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- [00:01]
Sam Stein
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- [00:15]
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- [01:11]
Sam Stein
Hey, everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Book, here with Katherine Rampel, who graced us with her presence in the D.C. office. And yet we're down the hall from each other and we're not even in the same room.
- [01:23]
Catherine Rampel
What is this social distancing here?
- [01:25]
Sam Stein
It's like very, very March 2020.
- [01:29]
Catherine Rampel
Yeah, it's like completely empty behind me. It's just this big, vacant, cavernous space.
- [01:36]
Sam Stein
So anyway, I don't think that's a metaphor for the bulwark, but we did move into new offices. Catherine's in D.C. because logistically it's a pain in the butt to do this in person. We are just sitting about 100ft from each other. We're going to talk about the economy. Couple big headline numbers today. Look, I'm not the guy who knows the numbers. That's JVL. But JVL's got a bunch of things he's recording today. So I'm sitting here for jvl. So Catherine's going to educate me. Let's start with gdp. So I saw this morning, revisions to GDP went way down. Now, there's been a bit of theorizing about why it is it was rise down to 0.7% growth. It was an estimate. It was going to be about 1.4% growth, well below the consensus for Dow Jones, which is 1.5% growth and throwing a lot of numbers out here, considerably slower than the 4.4% gain. In the prior period, all these numbers always get revised. First of all, why do they always get revised so much?
- [02:32]
Catherine Rampel
Because the government statistical agencies that are collecting these data are getting more and more data in. So like their first shot at GDP numbers, you know, it'll be based on certain information that they actually have. And then some of it is just imputed, like they're just, they're guessing, basically saying some of the key elements that go in. And then they get.
- [02:51]
Sam Stein
And yet we go crazy. We go crazy over the first round of numbers and we treat it as headline news, knowing very well that it's going to get revised some way.
- [02:59]
Catherine Rampel
Yes, that's true.
- [03:00]
Sam Stein
Noted, noted. Okay, so what do you make of the revisions?
- [03:05]
Catherine Rampel
They're not great. And it suggests that the books.
- [03:09]
Sam Stein
That's why we pay her. That's why we pay her for the analysis.
- [03:12]
Catherine Rampel
Exactly. Yeah. Look, the numbers suggest that we are not in the economic golden age that Donald Trump had promised. And I've seen a bunch of comments from various Republican lawmakers, among others, suggesting that the reason why the numbers were bad, that we only grew 0.7% at an annualized rate, is that Democrats shut down the government and are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy or whatever. And first of all, I would say, like, we already had those government spending numbers before. Like, actually the government number, the government piece of GDP did not change a whole lot. It looks a little bit worse than the first imprint, but not that much. And even if you stripped out government spending, government spending only like lopped off about a percentage point of GDP growth, you know, again, at an annualized basis. So what that would mean is even if you like got rid of all of that and you didn't have government dragging on things, you still would see overall GDP growth at a little over 1%, you know, 1.7% thereabouts, which is still not great. I mean, the, the long term average from the past, however many, you know, recent couple of decades is more is higher than that. And you know, let's say 2%, ish, you know, or one, you know, somewhere around there. And Donald Trump had promised like 6% growth at various points. Or I think recently he said something like, why can't we have 12% growth? I forget what it was he threw out.
- [04:49]
Sam Stein
He did not say 12. Come on.
- [04:50]
Catherine Rampel
It was, it was something. Double digits, as I recall.
- [04:53]
Sam Stein
What's like the top growth rate that China's had? It's like 10% or something like that. It's like crazy. That would be nuts.
- [04:58]
Catherine Rampel
Okay. Yeah. And, and besides all of that. So, so it's like, first of all, we're not meeting the metrics that Donald Trump's said we would get before. The other thing I would point out is that when the government shuts down that, you know, that subtracts off of GDP when it reopens, that adds back to GDP because, like, you have all of those people going back to work and those paychecks going back out and all of that. And we haven't gotten the numbers for the first quarter of this year. But you'll probably see some bounce back. And I am sure, you know, you can, I'm on record now, you can take my word for it that when that happens, no one in this administration or in the Republican Party is going to be like, aha, thank you, Democrats, for shutting down the government before and giving us a bounce in January. No, they're not going to, you know, they're not going to allocate responsibility for whatever slight little boost, you know, symmetric boost, we get to the government reopening. They'll claim any good numbers, if there are good numbers in the first quarter are related to, of course, you know, Donald Trump. Good things that Donald Trump did anything bad, the Democrats did anything good is something Donald Trump did.
