He kind of that grows the economy from the middle out the bottom up instead of just the top down. When that happens, everybody does well. This vision is a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America's middle class for decades now.
President Joe Biden this week launched an ambitious bid to persuade Americans he's boosted the US economy, with a speech describing how his legislation in the past two and a half years would grow the economy long term and boost the position of ordinary Americans.
And I'm not here to declare victory on the economy. I'm here to say we have a plan that's turning things around incredibly quickly. Well, you have more work to do.
It showed that Biden will put the economy at the center of his re election campaign. It's a strategy, though not without risks. You'd think, given inflation and now mortgage rates are both sword in the Biden years, and most voters appear to race him poorly on his handling of the econom In fact, you'd think it would be the Republican candidates for president who'd be wanting to focus on the state of the US economy. But we're not hearing
much of that at all. So what's going on and how important is it for President Biden and his team that we don't have a US recession in the next twelve months. Well, let me chat first to senior Bloomberg reporter Nancy Cook in DC, who's already spending a chunk of her time out on the campaign with some of these wanna be presidents. Nancy, thanks as ever for joining
us on Stephanomics. I guess we should just ask the basic question, is the economy a positive or a negative of President Biden's hopes of re election?
Do you think I think that President Biden's problem is he just has not been able to get credit for the good parts of the economy. The US has one of the strongest labor markets we have ever seen. Unemployment is very low. Unemployment is also low among women, it's low among African Americans. You know, there has been a big boom in infrastructure spending. The US is trying to wrestle manufacturing away from China and build more semiconductor factories here.
So there's a lot of interesting things happening in the economy. Despite the historically high inflation and a lot of bright spots for the White House. But it has just been very hard for the Biden White House to sell the American public on the idea that the economy is good and for people to feel okay about it. You know, a majority of Americans cannot name a single accomplishment that the Biden White House has done, and that has really
dogged them. So I would argue that their problem moving forward as they try to make economics a centerpiece of the campaign, is more of a sales pitch problem than an actual policy problem.
Well, you know, as you mentioned, he has passed these massive bills, the Infrastructure Bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is obviously more about the green transition and investing in being carbon neutral. You've also and you saw we've also seen the Chips Act. All of those things seem to be triggering construction booms in some key election battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Hasn't any of that helped him?
Well, I think that part of the problem with all of the legislation and the money that has been allocated to these projects is that they are long term, you know, investments. And so for instance, last year I was in Ohio with President Biden. We were standing in the middle of a field of chips at a chips factory where you know, eventually the White House and local officials hope people without college degrees can make you know, one hundred and twenty
thousand dollars a year producing these chips. And that is really a huge part of the White House's message to voters. You know, we are creating really good, high end manufacturing jobs in the US. But part of the problem is that there's no guarantee that that factory, or that the infrastructure projects or the bridges and roads that are being funded by these investments, that the White House and Congress has passed that those things will be done by twenty
twenty four. And so part of the White House's challenge is to convince people to sort of make them aware of projects that are in process right now.
Obviously, when you look at the Republican side, it's, to put it politely, it's not exactly a traditional campaign that we're seeing, but what in general a Republican candidates saying about the economy. I mean, this is a time when you would think, you know, if he's not popular on a handling of the economy, that would be an opportunity for the opposition.
You would think that you would think that Republicans day in and day out, would be hitting the White House on the last two and a half years of historically high inflation, or hitting them on the amount of money that Congress and the White House has allocated to all of these bills, which are not you know, typically you know, Republican priorities. Instead, what we have seen from the Republican candidates so interesting is really a doubling down on culture
wars and sort of fear based messages. They're talking about threats from China, but not really in terms of the economy. They're talking about, you know, fears about transgender athletes participating in women's sports. They're talking about well they're not talking as much about abortion, but they're talking about sort of
people getting their guns taken away. So it's a lot of these culture war messages, and I think that it just goes to show you how in the US the Republican Party has just really changed so much over the last decade. This used to be a party which was seen as much more affiliated with like country clubs and
business groups. Now we have one of the leading Republican candidates Florida Governor Ron De Santis waging a huge battle with Walt Disney Corporation over their tax status and some building permits, and you know, some legislation that he has in Florida that dealt with how people talked about gender
and schools. So it's just, you know, there are Publican party, I would say, has just really transformed itself into something that people wouldn't recognize from a decade ago, when they were much more concerned with tax cuts, the economy, you know, putting forward fiscal proposals. Interestingly, we have not seen any economic plans from the top two Republican candidates Florida Governor Rohnda Santis or former President Donald Trump outlining what they
would do with the economy in a second term. And I think that's really telling about how the economy is being handled by Republicans at this point.
