Trump is Singlehandedly Manifesting Stagflation.

Today we’re doing a very deep dive into the economy to discuss the differences between now and the crisis of the ‘70s and show how Trump might very well be singlehandedly pushing us into an entirely preventable new crisis of stagflation.

There’s a short version of this story and then the longer, more technical version. I’ll give you the quick take first but then we’ll have to slog through some of the technical terms and nuances to explain the short version.

In a nutshell, we’re entering a period of what I’ll call baby stagflation, but there’s very little correlation between today and our only real basis of comparison in the 1970s. But know this—this time around is completely avoidable and being driven singlehandedly by Donald Trump.

Before we go into detail, understand that in every economic cycle—hot or cold—at some point sentiment overtakes fundamentals. So the lesson here is that while this can be avoided at this moment in time with a reversal of certain executive actions, if left for too long there will come a point of no return where investors and consumers pull the “fuck this” lever and it leads to a death spiral.

So let’s talk about the present circumstances then we’ll dive into a bit of history to illustrate the differences.

The Phillips Curve

Conventional theory dictates that inflation and unemployment are inversely related, meaning when unemployment is high, prices are low because demand is down. You’re laid off, you have less money, you don’t buy as much and the market responds by lowering prices to encourage you to buy things again. Therefore, all things being equal, the opposite holds as well. So if there’s low unemployment, prices have a tendency to increase because people are making money and driving demand.

This relationship is known as the Phillips Curve. Most economists still believe in the relative value of this relationship in the short run, but longer run models have been challenged over the years because other factors—economists call them ‘externalities’—can disrupt this natural correlation. And there was no greater challenge to this theory than the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, which upended all convention.

Importantly, inflation and unemployment are features of the broader economy; there are other key ingredients that significantly impact the economy and contribute to both of them. Such as:

• The strength of the dollar relative to other currencies. How far does your money go?
• Tariff and trade policy, something we’re all getting a lesson in right now.
• Inputs such as raw materials, food, crude oil and housing that contribute to the inflation equation.
• Fiscal government policies like spending on infrastructure projects or tax policy.
• Monetary policies like the amount of money flowing through the economy or interest rates that can serve to spur savings (high rates) or investments (low rates).

Economists will mix these measurable inputs with sentiment data from consumers, manufacturers and businesses—what’s real with how people feel—to predict future activities.

So with that, let’s plug these into real life scenarios.

Inflation

We’ve identified the classic tension between unemployment and inflation that the Federal Reserve and the federal government are constantly trying to manage. The Biden team chose to focus narrowly on the historic low unemployment rate during his term and to be fair, it’s usually a solid thing to hang your hat on. Conventional wisdom dictates that incumbent presidents don’t lose when everyone has a job because people are reluctant to rock the boat. What they underestimated was the effect that inflation was having on household savings. Since we just lived through this, you know the details already.

I don’t want to get too hung up here because we’ve covered a lot of this ground in our critiques of Biden’s “bottom-up, middle-out” strategy and why it was destined to fail. The important takeaway is that the very real inflation we experienced wasn’t transitory; meaning once prices went up, they never came back down again. Did the rate of inflation cool off? Sure. But this chart from The St. Louis Fed illustrates the historical trend of personal savings.

What it shows is that relative to household income, we wound up with a serious gap that resulted in almost a complete liquidation of any household savings accrued from pandemic relief measures and an increase in household debt. The only periods where household savings were this low were prior to the financial crisis and the dot-com bubble. Even during the stretch of stagflation in the ‘70s, personal savings was higher than it is today. This is the amount of money after taxes that people have to spend on things like cars, houses, vacations, etc.

This is why younger generations aren’t buying homes like their parents and grandparents did. It’s not just about interest rates. It’s about wages versus the cost of living. One simply isn’t keeping up with the other.

Ultimately what mattered to voters in 2024 wasn’t that we reduced inflation more than peer nations or even that people had jobs. It was that they couldn’t cover their expenses without going into debt.

Let’s go through the three big parts of inflation to set our baseline, then talk about how Trump is influencing them in ways that make little to no sense.

Housing

Housing prices remain elevated for a couple of reasons. One is that we don’t have enough housing. And because raw materials are so high, new housing starts have been low. It’s riskier and more expensive to build. Another factor is interest rates; when interest rates are high, homeowners aren’t incentivized to sell if they have a mortgage locked in at a lower rate. And fewer new homebuyers are willing to take on a high interest rate mortgage, so the whole market just sort of stagnates.

