Is This Economy as Awful as Voters Think? We Ask Our Expert.

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: — From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow-Eff. This is The Daily. The election issue people are most concerned about is the economy. And President Trump knows it. [00:00:17] Speaker 2: — We have the single greatest moment in the history of our country in terms of the economy. [00:00:24] Speaker 1: — As the midterms approach, Trump has been trying to persuade voters that they're wrong to be so frustrated about the cost of living. [00:00:31] Speaker 2: — We're the hottest country anywhere in the world — [00:00:33] Speaker 1: — And saying that, instead of criticizing him, they should be grateful. [00:00:38] Speaker 2: — We brought our pricing way down. Oil is right now much cheaper — — We have almost no inflation, by the way, and we've taken in trillions and trillions of dollars. — We're richer now. We're making more money there than we ever — and we have more jobs than ever before, remember, though. [00:00:55] Speaker 1: — Today, my colleague, chief economics correspondent Ben Castleman, explains what the latest economic data actually says, and why so few voters are buying Trump's story. It's Wednesday, October 21st. [00:01:19] Speaker 3: — Sorry, Natalie. — Ben, I brought you pastries. — Uh, incredible. — Yeah. — Do you have a whole new set up here? — This is the deal. I bring you pastries. You explain the state of economy to me. [00:01:29] Ben: — This is what we do. — Uh, nothing sounds better on mic than people eating pastry. [00:01:34] Speaker 1: — A hundred — and nothing sounds better on mic than you explaining the economy. Yes. [00:01:38] Ben: — While eating pastry. — Yeah. [00:01:40] Speaker 1: — Let's do it. Ben, it is wonderful to have you back. [00:01:44] Ben: — Thanks for having me. — OK. [00:01:46] Speaker 1: So we know, of course, that people always weigh the economy very heavily when they go to the polls. This year is no exception. We just got this new batch of economic reports that I understand are our last big temperature check before the midterms. So we want you to help us decode this moment. What is the state of the economy heading into the midterms? [00:02:09] Ben: — So, as you alluded to, right, we just got this big batch of data, this kind of our last snapshot of the state of the economy. — And we got this sort of whole list of reports. We got retail sales data, we got claims for unemployment insurance, we got industrial production, and we got a boatload of data about inflation. [00:02:32] Speaker 3: — OK. So we're data rich right now. [00:02:34] Ben: — We are data rich. And the story that it tells is nuanced, but the sort of basic takeaway is that there are a lot of real sources of strength in the economy right now. There's a lot that Republicans on the trail right now can point to and say it's going pretty well. But there's this big, glaring thing that is wrong, and that is affordability. And that, of course, is the issue that matters most to a lot of voters, and it's kind of this big, blaring klaxon that is going off in the economy right now. [00:03:13] Speaker 1: — And how do you think about affordability when you look at this data? How do you measure it as this big, flashing warning sign? [00:03:22] Ben: — So there are really three ways of thinking about affordability here. There's inflation, the price of goods and services. — Right. — There's interest rates, the cost of borrowing, the cost of money. — Right. — And then there's income, wages, how much workers and families actually have coming in every month. When you put all three of those together, that gives us a picture of what's happening to the cost of living, to affordability for the typical American family. [00:03:55] Speaker 1: — All right, I think it makes sense to take those three factors kind of one at a time, starting with the first one, which I sense is the biggest and most obvious electoral issue: inflation. Where do we stand right now? [00:04:09] Ben: — Well, so let's go back just a little bit. — We all remember the huge spike in inflation that we got in 2021, 2022. It was a huge reason that the Democrats lost in 2024. It was a huge part of President Trump's promise on the campaign trail, which was that he was going to get inflation under control. [00:04:35] Speaker 1: — Just remind us how bad it was, because while I remember it, I also kind of tried to block it out. [00:04:40] Ben: — So inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, right, hit 9% in 2022. — Crazy. — It was the highest in 40 years. — Wild. — But it had made some real progress. — You know, by the time President Trump took office, it was down to around 3%. Most economists expected that progress to continue and to kind of get back towards what we think of as normal, which is like 2%. Instead, Trump comes in, what's the first thing he does? He imposes tariffs. — Yeah. — Tariffs are taxes on imported goods. And so that adds to costs. And we see inflation, progress kind of stalls out at around that 3% level. It doesn't get a ton worse, but it doesn't really get better either. And then we get into this year and we sort of have this hope that, hey, tariffs are sort of maybe mostly behind us. And, you know, maybe we can get back to making progress on inflation. And instead, President Trump makes the decision to go to war with Iran. And all of a sudden, we see oil prices spike as the Strait of Hormuz gets shut down, as oil supplies around the world get constricted. And all of a sudden, Americans are paying $4, $4.50 at the gas pump. — Mm-hmm. — All of a sudden, diesel prices are hitting records. [00:06:09] Speaker 1: — And just talk about how the rise in oil prices affects prices across the board. It's pretty clear how it affects gas prices at the