Inflation Woes Persist Despite Economic Growth

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Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Hey, buddy, can you spare $30 trillion? That could be a headline today from the breaking economy news. We'll explain. Did you hear how bad the economy is? Wait, did you hear how good the economy is? Did you hear about the 6% inflation we haven't seen in 40 years? Wait, did you hear about the 6% economic growth we have been seen in 40 years? Remember when Donald Trump got elected in 2016 promising 3% or 4% growth and people scoffed that that was so unreal. "Oh, we'll never see 3% or 4% growth."

Suddenly now, under Biden, it's 6% for the first time in 40 years and the stock market, the debt was up almost 20% last year, 6,000 points. Wait, the headline yesterday was that the US national debt just hit $30 trillion for the first time ever up $7 trillion just since 2019 because of all the borrowing to fund the programs to help people through the pandemic. USA Today quotes economists calling that unsustainable with long-term consequences for every American.

The New York Times this morning calls it "an ominous fiscal milestone that underscores the fragile nature of the country's long-term economic health as it grapples with soaring prices and the prospect of higher interest rates". Wait, that pandemic borrowing and spending, helped make it possible for low-paid service sector workers to have a little cushion to say, "I'm not going to take your garbage wages anymore," the great resignation. Those wages are going up to get them back as pandemic unemployment is going down. Low unemployment is good, right?

Did you hear how epicly and historically bad the economy is? Did you hear how epicly and historically good it is? Let's try to make some sense of all this. With us now is John Cassidy from the New Yorker. For a decade now, he's written a daily column on economics and politic at newyorker.com as well as articles in the magazine. He's also author of the books, How Markets Fail and Dot.con. Now, he's out with a New Yorker economic analysis piece called Three Economic Scenarios for an Election Year. Spoiler, one is good, one is mixed, one is really bad. Thanks for coming on, John. Welcome back to WNYC.

John: Thanks, Brian. Thanks a lot for inviting me on.

Brian: Can we start with today's headline? $30 trillion in total federal government debt up $7 trillion just since 2019. The numbers are so big. The average person has no idea of a context or whether it's smart borrowing that fuels the future or excessive borrowing that threatens it. How would you begin to explain what a $30 trillion national debt means?

John: I think one way to look at it is to compare it to the size of the economy if you just think about household, you look at your debts and you look at it compared to your income and so how you can service it. The American economy is now about $25 trillion. It's a huge economy. The national debt figure which came out is total national debt, that's gone up to $30 trillion. Now, you need to qualify it in some ways in that some of that money is owed to the government itself through the social security trust fund.

The actual amount of debt in the hands of the public is about $23 trillion, so $23.5. We look at it by that, it's just a bit smaller than the economy if you count the social security trust fund, which some people say you should, some people say you shouldn't. You get up to $30 trillion, which about 125% of GDP. That's high. Though, as you said, we've spent a lot of money fighting the pandemic. I always compare it to a wartime economy. When you have a war, it's a national crisis, the government always steps in, spends a lot of money, does whatever's necessary to get through the war.

We've effectively been fighting a war, domestic war for the last two years against the pandemic. The government, both parties, if you remember, steps in and spend an awful lot of money propping up businesses, propping up households, and keeping the economy together. If you look at the actual national debt figures, the biggest jump, I just looked at this morning, because I thought you might ask me about this, was actually under Trump because from 2016 to 2019, the debt went from, I think it went from about $20 trillion to about $27 trillion, and then it's gone another $3 trillion since Biden coming, but it basically both [crosstalk]

Brian: And that was mostly for tax cuts, wasn't it?

John: No, it went up quite a bit for tax cuts. The biggest jump came after the start of the pandemic in 2020 because remember, there'd been two huge demo packages, one under the Republicans while they did one and a half, and then one under the Democrat crash. We basically spent $5 trillion in the last couple of years fighting the pandemic. That's about 20% of GDP. Naturally, how we pay for it, the government issues debt. It's been issuing debt at very low rates.

Yes, we spent a lot of money in the last two years, but the government always spends a lot of money when you're effectively fighting a war. So far, it hasn't faced any strains financing it. If you look at interest rates, again it's just the same as an individual. If banks don't think you're a good borrower, they'll charge you a high-interest rate. People still think the US government is a very good borrower. They're borrowing money, the treasury can borrow money at 30 year rates, I just checked, 2.1%, 10-year rates 1.78%.