It’s impossible to overstate the impact of housing on the economy because for most families, home equity is literally their only source of wealth. So if you have all your wealth tied up in an asset that you can’t move, it’s paper wealth that doesn’t translate to positive sentiment or confidence. Again, according to the St. Louis Fed, new privately owned housing starts were on a very long road to recovery after things bottomed out in ‘09. Take the pandemic out of the mix for obvious reasons and the recovery slumped again during the height of the inflation spike in 2022.

Not to give him any grace, but Trump’s starting point with housing wasn’t great.

Energy

The price of oil is one of the largest contributors to inflation. This is one of the most misunderstood and mischaracterized inputs because there are several forces at play here and they have changed significantly over time. The natural forces are supply and demand and the value of the dollar. Of course, these can be manipulated and, in fact, often are. But for the sake of argument, strong demand usually means higher prices when there’s a balance of supply. And vice versa. But because oil is priced in dollars, it’s also dependent upon its relative strength. This part has changed more dramatically over time, which we’ll cover in the ‘70s crisis.

But again, we’re just talking about fundamentals. The bottom line is that oil prices have been relatively constrained; not too high, not too low. A story for another day is how much influence the big banks and commodity traders have here. In terms of Trump’s scorecard, this should have been a strength for him coming in. OPEC is opening up supply, we’re already producing the most oil and gas of any nation in history and demand from China remains soft, which has been a drag on energy prices. And even though the dollar remains strong, because we’re a net exporter of oil it doesn’t matter as much as it used to when we had to import oil to meet domestic demand.

Food

Pick your poison as to how we got here. This is another thing The St. Louis Fed tracks and the increase in prices over time is relentless. For the most part, food tracks inflation. In many ways, it’s the most important component of it even if they exclude it from so-called “core inflation.” The only time prices didn’t flatten out during a recession was the pandemic and that’s because of the supply chain shocks. Even in prior recessions, prices stabilize, so typically food is in line with normal inflation expectations. But the rate of increase was much steeper in the stagflation era and it never really returned to the stable and moderate annual growth prior to that time.

Having said all that, the pandemic was the fastest rate of change we’ve ever seen, and there’s no sign of it slowing down. This was certainly Biden’s undoing but it’s also going to remain a huge problem for the Trump administration.

Matt Stoller did outstanding work during the inflation crisis under Biden to demonstrate how the food and grocery monopolies were price gouging above and beyond core inflation pressures. Then there’s the disruption in grain supply due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Increasing severity of weather events has led to decreasing crop yields. The dollar is strong so imports are high. Drought has affected protein prices, bird flu led to a spike in egg prices and on and on. Taken together and Trump walked into a toxic cocktail of food inflation.

Let’s recap before we talk about the labor market.

1. Trump came into office with a handful of inflationary predicaments.
2. Housing inventory is low, interest rates are high.

To fix the second part we would need to build a ton of new housing and the Fed would have to lower rates significantly. Neither of this is likely to happen. While the Fed has indicated it would consider two rate cuts this year, they typically cut by 25 basis points. And it will be a while. So as of right now, the federal funds rate is around 4.3% making the prime loan rate 7.5% and the 30 year mortgage rate is hovering around 7%. 50 basis points over two cuts extended through 2025 isn’t going to make a material difference at all.

And as far as inventory is concerned, the private real estate housing industry isn’t going to fill the gap right now for a few reasons. One is that Trump is placing tariffs on literally everything so raw materials are going to be too expensive. To combat this, Trump signed an executive order to “free up our forests” and cut down more trees.

You can’t make this up. Do you know how long it takes to convert fresh cut lumber into building materials? A year. At best. Performative nonsense. So housing inflation will persist.

Any new housing, private or public, will take years to bring online. Years. And Trump’s cuts to federal agencies that oversee affordable housing and provide public financing for housing projects like the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund ensure that no new affordable public housing will be built for many years to come.

Energy is harder to read and a lot more fascinating. Like I just said, OPEC is increasing supply, the United States is basically energy independent, and demand from China remains suppressed. And yet, West Texas Intermediary (WTI) and Brent Crude keep hanging between $70–$80. It just won’t budge. But because demand is declining and supply is increasing, Trump should be able to score a victory on this one. On the fundamentals alone, oil prices should start to come down which would benefit the consumer.