pump, right? But my understanding is that this reaches far into many corners of the economy. [00:06:25] Ben: — Yeah, I mean, right. So there's the obvious one, which is gas prices. Also, other energy prices, right, for any listeners who heat their homes with heating oil, those prices are up 74% from a year ago. — Yikes. — We also see it in sort of energy-intensive sectors like airlines, right? Airfares are way up because, of course, that's a huge cost for airlines. But then it filters through everything else, right? Diesel is what moves products around the world and around the country in trucks. It's what powers tractors and combines that eventually lead to our food supply. And so what starts as just an energy shock can filter through to everything else in the economy. So that inflation in September — this is the data that we got last week — hits 3.7%. That's not 9%, right? It's not as bad as it was back then. But instead of making the progress that President Trump promised repeatedly on the campaign trail, we're actually going the opposite direction. The problem is getting worse. — Right. — And then that leads directly into the second big issue here, which is interest rates, the cost of borrowing. [00:07:38] Speaker 1: — And just, again, remind us how these are connected, how one feeds into the other. [00:07:42] Ben: — So the Federal Reserve is responsible for managing inflation. The main tool that they use for that is interest rates. When inflation is a problem, they raise interest rates to try to slow down the economy, take it off the boil. When inflation eases, they tend to cut interest rates, allow the economy to grow a little bit faster. And it's similar here to the story that we just told about inflation. Inflation had started to come down, and so the Fed started to ease off the brake pedal. They started to cut interest rates. They started to make it a little bit easier for consumers and businesses to borrow money. And then inflation picks up again, and the Fed has to stop. First, they stop cutting interest rates. And then in September, they raised interest rates for the first time in three years. And that filters through to, again, all of us who have to borrow money. If you've got to put things on a credit card and carry a credit card balance, if you want to buy a car, if you want to borrow to put a machine in your factory, right? All of this is easier if you have lower interest rates. And critically, this shows up in housing. [00:09:01] Speaker 1: Let's talk about that. What is the relationship between these high interest rates and what we are seeing in the housing market, which seem to be really very high mortgage rates? [00:09:12] Ben: So mortgage rates are really driven by the bond market, which we did a whole episode about. We did. Not too long ago. The relationship between the bond market and the Fed is complicated. But the shortest version is the same, right, which is that when inflation is rising, that tends to push up interest rates. It pushes up borrowing costs. And we've seen mortgage rates, which had been at these incredibly low levels, right, below 3% for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage back in the pandemic period, spike up to 6% and 7%. And they had finally, finally started to seem like they were turning around early this year. Yes. And then, boom, inflation takes off again, interest rates rise again, and now you're looking at somewhere around 7.5% on a 30-year mortgage. And so for all of these people who have been waiting to buy homes, saving up for that down payment, thinking that finally when rates come down, I'll be able to jump into the housing market and finally buy that home years later than I had hoped to, right, they saw this moment of opportunity, and now that has been sort of slammed shut in their face. Just crushing, yeah. There's a whole generation of people, I think, who believe that they will never be able to buy homes, and there are a lot of reasons for that, but interest rates are clearly a huge part of it. [00:10:29] Speaker 1: Okay, let's turn to the third factor that you flagged at the top as being crucial to the affordability picture, which is wages, people's pay, the thing that basically determines how well or not anyone is able to handle these rising costs. [00:10:44] Ben: Yeah, I mean, I think when we talk about affordability, right, we tend to focus on the price side of the equation, but incomes, wages matter every bit as much, right? If your wages are rising, you may not like rising prices, but you can manage it on some level. And if you go back to that sort of post-pandemic period, we saw, you know, this period of really rapidly rising prices, but we also saw rapidly rising wages. We're in a very different environment now, where wage growth has slowed significantly. It slowed from around 4% even a year ago to 3% today. That's not terrible on its own. But if you combine that slowing wage growth from 4% down to 3% at the same moment just about that inflation has done almost the opposite, right? Gone from around 3% to around 4%, now we have this situation where the value, the real value of people's paychecks is falling. By some measures, wages adjusted for inflation haven't grown at all since President Trump returned to office. [00:11:51] Speaker 1: Okay, so that picture taken together sounded quite bad. You did say there were strengths in the economy. [00:12:00] Ben: Yeah, there are real strengths in the economy. The challenge, I think, especially for Republicans, is that the weaknesses are really obvious and clear. They're easy to put on a campaign sign. They're easy for voters to understand and to feel. And the strengths are much more complicated. They're nuanced. They carry caveats in a way that doesn't make for great ad copy. [00:12:31] Speaker 1: We'll be right