Justin Wolfers on Trump's Economy as Pressure Mounts

"Very good." "Very good." "That's a lot." "That's true."

"The world's most comfortable."

"The world's most comfortable." "The world's most comfortable." "Mega, but the world is more complicated."

“"The only way to make a real estate business."”

"And it's very good." "Very good." "Very good." "It's a very good business." Donald Trump is crashing the United States economy as he further escalates his catastrophic war

in Iran, in the real world, not in Donald Trump's fraudulent criminal world. The United States has not brought in 19.2 trillion dollars. If we brought in 19.2 trillion dollars, then why is the debt going up over 3.5 trillion dollars in this year alone? Why has the total debt?

And I know a lot of people are talking about this anymore because they just want to cover up for Donald Trump and MAGA, but the national debt is approaching $40 trillion dollars. Donald Trump has added basically 30% in his presidencies to the overall national debt. Let's just take a look at charts, not Donald Trump's fraud to talk about what's really happening in the economy.

And you know what's happening in your economy, in your home, in your apartment. You know the struggle to pay rent. You know that housing is not affordable, groceries are not affordable, gas prices are going back up right now.

“Let's just talk about the data because that's what we do here at the mightest touch.”

Network. You want to take a look at the traffic in the straightive Hormuz, you know how Donald Trump says.

Never before have we had such good traffic.

It's like never before so good. Actually, if you take a look right here, it looks like to the left the giant wall from the game of thrones and then everywhere to the right of it is where the traffic is right now. Traffic in the straightive Hormuz is at a complete standstill.

There are no ships leaving the straightive Hormuz as now it appears Iran will escalate in response to more of the war crimes being committed by the Trump regime. And perhaps shut down the Bob L. Mondob straight in the red sea at the end of last week. Real prices are up 20% over the past 10 to 15 days or so. Oil prices were approaching $90 a barrel.

You have treasury secretary, Bessent, in my opinion, trying to manipulate the market by bringing in certain well investors to short the crude market and try to bring down the price there. But the crack spreads. They don't lie.

That's the difference between the refinery price and the price of crude. At an all-time high there, those crack spreads like $86 a barrel. The crack spreads are higher than the price of crude itself, which is unheard of. And that crude price is that $80 to $90 a range. But with this escalation, we can expect that to go up into the 90s and perhaps even higher.

We'll see where that lands later today when the futures market opens there. And it comes to mortgages right now, as you know, the mortgage rate about 6.55% up sharply recently. And that continues to go up. I mean, housing entirely unaffordable.

You take a look right now speaking of housing. You have four closures this year, a 21% increase from last year and a 30% increase from two years ago.

“And I think these are important metrics for closure up right now, 30% from two years ago.”

And when you look at credit card delinquencies, record high, student loan delinquencies, record high, medical debt delinquencies, record highs, consumer sentiment, all-time historic lows.

And when it comes to all of this data, always in the negative, always on the bad side of

these things, we were talking about great recession. We're talking about the collapse of the dot com boom. When we were talking about, you know, a lot of data right here being aggregated. You have health care being torn away from Donald Trump's one big beautiful bill, the disastrous fraud that that was.

You've seen already millions of people lose their health insurance as soon as the midterms are over. We're going to see millions of more people get kicked off of Medicaid and millions of more people lose the insurance that they have that's coming soon.

When you look at all of the like economic metrics, they look a whole hell of a lot like Donald Trump's D.J.T., Trump media, I mean, you look at Trump media crashing right now. The stock is sub $10 when you start a spec. You start at $10 a share.

“So it just below water right there, and what's the priority of Trump media right now?”

You heard at the end of last week, Trump media has been pitching $100,000 monthly fees for stock traders to get instant or to get access to Donald Trump's posts. We're Trump manipulates the markets. This is real. If you pay $100,000, you can get access or this was being floated to Trump's social media

posts on Trump media first, available to the oligarchs and the stock traders, if you

want to, like, systematizing this horrific, horrific behavior, you know, also, I'm sure you've been following this SpaceX crashing tanking down 22% or close to 23% since it was added to the Nasdech 100. So Trump and Musk had the rules changed for the Nasdech and Nasdech 100. Normally you'd have to wait a significant period of time to see how a company does because you want to avoid pumping dumps and all of these schemes before a stock can be put on the

Nasdech 100 because a lot of 401k's and mutual funds and funds that people invest in, part

“of the investment is in the Nasdech 100 or in the Nasdech.”

