Odd LotsPresident Biden recently made it clear that what we're seeing play out in the economy now is the result of "Bidenomics." The current expansion has defied the constant predictions of economic gloom. Every other day, it seems, some firm announces a new battery plant or semiconductor facility for the United States as a result of incentives from either the CHIPS Act or the Inflation Reduction Act. So what's next? How can we be confident the plants will be productive? And what is the Bidenomics view of global trade? To learn more, we speak with Jared Bernstein, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. We discuss the key pillars of the White House economic agenda, and how these ambitious policy measures are being implemented.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
I'm Joe Whysenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, So we're recording this of Friday, June thirtieth. It really felt like this week a bunch of people kind of like declared victory on the economy or suddenly like there's been like something in the water, you know, like they put LSD in the water or something like people are like feeling good. There's a good mood vibe.
Yeah.
If last year we were all worried about the Vibe session, so the idea that all these survey based measures were turning down even while activity was still relatively robust. What are we going to call this one?
VI?
What's the vibe expansion?
I don't know vibe Spanish.
You need to get Kyla Scanlon up, yeah, to come up with the term. But yes, the vibes shifted somehow this week.
Yeah, And it's interesting because a lot of the trends that we saw last to her, you know, very low unemployment, you know, still some inflationary pressures, housing market relatively robust.
Those have just.
Continued this year. So not a lot has changed, but it definitely feels like people are more optimistic.
Yeah, right, exactly, a bunch of people declaring that all the recession calls are null and void. The vibe session is over. Noah Smith had a blog saying that. And I think most notably, the White House sort of chose this week as a week to stamp out the success of what they're calling Bidenomics. And they're basically, you know, we had the president and they're sort of saying, yes, this is the economy that the White House is planned for and designed and the envisioned. And so I think that's a sign they're kind of like in a position where they want to brag a little bit. Yeah, they want to talk about it.
Yeah.
And it is interesting in and of itself that the White House feels comfortable enough to choose this moment to kind of put a time step on the idea of Bidenomics and declare it an early success.
Yeah.
And so I mean, obviously we know like some big components of it, and they are these really sort of extraordinary like you know, industrial policy like strategies, the Chips Act, which we talk a lot about on the show, the Inflation Reduction Act, the reshoring, domestic investment, all of these things sort of like sort of ongoing fiscal support for the economy, putting money in the hands of workers, et cetera. And you know, again, the numbers today seem solid, and so then I guess the question is like, Okay, what is the big coherent thought and like where going from next? Because we're getting the investments, we see the factory announcements all the time, but then like what's next for all that's being built?
Why now? And what's next?
Well, to learn more about what is Bidenomics and what is next, we are going to be speaking with Jared Bernstein. He is the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Jared Bernstein, thank you so much for coming on Odd Loaves today, huge week.
Wait a second, am I am I the perfect guest? Or not?
We have the perfect guest?
Okay, that's what I wanted to hear.
Yeah, soone told us recently how devastated they would be if they got intro without the perfect guest. Mentioned you are the perfect guest.
I mean once you start, once you start saying that, it sort of becomes like, wow, yeah, we have to say it every time. I didn't get it.
But when we don't say it. It's never intentional. Yes, we don't. It's not that volumes huge week, obviously. Why now, you know, the economy is hot and it's been hot for a while, inflation is elevated, labor market tightness. Why was this the week that President Biden in the White House chose to sort of sort of declare that biden Nomics is working well.
I think the simple answer is that there's a lot of evidence that it is. And in terms of the broader economy, you know, I think that there's headwinds and there's tailwinds. And I think one of the things that I know, I listened to you guys all the time, and I really enjoy what you do. But I think all of us here in this business get very focused on the news of the day, the news of the minute, the news of the week. You know, the mark asset that's in trouble, or the market asset that's soaring, the supply chain that's broken, the dwell time in some port somewhere, all of that's critically important to all of us, and you two do a great job of reporting on that. But you know, Bidenomics takes both a near term and a very long term view. So when we're talking about the bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the inflation reduction at the Chips Act, and I know you've done shows on all of those, we're talking about a long term play here where if we get the implementation and the public private aspects of those investments right, we have the potential to transform the economy very much in the spirit of Bidenomics, bottom up, middle out growth, a complete reversal from the trickle down, top down approach that I think decades of evidence fails to support. So I do think there is a longer term view here that gets away from the headwinds and tailwinds of the day.
So I'm glad you mentioned this because this sort of feeds into one of the criticisms that you sometimes hear about a more active industrial policy or you know, Bidenomics, where investment, long term investment does take a more central role, and that criticism is that potentially you are pulling a lot of investment forward, so you're sort of front loading capex, and that maybe you know in the next downturn, which hopefully will be a long time from now, that maybe you won't have as much ammunition for this type of spending. Again, how would you respond to that.