back. So, Ben, on to the good news. What are the main strengths of this economy that we're in right now? [00:12:57] Ben: Well, let's start with businesses. Business investment has been really strong. Business profits have been really strong. As a result of that, the stock market has been really strong, right? At record highs. At record after record after record. So, businesses are doing well. They're spending on new factories and equipment to put in those factories. We're seeing a lot of new business formation, new businesses coming along. But a lot of that spending is tied to AI. The build out in data centers and the power plants that power them. And this is where, when I said that the good news was all a little bit complicated, this is where this shows up. And you started to allude to this. [00:13:48] Speaker 1: But how should we feel about the investment being so heavily weighted towards AI? There's obviously been some worry about whether this AI boom potentially would turn into a bubble. [00:14:03] Ben: Right. I mean, look, the AI conversation is big and complicated. And obviously, there are people who are worried about it in all sorts of different dimensions, including whether it's going to kill all of us. Sure. But thinking about it from the sort of economic risk standpoint, it is this vulnerability where, to the extent that we kind of have this one thing that is driving everything in the economy, there's this obvious concern of what happens if the music stops. And we've seen some sort of subtle signs of that recently, where we've seen some of these data center companies that have kind of faltered a bit. And, you know, I don't think that anybody yet is predicting a bursting of the AI bubble. But there is obviously this concern that if there's even a bit of a loss of enthusiasm, that could cause a pullback that would have all these ripple effects, that you would see fewer data centers getting built and fewer electricians getting employed to build them, that you would see a pullback in investment, which leads to a fall in the stock market, and that potentially you could end up in a situation where the loss of enthusiasm for AI actually paves the way for a recession. [00:15:20] Speaker 1: Okay, we're getting dark again. Let's get back to the strengths. [00:15:23] Ben: I warned you that the strengths were complicated. You did. Let me give you another complicated one, the labor market. The unemployment rate is low. Right. It was 4.2% in September. It's been at or under 4.5% for five straight years now. That's a record. That's a record. Longest ever it surpassed a period in the 1960s, right? Which, again, we think of as this period of real economic strength. [00:15:50] Speaker 1: Yeah. Like, this is a legitimately good sign that says something very real about the underlying strength of the job market right now. Yeah, that's right. [00:16:00] Ben: And yet, and yet it doesn't feel like this big, robust labor market. And the reason for that is that it's solid, but it's kind of stagnant. You know, I think we've talked before about this low-hire, low-fire labor market. [00:16:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, people say this is a good time to have a job, but a bad time to be looking for one. They do say that, and I hate it. Okay. Why do you hate it? [00:16:26] Ben: So, listen, one part of that is true. If you are unemployed right now, it is a bad time to be looking for a job. That's absolutely true. But it's not necessarily true that it's a great time to have a job. I mean, listen, you would obviously rather have a job than not have a job. It is better to be employed than unemployed, no question. Amen. But think about how you, in your career, have gone about moving up, getting wage increases, right? Raising your salary. A lot of that is moving between jobs. Early in your career, you're trying to figure out what it is you want to do with your life. Later on, maybe you go and you take another great opportunity, or you threaten to take another opportunity in order to get your boss to give you a raise. In a moment of low hire, low fire, low turnover, there's less of that happening. And so, you know, we talked earlier about low wage growth. And one reason for that is that people aren't moving around between jobs. They're not getting those raises that come with it. And that means that it is not a labor market that is delivering consistent, strong gains for workers. And that, at the end of the day, is what people are really looking for. [00:17:42] Speaker 1: OK. So you have explained all the complexity in the labor market. What else should we be looking at as a complicated strength? [00:17:52] Ben: So if you listen to President Trump and Republicans out on the campaign trail, right, they talk a lot about strength in spending, in consumer spending. And they're right. We just, again, last week, got retail sales data that showed that sales were up more than 6 percent from a year ago, faster than expected. And it was just the latest piece of evidence that consumer spending has remained solid. [00:18:16] Speaker 1: Can you just help me understand this, Ben? Because it just, it doesn't on its face make sense, actually, that consumer spending would be so strong, even though, as you already told us, prices have continued to go up. [00:18:33] Ben: You are not the only one who is confused by this. I feel like I have been talking to economists for years now where they keep saying, well, the consumer's got to crack eventually, and the consumer keeps not cracking. So, to some extent, I think that there is a real mystery here, and we don't fully know. But I would point to two things. The first is what we were just talking about, the labor market. Yes, it's a somewhat stagnant labor market. Yes, it's not delivering great wage growth to people. But