And it's interesting you mentioned briefly abortion, but that was one of the cultural issues they weren't necessarily talking a lot about. I mean, famously, in that the midterms last year, there was this expectation that the state of the economy would play badly for Democrats and would be a big help for getting the Republicans into office. Ironically, it was the cultural issues and particularly abortion, that seemingly made a
big difference to the Democratic showing in those midterms. I guess it is a bit of a gamble for the Republicans to stick with the with the culture issues.
It is, and what we saw with you know, the Democrats too, though. I mean, Biden is going to be talking about the economy this week, but I don't want to discount the role that some of the culture issues will play for Democrats. To this, White House is very heavily playing up Republicans' efforts to restrict abortion access in
the US as a very key campaign message. They're calling out Republicans past messages on cutting Social Security and Medicare, which is not something that former President Trump wants to do, but what some of the other candidates have talked about. They're making that a key message. And so they're really the Democrats overall messages trying to paint Republicans as extreme on the policy positions, from abortion to entitlements to you know,
these culture war issues. And the Republicans, meanwhile, are just really trying to you know, make Americans quite fearful of a second term of President Biden both you know, what they view as his inept handling of the country, but also calling out things like his age and whether or not he is up to really have a second term.
How wide does the White House will have a recession in the US in the next six to eight months.
The White House has always done a lot of happy talk with the economy and has never really acknowledged, you know, the likelihood of a recession. I think that what I'm hearing from people is that if there is a recession, and this is from economists, from business leaders in DC, you know, it would be a more mild one, you know. CEOs I don't think are totally freaked out about a big recession. And so I think the question for the White House and the Biden campaign is when does that
recession come. You know, if companies are cutting jobs and laying people off, which we're already seen in some sectors like the tech sector, it's much better for the Democrats if that comes earlier in the year then later in the year. Typically, you know, the summer before an election is when American voters really start to clue into what's
going on. And so, you know, the best bet for the Democrats is if the recession comes in the first two quarters, not in the summer or in the fourth quarter, when people will have to go to the polls.
And of course, if we have a recession, it'll be because the US Central Bank has in effect had to cause one to get inflation out of the economy in other parts of the world, and I guess in some quarters in the US we're starting to see criticism of the Feed that there's it's inflicting harm on the American
people for no great gain. Do you think if things do turn sour economically and we start to see a lot of job losses, do you think that Democrats will start to be a bit more critical of the Federal Reserve.
We have seen Democrats on Capitol Hill, like Senator with Warren and other progressives be critical of the FED and say, you know, now is not the time to raise interest rates, or we should not raise them any further. The Biden White House has been trying to stay totally mum on criticizing the FED because they do not want to seem like they are former President Donald Trump in any way. You know, as you remember, he really was quite critical of the FED. He was quite critical of j Powell.
Despite having carefully selected I know, not given Janet yet in a second term.
He was You're right, but he you know, really started attacking the FED during his presidency, and the Biden White House tries to act like Biden is the grown up in the room. Trump is not, and so part of the way that they do that is by not attacking you know, independent institutions like the Federal Reserve or the Department of Justice or these other agencies.
Well see how they managed to stick to that down the road. But meantime, Nancy Cook, thank you.
So much, thanks for having me.
So I want to go a little deeper into the economics and the politics of all this with two excellent guests, Michael Strain, director of economic policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and our own Anna Woll, Bloomberg's chief US economist.
Thank you very much for joining me, both of you. Anna, maybe just start with you just to sketch out roughly where the US economy is now, but also in broad strokes, how you'd expect it to evolve over the next eighteen months or so leading up to the twenty twenty four general election.
Yeah, so, I think the one word that well described the US economy right now is belold trend growth. So it's the US.
Economy, isn't that three words?