So he would have to do something really stupid to push up oil prices.

And he did. Even prior to “Liberation Day,” he said he would put tariffs on any country that purchases oil from Venezuela, which immediately pushed up oil prices.

Another self inflicted fucking wound. Oh yeah, and I heard something about a group text that talked about escalating attacks on the Houthis who are already making it difficult for European companies to ship oil? Nothing calms the oil markets quite like bombing campaigns in the Middle East.

There’s a lot more to come relative to oil prices, however. We haven’t begun to feel the shocks from the Liberation Day tariffs so hold your beer.

As far as food prices are concerned, let’s think about this logically. Food producer monopolies, extreme weather events, food borne illnesses, a strong dollar and tariffs are contributing to high food prices. With massive cuts to federal agencies will there be more or less oversight on food protections and potential food borne illnesses? Do you think the gutting of the FTC will lead to more or less consolidation in the food manufacturing and grocery industries? Will extreme climate related events get better or worse under Trump? We already know the tariff answer.

Did he inherit an inflationary predicament? Absolutely. The economy is like James Caan in Misery and Trump is Kathy Bates taking real good care of it.

Unemployment and Labor

I’m not going to spend as much time on the labor and unemployment side of the equation because we unpacked this pretty thoroughly in our AI Job Apocalypse essay. Instead, I’ll do a quick review of the salient measurements of the labor force to give you a benchmark.

The headline figure is always the unemployment rate, right? As of this writing, it’s hovering around 4.1% and we’ve only started to see the federal layoffs show up in the data. So you can expect this to deteriorate in the coming months as Elon and DOGE continue their chainsaw routine to gut agencies that provide critical social services, investigate his companies for regulatory issues, track down deadbeat billionaire tax cheats and oversee the most critical entitlement programs.

The unemployment rate is a weird figure because it measures people starting at age 16, but there’s technically no cutoff. So you can be past retirement age and not working but actively seeking employment, in which case you’re included. If you’ve been out of the workforce for a long period and have given up, you’re not included. So pundits will talk about this measure because it’s an easy way to compare today’s rate to prior periods that use the same methodology.

But economists don’t really pay attention to this number as much as they look at the labor participation rate. So this is everyone who is theoretically able to work regardless of their active or inactive status. The sheer number of work age people that are in the workforce. You can see that it’s hovering around 62%. It recovered from the depth of the pandemic but it has recently stagnated and is in fact declining slightly. Seems startling when you consider how far it has fallen from the peak. We haven’t been at this range since 1976. But when you switch over to something called the prime age labor participation rate, you get a different picture.

This is a measurement of Americans between the ages of 25—54 who are gainfully employed in this economy. On this measure, we’re still near all time highs for this demographic. This is what economists consider to be the most valuable metric because these are the people who, in their estimation, are supposed to be working.

So if this is something you’re interested in, the prime age participation rate is the one to follow. If you see these numbers degrade in the coming months, brace yourself.

Trump’s Conundrum

This brings us into Trump’s calculus. If we’re being generous, the thinking of this administration is that they will artificially force U.S. manufacturing into a boom cycle by placing tariffs on everything coming into the country. If everything from raw materials and agriculture to auto parts and components is more expensive to import, then in Trump’s mind we’ll spur growth in manufacturing here at home. Again, a generous interpretation. But here’s the problem.

Let’s skip over the fact that these things can’t happen overnight, as in our lumber example. It would literally take years and years to completely reshape the global economy to suit our industrial whims. We’ve spent 40 years sending our jobs and plants overseas. That doesn’t come back in an instant.

But here’s the bigger problem. Let’s say he pulls it off and magically manufacturing and industry comes back tomorrow. To make this economically worthwhile we would need a global market to sell our goods to, and for that, Trump needs a weak dollar. But tariffs, the very thing he’s using to bring back manufacturing, have the opposite effect. They strengthen the dollar. Raising prices on foreign goods weakens the value of their currencies relative to the dollar because we’re the reserve currency of the world.

Put simply, he can’t have it both ways.

Now pull the Federal Reserve back into the mix because it will help contextualize the stagflation crisis of the ‘70s to compare it to today. So Trump’s tariffs are going to generate inflation. The only way to stop it is to halt them all right now. But we’ve hit peak absurdity with the April 2nd date of Liberation Day as Trump doubled down on tariffs and specifically hit auto manufacturers with new ones.