the fact that people do still have jobs means that most people are able to keep spending. We may be nervous about where things are going, but we don't have to pull back drastically because we do still have those jobs. And then there's this other factor, which is the stock market. You know, you talked about how it's hitting records. Well, for people who own stock, which is most people, a majority of Americans, either on their own or in their 401k plans, own stock. But especially for the wealthiest who own most of the value of the stock market, they have seen their portfolios grow dramatically. And that has given people, especially, again, the rich, the flexibility to keep spending, the confidence to keep spending. [00:20:07] Speaker 1: Ben, you know, you've been describing this sort of divide between the haves and the have-nots and how they spend. There's another gap that I've kind of been thinking about just broadly as we think about the economy and how people experience it, which is a generational gap. I mean, I think of all of the older folks who have already bought homes, right? So they're not spending on these very expensive mortgages. They've built up their savings. Their kids are grown. They're not paying for child care and all of the things that cost so much in this economy. Do you see a split in generations playing out when people talk about how they feel these days? [00:20:51] Ben: Yeah, I mean, I think that this is an economy that has so many splits in it, where one group is doing well and another group is struggling. And I do think that this sort of generational divide is one of the starkest right now. You know, you have a baby boom generation that is retiring with huge amounts in the aggregate of wealth in their homes, which, again, as you say, in many cases, is they've paid them off completely or at the very least they locked in those low mortgage rates. They have wealth in their portfolios, which have done very well. They have savings that are earning a higher interest rate. They have Social Security, which is indexed to inflation and therefore has done a better job of keeping up than many people's wages. Right. I don't want to overstate this, right? There are plenty of older Americans who are struggling right now. There are plenty of seniors we may hear from some of them after this who are having a very difficult time. But in the aggregate, you have an older set of voters who are doing, on average, relatively well, a younger set who are really struggling. But I think that that conversation can sometimes miss something important, which is that the older voters are the parents of the younger voters. And so, you know, I talk to plenty of older voters who will say this directly. You know, I'm doing okay, but I'm worried about my children. I'm worried about my grandchildren. And that affects their thinking about the economy as well. [00:22:22] Speaker 1: What you're getting at is that the thing that people really worry about when they think about their children, for example, that may not show up in any one metric that you can look at that comes out in a report. But that really matters to people, their perception of how this economy feels to them. We talked a lot about this in 2024, about how the Biden administration was going out and telling people that the economy was great and they just didn't agree and people really voted on that and they voted for President Trump. It sort of feels like something similar is happening. [00:23:00] Ben: So the parallels are kind of amazing, actually, and they come up all the time in my conversations with economists, which is that if you go back to the Biden administration, their big challenge, right, is that they're trying to tell everybody, you know, yes, inflation is high, but the economy is actually pretty good. And voters absolutely did not buy it. And, you know, this sometimes gets talked about in like, you know, the vibes were off. I think the reality was off in a lot of ways. There was a period there where, again, people's wages were not keeping up with inflation and naturally people were not happy about that. Well, now we're in this period two years later with a president who literally ran and won on a promise to address inflation, affordability, cost of living. And he is again trying to tell everybody the economy is good. We've just got a problem with inflation, with gas prices. And again, voters are not buying it. And again, voters are to some extent right that there are a lot of very real issues with cost of living. And yes, there may be other things in the economy that are pretty decent. But at the end of the day, what matters more to you than how far your paycheck goes and your ability to pay your rent and buy a house and pay the mortgage. [00:24:23] Speaker 1: Let me ask you a question that may seem a little naive, which is how much does President Trump and do the Republicans actually deserve the blame for where we are right now in our economy? Because I have heard you, Ben, say many times that no politician can really control the economy. And politicians overestimate their influence on the economic health of the country. And on the other hand, you have pointed to some very real policy decisions that have been made by President Trump that have affected all of this. [00:24:57] Ben: So look, the economy is complicated. Presidents have limited control over it. You're standing by that. I am standing by that. And look, a lot of the issues that President Trump is dealing with, right? I mean, the inflation problem obviously predates him. The low hire, low fire labor market predates him, right? That not all of that can be laid at his feet or frankly, probably at the feet of any president. But as you said, he has adopted some very specific policies, right? His signature policies that