- [06:07]
Sam Stein
Well, we've gone through these cycles where if, like, the Dow goes up, it's like, you know, they're tweeting out like, hashtag Trump economy, Trump boom. And then, you know, then it's still Joe Biden's fault when it goes down. The, the other sort of macro data elements here are that inflation remains kind of sticky. Right? It's not. Yeah, look, it's not like, put it this way, the most bearish prognosticators thought it might be worse because of the tariffs, and yet it's not great. Right? It's in that sort of 2.4 to 2.8 range. It remains there. It seems kind of like we can't jar it loose. And certainly the war in Iran is not going to help with the gas prices. We're going to get into that as well. But what do you make of the stubbornness around inflation? You know, the Fed's always, like, targeting 2%. That seems like a silly goal, but it seems sort of like. How do you want to characterize it kind of.
- [07:03]
Catherine Rampel
I don't know. That's. How do you characterize it seems. It seems reasonable to.
- [07:07]
Sam Stein
Is it arbitrary? Is it not arbitrary at all, or.
- [07:09]
Catherine Rampel
No, it's. It's slightly arbitrary in that, like, that specific number. They, they want some very small positive Growth in, in prices for complicated reasons that I won't get into. Like consumers always want prices to go down. That is not what monetary policymakers want. They want very, very modest stable growth for a whole bunch of reasons, including that it probably helps create some more flexibility in the labor market. I don't really want to get into all of that.
- [07:42]
Sam Stein
Please.
- [07:42]
Catherine Rampel
But 2% has been their target for a very long time and we have been overshooting it for, I think about five years now, fairly consistently. So we have been above target for a while and, and up until basically Liberation Day last year, which was April of 2025, it had been trending downward like we were coming closer to that 2% target. And then after Liberation Day, after Trump announced these tariffs, whatever progress we seem to be making, we've been backsliding on and we've seen inflation tick up a little bit and kind of stabilize, as you point out, like in that, that high two, you know, close to 3% level, two and a half to 3% level. And that's obviously not great. Again, that's my prize winning analysis for you. And it is partly because of a lot of things, or I don't want to say exclusively, but largely because of a lot of the things that Donald Trump has done. Donald Trump came in promising to whip inflation now and to, you know, in fact, bring down prices, which as I said, actually we don't want to happen. And the Fed is not targeting and did not happen. Instead, he added tariffs. He's been trying to politicize the Federal Reserve, which is bad for long term price stability. And he's been doing a bunch of other things like, I don't know, deporting our agricultural labor force and our construction labor force and all of those. And like things that will also, at least in specific sectors, potentially put pressure on higher prices. And then there is this war, which is not factored into any of these data, by the way, because the war is much too recent. But that's going to be putting pressure on not just oil prices, lots of other goods too, oil, gas, lots of downstream things that are made from oil and gas and petrochemicals and the byproducts of processing gasoline and all of that good stuff. So we can get into all of that, but, you know, we will. It's always, it's always the case that these data are somewhat backward looking because there's a little bit of a lag between when they collect the numbers and when they are released. But now it is really dated. You know, I don't want to say obsolete, but like this, the information in the GDP number and, and in the inflation number is not so valuable right now. Just because the state of the world has changed so much, so much in the past couple of weeks.
- [10:22]
Sam Stein
Look, and I'm not going to harp too much on it, but you keep saying these data and it's this data, okay?
- [10:29]
Catherine Rampel
No, it's plural. I'm sorry, I'm a pedant about this. It's.
- [10:33]
Sam Stein
I know you are because I.
- [10:34]
Catherine Rampel
Data are copy.
- [10:36]
Sam Stein
I'm not going to. Not going to let it bother me. I'm not going to let it bother me.
- [10:40]
Catherine Rampel
I think Adam is on my side on this.
- [10:42]
Sam Stein
He's definitely on your side. And that's how I relent.