So when SpaceX put itself into the Nasdech, you may not want to even own SpaceX, but your 401k, your mutual fund, your funds that you may have been invested in had space had to, they had to purchase SpaceX because they follow their criteria, which says they have to buy certain Nasdech company. So when it was added to the Nasdech 100 and it got this status, they had to buy SpaceX.

So that's been harming people's portfolios right now.

And the reality isn't in my opinion, I mean, it's the revenue that it was making never

merited anywhere near the valuation that it was given at first and here's the results of all of this. Also, more reporting about how Donald Trump would make social media posts about various companies in and around the time that he would purchase the stocks in these companies and CNN did a pretty good expose where they said Trump trade stocks before favorable true

social posts and they gave tons of examples how Trump made stock trade shortly before posting favorable comments about them. So with all of this taking place, and I know the struggle is real, what's Treasury Secretary Scott Beson saying, how is how's he dealing with all this well? You went on a podcast called the way I heard it and Treasury Secretary Beson's of everything

is look.

If you do the right thing and you work hard and you make good decision, there's still

maybe the American dream for you. I mean, just wanted to ask all this guy is here. Play this clip. I really think it's up to us to let people know that the system does work for them.

“If you do the right thing, if you want to work hard, if you want to make good decisions,”

then there is still the American dream. So you've got to make sure that they are good paying jobs on the other side where people can move up. Then he goes on state regime media Fox with state regime media Fox and he talks to them and he's just like, look, you know, the Fort Knox has gold and where he's with Jesse

Waters. You know, we have the gold in Fort Knox and you can trade these certificates for gold. No, you can't. What are you talking? What are you talking about?

Fort Knox, gold. They want to talk about everything other than the struggle that the American people are experiencing here. Let's play this clip. Have you visited Fort Knox?

I haven't. I haven't. People on my staff has it. We're going to the Treasurer's office. The Treasurer has been to Fort Knox and I am happy to say all gold is present and accounted

for. The US has the largest pile of gold in the world over a trillion dollars at current market value. And we're getting more gold from Venezuela, I hear. We're getting a lot from Venezuela, we're getting gold.

And just so you see, even though he says I never took the trip to Fort Knox, this has actually

been something that Donald Trump has been saying to his supporters over and over again. We got to check out if the golds in Fort Knox, we're going to get rich with all that gold in Fort Knox.

“You'll see it's all right around the corner, just like your doge dividend checks, right?”

$5,000. Your tariff rebate checks, it's right around the corner. The gold in Fort Knox, you're going to get rich, you're going to get rich, you're going to get rich. Remember when Donald Trump said that he goes, I would be the greatest communist, like

the need. That's what he said, Lenin. Just like the need because I would just promise people everything and then I wouldn't even have to deliver. I'd make the greatest communists he said here, but I don't need to show you that he

said that. But here's the video of Fort Knox. I got this one. You know, my life I've heard about Fort Knox, that's where the gold is kept, right? I've heard Fort Knox, you know, we're getting a little bit shaky.

We're getting a Yip, some of this stuff, like I want to find out. So we're going to open up the doors. I'm going to see if we have gold that we want to find out.

Did anybody steal the gold in Fort Knox, it's a pretty amazing place, but I'm going to

actually go. We're going to open the doors. We're going to inspect Fort Knox. We want to make sure that we actually have, you know, 400 tons of gold or whatever the hell it is.

It's a lot of gold. I don't want to open it and the cupboards are bare. Good happen.

“If you look at some of the things, oh, by the way, where do we go into the education department?”