There's dashes in betweets, So the economy is expanding. It has defied forecasts. Are recessions last year? We called that last year. Around June of last year, half of the country in a poll says that they think the country is already in a recession. But it seems like as of now the data says nope, the economy expanded. But looking forward, our call has been and remained to be that there will be a recession towards the end of
this year. And the reason for this timing is that a lot of headwinds is supposed to hit the economy around the fourth quarter this year. So first, you have household excess savings running out. We're already seeing the lower end of the income sector running out of savings and they have been resorting to credit cards and running down their existing savings in order to finance spending habits. That is one key factor for why we think that the
economy is finally running out of steam. The other headwinds include the student loan forbearons could be expiring later this year, which takes away another kitchen for household Alan Greenspan has two favorite economic activity indicators. One is corrugated box shipments and second is railcar loadings, and both of them have been tanking in recent months, which seems to suggest that
consumer demand are finally softening. So if a recession does happen around Q four this year, usually unemployment rate spikes only two quarters, two or three quarters after what the economy is formally in a recession. So yeah, GDP growth may decline in fourth quarter, first quarter next year, but an unemployment rate really only peaks around if that's the case, third quarter a fourth quarter next year, which is right
around the presidential election. Our baseline is for unemployment rate to rise to around four point nine percent in the third quarter of twenty twenty four, So that's a couple million, one or two million decrease in jobs. So that would be a serious headwind for Biden.
And just briefly, and a lot of people had been wrong footed by the resilience of the US economy so far and sort of dodging a recession so far, not least the Federal Reserve. What probability are you putting on that recession forecast, how much chance is there do you think that we could actually dodge it? And I guess the follow up to that is, just is it going to be a deep recession or is it possibly one of those ones that ends up not being felt as deeply.
In the past year, the economy demonstrated resilience, but in the second half of this year we see a loss of resilience because of this combination of shocks. So how deep the recession would be depends on what combination of negative shocks do we get. So if you have a combination of severe El Nino or weather forecasters are currently saying there's a chance of at least fifty six percent
of strong El Nino. If you have also a China slowdown, which tends to be very bad for investment, and on the other hand, also you have the FED continuing to raise rates because inflation is high and credit standards start tightening in the wake of the banking crisis in the US. I just don't see how the economy could survive all these shocks. But again, it depends on what combination of shocked you see.
Michael Strain, You've listened very patiently to all this. Are you broadly in line with Anna's assessment of the economy looking ahead?
Yeah, I think we are broadly in line. I expect a recession will hit the precise time we give that as difficult, but I think the slowdown will start, likely at the fourth quarter of this year, maybe a little bit earlier than that. I think that consumers have been buoyed by the cushions that Anna mentioned in Those are deflating student dead forbearance, excess savings that resulted from really
generous pandemic era fiscal policy transfers to households. I am probably more concerned than Anna seems to be about consumers running out of steam and not heavily business investment dropping off. I kind of expect to see both, but yes, I think we're broadly aligned.
We do already have consumer confidence and the consuman sentiment very low. Because inflation is felt so deeply by households, even with or without a recession, or even without a big significant rise in unemployment, we know inflation is hitting everybody, not just people who might be at risk of losing their jobs. This is already not a pretty picture for a president to be campaigning for re election. And you also potentially have a recession coming up in the months
before the election. So I guess the striking thing to us has been why Republican candidates on the stump haven't in talking more about the state of the economy on the campaign trail.
Yeah, it's confusing. I think there are two explanations for that. One explanation is that the fundamental problem with the economy is that economic demand substantially outpaced the productive capacity of the economy to meet that demand, and that's manifesting itself in inflation, and people just like inflation, and that's showing up in the poll numbers. President Biden's handling of the
economy is not favorably by many Americans. But the flip side of that is that labor demand is extremely strong. We have a really strong job market, very low unemployment. We are adding lots and lots of jobs every single month after month, and nominal wages are growing at a really rapid rate. Now, the purchasing power of those wages is being eaten away by inflation, but what's actually in your paycheck is the number on your paycheck is growing at a pretty rapid rate. And so it may be
that candidates don't quite know how to navigate that. Criticizing the president on economic performance kind of invites a question, Okay, well, what would you do? And you don't want to put yourself in a position of rooting for a weaker labor market, but you don't want to put yourself in a position of rooting of rooting for a recession, And you don't want to put yourself in a position of even really rooting for what's being described as a soft landing. And
so that could be part of it. But I also think that the candidates, through a combination of the role that President Trump is playing in this primary cycle and just how early it is in the calendar, the candidates don't have fleshed out economic policy agendas and policy plans, and so that makes it hard, I think, to try to turn the focus to the economy.
