2024-12-14
17 分钟Hey there, it's Adrian Ma.
So by now, we all know that Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election last month was driven in large part by the fact that a lot of voters were just not happy about the economy the past couple years.
They were feeling the sting of inflation.
And yet there is a sort of disconnect here because there are some pretty strong economic metrics that show that the economy the past couple of years has been doing pretty well, from cooling inflation to rising wages to low unemployment and strong consumer spending.
And when you put all this together, it's actually not an exaggeration to say that the US Economy is the envy of the world right now.
And in fact, that is the title of a special report in the Economist recently titled the Envy of the World.
It was co authored by Simon Rabinovich.
So the US has effectively grown three times as fast as its kind of largest comparable economic bloc.
That bloc he's talking about is the G7 group of rich countries, places like the UK, Japan and Germany.
If you take the economies of all the G7 countries and put them in a piece, he says the US used to be about 40% of that pie.
That was back in the 1990s.
Today it's grown.
It's more than 50% today.
So you look at all of these different basic top line gdp, economic output metrics, and American outperformance is really quite striking.
The big question now, though, is whether that outperformance will continue under a president who's promising some major economic changes.
And that is what we're talking about with Simon Rabinovich today.
Now, if Simon's name rings a bell, it's because we actually had him on the show just after the election.
Today's episode is an extended cut of that chat.
This version of the chat is something that you may have already heard if you are a supporter of Planet Money plus.
But today we're giving everyone a chance to hear it.