- [10:45]
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- [11:45]
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- [12:01]
Sam Stein
The state of the economy in the aggregate though, it's always tricky, obviously, to sort of say, oh, the economy's doing, you know, because there's so many components to it. But if you step back for a second, you look at the big numbers and then you look at what's happening in Iran. And then the stock market, which is, as you've pointed out many, many times, it's lagging significantly compared to our contemporaries. You look at the job market, we lost, what was it, 75,000 jobs last month?
- [12:31]
Catherine Rampel
72.
- [12:31]
Sam Stein
72.
- [12:32]
Catherine Rampel
No, 92 I don't remember. It was.
- [12:34]
Sam Stein
And those numbers get revised too. I just want to be clear, but let's just say you had to sort of, you were at a bar, you're hanging out with people, they're like, hey, you're Catherine Rampel. I read your newsletter. How should I feel about this economy? What would you tell them?
- [12:47]
Catherine Rampel
Wow, you are really projecting a lot onto my social life here.
- [12:51]
Sam Stein
You don't go to bars. Okay, sorry. Okay. You're having a cup of coffee.
- [12:55]
Catherine Rampel
Well, I have an infant, so my social life is somewhat right now anyway. So what would I say? I would say that the economy has been pretty resilient. A lot of, a lot of stuff has been thrown at it again even before this war. And there's some fragility there. Like, like we are not in a recession. I don't think we, we wouldn't know until like several months at least after the fact, given the way that these things are actually like decreed, you know how when they determined there is a recession. But I don't think we're in a recession right now. But we've lost jobs in whatever it is, like six of the last 12 months at this point. And if you look at for example, hiring among or job gains among younger people, they look really awful. So there are certain pockets of the population that have been hurt worse than others.
- [13:55]
Sam Stein
Why is that? People would say, oh, AI and technological changes and things, but that seems too simplistic.
- [14:03]
Catherine Rampel
It's a little hard to say. It's probably partly AI, but actually the numbers don't look great either for, for like people who don't have college degrees. Who. You would think that like they are. Pardon? Yeah, blue collar workers. Like you would not think that they would be as susceptible to AI churn and you know, AI disruption as like white collar workers. So I think we don't entirely know to be clear. I think it's partly just that we're in a low hiring, low firing environment right now because there's so much uncertainty in the economy. Lots of businesses are just like holding off on all plans, many of them, because there's a lot of uncertainty about specific things like tariffs. Right. Like if, if companies don't know what their costs will be, they're going to hold off on hiring and firing in general because they don't know. They don't know like what the business, what their business is going to look like going forward. But it's not exclusive to companies that import a lot of goods. You know, this has knock on effects. Like every company is looking around and saying, well, if my customers are worried about their environment, like let's say you're a services company that doesn't import a lot of stuff. I don't know, you do marketing for like retailers or something like that. So maybe your clients are the Walmarts and targets of the costcos of the world that are being hit by tariffs. But if they're holding off, then you're holding off. So all of these things are interconnected and there are a lot of these knock on effects. So there's a lot of uncertainty in the economy. The overall numbers suggest very low hiring and also low firing. Just not that much churn in the economy. So if you have a job, you know, you're probably okay. If you are among the unlucky people who don't have a job, you are, you know, basically soldiers.
- [15:55]
Sam Stein
Because you can say shit, it's okay, whatever.
- [15:58]
Catherine Rampel
I don't know, you got on my case some other time for saying shit too much on one of these things. Like it was going to.
- [16:02]
Sam Stein
I will just say, let me.
- [16:04]
Catherine Rampel
I was going to hurt the algorithm or something.
- [16:06]
Sam Stein
No, this is YouTube. I'll just say a Reuters pulling my leg. Yeah, a Reuters headline just crossed and I think it's just based on the morning data, which I. But I think it summarizes what you're getting. It says US job openings rise in January, but hiring remains tepid. So there is opportunity, but people are just uncertain. Look, I will say this. The administration has been, you know, presenting a very bullish demeanor around all this stuff, as they always do. They think things are great, but there are occasionally these instances where the curtain is pulled back a little bit and you get a sense that they're a little bit panicky. And that came yesterday. I believe this interview was yesterday where the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant, was in the middle of an interview, pulled away because of something. We don't know what it was, but apparently, apparently the President called him and he left and then he came back and he was in like a bit more of a dire tone and, and posture. Let's watch what happened. I want to get your thoughts afterwards.