That's interesting, you've captured something in that answer that I was that we've seen also in terms of governments around the world actually dealing with the popular response to interest rate rises. It's hard to be setting yourself against an overheating economy and somehow arguing in order to get inflation down,
arguing for less money in people's pockets. It's a very awkward place for any politician to be in where many candidates, I mean famously Governor DeSantis in Florida has been taking an economic tack, or at least been talking about some economic issues, is in sort of picking fights with the business community on the sort of anti woke agenda. It's an odd place for a Republican to be. How does it play with voters?
Do you think I'm not sure that it will play that well. I think we have to wait and see. But Disney is a very popular.
Company, and not just with people's children and not just with.
And I think if you are a person who spends a lot of time on social media, or spends a lot of time really kind of following the day to day happenings in American politics, and you're a conservative, that this might be appealing to you. But in order to be successful, certainly in the general election, you have to appeal to independent votership, to appeal to voters who don't pay attention to the kind of hour by hour, day
by day swings in the news cycle. And you know this, I'm skeptical that this will be all that appealing to many of those voters.
And one thing we have seen under President Trump and President Biden, but very strikingly in the last few years under President Biden, is this activist turn in US economic policy. With President Trump, it largely took the form of tax cuts and the trade wars with China. But under President Biden we've had these big spending on green energy, infrastructure, the Chips Act, and this explicit industrial policy goal of
reindustrializing the US economy. Initially, on the economics, I mean, is there a coherent strategy there for raising growth in the lasting way, increasing the potential growth rate of the US economy, or is this just another form of pumping money into the economy.
My understanding is that these you know, the Chips Act, the work underpinning the Chips Act was already in the works under President Trump, and so Biden's administration is just formalized those work that was already started when we were having a trade war with China, when the Trump administration just realized that we're just having too much reliance on imports from China. But in any case, in terms of the impact on the economy from Chips Act and the
Infrastructure Act, it's major. We're starting to see the impact, and the impact is number one. It prolonged the labor shortages in certain sectors, for example, in construction sectors. During the pandemic, the construction sector was already experiencing severe shortage of workers, so the ratio of job opening in the construction to unemployed was around one point seven one point eight. And now as the rest of the economy is coming
back into balance, there's less shortages elsewhere. The construction sector remains very tight because of demand to build these factories and these roads. There was a massive spike in manufacturing construction starting around the last couple of months ago and it seems to be continuing unabated. And our very preliminary estimate of the total job impact of the Infrastructure Act is that a minimum number is that it could boost jobs by over half a million over a span of
a couple of years. I think in the longer, in the media medium term, we will start to see the growth enhancing impact. Over time. It will boost supply as well, but that is a longer term trajectory. In the short term, what you what these acts do is boosts a demand without immediate impact on the supply. So in a way, it could actually worsen the inflationary impact. So if Powell's aim is to bring down nominal wages and then you
will have the persisting the jobs. Labor shortage in construction sector is not contributing to that goal.
Yeah, no, that's absolutely so it is making the federal reserves job harder. Potentially, Michael, we look at these big pieces of legislation and then very big amounts of spending that are being talked about. In a few years time, we will there will be a significant change in the in the visible change in the structure of the US economy in some of these areas. Or are we overdoing it a bit?
Uh?
I think that is overdoing it a bit. They're there, maybe, uh, some noticeable changes in kind of very narrowly defined sectors. And so the Chips Act, for example, very well. Could we could look back on that and say, you know, that really bolstered US production of semiconductors, although even there, I think we would be talking about kind of a relative, a relatively marginal effect. We're not going to reach a situation where half of the global supply of semiconductors are
produced in Ohio and Michigan or anything like that. The Infrastructure Bill, which was passed with bipartisan support, I think will have a big effect on the economy and specifically on the nation's infrastructure. But it won't reshape the structure of the economy, but it will improve productivity and increase the kind of quality and and and I guess quantity of American infrastructure. The Inflation Reduction Act, which is really a kind of a green energy bill, I think the
effects of that remain to be seen. It's extremely controversial because it threatens to launch a kind of subsidy race between the US and Europe and the UK. The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was just here in Washington trying to minimize the damage that the Infliction Reduction Act would do to the UK economy. Emanuel Macron, the President of France, warned that the Infliction Reduction Act might fracture the West
was the phrase that he used. And so that might again have a marginal effect on increasing kind of green energy production in the US. But you know, the world won't just sit still while that happens. And that's a lesson we learned from the Trump trade war introduced tariffs on imports from China. You would think that would have a big effect on the US manufacturing tittor it would
boost manufacturing employment. It turns out that it didn't. And the two reasons why it didn't are that it increased the price of intermediate inputs in production that US manufacturers import a lot from abroad, it turns out, and those imports became more expensive. And then China than just on its hands and allowed the US to engage in this regime.