We haven't even done that. So we could find as much as a $1.5 trillion worth of waste fraud and abuse. If we do that, we can balance budgets. We can do a lot of other things. All right, I'll show you just so you can hear him say, "Lanine, Lanine, I'd make the greatest

communists here. Let's play this clip." I want to get the word out because what's forming is communism in the country. And communism is easy to sell. I would be the greatest communist in history.

I'd be right up there with Lenin, I'd be as good as anybody. You've got free rent for the rest of your life. What they don't say is that you'll be living in squallor in 12 months. You've got free house with anybody like to have a free house. We'll take it away from somebody who will give it to you.

You'll have murders all over the place, communism is a disaster. It's been proven to be for thousands of years under different names, but the same thing. It's very important. And then you'll even see in 2025 Donald Trump when he was in the Oval Office with French President, Emmanuel Macron, Trump, again, talking about Fort Knox and Macron looking at

him like he's like a crazy person here playing this clip. We're actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there because maybe somebody stole the gold. Tons of gold.

“I think also the way to think about these reconciliation bills that Donald Trump does, you”

know, I used to litigate against Ponzi schemes. And I was a lawyer and I would be appointed by a receiver who would work for the SEC. And I would litigate these cases against mass-upponzi scheme fronts. One of the tactics that they would do is they would create SPV, special purpose vehicle one, special purpose vehicle two, special purpose vehicle three.

So they'd raise money for special purpose vehicle one. They take it for themselves. They would tell special purpose vehicle one investors. We got all this money for you, billions of dollars we've made. And then what do they do?

They then do special purpose vehicle two to then pay a little bit to special purpose vehicle one investor so that they feel okay, and then the Ponzi schemeers then take for themselves. And then they do with special purpose vehicle three and four and so on until they get busted. That's like a Ponzi scheme. Reconciliation one, the big beautiful bill, reconciliation two, now three point out.

To me, it's just like special purpose vehicles one, two and three. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul, except here it's robbing from the American people or bringing the American people further into debt in order to pay Paul. In this case, no offense at your name is Paul, Donald Trump and the right with all the garks and the military industrial complex and to feed the money to them and then create another

urgency. We need reconciliation for a point out. We need reconciliation. Didn't you all say the big beautiful bill was going to cover everything? Not only did it destroy American lives, it didn't cover anything.

So you had to go back for two point out. You had to go back for three, but it's a Ponzi scheme. And all the while, Donald Trump throws out the fraudulent number, $19.2 trillion dollars. I brought in. And of course, he didn't bring in $19.2 trillion, by the way.

So we talk about it in our book WTF America pre order right now. WTF America. I think we have on the QR code. It's climbing the charts. It comes out in October, pre order helps us live.

Right.

I want to bring in right now Justin Wolf first, an interview I just did with him.

The top economist runs platypus economics. He's the chief economist that might as touch now.

Now I want to bring in Justin Wolfers, chief economist at the might as touch network.

“Also the founder of platypus economics, just in great to see it as always Donald Trump's”

jaw boating this week, saying Iran wants to meet Iran wants to meet the boy who cried wolf. That clearly looks like that week, little pathetic boy, in my opinion, proclaiming deals. The boy who cried, deal, I should probably call it. Nobody wants to, you know, nobody's the, I don't think the markets are buying it anymore.

This comes at a time where there has been not just an escalation, a rapid escalation, Donald Trump destroying bridges and civilian infrastructure in Iran, Iran, responding by targeting a substantial infrastructure of the Arab nation, neighbors, or learning that further escalation is probably likely the M.O. use a pipe tree.

Like there's not even a thing anymore.

We ain't getting back to there, in my opinion, any time soon at the same time, in the dark of night, you had Donald Trump tariffing Brazil, 25% because of the Bolsonaro family. It's many believe that they're kind of putting tariffs on Brazil. But only the Bolsonaro's can get away with it as Flavio is running against Lula for president and Donald Trump now threatening more tariffs against Canada, saying that because of the wild

fires, where we want to punish Canada, where as Canada, help the United States. And when we have wild fires and the loss their lives, helping us fight our fires here, this is what Donald Trump is doing. Overall, I just want to get your take because you and I talk about reliability, predictability, and America used to be known for, and this isn't just volatility.

