Episode
A Whiff of Stagflation
- Podcast
- Paul Krugman Podcast
- Published
- May 22, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 516
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-whiff-of-stagflation-150
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/episodes/a-whiff-of-stagflation/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/paul-krugman-podcast-7703924/a-whiff-of-stagflation.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
For more videos, visit my YouTube channel . Transcript Hi, Paul Krugman here. Different city, different country, still not home. Unfortunately, couldn’t manage to do this one in a cafe, but we have been sitting in cafes a fair bit. I just want to weigh in on a really kind of alarming report on consumer confidence that came out today. This is the long-running University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment. It is kind of time hallowed. I don’t know that it’s necessarily the gold standard — there are other surveys — but this is the one that people really do focus on most. The numbers are terrible, people. We’re hitting a record low on consumer sentiment which fits in with the general picture. We know that people are very upset about prices; they’re very upset about economic management; they just don’t feel that there’s anyone making any sense who’s in charge of things; which is all true. I mean we can argue that objectively things are not as bad as all that. We have consumer sentiment that’s worse than at the depths of the financial crisis. We have consumer sentiment that is worse than during the stagflation circa 1980. And it’s hard to say that that’s really justified. But OK, the customer is always right. If people are feeling this down then we need to take that seriously. But that is actually not the big issue. The really big issue is inflation expectations. Now why do we focus on that? Inflation for a short period of time is not good but it’s tolerable. If we have a year of elevated inflation — even if you do something stupid, if you impose tariffs and raise consumer prices, or you start a war and mishandle it and you drive up oil prices that is not good. But it only turns into a really, really serious problem if it gets “entrenched” in the economy. That is usual…