It retaliated, and the kind of best evidence shows that the net effect of all of these, of all these different effects is that manufacturing employment went down, not up. Something very similar could happen with the Inflation Production Act. Something very similar could even happen with the Chips Act. It's just difficult for the US Congress to say, Okay, we're going to be a semiconductor manufacturing leader, or okay we're going to launch all these green energies.
If it were that easy, everybody would do it. It's striking even the words reindustrialization. Of course, those of us, you know, as economists. I was always taught that there's no fight, there's no fighting de industrialization. At some level if your advance developed economy, that you're inevitably moving on a path to have manufacturing be a smaller part of the economy. That's what we were taught for years. The idea that you're going to reverse that in a meaningful way,
it seems it's certainly challenging to the orthodoxy. But Michael, one thing that many of my colleagues have pointed out to me is that there is undeniably an investment boom, manufacturing investment boom underway, in part as a result of some of this legislation or expectations around it, and it's most intense in the New South and other parts of America that are primarily strong Republican stronghold. So I just
wonder how does that play. On the one hand, it seems like a Democrat administration is doing a lot to help Republican parts of the country. But I guess if you're trying to turn those Republican parts of the country a bit more Democrat, it might be just the right thing to do.
Well maybe, I mean, there's you know, there's a reason why the Infrastructure Bill was bipartisan and had support among Republicans in the Congress, and there's a reason that the Chips Act was bipartisan support among Republicans in the Congress. Republican members of the Senate from those states thought that the bill would would help their states, and it very well. May I would take a little bit of issue with one argument that animated earlier, which is that these bills
will create a bunch of jobs. The way that I think about it is that these bills will not kind of increase total US employment, but instead, what they will do is they will shift jobs from one part of the economy into manufacturing, or shift jobs from one part of the economy into a kind of manufacturing adjacent or infrastructure adjacent sector. And you know, that's that's hard to do,
and we're seeing that right now. Semiconductor companies are talking about how hard it is to fulfill these ambitions because they can't find workers. The administration is imposing other dovestic policy goals as a condition for government contracts, like providing childcare facilities and things of this nature, and are these are exactly the kinds of frictions. But in the case of reallocating workers across sectors, that's kind of an economic friction.
In the case of imposing other dovestic policy goals, that's more of a political economy friction. Both those types of frictions have been present every time the government tries to kind of step in and make big structural change to the economy from Washington, and I expect those kinds of frictions are going to are going to continue, if not grow, and I think it would basically be seen how all that shakes out. To be clear, I do think that at the end of the day, we will have more
green energy. The green energy industry in the US will be relatively larger and stronger than it would have been, so many conductors in the US will be relatively larger and stronger than they would have been. But the magnitude of that boost, I think is an open question.
It's sort of full circle to the beginning of our conversation around the lack of capacity in the US economy and the issue of overheating. One thing we do know is that a lot of this is costing a lot of money and for this period, and that you know, normally, when you have an economy that's at least that has been running quite hot, you would be looking at a pretty favorable fiscal situation. But that's not the case right now.
Anna very briefly, what are we looking at in terms of government borrowing right now, but also sort of looking further out because that again has often been part of the discussion and the campaign trail.
Yeah, so the US is embarked on it as a sustainable fiscal path. We estimate that the May CBO baseline has put the federal debt to GDP ratio on a path to reach about close to one hundred and twenty percent of GDP by twenty twenty eight, and the debt deal that Republicans struct with the Biden administration barely did anything to it. By our estimation, it only knocked off about two percentage point off the off that one hundred
and twenty debt to GDP ratio. In fact, my team used a more realistic set of assumptions, and we calculate that in fact, the debt to GDP ratio should be rising to about one hundred and thirty percent of GDP by twenty twenty eight, and then by twenty twenty eight, half of the annual fiscal deficit would be due to interest payments because the FED has been raising interest rate very fast, and that funds rate is at five point two five percent and it looks like Powell has been
telling us it could go up by another fifty BIPs, and so it's entirely feasible. I think that in a couple of years you would see annual fiscal deficit running at about over five percent per year, with half of which due to interest payments.
Michael, we did have this big debate around the debt ceiling in recent weeks, and Republicans were very vociferous about complaining about the excess spending, but that didn't tend to translate into any desire to raise taxes. In fact, if anything, they wanted to cut taxes more. So, it just are are there still fiscal hawks in the Republican Party or are they hiding? Are they going to come out after the election.