That's very, very low rates and suggest that investors around the world and in the US think the US government is still going to be able to repay its debts and is not facing any debt crisis in the immediate or even long-term future at those rates. I don't think it's anything to get too alarmed about. Obviously, it's something to note. We can't keep going up at $5 trillion every couple of years or there would be a debt crisis, but nobody's talking about that. There's no big stimulus this year. In fact, there virtually no stimulus at all because the Congress is deadlocked.

Brian: Your three economic scenarios for this year. Then, let's get into them with political implications for the midterms, positive, mixed, and potentially disastrous as you call them. Let's tick down the list and to make the listeners feel a little better, I'll note that you say the positive scenario is the most likely, want to lay it out?

John: Yes, there's a lot of good news around in the economy. You mentioned that in the introduction. Everybody's focusing on inflation and for some good reasons, but let's not forget the good news that we've seen over the last year. Unemployment rates come down from, I think, 6.7% to 3.5%, we've created 86.4 million new jobs. As you mentioned, the rate of GDP growth has hit the rate not seen since Reagan was in office in 1984 and it's not just a headline figures. There's also been some very good individual developments.

A lot of the money which we spent through the stimulus went on things like the Child Tax Credit, which is now stopped, but while it lasts, it was very good and reduced child poverty rate from 19% to 12%. We've seen low wages increasing. There's been a lot of good stuff. The economy has gone into 2022 with a lot of momentum because of that rapid growth we've seen over the last couple of years. The US economy is like a super tank. It's huge $25 trillion takes a lot to turn it around, $25 trillion GDP.

The good scenario is that we carry on growing at a healthy rate as we did last year. Maybe not as quick, we grew up 5.7% last year, nearly 6%, as you mentioned. If you look around at Wall Street or the IMF and people, most people think the economy will grow at 3% or 4% this year, which as you said, a few years ago, would've been seen as impossible. That's a good healthy rate. In the good scenario, it's accompanied by inflation, which is now 7% gradually coming down as the supply chain crisis eases a bit, as people shift from spending on goods to services.

Part of the problem here, we had this huge distortion and everybody was locked at home for a lot of the time so they started spending on stuff. Things like Peloton bikes and all sorts of other stuff from China, rather than going out for services so the prices of goods, cars, for example, price of used cars are nearly doubled in two years. There's been all sorts of one-off shocks, which have shot up the inflation rate. In the good scenario, that all starts to unwind as the year goes on.

Hopefully, the Omicron variant disappears or gets down to a very low rate, and we start to get back to the economy we were in last summer when things looked good for a while on the pandemic front. By you get to the midterm, maybe the inflation rate's coming down to 3% or 4%. I spoke to a couple of Wall Street economists and they said that's what they're looking at now, maybe 3%, 4% by October. With 4% growth, that would be basically a very healthy economy. That's good. [crosstalk]

Brian: That would be politically good for the Democrats attempts to hold on to Congress if people are relatively satisfied with the economy. Now, before, John, we go on to your mixed scenarios and potentially disastrous economic scenarios for this year, let me ask you a couple of underlying questions. How do the 40-year high inflation rate and the 40-year high growth rate, one considered bad, one considered good relate to each other, does one cause the other?

John: Well, that's a big topic of debate among economists. Certainly, there's some relation there. We've had a huge injection of demand into the economy over the last couple of years because of the two big financial support packages. People call them stimulus packages, but they're really emergency relief bills that we've had over the last couple of years. They've pumped a lot of demand into the economy.

As I mentioned, because of the distortions of the pandemic, a lot of this demand has been directly into specific areas, particularly goods, as I said, rather than services where largely a services economy, normally the services take up at least 70% of the economy and goods are only 30%. In the last couple of years, that's completely shifted or shifted quite radically. Suddenly, there was all this demand for goods because we did all the supply chain issue. We can't produce enough of them or can't import enough of them and that's led to higher inflation.

As I say, the classic example is cars, even used cars. I think I just looked at some figures last week. The average price of used cars has gone up from $20,000 to $28,000 in a year. From $13,000 to $28,000 in two years. We've never seen anything like that before and that is absolutely totally due to the pandemic. Now, as time has gone on and we've still had this large demand, those price increases start to spread throughout the economy, not to that extent, but we are seeing broader price increases.