- [17:02]
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- [17:04]
Scott Bessant
Oh, okay.
- [17:07]
Interviewer
Okay. Well, as you heard there, we were interrupted as the Secretary was pulled away by the President to join him in the Situation Room in the White House. We picked up our conversation again a little over an hour later. Mr. Secretary, I have to say it's a first, I'm sure a loss as well that an interviewee has been pulled away to go to the Situation Room. How was the president? Was he. Was he stressed?
- [17:34]
Scott Bessant
No, the president is in great spirits. The Iranian mission is proceeding well ahead of schedule.
- [17:46]
Sam Stein
First of all, has that ever happened? Actually, let me take two points. One is I. I freaking wish I had a British accent because you just sound so much better when you're interviewing people. I might try to adopt on. You should. Yeah.
- [18:00]
Catherine Rampel
Scottish or something.
- [18:03]
Sam Stein
Has that ever happened to you where someone's been. Where a principal's been pulled from an interview to take a really important phone call in like, an hour and a half, they goes by and they come back.
- [18:12]
Catherine Rampel
Not for that period of time. I mean, I've. I've had meetings, certainly with White House officials where, like, the aide comes in with the little slip of paper.
- [18:22]
Sam Stein
Yeah.
- [18:22]
Catherine Rampel
And, you know, they look at it
- [18:24]
Sam Stein
and then they just get back.
- [18:25]
Catherine Rampel
Yeah. Yeah. Or. Or they're like, oh, we gotta wrap this up. Like, I have to get pulled into something. But it's not usually. Well, I don't know. I guess. I don't know necessarily what other communications have been going on. It's weird. I guess we should put it that way, that. That the interviewer was. Was kept waiting for an hour and a half, and there's not necessarily anything nefarious.
- [18:45]
Sam Stein
We don't know what. Yeah. We have no idea what it's about. I mean, it presumably has to do with Iran, but, you know, maybe not. It was just a very interesting moment.
- [18:54]
Catherine Rampel
Yeah. It's also weird because I had seen that Besant was, like, giving comments about military strategy as well, you know, about escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz and things like that. And I'm thinking, why is that the Treasury Secretary's call on any of this?
- [19:12]
Sam Stein
Well, because it's affecting, obviously, global markets. Right. I mean, that's. But it doesn't make sense that he would have to be briefed on, like, opening up the Straits. Right.
- [19:22]
Catherine Rampel
Yeah, well, it would. Yeah. I mean, he should be briefed on it. But the idea that he would be guiding. Well, who knows?
- [19:29]
Sam Stein
What's your.
- [19:30]
Catherine Rampel
Not necessarily anything nefarious going on here. It's. It's just I. I think the broader takeaway is that they did so little planning going into this thing.
- [19:41]
Sam Stein
Right.
- [19:41]
Catherine Rampel
That I would not be surprised if the meetings like the one that, I guess Bessett was called into are happening a little bit more haphazardly than they.
- [19:51]
Sam Stein
Well, they don't. They are not conceding. They're not conceding that they did little planning. If you saw. Did you see Pete Hegseth this morning.
- [19:58]
Catherine Rampel
No, what, what did he say?
- [20:00]
Sam Stein
You missed. You missed a doozy. I'm going to play you a clip in a second. But I think he was challenged about, you know, there's been so. Just for people who are watching, there's been a lot of reporting that the administration was caught off guard by the Iranian resistance and specifically that they did not anticipate that the Iranians would move to close the Strait of Hormuz, which is where a large, large sum of our. Of oil, of global oil goes through. Even though basically. And JBL had this in his newsletter. Any war planning documents that were put together prior to this war said this is exactly what they would do. So it was very much easy to anticipate. But the. So Hegseth was asked about this morning. He was just absolutely defiant. They, you know, we've planned everything. We're, you know, just doing things by the book. He's like, everything's going as we anticipated. We've not been caught off guard whatsoever. You know, he has this thing where he adds adverbs to his, to his speech to make it sound like important. So he's like. And he throws in like sequentially and lethality. And he's just like, if he just throws enough adverbs at you, you're going to be wooed over. But then he had this moment where he was talking about the straight. And it was honestly one of the most. I don't want to say ridiculous because I use that word a lot, but it was dumbfounding. It's a seven second clip, but I want to play it.