The U.S. is trading, in my opinion, like a penny stock on steroids.

Or I should say, "Truth social, what do you make of it?" I'm tempted just to start with the joke that I'm surprised we haven't gotten tariffs on

“Belgium for burdens in the World Cup, but the fact is the president in his tariff”

theory just called they had a FIFA, so I'm not really a joke there at all. But let's come back a level because it's not just relentless dishonesty. It's, if you don't have a reputation being honest, it actually makes any form of communication difficult, right? If you knew that I was a lying liar and you went on a date with me and the date went

really well, and at the end of the day I said, "I think I love you." You don't know where you stand. It gives me no ability to form a relationship with you or to walk away from a relationship with you because nothing I say can be trusted. And the president has treated truth as if it were purely optional.

And in the short term, I think it had a very big political payoff for him. It had a payoff because the news media was not wired to understand, was not wired for someone to be relentlessly untruthful. There were a set of norms. If the president said something, you would give a difference.

You wouldn't fact check the president in real time. And you would take his messages because you thought his messages would be informative. And you broke all that and it had a very large short term gain for the president. Where that leaves us as a country is that he can go abroad and say things and no one takes him seriously.

On one day, he says he's going to blow around the smithereens.

“I thought it was a deeply dismaying day, I hated the repartrait, I think blowing out”

the countries off the face of the earth is an immoral and ethical thing to do. But the thing to realize is, that is a power that we have. And it's a power that we have because our tax dollars have gone to work, creating this extraordinary military and it does give us leverage. But if you speak like that and don't use the leverage, the leverage disappears.

The president speaks no longer carries any weight. And I think that's a huge part of the problem in trying to get to peace with Iran. And the guy promises one thing to die and then he rips it up the next die, right? Once you've seen that act, why would you give something up valuable if you're not going to get anything valuable in its own?

He mentioned Belgium and the joke that you were giving, you know, we should say Belgium gave Donald Trump a golden ring with all of these rubies and diamonds true story. And that was one of the reasons that he made a tariff decision that reduced certain tariffs after getting a gift from Belgium before. When you as an economist are making projections, that's, you know, when you teach university,

you know, it's charts, it's mapping, you know, and the charts are based on series of assumptions. And so when economists, whether they're at banks, whether they're people plotting mortgages, inflation, the markets, jobs, whatever, you are able to assess trends. And you could, you know, you know, we, some of them's who called soft landings.

your thoughts, you know, as an economist, the challenges that this also presents.

“Now that we've established what it means when trust is lost.”

But the level of volatility, you know, is, is so off the charts. And it seems that the only people who make money are the insiders when essentially they create their dips, they buy their dips, but at some point, the dips become, you know, you can only do that certain amount of times before the dip becomes, uh, or whatever. And, you know, look, you see, I saw Jamie Diamond, you know, someone who I, you know,

used to very much respect, I see him on stage. I understand he's got stakeholders and shareholders and he's got to say certain things that he's got to say, but, you know, he's up there on stages with Trump saying things that mean. Be it to the honest, a little bit kind of sick to my stomach while Trump is doing all

of this. And so I just want to get your take broader about how you deal with this as an economist, the volatility. Yeah. So it's interesting because the emotional volatility that you feel, I mean, Ben, I know,

no one lives at more than you do, you're on top of the new cycle day and day out. We've, every time I look up on the internet, there you are, um, that emotion of volatility that the new cycle is literally an order of magnitude faster than it's ever been, that the half-life of a story now is two hours. That's one thing, but actually it translates in a very different way into financial markets.

Yeah. Let's think about this slowly. Let's say the president says I'm going to invade Canada.

The first time he says that, you think to yourself, Christy, that would be terrible.

This is a president out of control. I definitely have to dump stock to be of the worst possible president. This is going to lead to a painful war. This is going to terrible economic consequences. And then by the end of the afternoon, the president said, uh, I was just kidding about bombing

Canada. Okay. So you've lived through that. Now the next day when he wakes up and says he's going to bomb Canada, what are you going to do?