So he’s not stopping this nonsense. When the economy heads into an inflationary period, the Federal Reserve has a couple of tools. One is to raise interest rates to encourage savings and discourage spending. Basically to manipulate demand to bring prices back in line. The other way is to constrict the money supply. The fewer the dollars in circulation, the less there is to spend.

Prior to Trump’s victory, the Federal Reserve had already been backing off on these measures because in their eyes, inflation was coming under control. This might seem confusing at first, but remember the figures that matter more to them. Food and fuel are wildcards in their eyes. It’s everything else that matters more. Consumer goods, healthcare, clothing, services, durable goods and housing are all good examples. And believe it or not, these things were finally coming back down to earth toward the end of Biden’s term. But because oil was stuck between $70–$80 and food was disrupted from drought, disease, war and weather, we couldn’t feel it.

So far I’ve tried to be really measured and clinical in presenting this information as it relates to economic fundamentals, norms and expectations. Hopefully a picture is starting to emerge about how this administration is literally putting the global economy at risk and why no one really knows what comes next.

• Trump needs both a weak dollar and a strong dollar for his plan to succeed.
• He needs interest rates to stay high to curb inflation, but needs them to be lower to energize the housing market and help reduce consumer debt.
• He needs other nations to buy our goods but is alienating every single one of them.
• He needs to keep prime age labor participation level but his tech minion is liquidating the federal workforce of prime age workers.
• Most of the big banks and economists have already lowered growth projections for the year substantially. So when you add it up, here is what we can expect as a direct result of his actions.

Low growth. Rising unemployment. And rising inflation.

In other words, the textbook definition of stagflation.

So there’s the long technical answer I promised to the question at hand. Yes, Trump is singlehandedly manifesting stagflation.

Time to Rewind

Now we can address the two other big questions.

1. Is this the same as the last stagflation crisis?
2. How will we recover?

To compare the periods, we can think in terms of before, during and after. The events that led to the crisis in the ‘70s were night and day from the current situation. But the net result might be the same if both inflation and unemployment run hot. But because they came about for different reasons, the way we handle them might also have to be different.

If we go back, it’s clear the economy was running pretty hot through the 1960s. The period between World War Two and the start of the 1970s was the biggest period of economic expansion in the United States in terms of income and mobility. And while we were first out of the gate, the rest of the world was starting to pick up as well so the pie got a whole lot bigger.

It was the economic system designed in 22 days in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 1944. One of the last great acts of John Maynard Keynes who oversaw the conference was to reorder the global system. One of the ways was by eliminating the physical gold standard, where every country literally had to stockpile gold equal to the amount of currency in circulation. In its place, the U.S. Dollar was established as the world’s reserve currency to settle international transactions. But even this was tethered to the value of gold as a backstop. So while we didn’t have to literally hold gold one-to-one, the dollar was tied to it as a protective measure.

Then, in August of 1971, President Richard Nixon stunned the world by effectively ending the Bretton Woods system and removing gold as the underlying valuation instrument.

With the dollar now completely unanchored from gold for the first time in modern history, the Federal Reserve gained unprecedented freedom to expand the money supply. The monetary base grew from $80 billion in 1970 to $155 billion by 1980, providing fuel for the inflationary fire.

Then came the energy shocks. The first arrived in October 1973 when OPEC imposed an oil embargo following the Yom Kippur War, sending crude prices from $3 to $12 per barrel in just months. This “cost-push” inflation rippled through the entire economy. Then in 1979 under Carter, the Iranian Revolution triggered a second crisis, with oil prices jumping from $15 to $40 per barrel. These external shocks delivered a one-two punch to an already vulnerable economy.

The Nixon administration’s response proved problematic. Beyond abandoning gold, Nixon implemented a three-phase wage and price control program between 1971–1974. Phase I froze wages and prices outright for 90 days. Later phases established price commissions and pay boards to regulate increases. Far from solving the problem, these controls distorted market signals and created shortages in everything from gasoline to meat.

As part of what became known as the “Nixon Shock,” the administration also imposed a 10% surcharge on imports—essentially a blanket tariff designed to pressure trading partners into currency revaluations. This move, combined with the Treasury’s dollar devaluation efforts, further exacerbated price pressures throughout the economy.

