what people are worried about right now, given all the various forces at work at the economy, from the war to AI to just a feeling that something is off. So it's important to get some clarity here. Our expert question today comes from Mariana Mazzucato, an economist, author, and professor at the University College in London. So stick around.
2:35Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them ever talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, in an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together, From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system.
3:07Kara Swisher:Try it today for free at odoo.com slash cara. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash cara. Lululemon's new drop of daily essentials feels like a deep breath of fresh air. Breezely is a collection of drapey pants, shorts, and tanks designed to mix and match with your wardrobe as the weather warms up. It's all made in our lightweight, stretchy, swift fabric. Throw on these everyday staples after practice and bring an airy feel to your daily moves. Shop the Breezely Collection now at lululemon.com.
3:47Kara Swisher:Annie, Catherine, and Claudia, thanks for coming on on. Thank you for having me. Yeah, great to be here. So before we get to the data, let's start about how Americans are feeling about the economy now. A new Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that people are generally pessimistic with one in five saying they think the economy will improve in the next year. That's not very good. What do you – each of you, just overall, what do you think the biggest factor driving economic pessimism is right now? Catherine, Annie, and then Claudia. I think people have kind of been soured on the economy for years at this point.
4:17And in some ways that makes sense and in some ways that do seem out of whack with the data, like prices have been elevated. Wages have not been, depending on which measure you use, have not been keeping up, particularly since the Iran war started. But, you know, obviously the elevated prices, elevated inflation predate that. We've been dealing with above target inflation for over six years at this point. So there are a lot of things to be cranky about. That said, the degree of crankiness does seem a little bit outsized relative to the amount of crisis, if crisis is a quantifiable term, in the economy.
4:59It's a combination of high inflation, kind of stagnant economy, and frankly, a lot of political disgust that sort of ends up as referred pain towards the economy. I think Catherine is completely right. There's a lot to not like about this economy. Even relatively high income families that are making in the low six figures families, which, you know, we don't generally worry about them a lot versus a family that's making$40 ,000 a year, are really squeezed by price pressures. That said, I think that basically the consumer sentiment and the economic sentiment numbers are no longer exactly reflecting just economic and consumer sentiment.
5:40I think that they have to do with our media and political environment. And so I think that those numbers essentially are not exactly telling you a lot about real economic conditions versus 20 years ago. But I think that the sense that we are in a declining democracy, that we have complete lack of trust in institutions and one another, some horrible hangover from the trauma of COVID and everything that came out of it, and also the media environment that we're in, where the media itself has gotten more negative, and also people are getting their news now from short-form video, from these sources that I think can really color your perception of what you should have and what you do have.
6:24I think that those numbers now, we should think of them as a more generalized sentiment number, not like how much money do I have in my bank account. Right. How do I feel? Yeah. And we could see gains in the economy and they would show up in the numbers or depressions in the economy and they would show up. They've just become a different measure in my mind.
6:39Kara Swisher:So we should include more measures. Yeah. Claudia? So I would add one more thing to the mix in terms of the uncertainty, the insecurity that people feel. So a few years ago, you know, inflation had come down some from its pandemic highs and unemployment rate was low. And so I'm an economist. I was looking at all this data and it really looked like things were at least improving, not great all around, but improving. And yet these consumer sentiment measures were still really negative. And I was trying to talk to people and be like, help me put the pieces together. And one woman pointed out to me, she's like, you know, on paper, we do look better than we were a few years ago, like coming out of the pandemic.
7:16But she's like, I don't feel it because it feels like the next shoe could drop. Right. Whether it's AI or whatever it happens to be. Right. And I think that I really trace a lot of this back to the pandemic, which was a huge out of nowhere, just upended people's lives. And frankly, between policy decisions and other, it just feels like we're in this rolling mess of uncertainty. And that, I think, weighs on people. And also, as they try to navigate, prices go up or there's tariffs or there's this and the job. It takes a lot of effort to go do the bargain shopping, to go do, you know, try to figure out the way to deal with this.
7:53Do you go get a new job? Do you not? It's like a tax on people. They don't pay it necessarily directly, but it just weighs on them. So I've come to understand, like, as I always said, like those measures are picking up more than economics. But I think it is relevant still to policy.
8:08Kara Swisher:More of a vibe thing, like in that way. So recent Labor Department data show that inflation did cool in June. The brief Iran war ceasefire gave Americans a break on gas prices. That's not expected to be the case this month. Catherine, after several years of rising consumer prices, are Americans just more price sensitive? Or how is it showing up in spending behavior when it comes to persistently high food prices? I have noticed them. I've never noticed food prices. And you see them everywhere you go. And you don't know why. Yeah, I mean, I think that there is some cognitive dissonance in all of this, which is one of the underlying themes that we've been talking about.
8:40which is that prices are high, people are cranky, but people are still spending. And I know Annie's written quite a bit about this as well. And so people are like mad that they're having to spend more money, but they're still spending the money as opposed to pulling back on their spending in response to those higher prices. But I think to Claudia's point about that mental tax, that is something that I have been hearing from consumers for a while. So like they're spending money, but they have to think more about each decision that they make. It's not like you go to the grocery store and you just have your list and you go down the aisles and you get the peanut butter and you get the eggs and whatever.
