Andrew Ross Sorkin

The lowest unemployment we ever had in this country was in the 1950s.

That was 2.5%.

So,

It's hard to know when people say things are unaffordable.

It's how we feel in the moment.

So do I think that people feel that things are unaffordable?

Sure.

I just took a taxi across town in New York City and I thought, oh my goodness, this bill is shocking.

And I think people feel that all the time.

But on a relative basis, it's hard to say what affordability is.

And I think

The issue of jawboning, meaning the president publicly trying to tell people that the economy is better than somebody feels it is, that's a very hard thing to overcome.

So I'm of the view not that we should be questioning the system unto itself, which is to say that capitalism, I think, with the appropriate guardrails, with the right regulations, with people doing things hopefully for the right reasons, with the right motivations and the right incentives…

capitalism has done extraordinary things for this country, and frankly, for huge swaths of the world, including arguably even places like China in terms of lifting people out of poverty and the like.

I think the problem, and I think you're identifying it, is that sort of classic capitalism is not classic capitalism today.

In fact, all of the things we've been discussing feel a lot more like state-sponsored capitalism or something, some other kind of flavor or variation of capitalism that may not really

be capitalism.

And because capitalism, at least in this moment, seems like it's been, quote unquote, perverted by all of these other forces, whether it be the lack of regulation or the lack of competition or some of our tax systems, which seem to favor the wealthy over the poor, that it's raising questions about whether it works at all.

I'm not sure it's not that it doesn't work.

It only works when you have all of the sort of component parts working in tandem with it.