Trump's Own Numbers Crush His Lies... (with Justin Wolfers)

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2:05Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. Donald Trump has no economic plan and the mayhem that he is causing is having severe negative consequences. If you're living in the United States and frankly pretty much anywhere in the world, unless you're one of Donald Trump's oligarch buds, you're struggling right now. And things are looking grim while Donald Trump says affordability is a made-up word. And it's a massive hoax. He also claims that he's brought down prices and we're in a golden age. And he also told Time Magazine that actually inflation is really good because it's helping us pay off that debt very rapidly, very, very rapidly. What are you talking about? The debt has exceeded $40 trillion. You know how Donald Trump likes to say he's brought in 19 trillion or

3:0521 trillion or as JD Vance said, I know you may not see it, but it's coming in a few years. It's all made up. It's all entirely false. But what is true is that the debt has increased to over $40 trillion. And these levels of inflation that are making the American people struggle, they don't appear to be paying off that debt. And the deficit continues to increase. And as we look at the treasury yields right now, the 10, the 20 and the 30 year off of all this various news when Donald Trump kind of contorted the PCE calculation earlier this week and it took economists a little bit of time to realize, are you kind of changing it? So it looks like 30 basis points lower than perhaps if it was the older formula. I mean, the treasury yields reacted for a moment, but the treasury yields, which talk really more to kind of the long term predictability stability of the

4:05US markets, they're painting a grim picture as well as the 30 year yield looks like a vertical line sometimes the 10 year year, the 20 year yield, not doing all that much better. You got a pretty bad jobs report, certainly below expectations. Some people have said it could have been worse, although what gets me nervous are these downward revisions. So while there were expectations somewhere in the range of 85 to 90,000 jobs being created and only 29,000 jobs were created, when you look at August, there was a downward revision of 29,000 jobs. So when you see the US economy adding 29, adding 29,000 jobs for September when there was supposed to be 80,000 or 90,000, if we see a downward revision next month, I would not be surprised if there was actually negative job growth for September if we see a similar downward revision over there. And some of the even more alarming data is not

5:09being as much discussed, but Heather long economy said the biggest sore spot wage growth of 3% in the past year, that's a new five year low and it's wiped out entirely by the 3.4% inflation. Also, if you look at the jobs report that Biden had same time, but in 2024, he had about 250,000 jobs created and he was attacked that even though it exceeded expectations, it didn't hit 300,000 jobs or 400,000 jobs. I mean, we're a country of over 300 million people. So 29,000 jobs when Donald Trump was telling the American people, I'm going to do so much better than Biden. I mean, we're not seeing it. That would be an understatement. And I think what we're seeing is just Trump continuing to lie over and over again. I mean, you're seeing global agriculture prices rising, a lot of inflation there, no surprise. We have fertilizer shortages, the input costs are increasing

6:10export markets are being cut off. A lot of things other than oil that come from the straight of hormones or that trans and are transported in the straight of her moves are not getting to where they need to be. Agriculture is suffering. We're seeing on the manufacturing side as well, struggles there, inflationary pressure intensifying in the manufacturing sector, the ISM manufacturing prices paid index surge 6.8 points in September to 77.9, it's highest since May. And then you just take a look at any sector. I mean, tourism, for example. I interviewed Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, who's running for governor. And we were talking about, you know, Nevada's getting crushed, not just Nevada, any state that relies on tourism. We're seeing countries across the world, not just Canada, Europe, elsewhere, saying, I'm not sure we want to be spending our dollars in the United States right now. We're not sure if it's safe, we're not sure

7:16how we're going to be treated. And Donald Trump keeps on attacking us. He keeps on saying horrific things about us. Why would we want to put our money there? I need help making sense of all of this. Let's bring in Justin Wolffers, Midas Touch, Chief Economist. You're on the Platypus economics YouTube channel. Make sure you subscribe to Platypus economics. Justin, great to see you as always, as we are in this weekend, first weekend of October, you and I, and you more frequently than I, are kind of chronicling this chronicled liar. I mean, as I call it, and he's just not telling the truth about what's going on. And he's doing everything that's like an economist nightmare. You know, every wrong answer on your exams that you administer, he's confidently checking those bubbles or coloring in those bubbles. Talk to us about it, Justin. Well, Ben, I like to collect economics statistics and I just collected a whole new one. The number of times Ben Mycelus breathed in his