9:17Like, maybe you're not going to get the fancy peanut butter this time. Maybe you have to, like, price compare and you're going to get the private label peanut butter. And so people are spending, but there's more exertion that goes into every choice that they make, and that is exhausting. But as long as people continue to have jobs and unemployment is still relatively low by historical terms, that means that they are able to keep spending. So, Annie, and one of the weird things about what Catherine mentioned is that by some measures, people are less price sensitive. They are emotionally, their feeling is more price sensitive.
9:53But say that we have like a coupon and we get 50 percent off. It doesn't have the effect that it might have had 20 years ago. But I really think of, you know, the past six, seven years as basically being an experiment telling us how much do people hate inflation and they really hate it. And we had not had a big economy wide test of this in a really long time. We weren't quite sure. Right. It's a very different economy than the last time. Then we had this kind of like runaway prices. Plus, what's worse now is the price of housing, of child care. You know, they're nuts and people just despise it.
10:30Kara Swisher:Right. So you wrote about the great affordability crisis back in February of 2020, and you noted the price of housing represented the most acute part of the crisis. It's been six years. The U.S. housing market still feels broken. There's more sellers than buyers at this point. The new Minneapolis Fed research found that only 53 percent of American adults own homes they live in. They're not buying, and at the same time, the market seems very flat for a lot of people I've talked to. So what is the underlying problem of probably people's biggest cost that they would pay for? Far and away housing, even if you are a person who is paying in your mortgage or in rent an amount that an economist would say you're doing OK, you still might not be happy.
11:11And it might not be easy to see that because, like, let's say that you're paying an amount you can afford,$1 ,800 in rent or something like that. But you're still living with roommates or you're living in a neighborhood that you don't like or you're putting off, you know, proposing to your partner. That's not going to show up except in a sentiment figure. And I think that's part of what we're seeing. But the housing, there's not an easy answer here. Some places are really building. But I think the truth is that, you know, the housing market is in a really tough place and it's going to be for a long time.
11:41And I think if we saw interest rates come down, which would help with affordability and help with building, we have so much pent up demand that you might not see prices fall, which is a really tough thing. Right.
11:51Kara Swisher:So the 21st Century Road to Housing Act became a law earlier this month. The package of provisions aimed at increasing the housing supply and making homes more affordable. What does that actually accomplish? I don't think it's going to accomplish a tremendous amount. Look, I think that there's not a lot of federal policy on the table that can affect this because overwhelmingly this is a local concern. And so we can incentivize local places to allow more construction. But you still have a lot of homeowners who say, hey, I don't want that giant thing in my neighborhood. You're still going through the more than 10 ,000 U.S.
12:26jurisdictions that are in control of this and asking them to go one by one. I think actually the best policies that we've seen have been state and local. So California, for instance, has had a number of policies to induce building. But still, right, like timber is really expensive. Labor is really expensive. This isn't a situation that we got into quickly. Right. Really, I think the roots go back to the housing crisis before before the bubble popped. It's not something we're going to get out of fast either. Mm-hmm.
12:54Kara Swisher:So, of course, the job of keeping prices and inflation is under control belongs to the Federal Reserve, and it is a new chairman, Kevin Warsh. We're now taping this on the day before the July meeting, and it'll come out the day after. But let's zoom out. Claudia, I know you've expressed some skepticism about Warsh, in particular how he sometimes uses standard economic language in non-standard ways. What do you make of him so far and his efforts to, I assume, get inflation in check so that he can lower those rates that Annie talked about? It's really too soon to have a firm opinion on Kevin Warsh.
13:25I mean, that's also partly by his design. He's been pretty quiet about his views on the economy, his views on what should be done. He's made very clear we're going to have price stability. He's going to get inflation down. But as we talked about with housing, you have a problem that it took years to build. It's going to take some time to bring it back to be fixed. And inflation has been running higher than what the Fed puts as its target of 2 % for several years now. So it's not going to turn on a dime with a new person in charge. I think the Fed is really aware of the inflation problem. Thankfully, we are at a moment right now where the labor market, if nothing else, appears very stable.
14:03So the Fed can kind of focus its attention on inflation, but it still has a tough decision to make. Should we step in and raise interest rates? Because that's creating more costs for people. And if you don't need to do that to get inflation down, well, then maybe you should hold off and stay on the sidelines. So it's hard to tell where the Fed is headed at this moment. And that's really going to be the judgment in the end on Warsh's leadership is, Can the Fed deliver on getting inflation down? And Trump doesn't want interest rates to rise, so there's political pressure. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the big challenge for the Fed right now.
14:35Like, it's always hard to be a Fed official and try to, like, make sense of all of the data, some of which is conflicting. It's especially hard when you have some messiness in the data today. But it's especially, especially hard when you have Donald Trump basically trying to screw up your job, which is what has been happening, right? Right. That Donald Trump does not understand or is unwilling to learn that the Fed, in order to be effective, needs to be politically independent, because if people don't believe that the Fed is independent, if they believe that politicians are in control of the money supply and are just like willing to print money whenever, then they don't believe that inflation can ever get under control.
15:16It becomes sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And Donald Trump, by very loudly leaning on the Fed, saying that he wants, you know, his new man at the Eccles building to cut interest rates actually undermines their ability to cut interest rates in a way.