You're going to realize that much of the time he says that, he's kidding. That's where he backs down. In which case, you no longer want to be the one who sells your stocks because they're going to rise again by the rest by the end of the afternoon, uh, when he says he's not going to bomb it.

Because you see they're going to rise in the afternoon, you're going to sell them in the morning, which actually means that the president's words do less to move markets today than they used to. And I can give you a couple of examples.

When we first went into a run, um, no one was sure how serious we were that actually led

to very sharp stock market movements.

“And then the president every day, I think I counted literally 50 occasions where he said”

we're on the cusp of peace with Iran. If we were literally on the cusp of peace with Iran, you would expect the market to rise all the way back up. And the first time he announced it, that led markets to respond that way. But then people kept, um, eventually understood every time the president speaks, it doesn't

actually mean anything. And so that meant markets today respond less to what the president said than they used to. Let me explain why that's complicated. One of the biggest checks on the president is sometimes he does a dumb thing in the market's

tank, effectively telling him it's dumb.

The problem is if the markets now understand half the time when the president speaks, he doesn't

mean anything. This is the point of honesty being important, then the market no longer tanks. And so that means next time he does a dumb thing, the market's not going to tank in which case he's going to persist with the dumb thing. Um, and so, look, I may be, I went deeper into that than you really want to.

It was just because he brought us to where we are today, because you look at these strategic petroleum reserves and people who are a lot smarter than me in this area say, you know,

“remember that, the, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, you know, the, the, the comments coming”

down. Don't look up. Don't look up. And people are saying, this tank thought him thing is a real issue and it's problematic. And we look at the straightive hormones and it's closed and Trump is saying it's open,

but it's not open. We look at the escalation taking place and you go, wait a minute, this right now seems to be that moment where we need to deal with this is serious stuff and, you know, even though Brent crude is going to be approaching $90 a barrel, which is very high. It took a long time for it to get there.

And I've been sounding like a oil geek talking about three, two, one crack spreads and trying to explain, you know, the delta between crude and refinery prices, but this is, this is, this is, this is the, this is your world of charts where you see these issues and I feel like a crazy person sometimes and everybody, this is there. The comments there, I'm telling you and you feel like Ben's not as bad as you think

it is, but what do you make us this moment particularly, though, feels like this is the bad moment, but with all of those other times he did the tacos and the this, this moment

What do you make it? Yeah, it's funny that you raised the taco because we can stick with Mexican food here.

So the so-called taco, Trump trade was Trump always chickens out.

And when we went from bombing around to a ceasefire, the taco trade looked really good. Now I've subsequently heard that our Mexican food menu has expanded.

“I don't know Ben, if you heard of the Nacho trade, this is the view that I think you're”

expressing, Nacho is not a chance homo's opens. So the concern here is that the US doesn't have a pathway to getting the straight, consistently persistently open. And that has much longer come to consequences. And so this is where what I want to do is sort of destroy your attention to different phases of the war with the run.

In the first phase of the war, markets responded very badly. And again, I want to remind people, I'm not obsessed with markets. It's what they're trying to tell us about the economy. When markets tank, that's because smart people on Wall Street, who bit millions of dollars, are betting that the future profitability of American firms will be lower. And so a mild obsessed with Wall Street, what I've obsessed with is understanding the future

of the economy. So when we first went to war in Iran, markets absolutely tanked. And what

they were doing is responding to concern about the intensity of the war, which is how much damage with the US do, how much would we damage Iranian infrastructure, how much damage would there be through the rest of the region.

“Remember, this was meant to be a four to six week war. Now we're now at four to six months.”

