Trumponomics

While the world's multimillionaires and billionaires (and multibillionaires) ponder inflation and supply shortages in the Swiss Alps, they might get a better view from the dusty landscape of Midland, Texas. Residents of the oil town have lived through inflation around 10% or higher for six months. Even worse, the forces driving up prices there may take months or even years to unwind. Bloomberg rep...

Touted as a potential prime minister not long ago, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak's star has been falling fast of late. Some of the blame can be placed on inflation hovering at a 40-year high and embarrassing headlines about his rich wife's taxes. To resurrect his political career, Sunak may want to help Britons out of their financial funk while persuading them he's not disastrously out o...

The old axiom about the sins of the father being visited upon their children got a shocking rebuttal this week, when Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won a landslide victory in the Philippines's presidential election. Whether Marcos will embrace progressive economic and social values or take after his father, the late dictator and kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos, is anyone's guess.  Singapore-based Bloomberg...

Persistently higher inflation and interest rates are probably in the offing as the world transitions to a greener economy. That’s hardly a selling point for politicians pushing climate-friendly policies, but it’s one they’ll have to cozy up to, says Isabel Schnabel, an executive board member of the European Central Bank. Unfortunately, she adds, before politicians will show enoug...

It’s hard to imagine a more chaotic world than the one we’re in right now—what with Russia’s war on Ukraine, a Covid-19 pandemic that won’t quit and the lockdowns spreading across China as a result. Now, add to the mix a debt crisis that’s threatening to cripple emerging markets. In the words of a former International Monetary Fund official earlier this month, &...

When visiting El Salvador, be sure to bring sunscreen, a long-lens camera to memorialize its bountiful biodiversity and … Bitcoin. But have some U.S. dollars on hand just in case local merchants don’t accept it. On this week’s episode, we dive into the disparate ways in which global leaders approach digital currencies, from the Salvadoran embrace to the tentative explo...

Last year, Larry Summers famously shot down one of the Federal Reserve's favorite buzzwords, "transitory." This year, he's taking aim at "soft landing." The Harvard University professor, former Treasury secretary and paid Bloomberg contributor says a combination of high inflation and low unemployment historically has spawned a recession. So, he's skeptical that the Fed can chart a path that will s...

We may live in a global economy, but beyond the war in Ukraine, what's front-of-mind for policymakers in the U.S., Europe and China is very different. For China it’s Covid-19; for Europe, it’s the price of energy; and for the U.S., it's inflation.  In the first episode of the new season, Stephanie Flanders takes us on a tour of the world economy, opening a window on the top concerns in all three r...

With his poll numbers falling, U.S. President Joe Biden is under pressure to do something—anything—to get inflation under control. That’s led his administration to scrutinize the prices you pay at the grocery store, even if some critics argue alleged price-gouging by consumer products giants is a convenient bogeyman. This week’s episode dives into the debate around corporate consolidation and whet...

When facing an economic crisis, the Fed's playbook normally skews toward juicing the economy too much rather than too little. After all, in the last go-round in 2007, being too stingy might have helped trigger a depression. Fifteen years later though, America's central bankers face the opposite problem: they need to move fast to cool inflation. That's one of the takeaways from a panel discussion a...

Closed schools. Empty shelves. Workers out sick. Almost two years after Covid-19 overturned the U.S. economy, "it's like deja vu all over again,'' in the words of baseball great and eminent wordsmith Yogi Berra. This week, we dive into how the omicron variant is likely to disrupt plans across America this winter. But we also explore how another country is bouncing back, as Stephanie chats with Fre...

With shortages at the grocery store and not enough people willing to work, 2022 is starting to look a lot like 2020. But beneath the ugly exterior, the world's economies have learned to cope with Covid's fallout, and the supply chain debacle in particular. One country is even thriving.  In the first episode of the new year, we offer two fairly optimistic assessments. Bloomberg Senior Editor Brenda...