8:20opening bit might have been zero. You've got a lot to say and a lot of passion and they love that about your brother. I'm going to try and slow it down because my job as an economics professor is actually to bore people to tears. And no, it's not really bad. Look, what have we learned over the past week or so since you and I talked to Ben? The biggest news is the jobs report. I just want to, I'd start with being pessimistic. So I'm going to tell you some good news. Lots of my friends, particularly my friends on the left have said, oh, I don't believe any of the jobs numbers these days, they're being made up by the regime. Truth is, if you wanted to what make up a set of numbers, this is exactly what you would not do. The last set of numbers before the midterm elections show very weak job growth in September. They show that what had looked like it would be reasonably strong job growth, particularly in August, into a lesser extent in July was a loseery. We now learned that the economy actually lost jobs in July. So if you were making facts up, this is not the set of facts

9:26you would make up. So I think it's time for folks to give up on the idea that any of these numbers are being made up. Reality is rough enough as it stands. We don't need to go further on that. The other thing that's really striking out of that jobs report was wage growth. Wage growth has just been falling month after month after month, now for years, literally years. And today we've got the lowest wage growth today, yesterday and Friday. We've got the lowest wage growth number with, we've seen in years wages are only growing 3%. It's worth remembering wages growing 3%, might not sound totally miserable until you remember prices are growing at 3.5, 3.3 quarters. So the purchasing power, the amount of stuff that a typical American work can afford is actually going backwards. And it's been going backwards now for several months. And if that feels like, if it elicits a primal scream, an emotional reaction, or even just a sense

10:29of it's tougher to get by, that's right, this is not how it's meant to be. Economism is a meant to grow, ours is growing. But some of that growth is meant to get shared with workers and not just go to owners of capital and big businesses. And that's what's really missing from this economy right now. Let me come back to you Ben, because you raised so many things and I could take this in so many directions. But I want to see what's on your mind, brother. It's on my mind right now is when you look at the market on Friday, it was green, $700 billion added to the US stock market. And you see these big AI companies and Nvidia hitting new eyes and all of that. And the American people are struggling. And I hear a lot of it has to do with, well, this makes it less likely for interest rates to be hyped when people were expecting three or four interest rate hikes because

11:30you don't rage interest rates when you're having this poor job growth. And you know, is it is talked to us about that? But is it also delaying the inevitable? Because the inflation isn't going away. So at some point, we're kicking the can down the road on the issue of when interest rates are going to be hyped. And so is this kind of short term gain versus a long term pain and gain, I mean, for these traders, not the American people. Yeah. It's a very tricky time at the moment. And there's two really important stories that kind of distort some of the messages you might be otherwise getting from our economic indicators. So the first is there's a massive AI spending vermin right now. And this is, I think, very sophisticated people making big bets. I think they call them investments in the AI build out. This is a view that the future of life in the United States

12:31around the world is going to be transformed by AI. I think there's good reason to think that that might happen. It also might not. But immediately there you see that's why there's stock of so many of the big tech companies is going up. Now, there's a separate stock index, which you can look at what's happening to what markets are saying about how valuable American stocks are excluding AI. And when you look at that, you see much less of this optimism. So the puzzle in some sense right now is markets are saying things are great. The economics statistics are saying, yeah, hang on, no, they're not. Well, a lot of what's going on there is AI. AI is a huge part of what's going on in the stock market. A much smaller part of yours in my lives. Remember, every time they sink another billion dollars into a data center, that's a big empty room made of concrete with basically blinking lights inside. I think of the movie Wally. So someone's making money, but it's not creating employment. And whatever money is being made is not really being spread out among workers. So that's the AI part of

13:35that and realize as we've had to borrow so much money, the market for loans is like any other market. If there's a lot of people trying to buy anything, they tend to push the price up. Well, in the market for loans, AI, the AI role, that's a huge thing that's pushing the price of loans up. The price of loans, of course, we call the interest rate. The other big actor in that market is the US government, which is, as you say, literally trillions of dollars in debt, 100% of GDP in debt. And borrowing like like a senior before there, before a keger on a Friday night, they're just all in on this. And between those two, that's a lot of what's pushing up bond yields, bond yields, fancy word for interest rates. And where that comes back and hits folks at home is when you're thinking about a mortgage, if you're thinking about your next car loan, even if you're thinking about a student loan, the cost of that borrowing has risen dramatically. That's not the only place

14:35where it's going to hit you by the way, because the government's credit card bill gets higher, because the government's facing a higher interest rate on an already enormous debt. That means next year, the government either will end up running a bigger deficit again, which would start to get dangerous. Or they're going to cut back on the stuff we rely on government to do, you know, roads and schools and healthcare and all of that sort of thing. So there's just so much going on there with AI. And then the other thing that's really distorting things in financial markets on a daylight today is we got bad news about what's going on in the job market. And you normally think if the US economy is a bit weaker, then you might think that would lead the value of American companies and therefore stocks to fall. But everyone's obsessed by what's going to happen to the Fed. And there's emerged of you that two things happened this week, and they did both happen. Inflation came in a little bit lower than we anticipated. And it doesn't look like the, and it looks like unemployment, an employment growth, a bit weaker than we'd anticipated.