But now that we went through one phase one of the Trump campaign was bomb, boast, and blockade. Then we had the ceasefire didn't work. So we went to the ceasefire and now phase two is bomb, boast, blockade, nothing's changed. And the fact that we seem to be out of ideas and unable to get ourselves to negotiating table in order to do more than Trump claims he had an agreement. He didn't had an agreement to agree in which they hadn't actually

agreed or on it needed the terms that the suicide's disagree on, mate, I couldn't have an agreement to agree with you, but it doesn't get us anyway. And so the fear is at this point, we look like we don't have a way out. And so now all of the concern is not about the intensity of the war, but about the duration of the war. We know it's not four to six weeks. We know it's definitely less four to six months, but what's happening now is it's raising

a very real possibility of four to six years. That's not alarm and that's actually reality,

“that that very much is in focus right now. By the way, I did warn people about this at”

the start of the war. And so what that in turn means is we can follow what's happening to the price of what we call the spot price of oil, the price of oil today. But people are also betting on what oil prices will be in the future. We call those futures contracts. And what you see over this current phase is those futures contracts now are moving quite sharply. Again, that's just the market saying, "Hey, we're not really worried so much about

the intensity now. We're worried about the duration, the possibility of what folks call it forever or what, but something just drags out that they're not a chance to lose opens, that things remain open, closed, open, closed. And the world oil markets are going to continue to either be deprived of a source of oil or continue to be buffeted about for many years to come now." Yeah. And what worries me is a student of history and

psychology and pathology and seeing Trump's never had a way out of any of this stuff.

His whole life, it's always been frameworks and agreed to agree later. He's never actually done deals. If you read the art of the deal, what he says is, "I don't actually view a deal as good faith bargaining between parties where each side gives. It's how you and I would generally teach negotiation in a class." He said, "I view it as the starting point to extract more and grind down the other side." He's met a adversary in Iran and people

over there like foreign minister Iraq, G. Who wrote books on negotiations and they have a certain way of thinking as well. That's not going to be like the way the Republican party was to Trump or the way certain institutions bend here in the United States because they view it as Trump talks about it as the very survival of the civilization because Trump has described it in such terms. And so the big fear to me when I saw the MOU when I see his

fake deals with China, when I see all these fake deals is they're not real, they're not real, just like we didn't bring in 19 trillion dollars and you can't really bluff it when you see what's going on. You can't keep it going for it. Let me give you the final word before we go. Let me simplify it, which is when someone thinks that the start of negotiation is to get into the table so they can continually take more and more and more from you, then you just don't

on a first date, you would just swipe, I don't know, which side do you sup swipe to get rid of them?

But you'd swipe to get rid of them. We're supposed to the same page I never used those out.

“We're both old men then, Ben, I'm not much of a swipe or either, but you know, it's I think it”

is swipe right to get rid of them. And in some sense, as it works in live so it works in war, which is the Iranians are here to swipe right. They don't need a relationship with us, but there is an offering that we saw continuously through the trade war. The trade war provides a really interesting map for how Trump operates, which is we actually did have deals. We had very

“real trade agreements with Canada, for instance, and the president came in and just ripped it up.”

As you said, he just comes to the table whenever he wants and rips it up whenever he wants. And what he wanted was a belief that he struck a deal. And so the cleverest countries in the world, the Brits were very, very good at this. The Japanese did this as well. Is they would basically

let the president walk out the front, hold a press conference and say, I extracted an incredible deal.

“I just screwed this country absolutely from here to kingdom come. And the Prime Minister of”

Britain, for instance, just sat there and nodded. He understood that there was no deal. He understood that there's no follow through. This is not a particularly competent administration. So he understood if he wanted to best represent his country, he had to let the president declare the win while quietly actually doing nothing that the deal or ever required,

because there was not in fact a deal. That's the way out of this. The problem is that the Prime

Minister of England was able to do that and the Prime Minister of Japan was able to do that. But this seems like the sort of thing would be a lot more difficult for a country like around to stomach. Everybody make sure you subscribe to platypus economics. That's Justin's YouTube page and organization. We're honored to have him as the chief economist here at Mightest Touch as well. We made the big announcement earlier this week. So after this video ends, just search platypus

economics. And in the comments, tell Justin that Ben said, I love things. Everybody thinks just breaking news right now. My brothers and I wrote a book. It's called WTF America. And well, doesn't that just say it all? It comes out officially this October, but you can preorder your copy today. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description below.