You can see if you go to the supermarket. I was speaking to the deli owner on my corner a couple of days ago and he was explaining to me how he's facing higher prices for almost everything, I was complaining about the price of milk going up or something.

Brian: I'll just share with everybody. One of the other examples from your article, Oscar Mayer turkey bacon is up 30%.

John: They're going to put it up 30% in March. They've just announced craft. I'm still not entirely convinced why is bacon so expensive. The arguments you get from the manufacturer is that they don't have enough workers in the meat processing plants, the price of grain, and everything has gone up for the farmers. The Biden Administration points out that a lot of these meat processes have been making record profits. Perhaps profit tier, there's certainly an element of that. There's a lot of factors going in here, but if you add it all together, the fact is inflation is at 7%. Last year is at 1.3%.

The public are noticing that. If you just look at the opinion data, people don't seem to be giving Biden enough credit for the good things in the economy because they're so focused on things like the price of gas, or the price of milk, or the price of eggs. There's a new opinion pullout today from Gallup showing that Biden's ratings on the economy are down at record lows. It's a very tough situation for the White House and they do need to see that inflation rate at least ticking in the right direction by the middle of the year.

In my mixed scenario, what you get is strong growth and maybe the inflation rate stays more or less or only ticks down a bit. That leaves the administration in a bind in that they're pretty much where they are now. They're trying to point to all the good things, but some people play in the media, maybe the media is partly responsible for focusing too much on the negative. I've argued that in the past myself.

I think the inflation rate does get there is too much relative coverage on that to the exclusion of everything else because it complicated picture you need to take into account with a lot of positive aspects. Anyway, whatever it is, that's going to be a problem for the administration if the inflation rate's still going up or it's still at 6%, 7% going into November. Then, my disastrous scenario, which has got nothing to do with the Biden Administration basically is the federal reserve has now stepped in and he's raising interest rates to try and slow down the economy and reduce inflation.

That's a very tricky thing they're trying to pull off there. In the past, there's often higher interest rates and Federal Reserve tightening policy has often led to a financial crash or stock market crash in a recession. There's always a possibility of that. Not putting a great high probability on it. If it happens, it probably won't happen until after the election takes a year or two often for these tightenings to feed through into recessions. It is a danger because we've seen such a huge run-up in the stock market, and a huge run-up in financial assets.

When you see stock crises at the levels they are now, there's always a possibility of a crash. That's my third scenario. Now, Biden would probably get blamed for that too. The way people look at things, even though it absolutely nothing to do with him. He's suffering from the Harry Truman saying, of course, that the book stops here. When things are going well in the economy, presidents tend to benefit, even if they don't have that much to do with it. When the public sees things going badly in the economy, they tend to blame the president, even if the president isn't responsible. That's just how the political system works.

Brian: Listeners, your questions or stories welcome here about the good economy, bad economy, the bad economy, good economy, that we're in right now and economic and political prospects around that for 2022 for John Cassidy from the New Yorker whose latest article is Three Economic Scenarios for an Election Year, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Tell your own economic story and how you think it fits into this picture economically or politically for the country or ask a question, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Or you can tweet your 280 character story or your question @BrianLehrer.

John, we've had low inflation and low growth for so many years around 2% or so of each per year. More or less since the great recession of 2008, 2009. Now, we have three times the inflation and three times the growth, but they still sort of match. We had 2% of each for many years. Now, we have 6% of each. Is it good, bad, or neutral to have inflation and growth numbers be similar to each other?

John: Yes, that's a good question. I haven't actually heard that put before. High inflation and high growth is not a bad scenario as long as inflation, doesn't keep going up. We could do with a period of moderate inflation. For one thing, it helps to inflate away the national debt that you were talking about because the national debt is denominating in nominal terms. The inflation is higher. Inflation is growing up 5%. That basically takes 5% off the national debt every year.

That's actually what happened after the Second World War, we had higher inflation and that helped to inflate away a lot of the debt that had been taken on after the Second World War.

Brian: Wait. Inflation can be good for the national debt?

John: Oh, yes, because national debt-- it's just like if you have a mortgage, you think you take out a $200,000 mortgage and you're earning $50,000 a year and then there's inflation so your wages go up to $60,000, $70,000 or whatever, that mortgage you've taken out is still only $100,000 because it's stuck in nominal terms.