Well, I think one of the very positive attributes of the Bidenomics investment that we're seeing right now is the extent to which public investment, which does have a longer term spend out it's much smoother, is pulling in private investment, which, as you suggest, can be kind of lumpy. Part of that is because of the actual building the initial cost that take place when we are standing up a domestic semiconductor industry, when we're standing up a domestic electric vehicle electric battery industry, when we're making these longer term investments in clean energy. So here's a way to think about that. If you look at the record on the prior administration of domestic spending on manufacturing facilities, So the construction of manufacturing plants in flatlined for many years. I think it grew two percent real in the prior administration. That's up one hundred percent since the president took office. So that's a hockey stick kind of a figure in the Treasury Department putut a nice blog on that if you want to just post the figure on that, And what the Treasury folks did in their blog was they looked at where those manufacturing facilities, what sectors is that construction taking place, and it very clearly relates to the investments that are incentivized by the legislation that we've been talking about. So of course you're going to see a big initial spend, but I think over the longer term that smooths out, and if we do it right, it keeps delivering in terms of domestic production and high quality jobs for American workers. Tracy, I want to comment on something you said. You guys talk a lot about industrial strategy policy. I'm not sure that this point has been made clearly enough, though you know, if it has, I'm repeating it, which is that, yes, we certainly have a very clear, conscious, visible, elevated agenda in that space. Nobody's trying to be cute or hide any balls. But I also think that you cannot find a time in our economic history when there wasn't an industrial policy of some sort or another. And you know, obviously you can go back to the beginning of our country and see a very clearly articulated industrial policy of Hamilton's manufacturing initiatives. But what I'm talking about is something much less positive than that. What I'm talking about is an industrial policy that is a function of who has the best connected lobbyist to get the tax code that they want and what you end up with, What you end up in that kind of industrial policy is the deepest pocketed, best connected, in many cases, most divorced from actual economic productivity initiatives are the ones that get the brakes, the funding, the tax credits, the attention. One thing you'd expect to have in that scenario is an outsized role for finance. And you know what I call the shampoo cycle, bubble bust, repeat, and you know, we've seen a lot of that. So I think that it's wrong to think that, you know, we sort of fell out of the sky with in industrial strategy, and more more correct to view this as very intentional and I hope very thoughtful.
One I want to ask about, you know, you mentioned the investment in structures and it's it is a hockey stick. And we see the battery announcements almost every other day, and the chip announcements almost every other day. What is next and by next them specifically, what can you and the administration and the rest of the administration do to focus that what happens inside the plants actually happens in a cost competitive way that good cutting edge batteries are made, that we compete, that they compete globally, that good cutting edge chips are being made. What's next in terms of, basically, yeah, guaranteeing that what's built inside these structures sort of delivers on the outside.
Well, the thing with capitalism is that there's no guarantees. The idea of you know, the government sort of getting in there and saying, you know, don't use this widget, use that widget sounds kind of unappealing to me. I think the best thing for our industrial strategy, and certainly the way I believe the President thinks about this, is that we create the environment and the conditions, both in terms of capital investment, in terms of worker quality, and in terms of the ancillary functions which I'll explain that workers need to make this all work. So, the first thing is there are deep market failures where private investors, because of risk reward ratios being what they are, will underinvest in critical sectors such as climate, such as batteries, such as more resilient supply chains here, and so our financing structures. And again, you've had lots of good conversations, You've had folks from the government on to talk about this. Our financing structures have to tweak those risk rewards so that we can get so that we can get the investment we need. That's you know, a pretty thirty thousand feet up versus you know, having to get into factory and make sure the chips are coming out the right way. But that's important. And then secondly, we have to make sure that the workforce is empowered and educated, and that happens to be Pillar two of Bidenomics, by the way, empowering and educating the workforce. And I think one somewhat underappreciated part of chips is the very significant resources in that bill to provide training for workers to come into these places, places which, by the way, and this might even be an od launch show someday, places that are being stood up all across the country. This is my favorite aspects of Bidenomics and the investment agenda. They're showing up in the Southwest, in upstate New York, in Ohio and Tennessee and Oklahoma, in blue places, in red places. You know, the President has a joke, I'll see you at the ribbon cutting for people who didn't vote for the legislation, would show up to cut the ribbons. And I think that's great. I mean, I think that's the way to have the most productive economy. But where's it going the third part of your question, Well, look, our car agenda is really important. That may sound divorced from what we're talking about, but it's not. Just like we announced earlier one of these weeks. They all mushed together for me. We're going to make sure that if you live in rural America, you have affordable high speed broad that is economic oxygen to people in those places. You can't participate without it. I'd say the same thing about accessible and affordable childcare. That's something we have to work on going forward, and it's in our budget we have to I think that's a great tool for us to work on, both in the context of helping people's personal budgets in their economies, their household economies, but also in this context to make sure people have access to the job market and to these good jobs.
