Donald Trump hasn’t talked much about policy in this election cycle, except for vague assertions that he’ll somehow bring back low unemployment and low inflation — which, by the way, has already happened. (Unemployment has been at or below 4 percent…

Ten finance guys are drinking in a bar. Nine of them are Masters of the Universe — wheeler-dealers who make many millions of dollars every year. The tenth is what Gordon Gekko, in the movie “Wall Street,” called a “$400,000-a-year working…

It feels like years ago, but actually only a few months have passed since many big Republican donors seemed to believe that Ron DeSantis could effectively challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. It has been an edifying spectacle — an…

Almost two years have passed since I began trying to draw people’s attention to the widening gap between economic perceptions and economic reality. At the time the economic picture was mixed, with rapid job growth yet also rising inflation; even given…

Does Donald Trump ever visit Queens, the land of his youth? If he did, he would presumably be horrified. According to the census, Queens is the most racially and ethnically diverse county in the continental United States; it’s hard to think…

Since Tuesday’s big Democratic electoral victories, I’ve been seeing some speculation to the effect that the 2024 election may be marked by a reverse coattail effect: that President Biden, whose poll numbers have supposedly been weighed down by a bad economy,…

The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, a conference held twice a year, is America’s premier forum for relating academic research to “the most urgent economic challenges of the day.” The lead presentation at the September 2022 conference was a paper by…

U.S. democracy is clearly in crisis. It’s entirely possible that in less than two years dissenters will face the power of a government with an authoritarian bent; if that sounds to you like hyperbole, you aren’t paying attention.But is America beyond…

Historians of propaganda are familiar with the concept of the Big Lie, a claim so extreme that many people end up accepting it because they can’t believe that authority figures would make up something so at odds with reality.It often seems…

Like most people who opine about politics and policy, I routinely talk in terms of left versus right. But when I do, I sometimes encounter people who decry this approach as simplistic. Surely, they argue, people are more complicated than that,…

It’s not officially over yet, but the United Auto Workers appear to have won a significant victory. The union, which began rolling strikes on Sept. 15, now has tentative agreements with Ford, Stellantis (which I still think of as Chrysler) and,…

There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters…

In 2022, according to F.B.I. numbers, there were 370 violent crimes reported for every 100,000 Americans. Even allowing for some underreporting, this likely means there was less than one violent crime for every 200 people. So the great majority of Americans…

What does it take to destroy a nexus — a place, real or virtual, where people go because they expect to find other people with whom they want to interact? How much do you need to degrade their experience before they…

Until quite recently there was a near consensus among forecasters that the U.S. economy was headed for a recession. In fact, it’s been exactly one year since Bloomberg declared that, according to its models, the probability of a recession by October…

When Hamas attacked Israel, Republicans knew whom to blame: President Biden. Donald Trump asserted that the attack wouldn’t have happened if he were still in the White House; Mike Pence, while condemning Trump for praising Hezbollah and Hamas, asserted that Biden…

Technological progress is a key source of economic growth, but its effects aren’t always fully captured by its effects on gross domestic product. Sometimes a new technology changes everything — the way we work, the way we live, the way we…

Amid terrible events abroad and the takeover of the Republican Party by agents of chaos, the U.S. economy has been delivering lots of good news. All indications are that real G.D.P. is still growing fast; we’re adding jobs at an extraordinary…

I’m not a historian, but as far as I know, America has never seen anything like the current political craziness. There have been bitter disputes within Congress — in 1856, Charles Sumner, an abolitionist senator, was attacked and severely injured by…

So, will artificial intelligence transform the economy? Today I thought I’d take a break from my usual preoccupation with ongoing crises to engage in a bit of bigthink about how technology may change the economic landscape in the years ahead, including…

So the federal government wasn’t shut down over the weekend, although we may have to go through this whole drama again in six weeks. Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, ended up doing the obvious: bringing a funding bill to…

Goodbye, inflation. Hello, unsustainable debt.If you’ve spent any substantial amount of time engaged in discourse about the economy — and I, alas, have been at it for decades — you know that there’s always something to worry about.At the start of…

Ever since debt was invented in ancient Sumer, there have probably been people enriching themselves through bad investments. The trick is to make these investments using other people’s money.Suppose, for example, that a wheeler-dealer uses borrowed funds to make risky investments…

And now for something completely different. Instead of the usual newsletter format, today’s edition will be a dialogue with my colleague Peter Coy over near-term economic prospects. Peter and I have been engaged in a sort of implicit dialogue for months,…

There are currently two clown shows — sorry, but let’s be honest — going on in the Republican Party. One is the intraparty fighting that seems extremely likely to cause a government shutdown a few days from now. The other is…

Are the United Auto Workers justified in seeking higher wages and benefits? Definitely. Is the union overreaching? I don’t know — partly because I’m not an expert on auto industry economics, partly because the actual agreement, when it comes, may be…

The speaker of the House is the only congressional officer mentioned in the Constitution, other than a temporary Senate officer to preside when the vice president can’t. The speaker’s job isn’t defined, but surely it includes passing legislation that keeps the…

A funny thing happened to me on the internet the other day. Like many economists, I’ve been looking at various measures of underlying inflation to try to peer through the economic fog, and I thought I should post an update on…

So Mitt Romney is retiring from the Senate. This is bad news. As excerpts from a forthcoming biography reveal, Romney is cleareyed about what has happened to his party and, if what he says is true, is a profile in courage…

Almost all the available evidence suggests that the U.S. economy is achieving what many economists had thought impossible — a soft landing in which inflation returns to acceptable levels without a recession. Yet polls suggest that the public remains very down…

I’ve been writing about economics and politics for many years, and have learned to keep my temper. Politicians and policymakers often make decisions that are simply cruel; they also often make decisions that are stupid, damaging the national interest for no…

Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we…

Early this year many economists held a very grim view about the prospects for reducing inflation without a major economic slowdown and a big rise in unemployment. One prominent economist declared that underlying inflation was at least 4.5 percent and that…

A decade ago the U.S. political and media establishment was obsessed with budget deficits. This obsession did a lot of harm, helping to deprive the economy of fiscal support after the 2008 financial crisis and keeping unemployment unnecessarily high for years.Happily,…

If President Biden loses his bid for re-election, a key factor will be the widespread perception that the economy is doing badly on his watch. Poll after poll shows Americans rating economic conditions as very bad and giving Biden very low…

U.S. economic policy in 2021 was met with a firestorm of criticism from many economists. I’m not talking just about Republican loyalists, who always predict disaster when a Democrat moves into the White House. Even Democratic economists, or relatively apolitical technocrats,…