- [21:16]
Catherine Rampel
It's a long buildup for this seven second. Okay.
- [21:19]
Sam Stein
It's a really good clip though. Let's play it. Only thing prohibiting transit in the Straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit. Should Iran not do that?
- [21:32]
Catherine Rampel
Who could have known?
- [21:33]
Sam Stein
Yeah, yeah, it's open if they just stop shooting. So it's not open. I mean, what are we doing here? Jeez.
- [21:40]
Catherine Rampel
A friend of mine was telling me a story about Billy from his first grade class or whatever it was and about how there would be snowball fights in the first grade class and you could tell the teacher to like put your name on a list if you didn't want snowballs thrown at you. And Billy's name was on the list.
- [22:01]
Sam Stein
Okay.
- [22:01]
Catherine Rampel
But Billy did not understand that when you throw snowballs at other people, that means that you're like effectively no longer on the list and people get to throw snowballs back at you. And he was like, I think Billy is now our president. He did not understand. This president did not understand that if you dump bombs on the Iranian regime, the Iranian regime is likely to respond in some way. And the best tool that they have at their disposal is essentially holding the global economy hostage by blocking all of these tankers and other commercial vessels that are trying to get through the Strait of Hormuz. So this is totally obvious to pretty much anyone.
- [22:48]
Sam Stein
And then there's the other element of it, which you've highlighted, you highlighted in one of your recent newsletters, which is Trump's sort of cavalier attitude about it, right? Like, he was just sort of. I think he said something like, have. Have the balls to go through it. He's like, just do it. Like, you know, take the risks and,
- [23:03]
Catherine Rampel
you know, have the guts. Yeah.
- [23:04]
Sam Stein
Have the guts. Yeah. You go first. Right? You go first, buddy. So let's break down the economics of it, though. What does it mean to have the strait effectively closed? I mean, there may be a couple ships going in there, and there's some reporting now that some of the European countries are trying to talk to Iran about getting certain ships done. And obviously the Chinese have their own relationship with the Iranians, but effectively much of the traffic through the strait is closed. What does it mean for the global economy? And the other thing I kind of am curious about, and you talked about the sort of it goes up fast and it goes down like a feather, right? Why, like, why is that the case that it's going to take weeks, months to get all the oil back online if you open up tomorrow?
- [23:48]
Catherine Rampel
Well, there are a few things that have happened. Let me take those questions one by one. What is the effect on the global economy? Again, nothing good. That's my sparkling analysis for you, because this is, again, like, 20% of the world's oil supply that goes through there. I forget what the fraction is for the world's liquefied natural gas supply, but it's also quite large. And if you disrupt the flow of those things, you also disrupt the flow, the production, for that matter, of a lot of downstream goods. So, like, if natural gas can't get through, then you have an aluminum smelter. And I think it was Qatar that had to shut down because it needs natural gas to. To. To run the factory. And the aluminum smelter is shut down and is going to take. I think it was months before it could reopen, just because of how complicated that whole process is for reopening a factory. It's not like turning on an office switch. So you have a lot of downstream effects here. And even if you reopen the strait today, you would not have the resumption of oil at the same level that you had before, in part because it's not only a shipping issue, it's now a supply, a production issue, basically, that Iraq, for example, was running out of storage, right. It couldn't send out its oil through the strait, and it can't store oil indefinitely. So you've also had production ratchet back in these countries that are affected. So, yeah, I guess if you reopen the strait today, if everything went back to normal, the stuff that's like waiting on tankers that hasn't already been set on fire because some of it has, stuff that's available could be shipped. But then you have a backlog of production that did not happen of oil, of liquefied natural gas. And so you have a backlog of all of that that needs to come back online. Refineries. My understanding is that refineries also take a really long time to sort of like, turn on and off. And one of the worst things that can happen to a refinery is to, like, run out of the. The. The crude inputs, right? Literal crude oil, because it is so devastating to have to turn off, you know, to shut down all production. So even refineries that have a lot of oil on hand may be very slowly actually processing it, because they'd rather pace themselves and keep the refinery open for longer than capture those really high oil prices today. Like, on the one hand, you would think that, oh, they're seeing the market prices for. For refined product, jet fuel and gasoline and diesel and whatever. And like, you'd think that they'd want to, like, churn out as much refined product as they can to capture those high prices. But in fact, they're having to pace themselves, too, because they don't want to run out of that feedstock. So there are all of these cascading effects, you know, these. These ripple effects from this. This disruption here. And, you know, I've mostly been talking about oil, but there's also fertilizer. Huge fraction of fertilizer. I think it's like it's over a third of maybe urea, Global urea, which is a. Again, something.