15:33Kara Swisher:May I ask, Claudia, is he his man, do you think, from what you can tell? Well, the president chose Kevin Warsh to be the Fed chair. Well, he chose Jerome Powell. So I take that as there was some alignment. The president saw in Kevin Warsh, someone he wanted to have at the Fed. Do I think that he's taking orders directly from the president? No, I don't. But he has an alignment. And I think one thing that's been unfortunate to what Catherine's talking about, there's some discussion of, well, the Warsh Fed, they need to raise rates just to prove he's independent. It's like, no, we should not be doing monetary policy to satisfy some political statement.
16:07Either direction.
16:08Kara Swisher:Right, either direction. So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, Cara. Hi, panel. I'm Mariana Mazzucato. I'm a professor at University College London, currently in Italy. I am Italian. So my question to you is the following. You're talking about the state of the economy, housing, cost of living. So I've written quite a few books, the recent one called The Common Good Economy, on how it's actually impossible to solve any problem with the current way we think about government as just, you know, at best fixing a market failure, always reactive, too little, too late.
16:42And I'm just wondering from your own experiences, maybe the cities you live in, where you've seen government of any type, you know, city level, regional level, national level, global level, actually get stuff done and do it through objectives. You know, there's so many different ways to do capitalism. And if you look at Vienna, if you look at Copenhagen, how they do housing and social housing is so different from American cities. But I think it is important to give people hope that there's different ways of doing things. And by looking actually at some positive examples, where the way that we governed went after the source of the problem, instead of, you know, the symptom at the end.
17:24Thanks.
17:25Kara Swisher:So Catherine, you go first, and then Annie and Claudia. I will talk about something that's actually not where I live, but that I've reported on before. So there is this sort of pilot program. I don't even know if you could call it a pilot since it's been around for a little while now that started in Flint, Michigan to give cash to pregnant moms, basically to address poverty and the various ancillary consequences of poverty at the source that basically the idea was that they were prescribing cash as a way to deal with a number of public health issues. It's called RxKids. And so this started in Flint, Michigan.
18:04It turns out that, you know, based on the data that they have available, where they were giving cash to everyone, everyone within the city limits who, once they were pregnant, they were eligible and they continued to be eligible, I believe, for a year postpartum. Anyway, that they determined that it resulted in much better outcomes in terms of higher birth weights and lower maternal depression rates, things like that. But this is top of mind for me, I think, because I got a press release today saying that they are expanding it to part of Ohio. Annie? I think this is such a fascinating question.
18:36And I love that it was posed by the person that it was posed for. I'm such a big fan of her work. You know, in the last 10 years, I think the most amazing governmental innovation that I can think of was in Project Warp Speed, right? We got a COVID vaccine far faster than we expected. It saved a ton of lives. and the material good that it did, I think, was really significant, but it didn't build trust in government, right? In fact, I think the vaccines were part of this broader collapse in trust in institutions. And it's something that I think about a lot, right? How do you have a good program that also creates these benefits that people can recognize it's a good program, that people can feel some trust in government?
19:20Like, how do we create these systems such that we're all in the same universe and pulling towards the same goal. It's been such a long time since I've seen that and felt that. Right, right. Claudia? Right. So it inverts the positive spirit of the question. But one thing that I've spent a lot of time watching, Reese, is just the effects of downsizing the federal government. Federal employment is lowest level in decades, and yet it does affect the government services. Like I see it a lot in terms of the statistics. You know, they don't have as many staff, like 20 percent less staff, less resources, collect data.
19:50But And also this came up in the CDC outbreak. They didn't have their communication staff. It's just hard to do these services. And I think it's in the spirit of you don't miss something until it's gone. And it's important to really underscore, like, the quality of the services we had. And they've really slipped. And that can be fixed. So that's, you know, kind of what I would focus on.
20:11Kara Swisher:Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you got till it's gone kind of thing. And now we have, you know, exploding diarrhea and measles at this point. Among other horrors, yes.
20:22Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.
Read the full transcript
20:51Kara Swisher:payroll and benefits software built for small businesses like my own Podium Media, which uses Gusto. It's an all-in-one, remote-friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, onboard and support your team from anywhere. Automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401k, you name it, Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. Unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. That means no hidden fees and no surprises. You can save time with built-in automated tools, offer letters, onboarding documents, direct deposit, and more.
21:26Kara Swisher:It's quick and simple to switch to Gusto. Just transfer your existing data and get up and running fast. Plus, you don't have to pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash cara and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash cara. Again, that's gusto.com slash Cara.
22:15Kara Swisher:It's all of these things and then some at a fraction of the price and it tastes great. They're able to pack in 20 vitamins and minerals in a daily pack with 60 ingredients, all of which include nutrient-dense and whole foods. A Gruen's pack also contains 6 grams of prebiotic fiber. To help you visualize it, that's equivalent to more than 2 cups of broccoli. Gruen's ingredients are backed by over 35 ,000 research publications. You can't fit the amount of nutrients Gruen's does into one daily gummy, which is why it comes in a pack. Save 52 % off with the code CARA at gruns.co. That's code CARA, K-A-R-A-G-R-U-N-S dot C-O.
23:11Kara Swisher:growing your business. That's where Odoo comes in. It's the only business software you'll ever need. Odoo is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. That means CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable and designed to streamline every process.
23:45Kara Swisher:It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.
