Episode
Comments on a Freaky Friday
- Podcast
- Paul Krugman Podcast
- Published
- Jun 6, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1537
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/comments-on-a-freaky-friday
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Summary
Hi everybody. I’ve been having an extremely busy week, so no two talking heads conversation this week. Just my head talking alone for a relatively short time. Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’m winding down some travel, and I’ve been meeting all sorts of people face to face, so virtual interactions are down. So just to give you some kind of Saturday video, I thought I would talk a little bit about latest economic news, markets — things that I don’t normally weigh in very much because that kind of market commentary is usually something that is best done by business economists who are focusing on the day-to-day stuff talking to market participants. But I think that the latest stuff is interesting enough to warrant some discussion and maybe a way to think about where we are economically right now. So okay, if you’re paying attention to this stuff you probably know that yesterday was a job report day. The report was unusually strong, certainly stronger than almost any of the professional forecasters expected, 172,000 jobs. Predictably, Trump first boasted about this with a lot of talk about how you know we didn’t have this kind of prosperity under Joe Biden. It is kind of odd given how well things are supposedly going how much Trump and his people talk about Biden. If it was really that much better would you need to be constantly comparing yourself and making claims about how much better you’re doing? For what it’s worth you know how often during his 48 months in the White House did Biden preside over job reports that were as good as yesterday’s in terms of job creation? The answer is 37 times. Now, there are reasons why the rapid job growth of the early Biden years, which was coming out of the COVID slump, can’t be replicated. And the fact that immigration is way down means that a…