- [27:22]
Sam Stein
Yeah, we talked about this on. With. On the pod with Tim. I was like, what is urea? But, yeah, it's. It's kind of like.
- [27:27]
Catherine Rampel
I mean, it's also in p. But that's not what literally goes to. To.
- [27:32]
Scott Bessant
That's putting.
- [27:33]
Sam Stein
They're putting that right through the Straight of Hermus. I know you have a little bit of a heart out here, so. And I have a couple more topics so I want to get you, I want to make sure you don't miss your train. One people, one, one thing that is happening here is that the administration is desperately searching for other avenues to get oil online. And so what happened last night is they, it was reported that they are going to ease sanctions on Russia because Russian oil had been sanctioned over the war in Ukraine. And now the administration's just like, you know what, we need the oil. So let's listen to our dear friend Scott Besant talk about how, yeah, Russia is going to benefit from the war. But don't worry, it's just a limited benefit.
- [28:14]
Interviewer
It, is it a matter of regret to you that Russia is benefiting from this conflict?
- [28:20]
Scott Bessant
Well, I, again, I think it's an inevitability and that's why we gave a 30 day waiver because the Russian barrels are on the water and it is a quick source of for the Indian refineries. The other way to think about it is those barrels are going to end up in China anyway.
- [28:49]
Interviewer
But is it a shame that Russia benefits?
- [28:51]
Scott Bessant
Sorry again, that it is unfortunate and we hope that it will be in a micro period that they will benefit.
- [29:05]
Sam Stein
Okay, War's war. Yeah, that's what happens. But they are also, I will just say Russia is also providing intel to the Iranians for strikes and they are providing medical care to the Iranians. We are funding the people who are funding our opponents. It's ridiculous.
- [29:24]
Catherine Rampel
We are funding the people who are helping our opponents figure out how to better kill our soldiers, our service members. That is really what this is about. And there have been many losers from this war economically, you know, diplomatically and in, you know, the, the mortally right children in an Iranian school, US service members, etc. Lots and lots of losers here. But the one unequivocal winner is Putin because Putin benefits from much higher oil prices in and of itself. Right. That is very good for his war chest. And the fact that Putin now has more customers he can sell that oil to because we are relaxing our sanctions. There have been a few different ways in which we have relaxed our sanctions, in fact on Russia. And it's just so short sighted because you help Russia, you enrich Putin, you enrich Russia's military operations. And that again, like enhances the ability of Iran to kill our people and
- [30:39]
Sam Stein
offer like a sort of short term benefit in the oil market that you're screwing up with this war anyway. So it's very circular.
- [30:46]
Catherine Rampel
Well, I mean. And also on top of all of this, reportedly we are asking the Ukrainians for help in.
- [30:53]
Sam Stein
They're giving us help. They are giving us help on how to deal with Iranian drones.
- [30:58]
Catherine Rampel
Yes. So it's like we are helping Russia kill Ukrainians whose help we need to protect our service members from Russian intelligence. Meanwhile, helping the Russians with its two
- [31:12]
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- [31:27]
Sam Stein
you think they didn't think about the ripple effects here. I want to get you out, but I have to do this one. I'm sorry. If you miss your train, you can blame me. There's a new. We knew that he was going to do this. He was going to do this coin. You see it right there? This is the US Mint. It's part of America 250, which is celebrating 250th anniversary of the founding of the country. It's got Trump's face on it. Look at that. This is the first time a living president will have appeared solo on a coin. I. I'm not shocked that it was Donald Trump who broke this taboo. There he is. Looks like a nice coin. I asked you in the lead up to this, who would be the most ridiculous person to put on a coin if not Donald Trump? And I have my. I have my choice. I don't know if you have yours.