24:03Kara Swisher:So let's take a step back and look at what else is fueling inflation, starting with President Trump's new tariffs. After a temporary 10 percent global tariffs expired last Friday, he imposed dozens of new tariffs of 10 percent to 12.5 percent on goods from more than 80 countries. Trump said he has additional tariffs planned, including duties of up to 200 percent on generic drugs. The Supreme Court struck down most of his global tariffs in February. Catherine, why don't you ask us, how is the administration legally justifying the latest round? So there are different tariff authorities that the president can use.
24:36And they have every one of them tends to have like pretty constrained rationales. And so they're kind of cobbling together any sort of pretext that they can for for tariffing other countries in ways that are, you know, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to the legality of all of this, but are at least very intellectually inconsistent.
24:57Kara Swisher:The first round of tariffs sent shockwaves through businesses and supply chains. And you described it as Trump's economic abuse. Are they more prepared, given all these hijinks that he's attempting to impose more of them on them? They being the administration? The businesses. No. You know, it's just like we were talking before about how it is a tax on consumers to have to deal with inflation. It is absolutely a tax on businesses to have to deal with, you know, basically having to watch and have to have someone full time monitoring Trump's Twitter feed or his social feed, because that's how policy is being made.
25:30It's not being made through the normal Administrative Procedure Act processes. It's being made by Trump's itchy Twitter finger. And as a result, businesses are having to devote a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of labor on calibrating, like, do we send the shipment now? Do we keep it on the boat? Do we keep it at the dock? Do we keep it at the port? Do we try to put it in this warehouse? You know, it's just such a tremendous, inefficient waste of time and resources, not just the actual cost of the tariffs, but it's like managing all of these logistics they did not have to think about before.
26:04And not only managing that, but like managing relationships with the administration, right? This is the reason why corrupt governments, non-democratic governments tend to have, in general, worse economic outcomes because businesses have to spend a lot of time like figuring out how to like appease the authoritarian rather than what makes the most business sense.
26:25Kara Swisher:So the economy obviously dealing with the war in Iran, the affordability crisis, inflation we talked about. Annie, what are the short-term and long-term consequences of Trump continuing his borderline obsession with tariffs? This is bad. This is really bad. And I think that in some ways, when the original large tariffs got pulled back, people stopped paying attention. But businesses did not. Businesses on the margin, especially small businesses, right, like a Ford or a Google probably has hundreds of lawyers dealing with this stuff or they can bring in legal counsel. It's still money spent. If you're like a four-person business, you're not going to be able to do that.
27:01You could be bankrupted, right? And we actually saw that happen. And so I think it's one of these things, like, it's just why. And I think he'll just continue doing it for as long as he's in office. He really cares about it sincerely. He does not care about a lot of policy sincerely. This he cares about sincerely. This he does.
27:17Kara Swisher:But to quantify the strain on the economy of these compounding sources is also difficult. Very hard. Because it's very hard to do. So Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers last week that he estimated the Iran war to cost$37.5 billion. In just the past few days, the war has escalated and oil prices have shot back up. So far, the U.S. economy has been pretty resilient. Claudia, at what point will Americans feel the broad impact of the war beyond food and gas prices? And what are the potential economic consequences of yet another extended war in the Middle East? So as the conflict drags on, it has effects on energy, food.
27:55It can potentially seep into a lot of other goods and services. I mean, energy is really a cost that isn't a lot of what we are spending our money on. So a lot of it depends on how long the conflict lasts and how bad it gets, right, in terms of disruptions in like the Strait of Hormuz and the Middle East. So it's all pointing in the wrong direction. It's, you know, without knowing how long it lasts, how bad it gets, it's hard to quantify, impossible to quantify what the effects would be on people. But it goes in the direction of cost. And it's just the war in the Middle East is another example of the administration pushing forward policies that unleash a whole set of costs on the economy, just like the tariffs unleashed a whole set of costs on the economy.
28:34And that is really we can see that in the inflation data, the broad based increase in the price level over the last year and a half really does tie to some policies. Tariffs, yeah. They may be justified in other outcomes, but immediate, they are costs. And another thing you see from the administration, they really don't recognize that they're creating those costs. With tariffs, they're still like foreigners are paying them. There's really good data to say foreigners are not paying them.
29:00Kara Swisher:We are. They've been corrected many times. They've been corrected many times on that topic. and even someone who does know Scott Besson pretends otherwise, which is I think that's what they do on a lot of issues. It feels like the economy has kind of factored in, though, Trump's erratic decision making, the taco, as it came to be known. When could that shift where they just assume erratic decision making, correct? I think that they absolutely already do. I think that if you are talking about financiers and Wall Street, they have proven remarkably adept at making money off of not a rising tide lifting all boats, but chaos.
29:34Right. So you have people that are algorithmically trading off of, you know, truth social posts. I think that there is a fair amount of right just kind of like guessing where he's going. Trump has always been quite suggestible to the people that he's talking to. And so I think that that has become another source of kind of like betting around this. And I'd note that there's a lot of things coming down the pike for the Trump administration that I think is going to prove really hard. Biggest one of which is, in my mind, the Medicaid cuts.
30:02Kara Swisher:In terms of people seeing effects. Yes, in terms of people literally losing their insurance and literally not being able to afford cancer treatment. I mean, we've already seen millions of people lose SNAP benefits at this point as well. And that coinciding with rising food costs because of the war, because of some things that are not Donald Trump's fault, including like a drought in the Midwest and El Nino this year. I don't know that we can lay all of that at the president's feet, but you do have all of these other factors pushing up prices at the exact same time that support for people to absorb those costs has been declining.