Well, Joe and I would be more than happy to do a Studs Turcle version of the show where we go on the road and talk to workers and new types of jobs. But just on that note, you know, Joe asked you about being cost competitive. How do you thread the needle between creating, for instance, a semiconductor factory and also a semiconductor factory that's able to, you know, compete on a global basis with empowering workers and making sure that workers are getting a fair deal. And the reason I asked that is because I think we just saw a headline that came out saying that there are some semiconductor firms that are talking about importing migrant labor rather than hiring locally in order to keep costs down.
And we know that, for example, the auto workers are concerned about wages and paid some of the battery factories replacing the ice factories.
I think this is very much a walk and chew gum kind of question. I think when it comes to the cost of production, we very have a very conscious agenda to lower cost curves, and I think we're seeing some success there. We've seen cost curves come down, particularly in renewable energy, where the prison and I believe said this in this speech in Chicago the other day, that some of the price points around renewable energy, given the increasing capacity in those sectors, have come down to be quite competitive with traditional sources. I think we could say the same thing with chips if our plans are able to be realized with the pace that they're on now. And that's just a very simple aggregate supply demand chart, whereby increasing capacity increasing supply, you help on the price side. And then you know, the other part is the job market. Look, we've had an on that's below four and a half percent. That's below four percent for eighteen months, a year and a half we've had. When you do that, you start seeing workers get a bit more bargaining cloud and that shows up in pay. And in fact, we're finally starting to see real wage gains as inflation begins to ease and the job market remains strong. We've now seen a year over year wage gain in the last job support real wage guyers say, a year over year real wage gain in the last job support. We now have real wages up a percent since last June. If you look for production non supervisory workers, so blue collar workers, non managers, that's eighty percent of the workforce, their pay is up one point five percent since last June. So interestingly that it's up fifty BIPs more than the overalls. That's a bargaining power story. We have blog on the CEA website showing gains for black workers even closing some of the black white gap a little bit because of the important that bargaining power. We have an economy that can do both of the above. That's the answer to Tracy's question, that can do both of the above, that can invest in productive capacity to bend cost curves while we run a tight enough labor market that workers are getting their fair share of the growth that they're helping to create. And by the way, one of the ways that happens mechanically or arithmetically is by labor share of income getting back to some of its historical average. It's been pretty depressed lately, and that's actually a non inflationary way of paying for higher real pay is through a higher labor share.
Can you talk about international trade under the bidonomics framework, and I'm thinking specifically about some of the frustrations from our our friends and allies in Europe about some of the rules that were put in place with the Inflation Reduction Act, and how you think about that relationship and how you know, what is the bidonomic stance on how we relate to our trading partners.
Yeah, one of the things I get to do is chair of the CEA. Is I chair something called the Economic Policy Committee of the OECD, and we recently had a meeting over there and I was talking to folks in my position in many different many other countries, and it was a very good, robust discussion about this point. I think there's actually a lot more commonality, a lot more agreement that we're all engaged. Many of these economies we're talking about, if you look at their policy agendas, we're all doing some version of the same thing. And it's exactly what we've been talking about in our investment discussion, and in fact, in many cases, Europe's been doing this for a lot longer than we have. You know, industrial strategy was not a bad couple of words over there, I would say, longer than has been the case here. And the idea is to I think, promote more spillovers than sort of head to head competition. If we can help lower the cost curve for producing the components of clean energy economy, components of electric vehicles. Yes, of course there's going to be competition, but there's also going to be I think some cooperation and some benefits from the increased capacity that we have here. Let me give a concrete example. If you're making a battery here, you're making it here, and if you follow the president's plans, you're creating good union jobs for folks to do that here. But nature, in her wisdom put the components of electric batteries under the earths of many different countries, and most of them aren't this one. I think there's some of that up in Alaska, but there's just you're going to be getting those intermediate inputs from other countries. So I think one mistake that's been made in this discussion is somehow assuming that our international trade policy is leaning towards autarchy and you know, far less in terms of trade flows. That is demonstrably false if you look at the trade flows themselves, which have been quite robust. I mean, I try to point people just do a couple of clicks and you'll see we engage in robust trade. But I would say, you know what really frames are thinking about this differently is we don't look under bidnomics. We don't look at Americans as consumers one hundred percent, full stop. We recognize that they and their communities are also working people, workers who depend on domestic production, getting good jobs here. If all you thought about was consumer spending, you'd say, let me import everything to try to increase the supply and lower the price. If you thought about consumers on people are consumers, but they're also workers, you'd think about both and you'd say, yes, we want robust trade flows. Yes we want to work with our partners to lower the costs of goods that are so quick for our future. But we also want to have good jobs here and we don't want to hollow out our communities. So I think that's really the way to think about the package.