Brian: Which is why people say buying a house is a good hedge against inflation?

John: Yes, exactly, exactly. It's the same with the national debt. People don't really focus on this, but there is an upside to a higher rate of inflation in terms of inflating away some of the national debt. That's a good thing. If you said to me, should we have an economy with 4% inflation and 4% growth versus 2% inflation and 2% growth? There's absolutely no comparison. 4% inflation, 4% growth will be fabulous because 4% growth, you are really getting a lot of wage growth there as well.

It's just the difficulty is, and if the economy starts to overheat and you get a wage inflation spiral, the inflation keeps going up and growth doesn't. That's the danger the Federal Reserve is trying to head off that inflation 6% this year. People start to demand higher wages, which they should to offset their inflation, you can get a wage-price spiral, which feeds on itself. I don't actually think that's a big danger at the moment. There's not much evidence of wages accelerating in that way.

They have gone up, but they're still below inflation, which is, again, another political problem because it means your real wages are actually going down. That's why moderate inflation is good, but rising inflation, escalating inflation is bad.

Brian: Your article does note that while low-wage Americans saw their wages rise faster than inflation, middle-class Americans did not or the other way to look at it is middle-class Americans lost ground compared to inflation, but low-wage Americans who needed the most help saw some gains during the pandemic. Can you say more specifically who the winners and losers are on that?

John: Yes. If you look at, for example, workers in hospitality and leisure who historically have been very poorly paid, their wages are less than $15, now we're going into the pandemic less than $15 and had been stuck for decades, the whole problem of wage stagnation at the bottom of the distribution, which I've written about for decades and I'm sure you've had people on talking about for decades. That seemed to be a very intractable problem.

Suddenly in the pandemic, where labor's very scarce and employers have to basically increase wages to attract anybody to work in these jobs, especially since the jobs are dangerous because they were first face-to-face in the pandemic, they've had to pay higher wages.

You see that just going around town and asking people how much they're being paid, whatever but you also see it in the aggregate figures of hourly wages for those workers are up between 15% and 20% over the last couple of years. Even with 7% inflation, you're talking about 5% to 10% real wage gain. That's great. They've done well out of the pandemic, they deserved it, and we've been waiting for that. We've needed that boost for decades. The average person on the other hand, who gets paid the average wages, $50,000 $60,000 a year, they have lost out a bit.

Some data came out last week, what's called the employment cost index, which is a very broad measure of wage growth, and on the wages compound of that is running, I think, at 4.5% last year, inflation ran at 7%, that means if you take 7 minus 4.5 inflation-adjusted what we call real wages and we're down 1.5%. It's not a big hit, but we'd actually seen in the years coming up to before the inflation spike, we'd seen real wages down there go up throughout the distribution for the first time in a long time. We want to get back to that.

That's another argument for bringing down inflation and that we need to bring down inflation to below wage growth again so that people's real wages go up.

Brian: We'll continue in a minute with John Cassidy who writes about economics and politics for the New Yorker. His latest article called Three Economic Scenarios for an Election Year, one good, one mixed one, politically disastrous as well as economically bad, but politically disastrous for the Democrats. We'll start to take some of your calls. Roger in Saddle River, who's a builder, who has an inflation report from the front lines. We see you, you'll be first, and some of the others of you.

I'm going to ask John why he says raising interest rates in the face of a weakening economy, which the Fed might be looking at would be a grave policy error, and we'll continue with more than that too. Stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. [music] Brian Lehrer on WNYC with John Cassidy from the New Yorker on the good economy, bad economy, bad economy, good economy. Roger in Saddle River, you're on WNYC. Hi, Roger.

Roger: Hey, good morning. Really briefly, guys. A builder here for about 20 years, never seen a situation like this. Some of my materials are up 30% and 40%. My subcontractors, electricians, plumbers, same thing. The other problem is we can't even get some of these materials, stock [inaudible 00:23:32]. My guys are telling me 18 weeks for a stock window. Engineered lumber that I need to complete a project, no time delivery from Boise Cascade. I ask what's going on, they say it's trucking, it's labor, it's logistics.

Another thing, two of my guys, one guy, 28 years old, another 42 years old. One has a heart attack after there his second vax, the other has a stroke. I'm missing labor. I can't find people to work. Again, 20 years, never seen a thing like this before.