Well, I think they're reasserting themselves. I mean, so what's happening right now? Well, first of all, what we saw at the dead Ceiling bill was a desire to cut discretionary spending, which.
Is a pretty small proportion of tital spending.
Yes, absolutely it is, but it's notable. That's not what happened when Donald Trump was president. When Donald Trump was president, discretionary spending went up and the Congress, Republicans and Democrats in Congress reached the deal about what discretionary spending would look like going forward, and Republicans in the House right now are trying to renig on that deal, and it cut spending even more than was agreed to in the
deal that was reached just a few days ago. I think that both political parties are interested in reducing the deficit. They're each just interested in doing other things. More Republicans are interested in lower taxes more than they're interested in deficit reduction. In Democrats are are interested in more generous government spending more than they're interested in deficit reduction. The striking thing to me is the bipartisan consensus on a
avoiding deficit reduction. You know, it's not just Republicans that don't want to raise taxes. Democrats don't want to raise taxes on the bottom ninety eight percent of households, and President Biden repeats that over and over again. If you make less than four hundred thousand dollars a year, he's not going to raise your taxes. That's ninety eight percent
of households. So the debate is whether to raise taxes on the top two percent which is not which is not going to affect the thirty year outlook for the debt to GDP ratio. Similarly, both parties are in agreement that the US Social Security and Medicare programs should not see spending productions, even though those are the two programs that are primarily responsible for pushing up the DET to
GDP ratio over the next several decades. This is an area where I think both parties are very much to blame, and neither party is willing to do what's needed to be done. And you know, despite all the conflict between Republicans and Democrats, if you actually look at their stated policy goals, there's a remarkable amount of agreement. That's the drivers of the.
Debt and as Anna pointed out, given the fact it's one of the big factors driving increasing spending and borrowing into the future is the higher debt interest costs. And if that continues to be an important factor, you don't feel like any winner of the next election is really going to have prepared the way to do some serious kind of damage reduction or deficit reduction. Michael, we talked
for a long time. I guess the last question I would have was maybe going to undermine the fact that we've had this whole conversation, But we're going on the premise that historically the economy has been important to the
result of elections. And I can certainly remember million years ago now, but when George Bush Senior lost to Bill Clinton, it was a sort of famous occasion where he partly lost because his campaign was fought on unrevised GDP numbers which showed a continued recession, when actually it turned out that things were already looking up when the campaign was
being fought, but we only knew that afterwards. And do you think that it's going to come down to the economy to that extent if we do see a recession, if we do see unemployment picking up as and a forecast at the beginning of the show, do you think it will be a big factor in next year's elections or will we find, as we did in the midterms, actually that cultural wars, the cultural issues are both more decisive for both sides.
My reading of the evidence suggests that historically, in a statistical sense, the trajectory of the economy really does matter quite a bit.
And oh, thank goodness, we haven't wasted our time, then, that's good, yes.
And my view is that what really matters is, you know, maybe one way to think of it as in the summer before the election. So in the summer of twenty twenty four, is the unemployment rate going up or is the unemployment rate going down? And if the unemployment rate is going down, that will help President Biden. If the unemployment rate is going up, that will hurt President Biden. Now, you know, we have had forty six presidents of the United States, so that is a very small sample, and
I think it's important not to be overly confident. I mean, there's a sense in which the science of presidential election forecasting is a science of single instances, which is to say that it's not a science at all, as we've seen. I think, certainly over the past decade or so, anything can happen in American politics, and something unexpected certainly might
happen in the twenty twenty four election. But if I had, if I had to bet, I would I would be very comfortable betting that whether the economy is improving or whether the economy is deteriorating in the months leading up to the twenty twenty four election will be a big factor in who wins?
Those are wise words. Indeed, Michael Strain, thank you very much for cutting through all our discussion with such a useful takeaway for those who bother to listen to the whole thing. And Anna Wong, thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me.
That's it for this episode of Stephanomics. Next week we will have more. In the meantime, you can get a lot more economic insight and news from the Bloomberg Terminal website or app. This episode was produced by Mangnus Hendrickson, Yang Yang and Summer Sadi, with help from Moses and special thanks to Nancy Cook, Anna Wong and Michael Strain. The executive producer of Stephanomics is Molly Smith and the head of Bloomberg Podcast is Sage Bohmer.