30:42And so those things coinciding has been bad economically will be bad politically, presumably for the president as well. That said, I don't think it's going to result in some sort of taco where they somehow try to beef up the safety net or otherwise pull back on tariffs.
30:57Kara Swisher:That one he's not going to do. Let's shift to the U.S. labor market and jobs. Last month, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration's authority to end temporary protected status of Haitian and Syrian immigrants. The ruling affects hundreds of thousands of foreign workers who will be let go by their employers this month. The health care industry in particular and elder care rely on this labor pool. We're seeing the impact of Trump's immigration enforcement across industries, including health care, agriculture, construction, and hospitality. Claudia, first, what point do worker shortages start to become untenable for employers and consumers?
31:30So at this point, we haven't seen, like in an aggregate level, much evidence of the worker shortages. In certain industries, say like in construction, there's more pressure, which shows up often in terms of like wages growing more quickly. But there's also a lot of demand building out AI data centers. So it's hard to piece out, like, is it actually a supply issue versus more demand. But that's where we would look first. Industries that are very, have a lot of native-born employment in them, we do see a big drop in the growth of the labor force. I mean, it's really striking how, I mean, basically the labor force is not growing, which is anomalous.
32:07Like, we just haven't seen that, right? And so even if we don't end up with shortages and real pressure points that could end up in higher prices, things are slowing down in the labor market overall. And we don't see a lot of dynamism. We don't see people moving around in different jobs. So there's something under the hood kind of fundamental shifting in the labor market.
32:26Kara Swisher:According to the Labor Department's June jobs report, the labor market appears to be in better shape than it was this time last year. Job growth has picked up. Long-term unemployment means people are out of work six months or more is near its highest level in years. I did an interview with former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and she made the point you have to look deeper, as you were noting in the top line stats to see whether the labor market is healthy. And she suggests, by the way, it's not. First, Annie, what's hiding underneath these numbers? And then Catherine. There's a lot of weirdness being hidden under there.
32:57So I think that you are seeing we haven't had growth in the white collar labor market. In fact, it's shrinking a little bit. Not hugely, right? We're not seeing mass layoffs. But I think that plus all of the talk about AI is really, really, really freaking people out. Young college graduates are in many ways having a little bit of a tough time in the labor market. The AI build out is having some positive effects in some places. So you can see like rising land values for certain farmers who are selling their land for AI. And I think that there's this question of fragility. If you have consumers that are very tapped out, if you have businesses that aren't hiring, if just everybody is a little bit concerned about what's going on.
33:39What does it take? The economy has proven enormously resilient over the past six years, shockingly resilient, right? Like whenever we get another recession, it's going to be one that was predicted that it would have been here every month for like the last, you know, five years. So I'm not saying that. I do think that the labor market is pretty good and you can see that in a lot of ways. But I do think that there are some strange things happening, including the way that the AI boom is and isn't supporting the economy right now.
34:06Kara Swisher:We'll get to AI in a second. Catherine about labor. So I do want to go back to people who have TPS, who are about to essentially have their livelihoods ripped away from them and their legal status ripped away from them. That's imminent, according to recent reporting. And you're going to probably have some mass detention campaigns that happen in places like Springfield, Ohio. So I do think you're going to see some major disruptions coming up in the next year as a result of all of that. and maybe that'll show up in things like prices and things like wages and maybe that'll just show up in in shortages um you know people not being able to get the the groceries that they need or not able to get the health care health care help they need yeah exactly yeah because those are two professions two areas that really do depend on these people we'll be back in a minute
35:10Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from 11 Labs. We all know what it feels like to waste time sitting on the phone with customer service. Nobody is having a good time on either end of the line. Well, 11 Labs says they have a solution, 11 agents. They say it's not a chatbot. It's not a phone tree. It's not some demo that falls apart the second the real customer asks a real question. It can look up your account, process your request, and escalate intelligently. The voice sounds like a human. The response time feels immediate with low latency performance, and it runs 24-7 in over 30 languages. If you run a business with any kind of customer operation, support, sales, or onboarding, you can start with a demo at 11labs.io slash cara.
35:54Kara Swisher:See what 11 agents can do for your specific workflows. Guided rollout capacity is limited each quarter, so if you want to be one of the first companies with a customer experience that people actually talk about in a good way, now is the time. 11labs.io slash Kara. E-L-E-V-E-N-L-A-B-S dot I-O slash Kara, K-A-R-A. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together.
36:34From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's odoo.com slash vox.
36:57Kara Swisher:So let's end by looking at how AI investment is affecting workers, companies, and the economy as a whole. A growing number of companies, including Cisco, IBM, Salesforce, and Uber, are citing AI as a contributing factor to layoffs, although now that's unclear. At the same time, a 2025 MIT study found that despite an estimated$30 to$40 billion in enterprise spending on generative AI, 95 % of organizations saw no measurable return, something Scott and I have been talking about for a long time. Claudia, to what extent are companies engaging in so-called AI washing, using tech to justify layoffs, and what evidence actually does it tell us about its impact on the employment so far?