Just going back to the investment side of Bidenomics, and I guess differentiating between bad industrial policy versus smarter industrial policy. You mentioned the idea of you know, potentially money or power being concentrated in the hands of a few firms, and I know that anti monopoly measures are of interest and a big plank of the Bidenomics agenda. So does this type of ramped up public investment, does that need to go hand in hand with stronger anti monopoly measures, and what are you thinking on that front?
I think it does, and I think that's h and that happens to be Pillar three of Bidenomics, by the way, which is promoting a competition both to lower costs and to give a smaller busin This is a seat at the table, chance to leap over some of those anti competitive barriers that you were just kind of alluding to. In terms of what it means, it's it's really everything from some very granular stuff to getting some competitive cops back on the beat. So on the granular side, you've seen a president who's who's come out strong against junk fees, who has implemented anti overdraft initiatives. I was talking to the President about this the other day and he reminded me about a famous case I know, Aaron Kline Brookings talks about this of this banker who had a boat that was called overdraft. He had a yacht and he had named it overdraft. You know that that was something that that does not sit well with President Biden, and so he took an action that's saving consumers five and a half billion dollars a year on overdraft fees. You know, non competes, which I think you've probably talked about. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, the idea that workers are come out from these really non competitive, non compete closes, and to allow that to get jobs in the same or similar industries where they were in a way that doesn't do anything to hurt company disclosures or anything like that. So that's the granular side of that equation. I think the other side, which there are other people who could talk about it know more thoroughly than me, is just having the FTC back on the beat, and you've seen lots of action there. I think it's fair to say they're an independent regulator, just like the FED, so we don't like the gut up in their knitting, but I think it's fair to say that they have taken this kind of view very seriously, the idea that when too many of your industries retail, healthcare, technology are so concentrated that's non or anti competitive. They've taken that seriously and they're actively working to fix the damage in a way that I think is impressive.
We just have about a minute or two left with you. You know, obviously for the remainder of this particular term, Republicans con control Congress, so legislative window probing not particularly wide open. I'm just curious, like, what active is there that you're working on specifically, whether it's still trying to push through legislation or on the sort of administrative regulatory side that we should be watching for.
Well, I think that so, first of all, we have to do both. And I'm not going to talk about student debt because we're going to let the President talk about that first. But that remains something he's been committed to since the campaign, helping helping people there. And you know, we have a lot of plans in that space, some of which are not as well known as they should be. In fact, i'd like to nudge you to do a show, not necessarily with me.
I appreciate, we appreciate all the show suggestions.
By the way, Yeah, yeah, I should be one of your editors in on our new income driven repayment plan. That is something people really need to learn a lot about. I'd love you guys to dig into that. It's great plan. We have people here can help explain it to the audience in a way that I'm sure people would find compelling. So you know, there are things we can do on the admin side, the rule side, But I think the more falseome answer to your question is to look at our budget. Our budget is where we put the idea is the policy agenda that the president believes is most important. And while people always say, oh, the president budget isn't going anywhere, in fact, the truth is that the history of presidential administrations, they always pull ideas out of their budget and you know, if they're good. And President Biden has shown that he's better than good when it comes to getting tough things over legislative goal lines. That's the place to look. Now. The carriage that we talked about earlier, childcare, elder care, that's in there. We have a really important housing agenda. We have a housing supply structural, not cyclical, structural housing supply shortfall for affordable housing in this country. We have really great ideas, many of which, by the way, people on sort of both sides of both builders and people who want to be homeowners would appreciate. So look at our housing agenda. And then there's the fiscal agenda. Look in order to maintain a sustainable fiscal policy, the President has been very much devoted to lowering the budget deficit by trillions of dollars. Much of that is on the book, but a lot of that is in the budget, and it does two things. We promote fairness in the tax code by finally getting folks at the top over four hundred thousand dollars, no tax increase, no audits for people under four hundred k. But for people over four hundred k, you know, some of our wealthiest people, the President likes to point out, pay an eight percent effective tax rate, and that's just not fair. So look, of course we have an anti tax evasion agenda, which means getting the irs the resources they need, and we're going to keep pushing that. Some of that came out of the debt deal, but we're going to keep pushing that. But we also have agenda for you know, high end progressive taxation, which just to circle back to kind of where we started, is, you know, Bidenomics, bottom up, middle out grow the economy. That's the opposite of trickle down trickle down. You know, you cut taxes for the rich, and you know, somehow hope that that magically, against.
