Catherine Rampell
speaker
759 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Catherine Rampell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, I don't know. My 401k doesn't look great. Democracy doesn't look great. But I have my health.
That's what I'm supposed to tell myself, right?
Well, you're assuming colleges will still be around.
Which...
She's not the only one. She was actually citing a study that looked at what Donald Trump's effect on the economy would be if he put in place his full agenda. And I also said last year, if he put in place his full agenda, yes, this would be devastating to the global economy. But we should not assume that's the base case, right? Because Donald Trump says a lot of things that he doesn't carry out
And so, you know, there's certainly a chance of Armageddon, but who knows what he's actually going to do. And then there were obviously people on Wall Street who were even, who were much more sanguine even than that, who like heard Armageddon. Donald Trump say again and again, I'm a tariff man. I'm going to put 10% tariffs on every product around the world.
But all they absorbed was, what was that, corporate tax cuts? And so markets were more joyful and euphoric even.
last year shortly after the election because they didn't think at all that you know they seem to think that there was zero probability that he would do the thing that he said he was going to do and they would only get the goodies essentially and now we're seeing people absorb the reality
Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of schadenfreude about random Trump voters who supported him thinking he was going to bring down prices or make IVF free or one of various other ridiculous promises that he made. And now they're getting what's coming to them. And that's not really how I feel. I feel like Trump lied a lot on the campaign during the campaign about what he was going to do.
And normal American voters generally don't have the bandwidth to do a lot of in-depth research about, for example, what happens when you impose a tariff, right? Some of these things that he talked about were not super intuitive. Some of them were in terms of what effects they would have. Some of them were just outright lies, like the IVF thing.
But things like, oh, he's going to bring down prices and he's going to make China pay for the tariffs or whatever, right? I think the fact that the falsity of all of that didn't penetrate regular Americans is not entirely their fault. I think the media didn't do a great job in covering things. Probably the marginal voter who made the difference here, at least, is somewhat disengaged from politics.
So for those people, it's easy for people to spike the football. But for those voters who thought they were getting one thing and are now enduring a bait and switch, you know, I don't entirely blame them. But for the people on Wall Street. They are paid to get this right.
They are paid to make accurate predictions, to read all of the white papers such as they are to figure out what Trump's proposals would be or at least the range of what they could be and then the range of outcomes. They're paid to know how tariffs work, things like that. And for them...
I have much less sympathy because besides the fact that like they clearly got the economics wrong, I think they also made some other Faustian bargains like, oh, well, we're going to get tax cuts in there for even if he does all of the other stuff. Forget the tariffs, like forget the destructive economic stuff.
if he acts on all of these openly stated plans to weaponize government against his enemies, to curb civil rights, et cetera, that's a trade I'm willing to make. So like on multiple levels, the support from a lot of, not everyone on Wall Street, but the support of people on Wall Street and various other executives in corporate America, I am much less sympathetic to.
The problem is they're not the only victims.
Even poor Elon Musk, as I've been saying, he invested $200 million into Donald Trump's campaign so that he and Trump could run government together. And it turns out, unfortunately, they suck at running government. And now he's like $130 billion poorer, right? Because Tesla stock has gone down.
I think he lost like a quarter of his net worth since the beginning of the year or something like that. It's much bigger than 2%, whatever it is.
Yeah. To unpack that a little bit, usually when stock markets go down, it means people are selling off their stocks, right? And then they have cash, and then they dump that cash into bonds, so like treasuries.
Okay? So they put the cash into bonds, right? When they buy bonds, the price of bonds goes up and their interest rate goes down. Sorry for all the technical steps, but this is just to explain that usually when equities fall, you see bond rates falling too. We are not seeing that now. Okay. And... Trump clearly expected it to happen.
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