Diane Swonk
speaker
161 appearances
14 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 9 Apr
Diane Swonk’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 — 14 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 8.
Appearances
That sort of reflects the underlying stress in the labor market.
The U6, which is that stress measure that we do of unemployment, which includes marginalized workers...
That fell to 8.4%, which is still 2.2% above the levels we saw back in 2019.
And it's really a sense that the overall unemployment rate is no longer representative of how people feel about the labor market.
Essentially, those who have a job are clinging on while those who do not have a job and trying to get a job are feeling locked out.
Well, first of all, we're not past it.
And he didn't say we were past it yet.
But an important issue is that's at the heart of the debate at the Fed.
Tariffs are typically a one-time bump in prices.
And so that is historically what you would count on.
But that assumes that the tariffs occur all at once.
Of course, they've been moved out in waves.
And it also assumes they don't come on the heels.
of a pandemic induced inflation that's persisted for nearly five years now and so the debate at the fed is some people saying listen this should be over soon we'll get through it and we can sort of look through it a bit and try to stimulate the labor market in the interim between those people who are worried that maybe this is a more entrenched bout of inflation that isn't as easily um sort of resolving on itself and that's the heart of this sort of very intense debate we see within the fed
Well, there's oftentimes what we call opportunistic pricing, and that is areas that are protected by tariffs.
Even if they're not specifically feeling tariffs, they can raise their prices, too.
We saw that back in the trade war with China, where
you know, the price of washers were tariffed, the price of dryers were not, yet they both went up by the same amount because they tend to be sold together.
And so we know that there is contagion from tariffs as well.
We also know that tariffs actually feed into service sector prices, a lot of medical equipment and, you know, personal protection equipment that was so important during the pandemic.
Showing 141–160 of 161 · page 8 of 9
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