Decades of evidence, lifts the middle.
It doesn't. So Bidenomics versus that achieves a stable fiscal path by injecting some real fairness into the tax code while not touching anyone under four hundred thousand.
May I ask just one more question. It's a quick one. I think you'll enjoy answering it. But you've obviously been working with Biden for a long time, back when he was vice president as well. How does he think through these issues? You know, when you and he get together, what kind of questions does he ask you.
It's not a simple quick question, and I do have to I'll give you. Here's what I'll tell you. This has been my experience, and Okay, I'm going to unpack this a little more than I have time for, So I apologize for people.
We appreciate it.
Yeah. When I talked to Joe Biden in December of two thousand and eight and he was trying to decide if I shall be as chief economist, I sit down with him since Delaware House. He reaches into his jacket pocket and he pulls out a graph that I had made with Larry Michelle that showed GDP going up and middle class incomes flatlining. And he pointed to the gap between those two and he said, Jared, this is what we're going to work on. The Idea that the economy was growing and the middle class was falling behind is unacceptable to him, and that is the core value at the heart of binomics. If I run into the President's office today and I say, sir, GDP did great in this quarter or the stock market up, He's like, Jared, stop wagging your tail and explain to me how that's reaching the middle class, how that's building the ladders for people who aspire to be in the middle class. What's the connective policy tissue that's missing, because that's what we're going to work on, because if the economy is growing and the middle class, lower income people are falling behind, that's not okay with this president. And bidnomics is another way of saying the economic agenda to close that gap.
Jared Burns and so great to have you on. Really appreciate it, really appreciate you taking the time, and we will be following the trajectory of Biden nomics.
Okay, take there. Than Thank you so much, Tracy.
I love you using the classic lawyer a tactic there, asking a very interesting question right at the end of time, knowing that he would have some you know, can't resist being able to answer. But I really, I really appreciate Bernstein coming on the show.
No totally, and it was a very good overview of the key planks of biden Omics, so public investment, pro worker, and anti monopoly, I think, he said. But I do think maybe the difficulty in messaging is that it's kind of it feels like the Biden administration wants to take credit for a strong labor market while also backing away from some of the inflationary pressures. And that feels like a little bit of a difficult needle to thread.
Sure.
But that said, you know, here we are in twenty twenty three. Things certainly have not been as bad as a lot of people were predicting just last year.
No, I mean definitely not. I mean, inflation has not come down as fast as people might have guessed. But on the other hand, everyone unemployment, I mean, but unemployment of some four percent. And I thought that was interesting, And I do think there's you know, speaking of tensions, the UAW is concerned about wages at battery plans, and there's a pretty big question of like, okay, to Jared Bernstein's point, in a hot labor market environment, you can expect wage games, you can expect labor's share of income, whether you can get back to the wages that the UAW has set at legacy automakers and legacy ice plants for years and years, accumulated through negotiations and negotiations and strikes and pressures through that hot wage a hot labor market, I do think is highly TBD and I do think watching that relationship unfold, especially you know, he said a lot of these new plants are going to be in red states where they don't have strong labor protections, et cetera, is going to be a pretty interesting tension for the next couple of years.
Yeah.
Well, there are so many tensions here. One of the big ones is delivering short term results on inflation and employment while trying to fix very long term structural supply side issues. And I got to say, like, from that perspective, A, it's ambitious, and I kind of appreciate someone trying to take that on. But B for now, again, it seems to be working. I guess the big question mark is what happens in you know, a decade's time.
I appreciate that he wants to give us suggestions and maybe maybe he'll have a career working along with Carmen and Dash as one of our producers one day. Wouldn't that be called?
Carmen says He's welcome to become an all Thoughts producer. Thanks Carmen, Yeah, anytime, guys. All right, shall we leave it there?
Let's leave it there?
Okay, this has been another episode of the Odd Loots podcast. I'm Tracyalloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Jared Bernstein, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. He's at econ Jared forty six. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman and dash Ol Bennett at dashbot. And check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts and from our Odd Loots content. Go to bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we have a blog, transcripts and a newsletter that comes out every Friday. And check out the Oddlogs Discord, Discord dot gg slash odd Lots chat about all these topics twenty four to seven, along with follow listeners.
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