37:35Anytime a company does a mass layoff, I mean, they're going to try to package it, explain it in a way that will go over well with investors, right? So I wouldn't I do think there's an aspect of AI may have enabled some of these companies to reduce their headcount, but there were probably a lot of other reasons like they overhired during the pandemic when they thought, you know, everyone was going online forever. And, you know, so there were probably a whole host of reasons. And they put forward the one that investors might be most positive about, like, oh, you're using the technology. So I think that's happening.
38:05But I also would say that's probably not a new phenomenon. And that's why you don't want to just take the companies at their word. You want to go look and see, can we make sense of it in the data? Do all the pieces fit together? And frankly, what has been really challenging, this is a relatively new technology. There's a lot of experimentation going out there. The data, it's tricky to catch up with it. And you have really good studies, sometimes using the same data that'll just define exposure to AI a little differently, or they might set up the comparisons a little differently and come to opposite conclusions.
38:38on how this is affecting how AI is affecting employment. So I think it's just more that like we're at a stage where you can't draw a firm conclusion because there's just a lot of experiments running in real time. And maybe some of those companies making the announcements, maybe for them, they actually are doing the layoffs because of AI, but that is not the broad sense right now. And automating away human beings is very difficult, right? Like with all the tasks that we do.
39:04Kara Swisher:Correct, yeah. Yeah, there isn't much effect as there are. But the stock market has been on a tear in the past few years, fueled in part by this AI boom. Pretty much that's what is fueling it. It's made a lot of people feel rich. Bloomberg's Stacey Venick Smith recently wrote about the wealth effect, which some economists estimate has accounted for roughly a third of consumer spending growth since the pandemic. It's rich people buying things. They're feeling good about themselves. Again, Scott talks about this a lot. But Alphabet and Tesla's earnings last week, concerns about growing AI spending helped wipe out roughly$890 billion of the combined market value of the Magnificent Seven.
39:39Kara Swisher:These companies focused on AI. Together, these companies account for about one-third of the S &P's 500s total value, which is astonishing. Catherine, can stock prices continue to support consumer spending? And the broader, can rich people feeling a little less rich? You know, SpaceX is down. Tesla's down. All the companies are pretty much down, except for Apple. I mean, if I knew the answer to that question, I would be a very rich woman and I'd probably keep the information to myself. I do not know the answer to that question. I will say that one thing that is troubling, that is like another one of these lurking risks under the hood, is that so much of the market is driven by just this very small handful of stocks.
40:22Right? Right. That in terms of market capitalization, in terms of investment, in terms of revenues, it's just like they are the whole story. And so that's concerning, particularly given fragility elsewhere in the economy. If we kind of put like all of our eggs in this one basket and then that I don't know what the rest of this metaphor would be, the basket explodes. Then, you know, a lot of this other fragility could become a lot more visible. all of these other things we've been talking about, all of these other things, all these other factors that have been battering the economy, in many cases, unforced errors.
40:56One of the themes of all of this is like, there's a lot of, you know, precarity, there's a lot of insecurity, but there's also a lot of resilience. But is it resilience? Or is it just that like, there is this one part of the economy that's propping everything up. And if it ceases to continue doing so, what happens to all of these other problems that we've been talking about, Particularly since we have really erratic policymaking that is making it harder to stabilize the rest of the economy. Right.
41:24Kara Swisher:I know you feel bad that Elon's not a trillionaire anymore. I feel very sad about that. Sad about that. So, Annie, you recently described the AI economy as, quote, a trillion dollar Ouroboros of buying and selling investment and equity staking all happening between San Francisco and San Jose. That's a snake eating his tail for people who don't know. So talk about the concentration of capital. Tell us about the durability of the AI boom, because it feels a little to me like when I was covering AOL in the early days and it was the same$2 ,000 going around. In this case, it's$2 trillion or$200 billion.
41:56So I think there are a bunch of things to give us some hope that this is going to be kind of OK. So one is that a lot of the companies doing the borrowing and the buying and the selling here, they really are profitable. Google is really profitable. Like, actually, that's not fake. And a lot of the money going into this is actually cash. It's not borrowing, or at least it used to be.
42:16Kara Swisher:Well, they're borrowing. They recently tried to borrow. Now they're borrowing, right? And so when there's two really, really big things that I'm concerned about, first is the circularity, right? This is all a very circular economy that they are all buying and selling. They're all interconnected with each other and becoming even more interwoven. So say for whatever reason, we need way fewer chips. All of a sudden, you have a huge decline in the price of one of these companies. but that means that they can't pay their debts to the other. The second is that the AI buildout has been so expensive that these companies are going into debt.
42:49So they are issuing corporate bonds and they are borrowing enormous sums, not from the traditional banking system, but from the shadow banking system, non-banking lenders. Those deals are structured to be off of their traditional balance sheets. If you're not starting to get worried, the deals are very, very opaque, right? We don't have a lot of insight into who is lending what for whom, but we have reason to believe that institutional investors, so people taking your pension or your index funds, are really helping this out. So if we don't have that visibility in and we have a huge amount of money that is being staked on a very circular economy that is making a bet that the returns on AI are not just going to come in, but are going to come in on a schedule that will allow them to pay their bets off, maybe it works out.
43:38Maybe it doesn't. And the entire, like, all economic growth right now is predicated on this one bet that, you know, very interestingly, your average person has nothing to do with. They are not investing in it. The way in which they are being touched by this is mostly through, you know, if they have a retirement fund. 401k.
