Justin Wolfers
@JustinWolfers • 439,606 subscribers
Prof @UMichEcon & @FordSchool | Fellow @BrookingsInst | Intro Econ textbook author | https://t.co/p3ziw22KMT | https://t.co/vvrskX2z0e
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The scarier story isn't a president firing a commissioner over bad jobs numbers. It's what happened last week, quietly, with no front-page coverage: our statistical agency actually put out a number shaped to please the president. That's not a bad data point. That's the loss of a shared source of truth.
Justin Wolfers128,984 views • 4 days ago
Americans hear "51st state" as Trump trolling. Canadians hear it as an existential threat to their sovereignty. That gap in perception is why Carney can't afford to look conciliatory, even if the economics of retaliation don't add up. This isn't just a trade war anymore.
Justin Wolfers165,349 views • 8 days ago
The Census Bureau's report is more than just a bad number. Our government is destroying the institutions charged with telling the truth. Real investigators got pulled off drug trafficking and child exploitation cases to chase phantom voter fraud. That's the actual cost of propaganda.
Justin Wolfers87,945 views • 6 days ago
The tariff math is the easy part: prices rise. The bigger cost is trust. Michigan's auto industry works because Canadian parts makers built their future around Detroit. Threaten that relationship long enough, and they start building their next factory near a port instead, ready to sell to Europe. That's not a price shock. That's a permanent loss of preeminence.
Justin Wolfers45,372 views • 5 days ago
Trump ripped up NAFTA, replaced it with USMCA, then ripped that up too. The lesson is that markets have little reason to trust this president's signature. So Canada shouldn't accept pain today in exchange for promises about tomorrow. It should judge any deal by whether it serves Canada's interests now.
Justin Wolfers249,672 views • 1 month ago
A 30-year mortgage currently has an interest rate of 6.3%. A reasonable guess it that a 50-year mortgage rate would be about 7.0%. ⇒ The monthly payment on a $500k mortgage: - 30 years: $3,050 per month - 50 years: Only $100 less at $2,950 (but 240 months longer).
Justin Wolfers1,995,523 views • 9 months ago
Trump just imposed 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods because they couldn't sign the trade deal. This clip is from a few days ago, but the point still stands. Canada said no because the U.S. kept changing what they wanted. You can't expect someone to keep crawling back to their lying spouse. And you can't expect Canada to keep crawling back to the U.S.
Justin Wolfers60,608 views • 10 days ago
Interviewer: "When you look at today's numbers, what do they tell us about the effectiveness of Donald Trump's tariffs." Me, very serious economist: "Hahahahahahahahahahaha... hahahahahahahaha... hahahahahahahaha... oh, wow." Sometimes all you can do is laugh at the absurdity.
Justin Wolfers899,592 views • 6 months ago
No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. No tax on Social Security. Except: all taxed with narrow carve-outs, and all of it expires end of 2028. The one part of the tax bill that doesn't expire? Tax cuts for the wealthy. Those are permanent. Populism with an asterisk.
Justin Wolfers180,552 views • 1 month ago
Silent Kevin's theory: if the Fed stops talking, markets will stop watching the Fed and start watching the economy instead. But. Every loan rate from overnight to 30 years is built on expectations of what the Fed does next. Going quiet doesn't change that math—it just makes the guessing harder.
Justin Wolfers16,820 views • 3 days ago
The Iran sanctions playbook isn't new. It's basically Cuba, 1960. Back then a State Department official named Lester Mallory wrote the quiet part out loud: deny Cuba money, cut real wages, produce "hunger, desperation and overthrow of government." The theory was that suffering turns people against their own leaders. That if you squeeze ordinary life hard enough, people direct their anger inward, not at whoever's doing the squeezing. Even some in the Kennedy administration were skeptical. Richard Goodwin warned that making Cuba look like a victim of US aggression would only strengthen Castro, not weaken him. Sixty-plus years later, we're running the same experiment on Iran. Worth asking whether the theory ever actually worked the first time. Read more here:
Justin Wolfers27,294 views • 7 days ago
Wall Street firms can pay Truth Social $100,000 a month for early access to market-moving presidential posts. High-frequency traders get a head start. The money flows to a company where the president is the major shareholder. It's hard to imagine a clearer conflict of interest.
Justin Wolfers85,430 views • 26 days ago
A smoke alarm going off doesn't mean there's a fire. It means there's something worth checking. The Census Bureau's report matched voting records to immigration records and found 24,000 alerts, then called them 24,000 illegal votes. That's not what an alarm tells you. It tells you to go look.
Justin Wolfers19,282 views • 5 days ago
Trump's "big" trade deal is with the UK: - It's a framework not a deal - They're our 11th largest trading partner - They're only 3% of US trade (97% to go) - They *already* charge average tariffs of only 1% (limited upside) It's a photo op, with little macroeconomic significance
Justin Wolfers1,421,640 views • 1 year ago