While still recovering from a coronavirus-induced recession, the U.S. may be rushing into a new downturn, this time thanks to inflation. Its economy faces no shortage of potential peril in 2022, Bloomberg chief economist Tom Orlik says, with the Federal Reserve looking set to raise interest rates to fight rising prices, and as Congress seems unlikely to pass any more big spending bills. That's one...

Economically at least, this holiday season feels a bit more like it belongs to Ebenezer Scrooge than Santa Claus. Amid a resurgent pandemic, there are shortages at the grocery store and the highest inflation in almost 40 years. So who better to sum up 2021 and forecast 2022 than Larry Summers, whose contrarian warnings about inflation have, at least at this point, largely proven accurate. On this...

The so-called great resignation that’s confounding businesses in the West has a counterpart in a most unlikely place: China. This week, we offer a double dose of China’s “lie flat” movement, which is challenging the nation’s historic industriousness, as well as a glimpse into how America’s massive pandemic bailout juiced spending, especially among historically disadvantaged groups. First, Hong Kon...

It seems nothing can hurt the world's billionaires, not the worst pandemic in a century or a global recession. On this week's podcast, New York-based reporter Augusta Saraiva shares how the wealthiest only added to their fortunes as Covid-19 killed millions and flattened economies. Indeed, the super-rich accumulated $4.1 trillion just as 100 million of the planet's less fortunate fell into extreme...

Initially, Jerome Powell said the highest inflation in decades was going to be "transitory." This week, the world's most powerful central banker said the nebulous term should be retired. Such is the high-stakes guessing game going on at the Federal Reserve and the world's central banks, which risk losing public confidence should inflation continue to prove less, well, transitory than expected. Thi...

This week we unpack two very different challenges facing global leaders: the climate crisis and domestic violence. First, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry joins host Stephanie Flanders to share why he thinks the Glasgow Climate Pact is more than just words on paper. Among other achievements, Kerry notes that countries representing most of the world’s gross domestic product ag...

As if rising sea levels and fiercer cyclones weren't enough to worry about, the climate crisis is already cutting crop yields and could lead to widespread food shortages. That's the grave warning from the United Nations, which cautions that farmers won't meet a projected 50% increase in food demand by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions stay high.  In a special episode, Stephanie Flanders tackles how...

One by one, countries that sought to stamp out Covid-19's spread with aggressive lockdowns are giving up zero-tolerance policies and learning to live with the virus. The most notable exception is China, which has decided to cling to the strategy. This week, the new attitude among many nations toward the coronavirus is getting a major test in Singapore, host of Bloomberg's New Economy Forum. The ci...

Robots may replace us eventually, but for now Covid-19 has revealed just how desperate businesses are for workers of the human variety, and the broader economic consequences of that desperation. Companies are raising wages to attract talent, which in turn is helping boost inflation. It hit 6.2% in the U.S. last month and is running at 8.1% in Russia. This week, Bloomberg reporters on two continent...

As if controlling spiraling inflation wasn’t enough to worry about, the world’s central bankers are under increasing pressure to help solve climate change, income inequality and myriad other societal ills. What’s more, elected officials in some nations are trying to exert more power over bankers for political ends. Stephanie Flanders debates the proper role of a central banker with three esteemed...

More than a decade after the U.S. subprime crisis sparked the Great Recession, the threat of default at giant property developer Evergrande is raising the prospect that ghost towns of unoccupied homes could trigger a China property slump.  On this week’s podcast, Hong Kong-based economics reporter Tom Hancock visits Evergrande to see how the company is trying to raise money and avoid default, incl...

Central bankers are in a precarious spot in this chaotic pandemic economy. U.S. and U.K. consumers are grousing about rising prices and want some relief. But if government officials give it to them by raising interest rates, they may set back the recovery. It wouldn’t be the first time an errant move by a central bank triggered a recession. This week, Stephanie Flanders helps listeners navigate th...

An old debate in economic circles is whether Europe’s strong safety net and worker protections are preferable to America’s more company-friendly labor rules. Now this classic argument is getting a fresh look, as economies on both sides of the Atlantic bounce back from pandemic work-stoppages. The U.K. and many euro-area nations adopted generous furlough programs that subsidized worker wages after...