43:57Kara Swisher:So if we're headed for an AI bubble collapse, Claudia, how vulnerable is the broader market and who will be impacted. An AI bubble collapse at this point would be very damaging, right? Because it has, you're talking about in financial markets, there's a lot of wealth tied up in terms of the AI spend in the quote unquote real economy. We can see a lot of capital investment that's happening. I mean, real, like durable goods are being bought to put in place. And I mean, that's very exciting to build up our physical capital. We can be very productive, But that is certainly in the, you know, kind of real economy, AI has build out is very much important, not doing it all, but it is important.
44:35And then the other piece that we kind of hinted at and touched a little bit is it is a positive overlay. Right. Especially in financial markets and businesses, AI is the technology of the future. It's going to be transformative. It's going to be profitable. That's been a real like positive message, a positive vibe that has counteracted a lot of like negative things. Like we have a war in the Middle East and we have and I do worry, too, that taking some of that positive overlay away could just amplify the collapse. One thing I'd like to point out that I think has been a positive development in recent months, you're seeing, I think, some healthy skepticism in financial markets.
45:11So announcing more capital expenditures, the market pulls back some in the bonds or they're requiring bigger interest rates. Credit spreads are going up. So there is some telling markets, hey, maybe maybe you're going a little too fast. slow down.
45:25Kara Swisher:Are either of you, Annie or Catherine, worried about a bubble bursting here in the stock market? I mean, I'm worried. Look, I think it's very easy to see the negatives of all of this, certainly, including all of this investment that's been going into these new data centers, all of the competition, because a lot of the AI investing companies are like assuming that it's a winner-take-all market. And so if somebody actually wins, does everybody else just suddenly pull out? And what kind of knock-on effects does that lead to for those firms and for those that depend on them because of all of the circular dependencies that Annie was referring to?
46:08So I'm definitely concerned about all of that. I do think it's important to sit a little bit longer with a point that Claudia made that there will potentially be some positives. It's easy to see which jobs disappear as a result of a big disruptive new technology, it's harder to imagine what jobs do come about. And I don't want to sound Pollyanna-ish, but I just want to temper a little bit of the doom and gloom about how lots of people are going to lose their jobs. And that may well be the case. We are seeing that, particularly in certain companies. Maybe it's AI washing and maybe it's not. But there will be jobs that are created.
46:46There will be people who are made more productive, and we don't know exactly where those benefits will fall. And I am hopeful that we will end up seeing lots of opportunities created by all of this in addition to some dislocation and that, you know, we really just need to work on, I think, beefing up the safety net so that those who are in that difficult transition are helped out in some fashion, right? I mean, I think we've done a poor job in the past at helping people transition when their jobs are displaced, whether it's because of globalization. Yeah, CNFTA. Globalization or automation or anything else.
47:21But I do think that there are a lot of opportunities. And what we should be thinking about from a policy perspective is how to make sure that those opportunities are available to as wide of a swath of the population as possible and that we help the people who are hurt. Annie? I think that the thing that I am concerned about beyond just a stock market correction, which would be painful for all of the reasons that Claudia and Catherine identified. And it does mean that, you know, a lot of people, right like there's always ancillary people that had nothing to do with it and they are going to be hurt um the other thing i'm somewhat concerned about is that this is taking place again outside of the traditional lending system so i've had the question of like are regulators on top of this are they the non-banking institutions should be but this is new and it's unusual and these deals are strange so again i'm not worried about like an apple or a google even with huge losses they're going to be fine.
48:15But like, what about like the smaller little guts of the system that we don't know? Are we really keeping a good eye on that? I don't have a great answer to that. But to Catherine's point, we think about the jobs created by AI. We think, oh, it should just be software engineers or something. And it's like, no, actually, when the whole economy gets wealthier, you get all kinds of new jobs that are created by AI in some strange way, but are not like literally tied to it. So I do think that that's positive. And there are other really positive things happening in the economy. We have some cool things happening with energy.
48:48And I think that it's all a matter of we know that we still have this very broken safety net, all of these policy problems, this lack of trust. But are we allowing these really positive things to come through?
48:59Kara Swisher:Yeah, absolutely. So it's a theme that's the theme that's been underlying, though, everything we've talked about, the giant gap between what's happening in the markets and what's happening in people's lives, right? Earlier this year, labor's share of the economic output hit an all-time low at this point, while profits hit a near record. How long can the gap continue to grow before something gives in that regard, when these benefits you're talking about accrue to more than just a small group of people? Catherine, you go first, then Annie, and then Claudia. I mean, this is a political economy question, right?
49:29It's an economy question, but it's also a political economy question. We started this conversation by talking about like, economic sentiment. And what does that mean? Is that really political sentiment? And I think all of these things are wrapped up in one. My fear is that as people become more disaffected with economic outcomes, more resentful that they've been left behind, that somebody else is getting ahead, maybe it's the immigrants, maybe it's the foreigners, maybe it's the billionaires, that politicians become less prone to trying to fix actual problems and more prone to just doubling down on blaming the scapegoats.
50:04And blaming the scapegoats is easy. Punishing the scapegoats is easy, actually fixing the problems is a lot harder. You know, there's a part of me that worries that we're going to end up in this sort of like infinite doom loop, like in Argentina, where you have the left-wing populists and the right-wing populists just alternating power and blaming each other and never actually solving problems. So that's the real concern that I have, that we do have these real underlying problems with economic inequality, with stagnation of living standards. And I worry that our political leaders are not as focused on actually doing the boring technical work of fixing them and instead are much keener on...