very directly raised prices for consumers, tariffs, and then the war with Iran. And we can debate the merits of those. We can debate the tradeoffs and whether they could be worth it. But there's no question that those, and especially the war with Iran, drove up prices at a time when Americans are laser focused on the cost of living. [00:25:59] Speaker 1: Okay, beyond these issues of day-to-day affordability, which are very urgent and real for most people, do you have the sense that there are broader questions being asked about the overall stability of the economy? Because I'm just remembering that the last time that we had you on the show, it was to talk about the bond market and specifically these concerns that the U.S. just has too much debt and is now spending a lot paying interest on that debt. [00:26:27] Ben: So, yeah, I mean, I think that this is in some ways the other big thing that is different in the economy now than it was certainly during Trump's first term in office, which is that higher interest rates, right, have all these impacts on consumers and households that we've been talking about. But they also have this big impact on the government itself, right? These are borrowing costs, what it costs for the government to borrow money and to service that debt. We have huge deficits, and now we have much higher interest rates, and that means that the federal government is now spending a trillion dollars a year just on interest on the debt. Unbelievable, unbelievable. And that has a real prospect of limiting the options for the future. It could limit how we respond to the threat of AI. It could limit the ability of the government to deal with some of these longer-running affordability issues like health care and child care. It could limit in some future Republican administration the ability to pass further tax cuts. It could really limit the ability of the federal government to address some of these issues that we've been talking about here. [00:27:40] Speaker 1: So let me just put this to you. So if people are going to go vote on the economy, on this issue, hoping for change in these midterms, and if the polls are right that a blue wave is coming, would that do anything to change things, can it? [00:28:00] Ben: So look, if this blue wave is as large as some of the polls suggest, and Democrats take not just the House but also the Senate, right, that gives them a lot of power to check a lot of what President Trump has been doing. And, you know, I don't want to predict exactly what policies they would put in place. I don't want to predict exactly where they would succeed and fail in stopping him. But I certainly don't want to discount the possibility that they could do things that would have a real effect on the economy and on some of these issues that we've been talking about. That said, a lot of the things that we've been talking about here reflect longstanding issues that it's pretty hard to imagine any Congress coming in and turning around in a couple of years. You know, it's hard for me to imagine that we're going to be sitting here in two years and talking about how homes are affordable again and childcare is affordable again and wages have risen so much that people aren't, you know, worried about cost of living anymore. These reflect longstanding structural issues that would be difficult to address in the best of circumstances and are going to be particularly difficult to address at a time when, because of these high interest rates, the federal government is constrained in what it can do. And so when we sat down here, I called the day that we saw last week as a snapshot of the economy. But it's not just a snapshot, right? It's a pretty enduring picture. And I think we have every reason to anticipate that a lot of the sort of core issues that underlie this malaise that so many voters tell us they're feeling, that that is going to endure well past this election. [00:29:49] Speaker 1: Well, Ben, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. [00:29:52] Ben: Thanks for the pastries. [00:29:58] Speaker 1: You can read more from Ben Castleman and all of our business reporters on the New York Times app. If you don't already have the app, we wanted to let you know that if you download it right now, you'll get access to all of our journalism free for one month. So give it a try. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, two weeks before midterm elections that are on track to become the most expensive ever, President Trump announced that he would shell out $100 million to boost Republicans, likely through a super PAC. That's on top of the $300 million he says his political machine has already spent to give Republicans a clear financial advantage over Democrats. The Democratic National Committee has been financially struggling, though help is on the way, thanks to Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York. Bloomberg announced today that he was giving roughly $80 million to Democrats. And in Yemen, the Houthis have besieged one of the country's largest cities, Thais, cutting off its access to food, water and fuel. Officials are now warning of a potential humanitarian catastrophe. The siege, which is now in its third week, is part of an escalating war between the Iranian-backed Houthis and the Yemeni government, which is supported by Saudi Arabia. On Tuesday, the British government said that it would send fighter jets to help the Saudis defend cities and critical infrastructure from Houthi missile and drone attacks. Today's episode was produced by Asta Chathurvedi and Jack Disidoro, with help from Rochelle Bonja. It was edited by Annie Minoff, with help from Lisa Chow. It contains music by Marion Lozano and Sophia Landman, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kittrelleff. See you tomorrow.