Fiscal policy made matters worse. The combination of Vietnam War spending and President Johnson’s ambitious Great Society programs had pushed federal spending from 16.6% of GDP in 1965 to 19.5% by 1975. Remember, this was still the era of balanced budgets so when spending like this increased, it meant the government was going to cut it from other areas. The whole thing was a volcano.

By 1980, inflation reached a staggering 14.5% while unemployment topped 7.5%. The crisis only ended when Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker implemented a dramatic monetary tightening, raising the federal funds rate to an unprecedented 20% by June 1981. This triggered a severe recession that pushed unemployment to 11% in 1982 before everything began to cool off in the years that followed.

Lessons and Insights

History has hung stagflation around Carter’s neck but it was really a Nixon phenomenon. Nixon delivered shock after shock to the U.S. economy by ending Bretton Woods, unleashing money supply and instituting price controls. The world poured gasoline on the fire, pun intended, with the oil shocks. And what Nixon, Ford and Carter all adhered to was balanced budget fundamentalism that left the Federal Reserve as the blunt instrument to beat back inflation.

Today, we just run deficits. Massive deficits to fuel our military ambitions and to cover for our policy missteps. The entitlement programs the Republicans love to blame aren’t part of them, but if you follow us you already know that. Our modern crises—savings and loan collapse, tech bubble bursting, housing crisis—these have been the result of deregulation, speculation and greed. Capitalism running amok.

But on balance, through a strictly non-ideological lens, we’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining order and balance in the United States under the capitalist system, if your measuring stick is GDP and overall wealth. But GDP can be a toxic metric. Not all growth should be seen as positive. For example, a sick population that spends a tremendous amount on expensive healthcare contributes positively to GDP. And if wealth is hoarded and not widespread, then it too can be a toxic measurement. Because the wealth gains in this country have gone almost exclusively to the top 1% of income earners in the United States since the Reagan era. The gap worsens along race and gender lines as well.

There are so many economic and ideological discussions we can have at this moment but I want to boil it down to the simplest explanation possible to show exactly how Trump is manifesting a new era of stagflation and why the policy tools used in the past will be ineffective.

Capitalism is an economic framework. People like to cast it as more than what it is. A social order. Governing theory. Legal system. You name it. As such, it has become a catchall framework to view the world. But if we strip it down to the core, capitalism is an economic system that attempts to explain the nature of capital, labor and trade in a market-based system. Who owns the capital, what is the value of labor and who determines the reciprocal values when these things are combined and traded.

The other frameworks like social order, government and legal structures exist to manage the outputs of this system. You can have elements of a capitalist market system in a communist country with paternalistic social orders. You can also have elements of capitalism in a democratic state that values an egalitarian social order. Regardless of what systems surround it, the economic system of market based capitalism is designed to fail periodically. This is a feature, not a bug.

Let me say that again. A proper market-based capitalist system is by nature supposed to fail at some point within a full cycle. Raw material extraction and manufacturing pop in the early stage, but growth, prices and employment are still relatively low. As these products move into production, more people are needed so employment and wages rise. Mid-cycle everything is in equilibrium. People are working, prices aren’t too high yet, orders continue, sales are made, capital flows. With this demand, corporations start charging more, prices increase, wages increase and everything starts running hot. Companies get addicted to the growth so they keep filling inventories, ordering new raw materials, making more products, raising prices, hiring people.

Eventually, something cools off. Maybe the market is flooded with products and services and demand falls off. So companies stop hiring new people and giving raises. But they keep prices high. Maybe they cut back on their next order of raw materials. A nip here. A tuck there. Households follow suit. When things were good they were buying more stuff, eating out more, taking vacations. That raise doesn’t come through or maybe you aren’t picking up as many hours. Maybe you’re laid off temporarily. Eventually a different mindset takes hold and the cycle falls into a recessionary period and resets.

That’s why it’s called a cycle.

Now, those frameworks we talked about will dictate how we operate at different times during these cycles. Unemployment insurance. Health insurance. Taxes. Interest rate policies. Farm and manufacturing subsides. Tariffs. New trade deals. Maybe a war. The priorities of a nation in the Global North and some in the South—in the post-industrial, capitalist era—are all designed to manage the outcomes of each stage of the cycle.