50:46To tap into the anger. To tap into the anger and to find the easy scapegoat rather than the hard fix. Annie? I think that that is completely correct. One thing that I think has been fascinating about AI is that, you know, in the early mid 90s, when people were getting computers in the Internet, there was really this broad feeling of like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be amazing. Right. Like we'll be able to connect with people all over the world. This is going to change this, that and the other. Right. Like maybe we'll send more people to the moon, all of this. And I think in part because the AI leaders have been so vocal about the downsides that they see of their own technology, right?
51:27Like, I always think, like, can you imagine if Ford came out and they were like, you know, the car is going to be great, but we're going to kill a bunch of your kids, right? Like, everybody would be like, what are you talking about? They'd be like, some of your children will die horribly. We're so sorry, but it'll still be worth it.
51:42Kara Swisher:It is something else. That people are now, they're like, don't do this to us. AI sentiment is really, really low. And I think it's because they see it as another technological advance that's going to lead to them getting screwed. And one nice thing I think about inequality is that it's very amenable to policy solutions. This is not something that we don't know how to fix. And so I do think that starting to reduce this sense of fragility for people, make sure that there are those AI guardrails. So it's not going to be that all of a sudden all of these workers are headed to retirement, believing that they're never going to have the lives that they wanted.
52:16I think it's really tough and we've not seen that kind of deep policy work to just get the, you know, everybody feeling involved again and productive again. Right. Claudia? And that declining labor share that you talked about, that puts some really important institutions at risk, right? And so even if AI doesn't mask unemployment, maybe makes people more productive, I don't really think it's going to push up wages that much in terms of getting a bigger share. And so many of our programs talk about social security as one example. Like so much of our taxation really depends on workers making money and that can feed into it.
52:53If the workers are not the ones gaining, if it's more and more going to the capitalist, which some of that is good, but it will cause some of those programs to be really under strain. So you think we have discontent right now. Talk about the discontent when Social Security falls apart. Right. And we are not that far from that program really coming into conflict. So I'd say a lot of the trends we're talking about, they're pointed to actually get worse, which is going to have some big conversations in the political economy space about how do we fix these problems? Because people are not going to be happy if they're just left to fall apart, those kind of programs.
53:29Right.
53:29Kara Swisher:Absolutely. Anyway, on that happy note, what one thing is positive that you see about the economy and what thing you worry about the most? Catherine, you do it first, then Annie, then Claudia. I don't know if this is about the economy or the political economy, but I think that people are starting to recognize the things that really matter about the economy that they may have taken for granted. And that means some of our institutions that help make the economy run. That means immigrants who bring new life, new skills, new energies to the economy and the importance of community. I feel like that there is a renewed appreciation for, you know, these are partly about democracy and these are partly about thriving civil society, but these are also partly about understanding what our economy needs to function, that we need rule of law, that we need trust.
54:17And your biggest worry? I guess my biggest worry is the dissolution of the safety net, which, you know, is one of the things we've been hammering on this whole discussion.
54:24Kara Swisher:Which leads to the anger part. Annie? Yeah, I'm really, really excited about the new cancer medications, GLP-1s, which are really improving a lot of people's lives. There's new biologics. There's new treatments for previously intractable conditions like cystic fibrosis, which is so exciting. I am terrified that we are pulling away the basic scientific funding that has made a lot of this possible. GLP-1s came in part from research on the Helium monster. And this is precisely the sort of stuff that now Doge and the Trump administration wants to cut. Right when we're at this moment that, you know, because of CRISPR and other things that I do not understand, we seem like we might be able to actually really improve people's lives.
55:06Kara Swisher:And save costs. Yeah, exactly. And I wish that everybody had access to the medications. You know, these are really expensive. I wish everybody had access to the medications they need. Good. Claudia? Right. So mine is with the low hire, low fire labor market. First, the positive, the low fire. Layoff rates in aggregate are very low. So if you're a worker who has a job and really likes your job, is a good job, like this is a good labor market. The flip side, the thing that does concern me is the hiring rates are really unusually low for a labor market that overall looks pretty good. And so this is an incredibly tough labor market for people coming into the labor market for the first time, trying to, you know, get back into labor market or stuck in a bad job.
55:48So like I do worry about that half of it, like the hiring rates need to come up. OK.
55:52Kara Swisher:All right. Thank you guys so much. I know we covered a lot of stuff. We were trying to get to a lot of stuff, but I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.
56:07Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Megan Burney, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Koro is Fox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Corinne Ruff, Rosemary Ho, Dave Shaw, and Julia Sharpe-Levine. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. academics. If you're already following the show, you've figured out the best way to do capitalism. If not, you're in an economic doom loop. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.
56:44Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Monday with more.
From the publisher
Americans feel pessimistic about the economy even as the stock market soars and unemployment remains low. Kara speaks with a panel of economic experts to explain the disconnect. She’s joined by Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey, Catherine Rampell of MS NOW and The Bulwark and economist Claudia Sahm.
They examine the impact of President Trump’s latest round of tariffs, the economic fallout from the Iran war and the hidden weaknesses in the current labor market.
Plus: How vulnerable is the broader economy to an AI bubble? And what happens when economic growth increasingly benefits investors rather than workers?
Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