Brian: Roger, thank you very much. I'll take your stories about prices on face value, but not your medical disinformation, trying to lay somebody's heart attack at the feet of vaccination and say imply therefore that vaccination is more dangerous than not getting vaccinated, which it is not, but how about on the inflation numbers in the construction industry? I think what Roger says is a pretty common story, John, right?

John: It is, yes. If you go to Home Depot, Lowe's, I do a bit of home reno myself, there's no doubt that what he says is true. The cost of lumber has gone up 20%, 30%, 40% over the last year or so. Again, it's a bit like food. It's hard to explain exactly why the prices are so much higher than they were. If you speak to people in industry about it, they say exactly what Roger said and that they're having logistical problems, what economists call the supply chain.

Now, a lot of it in terms of lumber, some of it's imported, some of it's made in the US. Trucking is a huge issue getting things from A to B. The container ports are all clogged up. Even when you unload things from the dock, it's difficult to get enough trucks in there, enough truckers at the moment to unload, load, get it around the country. The Biden Administration has had this Supply Chain Task Force at work for 12 months trying to resolve some of these issues, but what we've found is it's just a very intractable issue.

The supply chain, which as I say is this term which basically just means the economy that makes stuff is a lot more vulnerable than we realized before the pandemic. It's been hit with this big shock and it's just taken a heck of a lot longer than anybody expected to get everything back in gear. You can see when you see people like Roger or people going to a Home Depot, you see what's underlying the polling data there.

Brian: What makes all of that price-spiking go away?

John: Well, although the way the economy is supposed to work is that if prices go up and there's not a good reason for it, other people come in and supply goods more cheaply. Home Depot and Lowe's will be looking around for alternative suppliers of lumber if their stock lumber has suddenly gone up 50% and they've got every contractor in the UL Carrier shouting at them coming in saying, "We can't find it. It's too expensive. Can you do anything about it?" Their buyers will be looking around the country and looking around the world to try and import cheaper lumber.

The trouble they're having, as he said, they're having trouble locating these supplies and getting them here. You see exactly the same thing in the auto industry, which is why the price of cars and used cars has gone up. Therewith, t's a specific thing to do with semiconductors, but what we've found, and a lot of it is to do with this global supply chain. The economy is just a lot more vulnerable because of the way it's been restructured over the last 20 or 30 years than we realized going into the pandemic.

Brian: By the way, this segment is about inflation, not medicine, but I just get infuriated with the occasional bits of vaccine disinformation, the people try to drop in, and maybe it was just an honest misimpression on that caller's part, or maybe it was more nefarious than that, but it is just so destructive. My former colleague, Kurt Andersen, he's might have even been in the New Yorker, I'm not sure where he wrote it, John. Said that the disinformation movement has descended to the point of human sacrifice.

If you think about it, how many more people have died than would have died in the pandemic because people didn't believe in getting vaccinated because they were sold the bill of goods. You talk about a wartime economy to bring it back to the economy, that was a really interesting analogy you gave with inflation after World War II serving a positive purpose to some degree because of all the money that the government have had to spend in a wartime economy to fight the emergency of World War II.

Now, we've been borrowing and spending a lot of money to fight the emergency of the pandemic. John, do you happen to know how many Americans died in World War II?

John: I don't have that figure on the top of my head, I'm afraid, Brian. No.

Brian: It's around 400,000 Americans. Do you know how many Americans have died in the pandemic to date?

John: What's it up to now? About--

Brian: Yes, more than double the number of Americans who died in World War II. Just saying.

John: The human costs, obviously, I'm focusing on the financial and economic costs here, but obviously, the human costs of the pandemic have been incalculable really, but I think one point, which I would-- Just going back to the economy, the economic costs could have been a lot higher than they have been. We all love to beat up on politicians, but the fact is that the politicians, even in both parts, I'm going to even give the Republicans a bit of credit here, in reacting to the pandemic, did open the sloots gates and produced these massive emergency relief packages for a couple of years, which prevented what could have been a catastrophe. If you go back to March 2020, people have forgotten what it was like a couple of years ago. People were talking about a return to the great depression. We'd never seen huge increases in unemployment, huge drops in demand that we saw at the start of the pandemic when the lock-ups were introduced.