15:39And both of those say it's less important to raise rates to the Fed inflation, now inflation's little lower. And you might not even want to raise rates if what you worried about is slower job growth. So that's led to this whole revision of maybe we won't get a rate cut before the election. Having said that, Ben, you said this directly, we might not get one in October, but markets still seem to believe it's coming in December. So the only thing that's happening is the next rate hike, it's coming, but it might be coming a little bit later. I don't want to point out it might be coming at a politically convenient time, because I think everyone understands what's happening to their world right now. But a lot of movement, a lot of excitement, trying to understand what's going on. And that's what led stocks actually to rise, despite the fact we got bad news about the economy. They rose because they thought that might less likely the Fed's going to come along and slow things down. Look, when we have a pilot or when we have a doctor or when we have a lawyer or

16:42when we have you name, whatever the profession is, we expect them to operate steady hand, stable, regardless of what circumstances in their life. I don't want my doctor to perform differently because he's got a wedding coming up or because he's really excited about going out on a golf tournament the weekend or that he's sad because something happened in his life. We expect there to be people looking out for our interest. So the very fact that there does seem to be a lot of these things happening right ahead of the midterms that may give temporary, and I mean over the course of the next 28 days about relief, not relief in any major way, but enough to say, hey, look everybody, and an example I give is you're up releasing a hundred million barrels for mid-strategic reserves of diesel and crude. And then the US saying, well, I guess that we won't do an export ban on diesel

17:43because you're doing that. Now, putting a hundred million barrels of oil into the market, front loading it as well may have some downward pressure on the price of diesel and crude, but that's temporary. It causes damage to the overall strategic petroleum reserve stockpile. The war is not over. In fact, we all believe with the USS the United Roosevelt heading to the Middle East, it probably escalates more after the midterm. And so it just seems that I'll give you the final word to tie it all together. Again, we need people who are explaining it the way you and I are. We need we need sober assessments so that the right moves are being made, not compounding the wrong moves, or not having a doctor tell us we're perfectly healthy just to lie to us when we're sick and we need to we need to get medicine. So that's my worry with all of this. I'll give you the

18:45final word just then. Thanks. I think you really you've got it right. And at one level, you spoke about something that strikes me as so deep. I don't even know how to look cheerful about it. And it's I don't think we have any choice if we want to make the world a better place other than tell tell the truth about it. If we can't tell the truth to ourselves about what's going on. If we can't tell the truth to American people about what's going on at one level, that offends me. I was always taught not to lie at another level. It's inefficient, but I think it's even worse than that. If our lives aren't rooted in truth, we can never know we're doing the right thing. And so I want to put that forward as a value. There's so many values that are under threat right now, but the sense that there is a truth that we can talk about a truth. We can unveil a truth. We can explain it. Hey, if someone at home wants to tell me I'm wrong, you can write it in the comments and I promise I'll read it. And we'll find our way and fumble our way towards that truth. Ben, you talked about wanting a steady hand on the wheel. And I think that is exactly right. And that's what's missing right now.

19:51I once joked that if we've learned anything during the Trump presidency, it might be that men are too emotional to be president. It was meant as a throwaway line, but I actually want to come back to it. Imagine we had a female president who was so idiosyncratic and so moody and whose policy decisions were up and down like crazy. And who expected the world to operate around her mords? Could you just imagine the coverage? It's utterly bizarre. What we allow to happen and the way we've normalized all of it. So Ben, I'm with you. Let's come back to our core values. Each of us has different core values. Some of them, it's about fairness and some of us care about growing a pie and so on. But I hope we can agree on very simple things like a steady hand on the wheel and the importance of truth. Everybody subscribe to the platypus economics YouTube channel,

20:52where you can see Justin Wolfer's daily videos, where he breaks down all the developments in the economy. And he gives you a deep dive. He's not just on breaking news, but had to think through these issues in a way that I think are really important. Justin Wolfer is also the chief economist that might as touch. Justin, we appreciate you. Great pleasure, Ben. And everybody hit subscribe. Breaking news right now, my brothers and I wrote a book. It's called WTF America. And well, doesn't that just say it all? It comes out officially this October, but you can pre-order your copy today. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description below.