- [32:21]
Catherine Rampel
I mean, I can throw something out. That's silly, but sure, I would say it should be Pete Hegseth, but only the. The photos that he found too unflattering from his Pentagon press conferences. So unflattering that he threw the photographers out. Only use those as a template for what goes on the coin. What's your real answer?
- [32:43]
Sam Stein
Mine was Baron. Just put Baron on there.
- [32:46]
Interviewer
Let the little.
- [32:47]
Sam Stein
He's not little.
- [32:48]
Interviewer
Let the.
- [32:48]
Sam Stein
Let the big man have his moment. You know, he's all in crypto. He should be on some hard currency. This would be nice. It'd be like a little nice gift for them. I'm not going to get one of these coins. Maybe I'll have one as a collector's item, but kind of a silly moment. All right. You got to catch a train. It was a pleasure talking with you. Why don't you come to D.C. more often? It's just, I know you have a small kid, but we need you in the office.
- [33:10]
Catherine Rampel
I aspire to be here more often. Often. And I think I will be back more frequently than I have been.
- [33:15]
Sam Stein
So it's a pleasure having you just
- [33:17]
Catherine Rampel
for the pleasure of being 100ft away from you.
- [33:19]
Sam Stein
Yeah. So we could talk. So we could talk into our computers while sitting 100ft apart. All right, Catherine Rampel, everyone. Should I. We didn't even get to your newsletter. I'm going to give it a quick plug. She, Catherine wrote a newsletter last night for Receipts, which is an incredible newsletter. We, she and I were talking a couple days ago about the, the idea and we were trying to figure out, because I think the conventionalism was if all this terrible stuff was happening to the oil market, then it would create this incentive to go to renewables. And you know, maybe that was sort of this one sort of silver lining effect of the war that actually, you know, incentivize the purchase of, you know, wind and solar and things like that. And then as you reported it, how you discovered it's actually the opposite. Do you want to do a quick 30 second plug for what you discovered?
- [34:06]
Catherine Rampel
Yeah. So basically the issue is that Europe's climate change agenda is the main game happening in the world. The US Is useless on all of this and Europe has a complicated series of like carbon pricing and tariffs on, on the carbon for goods that are, that are imported into the eu. Lots of stuff there that has been having these positive spillovers to the rest of the world so that like almost all of the G20 right now has some form of carbon pricing except for us, Russia and Saudi Arabia. I wonder what those three countries have common.
- [34:47]
Sam Stein
Yeah.
- [34:49]
Catherine Rampel
So in any event, Europe has been leading the way and the massive oil shock, that oil and natural gas shock that is affecting Europe right now threatens to like basically undo this very tenuous political agreement that has to keep this decarbonization agenda going. And there are calls now to get rid of it, to get rid of having a price on carbon. And if Europe goes, then there'll be this domino effect elsewhere in the world that basically like you pull one thread in the sweater and the whole sweater unravels. So what matters is what Europe is doing. Europe has been destabilized by our war and as a result, our best shot potentially at curbing climate change now looks a lot less likely. I don't think it's dead entirely, but, but basically it's like I thought this was going to be a good news story that we were going to have this, you know, surge in political support for renewables. And in fact, it probably just further entrenches our global dependence on fossil fuels, unfortunately.
- [36:00]
Sam Stein
What an uplifting end to this live show. Catherine, thank you so much. I feel so much better about the world. All right. Everyone should honestly subscribe to our newsletter. It's so good. It's so freaking good. It's called receipts. It's on the bulwark. You should be subscribed to the block anyway. And, you know, we have so many channels, but you should be subscribing to our YouTube channel. We get great conversations just like this. We are doing this weekly, folks. It's an economic live discussion. Tune in. We'll be back next Friday. Katherine, take care. Good luck with the train ride home.
- [36:29]
Catherine Rampel
Okay, thanks.
- [36:31]
Sam Stein
All right, take care. Bye, everybody.
- [36:32]
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