The policymakers, obviously because they were frightened and because the public were demanding it, did step in and produce these stimulus packages, emergency relief packages, whatever you want to call them, and they've cost a lot of money, but they did the job.

They kept people going during the pandemic. They stopped a financial catastrophe. The financial system was on the edge. It was just like, looked like 2008 again. We spent a lot of money and it worked. Now, one of the problems nobody foresaw that it would end up with inflation that we've got now, and I understand people are frustrated about it and it is frustrating. Obviously too, if you go and see the price of gas, or milk, or whatever, doubling, we're going up 30%, 40%. We've got to keep things in perspective.

If the variants do go away and some economic normalcy is restored, I think people will look back on the pandemic as an economic success story. In that, we managed to avert the economic equivalent of the human catastrophe that we've seen. I think the policymakers need to be given some credit for that and Biden Administration deserves credit for it, and it's not getting it, but that's just the world we live in.

Brian: By the way, thanks to listener, Josh, who tweeted out the Kurt Andersen article I was referring to. It is from The Atlantic. I can say that with a New Yorker correspondent in the room, can I?

John: Of course, you can, yes.

Brian The Kurt Andersen piece on vaccine disinformation as human sacrifice is in The Atlantic. Brian in the Bronx are on WNYC with John Cassidy from the New Yorker.

Brian from the Bronx: Hi, thanks. I wanted to talk about housing. This is not so much a pandemic thing, but they call them investors, but they're really hedge funds that are going in and into purchasing housing. Housing is like air. It's not an option. Is there ever going to be a solution to this? We can't treat housing as a way of making profit forever, can we?

Brian: It's a great question. When we talk about the consumer price index, John, inflation generally, am I right that generally does not include the price of housing and does not include the cost of a college education? Two things which have been skyrocketing for a generation or more. Even as we say inflation is low.

John: It's a bit complicated. It certainly doesn't include college education. On the housing side, it doesn't include the cost of new housing, if you were to buy one, but it does include a rental component. It's actually quite a big component of the CPI. Actually, that's one of the reasons, the caller's right, rents have been going up a lot as well during the pandemic. That's one of the reasons inflation has been going up. It's quite a large component of the increase.

Brian: We're running out of time. Let me ask you one final question. This, again, pertains to headline news that we're hearing every day and trying to put it in context with you. The Fed is getting ready to raise interest rates to tamp down inflation, but that also weakens growth in the job market. You suggest that raising interest rates in the face of a weakening economy which they would create would be a grave policy error, one the US has made before. In our last minute or two, what's one of those scenarios from the past that we should learn from for today?

John: The Federal Reserve has raised rates lots of times in the past to head off inflation. The most dramatic example was in 1980, '79, '80, '81, when Paul Volcker raised interest rates to 15% to reduce inflation. If you remember, there were demonstrations in outside the Federal Reserve in Washington. The farmers famously came and blocked off constitution avenue with their tractors. I remember interviewing Paul Volcker about that once. I don't think we're going to get to 15% interest rates here, or 15% inflation, or anything like that.

As you said, we've had very low-interest rates for a long time, and even raising rate that basically is zero now. Looks like the Fed's going to raise them to maybe 1% this year and 2% next year. Although, there is a possibility they could go faster. That's a very delicate operation. What they're basically trying to do is just slow the economy down enough to reduce inflation without causing a recession. That's a really tough balancing act. It may be that they make an error or that they decide that inflation is even more of a problem they thought it was, and they're willing to take a recession.

Although, they would never admit it publicly. I think that would be an error. Given where we are, given the pandemic, I think they should be very cautious for at least-- They're going to raise interest rates, there's no question about it, but I don't think they should get even more hawkish to fight off inflation. Let's see how things look in six months or eight months when-- Hopefully, the pandemic will live within behind us, or in such a manageable shape that it won't be distorting the economy to such an extent.

Then, we can see where things are. We don't want to kill the economy now when we've just had a year of good growth, and we've actually got through the recession. Sorry, got through the pandemic in economic terms reasonably well.

Brian: John Cassidy who writes about economics and politics for the New Yorker in print and at newyorker.com, and is author of the books How Markets Fail and Dot.con, and he's now out with the New Yorker economic analysis piece called Three Economic Scenarios for an Election Year. I could tell from the phone calls and the tweets, our listeners so appreciate it, John. Thank you very much.

John: Thank you, Brian. I enjoyed it.

 

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