We don’t have to go through the past 150 years. Just take my lifetime. From the mid 1970s to the early ‘80s, we bottomed out. And then recovery. Early ‘90s, recession. Turn of the century, another recession. The financial crisis and housing collapse of ‘08 and ‘09 gave us the Great Recession. The pandemic. Each one started for different reasons but they all wound up the same. The bank accounts of the masses were depleted and bailouts of people and companies were required to rebalance the cycle. The top 1% wrote the rules each step of the way and were therefore fairly insulated. Every seven to ten years the wealth of the masses is wiped out and the gains that followed in the recovery cycles went mostly to the top. Again, no judgment or ideology in this analysis. This is how we, as Americans, have chosen to deal with the natural boom and bust nature of capitalist cycles. Others handled these periods differently. Not us.

COVID was an economic event of a different character. But had it not occurred and had we not poured several trillions of dollars into the economy, we were very likely due for a recession of some kind in the past couple of years. Because, you know, cycles. But we prolonged the inevitable after the supply chain shocks settled down and corporate greed maxed out during the middle of Biden’s term; we were coming back into the mid-cycle period of equilibrium. And once again, we had a choice. More conventional mid-to-late cycle maneuvers like student debt relief, infrastructure spending, renewable energy incentives, entitlement expansions, trade deals and tax changes? Or a complete dismantling of the fundamental frameworks designed to mitigate the worst effects of the late stage economic cycle?

You see, either way we were headed for a downturn. Under Harris, the Federal Reserve would have been muted in its response, because they actually wouldn’t mind a few more natural job losses. Rents and mortgages, auto and student debt payments and credit card debt would have pushed the consumer to retreat. Growth would have slowed. Eventually we would have hit a recession. There’s a chance, however, that it would have been short-lived because the Biden infrastructure bills would have been fully deployed so that would have offered some relief to the middle and upper middle classes. But the bifurcation of wealth between the lower classes and everyone else would have worsened. And we would have continued the slow and painful demise of the working class. Rinse and repeat.

Instead, in this late cycle period we chose Donald Trump. And perhaps for the first time in his entire life, he’s honoring his promises.

• He is implementing punitive tariffs across the board on our primary trading partners and allies in the world. This will increase inflation.

• He is firing tens of thousands of federal workers and halting federal contracts and grants that employ tens of thousands more outside of the federal government. This will increase unemployment.

• He is cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans, which will increase the federal deficit while mandating that we cut $2 billion from the federal budget to make up for these cuts. These cuts will lower GDP.

• He is making it more difficult to file for Social Security benefits by firing employees, shutting down help lines and closing offices. This is already creating delays in enrolling seniors, which is effectively an entitlement program cut that will further impoverish seniors.

• He is gutting Medicaid funding, which will increase the burden on states to fill the gaps. But many of the states that lean on federal money to fund Medicaid have budget deficits, which they are NOT allowed to run. So they will have to increase taxes to make up for the shortfall. This will take more money from middle and lower income earners who are already historically overburdened with debt.

• He’s gutting federal aid programs for disaster relief, social services, mental health, poverty alleviation and homeless population services, which means quality of life in many areas will rapidly decline.

• These measures will increase the amount of petty crimes and misdemeanors, which will put more pressure on police departments and the courts. But states won’t have the ability to increase budgets in these areas, so the problems will only worsen.

Taken together, these are the externalities and circumstances that I mentioned at the very beginning. The tipping point when sentiment overtakes fundamentals and negative economic metrics compound leading investors and consumers to pull the “fuck this” lever. The last time things came crashing down like this during the pandemic, Trump 1.0 and Biden sent trillions of dollars coursing through the system to prop up households, business and banks.

The time before that during the financial crisis, the Obama administration sent nearly a trillion dollars through the economy over a longer period of time.

The time before that, George Bush pulled us out of the dot-com collapse through fiscal means by generating a modern wartime economy on the heels of 9/11.

The economy craters every seven to ten years because that’s how it’s designed. Each time we’ve responded with enormous sums of cash to stabilize the system. Each time the top 1% has hoarded the bulk of it and the recovery at the bottom has taken longer.

This time the administration is determined to send us into a recession faster than we normally would have. And it’s committed to eliminating any of the provisions utilized in the past that helped us recover. So Trump is taking what would have normally been a standard recession and manifesting a stagflationary period of high unemployment, high inflation and low growth.

As for why he’s doing this, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions. The rest of UNFTR and the work we do is dedicated to answering this question. But I didn’t want it to cloud this discussion. Because if we can’t agree on the how, then there’s no point in discussing the why.

Here endeth the lesson.